by David Grand
Freddy threw his coat and briefcase over the arm of the sofa. He walked into the bedroom, picked up the bottle of bourbon from the floor, and placed it on the table. He pulled a clean ashtray from a drawer and another teacup off the desk, then filled the cups to the rim. Victor took hold of his drink and sipped off its edge.
“Can I ask you something, Victor?”
“What is it?”
“Just something I was thinking about while we were across the street.”
“What is it?”
“You remember the time when we were stranded out in the French countryside during the war?”
“Yeah, sure, I remember.”
Victor remembered the very simple woman and the very simple child and the small barn in which he, Freddy, and Boris had spent the night. He remembered Freddy’s face when he saw the woman and the child in the vegetable garden, limp and crooked, the blood from their slit throats filling the crevices of moist tilled earth. Freddy caught sight of the soldier that did this, and when he chased him down, he unloaded his side arm into the man’s face.
“You think he would have been grateful that I spared him a lifetime of bad memories?” Freddy asked.
“I don’t know,” Victor said as he recalled the stricken faces of the men that he had disposed of in the trenches.
“He was the first, the first one I’d seen up close before I killed him.”
“You killed a lot of men,” Victor said tiredly. “We all did.”
“The funny thing is, I never really saw his face before I did away with it . . . he fell face first into the mud when he was trying to run away.”
“He deserved what he got, Freddy.”
“Maybe so, but I’ll tell you, he’s the one I dream about most.” Freddy looked away from Victor to one of the muddy watercolor paintings of the Martins’ country property. “It was the smell of the woman’s and the girl’s blood that made it stick to me, I think. The fact that when we buried them, I could actually smell the blood after coming out of the trenches, away from the stench of all that rotting flesh.” Freddy shook his head as he lit another cigarette. “It’s strange, since Evelyn left, I see her face like I see that soldier’s. It’s not so horrific as that, but it’s just everywhere. Everywhere I look, I see her, as if she were some kind of apparition.”
Victor didn’t know what to say. He just stared at Freddy in such a way that his spirit seemed to momentarily vacate his body. He recalled the emptiness he had felt while in his cell, the longing he had to be touched by another person, the memories he had made sacred of him and Elaine Price riding the ferries between the City and Long Meadow when they were young.
“I know it’s on the early side,” Freddy said, “but I think maybe you should get some rest.”
Victor nodded his head. “It’s been a long day.”
“You want to stay the night?”
“You don’t mind?”
“Come on, I’ll take you downstairs.”
Freddy put out his cigarette and walked down the hall leading to the kitchen. Victor rose from his seat and followed Freddy. As they walked down the hall, Freddy looked to Victor like a thin pool of a man flattened against the wall, nearly folding in on himself.
Freddy opened the door next to the stove, turned on a light, and walked down some stone steps into the cellar. The cellar was a large, low-lying space that expanded across the foundation of the house. Strewn about half the floor were pipes and hardware, some gardening implements leaning against columns, and a few broken-down brass bed frames. The other half of the floor contained a potbelly furnace, a large metal bin filled with coal, a table, and a chair. On top of the table was a shortwave radio with a wire running out its back, inching up the wall and out a small hole in the windowpane. Beside the table was a canvas cot, a bulky pillow, and a heavy gray wool blanket. With all its clutter it was a clean, dry room filled with the deep and constant sucking noise of the furnace.
Freddy took a seat before the shortwave radio and flipped on a switch, to listen in, to listen to something on the outside for a minute. A soft brush of static burst out and then was invisibly consumed by the furnace fire. An occasional detached voice rose above the hush as Victor, without removing Noel Tersi’s coat, laid himself out on the cot and stared up to the thick beams of the ceiling, listening to the words as they whispered into his ears. “. . . tug at the stern . . .” static “. . . long journey, long indeed . . .” static “nice to be . . .” static “nice to be . . .” Freddy watched Victor’s swollen eyes shut and watched his breathing ease. He watched him until Victor was deeply asleep, then pulled the blanket over his legs and up to his chest.
Chapter 16
After his visit to the Fief Building, Harry Shortz started back downtown to the office, briskly, but after a few blocks, the brisk pace turned into a stroll and the stroll came to a halt. He had stopped dead in his tracks, in the middle of the rush-hour crowd, his feet feeling like they were rooted to the sidewalk. Every part of himself that made his body move felt like it was stuck. The bodies behind and approaching detoured around him and bounced off his rigid arms as though they were limbs of a tree jutting up from the bottom of a river. He stood solid like this in the frigid headwind until his cheeks and nose had become numb with pain, when suddenly from behind, a man as large as Harry accidentally knocked into him and spun him around. Harry’s feet started moving again, and now that he was facing uptown, away from the office and in the direction of home, he decided home felt like the right place to be.
Harry and Beverly Shortz lived in a three-story East End townhouse on Sixty-third between Grand and Shrine. The house was dark when Harry arrived home. Beverly was at the theater and the boys were having dinner at the Kellys’. The darkness suited his mood, so he kept it that way. He hung his coat and hat in the foyer closet and went straight for the liquor cabinet in the front parlor. He splashed a little seltzer into a tumbler and added a very long shot of scotch.
“I didn’t know you went in for the drink, Harry,” Harry heard from behind him. The bottle of scotch slipped from Harry’s hand and fell onto the floor as Harry reached for his gun.
“Why’d you go and do that, Harry?”
“Who’s there?” Harry asked harshly as he thrust his gun into the darkness over by an armchair in the corner, over by the front window.
“It’s Claude.”
“Jesus Christ,” Harry said as he placed the gun back into his holster and picked up the bottle from the floor.
Claude Fielding and Harry had served together in counterintelligence during the war. Claude now had a high-level position at the Department of State. Beverly was friendly with Claude’s wife. Claude’s kids were the same age as Harry’s. The two men weren’t close, but knew each other well enough.
“What the hell’s the idea?” Harry asked as he was about to turn on a light.
“Don’t turn on the light, Harry.”
“Why not?”
“Let’s go into the back of the house, away from the street, and I’ll tell you why not. And if you got anything left in that bottle, why don’t you pour me one while you’re at it.”
Harry grumbled a little as he watched Claude’s dark figure stand up from the chair and move over to the doorway. His hand still shaking from the fright, Harry finished pouring the scotch for himself and poured one for Claude with what was left in the bottle. Harry walked over to the door and led his old friend into the back of his house, into the library; he placed the drinks down on a small desk and drew closed the heavy velvet curtains hanging in the window.
“All right,” Harry said as he turned on the light, “start talking.”
Claude Fielding was a thin rail of a man with a bald egg-shaped head and a mouth the size of a garage door. He had a baritone voice that fit with his oversized Adam’s apple. He was carrying an attaché and looked jaundiced in the dim light of the library.
“I’m sorry I startled you,” Claude said.
“What’s with the snooping around?”
“I’ve got some sensitive news.”
“What’s it all about?”
“Why don’t you sit down and start on that drink.”
Harry was trying to sound like all was well with the world, but wasn’t doing such a good job of it. His voice sounded a little wounded. Harry handed Claude Fielding one of the glasses, and the two men sat across from each other surrounded by the books lining the walls.
“It’s like this,” Claude said with a solemn expression on his face. “You’re in a good deal of trouble and I’d like to see you avoid it if I can.”
“How do you figure I’m in trouble?” Harry asked, suddenly feeling unsure if he could trust Claude.
Claude opened up his case and looked at Harry squarely. “This part of the conversation is between us, Harry. If you ever say I said anything to you, I’ll deny it.”
“If you’re not willing to stand up for what you have to say, Claude, then why are you telling me anything at all?”
“Because I don’t like the idea of you getting broadsided like this and I don’t think you deserve to go through the rest of your life not knowing why it’s being done and who’s doing it. But I’m not willing to give up my life for it, either, all right?”
Harry didn’t say anything. He just stared at Claude, thinking him a coward.
“We have an understanding?” Claude said.
“Yeah,” Harry said, “I get it.”
“Okay, then.” Claude slipped out a photo and handed it to Harry. “You recognize this man?”
“Yeah,” Harry said. “I met him for the first time this morning, over in Long Meadow.”
“Paulie Sendak,” Claude said, “armory foreman, the man who called your office to get you out there this morning.”
“That’s right,” Harry said, looking over the picture of the small rotund man with the pockmarked face.
“He was also the one who incited the men to take over the plant.” Claude pulled another photograph out from his attaché and handed Harry another photo. “He’s taking orders from this man.”
“Who’s this?” Harry asked.
“You don’t recognize him?”
“No.”
“His name is Benny Rudolph. He’s a former private investigator. Worked both sides of the law.”
Harry looked at the picture more closely, momentarily thinking of his trip up to Ten Lakes and the boxes filled with heroin in the basement of the Lowenstein house. “I don’t know the face, but I know the name,” Harry said. “Two of my men sent him away a long time ago on extortion charges.”
“Well, currently he’s unofficially doing some dirty work for Tines.”
Harry blinked hard a few times. “What’s Tines’s hand in this?”
“On Tines’s orders, Rudolph got Sendak to start the hullabaloo this morning, and gave him the order to call you in. He also got Sendak to plant the dynamite in Waters and Capp’s fishing shack.”
“What’s Sendak’s role in all this?”
“To help Tines bust up the union.”
“His own union?”
“He’s getting paid, Harry.”
“You mean to tell me that Tines is going that far outside the law to bust up this union?”
“It depends on how you look at it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Try to get this, Harry: if the union is strong enough to cease the production of munitions whenever they damn well feel like it, what happens if we find ourselves getting caught up in a war? What if the munitions plants fall the way the steel plants did just last year? You got a lot of people asking those kinds of questions right now.”
“Is this you talking, Claude?”
“No, but it’s the talk I’ve been listening to. The idea of a munitions workers union acting as they please is making people nervous, and those people have given Tines the authority to do as he pleases.”
“You mean people in the Department of State.”
Claude’s Adam’s apple made a long swooping motion.
“What else?” Harry asked with more than a little bluster in his voice.
Claude, picking up on Harry’s tone, said, “Remember, Harry, I’m here as a friend.”
“What else?” Harry persisted with the same bluster. “What’s Long Meadow got to do with me?”
Claude’s egg-shaped head formed some lines in it that made it look like it was going to crack open. “The way I understand it, Tines is responsible for relocating Fief somewhere outside of Long Meadow and it seems no one wants to take a chance that you and your labor platform are going to stand in the way of that.”
“So Tines is sending this thug Rudolph after me, to scare me out of the race?”
“That’s the gist of it, yeah.”
Harry gripped his glass so tightly it should have broken. “And how exactly do your colleagues at the Department of State figure I stand in the way?”
“Some people figure on you winning. You’re a popular man, Harry. An honest man. A man who does what he says he’s going to do. They don’t like the idea of it. Not one bit. They have it in their heads that your allegiance is with the worker and not with the country.”
“What makes them think that the average worker’s allegiance isn’t to their country? They’re the ones building the fucking place. What makes these people think that labor would want what they’ve built torn from their hands?”
Claude didn’t bother answering.
“And what do these people figure I should do? That’s what you’re really here for, isn’t it, Claude? To tell me what to do.”
“I’m not here to tell you what to do, Harry. I’m just here to tell you that if you’re not careful you’re in for a fall, and as far as I can tell from how Tines is going about it, it’s going to be steep.”
Harry scratched at his face and started pulling at his ear. “All he’ll be doing is challenging an honest cop if he tries.”
“Anything questionable in your past,” Claude said with emphasis, “anything unseemly-looking in the present, he’s going to use to destroy you.” Claude looked into Harry’s eyes with what appeared to be genuine apology, and shook his head. “All that’s going to help is if you take a bow and step off the stage.”
“I’m not buying.”
“I think you should think about it,” Claude said, standing up. He reached out and picked up the pictures of Sendak and Rudolph that Harry had set on the table. “You of all people, Harry, shouldn’t be so naive as to think that the good can’t fall as hard as the bad.”
Harry shook his head with disgust. “You believe in this, Claude?”
“Would I be here telling you this if I did?”
“Then why don’t you help me?”
“I’m not that kind of a man, Harry, and you know it.” Claude started walking away from Harry. “I should be going.”
“I’ll show you out.”
“I can find my way.”
“I’ll show you the way,” Harry said.
Chapter 17
While Victor slept downstairs in the cellar, Freddy sat up in bed, drinking and smoking cigarettes. From the drawer of his night table, he took out a pad and a pen, and an old newspaper clipping he had found in the Globe a few months ago, a Miss Lonelyhearts column that he had already read a few dozen times.
Dear Miss Lonelyhearts,
A year ago a steel girder clipped me in the back on a job and left me crippled so bad I can’t get out of bed no more. I got no insurance and no money, and to add insult to my injury, after the accident, my wife left me because she said I was an ungrateful loudmouth and a goodfornuthin. When my wife left, an old lady in my building looked after me, but she died last week of a bad heart, god rest her soul. She cooked me all my meals and cleaned up after me and let me stay with her cat when she was out doing the shopping. I been calling my wife every day since the old lady died, but my wife, she says I deserved what I got and that she don’t want nothing to do with me no more and that she don’t have an ounce of pity
left for a poor slob like me when she’s gotta wait in lines at the soup kitchen for her next meal. I get so sad and angry for being messed up like this, and without being able to take care of myself, the only thing I got left to do is make some peace and say goodbye. I know my wife, she reads your column every day, and I just wanted to let her know that I got no more hope for this world and it’s time for me to check out. Please don’t let me down Miss Lonelyhearts. Please print this letter, because by the time you get it, I ain’t going to be around no more, and I want to make sure my wife knows that I love her regardless of her cold heart.
Yours truly,
Hopeless and Full of Remorse
Freddy placed the clipping back into the drawer of his night table and then for the better part of the night, as he drank his way down to the bottom of his bottle, he labored over a short letter to Evelyn.
Dear Evelyn,
There’s no point in telling you how miserable I’ve been without you. I know you know this and I wish I were better at hiding it from you. But as we both know, my misery is my own burden and your devotion to me for all those years I treated you so badly could never have remedied my flaws. I have many regrets for treating you like I did over the years, and I just wanted you to know how grateful I am to you for putting up with me for as long as you did. That, and I also wanted to say how truly sorry I am. With all this time between us, with all this time I’ve had to myself to think about what’s been eating at me, I only now realize how sick my heart is.
Other than to apologize for all the pain and trouble I caused you over the years, I’m writing to you now because I think I found a way out of this misery once and for all. The details aren’t important. What’s important is that if you receive this letter, you should know that I’m now at peace with myself. Although you may not like that this comes from me, enclosed is an insurance policy that makes you and the baby the beneficiaries. If all works out as I think it will, you’ll have a nice start for the baby’s future. Please take it and use it. It’s the only thing I’ve done in so many years that I feel proud of. I love you always, and urge you not to be sad for me anymore.