Festival of Deaths(44)

“Before we go in,” Sofie said, “do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Of course not,” Gregor told her.

“It’s about this visit of yours. Which is because of Joey. It is also because of—of my wallet being stolen?”

“More than once,” Gregor reminded her. “At knife point.”

“Yes,” Sofie said. “I know. Well. And I know I should have told Aunt Helena the truth, you see, but I did not. She thinks I had my pocket picked. She is an old woman, do you understand?”

“I take it you don’t want us to tell her the truth,” Gregor said.

“You can tell her the truth,” Sofie said, “but I would appreciate it if you would tell her in such a way that she will not want me to stop going to school. I very much want to go on going to school. In Armenia, when I was growing up, we had the European system, and at eleven we took our examinations and those of us who did not pass them were not put in the classes to go on to university. But here, I have talked to a counselor at the school, and she says that there is no problem. If I want to go to a university, I can take new tests, and if I pass them there are places where I can get the money. And so—”

“Sofie?” a voice said from the other side of the door. “Why are you so long in the hall?”

Sofie blew a stream of air into the bangs that hung over her forehead. “Of course, I would like a lot of things,” she said. “I would like a skirt as short as the ones the other girls wear. I would like to go to the movies with Joey without a chaperon. Maybe none of these things are possible.”

“I think we can at least manage to keep you in school,” Gregor said.

“Although perhaps not that school,” Tibor amended.

“Sofie?” Helena called from the other side of the door again.

Sofie put her hand on the knob. “She has put on all her lace and taken out her cane,” she warned them. “You’d better be prepared.”





FIVE


1


THE DREIDEL WAS STUCK in the thin plastic bag the cleaners had put over Lotte’s favorite rose tweed jacket. DeAnna Kroll took it out and looked at it. Nūn, gīmel, hē, shīn. Nes gadol hayah sham. “A great miracle occurred there.” It was amazing what you picked up just hanging around people. DeAnna could remember years in her life—in her adult life—when she hadn’t known a lot of words in English, never mind being able to reel off a sentence in Hebrew, never mind being able to recognize four letters in a different alphabet. There had been years in her adult life when she hadn’t even known there were other alphabets. There had never been a time when she hadn’t known about room service, though. Before she’d been able to afford it, she’d dreamed about it.

“Go to your own room,” she told Maximillian Dey, who was still standing in the middle of hers. “I want to get some rest. Once we start working, we won’t stop again until Hanukkah.”

The room in question was the one DeAnna always took in the Sheraton Society Hill, which was her favorite hotel in Philadelphia, mostly because the room service was unbelievable. The room was full of stuff—Lotte’s clothes, so she didn’t have to bring them all the way out to David’s; props for the show; her own luggage—but the bed was clear and the phone was in plain sight and she had a copy of Vanity Fair in her totebag. If she could only get Max out of here, she could be in heaven. She just didn’t feel right about throwing him out on his ear. After all, he’d helped her get all this stuff up here. His job was to move the show, not the executive producer.

He was standing in the middle of the carpet, his hands in the pockets of his jeans, scowling fiercely. With Max, fierce never looked too fierce. There was something about his face that was much too young.

“It is a terrible thing,” he was saying, as he had been saying, over and over again, since they left New York. “One minute I am on the subway, the next minute I am on the sidewalk, and there it is. There it is not. It is gone.”

“Right,” DeAnna said.

“It is as I have tried to tell you,” Max said. “It is a terrible thing. It is an outrage.”

“I know.”

“Everything I have is gone. Everything.”

“I know.”

“My money. One hundred and two dollars.”

“Do you need money, Max? We could get you some money.”

“Thank you. I do not need money. My green card, it is also gone.”

“You told me.”

“And my pictures of my sisters and my mother that I carry all the time. That they sent me from Portugal.”

“It’s a shame.”