‘Just a cup of coffee.’
‘Sure, if that’s what you want.’
‘No, it’s not what I want, but I’m thinking if I go for a cup of coffee with you then you might leave me alone. Is that hoping too much?’
‘Yes, that’s hoping too much. If you come for a cup of coffee with me then I’m gonna want to come back and go someplace else next time.’
Angelina said nothing for a moment, and then she nodded. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Come back at four.’
She closed the door.
I went back at four. I beat on the door until someone in the adjacent house leaned out of the window and told me to shut the fuck up, asshole.
Angelina was either out, or she was hiding inside.
I wasn’t mad, not then, not ever; I was just determined.
I left it ’til Tuesday evening, a little after seven and I called at her house again.
She came to the door. She was dressed smart, a skirt, a woollen jacket, a pretty pink blouse that made her complexion warm and inviting.
‘I was ready last night and you didn’t come,’ she said.
‘I didn’t say I would come last night.’
‘You’re right, you didn’t, but seeing as how you came the day before and the day before that I figured you were gonna come every day until I gave in.’
‘If you’d said you were gonna be ready last night I would have come last night. You just shut the door on me and then when I came back on Sunday you weren’t here.’
‘I was here, I just didn’t come to the door.’
‘How come?’
‘I wanted to see how persistent you were.’
‘And?’
‘And you’re very persistent, though I’m still surprised you didn’t come yesterday.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Apology accepted,’ she said. ‘So where you gonna take me?’
‘Where d’you wanna go?’
‘Up to Avenue of the Americas on the subway, and find the most expensive restaurant and eat stuff I’ve never eaten before.’
‘We can do that.’
She paused for a moment as if contemplating something, and then she nodded. ‘Okay, give me five minutes and I’ll be down.’
‘You’re not gonna shut the door and then go hide inside the house?’
She laughed. ‘No . . . give me five minutes.’
I gave her five minutes. She didn’t come down. She left me standing there a further two minutes and then I heard her footsteps behind the door.
She opened up and came out. She looked great; she smelled great, something like violets or honeysuckles or something, and when I gave her my arm she took it and I walked her to the car. I opened the door for her and drove her to the subway station. I didn’t ask her why she didn’t want to drive. She wanted the subway, she got the subway. Had she asked me to buy the subway for her I would have found a way.
I took her to the Avenue of the Americas. We found a restaurant, and whether it was the most expensive one on the Avenue I don’t know, didn’t care, but I spent two hundred and eleven dollars on dinner and left a fifty-dollar tip.
I didn’t drive her back from the subway station to the house when we returned. I wanted to spend as much time with her as I could. I walked with her, it took a good twenty minutes, and when I stood on the stoop and told her I’d had the greatest night of my life she reached out and touched my face.
She did not kiss me, but that was okay. She did say I could call on her again, and I said I would.
I saw her most every day, except for those few days I was out of town on business, for the better part of eight months. In July of 1976 I asked her to marry me.
‘You want me to marry you?’ she asked.
I nodded. My throat was tight. I found it hard to breathe. The girl did the same thing to me as Ten Cent would do to someone who welched on a payback.
‘And why d’you wanna marry me?’
‘Because I love you,’ I said, and I meant it.
‘You love me?’
I nodded. ‘I do.’
‘And you understand that if I say no then you can’t ever come round here again. That’s the way it goes in this business . . . you ask a girl to marry you and she says no, then that’s the end of the matter. You know that right then it’s dead and gone to Hell. You understand that, Ernesto Perez?’
‘I understand that.’
‘So ask me properly.’
I frowned. ‘Whaddya mean, ask you properly? I just did ask you properly. I gotta ring here in my jacket pocket and everything.’
Angelina turned her mouth down at the edges and nodded her head approvingly. ‘You gotta ring?’
‘Sure. You didn’t think I’d come down here and ask you to marry me if I didn’t have a ring?’
‘Let me see it.’
‘Eh?’
‘Let me see the ring you brought.’
‘You’re serious?’ I asked.
She nodded. ‘Sure I’m serious.’
I shook my head. This wasn’t going according to plan; this was getting an awful lot more awkward and complicated than I’d imagined. I reached into my jacket pocket and took out the ring. It was in a small black velvet box.
I handed it to Angelina.
She took it, opened it, removed the ring and held it up to the light. ‘Real diamonds?’ she asked.
I scowled. Now I was beginning to get pissed. ‘Sure it’s real diamonds. You think I’d bring something to get engaged that was some cheap piece of shit—’
‘Language, Ernesto.’
I nodded. ‘Sorry.’
‘And it’s legit?’
‘Angelina, for Christ’s sake—’
‘I gotta ask, right? I gotta ask. I’ve been living around people like you all my life. Don’t think there can be more than three or four things given to me in my life that weren’t stolen. Getting engaged is important, getting married even more so, and I wouldn’t wanna be making any vows to God and the Virgin Mary on something that was stolen from some poor widow down on 9th Street—’
‘Angelina, for fuck’s sake—’
‘Language—’
‘Screw the fucking language. Give me the fucking ring back. I’m going home. I’m gonna come back tomorrow when you’re a little less crazy.’
Angelina held the ring in her hand. She closed her fist around it. ‘But I thought you came down here to ask me to marry you?’
‘I did. I came down here to ask you to marry me, but you’re just standing there busting my goddamned balls for no reason.’
‘So do it properly,’ she said.
‘I just did for Christ’s sake!’
‘Down on one knee, Ernesto Perez . . . down on one knee and ask me properly with no cursing or taking the Lord’s name in vain.’
I sighed. I shook my head. I kneeled down on the stoop and looked up at her. I opened my mouth to speak.
‘Yes,’ she said, before I had a chance to say a word.
‘Yes what?’
‘Yes, Ernesto Perez . . . I will marry you.’
‘But I haven’t even asked you yet!’ I said.
‘But I knew you were gonna ask me and I didn’t want to waste any more time.’
‘Aah Jesus, Angelina—’
‘Enough cursing Ernesto, enough cursing.’
‘Okay, okay . . . enough already.’
In November I suggested we get married in January of the following year. She put it off until May as she wanted to be married outside.
Three hundred people came to the party. It went on for two days. We took a honeymoon in California. We went to Disneyland. I did not have to learn to love her. I had loved her from a distance for a very long time. She was everything to me, and she knew it. Apart from the children she was the most important thing in my life. She made me important, that was how I felt, and that was a feeling I never believed possible.
In July of ’76 I had heard of Castro, how he had declared himself Head of State, President of the Council of State,
also of the Council of Ministers. Word of him came from TV reports regarding the Senate Select Committee in Intelligence under Senator Frank Church and their investigations and inquiries regarding the alleged CIA involvement in the attempted assassination of Castro. It made me think of Cuba, of Havana, of my mother and father and all that had gone before. Of these things I said nothing to Angel, for that was what I called her, and that’s what she was.
In a way she was my salvation, and in some way my undoing, and but for the children there would have been nothing to show for any of it. But those things were later, so much later, and now is not the time to talk about such things.
By the time we talked about leaving New York I was forty-three years old. A second-rate B-movie actor had become president of the United States, and Angel Perez was pregnant. She did not want our children to grow up in New York, and with the family’s blessing we thought of moving to California, where the sun shone twenty-three hours of the day, three hundred and sixty-three days of the year. I cannot say that we existed together in a halcyon haze of contentment; I do not believe such a thing would be possible for a man with work such as mine, but the images and memories of my parents’ relationship were so far removed from what Angel and I had created that I was happy.
I did not believe, not for a heartbeat, that anything would go wrong, but then – in hindsight – I can honestly say that I was not a man who lived my life on the basis of belief.
New York became a closed chapter. We flew out in March of 1982, Angel was six months pregnant, and though it would be another fifteen years before I returned to New York I would never again look at that city with the same eyes.
The world changed, I changed with it, and if there was one thing I had learned it was that you could never go back.
EIGHTEEN
The storm had not abated. Rain hammered down relentlessly, and when Hartmann was escorted from the FBI Field Office across town to the Royal Sonesta – a convoy of three cars, himself in the central vehicle with Woodroffe, Schaeffer and Sheldon Ross – he imagined himself more the guilty party than the confessor. For that’s what he was being, was he not? Confessor to Ernesto Perez, a man who had filled his life with as many nightmares as was perhaps possible for one human being.
‘I cannot believe this,’ Woodroffe had kept repeating, and was even now saying it again as they drove. ‘Jimmy Hoffa’s murder must be one of the most significant unsolved murders of all time—’
‘Apart from Kennedy,’ Ross had interjected, a comment that provoked scowls of disapproval from both Woodroffe and Schaeffer. Hartmann imagined that the party line in and amongst the Bureau was that J. Edgar Hoover and the Warren Commission had been right all along. It was, he could only suppose, one of those topics of conversation that did not occur among these people. They believed what they believed, but what they believed stayed inside their heads and did not venture from their lips.
‘Jimmy fucking Hoffa . . . Christ al-fucking-mighty,’ Woodroffe said. ‘I remember it. I remember it happening. I remember all the speculation, the newspaper reports, the theories about what had happened to him.’
‘You must have been in your teens,’ Schaeffer said.
‘Regardless,’ Woodroffe said. ‘I remember it well. And when I came into the Bureau and started reading files that related to organized crime that name came up again and again. That was the big question . . . what the hell happened to Jimmy Hoffa? I can’t believe that Perez was the one who actually killed him. And that Charles Ducane, the fucking governor of Louisiana, knew about it . . . in effect sanctioned it—’
‘And was gonna send Gerard McCahill down to do it,’ Hartmann said, which seemed to him the most relevant point, and the one everyone seemed to be unwilling to face.
‘Enough,’ Schaeffer said. ‘We have no evidence of that.’
‘But we know that pretty much everything Perez has said so far has proven to be true,’ Woodroffe retorted.
‘Supposition,’ Schaeffer replied. ‘We do not know that everything he has said is true, and right now we are investigating Ernesto Perez, not Charles Ducane. As far as I am concerned Charles Ducane and his daughter are the victims of a crime, as is Gerard McCahill, and I don’t want to hear another word about it.’
‘There’s also the fact of how McCahill’s body was found,’ Hartmann said.
‘How so?’ Woodroffe asked.
‘The drawing on his back . . . the constellation of Gemini. That was the word they used when they referred to the hit on Hoffa . . . they referred to it as Gemini. I figure that must have been done to remind Ducane that his involvement had not been forgotten.’
‘Again supposition,’ Schaeffer said. ‘We don’t know anything for a fact. All we have to go on is the word of one man, and he’s as crazy as they come.’
‘Well shit,’ Hartmann said. ‘There goes one of life’s great mysteries,’ and that seemed to kill the subject stone-dead. There was silence for a moment. Hartmann looked out of the window. In the back of his mind he could see the image of the constellation glowing on McCahill’s back, and then he thought of Ernesto Perez standing over the dead body of Stefano Cagnotto. For a heartbeat he was back in the motel with Luca Visceglia, a motel out near Calvary Cemetery the night before an affidavit was due to be sworn. He knew how someone looked when they’d been forcibly overdosed.
‘Now we gotta find the wife,’ Schaeffer said. He looked over at Hartmann in the back seat. ‘See if you can’t get him to tell you something more about the wife. She’s gotta be around somewhere.’
‘And the kid . . . boy, girl, whatever, they’ve gotta be in their early twenties now,’ Woodroffe said.
‘I’ve got FBI Trace alerted,’ Schaeffer added. ‘They’ll find her, we just don’t have a realistic estimate on how long it will take. They’ll go back as far as they need to. Fact of the matter is that there’s no-one in this country who can’t be traced eventually.’
‘Except for Perez himself,’ Woodroffe said, and Schaeffer cut him a look that silenced him immediately.
‘I don’t think we can rely on Perez’s wife being any part of this,’ Hartmann said.
‘And what brings you to that conclusion?’ Schaeffer asked.
‘Perez is too smart to involve his own family. That would be too close to home.’
‘Regardless, it’s something,’ Schaeffer said, ‘and in this situation we follow everything, no matter how unrelated it might seem right now.’
‘And that includes Charles Ducane?’ Hartmann asked, and though it was a question it was as good as rhetoric because he knew how Schaeffer would respond.
Schaeffer just turned and looked at him. The expression on the man’s face was cold and aloof, but beneath that there was something tired and beaten. ‘You wanna get into this again?’ he asked Hartmann.
‘Do I want to?’ Hartmann asked. ‘No, I sure as hell don’t. I don’t want to get into any of it. In fact I’d much prefer to just step away from the whole thing and go back to New York right now.’
‘We find the girl,’ Schaeffer said.
‘And then?’
Schaeffer raised his eyebrows.
‘And then someone is talking to Ducane?’ Hartmann asked.
Schaeffer closed his eyes and sighed. ‘Whether or not someone talks to Ducane is entirely up to someone else,’ he replied.
‘And none of us here are gonna take any responsibility for that at all, right? You’ve heard what I’ve heard—’
Schaeffer raised his hand. ‘Enough already,’ he said. ‘I’m doing one thing at a time, I’m following the brief I’ve been given . . . and right now the only thing that bears any relevance to anything is Catherine Ducane.’
‘So we’re gonna let it all slide once we find the girl?’
Woodroffe leaned forward. ‘Ray . . . just drop it for now, okay? We go do this meeting with Perez, we do everything we have to do until we’ve got the girl back, and then—’
Hartmann interjected. ‘It’s okay. I’m not saying anyth
ing else. It isn’t my job to decide who runs this country anyway.’
Schaeffer didn’t respond; figured it was better that he didn’t. This was a circular conversation, and right in the middle of it was a great number of things that none of them really wanted to know.
The journey was brief, made longer simply by the rainfall; the streets were flooding against the storm drains, and here and there Hartmann saw people hurrying through the downpour in some vain effort to avoid the worst of it. It was hopeless, the heavens had opened wide, and everything that was available was being focused on New Orleans. Perhaps God, in His infinite wisdom, was attempting to clean the place up. It wouldn’t work: too much blood had been spilled on this land for it to be anything other than a small reflection of Hell.
The convoy pulled up outside the Royal Sonesta. Hartmann was out and running towards the front entrance, and there he was met by three federal agents. Inside there were four more, all of them armed, all of them clones of one another, and Hartmann realized how much attention and money was being devoted to this operation.
Now he was being placed in a supremely untenable position. He knew, with more certainty than most other things in his life, that Perez was not here to barter for the life of the girl. That was the very least of his interests. Perez was not here to avoid jail or the death sentence or anything else the justice community could throw at him. Perez was here to tell a story and to make a point. What that point was, well that was anybody’s guess. Hartmann had reconciled himself to giving it the best he had, and if the best wasn’t good enough then they could have someone else come in and do the job.
One of the agents took his overcoat and handed him a towel.
‘Fucked-up weather,’ Hartmann said and started to dry his hair and the back of his neck.
The agent just looked back at him implacably and said nothing.
Where the fuck do they get these people? Hartmann wondered. Maybe they have a factory out near Quantico where they just breed them from the same stem cells.
Hartmann returned the towel and straightened his hair.
Woodroffe appeared beside him, Schaeffer close behind.
‘You gonna give me a wire?’ Hartmann asked.
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