"A Quiet Vendetta" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellory R. J.)

FOUR

And he would say, ‘But there never was a time when you told me exactly how you felt,’ and she’d say, ‘Even if I had told you you wouldn’t have listened anyway,’ and he would close his eyes, sigh deeply, and reply, ‘How the hell would you have known, Carol… I mean, tell me that, how the hell would you have known if I’d been listening?’ and then one of them – it didn’t matter who – would mention Jess’s name, and at that point things would kind of quieten down. Seemed that Jess was perhaps the only real reason Ray Hartmann and Carol talked any more, and maybe because of that there was the hope that somehow, some way, something good might have been salvaged from their thirteen years together. Spend that many years living side by side, breathing the same air, eating the same food, sharing the same bed, and separation felt like losing a limb, and though hours were spent in some vague attempt to convince themselves that the limb was diseased, that it had to be amputated, that they could never have survived leaving it where it was, the truth always haunted them. No-one else would ever feel that good, that right, that familiar. And there would always be a standard against which all others were judged, and though the sex might have been better, though the complaints might have been different, they would always be aware of the fact that this new one was not the one.

All their conversations went like that these days: recriminatory, bitter, resentful, sharp and to the point. And they would always talk on the phone when Jessica wasn’t there, because she was a human being too, all of twelve years old and mindful of what was happening between her parents. Carol Hartmann, separated from her husband now for the better part of eight months, always called when Jessica was out with friends or on a sleep-over, or at band practice or down at the gym. And Ray Hartmann – he of the broken heart and bloodied knuckles where he’d put his fist through the kitchen cupboard door that evening of 28 December – would take the call and sit on the edge of his bed, and he would hear her voice and believe that never in his life would he miss anything as much as he missed his wife. Three days after Christmas for God’s sake, drunk and loud and screaming some mindless crap at the top of his voice, and Jessica crying and running to her mother because daddy had gone out of the loop once again. And it was never Jessica, and truth be known it was never Carol, whom he’d married one fine February morning in 1990. It was the job, the stress of the job, the way the job carried over into everything you were, everything you ever imagined you could be, and it was a rare and special woman who could have weathered the storms Ray Hartmann brought with him, for sometimes he didn’t just bring storms, sometimes he brought Hurricane Ray, loud enough to bring down trees and take the roof right off of the eaves. But for thirteen years she had managed, and though not all of those years had been difficult they nevertheless had had their moments. Prone to mood swings and sudden shifts of temperament, Ray Hartmann had lost count of the number of times his wife had looked at him across the room with an expression of wonder and terror, an underlying sense of panic that this time, this time, he might just do something all of them would seriously regret. But he never did, not until that night of 28 December, and then he’d gatecrashed his way through the supposed harmony of their house, and then he’d started up again like a fire siren, and before he knew it he was standing there with blood running out of his knuckles and spotting the linoleum floor, and his wife and his daughter were both screaming at him to get out of the house and not come back. Bruised they looked; spiritually bruised.

So he left the house that night, more out of shame and an abiding sense of fear about what he might be capable of, and he walked seven blocks in the snow to the ER and they cleaned and bandaged his knuckles and told him to sleep off his drunk on a trolley down the corridor. When he’d woken, his mouth tasting like copper filings and seaweed, he had remembered what he’d done, and when he’d called and got no answer he knew that Carol had taken Jessica to her grandmother’s. He’d walked back and taken a few things from the house. He’d checked into a motel for three days and stayed sober. Then he’d rented an apartment in Little Italy, downtown Manhattan, a four-room gray-walled apartment with windows overlooking Sarah Roosevelt Park, and he’d called in sick and spent forty-eight hours asking himself why he was such a goddamned asshole.

Their home, the Hartmann home, was in Stuyvesant Town, and though he drove past the very block where his wife and daughter were, he never set foot on the porch, he never rang the bell and waited for the sound of footsteps in the hall. He was too ashamed, too self-critical of the kind of man he’d been, and he would spend another three or four weeks beating the shit out of himself before he got the nerve to call her.

The first call had been difficult: strained, long silences, ended on a sour note.

The second call, a fortnight later, had been slightly warmer. She had asked him how he was, and he’d said, ‘Sober, sober since December twenty-eighth,’ and she had wished him well, told him that she wasn’t ready for anything ‘complicated’, that Jessica was fine, she sent her love, and last week she was chosen to lead the gymnastics team for the Homecoming Pageant.

The third call, six days later, Carol let Ray speak to his daughter.

‘Hey daddy.’

‘Hey sweetpea.’

‘You okay?’

‘Sure I am, honey. Your mom says you’re leading the gym team for the Homecoming?’

‘Yes, sure. Are you gonna be able to come?’

Ray was silent for a moment.

‘Daddy?’

‘I’m here, Jess, I’m here.’

‘So you gonna be able to come?’

‘I don’t know, Jess, I don’t know. It kinda depends on what your mom says.’

This time it was Jess’s turn to be silent, and then she said, ‘Okay, I’ll talk to her.’

‘You do that, honey, you do that,’ and then Ray heard the sound of his own voice breaking up with emotion, and he didn’t think he could talk to his daughter any more without crying, and so he told her he loved her more than anything in the world and asked to speak to her mom again.

‘Don’t come to the Homecoming, Ray,’ Carol had stated matter-of-factly. ‘It’s too soon for me and Jess to see you.’

‘Too soon for you… but what about Jess?’

‘Don’t start it up again, Ray, just don’t start it up again, okay? I gotta go now. I gotta take Jess to get her hair done.’

And the call had ended, and Ray Hartmann had hung up and had asked himself why – after things seemed to have been going so well – he just had to be an asshole all over again.

Thirty-seven years old, sick leave from work, holed up in a crappy apartment in Little Italy while his wife of thirteen years took his twelve-year-old daughter to have her hair done.

What he would have given to have taken her himself.

Never did when you were home, the voice inside said, and he cut that short, because he knew from long experience that listening to such voices was the road to madness, and that road led only one way: right down the neck of a bottle, and that was the kind of shit that had gotten him into this kind of shit in the first place.

Ray Hartmann was an enigma. Born in New Orleans, 15 March 1966. Younger brother, Danny, born 17 September 1968, the two of them close like flesh and blood should be. Went everywhere together, did everything together, Ray always leading the way, Danny – looking up to him, forgiving all his faults, wide-eyed and wondrous the way that younger brothers always seem to be – and always in trouble, and dreaming like little kids do, and throwing stones and water bombs and skinnydipping, and missing school days to go catching frogs down in the glades… all these things, living their lives so fast, so furious, like they wanted nothing left for tomorrow. It was always Danny and Ray, Ray and Danny, like a litany, a mantra to brotherhood.

And then it all ended. 7 July 1980. Danny was eleven years old, eager and enthusiastic and overwhelmed by the magic of everything, and he went down beneath the wheels of a car on South Loyola, and the guy never stopped and Danny got his legs crushed and his head stoved in, and there wasn’t even a single breath left in his tiny broken body when Ray got down there and saw his brother was killed.

Ray, fourteen years old, knelt on the sidewalk with his brother’s body across his lap, and he didn’t say a word, and he didn’t shed a tear, and even when the paramedics came down and tried to separate the pair of them there was nothing they could do but carry them both, carry them like they were one, into the back of the Blue Cross ambulance… It was Ray and Danny, Danny and Ray, in life, in death, in trouble. Always and forever would be.

They didn’t fire up the siren, because they didn’t need the siren when the passenger was dead.

The boys’ father wasn’t there to comfort his eldest because he was gone too, back in the fall of ’71 with a coronary that could’ve leveled a horse. Big man, strong man, a fighter by all accounts, but drank like a buffalo at the desert’s last watering hole, and Ray thought maybe that’s where his own taste for the liquor came from, but then he told himself no, because asshole wasn’t genetic. So mom took it all on board, and she held them together, held herself together as well until the little one got rolled by a Pontiac Firebird on South Loyola. They caught the guy later, and he was a drunk too, and they knew it was him because they found the little kid’s blood and the little kid’s hair caught in the radiator grille on the front. Mom hung in there until after Ray graduated, and then she went too, May of ’87. Natural causes, they said. Sure thing. Natural causes like a broken heart and too much losing, and little enough of life to keep the spirit wanting in the face of such adversity. Those kind of natural causes.

Ray went into the National Guard, shoveled folks out of snowdrifts and cleaned boots on the weekend; started hitting the bottle a little too often and invalided himself out before he shot himself or someone else. Worked a regular job for six months and then moved to New York in February of 1988. Even now he couldn’t understand why he had chosen New York, perhaps for no other reason than it was the one place he could think of that was most unlike New Orleans. He took to studying the law, studied it every hour that God sent, studied it like there was an answer to be found. Didn’t find it, but did find a practice that took him as an intern, and he trawled his way through the Circuit Court system, took the bar, became a public defender and tried to make sense of the mistakes that people all too easily made. It was then that the House Judiciary Subcommittee started the integration programs, posting public defenders inside the police precincts, and there they acted as filters for the courts, an attempt to limit the traffic that hit City Hall. It was an economy drive, and to some degree it worked. It was during that program that Ray Hartmann met Luca Visceglia, one of the key investigators who finally nailed Kuklinski. Richard Kuklinski was a star among stars. Recruited by the Gambino family, his audition was a very simple test: he was driven out into New York, driven along regular streets where regular people walked, and with a single word a man was selected at random, a man walking his dog, minding his own business, perhaps thinking about a birthday present he had to buy, maybe his daughter’s engagement dinner. The car slowed, Kuklinski climbed out, and with a half dozen steps he faced the man, raised a gun and shot him dead. That was all the Gambinos required of Kuklinski, and Kuklinski was in.

Living on a quiet street with his wife and family in Dumont, Bergen County, Kuklinski took his orders from Roy DeMaio, the Mafia boss whose office was located in the Gemini Lounge in Brooklyn.

Over the next three years the New Jersey Organized Crime Task Force concentrated their efforts on nailing Kuklinski. In the early ’80s, when Paul Castellano and the Gambino family instigated a collaboration between the State Organized Crime Task Force and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Castellano happened to mention his concern regarding Roy DeMaio. Castellano was worried DeMaio would talk, that he would ‘go the wrong way’. DeMaio was acting increasingly paranoid, and so in 1983 Roy DeMaio’s body was found in the trunk of a car. He’d been there a week. Later, much later, when Kuklinski was finally secured in Trenton State Prison, he said of DeMaio’s death, ‘it couldn’t have happened to a nicer person… If somebody had to die that day, it was a good day for him to die.’

The New Jersey Task Force employed the assistance of the FBI, and they assigned an undercover agent called Dominick Polifrone to the case. Posing as a fellow hitman, an associate from New York City called Dominick Michael Provanzano, he managed to get Kuklinski talking, and once Kuklinski started talking he was a man who appreciated the sound of his own voice. It was those tapes that finally got him, and whereas the police and the Organized Crime Task Force believe Kuklinski murdered something in the region of forty people, Kuklinski placed his record at something over a hundred. He was a busy boy. As was his younger brother Joey, already serving life in Trenton for raping and strangling a twelve-year-old girl, a girl he dragged across two adjoining rooftops and then hurled, along with her dog, forty feet to the sidewalk below. Maybe such things were in their blood, perhaps – as FBI Criminal Profiling suggested – there were situational dynamics that precipitated the direction the Kuklinski brothers took.

Not until 4 July 2002 did Federal and New York State prosecutors finally bring charges against seventeen members and associates of the Gambino crime family. The charges they faced involved racketeering, extortion, loan sharking, wire fraud, money laundering and witness tampering. It was in this miasma of brutality that Ray Hartmann met his baptism of fire. Luca Visceglia had been an insider, one of the few Federal investigators that spoke directly with the crime family members when they came in for questioning. Ray transcribed interviews, he boxed tapes, he checked inventories of evidence, he filed photos and videotapes, and learned a great deal about what these people had done and why they had done it. Fascinated by the underlying causes of such actions he studied Stone and Deluca’s Investigating Crimes, Fundamentals of Criminal Investigation by Charles and Gregory O’Hara, and Geberth’s Practical Homicide Investigation. When Visceglia was made Deputy Investigative Director for the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Organized Crime he was asked to select his own staff. He selected Ray Hartmann, and Ray made himself indispensable. Ironically, though the stress of his work would be the thing that finally drove him and his wife apart, it was in amidst the madness of one of those cases that he met Carol Hill Wiley. Summer of 1989, stationed at the New York District Attorney’s Office, Visceglia, Hartmann, and the three others who made up their team, were asked to undertake a refiling of all materials relating to the triple murder of Stefano Giovannetti, Matteo Cagnotto and Claudio Rossi. Giovannetti, Cagnotto and Rossi were themselves soldiers for an arm of the Genovese family. They had worked beneath Alessandro Vaccorini, one of Peter Gotti’s right-hand men, and under his direction they had carried out at least seventeen known murders between them. They lived together, worked together, and were together in a Lincoln Towncar leaving the outskirts of Brooklyn when tirespikes had brought their vehicle to a shuddering halt. From the verge behind the fence at the side of the highway, witnesses had given varied reports of between four and nine men levelling semi-automatic rifles at the car and turning it into a spaghetti strainer. The driver and his three passengers were blended into mystery meat. The monochrome photographs of the murder scene could in no way have done justice to the actuality of what crime scene investigators found when they closed off the highway and went down there.

Carol Hill Wiley, a twenty-two-year-old New Yorker, brunette, petite, a wicked sense of humor, green eyes, drop-dead-gorgeous smile, had been on assignment under the aegis of the New York State Supreme Court’s training program for legal interns and secretaries. She had majored in law herself, had set her heart on a private practice by the time she was thirty, and would have pursued that goal paramount to all else had she not had that same heart stolen by the seemingly reserved and yet somehow strangely fascinating Ray Hartmann. Hartmann, as far as Carol could see, was serviceably handsome, five-foot ten or eleven, sandy-colored hair and blue eyes, with a kind of wasted look about him that told of surviving regardless of something bad. Pressed together by duty and obligation, many were the nights that she and Ray Hartmann had stayed late in the dimly-lit office on the corner of Adams and Tillary in Brooklyn Heights, right there in the shadow of the Supreme Court building itself. Afternoons they took to walking down to Cadman Plaza to eat their lunch, and there – the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges to their right, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to their left – they got to talking. It was outside the NYC Transit Museum that Ray Hartmann first kissed Carol Hill Wiley. It was a cold Tuesday in the latter half of December 1989. They were married on 10 February 1990. They moved to an apartment near Lindsay Park in Williamsburg, and there they stayed until Carol got pregnant. Two weeks into her second trimester they moved across the East River and bought a two-bedroomed apartment in a three-storey walk-up in Stuyvesant Town. Despite the lengthy journey each day, back and forth across the Williamsburg Bridge, Ray and Carol Hartmann found some small compensation in the fact that her simple request to be assigned to Luca Visceglia’s unit was approved. At least they could travel together, work together, go home together.

It stayed that way until Jessica was born, and then Carol decided, without pressure or persuasion, that she would be happier spending her days as a mother rather than examining photographs of dismembered, burned, drowned, decapitated bodies. Money was adequate though not extravagant, and money, lack of, could never have been cited as a contributory factor in the dissolution of the Hartmanns’ marriage. Rather, perhaps more accurately, it was a combination of factors on both sides. For Carol, having left the employ of the District Attorney’s Office, there was a gradual disassociation from the work that she had done. She began forgetting the way in which the sounds and images and words could haunt your thoughts irrespective of your location. Ray went in to work and dealt with these matters every single day, and it was not hard to become embroiled in the darkness that such work generated. Carol’s days were spent looking after Jessica, a remarkably bright and enthusiastic child, and as soon as Ray walked back through the front door she would want to regale him with the many miracles she had witnessed in their daughter that day. Ray, oblivious to the world everyone else inhabited, would often be distracted, curt, brusque and inadequately interested. He started to drink, just that swift half-inch of scotch to smooth off the edges when he came home, the single drink before dinner, and then it became an inch of scotch and a can of beer with his meal, and then sometimes he would shut himself in the den and watch TV, a six-pack on the floor by his feet.

In July of 1996 he shouted at his five-year-old daughter. Wanting to show dad her painting she repeatedly knocked on the door of the den, and Ray – suffering from a migraine which was not surrendering to either Excedrin or Michelob – tore the door open and screamed at the top of his voice: What in fuck’s name do you want for Christ’s sake?

Jessica, shattered, crying, completely unaware of what she might have done to prompt such a reaction, ran to her mother. Carol said nothing. Not a word. Within fifteen minutes she had packed some overnight things into a holdall and left the house.

Ray Hartmann fell into the abyss; the abyss populated by all drunks where self-abnegation, self-pity, self-recrimination, self-loathing and crying are the only footholds marking the way back out. The expression on Carol’s face had been as startling and sudden as an epinephrine injection, and it made Ray Hartmann look seriously at what he was becoming. He was becoming someone even he didn’t like, and that was the worst kind of person of all.

Carol and Jess came back three days later. It was another seven months before Ray Hartmann raised his voice again. This time Carol and Jess went upstate to Carol’s mother’s place and stayed a week. Ray went to an AA meeting. He began the Twelve Steps. He realized he was perfectly capable of being a scumbag of the lowest order, in fact perfectly capable of becoming the bacteria on the amoeba on the scumbag in question, and he didn’t drink again for nigh on a year.

The incident that precipitated the separation of Carol and Ray Hartmann occurred five weeks before her actual departure in December of 2002. Ray had worked late, as was ordinarily the case when a particular investigation was being prepared for the Attorney General’s Office. He and Visceglia had secured an inside line on one of the defendant’s former girlfriends and she had agreed to testify. She was neither a drug-user, ex-felon, or prostitute, nor an employee of any legal, judicial, police or intelligence agency. She was a star, a perfect and exemplary witness. She could place the defendant in a particular location at a particular time. The simplicity of this was that he would go down. A stream of fabricated alibis could be undone with her words. She was a woman of substance, a good speaker, and she wasn’t afraid.

The evening before Ray Hartmann and Luca Visceglia were to present her as-yet-unsworn affidavit to the Grand Jury, an affidavit that would have earned her federal protection, she was found in a motel room off Hunters Point Avenue near the Calvary Cemetery. This woman, thirty-seven years of age, a respectable background, a good education, who never touched a reefer in her life, had overdosed on cocaine. She was found naked, one hand and one foot bound to the frame of the bed, her mouth gagged, a selection of sex aids scattered across the mattress, and a butt plug in her ass. Once a rape kit had been done there was evidence that she had engaged in vaginal and anal intercourse with at least three different men. The three men were located through their DNA and hair samples. All three were interrogated separately. All three gave exactly the same story. They were male prostitutes, they had all been called and given a motel room address, they had all been promised a thousand dollars if they appeared at a particular time on a particular day. There they would find a woman gagged and tied to the bed. She would have a pillowcase over her face. It was her wish that they fuck her, all three of them one after the other, first in the regular way and then in the ass. She wanted to be slapped around a bit, she wanted them to call her a whore and a bitch, other such things, and once they were done they should leave her exactly where they found her. The money would be in the bedside table drawer. These guys were rent-boys. These guys had seen and done worse every day for most of their adult lives. This was New York. They did what they were asked to do, they took their money, and then they left. No questions asked, no answers required. Whoever had staged this ‘party’ must then have come in and administered the lethal dose of cocaine. There was nothing to suggest that the victim had not administered it herself, after all she had one hand free and could quite easily have scooped a handful out of the clip-top baggie of coke that was right there on the pillow beside her. In fact, there was evidence of cocaine on her hand, under her nails, around her mouth and nostrils. It could have been done. It really could have gone down that way.

Well, however it might have gone down it was enough to invalidate the affidavit and testimony she had given. As far as the Grand Jury was concerned she was a cocaine user who’d hired three male hookers to fuck her in the ass in a motel near Calvary Cemetery. Visceglia was pissed beyond measure. His rage registered somewhere on the Richter Scale. He went out and got drunk. Ray Hartmann – against his better judgement, against the tearful promises he’d made to his wife and daughter – went out too. It was in the early hours of Thursday morning in the first week of December when he rolled in through the front door of his Stuyvesant Town walk-up, as drunk as a man could be while still conscious, and collapsed in a heap on the kitchen floor. Thankfully he collapsed onto his side, and not his back, because sometime before his eleven-year-old daughter found him he puked. And when she did find him he was still there, his head resting in a pool of dried vomit on the kitchen linoleum, and she said nothing, did not try to wake him, merely walked back to her mother’s room and woke her.

Carol Hill Hartmann, incensed into silence, took a bowl of freezing water and tipped it over her husband’s sleeping form. He barely stirred. Finally she woke him by kicking the soles of his shoes, and when he slurred into semi-consciousness, when he opened one sick-caked eye and looked up at her, he mumbled Leave me the fuck alone, will ya?

Jessica started crying. She didn’t know why, she just did, and though they did not leave the house that day, though they packed nothing for a trip upstate to Carol’s mother’s place, they agreed that they would not talk to Ray Hartmann for four days straight. They kept to their word, and despite his begging, his pleading, despite bringing flowers and take-out, despite his promises to stay clean and sober for the rest of eternity, mother and daughter held out.

On the following Monday morning Ray Hartmann found a note on the kitchen counter. Carol had already taken Jessica to school and he was alone in the house. The message was very simple. Carol had written it but it had been countersigned by Jessica.

Ray. We both love you. You are a good husband and a good father. We don’t want to be without you. If you get drunk again we will leave you behind. We have lives to get on with, and the man we know and love can come with us or he can get drunk and crazy all by himself. You decide. Carol. Jessica. xxx

When he returned from work that evening both of them were speaking to him. They asked about his day. They chatted between themselves and included him in their conversations as if nothing had happened. The note they had written was in Ray Hartmann’s wallet, and he made a practice of looking at it every day and reminding himself of what was important in his life. He held it together, he really held it together until Christmas came around and his professional world collapsed once more.

Christmas was tough for Ray Hartmann, always had been, always would be. Christmas was a time for family, and though he had somehow navigated the potential disaster of losing the family he had created, he nevertheless took it hard when December came around. Once upon a time he’d had a father and mother of his own, a younger brother whom he’d loved and adored as much as Danny had loved and adored him. There were four of them, and now there was one. A week couldn’t go by without him thinking of Danny at least once. Wide-eyed and mischievous, the pair of them haunting the streets, playing tricks, filling the house with the sound of their laughter and catcalls. Danny would always and forever be a kid in Ray’s mind, and that Christmas, the Christmas it all came apart at the seams, it was a kid that started the trouble.

Ray was still living on a promise. He still had the note his wife and daughter had given him, a note he had covered with scotch-tape to prevent it falling apart. But there was something about kids, something that made everything different in the most different kind of way. Many times before Jess had been born he’d spoken to people who were parents. Do anything for my kids, they’d say. Kids are the most important thing in my life. Anything happened to my kids, well… And he’d listened, a degree of interest perhaps, but always objective and somehow separate. When Jess came he knew exactly what they were talking about. Bullet came, well you’d get right in there, no questions asked. You’d kill for your kids, die for them, breathe for them if needs be, and there was no way to share that kind of sentiment with anyone who wasn’t a parent.

The photographs came in on Monday 23 December. Ray was on leave for Christmas but Visceglia called him in. Kid was a bystander, seven years old, walking down Schermerhorn Street with his dad. Kid was carrying a Deluxe Power Rangers Playset. Early present paid for by grandma. Dad said he could have it because he’d helped his mom clean up after grandma had gone home. Dad survived with only a single gunshot to the right thigh to show for his trip to the store. Kid took two in the chest and they broke him like a rag doll. Gang war. Family feud about some smalltime gambling operation that couldn’t have turned over more than five or ten grand a week. Gunmen missed their mark and hit the bystanders. No witnesses who had anything helpful to offer. Case was closed before it was even opened.

Ray Hartmann went home from the crime scene with a broken heart. Felt like it could have been him and Jess. Could’ve been his own mom and Danny. One of those times he started asking himself whether what they were doing was actually making any fucking difference at all. Sure it did, but at times like that all he saw was the kid’s body, the anguished and broken-down father, the resigned State prosecutors as they told him there was nothing they could do to help on this one. He didn’t drink that day. Didn’t drink the next or the one after that. Christmas Eve he had a can of beer at home, and even Carol didn’t say a word. Christmas Day itself was good, a day for the family and nothing else, and as Jess opened her gifts she told both her mom and her dad that she loved them more than anyone else in the world, and somehow it seemed like he would come through and out the other side, the kind of man he wanted to be.

Morning of the twenty-eighth he and Carol had a fight. It was nothing really, a stupid thing. She asked him to hoover the front room. He said he’d do it later. She asked him again after half an hour and he snapped back I said I’d do it later! to which she replied It is later, Ray… all I’m asking for is ten minutes’ help keeping this goddamned place clean! Ray got annoyed, there were a few more words, and then he left the house. Just put on his shoes and his jacket and left the house. Later, thinking back, he would wonder if his temper hadn’t already been frayed. That morning he’d received an e-mail from Visceglia asking if he could come in for a few hours the following day. He hadn’t replied, hadn’t wanted to reply, but knew that he would before the day was out. He had no choice. It was one of those kinds of jobs. It was a vocation, an undertaking, it wasn’t just a salary. Maybe that was what it was. Or maybe it was because he was still cut up about the little kid, a kid whose name he couldn’t get out of his mind, and how he’d lain there two nights after Christmas and all he’d been able to think about was the kid’s parents, about how this was a Christmas they would never forget. The dad had taken the Power Rangers Playset in the ambulance with him. Couldn’t take his son home, so he took the boy’s present from grandma. Wrapping paper had blood on it, paper was torn so you could see what was inside, and there was a narrow spray of blood right across it. Ray had wondered what the father would do with it. How could you keep something like that? What would the boy’s mother feel when she saw it? What would Ray say to her if she came and asked what he was going to do about the people who had killed her child?

Hindsight, the cruellest and most astute advisor of all, would be a rear-view mirror into which Ray Hartmann looked many times in the subsequent months. He’d stayed away from the house to cool down. This was a rare time, a number of consecutive days when they could be together as a family, and here he was acting like a spoiled child just because Carol had asked him to hoover. He decided to stop for a single beer at a bar three blocks from home. He lost track of time, he talked with the barman, he caught the tail-end of a game on the tube. He even played a couple of games of pool with a guy called Larry, and Larry bought him a beer, and then another, and it would have been nothing short of rude to decline the guy’s generosity, and hell it was Christmas, and what was the point of Christmas if you couldn’t have a good time?

Ray Hartmann stumbled through the front door of his house and crawled along the hallway a little after one a.m. Carol had waited up for him. So had Jessica. They were both dressed. It was then that he started hollering; it was then that he raised his fist and put it through the kitchen cupboard door. And when Carol pushed past him and he fell to the floor, when both his wife and his daughter started screaming at him, telling him to leave the house and never come back, it was all he could do to raise his bruised and bloodied hand in an effort to silence them. But he heard what they said, and he did leave, and he walked the seven blocks to the ER and got his hand cleaned and bandaged. That night was the end of one thing and the beginning of something else. He took the apartment in Little Italy, Carol and Jess stayed in Stuyvesant Town. That night marked the point at which Ray Hartmann had stopped drinking for life. He didn’t go to AA, he didn’t even do the first of the Minnesota Twelve Steps, he just decided, and it was perhaps the most certain and solid decision of his life. He’d held to that unrelentingly, and on the evening of Thursday 28 August, separated from his wife and daughter for eight months to the day, Ray Hartmann had been sober for every single one of those days, every single hour, every single minute. He had convinced himself there was a way to get his family back, and that way would be paved with sobriety, hard work, honesty and commitment.

That frame of mind had served him well at work, for work was where he’d buried himself, and his office, narrow and cramped though it was, each wall covered with a pinboard displaying photographs and maps and crime scene details, was where he would ordinarily be found, often late into the night, sometimes in the early hours of the morning.

Morning of Friday 29 August he took a call right there in that same office, at the very same desk.

‘Ray?’

‘Carol?’ In his voice was a tone of surprise, beneath that a sense of concern that something bad might have happened to prompt her call.

‘How you doing?’ she asked.

‘I’m okay, Carol, I’m okay. How’s Jess?’

‘She’s fine, Ray, just fine. She misses you, and that’s why I’m calling you.’

Ray was silent. He’d learned to speak when he was asked, and the rest of the time keep his asshole mouth shut.

‘Saturday, a week on Saturday, September sixth, you can come meet us in Tompkins Square Park at midday. We’re gonna have some lunch together and you can see Jess, okay?’

Ray Hartmann was struck dumb for a second.

‘Ray? You there?’

‘Yes, sure… sure I’m here. That’s great. Thanks. Thanks, Carol.’

‘You’re coming because of Jess, not because of me. I need more time. I’ve been grateful for the time I’ve had, and I’ve thought about a lot of things. If you and I are gonna make it then we have a number of things to work out. Right now all we’re doing is making a little time for Jess, you understand?’

‘Yes, sure I understand.’

‘So you be there, midday a week on Saturday, and if things go fine then maybe you and I will start talking about what we’re gonna do.’

‘Right, of course, of course.’

‘So we’ll see you then, okay?’

‘Okay, Carol… I’ll be there.’

And then she hung up, and Ray Hartmann sat there with the receiver burring in his ear, his eyes filled with tears, a kind of idiot grin on his face.

Still looked like that when Luca Visceglia opened the door of his office and stood there with an expression Ray Hartmann had seen all too many times.

New York District Attorney’s Office Administrative Annexe B, nine-sixteen a.m., morning of Friday 29 August, and back of Visceglia were three men in dark suits, white shirts, dark ties, and all of them wore that expression: an expression that told Hartmann that he was once again about to collide with the business end of things, though in that moment, lightheaded with the thought that his wife might talk to him again, he had no clue about what they were going to say, and where those words would take him. Whoever these people were they had found him, found him all too easily, it seemed; apparently he had been the only Ray Hartmann in the entirety of the federal employee database system in Washington, and that database had been only the second they had searched.

An hour later and all the colors would be different, the sounds and images too, and Ray Hartmann would be driving along Flatbush Avenue in a generic gray sedan towards the Brooklyn Navy Yard. There he would find a waiting helicopter that would carry him and three New York FBI field agents to the airport. A handful of hours and he would be home, home in New Orleans, and though New Orleans was the last place in the world he would ever have wanted to go, he had no choice in the matter.

The world had come looking for Ray Hartmann, it seemed, and the world had somehow found him.