The Disappearance of Grace

  PRAISE FOR VINCENT ZANDRI

  “If you want a novel that runs wild like a caged beast let loose, Zandri is the man.”

  —(Albany)

  “Sensational…masterful…brilliant.”

  —New York Post

  “Probably the most arresting first crime novel to break into print this season.”

  —Boston Herald

  “A thriller that has depth and substance, wickedness and compassion.”

  —The Times-Union (Albany)

  “Vincent Zandri explodes onto the scene with the debut thriller of the year. As Catch Can is gritty, fast-paced, lyrical and haunting. Don’t miss it.”

  —Harlan Coben, author of The Final Detail

  “A Satisfying Yarn.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Compelling…As Catch Can pulls you in with rat-a-tat prose, kinetic pacing…characters are authentic, and the punchy dialogue rings true. Zandri’s staccato prose moves As Catch Can at a steady, suspenseful pace.”

  —Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

  “Exciting…An Engrossing Thriller…the descriptions of life behind bars will stand your hair on end.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Readers will be held captive by prose that pounds as steadily as an elevated pulse… Vincent Zandri nails readers’ attention.”

  —Boston Herald

  “A smoking gun of a debut novel. The rough and tumble pages turn quicker than men turn on each other.”

  —Albany Times-Union

  “The story line is non-stop action and the flashback to Attica is eerily brilliant. If this debut is any indication of his work, readers will demand a lifetime sentence of novels by Vincent Zandri.”

  —I Love a Mystery

  “A tough-minded, involving novel…Zandri writes strong prose that rarely strains for effect, and some of his scenes…achieve a powerful hallucinatory horror.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A classic detective tale.”

  —The Record (Troy, NY)

  “[Zandri] demonstrates an uncanny knack for exposition, introducing new characters and narrative possibilities with the confidence of an old pro…Zandri does a superb job creating interlocking puzzle pieces.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “This is a tough, stylish, heartbreaking car accident of a book: You don’t want to look but you can’t look away. Zandri’s a terrific writer and he tells a terrific story.”

  —Don Winslow, author of The Death and Life of Bobby Z

  “Satisfying.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Also by Vincent Zandri

  The Innocent

  Concrete Pearl

  The Remains

  Moonlight Falls

  Moonlight Mafia

  Moonlight Rises

  Scream Catcher

  Permanence

  Godchild

  True Stories

  “They lay together now and did not speak and the Colonel felt her heart beat.”

  — Ernest Hemingway

  Across the River and Into the Trees

  Chapter 1

  “FEEL THIS ONE,” SAYS my fiancée, Grace. Her voice is hardly more than a whisper, but her tone is insistent. Strong. I hear the movement of her hands on the metal café table, the rain steady and loud as it sprays against the canvas canopy above us, yet somehow soft when it showers against the cobblestone pavement of the small Venetian piazza.

  I hear lots of things these days since I began going in and out of blindness six weeks ago. I hear the sound of wine glasses clinking, plates shifting across circular tabletops, knives and forks coming down on them. I hear the birds, the barking of dogs, the purring of cats. I hear voices. The steady murmur of voices. But right now…right this very second…I listen only to Grace.

  My Grace.

  “Come on,” she insists. “Try harder, Nick.”

  I cup my hands together, lay them palm up on the table. It comes as a slight surprise when she touches my fingertips. I feel the tingle of her fingernails and the cold of the metal table against the backs of my hands and knuckles.

  “Look at me,” she says, and that’s when I begin to laugh. She’s got to be joking. But she tells me to keep my head straight and it suddenly comes to me: my brown eyes are drifting again. When I’m blinded like this, sometimes for a week at a time, my eyes are not a part of me anymore. They are no longer in my control. They become rudderless boats drifting in pools of tears.

  “Get ready, Nick.” She takes hold of my hand with her warm, soft hand. She sets an object into my left palm, presses it into the skin and folds my fingers into a fist around the object. “What do you feel?”

  What I touch is simple. A small, metallic band to which a jagged stone is attached. The engagement ring I bought for her before I shipped out for my last Afghan tour.

  What I feel is not so simple. My significant other of three years makes me feel like a child learning to speak, learning to crawl. What I want to say to her is this: After six weeks of on and off again blindness, I can do better. I’ve made progress.

  I want to remind Grace that I’m able to recognize something obvious like her engagement ring with my eyes closed. Since I can’t see, I will say this instead: Being blind is not so much having lost my vision as it is learning to see things in other ways. I have to rely on touching, smelling, listening. Remembering! I have to learn how to feel all over again. I have to relearn so many things that require eyesight. But I have not lost my memory, and I can recall the simple shape and feel of an engagement ring.

  “I think I’m ready,” I tell Grace. “Ready for something a little more challenging than engagement rings.”

  I listen for the smooth, whispering tone of Grace’s voice. I picture her thick, shoulder-length dark hair filling with the gentle breeze and I see her thick lips and sculpted cheeks covered in rich pale skin. I hear nothing other than the foreign voices of the many café patrons who surround us. The subdued voices blend with the sound of the rain, steady and never ending like the water that channels through the feeder canals in sensual, romantic Venice. Like the engagement ring, Grace’s silence is something I am able to recognize without the use of vision. Grace’s silence might be as cold and hard as her diamond, but it also means I’m not ready for something more challenging yet. It means that, in her eyes anyway, I need to make more progress first.

  Here’s what I do in the name of progress: I open my fingers and allow Grace’s engagement ring to slip away. When the ring drops through the humid air, it makes not a sound. But then that single half-second of silence is followed by the tinny metallic jingle of the ring landing and spinning on the cobblestones. The table tilts against my stomach and I know without having to look that Grace is reacting to the fallen engagement ring like a mother to a suddenly lost child. She’s jumped up from her chair with blinding speed.

  “Please sit, Grace,” I say, now feeling crappy for having dropped the ring on purpose. “I’ll find it. I promise I will find it.”

  “Sometimes I swear I don’t know you anymore,” Grace barks under her breath. But I sense that what she doesn’t know is what I’m capable of now that the war is over for me but, in some ways, has only just begun for us.

  I lean hard to my right and nearly fall over, but manage to regain my sense of balance by doing something as simple as holding tightly to the metal table. I rummage the fingers on my right hand inside the open linear spaces between the cobbles, through the chunks of wet, sandy dirt and spent cigarette butts.

  “People are staring,” Grace says. The leather on her jacket rubs audibly against the table when she slides back down into her seat. She adds, “They’re looking at us and you know how much I hate to
bring attention to myself.”

  “Making a scene,” I say. “Oh dear God.”

  “Exactly. And it doesn’t matter to you, does it? You can’t see them.”

  “Oh, now that hurts.”

  Here’s the way I look at it, if you’ll pardon the pun: Grace is right. What other people see doesn’t matter. But then as a blind guy, I possess a distinct advantage over that of my wife-to-be: Since I can’t see the nosy people anyway, I can pretend they don’t exist. It’s not like I’m about to get naked in front of them. But being sightless definitely has its perks. It makes me feel super-hero-invisible.

  “This is silly,” says Grace. “Why don’t I pick it up for you?”

  “Patience, Grace. Patience.”

  I continue probing, feeling. I try to see with my fingers, like I’m reaching for an extra ammo clip I set out on the ground before the shooting starts, until I discover the ring wedged between two cobblestones. My gut instinct is to toss the ring away. Toss it out of the square and into the canal. Toss it away for good like a man who knows how to take control. A man who is whole. A man who is in control of all his senses.

  Listen: I found the ring without Grace’s help. That’s definite progress. But I can’t help tossing this image around in my ever-expanding vivid imagination: The ring flying above the tables, above the heads of all the seeing people. So here’s what I do instead: I raise the ring up and hold it above the table like a magician. The hand quicker than the eye. The hand better than the eye. Then out of nowhere comes the feeling of a hand against my own and quickly Grace snatches her diamond away from my now filthy fingers.

  * * *

  We sit in silence.

  Which isn’t really silence because I can hear pretty much everything going on around me. The rain on the canopy. Boats running the narrow feeder canals in the far distance. Boot heels on the cobblestones. Someone laughing, getting drunk. A waiter taking an order from a tourist who insists on reciting it in train-wrecked Italian since he has no real idea how to speak Italian.

  I try not to move, other than taking small sips of my beer.

  “They’re all still staring at us,” Grace whispers. “They think we’re fighting.”

  “You need another drink,” I suggest. “Kill that bug up your perfectly shaped behind.”

  “It’s not funny, Nick. You can’t see them. You can’t feel their eyes.”

  But she’s wrong. I feel them all right. Like the red laser-beam from an electronic gun sight. A sniper’s sight.

  “You really should have spent some time in the Peace Corps before art school, Grace. A little blood, guts and shit on your boots instead of paint makes you pretty indifferent to people who like to stare.” I shout the word “stare!” and the whole joint goes quiet.

  If Grace’s embarrassment were a flamethrower, my face would be burned away by now. That’s when I reach out for her hand, but instead, manage to tip my beer over.

  “Nick!” Grace cries. She slides back in her chair to avoid the tsunami of spilled beer.

  I sit back in my chair, reach out for the tipped glass, but only touch my fingers to the spilled beer pooling on the table. At the same time I feel the soft mist from the rain falling outside the canopy that coats my face. I’m helpless.

  The waiter approaches.

  “Non è un problema,” he insists. I know he’s wiping the beer up with a towel because I can hear him whistling while he works. “Un’ altra birra per voi signore.” It’s a question.

  “Una birra,” I say. “Due birra. Tres. Quatro birra…And a fucking shot of Jager!”

  “Most certainly,” he follows up in his perfect King’s English.

  While he retrieves the beer the tourists gradually resume their conversations. And Grace sits stewing. I like it when Grace stews. Gives me time to think. Probably if we were back in America, back in upstate New York, she’d have stormed away by now to the apartment we share in Troy. Maybe she’d secretly place a call to her ex-husband Andrew. But she isn’t going anywhere and she’s not making any calls. Not in lovely, scenic Venice.

  She exhales after a time, lights a cigarette, slaps the lighter down on the now clean table. The waiter is back.

  “Una birra,” he states. “And one fucking shot of Jagermeister.”

  Grace and I both burst out laughing. A waiter with a sense of humor. As he sets the drinks down onto the table, I hear Grace reaching into her purse.

  “Remember,” I say, running both my hands over my military short salt-and- pepper hair. “Tip’s included in the bill.”

  “Grazie,” she says politely. Tyler School of Art, undergrad. Vermont College, Master of Fine Arts in poetry. A dual artist is my Grace. Funny, I didn’t meet a soul on my side or theirs in Afghanistan who went to Tyler or did an MFA in writing school. But I did have a guy in my squad who made it through one year of ju-co where he was studying accounting. Stepped too close to an IED and lost both his legs all the way up to the business part of his groin.

  Grace smokes for a while.

  I think about asking for one, but then I’ll want to smoke the crap out of a whole pack and I’ll want to drink more Jager and more beer and my dark mood will darken further. Getting hammered in Venice without the use of my eyes is not my idea of a good time. Not now. Not when Grace and I are supposed to be getting re-acquainted after my tour in Indian country for fourteen months. Not when we’re supposed to be forgetting the mistakes and missteps that occurred during those fourteen months when we lived together but so very far apart. Not when we’re supposed to be so in love again.

  I drink down my shot of Jager, set the now-empty shot glass back onto the table. I feel the slow burn in my chest and throat. I’ve forgotten how soothing yet fiery hot a chilled shot of Jager can be. Maybe another will be doubly soothing, doubly fiery. For now I sip my beer.

  Grace stamps out her cigarette, exhales the last hit of ash and nicotine so that I catch a good strong whiff of it.

  “What exactly is it you’ve been trying to tell me, Ms. Grace, my lovely wife to be? Or put another way, what is the nature of the message you are trying to convey with your object identification game?”

  I sense a big fat sigh.

  “I’m not entirely sure,” she says. “But did you have to drop the ring like that?”

  “Grace Blunt. Have I embarrassed you?”

  I hear her shifting uncomfortably in her chair.

  “Well have I?” I push.

  “Maybe a little, but…”

  One of those dreaded dangling buts. I know what’s coming, so I turn away, as if looking away matters at all for a blind man.

  “But what?” I whisper.

  “But you’re going to be my husband, after all,” she exhales. I hear her stamp out her cigarette. She feigns silence for a weighted minute. Until she says, “Don’t look now, but I believe we have a secret admirer.”

  “You’ll have to describe said admirer. I can’t exactly look right now.”

  “He’s a man,” she says. “Standing by the fountain outside the café. He’s got a short beard and dark hair. He’s dressed in a long overcoat and he’s been staring at us for a while.”

  “How do you know he’s staring at us? Could be staring at anyone.”

  “True that. But I feel like he’s staring at us. I haven’t said anything about him until now, because I thought he would just go away. But his eyes are glued on us. Dark eyes. Glassy. Glued on me.”

  “You think everyone is staring at us. At you.”

  She’s quiet for a moment.

  “He still there?” I say.

  “Yup,” she says.

  “Invite him over.”

  “No, thanks. You’re enough strange company for one afternoon.”

  “Who knows,” I say, “maybe he’s a criminal bent on snatching us up and demanding a huge ransom.”

  “Very funny.”

  “He still looking?”

  “Yes.”

  “Keep me apprised of the situation, please.”
/>
  “I will,” she says, the nervousness in her voice sending a slight chill up and down my backbone. “Not that you can do anything about it,” she adds. “Not in your blind as a bat condition.”

  Chapter 2

  MOMENTS LATER, GRACE LIFTS my hands from where they’re resting on the table and positions them around my drinking glass to make it easier to find. It’s an act she performs gently, naturally. But I don’t need her charity.

  “I can find my own drink even in my condition,” I snap, releasing the glass. “I’ll need the practice in the event my eyesight is gone-baby-gone for good.”

  I extend my arms out over the table, pat it with my fingers, pretending to search for something, anything, like a man trying to see his way in the pitch dark. Until I find my glass. I play the role of the blind man, as if this come-and-go condition were all made up.

  “That guy still staring at us?” I ask.

  “He is.”

  “Ignore him.”

  “I’ve been trying to do exactly that. But it isn’t easy.”

  “It is easy. Just close your eyes, baby, and try to be just like me.”

  Chapter 3

  ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE heavyweight silences. It lasts for a minute or more.

  Then Grace breaks it by saying, “I’m not trying to insult you, Nick. It’s just difficult for me. We haven’t been back together for a very long time. Give me a chance to understand. You’re a different man now, Nick. A closed-in man. A protected shell of yourself. It’s impossible for me to know what you’re feeling. I don’t know what you’re seeing inside your head.”

  What I see is nothing. The nothing I see is not cold, absolute black. The nothing I see is dark gray and lifeless. When the lights go out in my head, the only sign of life I can gather up is to stare straight up into the sun. And in Venice in the early winter, I have yet to experience much sun.

  But here’s what I imagine: Grace’s fingers fiddling with her engagement ring. A nervous habit of hers that I recall from long ago. Before I ordered the airstrike on the Taliban stronghold situated on the top of mountain I no longer recall the name of. Mountain 346.1/B or some such Army nonsense. Just a hill really, with an ancient village situated on top of it. A village made of stones fitted together without mortar and thatched roofs and dirt floors. A village surrounded by terraced gardens, dogs, horses, chickens and the occasional cow grazing the property. In the center of the place was a well with a good old fashioned hand crank made out of wood and rope.