The Disappearing Body

by David Grand

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Players

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Also by David Grand

  Copyright Page

  For Christine,

  Sasha, and Nathanael

  If a man is destined to drown

  he will drown in a spoonful of water.

  The Players

  Victor Ribe—Ex-con, released after fifteen years of a 25-year prison term

  Freddy Stillman—Munitions dispatcher at Fief Munitions

  Evelyn—Freddy Stillman’s ex-wife

  Harry Shortz—Narcotics Bureau Commissioner, senatorial candidate, former WWI counterintelligence operative

  Edward Kelly—Former state treasurer, Harry Shortz’s father-in-law

  Beverly Shortz—Harry Shortz’s wife, Edward Kelly’s daughter

  Ira Dubrov and Pally Collins—Shortz’s most trusted sergeants

  Maurice Klempt—Shortz’s lieutenant, murdered

  Boris Lardner—Crooked pharmacist, murdered

  Sidney Lardner—Boris’s brother

  Gloria Lime—Nightclub hostess

  Janice Gould—Resident at the Beekman Hotel for Women

  Johnny Mann and Jerzy Roth—Local crime bosses, owners of the Triple Mark nightclub; the R and the M in the REM Narcotics Syndicate

  Elias Eliopoulos—Greek socialite, owner of American Allied Pharmaceuticals; the E in the REM Narcotics Syndicate

  Lawrence Tines—Chief Investigator for the Department of Investigations

  Reynolds and Shaw—Cops investigating a possible murder

  Julius Fief—Owner of Fief Munitions

  Max Waters and Henry Capp—Leaders of the Fief Munitions Workers Union

  Paulie Sendak—Fief Munitions armory foreman, union member

  Gerald Kravitz—Lawyer for the Fief Munitions Workers Union

  Murray Crown—Owner of Crown Crackers, state witness, Mann and Roth associate

  “Bubbles” Crown—Murray’s bombshell wife

  Faith Rapaport—Rising young reporter on the Globe metro desk

  Sam Rapaport—Faith’s dead father, legendary Globe columnist

  Marty Volman—Editor of the Globe metro desk

  Celeste Martin—Heiress, socialite, and real estate developer

  Richard Martin—Celeste’s taciturn brother

  Noel Tersi—Real estate magnate, Celeste’s longtime companion

  Steven—Celeste’s cook

  Aleksandr and Nicol—Celeste’s handymen

  Byron Sands—Nicol’s son

  Dr. Joseph Gamburg—Employee of Leslie’s Auction House

  Dr. Jerome Brilovsky—Former owner of American Allied Pharmaceutical, former head of the communist Brigade

  Arthur Brilovsky—Jerome Brilovsky’s eldest son

  Sheldon (Shelly) Price—Jerome Brilovsky’s business partner and fellow traveler

  Elaine (Price) Brilovsky—Shelly Price’s daughter, Arthur Brilovsky’s wife

  Joshua Brilovsky—Elaine and Arthur’s son

  Professor Mikhail Tarkhov—Russian art historian, expert on the Soviet avant-garde

  Katrina Lowenstein—Resident of Ten Lakes

  Sylvia Lowenstein—Katrina’s mother

  Daniel Greely—Screenwriter and pulp novelist

  Claude Fielding—Official at the Department of State, former WWI counterintelligence operative

  Zelda—Harry Shortz’s secretary

  Shlomo Feldman—The heavy

  Stu Zawolsky—The hit man

  The Grizzled Men—The Grizzled Men

  Benny Rudolph—The everywhereman

  Chapter 1

  Early one frigid Thursday morning in mid-January 193–, sometime between the hours of four and five, a tired-looking prison guard holding a set of leg irons and handcuffs appeared outside Victor Ribe’s cell. The guard, a burly man whose gray wool uniform tightly hugged at his shoulders and thighs, knocked his baton on the foot of Victor’s bed and ordered him to get dressed. Victor, who didn’t undress during the winter months, rolled back his tattered blanket and put on his boots and longcoat. The guard motioned with the baton to the cell operator, and Victor stepped up to the bars, his hands at his sides, palms extended outward. The roll and clank of the door echoed through the cell block; when the violent sound quieted, the guard motioned the baton at Victor as if he were tracing the shape of infinity in the air. “Out,” he said, dropping the shackles and chains on the floor.

  With his hands in plain sight, Victor took one large step out from his cell and with a practiced hand quickly arranged the cuffs and chains around his ankles and wrists; once they were set in place, the guard bent down and fastened the locks. He then stood before Victor, close to his face, so close that Victor couldn’t look away from him.

  “Is there any one thing in there you don’t want to live without?” the guard asked quietly, almost intimately.

  “Why?” Victor asked.

  “Is there any one thing in there you wouldn’t want to live without?” the guard repeated, this time with a sense of urgency. The guard continued to trace long figure eights with the point of his baton.

  “Underneath the mattress,” Victor said reluctantly, as quietly as the guard spoke to him. “Beneath the pillow, under the mattress.”

  The guard walked into Victor’s cell and from underneath the mattress at the head of the bed, he removed an old photograph, whose paper had turned yellow and thin from touch. It was a picture taken in front of a cheap backdrop of a carousel, a picture of Victor, looking much younger and vital, and a young slender woman on his arm. They looked carefree, happy, unhindered. The guard respectfully placed the photo in the pocket of Victor’s coat, and then circled around him.

  “Walk,” the guard ordered.

  Victor Ribe, who was serving the fifteenth year of his twenty-five-year sentence, walked with the guard through the cell block, through damp rusting corridors. They walked outside, over a long narrow stretch of the yard’s stiff frozen grass, which led them to the prison’s gates, where waiting was a somber-looking sheriff’s deputy and a paddy wagon with its engine running. Victor turned his head over his shoulder. “What’s happening?” he asked.

  “Eyes front,” the guard ordered.

  The sheriff’s deputy opened the back of the paddy wagon and pulled out a crate. “Inside,” he said to Victor. Victor stepped onto the wooden crate and then inside the windowless metal casing of the wagon. The guard said something to the deputy privately and then he looked up to Victor, raised his arm, and tipped his hat. Not knowing what to make of it, Victor squeezed his jaw tight and nod
ded his head, then took a seat on a bench that was bolted to the floor. The deputy slid the crate in by Victor’s feet and then slammed the doors closed. The padlock banged shut, the compartment turned black, and then, with Victor’s chains rattling all along the way, the sheriff’s deputy drove him down bumpy roads for the better part of three hours.

  When the sun had risen above the horizon, and the spectrum of color had dissipated white, through a small opening in a metal slat separating the driver’s compartment from the back of the wagon, a thin stream of light crept down the arm of Victor’s coat. As quietly as he could, Victor shuffled to the opening in the slat, cupped his large hands around his face, and squeezed his eye into the light. He could see through the small hole well enough to realize that they were driving through Long Meadow, the town in which Victor had grown up. He could see well enough to find that the streets were more crowded than he ever remembered them, that many of the buildings he best recalled from his childhood were no longer there, that the town appeared to have grown more dense with commerce; instead of tourist shops selling local crafts and figurines as there once were, in place of the small boutiques, were outlets selling guns and ammunition. As they approached the factory in which his father worked as a machinist, the sight of all this became a little more clear to him, as instead of the company name reading “Barkley & Sons,” which used to manufacture bird figurines and bird feeders, it read “Fief Munitions.” Limestone walls, as tall as the walls that had surrounded his prison cell, had been built around the factory, and the factory, which had been only on two square blocks, had expanded by several more.

  As they reached the plant’s entrance, Victor’s long quiet morning ride was suddenly disrupted by what sounded through the thin metal walls of the paddy wagon like a battlefield of men on an offensive. The noise was converging all around him. As he tried to see where it was coming from, a large man with a shotgun slung over his shoulder backpedaled into the street. The deputy slammed on the brakes, and the next thing Victor knew he was lifting himself up off the floor and wedging his eye back into the opening in the slat. An angry mob of men carrying guns and truncheons were now crowding before them. Victor could feel the bodies bumping up against the wagon; he felt as though he could physically touch the anger in their riotous voices.

  “What’s happening?” Victor asked.

  “They’re filing into the plant,” the deputy said quietly.

  “What for?”

  “Seems they’re taking it over.” Victor could see the deputy’s thin smooth fingers nervously tapping at the steering wheel.

  “Why?”

  “There was an explosion inside one of the shops the day before yesterday. I guess they don’t like the idea of their men getting blown up.”

  “There were men killed?”

  The deputy’s fingers continued tapping, slower and more deliberately than before. “Your father,” he said as the congestion of bodies began to thin before them, “he was one of them. He and five other men.”

  A tightness took hold of Victor behind his eyes. “Is that why I’m with you?”

  “All I know is that your father’s dead and that I got a call to come get you late last night. That’s all I know.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “We’ll be there soon enough.”

  The deputy shut the latch so that the small opening through which Victor was able to see was closed. Victor was once again in the pitch black of the wagon, alone with the news that his father was dead. He hadn’t seen nor talked with his father in the fifteen years that he was imprisoned, not since the day he was sentenced for his crime.

  When the paddy wagon cleared the crowd it picked up speed. Victor felt the wagon turn left and could feel in the clattering vibration of his seat the rapid monotonous drumming of piston fire. Tired of listening to the rattle of his chains, he pulled them into his body and tried to imagine where they were driving. If he was right, they were traveling north out of town up along the woods and meadows and creeks and streams of Palisades Parkway, right into the middle of the nature preserve that gave Long Meadow its name.

  They motored straight ahead for about fifteen minutes. When the wagon stopped, when the motor had been turned off, the deputy walked around back and opened the door. As if channeled through a kaleidoscope, a vermilion-colored light broke into the darkness off an ice-encrusted billboard on the side of the road. Cardinals, it read. Cardinals in June. Staggered at half-mile intervals up and down Palisades Parkway were billboards informing City tourists of what type of bird life they could expect to find in the Long Meadow Bird Sanctuary. With one of his hands resting on his holstered gun and the other carrying two large bundles wrapped in brown paper, the deputy motioned to Victor that he should stand up. “Hands,” he said.

  Victor, whose hands were tethered by chains to his ankle bracelets, moved his arms from his sides.

  “Back to me,” the deputy said as he stepped up and in.

  “Do I know you?” Victor asked as he turned his back to the deputy.

  “We went to school together,” the deputy said as he placed the bundles on the floor. He removed a set of keys from his belt, and moving from one lock to the next, he set Victor free. “My mother worked alongside yours before . . .”

  “Right,” Victor said. “I remember now.” The image of the deputy’s face came into his mind as he stared at the wall of the wagon and he could suddenly see what he looked like when he was young.

  “Get dressed,” the deputy said. “I’ll wait outside.”

  Victor opened the packages. Inside he found the set of clothes he had worn the day he was sentenced, as well as a beat-up scarf and coat. Standing exposed to the freezing wind rushing into the back of the paddy wagon, he removed his prison clothes and quickly redressed. When he had knotted his tie and tied his shoes, he removed the photo of himself and the woman from his prison longcoat and delicately slipped it into the breast pocket of his jacket. He then stepped out from the wagon onto a heavily wooded road.

  “You’ll be going with them,” the deputy said to Victor as he pointed to a car parked across the road from where they stood. Two grizzled-looking men in heavy belted coats and fedoras, each of them with a cigarette sticking out the corner of his mouth, waved him over. They were a dark pair, unshaven, one distinguishable from the other mainly in that one looked happy and one didn’t. Victor looked to the deputy for some assurance, but he said nothing more. Without looking at Victor again, he got back into the paddy wagon and drove away.

  “Ride up here with me,” the one with the sunnier disposition said to Victor as Victor walked toward the men. Victor did as he was told. He rode up front, and together the three men drove down the road.

  “What’s happening?” Victor asked again.

  “You like to play cards?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Why?”

  The man up front pulled cards out of his pocket as he drove and held them in the palm of his hand. “High-low,” he said. Victor hesitantly grabbed a handful of cards from the top of the deck. He drew a nine of hearts. The man up front placed the cards in Victor’s hand, then drew a one-eyed jack of clubs. He held the card up for Victor to see, for the man in the back to see, and smiled. “I think we’re gonna get along just fine, you and me.” The man scooped up the cards from Victor’s hand and placed them back in his pocket.

  “You’re not the ones I’m talking to, are you?” Victor said.

  The two grizzled men didn’t say anything more. They drove down the wooded parkway in silence until Victor could see the broad-shoulder fenders of a black Ford sedan gleaming on the roadside. “Shut your eyes and keep still,” the man in the back said to Victor.

  “Why?”

  “Do as I said.”

  Victor shut his eyes. He felt the man in the backseat shroud a smooth piece of fabric over his forehead and nose, and then it tightened. The man then placed a musty-smelling burlap sack over his head. As the sack touched Victor’s shoulders, the car pulled over
and came to a stop.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” the man in the back said.

  The front door opened and closed. The back door opened and stayed open, so the frigid air blew up into the sack, onto Victor’s neck. He could hear footsteps approaching on loose dirt, the car wobbled, the door slammed shut, and then a calm, measured voice, damp and guttural and unhealthy-sounding, spoke to him from the backseat.

  “You have any idea what you’re doing here, Mr. Ribe?”

  “No, I don’t,” he said, smelling his own dank breath as it hovered between him and the scratchy burlap of the sack.

  “Did anyone tell you what happened to your father?”

  “The sheriff. He told me.”

  “A real shame that is,” the man said. “My condolences.”

  “What’s this all about?”

  The man in the backseat struck a match. Victor could hear the match spark. Then the smell of sulfur and burning tobacco. “Your father and I, we had a deal. I’m making good on my end of it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will, in good time; but for now, I’ve got a proposition for you.”

  “Who are you?”

  The man breathed a difficult breath that sounded like the thin, leafless branches of the birch trees whipping about in the cold wind outside.

  “I’m listening,” Victor said.

  “If you agree to help me, when we’re through with this, you’ll walk down the road and attend your father’s funeral as a free man.”

  “How’s that work?”

  “It just does.”

  Victor suddenly remembered which road he was on. He remembered the grove of cherry blossoms that bloomed in the springtime. He remembered walking barefoot with his childhood sweetheart, along one of the many brooks that fed the river. He remembered the plot by the field in which his mother was buried after she was taken by the Spanish flu. He could see in his mind the priest waiting for him at the foot of his father’s grave. Considering that all his father’s men were inside the plant, he thought that unless he walked down the road, the priest would more than likely be standing there alone. “What would I have to do?”

  “Help me finish what your father started. Help me take care of the men who murdered Boris Lardner.”