Festival of Deaths(14)

“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.





6


ITZAAK 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.