R. J. Ellory

by A Quiet Vendetta

  Let the dead be buried, he thought. Let the dead be afforded whatever degree of respect they deserve, whether they be brother or mother or father, and if they deserve none then at least let them rest. Pax vobiscum.

  Desirous, perhaps, of some complete and unqualified absolution, an absolution that would never come, he nevertheless understood that life would keep on coming every which way, and regret, disappointment, even failure – such commodities as these – are inextricably woven within the woof and warp of existence. Life was there. It was what it was, and when it bent in some fashion that was unwanted you often found that you had to bend with it. We – we people – are built of whipcord and rubber and such flexible emotions, and somehow we spring back. As we age we sometimes feel the strain, the torture of muscles that as yet have seen no motion since our youth, but though stiff, a little unyielding, they are not altogether redundant. Possibly we will never recover our entire identity, but at least a greater percentage, and for that we would be grateful. We have breathed, life has breathed back, and though the taste was bitter, we have swallowed. Choice? No, we possess no choice. We have power of decision, but often we are compromised for the obligation of rightness, rectitude, duty. These things we have suffered, yet we have continued regardless.

  The district Ray saw beyond the window was rich with the past, the buildings crouched together, a barrio filled to bursting with Spanish and French-descent southerners, and the old people, the mothers and fathers, their mothers and fathers where they still lived, stood testament to the fact that tradition and heritage had nothing to do with color or creed. They had built their own, sweated their hands and brows into this earth and grown from it a timeless grapevine of beliefs and ideals that did not change, merely grew with time. This was where Ray had shared the early years of his life with his brother, and coming back here brought with it a storm of emotions that raged right into the present and defied escape. The street where his father fell to his knees as if to pray, his hands clutching his chest, his mouth agape as pecans and avocados and small ripe oranges spilled from his bag across the sidewalk and beneath the wheels of cars; the corners where Ray and Danny had hung out, sweating through many a childhood vacation, escaping chores and whippings, and older kids with stones dropped into long socks that they whirled around their wrists like the old Irish cop with the billy club that used to patrol down here; the alleyway beside the bar where he and Danny used to crouch and wait breathless for some drunk to come falling through the doorway, and when he fell they’d be there to empty his pockets, to take his bottle, a bottle filled with something that coalesced with the warm humid air and knocked them sideways; all of this, these images, forever engraved: indelible.

  Ray Hartmann could remember when there was snow on Dumaine. Snow that hung from the branches of withered wisteria and mimosa and magnolia, and piled against the curb, and dropped from the eaves of houses, and through that whiteness had run the expedient streamers of youthful voices, the mittened and scarved and gloved and galoshed, the hurrying excitement attendant to seasonal novelty that we – in our age, in our reflections, in our bruised hopes and dented dreams – have somehow appeared to lose.

  Everything stopped here. Carol. Jess. Luca Visceglia and the manifold legal complications with which he battled each day. The sounds changed, the shadows closed up against him, the temperature dropped.

  The FBI agents had told him next to nothing, merely that his assistance was required in a matter of potential national security. From the plane they had driven him to a hotel and told him to rest for a couple of hours, and yet they had no idea of where they were really taking him. Here, a stone’s throw from where he stood looking from the window, was Dumaine: a map of his past, a fingerprint he had left behind, the sidewalks where he too had scraped his knees against life and found it rough, unforgiving, coming at him from all sides and never stopping.

  After his mother’s death he’d vowed never to come back, and yet he realized that his vias, his detours, had been nothing more than a preternatural rejection of inevitability. He realized New Orleans would once more walk right through him as soon as he crossed its limits, and that sensory invasion was neither willed nor welcome.

  Ray Hartmann shuddered in the breeze that found its way through the half-opened window, believed that he would always find this place abhorrent no matter the season – stinking and ripe with the smell of loose and swollen vegetation in summer, and then through fall and winter the frozen brittleness, the ghostly angularity of the trees, the picket fences that ran in non-sequitur patterns through all territories, defiant of whatever authoritarian plutocracy held sway, standing also in defiance of any sense of the aesthetic. This was a mean and hollow country, perhaps its only blessing the people themselves, holding true to the intent and determination of their ancestors who’d dragged whatever life they’d lived out of the clutches of the everglades.

  He looked left, turned towards the mimosa grove he could see across the street. On a clear day, standing on a ladder from the garage, he and Danny would look out over such trees, look out over the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, a band of clear dark blue, a stripe through the earth, a vein. Used to dream of sailing away, a paper boat big enough for two, its seams sealed with wax and butter, their pockets filled with nickels and dimes and Susan B. Anthony dollars saved from scrubbing wheel arches and hub caps, from soaping windscreens and windows and porch stoops for the Rousseaus, the Buies, the Jeromes. Running away, running away with themselves from Dumaine, from the intersection where bigger kids challenged them, tugged their hair, pointed sharpened fingers into their chests and called them weirdos, where they ran until the breath burst from their chests in great whooping asthmatic heaving gusts, turning down alleyways, hiding in shadows, the reality of the world crowding the edges of the safe and insular shell they had created for themselves. Danny and Ray, Ray and Danny, an echo of itself; an echo of childhood.

  The distant chatter of children in the street . . .

  The vague and indefinable sensation that, as he thinks, he’s thinking back years, that each time he thinks of these things he’s younger for the duration.

  And then later, Danny long since gone, coming home from school while his mother was still alive, brief stop-overs, passing through . . .

  Hi Mom . . .

  Ray . . . you gonna stay for dinner, son?

  I already ate, Ma, ate on the way down.

  She would talk a little of her day, that Mister Koenig had taken her to mass, that she’d prayed for them both and felt all the better for it. She’d talk of a show at the Saenger Theater, of dinner at the Royal Sonesta, and then suddenly she’d be reminded of Mary Rousseau.

  You remember Mary Rousseau, down here a block or so when you boys were young . . . pretty little thing you had a crush on?

  I remember her, Ma, and I did not have a crush on her.

  He would feel the pressure of his mother’s hand upon his own.

  The smell of the parlor, of chicken cooking, of lavender and ointment for scrapes and burns and bruises, forever ambient of childhood, of growing, losing and learning how to love all over again.

  Also leaving, for leaving was the very last thing he did.

  So how goes it, son?

  It goes, Ma, it goes.

  You down here on business?

  Sure am . . . wouldn’t come down here for any other reason.

  Bad business?

  Real bad . . . bad as it gets.

  She would look at him, this slight and frail-looking woman, though nothing could be further from the truth. One year she was assaulted by a teenager after her purse. She kicked him down an alleyway, cornered him, screamed until someone came to her assistance. Even after that she still walked out alone. She watched everything that happened through pale blue washed-out eyes, and if there was something that went down within four or five blocks from where she sat she could tell you all about it. She could tell you names, dates, places, the lies told, the actual truth. She’d stayed a widow aft
er her husband’s death, some said because no man possessed the cojones to question her right to be alone. She was not sorry, she did not regret; she listened, advised, hoped someday to understand all that had happened and make some sense of it.

  So what’s with you?

  Just thinking, Ma.

  Always thinking. You don’t eat enough vegetables to be thinking so much. Your skin will grow pale and you will dry up like a leaf and blow away.

  He would turn his head, look out towards the streets where he’d grown up.

  Stay and have some lemonade or something, why don’tcha?

  Sure Ma, sure . . . I’ll stay and have some lemonade . . .

  The phone rang. It was as if someone had tied elastic to Ray Hartmann and suddenly snapped him back into the present.

  He blinked twice, inhaled deeply, and then reached for the receiver.

  ‘Mr Hartmann?’ someone asked him.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’re coming up to get you.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ Hartmann replied, and then he replaced the receiver and walked through to the narrow bathroom to wash his face.

  It was just after five p.m., evening of Friday the twenty-ninth. Outside it looked like a storm was coming.

  Ray Hartmann’s first impression of FBI unit chiefs Stanley Schaeffer and Bill Woodroffe was of their seeming lack of individuality. Both in their mid to late forties, dark suits, white shirts, black ties, hair graying at the temples, furrowed brows and anxious eyes. These guys would spend the entirety of their working lives dressed for a funeral. The two Feds who’d flown out to New York to collect Hartmann had escorted him to the New Orleans FBI Field Office, signed him in without saying a word, walked him through a maze of corridors and then left him outside their door.

  ‘Inside,’ one of the agents said, and then the pair of them turned and walked away.

  When Hartmann knocked it was Schaeffer who told him to come in, who greeted him, shook his hand, asked him to sit down, but it was Woodroffe who started talking.

  ‘Mr Hartmann,’ he said quietly. ‘I understand that you must be feeling some sense of confusion regarding the manner in which you have been brought here.’

  Hartmann shrugged.

  Woodroffe glanced at Schaeffer; Schaeffer nodded without looking away from Hartmann.

  ‘We have a case here. An unusual situation. A man has been murdered and a girl has been kidnapped, and we find ourselves requiring your services.’

  Woodroffe waited for Hartmann to speak, but Hartmann had nothing to say.

  ‘The man we believe responsible for both the killing and the kidnapping has asked for you specifically, and this evening at seven he will call and he will speak to you. We believe he will make his demands known.’

  ‘What’s his name?’ Hartmann asked.

  ‘We have no idea,’ Schaeffer said.

  Hartmann frowned. ‘But he knew my name? He asked for me specifically?’

  Schaeffer nodded. ‘He did.’

  Hartmann shook his head. ‘And you think I might be able to tell you who he is from the sound of his voice on the telephone?’

  ‘No, Mr Hartmann, we don’t believe that at all. We have studied your records, we know how busy you have been with the many hundreds of cases that have passed across your desk over the years. We don’t imagine for a moment that you’ll be able to identify the man by his voice, but we can’t help but think that he might be someone you have dealt with or come across at some point in the past.’

  Hartmann nodded. ‘That would be logical, considering he asked for me by name.’

  ‘So we want you to take the call, to speak to him,’ Woodroffe said. ‘He may identify himself, he may not, but what we are hoping is that he will give us his terms and conditions for the return of the kidnap victim.’

  ‘And that would be?’ Hartmann asked.

  Woodroffe once more glanced sideways at Schaeffer.

  ‘You know Charles Ducane?’ Schaeffer asked.

  Hartmann nodded. ‘Sure, Governor Charles Ducane, right?’

  Schaeffer nodded. ‘The kidnap victim is Governor Ducane’s daughter, Catherine.’

  ‘Holy shit,’ Hartmann said.

  ‘Holy shit exactly,’ Schaeffer said.

  Hartmann leaned forward and rested his forearms on the edge of the desk. He looked at Woodroffe and Schaeffer, and then he closed his eyes for a moment and sighed.

  ‘You understand I am not a trained negotiator?’ Hartmann said.

  ‘We understand that,’ Woodroffe said, ‘but we find ourselves in a situation of being able to turn to no-one but you. Believe me, if there was some way we could avoid involving you we would. This is a federal matter, and though you are by necessity in the employ of the federal government we also appreciate that this is not the sort of thing you are suited to.’

  Hartmann frowned. ‘What, you think I can’t take a phone call?’

  Schaeffer smiled, but there was nothing warm in his eyes. ‘No Mr Hartmann, we know you are perfectly capable of taking a phone call. What we mean is that you are an investigator for the Judiciary Subcommittee on Organized Crime, not a field agent with years of training in hostage negotiation.’

  ‘But you guys are, and you figure between us we can get the guy and save the girl?’

  Schaeffer and Woodroffe were silent for a moment.

  ‘A flippant attitude does not befit proceedings such as these,’ Schaeffer said quietly.

  Hartmann nodded. ‘Sorry,’ he said equally quietly, and wondered how long the call would be, how long he would have to stay afterwards, and whether there would be a late flight back to New York that night.

  ‘So, we do this this evening,’ Hartmann said.

  ‘Seven o’clock,’ Schaeffer said.

  Hartmann glanced at his watch. ‘I’ve got something over an hour to kill.’

  ‘You can study these,’ Woodroffe said, and rising from his chair he crossed the room to a small desk in the corner. He returned with a number of files and placed them in front of Hartmann.

  ‘All the details we have thus far, pictures of the murder victim, pictures of the girl, Forensics and Criminalistics reports, the usual things. Study these now, so when he calls you have some kind of idea of what we are dealing with here.’

  Woodroffe stayed on his feet as he spoke, and then Schaeffer rose also.

  ‘We’ll leave you for a little while. Anything you need?’ Hartmann looked up. ‘An ashtray. And could someone get me a cup of coffee? Not some of this shit you get out of the machine, but like a real cup of coffee with cream?’

  Schaeffer nodded. ‘We’ll see what we can do, Mr Hartmann.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Hartmann waited until they had left the room before he opened the first file and looked down into the trunk of a ’57 Mercury Cruiser with some beat-to-fuck dead guy inside.

  It was the constellation that got him. Caught him like a fish on a hook. It meant nothing, at least nothing specific, but the mere fact that whoever had done this had taken the time to draw the constellation of Gemini on the vic’s back told Hartmann that here he was dealing with someone a little more sophisticated than the regular kind of thug. And then there was the heart. And then there was the simple fact that the girl who’d been kidnapped was Charles Ducane’s daughter. Perhaps it was then, seated in the plain office with the photos, the reports, the transcriptions of the two phone calls that had been made, the collective details of all that had occurred since the night of Wednesday 20 August in front of him, that Ray Hartmann believed he might not get away from this thing tonight.

  And if not tonight, then when?

  Why did this man wish to speak to him, to him in particular, and what would he require of him? Would it be something that would keep him in New Orleans?

  And what of Tompkins Square Park at midday on Saturday?

  Ray Hartmann sighed and closed his eyes. He leaned forward, his elbows on the table, his forehead against his steepled fingers, and behind his eyes he could see Carol’s face, t
he way she would look at him when he’d done something else to piss her off. And then there was Jess, the way she would greet him when he arrived home, her smile wide, her eyes bright, everything that ever meant anything to him all tied up in the lives of two people he couldn’t see . . .

  He started when someone knocked on the door.

  Ray Hartmann opened his eyes and lowered his hands.

  The door opened, and Bill Woodroffe, same expression as before, stepped inside and nodded at Hartmann.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ he said, ‘We’re gonna take the call out here where we have other agents on additional lines.’

  Hartmann rose from the chair, walked around the table and followed Woodroffe.

  They passed down the corridor and took the second door on the right. The room looked like mission control at Houston: banks of computers, gray free-standing dividers separating dozens of desks one from another, floor-to-ceiling maps on three of the walls, endless rows of file cabinets, and in amongst this a good dozen Bureau men, all of them in white shirts and dark ties.

  ‘Hold up!’ Woodroffe shouted over the murmur of voices.

  The room fell silent. Could have heard a pin drop.

  ‘This is Special Investigator Ray Hartmann from New York. He is part of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Organized Crime up there. This is the guy that’s gonna take the call.’

  Woodroffe let his words sink in for a moment.

  Hartmann felt a dozen pairs of eyes watching him.

  ‘So when the call comes we take it in three stages. Feshbach, Hackley and Levin are gonna take the first pick-up on line one, Landry, Weber and Duggan the second, finally Cassidy, Saxon and Benedict on line three. When all three teams have picked up, Mr Hartmann will take line four right here. If there is the slightest sound from anyone in the room when the call has been connected through the speakers they will take a two-week unpaid suspension. This is a young girl’s life we’re talking about, gentlemen, understood?’

  There was a hushed series of acknowledgements across the room.

  ‘So that’s the game plan. Mr Kubis will trace the call and record it as per protocol. So take your seats, gentlemen, and wait it out.’