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.