A Quiet Vendetta (31 page)

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?’

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.