Festival of Deaths(2)

The doorman jerked in his chair, unbalanced himself and began to fall. The fall did what DeAnna’s rapping had failed to do and woke him up. He saw the big black face staring at him from the window and leapt to his feet, imagining God knew what. DeAnna closed her eyes and counted to ten.

She had gotten to eight when she heard the sound of the key in the lock. She opened her eyes again and stepped back so that the doorman could let her in. Then she gave him a tight little smile—his name was Jack Pilchek, but she made a habit of not remembering it—and marched across the foyer to the couch where the driver was sleeping.

“Prescott,” she said in her second-to-loudest voice. She saved her loudest voice for screaming fights with her younger daughter, who had just turned twenty and decided that she’d really much rather be a street person than a student at one of America’s most expensive private colleges, but she wanted to be a street person in Reeboks. DeAnna hated Reeboks. She kicked the edge of the couch with her Gucci-shod toe and said, “Prescott, come, on, wake up, tell me what’s going on here.”

Prescott turned, stirred, sat up. His eyes were red and his face was lined. DeAnna thought he must once have been a fine-looking man, in that fine-boned Waspy way that characterized President Bush and the nonethnic presidents of Yale. She also thought he must once have had one hell of a drinking problem.

Prescott ran his hand through his hair and yawned. “Ms. Kroll. Hi. Sorry. Just a minute.”

“Siamese twins,” DeAnna reminded him.

“Right.” Prescott blinked. “They weren’t at the airport.”

“You mean they weren’t on their plane?”

“There was no plane for them to be on. It was canceled.”

“Canceled.”

“I talked to the woman at the reception desk. The—whatever. The airline.”

“And?”

“And there’s some kind of awful fog in London, so there aren’t any planes leaving from there. There haven’t been all night. Our night. I mean—”

“I know what you mean. Did you call Maria Gonzalez?”

“I tried. I called her office and I called here.”

“And?”

Prescott shrugged. “No answer. No answer. No answer. So I came back here and Jack and I went looking around the building, but you’re usually the first one here on tape days and Ms. Gonzalez wasn’t, so we called you.”

“Right,” DeAnna said. She passed back to the check-in desk and tapped her long red fingernails against the laminated edge. Maria Gonzalez was the talent coordinator for The Lotte Goldman Show. She was supposed to discover the talent, book the talent, and make sure the talent got to the studio to tape. DeAnna supposed it was wrong to call Maria’s charges talent, but she didn’t have any other word for them. The Lotte Goldman Show had a problem format. People got on and poured out their most intimate secrets, their most exquisite pain. People cried and screamed and broke down into convulsive fits. People told other people how their lives had been ruined and how they needed something more than what they had to want to go on living. What most of them seemed to need was more and more sex.

And more athletic sex.

And more unusual sex.

And more ecstatic sex.

And—

For DeAnna Kroll, sex was a highly inadvisable activity prone to landing a woman with God only knew how many problems, not the least of which was a man who wanted more, but DeAnna Kroll was not a fool. Her original idea for The Lotte Goldman Show had been “Dr. Ruth with pizzazz.” Her development of it had been somewhat eclectic, but her eyes had remained firmly on the goal. Sex, scandal, and celebrities, that was the ticket. That was how DeAnna Kroll had made The Lotte Goldman Show the most successful talk show in the history of television. One week a station in St. Louis had thrown Lotte up against Cosby and Star Trek, and Lotte had still pulled down a thirty-five share.

At the moment, Lotte was in danger of pulling down no share at all, because Lotte was in danger of having no show to tape for this afternoon. The Siamese twins were stuck in London. Maria Gonzalez—

DeAnna picked up Jack’s phone and dialed Maria at home. The phone rang and rang and wasn’t answered. DeAnna hung up and dialed Maria’s office upstairs. There was no answer there, either. Then DeAnna wondered for a moment if she ought to be worried. Maria was a relatively new hire. She wasn’t very dependable and she hadn’t been working out too well. She was also very nearly as sex obsessed as the show’s fans. She was probably asleep in some man’s bed. Even so, New York being New York, it usually made sense to worry.

DeAnna rubbed her hands against her face. “Okay,” she said, to nobody in particular. “We start from square one. Prescott?”