by David Grand
“Is that why you’re doing this?”
“In part.” Benny looked to the door of the back room, where Sid had been sitting quietly all this time.
“You going to tell me how you got my father mixed up in this?”
Benny pulled on his ear a couple of times and scratched at his head a little. “Unlike you or me, your father was a man of principles.”
“And how’d he end up in that shop a couple days before I got released from Farnsworth, Benny?”
“I convinced him it was the right time to act on his principles.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I had a client who would benefit from what he wanted to do in the first place.”
“Stop talking in puzzles, Benny. I don’t have time now to work through your puzzles.”
Benny pinched at his nose with his fingers, shook his head, repeating under his breath in mock disbelief, “You don’t have time . . .”
“Who was this client?” Victor pressed.
“If I tell you that . . .”
“If you tell me, Benny, you’ll give me some peace of mind, the first peace of mind I’ve had in many years.”
Benny looked at Victor hard. “If I tell you, your peace of mind is only good so long as you keep your trap shut, understood?”
“I won’t talk. You know that.”
“So I do.” Benny paused, hesitating again, then jumped in matter-of-factly. “Your father actually thought he was starting an uprising. He thought that his actions would drive Fief out of Long Meadow and the union would then be able to take over the plant.”
“Why would he think that?”
“That’s what he believed. What can I say?”
“Why, Benny? Why would he believe that?” Victor persisted.
“To show everyone how belligerent the union is, that’s why.”
“There’s more to it than this, Benny, and you know there is. Be straight with me.”
Benny looked Victor square in the eye. “I told him that if he did it, I’d get you out of jail. Somehow, it made good sense to him—to get what he wanted on both ends. Like I said, he was a man of principles. It was just the push he needed to do what he’d been dreaming of doing to begin with.”
Victor hadn’t expected that. He loved his father for doing it for him, but lost respect for the “man of principles” Benny had been describing.
“Once he understood the truth about your situation, he suddenly felt all those fifteen years of your life, suffering in that cell. He couldn’t stand it that he hadn’t thought better of you when you told him that you were innocent. He couldn’t stand himself for having cut you off.”
Victor’s jaw clenched shut and started grinding his teeth.
“He wasn’t supposed to get killed, Victor. And not to be callous, but it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever done for this client. I’m not a naïf like you, a man of principles like your father. Never have been.”
“You just finished saying this was different, that you’re trying to set things right, and then you tell me that you’re on the inside of something dirty like this. I don’t get it.”
“I didn’t get it at first, either, to be honest.”
“So what are you doing all this for? Fief can’t be paying for all this.” Victor gestured grandly around the room, but quickly realized that he was just showcasing a small room full of old shoes. He put his arms down and just looked at Benny, who looked up from the floor and met his gaze.
“What can I say?” Benny said, tugging on his ear again. “It was an exchange. I got what I wanted, they got what they wanted: fair deal. I wouldn’t’ve found any peace otherwise. You understand? It’s the only thing that’s been keeping me going, living with this . . .” Benny pounded on his chest a little.
“It ain’t right, Benny.”
“I know.” Benny started laughing and then coughing. This time the blood splattered onto Sidney’s display case of galoshes before he could get his handkerchief out. Benny looked at the blood, bemused.
“What about the other men at the plant?” Victor asked. “What’s going to happen to them?”
“To be honest, your guess is as good as mine,” Benny said as he stood up. “Buy yourself a paper tomorrow afternoon.”
Victor stood up with Benny and put on his coat. “So is this it, Benny? Are we done for good?”
“I never really needed you to begin with, Victor.” Benny smiled again. “I just wanted to get you out.”
“Yeah, well, I do appreciate that,” Victor said to Benny in a soft voice. “I do appreciate that.”
“I put some more money into that account of yours.”
Victor didn’t say anything.
“And you should also know that your father, he willed his house in Long Meadow to you. He gave this to me in case something happened.” Benny took an envelope out of his attaché and handed it to Victor. “It’s the will and the deed to the property.”
Victor stuffed the envelope into one of his coat pockets and looked back at the door of the workroom. “What are you going to do with him back there?”
“I think I’ll let him sit in there and stew for a while,” Benny said. He walked behind the counter and quietly unlocked the door. “He’s got what’s coming to him.”
“I’ll see you around, Benny.” Victor started out.
“Probably not.”
“Yeah,” Victor said, and stepped out into the lobby of the Prescot Building. He walked through the long corridor and started for uptown when he reached the street.
Chapter 33
When Freddy walked into his apartment, the two men who he had seen enter his building from the Martins’ stoop were now standing inside his living room. They looked to Freddy to be too clean-cut to be gangsters; they were a far throw from a man like Stu Zawolsky, or Feldman for that matter. Their suits were conservatively cut; they wore solid ties, black shoes, white shirts; one of them wore glasses that a librarian might have worn and carried an attaché; the other had a camera dangling from his shoulder. They didn’t introduce themselves to Freddy. All they did was look around at the quaint grandmotherly decoration of his apartment.
“What can I do for you?” Freddy asked, hearing the nervousness in his own voice as he looked to each of the men. Benign as this pair looked, he had no idea what he was in for.
“You have the carbons from the dispatch?” the man wearing the glasses asked.
“Yeah,” Freddy said. Freddy pulled out the copies of the dispatch forms from his jacket pocket, and handed them to the man. The man looked them over some, placed them in his attaché, then nodded to the man carrying the camera. “All right, let’s go, Mr. Stillman.”
“Where?” Freddy asked.
“For a little ride.”
“Where?” Freddy asked again.
The two men didn’t answer. They turned Freddy around and escorted him outside to a black sedan and put him in the backseat.
They sludged and skated uptown through the half foot of snow that had fallen. They drove up to Ninety-fifth Street, where they boarded the Barkley ferry bound for Long Meadow. The men remained businesslike with Freddy, speaking to him only long enough to give him orders. With all the snow and barges of ice, the current of the river appeared on the surface to be slow, but Freddy could feel its force working on the ferry’s starboard underbelly as they crossed the river’s girth westward. Freddy remained seated in the back of the car and tried to get a glimpse of the Long Meadow Palisades over the ferry’s nose as the boat dipped and dodged over the wakes of cargo ships, but through the heavy snow, the opposite shore was whitewashed; until they were a few hundred feet from shore, all Freddy could make out was the bright lights of the tugs illuminating the heavy gray daylight.
The landscape of the Palisades came into view as the ferry landed. The man who had been carrying the camera revved up the car’s engine as the porter lifted the gate and slipped out the gangplank. The few cars that had ridden the ferry over to Long Meadow rumbled up the wi
nding road leading away from the ferry landing, and the two men and Freddy followed. When they reached the top of the road at the edge of the town, the car veered right onto Palisades Parkway and the man behind the wheel slowly drove into the thickening storm with his head nearly pressed against the windshield. Every half mile the snow-and-ice-encrusted billboards covered in paintings of the birds marked the road for him. They passed the well-marked Promontory Peak and then continued on past long stands of birch and maple, oak and pine, passed small roads that seemed to lead nowhere. When they had traveled a few miles, they turned onto a narrow stretch cut through a stand of trees that led back in the direction of the river, and the driver traversed and dodged ruts and heavy tree roots hidden by the soft pack of snow. They finally reached a shack at the end of the road, just a hundred yards from the riverbank. A car was parked outside the shack and a lantern burned in the window.
“All right, let’s go, Mr. Stillman,” the man with the glasses said to Freddy when the driver parked the car.
“What are we doing here?” Freddy asked. A portly man in a heavy red hunting coat opened the door of the shack and stood half lit in the yellow light of the lantern.
“We need a few snapshots for our photo album,” the driver said as he grabbed his camera and a flash from the front seat.
The two men swung their doors open and climbed out into the snow. Freddy slowly opened the back door and stepped out along with them, then trudged behind them to the man waiting at the shack’s entrance.
When the man with the glasses reached the shack, he reached into his attaché and removed a small hand mirror. As he undid the clasps of the mirror and slipped out a piece of paper from the mirror’s backing, Freddy could hear the man with the glasses say quietly, “All right, Mr. Sendak, these are the coordinates. As we discussed before, the ship will dock at midnight. You check over the plant, make sure no one is around. Open the armory at a quarter to midnight, then make your way down to the docks and wait out of sight. Got it?”
The portly man nodded his head and looked over to Freddy. “What do I do with him?”
“I just want you to stand right here so we can document the exchange of this document. . . . Mr. Stillman,” the man said, turning to Freddy, “stand right here.” The man took Freddy by the shoulders and set him in front of the door so his body was sufficiently facing out toward the man with the camera. The man with the glasses then handed Freddy the list. “You just stand here and hold this out so the print is facing the camera.”
Freddy held up the list in front of Sendak’s face.
“A little lower . . . just like that. Perfect. Don’t move.” The man fell back a few yards behind the man with the camera.
As Freddy stood there with his arm outstretched, presenting the document to Mr. Sendak, the flash from the man’s camera burst into Freddy’s eyes, turning the falling snow into shining glitter. When he was through, the man with the glasses approached Freddy again and took the paper from him, and handed it to his partner, who immediately started copying the information onto a pad. “Now, are you certain the order will be packed before the end of the day?” the man with the glasses asked Mr. Sendak.
“Yeah,” Sendak said nervously. “It’s a pretty tremendous order, but I’ll keep men over to finish it up and have them out in time. They’ve filled bigger in less time.”
“Good. We’ll be in touch.”
“You’re gonna be watching my back, I hope.”
“You have nothing to worry about, Mr. Sendak.”
“You just keep up your end. You tell that to Rudolph. I ain’t as stupid as he makes me out to be.”
The man with the glasses ignored Sendak and walked away from the shack with Freddy in tow.
“Rudolph?” Freddy said to the man.
The man ignored Freddy as well and escorted him back to his seat in the car. “You keep your mind on what’s important, Mr. Stillman,” he cautioned him when he shut the door. “Let’s go,” he said to the man with the camera.
The cameraman put the finishing touches on his notes, handed the paper to Sendak, then returned to the car. He turned the engine over and pulled out away from the shack back in the direction of the ferry landing.
Chapter 34
The shades of Marty Volman’s office were still drawn when Faith returned to the Globe offices. Faith knew that he was in there waiting for her, drunk stiff; he’d probably been drinking since she left for the meeting and by now had finished off his bottle of bourbon. She decided to let him wait. She knew that if she didn’t sit down and write her story, that if she went in there to talk with Marty, if she saw his eyes, if she started remembering what he’d been to her, she might not go through with the story. She gathered together the notes on her desk, the Ribe and Rudolph files, the pieces of the story she had collected just a short while ago in Sid’s shoe repair shop, and piled them up beside her typewriter. She then removed the story her father had written all those years ago, the story that had never made it into print on account of Marty, and nearly word for word copied it out, updating as she went along to tell the part of the story that involved her father’s murder, Crown’s murder, Sid Lardner’s role in setting up his brother, the miscarriage of justice weighed down on Benny Rudolph and Victor Ribe, how it was that her father’s closest friend, the man that she thought of as her own father, suppressed Sam Rapaport’s story to save his own neck.
In less than an hour, after Faith had smoked herself through half a pack of Lucky’s, all the connected stories were complete; the photos, the letters, the text from Rudolph’s notes, were all in order; all the questions and speculations about Harry Shortz’s involvement raised and thought through; all the details about how Faith received a call early this morning and how she found herself in the company of Murray Crown’s corpse. She recounted how it was she discovered her father in a similar state fifteen years earlier. She wondered what exactly it all amounted to, how it was all connected, or if it was simply Benny Rudolph trying to make just an unjust past.
Faith then gathered everything together and walked to Marty’s office. Without looking at any of her colleagues, without knocking, she opened the door, walked in, and closed the door behind her. She found Marty passed out, snoring, with his head resting precariously on the edge of his desk. Faith tried to shake him awake. She tried pinching his flared nostrils closed. And when she realized nothing else would work, she reached over Marty’s desk, took hold of a fresh seltzer bottle, and sprayed him right between the eyes until his eyelashes started fluttering and he started hacking a dry cough. When he was alert enough to understand what was going on, he reeled back in his chair and wiped his face with the sleeve of his jacket. “Faith,” he said in a weak voice. “You’re back.”
“I’m back,” Faith said.
“I dozed off.”
“I see,” Faith said, looking at the empty bottle of bourbon in the trash and a fresh quarter-empty fifth on his desk.
“You got your story,” Marty continued, still waking.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah,” Marty said. He pointed to the hip pocket of Faith’s pants and made a crooked V with his fingers. Faith removed a cigarette from her pocket, lit it for Marty, and then placed it in his hand. “Thanks.”
Faith took the same seat she had sat in earlier in the day and lit a cigarette for herself.
“So . . .” Marty said, looking at the smoke clouding around Faith’s head.
“It’s all right, Marty,” Faith said. “You can look at me.”
“I really can’t, Faith. I’m afraid everything’s a blur.”
“Look at me, Marty.”
Marty tried to focus his eyes on Faith. His eyes weren’t shining as they had that morning, when he’d put on his charade for her. His eyes were bloodshot and drunk and full of shame. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything. Just read the story and get it to the typesetter.”
“Give it to Jonesy.”
“I ain’t giving it to
Jonesy. You’re taking care of this one, Marty.”
“Don’t make me do that, Faith.”
“If I give it to Jonesy, he’ll run it as it is. If I give it to you, you can edit those parts out about yourself. I don’t feel the need for you to be in there, Marty.”
Marty shook his head. “I can’t do that, cupcake.”
“Yes, you can. You’re the editor.”
“No,” Marty said. “You don’t understand. I can’t.”
“Marty,” Faith said, “I got a brain up here, remember? I know what they would have done to you. They would have knocked you off, plain and simple.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Sure I do.”
“If I’d just picked up the phone to call the police . . .”
“Then they definitely would have killed you.”
“At least Sam would have been around and all this would have come out the right way.”
“I don’t buy it, Marty.”
“It doesn’t matter, sweetheart. It’s all been arranged.”
“Then rearrange it.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because if we don’t do it this way, it’ll come out in the Tribune or the Herald or the Times or the Observer, tomorrow, or in a couple of days. That’s just the way it is.”
“Is that what Rudolph told you?”
Marty nodded his head. “So, you see, like he said, at least I get a little feeling as to what it’s like to pull the trigger myself. And you know what, sugar? He’s right that it should be me who does it.”
“You’ll lose your pension.”
“Don’t worry about that. I’ll make do.”
“If you haven’t noticed, Marty, it’s hard times out there.”
Marty’s eyes turned misty. “The important thing is, Faith, that no matter what this says here, you gotta believe that I love you like you’re my own. I loved your father like a brother. You understand that? You understand why I looked out for you all these years? Why it was I couldn’t bring myself to say anything about it, right?”
Faith nodded.
“I didn’t want you losing that much more hope for this rotten world.”
