Woodroffe indicated that Hartmann should take a seat at the desk ahead of him. Hartmann did so. He glanced at the wall clock. Four minutes to seven. He could feel the tension in his throat and chest. His hands were moist, and beneath his hairline beads of sweat were breaking out. This was not what he had intended to be doing this evening.
At six-fifty-eight someone sneezed. Woodroffe ordered the man from the room.
The place was deathly quiet.
Hartmann could feel his heart thudding in his chest. He wanted to close his eyes for a moment, open them and find that all of this had vanished, that it had been nothing more than some strange non-sequitur dream. He did not dare close his eyes. He could not appear to be unsettled by this in any way. Like Woodroffe had so clearly stated, a young girl’s life was at risk.
Six-fifty-nine.
Hartmann glanced up at Woodroffe. Woodroffe looked back dispassionately. This was business, nothing more nor less than business. Hartmann’s presence would naturally be resented. He may have been bound by the same legal and judicial code of practice, but sure as shit he wasn’t family.
He looked back at the phone and willed it to ring. He wanted to know. He wanted to hear this man’s voice, to know instantly who it was, to turn to Woodroffe and tell them exactly where they would find him and how to rescue the girl . . .
He wanted to be back on a plane to New York knowing that he would see Carol and Jess next Saturday.
He inhaled.
The phone rang and Hartmann nearly left his skin.
‘Line one,’ Woodroffe barked.
‘Line two.’
Hartmann’s heart thudded like a derailed freight train in his chest.
‘Line three . . . go!’
A moment’s pause, a moment that stretched out for ever.
Woodroffe’s hand on his shoulder.
Hartmann watching his own hand as it reached for the receiver ahead of him.
Now, Woodroffe mouthed, and Ray Hartmann – he of the broken heart and bitterness, he of the regrets and darker aspects, his mind filled with nothing more than the wish to see his wife and daughter next Saturday noon – lifted the phone.
‘Yes?’ he said, his voice subdued, almost cracking.
‘Mr Ray Hartmann,’ the voice at the other end of the line returned. ‘Welcome home to New Orleans . . .’
SIX
Later, the lights out, through the window from the street the faint glow of New Orleans as it ached in slow-motion through the chilled hours of early morning, Ray Hartmann asked himself why he had chosen this life.
A life of crime, if you like; others’ crimes, but crimes all the same.
Just as with the police, the FBI, the county coroners and medical examiners, all those whose lot it was to scour the underbelly of America, to turn over the stones, to search out the darker shadows and find what lurked within, he had somehow – through fate or fortune – found himself charged with this duty. The killers, the serial rapists, the hitmen, the murderers, the child molesters, the assassins, the psychopaths, the sociopaths, the guilty, the tormented, the tortured and depraved. Here, in all its resplendent glory, was the worst the world could offer, and he – he of all people, wishing now for nothing more than safety and sanity for himself and his family – was once again walking along the edge of the abyss, looking down, tempting equilibrium, challenging his own sense of balance to see if this time, this time, he would fall.
Back in New York, in the office complex he shared with Luca Visceglia and the crew, were the details of a hundred thousand lives wrecked by a collection of truly crazy people. Even the FBI’s January 1997 release of fifteen thousand pages of documents relating to the Mafia, the death of Kennedy, of Jimmy Hoffa, the workings of the Teamsters’ Union and the killing of their associates and cohorts, gave no indication of the extent to which the government and its many systems had been infected by corruption and Machiavellian dishonesty. Even Hoover, perhaps the most shrewd and conniving hypocrite of them all, had once commented, ‘I never saw so much skullduggery . . .’
Ray Hartmann had spent hundreds of hours immersed in the history and heritage of these people. He remembered vividly the conversations he and Visceglia had started and never seemed to finish in the small office they had first shared. Back then Hartmann had believed himself cognizant of the methods and motives of these people, but Visceglia had illustrated his naivety.
‘Never really been anything other than the Gambino and Genovese crime families,’ Visceglia had told him. ‘Those families were established many generations before any of the stuff we have to deal with. Those people divided New York like it’d always belonged to them . . . like it had always been their own.’
Visceglia chain-smoked, he drank too much coffee. He possessed an air of philosophical resignation regarding his place in life. He seemed to carry the weight of this darkened world on his shoulders, and those shoulders would bow and strain beneath the pressure, but they would never give.
‘Stressed?’ Hartmann had asked him one time, and Visceglia had smiled wryly, nodded his head as if such a thing was the understatement to shame all understatements, and said, ‘Stressed? Like the Brooklyn fucking Bridge, Ray . . . like the Brooklyn fucking Bridge.’
Hartmann had acknowledged him but hadn’t known what else to say. In the face of what they were dealing with what could one say?
‘Billions of dollars,’ Visceglia said. ‘And these people own territories that cross the fucking world, and all of it gained within a handful of decades. It beggars belief sometimes, it just beggars fucking belief. Lives are lost with no more concern than a five-dollar hand of poker. This whole thing goes back forever . . . and this is where the names you have heard come from, people like Lucky Luciano, Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky and Al Capone.’
Visceglia would shake his head and exhale. There was something about the way he did it that sounded like he would empty out and vanish.
‘The Genovese family was where Joseph Valachi came from, and he threw everyone a left-handed curve when he testified at the Senate Permanent Investigations Committee in September and October of 1963. Valachi was the one who used the term “Cosa Nostra”, “This Thing of Ours”, and the things he told the Committee freaked the living shit out of everyone who heard him. Bottom line was that what he had to say didn’t directly incriminate anyone enough to charge them, but it did turn things around for the families.’
‘I’ve read about that stuff,’ Hartmann said. ‘The whole code of silence thing—’
‘Omerta,’ Visceglia said. ‘Valachi violated omerta . . . one of the few family members ever to do so, and he opened up a can of worms that gave more insight into the power struggles and rank-and-file operations of the Mafia than any other man.’
‘You know why he did that?’ Hartmann asked.
Visceglia shook his head. ‘I know something of it, yes.’
Hartmann raised his eyebrows expectantly. It was late, he should have been on his way home, but there was something about the subject that both intrigued and appalled him.
Visceglia shrugged his shoulders. ‘Valachi had joined Salvatore Maranzano’s organization in the late ’20s, and he served beneath Maranzano until Maranzano was assassinated in ’31. Thereafter Valachi served beneath Vito Genovese within the Luciano family. He was nothing more than a button man, a soldier. He was a hit man, an enforcer, a numbers operator and a drug pusher, and he did whatever he was told to do. They got him in ’59 and he went down on a fifteen to twenty for trafficking. Sent him to Atlanta Penitentiary in Georgia, and there he kind of lost his mind – maybe the lock-up, maybe the loneliness, but he got it into his head that Vito Genovese had named him as an informer and ordered his death. He mistook another prisoner called Joe Saupp for a hitman called Joe Beck. Valachi killed Saupp with an iron pipe and was given a life sentence. It was only at that point that he decided to turn informer. He wanted federal protection and that was the only way he could buy it. The only thing he had of any value at all was what
was inside his head.’
Visceglia smiled, again that expression of philosophical resignation. ‘Ironic,’ he said, ‘but by the time Valachi reached the Senate Permanent Investigations Committee hearings he was guarded by no less than two hundred US marshals. More bodyguards than the fucking president. The Mafia put a $100,000 tap on his head. Regardless, Valachi went on to name more than three hundred Mafia family members and present a more detailed and concise history and structure of the Mafia than had been available before. Valachi named Lucky Luciano as the most important voice within the Mafia. He told them about the Havana conference and how, even in exile, Luciano had still controlled the business relentlessly. He gave up Meyer Lansky as Luciano’s second-in-command. The family started to call Valachi Joe Cargo. That was bastardized to Cago, the Italian dialect expression for shit.’
Visceglia laughed and lit another cigarette.
‘Valachi wasn’t no fucking Einstein. He was just muscle, and most of what came out of his mouth during those hearings was later discredited. Seems that members of Valachi’s crew knew Valachi well enough. They told him a whole heap of bullshit, things that Valachi actually thought were the truth. Nevertheless the words of Joseph Valachi and the subsequent Valachi Papers proved devastating to the Mafia. That was the point at which it all started to come apart at the seams. If Valachi hadn’t gone down and sung like a fucking canary who knows what the fuck might have happened.’
Visceglia paused and shook his head. ‘Truth was that after Valachi’s testimony the New York City Police Department released a very significant statistic. More family members in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metropolitan area had been jailed in the subsequent three years than in the previous thirty. The guy did what he did, right or wrong, as far as the federal people were concerned, and though not one word actually served to finger anyone directly it still raised public and political awareness of what was really going on and what these people were capable of.’
‘And now?’ Hartmann asked.
‘Now? Well it ain’t what it used to be,’ Visceglia said. ‘Things ain’t never the same as they was in the old country . . . whaddya know, huh? Give it a name, forgeddaboudit, right?’
Hartmann had laughed. Visceglia, despite everything, despite the pictures, the stories, the lives lost, the deaths witnessed, despite everything he carried on his shoulders, somehow managed to retain an element of dry humor. Visceglia wasn’t married, and one time Hartmann had asked him why.
‘Married? Someone like me? Wouldn’t be fair to drag someone into this who hadn’t asked to be part of it.’
Hartmann had appreciated the sentiment, and believed – perhaps – that he possessed sufficient strength of character to maintain an air of separation and objectivity. He believed he could live two lives, one at work and one at home, and it would only be in time that he would see how insidiously one could silently invade and unsettle the other.
Complex and almost indecipherable, incestuous and nepotistic, the Mafia was a many-headed Hydra that had survived all attempts to wipe it out. It was not something that existed in any real or tangible sense. It was a spectre, a series of interconnecting and yet separate shadows. Grasp for one facet and another would slip irretrievably out of reach. It was This Thing of Ours, and those whose thing it was were perhaps more loyal than any officially recognized body that faced them.
And Hartmann, despite the hours of reading files and transcripts, despite the tapes he’d listened to, the court reports he’d fallen asleep over, had never really managed to grasp the true meaning of this ‘family’. These people did indeed seem to be the worst the world could offer, and many were the times he’d asked himself if he shouldn’t just step away from the edge, take three paces back and turn the other way. And yet even in his darkest times, even when he understood that carrying the weight of this was a major contributory factor to his drinking, and understood also that drinking would be the thing that could irretrievably take his wife and his child away from him, he nevertheless found himself unable to avert his eyes. Morbid interest became fascination became obsession became addiction.
And so he lay there on his hotel bed, the echo of the conversation he’d held earlier that evening still echoing in his mind, and the thoughts that came with it, the thoughts that such a thing would carry, were shadowed and oppressive and almost too heavy to bear.
‘You’re here for the duration, my friend,’ Schaeffer had told him with a simple matter-of-factness that allowed for no rebuttal. ‘You are an employee of the federal government whichever way this comes, and as such you are now working within our jurisdiction. What we say goes, and that is the only way it can be. We are dealing with a girl’s life, not just a girl, but the daughter of one of the country’s most significant politicians. Charles Ducane has been a personal friend of the vice-president since they attended college together, and there is no way in the world any of us would say No to the vice-president. You understand this, Mr Hartmann?’
Ray Hartmann had nodded. Yes, he understood, understood that he had no choice in the matter. He watched Schaeffer’s face as he talked, as the words issued from his lips, and yet all he could see were the faces of his wife and child when they appeared at Tompkins Square Park the following Saturday and he was not there. That was all he could see. He could hear something as well, and what he heard was Jess’s voice as she asked Where’s daddy gone? Why isn’t he here? He said he’d be here, didn’t he, Mommy?
And Carol would have to explain once more how daddy wasn’t really running with the same program as them, that daddy had a very important job to do, that daddy never meant to not be there and there had to be a good explanation for his absence. But in her mind Carol would be cursing him, telling herself that she’d been a fool to believe he would ever keep his word, that despite being apart for these months nothing had changed, that Ray Hartmann was still the same self-centered, disorganized, alcoholic loser that he’d always been.
But that wasn’t the truth. He hadn’t always been self-centered, hadn’t always been disorganized, and sure as hell he hadn’t been, and wasn’t, an alcoholic. It was this that had made him this way, this life, these people, and now he was falling right back into the same patterns all over again despite promising himself that this year, this year, would be the one he left this crazy bad business behind.
Hartmann turned over and buried his face in the pillow. New Orleans was out there, the same New Orleans he had left with a vow never to return. But return he had, and in returning he’d carried with him all the suitcases he believed he’d left behind. He had never really set them down, that was the truth, and whatever was inside them, whatever it was that scared him so much he dared not look, had been right there all along. You never really let things go, you just fooled yourself into believing that you had grown out of them. How could you grow out of them when they were, always had been, and always would be an intrinsic part of exactly who you were?
He felt the tension in his chest, a difficulty in breathing. He turned over and stared at the ceiling, watched the trace-lines of car headlights as they turned at the end of the street beneath his window and wound their way out into the darkness. Out there he would find simpler people with simpler lives. Yes, they told lies, they cheated, they failed one another and possessed their regrets, but those things belonged to them; they were not so crazy as to try to carry their own burdens and the burdens of the rest of the world as well.
Perhaps it would never be easy. And no-one had ever told him it would be easy. But sure as hell they’d never let on it was going to be this hard.
Hartmann sat up and reached for his cigarettes. He lit one and flicked on the TV with the remote. He let the sounds and images blur together in his mind until he had no idea what he was watching or why. It worked for a minute, perhaps two, but always present was the sound at the other end of the phone, the way the voice had seemed to crawl down the wire and invade his head right through his ear.
And the way those first words sounded, and
how they could not have been worse.
‘Mr Ray Hartmann . . . welcome home to New Orleans . . .’
A chill edge of fear crawled along his spine. It settled at the base of his neck. He reached up with his right hand and massaged the muscles that were knotting into small fists.
Hartmann opened his mouth. He looked sideways at Schaeffer. Nothing came forth. Not a word.
‘You are well, Mr Hartmann?’
Schaeffer nudged him in the shoulder.
‘As can be,’ Hartmann replied.
‘I understand that you have been dragged all the way home from New York . . . or did you manage to convince yourself that New York was now your home?’
Hartmann was silent.
Schaeffer nudged him again. Hartmann wanted to lunge from the desk and drive the receiver right into Schaeffer’s face. He didn’t. He sat stock-still and felt the sweat break out on the palms of his hands.
‘I don’t think I did that,’ Hartmann said.
‘Then you and I have something in common, Mr Hartmann. Despite everything, all these years, all the places I have been, I am like you . . . I could never get New Orleans out of my blood.’
Hartmann didn’t reply.
‘Anyway, I can imagine Mr Schaeffer and his federal agents are busy trying to trace this call. Tell them it doesn’t matter. Tell them that I am coming in. I am coming in to speak with you, Mr Hartmann, to tell you some things.’
‘Some things?’
The man at the other end of the line laughed gently. ‘You and I, we shall be like Robert Harrison and Howard Rushmore.’
Hartmann frowned. ‘Like who?’
‘Harrison and Rushmore . . . you do not recall those names?’
‘No, I don’t. Should I?’
‘Robert Harrison and Howard Rushmore were the men who published Confidential magazine. You know, “Uncensored and off the record”, “Tells the facts and names the names”. You have heard of Confidential magazine?’
R. J. Ellory Page 10