R. Ellory - A Quiet Vendetta

‘How do you know that?’

‘It is about time for the attorney general to play his best hand, and like I said before, you do not live the life I have lived and survive by being stupid. So out with it. What is it they are prepared to offer me?’

‘Clemency,’ Hartmann said, believing that the entire conversation had been predicted and determined by Perez from the off. This was not the way Hartmann had wanted to handle it, but it had become something out of his control. He had believed his cards were hidden, but he had sat down at the table unaware that his cards had been chosen for him by his opponent.

‘Clemency?’ Perez asked. ‘Mercy? You think this is what I came here to ask for?’

Hartmann shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t.’

‘I came here of my own volition. I handed myself in to you people with no resistance. I could have continued to live my life, could have done nothing. Had I not called the FBI, had I not spoken with these people, had I not asked for you to come here, then we would not be having this conversation. I could have taken the girl, I could have killed her, and no-one would ever have been any the wiser.’

‘They would have found you,’ Hartmann interjected.

Perez started laughing. ‘You think so, Mr Hartmann? You really think they would have found me? I am nearly seventy years old. I have been doing this for the better part of five and a half decades. I was the man who killed your Jimmy Hoffa. I put a piano wire around his neck and pulled so hard I could feel where the wire stopped against the vertebrae of his neck. I did these things, and I did them all over this country, and these people didn’t even know my name.’

Hartmann knew Perez was right. He had not lived this life and survived by being stupid. If he had wanted to kill Catherine Ducane he would have done, and Hartmann imagined the murder would have gone unsolved.

‘Okay,’ Hartmann said. ‘So this is the deal… you give us the girl, you are extradited to Cuba, and the United States Federal Government will not further any information about your past to the Cuban Justice Department. That’s the deal, take it or leave it.’

Perez leaned back in his chair. He looked pensive for some time, said nothing, and when he turned his eyes towards Hartmann there was something cold and aloof in them that Hartmann had not seen before. ‘You will come back tomorrow night,’ he said. ‘We will meet in the morning as planned. I will tell you some more things of myself and my life, and when we are done we will return here for dinner, you and I, and I will give you my answer.’

Hartmann nodded. ‘Can you tell us one thing?’

Perez raised his eyebrows.

‘The girl. Can you assure us she is still alive?’

Perez shook his head. ‘No, I cannot.’

‘She is dead?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You are saying nothing?’

‘That is right, I am saying nothing.’

‘If she is dead it makes this whole thing rather pointless,’ Hartmann said.

‘It is only pointless to those who do not yet understand the point,’ Perez replied. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I am tired. I would like to rest. I have an appointment in the morning, and if I am tired I do not concentrate well.’

Hartmann nodded and started to rise from his chair.

‘It has been a pleasure, Mr Hartmann,’ Perez said. ‘And I trust that things work out for yourself and your family.’

‘Thank you, Mr Perez, though I do not necessarily feel I can reciprocate the sentiment.’

Perez waved Hartmann’s comment aside. ‘It is of no matter to me what you think, Mr Hartmann. Some of us are more than capable of making our own decisions and allowing life to intervene as little as possible.’

Hartmann did not reply. There was nothing more he could say. He walked back to the door of the bedroom and let himself out.

Behind him the music increased in volume – Shostakovich’s ‘Assault On Beautiful Gorky’ – and Hartmann looked at Dauncey with a somewhat bemused and mystified expression.

‘Like I said before, a real character,’ Dauncey said, and opened the hotel suite door to let Hartmann out into the corridor.

The rain finally stopped around ten. Hartmann sat on the edge of his bed in the Marriott Hotel and considered the awkward slow-motion war-zone of his life. Carol and Jess were not happy with him; Schaeffer and Woodroffe, Attorney General Richard Seidler and FBI Director Bob Dohring were not happy with him either. By now Charles Ducane would surely know Hartmann’s name, and believe him to be the man responsible for the safe return of his daughter. And what about Charles Ducane? Had he really been involved with these people? Organized crime? The murder of Jimmy Hoffa? The killing of McLuhan and the two people in the Shell Beach Motel back in the fall of ’62? Was Charles Ducane as much a part of this as Ernesto Perez?

Hartmann undressed and took a shower. He stood beneath the water, as hot as he could bear, and stayed there for some time. He thought of Carol and Jess, of how much he would have given to hear their voices now, to know they were safe, to say he was sorry, to tell them that he was in some way undergoing a catharsis, an exorcism of who he had once been, and that from this point forward it would be different. It would all be so different.

Ray Hartmann, for a short while, was overcome with a sense of desperation and despondency. Was this now his life? Alone? Hotel rooms? Government inquiries and investigations? Spending his days listening to the worst that people had to offer and trying to make deals with them?

He sat in the base of the unit. The water flooded over him. He could hear his own heart beating. He felt afraid.

Later, lying on the bed, he fought with a sense of restless agitation and did not sleep until the early hours of Thursday morning. His mind was punctuated with strange images, images of Ernesto Perez carrying Jess’s lifeless body out of a swamp while Shostakovich played the piano in the background.

And then morning invaded his room, and he rose, he dressed, he drank two cups of strong black coffee, and he and Sheldon Ross – who now looked ten years older than the young fresh-faced recruit he had first seen only a handful of days before – made their way back to the office on Arsenault Street to hear what the world and all its madness had to offer them today.

And it was only as he passed through the narrow doorway into the all-too-familiar office that he remembered that there were three reasons. Three reasons Perez had chosen to bring him here to New Orleans. Perez had told him two of them, and Hartmann – amid all that had been said – had forgotten to ask for the third.

It was the first thing he asked Perez when they were seated.

Perez smiled with that knowing expression in his eyes.

‘Later,’ he said quietly. ‘I will tell you the last reason later… perhaps when we are done, Mr Hartmann.’

When we are done , Hartmann echoed. It sounded so final, so utterly conclusive.

‘So we shall share a little of California,’ Perez said. ‘Because I believe that sharing is a truly Californian trait, is it not?’ Perez smiled at his own dry humor and leaned back in his chair. ‘And when we are done we will return to the hotel. We will share some supper and then I will give you the answer to your proposal.’

Hartmann nodded.

He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to see his daughter’s face.

He struggled but it did not come.

Angel and I, we went out to the West Coast of America; to California, named after an island in the Spanish novel Las Sergas de Esplandian by García Ordónez de Montalvo.

The Land of Happily Ever After; the Big Sur coastline where the Santa Lucia mountains rise straight out of the sea; the northern coast, rugged and desolate, deep banks of impenetrable fog; the dormant volcano Mount Shasta; beyond this, vast groves of one- and two-thousand-year-old redwood trees.