The Disappearing Body

by David Grand

  When he was through with his breakfast, Victor walked down toward the river, near the warehouse district by the Southside Docks, where he watched freighters drift up- and downstream. He followed with his eyes the wakes of the boats as he caught glimpses of them through the alleyways between black smoke-stained brick warehouses and manufacturing plants, through piles of scrap and garbage and barbed wire. After all the years he was in jail, not since he worked the docks after the war had the M. J. Morris Paperclip Company fixed its fencing. Victor squeezed through the old rusted tear to the river’s edge and strolled along a narrow truck transport that ran from docking slip to docking slip. From this road, he could see unobstructed the mouth of the harbor, and from the harbor, the ocean, and where the harbor’s fresh water met salt, the fine curve of the horizon. As he looked onto this scene, his two shadows, who inconspicuously stood on the road a few hundred feet away, looked with him. Another hundred or so feet beyond them, Victor noticed another person trying to look equally inconspicuous, a woman not exactly dressed for the docks, looking very much out of place. The woman and the men all looked onto the horizon with equal contemplation, and watching them watch this, Victor turned away from his entourage and continued his way uptown.

  He casually strolled along the river, looking up at the erect skyline over his shoulder. As he marveled at the needles and clock towers, the gilded spires and domes built during the boom years in which he was imprisoned, he turned back into the City’s streets, through the crowded throng of the financial district, stopping occasionally to glance inside the cavernous and ornate lobbies of the office buildings, at the massive expanses of concrete and steel rising above him. As he looked at the faces of the well-heeled men and women that passed before him, however, it seemed to Victor as though these buildings that were vibrant and astonishing to him were already ancient artifacts to those people passing by, as if the inspiration, the optimism, that had prompted these buildings’ construction, had faded long ago.

  Victor couldn’t exactly put his finger on it, but he somehow felt more comfortable among these somber hardened faces, these melancholy mopers, more comfortable than he remembered feeling all those years ago when he walked about the City’s streets after the war. It was as if the world had gone through a transformation that made it fit more easily into Victor’s pocket. These people had lost something. Their eyes had surpassed yearning for whatever it was that was gone. They were focused on what they had, and weren’t looking back.

  When Victor reached Adams Square in the heart of the Jewish quarter, he knocked on the door of a townhouse that had once been well kept, but now had fallen into some disrepair. An elderly man dressed in a worn brown wool suit, as unkempt as the house, answered the door. Victor, who had thought about this moment for as many years as he was jailed, wasn’t sure what to say.

  “What do you have to say for yourself?” the man asked in a heavy Yiddish accent. It was obvious from his tone that he didn’t recognize Victor.

  “Mr. Price, it’s Victor Ribe.”

  “Victor Ribe . . . Is that possible it is Victor Ribe?”

  All Victor could think to do was to reach into his pocket and pull out the photograph he had kept of himself and Sheldon Price’s daughter. He handed the picture to Mr. Price. The old man removed a pair of glasses from his vest pocket and put them on. He looked over Victor’s outmoded clothes, his work-worn hands, and when he saw the photo, the old man became transfixed. “Victor,” he said again, this time as though he were saying the name of a ghost. The man looked over Victor’s face, and at the moment he comprehended that it was indeed Victor Ribe who stood before him, a troubled look came over his face, making Mr. Price look much older than he initially appeared. Holding on to Victor’s photo, he stepped away from the door, and as if he felt it was something that must be done for some reason greater than himself, he made room for Victor to pass.

  The house was unclean and dusty; books and newspapers were piled indiscriminately in corners, on tables, chairs; spoiled dishes on top of the papers and books made for an unpleasant odor. The old man led Victor into the living room and made a place for him to sit on the couch. He then sat on a chair he obviously sat in often, and started tapping his fingers on the chair’s arms as he continued looking at the image of Victor and his daughter. “I assume you’ve come to find out where they are?” he said ponderously.

  “Yes.”

  “I see.” The old man continued tapping and staring at the picture. “If a man such as yourself came looking for your daughter and grandchild after all these years,” Mr. Price mused, “what would you say to him, Victor?”

  “I would be reluctant to say anything, sir.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Price said, still looking at the picture. Now a sadness came over his hollow face and for a moment he seemed to disappear from the room and the conversation. “It’s unfortunate . . .” he said from his distance, “it’s unfortunate what some men become when they lose the people they most cherish in life.” Mr. Price lifted his head from the photo and looked around the room, at the disarray in which he and Victor sat. “Isn’t it, Victor?”

  “Yes, sir,” Victor said. “Yes, it is.”

  “There is nothing that can replace their absence.”

  “No, there isn’t.”

  The old man’s eyes suddenly focused inside the ashen fireplace opposite his chair. Victor watched Sheldon Price once again disappear from the conversation and remembered how when Mr. Price was a young man he could stand before a crowd of workingmen and have them scream out for the heads of their bosses.

  “If I tell you where to go, you must promise that you’ll be gentlemanly,” Mr. Price said after some time.

  “I promise,” Victor said, his spirit rising.

  “If I hear you’ve caused any problems, I’ll be sure to make a big headache for you. Don’t be deceived by all this,” he said, pointing to his house, to himself, to the disarray. “You have known me since you’re a child and you know that until I’m dead I still have it in me to cause a good deal of unpleasantness.”

  “I assure you, I have no intention of making any trouble.”

  The old man reached for a pen from a table and ripped a piece of paper from a book. “You go here. You wait in the lobby. You wait and watch, and then you see. This is the way, is that understood?”

  “Yes, I understand,” Victor said quietly.

  “Like yourself, they’ve only recently returned to the City. I would wait a little time before you present yourself, to give them some time to reacquaint themselves with their surroundings.”

  “I agree.”

  “Now go show yourself to the door and be on your way.”

  Victor got up from the couch. He delicately took the piece of paper and the photo from the old man’s hand, and without saying anything more, he walked back onto the street, relieved that Mr. Price had been helpful. As he started walking uptown again, he was followed by the two men and the woman, who he could see were shivering in the cold. They all rode the subway to midtown together and exited on the east side, where, after walking a block from the subway station, Victor entered the lobby of the Ansonia Hotel and took a seat. The two men entered the hotel’s lobby right behind Victor and went to the hotel restaurant. The woman went across the avenue to a coffee shop and took a table by the window. The hotel’s elevator doors opened and closed, the revolving door to the street swung around and around, the phone rang and the concierge said names of women and men, and Victor waited impatiently, his chest tight from anticipation, with every entry and exit, with every word spoken.

  Victor had been waiting nearly an hour when a woman in her later thirties, accompanied by a boy no more than twenty, walked out of the elevator. When he saw her profile, when he saw the boy’s fair skin and taller-than-average height, and, especially, the length of his face, and the way he walked, Victor knew it was them. The woman and the boy walked through the lobby and right by him as if he were invisible. Victor, the two men, and the mysterious woman foll
owed the woman and the boy uptown through the crowded streets.

  Victor watched her move and was reminded of how she had moved with him through the fields of Long Meadow so many years ago. Victor couldn’t believe that the moment was real; he could feel his heart rate triple; he could feel his pulse beating behind his ears, in his palms, inside the balls of his feet. He couldn’t imagine that she would still be so beautiful to him, and he couldn’t have ever imagined that the boy would be as he was, as tall and as fair as he was, as handsome and fit. He followed them as far as the entrance of Zeligman’s Department Store on Thirty-eighth Street, and not wanting to risk being noticed by them just yet, he watched them disappear behind the doors.

  Chapter 9

  Freddy Stillman anxiously idled away the rest of the morning approving shipments of grenade fuses and detonators, rifle barrels and cocking levers, scrolling each order into a cylindrical container, and sending each container through the pneumatic tube beside his desk to the shipping foreman on the third floor. The shipping foreman telephoned in the orders to the manufacturing plant’s armory in Long Meadow, where the arms and munitions were inspected, crated, loaded onto barges, planes, trains, all bound for military installations across the country, all over the world.

  Just after noon, when Freddy heard the technicians break for lunch and clear the display area, he put on his coat and homburg, scarf and gloves, and walked out of his office. The floor was empty and quiet. The nearly completed mobile of torpedoes hung from the very center of the rotunda and circled and undulated about like a pinwheel of fish chasing each other’s tails. Freddy rode the elevator into the lobby and swung through the revolving doors into the dense pack of pedestrian traffic on Central Boulevard.

  It was the most frigid day of winter thus far, a day so crisp one wouldn’t know how to remember spring. The chill passed through the heaviest wool and fur, into the innermost warmth of the body. It was a freeze that chafed the most hardened bedrock of exposed skin. For some weeks now, a steady gust of this debilitating weather had blown down from the north. The winds leveled against the backs and chests of men and women who trudged their way to work and home, along the dozen-mile stretches of the City’s boulevards. It ran through the brightest hours of the day, through the bluest of cobalt skies; it howled about the office towers and made the gleam of afternoon light refract off the City’s detritus. Palls of colorful dust became a fog of airborne fool’s gold. Yet, the weather being what it was, hawkers still took to the streets, vagabonds stood in lines for brackish soup and hard bread, jackhammers pulverized earth, steel was welded and stacked, pipe was hauled and laid. Trains and trolleys ran round the clock, and into the earliest hours of the morning, freighters and liners drifted through the icy narrows of the harbor to their docks. The theaters and taverns remained full, and the nightclubs and dope dens were respectively as electric and down as ever. If at this time, so many years ago, people had been able to look onto the City from space, they would have confirmed all the feelings they had that they lived at the center of the universe. If they could only have seen the site from just outside the atmosphere, as the earth turned on its axis away from the sun, they would have seen the City appear as a bright heavenly body embedded into the land, where everything around it—all the darkness and the cloud cover—swirled in its gravity, in a perpetual vortex of motion.

  With one hand holding down his hat, his other gripping the collar of his coat, Freddy leaned into the wind and ventured toward the flapping awning of the Beekman Hotel for Women, through whose lobby windows he briefly glanced, and seeing nothing but the concierge at her desk, he continued his way downtown with the throng. He passed a row of failed haberdasheries and shops selling ladies’ finery, then trailed behind a phalanx of trundling clothes racks along Thirty-ninth Street. As the garment workers pushed the racks through the entryway of Zeligman’s Department Store, Freddy stopped and lit a cigarette, and watched the anonymous bundled faces of the lunch crowds pass. After carefully looking down the block from which he had just come, he walked into Zeligman’s lobby, through the elevator banks, through the menswear section, and exited the rear lobby onto Thirty-eighth Street. He crossed over onto the south side and walked past the street-level boutiques of the exclusive Gable Hotel, keenly aware of his moving image obscurely reflecting back at him from plate-glass windows. He passed over Central Boulevard and walked to the edge of the city, near the bank of the Eastbend River, where he turned the corner and entered Grimes’s Delicatessen, a narrow storefront with a few tables in the back. The deli was empty, except for a man Freddy only knew as Feldman.

  Feldman, the fat, clean-shaven sort with sweet liquored breath and a triple chin, was sitting at a table in the back corner. His short belt-warmer tie pressed up against the edge of the table, so much so that when he tried to stand up to shake Freddy’s hand, all the table’s condiments shook and the pickle jar nearly fell over.

  “Good to see you,” Feldman said as he took hold of Freddy’s hand.

  Freddy nodded his head and sat down. He didn’t remove his coat or hat. He turned his chair so that he faced Feldman, so that from behind he couldn’t be seen. A waitress wearing a white apron and a dress patterned with oversized petunias approached the table and asked Freddy what she could get him. Freddy, without looking up, ordered a pastrami sandwich and a beer.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d come after not calling me this morning,” Feldman said when the waitress had walked away.

  “I only came to say I shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t try to contact me anymore.”

  “What’s gotten into you?”

  “What can I say? . . . I don’t trust you. I don’t trust any of this.”

  “I hate to break it to you, but this isn’t about trust anymore, Freddy. And I think you know that.”

  “I’m not going ahead with this thing,” Freddy said in a quiet voice.

  “Is this about money? You want that I should go back and ask them for more money?”

  “No.”

  “Then what the hell’s this about?”

  “Look . . .” Freddy said.

  “You look,” Feldman said harshly. “You’ve done everything right so far. You made the call and you told your story. It’s done. I watched the police come and go. Anyone who matters knows they came and went. All you’ve got left to do now is a few secretarial duties.”

  Freddy shook his head.

  At the sight of this, Feldman tightened his face and then relaxed it. Freddy expected the anger to come then, but instead, to Freddy’s surprise, Feldman said, “Look, it’s your prerogative. But I do feel obligated to say,” Feldman continued, leaning over the table as much as he could, “there isn’t anything smart about what you’re doing, see. Believe me, if you weigh this against the stew of bad decisions you’ve made in your life up to now, I think the more you reflect on this, those won’t seem so bad.”

  Feldman chewed on his tongue for a second. “Well, if you’re not of the mind to do yourself a favor, why don’t you at least think about Janice, and the spot this puts her in.”

  “What are you saying, Feldman?”

  “I think you know what I’m saying, Freddy. I think you know exactly what I’m saying.”

  “You wouldn’t hurt Janice. I know you wouldn’t.”

  “Are you so sure? Thanks to you she’s as good as dead as far as the cops are concerned.”

  “No,” Freddy said as he nervously tapped his finger on the table. “You’re not using Janice to get to me again. Not again.”

  Feldman chewed on his tongue some more. “You know I can’t do nothing to stop what you’re starting here, right?”

  “Just do me a favor and tell your people I’m through with them.”

  Feldman looked a little sorry for Freddy. The sorry look on the sad-sack Feldman’s face made Freddy think, made him feel, as though with these last words he was signing a contract he couldn’t get out of. Freddy’s eyes shuffled about and his breath became shallow as he thought about what h
e was doing.

  Freddy stood up abruptly to leave.

  “Don’t do that,” Feldman said amiably, taking hold of Freddy’s arm, the empathetic expression on his face now a bygone. He pushed the table away a little and stood up. “I’ll go. You stay.” He winked. “I’ve already eaten. You enjoy yourself while you still have the chance.”

  Freddy, feeling a chill run through him, sat back down while Feldman, continuing to appear amiable, straightened his tie so that it laid flat over his bloated midsection, then started patting at the breast pocket of his jacket. He reached into the fold of the pocket with his thumb and index finger and pulled out a small manila envelope the size of his hand. “Just in case you have a change of heart,” Feldman said, “you’ll find what we’re looking for in here.” Feldman placed the envelope before Freddy, put on his oversized coat and hat, and wished him a nice afternoon. Feldman sauntered down the narrow lane of Grimes’s, his bulging sides brushing up against the wall and the deli counter, and walked out onto the street. As the door closed, the waitress slid Freddy’s pastrami sandwich onto the table and placed his beer next to the packet.

  “Can I get you anything else?”

  “No,” Freddy said, not looking up, looking at the envelope before him—a plain manila envelope, as plain as could be. The waitress walked away and Freddy slipped the envelope into his coat pocket.

  When Freddy returned to the ninth floor of the Fief Building, he was relieved to find that the display floor was still empty. He went into his office, locked the door, hung up his hat and coat, and removed the envelope given to him by Feldman. He placed it on his desk, on his blotter, and from the same drawer that held his binoculars, he removed an orange Bakelite letter opener, which he used to slice open the seal. With the mouth of the envelope opened, he slipped out three folded pieces of paper. On them was an extensive list of components to build grenades, mortars, armor-piercing bombs, and recoilless rifles. There were gun barrels and locking rings; equilibrators and recoil sleighs; firing shafts and breech blocks; lead balls; strikers; primers; base plugs; springs; triggers; grips. They were all items Freddy oversaw, and given an hour or so on any given afternoon, he could conceivably dispatch the order without anyone taking notice.