Festival of Deaths(3)

“Yes, Ms. Kroll?”

“I want you to go get Sarah Meyer. She lives on the East Side—just a minute, I’ve got the address in my book—Call her from the car and tell her we’ve got an emergency and then bring her here. Can you do that?”

“Yes, Ms. Kroll.”

“When you get Sarah here, wait. I’m going to need you to do a few more things. Can you work overtime tonight?”

“It’s this morning. Of course I can work overtime. I like the money.”

“Good. Go get Sarah. We’re going to have to think of something quick and then we’re going to have to set it up. God, I’ve got to think.”

“I’ve got to go,” Prescott said.

“Go.” DeAnna picked up Jack’s phone again. Then she put it down again. She really ought to go up to her office. She really ought to make this next phone call in a private place. She really ought to get up close to Maria’s files to see who it might be possible to get at the last minute. She really ought to do something about this screaming headache. Maybe there was nothing she could do about the headache. She was too phobic about drugs to take aspirin.

She stalked away from Jack’s desk to the elevators and called back over her shoulder: “If Maria comes in, tell her I want to see her ASAP.”

She stepped through the elevator doors and punched the button for the twentieth floor.

The next thing she had to do was call Lotte.





2


LOTTE GOLDMAN HAD COME to the United States from Israel when she was nineteen years old. She had come to Israel from Germany when she was eight. That first trip was something she remembered in great detail, but it was like staring into a blinding white light. First there was the big black English car that had driven up to the back door of their house in Heidelberg. Then there was the thick brown blanket Lotte’s mother had wrapped around her before laying her in the car’s trunk. First there was Lotte’s small brother David, whimpering in the dark. Then the door of the trunk came crashing down over their heads and Lotte had her larger hands around David’s small ones, holding tight as she whispered, “shh, shh, shh.” That was the fall of 1942, and if they had waited even a month longer it would have been too late. It had been too late for both of Lotte’s parents, who had disappeared from the face of the earth, never to be seen or heard from again. All Lotte had left of them was a pair of photographs that said nothing to her at all. The stiff tall man didn’t look like anyone she had ever known. The pretty woman with her wide face and gentle eyes was just another antique picture. The memory of escape had blotted out everything around it. It had obliterated all of Lotte’s earliest life. David professed to remember, and she supposed that she believed him. She never could.

When the call came from DeAnna Kroll, Lotte was already awake, sitting up in bed, reading her way through a novel by Dorothy Cannell. Dorothy Cannell wrote murder mysteries of the humorous, rational sort, which was the sort Lotte liked. There had been very little reason and very little humor in her life. There had also been very little sleep. In the early days after the escape, Lotte had been unable to sleep because of nightmares. Then the world war had ended and the Israeli War of Independence had begun, and she had been awakened every night by gunfire and tears. Then there had been coming to America, and college and graduate school, and—it was thoroughly incredible how many things there were in life that could keep a person awake. Of course, by now, all those things had been eliminated. Lotte didn’t have to worry about money any more. The show seemed to generate the stuff out of thin air, so that now in her old age Lotte was not just financially secure, but positively rich. She owned this enormous Park Avenue apartment and a house in the Catskills. She had a closet full of idiotically expensive clothes and a financial consultant who took her to lunch at the Four Seasons to discuss aggressive strategies for capital maximization. Lotte didn’t have to worry about David any more, either. He was a rabbi with a big congregation on the Philadelphia Main Line. He had a wife and three children and a black Persian cat. His wife kept a kosher home and invited Lotte to it at regular intervals. In fact, David’s wife did better than that. Once a year, Lotte took the show on the road for a ten-city series of location programs. One of those programs was always filmed in Philadelphia during Hanukkah. When then happened, Rebekkah invited the entire cast and crew and really threw a party.

No, Lotte thought, there was really no worry in her life to keep her awake. She was just used to being awake. She went to bed late. She rose early. There was nothing she could do about it. She only wished she could convince DeAnna Kroll of that, because DeAnna Kroll always apologized too much when she called in the middle of the night.