Festival of Deaths(8)
These were a group of women who felt devastated because their husbands refused to perform one of the trendier acts of physical gratification. They met once or twice a month to “feel their rage” and “honor their pain.” If she was Carmencita, where would she file them?
Sarah went back to the cabinet and checked carefully through all the folders in the first drawer. She looked in “Divorce” and “Dissatisfaction” and “Communication” without success. Then she went on to the second drawer and tried “Frequency” and “Gratification.” Under “Gratification” she found a set of papers titled “Serial Killers—What Do They Really Want” and marked across with red pen:
PHILADELPHIA THIS YEAR.
TALK TO GREGOR DEMARKIAN
Sarah wondered uneasily what sort of program a sex show could do about serial killers and then put that folder back. She was just about to go on to file cabinet three when she saw the tag on the last file in this drawer. “Idiotas.”
Idiotas, Sarah thought.
That meant “idiots.”
She didn’t need to speak Spanish to figure that out.
Sarah reached for the file folder, pulled it out and put it on top of the cabinet next to the geode. She opened it and found all the prearranged permission agreements for Lotte’s cunnilingus show. She closed the file folder. She smiled.
Prearranged permission agreements were very important to a show like the one they were doing—sometimes because of emergencies like this one tonight, but mostly because there was some sticky legal territory in developing what were intended to be mass-marketed, commercial programs about ordinary peoples’ private lives. Lotte Goldman refused to begin any investigation on the feasibility of a topic before she had her permissions. It was one of the most important responsibilities of the talent coordinator’s office to get those permissions and make sure they were easy to find. Tonight, of course, they would be even more important, because without them they’d have to drag the lawyers out of bed and get the signatures all over again before they even started to tape.
Sarah thought about taking the file folder itself and decided against it. Instead she took the permissions out, left the rest of the papers, and replaced the folder in the drawer. Then she folded the permissions into a thick paper square and put the square under her tunic. That was one advantage to being fat and lumpy. Nobody ever questioned the appearance of one more lump.
Sarah let herself out of Carmencita’s office and into the hall. She was prepared with an explanation if anybody caught her, but there was nobody there. She walked down the hall and stopped again at the side corridor where she had seen DeAnna Kroll go after she first came in. DeAnna was nowhere to be seen, but Sarah could hear her. DeAnna had to be down at her own office or in Lotte’s, if Sarah could judge from the echo. She was doing her patented bellowing act on the phone.
“Shelley, for God’s sake,” she was saying. “I’ve got a love seat. A love seat. I can’t put any of these people on a love seat.”
Sarah walked the rest of the way to the lobby, looked around at the emptiness again, and then let herself through a door at the side of the elevator bank that led to what they called the “back hall.” The “back hall” wasn’t actually in the back of anything—it certainly wasn’t in the back of the building—but it was that kind of place, concrete and cold, dark and faintly foul. Sarah made her way around coils of wire and metal buckets and big cans of paint to the incinerator door at the back, and then she took out the wad of paper that was the permissions and looked at them.
This was an old building with an old-fashioned incinerator. A long chute went down to the basement where a fire was kept going at all times, and anything that fell into it got burned up.
When Carmencita couldn’t find the permissions, there would be hell to pay, there really would be. DeAnna Kroll would go positively ballistic, and Lotte Goldman would smoke in the office.
Sarah looked at the wad of paper in her hand and unfolded it. Then she ripped it in half and in half again. Then she opened the incinerator chute and shoved the scraps down. At the last minute, she was seized by caution. It was a good thing. One of the ragged-edged pieces of paper had fallen out of her hand. It lay on the floor just next to her left foot, threatening to incriminate her. Sarah bent down, picked it up, and shoved it into the chute after the rest.
The world might be a genuinely awful place erected for the single purpose of making Sarah Meyer miserable, but there was no reason to let it get its way all the time.
No reason at all.