right through him as soon as he crossed its limits, and that sensory invasion was neither willed nor welcome.
Ray Hartmann shuddered in the breeze that found its way through the half-opened window, believed that he would always find this place abhorrent no matter the season – stinking and ripe with the smell of loose and swollen vegetation in summer, and then through fall and winter the frozen brittleness, the ghostly angularity of the trees, the picket fences that ran in non-sequitur patterns through all territories, defiant of whatever authoritarian plutocracy held sway, standing also in defiance of any sense of the aesthetic. This was a mean and hollow country, perhaps its only blessing the people themselves, holding true to the intent and determination of their ancestors who’d dragged whatever life they’d lived out of the clutches of the everglades.
He looked left, turned towards the mimosa grove he could see across the street. On a clear day, standing on a ladder from the garage, he and Danny would look out over such trees, look out over the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, a band of clear dark blue, a stripe through the earth, a vein. 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 weirdos, 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.
The distant chatter of children in the street…
The vague and indefinable sensation that, as he thinks, he’s thinking back years, that each time he thinks of these things he’s younger for the duration.
And then later, Danny long since gone, coming home from school while his mother was still alive, brief stop- overs, passing through…
She would talk a little of her day, that Mister Koenig had taken her to mass, that she’d prayed for them both and felt all the better for it. She’d talk of a show at the Saenger Theater, of dinner at the Royal Sonesta, and then suddenly she’d be reminded of Mary Rousseau.
He would feel the pressure of his mother’s hand upon his own.
The smell of the parlor, of chicken cooking, of lavender and ointment for scrapes and burns and bruises, forever ambient of childhood, of growing, losing and learning how to love all over again.
Also leaving, for leaving was the very last thing he did.
She would look at him, this slight and frail-looking woman, though nothing could be further from the truth. One year she was assaulted by a teenager after her purse. She kicked him down an alleyway, cornered him, screamed until someone came to her assistance. Even after that she still walked out alone. She watched everything that happened through pale blue washed-out eyes, and if there was something that went down within four or five blocks from where she sat she could tell you all about it. She could tell you names, dates, places, the lies told, the actual truth. She’d stayed a widow after her husband’s death, some said because no man possessed the cojones to question her right to be alone. She was not sorry, she did not regret; she listened, advised, hoped someday to understand all that had happened and make some sense of it.
He would turn his head, look out towards the streets where he’d grown up.
The phone rang. It was as if someone had tied elastic to Ray Hartmann and suddenly snapped him back into the present.
He blinked twice, inhaled deeply, and then reached for the receiver.
‘Mr Hartmann?’ someone asked him.
‘Yes.’
‘We’re coming up to get you.’
‘Okay, okay,’ Hartmann replied, and then he replaced the receiver and walked through to the narrow bathroom to wash his face.
It was just after five p.m., evening of Friday the twenty-ninth. Outside it looked like a storm was coming.
Ray Hartmann’s first impression of FBI unit chiefs Stanley Schaeffer and Bill Woodroffe was of their seeming lack of individuality. Both in their mid to late forties, dark suits, white shirts, black ties, hair graying at the temples, furrowed brows and anxious eyes. These guys would spend the entirety of their working lives dressed for a funeral. The two Feds who’d flown out to New York to collect Hartmann had escorted him to the New Orleans FBI Field Office, signed him in without saying a word, walked him through a maze of corridors and then left him outside their door.
‘Inside,’ one of the agents said, and then the pair of them turned and walked away.
When Hartmann knocked it was Schaeffer who told him to come in, who greeted him, shook his hand, asked him to sit down, but it was Woodroffe who started talking.
‘Mr Hartmann,’ he said quietly. ‘I understand that you must be feeling some sense of confusion regarding the manner in which you have been brought here.’
Hartmann shrugged.
Woodroffe glanced at Schaeffer; Schaeffer nodded without looking away from Hartmann.
‘We have a case here. An unusual situation. A man has been murdered and a girl has been kidnapped, and we find ourselves requiring your services.’
Woodroffe waited for Hartmann to speak, but Hartmann had nothing to say.
‘The man we believe responsible for both the killing and the kidnapping has asked for you specifically, and this evening at seven he will call and he will speak to you. We believe he will make his demands known.’
‘What’s his name?’ Hartmann asked.
‘We have no idea,’ Schaeffer said.
Hartmann frowned. ‘But he knew my name? He asked for me specifically?’
Schaeffer nodded. ‘He did.’
Hartmann shook his head. ‘And you think I might be able to tell you who he is from the sound of his voice on the telephone?’
‘No, Mr Hartmann, we don’t believe that at all. We have studied your records, we know how busy you have been with the many hundreds of cases that have passed across your desk over the years. We don’t imagine for a moment that you’ll be able to identify the man by his voice, but we can’t help but think that he might be someone you have dealt with or come across at some point in the past.’
Hartmann nodded. ‘That would be logical, considering he asked for me by name.’
‘So we want you to take the call, to speak to him,’ Woodroffe said. ‘He may identify himself, he may not, but what we are hoping is that he will give us his terms and conditions for the return of the kidnap victim.’
‘And that would be?’ Hartmann asked.
