Festival of Deaths (5 page)

He was just about to leave the storeroom—to try the back hall, to see if anything had to be done there—when DeAnna Kroll came in, jumped a little at the sight of him, and then began to look thoughtful.

“Max,” she said. “I didn’t think of you.”

Max smiled politely. It was a kind of smile he had learned early. It was usually very effective. “You should think of me always,” he said. “It is how I think of you.”

DeAnna Kroll shot him a look that said she wasn’t having any—DeAnna Kroll never was; she was the closest thing to an impervious female Max had ever met—and told him, “You can solve a problem I’ve got. You can at least solve half of it. Do you have a clean sweatshirt?”

“Of course,” Max said. “I have a clean sweatshirt and a clean shirt. In my locker. I always keep them there. This job—”

“I know all about your job. Go wash up.”

“Excuse me?”

“Go wash up,” DeAnna insisted. “Go to the men’s room and strip to the waist—you’re sweating like a pig; I suppose Shelley’s been running you ragged—anyway, go wash up and put on a clean shirt and a clean sweatshirt and come meet me in the greenroom as quick as you can. That’s where I’ve got the women.”

“The women?”

“The wives,” DeAnna said impatiently. “Oh, God, I don’t know how we’re ever going to survive this. There’s a guy in Lotte’s office threatening to tear the wall-to-wall. Will you get moving?”

“Yes,” Max said. “Of course.”

Max did get moving, too. He had been in the United States now only ten and a half months, and with the exception of the two weeks he had spent getting himself settled, he had worked all that time for
The Lotte Goldman Show.
He knew what Lotte was like. He knew what Shelley was like. He knew what Itzaak was like. Most of all, he knew what DeAnna was like. When she got into this kind of mood, it was best to give her more than she was asking for.

Max not only kept a clean shirt and a clean sweatshirt in his locker. He kept clean underwear, clean jeans, and clean socks in there, too. His work was heavy and sweaty and hot, but he liked to go out when it was over. It didn’t leave a good impression if you went out covered with sweat. There was a shower stall at the very back of the bathroom in the back hall, meant for use by the men who came in once a month to exterminate cockroaches. Max had discovered it his second week on the job. He went there now and cleaned up as thoroughly as he ever did when he had a date. He even washed his hair. If DeAnna Kroll wanted him clean, she would get him clean.

Max was fast. It took him less than fifteen minutes to shower and change, although that meant that his hair was hanging wet in the office air-conditioning and threatening to give him a sore throat. He made sure the stiff points of his Oxford cloth shirt collar were opened to precisely the right angle and that his sweatshirt rode up close enough to his waist. He made sure his fingernails were clean. Then he went back down the hall in search of DeAnna.

The storeroom door was still open when he came to it. The lights inside were still on. Max stopped and looked inside at all the barren order and sighed. Then he shut the lights out—

PRESERVE ELECTRICITY,

said a sign in the locker room—and closed the door.

DeAnna was up at the other end of the corridor, standing half in the greenroom and half in the corridor, looking frazzled. When she saw Max she brightened up a little, but not much.

“Thank God you’re here,” she said. “I think I’m going to lose my mind. Do you happen to know where Maria is?”

“No,” Max said. Maria was in many ways just the sort of woman Max was looking for, but she was too old. She had to be twenty-eight at least.

“I don’t know why I would think you would know,” DeAnna said, “but there’s all hell breaking loose around here and I’m absolutely bonkers. Just absolutely bonkers. Why doesn’t she remember to turn on her beeper?”

“She isn’t wearing her beeper,” Max said helpfully.

“What?”

“She isn’t wearing her beeper. Or perhaps should I say carrying it. She carries it?”

“Never mind what she does with it,” DeAnna said. “How do you know she doesn’t have it?”

“It’s the one with the little enamel rainbow on the back, yes?”

“Yes,” DeAnna said.

“It’s on top of the file cabinet in Mrs. Feldstein’s office,” Max said. “I saw it there myself, less than an hour ago, when I went in to put some things away Mrs. Feldstein asked me to. It was sitting right there next to the little statue of the head of Einstein—”

“God
damn
,” DeAnna said.

“I think perhaps she took it out of her pocketbook looking for something else and then forgot to put it back,” Max said. “Women are always doing this thing. They carry so much in their bags, they pull it all out looking for the one lost thing and then they lose something else. I think this is true.”

“I think I have a headache,” DeAnna said. “The prearranged permissions are lost. Maria is lost. I’ve got a guy used to play end for Ohio State swearing he’s going to break my bones. Never mind. You’re going to do a favor for me, right?”

“Right,” Max said loyally.

“Good.” DeAnna stepped all the way into the hall and closed the door of the greenroom behind her. “In that room,” she said, “I have six women. They are the guests who are going to be on the show we tape today—you know the Siamese twins couldn’t come?”

“Of course.”

“Good. So instead we’ve got these women, and we had to drag them out of bed in the middle of the night and then we had to get their husbands in here too and everybody is in a very bad mood, Max, let me tell you, everybody is in a very bad mood. Now normally it’s Maria’s job to see that everybody calms down and that nobody leaves—that’s the important part, that nobody leaves—but Maria isn’t here. I’ve got Carmencita in with the men—”

“This is not likely to calm them down,” Max pointed out.

“If they try any of
that,
I’ll break their heads. I want you to take care of the women. You think you can do that?”

“Possibly, yes. I am to calm them down?”

“You are to be sure they do not leave. No matter what, Max, it’s important. You are to be sure they don’t leave. If you can make them happy, that would be even better.”

“I can, of course, only try,” Max said.

“I can, of course, only wait for the lawyers, who aren’t exactly in a sunshine mood this morning either. You’re sure that was Maria’s beeper you saw?”

“Oh, yes. Definitely.”

“Wonderful. Marvelous. She could be in Acapulco and the world is coming to an end. Get in there and be nice to the ladies, Max. I’ve got to see a woman about a shit fit.”

“Excuse me please?”

“I’ve got to go talk to Lotte.” DeAnna turned on her high pointy heel. A moment later she was chugging down the hall, her cornrows dancing, the flowing edges of her skirt and her jacket billowing in the wind. She looked like a swarm of angry bees that had developed a coordinated intelligence. Max would not have wanted to get in her way.

Of course, if it was up to Max, Maria Gonzalez would never have been given so important a job as that of talent coordinator. It was a position that carried too much responsibility to be left safely in the hands of a woman, and in Portugal they would have understood that. It was one of the great confusions of America for Max that American men were so thoughtless and easygoing about the things they let women do. It was as if they didn’t think anything was really important. Max supposed that some of that might be due to how different American women were from women anywhere else in the world. Max didn’t trust Maria Gonzalez with responsibility and he wouldn’t have trusted any of the women he knew in Portugal, but he thought DeAnna Kroll was competent enough to run the world. Still…

Still. The only women he had to worry about now were the ones in the greenroom. He faced the greenroom door, reached for the knob, and hesitated. Then he knocked. He had barely stopped knocking when the door was opened and a round, plump face peered out, suspicious.

“Who are you?” the woman demanded.

Max bowed, the way he had seen it done in the old movies that played every Saturday night at the small tavern in his town. “I am Maximillian Dey,” he said. “I have been sent to keep you company until the taping.”

The small round face retreated behind the door, to set up a chorus of whispering. Then the door was drawn all the way open and Max found himself looking at six women, mostly middle-aged and mostly plump, but middle-aged and plump in a pleasant way. The tallest one—who was not the one who had originally opened the door—came forward and checked him out. The tallest one had a pimple the size of Mount Rushmore on her left cheek.

“He looks all right,” she said. “He even looks—sensitive.”

“Oh, he’s European,” one of the others said. “You could hear it in his voice. Europeans are entirely different.”

“I’m sure he would never refuse to perform cunnilingus on his lady friend,” a third one said.

Max bowed again. He didn’t know what this
cunnilingus
was, but he was sure he would not refuse to perform anything for the woman he loved, except to change diapers or wash the dishes. As to these women—

—well, if this cunnilingus was something he was supposed to perform on
them,
they would probably let him know.

I
TZAAK BLECHMANN HAD HAD
a difficult life—a very difficult life—and now, at the age of forty-six, he was beginning to come to terms with it. For many years he’d had only his dreams, screaming nightmares that woke him at two and three and four o’clock in the morning. His waking world had never seemed quite real. His present had never seemed to be as compellingly true as his past. After he had been allowed to leave the Soviet Union for Israel—after the deaths of his wife and his mother; after his left leg had been broken for the third time and finally rendered permanently deformed—he’d had trouble simply getting through the days. He wasn’t depressed. It was one of the oddities—maybe one of the blessings—of his nature that he was never depressed and never despairing. In spite of everything that had happened to him, Itzaak found it impossible to think of life as anything but God’s most wonderful gift. What he found troubling was practical thinking. How to make change. How to catch the bus. Which of the keys on the ring opened the door to the apartment. His mind and body seemed to be permanently stuck in crisis mode. His fright-or-flight response never came down out of high gear. He couldn’t buy a loaf of bread and a chicken at the grocery store without becoming totally confused. That was why his best friend in Jerusalem had advised him to go to the United States.

“You can be just as kosher in New York as you can be in Tel Aviv,” Abraham had told him, “if you’re careful. And there’s not so much… emergency there.”

Itzaak Blechmann was not a hick. He hadn’t been a hick when he was living in Jerusalem. He knew there were problems in New York City, problems with race, problems with poverty. Still, he understood what Abraham meant. In some ways, living in Israel had been very much like living in the Soviet Union. In the most important ways it had not, of course. Nobody in Israel was going to send Itzaak to jail for keeping kosher or going to shul. The Israeli government didn’t send spies in the guise of rabbis or bug the walls of houses of worship. The two countries were as far apart as they could be, except for the fact that they were both constantly and unrelievedly in the middle of a crisis.

There were times when Itzaak would have liked to have been in the Soviet Union to witness the fall. There were times when he wished he knew much more about the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and was on-site to investigate it further. Mostly, he was happy he had come to New York. Standing on a street corner in the dark when the whole of Manhattan seemed to be deserted was just as frightening as hearing the sirens go off in Jerusalem or listening to the sound of heavy boots coming up the stairs in Leningrad. The rest of the time things were calm. It had taken a while, but Itzaak had gotten used to ordinary life. He bought shoes and ate in restaurants without going into spates of mental paralysis. He read the papers in Russian and Hebrew and English without getting his languages mixed up. He played chess with friends without losing his concentration to worries he should have been free and clear of years ago.

Most of what he did, however, had to do with this job, and the three other like it he had for various other shows on the Gradon Cable System. Itzaak Blechmann had not been trained as a lighting engineer. He hadn’t even been trained for the theater. He had agreed to try this because Lotte Goldman had agreed to give him a job. The job he’d taken had been as Lotte’s lighting engineer’s assistant. Itzaak hadn’t known at the time that the man had already declared his intention to leave the show at the end of the taping year. In the long run it had worked out better than could be expected, and Itzaak had been launched. But that was six years ago.

Carmencita was new. Carmencita had been on
The Lotte Goldman Show
for less than a year. Carmencita was also a revelation. Itzaak Blechmann had known women in his life. He had been married. He had had his share of affairs in Jerusalem and New York. He had never in his life known anyone like Carmencita. Part of it was that she was young. Part of it was that she was exotic, with skin the color of poured gold and deep black hair and eyes so blue they made him think of sapphires. Itzaak didn’t know where the blue eyes had come from, but he wouldn’t have traded them for anything. He wouldn’t have traded Carmencita for anything. She was far too young for him and far too Catholic, but he couldn’t stop thinking of her and he didn’t want to stop thinking of her and that’s the way it was. Itzaak was in the grip of the greatest passion of his life, and it made him think the unthinkable. It made him think that he would die if he didn’t marry this woman who was not a Jew.

Prison camps and exile, the judicial murders of two people he dearly loved, year after year of living in hiding—Itzaak Blechmann had done more than most people would ever be asked to do in the service of his God. It was as impossible for him to consider turning his back on the commandments of that God as it had become for him to consider giving up Carmencita.