A JEWEL THEFT

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

A jewel theft at 8 Silver Park Street was reported last night by Eleanor Rustwick. Items included a ring and necklace given to her by her late husband, Eric Rustwick, who founded the firm of Rustwick and Dollimore back in 1964 and shepherded it through the decades as it became one of the city’s most prominent institutions. Mr. Rustwick, who passed in 2017, was known for his ruthless eye for contractual details and his fierce loyalty to his corporate clients, particularly to those who developed the area of downtown formerly known as The Trunk. Many a family would later recount the dread they felt after walking to the mailbox, expecting a card from a relative or a magazine, and instead discovering a letter from Rustwick and Rustwick, its cream-colored envelope belying the violence contained within. The letter was clear: it was time to go. Neighborhoods were divided or dissolved altogether in favor of the sports complex, the office towers, the luxury apartments. Rustwick made as many refugees as he made reputations. When he retired at the age of 78, he moved himself and his wife into the penthouse of the most exclusive of the residential developments. Within six months, he had renounced nearly all of his previous work as bloodthirsty profiteering, and he began to give away as much of his fortune as he could to groups active on behalf of causes that included environmental protection, criminal justice reform, and financial literacy. He also started to write poetry, which he had not done since he was a child, and to fold his work via origami into housings for the valuables he had purchased for his wife over the years. The ring that was stolen, which was valued at $750,000, had been nesting in a prose poem that Rustwick wrote less than a month before his death: “Bodies in suits. Bodies in dresses. Bodies in blouses and shirts. Bodies in nothing, but nothing is still something, is still skin and blood, tissue and sinew. Bodies without nothing are no longer bodies, are bones, are boxed up, are buried. Bodies are buried.” Eleanor Rustwick said that while she was sad to lose the ring, she was pleased the the poem had been left behind. Police are uncertain how the penthouse was obtained by the thieves.