Festival of Deaths(45)

“What will I do now if I want their pictures with me? Write to Portugal to get others?”

“That’s an idea.”

“What will I say to them, my mother and my sister? That my wallet is stolen? They will think this city is full of thieves.”

“It’s not this city, Max. We’re in a different city now. And they’re both full of thieves.”

“I could tell them I have lost the pictures, but then they will think I am careless. They will think I no longer respect them. I will get a letter from their parish priest.”

“Because you lost a couple of pictures?”

“There it is not like here,” Max said. “There we believe in honoring our mothers. Especially our mothers. The wallet was made of real leather. I bought it in Manhattan. It cost me twenty-six dollars I should not have spent.”

“Of course it did.”

“It is the only grace that I am too poor a man to have a credit card. I have finally found the virtue in poverty all the nuns talked about.”

“Is there a virtue in starvation, Max? Because I’m really hungry here. I’m really hungry.”

“In my wallet there was also my library card and my membership card for the Museum of Natural History. It is a scandal, I tell you that. It is an outrage.”

It is an outrage, DeAnna thought, sitting down on the bed and picking up the dreidel. Sometimes she wondered what it was like, living in a place where even poor people were innocent. Sometimes she wondered if she would have done the things she had done here if she had been there. Here meaning the United States. Here meaning a place where poor people were definitely not innocent, not even as children, because they lived in a sea of dope and prostitution and firearms and crime. Then she reminded herself that there were probably no black people in Maximillian’s village in Portugal, and from what she’d heard about Africa she wouldn’t be happy there, either. Then she told herself she was tired, which was true. When she was tired she always wandered off into the metaphysical, getting melodramatic about her inability to solve the age-old questions of the universe. Good and evil. Wealth and poverty. Black and white. When she wasn’t tired she concentrated on four orders of shrimp cocktail and a bottle of Montrachat.

Maximillian was still standing in the middle of the room. For some reason, when he looked sad he also looked very thin. In spite of all the swearing he did in Portuguese, he was still a boy, and frail.

“Listen,” DeAnna said. “Have you got a room in this hotel?”

“Not in this hotel. Across the street. With Prescott Holloway and the man who drives the truck.”

“Fine,” DeAnna said. “Why don’t you go over there and lie down for a while? Why don’t you order dinner in your room and charge it to the show—”

“I can’t charge it to the show, as you put it—”

“I’ll call over and give them a credit card number to bill it to. Go ahead. Go relax. Tomorrow morning, everything’s going to start to go crazy. You’re going to be throwing furniture around for Shelley. We’re going to have that Demarkian man in—”

“The detective,” Max said shrewdly. “Everyone is saying you have brought him here to make a secret investigation into the death of Maria Gonzalez. He will catch her murderer and we will not have to talk to that foul man from the police department again.”

“If Gregor Demarkian makes an investigation into the death of Maria Gonzalez, there’ll be nothing secret about it,” DeAnna said firmly. “Seriously, Max. It’s ten thirty. We have to be over at WKMB at four thirty. Which means we all have to get up at four or whenever. I’ve been up since three o’clock in the morning. You have to be exhausted.”

“I am angry,” Max said, “therefore, I am not exhausted.”

“Well, I am. Exhausted, I mean. Go over and get some rest and let me get some, too. Have a couple of drinks on me.”

“I cannot have a couple of drinks,” Max said. “In this state the drinking age is twenty-one.”

“Oh, dear.”

“It would not matter if I had my wallet,” Max said. “In my wallet I have a driver’s license that says I am twenty-one.”

“You don’t drive.”

“I do not have the driver’s license to drive.”

“Just a minute,” DeAnna said.

DeAnna kept most of Lotte’s luggage as well as her own. Lotte went out to stay with David and brought only an overnight bag, so as not to burden Rebekkah with the need for too much storage. It wasn’t just jackets and dresses from the cleaners, hung up on a moving rack. It was suitcases and boxes of files. For some reason, no matter who helped her bring these things upstairs, it was Lotte’s stuff that ended up piled on top of DeAnna’s and not the other way around. DeAnna threw Lotte’s Coach weekender to the side and found her own Louis Vuitton double-zip. This was how you knew both she and Lotte had come from nowhere and ended up with money. They both bought ridiculously expensive suitcases.