The Disappearing Body

by David Grand

  Elaine turned back to Joshua. “What makes you think he’s following us?”

  “I first noticed him in the lobby of the hotel yesterday. His face wasn’t black-and-blue like that, though. . . . And now he’s here. He’s been walking behind us the entire time we’ve been in the museum.”

  “For all we know, he’s looking after us,” Elaine whispered.

  “We’ll have to tell Father about it.”

  “Yes, right when we get home, you tell him, dear.”

  Victor followed Elaine and Joshua through the museum, then walked with them over the fresh blanket of snow in the park. He walked with them downtown until they reached the Ansonia Hotel, where Victor watched them swing through the revolving doors. When he saw them enter the elevator, when he saw the elevator doors close, he walked inside and asked the concierge for a piece of paper and a pen. He wrote a short note to Elaine and asked the concierge to deliver it immediately. When the concierge took the note from Victor’s hand, he told Victor that there were two men waiting for him at the door. Victor turned around to find at the door the two grizzled men. Without a word spoken, he walked over to them, and together they walked out of the hotel to the grizzled men’s car.

  Chapter 29

  Operator.”

  “South End three nine eight.”

  “One moment, please.”

  The phone rang once, twice.

  “Hello.”

  “Evelyn.”

  “What is it, Freddy?”

  “We need to talk.”

  “It’s not a good time.”

  “No, you don’t understand. We need to talk.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t, Freddy. Really, you really shouldn’t be calling me.”

  Freddy could feel the phone moving away from her ear. “I’m in trouble, Evelyn, a lot of trouble. . . . Will you please see me for just one minute? It’s important that we talk.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line.

  “What have you done?”

  “Will you please see me? See me this one time and I swear to God you won’t ever hear from me again.”

  There was more silence.

  “Where are you?”

  “Across the street. I’m across the street at the bakery.”

  “If you’re coming, you’d better make it quick. William is coming home for lunch.”

  Freddy hung up the phone and walked out of Cuccio’s Bakery. He had already bought a pink box full of pastries, and he had had Mrs. Cuccio tie the box off with a white ribbon.

  Evelyn was standing inside the door of her apartment house wrapped in a heavy coat when Freddy approached. She stood atop the stoop, her waves of chestnut hair hauntingly still in the wind, her eyes fixed coldly on Freddy’s beaten face. Her eyes and mouth tightened with concern for a brief moment and then became indifferent. Whatever meaning Freddy had once held for her in her life had been dismantled, and seeing the absence of affection Freddy could feel himself dematerializing. He could feel himself turning into something vague and ghostly. He was invisible to her. All he could think of was how much he would prefer to be chiseled into a pile of dust rather than say what he had come to say.

  “What did you do?” Evelyn asked when Freddy reached the middle of the stairs.

  “What I did doesn’t matter.” Freddy tried to hand Evelyn the box, but she wouldn’t take it. “What matters is that what I did do . . .”

  “What is it, Freddy?”

  “I’m going to make things right for you, Evelyn,” he managed. “I’ve done everything wrong by you, I know that.”

  Evelyn nodded her head and looked away into the drift of the storm. “I think I should go in,” Evelyn said. She started to turn away from Freddy.

  “Wait,” Freddy said, raising his voice. “Just wait a minute.” He walked up the stoop a few more steps.

  “Are you going to tell me what this is about?”

  “I need you and the baby and William to go stay with your mother for a few days,” Freddy said in a serious steady tone.

  “What?”

  “Like I said, Evey, you and the baby and William need to go stay with your mother for a few days.”

  “Why?”

  Freddy shook his head. “Please don’t ask me why. Just do as I say. Call William right now, then after you get off the phone with him, take the baby and go stay with your mother. If you have to, tell William there’s something wrong with the heat in your apartment, tell him anything you think he’ll believe, but please, just go. Everything will be fine by the end of the weekend. I swear it.”

  Evelyn looked so scared she seemed afraid to move. “What have you done, Freddy?”

  Freddy took another step up the stoop. “I can’t tell you that. For your own sake, for the sake of the baby, Evelyn, please do as I say.”

  “You have some nerve, Freddy. Coming here and scaring me like this. Are you that cross with me that you have to come here and scare me like this?”

  Freddy started to shake and his voice started quavering. “Something went wrong,” Freddy said desperately. “Something went very wrong. If anything happened to you . . .”

  “I’m calling the police, Freddy. I’m calling the police right now. You have no right, no right at all!”

  “Yeah,” Freddy said, feeling the force of her voice constricting his chest. “Yeah, do that. Call the police. Tell them that you’re afraid I’m going to do something to you. Tell them that I’ve been after you, that you’re afraid for your life.”

  Now Evelyn looked scared and confused. “Is that what this is about?”

  “Tell them to talk to Mrs. Cuccio,” Freddy said, pointing behind him. “Go ask her how often I stop by and have pastries sent to you, so that I can watch you stand in the doorway.”

  Evelyn looked at the pink box in Freddy’s hand, glanced across the street, then back at Freddy. “Do you really want to hurt me, Freddy? Is that what you want? . . . You’ve lost your mind. You’ve really gone and lost your mind once and for all.”

  Freddy nodded his head complacently and placed the box down on the stoop. He wedged it into the snow, took another step up the stoop, and reached out his hand. “I promise, Evelyn, I’ll make it all right.”

  Evelyn, who had her hand on the door, quickly took a step back and slammed the door in Freddy’s face. Freddy continued looking at the door and could feel his diaphragm contract as though it wanted him to cry. He turned down the stairs and started to convulse as a man does when he’s incapable of crying, when he hasn’t cried for such a long time that his body has forgotten how. He walked away quickly in the direction of the subway, punching at himself in the gut, slapping his face; not paying any mind to the people watching him do this, he threw himself against a stone wall of a courtyard, desperately trying to push the feeling out of the cage of his chest, as though if he didn’t, the feeling itself would grip hold of his heart and lungs and squeeze them closed until they ruptured. When Freddy reached the subway entrance, hovering above the first step, he could finally feel the pressure start to release; he could feel his eyes expand in volume, the tear ducts swell with water, a force as strong as ignited gunpowder compacted within a solid metal casing expanding inside his throat, and then, all of a sudden, two men in heavy coats and gray fedoras took hold of his wrist, wrenched his arm behind his back, and threw him in the backseat of a car. Instead of crying, Freddy let out a moan and wail that instantly transformed into laughter.

  “It’s time to be getting back to the office, Mr. Stillman,” one of the men had said severely as he stepped in front of him. “You’re really starting to try our patience.”

  Freddy couldn’t say a thing to this. He couldn’t stop laughing. He was laughing hysterically now. He didn’t stop laughing until the man who sat next to him in the backseat of the car took hold of his shoulder and with a pair of brass knuckles forcefully hit him with an uppercut right in the solar plexus, at which point Freddy rolled onto the car’s floorboards. He wheezed out the last of his breath, the
n started coughing uncontrollably and gasping for air.

  “Don’t you dare touch her,” Freddy kept saying spastically when he was able to speak. “Don’t you dare touch her,” he said to the man’s wet shoe.

  “It’s all in your hands now, Mr. Stillman,” the man said. “It’s always been in your hands.”

  Freddy reached up to the seat and tried to pull himself up. But when he got to his knees the man took hold of his shoulder and dug back into his gut with the brass knuckles, sending Freddy back down to the floorboards.

  When the car came to a stop, the man reached over Freddy, opened the door, and pushed Freddy out onto the sidewalk in front of the Fief Building, where his fellow dispatchers were leaving the building for lunch. They watched the car speed off, up the snowy boulevard; they watched Freddy slowly lift himself from the ground, watched him brush the snow from his clothes and his beaten face. They all stood there silently in the downpour of snow and watched Freddy, half hunched over, his breathing still labored, limp by them and enter the lobby. With his head down, Freddy pushed his way through a crowd exiting an elevator, and rode upstairs. When the doors opened on the ninth floor, he walked under the snow-covered glass ceiling of the rotunda and locked himself inside his office. As the snow fell between his window and the window of the empty apartment across the air shaft, he removed from his coat pocket the list that Feldman had given him just this time the day before, opened the drawers to his filing cabinet, removed a thick set of dispatch forms, and spent the next half hour filling them out. Thinking of Evelyn’s stillness as she stood in the doorway, thinking of the delicate pliant features of Janice Gould—bruised from being bound, her larynx crushed, her voice snuffed out by a large pair of hands, by Stu Zawolsky’s brutish hands—he filled out the forms as he should have done the day before. He prayed for Evelyn’s safety; he prayed that she would never know what he had done. When Freddy was through, he bound the paperwork into a casing, stuffed it into the pneumatic tube beside his desk, and pushed it into the sucking current of air. As it streamed away from his fingertips en route to the armory foreman’s office, he prayed some more that Evelyn wouldn’t be harmed. He didn’t know to whom or what he was praying, but he prayed nonetheless. This was all that Freddy cared about. This was what his life amounted to now, to Evelyn’s image remaining intact, the image of her, serious and withdrawn, fearing him, there on the top of her steps, looking ready to crush his small pink package.

  As soon as Freddy had filed the dispatch forms, he called the number Feldman had given him. The man on the other end of the line said in Benny Rudolph’s unmistakable voice, “Who’s there?”

  “Stillman.”

  “It’s done?”

  “Yeah, it’s done.”

  “You got the carbons like we wanted?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Now make yourself scarce.”

  “What?”

  “Get out of the building. Go home. And bring the carbons with you.”

  “Why?”

  “Go home and bring the carbons with you.”

  “I thought this was it? I thought you were finished with me?”

  “Go home, Mr. Stillman. You know the consequences if you don’t do as you’re told.”

  The man abruptly hung up.

  Freddy nervously gathered the carbon copies of the dispatch forms that he would usually send to his supervisor, neatly folded them together, and then slipped them into an envelope. He put on his coat, his scarf and gloves, and with the envelope in hand, he walked to the elevator bank.

  All the way home, Freddy thought he saw pairs of men following him through the storm; he saw them reflected in the windows of his subway car, on the platform of the Eighty-fifth Street station when he exited the train. But, as far as he could tell, he was now alone, and he had never felt more alone knowing that after today, after that episode on Evelyn’s stoop, he would never be able to see or speak with her again.

  The storm was now the strongest it had been all day. The snow fell into the heavy gusts of wind with greater ease, in large tufts. Like cold clenched fists, the snow landed hard blows on Freddy’s head and face. With his hat in his hand, he walked into the wind, into the icy snow with his chin up, his eyes up. He noticed, as he looked to the facades of Celeste Martin’s buildings along West Eighty-third Street, that icicles had hardened onto the cheeks and fingers of the gargoyles leaning precariously over the sidewalks. The gargoyles were heavy with snow, the wet pack weighing down on their narrow shoulders and large heads, inside the deep hollows of their sunken eyes; their open hands reached out as if they were laying claim to the face of a small child, as if they were reaching for an invisible, unobtainable object. They reached out as if they wanted to dive and be aloft in the wind for the few moments it would take for them to crash to the ground.

  As Freddy approached his building, he could see rafts of ice floating in the river’s current; he could see freighters propelling the ice onto the shore; he noticed that when the ice crumbled, it didn’t shatter like glass, but broke more like bone, slowly, as if there were sinew strung throughout its crystal lattice. Freddy thought for a moment that he would walk out to the dock and look more closely at the river. He wondered how long a body would take to freeze in icy water, and if it was frozen and hit by a ship if his bones would crush with the consistency of ice. He had read in a novel when he was a boy about a seaman whose boat had been capsized in northern waters, and in the description of his death, the writer made the state of hypothermia seem like a blissful end. There was part of Freddy, an automatic part of him, that wanted to walk onto the dock, to walk without stopping until he was submerged in the current of the river, where his thoughts would drift with the ice as his body slowly turned numb and uncomprehending. But then he thought of Evelyn again, of the letter he had written her early that morning, and something suddenly occurred to him, something that he knew would give him everything he wanted.

  Freddy crossed the street to the home of Celeste Martin and knocked on the door. When there was no response, he knocked again. Then again. After the third round of knocks, Freddy stepped back a few feet from the window and, still facing the house, walked down a few steps on the stoop. He looked up and could see standing inside one of the third-story dormer windows Richard Martin. Richard was looking down, but not down onto Freddy. He was looking across the street.

  Freddy turned around, to find entering the front door of his building two men wearing dark trench coats and fedoras.

  “What is it?” the cook asked when he finally opened the door. His large cheeks and small eyes were downturned.

  Freddy turned to Steven, distracted. “I need to see Miss Martin.”

  “She no see you now.”

  “I must see her,” Freddy said. “It’s urgent.”

  “She no feeling good, no good at all.”

  “Please, just ask her if she’ll see me for a few minutes.”

  “No,” Steven said firmly, shaking his cheeks.

  Steven tried to shut the door on Freddy, and Freddy stepped into the threshold before Steven could shut it. He forced his way in, pushing Steven’s thin frail body back as if it were part of the door.

  “No,” Steven said, “you mustn’t.” He frantically grabbed at Freddy’s arm and tried to pull him back outside, but Freddy easily pushed by him.

  “I must see her,” he said calmly.

  Steven threw his hands up. “No matter,” he said, shaking his head. “No matter,” he pattered. “You see her, but she no see you.”

  “Where is she?”

  “There,” Steven said, pointing at the sliding door that led into Benjamin Martin’s study. “Suit yourself. Go. You be ashamed. No good will come of it.” Steven walked away, back into the kitchen. He slammed the door shut and yelled through it some unkind-sounding words in Chinese.

  Freddy stood in the foyer, stubbornly looking at the closed door to the study, wondering if, in fact, he should enter the room. He knew whose room this was and what it m
eant to Celeste. It was the room to which her father had gone to brood, to paint, to die. It was a room that had been blacked out from the sun as long as Freddy had lived across the street, and as long as he had come to visit Miss Martin’s home, the room that had given the entire bottom floor of the house a musty, stuffy, thick odor, as if all the smells from the rest of the house for the past twenty years had gathered inside and festered.

  Freddy could hear nothing on the other side of the door. All he could hear was the angry clang of pots coming from the kitchen. He took hold of the brass handle on the door and pushed. He pushed the door into the slot in the wall. A thick odor, surprisingly sweet, unlike the odor he expected to smell, wafted out of the room in a billow of smoke.

  Freddy found Celeste Martin dressed in a yellowing crushed silk gown, sprawled out on a purple divan in the center of the room, her gray wig set on a mannequin head. Beside the divan was a pipe that resembled a tall, thin vase with a silver crown at its head. The pipe was freestanding; a long tube ran from the base of the crown to one of Celeste’s fingers and was attached to a crooked knuckle by a silver ring. Motionless. Celeste was motionless. Her hair, her real hair, was cropped short, as gray as her wig, and her face was as gray as her hair. If she weren’t so obviously haggard, there in the dim light, the way her body was splayed, the way her dress was hiked up around her thighs, she might have appeared sexual. But she was old and haggard and the furniture was old and dusty and the paintings of the flowers on the walls were dusty and hung with cobwebs; and haunting portraits of Celeste and Richard as teenagers hung above a desk on the opposite wall, their figures looking so frail that they seemed more like little children than young adults.

  “She won’t be able to help you right now, Freddy,” Richard said from the stairs.

  Freddy turned around and looked up. “I’m sorry,” Freddy said. “I didn’t realize . . .” He looked back at Celeste.