and joins that defined him. He was somehow awkward in his manner, and as he spoke he seemed to be seeking Feraud’s approval for each word he uttered. Feraud was the Devil, and this man, this young and inexperienced man, was perhaps his acolyte. I imagined there was some arrangement between them, that Feraud was orchestrating the execution of some necessity, and for this thing Ducane would be forever in his debt. For all the world Charles Ducane wanted people to believe he was someone important, someone special, but in all truth I believed that whatever was happening was going to take place solely and exclusively because of Antoine Feraud. A Faustian pact had been engineered, and though Ducane appeared to be of significance in this matter, it was Feraud who had created the reality.
We three – the head of the Feraud family, his old-Orleans-money friend and myself, the crazy Cuban- American – sat in a room not dissimilar to the one where I had first met Feraud. Feraud and I said almost nothing throughout the whole exchange, and Ducane spoke with me as if we were close, had always been close, and would remain so for the rest of our lives. He was pretending that I had entered his world, that I had been granted an audience with Lucifer and should be appreciative. But Charles Ducane, unknown to himself, was in truth talking to Satan.
‘Politics is Machiavellian,’ he began, ‘and where once a concession might have been made for territorial indiscretions, we have an indiscretion here that cannot be forgiven. My family owns a great many businesses, many interests right across the state, and behind those interests are people whose names must never be questioned or sullied, and whose pockets must be kept fat with enough dollars to make them feel they need no more. You understand, Mr Perez?’
I nodded. I didn’t need the precis, merely the name, the place, the manner in which the job needed to be done.
‘My father owns a factory where canned goods are processed. There is a senior manager there, a man of little significance, but his brother is the head of the workers’ union, and the workers are restless and agitated. This, in and of itself, is of no great importance, but the company is to be sold, and if there is the slightest hint of unrest within the ranks the deal could be soured. The union man is a voice for the workers, he is their guiding force, and with a few words he could march those men right out of there and collapse this sale. We are not interested in the union. They can fight amongst themselves until Kingdom come after the factory has been sold, but for the next two weeks we require nothing but silence, compliance and hard work.’
Charles Ducane, a young man, a man perhaps asked to ‘take care of this small matter’ by his father, leaned back in the deep leather armchair and sighed.
‘The union man we will not touch. He is too visible. We have spoken with him but his head is as hard as rock. He has no wife, no children, and thus the closest person to him is his brother, the manager. Tonight, a little after nine, the manager will take a young woman to a motel off the highway down here, perhaps three or four miles away, and he will stay the night. We require a message to be carried to the union man, a message he will not misinterpret, and how this is done we do not care. There is to be no connection to me or my family. It must appear to be the work of some crazy person, a vagabond or an opportunist thief perhaps, and we will ensure that the message is received loud and clear. We need this to be unmistakable but unconnectable, you understand, Mr Perez?’
‘The name of the motel?’ I asked.
‘The Shell Beach Motel,’ Ducane said. He paused for a moment and then withdrew a single monochrome photograph from his inside breast pocket. He handed it to me. I studied the man’s face, and then I returned the picture to Ducane.
Ducane smiled; he turned and looked at Feraud. Feraud nodded as if granting Papal indulgence.
I believed then that I understood what was happening. Ducane, perhaps his family, needed this man killed. They could not do it themselves, such a thing would have been too great a risk, but more importantly it seemed that such a thing had to be sanctioned by Feraud. Ducane, important though he considered himself to be, had been sent as the negotiator. I wondered what price these people had had to pay in order for this execution to have been granted.
Feraud looked at me. ‘Any further questions?’
I shook my head. ‘Consider it done.’
Ducane smiled and rose to his feet. He shook Antoine Feraud by the hand, and then me. He said something in French to Feraud which I did not understand, and Feraud laughed.
He looked once more directly at me, and in that second I saw the fear manifest in his eyes, and then he started towards the door. Innocent appeared and escorted him to the front of the house.
‘This is important enough,’ Feraud said once Ducane had disappeared.
‘I understand,’ I replied.
Feraud smiled. ‘You do not care for details, do you, Ernesto Perez?’
I frowned.
‘The whys and wherefores of all of this business we are involved in.’
‘I ask when I need to ask, and when I do not I keep my thoughts to myself.’
‘Which is the way it should be,’ Feraud said. ‘Now we will eat, and when we are done you will do this thing. Then you will return to see Don Ceriano and tell him that he and I will do some business of our own.’
It was close, the air thick with the smell of verdant growth. Out there I was alone. Out there the sky pressed down on me between the thick overlapping branches of the trees, and between the gaps I could see the stars watching me in silence.
To my left the highway ran a straight line back towards Chalmette and the Arabi District, and every once in a while the faint hum of some traveler drifted through. From where I lay in the mud, from beneath the ankle-deep water that stuck to my skin, I could see the vague haunt of lights in the distance. I lay quiet for some time, and then I rose slowly and stripped naked. I became one with everything around me; I became truly, seamlessly invisible. I stood there in the swollen heat of night, and then I shifted back and disappeared into the silence and darkness of the everglades. Sometimes I went under, walking out along the bottom of some stagnant riverbed, and then I surfaced, my hair slicked to my skull, my eyes white against the blackness of my face. Around me the trees stretched their roots through the soft and forgiving earth, teasing their gnarled fingers into the weed-infested water as if to test it for temperature, and everywhere, inside every breath, was the smell of decay, the strong odor of a country dying – inborn, inbred, slime-caked boles crumbling into the ground, and from the mulch of their stinking graves a new land would be born. The ground was thick with this amniotic pulp, the effort of life attempting escape, the stench heady and enervating, a high like smoking something dead.
Sometimes I paused to kneel, the sensation of undergrowth between my legs, and I leaned back, my head angled away from my body, and I closed my eyes. I could smell burning, like gasoline, oil, cordite, wood. I could smell gasoline on my skin, see the colors that grew and spread across my arms, my chest. I imagined my face in deep rainbow hues, blackened at the nose and chin, and above this the frightening starkness of white eyes. I bared my teeth, and wondered how much like a nightmare I looked. I smiled, I crouched and crawled back to the water and sank beneath the filth.
I walked a mile, perhaps more, and above me the stars watched all the way. They bore witness, they understood, but they did not judge. They saw us all as children, because compared to them we came and went in one brief twinkling, and if I understood this I understood how we were all truly nothing. Nothing mattered. Nothing bore any significance in comparison to that. Nothing meant anything any more.
I eventually tired, and lying at the side of some swollen tributary, the dank and stinking water overlapping my chest, I closed my eyes and rested. After an hour or so I rose once more and started out towards the highway.
Lights were ahead of me. Something stirred within, something excited, something indefinable, and I stepped into the depth of the trees and watched. A car turned off the highway and slid silently into the forecourt of a semicircular arrangement of small cabins. A motel. Lights from a cabin. People. My heart beat beautifully, had never worked better, and I understood that I was loved by the stars, loved by the earth, loved by everything, for that’s what I was, wasn’t I? I
Again I sank to my hands and knees, and from where I hid within the dank and humid woods I started out through the undergrowth towards the lights. I was one with the darkness. I was unseen, unheard, unknown. I was everything and nothing. My thoughts were hollow and weightless, and they turned in invisible circles, back and forth within the bounds of some limitless and empathetic mind. Ghosts, you see. I haunted the world.
