by David Grand
“Where’s Tines?” Harry asked as he walked alongside Pally.
“He just left. Said he’d be in touch with you.”
Harry shook his head. The feeling of the setup was about as subtle as the bullet that had exploded out of Murray Crown’s skull that morning.
“What do you suppose happened, Pal?” Harry asked as their feet crunched over the gravel.
“According to Crown’s note, he couldn’t take the heat.”
“So, you think Crown did it on his own, then?”
“Guys have done themselves in for a lot less than what Crown had to face up to.”
“Yeah, but why come all the way down here to do it? Why not just kill himself inside the Hanover?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t you think it would have been more comfortable that way? He could have just thrown himself out that window. Did you ever think of that? Why would he go to all that trouble to get back to the plant?”
“Maybe he had some unfinished business? I don’t know, Harry,” Pally said with an almost beatific calm, “maybe somebody pulled him out of that room.”
“Like who?”
“Mann and Roth, say.”
“All right, let’s say it was Mann and Roth.”
“Let’s say.”
“How’d they find out where Crown was?”
“They might have followed one of us over to the Hanover.”
“Maybe.”
“If not them,” Pally said, “who are you thinking did it?”
Harry didn’t answer Pally. After a few silent steps through the gravel, Harry said, “Claudia, she go with Ira to the hospital this morning to get his hand patched up?”
“No, I dropped him there on our way to the Hanover. He didn’t want to go, but I insisted. He was bleeding pretty bad.”
“What were they fighting about that Ira got so upset?”
“He wouldn’t say.”
“He wouldn’t say, huh?”
“Something about money, I think. Something about Ira going down to the track a little too often.”
Harry nodded his head. “What time you pick him up?”
“Around four-thirty.”
“What time he put his hand through the window?”
Pally stopped walking and turned to Harry. “What is it that you got to say to me, Harry?” Pally said, now showing his nerves. His calm was starting to come undone in his eyes; they were squinting as if he’d walked out into the sun after being inside a dark movie house.
Harry stopped and stepped into Pally’s space, and although he didn’t want to have it out with Pally right then and there, he couldn’t help himself. “How long have you and Ira been on the syndicate’s payroll?”
Pally blinked hard a few times and stepped back from Harry, laughing. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Does Claudia know that she’s going to have to testify for Ira?”
“About what?” Pally’s eyes shot open as if he wanted to hit Harry.
Harry pulled the straight razor out of his pocket and held it with his handkerchief. “You two didn’t expect Crown to go to bed with this under his pillow, did you?”
Pally looked at the razor, then looked at Harry. He looked confused. Harry didn’t know if he looked confused because he didn’t know what he was talking about or because he didn’t know how it was Harry could have found the razor.
“What’s this all about?” Pally asked. “You’re losing your mind, Harry.”
“I had to wonder if you two were capable of being that careless, but . . . why not? It was dark. You needed to get out before the boys heard you. Maybe it was worth it for some reason to take the risk of leaving this behind.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Harry,” Pally said, still postured as if he wanted to throw a punch at Harry, “but if you’re saying what I think you’re saying, I got nothing more to say to you, Harry. Nothing. At least nothing that I might regret saying later.”
Pally, looking at Harry in disbelief, backpedaled away from Harry, back in the direction of Crown’s plant.
“Did you know that Benny Rudolph was in town?”
Pally stopped for a second and doubled back. “You really are losing your mind, Harry, you know that, don’t you?”
“What did you and Ira do to him to get him so angry?”
Pally shook his head as if he wanted to say something conciliatory, as if he was about to confess something, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
“What did you do to him?”
“Nothing. Not a goddamn thing.”
“All right,” Harry said, looking down the road. “I’ll give you an hour to make up your mind. You come talk to me,” Harry said, his hand banging on his chest, “or you’ll be trying to explain to Tines why it is that the window in Crown’s room had been tampered with, why it is this straight razor was found under Crown’s bed, why it is that Ira needed to go to the hospital to get stitched up. Don’t you get it? . . . No, I know you get it. That’s why you’re so damn . . . You’re smarting from your idiocy.”
Pally stood there and took it, his face hard as a rock.
“Go find Ira and bring him to me.”
Pally continued shaking his head, gritting his teeth. “You think you’ve got a case against us, you try to make it,” he said.
“I will.”
“Then you better get started.”
Pally turned away from Harry and made his way back in the direction of Crown’s warehouse. Harry watched him go. When Pally was far enough away, Harry continued walking to the front end of the American Allied plant, wondering what it was that could have brought Ira and Pally to this, wondering if by turning on them, or not turning on them, he would be playing into Tines’s hands. As Harry turned onto the front lot of the American Allied plant, he stopped in disbelief. “How the hell did he manage this?”
Harry Shortz stood in front of an empty parking lot and by empty slips. No trucks. No freighters. No workers. The doors and the loading docks were all open, the sound of the wind violently echoing through the empty building. The whole facility had been stripped bare. American Allied Pharmaceutical was no longer there. No machinery. No lab equipment. No furniture. Not one flask or Bunsen burner. It was swept clean. Everything gone.
Chapter 21
Victor woke up early that morning. As a lavender light luminesced the dusty cellar window, he removed his bloodied suit and put on the clothes Steven had rummaged out of Mr. Tersi’s closet. He left his own clothes neatly folded on the cot and quietly walked upstairs to the bathroom. He used the toilet, gently splashed some water on his face, carefully dabbed at his bruises with a musty towel. His face looked worse than it had last night, but, all in all, in Mr. Tersi’s nicely tailored clothes his condition somehow didn’t appear so dire.
Victor found Freddy asleep, the bottle of bourbon on his night table drained, the ashtray full of cigarette butts. Victor didn’t want to wake Freddy, so he wrote him a note and placed it on the kitchen table. He then bundled up into Mr. Tersi’s thick fur-lined herringbone coat, put on his new hat, and stepped out into the brisk cold.
Standing at the curb in front of 319 West Eighty-third were two men Victor hadn’t seen before. One of them flashed him a badge. “Department of Investigations,” the man said. “We’ve got a few questions about your father.” Both men had baby faces. One tried to cover his boyish features with a thick desperado mustache, but it wasn’t doing him any good.
“What about him?” Victor asked.
“About the incident over in Long Meadow the other day.”
“I don’t know how I can be helpful to you. I haven’t seen my father for fifteen years, since I got sent upstate.”
“Did you have any kind of correspondence?”
“No.”
“Do the names Max Waters and Henry Capp mean anything to you?”
“Yeah, sure. They worked with my father at Barkley & Sons. They all grew up together. I went to grade s
chool with their kids.”
“Did you know your father ever to have connections to the Communist Party?”
“Not exactly.”
“What do you mean, not exactly?”
“I mean just that. When I was growing up I was close with Shelly Price’s daughter, Elaine. Shelly Price was—”
“—one of the former leaders of the Brigade?”
“Yeah, my father and Mr. Price, they got to know each other, sort of. Enough so that my dad went to a few meetings. But it was nothing more than that so far as I know.”
“Would it surprise you to know that your father went to more than just a few meetings, like you said? That he went to more than a couple dozen?”
“I can’t say I know my father well enough to say it would, but my father was a freethinking man.”
“Would it surprise you to learn that up until the day he was killed, your father was an active member in the Communist Party?”
“Look, I hadn’t talked with the man in fifteen years. I suppose nothing you say about my father could surprise me.”
“Then it wouldn’t surprise you to learn that your father intentionally sabotaged the Fief Munitions plant in Long Meadow the other day? To ignite a conflict between the Long Meadow Munitions Workers Union and Julius Fief?”
“Why would he do that?”
“Apparently your father was as disgruntled as he was freethinking, Mr. Ribe. A rabble-rouser. . . .” The baby-faced man doing the talking leaned into the car, opened the glove compartment, pulled out a few pieces of paper, and started reading. His voice, which suited his face, was full of adolescent-sounding invective. “Comrades, rise up! . . . The means of production can be OURS! . . . Stop thinking like menial servants, like indentured laborers, like field fodder, and ACT as men of ACTION would!” The man angrily slapped the piece of paper with the back of his hand. “Do you know who wrote these words, Mr. Ribe?”
“That would be my father?”
“Yeah, your father, who led a group of men with families to their destruction.”
“If you say so.”
The man took a breath. “Look, I know you haven’t had any contact with your father in the past fifteen years, but do you think you might recognize his handwriting if you saw it?”
“Probably.”
“Does this look like your father wrote this?”
The officer handed Victor a letter dated the day of the explosion. It read,
Dear Victor,
What I do today, I do for more than just us. If for some reason something goes wrong, please know that I’m sorry I doubted you, son, and I’m sorry I didn’t fight for you as hard as I’ve fought for my men in all these years you’ve been imprisoned. Your mother wouldn’t approve of what I’m about to do, I know, but she would at least have understood the bull stubbornness that fortifies my spirit to do what I feel I must do.
Love,
Dad
“The handwriting looks like my father’s, but I can’t say it sounds like him much.”
“Men change in fifteen years.”
“Some do.”
“I expect that your father is the sort that did.”
“So?”
“So, you haven’t anything to say about the fact that your father managed to kill himself and five of his men on a matter of principle?”
“I don’t believe he meant to kill anyone. I’m not sure I believe that he even did it.”
“You will.”
“If you say so.”
“I do.” The man climbed into the passenger seat, slammed the door shut, and rolled down the window. “Don’t leave town,” the man said. “We’ll need you to testify.”
Victor turned away from the detectives and started walking. The moment the detectives’ car drove past him, another car pulled up alongside Victor, and Victor could see it was the two men who had shadowed him the day before.
“Where we going?” Victor asked as he got in the backseat.
“Where would you like to go?”
“The Ansonia Hotel.”
“We’ll drive you there.”
“I figured as much.”
The driver pulled the car away from the curb.
“You need to be somewhere at one,” the man in the passenger seat said.
“All right.”
“So whatever you got planned, just keep it in mind at half past noon, you’re going for a ride.”
“All right by me.”
“That’s what we figured.”
The two men drove Victor down to the Ansonia and parked the car. They all got out. Victor went inside the lobby and the two men went into the Ansonia’s restaurant and took a table from which they could keep an eye on Victor. And as Victor had done the day before, he sat in the Ansonia’s lobby and waited for Elaine and the boy to walk through the elevator doors.
An hour or so after Victor had left, Freddy woke up, hungover. Outside his bedroom window a heavy bank of storm clouds moved toward him in the far distance over the rooftops. He watched it move for a while and then got out of bed and went into the kitchen to make some coffee. On the kitchen table, he found Victor’s note. Freddy, it read, Thanks for taking care of me last night. I didn’t want to wake you. Needed to be somewhere. I’ll stop by again when I can. Victor. Freddy put up a pot of water to boil, lit a cigarette, and went to the bathroom to use the toilet. As he was about to sit down, he heard a few quiet knocks on his door. Thinking it was Aleksandr or Nicol asking him if he had any trash to go out, he walked to the door and opened it, to find, standing in the threshold, a big man, a man a little bigger than big, wearing a trench coat, his face toughened like a boxer’s. This overwhelming figure pushed his way in and shut the door. Before Freddy could speak, the man grabbed him by his nightshirt and threw him down onto the couch, knocking his cigarette onto the floor.
“Where were you?” the man asked harshly.
“I’m sorry?” Freddy responded. “Who . . .” he said, trying to think clearly.
“I waited for you all night.”
“I’m sorry,” Freddy repeated. “Do I . . .”
The man took a small step toward Freddy and bent forward a little so that the two of them were face to face.
“I want the other half of my money. I was told you would deliver it at the club, midnight.”
Freddy looked puzzled. “I couldn’t have . . .”
“Is it midnight? Are we at the club? Or are we right here, right now?”
“Please,” Freddy said. “Get to the point, to the point.”
“Don’t play dumb. What did you expect when you didn’t show up? That I’d disappear without a word?”
Freddy could see a drop of angry sweat begin to form between the man’s eyes. It was about to drop right off his nose into Freddy’s gaping mouth.
“Look,” Freddy said. “You’ve obviously got me mixed up with someone else.”
“Freddy Stillman. Three-nineteen West Eighty-third Street, first floor. Two hundred bucks.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. I don’t have that kind of money.”
“No?” The man stood up erect and reached into his pocket for a pair of leather gloves. “Then why would you make a deal to pay me that kind of money?”
“I couldn’t even begin to tell you, because I didn’t make the deal. What was the deal?”
“It seems pretty simple to me. Half up front, the other half when the job was done, twelve midnight at the Triple Mark. That was the agreement. Can it be any simpler?” The man smiled as though aggravated. With his gloves now on his fists, he pulled Freddy off the couch and stood him up.
“Was it Feldman? Was it Feldman who put you up to this?”
“I don’t know no Feldman.”
“Listen,” Freddy said calmly, as calmly as he could. He tried to find an image of Evelyn in his mind, but he couldn’t. “Wait,” he said. “Just wait.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
And then it came to him. He suddenly was able to see her sitting
in her bathrobe at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee, no smile on her face, no anger on her face, just Evelyn, waking up, her hair resting on her shoulders, her eyes tired, the morning light on her fingers. “Okay,” he said.
The man shook his head—he was plainly disgusted. He cocked his fist back, turned Freddy so that his back was facing the hall, and then unleashed a punch right on Freddy’s jaw that sent him backpedaling into the kitchen, where he banged into a cupboard, whose wood buckled in on itself. Dizzied from the blow, Freddy sat there, wedged into the cupboard, on the edge of falling unconscious, seeing Evelyn that much more clearly at the kitchen table, until the man pulled him up and sent him back down the hall with another roundhouse delivered this time to the side of his head.
Freddy toppled over the coffee table in the living room and landed on his side. When he looked up, the man was standing over him with his foot resting heavily on Freddy’s knee. The man bent down, took hold of Freddy’s ankle, and asked him again, “Do you have my two hundred bucks?”
Freddy took a deep breath and shut his eyes so he wouldn’t have to watch. “No,” he said.
“That’s a shame,” the man said matter-of-factly.
“You mean you’re just gonna break my fucking leg,” Freddy said as he realized what the man intended to do. He could feel the pressure of the man’s foot on his knee increase.
“What? You want it to be an arm and a leg?”
“No,” Freddy said, not wanting to explain what he wanted. “But just let me be clear here,” he continued, “that’s all you’re gonna do? All you’re gonna do is break my leg?”
“What do you expect? You expect that I should kill you? If I kill you, how the hell am I gonna collect my money?”
Freddy, feeling the pressure increase that much more on his knee, shook his head. “I’ve got twenty-five bucks, twenty-five and some change.”
“You got it here?” The man started lifting Freddy’s ankle so that the joints in both his knee and ankle started to stretch and distend.
