by David Grand
“Why didn’t you ever tell me this?”
“I didn’t take him seriously. Yes, I knew about the affair and the girl, Harry—and I remain disappointed in you for that—but, that aside, I never saw it amounting to anything like this,” Kelly said with his clear blue eyes trained on Harry. “I honestly didn’t think Tines was clever enough to make something like this wash.”
Harry just looked back at his father-in-law. “It wasn’t all him.”
“What have you left out?”
“Claude Fielding paid me a visit last night.”
“What did he have to say?”
“It’s nothing that we can repeat.”
“All right.”
“The State Department is behind Tines. They gave him full authority to do whatever he had to do in order to get rid of me.”
“Why’s the Department of State concerned about you?”
“They were afraid that if I won the election, that because of my politics, if I got wind of the Feds trying to discredit the Munitions Workers Union, I would obstruct Fief’s effort to relocate his plant.”
“That’s ludicrous.”
“Maybe so, but not ludicrous enough not to unleash Tines.”
“Is Claude willing to come out and say anything? Is there any way to make a case against the Department of State, against Tines?”
“There would be if I had any evidence. But as it is, Claude said he’d deny everything if I came forward.”
“Is there anything you can think of doing before we take the step of withdrawing your name from the race?”
“I hardly think so, Ed. At this point, with my men behind Lardner’s and Crown’s murders, me with motive to have ordered the hit . . . with the narcotics up in the Ten Lakes house connecting me to the syndicate, I don’t think there’d be much of a race.”
“You think Tines intends to use all this, or do you think he’ll hold back and want to use you?”
“I think I’m pretty well ruined, Ed, if not worse.”
Edward Kelly took a long hard breath. “I think it might be time to get you a lawyer.”
“Yeah,” Harry said, “I think that’s a decent idea.”
Edward Kelly reached for the phone on his desk and made a call. As he was waiting for the answer he said to Harry, “We’ll arrange a time for you to withdraw your name from the race tomorrow morning.”
“Yeah,” Harry said.
As the snow fell and packed the streets nearly a complete foot, as shades of indigo darkened the westward-facing windows across the street from her apartment, Faith Rapaport swallowed three sleeping pills chased by a large glass of whiskey. She closed her phone away inside a bureau drawer and placed a pillow over it for good measure. When the doorman delivered her newspaper from Marty, she looked it over briefly and then propped the photo of her father up on her nightstand. When she shut her eyes, the image of the smoke billowing out of her father’s mouth wouldn’t leave her head; it drifted into the hole she had seen in the back of Crown’s head that morning; the smoke drifted around the black gluey blood pooled around his body; it drifted through her father’s dead mouth, into her own, and once the sleeping pills took effect she dreamed of smoke sifting out of every pore of her body, until she was nothing more than mist and stillness.
Victor Ribe was nearly frostbitten when he returned to Fuller House. For more than two hours he walked the streets. For the first time since he was arrested, his mind could no longer contain his anguish, and he now wished it were he and not Benny Rudolph who exacted revenge against the forces that had put him behind bars for all those years. He now wished that when Ira and Pally had pulled him onto the street the day before, he had resisted and beaten them down and made them pay for what they had done to him. In the short time that he sat across from Elaine in the coffee shop, he understood from her tone of voice that the love they had felt for each other in their childhood was a true lasting love and that in his haste to run away from her after that day he escorted her to the abortionist’s office, he had abandoned that love as much as Elaine had. If he had only stayed behind, if he had only challenged Elaine and her father, if he could only have been as strong as the two of them combined, if he could have inherited his father’s stubbornness at that moment, his life would have been his own. Instead, he wandered haplessly into his manhood and inextricably joined himself with the worst horrors of humanity. He hated himself most of all for it. He hated his listless nature. He hated the man that he had allowed himself to become because of it.
For the first time in a very long time, a yearning so complete with a life of its own took hold of Victor, and he wanted more than anything else to find some dope.
By five o’clock, a deep calm had come over Freddy Stillman. Time for Freddy now slowed to an even slower increment of slower time. He spent the better part of an hour in a steamy bath. He anointed himself with bath oils. He shampooed his hair several times, until it was squeaky clean. He clipped his fingernails and nostril hairs and trimmed his pubes. He shaved his face and the uneven hair on the back of his neck, the hair growing like a vine up from his chest to his throat; he tweezed the middle-aged roots at the end of his earlobes. He pushed back his cuticles with a butter knife and brushed his hair with his fingers. He pressed his nicest suit and shirt and tie and brushed the lint off his hat and his coat, polished his shoes and his cufflinks, folded a handkerchief, and when all dressed, Freddy Stillman, though a little beaten and bruised around the eyes, looked as good as Freddy Stillman could possibly look. Six hundred dollars lining his inner pocket like a soft brick.
Freddy locked up his apartment and ventured back out into the storm. He rode the train downtown to the coffee shop next door to the Castaway movie theater, where Gloria Lime was already waiting for him, looking as becoming as Freddy hoped she would look, the soft flesh of her bosom exposed in the grim light of the restaurant. Freddy lightly tapped on the window and smiled at Gloria and looked onto her plunging neckline, at the line of its cleavage, as if it were a third party at the table, smiling knowingly at Freddy. And Freddy sighed. He sighed and he sighed again.
“Freddy,” Gloria said with concern when Freddy walked up to her table, “what happened to your face?”
“It doesn’t matter, Glory.”
“If you weren’t bruised up like that . . . what I mean is, you look handsome in that suit, Freddy.” Gloria took hold of Freddy’s hand and pulled him down next to her. “You look too good to be eating in a joint like this.”
“What do you say we move on, then? Over to the Biloxi?”
“Get outta here, Freddy. Since when are you loaded?”
Freddy stood up and offered Gloria his hand. “I’ve been saving for a special occasion.”
“You mean it?”
“Yeah, I mean it. I’ve been thinking about you a lot today, Glory, an awful lot. How it is you and I found each other the way we did at exactly the right time.”
Gloria stood up from her seat and reached up to touch Freddy’s forehead. “You sure you’re okay? You sure no one knocked you silly?”
“If anyone knocked me anywhere, they knocked some sense into me.” Freddy reached over to a hook on the wall near Gloria’s table and removed her coat. He wrapped it around Gloria’s shoulders and buttoned it for her, the entire time looking into her eyes, onto her painted face. He felt as though he could see every detail that went into making her and all he could think of was how he wanted to examine her more closely. If Freddy was going to be excommunicated from the living, he wanted to do as he pleased one last time.
Freddy held Gloria by the waist as she bundled herself into her hat and scarf and gloves, and then, arm in arm, Freddy and Gloria Lime walked into the stormy night. With the wind and the snow to their backs, they walked over to the Biloxi Hotel three blocks away, where instead of going to the restaurant, they took a room and ordered room service.
Sidney Lardner wasn’t much of a drinker, but after Benny Rudolph did his number on him that afternoon, after the unwa
nted company left his shoe repair shop, a gulping thirst for liquor came over him. He spent his last hours of anonymity at the bar inside the Prescot Building surrounded by life insurance claimsmen going over actuarial numbers. Oblivious to the men glibly bandying these numbers about, Sid quietly drank drink after drink, preoccupied not nearly so much with what he had done to his brother, not with the possibility that he might be brought up on charges for being an accomplice to his own brother’s murder, but more with the fact that Gloria Lime, the only person he genuinely cared for on this earth, the woman he loved obsessively, would soon learn what he had done. He was suffering more guilt for this deception than he had ever suffered for telling the bureau investigators where to find Boris the day they killed him. In fact, for interfering with his life at present, he hated Boris that much more on this day and wished he could watch him murdered all over again. Such was the nature of Sid Lardner, Sid thought to himself—lonely, pathetic, bitter, and full of anger for the world. Such was the reason no one all throughout Sid Lardner’s life cared for him.
Sidney got so drunk that afternoon, when he tried to make his way to the door, the insurance claimsmen—all of them customers of Sid’s—had to take hold of him and escort him back to his shoe repair shop. When they saw that he was alone with no one to care for him, they held him over the dirty toilet behind his workroom and tried to get him to purge himself of the liquor. Sid slurred incomprehensible curses at them until his big bovine eyes rolled up into his head, at which point one of the men found a shoehorn and, with his shirtsleeves rolled to his elbow, heroically stuck it down Sid’s throat until he gagged and vomited into the bowl what amounted to an entire bottle of whiskey. The men, feeling they had been sufficiently humane, left Sid, who was now awake, on the bathroom floor, hugging the toilet. He sat there in a fetal position for the better part of an hour, throwing up and nodding off.
When his head cleared and his body stopped convulsing, Sid, smelling of puke and sweat, wandered out onto the street. It was already dark, and he could hear in the distance, echoing up from the canyons of the financial district, paperboys screaming, “Globe extra, special edition!” He had no interest in seeing his picture in the paper, but cared less than anything else if those reading the paper saw him wandering the snowy streets, sodden and disheveled. On his way uptown, he walked into the throng of the rush-hour streets believing that men and women recognized him for what he was. He walked defiantly, he and his stink, staring anyone in the eye who bothered to take notice of him. He rode a crowded subway car and felt a surge of bitter power as people avoided him, buried their noses in their scarves, gave him space for his body to breathe. He rode all the way uptown to Gloria’s apartment, hoping he would be able to tell her in his own words what had been done to him this afternoon, hoping vaguely that she wouldn’t believe a word of it. He believed that if he could talk with her for just a few minutes, he could make her believe that the whole story, the pictures, were fabricated to discredit him, for accusing the government in the first place of killing Boris.
His anxiety became all but unbearable when he found Gloria was out. Then he remembered that she and Freddy Stillman had a date down at the Castaway. Sid stumbled into a corner liquor store and bought himself a pint of scotch and made his way downtown through the snow, walking with his coat and jacket open, his gut hanging over his belt, his hat tipping back on the crown of his head, cursing himself for nothing in particular—“You stupid fuck,” he said, “you stupid fuck.” He fucked at Freddy Stillman as much as he fucked at himself. He babbled away into the storm, stopping occasionally to dramatically crane his neck back as he tipped his bottle for a drink. When he finally felt the cold on his already numb skin, he descended back into the subway, and with rush hour coming to a close, he found a small spot on the back of the train and rode downtown relatively unnoticed.
The Castaway was so brightly lit Sidney had to look away from the marquee. A Marriage to Forget was playing, with Carl Gantry, Kate Horn, and Jimmy Swain. Sid placed the bottle under his coat, straightened his hat and coffee-stained tie, and bought a ticket. He went upstairs to an empty balcony and entered the film somewhere toward the end, as Jimmy Swain and Kate Horn were drunk and off for a swim. Sidney leaned over the balcony’s railing and tried to search the crowd; when a moon over a gazebo lit up the theater, he could see that Gloria and Freddy weren’t there. He flopped back into his seat and took a long drink, a very long drink, so that when he removed the bottle from his lips, the inside of his throat felt like someone had put out a whole carton of burning cigarettes inside his body. He stupid fucked himself some more and fucked Freddy Stillman an equal amount. When the house lights came on between shows, Sid’s fat pathetic eyes were once again rolled up into the back of his head and his bottle had dropped to the sticky balcony floor.
At around nine o’clock, Freddy woke up from a deep sleep. He woke up screaming deep from within his chest. When he opened his eyes, he found Gloria shaking him, her beautiful breasts shaking along with him. Freddy’s first instinct was to calm Gloria’s breasts. They were distraught, moving in ways beautiful breasts shouldn’t move, herky-jerky-like, so that they suddenly were no longer beautifully curved objects to be admired, but two inconsolable weapons. Freddy cupped Gloria’s breasts in his hands and defused them. Gloria tried to push Freddy away and screamed at him to cut it out. He wrestled her around so that he lay over her, so that her breasts lay still on either side of her chest, like two poached eggs.
“It’s all right,” Freddy insisted. He could feel the sweat dripping from his face, and although Gloria was no longer thrashing him about, he could still feel his body shaking, like an aftershock, but he couldn’t remember for the life of him why he was so upset.
“What’s happening, Freddy?” Gloria looked and sounded alarmed. “The things you were screaming . . . I’ve heard you scream some horrible things in your sleep, but nothing like this.” When she said the word “this” she looked scared.
“What did I say?”
“Please let me up, Freddy.”
“What did I say?”
“Who is Janice? What did you do to Janice?”
“What do you mean?” Freddy suddenly felt a shiver of fear.
“You were confessing something. You were swearing that it wasn’t you who killed Janice.”
“What did I say?” Freddy insisted, his mood turning. “What?” He started to shake Gloria.
“Stop it!” she screamed.
“What?” Freddy screamed back at her. “What did I say?”
Gloria’s face cringed and her body tensed up all over. “You’re hurting me, Freddy.”
“No,” Freddy said, letting go of Gloria, “I would never.” Freddy lifted his weight off of Gloria. He slid over to the opposite end of the bed and held his hands up so both he and Gloria could see them. “No,” he said again, “I would never.”
“Who is Janice?” Gloria asked as she pulled away from Freddy even farther and pushed herself off the bed. She opened a bureau drawer and took out a white hotel robe. She put it on and lit a cigarette.
Freddy sadly watched Gloria retreat to the window, looking out the deluxe suite they had taken. All he could think of was that Gloria’s breasts, her thighs, her delectable rump, were covered by the bathrobe. He wasn’t through with her yet. He had an overwhelming irrational need for her.
“You’re really scaring me, Freddy,” she said, looking back at Freddy, her voice shaking. Her hand with the cigarette looked as though it were having a seizure.
“It’s not what you think,” Freddy said calmly. “It was just a dream.”
“No,” Gloria said. “You didn’t hear yourself. You spoke so clearly.”
“It was just a dream, Glory. I swear it.”
“Tell me what’s going on with you, Freddy, or I’m walking out of here right now.”
“No,” Freddy said desperately, “you can’t.” Freddy got up out of bed and stood next to Gloria, his penis erect and pointing at her. “You do
n’t understand,” he said. Freddy reached for the sash of Gloria’s robe. “You can’t leave me,” he said. “Not tonight. I need to have you here with me.”
“Don’t!” Gloria said, pushing herself away from Freddy.
Freddy looked down at his hand as if it were a foreign object. The sash of the robe was in his hand. “Please, Glory,” Freddy said. He walked toward her with the robe’s sash dragging across the floor.
“Don’t come near me, Freddy,” Gloria warned as she retreated along the length of the wall. Her robe had come undone. Her breasts were exposed, her belly button staring at him like a third eye, and all Freddy could think of was to take hold of her.
“Try to understand,” Freddy kept saying quickly, frantically, as he walked toward her, “I . . . I . . . Just this last time . . . just this one last time so that I know that it was worth the . . .” He couldn’t finish the thought. He could only feel whatever the thing was inside him that was broken. The unidentifiable thing. The thing that he couldn’t locate in himself for as long as he could remember. He could feel this piece of himself missing that should have been there to tell him that what he wanted to do was wrong, was horrible. But all he could answer to at the moment was his desire. Freddy took hold of Gloria’s shoulders and threw her onto the bed. He gripped her throat, his thumbs pressing down onto her windpipe; his torso crushed down on her chest, his hard cock rubbed up against her inner thigh. Gloria struggled and writhed, swung her head from side to side, and then acquiesced when she noticed that the burning cigarette she had been smoking was smoldering on the sheet beside her. As Freddy let go of her throat and lifted himself over her, she grabbed the cigarette and with all her strength dug it into Freddy’s cheek.
“You fucking bastard!” Gloria screamed at Freddy when he fell away from her. She hit Freddy across the face, right where she had burned him with the cigarette. She swatted at him with her fingernails, and then she hit him again and again with an open hand, and Freddy, with a beaming deadness to his eyes, let her hit him. He didn’t move.
