I nodded. I didn’t need the précis, merely the name, the place, the manner in which the job needed to be done.
‘My father owns a factory where canned goods are processed. There is a senior manager there, a man of little significance, but his brother is the head of the workers’ union, and the workers are restless and agitated. This, in and of itself, is of no great importance, but the company is to be sold, and if there is the slightest hint of unrest within the ranks the deal could be soured. The union man is a voice for the workers, he is their guiding force, and with a few words he could march those men right out of there and collapse this sale. We are not interested in the union. They can fight amongst themselves until Kingdom come after the factory has been sold, but for the next two weeks we require nothing but silence, compliance and hard work.’
Charles Ducane, a young man, a man perhaps asked to ‘take care of this small matter’ by his father, leaned back in the deep leather armchair and sighed.
‘The union man we will not touch. He is too visible. We have spoken with him but his head is as hard as rock. He has no wife, no children, and thus the closest person to him is his brother, the manager. Tonight, a little after nine, the manager will take a young woman to a motel off the highway down here, perhaps three or four miles away, and he will stay the night. We require a message to be carried to the union man, a message he will not misinterpret, and how this is done we do not care. There is to be no connection to me or my family. It must appear to be the work of some crazy person, a vagabond or an opportunist thief perhaps, and we will ensure that the message is received loud and clear. We need this to be unmistakable but unconnectable, you understand, Mr Perez?’
‘The name of the motel?’ I asked.
‘The Shell Beach Motel,’ Ducane said. He paused for a moment and then withdrew a single monochrome photograph from his inside breast pocket. He handed it to me. I studied the man’s face, and then I returned the picture to Ducane.
Ducane smiled; he turned and looked at Feraud. Feraud nodded as if granting Papal indulgence.
I believed then that I understood what was happening. Ducane, perhaps his family, needed this man killed. They could not do it themselves, such a thing would have been too great a risk, but more importantly it seemed that such a thing had to be sanctioned by Feraud. Ducane, important though he considered himself to be, had been sent as the negotiator. I wondered what price these people had had to pay in order for this execution to have been granted.
Feraud looked at me. ‘Any further questions?’
I shook my head. ‘Consider it done.’
Ducane smiled and rose to his feet. He shook Antoine Feraud by the hand, and then me. He said something in French to Feraud which I did not understand, and Feraud laughed.
He looked once more directly at me, and in that second I saw the fear manifest in his eyes, and then he started towards the door. Innocent appeared and escorted him to the front of the house.
‘This is important enough,’ Feraud said once Ducane had disappeared.
‘I understand,’ I replied.
Feraud smiled. ‘You do not care for details, do you, Ernesto Perez?’
I frowned.
‘The whys and wherefores of all of this business we are involved in.’
‘I ask when I need to ask, and when I do not I keep my thoughts to myself.’
‘Which is the way it should be,’ Feraud said. ‘Now we will eat, and when we are done you will do this thing. Then you will return to see Don Ceriano and tell him that he and I will do some business of our own.’
It was close, the air thick with the smell of verdant growth. Out there I was alone. Out there the sky pressed down on me between the thick overlapping branches of the trees, and between the gaps I could see the stars watching me in silence.
To my left the highway ran a straight line back towards Chalmette and the Arabi District, and every once in a while the faint hum of some traveler drifted through. From where I lay in the mud, from beneath the ankle-deep water that stuck to my skin, I could see the vague haunt of lights in the distance. I lay quiet for some time, and then I rose slowly and stripped naked. I became one with everything around me; I became truly, seamlessly invisible. I stood there in the swollen heat of night, and then I shifted back and disappeared into the silence and darkness of the everglades. 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. Around me the trees stretched their roots through the soft and forgiving earth, teasing their gnarled fingers into the weed-infested water as if to test it for temperature, and everywhere, inside every breath, was the smell of decay, the strong odor of a country dying – inborn, inbred, slime-caked boles crumbling into the ground, and from the mulch of their stinking graves a new land would be born. The ground was thick with this amniotic pulp, the effort of life attempting escape, the stench heady and enervating, a high like smoking something dead.
Sometimes I paused to kneel, the sensation of undergrowth between my legs, and I leaned back, my head angled away from my body, and I closed my eyes. I could smell burning, like gasoline, oil, cordite, wood. I could smell gasoline on my skin, see the colors that grew and spread across my arms, my chest. I imagined my face in deep rainbow hues, blackened at the nose and chin, and above this the frightening starkness of white eyes. I bared my teeth, and wondered how much like a nightmare I looked. I smiled, I crouched and crawled back to the water and sank beneath the filth.
I walked a mile, perhaps more, and above me the stars watched all the way. They bore witness, they understood, but they did not judge. They saw us all as children, because compared to them we came and went in one brief twinkling, and if I understood this I understood how we were all truly nothing. Nothing mattered. Nothing bore any significance in comparison to that. Nothing meant anything any more.
I eventually tired, and lying at the side of some swollen tributary, the dank and stinking water overlapping my chest, I closed my eyes and rested. After an hour or so I rose once more and started out towards the highway.
Lights were ahead of me. Something stirred within, something excited, something indefinable, and I stepped into the depth of the trees and watched. A car turned off the highway and slid silently into the forecourt of a semicircular arrangement of small cabins. A motel. Lights from a cabin. People. My heart beat beautifully, had never worked better, and I understood that I was loved by the stars, loved by the earth, loved by everything, for that’s what I was, wasn’t I? I was everything.
Again I sank to my hands and knees, and from where I hid within the dank and humid woods I started out through the undergrowth towards the lights. I was one with the darkness. I was unseen, unheard, unknown. I was everything and nothing. My thoughts were hollow and weightless, and they turned in invisible circles, back and forth within the bounds of some limitless and empathetic mind. Ghosts, you see. I haunted the world.
I reached the edge of the road. I crouched in silence. I held my breath. There was nothing out there, nothing but me and the lights, and I slipped across the surface of the highway, my feet never touching the ground, it seemed. I was perfect. More than perfect. I was somebody.
There were twelve cabins, five with lights, seven without. I was within speaking distance of the first but I said nothing. There was nothing to say.
In my hand I held a knife I had carried all the way without thinking, as if a natural appendage to my arm. Its blade was blackened with mud and filth, and wiping it clean between my fingers, I turned it beneath the light of the neon sign. It flickered beautifully, colored like gasoline on water – indigo, purple, blue, indigo once more.
I slipped through the shadows that clung to the walls of the cabin. I edged up against the back door, and crouching low beneath the window I peered over the edge.
People I did not recognize.
I moved away, once more slipping between the cabins as if I was a shadow myself.
/> I found them in the fourth lighted cabin.
I crept to the back of the low building, and leaned up against the wall. I slipped the edge of the knife in between the latch and the striker plate of the rear door. I heard the snick of the metal as it clicked back. The door eased open effortlessly, and I slipped into the room, gliding like air, like slow-motion fire.
The woman was asleep on the bed, her bottle-blond hair spread out over the pillow. Her hand had slipped free of the covers, dangled from the edge of the mattress as if she had forgotten its ownership.
I could smell sex in the air, and I breathed in the bitter tang of liquor mingled with the raw stench of sweat. I leaned closer as she exhaled. I could hear him. He was talking to himself, mumbling something incomprehensible as he stood in the bathroom doorway watching her. I waited until he turned out the bathroom light, slipped off his robe, and slid beneath the sheets beside her. She turned towards him, towards me, and in the flickering light of the neon sign through the thin curtains I could see her mascara was smeared, her hair tousled, dark roots creeping out from the surface of her scalp and giving it all away.
I watched these nothing people, and I thought of the man’s name, his age, where he came from, where the world believed he was. There was no-one here but people who meant nothing, said nothing of consequence, listened to themselves speaking as if they possessed the only voice in the universe. They have been watched, from the moment of their inception, by the stars. They did not understand. I understood.
I leaned back. I smiled. With my left hand I grasped my erection, with my right hand the knife, and then, sliding across the floor on all fours I approached the edge of the bed. I lay right beneath the man. He could have reached out and touched me, but he heard nothing. I rose slowly, as if I had grown from the carpet, and then I raised the knife and held it a foot above his heart. I pushed forward with all my weight, felt the knife puncture, and then with greater force than even I believed I possessed I drove that blade home. I felt it slide through flesh and cartilage and muscle. I felt it stop against the back of his ribcage.
The sound from his lips was almost nothing.
She did not wake.
I frowned, and wondered how much she had drunk before she lay down on the bed. The man was dead. Blood ran across his chest like a rivulet of black. Light like that turned blood the color of crude oil. I touched it with my fingertips. I raised my head, and then leaning gently forward I painted a cross on the woman’s forehead. She stirred and murmured. I touched my finger to her lips. She murmured again, sounded like someone’s name but I did not hear it clearly.
‘Huh?’ I whispered. ‘What was that you said, sweetheart?’
She murmured again, a breathless whisper, a distant nothingness.
From the side of the bed I rolled the man down onto the floor. I lowered him without a sound, and then I climbed in where he had lain, the sheets warm, the mattress imbued with the heat of his body. I felt the dampness, could smell the raw earthiness of what had happened here before I arrived, and moving my hand down I slid it across her stomach, over her ample heavy breasts, down across her navel and between her legs. I stroked my fingers through her pubic hair, she smiled in her sleep, her lips slightly parted, her eyelids flickering, and then when she spoke I could feel my heart thundering in my chest. I felt the emotion and power of that moment rising to my throat.
I closed up against her, aware of the filth that had dried to my skin, the smell of the everglades, the sweat I had bled in the miles I had walked to this place.
I thought of the dead man who lay on the floor beside us. I thought of the reasons why Feraud and Ducane had to have him killed. Reasons were inconsequential. Reasons were history.
Perhaps it was such thoughts that woke her. Alien thoughts. Strange sensations as she reached out her hands to touch me, to feel for my stomach, my legs, the memory of something she had found there that once had her scratching the walls, gasping for air, crying with pleasure . . .
She opened her eyes.
So did I.
Her eyes were rimmed with sleep, bloodshot and unfocused.
Mine were stark, brilliant white against the blackness of my face. I looked like a nightmare.
She opened her mouth to scream, and with one hand I forced her jaw closed. Gripping the base of her throat with my other hand I rolled over and on top of her. I could feel the pressure of my erection against her stomach. She struggled, she was heavy, strong almost, and it was some moments before I could push myself inside her. I thrust hard. I hurt her. Her eyes widened, and even as she felt me thrusting up inside her again, even as she struggled to breathe at all, she knew from the expression in my eyes that she was going to die. My hand tightened relentlessly around her throat. And then it was as if she resigned herself to it. She seemed to fall silent inside, and even though I knew she was still alive there was nothing left within her with which to fight. I thrust again, again, again, and then I sensed the moment that her life gave way beneath her. I released her throat. She lay still and silent. I thrust once more, and as I came I kissed her hard and full on the mouth.
I lay there for some time. There was no hurry. Where I was going would wait forever, it seemed. I teased her bleached-blond curls around in my fingers. Her eyes were open. I closed them. I kissed her lids in turn. Her mouth was open, gasping for air that would now never come. I moved against her, felt her fading warmth, felt the softness of her flesh turn cool and unyielding, and after an hour, perhaps more, I grew from the bed like some angular tree and padded barefoot into the bathroom.
I showered, scrubbed the dirt from my skin. I washed my hair with shampoo from a bottle labeled Compliments of the Shell Beach Motel. I soaped myself with a small ivory tablet that smelled of children and clean bathrooms. I stood beneath the running water, my face upturned, my eyes closed, and I sang some tune I remembered from years back.
I dried myself with clean towels, dressed slowly in the man’s garments, much as I had done after Pietro Silvino had died. The clothes were large. I turned up the cuffs of the pants, left the shirt unbuttoned at the neck and did not wear his tie. His shoes were two or three sizes too big so I stuffed the toes with the woman’s silk stockings. The jacket was cut wide at the shoulders, ample in the waist, and when I stood before the small copper-spotted mirror I looked like a child dressed in his father’s clothes.
Hell, we were all children beneath the stars.
I smiled.
Nothing mattered any more.
I spent a minute at the doorway of the cabin. I breathed in the swollen air, the raw earthy ambience, and then I inhaled again and the whole world came with it.
I took the man’s cigarette lighter from his jacket pocket. I walked to the edge of the bed. The tiny flame that started climbing from the edge of the bedsheet towards the spread-eagled form of the woman looked like a ghost. I watched until the sound of burning cotton was audible within the silence. I leaned sideways; I lit the lower edge of the curtain. The cabin was nothing more than wood and paint and felt. It would burn well on a hot airless night like this.
I closed my eyes.
The past was the past.
Now this was the future.
I dreamed my dreams, I lived my nightmares, and sometimes I chose guests to stay a little while.
I left the cabin and did not look back. I walked towards the highway, the stars above me, my ears filled with silence.
Word had gone ahead of me to Don Ceriano. He greeted me like a long-lost son. There was much drinking and talking. Afterwards I slept for the better part of a day, and when I woke Don Ceriano told me that Antoine Feraud and he were working together exactly as he had planned.
‘Whatever you did,’ he said, ‘it was a good thing, and I thank you for it.’ Don Ceriano smiled and gripped my shoulder. ‘Though I think perhaps you scared these people a little.’
I looked at him and frowned.
Ceriano shook his head. ‘Possibly they are not used to things being dealt with so sw
iftly and with so little difficulty. I think Antoine Feraud and his friend . . . what was his name?’
‘Ducane,’ I said. ‘Charles Ducane.’
‘Right, right . . . I think they are a little concerned that if they cross me you will visit them in the night, eh?’ He laughed loudly. ‘Now they know your name, Ernesto, and they will not wish to upset you.’
I did not hear Antoine Feraud’s name again, not directly, for some time. I did what I was asked to do. I stayed with Don Ceriano in the house in Miami, and from there I watched the world unfold through another year.
I remember the fall of 1963 with great clarity. I remember conversations that were held into the early hours of the morning. I remember the names of Luciano and Lansky, of Robert Maheu, Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli. I remember feeling that there were things beyond the confines of those walls that were of greater significance than all of us combined.
In September of the year a man called Joseph Valachi revealed the key names in organized crime to the Senate Committee. Don Ceriano spoke of Jack Kennedy’s father, how he had been in with the families, how family money had put Jack Kennedy in the White House with the promise that concessions and allowances would be made for New York, for Vegas, for Florida and the other family strongholds. Once Kennedy was in, however, he had reneged, and with the assistance of his brother Bobby they had announced their intention to oust the families from all illegal businesses and rackets countrywide.
‘We have to do something,’ Don Ceriano told me one time, and this was after Valachi’s testimony, and the way he spoke of it made me feel that something had already been done.
November twenty-second I realized what had been done. I believed that the family had consorted not only with the wealthy Cuban-American exiles, but also with the big conglomerates who paid for the Vietnam War. It was ironic, to me at least, that the only criminal case ever brought against any man for the assassination of Kennedy took place in New Orleans, the trial of Clay Shaw overseen by District Attorney Garrison.
R. J. Ellory Page 25
