A Quiet Vendetta (57 page)

A hundred yards from the Field Office the smoke obscured everything. Schaeffer pulled to the side of the road, opened the door and started running immediately his feet hit the ground. Hartmann came up behind him, Woodroffe following, but within fifteen yards the pall of black and acrid smoke prevented them making any further progress. The heat was unbearable, like an inferno, and all Hartmann could think of was that they would have been within it had they left no more than ten minutes later.

Schaeffer was at the side of the road doubled up. He was gasping for air. Woodroffe dragged him back, shouting something unintelligible over the roar of flames, and when he turned Hartmann realized that he needed help bringing Schaeffer back to the car.

‘Radio!’ he was screaming at the top of his voice. ‘Gotta get back to the fucking radio!’

Hartmann could barely co-ordinate himself. He felt sick, not only with the smoke and the heat but with the import of what was happening around him. Then he remembered Ross and the other men, the men they’d left behind to take messages while they drove out to the restaurant. Impulse and instinct drove him towards the source of the heat, but survival inhibited him. He knew there was no way he would make it five yards closer to the Field Office.

Suddenly another sound, like something being wrenched wholesale from the ground, and Hartmann heard shattering glass, echoing all around him, and when he felt another rush of heat he threw himself to the ground and covered his head. It was like a hurricane passing over; he felt sure the hair on the back of his head was scorched. He lay there for a moment, and then he heard Woodroffe’s voice again, screaming for him to get up, to get back to the car and call for help.

Hartmann rolled over. The sky was black above him. He lay on his side for a second, and then with every ounce of strength he possessed he forced himself up onto his feet and ran back towards the sedan.

The three of them made it back within seconds, and even as Woodroffe snatched the radio handset from the dash, even as he started shouting into the mouthpiece, Hartmann heard sirens. They were coming from his left, and he turned and saw flashing cherry-blue bars through the smoke. He could hear the thunder of flames behind him, relentless and deafening, and he sat down on the road, his back against the side of the car, and held his hands over his ears. His eyes were streaming with tears, a sharp burning sensation in his chest, and when he started to breathe deeply he felt the acidic smoke scorching the inside of his throat and nostrils.

Later, from evidence, from Crime Scene Investigation reports, from everything they could gather without any eyewitnesses, it seemed that a suitcase had been hurled through the door of the FBI Office on Arsenault Street. Forensics and Bomb Squad estimated there must have been eight or ten pounds of C4 plastic explosive packed inside that case. It was a simple detonation. The impact of the case landing in the foyer would have been enough to trigger it, and the force of the explosion took out the majority of the building’s lower floor and much of the first. It also resulted in the deaths of Sheldon Ross, Michael Kanelli, Ron Sawyer and James Landreth. Every shred of evidence, every report, every document, every tape and transcript, every piece of recording equipment was destroyed too, but in that moment – as Hartmann, Schaeffer and Woodroffe watched flames bursting out from the back of the building – their only thought was for the men who had stayed behind.

None of them spoke. Dinner was forgotten. Medics came down from New Orleans City Hospital and checked each of them over. Hartmann suffered no burns or abrasions, but Woodroffe had skidded sideways into the car and bruised much of the left side of his body. Schaeffer was merely stunned into silence, and when the medics attempted to direct him away from the scene he told them to leave him alone. He was the assigned Duty Section Chief for the New Orleans FBI Field Office. This had been his territory, these had been his people, and something had torn his small world apart. The sole purpose of their being there – the investigation, the disappearance of Catherine Ducane, the details of Ernesto Perez’s illustrious history – was wiped clean in the face of the horror that had been perpetrated.

It would be more than an hour before the flames were finally extinguished, before Crime Scene and federal Criminalistics teams could enter the site, before anyone even began to ask questions about what had happened and why.

‘Feraud’ was Hartmann’s first word. By that time they had made their way from the scene and were close to the Sonesta. Woodroffe concurred, Schaeffer also, but they knew that such an investigation took weeks, and evidence would have to be collected for days before anyone could even begin to understand how this had been done, let alone by whom.

Hartmann was incensed, angered beyond words, and yet he watched as Stanley Schaeffer’s training kicked in. Hartmann’s immediate response would have been to hit back at Feraud, hit back hard and fast, but Schaeffer kept telling him how such a thing could not be considered until they possessed direct and unquestionable authority to act. It was the same world of rules and regulations, the same command channels and disciplined rigidity that prevented them taking any steps towards investigating Ducane himself. The degree of corroboration they had already obtained regarding so much of what Perez had told them, the fact that everything pointed to a clear and undisputed motive for Perez’s actions, nevertheless counted for nothing in the face of federal protocol.

Hartmann was beyond the point of questioning it any further and said nothing.

None of them spoke again until they reached the Sonesta. The second floor of the hotel was opened up and every agent was called back from the field. The atmosphere was one of disbelief and shock; men asking questions that could not be answered, men standing stunned and silent, their faces white, their eyes wide. Schaeffer stood before them, and to Hartmann’s surprise he said some words for the four men who had been killed, and then he led the attendant crew in the Lord’s Prayer. Some of them were not ashamed to show their emotions. Some of them could not stand, and so they sat with their faces in their hands, and all tried to reconcile themselves to the fact that such things could almost be expected, for this was their chosen life, this was the world into which they had walked, and some . . . well, some never walked out again.

Later – two, perhaps three hours – Hartmann went up to see Perez.

The man seemed genuinely distressed and upset.

‘How many?’ he kept asking. ‘Four men . . . all of them young. Families, with children also? Aah, such a waste, such an unnecessary waste.’

And then he said something that Hartmann did not understand, and perhaps would not understand until this whole thing unraveled.

‘This thing,’ he said. ‘This thing that Feraud has done . . . and I am sure, as sure as I am of my own birth and death that it was Feraud . . . this thing he has done has merely served to confirm that I have made the right decision.’

And though Hartmann questioned him, insisted that he explain himself further, Perez would not divulge anything.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Wait, Mr Hartmann, and you will see what I have done.’

Hartmann, Schaeffer and Woodroffe did not return to the Marriott. They stayed there at the Royal Sonesta, for this now had to be their base of operation, and while they lay, restless and afraid, in their beds, while they asked themselves if Feraud would also attempt to kill Ernesto Perez in the very hotel where they now were, Lester Kubis sat up until the early hours of Saturday morning preparing another room in which Hartmann could speak with Perez.

The following morning Feds would be stationed en masse in the foyer and around the Royal Sonesta Hotel. Less than a mile away three teams of Crime Scene investigators would pore through the rubble of the FBI Office’s lower floor, and from the still-smouldering wreck they would salvage what little they could to help them understand what had happened. Schaeffer exercised a degree of self-control and military precision in everything he did, and he stressed time and again that they could not afford to lose sight of what they were doing and why. The investigation of the bombing was now someone else’s problem; theirs was still the task of finding Catherine Ducane.

A report would come back from Quantico regarding the bombing in Chicago in March of 1991. Seemed that whoever had overseen the investigation had been in the employ of the Irish families, and with a word from their Italian counterparts the details had been ‘lost’. Official documents acknowledged that a car had in fact exploded, but whether it was an intentional attempt on someone’s life or a vehicular ‘accident’ was never established. Two deaths were noted but there were no names, nothing at all to indicate who might have been in the vehicle when it exploded.

Sheldon Ross’s mother would wake to find a representative of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on her doorstep, as would the wives of Michael Kanelli and Ron Sawyer. James Landreth had been orphaned at the age of nine, but his sister was still alive and well and living in Providence, Rhode Island. Her name was Gillian, her husband’s name was Eric, and three weeks before they had been informed that there was a ninety-five percent possibility they would never conceive children. Gillian greeted the agent, a man called Tom Hardwicke, and while he told her of her brother’s death she made coffee at the stove and cried without tears.

‘Such a waste,’ Ernesto Perez kept saying as he sat facing Hartmann that Saturday morning. ‘Such an utter waste of life, is it not?’

And Hartmann – still shocked and horrified at what had taken place only hours before, still ragged from too little sleep and insufficient appetite to manage breakfast – looked back at Ernesto Perez and wondered when this nightmare would end.

The trick
, he kept telling himself,
is to keep breathing
.

Ross, Kanelli, Sawyer and Landreth had missed the trick, it seemed, and so might Catherine Ducane if this went on much longer.

‘Tell me,’ Hartmann eventually said. ‘Tell me what happened when you went back to Havana. Tell me what happened to your son.’

And Perez, seated there in a room on the second floor of the Royal Sonesta, surrounded every which way by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, leaned back in his chair and sighed.

‘Okay,’ he said quietly. ‘I will tell you exactly what happened.’

Havana. Home of my father.

Thirty-two years ago we had come here. Irony is sharp and relentless: he too was running from the murder of his wife.

Havana. Some imagined sanctuary perhaps. It had begun to show its age, to lose its charm and passion, but for me it had not lost its memories.

Losing also its Soviet patronage, but Castro was nevertheless still a presence everywhere I looked. American finance and influence had already begun to show, and as I walked my eight-year-old son through the streets of
La Habana Vieja
I could see where time had marked its passage through the city.

Three decades I had been absent, three decades of life with all its sharp corners and rough edges, but still the sounds and smells of this place returned to me as if it had all been yesterday.

I found the house where I had lived as a young man with my friend Ruben Cienfuegos, and for the first time I was truly aware of how much I had changed. Back then I had killed Ruben for the promise of something. Now I believed I would kill for two reasons alone: the vengeance of my wife and daughter, and to protect the life of my son.

There was no shortage of money, and I rented a small house on Avenida Belgica near the Old Wall Ruins. I hired a woman also, an elderly Cuban national called Claudia Vivó who was to stay with us to cook, to clean the rooms, to school Victor and care for him.

I was a man lost, a man without a soul, and often there would be afternoons when I would walk the streets without purpose or direction. Sometimes I would hear their voices, Angelina and Lucia, the sound of their laughter as they ran down the street behind me, and I would turn, my eyes wide with anticipation, and I would see some other child, some other mother, and I would lean against the wall, my breath shallow and fast in my throat, my eyes stinging with tears.

My heart was broken beyond repair. I knew it would never mend again.

I remember a day, perhaps a week or two after we arrived. Victor was home with Claudia Vivó; he was learning of Cuba and its history, for I had told him this was the country of his grandfather, and he wished to learn of it. Though it was only mid-afternoon, morning swallowed irretrievably in some vague wash of forgetting, the sky had deepened into incipient gray-green solidity. The air seemed thick, difficult to breathe, and I felt as if I could bear it only for moments. I wandered through the back streets, my shirt open to the waist, sandals on my feet, and at some point I stumbled towards a plankboard house with a veranda running the width of its frontage. I collapsed into a wickerwork chair, and I removed my shirt and used it to wipe the sweat from my forehead and chest. I heard voices behind me, someone calling for lemonade. Somewhere music played from an ancient phonograph, the bakelite records scratched and heavy, the sound like a chamber orchestra coming out through a maze of tunnels.

Sometimes I felt angry. Other times sad, alone, desperate, quiet. Sometimes I felt I could light the world with fire and watch everyone burn. And again, in that moment, I felt nothing. I was sick and weak and thin. I was fifty-three years old, and I felt eighty. So many things had changed, but changed for the worse, it seemed. People like me were no-one at all, less than nothing, minus zero, and we had to carve our own way through life.

Often I wished I was someone else. Someone tall and strong. Anyone else. At least it would have been different.

The heat, the bruised and turgid air, made me feel nauseous. I took my damp shirt and put it on again.

Motivation came a little later, the sky darker, the promise of a storm pressing against the afternoon, some merciless and unforgiving invasion, and I rose from the chair and started walking the streets again.