by David Grand
“He speak English?” Benny asked Brilovsky.
“Yes.”
“Speak English so I know what’s being said.”
Brilovsky nodded. “But the men with the guns won’t understand me unless I speak to them in Russian.”
“Just keep in mind, I’ve got this gun aimed right at your back.”
“I understand.”
When the two armed men waiting outside the shack saw Benny and Brilovsky walking toward them, one of them knocked on the door to alert Chubayev, while the other placed himself between the men and the shack. Brilovsky raised his hands. “We’re here to see Chubayev. Tell him it’s Brilovsky.”
The man at the door leaned his head into the shack for a moment. When he pulled his head out, he told the other man to stand away, and both men moved aside. Benny and Brilovsky walked in, followed by the armed men.
“Arthur,” Chubayev said in Russian. “This is unexpected.”
“What’s going on?” Paulie Sendak asked. He looked startled and angered. His pockmarked face started to glow red.
Benny leaned over to Sendak. “Keep your mouth shut if you don’t want to get yourself shot,” Benny whispered. He then turned to Chubayev’s hardened face. “There’s been a change in plans.”
Chubayev looked Benny over some, then, disregarding him, turned to Brilovsky. “What’s happened?”
“In English,” Benny said to Chubayev with a thin smile. “So I understand you.”
Chubayev didn’t avert his gaze from Brilovsky.
“They know where the transport ship is,” Arthur said in English. “You mustn’t go near it.”
“They know I am here?”
Arthur nodded his head.
“How do they know this, Arthur?”
“I don’t know how. We came to warn you.”
Chubayev sucked on his teeth a little. “Who is this man you’re with?” Chubayev asked in Russian.
“An old contact,” Arthur responded in English. “He’s all right. He was the one who came to me with this.”
“And how did he come by this information?”
Arthur looked to Benny as though he were seeking his approval. Benny nodded a little, realizing he was meant to play along.
“He’s inside the government,” Brilovsky said.
“If they know I’m here,” Chubayev continued in Russian, “they are out there, waiting for me.”
“What did he say?” Benny asked.
Arthur ignored Benny and responded to Chubayev in Russian, “I don’t know if they’re out there, but it’s very possible.”
“In English,” Benny said to Brilovsky.
“Why is this man so eager to understand everything I say?” Chubayev asked Arthur in Russian. “He doesn’t trust you?”
Arthur looked at Benny, then back at Chubayev. “If he’s seen here it could mean his life,” Arthur responded in English. “He’s nervous.”
Chubayev looked at Benny and laughed at him. “But I am one in trouble. If you nervous, go,” Chubayev said, pointing to the door. “You say what you have to say. Go.”
Benny didn’t move.
“What will you do?” Arthur asked Chubayev, trying to get his attention off Benny.
“We will go,” Chubayev went on in English. “We will go. If need be,” he said to Benny, “we fight. We have much to fight with, no?” He snickered at his men, then chewed on his tongue a little. Chubayev’s men smiled with their captain, even though they didn’t understand what he was saying.
“Nu, davai, tovarishchi,” Chubayev said to his men as he walked to the door of the shack.
“Good luck, Grigori,” Arthur said to Chubayev.
“Same to you, Arthur,” Chubayev said in parting. He brushed against Benny’s shoulder and walked out the door, his men trailing behind him. The cargo by now had been fully secured and the ship was ready to depart.
Benny, Arthur Brilovsky, and Paulie Sendak watched the men board the ship, and when Benny saw Chubayev and his men were safely away, he pulled out his gun and pointed it at Paulie. “Get moving,” Benny said. “To the ferry landing.”
“What’s this all about?”
“Get moving,” Benny said again. “You too,” he said to Arthur as he waved the gun at him. “A government official?” he said to Brilovsky.
“He bought it, didn’t he?”
“Jesus Christ.”
“You mean, you ain’t with the government?” Sendak said.
“Walk,” Benny said.
Brilovsky and Sendak walked a few steps ahead of Benny in silence. When they reached the ferry, the ferryman was waiting beside the boat, drinking a cup of coffee. Benny told him to take them back to the city. He then marched Brilovsky and Sendak to the car, put them both up front, and took a seat in the back.
“What’s next?” Arthur asked passively, his eyes looking at Benny in the rearview mirror.
“I’m thinking about it,” Benny said.
“Will one of you tell me what’s going on?” Paulie said again.
Benny turned his gun around in his hand and clocked Paulie in the back of the head.
“Just shut the fuck up,” Benny said pensively. “Just shut the fuck up. Both of you, keep your traps shut until we get where we’re going.”
When Rudolph, Brilovsky, and Sendak reached the City, Benny ordered Brilovsky to drive across town through the park. Brilovsky drove them through a stone-walled passage that wound through the park’s upper woods and dropped them onto Grand Avenue in the East End. They continued on to Shrine, then Halifax, then drove down Halifax to Seventy-eighth Street. Benny ordered Brilovsky to park the car off the corner of Seventy-eighth and Halifax and then ordered the two men out of the car.
“What are we doing here?” Brilovsky asked.
Benny didn’t answer him. He opened the back door of the car and stepped out onto the empty street, his gun at his side. He opened Brilovsky’s door and stuck the gun in Brilovsky’s ribs. “Let’s go.” He took hold of the collar of Brilovsky’s coat and held on to it as Brilovsky slowly got out of the car. He kicked both doors closed and then walked to the other side of the car. “Open up,” he said to Sendak.
Paulie Sendak pushed the door open and looked up to Benny pathetically. “Come on, already,” Benny said when Paulie didn’t move. He turned the gun from Brilovsky to Sendak. With his red pockmarked cheeks nearly dragging off his face, Sendak pushed his rotund body out of the car and stepped out onto a small embankment of snow that had been shoveled onto the walk. Benny let go of Brilovsky and placed Sendak alongside Brilovsky. “Through those doors.”
An elderly doorman sat on a chair asleep in the lobby of the apartment building they entered. He came to in a sleep haze when Benny nudged his leg with his shoe. “Let’s go,” he said to the doorman, waving his gun in his direction. Once seeing the gun, the doorman’s eyes were alert.
“Where to, mister?”
“Miss Rapaport’s apartment.”
“What business have you got with her?” the doorman asked the gun.
“Get the keys,” Benny rasped.
Brilovsky turned his head over his shoulder slightly. “Rapaport?”
Benny didn’t say anything.
“The reporter that wrote that bit about you in the paper this afternoon?”
“I didn’t think you were paying attention,” Benny said.
“I won’t talk,” Brilovsky said.
“You’ll talk.”
“If I talk, I’m as good as dead.”
“If you don’t talk, you’re as good as dead.”
“If you talk,” Brilovsky countered, “you’re as good as dead.”
“I’m already dead, Mr. Brilovsky, if you haven’t noticed.”
“I ain’t talking neither,” Paulie Sendak said over his shoulder. “You got no right. I want a lawyer.”
“I’ll give you a lawyer,” Benny said as he turned and angrily and forcefully knocked Sendak over the head with the butt of his gun again. To Benny’s surprise
, Sendak’s legs fell out from under him and the man dropped to the floor. “Aw, shit,” Benny said just as the doorman stepped up to Sendak’s head with a clanging ring of keys. The doorman looked up to Benny with drooping bloodshot eyes. “All right,” Benny barked, “the two of you, get him into the elevator.”
Brilovsky bent down and took Sendak by the shoulders, the doorman took his legs, and together they dragged him into an open elevator. Benny shut the gate and the door and the doorman pressed number 6. Sendak started to groan a little when the elevator moved and had his hands on the back of his head by the time the elevator reached the sixth floor. Brilovsky and the doorman struggled the stout man onto his feet and wrapped his thick arms around their shoulders.
“Which door?” Benny asked.
“Right there, six oh three.”
Benny knocked hard on the door. “Faith!” He waited a moment and knocked again. Benny ran through the key ring and found the key for Faith’s door. He slipped it into the lock. “Get the light,” he said to the doorman when he opened the door. Benny moved out of the way and the doorman and Brilovsky swung Sendak around and the doorman flipped a switch that lit a fixture in the corner of a simply decorated living room—worn couch and chair, lamp, bookcase, coffee table with nothing but ashtrays and a stack of newspapers. Benny marched the men through the small apartment, back through to the bedroom, where the doorman flipped on the light and all the men huddled around Faith’s bed, where she was dead asleep. Benny found the half-filled glass of whiskey and the bottle of sleeping pills. He bent down and patted Faith’s face. “Hey, kid,” he said, “wake up. Faith, wake up. Come on, girlie, I got a big scoop for you. It’s gonna knock your socks off.”
Chapter 38
Before first light, Nicol and Byron Sands attached a plow to a tractor and plowed the Martins’ private road that led to the country estate. They plowed a smooth flat path two miles long that ran to and from the train station. Celeste, Richard, Noel, and Steven rode the first train of the morning and were picked up by Byron in a school bus his father had hired from the nearby boarding school. Riding on the same train was an auctioneer hired from Leslie’s; also from Leslie’s were four art handlers; in the same car with the auctioneer and the art handlers rode the musicians, a string quartet, and the caterers from the Tea Room, seventeen men in total, eight waiters, three bartenders, two chefs, three line cooks, and a florist. They brought with them, from the finest markets in the City, crates full of oysters and cheeses, cured meats, wines and liquor, barrels full of hothouse lilies and orchids. When they all arrived at the estate, Dr. Gamburg and Professor Tarkhov were already awake and dressed; they were going over Dr. Gamburg’s opening remarks. All the paintings had been hung in the gallery and were being watched over by Aleksandr and his son, Slava. A stage and chairs were set at the head of the gallery’s partition, and on the stage was a lectern for the scholars and the auctioneer. Behind the lectern was a hand-carved rococo easel on which the art handlers would display each painting. Nicol’s and Aleksandr’s wives had already laid out on the mahogany banquet tables the silver and the china, the serving trays, all set before the windows that looked onto the sculpture garden. At public events such as this, Steven no longer played the function of cook, but rather took on the role of Celeste’s keeper. At events such as this, he wore a fine hand-tailored suit, a boutonniere, and a monocle, and over his shoulder would hang a black leather purse that contained Celeste’s pipe, her smoking opium, and massage oils. In the afternoon after the affair, Celeste and Steven would retire to her room, where Steven would undress her, rub her down, and then draw her a bath. As she bathed and smoked a pipe, he would sit by her side and, in his thick accent, read short passages from Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, until Celeste nodded off in the tub, at which time Steven would carry her off to bed, pat her dry with a pink towel, then dress her in her gown. He then cumbersomely laid her out on the couch, in front of a window that looked out onto the sculpture garden, and he would sit by her side. Together, the two of them would doze in and out of consciousness until the middle of the night. Sometime around one in the morning, he would carry her to her bed, at which point he would retire to his room.
No one who knew Celeste well expected anything more from her in her old age. She was notorious in her circle for abusing her fortune and all the freedoms that had come with it. Many said that both she and Richard were far too naive to be responsible for the amount of money they had inherited. Many speculated that Noel Tersi had taken control of her money from her many years ago and that if he hadn’t come along when he had, she and her brother would have been destitute after the crash. Others, who didn’t know Celeste, conjectured that she was more savvy than people gave her credit for being, and that Noel Tersi, who had been made the man he was by her charity and influence, was her instrument in the world of finance. The truth, of course, was that Celeste cared very little for money and power. All she cared about was living her life as she pleased. As long as she was allowed to behave as impulsively as she liked, she wasn’t concerned about who was controlling her wealth. To both her and Richard, exercising power was a frivolous activity when more temporal and sensual activities could be had. As long as Richard had time to think and dwell in his moods, in his books, in his thoughts, he was happy to allow the responsibility of his position to fall onto the shoulders of someone who did care for that responsibility. He preferred that someone else be morally compromised by such behavior. He had always been too sensitive to dirty his hands with the harsh paradoxes of doing business. Even when he was out in the world, traveling from culture to culture, he always did his best to seek out tranquillity in nature, away from man, away from bazaars, away from war, away from any kind of commotion or upheaval that might require him to act. If he had had his life to live over, he would have spent it in a monastery, in a silent tomb.
The guests seemed to arrive all at once on the noon train. Byron made four trips with the bus to the station. Those who had to wait were accommodated with hot cider and crab cakes. When everyone reached the house, they ate and drank and chatted for the better part of an hour. Everyone seemed to know everyone. The crowd consisted of the moneyed, who came to bid, the hangers-on, who came to gawk and be part of the event, and the artists, writers, politicos, intelligentsia who came to see, in particular, Rodhinsky’s long-hidden masterpiece. A dozen journalists, including a cameraman, were also in attendance. Arthur Brilovsky, to Professor Tarkhov’s surprise, was curiously absent from the event. The professor was very anxious to receive word from Arthur about his wife and children. He had been calling the Ansonia all morning, but was told by the operator that Mr. Brilovsky had left his room early that morning with his bags, and that his wife and child had already gone out for breakfast. Dr. Gamburg had no knowledge of Arthur Brilovsky when the professor casually asked him if Arthur would be attending the event, and Noel Tersi, when asked if Mr. Brilovsky would be attending, said to Professor Tarkhov that perhaps he had been delayed, and with that said, Mr. Tersi, who appeared unusually anxious in Professor Tarkhov’s company, conveniently excused himself to attend to his guests. The professor began to perspire, reliving the last moments he had spent with his family, and then started torturing himself with thoughts of them clandestinely crossing the Finnish border in the back of some freezing truck, wrapped in blankets with nothing more than the very things on their backs. As the lavish gallery became more and more full, the dread and loneliness and guilt that the professor felt were indescribable. He forced himself to be polite to a couple of elderly Russian exiles from noble families who had come to the city by way of Paris shortly after the revolution. Though they were pleasant and full of enthusiasm for the lecture the professor would give, he felt the great divide between himself and their former nobility. They had many questions for him about life in Leningrad these days, and then unabashedly reminisced about the former St. Petersburg, how they missed its beauty and grandeur, the canals and cathedrals, the concert halls and palatial gardens, and of
course their homes. They envied the professor so for being able to walk along Nevsky Prospect, over the Neva, to the Admiralty, on his way to the university every morning. By the end of the conversation, the professor surprisingly felt disdain and contempt for these people and found himself sadistically wishing that these two, as pleasant as they were, hadn’t escaped and had been forced to watch their home subdivided and their property usurped, to spend their lives in the company of peasants. Here they wore jewels and finery and attended parties at estates, maybe not in the style to which they were once accustomed, but, still, here, even without their wealth, they were able to pretend that their status was somehow equal to what it once had been, as if by their breeding alone they were worthy of being admired and celebrated. In Leningrad, the professor thought, they would be relics relegated to the propaganda machine, despised anachronisms in the mouths of young schoolchildren.
At one o’clock in the afternoon the guests were asked to take their seats, at which point Professor Tarkhov walked onto the stage with Dr. Gamburg and sat next to the veiled easel holding Evgeny Rodhinsky’s The Disappearing Body. When everyone was seated, Dr. Gamburg approached the lectern and, on behalf of the Martins and Mr. Tersi, welcomed everyone. “This afternoon,” Dr. Gamburg said to the audience, “it is my great pleasure to introduce you to one of the Soviet Union’s foremost scholars of contemporary art, a man who has not only chronicled the history of painting over the past twenty years, but has witnessed it as it came to fruition. Professor Mikhail Tarkhov has traveled from Leningrad this past week to bring to you one painting in particular that has never been seen before in either the West nor the East—Evgeny Rodhinsky’s The Disappearing Body.” Dr. Gamburg stepped back from the lectern and unveiled the painting. “The Disappearing Body,” the doctor continued as the guests craned their necks forward for a good look, “has been in the hands of an anonymous private collector, who, for reasons unknown to us, has entrusted this painting to Professor Tarkhov to be sold today at auction. As Professor Tarkhov will attest, it is a small miracle that this painting of Rodhinsky’s has survived—because of its controversial content and because of the controversial figure that painted it. That we have the distinct privilege to look at it here today, and to hear the story of its making, makes this event a truly historic occasion. Without a doubt, whoever purchases this painting today will be acquiring nothing less than both an artistic and a historic treasure.”