Festival of Deaths (13 page)

“Fine,” Lotte said again.

DeAnna turned away and started heading back to the moving van. “We’ll get Demarkian in on it and everything will be just fine,” she said. “You wait and see.”

Lotte Goldman sighed.

She didn’t know if getting Demarkian in on it would make everything “just fine,” but at least it would be doing something.

T
HE POLICE SHOWED UP
at Itzaak Blechmann’s door ten minutes before he was intending to leave for the Hullboard-Dedmarsh building. They were the same two policemen who had come before, twice before, with their badges held out and their faces set like bad clay models in a kindergarten class. They reminded Itzaak of the policemen he had known in Leningrad. All policemen were the same, he told himself. All governments are the same. Law and order can mean only one thing: a license to commit terror.

When Itzaak saw the faces of the two policemen through his peephole, his stomach heaved so badly he thought he was going to throw up right there on the floor. He had to put his head against the doorjamb and close his eyes and count to ten before he could open up.

The taller of the two policemen was thick and ham faced and vaguely lewd, so that everything he said sounded obscene, even something as simple as “Can I have a glass of water?” The shorter of the two was mostly bald and called the taller one “Chickie.” Itzaak didn’t like the idea of a grown man people called “Chickie.” He wouldn’t have liked it even if the grown man had been a civilian. The idea of a policeman named “Chickie” made him start to sweat.

Itzaak had his two suitcases packed for the tour and piled next to the door. Chickie and the other cop looked at them as they came in. Itzaak had been getting his coat out when they buzzed. He still had it in his hand. He put it over the suitcase and then went into the living room, where the cops had already sat down.

The two of them always came in and sat right down, without asking. Itzaak had the idea that this was not permissible in the United States, but he didn’t know for sure, and he couldn’t see what he was able to do about it. The one called “Chickie” was sitting in his Barcalounger, his favorite chair in the world. The other one was sitting on the sofa.

Itzaak took a straight chair from his dining room table—his dining room was part of his kitchen; it was that kind of New York apartment—and sat down in it. The two cops looked at him as if he were a performing flea who had just done something terribly clever.

“Well,” Itzaak said. “Well. Here you are again.”

“That’s right, Mr. Blechmann,” the smaller cop said. “Here we are again.”

“I take it you’re not going to be here for long,” Chickie said. “Since you’re packed and everything.”

“I am leaving on the tour,” Itzaak said. “With the rest of
The Lotte Goldman Show
.”

“Ah,” the smaller cop said. “
The Lotte Goldman Show
.”

“My leaving has been cleared with the police department,” Itzaak said. “Just like the leaving of everyone else who works on the program.”

“Cleared,” Chickie said. “Oh, we know it’s been
cleared
.”

“I don’t know what you’re doing here,” Itzaak said.

The one called Chickie had been staring at the ceiling. The other one had been staring at the floor. Now they looked at each other and nodded a little. Chickie reached into the pocket of his jacket and brought out a stenographer’s notebook. His jacket was a badly cut brown tweed. Policemen here were like students in Leningrad in this one respect: their clothes always looked as if they had been modeled on creatures from another planet.

Chickie looked through his stenographer’s notebook. Itzaak reminded himself that there was no Leningrad any more, there was no Soviet Union, and since he had done nothing wrong nothing wrong could be done to him.

Chickie stopped at a page covered with blotted-ink scrawl. “We checked it out,” he said. “With Immigration and Naturalization. We checked out your green card.”

“What is there to check out about my green card?”

“We checked it out to see if it was legitimate,” Chickie said. “You know. The real thing. Not forged.”

“Of course my green card is legitimate. I have been in the United States for six years.”

“There are people, been here twenty years, their cards aren’t legitimate,” the smaller cop said.

“I am already taking citizenship classes.” Itzaak felt himself go stiff. His head especially went stiff. It went so stiff he couldn’t think straight. “If I pass my test, I will take the oath this coming Fourth of July.”

Chickie looked through his stenographer’s notebook some more. “We checked out your Social Security card,” he said. “That turned out to be legitimate, too.”

Itzaak didn’t answer this. He thought anybody who faked a Social Security card had to be crazy. You had to pay all that money to the Social Security administration. How would you get it back if your Social Security card was faked?

Chickie was checking through his notebook again. “We tried to check out your background in—Leningrad, did you say?”

“It’s St. Petersburg now,” Itzaak said. “It was Leningrad then.”

“Well, things seem to be a little confused over there. We can’t seem to get anybody to give us a straight answer about anything.”

“Like about why you were in jail,” the short one said.

“And what you were in jail for,” Chickie said. “Did you know we knew you had been in jail?”

“It was on your application at INS,” the short one said, “but we didn’t need that. We knew anyway.”

“You can always tell when a man’s been in jail,” Chickie said.

“He walks funny,” the short one said.

“Your application at INS said you’d been in jail for
political
reasons,” Chickie said. “It said you’d been in jail for your
religion
.”

“I am a practicing Jew,” Itzaak said, stiff, stiff, paralyzed. “At the time, Leningrad was not a good place to be a practicing Jew.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Isaac, we were thinking about that. We surely were. I mean, it stands to reason, doesn’t it? If you’d been in jail for, say, murder, you wouldn’t tell the INS
that
.”

“I was not in jail for murder.”

“Funny about your being a practicing Jew,” Chickie said. “We got one of those in the department. Wears one of those little hats just like yours.”

“Yarmulke.”

“Yeah, yarmulke,” Chickie said. “Thing is, he doesn’t have a Spanish girlfriend just like yours.”

“A Catholic girlfriend,” the short one said.

“He wouldn’t even talk to a Catholic girl,” Chickie said. “So it kind of makes me wonder.”

“Just like we wonder about which Catholic girl your girlfriend really was,” the short one said.

“
You
say it was Carmencita Boaz,” Chickie said.

“But it could have been either of them,” the short one said.

“Look at it this way.” Chickie slapped his notebook shut. “Your super saw you with a Spanish woman. That was it. The people in Carmencita’s building, they never saw you at all. So it makes us think, if you see what I mean. It makes us curious.”

“Because if your girlfriend was Maria Gonzalez instead of Carmencita Boaz,” the short one said, “you’d probably be in a lot of serious trouble right about now.”

Itzaak Blechmann did not believe that the people in Carmencita’s building had never seen him. He thought they were protecting Carmencita’s reputation, because he came late and stayed all night sometimes. He didn’t blame them for thinking he and Carmencita were doing all sorts of things they weren’t actually doing. What else would they think? He too wanted to protect Carmencita’s reputation. He wanted to protect Carmencita more than anything. Now it appeared that he couldn’t even protect himself.

“I never spoke more than politenesses and business to Maria Gonzalez in my life,” he said helplessly. “She did not like me. And she was very devout.”

Chickie put his notebook back inside his jacket and stood up. “That’s all we came out here about. We just wanted you to know the way we were going these days. We just wanted you to know.”

“We thought you might have some kind of comment you wanted to make,” the short one said.

“Or some information you wanted to supply us.”

“Or some suggestion you might want to make.”

“Or something,” Chickie said. “I’m convinced of it. One of these days, you’re going to give us something.”

“No,” Itzaak told him. “I’m not going to give you anything. I don’t have anything to give you.”

The two policemen were on their feet. They left Itzaak sitting in his chair and walked to the door, side by side, as if they’d rehearsed it.

“Bye,” Chickie said, when he’d gotten the door open and let his partner out into the hall. “See you when you get back from your tour. You have our card if there’s anything you want to tell us.”

“You can call us any hour of the day or night,” the short one piped up from the hallway.

“If you lose the card, we’re in the phone book,” Chickie said. Then he went out into the hall, too, and closed the door after him.

Itzaak sat in the chair he had been sitting in and closed his eyes. He had to stop sweating. He had to start breathing well enough to get up and walk. He had to start thinking again and he had to do it soon, because things were worse than he’d thought they were. For a moment there, they had almost gotten close.

He got out of the chair and went to his bedroom. He picked up the phone he kept on the night table and dialed Carmencita’s number. The phone rang and rang and rang, but no one answered. Carmencita must have already left to go downtown.

Itzaak went back out to the front door and got his coat off his suitcases and put it on. He wouldn’t have a chance to talk to Carmencita in private now until they were at the hotel in Philadelphia. Since he didn’t dare talk to her in front of other people, he would simply have to wait.

In the meantime, he thought he was going to get an ulcer.

M
OMENTS LATER—JUST AS
Itzaak locked his apartment door and started for the lobby to find a cab—Maximillian Dey got off the Lexington Avenue local at Fourteenth Street in a crush of people who all seemed to be dressed up to go to a biker’s convention. The men wore fringed leather vests and no shirts—in this cold!—and ragged jeans and lace-up boots with metal-tipped spikes on the soles. The women wore torn net stockings and very short skirts and peasant blouses and high-heeled ankle boots. There was a heavy-metal club just south of here, and Max supposed they were heading there. It was a little early for that kind of thing, but in the city you never knew. Most of the men were old and most of the women were much too young and much too fat. Max could never get over just how fat Americans were, at every age. He expected it in the old, but in the young he looked for leanness. He wondered what caused it, and came to different conclusions. Diets, that was his conclusion of the month. Americans were fat because they went on so many diets. He’d watched a girlfriend of his go on a diet once, and after about three days it had made him so crazy he was ready to eat the refrigerator. Whole.

The stairway to the street was to his left. He let himself be pushed along by the crowd. It was moving faster than he wanted to. He reached the steps and started up at his usual measured rate. He was pushed first from behind and then from the side, so that he fell forward and then around and nearly broke his back. He shouted in the general direction of whoever it was might have pushed him, but he couldn’t really tell. Everyone was milling around and the light was very poor. He was still moving up the stairs. There was no way to stop himself. He faced forward so he wouldn’t stumble again and almost immediately felt an elbow in the small of his back, someone hurrying him forward. The push catapulted him upward and into the air. He stumbled on the top step and fell to his knees. The crowd would have run him over if he hadn’t braced himself against a trash can.

“For Christ’s sake,” he said to nobody in particular. “What are you trying to do to me?”

He might as well have been talking to the Ghost of Christmas Past. There was nobody there to hear him. The biker people had disappeared. The street was deserted for a block and a half in either direction. Even Union Square Park looked empty.

And then it hit him.

“Goddamn,” he said into the air, loud enough to convince anyone who might hear him that he was a certified crazy. “God
damn
.”

He reached into his back pocket for his wallet and came up empty. His wallet was gone.

He had had it when he left his apartment. He remembered checking the hundred dollars in it twice and then tucking it back there.

He had had it when he got on the subway. He remembered the side of his hand knocking against it as he looked through his other pockets for a token. He kept everything in the world that was important to him in that wallet, and now what was he going to do?

He turned in the direction of Fifth Avenue and started walking, quickly and angrily, and the inside of his head took up a litany.

He was going to have to replace it all.

Replace it
all.

And it was going to cost a hell of a lot of money that he just didn’t have.

G
REGOR DEMARKIAN ALWAYS TOOK
Father Tibor Kasparian seriously. He did what Father Tibor asked him, and he investigated what Father Tibor thought was worth investigating—with the exception of a possible permanent union between Gregor and Bennis Hannaford, which Gregor thought of as Tibor’s single symptom of mental illness. Since the graffiti on the walls of Rabbi David Goldman’s colleague’s synagogue had nothing to do with Bennis Hannaford—she’d dated a Reform rabbi once and gone to her best-friend-from-college’s oldest son’s bar mitzvah, but beyond that she’d never had anything to do with synagogues—he started looking into it as soon as he got a free minute. It turned out to be more complicated than he had expected. Gregor called a friend of his at the Philadelphia office of the Bureau, who referred him to a mutual acquaintance in Omaha, who turned him around and sent him to a man all three of them had known at Quantico who was not in Washington, D.C. The man in Washington, D.C., was on vacation. Gregor left four or five messages and then gave it up. The man would be back from Florida when the man got back from Florida. There was nothing Gregor could do before then.