Festival of Deaths(60)

“Gregor, for God’s sake, what is this? I expected the queen of England, at least.”

“Not the queen of England,” Gregor told him. “The Lotte Goldman Show.”

“What did you say?”

“The Lotte Goldman Show,” Gregor repeated.

“Oh, shit.”

“There’s a minor league serial killer named Herbert Shasta in one of the rooms down there,” Gregor pointed over his shoulder, “and before the show left New York they seemed to have had a murder that was just like this one, and that’s only for starters—”

“You’re giving me a migraine.”

“—and Bennis is around somewhere—”

“Ouch.”

“So I think we’d better talk.”

John Henry Newman Jackman heaved out a sigh that would have done credit to Moses going up the mountain to collect the Ten Commandments for the second time.

“You’re right,” he said. “We really had better talk.”





TWO


1


HANUKKAH IS ALSO CALLED the Festival of Lights, and because of that Rebekkah Goldman took the liberty of bathing her own house in lights, even though they were what other people would call Christmas lights. The house was in Radnor, in a “good” neighborhood that was not really expensive. Expensive houses in Radnor tended to run to eight thousand square feet and cost two million five. Anyone driving by would have thought Rebekkah was just another Christmas decoration enthusiast. She had lights strung around the pillars on her front porch. She had lights strung wound around the evergreen bushes that made up the hedge that bordered the road next to her front yard. She even had lights on her roof. She also had a Star of David, solid and glowing, at the end of her driveway, but Lotte thought that was rather funny. The Star of David would have had to have been the size of the Liberty Bell to have had any effect against that background of electric twinkles. It was a good thing that the members of David’s congregation were Conservative and not Orthodox, with leanings that sometimes drifted toward Reform. At any rate, they didn’t mind. David and Rebekkah’s children did mind, but in another way. They wanted more lights, not fewer, and if they were going to have Jewish decorations they wanted one of those big electric menorahs the delis had downtown. Like all children, they were less interested in symbolism than they were in ostentation.

Like most women getting on in years, Lotte Goldman was exhausted at the end of an ordinary day. At the end of a day like this—Maximillian dead, God help us, and the police, and Itzaak getting hysterical and confusion everywhere—she felt as if her bones had turned to chalk. She felt it even sitting in David and Rebekkah’s living room, which was the one place on earth where she was truly comfortable. It always came as such a surprise to her to realize she was old. In her dreams, she was still no more than eight and still in the trunk of that car. Waking up in the morning, she always headed for the bathroom of the first apartment she had ever had in New York, when she was in her twenties and had so little money she had to choose between toothpaste and bread.

David and Rebekkah wanted to hear everything that had happened. David had been on the phone to his friend Father Tibor Kasparian for an hour, but now he wanted to hear it all again from Lotte’s mouth. The problem was that no one wanted to discuss it in front of the children. The children were all still very young, because Rebekkah was still young. David told Lotte once that he thought he’d done it on purpose, married this woman who had not even been born on the night he left Germany, who had not been born in 1948 when the War of Liberation was going on in Israel, who had not been born in 1957 when David had fallen in love for the first time. Lotte told David it was a damn fool thing to be guilty about. Rebekkah was a beautiful woman who had given him beautiful children and he was lucky to have her.

Rebekkah finally got the children in bed at nine thirty. They were supposed to be tucked in an hour earlier than that, but with Lotte in the house they were more than a little overexcited. They were also not stupid. Lotte didn’t know why adults thought children didn’t listen to what was going on on the evening news. With the television blaring through the house the way it did and their own aunt’s name mentioned right there in the leader. Abraham, especially, wanted to know all the details. Abraham was twelve and convinced of his capacity to understand far more than any adult ever could. Lotte also suspected him of watching her show on afternoons when Rebekkah was out at the store or meeting with one of his teachers. Abraham didn’t have to be in bed by eight thirty, or even by ten, but he was supposed to be up in his room “reading or resting,” as David put it. Lotte assumed he would creep downstairs at just the right moment and eavesdrop.