A Quiet Vendetta

‘You are well, I trust?’ the voice asked.

‘Well enough,’ Schaeffer replied. He waved his hand to quieten down the murmur of voices around him and took a seat at his desk.

Woodroffe gave him a thumbs-up. The call was being recorded and traced.

‘I am calling from a different callbox,’ the voice said. ‘I understand it takes approximately forty-three seconds to locate me, so I won’t waste time with asking how the investigation is going.’

Schaeffer opened his mouth to speak but the voice continued.

‘I told your colleague Agent Fraschetti that a trade would be required. I am now going to give you my terms and conditions, and if they are not met I will shoot the girl in the forehead and leave her body in a public place. Understood?’

‘Yes,’ Schaeffer said.

‘Bring Ray Hartmann down to New Orleans. You have twenty-four hours to find him and get him here. I will call at exactly seven p.m. tomorrow evening and he should be ready to take my call. At this time this is all I ask of you.’

‘Hartmann, Ray Hartmann. Who is Ray Hartmann?’

The voice laughed gently. ‘That is all part of the game, Agent Schaeffer. Tomorrow evening, seven p.m., and have Ray Hartmann there to take my call or Catherine Ducane is irretrievably dead.’

‘But-’ Schaeffer started.

The line went silent.

Woodroffe was in the doorway before Schaeffer had replaced the receiver in the cradle.

‘Two blocks down and east of Gravier,’ Woodroffe said. ‘We have a unit three or four minutes away already.’

Schaeffer leaned back in his chair and sighed. ‘Won’t find anything,’ he said quietly.

‘You what?’

Schaeffer closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘You won’t find anything down there.’

Woodroffe looked momentarily irritated. ‘You think I don’t realize that?’

Schaeffer waved his hand in a conciliatory fashion. ‘I know, Bill, I know.’

‘So who the hell is this Ray Hartmann?’

‘I’m fucked if I know,’ Schaeffer said. He rose from his chair and filled a paper cone from the water cooler. ‘I don’t know who he is or where he is, but we’ve got twenty-four hours to find him and get him here or the girl is dead.’

‘I’ll call Washington,’ Woodroffe said.

‘And give the tape to Kubis and see if he can find out anything else about this guy.’

‘Sure thing,’ Woodroffe replied. He turned and left the room.

Schaeffer drank his water, crumpled the cone and tossed it into the trashcan.

He returned to his desk and sat down heavily. He sighed and closed his eyes.

Outside it started raining, and a little more than two miles from where Stanley Schaeffer sat an elderly man, perhaps sixty-five or seventy, watched a stream of generic gray sedans invade a street not far from Gravier.

Tucking his hands in his overcoat pockets he turned and walked away. He whistled as he went, a tune called ‘Chloe’, a classic by Kahn and Morret that was popularized by Spike Jones in the ’50s, a song that told of a lonely girl searching for her lost love.

The old man had wanted to tell them more, had wanted to tell them everything, but as so many of his friends in the old country used to say, ‘A temptation resisted is the true measure of character.’ There was a time and a place for everything. The place was New Orleans, and the time would be tomorrow evening when Ray Hartmann came home.

FOUR

And he would say, ‘But there never was a time when you told me exactly how you felt,’ and she’d say, ‘Even if I had told you you wouldn’t have listened anyway,’ and he would close his eyes, sigh deeply, and reply, ‘How the hell would you have known, Carol… I mean, tell me that, how the hell would you have known if I’d been listening?’ and then one of them – it didn’t matter who – would mention Jess’s name, and at that point things would kind of quieten down. Seemed that Jess was perhaps the only real reason Ray Hartmann and Carol talked any more, and maybe because of that there was the hope that somehow, some way, something good might have been salvaged from their thirteen years together. Spend that many years living side by side, breathing the same air, eating the same food, sharing the same bed, and separation felt like losing a limb, and though hours were spent in some vague attempt to convince themselves that the limb was diseased, that it had to be amputated, that they could never have survived leaving it where it was, the truth always haunted them. No-one else would ever feel that good, that right, that familiar. And there would always be a standard against which all others were judged, and though the sex might have been better, though the complaints might have been different, they would always be aware of the fact that this new one was not the one.

All their conversations went like that these days: recriminatory, bitter, resentful, sharp and to the point. And they would always talk on the phone when Jessica wasn’t there, because she was a human being too, all of twelve years old and mindful of what was happening between her parents. Carol Hartmann, separated from her husband now for the better part of eight months, always called when Jessica was out with friends or on a sleep-over, or at band practice or down at the gym. And Ray Hartmann – he of the broken heart and bloodied knuckles where he’d put his fist through the kitchen cupboard door that evening of 28 December – would take the call and sit on the edge of his bed, and he would hear her voice and believe that never in his life would he miss anything as much as he missed his wife. Three days after Christmas for God’s sake, drunk and loud and screaming some mindless crap at the top of his voice, and Jessica crying and running to her mother because daddy had gone out of the loop once again. And it was never Jessica, and truth be known it was never Carol, whom he’d married one fine February morning in 1990. It was the job, the stress of the job, the way the job carried over into everything you were, everything you ever imagined you could be, and it was a rare and special woman who could have weathered the storms Ray Hartmann brought with him, for sometimes he didn’t just bring storms, sometimes he brought Hurricane Ray, loud enough to bring down trees and take the roof right off of the eaves. But for thirteen years she had managed, and though not all of those years had been difficult they nevertheless had had their moments. Prone to mood swings and sudden shifts of temperament, Ray Hartmann had lost count of the number of times his wife had looked at him across the room with an expression of wonder and terror, an underlying sense of panic that this time, this time, he might just do something all of them would seriously regret. But he never did, not until that night of 28 December, and then he’d gatecrashed his way through the supposed harmony of their house, and then he’d started up again like a fire siren, and before he knew it he was standing there with blood running out of his knuckles and spotting the linoleum floor, and his wife and his daughter were both screaming at him to get out of the house and not come back. Bruised they looked; spiritually bruised.

So he left the house that night, more out of shame and an abiding sense of fear about what he might be capable of, and he walked seven blocks in the snow to the ER and they cleaned and bandaged his knuckles and told him to sleep off his drunk on a trolley down the corridor. When he’d woken, his mouth tasting like copper filings and seaweed, he had remembered what he’d done, and when he’d called and got no answer he knew that Carol had taken Jessica to her grandmother’s. He’d walked back and taken a few things from the house. He’d checked into a motel for three days and stayed sober. Then he’d rented an apartment in Little Italy, downtown Manhattan, a four-room gray-walled apartment with windows overlooking Sarah Roosevelt Park, and he’d called in sick and spent forty-eight hours asking himself why he was such a goddamned asshole.

Their home, the Hartmann home, was in Stuyvesant Town, and though he drove past the very block where his wife and daughter were, he never set foot on the porch, he never rang the bell and waited for the sound of footsteps in the hall. He was too ashamed, too self-critical of the kind of man he’d been, and he would spend another three or four weeks beating the shit out of himself before he got the nerve to call her.

The first call had been difficult: strained, long silences, ended on a sour note.