Hartmann did not reply. There was nothing more he could say. He walked back to the door of the bedroom and let himself out.
Behind him the music increased in volume – Shostakovich’s ‘Assault On Beautiful Gorky’ – and Hartmann looked at Dauncey with a somewhat bemused and mystified expression.
‘Like I said before, a real character,’ Dauncey said, and opened the hotel suite door to let Hartmann out into the corridor.
The rain finally stopped around ten. Hartmann sat on the edge of his bed in the Marriott Hotel and considered the awkward slow-motion war-zone of his life. Carol and Jess were not happy with him; Schaeffer and Woodroffe, Attorney General Richard Seidler and FBI Director Bob Dohring were not happy with him either. By now Charles Ducane would surely know Hartmann’s name, and believe him to be the man responsible for the safe return of his daughter. And what
Hartmann undressed and took a shower. He stood beneath the water, as hot as he could bear, and stayed there for some time. He thought of Carol and Jess, of how much he would have given to hear their voices now, to know they were safe, to say he was sorry, to tell them that he was in some way undergoing a catharsis, an exorcism of who he had once been, and that from this point forward it would be different. It would all be
Ray Hartmann, for a short while, was overcome with a sense of desperation and despondency. Was this now his life? Alone? Hotel rooms? Government inquiries and investigations? Spending his days listening to the worst that people had to offer and trying to make deals with them?
He sat in the base of the unit. The water flooded over him. He could hear his own heart beating. He felt afraid.
Later, lying on the bed, he fought with a sense of restless agitation and did not sleep until the early hours of Thursday morning. His mind was punctuated with strange images, images of Ernesto Perez carrying Jess’s lifeless body out of a swamp while Shostakovich played the piano in the background.
And then morning invaded his room, and he rose, he dressed, he drank two cups of strong black coffee, and he and Sheldon Ross – who now looked ten years older than the young fresh-faced recruit he had first seen only a handful of days before – made their way back to the office on Arsenault Street to hear what the world and all its madness had to offer them today.
And it was only as he passed through the narrow doorway into the all-too-familiar office that he remembered that there were three reasons. Three reasons Perez had chosen to bring him here to New Orleans. Perez had told him two of them, and Hartmann – amid all that had been said – had forgotten to ask for the third.
It was the first thing he asked Perez when they were seated.
Perez smiled with that knowing expression in his eyes.
‘Later,’ he said quietly. ‘I will tell you the last reason later… perhaps when we are done, Mr Hartmann.’
‘So we shall share a little of California,’ Perez said. ‘Because I believe that sharing is a truly Californian trait, is it not?’ Perez smiled at his own dry humor and leaned back in his chair. ‘And when we are done we will return to the hotel. We will share some supper and then I will give you the answer to your proposal.’
Hartmann nodded.
He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to see his daughter’s face.
He struggled but it did not come.
NINETEEN
Angel and I, we went out to the West Coast of America; to California, named after an island in the Spanish novel
The Land of Happily Ever After; the Big Sur coastline where the Santa Lucia mountains rise straight out of the sea; the northern coast, rugged and desolate, deep banks of impenetrable fog; the dormant volcano Mount Shasta; beyond this, vast groves of one- and two-thousand-year-old redwood trees.
Los Angeles, The Angels, surrounded to the north and east by the Mojave Desert and Death Valley, but despite the vision and the apparent romance of this place, despite the promise of sun, of twenty miles of white sand and warmth at the Santa Monica beachfront, we came to this city in March of 1982 as immigrants and strangers.
Our welcome was no welcome at all. We moved into a three-story walk-up on Olive Street by Pershing Square in downtown LA. We paid for the place in cash and registered under Angelina’s maiden name, and though we had been people in New York, though we had possessed faces and characters and personalities, in LA we possessed nothing. We were swallowed silently, effortlessly, into the great maw of humanity within that pinpoint microcosm of America.
It was three weeks before I saw our neighbor. I came back from a meeting with Don Fabio Calligaris’s cousin who ran a chop-shop on Boyd Street. I saw a man leaving the house adjacent to my own, I raised my hand, I called out
We came here for Angelina, for the children also.
‘The sunshine,’ she said. ‘The sun shines here. It is always dull and gray in New York. There are too many people who know of me back there. I wanted to get away, Nesto. I
I could empathize with her. I felt the same way for New Orleans, perhaps for Havana, but the coldness of the city, the absence of feeling and family in California was disturbing.
There was no shortage of work, however. Through Fabio Calligaris’s son I met Angelo Cova’s brother, Michael. Michael was a man unlike any I had met before. He was a big man, in stature – much the same as Ten Cent – but more so in personality. We met in the first week of May, and he explained to me that there were matters of business that I could attend to in Los Angeles that would be gratefully acknowledged by New York.
‘LA is Lucifer’s asshole,’ he said. We sat in a small diner back of Spring Street. The narrow building seemed to rumble constantly with the traffic running along the Santa Ana Freeway. Ahead of us was the Hall of Justice, behind us the US Courts, around the corner the Criminal Courts Building. I felt cornered in a way, fenced in by the presence of authority and federal residence. ‘LA is what God created for human beings to exercise their depravity. Here you got hookers with faces like a bulldog licking piss off of a lemon tree. You got thirteen-year-old boys peddling their asses for barbiturates and amphetamines. You got drugs the like of which you wouldn’t give a dying man to ease his pain. You got gambling and murder and extortion, all the shit you’ll find in New York and Chicago, but in LA there’s a difference. Here you’ll find something missing, and the thing that’s missing is a basic respect for the value of human life.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Take last week,’ Michael Cova said. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. He held a small espresso cup in his hand despite the fact it was empty. ‘Last week I went down to see a guy who runs a few girls. They ain’t bad-looking girls, little rough around the edges, but slap some face paint on them ’n’ they look halfway decent. Sort of girl you’d slip the old salami and have a pretty good time, you know? So, I went down there to see him. He wanted some help dealing with some assholes that were trying to muscle in on the turf, and there was this girl down there, could’nta been more ’n’ twenty-one or two and she had half her face banged up so bad she couldn’t see out of her eye. Her lips was all swelled like a punchbag, and across her neck and throat were these dark black welts like some motherfucker had tried to strangle her.’
Michael cleared his throat.
‘I says to this guy, I says, “Hey… what the fuck happened to her?” and he says, “Oh, take no notice of the
