Lord’s name in vain.’
I sighed. I shook my head. I kneeled down on the stoop and looked up at her. I opened my mouth to speak.
‘Yes,’ she said, before I had a chance to say a word.
‘Yes what?’
‘Yes, Ernesto Perez… I will marry you.’
‘But I haven’t even asked you yet!’ I said.
‘But I
‘Aah Jesus, Angelina-’
‘Enough cursing Ernesto, enough cursing.’
‘Okay, okay… enough already.’
In November I suggested we get married in January of the following year. She put it off until May as she wanted to be married outside.
Three hundred people came to the party. It went on for two days. We took a honeymoon in California. We went to Disneyland. I did not have to learn to love her. I had loved her from a distance for a very long time. She was everything to me, and she knew it. Apart from the children she was the most important thing in my life. She made me important, that was how I felt, and that was a feeling I never believed possible.
In July of ’76 I had heard of Castro, how he had declared himself Head of State, President of the Council of State, also of the Council of Ministers. Word of him came from TV reports regarding the Senate Select Committee in Intelligence under Senator Frank Church and their investigations and inquiries regarding the alleged CIA involvement in the attempted assassination of Castro. It made me think of Cuba, of Havana, of my mother and father and all that had gone before. Of these things I said nothing to Angel, for that was what I called her, and that’s what she was.
In a way she was my salvation, and in some way my undoing, and but for the children there would have been nothing to show for any of it. But those things were later, so much later, and now is not the time to talk about such things.
By the time we talked about leaving New York I was forty-three years old. A second-rate B-movie actor had become president of the United States, and Angel Perez was pregnant. She did not want our children to grow up in New York, and with the family’s blessing we thought of moving to California, where the sun shone twenty-three hours of the day, three hundred and sixty-three days of the year. I cannot say that we existed together in a halcyon haze of contentment; I do not believe such a thing would be possible for a man with work such as mine, but the images and memories of my parents’ relationship were so far removed from what Angel and I had created that I was happy.
I did not believe, not for a heartbeat, that anything would go wrong, but then – in hindsight – I can honestly say that I was not a man who lived my life on the basis of belief.
New York became a closed chapter. We flew out in March of 1982, Angel was six months pregnant, and though it would be another fifteen years before I returned to New York I would never again look at that city with the same eyes.
The world changed, I changed with it, and if there was one thing I had learned it was that you could never go back.
EIGHTEEN
The storm had not abated. Rain hammered down relentlessly, and when Hartmann was escorted from the FBI Field Office across town to the Royal Sonesta – a convoy of three cars, himself in the central vehicle with Woodroffe, Schaeffer and Sheldon Ross – he imagined himself more the guilty party than the confessor. For that’s what he was being, was he not? Confessor to Ernesto Perez, a man who had filled his life with as many nightmares as was perhaps possible for one human being.
‘I cannot believe this,’ Woodroffe had kept repeating, and was even now saying it again as they drove. ‘Jimmy Hoffa’s murder must be one of the most significant unsolved murders of all time-’
‘Apart from Kennedy,’ Ross had interjected, a comment that provoked scowls of disapproval from both Woodroffe and Schaeffer. Hartmann imagined that the party line in and amongst the Bureau was that J. Edgar Hoover and the Warren Commission had been right all along. It was, he could only suppose, one of those topics of conversation that did not occur among these people. They believed what they believed, but what they believed stayed inside their heads and did not venture from their lips.
‘Jimmy fucking Hoffa… Christ al-fucking-mighty,’ Woodroffe said. ‘I remember it. I remember it happening. I remember all the speculation, the newspaper reports, the theories about what had happened to him.’
‘You must have been in your teens,’ Schaeffer said.
‘Regardless,’ Woodroffe said. ‘I remember it well. And when I came into the Bureau and started reading files that related to organized crime that name came up again and again. That was the big question… what the hell happened to Jimmy Hoffa? I can’t believe that Perez was the one who actually killed him. And that Charles Ducane, the fucking governor of Louisiana, knew about it… in effect sanctioned it-’
‘And was gonna send Gerard McCahill down to do it,’ Hartmann said, which seemed to him the most relevant point, and the one everyone seemed to be unwilling to face.
‘Enough,’ Schaeffer said. ‘We have no evidence of that.’
‘But we know that pretty much everything Perez has said so far has proven to be true,’ Woodroffe retorted.
‘Supposition,’ Schaeffer replied. ‘We do not know that everything he has said is true, and right now we are investigating Ernesto Perez, not Charles Ducane. As far as I am concerned Charles Ducane and his daughter are the victims of a crime, as is Gerard McCahill, and I don’t want to hear another word about it.’
‘There’s also the fact of how McCahill’s body was found,’ Hartmann said.
‘How so?’ Woodroffe asked.
‘The drawing on his back… the constellation of Gemini. That was the word they used when they referred to the hit on Hoffa… they referred to it as Gemini. I figure that must have been done to remind Ducane that his involvement had not been forgotten.’
‘Again supposition,’ Schaeffer said. ‘We don’t know anything for a fact. All we have to go on is the word of one man, and he’s as crazy as they come.’
‘Well shit,’ Hartmann said. ‘There goes one of life’s great mysteries,’ and that seemed to kill the subject stone-dead. There was silence for a moment. Hartmann looked out of the window. In the back of his mind he could see the image of the constellation glowing on McCahill’s back, and then he thought of Ernesto Perez standing over the dead body of Stefano Cagnotto. For a heartbeat he was back in the motel with Luca Visceglia, a motel out near Calvary Cemetery the night before an affidavit was due to be sworn. He knew how someone looked when they’d been forcibly overdosed.
‘Now we gotta find the wife,’ Schaeffer said. He looked over at Hartmann in the back seat. ‘See if you can’t get him to tell you something more about the wife. She’s gotta be around somewhere.’
‘And the kid… boy, girl, whatever, they’ve gotta be in their early twenties now,’ Woodroffe said.
‘I’ve got FBI Trace alerted,’ Schaeffer added. ‘They’ll find her, we just don’t have a realistic estimate on how long it will take. They’ll go back as far as they need to. Fact of the matter is that there’s no-one in this country who can’t be traced eventually.’
‘Except for Perez himself,’ Woodroffe said, and Schaeffer cut him a look that silenced him immediately.
‘I don’t think we can rely on Perez’s wife being any part of this,’ Hartmann said.
‘And what brings you to that conclusion?’ Schaeffer asked.
‘Perez is too smart to involve his own family. That would be too close to home.’
‘Regardless, it’s something,’ Schaeffer said, ‘and in this situation we follow everything, no matter how unrelated it might seem right now.’
‘And that includes Charles Ducane?’ Hartmann asked, and though it was a question it was as good as rhetoric because he knew how Schaeffer would respond.
