A Quiet Vendetta

Hartmann sat down. He waited patiently. He knew when Perez had arrived in the building because he was accompanied by a good dozen or more FBI operatives, all of them awkward and nervous.

Perez appeared in the doorway of the small office and Hartmann instinctively rose from his chair.

Perez extended his hand. Hartmann took it and they shook.

‘You slept well, Mr Perez?’ Hartmann asked, at once feeling a sense of apprehension around the man, but at the same time a considerable degree of disdain.

‘Like the proverbial baby,’ Perez replied as he sat down.

Hartmann sat down also, reached for a packet of cigarettes on the trolley, offered one to Perez, took one himself, and then lit them both. He felt an unusual conflict of emotions – the necessity to be polite, to treat the man with some degree of respect, and at the same time hate him for what he had done, what he represented, and the fact that he had single-handedly jeopardized the only real chance Hartmann had to salvage his marriage. He looked at Perez closely; he believed there was nothing in his eyes, no light of humanity at all.

‘I have a question,’ Hartmann asked.

Perez nodded.

‘Why am I here?’

Perez smiled, and then he started laughing. ‘Because I asked you to be here, Mr Hartmann, and right now I have all the aces and none of the jokers. I am in the driving seat for this short while, and I know that whatever I ask for I will get.’

‘But why me? Why me of all people?’

Perez sighed and leaned back in his chair. ‘Did you ever read Shakespeare, Mr Hartmann?’

Hartmann shook his head. ‘I can’t say that I did.’

‘You should read him, as much as you can. The truth of the matter is that Shakespeare said that there were seven ages of man, and apparently just as there are seven ages of man, there are also only seven real stories.’

Hartmann frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Seven stories, and everything you read, every movie you might see, everything that happens in life is one of these seven stories. Things like love and revenge, betrayal, such things as this. Only seven of them, and each of those seven stories can be found in every one of William Shakespeare’s plays.’

‘And the connection?’ Hartmann asked.

‘The connection, as you so call it, Mr Hartmann, is that everything you could ever wish to know about me, about why I am here, about what has happened to Catherine Ducane and why I chose you to come home to New Orleans and listen to my story… all of the answers can be found in the words of William Shakespeare. Now pour us some coffee and we shall talk, yes?’

Hartmann paused for a moment and then he looked directly at Perez. He had been right. There was not the slightest spark of humanity in the man’s eyes. He was a killer, nothing more nor less than a killer. Hartmann reminded himself of what had been done to Gerard McCahill; he remembered Cipliano’s words, It’s hard to tell on the blows as well. So many, and all coming at different angles, like whoever did this was walking around the guy in circles while he whacked him. He pictured Ernesto Perez doing just that: walking around a bound and gagged man, hammer in his hand, raining blow after merciless blow down on the defenseless victim until shock and blood loss brought his life to an end.

Inside he shuddered.

‘You’re not going to give us anything, are you, Mr Perez?’ he asked.

Perez smiled. ‘On the contrary, Mr Hartmann, I am going to give you everything.’

‘About the girl though,’ Hartmann said. ‘You’re not going to give us anything about the girl.’

‘All in good time,’ Perez replied.

‘And you can assure us she is safe and well, and that no harm will come to her?’

Perez looked away towards the corner of the room. His face was implacable, and Hartmann believed a man such as this must have spent the greater part of his life withholding as much as he could from everyone around him. A man like this would stand on a subway platform, in a queue at a coffee shop, biding his time patiently as he waited in line at a supermarket checkout, and no-one would have had an inkling of who he was.

‘I can guarantee nothing, Mr Hartmann. Even as we speak Catherine Ducane might be choking to death on the ropes that have been used to tie her. She may have attempted to work herself free and be suffocating even as we speak. She does not have a lot of time, and thus any time you spend attempting to solicit information from me is indirectly contributing to her demise. It’s the rule of threes, Mr Hartmann-’

‘The what?’

‘The rule of threes. Three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food. Catherine Ducane has already been in my possession since Wednesday the twentieth… that’s the better part of a week and a half already.’

In his possession, Hartmann thought. That’s the way he thinks of her, that she is in his possession. Hartmann closed his eyes for a moment. He tried not to think of her. He tried not to comprehend the combined frustration of every federal operative that was now directly, and indirectly, involved in this situation. He tried to focus his mind, tried so hard to focus, but no matter how hard he concentrated he could not pull away from the image of a starved and frightened young woman tied somewhere to a chair, all the while believing that this man would return only to kill her.

‘So we should waste no more time, Mr Hartmann,’ Perez said matter-of-factly. ‘We should talk, should we not?’

‘Yes,’ Hartmann said. ‘Yes, we should talk.’

He poured the coffee. He set the cups on the table along with an ashtray and, as Ernesto Cabrera Perez began to speak once more, Ray Hartmann leaned to his left and gently closed the office door.

ELEVEN

?Lo Cubana – esta aqui! – The real Cuba – it’s here!

Havana.

Stalinism and palm trees.

The crumbling facade of Spanish colonialism.

Barrio di Colon, the tattered remnants of the red light district from Batista’s dictatorship.

San Isidro, once beautiful, stately, awe-inspiring, now ramshackle and desperate, hunkering around Havana’s railway district like a dirty and discarded coat.

Later, much later, there was a boy who would become as close to me as a brother, and we would remember this time.

‘You remember January of ’59?’ he would say. ‘When there was a strike of all the working people, and Havana came to a standstill. Batista was president then, and his secret police were fighting with the rebels in the streets. It was then that Castro’s guerrillas came from the mountains, and they ran through the streets and took this city. There was no-one left to fight them, no-one at all. You remember that time, Ernesto?’

The boy would smile, and in that smile was a memory of something that would forever remain a part of our lives.

‘When Castro made Manuel Urrutia the president after Batista fled, and he swore in the new government at Oriente University in Santiago de Cuba, yes? They made Castro Delegate of the President for the Armed Forces and Jose Rubido as Chief of the Army. And Castro? He drove like a conquering Caesar along the length of the island towards Havana! We celebrated everywhere he went, and that evening we heard that those who’d stood against Castro in Las Villas Province, Colonel Lumpay and Major Mirabel, had been executed.’

The boy had smiled again. ‘I saw them executed, Ernesto… I saw them plead for their lives, but Castro was like a king returned to his homeland and he allowed no mercy. He put Che Guevara in charge of Havana itself, and we went through the streets, thousands of us, and we burned flags and we set buildings on fire, and there were men drinking wine and singing and fucking women in the street. Down Calzada de Zapata we went, our voices raised, and out along Avenida Salvador Allende and through Coppelia Park to the Cristobal Colon Cemetery…’