by David Grand
“It’s all right,” Richard said calmly. Richard walked down to the first floor and took hold of the door and closed it as if he were shutting Celeste away inside a mausoleum. He then took Freddy by the arm to a sitting room just opposite the study. “What was it you wanted to discuss with Celeste?”
“Money,” Freddy said. He stepped close to Richard Martin’s kind dignified face. “I’m sorry to be so forthright about it, but . . .”
“Yes?”
“It’s just that I was going to ask Miss Martin if she would loan me some money to help me out of some trouble I’m in, you see.”
“I see.”
“It’s just that she’s been so kind to me in the past, and I don’t mean to take advantage of her generosity, but I’m in a very uncomfortable position, a very bad situation, and I . . .”
“How much do you need?”
“Quite a lot, I’m afraid. More than I’ve ever imagined asking anyone in my entire life.”
“Please, Freddy,” Richard said gently, “you must calm down.” Richard placed his hand on Freddy’s shoulder. “Please,” he said again.
“Five hundred,” Freddy said. “I need five hundred to get me out of this mess. I realize it’s a fortune, but, if I don’t have it . . . if I don’t have it, I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.”
“When do you need it?”
“Immediately.”
“I’m not sure if we have that kind of money here in the safe, Freddy.”
It suddenly occurred to Freddy as Richard said this, as he nodded his head, that Richard Martin looked almost exactly as he had in that portrait hanging in the study. He was still an innocent. At the end of his life, he was still as innocent as he looked in that painting he had posed for in his youth. Richard tilted his head. “But if it’s here, it’s yours.”
“I don’t know how to thank you.” Freddy gripped Richard’s shoulder and held on to it tightly. Freddy could feel the bones of his arm as if he were gripping a skeleton dressed in a jacket. “I’ll get it back to you as soon as I’m able, Richard. I promise.”
“No,” Richard said, smiling, “I don’t expect you will.”
“But I will. I promise.”
“It’s all right, Freddy. It’s of no consequence.”
“What do you mean?”
Richard gently patted Freddy’s hand, slid it off his arm, and feebly walked away. Freddy watched him. He watched him walk out of the room and back to the study. He opened the door, then shut it. After a few minutes, he returned to the sitting room with a handful of nicely stacked bills.
“There’s six hundred here,” Richard said, handing the money to Freddy. “That’s all there was in the safe.”
Freddy took the money and held it in his hand. He had never held six hundred dollars all at once before. “I really don’t think I’ll need more than five hundred.”
“Sometimes it’s better to have more money than you thought you needed.”
Freddy looked at Richard, feeling distracted by the gesture, suddenly feeling as though he had misjudged him. The way Richard was looking at Freddy, he seemed to intimately know exactly what Freddy was about to do. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because you’re in trouble and I’ve found, personally, that the best use for money, whether it be yours or mine, is to remedy troubles. And as far as I can tell, I think, perhaps, your troubles are closer than you think.”
“What do you mean?”
Richard looked over his shoulder in the direction of the window that looked onto Freddy’s apartment, and then he looked back at Freddy. “I saw them go in,” Richard said, suddenly not looking as innocent as he had before.
“Yeah, I noticed.”
“Would you like me to call the police?”
“No,” Freddy said. “That wouldn’t help matters.”
“Whatever you think is best,” Richard said.
Thinking of the men in his apartment, Freddy wanted to say, I may not need your money after all. But he didn’t say this. Instead, he let Richard continue speaking.
“Whatever you’ve done, whatever has happened, whatever will happen, Freddy,” Richard said with some certitude, “God will forgive you.”
“You’re a kind man,” Freddy said as he opened his coat and neatly placed the stack of bills inside his pocket, next to the envelope with the dispatch forms.
“Celeste would want you to have that money,” Richard said. “She doesn’t like anyone she knows to suffer if she can help it.”
“Thank you for your help,” Freddy said.
“Godspeed,” Richard said, wiping his brow with his handkerchief.
Freddy shook Richard’s hand and turned away from him. “I’ll see myself out.”
Freddy walked out of the Martins’ townhouse and stood on its stoop again. He stood on the stoop for a long time, looking across at the windows of his ground-floor apartment, trying to see in. But all he could see was snow and ice forming around the fanciful ironwork of the gates bordering the property. As he walked down from the stoop, all he could think about was the drop from the ninth-story window of the Fief Building to the bottom of the air shaft that separated his former office from Janice Gould’s window. He could see himself falling. He could see himself wanting to step out, wanting to waste no time to be with her. He wondered what it was at the origin of this desire. He wished he could explain it to himself, how it was that he needed it, how it was he needed to be used by her. His fate always seemed to be written by such hidden desires; he vanished into such desires, into their intrigues, as if they were unlikely afterlives, in order to find the basic pulse that allowed him to endure what he knew as true. As he walked across the street, he recalled the instant that he knew that he would kill the man who had murdered the woman and her little girl in the French countryside. Kill the man or die trying. And he realized that it was death that he had yearned for at that point in time; it was death, not vengeance, that he had wanted to touch, and that secretly he had wished that the man had fired at him before he had fired at the man.
Chapter 30
After getting a glimpse of Johnny Mann’s and Jerzy Roth’s corpses being hauled out of the Triple Mark by the medical examiner’s men, Faith shared a short taxi ride across town with her photographer. When they reached the newsroom, the shades of Marty Volman’s glass-encased office were drawn, the office was lit, and everyone on the floor was watching Marty’s shadow pacing back and forth behind the scrim of the shades. Marty had pulled the shades of his office down only once in the past five years, when he had heard the news that his wife had died after getting hit by a car outside their West End apartment building. The time before that was fifteen years ago, when Marty found out that Sam Rapaport had shot himself.
“Someone die?” Faith asked Jonesy, Marty’s old sidekick, a small bald man with a gut and a big bow tie. She sounded concerned.
“Aside from the bums you been after all day?” Jonesy flipped, trying to make light of it. “I don’t think so.”
Faith gave Jonesy an arched brow.
“I don’t know,” he said more seriously. “I tried talking to him, but he don’t want nothing to do with me.”
“How long’s he been in there like that?”
“Couple of hours, ever since you left. . . . What you say to him?”
“Nothing that would throw him into a stupor as far as I know.”
“Well, pay it no mind for now and get to work,” Jonesy said, walking away from Faith. “I want to get the late afternoon out early.”
“Sure, all right,” Faith said, walking in the opposite direction away from Jonesy over to her desk.
Faith wrote up the story on the deaths of Crown, Mann, and Roth, about the disappearance of Elias Eliopoulos and the rumored sale of the Southside Docks to Noel Tersi. She made it a straight reportage with little color, wrote the facts as they had been revealed at Shortz’s press conference. She left out the knowledge she had that someone had thrown Boris Lardner from the el platform
all those years ago, and that it was most certainly not Victor Ribe. As she wrote, she would occasionally look over her shoulder to peek into Marty Volman’s office. A few times when she looked, she could see from his silhouette that he was in there pouring himself drinks, and not from the bottle of seltzer he kept on his desk.
Faith finished the story in about a half hour, tapped the pages into place, and dropped them with Jonesy. Jonesy gave her a smile and wink, snatched hold of a pencil resting behind his ear, and started editing. Faith walked off with her eyes on the drawn shades of Marty’s door. It was too big a day for Marty to go under, Faith decided. She needed to know what he knew about Benny Rudolph, needed his take on the photos, the notes, on Shortz, Dubrov, Collins . . . she needed his advice. She went back to her desk and grabbed hold of her attaché, and she walked over to Marty’s door.
The loud rap on the glass stopped the bustle around her, and everyone looked over to see what would happen. “Marty,” Faith called out into the door, “I’m coming in.”
“No! Don’t you dare!” Marty screamed out.
“Or what?” Faith screamed back, mocking him a little. Faith shrugged her shoulders for the benefit of those watching, opened the door, walked in, and shut the door behind her. Without an invitation from Marty, she took the same seat she had sat in that morning before she left for the bank. She found Marty sitting at his desk, his body slumped forward, a burned-out cigarette wedged between his fingers, his bottle of seltzer drained, and a bottle of bourbon nearly half empty.
“Take a seat,” Marty said to Faith.
“I’m already sitting, Marty.”
“Yeah, I see that.” Marty sounded more sober than she thought he would from the looks of him. Faith leaned over Marty’s desk and took the burned-out cigarette from his fingers and replaced it with a new one.
“So,” Faith said, as she lit the cigarette for Marty, “what’s brought this on?” Faith couldn’t stand to see him so upset, but she wasn’t going to let him know it was bothering her. She was expressing her sympathy like a cranky old woman with a soft spot for a warm cuddly animal.
“You wouldn’t understand,” Marty said.
“Try me.”
“No,” Marty said, shaking his head.
“Come on, Marty, why are you drunk at this time of the morning? It’s a big day out there. You gotta pull yourself together.”
“I want no part of it.”
“Why not?”
“Because I got pain, cupcake. I got tragic Shakespearean pain, murderous pain, and it ain’t gonna go away until I’m dead.”
“Marty . . .”
“We’ll take it up later. How’s about that? Later, when your finger’s ready to point to exactly where I’m hurting.”
“You’re making no sense.”
“And ain’t it beautiful to sometimes make no sense?” It seemed like an accusation. “What you come in here for?”
“I just got done with the pages on Shortz and the murders and—”
“Hand them over to Jonesy. I’m on holiday.”
“I already handed them to Jonesy.”
“Then what do you need me for?”
“I’ve got some questions.”
Marty shook his head, his heavy hooded lids half closed. “No, right now, this here is my own desert island until the end of the day. That snow out there ain’t nothing but white-hot sand and this bottle of bourbon ain’t nothing but my coconut with a straw sticking out of it. And you, my dear kid, ain’t nothing but a gorgeous mirage that is ready to fade away right through that magic door there,” he said, pointing to the door with his crooked elbow.
“I guess we’ll talk about this later when the rescue party’s come with the smelling salts.”
“Yeah, sure. Come back when they’ve finished salvaging my head for scrap.”
“Have it your way.”
As Faith was almost out of his office, Marty said, “I told you, Faith . . .”
Faith turned back. “What you tell me, Marty?”
“I told you you’d be alone on this one. I wasn’t kidding,” Marty said with a sadness in his voice that Faith had never heard before.
“Yeah, all right,” Faith said straight. “I’ll tough it out alone, Marty. No skin off my back.”
“I wish that part were true, sweetheart.”
Faith shook her head in confusion and left Marty to his stupor. She walked back out onto the floor, then walked in the direction of the elevator, wondering what had shaken Marty up so much. She rode down to the basement for the second time that day and walked into the dark corner housing her father’s archive. For the second time that day, she went back to R, on the outside chance that there would be a file for Rudolph. She pulled the drawer toward her, and sure enough, a few tabs beyond RIBE, she found RUDOLPH, PI, a thick file. She started looking through the stack of papers—short profiles on gangland figures, cops, politicians, average John Q. Citizens, scams, rackets—and could tell instantly that Rudolph was one of her father’s close sources. There were dozens of notes in Sam’s hand like the one she had found in the Ribe file on the way to the bank: BR says the witness is a plant; 789 47th Street, murder weapon under the bed. . . . It was only when Faith turned to the end of the file that she found what she was looking for. Amid some sloppy notes written on cocktail napkins from the Triple Mark, she found one of Rudolph’s business cards. Written on the back, scribbled in pencil, was ITB684. It was the same number as the safety deposit box Sam shared with Rudolph. And suddenly her mood lifted. She popped a Lucky into her mouth and then started sorting through the articles Sam had written on Rudolph’s arrest for extortion and his alleged ties to the syndicate. The last article was filed the day before her father died; in it he questioned the credibility of the arresting officers, Dubrov and Collins, on whose testimony Rudolph was sent away. And Faith couldn’t help but notice that Rudolph’s sentencing had taken place the very day her father supposedly put the gun to his head.
Faith packed the Rudolph file into her attaché and rode back up to the newsroom. A young clerk holding an unmarked package was waiting for her when she reached her desk.
“Miss Rapaport?”
“Are you all right?” Faith asked. The boy’s face was pale and his entire body was trembling.
“A big guy in the lobby told me that I was to deliver this to you.”
“All right.”
“He told me that you were to call this number and tell the person on the other line that you had received it.”
“All right,” Faith said again, wondering why the boy was worked up.
“He said that I should stand by your desk until you made the phone call.”
“Why?”
“For peace of mind. He said that if he found out that you didn’t make the call, he would be waiting for me after work. He said that I wouldn’t want that to happen.”
“I see,” Faith said, taking the slip of paper from the boy. “I’ll call right away. You can calm down now.”
“Thank you, Miss Rapaport. I’ll try to. I’ve just never been . . . I’ve just never had a man like that . . . He scared me good, Miss Rapaport.”
Faith nodded her head and reached for the phone and dialed the number on the slip of paper. It rang a few times and then the same man with the broken-down voice who had called her early that morning answered the phone. “Yeah,” he said.
“I’ve got your package,” Faith said.
“Good. Send the clerk away.”
Faith placed her hand over the mouthpiece. “Everything’s all right now,” Faith said.
“Are you sure?”
Faith got back on the phone. “Tell the kid everything’s all right. You got him scared half to death.” Faith handed the phone to the clerk. “Here, he’ll tell you himself.”
The clerk took the phone. “Sir? . . . Yes, sir. . . . Thank you, mister.” The clerk handed the receiver back to Faith. “Thank you, Miss Rapaport,” he said.
Faith waited until the clerk was halfway a
cross the floor, on the way to the men’s room, before she said, “What’s this all about, Mr. Rudolph?”
“I knew you’d catch on, girlie. You got your father’s blood in you, for sure.”
“You knew my father well, I see.”
“Well enough to know he loved you more than himself, and would have suffered a lifetime of pain before he put a gun to his head. Unless, of course, someone was threatening you.”
Faith was quiet. A sadness started to swell in her chest as she thought about what Rudolph just said. “I see you tipped him off pretty often.”
“You know the game by now, sister. He used me. I used him. Sam Rapaport didn’t get around without putting his nose in it. That’s why he was as good as he was. But you know that. You were at his knee while he was at it.”
“Yeah,” Faith said, not wanting to continue in this way about Sam, “so, what have I got here?”
“That there? That’s what I sent your father the day before he was murdered. That there was the thing that got him killed.”
“This is what he’d put in that safety deposit box you steered me to?”
“That’s right.”
“What is it?”
“Some notes I wrote down on behalf of a client.”
“That client wouldn’t happen to be Boris Lardner, would it?”
“That’s right.”
“So, whoever killed Pop killed him to get this back?”
“To get that back and because of what he knew.”
“Who are we talking about here?”
“That’s the curious question, isn’t it?”
“You don’t know?”
“Sure I know. The same ones who set me up and sent me away for ten years. The same ones who killed Boris Lardner.”
“Who?”
“I think you probably already have an inkling.”
“The two narcotics cops?”
“That’s right. But the question is, if they’re involved, who else?”
“All right, who else?”
“Take a look at the file, then bring it over to the Prescot. I’ll see you there shortly.”
Faith hung up the phone. She turned around in her chair and looked across the floor in the direction of Marty Volman’s office. His shadow was in the doorway; it stood there as Faith bundled up and walked to the elevator. Faith rode down to the lobby, headed over to the coffee shop on the corner, took a table in the back, and opened the package.
