R. J. Ellory

by A Quiet Vendetta

  I did not understand the politics, and I did not pretend to. I knew that people visited with Santo Trafficante, and from Trafficante would come messages to Don Ceriano, and some of those messages would find their way to me and I would be sent forth to see to things in the best way I knew how. Connections between Miami and New York were tight, also with Los Angeles, but when I heard of Don Ceriano’s intended move into the casinos and clubs of New Orleans, I felt that an aspect of my own past was in danger of surfacing. I believed I had disconnected, but – through my loyalty and allegiance to those who’d brought me back from Havana – I was to be obliged to return to my own homeland, the place of my birth, the beginning of all these things.

  It was soon after the murder of Marilyn Monroe, August of 1962. Found dead in her Hollywood bungalow after taking an overdose of Nembutal, Marilyn Monroe was a casualty of war, it seemed. Jack Kennedy’s sexual preferences were not unknown within the Mafia community, for it was Jack Kennedy who’d had an affair with Judith Exner, a girl who had also slept with Sam Giancana, the most influential Chicago mob boss. Exner had been introduced to Kennedy and Giancana by Frank Sinatra, who had entertained the likes of Albert Anastasia, Joseph Bonanno, Frank Costello and Santo Trafficante on Christmas Eve 1946 during a break in the infamous Havana Conference, a conference which had resulted in the contract to kill Bugsy Siegel for the theft of several million dollars from the Flamingo operation in Las Vegas. Besides Judith Exner, it was known that Kennedy had had an affair with Mary Pinchot Meyer, a fact recorded in the memoirs of White House assistant Barbara Gamarekian. The Meyer girl wound up dead only months after Kennedy himself, and it certainly wasn’t from natural causes. Another girl, only eighteen when she went to the White House to interview Jackie Kennedy for a school newspaper, was Marion Fahnestock, known at the time as Mimi Beardsley. After Kennedy met her she was rapidly assigned a post as a White House intern, and from then until days before Kennedy’s assassination she continued an affair with the most powerful man in the world. Marilyn was a different story. Interns, secretaries, legal aides and internal White House staff – these people could be hushed up and paid off. But Marilyn Monroe? Marilyn had to die, and die she did. On 5 August 1962, a little more than a year before Kennedy got his own cranium ventilated in Dealey Plaza, Marilyn was obliged to take a few more Nembutal than she really needed to get herself off to sleep. Don Ceriano knew the details. I asked him one time, and he said, ‘You know enough to know that she is dead.’ He said nothing beyond that, and I didn’t ask again.

  It was in the latter part of that month that I was asked to visit a man called Feraud in New Orleans. I had been away the better part of four years, and in my expression Don Ceriano saw that I did not wish to go.

  He asked me why.

  ‘I have my own reasons,’ I replied.

  ‘Reasons enough to dissuade you from doing something I need you to do?’

  ‘There would never be enough reasons to dissuade me, but I can ask you only once if there is someone else who can be sent.’

  Don Ceriano leaned forward. He rested his elbows on his knees and steepled his hands together. ‘This man, this Antoine Feraud, is a very powerful man. He has much influence and importance in New Orleans. New Orleans is like Havana of old, it is a gambling city, a city filled with prostitution and drugs and great potential. We need to work out a co-operative agreement with these people, and as a gesture of goodwill I wish you to go to see this man and do something for him, you understand?’

  I nodded. ‘I have asked, and you have answered.’

  ‘You are a good man, Ernesto, a true friend. I would not ask you if there was someone else I could trust as much, but there is not. I am not prepared to risk the possibility of losing the business that will come our way because of this man by sending someone who may make a mistake.’

  ‘With your blessing I will go and do this thing,’ I said.

  Ceriano rose to his feet. He placed the flat of his hand on my head. ‘If only my own sons were of your caliber and ability,’ he whispered, and then he leaned and kissed my cheek.

  I rose. He gripped my shoulders. ‘I will be with you,’ he said quietly, and I believed he would be – if in spirit alone – for he had become more a father to me than the Havana Hurricane had ever been.

  Louisiana came back to me like a cancer, once benign, now malignant.

  Louisiana came back to me like a nightmare I believed I had forgotten.

  Times were that the law would walk these tracks: the Revenue men driving their unmarked cars along these winding roads, out here amongst the everglades, the bayous, the intersecting canals that cut some fine-drawn line between the swamps and stagnant tributaries. Times were that they would bring their city prayers down here and fight for what they believed was equitable and just. They would find distilleries, dynamite them, arrest the families’ men and bring them to trial before the peripatetic circuit court judges who traveled these quarters dispensing law and judicial expertise. The families would retaliate the only way they knew how, returning justice in true eye-to-eye manner, killing and maiming and despatching wounded Revenue men back to the city. For many years this process continued, until statisticians with sharp pencils and white collars proved that these search-and-destroy missions were fruitless. They lost as many men as they arrested. The belief in the law changed, civilization seemed to grow around the family territories, and people were no longer interested in what was done beyond their limits. The police did not so much concede defeat as adopt a live-and-let-live attitude. This itself wore these agreements into the earth, a path cut through by the passage of many feet rather than any conscious decision, and the territory stayed the territory, the law that applied to these people quite the opposite to any law known and followed elsewhere.

  I entered this country with the degree of respect ordinarily reserved for the dead, but I also understood that the dead could perceive nothing, and thus deserved no respect. Don Ceriano had spoken to me of Antoine Feraud. Daddy Always, he called him, for this was the name he was given in these parts. To take the law into your own hands down here was to play into the hands of Feraud, and his authority was close to autocratic. Those who followed him, Don Ceriano told me, followed him reverentially. Those who did not walked a fine line between his compassion and his own form of brutal and indifferent justice.

  A bridge spanned a small tributary close to the limits of Feraud’s land. His property ran a good mile from the large colonial house that had passed down the family line for many generations, and where the swamps began his necessity to guard his boundaries ceased. The bridge was stationed at all times by at least two of Feraud’s men, tall, invariably ugly, and they carried carbines or pump actions with no threat of unlawful possession. The police knew, and they understood a man’s desire to protect his land and his family, and concessions had been granted.

  It was 1962, but here time had stopped somewhere in the 1930s.

  One afternoon, with the threat of imminent rain darkening the sky as if evening had already begun, I approached the bridge with a deepening sense of desperation. I did not want to be here, but I had no choice. To return to Don Ceriano with this thing undone would be to return with betrayal. There was work to be done, and as an act of good faith between Feraud and Ceriano I had been sent to complete the work. This I would do, but this thing scared me. This was my own homeland, a place where I had witnessed the death of my mother, and though my father had paid the price for his actions, though I had exacted my own justice for what he had done, I still harbored a memory of this place in the darkest recess of my heart.

  At the bridge I was greeted by Feraud’s men. They spoke in broken New Orleans French, and they directed me up towards the house. I started through the banks of swollen, fetid undergrowth that infested this land like spreading sores. Perhaps the water was bad, stagnant and oily; perhaps the density of foliage denied sufficient light; perhaps the earth was deficient in nitrogen and minerals, for the trees down here were twisted and gnarled
, and the branches that leered over the footworn pathways were like beckoning arthritic fingers, summoning harsh words and harsher actions. When darkness drifted through these groves and banks, there could be no man who didn’t feel some sense of unease, the shadows pressing against the face, the hands, the humidity exaggerated, the vision blurred and limited to ten or fifteen feet. Years ago I had walked near this territory. Years ago I had driven a dead man out here and crushed his head beneath the wheel of a car. I could recall that journey, fine lines of condensation chasing tracks down the car windows, the smell of the everglades, the intensity of it all . . .

  I walked out towards Feraud’s house, paused at the end of a wide, churned-up driveway, its mud ridged and dried where the tires of arriving and departing cars had twisted the earth into patterns of progress. I stood with my hands buried in the pockets of my coat. I was apprehensive, tight in the stomach, and when I walked on I felt my heart beat a little faster with every step. It was not the prospect of meeting Feraud that scared me, nor the promise of whatever he might ask of me, but the fact that this territory – after all these years – still aroused feelings that I could not comprehend.

  Ahead of the house’s wide frontage, a cream-colored sedan was parked, the rear door opened towards me and an elderly man seated inside smoking a long cigar. Up on the wooden-balustraded veranda a swing hammock rocked gently back and forth. On it sat two small dark-skinned children who said nothing, who just looked at me as I approached.

  The man in the back of the car watched me also, drawing on his cigar every once in a while and issuing a fine pall of silvery smoke out into the darkening atmosphere. The breeze came up from Borgne, the trees shifted with the breathless vacuum it created, and the sound of cicadas punctuated the static silence with a regularity that seemed unnatural.

  The hollow echo of my feet on the wooden planking at the front of the house, the screen door creaking as I reached for the handle and drew it open, the wire mesh casting fine checkered patterns on my skin, sweat breaking out across my forehead: nervous tension sat in the base of my gut like something awful sleeping.

  The house smelled of roasted pecans, freshly-squeezed orange juice and, beneath these vague aromas, the bitter-sweet tang of alcohol and cigar smoke, the haunt of old leather and wood, the ghosts of the everglades that invaded every room, every hallway and corridor.

  I took my left hand out of my pocket. I stood there silently. I heard footsteps approaching from the rear of the house and instinctively took a step backwards.

  A domestic, an ancient Creole with a face like warped, sun-bleached leather appeared through a doorway alongside the stairs. A wide grin creased the lower half of his face.

  ‘Mr Perez,’ he said, his voice like a deep ache coming from somewhere within his bones. ‘Mr Feraud is waitin’ for ya . . . come this way.’

  The old man turned and walked back through the doorway. I started after him, the sound of my footsteps resounding in triplicate through the vastness of the house’s interior.

  We walked for minutes, it seemed, and then a door appeared as if from nowhere on the side of the hallway, and I waited while the old man opened it and indicated I should pass through.

  Feraud stood there, immobile. He looked out through the ceiling-high windows that seemed to span the entire length of the room, and when he turned, he turned slowly, all the way round to face me.

  He smiled. He was not an old man, perhaps no more than forty or forty-five, but etched into his parchment skin were lines that spoke of a thousand years of living. Don Ceriano had told me that this man was responsible for many killings, people shot and hanged and garrotted and drowned in the bayous, and even as I looked into his eyes I imagined that this man was perhaps responsible for the fights that my father had attended; that a man such as this would have sufficient money and influence to not only arrange such things, but also take care of any misfortune that might befall one of the fighters.

  ‘To make a man a myth determines his stature,’ Don Ceriano had told me before I’d left. ‘For despite the rumors, some of which have been exaggerated, there are still many stories that are factual in their origin. When he was thirteen Feraud killed his own father – opened his throat with a straight razor, cut his tongue away and sent it to his mother in a handmade mother-of-pearl box. With his father silenced, Antoine Feraud became the child Napoleon. There were many who refused allegiance, more from their revulsion at his merciless lack of respect for his forebears than his age, but a few examples brought opinions around. Feraud was renowned for one unerring quality. In his favor you were protected. If you crossed him you followed the advice of those who knew him: you left the county, the state, even the country, or you killed yourself. By the time he was twenty, Feraud was credited with more than ten suicides, people who had apparently killed themselves as a result of his dissatisfaction. Better to die fast with a bullet in your head than to suffer the penalty that Feraud would inflict. He took the law away, and everything ran by his word. He created a territory, and within that territory everything was his and his alone.’

  ‘Mr Perez, venez ici—’ Feraud said. His voice was rich and deep; it echoed within the huge room.

  I stepped forward, apprehension flooding my body. I approached him. He smelled of lemons, of some vague and haunting spice, of smoke and ancient armagnac.

  ‘You have come from my friend Don Ceriano,’ Feraud said. ‘Il dit que vous avez un coeur de fer . . . an iron heart?’

  Feraud stepped back. He reached up and held my shoulders. I could not move, could barely breathe, and then he steered me gently towards a high wing-backed chair in front of the window. He took the chair beside it, lowering himself slowly, tugging the creases of his pants before he sat.

  ‘I know of Don Ceriano,’ Feraud said. ‘He is a powerful man, a man of spirit and virtue. He possesses ambitions and dreams, and this is good. A man who does not possess dreams is an empty shell. He believes that we can conspire in business, that we can serve each other well, and I am inclined to agree. In order to initiate what I believe will be a mutually beneficial relationship, he has offered me your services in a small matter that needs to be addressed. Comprenez-vous?’

  I nodded. I was here not for Feraud but for Don Ceriano. I did not need to understand anything but the details of what had to be done.

  ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘We shall have dinner here. You shall stay with us, and then tomorrow we will discuss this business and see what is to be done.’

  It was late afternoon of the following day when Antoine Feraud sent Innocent to fetch me from my room. I once again followed the old Creole through the corridors of the vast house and was shown into a room where Feraud stood talking with another man. He was perhaps the same age as myself, somewhere in his mid-twenties, though any similarity between us stopped there. He was Louisiana-born and bred – not the Louisiana of my mother and father, but that of old Orleans money, the kind of money that wanted for nothing, and thus was unaware of any such notion as absence.

  Antoine Feraud introduced the man as Ducane, Charles Ducane, and when he shook my hand he gave that impression of worldly confidence that comes from having sufficient family money to make anything go away. He was a handsome man, perhaps a little taller than I; dark-haired, his features almost aquiline. He appeared to me as a man who knew that anything could be obtained with sufficient money or sufficient violence, and yet his features told me that he understood neither. His looks would gain him the attention of women, and yet the lack of compassion behind those looks would ultimately drive them away. His position and connections would gain him associates and ‘friends’, but such people would remain loyal only so long as his position served their own ends. I was there to make something go away, and where most men would have believed me dangerous, at least a man to be wary of, this Charles Ducane seemed to register nothing. It was only as I watched him that I saw the seams 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?’