Free A Quiet Vendetta by R.J. Ellory Page A

than two miles from where Stanley Schaeffer sat an elderly man, perhaps sixty-five or seventy, watched a stream of generic gray sedans invade a street not far from Gravier.
    Tucking his hands in his overcoat pockets he turned and walked away. He whistled as he went, a tune called ‘Chloe’, a classic by Kahn and Morret that was popularized by Spike Jones in the ’50s, a song that told of a lonely girl searching for her lost love.
    The old man had wanted to tell them more, had wanted to tell them everything, but as so many of his friends in the old country used to say, ‘A temptation resisted is the true measure of character.’ There was a time and a place for everything. The place was New Orleans, and the time would be tomorrow evening when Ray Hartmann came home.

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