The Disappearing Body

by David Grand

  “I get it, Marty.”

  “And if you feel like hating me for what I’ve done . . .”

  “I wouldn’t know how.”

  “You should, Faith. Because of me, they took away all you had left. Because of me . . .”

  Faith could feel the idea of it biting at her for the first time. She started to feel the nature of Marty’s deception run through her limbs. It didn’t occur to her until just then that Marty had known what was going to happen to Sam before it happened. Her entire body started to feel as though her bones had been warped by a bitter chill on her way uptown from the Prescot Building. “They would have eventually taken him,” Faith reasoned. “You knew him best. You knew he would have given them grief until it was too late.”

  “You got a good heart, kid. But, listen, it’s okay when you wake up tomorrow hating me that you keep on doing it. Okay?”

  “Whatever you say, Marty.”

  “But just remember when you’re hating me like that, that I’ll be loving you until I take my last breath.”

  Faith started to get a little misty now.

  “Just so we’re clear.”

  “We’re clear, Marty.”

  “Good. Now take a powder. I’ll send this downstairs and get the presses rolling.”

  “I’m going to go home, if that’s all right with you.”

  “Anything you do, Faith, is all right by me.”

  “I’ll see you around, Marty.”

  “Yeah, Faith, I’ll see you around.”

  When Faith reached the door to Marty’s office, she took hold of the knob and held it in her hands for a moment too long. “Marty?”

  “What is it?”

  “Just for the sake of it, will you hear me out about one last thing?”

  “Sure, anything.”

  Faith turned around and sat back down on the edge of the chair opposite Marty’s desk. “There’s something bigger here. You know that, don’t you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “C’mon, Marty, I know it’s been a rough day, but try to think. Think about all that’s happened in the last few days. Think about it.”

  Marty shook his head drunkenly. “If you want me to see beyond this,” Marty said, patting Faith’s story with his hand, “you’re going to have to do some thinking for me.”

  “Look at it,” Faith said. “All in a few days, what have we got? We got an explosion in a machinist shop in Long Meadow. Six men get killed. At about the same time, Victor Ribe gets sprung from jail, and it just so happens that one of those machinists killed in the explosion was his father. Crown turns up dead, then Mann and Roth, American Allied goes out of business, and Eliopoulos disappears, all in the same day. What’s the connection, Marty?”

  Marty drunkenly shook his head again.

  “It’s gotta be right in front of our faces for chrissakes.”

  “I wish I could tell you, Faith.”

  “I wish you could, too, Marty. Because I feel it in my gut.”

  Marty looked down to his desk in such a way Faith thought he was going to be sick, but she saw that Marty was reading though the article she had written in the afternoon edition.

  “The Southside Docks,” Marty read slowly from a paragraph in the middle of the story. “Tersi bought the Southside Docks from Eliopoulos. Why?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “You ask me, you should find out.”

  “Why?”

  “A hunch.”

  Faith looked at Marty lovingly. “Won’t you think it over?” she said, pointing with her nose to the article she had just written.

  Marty shook his head.

  Faith stood up and walked behind Marty’s desk. She bent down, gave him a kiss on the bald crown of his head, and looked down on him. “You know, Marty, you played it up good this morning. Real good.”

  “Thanks, sweetheart.”

  “You’ve been good to me all these years.”

  “I tried. I really did try to be.”

  Faith gave Marty another kiss. “I’ll see you around.”

  “I certainly hope so, cupcake.”

  Faith let go of Marty and walked out of his office. She gathered her things from her desk, put on her coat and hat, and rode the elevator to the lobby.

  Chapter 35

  When Victor left Benny Rudolph at the Prescot Building, he rode the subway to midtown and took a booth inside the coffee shop opposite the Ansonia Hotel. For the better part of an hour, he drank coffee and stared through a small hole he had rubbed away in the restaurant’s steamy plate-glass window. As it came to the end of the hour, he saw Elaine Brilovsky crossing the avenue in his direction out from the downpour of snow. He watched her step over the curb and pull open the door. When she walked inside the coffee shop, Victor slowly stood up and anxiously waited for her to recognize him. To his surprise, she saw him immediately and, without hesitation, made her way over to his table. As she approached, he could feel his eyes open and close, as though each blink of the eye were the still frame of a motion picture. When she was standing before him, looking cautiously at his beaten face, he could now see that she was no longer the woman that he kept in his thoughts. The skin around her eyes and mouth had started to wrinkle; her face had become more full; thick, unruly silver wisps of hair hung like floating electric charges, as though they had grown directly from the core of her youthful intensity. She now appeared to have grown calm—and resigned—and, perhaps, more kind-looking. “Are you all right, Victor?” she asked. The ambient sounds of the restaurant fell away from Victor when she spoke, and Victor realized at that moment that he had forgotten what her voice had sounded like; he had forgotten how much solace he felt whenever she spoke his name. “Victor?” Elaine said. “Haven’t you anything to say?”

  “Yes, of course,” Victor said. “I’m sorry. I just . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I just can’t find the right words.”

  Elaine tilted her head slightly. “Your face, Victor. I was trying to ask about your face.”

  Victor touched his face. “Part of my past caught up with me,” he said plainly.

  “Seems to be happening a lot lately.” Victor watched Elaine as she pulled off her gloves with the same air of self-possession that he had remembered for all these years. With the gloves off, she reached up to his face with her right hand and gently held it there, then pulled him down so that she could kiss his cheek. “Why don’t we sit,” she said as she released him.

  “Please,” Victor said.

  Elaine removed her coat and hat and hung them on the hook of the booth. The waitress walked over. As Elaine ordered a coffee, Victor reached into the pocket of his jacket and removed the picture that he had carried with him for so many years. He set it down on the table when the waitress left and pushed it to Elaine’s side of the table. As delicately as she had greeted him, she touched the corner of the picture and drew it close to her. “I’ve carried it with me everywhere,” Victor said quietly.

  Elaine rubbed her fingers over the most worn parts of the paper. She remembered the day clearly. She remembered Victor easing her off the boardwalk of the seaside into the photographer’s studio. She remembered when they were children growing up in Long Meadow how carefreely she and Victor spent time together in the fields that ran along the Palisades. She remembered how as they walked through tall spring grass and wildflowers, his long fingers would unknowingly and harmlessly brush the new blooms as they swayed in the breeze. She remembered that when she first knew him she thought she would love him unconditionally for the rest of her life. She recalled her father’s disdain for Victor’s lack of direction. “Now I don’t know what to say,” she said.

  “You don’t need to say anything.” Victor shook his head. “I know it might sound odd, but I just wanted to thank you for keeping me company.”

  Elaine continued looking at the picture, at the flags atop the carousel, at the way Victor’s hand so nicely fit inside the gulf of her young waist.

&nb
sp; “I needed to remind myself that it was all once real.”

  Elaine was struck by how remarkably her son resembled Victor in this picture, and then by how remarkably similar their temperaments were, and she began to wonder what her life would have been had that part of her been absent. “It’s never stopped being real for me,” Elaine said as she ran her fingers over the image of Victor’s face.

  The waitress returned to the table and left Elaine’s coffee. Elaine took a sip from the mug, then turned to the fogged window and looked in the direction of the hotel. After a moment, she said, “Did you know that Joshua noticed you following us these past few days?”

  “I can explain that.”

  “No,” Elaine said with a kind smile. “You don’t need to. Father, he told me that you were here and . . .” She continued to smile. “I know this may seem cruel, but when I saw you myself in the museum earlier today, I was relieved that your face was so bruised as it is.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was afraid that Joshua would recognize himself if he saw you. I thought it might startle him.”

  “Then he doesn’t know about me.”

  “No.”

  Victor extended his jaw as if he were about to say something, but nothing came out. The dark crevices that meandered through his face were suddenly attenuated; they stretched into a map of taut creases that made apparent to Evelyn the long quiet suffering Victor had been through in the years she hadn’t see him.

  “I tried to find you,” Elaine said. “Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “I’m not surprised Father didn’t tell you.”

  “No, I’m not either.”

  “Well, when I found out that you were gone, that you had been sent overseas, I was devastated. I . . .”

  Victor reached out and touched her hand to silence her, and then withdrew it. “I’m glad you found someone to take care of you.”

  “Arthur was very kind to me.”

  Victor was quiet for a moment. “When I got back from the war,” Victor managed, “after your father told me what happened, I thought I would travel to Russia and try to find all of you.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “My nerves,” Victor said. “I was pretty broken up. I always intended to go, but the more time that passed, the more I convinced myself that if we were going to see each other again, if I was ever going to see my son—Joshua—fate would eventually draw us together.”

  “Fate.”

  Victor nodded.

  Elaine smiled. “Is that really what you believed?”

  “I don’t know.” Victor smiled now. “You have to understand, Elaine, when I returned from the war, after seeing the things that I saw and doing the things that I did to stay alive, what we had together all those years? It was this wonderful, beautiful dream. I couldn’t take it if I did anything to ruin it.”

  “But I treated you so horribly.”

  “You were the most decent thing that happened to me in my entire life.” Victor started running his finger up and down the edge of a knife sitting on the table. “When I was in prison? Every morning when I’d wake up in my cell, I would dream of you, of us.” Victor suddenly felt so moved, as if the knife he was playing with had split open a vein.

  “Victor, please say what you were going to say.”

  Victor remained silent.

  “Please, Victor.”

  “They were just dreams.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  Victor set the knife aside and took hold of his empty coffee mug. “I didn’t know what Russia looked like,” he started, and he looked renewed to Elaine as he talked, like an entirely different man. “I didn’t know what your husband looked like, or Joshua, but I dreamed of you all sitting inside a cozy dining room by a small kitchen, eating your breakfast and drinking your coffee. After morning roll call, when I went to work in the quarry, I dreamed of peasants breaking their backs in the fields, and I would see you and Joshua pass by, wrapped in warm coats, carrying bags of bread and cheese. When I had to walk in endless circles in the prison yard, following the other inmates in a line, I dreamed of you and the boy running through some grand park with big oak trees and ponds with small boats floating across the water. When the lights went out in my cell at night? I was there by the boy’s bedside with you, just sitting there, watching him sleep.”

  Elaine reached across the table and took one of Victor’s hands.

  “Will you promise me something, Victor?”

  “Yes.”

  “In the spring, when the snow’s cleared and the trees have come back, will you take me and Joshua walking along the bluffs in Long Meadow?”

  Victor lost his voice again.

  “We’ll pack a picnic, just the three of us.”

  Victor’s lips began to quiver.

  “And we’ll walk among the cherry blossoms where we used to meet?”

  In Victor’s mind, he could feel Elaine’s hand in his as they walked along the stream beside the cherry blossom orchard.

  “And we’ll wait for dark and we’ll tell Joshua how we would sit by the stream and wait for the birds to fill the branches of the trees?”

  Victor nodded his head. He nodded it violently. An incredible pressure was now filling the walls of his chest. It was building inside his head. “I need to go now, Elaine,” he said, letting go of her hand.

  “But we’ve only just started talking.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’ll call for you tomorrow, if that’s all right with you, but right now, I’ve got to go. I’ve really got to go.”

  “In the morning. Arthur, he’ll be leaving early tomorrow morning. Come by then.”

  “I’ll be by as early as I can.”

  Victor left Elaine at the table and rushed out into the snow, bumping diners and upsetting coffee cups on his way out. Once outside, he just walked in the snow with no one looking over him. He walked feeling the pain from the blows he had received the night before; he walked feeling the loss of his father, feeling the lost time taken from his youth, and the tears that he had held back at the table with Elaine, held back while locked inside his prison cell for fifteen years, broke from their ducts like a river bursting forth through the concrete seams of a faltering dam, and as the water flowed through the deep crevices of Victor’s face, he let out a horrible moan that bellowed through the storm and into the canyon of buildings. As he walked, he remembered feeling the warmth of Elaine’s lips on his cheek, and the moan grew deeper in pitch, and then Victor Ribe quietly sat down on a bus stop bench and quietly began to sob.

  Chapter 36

  Shortly before five o’clock on this snowy Friday, the Globe extra hit the streets. The newspaper boys, emanating from smoky truck exhaust filling the loading docks, trudged out of the Globe’s distribution center weighed down by heavy canvas bags, screaming, “Globe extra, special edition! Narcotics Bureau caught in corruption scandal! Read all about it! Commissioner Harry Shortz murder suspect! Read all about it!” On the front page was the photograph of Dubrov, Collins, and Klempt heaving Boris Lardner off the el tracks. Inset was the photo of Klempt attacking Victor with his gun, Sidney Lardner in the background. Inside were photographs of the blackmail letter from Sid to Boris, and an excerpt from Benny Rudolph’s case file on Harry Shortz’s affair. Also printed was the original story written by Sam Rapaport on all that was discovered by him those days before his murder; his story ran parallel to Faith’s more current account. And there was a formal resignation letter from Marty Volman.

  Before the paper had gone to press, Marty Volman, in his drunken state, somehow managed to find the clarity of mind to write an honest and dignified mea culpa to his readers and his colleagues, neither pitiful nor self-justifying. When he finished the note, for the first time since Sam Rapaport’s death, Marty went down to the basement to Sam’s famous file drawers and pulled out a photo of Sam taken outside a mayoral inauguration. Sam was dressed in his signature overcoat and a strangely positioned top hat as
he blew cigar smoke up the mayor-elect’s nose. Marty returned to the newsroom and dropped the photo with Jonesy. Told him to make sure it ran opposite Sam’s story. Thought this image of your father would please you, Marty wrote to Faith in a note when the first papers rolled off the presses. It pleases me no end. He clipped the note to the page that ran the photo, then left the Globe Building. He walked uptown in the storm and hand-delivered the paper to Faith’s doorman, knowing full well she would be pleased.

  As the newsboys screamed his name on the sidewalks, Harry Shortz sat in his father-in-law’s study explaining to him the full extent to which he was involved in this scandal. Man to man the two went over everything that had happened in the past few days and eventually got around to discussing Harry’s lapse of judgment with regard to Edward Kelly’s daughter. Harry swore to his father-in-law that it was the only time in his marriage that he had strayed. He swore that though he had improperly exonerated Boris Lardner, he had taken part in no plot to kill him. He swore that the promise he had made to Boris Lardner he had kept, and that he had no knowledge of his men’s deceits.

  “I should have seen it coming,” Edward Kelly said with some regret. “I can’t help but feel a little responsible.”

  “Why do you say that?” Harry asked.

  “Why?” Edward Kelly said, his elbows on his desk, the palms of his hands resting against his cheeks. He sat across from Harry in front of a wall lined with photographs of Harry, Beverly, and his grandchildren. He was an aging man in good health and good spirits, with a headful of graying brown hair, distinguished in every regard. “I was warned.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Before your nomination was announced,” Kelly said, leaning back in his desk chair, “Tines came to see me and tried to tell us to back away from the election.”

  “How exactly?”

  “He wasn’t specific in any way. He just said that he thought it was a mistake for your career, my reputation. . . . He intimated that it would be a grave misstep for the party to try to push you through to the fall. I honestly thought it was all a bunch of nonsense and bluster, and took it as an assault on our confidence in you.”