Festival of Deaths(93)

“Free.” Itzaak Blechmann shook his head. “I don’t care if he goes free. I care only about Carmencita.”

“Fine, Mr. Blechmann, fine. But how about this? I was for many years an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and later a very high level administrator there. I still have a great many friends in the Bureau, and on Capitol Hill, and—possibly more pertinent to the present discussion—in the Immigration and Naturalization Service. If you will talk to me, and tell me everything you know, I give you my word that I will make a few phone calls about Carmencita. And about you, too, if that happens to be necessary.”

“No,” Itzaak said. “That isn’t necessary.”

“That’s good.”

“Why do you have to ask me questions if you know everything about it already?”

“Because I don’t know everything about it already,” Gregor said, standing up. “I only know the bare outlines. And I don’t know enough to give the police an excuse to put this idiot out of business. There are also something called rules of evidence, and whether we like them or not, we must follow them. There’s a coffee machine down at that end of the hall. The coffee will be terrible, but we could both use some. Shall I get you a cup?”

“Yes,” Itzaak Blechmann said.

“Good. Will you talk to me?”

“Yes,” Itzaak Blechmann said again. “I’ll be right back.”

Gregor meant it, too. He had no intention of letting Itzaak Blechmann get away.





TWO


1


TO LOTTE GOLDMAN, THE principal problem with this tail end of the twentieth century was softness. Everyone and everything had melted just a little in the heat of luxury. Instead of men and women with firm identities and ramrod backbones, there were—what? It was hard to put it into words. The people who came to be in her show were often colorful and frequently outrageous, but at the core of them there was nothing in particular. It wasn’t that they were hollow, the way shallow people are supposed to be. Most of them meant well and most of them felt as much as it was possible for them to feel. The problem was, it wasn’t possible for them to feel much. It wasn’t possible for them to know much, either. They were adrift in a sea of indeterminacy. Lotte had never been able to make herself a religious woman—although she had tried from time to time, for David’s sake—but every once in a while, sitting on the platform next to some woman in bright green silk and twenty-two-carat solid-gold hoop earrings, she would want to claim the history of her religion for her own. The woman in the green silk would be going on and on about how terrible her life had been, about what life had been secretly all about behind the pretty facade of her middle-class suburban American home. Her mother had praised her brothers’ good grades and only praised her when she was looking pretty. Her father let her brothers ride their bikes all over town but told her girls were only safe when they stayed in the yard to play. Lotte would sit on the platform with her hands folded in her lap and her teeth clamped down firmly on her lower lip, wanting to say: When I was twelve I lived with my brother in the hills outside Jerusalem, in a hole dug out of the ground to keep us safe from rain and gunfire; when I was fourteen I had one dress to wear to school and every night I had to come home and wash it; when I was sixteen a bomb went off under the bench at a bus stop I had just left to get on the bus, and through the bus windows I saw four people blown into pieces of blood and skin and bone on a city street. Lotte wanted to say these things, but she never did, because she knew what answer she would get.

She wanted to say something similar now to the reporters stationed outside the front doors of St. Elizabeth’s hospital, but if she tried she could just imagine what answer she would be reported to have given. What she did instead was to stand on the front steps and give a little press conference, filled with all the correct expressions of horror and sympathy and all the expected resolutions to urge the police on to greater tenacity of commitment in the doing of their duty. Privately, Lotte thought the police had about as much tenacity in the doing of their duty as anybody could reasonably expect. The people who were not reasonable about it did not spend their working lives wondering if someone was going to shoot them.

What had to be said and done here was a script, written by God only knew who God only knew when, and now as surely engraved in stone as any one of the Ten Commandments. Lotte performed her part in this script well. Because of that, her clothes were not clutched at, never mind ripped or torn, and not one person in the mob screamed directions in her face to get her to look at the camera. She said her piece. She answered a few questions. She explained that she was anxious to get upstairs and check the situation out. Then she knocked for Sister Mary Vincent to let her in and escaped into the silence of the lobby. Sister Mary Vincent had been warned that Lotte was coming. There was no time-wasteful checking of identification.