Festival of Deaths(85)
“The traffic is about to get moving,” the uniformed man in the front seat said. “Look. Do me a favor. Let me run the siren.”
John Jackman took a look at his watch. “Okay,” he said. “Run the siren. But only for as long as it takes to get out of this mess. Turn it off as soon as we get to town.”
“Right,” the uniformed man said. He put the car into gear and turned on the noise, producing a whooping wail that reminded Gregor of the death throes of whooping cranes.
Gregor Demarkian hated sirens and everything that went with them. He shut this one out of his consciousness as far as that was possible and turned to John Jackman so he wouldn’t have to look out the windshield at the progress they were suddenly making.
“Now let me tell you something,” he said. “David Goldman came to see me this morning, to tell me all about a curious little item called an Israeli dreidel.”
3
THE HALLS AND CORRIDORS of WKMB were neither more nor less busy than they had been when Gregor had first seen them early yesterday morning, but the halls and corridors of that part of WKMB now assigned to The Lotte Goldman Show were almost deserted. Gregor and John Jackman went in together, without bringing the uniformed man along. This was only a semiofficial visit. John Jackman wanted to check out the scene one more time, now that the crisis was over and he could investigate in relative calm. Gregor had a few questions he wanted to ask. Studio C looked forlorn. The furniture that had served for this morning’s taping was still strewn across the platform. Prescott Holloway was picking up a small round coffee table just as Gregor and John came in. He paused in his work as Gregor and John walked toward him. Gregor thought he was probably handier at this than Maximillian Dey had been. He was certainly stronger. Gregor and John stopped at the edge of the platform and said hello.
“Everybody’s gone,” Prescott told them. “Everybody except DeAnna, that is. She’d down in her office.”
“DeAnna will be fine,” Gregor told him. “We really just want to look around.”
“Yeah. Well. Have a good time. I really want them to hire another set man. I want them to hire two. I was getting drafted into this shit all the time back in New York, and Max was alive and kicking then.”
Prescott raised the coffee table a little higher and wedged one curved edge of it against his hip. Then he hopped off the platform and headed for the doors to the outside. Gregor and John Jackman went in the other direction, to the doors at the back of the stage, and let themselves into the corridor that led to the offices and the greenroom and the other temporary accommodations for The Lotte Goldman Show. Prescott had been absolutely right when he said the place was deserted. Gregor and John passed door after door, open on empty offices.
DeAnna Kroll was in the very last office at the back. Her door was open too, but what it revealed was chaos. It did not seem to Gregor to be the kind of controlled chaos very creative people were supposed to prefer to work in. It looked like an outrageous mess she had been helpless to prevent. Papers and envelopes were spilling off the desk onto the floor. Half-filled polystyrene coffee cups were balanced on chairs and arranged in a pattern on the file cabinet top. Bits and pieces of Hanukkah and Christmas paraphernalia kept popping up in the oddest places. A plastic crèche with babe in manger was nestled in the folds of a gray flannel scarf that had somehow fallen to the floor. One of those ubiquitous little plastic menorahs with nine supposedly already-lit plastic candles was coming out of the pocket of the pea jacket DeAnna had hung over the top of the office door. Gregor checked out the pea jacket and saw that it had been bought at Ralph Lauren Polo. DeAnna went on talking into the phone.
“I know it’s impossible to get Marianna here from Sarajevo by Monday,” she was saying, “but you have to get Marianna here by Monday from Sarajevo and that’s that. … Well, I know they’re having political difficulties, everybody over there is having political difficulties, but. … Well, bribe them Bribe all of them. … Bribe enough of them to get a cease-fire Wait, I can’t. … Shit!” DeAnna dropped the phone into the cradle. “He hung up on me. Can you believe that? Long distance from Vienna and he hung up on me.”
Gregor could believe it.
“What was that all about?” John Jackman asked. “Is Marianna a guest you want for the show?”
“Marianna is a show,” DeAnna said. “She wrote a book called Masturbation as an Art Form. Now she’s coming out with one called Masturbation as a Political Act. Lotte can do an hour with Marianna standing on her head. And with the way things have been going around here, we need—oh. You should sit down. Do you want to sit down?”