THERE WAS ALWAYS GILLIATT. He met me at the door of my office in the Administration Building.
“Shalom,” he said with a skeletal grin. “It’s shaping up to be a bad day.”
The shalom was his latest needle. His imagination was inexhaustible when it came to the small nudges. I ignored it. “I missed you at breakfast,” I said.
“I ate on the early shift. I’m sodden with virtue.”
“Why?”
“Working since dawn you get to feel that way.”
“I mean: why the bad day?”
“Barbara wants to quit.”
“Why?”
“Post-holiday depression, I would guess.”
“I’ll talk to her after I check the day’s roll. Do we have any reserves?”
“Nobody any good.”
I took the typewritten list from him. Thirty-two. Not too bad. And there were no children. That was good. Children were hard to handle.
Gilliatt seemed to be studying me more intensely than usual. I stared at the list, seeing nothing but abstract print formations. Finally I said: “You’re pressing pretty hard for such an early hour.”
“Never too soon to start,” Gilliatt grinned.
“You son-of-a-bitch, this could be the day I finally fire you.”
“Perhaps. Or it could be another kind of day, entirely.”
I looked at his sly face over the edge of the sheet of paper in my hands. “Don’t you get tired of bringing charges against me?”
“Never. Your fallibility is a passion with me.”
“You never win.”
“The day has just started.”
There was something in his persistence that almost reversed everything. It was not the fool persisting in his folly and becoming wise. There was a mad purity in his extreme ambition to destroy me; to replace me as Director. But he was not without belief. Anti-Semitism was his religion, and he kept the faith. He wove, incessantly, magnificent, malevolent myths about the Jews. I think the only thing that could have tempted him to suicide would have been the total and permanent absence of Jews from the world.
I handed back the list.
“Haven’t you forgotten something?” He was pacing himself; there was plenty left up his sleeve.
“Okay,” I said wearily, “let’s have it.”
“The couple that are making the movie on the Academy.”
“Today?”
“Today!”
I searched blindly for an out, “Did the Board of Management give final permission?”
“Yes. I arranged it.”
“Why?” I was furious.
“Because I think the film would be a good thing for the Academy.” He stared at me. “You see, Wolf, I care about this place.”
“It may come as a great shock to you, Gilliatt, but I care about it, too.”
“Shit! The whole idea of suicide is absolutely alien to the Jew. You having this job is like a priest working as a pimp for a whore house. It must be eating up your soul.”
I smiled sweetly at him. “No, Gilliatt,” I said. “That’s your exclusive assignment.”
The new day, the new year, was not beginning well.