A Quiet Vendetta

the ones that make it back alive… Well, they are home within forty-eight hours. That’s just the cold, hard reality of the matter.’

‘So why kill her and go through all of this?’ Woodroffe asked, knowing even as he asked the question that the answer was obvious, and voicing it for no other reason than grasping at straws, asking anything that might throw some fragile shadow of hope across the thing.

‘So we would sit here patiently and listen to his life,’ Hartmann said.

‘And that, simply enough, was the way he could make us hear the truth about Feraud and Ducane,’ Schaeffer said.

‘Maybe,’ Hartmann replied.

‘Right,’ said Woodroffe. ‘It’s all a maybe.’

Hartmann looked up at both of them. ‘Until tomorrow,’ he said, and rose from his chair. He walked along the hallway to the stairwell and made his way down to the foyer.

He believed he’d never been so exhausted in his life.

He was there on the street in front of the hotel when the FBI transporters came. There were two of them, an older man, tall and heavy-set, almost too old to be in active service, and a much younger one, dark-haired, and had he been but a few years older they could have been stand-ins for himself and Perez. Agents such as these were specially assigned to tasks such as this – the passage of Ernesto Perez to Quantico, right into the heart of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Headquarters, and there – while he awaited whatever judicial procedure the Bureau had arranged for him – there would be a hundred profilers with a hundred different tests, all of them eager to ascertain the specific common denominator that linked all such people together. There was no one thing: Hartmann knew that from studying thousands of case files on all manner of killings. These people were human beings just like the rest of us, and Hartmann believed all people possessed the capacity and will to murder; it was merely a matter of environment, conditioning, situational dynamics as they were so often referred to, that precipitated that actual moment, the split-second heartbeat when the mind moved the hand and the hand pulled the trigger or buried the knife or tightened the cord around someone’s unsuspecting throat. It was not complicated; it could not be filed or classified or cataloged or cross-indexed; it was what it was, and what it was would always and forever come down to people. Guns were never the cause of death; thoughts and emotions and reactions were the force majeure. People killed people, and that was all there was to it.

So Ray Hartmann sat smoking his cigarette while the transporters made idle talk with the other agents present, and no-one seemed to possess the same degree of tenacity or drive about this thing. Perhaps they all subconsciously knew it was coming to an end. Perhaps they all believed that Catherine Ducane was dead, and thus there was nothing else worth fighting for.

Outside the hotel stood an armored four-by-four Humvee. Dark gray, mirrored windows, bulletproof tires, skirting between the wheels that was designed to prevent anything being rolled beneath the vehicle. It was in this vehicle that Perez would make his final journey from Louisiana. Once he climbed inside that car he would never come back. Of that Hartmann was certain. And himself? Would he ever come back? He believed not, for this had not only been a trial by fire, it had also served as some means of exorcism and catharsis. Perhaps Louisiana would always and forever hold his past, both his childhood, and this particular rite of passage.

He rose and crossed the foyer. He shared a few words with the transporters – the elder one, Warren McCormack, the younger one, David Van Buren. They were cold and businesslike; they were here to do something specific, something functional and precise. They had done this sort of thing a thousand times before, ferrying the worst the world could offer to their final destination, and they were hardened and matter-of-fact and eager to be on their way.

Hartmann left the Royal Sonesta and walked the long route back to the Marriott. He felt as if he were breathing New Orleans air for the very last time. Tomorrow he would be gone. Tomorrow he would fly back to New York and call Carol. He considered once more what she had said when he’d had Verlaine call her. That she’d expressed doubts. Actions speak louder than words, she had said, and he felt sure he could demonstrate the necessary actions if only he was given another chance. But how many chances had she given him already? And how many times had he let her down? He would speak with Jess again, he knew that, and it was something he could almost physically anticipate. He wanted that meeting so much, a meeting where they could talk about the possibility of making their lives together work. He felt the conflict then: the need to know about Catherine Ducane versus the desire to know nothing more. Perhaps that was the point he believed he could let go of it all. It was so much a part of him, as intrinsically his own as his fingerprints, the sound of his voice, the way his face looked when he stared at himself in the mirror. Perhaps he had let whatever held him within this go – finally, without question. Perhaps. Time would tell.

In his room he watched TV. Cartoons, ten minutes of some awful made-for-TV movie, a brief flash of news that reminded him that the world had gone on about its business without him. He’d been here eight days, all of thirteen or fourteen hundred hours, and whereas a week had just effortlessly slipped through his fingers in New York, this week had seemed like a hundred years all crammed together with no breathing space at all.

He turned the TV channel to the hotel radio and lay on the bed. Dr John played ‘Jump Sturdy’, and following on came Van Morrison singing ‘Slipstream’. He remembered the record, the album he and Carol had bought together so many years before. Best record to make out to, she’d told him, and then she’d laughed and told him they’d wear the grooves flat by the time they were finished. It was all there just inches back of his forehead – the faces, the names, the colors, the sounds, the places – everything they had shared together for the better part of a decade and a half. And then there was Jess, all of twelve years old, nothing less than a woman in her own right, and how she had made everything they had worked for seem truly and eternally worthwhile.

He believed it was all there, every single moment of it, and now all he had to do was say the right thing at the right moment and he could take it all back.

And so he slept, once again fully clothed but for his shoes, and when he woke it was a little after six in the morning, and he stood on the balcony of his hotel room and watched as the sun rose and warmed and then bleached the landscape of shadows. This was the Big Easy, the Big Heartacher. New Orleans, where they buried the dead overground, where the guidebooks recommended you walk in groups, where everything slid over-easy, sunny-side down, where the Big George fell on eagles nine times out of ten.

This was the heart of it, the American Dream, and dreams never really changed, they just became faded and forgotten in the manic slow-motion slide of time.

Sometimes, out there, it was easier to choke than to breathe.

‘So you’re up for the last show,’ Schaeffer said as Hartmann appeared in the hotel room doorway.

Hartmann looked at Woodroffe and Schaeffer; they appeared as worn-out as he felt.

‘What happens when he’s done?’ he asked.

‘We got a couple of transporters who’ve come down,’ Woodroffe said. ‘Didn’t catch their names but they’re here from Quantico. That’s where he’s going after all is said and done.’

‘You were told that was gonna happen?’ Hartmann asked.

‘We were informed that people would be coming, of course,’ Schaeffer said. ‘They don’t send names or dates or anything, just that people would be coming to take Perez.’

Hartmann frowned.

Schaeffer laughed drily. ‘You don’t work for the FBI,’ he said. ‘Everything, and I mean everything, is on a strictly need-to-know basis. We’re just the babysitters. We’re just here to make sure he sings like a canary and doesn’t fly the coop. When our job’s done we get to go home and someone else takes Perez wherever the fuck he’s supposed to go.’

‘You’ll go with him to Quantico?’ Hartmann asked.

‘Sure we will,’ Woodroffe said. ‘I ain’t letting the guy disappear outta my life without saying goodbye.’

‘Me and Woodroffe will go with them,’ Schaeffer said, ‘and you, Mr Hartmann, you get to go back to the real world and fix this business with your wife.’

‘Any more news on Feraud and Ducane?’ Hartmann asked.

‘I haven’t heard anything else,’ Schaeffer said. ‘I imagine we’ll catch something on the news sooner or later.’

‘A statement will come from Ducane’s office that he has been taken ill and his doctor has consigned him to