Every paper in the city was now devoting space to Ruth Cruger. Twice a day, Henry went downstairs and purchased every rag he could get his hands on. He pressed them to his chest as he maneuvered up the stairs before unlocking, then locking the door. He read the papers, one by one, studying the different accounts. The Evening World had the best coverage by far, and he liked the reporter there, so he was shocked when he opened the New York Times and read the name of the mysterious chauffeur he had spent so much time hunting for. The Times identified the witness as Henry Rubien, a Turk cabdriver who had a stand at 125th and Broadway. Rubien had told the detectives that he had picked up the mysterious couple on Manhattan Street and took them uptown to the subway station at Lenox Avenue and 125th. The words replaced each other in a blur as Henry read as fast as he could.
“I had seen her often in the neighborhood,” Rubien said. “But I did not know her name. When she entered the taxicab, I recognized her as a girl who had passed my stand. When I saw the pictures of Ruth Cruger in the papers, I knew it was she.”
Henry Cruger hurriedly put on his cuffs, ran for the door, and found himself on the sidewalk. He passed fruit carts and newsstands to get down to Broadway to the exact same taxi stand he had been riding from. Henry asked for Rubien’s cab. Someone pointed him out, and Henry had to look twice. Rubien was one of the men whose cabs he had been riding in all week. When their eyes met, Rubien looked almost relieved.
The air on the street was cold, so they got into his cab and Rubien started driving. As Henry Cruger sat in the backseat and watched the back of this familiar head, he heard a different story than the one he was hearing from the police. Rubien said that his cab was hired at 3:15 on Tuesday afternoon at 127th and Broadway. A young man, alone, stepped off the curb and hired the machine from the stand at 125th Street and Broadway.
“The man directed me to drive a block to 127th and Manhattan,” Rubien said. “Right across the street from Cocchi’s shop.” Rubien said he then saw a girl about 150 feet away. “The man then jumped from the cab,” said Rubien. “He took her by the arm and rather roughly urged her into the car, telling [me] to take them to the subway station, which he did.” The girl, who looked unsure of her feet, carried a bundle with her. Rubien couldn’t rightly see what it was without being nosy. He said that the girl and the man spoke to each other with great familiarity. Rubien dropped them off uptown at the Lenox Avenue subway at 125th Street.
Rubien told Henry that the girl looked just like the photos in the newspaper and that she wore “a dark coat” and a “wide black hat.” When Henry asked why he never said anything to him all the times he had been riding in his cab, Rubien replied that he had been cautioned by the police to keep silent. There was silence now again.
“It looked as if she had been crying,” Rubien said.
Henry was becoming increasingly certain that the suspicion in the pit of his stomach was leading him toward the truth. Henry asked if the man who had called the cab was Alfredo Cocchi, the Italian motorcycle shop owner.
The driver shook his head. It was not.
Henry asked again.
The cabbie knew Cocchi. He was a good man. It was not him.
After a pause, Rubien said that he overheard the two people talking about how the girl had been quarreling with her parents about a student from Columbia. A boy. Henry straightened in the seat. Rubien described the mysterious man as being under six feet in height and under thirty years old. He had a roundish face, was good looking, and wore nice new clothes.
Henry wondered if he was sitting on the same side that his daughter had been, barely a week ago. And he wondered, more than ever, what she was thinking about in that moment.
When Henry reached home, there were more reporters gathered at the stoop of the apartment. So he stood and talked to them, even though he was tired. After talking to Rubien, and for the first time in days, he felt as if he had some answers, ones he could build on to form a statement of fact. For the first time, Henry felt like he had something of value to say.
“My girl has been kidnapped,” Henry said to the reporters. “This talk about her having gone away voluntarily is an unwarranted insult to her and to us. It is nothing more than a screen for police shirking.” Henry knew that the detectives wouldn’t care for his statements, but turnabout was fair play. The thought that his daughter—his lovely daughter with her smile and voice that was getting quieter in his head—had most assuredly come to harm after leaving that oily little shop was just too much to bear.
At home, Mrs. Cruger had been in no condition to talk to the press. She was shut behind her bedroom door. Every night, she would awaken everyone in the house by crying out for her missing daughter. But in hearing the news from her husband about Rubien, she finally agreed to speak. “My daughter would never go off this way unless she were drugged,” she said. “I am certain that she is under restraint somewhere. If she is alive and at liberty she would have communicated with me long ago.” Henry was very proud of his wife for saying this.
That night, in his chair and with his daughters and wife quiet and enclosed in their rooms, Henry watched his missing daughter stare at him from framed photographs on tables. Henry once again read the evening editions, trying to find some hope. As he read the paper, Henry was surprised to see that Mrs. Cocchi, the wife of the motorcycle man, had published a letter. It read:
Alfred: I believe you are innocent and all your friends do. Please come home. Remember our happy married life—nine and a half years and the children.
Henry could sometimes be filled with hate, a killing hate—for that woman, her Italian husband, the cops, even the people he had seen on the street who weren’t his daughter or didn’t know who she was. This hate galvanized him. But it did not last. Henry would then try to fall asleep, waiting for that half a second when he woke, when his daughter was still in the room with him, seated in the other chair, smiling about something or other. Or even being mad at him. Henry wouldn’t care. As long as she wasn’t crying, like Rubien said she had been. Anything but that. All he knew was that no one could ever know or understand what it was like to have his daughter taken from him. No one. There, in that room, Henry felt as if something had been pulled from him and something else had come to take its place. He could feel it standing in the corner. He tried to ignore it, breathing hard and fast.
To Henry, this whole mystery had swept over his family like the city itself: immense but suffocating, unrestricted but demanding. Henry felt as if they were only beginning to grope their way out of the short routines they had carved out for themselves, which ran from hallways to streets to buildings. Now, the larger city in his mind was filled with impossible hope and miserable fear—with nothing in-between.
*