A Quiet Vendetta

‘A tribute?’

Verlaine nodded. There was tension in his voice, fear in his tone. ‘I had to make something disappear quietly, you get me?’

Hartmann realized what had happened: Verlaine had made a trade with Feraud.

‘Better that I don’t know anything,’ he said.

‘Too damned right,’ Verlaine replied, and eased the car off the main freeway and down a slip road that would take them towards Feraud’s territory.

Within half a mile Hartmann felt it: Feraud’s presence. Smells like Cipliano’s office, he thought. Smells like dead bodies, bloated and rank, and no matter if the air-con has been running all night it’s a smell that you can’t escape. Even when you leave it’s there on your clothes.

A quarter-mile from Feraud’s house and Hartmann felt a sudden and necessary urge to turn back, to tell Verlaine that he had been wrong, that he didn’t want to do this, that he’d decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to do anything that might jeopardize the federal investigation. The thought was there but the words didn’t come… and later he would think that even though he felt these things he also knew, in his heart of hearts, that he was prepared to do almost anything to see this come to an end.

And so he said nothing, and Verlaine kept driving, and before long they were slowing down and shuddering to a halt at the side of the mud-rutted road that ran alongside the edge of Feraud’s property.

‘You ready for this?’ Verlaine asked.

Hartmann shook his head. ‘No, and I don’t think I ever will be.’

‘Feeling’s mutual.’

Hartmann opened the door and stepped out. The clouds he’d seen on the horizon were now directly overhead. He shivered at the feeling that came with the smell, the breathlessness around him, the feeling that everything was tightening claustrophobically. This place had the power to invade the senses, to invade the mind and the heart. This place provoked images and sounds and memories that he had believed gone, but they were not gone, never had been, and he knew that Louisiana and all it represented would be eternally a part of who he was. Like a fingerprint on the soul. This was his past, and however hard and fast he might run from it, it would never leave him. The simplicity was that it was always one step ahead, and wherever he might turn it was there waiting.

‘You first,’ Hartmann said. ‘He knows you.’

‘Lucky for me,’ Verlaine cracked, but there was no humor in his tone. Once again Hartmann recognized that his companion was as scared as he was.

They took the path and cut through the trees. The light was bad, dense and forbidding, and Hartmann carried with him the image of Ernesto Perez sliding through this undergrowth on his way to the Shell Beach Motel.

… 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… such a high… like smoking something dead…

Hartmann felt a wave of nausea in his chest and clamped his hand to his mouth. He believed he had never been so afraid in his life.

And then Feraud’s place was ahead of them, a vast colonial mansion. There was a single lighted window visible on the ground floor, and up on the veranda a group of men stood talking and smoking. They carried carbines, they talked in low guttural Creole French, and when they saw Verlaine and Hartmann they stopped.

Half a dozen pairs of eyes watched them as they made their way up to the house.

None of them said a word, and this was in some way worse than being challenged. It meant that they were expected. That simple: he and Verlaine were expected.

One of the men stepped forward and held out his hand.

Verlaine turned to Hartmann. ‘My gun,’ he said quietly, and Hartmann didn’t even consider questioning him. Verlaine reached around back of his waist and released the catch on his holster. He handed over his.38 and waited patiently for their next instruction.

Another man stepped forward and frisked both of them, and then he turned and nodded.

The man who held Verlaine’s gun stepped forward and opened the front door of the house. He indicated with a swift nod of his head that they should go inside.

Rock and a hard place, Hartmann thought, and walked into the house behind Verlaine.

They waited for minutes that appeared to stretch into hours. Somewhere the sound of a grandfather clock, its ticking like the beating of some heart, echoed through the seeming emptiness of the house. It was all dark wood and thick rugs, and even Hartmann’s breathing seemed to come back at him in triplicate.

Eventually, even as Hartmann believed he couldn’t take a second more of the tension, there was the sound of footsteps. Coincidentally, the sky above them seemed to swell and rumble. Thunder was starting up somewhere, perhaps a mile, perhaps two, from where they stood. Soon the rain would come, the lightning illuminating the surrounding countryside in bright flashes of monochrome, the trees set in stark white silhouette like skeletons against the blackness of the horizon.

A Creole appeared, middle-aged, his hair graying at the temples, and stood for a moment at the end of the hall that ran from the main entranceway.

Hartmann remembered Perez speaking of an old man called Innocent, a man that must have been dead a considerable number of years by now. Perhaps this was his son. Perhaps employment in this particular line was inherited.

‘Come,’ the Creole said, and though his voice was barely a whisper it carried through the building and reached Hartmann as if the man had been standing right beside him.

The entire ambience of the place was enough to make his skin crawl.

They followed the man and were shown into a room that Hartmann guessed must have been at the front of the building. It was from here that came the only light in the house, and that light stood in the corner and barely illuminated the place enough for them to see Feraud.

But he was there, no doubt of it. Hartmann sensed the man.

His eyes adjusted to the gloom, and then he caught the shape of a ghost rising from behind a high-backed chair. It was cigarette smoke, a plume of cigarette smoke that arabesqued in curlicues towards the ceiling.

The Creole nodded towards the chair, and then turned and left the room.

‘Gentlemen,’ Feraud said, and his voice was like something dead and buried and now crawling its way up through damp gravel.

Verlaine went first, walking slowly towards the window, Hartmann a step or two behind him. When they reached the end of the room Hartmann could see that two chairs had been set against the wall, evidently for their audience with Feraud. The man was like Lucifer’s Pope.

Verlaine sat down first, Hartmann followed suit, and when he looked up he was shocked by the appearance of the old man before him. Feraud’s skin was almost translucent, paper-thin and yellowed. His hair, what little there was, was thin and frail, like strands of damp cotton adhering to his skull. The wrinkles on his face gave the impression of a man burned and healed, the lines deep and irregular and almost painful to see.

‘I asked you not to come back,’ Feraud said, and as he spoke smoke issued from his nose and his mouth.

Verlaine nodded. He glanced at Hartmann but Hartmann was transfixed by Feraud.

‘You did this thing for me?’ Feraud asked.

‘I did,’ Verlaine said. ‘The case will never reach the Circuit.’

Feraud nodded. ‘An eye for an eye.’

‘This is Ray Hartmann,’ Verlaine started.

Feraud raised his hand and smiled. ‘I know who it is, Mr Verlaine. I know exactly who Ray Hartmann is.’

Feraud turned his eyes towards Hartmann, eyes like small dark stones set into his face. ‘You have come home, I understand,’ Feraud said, which was the second time someone had made that comment. The first time it had been Perez, right there on the telephone while Hartmann was in the FBI Field Office.

‘It doesn’t leave you, does it, Mr Hartmann?’

Hartmann raised his eyebrows.

‘New Orleans… the sounds and the smells, the colors, the people, the language. It is a place all its own, eh?’

Hartmann nodded. The man was voicing thoughts he had possessed only a little while before. He felt as if