The Disappearing Body

by David Grand

  A week before Celeste and Richard’s photographer captured Arthur striding through the park, a young, elegant woman of about nineteen entered Dr. Brilovsky’s office and was greeted by Arthur at the front desk. The young woman wore a yellow silk dress that hugged at her hips and shoulders. Her face was powdered so that her brown eyes glistened in the late-afternoon light shining through the office window. She had a severe haircut that sharply hooked under her jaw and fanned out in front of her face when she leaned over the desk to shake hands with Arthur. Arthur, who was reading a speech his father was to deliver to members of the Brigade that evening, placed the paper down, stood up, and shook the woman’s hand. She shook firmly, didn’t smile; she looked around the office and listened at the open doors of the examination rooms. There was no one in the office at the time. The nurse had already gone home. Arthur’s brothers had gone to join his father.

  “I was told that you perform abortions,” the woman said bluntly. Her voice was deep and unemotional, but so determined Arthur imagined her practicing this statement in front of a mirror at home.

  “I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed,” Arthur said to her plainly.

  “Shelly Price says abortions are performed here,” the woman persisted.

  “Shelly Price told you this. . . . How is it that you know him?”

  “He’s my father. I’m his daughter, Elaine.”

  Arthur considered her for a moment, looking at her more closely, at the brunette wisps of hair that curled onto her cheek. They stuck to the dampened powder on her face.

  “I see,” he said.

  It was true that Arthur’s father did occasionally perform abortions, with which Arthur had assisted him on more than several occasions, and Arthur, in fact, had performed a number on his own. As for Shelly Price, he was a new business associate of his father’s, whom Arthur had met only a few times over lunch but whom he liked very much.

  “Your father told you to come here?”

  “He insisted that I come here.”

  Arthur allowed this answer the silence it deserved. And in the interim of this silence the strength Arthur felt in Elaine Price’s handshake appeared to drain from her body and her voice. She and the yellow dress slowly wilted into the hard chair before the desk. “He insisted that I come,” she repeated softly. She drew her knees together and tightened her lips, clutched hard at a black beaded bag she was carrying. She looked at Arthur, then looked out the window. “I would like you to perform the procedure on me as soon as you can fit me in, please,” she said, looking back at him.

  Arthur didn’t ask any questions. He simply looked into her intense brown eyes and showed her he was capable of attending to her needs. He sat down, reached across the scattered surface of the desk, pushed aside his father’s speech, and began to flip through the appointment book. He wrote her name and told her to come back the following week first thing in the morning.

  That evening inside the American Allied warehouse, Dr. Jerome Brilovsky, a stout and formidable man with a pile of red kinked hair addressed Shelly Price and over a hundred members of the Brigade with news that American Allied Pharmaceutical had profited well beyond expectation and would be the largest American contributor to Russia’s provisional government. Because of this auspicious moment, he was proud to announce that Kerensky had requested a meeting with him and that he would be traveling to Russia at the end of the month to discuss what more the Brigade could do to quicken the pace of the revolution and ease the famine that faced the people of Russia.

  When he was through with his speech, when everyone was properly won over by the news, everyone ate. Dr. Brilovsky sat at the head of the table that night. On his right was Shelly Price, on his left, Arthur, who, to Arthur’s great surprise, was sitting opposite Elaine. Elaine, who hadn’t realized Arthur was the son of Dr. Jerome Brilovsky, couldn’t look across the table; nor could she look at her father, who was engaged in conversation with the doctor. Arthur did his best to ignore Elaine and kept his mind focused on his father’s conversation. Together, Dr. Brilovsky and Shelly Price privately discussed the ongoing needs of the local unions and the Southside Docks dockworker strike planned for the following week and moved on to talk of what they should present to Kerensky in Petrograd. Shelly Price, one of the largest partners in American Allied next to Dr. Brilovsky, suggested that they offer to continue their financial support, but that they start approaching American industrialists who wanted to open new markets overseas.

  Arthur listened to their conversation, listened for mention that Shelly Price had sent his daughter into the clinic that afternoon. However, there was none. The only indication that Mr. Price was aware of his daughter’s presence at all was when he cast his eyes on her in the middle of a sentence or in the middle of a drink and his brow furrowed, his thoughts drifted, and his overall expression became tinged with a certain flare of the nose that made him look like he was smelling something unpleasant.

  Only when a number of members of the Southside Docks local arrived at the head of the table to discuss some concerns with Shelly and Jerome about the strike did Arthur approach Elaine and ask if she would like to go outside with him for some fresh air. She agreed with a withdrawn nod of the head and walked in front of Arthur up the aisle, through the smoke and clamoring voices. When they exited the meeting hall and shut the door behind them, the voices quieted, and they could hear a small electrical buzz from the nearby manufacturing plants and the brays of horses coming from the milk wagon stables. A greenish tint cast from a half-moon coated the debris of an ironworks across the way. An occasional breeze whistled through the twirling canals of metal scraps and carried the scent of manure and oil. A burly man dressed in overalls pushing a wheelbarrel full of something dark and viscous passed before them.

  Arthur took his jacket off and laid it on the front steps of the warehouse. He sat down first and invited Elaine to sit beside him. Elaine, a little apprehensive at first, crouched down next to him, so that Arthur could smell her sweat and the cigar smoke that mingled with the perfume in her hair. Her shoulder pressed against his a little, which gave Arthur a fluttering sensation in his groin. At that moment, he had nearly forgotten their awkward meeting earlier that afternoon, that she was pregnant and distraught. There was a crude and brazen part of him that felt like taking her hand and resting her palm in his lap. That is, until her eyes turned on him.

  “He isn’t a bad man,” Elaine tried to explain.

  “No,” Arthur said, knowing she was speaking of her father.

  “What I did was wrong, very wrong,” she said. Elaine was more casual now, talking as though she were talking to God more than to Arthur. “He isn’t even a man of such restrictive scruples,” she continued. “He’s simply practical. He doesn’t want me to be alone with the child, and he couldn’t live knowing I’d be with the man who got me pregnant.”

  “Are you in love with him?” Arthur asked innocently. “With the man?”

  “He’s deeply in love with me.”

  “Are you in love with him?” Arthur repeated.

  “He’s a dear man. He’s gentle and sweet, but . . . a little helpless. And . . . I don’t really know. But I do know that Father’s right.” She nodded her head quickly. “He is right.”

  “Yes, I’m sure he is.”

  Arthur and Elaine sat on the stoop for some time. When Elaine finally allowed herself to cry, without looking at him, she took Arthur’s open hand and pulled it onto the soft flesh of her belly, and wept.

  The morning Elaine Price was to have her abortion, the two grizzled men—the very ones who collected Victor Ribe off the side of the road in Long Meadow at the start of this story—sat at a picnic table in the park. They had just bought from a young buck-toothed boy with a lame leg the very first deck of playing cards they would use for an ongoing game of gin. On this day in the park, the score had yet to move beyond zero to zero—there was no winner or loser, no black book filled with numbers. Both men were feeling very optimistic. On this day, t
hey sat under two maple trees whose leafless limbs crossed perfectly over a wading pool for birds. Yellow warblers migrating north for the summer bathed and warbled and plucked at seedlings and worms under uncut grass sprouting from the cracks of the pool’s cement. The birds darted after galloping dogs fleeting across a great open lawn. Flying just inches from the undulating canine spines, the birds brought smiles to the unshaven faces of the two grizzled men. They had just returned from a job well done. Posing as members of the Southside Docks local, they carried a handful of scabs across a picket line, and, in the process, knocked together a few heads, got a couple of good knocks back, and incited a small riot. One of the recruited scabs was sent to the hospital with a broken leg, another was knocked into a coma, a third lost three teeth, and a fourth, an innocent striker trying to save his scab cousin, was killed from stab wounds. In their estimation, it was a morning well spent. The two grizzled men were well paid. Even though it was morning, and a little too early for both of them, the men broke into a local speakeasy, filled two pints of beer, took a bagful of peanuts, and went to the park.

  It was at about the same time that the two grizzled men settled down at the picnic table that Dr. Brilovsky arrived at the office. Arthur was already there, bustling about, preparing the operating room, while a dark-haired Russian woman dressed in a short black dress and clutching a silver cross in her hand sat on a hard chair in the waiting room, bouncing her foot nervously against the sharp edge of her high-heeled shoe. As Arthur took in the sight of this woman’s tightened face, the phone rang, and the woman began bouncing her foot even harder, so hard that her heel cracked right off the bottom of her shoe. His father, who was paying no attention to any of this, answered the phone. “Allo. . . . Yes, it’s me. . . . Sheldon. . . . Sheldon. . . . Don’t worry, I’ll be right there.” Jerome Brilovsky hung up the phone. Without a word, without consulting his son or his appointment book, he hurriedly ran out of the office and onto an approaching streetcar.

  Arthur remained behind. He was standing by an open office window that looked out onto a terra-cotta building with busts of men wearing conquistador helmets. He noticed Elaine standing in the shade under the awning of the entryway with a tall lanky man in a suit who was carrying a large bundle of white roses. “Please, Victor, I want to go in alone. Let me go, and try to understand,” Arthur heard Elaine say. The man was speechless. “We mustn’t have bad feelings for each other. Not ever. Do you promise?” The man remained still. Elaine took hold of his free hand, squeezed her face into his chest, and then abruptly walked away from him toward Dr. Brilovsky’s office. As the tall man watched Elaine walk away from him, he smelled the flowers, then turned and handed them to the doorman standing in one of the building’s double-arched doorways behind him.

  Victor Ribe, young and uncorrupted, walked down the block toward the entrance of the park, away from Elaine Price, his one true love. Waving his hands about and talking to himself, he walked through couples and groups of workmen congregating on the street corners. He walked without seeing them. When he reached the park’s entrance, he walked onto a path of freshly cut grass, on either side of which were purple tulips cupping up to the sky. The sight of their thick, fresh green stems and their delicate plum petals reminded him of the flowers he had just dropped into the hands of the doorman. With this thought in mind, he diverted off the path into the rows of bulbs. He stepped on each and every tulip along his way. He crushed their delicate petals so that when he lifted his heavy feet, the secretion of tulip water impressed itself onto the soles of his shoes. What remained was the scrawny, frizzled meat of the flower, its purple veins bleeding onto the recently defrosted soil that had just turned the perfect temperature for the blossoms to reach their pinnacles, and bloom.

  Women of all ages shamed Victor with harsh stares and shouts. “Have you no shame?” He could see in his mind the doctor spreading Elaine’s legs, spreading her apart and reaching inside her in search of the small delicate piece of himself that he had left with her. He was still young and sensitive enough to feel a deep connection to the sanctity of the future. The future hadn’t yet come for him when he would be forced to stick bayonets through the chests of men until all that was left was gushing holes draining into ditches, when he would need to stick needles into his arm to infuse his heart with forgetfulness.

  Victor walked to the open field, where he climbed onto a large boulder and stood on its broken edge. He looked down and across to the two grizzled men who were now playing cards, onto the warblers chasing the dogs, onto the photographer who had just arrived and was preparing his tripod and occasionally pulling out his pocket watch. But Victor saw nothing. It was only a matter of minutes until Richard and Celeste would arrive, wearing their finest clothes. And it was only a matter of some more time passing until Arthur Brilovsky would come walking blindly through the field, stepping into the picture and becoming the tip to what might have been a perfect equilateral triangle—Victor, the two grizzled men, and Arthur—Richard and Celeste Martin somewhere in the middle. As the grizzled men played gin, as the socialites became immortalized, as Victor sunned himself and calmed himself on the rock, Arthur would remain panicked, panicking and praying, preparing speeches in his head for his father, digging away at drying blood from under his fingernails, preparing to drag the doctor from the jailhouse to explain to him a very grave error he had just made.

  GLOBE METRO REPORT, DECEMBER 17, 191–

  BRIGAD OFFICES RAIDED, AMERICAN

  ALLIED SOLD TO

  GREEK-BORN SOCIALITE

  SAM RAPAPORT

  Southside Docks—This afternoon, with a court order in hand and a team of investigators at his side, Department of Investigations Officer Lawrence Tines raided the Southside Docks offices of the Brigade, the well-known revolutionary communist apparatus that has long been suspected of lending its moral and financial support to the Soviets. At the time of the raid, the Brigade offices—located in the American Allied Pharmaceutical warehouse— were being dismantled by its members.

  Officer Tines was issued a court order this morning to seize all Brigade files after newly appointed Alcohol and Narcotics Bureau Commissioner Harry Shortz—on behalf of his own interests, as well as Tines’s—testified before Judge John Deaver that an investigation into the business practices of American Allied Pharmaceutical would be jeopardized if the Brigade, in its move, destroyed documentation linked to American Allied’s trade in raw opium.

  The ANB has reason to believe that American Allied was leaking opiate derivatives onto the black market, including heroin and laudanum.

  Tines’s raid comes a little over a year and a half after Dr. Jerome Brilovsky, leader of the Brigade, was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment at Delacort Prison for performing an illegal abortion on the wife of a former Russian diplomat, which resulted in the woman’s untimely demise.

  Because of the careful scrutiny given to the Brigade and American Allied by law enforcement officials, after Dr. Brilovsky’s arrest his family and the members of the Brigade agreed last month to liquidate their assets and reinvest them overseas.

  Upon hearing the news that American Allied was up for sale, Elias Eliopoulos, Greek-born socialite and owner of the Southside Docks property, bought American Allied Pharmaceutical from its controlling partners.

  According to unconfirmed reports, Dr. Brilovsky’s son, Arthur, his wife, Elaine—daughter of one of the Brigade’s high-level backers—and their infant son left last week for Petrograd with a substantial percentage of the money advanced by Mr. Eliopoulos.

  Chapter 8

  Be at Jack’s Basement Tavern at 4 P.M., 56 West Eighty-third Street

  The note was waiting for Victor in his room when the two grizzled men dropped him off at Fuller House. No larger than his cell at Farnsworth, it was a small dark room that consisted of a chair and a bed and a narrow window lined with bars that looked out onto an old mariners’ cemetery. The note was waiting on his pillow. He stuffed it into the pocket of his coat and walked
downstairs into Fuller House’s basement. He had noticed a sign on his way in: Resurrect Your Spirit and You Shall Find Your Way. What he found was an old faltering priest holding mass to an audience of three disheveled men in dirty coveralls. As he was about to turn and leave, the priest caught Victor’s eye and with a wave of his arm beckoned him forward to take communion with the others. Victor hesitated at first, but then stepped down past the pews and bowed down to the mottled hem of the priest’s robes. Victor lifted his chin, opened his mouth, received the wafer and the blessing, and as the wafer dissolved in his mouth, he could see in his mind the towering stone wall outside his prison cell thinning and becoming translucent, revealing the trees on the other side.

  When Victor was through with his prayer, two nicely dressed men who had walked downstairs while Victor kneeled before the altar trailed after him upstairs through Fuller House’s old brown varnished lobby onto Pearlmutter Lane. They walked down the block in the shadow of the downtown skyline, through a passage of the City that smelled like the viscera of the sea. They weaved in and out of the stand-still crowd of the Pearlmutter Fish Market, where they passed gutting tables and buckets of fish guts and heavily bundled mongers slapping freshly gutted fish onto carts full of ice. Victor walked with his nose buried in his scarf, feeling the thwacking blows in his temples of fish hitting ice, until he reached the coffee shop on the corner. He and the two men took seats at the counter, at which point Victor reached into his pocket and laid out the photograph he had kept of himself and the woman in front of the carousel. With some pocket money given to him by the two grizzled men, he bought a coffee and a roll and just stared down at the woman, occasionally brushing bread crumbs off her hair as they fell from his lips.