Festival of Deaths(17)

“They’re going to get divorced,” Carmencita told him, “but that’s not my responsibility. I just have to make sure they get through the next three hours. Are we going out to breakfast after this is done?”

“We always go out to breakfast. I never want to miss going out to breakfast with you.”

“Good.” Carmencita hopped down off the desk, looked into the pastry bag again, and came up with a third cheese Danish. Itzaak was charmed. Three. Three. This was no hard-bitten American career woman with her mind on her diet. This was a lovely, life-celebrating creature who would one day be a marvelous cook.

“I think I’ll go see if the lawyers are done with my gentlemen,” Carmencita said. “Max is in with the ladies. They’re behaving predictably. See you later?”

“See you later,” Itzaak said.

“I’m really glad you’re here. If it wasn’t for you, I think I’d lose my mind.”

Itzaak almost told her that she ought to lose her mind, she’d fit in a lot better on The Lotte Goldman Show. It was the kind of joke he knew he was supposed to tell and was so very bad at. She was gone anyway, out the door, down the hall, her heels clicking sharply even on the carpet. Itzaak wondered what it was they made the heels of women’s shoes from.

At the last minute, he got up and went to his office door, to see if he could catch a glimpse of her walking away. He got Maximillian Dey and Lotte Goldman instead, although not in the same time or the same place. Max was coming out of the greenroom door looking a little green himself. Lotte was going in the direction of her office with a distracted look on her face. Itzaak didn’t think he could blame her for being distracted. So far, it had been a mess of a day from start to finish.

Itzaak went back to his office, sat down at his desk, and began to fuss with the things on his blotter. He didn’t keep much—a picture of his wife and a picture of his mother, a little replica of the Israeli flag, a copy of the Torah—but what he had he treasured, and he didn’t like the feeling he sometimes got that the things on his desk had been moved around in his absence. Nothing had ever been taken. He would have noticed that. He thought it was probably just the cleaning lady, polishing up. He didn’t like it anyway.

Today, however, nothing was missing and nothing was moved, and Itzaak decided to take it as a good omen.

The rest of his day was going to go well, and so was Carmencita’s.





7


PRESCOTT HOLLOWAY HAD BEEN born and brought up in the city of New York—in Brooklyn, in fact, so that he had gone to Erasmus High School, just two years behind Barbra Streisand—but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t remember when The Change had happened. That was how he thought of it, as The Change, as if New York were a woman going through menopause and having some kind of fit. Prescott Holloway didn’t know much about women. He didn’t know anything about menopause. Even so, the metaphor seemed to fit. It even had an element of hope in it. Women went through menopause and came out the other side and were normal again. Maybe New York would do that, too.

At that moment, New York was what it had been at least since the election of the last mayor, and maybe before—meaning nuts in a totally nasty way. Prescott couldn’t remember a time when New York hadn’t been nuts. That was part of the city’s identity. It was just that lately, lately…

That kid from Utah, chased through the subway tunnels to his death…

That woman in Central Park…

The Change.

What really made Prescott nervous was the car he drove. It was Bart Gradon’s idea of the minimum necessary luxury for a major cable network, but Bart Gradon’s ideas of minimum necessary luxury had been formed on Wall Street and the Connecticut Gold Coast. Prescott was parking at the curb outside something called the Bodega Santiago in a pearl gray Cadillac stretch, longer than two ordinary cars, complete with telephone, television, VCR, radio, compact-disk player, and bar. The streets looked empty enough—it was five o’clock in the goddamn morning—but trouble could come out of anywhere, anytime, and trouble had a mean face. Especially up here. Prescott looked up the street at the lighted storefront that was the public face of the local Pentecostal church. These days, the Latinos who weren’t in gangs all seemed to be holy rolling, coming to Jesus in a whirling cloud of sweat and hair, screaming and writhing on the floor. The churches were as bad as the crack houses. They stayed open all night. Prescott could hear the hymn music from where he was sitting, faint and tinny but with a driving beat.

If Prescott had Maria Gonzalez’s job, he would have moved downtown. He wouldn’t have had anything to do with an ethnic neighborhood like this one, any more than he had anything to do with his old neighborhood back in Brooklyn. He lived off Times Square, in a fifth floor walk-up with the bathroom down the hall, just to be in the middle of everything.