by Jane Haddam
Itzaak and Lotte were upset. Shelley and Sarah were nervous. Prescott Holloway seemed to want to fade into the background, which was where he belonged, anyway. DeAnna Kroll felt as if she were coming home. DeAnna Kroll felt as if nothing had happened to her that wasn’t perfectly normal. DeAnna Kroll thought she was going nuts. Maybe this was the flaw in the fabric of the American Dream. Maybe you could get your body out of the ghetto and into the upper middle class, but your head always slept in the bed it had been born to. That was a terrible way to describe it, but DeAnna knew what she meant. Maria and Max were dead and that felt just about right, for a death rate, among the group of them, in this period of time. Maria and Max were dead and all DeAnna could think about was how to devise ways to ensure that she never got left in the ladies’ room without at least two other women for company.
Now the taping was over for the day and the studio was dark. Since The Lotte Goldman Show had rented not only Studio C but the entire cluster of offices around it for their two-week stay in Philadelphia, nobody would be coming in to produce a game show or give the weather report between now and the time they were ready to tape the next Lotte Goldman show, tomorrow morning. This was the shoe fetishists show they had done today. It had come off better than DeAnna had expected. DeAnna wasn’t sure what she had expected. The Shoe Lovers Liberation Army. Shoe Fetishists Anonymous. It wasn’t drive-by killings or the murders of Maria and Max that made her think the entire country was going insane. She wrapped up the paperwork she had been doing through lunch—hot pastrami on a roll with Russian dressing; guest roster for the show on sex therapists who say their clients make them frigid—and put it under her paperweight for Sarah to find. She thought about leaving a nasty note under there for Sarah to find—but she thought about doing that every day, and she never did. She got up and grabbed her tote bag and went into the hall. All she had to do now was watch the tape, make sure anything that needed fixing got fixed and sign off on the show. After that, she could go back to the hotel and have a good stiff drink.
Out in the hall, she saw Prescott Holloway following Carmencita Boaz down the hall. Carmencita was telling him how they had to have six dozen yellow roses brought up at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning, it didn’t matter when the flower shops opened, because roses were the only thing that would calm the sex therapists down enough so they wouldn’t swear when the discussion started.
“They’re very temperamental,” Carmencita was saying. “They’re highly sensitive people. They’d have to be, given their work.”
“Right,” Prescott Holloway said.
DeAnna turned a corner and saw Lotte through the door of one of the offices. Sarah was in there, too, which made things easier. Shelley and Itzaak were nowhere to be seen, but that didn’t matter. DeAnna didn’t need them for this.
“Come on,” DeAnna said. “Let’s get moving. I want to get out of here at a reasonable hour today.”
“Most people would say three or four o’clock in the afternoon is a reasonable hour,” Lotte responded.
“Most people don’t start work at three A.M. Come on, Sarah, move your butt. And you need your pad.”
Sarah made a face, which DeAnna ignored. DeAnna had suffered through her share of shit jobs. She didn’t have much sympathy for a Wellesley girl who thought typing was beneath her. She went on down the corridor and stopped at a door with a big red dot on it. Just to be safe, she knocked. There was no answer.
“All clear,” she told Lotte and Sarah, who had come up behind her. She opened the door and stuck her head in. The room was dark. She felt around inside the door for the light switch and switched it on.
It was a compact, crowded room with one wall taken up entirely by an enormous television screen and quadraphonic speakers. Under the television screen there was a VCR unit so small, it was ludicrous, like the mouse the elephant stood on in the illustrations to the old children’s story. This was the room people came to to review the tapes they had made of their shows and decide what to keep and what to cut in them. In a minute or two, the technical man who would do the actual cutting would come along to get them started. DeAnna was in rooms like this five days a week, forty weeks a year. There was nothing about them to make her feel so nauseated.
Nauseated, however, she was. She grabbed the nearest chair and sat down in it. She put her head between her knees and felt her shoulders tremble in fluttery little spasms that reminded her of the heart palpitations you got from drinking too much coffee.
“Are you all right?” Lotte asked her.
“Jesus Christ,” DeAnna said, when she was able to talk at all. “You won’t believe what I just did to myself.”
“Maybe I should get her some water,” Sarah said, sounding as if she’d just as soon rather not.
DeAnna sat up and shook her head. The motion didn’t clear it. It did come close to giving her a headache.
“Jesus Christ,” she said again. “It was unconscious or something. It was weird. I turned on the light, and then when there was nothing here, I think I went into shock.”
“You’re not making sense,” Sarah said.
“She is making sense,” Lotte said. “Do you want to lie down, DeAnna, and leave this to me?”
“No, no, of course not. You can’t cut a tape. You’ve never done it in your life.”
“I’ve been working on this show for fifteen years of my life. And I’ve been sitting in on your cutting sessions for just as long. I would do all right, DeAnna.”
“Yes,” DeAnna said. “Yes, you probably would. But it’s okay, Lotte, it really is. I’m fine.”
“Fine,” Lotte repeated.
DeAnna laughed. “I’m getting soft, Lotte, I’m having visions. What do you say about that?”
“I say that I am having visions, too,” Lotte said. “The day has felt all wrong from the start.”
It was not, DeAnna thought, what she wanted to hear. Always before, she and Lotte bounced off each other. When one of them was depressed, the other was optimistic. When one of them was afraid, the other was fearless. It had been a good partnership that way and it had been supposed to last forever.
DeAnna hauled her tote bag onto her lap and began to go through it, pulling out papers and pens and spiral notebooks in profusion.
“To hell with this,” she said. “We’re letting ourselves get spooked. Nobody on earth can predict the future.”
“My paternal grandmother used to do a good imitation of it,” Lotte said drily.
“You only believed that because you were a child at the time.”
The entire contents of DeAnna’s tote bag were now on the seat of the chair next to the chair she was sitting in—except for the four kinds of makeup she always kept with her just in case, which didn’t count. DeAnna grabbed her favorite pen and one of the spiral notebooks and sat back, looking busy, looking important, trusting in what she always trusted in when she was scared stiff. Besides, she told herself. She didn’t have any reason to be scared stiff.
Just because she felt that something awful was about to happen, didn’t mean it really was.
2
CARMENCITA BOAZ ALSO FELT that something awful was about to happen. She’d been feeling it all day, and it had been making her dizzy. Carmencita always got dizzy when she was frightened. She’d been doing that since she was a child. Guatemala City had not been the calmest place on earth over the last twenty-five years. It had not been as bad as Managua or some of those places in El Salvador, but it hadn’t exactly been St. Petersburg, Florida, either. Carmencita could remember hearing gunfire in the distance when she was very young and being warned against stopping for ice cream in one café or another because some political group nobody had ever heard of the day before yesterday was now threatening to bomb it. There were times when Carmencita thought that getting the United States of America out of Guatemala was the best thing that could happen, but she’d never understood how anybody was going to bring that about by blowing up cafes. That was when she’d decided that all pol
itical people were mentally and spiritually ill. She had added spiritually to her definition in spite of the fact that her own spirituality was somewhat suspect. Itzaak thought she was very religious. She let him go on thinking that because he was very religious himself, and she thought he might think less of her if he realized how ambivalent she had always been about Catholicism. Maria had gone to Mass every morning and made her go, too. Now that Maria was dead, Carmencita slept late or stopped at the Greek diner around the corner from work for breakfast and a newspaper or just walked slowly instead of rushing, but she did not use her mornings for church.
Back in Guatemala city, the nuns brought the children to Mass every morning before school. The children knelt in the dark and the cool of the church and looked at the statues cradled in the niches against the walls, the Virgins and the Martyrs, the Patron Saints and Intercessors. To Carmencita, they had always looked as wooden as they really were, as dull as the plaster they were made of. The nuns were real and always holy. The nuns gave up their lives for the sake of other people. The saints stared sightless into the candles poor women had spent the milk money to light at their feet, and did no good at all.
I should have joined one of the Pentecostal churches, Carmencita thought, and almost laughed, out loud, in this temporary office with its walls of thin plasterboard. She could just see herself, jumping and dancing and speaking in tongues. She could see herself doing those things the way she could see herself bungee jumping from the Brooklyn Bridge.
She got up from behind her desk and went into the hall. The cutting room door was open. She could see DeAnna and Lotte and Sarah sitting around inside it, but no sign of the tech man. If this had been New York, Lotte would have been screaming, wanting to know why the tech man hadn’t gotten there first, wanting to know who she had to fire to get the job done the way she wanted it done. Since this tech man belonged to WKMB and not to The Lotte Goldman Show, DeAnna apparently believed she didn’t have the right to shriek or that it wouldn’t do any good.
Carmencita moved off to the door that led directly into Studio C. She opened that and peered into the rafters to see if Itzaak was still at work. The rafters were empty. They echoed hollowly above her head. Carmencita pulled the door closed and went on down the corridor.
She found Itzaak in the room they called the open room, which was nothing but a small space that had been cleared of everything but a few chairs and designated for the use of nothing. It was where the people who didn’t have offices ate their lunches if they didn’t go out or rested for a moment or two when nobody needed their services. It was the only room in the Studio C suite that had been decorated for the season. In one corner stood a dwarf plastic Christmas tree, with a handful of tinsel on it and not much else. In another corner stood a plastic menorah with plastic candles with plastic flames on them, set off by strings of paper-doll cut-out menorahs stuck to the walls behind it. Itzaak was always saying that it didn’t make any sense, the way Hanukkah was celebrated in the United States. Everywhere else in the world, it was a minor holiday. But Carmencita understood.
Itzaak was sitting at a cardboard-topped, fold-up card table, eating soup out of a polystyrene cup. When he saw Carmencita in the doorway, he got immediately to his feet and held out his hands to her.
“Carmencita,” he said, “come in. I would have stopped by and asked if you wanted to eat with me, but I thought you would be working.”
“I was working.” Carmencita kissed him on the tip of the nose, and then pulled up a chair for herself. “I got tired of working. And besides, I was a little nervous about this afternoon.”
“This afternoon,” Itzaak repeated, sitting down again. “Is it this afternoon, that you are supposed to see this person?”
“Yes, Itzaak. It’s this afternoon. I’m glad it could be arranged so quickly. It’s an emergency. And it’s not like we’re in New York, where I’d know a dozen places to go.”
“It still worries me, this meeting of yours,” Itzaak said. “I wish you would at least tell me the name of the person you will see.”
“The person asked me not to,” Carmencita said, careful to keep the pronoun out of it, careful to keep sex vague. “And it’s just as well, Itzaak, it really is. For your protection.”
“I do not need protection. I am an old man. And I have been shot at.”
“You are not an old man. At least I don’t have to worry about the quality of what I’ll be getting. It’s the same person who got Maria her green card. I saw Maria’s green card. Hers was very good.”
“Yours is very good,” Itzaak said, “but it’s like all of them. It will not survive a check.”
“Nobody’s going to check it.”
“That policeman in New York checked mine,” Itzaak said. “It was a good thing I was legal. That is the other thing that worries me about all this. If you get caught, they will not only investigate your cousin Alejandro. They will investigate you.”
“I won’t get caught.”
“It is a crazy situation all around,” Itzaak insisted. “You should not have to have a forged green card and a dead person’s social security number. The United States should be proud to have you.”
“What about my cousin Alejandro?”
“I have not met your cousin Alejandro. I have only met you.”
There were two unopened bags of potato chips at Itzaak’s elbow. Each one was stamped with the U inside a circle that was a symbol of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, certifying them kosher. Carmencita took one and opened it.
“I’m starving to death,” she said. “I haven’t eaten since before we got here this morning. I’m sorry this has caused you so much trouble, Itzaak. What with the money—”
“I’m not worried about the money.”
“But it really is an emergency. Alejandro has to report for work in just four days. It’s not much of a job. He’ll only be a janitor in Queens somewhere. But it is a start and if he doesn’t have his papers when he shows up for his first day, they’ll throw him out. The government is getting so picky about these things.”
“I don’t care about the government. I’m worried about what I told you I was worried about. And I’m worried about your going to meet this person alone, when there have been two deaths and we don’t know who has been committing the murders.”
Carmencita shifted uneasily in her seat. “It’s broad daylight.”
“Max was killed in broad daylight.”
“There will be lots of people around, lots of people in shouting distance. There will. And it won’t take very long to get the business over and done with.”
“So,” Itzaak said. “You are worried about this person. You are not sure this person is safe.”
“Of course I’m sure.”
“This is why you look so sick to your stomach,” Itzaak said. “It is because you are so sure.”
“I just don’t like to think about the things that have been going on around here,” Carmencita said. “Around the show, I mean. In New York and here. I get so confused. And I hate to think about them.”
“So do I.”
“But I am sure about this person, Itzaak, I really am. I’m certainly not worried that this person is going to kill me. It would be bad for business, wouldn’t it? Killing off your customers.”
“And you won’t tell me who it is?”
“No, Itzaak, I won’t.”
“Or where you will be meeting?”
“Of course not. You’d come.”
“Or when?”
“It’s much better the way it is now,” Carmencita said. “Really, Itzaak, it really is. When is sometime this afternoon, and that’s all you have to know. When I’m finished with it, I’ll come and get you and we can have a drink at the Israeli nightclub you told me about.”
“Then it will be late this afternoon,” Itzaak said, and then he sighed, and put his hands up to his face, and rubbed his eyes. He looked suddenly very old, much older than he really was, and Carmencita’s heart wen
t out to him. She put her hand on the thick hairy pad of his wrist.
“Don’t do this to yourself,” she said. “I’ll be all right. I really will. You can’t protect me from everything in the world.”
“I don’t want to protect you from everything in the world. I only love you.”
“I know,” Carmencita said. “I love you too.”
Itzaak put his hands on the table. “This is not how I had imagined saying it to you for the first time. In a place like this. Worried sick that you are going to get yourself killed. I saw us in a restaurant with candles and a tablecloth.”
“I don’t need a restaurant with candles and a tablecloth.”
“I don’t know what you need,” Itzaak said. “Maybe this Mr. Demarkian will be the genius he is reported to be. Maybe this will all be cleared up in a few days and we can go on with things.”
“Maybe we ought to go on with things now.”
