DeAnna opened the side pocket of the double-zip and came up with a bottle of Glenlivet Scotch. She didn’t much like Scotch and she especially didn’t like Glenlivet, but she always got a Christmas present of the stuff from the women in the typing pool, and she didn’t want to hurt their feelings. She handed the bottle to Max and said, “There. Go drink that.”
“Thank you,” Max said. He shoved the bottle into the pocket of his jean jacket. “Thank you very much.”
“Get a little smashed and get some sleep,” DeAnna said.
“If you don’t mind, I will share this with Prescott and the truck driver,” Max said. “If I tried to drink all the liquor in a bottle of this size, I would be very sick.”
DeAnna didn’t care if he shared it with a pet rabbit and a stray cockroach, as long as he went somewhere else before he got started. She pushed him gently toward the door.
“I’ll see you at four thirty in the morning at WKMB.”
“Four thirty. WKMB.”
“Don’t be too hung over.”
“I am never hung over. I am a man.”
DeAnna pushed him into the hall. “I am a woman, and no one ever lets me get any sleep,” she said. “Go, Max. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He was out in the hall. DeAnna gave him another gentle shove, just to make sure. Then she retreated into her room and shut and locked the door. For a moment, she was afraid he would knock and insist on talking some more, but it didn’t happen. She heard him say something under his breath, and then he was gone.
DeAnna went back to the bed, sat down again, and picked up the phone. She had the room service menu in this hotel memorized. She knew exactly what she wanted. She was going to order enough food for a family picnic and eat until she passed out.
She picked up the dreidel and spun it, watching it whir like the top it was across the polished surface of the night table.
There were always a lot of dreidels around for Hanukkah, but this year there were millions of them.
The situation was ridiculous.
2
CARMENCITA BOAZ WAS GLAD that Shelley Feldstein did not keep kosher. Carmencita had nothing against keeping kosher. Itzaak kept kosher and she accommodated him, as she accommodated him in everything. If it had been Itzaak she had been intending to have dinner with tonight instead of Shelley, Carmencita would have found some place that served kosher food and gone to it, even if it took a cab ride halfway to the Ohio border. Since it was past ten thirty and she was tired and hungry, though, she was just as happy that she and Shelley would be able to eat right here in the hotel, with no need to go out into the awful weather. Carmencita wouldn’t have thought that the weather in the United States could get much worse than it got in New York, but she would have been wrong. This was her first trip to Philadelphia, and it was a shock. Cold. Wet. Slush. Muck. It bothered her that there were so many fewer decorations here than she remembered from New York, both in her old neighborhood and in the streets around the Hullboard-Dedmarsh building. Her neighborhood was so Hispanic, it took celebrating Christmas as its cultural birthright, and said so whenever city officials began to make grumbling noises about the separation of church and state. The people who occupied the buildings around the Hullboard-Dedmarsh, and who occupied the Hullboard-Dedmarsh itself, were mostly Jewish and entirely determined not to let the Christmas spirit overwhelm their own. They decorated for every Jewish holiday on the calendar except Yom Kippur. Of course, Carmencita told herself, there were probably neighborhoods in New York that were even more barren than this one was, and neighborhoods in Philadelphia that could put her New York paragons to shame. It was just that she had seen what she had seen, and she couldn’t very well change her opinion until she’d seen something different.
The Sheraton Society Hill was built around a courtyard, with restaurant seating right in the middle of the big open space. Coming out of the elevators, Carmencita saw Shelley sitting at a table, looking over the notes she had written on a yellow legal pad. Shelley was Carmencita’s vision of what it meant to be a Real New York Lady. Her pen was sterling silver and from Tiffany’s. She kept her yellow legal pads in a thick black leather writing folder that had been bought at Mark Cross. Shelley’s clothes made Carmencita want to cry. It wasn’t that they were good. Carmencita believed that if she worked hard and did right, she would have the money to buy good sooner or later. It was that Shelley’s clothes were so obviously suited only to a woman who was tall and spare, instead of small and round like Carmencita herself. Carmencita didn’t know if there were sophisticated clothes for five-foot-tall, hourglass-figured Spanish women. Somehow, she doubted it.