Festival of Deaths (38 page)

Itzaak picked up the pad and looked at it.

“S. I.” He shook his head. “This is the beginning of a word, Carmencita? Do you want me to try to figure out what it is?”

She gestured and he gave the pad back to her. He held it down under her hand to help. She wrote,
si,
again, and then, in a burst of brilliance and energy she wouldn’t be able to match for several days, she followed with
NOT NO
.

Itzaak took the pad. “S. I. Not no. Oh. Oh. I see.
Si.
Not no. Yes.”

Carmencita got the pad back and wrote,
SI
in the biggest letters she could make. She wondered what they looked like.

“Yes,” Itzaak said happily. “You mean yes. But yes what? That you will like Hanukkah?”

If the human race had to rely on the perceptive intelligence of men, Carmencita thought, it would have been extinct a couple of million years ago. She gestured for the return of the pad and got it. She got a grip on the pencil and tried one more time. She was really very tired. Exhausted. It was difficult to keep this up. She got out some semblance of
MAR
—she really wished she could see what she was doing—but that was as far as she could go. Her hand felt numb.

Itzaak looked worried. He took the pad away from her but didn’t look at it. Instead, he stared into her face.

“You should not put yourself to so much effort. You will make yourself more sick than you already have to be. It is not something I would like to happen.”

It wasn’t something Carmencita wanted to happen, either. She raised her left hand and lowered it again, doing her best to point to the pad.

Itzaak got the message. He looked down at the pad and read. “M. A. R.” He looked thoroughly bewildered.

“Yes, not no. And mar. Carmencita—”

Carmencita Boaz had heard often enough about light bulbs going on over people’s heads. She had seen enough animated movies and read enough comic books to know it was a popular culture cliché. She had never seen anything in real life that might equate to it. Itzaak’s face at this moment did. His eyes were brighter. His smile was wider. His face glowed as if he’d been hit by a hot pink spot. He was ecstatic.

“Carmencita,” he said. “Carmencita, this is wonderful. You will marry me. You will marry me.”

Carmencita raised her hand and lowered it again.

“Of course,” Itzaak told her, “this is no place for a woman like you to receive a proposal of marriage. We will go out as soon as you are better and do it all properly, in a restaurant, with candlelight. I will start at the beginning and tell you I love you and go right on to the end. And in a year, Carmencita, I will be an American citizen. Do you understand?”

Carmencita raised her hand, wobbled it back and forth, and lowered it again. She didn’t understand much of anything at the moment.

“The wife of an American citizen can also become an American citizen,” Itzaak said, “it is more complicated than that but less more complicated than you think. It will be fine, Carmencita, you will see. It will all be just the way you want it to be.”

I wish I could tell him that I’m willing to convert, Carmencita thought, feeling herself drifting away. I wish I could tell him I am at least willing to keep a kosher home. I wish I could tell him
anything
.

The floating feeling was really awful now. The bed felt like water. Carmencita’s eyelids felt like stones.

Itzaak was fussing around at the side of the bed again, holding onto her hand, stroking her fingers. The skin of his hand was rough and yet soft at the same time. That didn’t make sense but she knew what she meant by it. If he would just go on doing that for another sixty seconds, she would be asleep.

Asleep.

Darkness and peace. Silence and the light of dreams.

Way on the other side of the room there were three sharp raps, and Carmencita thought: Death always knocks three times.

“Just a minute,” Itzaak told her, letting go of her hand. “There is someone at the door, Carmencita. Perhaps it is the nurse and it is time again for your medication.”

But it wasn’t the nurse and it wasn’t time for her medication. Carmencita knew that. She knew it as certainly as if she could see who was standing outside that door.

It was just that she was much too weak to get a warning to Itzaak before it was too late.

F
OR SARAH MEYER, SHELLEY
Feldstein’s theft of her diary would have been enough on its own to provide cause for launching thermonuclear war. The state her hotel room was in was—well, she didn’t know what it was. She didn’t know what to think of it. She didn’t know what to do about it. She was going to have to do all the usual things, like get in touch with the hotel staff and swear out a complaint of some kind. Whether anybody would believe her if she said Shelley had done this, she didn’t know. She wasn’t sure that was the way she wanted to go about it in any case. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, except sit down and think. Sarah had come back from the hospital dead tired and in a foul mood. Shelley had made such a point of reading that diary whenever Sarah could see her, it was a form of abuse. That diary was damned dangerous, and Sarah knew it. It was the only place on earth she ever allowed herself to be herself. Making that sort of thing public would be a disaster. At least, it would be a disaster for Sarah. Sarah suspected that Shelley would think the consequences were just fine. Sarah knew what that was about. Shelley hated the idea that she had ever been one-upped by a fat person.

Sarah locked the door to the room, considered opening it again to put out a “do not disturb” sign, and decided against that. She wanted it to look as if she’d come right into the room, seen the mess and called the desk, right away. She also wanted to give herself enough time to take her revenge. She went over to the desk and opened the drawer. This was how she could be sure the mess was Shelley’s doing, if she hadn’t been sure already. Her own clothes and perfume and papers were all over the floor, destroyed forever, but the red leather address book, which was the property of
The Lotte Goldman Show
, was still in the desk intact. Which was good. Sarah took it out and flipped through it until she found Feldstein, Shelley. Then she sat down to puzzle this out.

There were four phone numbers under Shelley’s name in the red leather book, next of kin to call just in case. Two of these were identified as belonging to “Robert.” The other two were identified as belonging to “Stephen.” Two of these were the phone numbers—at home and at work—of Shelley’s husband. The other two were the phone numbers—at home and at school—of Shelley’s oldest son. It was such a pain when parents gave their children their own private telephone lines. Sarah’s parents would never have done any such thing.

Husbands come before children, Sarah told herself, and home comes before work. She punched in the number and her phone credit card and waited. She heard the phone picked up in New York and a deep bass voice say,

“Hello?”

“Hello?” Sarah could do breathlessly upset very well over the phone. The only thing she couldn’t make convincing was her face, and she didn’t have to. “Is this Mr. Robert Feldstein I’ve got hold of? Husband of Shelley Feldstein?”

“If you’re some kind of a reporter,” Robert Feldstein said, “I have already made it perfectly clear—”

“Oh, I’m not a reporter, Mr. Feldstein. I’m Sarah Meyer. I’m an assistant on
The Lotte Goldman Show.
Do I have the right Mr. Feldstein?”

“Yes,” Robert Feldstein said reluctantly. “Yes, you do. Has something gone wrong? Is Shelley all right?”

“Oh, Mr. Feldstein,” Sarah said. “I don’t know what to do. Let me tell you the story from the beginning.”

Sarah Meyer then proceeded to tell Robert Feldstein the story from the beginning, complete with names, dates, times, places, and preferences in romantic restaurants and out-of-the-way sexual venues, like the roof of the Hullboard-Dedmarsh building.

By the time Sarah was through, Shelley Feldstein’s life sounded like a chapter from
Peyton Place
.

A
T JUST ABOUT THE
time Carmencita Boaz was listening to Itzaak Blechmann explaining the ceremonies of Hanukkah—before she was able to tell him “not no,” significantly before there was a knock on the door and everything began to get nasty—Gregor Demarkian was getting out of a police car on the far side of the street from St. Elizabeth’s south-side door, so tense with impatience he felt as if his muscles had turned to glass. It would have been quicker to go in through the front doors, or the north-side entrance, but he didn’t have access to either. The north-side entrance was on a side street now blocked entirely by eighteen-wheel tractor trailer trucks, bringing in supplies for the hospital and the few businesses that surrounded it. St. Elizabeth’s was in one of those parts of Philadelphia that looked as if it had stopped being part of a city and started being part of the interstate highway system. What was going on around the front doors was bad. Stuck at the corner, realizing what it all meant, Gregor almost longed for the return of the reporters. Reporters only stabbed people with their rapier wits, which were far less sharp than they liked to think. Whoever had stabbed the two men now bleeding into the steps leading up to St. Elizabeth’s front doors had either used a very sharp knife, or gone at his victims over and over again. The rescue effort now taking place in the curving drive was a full-scale object lesson in emergency mobilization. Maybe whoever had done the stabbing was up there, too, half-dead on the ground. Wherever he was, Gregor and John Jackman were not going to be able to go through St. Elizabeth’s front doors.

“It might be different if we could claim an emergency,” John told Gregor, “but not much. We have other options.”

“Let’s use them,” Gregor said.

The other options turned out to be the south-side door, a gray metal slab with a tall rectangle of glass in the upper half of it that opened onto a small staff parking lot. The parking lot was deserted and the security light that was supposed to shine right at the door’s knob and keyhole was broken. At least half the lights in the parking lot were broken, too. Gregor looked into the deserted space and grimaced. Staff parking lot. Nurses’ cars. Aside from serial killers, there were animals known as serial rapists. Gregor had run across one or two. This was just the sort of place they liked. It was infuriating. It was so easy to fix a situation like this. It was cheap, too. A couple of the right lights, a fence—

He was always doing this. He had someplace to go and something to do. John Jackman was already at the fire door, rattling the lock.

“There’s a buzzer,” he called out. “I rang it.”

“Fine,” Gregor said.

He lumbered up to the fire door and looked through the rectangular window. The window was composed of two panes of glass with wire edging pressed between. Beyond it there was a deserted hall with doors opening off it on both sides, dimly lit. The far end wasn’t lit at all. Gregor thought this place ought to have a sign on it that said:

REALLY BAD SEX CRIME

TROUBLE EXPECTED HERE.

At least it would give the women who were forced to use this passage a shot at informed consent.

Out of the dark spot at the back of the hall came a middle-aged woman in a nun’s habit, carrying too much weight on too short legs and looking as if she were getting winded. Bennis said so many nuns got heavy because they weren’t required to do anything to make themselves attractive to men. If women ever got feminist enough, a lot of them would get heavy. Considering the fact that Bennis could eat her way through four pounds of yaprak sarma and a foot-tall mound of halva and never gain an ounce, Gregor didn’t think he could trust her opinion on this.

The nun stopped at the door and peered out. John Jackman raised his identification to the window. The nun began to open up. There were a lot of locks on this door, a bad sign. It would take a woman a good two or three minutes to open up, and two or three minutes was more than an attacker would need.

The door swung open and the nun peered out. “Yes? Didn’t you want to go in the front door?”

“There’s a medical emergency going on at the front door, Sister,” John Jackman said politely. “We couldn’t get through.”

Sister made a face. “Stabbings. Always with the stabbings. Two or three times a week.”

“Right at the hospital doors?” Gregor asked.

“Father McCormack came and talked to us about it. It has something to do with where we are. The neighborhood to the north is controlled by one gang, and the neighborhood to the east is controlled by another, so—”

“Never mind,” John Jackman said. “We get the idea.”

“It causes everybody no end of problems when they do this,” the nun said. “And they get terribly hurt and somebody always dies. How do you talk people out of behaving like that?”

“If I knew the answer to that, ma’am, I could retire to Miami.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t go to Miami,” the nun said. “Miami is worse. I know. The Sisters always watch the reruns of that show on television.”

“Nuns who watch
Miami Vice
,” John Jackman said into Gregor’s ear. “I think that makes my week complete.”

Gregor ignored him. The hall was not only dimly lit but much too well heated. It was so hot, Gregor thought steam was going to rise from the floor beneath his feet.

“You come right this way,” the nun told them, padding off down the hall into the dark. “The elevators are right over here. Just push the button for lobby and get off when the elevator stops. Unless you’re looking for a room on the south side. Are you looking for a room on the south side?”

“North side,” Gregor told her.

“Oh. Well, then. You get off at the lobby and use the other set of elevators. They’ll take you right up. And there’ll be a Sister on duty at the desk to give you any other directions you need.”

“Thank you,” John Jackman said.

They were at the elevators now. They had passed into a lightless place. Then the Sister had flicked a switch and an entire ceilingful of overhead fluorescents had come on.