Festival of Deaths

by Jane Haddam

  PHILADELPHIA THIS YEAR.

  TALK TO GREGOR DEMARKIAN

  Sarah wondered uneasily what sort of program a sex show could do about serial killers and then put that folder back. She was just about to go on to file cabinet three when she saw the tag on the last file in this drawer. “Idiotas.”

  Idiotas, Sarah thought.

  That meant “idiots.”

  She didn’t need to speak Spanish to figure that out.

  Sarah reached for the file folder, pulled it out and put it on top of the cabinet next to the geode. She opened it and found all the prearranged permission agreements for Lotte’s cunnilingus show. She closed the file folder. She smiled.

  Prearranged permission agreements were very important to a show like the one they were doing—sometimes because of emergencies like this one tonight, but mostly because there was some sticky legal territory in developing what were intended to be mass-marketed, commercial programs about ordinary peoples’ private lives. Lotte Goldman refused to begin any investigation on the feasibility of a topic before she had her permissions. It was one of the most important responsibilities of the talent coordinator’s office to get those permissions and make sure they were easy to find. Tonight, of course, they would be even more important, because without them they’d have to drag the lawyers out of bed and get the signatures all over again before they even started to tape.

  Sarah thought about taking the file folder itself and decided against it. Instead she took the permissions out, left the rest of the papers, and replaced the folder in the drawer. Then she folded the permissions into a thick paper square and put the square under her tunic. That was one advantage to being fat and lumpy. Nobody ever questioned the appearance of one more lump.

  Sarah let herself out of Carmencita’s office and into the hall. She was prepared with an explanation if anybody caught her, but there was nobody there. She walked down the hall and stopped again at the side corridor where she had seen DeAnna Kroll go after she first came in. DeAnna was nowhere to be seen, but Sarah could hear her. DeAnna had to be down at her own office or in Lotte’s, if Sarah could judge from the echo. She was doing her patented bellowing act on the phone.

  “Shelley, for God’s sake,” she was saying. “I’ve got a love seat. A love seat. I can’t put any of these people on a love seat.”

  Sarah walked the rest of the way to the lobby, looked around at the emptiness again, and then let herself through a door at the side of the elevator bank that led to what they called the “back hall.” The “back hall” wasn’t actually in the back of anything—it certainly wasn’t in the back of the building—but it was that kind of place, concrete and cold, dark and faintly foul. Sarah made her way around coils of wire and metal buckets and big cans of paint to the incinerator door at the back, and then she took out the wad of paper that was the permissions and looked at them.

  This was an old building with an old-fashioned incinerator. A long chute went down to the basement where a fire was kept going at all times, and anything that fell into it got burned up.

  When Carmencita couldn’t find the permissions, there would be hell to pay, there really would be. DeAnna Kroll would go positively ballistic, and Lotte Goldman would smoke in the office.

  Sarah looked at the wad of paper in her hand and unfolded it. Then she ripped it in half and in half again. Then she opened the incinerator chute and shoved the scraps down. At the last minute, she was seized by caution. It was a good thing. One of the ragged-edged pieces of paper had fallen out of her hand. It lay on the floor just next to her left foot, threatening to incriminate her. Sarah bent down, picked it up, and shoved it into the chute after the rest.

  The world might be a genuinely awful place erected for the single purpose of making Sarah Meyer miserable, but there was no reason to let it get its way all the time.

  No reason at all.

  4

  SHELLEY FELDSTEIN HAD STARTED out as a dresser of department store windows, and she had been pretty good at it—very good at it—at a very young age. She had started the way all dressers start, as the assistant to an assistant, in a second-rate store with delusions of grandeur. She had just graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and had delusions of grandeur herself. Maybe they weren’t such delusions. By the time she was twenty-four, she was chief dresser for her store. By the time she was twenty-six she was head dresser for Saks. By the time she was twenty-eight she was freelance, the single most successful dresser in Manhattan, the kind of person to whom stores paid thousands of dollars to do just one window. She was also married, pregnant, and bored to tears. If she had been born in another time and place, she would have quit working as soon as her baby was born. Having been born in this time and this place, that didn’t seem right. It also didn’t seem right to give up the money. In the year that she was pregnant, Shelley bought home over two hundred fifty thousand dollars, beating her husband’s take from his job as a stockbroker by better than twenty-five grand. Fortunately, Robert didn’t mind. What Shelley minded was the repetitiveness of it. Executives from Saks and Lord & Taylor and Altman’s and Bergdorf Goodman would call her in and tell her they wanted something different, but they wouldn’t mean it. What they wanted was what had come to be called a “Shelley Feldstein Look.” Shelley Feldstein was sick of the Shelley Feldstein Look. It reminded her of the Villager skirt and sweater sets she used to wear in high school. It was that out of date.

  Shelley Feldstein had been brought up to be what her mother called “a sensible girl.” She had been taught the importance of things, like home and family, husband and children, security and responsibility. She had been taught the dangers of chasing after butterflies, especially when that meant giving up a good job or a good marriage when you didn’t have anything else on the line. Shelley might have gone on forever, posing faceless black mannequins wearing Christian Lacroix in tableaux meant to resemble the Amazon rain forest, if it hadn’t been for a set of very unusual circumstances. In the first place, Robert took her to Tavern on the Green for dinner, which he hated, because she loved it and it was her fortieth birthday and she had been feeling depressed. In the second place, Robert said something grossly insensitive and made her cry, which he had never done before in all their years together. In the third place, when Shelley had gone to wash her face, she had met Lotte Goldman and DeAnna Kroll in the bathroom.

  The reason DeAnna had not been able to get in touch with Shelley was because all but one of the ringers on the phones in Shelley’s apartment were off. They were off because Shelley’s four-year-old had turned them off, which was what he had taken up for a hobby over the last few months. Shelley had gotten up in the night with a headache and gone down to the kitchen for an aspirin, and it was there that DeAnna had found her. The kitchen phone was a wall phone. Jason couldn’t reach it.

  Shelley had had her meeting with Lotte and DeAnna five years ago. They had been five good years, in spite of the fact that she was making less money than she had been doing windows. They had been five years of excitement and adventure and very late nights. In fact, Shelley had gotten pregnant with Jason in the warm glow of the euphoria that had visited her after DeAnna made her offer.

  Coming into the studio at quarter after four in the morning, carrying a black leather tote bag from Coach full of line drawings and lighting specifications, Shelley felt like a student again, not the forty-five-year-old mother of six. It even made her secretly pleased that the sets she would be dealing with were intended to house such—well, outrageous programs. Shelley loved telling people she worked for The Lotte Goldman Show. Not only did everyone watch it, everyone was shocked by it. When Shelley got a couple of glasses of wine into her, she told stories about what it was like to work with the woman who smoked a cigar with her private parts and the man who had had his balls tattooed. That second one really got to the men, turning them green, making their eyes bulge. It was wonderful.

  What was not wonderful was this set left over from the Siamese twins, and Shelley kne
w it. She dropped her tote back at the door of the studio and walked to the center of the stage, looking at the love seat, looking at the wide-armed club chair Lotte was supposed to sit in for the interview. For one thing, there weren’t enough places to sit. DeAnna had said something on the phone about four couples. For another, the ambiance was wrong. Ambiance was the important thing. People on the outside had no idea. The set of The Lotte Goldman Show might look simple to produce, but it wasn’t, because tone was everything. Get the tone wrong, and you were likely to have the FCC down on your neck, screaming about obscenity.

  Shelley walked around the love seat and the club chair. She walked to the middle of the platform and looked straight up into the lights. She frowned. Then she went back to the studio door and picked up the interoffice phone.

  “DeAnna?” she said. “Can you come down here a minute? And can you bring Itzaak?”

  “I can’t find Itzaak,” DeAnna said. “I’ve tried.”

  “He’ll come in with Carmencita,” Shelley said dismissively. “He’ll give her five minutes and come in after. Never mind. Come down here and talk this out with me.”

  “But—”

  Shelley hung up. None of them wanted to talk about sets. None of them thought consultation about sets was important. Shelley just had to make them do what they ought to want to do.

  By the time DeAnna came in, Shelley had the love seat pulled off to one side and listing at the edge of the platform. She wasn’t strong enough to drag it any farther. She had the club chair all the way off and onto the studio floor. All that took was a sharp shove with her hip. She needed Itzaak for the lights and Maximillian for the heavy lifting, but she was feeling much better.

  “It’s going to be fine,” Shelley said, as DeAnna came across to the set. “I was a little worried on the way over here, because of the time frame, but it’s going to be fine. Where’s Max?”

  “On his way,” DeAnna said.

  “Good. We need him to paint a new set of backdrops. Pearl gray, I think, or even navy blue with a white trim. Something conservative.” Shelley looked at the bright yellow backdrops now on the set and wrinkled her nose. “These are all we’d need. I can hear the phone calls now. What color dress is Lotte going to wear?”

  DeAnna made a face. “I don’t know. Do you need to know right away?”

  “I need to know before Max paints. We don’t want to paint gray and have in her gray. Or navy blue and have her in navy blue. She’d fade into the background. What about the guests?”

  “I haven’t seen the guests. I don’t even know if we have any guests.”

  “What does Maria say?”

  DeAnna looked away. “Maria doesn’t say anything. I can’t find her.”

  “You’ve tried her beeper?”

  “Of course I’ve tried her beeper. I’ve tried her apartment. I’ve tried everything.”

  “That makes the second time this month,” Shelley said.

  DeAnna shrugged. “The last time we didn’t have an emergency like this one. It doesn’t matter. Lotte isn’t fed up yet. And when Lotte isn’t fed up—”

  “—nobody is fed up,” Shelley said. “I know. But we have to do something about this, DeAnna.”

  “Right now, I only have to do something about this show. Carmencita’s coming in. She ought to know what you need. We’ve never had any trouble with Carmencita.”

  “Right. Well. Tell her I need to know what everybody’s going to be wearing and also if there are any problems I ought to plan for—if one of the guests is too fat or too thin or too tall or too short, you know what I mean, something really out of the ordinary. I usually do this myself in advance but—”

  “Don’t apologize.”

  “I’m not apologizing,” Shelley said. “Get me Max. Get me Itzaak. Oh, and as soon as we set up, get me Lotte, if she’s in, because Itzaak’s got to light her and I’ve got to be sure—”

  “I know,” DeAnna said. “I know.”

  “Everybody knows everything around here,” Shelley said. “We sound like a couple of mynah birds. Go back to your office. If you could remember to give the messages I told you—”

  “I’ll remember. You going to need anything in the way of props?”

  Shelley looked the set over, seeing it in her mind the way it would be once it had been transformed, and shook her head.

  “No props. Some water because they have to have it or they choke. That’s all.”

  “I’ll make sure Sarah knows about the water.”

  Sarah. At the sound of Sarah’s name, Shelley shot a look of sympathy at DeAnna and caught DeAnna shooting one back. The two women smiled and looked away from each other. Sarah was the ultimate example of Lotte’s “not being fed up yet.” Everybody else on the show had been fed up with Sarah for years. At least, Shelley thought, she was better off than DeAnna. DeAnna had to put up with Sarah as an assistant.

  Shelley sat down on the edge of the stage and said, “Go. I’ve got everything under control. Send me the guys when they come in.”

  “You really think Itzaak was with Carmencita?” DeAnna asked.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Shelley said.

  DeAnna sighed. “It’s my personal opinion that most women—Christian and Jew; fat and thin; white, black, and green—need their heads examined.”

  Shelley laughed, and DeAnna went striding across the studio and out the studio door. Shelley turned around and looked at the set, going over the changes in her mind one more time, making sure she had it all down pat. It wasn’t as easy to think on no sleep as it had been when Shelley was still at Rhode Island, but it was easier than she would have imagined. Middle age had turned out not to be such a boogeyman after all.

  Shelley had gotten to her feet and started across the studio to get her tote bag when she saw the dreidel, and then she couldn’t help herself. It was sitting in the middle of the set where it didn’t belong. Shelley couldn’t abide having things where they didn’t belong. It was an ordinary dreidel, a small top with four planed surfaces on its sides and the surfaces painted with Hebrew letters, a toy for family gambling games during Hanukkah. Hanukkah was late in December this year, but the dreidels had started showing up at delis and newsstands at the beginning of November, and now everybody on the show had at least one. Shelley supposed half of everybody in New York had at least one, since fifty cents, and not a connection to Judaism, was the only requirement for ownership.

  She picked this dreidel up and turned it over in her hand, murmuring the Hebrew letters to herself and the sentence they stood for. Nūn, gīmel, hē, shīn, the letters went, meaning Nes gadol hayah sham—“A great miracle occurred there.” That meant the miracle of the one night of oil that had lasted eight nights and allowed the Maccabees to win a military victory over Antiochus, after Antiochus had tried to forbid the Jews to practice Judaism. Shelley had grown up in a decidedly secular family and married a decidedly secular man, but even she knew this much about the religion of her ancestors. Hanukkah, her grandmother used to say, is the one holiday even Communists are loath to give up. Shelley hadn’t known what that meant, because all the people in her family were advocates of Freud, not Marx, and wouldn’t have known a manifesto if it showed up for dinner.

  Shelley flipped the dreidel in her hand one more time, and then stopped. The dreidel was defective. Maybe that was why it was left on the floor. The nūn and gīmel and hē were all in their right places, but the shīn wasn’t. Where the shīn was supposed to be was a different letter entirely, the letter pē. Shelley had to wrack her brains to come up with the name—she had taken exactly six weeks of Hebrew lessons when she was thirteen and then decided the enterprise was going to make her crazy—but she was proud of herself for doing it. She wondered why nobody had noticed the mistake until the dreidel was bought and brought here. Maybe the mistake hadn’t been noticed even then. Maybe she was the first one to see.

  She stood up and started back for the door, and then the lights above her head began to go on one by one. She sq
uinted into the rafters and said, “Itzaak?”

  “Ready to go,” Itzaak said, in his thick Russian accent overlaid with an Israeli lilt.

  Shelley dropped the dreidel into her pocket.

  “I’ve got to get the new set together,” she said. “Then I’m going to give you a lot of work to do.”

  5

  ALL HIS LIFE, MAXIMILLIAN Dey had wanted exactly two things, and now, at the ripe old age of eighteen, he had one of them. The one of them he had was his residence not only in the United States, but in New York. Back in the little seacoast town in Portugal where he had grown up, New York was like Atlantis, considered to be fabulous at the same time it was considered to be fake. Maximillian sent his mother and his sisters chips of New York City sidewalk, just to prove that it was real. He sent them pictures of himself sitting in espresso bars in Greenwich Village and standing in front of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. He did not send them detailed explanations of the geography of the city or the status of the five boroughs. Boroughs were something he hadn’t known about himself until he landed in the States. Besides, for the moment, there was nothing he could do about the fact that he lived in Queens. Maximillian was only surviving out there by rooming with three other young men like himself in a two-bedroom place that needed a coat of paint. He had checked out rents in Manhattan and they were appalling: fifteen hundred dollars for one room and a Pullman kitchen on West Ninety-fourth Street near Amsterdam Avenue; eight hundred dollars a month for a smaller room and a hot plate in a decaying brownstone on a seedy back street in the Village. It was insane. It was only a matter of time. Maximillian Dey was much too young to believe in his own mortality, physical or metaphorical. He was sure that he would have his apartment in Manhattan and his furniture from Conran’s and his season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera by the time he was twenty-two. In the meantime, he bought discount everything and fished copies of The New Yorker out of the office wastebaskets to read.