A Quiet Vendetta (32 page)

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 swiftly 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.

I did not ask questions. Who had killed Jack Kennedy and why was of no consequence to me.

On 24 November Jack Ruby, a man I knew by name and face, a man who had been to the Ceriano house on more than three or four occasions in the previous three months alone, shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald on television.

‘Eight bullets,’ Don Ceriano told me later. ‘They found a total of eight bullets down there in Dealey Plaza, and not one of them matched the rifling of the weapon Oswald was supposed to have fired.’ And with that he laughed, and said something in Italian, and then he added
Chi se ne frega
! and laughed again.

It was as if I had stepped back to watch the world commit itself to madness during those subsequent years. I was down in Miami. The weather was good, the girls were beautiful, and I had all the money I needed. Every once in a while Don Ceriano would call for me, and with a name, a face, I would walk out into the world and do what I was asked to do. Sometimes they were Italians, other times Americans, even Cubans and Mexicans. Miami was a cosmopolitan place, and I had no prejudice when it came to killing a man.