A Quiet Vendetta (69 page)

‘You were right,’ she said. ‘He was gonna wait another hour and then call the cops.’ She sat at the table, tucked her legs beneath her. ‘I’ll go back in a bit and get the third degree for a while. Where was I? Who was I with? Where did I stay? All that kinda crap.’

I nodded. I understood the third-degree kind of crap. ‘Your father?’ I asked her. ‘He doesn’t come down here with you?’

Emilie shook her head. ‘He’s like the busiest guy on the planet. Meetings all the time, all sorts of important stuff. I think he’s in the process of buying about eight trillion companies and if he leaves the office for like eleven seconds the world will end.’

‘A workaholic.’

‘A cash-aholic more like.’

Emilie tore a thin strip of bread from a roll and dipped it in her coffee.

I looked towards the doorway and wondered what was taking Victor so long.

‘So you guys here for a few days?’ she asked.

I nodded. ‘Yes, we’re staying for a little while. If Victor likes it here we might stay for some months.’

‘That would be cool. I could maybe come down and see you.’

‘Yes, that would be good,’ I said, and I meant it, for here I believed was someone that would give Victor all that he had become so aware of missing in Cuba.

The door opened and Victor walked through. His hair was wet, combed back from his forehead. He had on a pair of jeans, a white tee-shirt. Somehow he looked older, as if in one night he had gained a handful of years.

‘Could I take a shower before I go?’ Emilie asked.

I nodded. ‘
Me casa su casa
,’ I said. ‘Go ahead, take a shower, and then we will arrange a cab to take you to your uncle.’

Emilie rose from the chair. She touched Victor’s arm as she walked past him. ‘Your dad is cool,’ she said. ‘Hell, I wish my dad was more like yours instead of this Donald Trump thing he’s got going on.’

Victor smiled. He seemed pleased. He turned and watched her disappear and then came to join me at the table.

‘Nothing happened,’ he said as he sat down. ‘I mean nothing happened between me and Emilie.’

‘But one day soon something will,’ I said. ‘And if it isn’t Emilie then it will be someone else, and I want you to understand that such an event will be important and that it is natural and normal and the way life is. My first girlfriend was the cousin of a friend of mine. Her name was Sabina and her hair was longer than anyone’s I’d ever known. It was perhaps the most important day of my young life, and it made me very happy.’

Victor looked momentarily embarrassed. ‘You’re not mad with me?’

I reached across the table and took Victor’s hand. ‘You are happy?’

He nodded, ‘Happy? Yes, I’m happy. I had a great time last night, and I really like Emilie.’

‘Then I am happy too, and she said that if we stay here a while she will come down and visit with us.’

‘We could stay here a while?’

‘Yes, if that is what you want.’

‘For real? We could stay here?’

I smiled. ‘Well, perhaps not right here in this hotel but maybe we will take a house somewhere on the outskirts of the city and stay for a few months.’

Victor smiled, seemed pleased. There was a light in his eyes, something new and youthful, something I had not seen the entire time we had been away from America. He was an American boy, perhaps more than I had ever been, and there were so many more things here that were right for him. Perhaps, truth be known, I had begun to realize that as my own life would come to an end so his would truly begin. Maybe that was now my purpose: to contribute to the life of another instead of contributing to their death.

Emilie reappeared. Her hair was wet, tied back with a colorful band, and she had on her deck pumps.

‘A taxicab,’ I said. ‘We will send you back to your uncle and you will take whatever words he has to give you, alright?’

For a moment she looked irritated.

‘If you are humble and tell him you are sorry then he will let you come back this evening and have dinner with us. Tell him he is more than welcome to join us if he so wishes.’

And so it was done. Emilie Devereau was despatched to the care of her uncle, and within an hour she called the hotel room to say that her uncle wished to speak with me. I introduced myself, told him that I was here in New Orleans for the Mardi Gras with my son, and that his niece would be more than welcome to have dinner with us that evening. He seemed satisfied that it had not been some fabrication by Emilie to rid herself of her uncle for another evening. He apologized for being unable to join us but allowed that Emilie should come. Would I take care to see she was returned safely no later than eleven? I gave my word and the call ended.

Emilie came. We spent some hours together, the three of us, and it seemed for all the world that here were two young people, one of them my son, attracted to one another, enjoying each other’s company, and perhaps, just perhaps, on the verge of falling in love. In Victor I saw myself, in Emilie I saw Angelina, and I vowed that I would do all I could to ensure this thing was preserved as long as it possessed a life of its own.

Emilie was in New Orleans another week. We saw her much of every day, and on two occasions I went with Victor to the Toulouse to collect her. There I met Uncle David, a remarkably serious man, and though he presented no opposition to his niece visiting with us I sensed an air of suspicion. I gave it no credence. It seemed to me that some people were born with such a slanted view of the world, and they were more than welcome to their fears and anxieties. Emilie was in no danger, for through her my son had found the greatest happiness I had witnessed, and for this I would be eternally grateful.

They stayed in touch once she returned home. He wrote often and she replied. On several occasions they spoke on the phone, and an arrangement was made for Emilie to visit once again nearer Christmas.

I rented a house on the western outskirts of New Orleans. I went about my days with nothing to concern me, and for some months it seemed sufficient that this was my life. Victor attended to the latter part of his schooling and enrolled at a college to study architecture. I supported him wholeheartedly, and he learned quickly and well.

Time unfolded quietly and without incident until the early part of 2001. It was then that I became aware of something that served to draw me back to my former life.

I was alone one afternoon. It was the second or third week of January. Victor was at college and I was eating lunch in a small restaurant. I had paid no particular mind to the people sitting at the adjacent table, but when I heard a name mentioned my attention was snapped towards them.

‘Of course Ducane will shake things up. He’s never been one to let these things go too easily—’

I turned and looked at them. I wondered if this was merely a coincidence, or if they were speaking of the same Ducane I had met so many years before.

I glanced towards them, and there, held up in the man’s hand, was the front page of a newspaper. The face of Charles Ducane – so much older, but so unmistakably the same man – looked back at me. And the headline over it, DUCANE LANDSLIDES GOVERNORSHIP, almost took my breath away.

I did not eat anything more, but called for the check, paid for my meal, and left the restaurant. I walked half a block and bought a newspaper from a street vendor, and there, in startling black and white, the same face smiled back at me from the front page. Charles Ducane, the very same man who had stood beside Antoine Feraud nearly forty years before; the same man who had orchestrated the killing of three people whom
I
had murdered through his indirect command, was now governor of Louisiana. I smiled at the dark irony of the situation, but at the same time there was something about this that unsettled me greatly. I had not liked Ducane, there had been something truly sinister and unnerving in his manner, and I could only imagine that he must have risen to such a credible position through the sheer quantity of money that was behind him.

I walked the streets, unable to identify what it was that disturbed me so about this man: his manner, his conceited attitude, the feeling that here was someone who had engineered his way through life and arrived at a governorship through Machiavellian deceit and murder? And he had been the one, alongside Feraud, who had attributed killings to my name. The thing about someone having their heart removed: that had been Ducane and Feraud. It angered me that I was now in hiding somewhere on the outskirts of New Orleans, unable to engage in life the way I wished, and yet this man – guilty of the same deeds – was now proudly smiling from the front page of a newspaper with his public reputation intact.

At some point I tore the newspaper in half and hurled it to the sidewalk. I went home. I sat in the kitchen and considered my reactions, but I decided that I could do nothing. What was there to do? It would not have served any purpose to expose the man. In order to do that I would have to lay bare my own soul, and what would that have accomplished? Ducane was the governor. I was an immigrant Mafia hood from Cuba, responsible for the deaths of countless men. I thought of my son and the shame it would bring upon him. Whatever happiness he had now discovered here in America would be obliterated by one single action. I could never do such a thing.

After a while I calmed down. I had a drink and felt my nerves settle. True, I was here in this small house living my quiet life, but nevertheless afraid of nothing. Ducane, however, was up there in his governor’s mansion, living with the ever-present possibility that someone might take an unhealthy degree of interest in his past. There would always be enemies, always be people who would find no greater pleasure than exposing the sordid details of some political figurehead’s past, and money – no matter how much he might have – would only keep such things away for so long. Someone else, I concluded, could bring Charles Ducane down, and that someone would not be me.

Nevertheless I took an interest in the man. I watched him when he came on the TV. I went to the New Orleans City Library and learned something of his route to the governorship. He had been involved in state and city politics his entire adult life. He had worked alongside and within the bureaux that handled land acquisitions and property rights mergers, civil litigation, state legislature and union affiliations for industry and manufacturing plants. At one time he had spent six months as legal advisor to the New Orleans State Drug Enforcement Agency under the auspices of the FBI. The man had been busy. He had used his money and influence to carve out a position for himself within the political ranks of Louisiana, and for his efforts, for his undoubted generous contributions to many important funds and campaigns, he had been rewarded with his current title. In some ways he was a man not unlike me; he had used what he possessed to make something of his life, but whereas I had come from nowhere and ended up nowhere, he had started somewhere and wound up in an even more elevated position.

I collected newspaper articles about Ducane. I made an effort to see him when he made public appearances, and though there was even a moment when I approached him at the opening of a new art gallery and shook his hand enthusiastically, there was no indication of recognition. I knew who he was, I knew where he had come from and what he had done, but of me he knew nothing. I had been a means to an end forty years before, and beyond that he had even used my name to cloud the facts regarding several killings that had taken place. Whereas he was in the public eye, I remained anonymous, and that fact in itself became a source of particular enjoyment for me.

The following year Emilie returned once again for the Mardi Gras. The first week of April, and the streets of New Orleans exploded with life and color and sound. Once again her Uncle David brought her down, and once again he managed to be there without ever really being there at all. He was a strange man, quiet and aloof, and yet he seemed to have no difficulty permitting Emilie to spend much of her vacation with us. I believed that Emilie was more than a little responsible for his lack of opposition. We had seen her briefly a little before Christmas, but it had been a year since the previous Mardi Gras, and within that year she had grown. Victor would be nineteen in a couple of months, and in the following September Emilie would reach eighteen. She was a young woman, spirited and independent, and though I recognized her passion for life and all it offered, there was nevertheless an element of her character that I felt sprang from the strained relationship she seemed to have with her father. While she was with us she never called him, and he – apparently – never made any attempt to contact her. I questioned her one time, carefully, diplomatically, and her responses were dry and monosyllabic.

‘He runs his own business then, your father?’

‘And tries to run everyone else’s as well,’ she replied, in her eyes an expression of sour disapproval.

‘He is a driven man, it seems.’

‘By money, yes. By anything else, no.’

I was quiet for a time. I watched her. She seemed at her most unhappy when the conversation turned towards her own family.

‘But he cares a great deal for you, I am sure, Emilie.’

She shrugged.

‘He is your father, and despite the fact that he is a busy man I am sure that he loves you a great deal.’

‘Who the hell knows?’ Again the sour expression, the flash of irritation in her eyes.

‘All fathers love their children,’ I said.

She looked at me. ‘Is that so?’

I nodded. ‘Yes it is, and though there might be some people who find it difficult to express the way they feel it doesn’t change the fact that they still feel those things towards their own blood.’

‘Well, maybe my father is the exception that proves the rule, eh?’

I shook my head. She was stonewalling me. ‘And your mother?’

Emilie smiled bitterly. ‘She left him, couldn’t take any more.’

‘And where is she now?’

‘Around and about.’

‘You see her?’

‘Every so often.’

‘And she is perhaps a little more forthcoming in her affections for you?’

‘She’s as crazy as he is, but in a different way. She spends all her time worrying about what other people might think of her. She’s possibly the most introspected and self-centered person I know.’