The Disappearing Body

by David Grand

  “You realize, however, if you go on strike it’s going to make it almost impossible for me to influence Tines to give Waters and Capp a fair shot.”

  “No offense, Mr. Commissioner, but you and I both know that nothin’ you say to Tines is gonna get him to clear those two. The only thing we’re hoping for is to get through to you so you can help us put up what at least looks like a reasonable fight.”

  “And what do Waters and Capp say about all this?”

  “I’m sure they’re scared, but they won’t keep the men back.”

  “And the men won’t hold off for the sake of Waters and Capp?”

  Gerald Kravitz curled his lips down and shook his head.

  “You mean to say they’ll just sacrifice them?”

  “Like helpless little lambs.”

  “Then why all the hullabaloo this morning?”

  “War cries. We use what we’ve got.”

  Harry leaned his large heft back into his seat and shrugged his shoulders. “I’ll do whatever I can,” he said without much enthusiasm.

  “That’s all we ask, Mr. Commissioner. Thank you for seeing me.”

  Gerald Kravitz closed his briefcase and collected his coat and hat. “Good day,” he said to Harry and shook his hand.

  When Gerald Kravitz stepped out of Harry’s office, Harry reached back over to the envelope he had set aside and opened it.

  If you don’t want the public to know about Sylvia and Katrina Lowenstein, drop out of the Senate race by Saturday afternoon. If you aren’t careful, more than just your career will be at stake.

  Along with the note was a carbon of a deed to a piece of property transferred to Harry’s name a few months earlier, a ring, and a photograph of an old country house set against an empty field on one side and an apple orchard on the other. Harry sat there, blisteringly numb, studying the photo.

  “Zelda!” Harry growled loudly at the door, the sound of his own voice unsettling him. He could hear Zelda jump.

  “What is it?” she asked when she opened the door.

  “Who sent this?” Harry said holding up the envelope.

  “That? It came by messenger while you were over in Long Meadow.”

  “Who sent it?”

  “Hold on a second.” Zelda quickly walked to her desk and returned.

  “Who?”

  “It says here . . . Lowenstein. Katrina Lowenstein.”

  Harry was speechless.

  “There was no return address,” Zelda said after a moment. “Just the name.”

  “All right,” Harry said, his tone quieting.

  “Everything okay, Mr. Commissioner?” Zelda’s face was blanched.

  “Yeah, everything’s peachy,” Harry said pensively. “Just peachy.”

  “You startled me,” Zelda said in a wounded voice as she pulled the door closed.

  Harry sat there in a stupor for a while, unable to figure out how it all added up. He tried to put it all together for a few minutes, and then, in a rage, gathered the papers with the photograph and walked over to the closet in which Beverly had hung his coat. Inside the closet, behind the clothes, was a small safe. Harry dialed the combination and opened the door, placed the package inside, and shut it away. He removed his coat from the hanger, put it on, and walked back to his desk and picked up the ring. It was gold, nesting a large amethyst. He held the amethyst up to the light, and while looking at it he simultaneously felt a sense of longing and anger. He charged out of his office and told Zelda that he would be gone for the better part of the afternoon.

  Chapter 6

  Celeste Martin, who would be hosting the auction of Soviet art at her country estate on Saturday, was currently upstairs in the roomy attic of 319 West Eighty-third Street, rummaging through a trunk in search of a box of old photographs. Other than being well known as an aging society matron who had slummed through the better part of the last decade with the heavy-drinking Oak Street set, Celeste Martin was best known as the real estate baroness of Gravesend Avenue. Celebrated by some, reviled by others, awe-inspiring to all, Celeste had become a City icon when, after the war, she cavalierly demolished three blocks of historic homes—from the corner of Eighty-third and Langore Square to Eighty-third and Gravesend Avenue—bequeathed to her in her father’s will. Only two homes—319 and 322—were spared. 319 was her mother’s place of birth, and 322 her father’s place of death, as well as the home in which Celeste grew up, and the house in which she now resided with her brother, Richard, and her elderly companion, the successful property developer Noel Tersi.

  With Noel Tersi’s guidance, Celeste consulted the visionary architect Raymond Montgomery to create in the grand neo-Gothic style a row of idiosyncratic buildings, twenty-three stories high, that would run to the gates of her mother’s and father’s homes and be crowned with gargoyles cast in the image of Celeste’s Croatian handyman, Aleksandr. The son of a master builder, and a master builder by training himself, Aleksandr was, by all accounts, the inspiration for this awesome undertaking. According to the papers, early one Sunday morning, on her way home from an exhausting night on the town, Celeste Martin was overwhelmed by a vision. She saw from the back of her car what she thought was the face of an Orthodox Christian icon framed within the stained-glass doorway of the Langore Square Orthodox Church. When she realized that the sunken eyes, sagging jaw, gaunt cheeks, and thin pert lips of this beatifically sorrowful face belonged to her handyman, and that the child in his arms wasn’t baby Jesus, but Aleksandr’s young daughter, she felt the overwhelming presence of God. As Aleksandr stood there forlornly in his humble and hapless pose, looking so lost and fragile as he did, he appeared to Celeste as an immigrant-saint whose image, she believed, should be preserved on a landmark that would stand the test of time.

  On a whim of the highest order, Celeste commanded her driver to halt, then jumped from the car onto the street and rushed Aleksandr away from his wife and children and urged him to immediately begin the work of re-creating himself in the form of a sculpture. She did this with such great passion she had turned crimson. “This, for the sake of your own posterity,” she argued breathlessly. “And for all like you to come. And because I will pay you handsomely. Handsomely.”

  The molds for what would eventually become very somber-looking grotesques were cast by Aleksandr’s father in Split, Croatia, in the shadow of the two-thousand-year-old palace of the Roman emperor Diocletian. They arrived in hundreds of crates insulated with hay and were stored away inside a South End warehouse until the finishing touches were being put on Celeste’s buildings. Raymond Montgomery looked on with Celeste as the figures were anchored onto the eaves of the roofs, and when the work was finally completed, Aleksandrs in the hundreds stood fixed over all of West Eighty-third Street, looking down with arms outstretched as if each and every one of him were contemplating suicide.

  When Celeste found the box of photographs she had been looking for, she shut the trunk and carefully made her way out of the attic and down the stairs, then crossed the street to her home. Celeste’s townhouse was a five-story brownstone whose bottom-floor windows were draped with ivory-colored curtains that hadn’t been opened in twenty years, not since the day Celeste’s father, Benjamin Martin, passed in his sleep on the divan opposite his easel, where he had been painting his last bouquet of lilacs. This darkened room had been his parlor, the room to which Celeste, as a young girl, had run with large bundles of flowers picked from the bushes in the backyard each spring. She would arrange the bouquets in immense urns her father had had shipped from Egyptian tombs. In memory of her late father, the parlor was kept as a shrine, exactly as it was the day Benjamin Martin died. The half-painted bouquet of flowers on its easel, the pigments dried on their palette, the smock he had worn draped at the foot of the divan.

  When Celeste closed the front door, she quietly walked around a mahogany stairwell into the dining room, where hanging above the dining room’s mantel was a portrait of Benjamin and Rosemary Martin. Hovering before their venerable
eyes were ribbons of cigar smoke that funneled into the fixtures of the chandelier; they wrapped around the individual crystals on their way up toward the yellowed ceiling. “Don’t let me disturb you,” Celeste said to Noel Tersi, Dr. Joseph Gamburg, and her brother, Richard, who were sitting at the table discussing the final arrangements for Saturday’s event. She placed the box before Richard and whispered in his ear, “I found it, darling. But I’m afraid it’s locked. I’ll try to find the key.” Richard nodded at his sister, then returned his attention to Noel, who, sitting opposite him, was pointing his cigar at Dr. Gamburg, a curator for Leslie’s Auction House. Dr. Gamburg, a middle-aged man, modestly dressed, with a full head of black hair and hardly a line on his face, stared intently into the deep crevices that made up Noel Tersi’s mouth.

  Richard Martin watched Noel and the doctor engage in conversation, but had his mind elsewhere. He was the eldest of this group at the age of seventy-three, was in ailing health, and had little interest in art or the society that formed the art world. In his day, he had run from the family business to escape the expectations cast upon him by his father. A shy but adventurous man, he traveled to distant countries with the ambition to write books about all things he found exotic. But, in the end, he never wrote one. Instead, he spent many years living as a vagabond until his father died, at which time he returned to his sister to help settle the estate. Today, as on many days in the decades since his return, he sat in his chair without commenting on Noel Tersi’s business matters.

  “What did Director Tines want exactly?” Dr. Gamburg nearly yelled as he moved his chair closer to Noel Tersi.

  “What?”

  “What did Director Tines want?!!!”

  Noel Tersi was hard of hearing, more so than he liked to admit. He spoke very loudly in a clipped, sometimes incoherent syntax that at the moment left a very consternated look on Dr. Gamburg’s face. “He has some concerns.”

  “Concerns?!”

  “About the nature of the show. Concerns about the show.”

  “Why does he feel it’s his place to . . . !!!”

  “He doesn’t like Tarkhov. He has a past.”

  “A past?! We all have . . .”

  “It’s nothing but numbskullery. He’s a young curmudgeon is what Tines is. A gen-U-ine ass on a crusade.”

  “Noel, what exactly did he want?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I said, what did he want us to do for him?!”

  “Details. Records. Nonsense.”

  “Wha . . . ?!” Dr. Gamburg shook his head as though he were confused. He looked tired from talking so loud.

  “Records. He’ll want records of what’s sold. To whom and so on.”

  “That’s unlawful.”

  “Hmm?”

  “That’s unlawful!”

  “It was a request,” Noel said quietly, his eyes widening as he took a puff of his cigar. “He made a polite request.”

  “What did you tell him?!”

  “Before or after he threatened to send some men out to the estate?”

  “So that’s how it is.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I said, so that’s how it is!!!”

  “Yeah,” Noel said as he ashed his cigar and planted it in the corner of his mouth.

  “Noel, I don’t need to tell you that I’ve gone out of my way to get very important people interested in this show! There are very important moneyed people interested in attending Saturday’s auction, and they’re not going to come if they think a gaggle of G-men are snooping into their business!”

  “And you’ve done a smashing damn good job of it too.”

  “Did you hear me?!”

  “Hmm?”

  “The point is, I don’t think these people . . . !” Dr. Gamburg took a breath. “I don’t think these . . .” Dr. Gamburg looked over to Richard for some help. Richard had his eyes shut. He had fallen asleep in his chair.

  “Listen,” Noel Tersi said severely. “Don’t you concern yourself. Let’s just pretend I didn’t say anything at all if it makes you feel any better.”

  “Surely you understand that I have to think of the reputation of Leslie’s and its clients in all of this! I can’t . . . I can’t just pretend that . . . We can’t afford a scandal of this nature!!!”

  “Are you so sure?” Noel said slyly, now leaning in toward Dr. Gamburg.

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I said, WHAT ARE YOU GETTING AT?!!!”

  “Don’t you see how this might work to our advantage?”

  “No!” Dr. Gamburg said with a little bit of “yes” starting to form on his face.

  Noel Tersi smiled, his yellow teeth glistening in the dim light of the room. “The more to-do made over this? The more to-do . . .” Noel made circles with one of his fingers.

  Dr. Gamburg sat back in his chair and studied Noel’s eyes. They were full of delight and mischief. “Noel?!” he said, leaning back over the table, “Out of curiosity . . .”

  “Hmm?”

  “Out of curiosity! Do you know who it was that happened to tip off Tines about the show?!!!”

  Noel continued smiling.

  “So that’s how it is.”

  “Hmm?”

  Dr. Gamburg didn’t repeat himself this time. He just started mulling it all over in his head.

  “Look,” Noel said in a way suggesting he wasn’t sure if he’d gotten through to Dr. Gamburg, “you let me worry about who’s going to be upset about what, all right? You just be a good kid and run on up to the estate and keep this bit of gossip to yourself if you think that’s what’s best. But if you ask this old dog, I’d be . . .” Noel Tersi started manically flapping his fingers together as if his hand were the head of a rabid puppet.

  “You sly old bug,” Dr. Gamburg said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I said, I’ll keep it under the rug for the time being, if that’s all right with you!”

  “Suit yourself.” Noel shrugged his shoulders and took another puff on his cigar. “But can’t expect something like this to stay hush-hush.”

  “I suppose not!”

  “That’s a good kid.”

  Dr. Gamburg laughed a light knowing laugh. “I think I’ll run up to the estate to get everything ready for the professor and leave you to . . . !” Dr. Gamburg started flapping his fingers together as Noel had done.

  “That’s the right idea.”

  “Yeah,” Dr. Gamburg said, nodding. “All right.”

  Just as Dr. Gamburg came to this, Celeste entered the dining room and gently shook Richard awake. “I’m back with it, Richard,” she said. She turned to Noel. “Isn’t that wonderful, Noel?!!”

  “Yes, darling, it is,” Noel said as he stood up. “Dr. Gamburg, why don’t I show you on your way.”

  “Yes, I’m anxious to get a start! It was a pleasure seeing you again, Celeste! Richard!”

  “No need to yell at us, dear,” Celeste said cordially.

  “I’m sorry, I just . . .” Dr. Gamburg said, flustered. “I just . . .”

  “We’ll see you on Saturday,” Celeste said in a whisper. “I do look forward to it. Everyone I’ve talked with is. Did you know the Department of Investigations has taken an interest?” Celeste asked innocently.

  “Very good to hear it,” Dr. Gamburg said, shaking his head in wonder.

  “It’s all very exciting, isn’t it?”

  Dr. Gamburg turned the shake of his head into a nod and waved an awkward goodbye as he followed Noel into the hall.

  “This is what took me so long,” Celeste said to Richard when the noise from the men’s heavy footsteps ceased. She held up the key to the box. “I couldn’t for the life of me remember where I had put it. Finally, I realized it was hanging on a hook in the upstairs hallway. It must have been there since you returned . . . gathering dust.”

  Richard smiled at Celeste as she opened the lock. With the lock undone, she gently pulled open the lid and remo
ved a package of photographs, the first of which was a picture of Celeste and Richard standing on a hillock in the park the year Richard returned home. Behind them were passersby, clearly defined figures wearing dark suits and hats.

  Chapter 7

  Arthur Brilovsky just happened to be walking through the park the day Celeste and Richard met the photographer for their picture. He was in a great rush and never even saw the pair when he passed them on the little hill, not even for a moment. Something catastrophic had just occurred and his blood was rushing through him so hard the veins in his temples were visibly pulsating. He was formulating words there, a long speech for his father, full of explanations, a course of action, thoughts that were making it hard for him to think clearly. But there was absolutely no indication of Arthur’s crisis depicted in the photograph. Captured as he was, he looked like an average man of average height and build; his face was slightly out of focus, just enough so one could easily misconstrue his torment for euphoria—especially since he had raised his arms into the air, bathing them with sunlight. Casting such a pose, he seemed to be making an appeal for mercy to the cloudless sky and to the newly burgeoned magnolia blossoms that swagged into the upper right-hand corner of the camera’s frame. It was a portrait of a spiritual awakening, one at which Celeste and Richard marveled when they first saw the image.

  Arthur Brilovsky was twenty-two years old in this photo, a doctor in training, and the son of Dr. Jerome Brilovsky, a respected physician, entrepreneur, and political radical. The Brilovskys were well-educated Russian Jewish émigrés who, while living in St. Petersburg, had been vocal against the czar and his army, and had supported the eradication of his regime. In return for such outspoken beliefs, Arthur’s father survived two assassination attempts and painfully grieved the undignified and cowardly murder of his brother, Lev, who was shot between the eyes while eating a piece of bread with honey at his dining-room table. Dr. Jerome Brilovsky vowed, in return for this assault, to destroy the aristocracy of his former country. He fled to America, to the City, where he opened a medical practice on Elsworth Street and made a success of American Allied, a pharmaceutical company located on the Southside Docks. Here the Brilovskys amassed a considerable fortune, and with it began funding the most formidable opposition against the czar, the notorious Brigade, which was the largest American organization to contribute funds toward revolutionary activities.