“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—”
“Goddamn,” 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—”