what he was going to do next.
Reports came later, inconsistent, inconclusive – but for one key fact.
Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, members of the ATF and DEA had raided the property of Antoine Feraud.
Daddy Always.
Men had been killed on both sides. There were numerous fatalities and woundings. Even as those reports came in, even as Hartmann listened to the words that were relayed back to the Royal Sonesta through Lester Kubis, men were being ferried to the Emergency Room in New Orleans suffering gunshot wounds. But one thing was known for sure.
Daddy Always was dead. Standing at the top of the stairwell in his own house he had fired on FBI agents as they came in through the front door. He went down in a hail of gunfire. He went down fighting back, and even as his body fell down two flights of stairs, even as his old and broken form lay spread-eagled at the foot of the risers, blood making its cautious way from his head and out across the deep polished mahogany flooring, Governor Charles Ducane’s heart monitor flatlined while surgeons attempted to remove a third bullet from an arterial channel close to his heart.
They died within moments of one another, and had they known, had they been aware of that narrow coincidence, they might perhaps have been amused at the irony. As, undoubtedly, would Ernesto Perez, crossing the Louisiana stateline into Mississippi beside a tributary of the Amite River.
Night was closing in. The lights of the Royal Sonesta burned bright. Federal agents returning from the Feraud property were gathered and briefed. Even Verlaine was there, aware that all hell had broken loose and eager to understand what had happened in his territory.
And it was he who stood beside Ray Hartmann when Michael Cipliano showed up, beside him Jim Emerson and in his hand the report prepared from the clothes they had processed from the Shell Beach Motel.
‘Her clothes alright, no question about it,’ Cipliano told Hartmann. ‘Nothing out of the ordinary, ’cept for this one little thing.’
Hartmann, his mind too overwhelmed with all that had happened to cope with anything else, merely looked back at Cipliano.
‘Back of her jeans we found some blood… tiny little spots of blood around the edge of the rivets-’
Hartmann knew what Cipliano was going to say before he uttered the words.
‘Except it wasn’t blood, Mr Hartmann… it was burgundy paint, the kind you’d find on a ’57 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser.’
Cipliano was smiling, as if everything the world had to offer had now fallen into place.
‘We estimated the carrier’s height at maybe five-foot ten or eleven. Catherine Ducane was five-foot seven, but along with her jeans you brought a pair of three-inch high-heeled shoes…’
Hartmann closed his eyes. He stepped past Cipliano and Emerson and walked out into the street. He stood there on the sidewalk, the noise behind him blurring into nothing.
He inhaled, exhaled, inhaled once more… and then he found it: the ripe malodorous blend of smells and sounds and human syncopations; the heat of rare ribs scorching in oiled flames; the bay leaf and oregano and court bouillon and carbonara from Tortorici’s; the collected perfumes of a thousand million intersecting lives, and then each life intersecting yet another like six degrees of separation; a thousand million beating hearts, all here, here beneath the roof of the same sky where the stars were like dark eyes that saw everything… saw and remembered…
He thought of Danny, of looking out over the trees, out over the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, a band of clear dark blue, a stripe through the earth, a vein… how they 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 weirdo kids, 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…
Ray Hartmann felt that vague and indefinable sensation… believed that each time he thought of these things he was younger for the duration.
And then he saw his mother’s face, his father’s too, and within a moment he had to wipe the soft salt-sting of tears from his eyes.
‘It was always here,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Everything I ever was. It was always here.’
And then he turned. Quietly, step by step, he turned and left. Walking slowly now, carefully, each chosen step a moment of thought in itself, and made his way down to the junction.
It was there that he found a callbox, and with his quarters in his hand he dialed the number, a number he could never have forgotten if his life had depended on it.
And he almost broke down in tears when he heard her voice.
‘Ray? Ray, is that you?’
‘Yes, Carol, it’s me.’
TWENTY-NINE
New York would never be the same. At least not through Ray Hartmann’s eyes. The eyes that looked out over the skyline as the plane banked and veered towards the airport were different eyes now. It was early afternoon, Tuesday 10 September. Eleven days had passed, during which Hartmann had lived two lifetimes, his own and that of Ernesto Cabrera Perez.
The world had fallen apart behind him as he’d left Louisiana. Ducane was dead, Feraud also; and though all efforts were being made by the federal and intelligence communities within the mainland United States, Hartmann truly believed that Perez, his son Victor, Catherine Ducane and Samuel ‘Ten Cent’ Pagliaro had already left the United States behind. Perhaps they were in Cuba, or South America – it didn’t matter. What mattered was that they were gone. And Ducane was a man who had died with his own reputation intact. He was acknowledged in the newspapers, on the TV; he was applauded as a man of vision, a man of the future. He went to his grave with his image unsullied by the ugly truth, for there were people above and behind him who knew that nothing would be gained by revealing that truth to the world. Charles Ducane had been murdered at the behest of Antoine Feraud, and now Feraud himself was dead. His son would be swiftly processed through the judicial system, and would irrevocably disappear. This was politics, the same politics that had given America Watergate and Vietnam, the deaths of two Kennedys and Martin Luther King. It was the public face of Charles Ducane that would be worn for the world: husband, father, governor, martyr.
These things did not concern Ray Hartmann. The sole and prevalent thought in his mind was his meeting at four p.m. in Tompkins Square Park. A little more than eight months he had been separated from his family. Jess would be different. It never ceased to amaze him how fast children ceased to be children and became young men and women. Carol would have changed too. You cannot spend two-thirds of a year away from your husband, away from the familiarity of the family you have created, and not be somehow changed. But he had changed too; Ray Hartmann knew that, and he hoped – against everything that previous experience had taught him – that he had changed enough.
He had called Carol earlier, from New Orleans. She had said nothing for a good three or four minutes while he poured out every thought and feeling, every reason he believed they should meet again. He had apologized for Saturday ten, twelve, perhaps twenty times, and finally, exhausted perhaps, she had said, ‘Okay Ray… for Jess. Same place, Tompkins Square Park at four. And don’t fuck this up, Ray… please don’t fuck this up again. Right
