Festival of Deaths(67)
“But you’re willing to help her with those shows,” Gregor said. “You’re willing to intercede with Tibor to get me to agree to appear on one.”
“Of course.”
“Of course?”
David Goldman poured himself another cup of coffee. His coffee pot was marked with a red dot. Did this mean it was kosher? Would there be a difference between kosher coffee and the other kind?
“Look,” David Goldman said, “the first clear memory I have of Lotte is from when I was three and we were leaving Heidelberg. That’s where we lived, in Germany, during the war. Anyway, we’re both lying in the trunk of a car, covered with a blanket, and she has her body completely over mine, completely, so that if the car gets stopped someone might see her in the trunk but they won’t see me. It wouldn’t have worked, of course. I know that now. But at the time she made me feel extremely safe.”
“How old was she?”
“Eight,” David Goldman said. “Later, when we were living in what was at first Palestine and is now Israel, all during the war and then the War of Independence later, when we were very poor and there was very little food, I always had more than most people, because Lotte always gave me half of hers. And I never went without a blanket, because Lotte always found me one. And later when the fighting was momentarily over and Lotte came to the United States, the first thing she did after she got her graduate degree was bring me over and put me through the rabbinical program at Yeshiva University. Of course, Lotte is an atheist.”
“I had noticed that,” Tibor said sadly.
“Everybody notices it,” David Goldman said. “But there used to be a joke in Yiddish when I was younger. A young man comes back from a sojourn in the big city and marches up to the rabbi who taught him for years in his small town and says, ‘Rabbi, my entire life is changed. I no longer believe in God.’ The rabbi shrugs his shoulders and says, ‘That’s all right. God still believes in you.’ Well, that’s how I feel about Lotte. God still believes in her. And will go on believing in her, in spite of the fact that she probably gives Him ulcers.”
“Besides,” Tibor said, “the Good Lord’s ulcers may not be so critical as you think. Lotte Goldman is at heart a very conservative woman.”
“Conservative?” old George Tekamanian said.
“She always comes down on the side of very traditional morality in the end,” Tibor said. “She talks about these crazy things, but she does not approve of them.”
Linda Melajian leaned over and put down a plate of waffles in front of Gregor. Then she began unloading heaping plates in front of old George Tekamanian.
“Good God,” Gregor said. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“It’s my grandson Martin and my granddaughter-in-law,” old George said. “They are coming this afternoon to bring me food and make sure I have a healthy lunch. I do not know why it is, Krekor, but food that is healthy for you always seems to taste awful.”
2
GREGOR DIDN’T KNOW IF healthy food always tasted awful. He made it a matter of principle never to eat self-consciously healthy food. He didn’t know if Lotte Goldman was in her heart a conservative, either. From what he’d seen of her show, he thought she was a nut case. What he did know was that everybody seemed to need a break, himself included. In spite of the fact that David Goldman had come down here specifically to tell Gregor Demarkian something relevant to at least one of the cases of murder that had occurred among the people associated with his sister’s television show, he wasn’t ready to talk.
The situation made Gregor Demarkian a little antsy. He was not a sociable man, in the ordinary sense of the term. He spent almost every morning of his life these days having breakfast in the Ararat with Tibor, but the two of them read their respective papers and made comments on the world in general. They didn’t have “conversations” of any formal kind. Even Gregor and Bennis didn’t have conversations of any formal kind. When he went down to visit her, or she came up to visit him, they talked about his work or hers or Cavanaugh Street, but mostly they talked about each other. Gregor knew everything about Bennis’s latest Zed and Zedalia novel. That was what Bennis did for a living. She wrote fantasy novels full of knights and ladies and dragons and unicorns set in the imaginary countries of Zed and Zedalia, which would have been ridiculous if she hadn’t been making so much money doing it. Gregor knew that Ulrich of Rolandia was about to kidnap the evil Queen Allisandra to harness her magic powers for his unjust aggressive war against the Crown Prince of Zed. He didn’t know anything at all about the young man who had taken Bennis to dinner last week and didn’t want to know. Bennis knew all about Gregor’s last case—he always filled her in when the cases were over, he didn’t want her trying to be an amateur detective, but he did like to hear her comments once the coast was clear—but nothing about his visits to Elizabeth’s grave. Gregor didn’t know if that was all right with her or not. Sometimes he worried that he didn’t do more talking to Bennis in the way men usually talk to women they are close to because he was afraid to. What would he talk about, if Bennis insisted? The fact that they now spent more time with each other than most people who were married? The fact that except for one minor technicality, they might as well be married? On second thought, that technicality wasn’t so minor after all. What was also not minor was the fact that he seemed to have wound his life around an extremely rich, extremely pretty, extremely impetuous, relatively young woman on whom he had no real hold at all.