AT DINNER THAT EVENING in the upstairs dining room of Krakow’s Hawelka restaurant, which Maurice had reserved for their private use, justifiably deploying congressional Holocaust appropriations for that purpose, unstintingly ordering a full array of Polish culinary classics specially prepared by the chef—pigeon stuffed with kasha and mushrooms, white sausage, tongue in Polish sauce, pork roast, cabbage pierogi, salmon kulebiak, beet zurek, each presentation accompanied by a wine from the restaurant’s own cellar—Norman felt himself to be utterly disconnected and apart, dissociated from the reality of his companions, like a visitor from another planet who had been dropped on the ice sculpture at a bar mitzvah smorgasbord, the broiled red faces of alien gorgers and fornicators swirling bizarrely around him. Let them think what they want, he reflected morosely as he clinically observed Gloria leaning against Monty, who was stuffing into his mouth something fleshy and glistening and wet. So I’m uptight—a wallflower, a prig, a puritan at a bacchanal, a bumpkin among the sophisticates, gloomy when everyone else is having a blast—I don’t care what they think of me. Oh, a death camp can certainly make a person work up an appetite, like the flagellants in old Russia he had read about who would get so turned on, the priests as a precaution recommended castration. What loathsome lowlifes they were, Norman thought, assessing his dinner companions—revolting!
His father was kicking him under the table, as if he were an old TV set on the blink, to get him to start running again, entertain them, give them their money’s worth, sing for his supper. Well, he definitely was not about to knock himself out for the old man tonight, no way, not after their curt but painful conversation before dinner this evening when, in response to his request uttered with such obvious trepidation and embarrassment, instead of showing a single sign of paternal tenderness and sympathy toward his supplicant son, Maurice had cut him down without ceremony, icily informed him that there was absolutely no chance in hell that he would ever get his wish, he could just forget about it, turn off his heart’s desire, he would never be named director of the museum, certainly not while Maurice was chairman, and Maurice had no plans whatsoever of retiring in the near or distant future, they would have to drag him off the premises kicking and screaming, or in a body bag even—didn’t he deserve a little tribute and reward after what he went through in the war, why should Norman begrudge him?—that for Norman to push to be director under the circumstances was selfish in the extreme, inexcusably piggish, not to mention suicidal for both of them. “Why you being such a chazzer?” Maurice had demanded harshly. “Why you not satisfied mit what you have? It’s not enough for you to be the big boss from our business, Holocaust Connections, Inc.? What’s wrong mit you? You never heard from nepotism?” “So who’s going to get the job?” Norman had asked, abashed, defeated by the hopeless finality of it all, dreading to hear the answer, which of course he knew beforehand. “Monty—who then? Unless he fucks a goat in broad daylight on the front lawn from the White House—it’s his for the taking, on a silver platter.” The best Maurice could do for his own son at this sensitive time, the old man had added, softening a bit at last as he recognized the quivering little boy about to cry behind the grizzle of the grown man, was to use their contacts in the West Wing to get Norman appointed to the council—Monty’s girlfriend, for instance, that old grandma, that alter cocker who only wanted to feel Monty’s Holocaust pain, the Jewish liaison for the president, Zelda Knecht or whatever her name was, she could maybe lobby for it from the inside. Then, after a decent interval—because even putting his name forward for a seat on the council at this critical time was risky, bound to raise eyebrows, sure to incite their enemies to sharpen their teeth—but still, after a respectable interval, once Norman had become a council member, once he had been sworn in, it might be possible to arrange for him to be placed at the head of one of the committees, Second Generation maybe, or Death Camp Preservation, or, with a little luck, maybe even the heart of the heart where Norman’s trusty vote would earn double value by solidifying Maurice’s majority, the kitchen cabinet, the war room itself—Politics and Perks.
Then, as if the disappointment inflicted upon him by his own father had not been grievous enough, as he was waiting at the elevators to go up to the privacy of his room for the pitiful purpose of calling his wife to tell her what had happened to him and abjectly accept whatever paltry shred of solace she might condescend to dole out from her vestigial sense of spousal obligation, a clerk from reception scurried over and handed him a message that Arlene had indiscreetly, shamelessly dictated to a complete stranger over the telephone. Norman got rid of the peasant with a few zlotys, unfolded the edible sheet of creamy Grand Hotel stationery, and read: “If you don’t get in to see Nechama, don’t bother coming home.” For Christ’s sake, Norman thought, now everyone knows our business! Instead of comfort from a cold wife, what does she cast at him? Consolatia—their lost child, Sister Consolatia of the Cross. Well, maybe this was the opportunity he had been waiting for; maybe he should shock Arlene out of her smugness, take her up on her offer—and not come home. But, of course, whether he came home or not was beside the point, because after all, more than anything else in the world, he too longed to see Nechama, she was his baby too. What kind of a father did Arlene think he was? He didn’t need her to remind him—or to offer incentives. Almost three years had gone by since anyone from the family had laid eyes on their Nechama, though once in a while a terse letter came, and sometimes even a staticky phone call. So much had changed since she had vanished, above all Maurice being named chairman of the Holocaust, for which, it should be noted, the fact that he had a Catholic nun granddaughter contributed very positively toward his appointment, and the old man, once so appalled by the idea, had not hesitated to package his personal cultural diversity as a major plus. But ever since they had arrived in Krakow the previous evening, not for a single minute had Norman forgotten that Nechama was alive and breathing in the neighborhood—not at Auschwitz today with the Carmelite convent achingly within a short walking distance, and not at this moment either, here at Hawelka, at this obscene dinner party to which Maurice had even offered to invite her, “for some decent food and a little quality time,” he had said. “What’s the matter?” he’d added when he noticed Norman’s incredulous expression. “I talk mit the president from the United States himself and mit big-shot senators and mit all the members from the diplomatic corpse. You think I can’t talk mit some fershtunkene old Mother Superior? Believe me, they’ll have her delivered to Hawelka wrapped up in a pink bow faster than you can say ‘Pope Pius the Twelfth the Nazi Sympat’izer.’”
Norman could just picture it: special delivery to this profane restaurant, wrapped in a pink ribbon like a stripper popping out of a cake—his daughter, the nun. Quality time—what a joke! Where did the old man pick up that phrase anyway? Even if Maurice were right and the convent released her for the night to avert a major crisis in Catholic-Jewish relations, he could just picture her here in this garish room in her nun’s getup, squeezed into her grandfather’s tight schedule between the Krakovian duck and the big plunge into Gloria’s pants in quest of her purse. No thank you, Pop; I’ll figure out some other more practicable way to get to her on my own. At dawn tomorrow morning, before they all set out in the chauffeur-driven limousine for their leisurely afternoon tour of the killing center at Birkenau, he would make a pilgrimage alone to the Carmelite convent. He would kneel outside the gate like King Henry in the snow at Canossa, even though it was June now at Auschwitz and the grass was eerily thick, almost blue, thanks to all that human fertilizer. Of course, he would never climb the convent fence like that crazy spiderman rabbi—did they think he was out of his mind?—but he would respectfully and non-violently declare to one and all in the huge crowd that would quickly gather there of high-level clergy, politicians, press, and other assorted celebrities, and also, naturally, ordinary curious bystanders, that he would not move from that spot until they let him see his daughter. “Give me back my Nechama,” he would cry. Norman wondered if he should alert the media.
He looked around the table, his internal vision bulging with images of his not-so-bad-looking-after-all face splashed across the front pages of all the newspapers around the globe, future prizewinning photos of his really rather strikingly handsome face when you came to think about it, even when contorted with the noble anguish of a father relentlessly and at enormous personal sacrifice pursuing his righteous cause with which any human parent could empathize. His external vision, on the other hand, was still filmed by estrangement. His father, glumly chewing his goulash, did not look happy, Norman could tell—not that it mattered to him at the moment, but he was condemned, even in his present state of supreme indifference, to be privy to the privies inside the old man’s head. Maybe Maurice had finally achieved the exclusivity he had so vainly sought in the death camp tour today by forking over a hefty wad of American taxpayer dollars this evening to this overpriced Polish restaurant, it is true, but the main purpose for which this whole event had been staged still eluded him. Things were not going well at this table. “Tuches oif dem tisch,” Maurice would have liked to say, let’s get our asses in gear, let’s cut to the chase, let’s get down to the bottom line, let’s talk tachlis, let’s deal—five million big ones, Mrs. Lieb, not a penny less, hand them over, wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. But no, that was not the way it was done. Foreplay—he was sentenced to kill himself performing fund-raising foreplay. What had there ever been in foreplay for a man? And to make matters worse, he was getting no help from his team. Norman was sitting over there in a mood, on the warpath. Krystyna was stuffing her face like it was the last supper, bending over occasionally to spear a morsel off Bunny’s plate, the two of them exploding in great poufs of giggles that sent disgusting sprays of expensive wet food flying out of the gothic circlets of their matching burgundy lipstick. And his Monty here, instead of sticking to someone closer to his own age, instead of working on the daughter as Maurice had ordered, Monty was doing a major job on the mother, flashing for Gloria’s titillation his professionally packaged Holocaust melancholy, which never let him down, a proven aphrodisiac, it never failed, ladies of every age and shape were driven to recline and comfort him every time. Maurice just watched in awe as Monty wrapped himself in the erotic robes of borrowed suffering, he listened reverentially to the seductive agonizing of his star pupil. “There are no tears,” Monty was riffing, ripping off the most decorated Holocaust gigolo of them all, the Holocaust High Priest. “There are no words, we cannot speak, yet we cannot remain silent; silence is forbidden, talk is impossible, yet talk we must.” Maurice could see Gloria weakening, surrendering, submitting. Monty’s stump speech was as potent as the scent of musk. No woman, except maybe a frigidaire, could listen to this stuff and not have an irresistible urge to immediately go down on her knees and light a candle. Monty shook his head with lyrical sadness. “As for myself, I was not privileged to be there, I was not worthy,” he said—which was, as far as Maurice was concerned, A-plus-plus, a gem, a masterful line, the kid should copyright it. Gloria also appreciated it; she nodded solemnly—she understood. “But dealing with the subject every waking hour,” Monty was going on, “and even in my dreams—my nightmares, I should say—living and breathing this material day and night for the last ten years working in the museum, and for the next I-don’t-know-how-many years also when I’m director, it’s like a life sentence—you know what I’m saying?”
Yes, Gloria knew—one look at her told you that she knew, you didn’t have to be an Einstein or even a Weinstein to figure that out. The boy definitely had a way with older women, Maurice had to hand it to him. For example, to take another case, the president’s Jewish liaison, Zelda Knecht, not as it happened a still juicy albeit aging broad like Gloria Bacon Lieb, but a bona fide dried-up, decaying senior citizen—it was, Maurice had to admit, to some degree thanks to Monty’s very personal interventions with this Zelda, which you wouldn’t even want to begin to think about, that he, Maurice, had been installed in his wonderful new job of chairman, the dream job of a lifetime, though of course Maurice’s own considerable merit should by no means be discounted, as Blanche never failed to remind him. Nevertheless, Maurice recognized that he owed Monty an enormous debt, and there was no question that as a man of honor he was not only obligated to repay him, but he also wanted to, with his whole heart and soul, he wanted to hand Monty the prize, to make him director of the museum, the two of them together would be an unbeatable team. Monty was the best friend a person could have, and also, it should not for a minute be forgotten, potentially the most dangerous of enemies. Maurice absolutely did not need Monty as an enemy with all the inside dirt and garbage that he had stored away as ammunition, ready to deploy at a moment’s notice. Still, Maurice made a mental note to himself to admonish the kid not to talk so publicly about becoming director—Gottenyu, why was he counting his chickens already?—even if it puffed him up for a second while oiling the ladies, this “who-knows-how-long as director,” as Maurice had just heard Monty casually let drop to Gloria whom he was still moving in on so disgracefully, neglecting his main assignment, the old-maid daughter, which meant, of course, that for the meanwhile, in this emergency at least, Maurice had to cover for him, Maurice was left with the cheese, with Miss Bunny, to whom, because it was absolutely imperative for the success of their endeavor that the targeted donor’s ferocious maternal instinct not be slighted, he now turned his attention. What in the world did he have to say to her? Even so, for the sake of ultimately milking the mother, for the sake of his museum for which he was ready to endure anything, Maurice strode valiantly into the breach.
“You know, Bunny”—Maurice made a stab at conversation—“there’s definitely something different about you tonight. You look very pretty, if I may say so. You should excuse an old man, but did your face clear up or something?” Bunny squinted at him, speechless. “Ah, now I know what it is!” Maurice exclaimed. “You’re not wearing your eyeglasses. That’s what it is. It’s very becoming, I might add. And you put on a little makeup too—am I right? That should make your mama very happy.” When Bunny still failed to run with this baton that he had relayed to her, Maurice persisted, ready to exhaust himself terminally small-talk y stroking her all night long if necessary until he finally figured out what the hell it was that she wanted. “So you’re a kindergarten teacher, I hear.” Maurice took another shot. “Well, if you want to know mine opinion, Bunny honey, I always say that kindergarten teachers are the unsung heroes from the universe, they have the world’s most important job, the molding and shaping from young minds—what could be more important than that? Tell me please, if you don’t mind! Believe me, I myself would personally not hesitate for one minute to trade in mine own job as chairman from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum no matter how hotsy-totsy everybody and his uncle thinks it is, to be a kindergarten teacher and teach—what do you teach, by the way?”
“Self-esteem,” Bunny replied sulkily, displaying the contents of her mouth.
“Very nice, very nice. And what else?”
“Small motor skills.”
“Small motor? That’s very good, very useful. You mean, like the children should learn how to fix a toaster?”
Monty and Gloria now pushed their chairs back and stood up. “I’m going to show Gloria the Kazimierz,” Monty announced, twisting his head with a grimace as he loosened his tie.
“Yeah,” Gloria slurred as she slumped against him, sliding her hand slowly down the front of his torso in a manner seen only in movies of a certain genre. “Monty promised to show me his Jewish quarter.” She was overripe and reckless from the establishment’s vaunted red wine.
“Gloria darling,” Maurice whimpered in desperation, “you promised to have a drink mit me tonight. A night cup. Remember? We have a date. I want you should know—I’ll be waiting for you in mine lounging pajamas and mine slippers, I’ll be waiting for you all night long if I have to, in mine suite, Mrs. Lieb. You remember where mine suite is—yes, Gloria darling?” And he glared furiously at Monty, his treacherous protégé, as the couple swept brazenly out, waving to those left behind, like royalty at the open door of their fabulous cabin about to embark for places about which the rabble could not even begin to dream.
Gloria also had a suite of her own, the Palace Suite, a sensible investment of Holocaust discretionary funds, Maurice had calculated, but they made their way instead to Monty’s far from frugal expense-account room where, even in the rash and glazed condition they were in, they recognized they were less likely to be disturbed. In no time flat, all of Monty’s rumpled and limp clothing molted in a heap on the medallion of the Persian rug. He stretched out on his back in the king-size bed, his furry sponge of a belly overlapping the sheet drawn up to the general vicinity of his former waist, one hand, as he waited for Gloria to emerge from the bathroom, idly performing a housekeeping chore, picking the lint from his navel, the other arm winged on the pillow, propping up his head, which he swiveled slowly toward her when she finally appeared. “Hey, you’re a real chick,” he observed appreciatively as she stood alongside the bed, draped from breast to drumstick in a plush white towel embroidered in gold with the Grand Hotel monogram, held clutched together at the cleavage with one pampered hand. “Great legs,” Monty went on with appealing boyish enthusiasm, and then, thankfully, instead of tagging on, “for a woman your age,” which was what Gloria was vaguely expecting and dreading, already ducking figuratively against the impending blow, he added, “You should really have them insured.”
Va-va-va-voom, Gloria mused, the little champ thinks he’s about to add Marlene Dietrich to his trophy case.
“So,” Monty casually rapped out, “I hope you don’t mind being on top.”
Gloria’s eyebrows shot up. Oh, my God, I’m too old to be on top, she was thinking. Under the towel, even with all the extravagant maintenance, things were withering relentlessly, things were drooping and sagging, things, alas, would never be the same, never be as tight, as smooth, as fresh, or as firm as once they had been.
“See, I’ve been diagnosed with chronic Holocaust fatigue syndrome,” Monty explained. “I’m under strict doctor’s orders not to exert myself.”
Ah, handicapped by the Holocaust. Who could argue with that? “Sure,” Gloria said after some reflection. “No problem, Rabbi.” She began to strut around the room. For a minute Monty thought she was going to entertain him with some kind of mature-woman grinding number before dutifully climbing on top, but then she began switching off all the lights with her one free hand, drawing all the draperies gaplessly tight, inspecting the venue meticulously for even a single rogue ray of light that might have sneaked through to illuminate her, the stealth invasion of even one revealing pale moonbeam, releasing the towel shielding her only to grope her way invisibly into the bed, flinging it directly over the telephone on the nightstand, to cover the message bulb, which was glowing urgent red.
Luckily, it was only after she had hastily dressed and tiptoed considerately out of the room in the pitch-dark, only after she had shut the door softly behind her and he had popped his eyes open from the simulated sleep of the mythical sated male, that Monty pressed that button to listen to the message. “Pincus? Crusher Casey here from the Washington Post. I got your number from your wife. Look, I’m on deadline on the museum piece, and I wanna run a couple of things by you for your input. Okay, number one, according to a very reliable source, when you were a reporter for the Jewish Journal, you were responsible for the deaths of a couple of hundred, maybe even a few thousand, Jewish refugees when you charged ahead to scoop a story about a secret airlift that all the other newspapers knew about too but were sitting on for fear of endangering the escapees. Care to comment? Number two, re that police record of yours on a domestic violence spousal abuse rap, i.e., wife beating, and also for bloodying a hooker—any comment? Three, we’ve got eyewitness confirmation here that you’ve been keeping a couple of cans of poison gas from the concentration camps on a shelf in your garage. Comment? Okay, let’s see, that’s about it for now. So Pincus, give me a call, you’ve got my number. The ball’s in your court. The way I figure it, it’s probably in your best interest to tell your side of the story, or whatever the hell, but like I said, I’m on deadline. If I don’t hear from you in time, we’ll have to run with it as is, with, you know, that great old one-liner, for whatever it’s worth, ‘The Holocaust Museum’s Dr. Monty Pincus was unavailable for comment.’ So okay, Pincus, ciao, looking forward to hearing from you.”
That was enough to deflate any man. Sitting up stark naked with his thin legs hanging over the side of the bed, Monty looked at the clock next to the telephone. It was past midnight in the charnel house of Poland, which meant that it was about six hours earlier in the giddy capital of the free world. He would call that son of a bitch in Washington and if he actually got the living and breathing version on the line, he would hang up immediately. As it happened, he got the machine version. “Mr. Casey? This is Rabbi Dr. Monty Pincus, director of scholarship and academics at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, calling you from the Auschwitz death camp. I would like to make three points to you. First, you should be aware that my wife is not a reliable source. She is a sick woman not responsible for anything she says or does, of whom you are unconscionably taking advantage. There is a wealth of certified psychiatric documentation attesting to this fact. Second, you should be advised that if you move ahead and publish your scurrilous article, it is not only me that you will be hurting, but, far more importantly, the six million Jewish martyrs, including men, women, and over one and one half million innocent children, exterminated by Hitler during the Holocaust, whom you will be murdering for a second time, not to mention the fact that you will also be seriously harming the museum that has been erected in their memory. I therefore advise you to consult your conscience and to consider very carefully whether you are ready to take upon yourself such a heavy weight of responsibility and guilt. Finally, I’m giving you fair warning here and now, you bastard—if you go ahead and print this shit, I’m gonna sue the crap out of you, I’m gonna take you to court and wipe you out, sue you for everything you’ve got, your last fucking nickel. That’s a promise—and let me tell you something, motherfucker, rabbis always keep their fucking promises. It goes with the job description. Any comments?”
He was practically reeling when he smashed down the receiver. There was no point trying to sleep now. In painfully swelling agitation he threw on his gamy and rumpled pants and shirt from the pile in the middle of the floor, not bothering with underwear, and blundered barefoot straight to Krystyna’s room on the cheaper side of the hotel. “Didn’t I tell you it was him?” Krystyna commented to Bunny, who was sprawled on the bed. “I could smell you from down the hall,” she said to Monty as she stood aside to let him through the door. “You smell like her mommy,” she added in a whisper, bobbing her head toward Bunny. “Joy, the world’s most expensive perfume.”
The two women, wearing matching white terry-cloth bathrobes with the gold Grand Hotel insignia pressed onto the breast like a badge, had been watching Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS, dubbed into Serbo-Croatian, which Bunny now clicked to mute. Good old Ilsa of the splendid boobs, the leather boots, the black gloves, the shiny whip, the swastika armband, the Aryan tresses, the death’s-head cap—just what he needed at the moment! Still twitching with fury over that phone call, Monty swatted aside the candy wrappers, empty soda bottles, greasy potato chip bags, and other nauseating trash that was strewn across the befouled bed, evidence of a barbaric and costly expense-account raid of the minibar. He churned his weight down into the mattress alongside Bunny, who instantly recoiled, sprang up immediately as if scorched by a hot poker. He narrowed his eyes at her as she squeezed next to Krystyna on the brown velvet club chair, the two of them in their twin assembly-line robes resembling spent porno extras on a break on the set from the drudgery of boring, pointless girl-gropes-girl scenes. There was no chance of a threesome tonight, he figured resentfully as he glared at them sitting there with perfectly serviceable bodies under their robes, especially when you factored in the subfreezing signals that Bunny was giving off almost audibly, even though he really deserved an extra-special treat of some kind after what he had just gone through with that punk reporter, not to mention deserving some kind of special thank-you just in principle, just in a general sense, for all those hours, days, weeks, months, years, of his life that he had at such incalculable personal emotional and spiritual cost sacrificed to the museum, to making the Holocaust number one on the horror hit parade, the paradigm and model against which all past and future atrocities must strive but can never quite succeed to measure up. But if the Holocaust had taught him anything at all, it was that there was no justice in this world, it was foolishly naive, childishly innocent, to expect it. No, there would be no threesome for him tonight no matter how truly he deserved it, no matter even how desperately badly he needed it for the sake of his health—he was under such pressure from all that museum work, so stressed out, so tense, he needed some relief, some release, by all rights the two of them over there on that chair compacted together in their identical snow-white robes like some kind of freaky two-headed ice queen, should just break down, they should just give in, just say to themselves, Oh, what’s the big deal, we’ll do it for the cause. But no, he was not fated this night to be part of a fun trio. Their pathetic threesome, instead of getting down to business like any normal lusty threesome in this day and age, would just go on staring at the tube as if they’d been hit over the head with a sledgehammer, watching dopily with jaws hanging down while Commandant Ilsa, as part of her job description, soundlessly tortured a naked nubile female prisoner for purely scientific reasons, in compliance with the camp’s medical experimentation program to test the limits of pain endurance, and then as she went on, with equal professionalism, to chop off the useless member of a male prisoner who, like the other losers before him, could not hold back long enough to gratify her.
Monty turned from the evening’s entertainment and eyed Bunny like a rival he was about to trump. “You don’t by any chance find this stuff in any way in violation of your principles by being just a teensy-weensy bit sadomasochistic, or maybe really really offensive to women, not to mention a trivialization of Holocaust memory?” he inquired.
Deliberately avoiding returning his gaze, Bunny shook her head in wordless communion with Krystyna; this guy just doesn’t get it, was what she was beaming. “As far as I’m concerned,” she proceeded to lecture with grim didacticism, “when it comes to artistic expression, I reject all forms of censorship. In my opinion, artistically speaking, nothing’s off-limits, even with respect to the Holocaust—except, of course, denial. Holocaust denial? That’s where I draw the line, that’s the only no-no. Denial has to be outlawed everywhere, across the board, universally banned as a hate crime. I personally wouldn’t dignify a denier by arguing with him even for two seconds. Give a denier a platform, and you give him legitimacy, it’s as simple as that. But as long as you don’t deny that the Holocaust happened more or less the way it happened, it’s out there for everyone’s creative expression—kind of like my kids’ finger paints, for example, or their Play-Doh. It’s raw material for all humanity, so to speak. The Jews don’t own the Holocaust.”
So now it was denial, the latest heresy. Burn the denier at the stake and turn the pathetic little fruitcake into a major martyr. What a tiresome, self-righteous, stupid bitch! What had he ever done, Monty pondered morosely, to be named the designated receptacle of her pieties, her totalitarianism couched as liberalism, her simpleminded political correctness? So new to the Holocaust game, so fundamentally ignorant on the subject, and already she was spouting her canned opinions. Thank God he had managed in the nick of time to avoid that lurid threesome they were tempting him with, he would have shot his reputation by falling asleep in the middle out of sheer brain-numbing tedium. Still, he was keenly aware that she was the vital link to the big check that Maurice was gunning for, Maurice would strangle him plain and simple if he screwed things up, it was essential to be polite, to carry on as if he took her seriously. “Well, Ilsa’s definitely not a denier,” Monty conceded, “she doesn’t deny herself a single thing.” Then, struggling to keep the conversation going, he pushed on, taking up even in this incongruous context his handy persona of the eternal expert. “Did you know that they shot this schlock on the sly over just a couple of days, on the old set of Hogan’s Heroes—you know, the television series with that crazy Nazi Klink, ‘Co-lo-nel Klink,’ as Maurice used to say, he just loved that show?”
“Excuse me, but I really really can’t even begin to tell you how offensive it is to hear you making fun of a harmless little senior citizen’s mispronunciations,” Bunny scolded in her scariest kindergarten teacher’s tones. “How would you like it if someone made fun of something about you that you couldn’t help? And, by the way, calling this movie ‘schlock’? It just so happens that this ‘schlock’ is part of the academic curriculum of the prestigious UCLA film school.”
Maurice harmless? That’s a good one. But with the old man so bent on the grand prize of her mother’s big bucks, he wasn’t even going to begin to get into it. Instead, he went on flashing his expert’s license. “You know, it’s really too bad you weren’t at UCLA when I gave a lecture on the Holocaust in cinema. It’s one of my scholarly specialties, as it happens. Of course everyone knows that Ilsa’s a bona fide cult classic, based on a real person, as a matter of fact, the Nazi camp guard Irma Grese, who would whip female prisoners until she reached orgasm—this tidbit comes from oral testimony, needless to say, so it has been a little hard for researchers to document. In any case, one thing’s for sure—Hitler has made a major contribution to the fantasies of sadists and masochists worldwide, greater even, in my humble opinion, than the Catholic church, the medical profession, and the educational system combined. The S-and-M crowd has a lot to thank him for.”
Bunny flicked a look at Krystyna. “Where in the world did you guys ever pick up this jerk?” she asked blandly, as if getting an answer to her question did not really matter to her anyway.
Monty did not quite know how to interpret this unremitting stream of apparent hostility, so accustomed was he to regarding himself as lovable; some kindergarten teacher almost half a century earlier had done an excellent job on him in the self-esteem department. He therefore concluded once again that this nasty display of attitude from Bunny was merely superficial, the flip side of adoration, and he plunged ahead doggedly with another factoid. “Well, since you have such a high opinion of this cinematic masterpiece,” he informed, “I’m sure you’ll be pleased to learn that the producer is one of our own—Friedman, a Jew, naturlich.”
“Oh, please,” Bunny said, pursing her lips in weary disapproval. “Is it at all possible for just once in your life to look at something minus the Jewish connection? I mean, it’s just so dull and provincial. You are aware, I hope, that there are other varieties of experience in this world besides the Jewish one? To take just one example, how important do you think the Jewish question or the Holocaust is to those little guys with the loincloths and feathers in the Amazon rain forest?”
Monty set about with feigned academic earnestness to tackle her openly hostile question—even he could recognize that. “Well, if you don’t count the exploiters of the Amazon, a bunch of whom, true to stereotype, are no doubt Jewish, or the fact that some of those natives in penis gourds might very possibly be descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel exiled by the Assyrians in 722 BCE, which future DNA testing might one day prove conclusively, there are, for your information, also probably at least a dozen or so Nazis still hiding out there in your rain forest, very much connected to the Jewish question and the Holocaust, as a matter of fact. Oh, and by the way, speaking of which, Nazis, I mean—Ilsa? The actress who plays Ilsa? I’ll bet you she’s Jewish too. She looks Jewish. She looks exactly like a Jewish mother from hell. And she’s no spring chicken either. She’s definitely over forty, about your age more or less, I’d guess. Check her out—there are unmistakable signs of wear and tear.”
“Oh, so he’s an ageist, too.” By now, Bunny was addressing herself exclusively to Krystyna.
Monty leaned over and grasped her hand, forcing her to acknowledge him. “Believe me, I have nothing against older women,” he articulated with precision. “I love older women. Trust me.”
Bunny freed herself with a shudder and stood up. “I’m out of here,” she said. She gathered up her clothing and stomped off to the bathroom. A minute later, she emerged haphazardly dressed. “Where are you going?” Krystyna asked anxiously.
“This place stinks,” Bunny declared, irrevocably on her way out. “I need some air.”
As soon as the door slammed shut, Monty stretched out his arm and roughly pulled Krystyna over to him down onto the groaning bed. “Come here, shiksa,” he said, and in an impressive feat of carnal dexterity, with one motion tore off her ridiculous robe while almost simultaneously shedding his own overworked rags. But she turned her face pettishly away from him to the stained fleur-de-lis wallpaper. “I think you may have spoiled everything this time,” she said, a fetching wenchlike pout in her voice.
Even though she was an underling and beholden, Monty recognized that there was no way he was going to score with her that night until he let her talk herself out. He did not possess the will or the energy at the moment to use brute force, which in principle, he was firmly convinced Polish girls were accustomed to and actually preferred. He was just too tired and preoccupied right then for that kind of heavy investment. For his part, there was no chance at all that he would confide his problems to her, she was too simple and alien. So lying naked on their backs side by side with their noses pointed up to the peeling ceiling under one sheet on the bed paid for through a combination of private Holocaust donations and U.S. government funding, he channeled the bulk of his mental powers to sifting and resifting through the situation with the reporter, reviewing and rehashing also in that framework his private troubles with his wife Honey at home, yet he still managed at the same time, thanks to his long experience faking listening to women, to devote a rationed number of brain cells of an inferior quality to more or less taking her story in, lubricating this show of attention with grunts and snorts now and then at what must have been approximately the right pauses and intervals, judging from the fact that she kept on going, she hadn’t yet stopped suddenly to accuse him of not listening as sometimes happened with women in similar circumstances, though not very often, he was such a pro. She was as selfishly and as single-mindedly focused on her story as he was on his own, he suspected, too absorbed in her own saga to pay attention to him; probably in the end she didn’t really care one way or another whether he was listening or not as long as she could go on unwinding her tedious soap opera—something about how Bunny was planning to get a job in the museum, in the education department or some other division, her mom would arrange it, and then Bunny would bring her, little Krystyna Jesudowicz from Brzezinka, Poland, to Washington, D.C., in the great and glorious United States of America, to work in the press office or in public relations or as chief of the guides or in collections and acquisitions or whatever, because Bunny was not only fond of her, they had so much in common despite their differences in background, it was really remarkable, but also because Bunny firmly believed that the museum should hire employees of all races and religions and minorities and sexual orientation in order to elevate the Holocaust from just a Jewish hang-up with which the Jews were guilt-tripping the rest of the world to the level of a universal archetype with all-purpose generic lessons and implications for everyone. Bunny would sponsor her, Bunny would get her a green card, Bunny would bless her with citizenship, he could have no idea what an opportunity this was for her, what all this meant to her, and now because he had been so obnoxious to Bunny, so condescending and vulgar and insulting, maybe she would change her mind, maybe it would not happen at all.
Krystyna was rambling on and on, over and over again, with the same obsessive refrain, like a broken record; by now he had tuned out almost completely, she was droning him to sleep, his eyelids were drooping, and it was only when a second voice, not Krystyna’s, jolted his flattening sleep line like an electric shock, only then did he snap his eyes open with animal alertness. “I’m looking for Barbara,” the voice was saying. “She’s not in her room. Do you know where she is?”
Krystyna, with the heedlessness of a creature not fully evolved to a higher stage of self-consciousness, must have at some point while he was dozing off unthinkingly made her way to open the door when she heard a knock. That was where she was now, standing with their once shared cover sheet spilling loosely over the front of her body, the entire undulating length of her rosy back turned to him for his viewing pleasure, while he lay on the bed utterly exposed from head to toe at the very moment when his eyes met Gloria’s.
From Krystyna’s room Gloria went on to keep her date as promised with Maurice in his suite—the Papal Suite, it had been christened. Whenever he was scheduled to go to Krakow he always made sure to have his secretary request it specifically. The brass plate on the door was such a conversation piece, such an icebreaker with visitors, and the paradox and irony of it—himself, an eighty-year-old-give-or-take Jewish survivor with corns and bunions, toiling for the Holocaust from his command post in, of all places, the Papal Suite—in addition to being gratifying, also made him appear laudably ecumenical for the same money. The money, it is true, was nothing to sneeze at, but the benefits you got from this budgetary allocation gave you one hundred percent bang for your buck, like flying first class. But now that he was chairman, because he was getting around on the government’s nickel, for which only economy class was authorized and legal, the only way he could wing it, so to speak, was, unfortunately, even in the face of Blanche’s superstitious terrors, to claim for himself a sickness that necessitated an in-flight upgrade, chronic aggravation or heartburn or slipped disc or hemorrhoids or whatever, for which, like a schoolboy, he was reduced to submitting to some bureaucrat the corroboration of a doctor’s note, which he had no trouble getting, thank God, from his dear friend and fellow partisan fighter, Dr. Adolf Schmaltz, the world-famous proctologist and private hospital chain magnate. Having a suite was, likewise, a big-deal red tape fuss and potential scandal brouhaha for such a high official of a major government institution like himself, but he insisted nevertheless that it was an absolutely justified expenditure to dip into the federal budget pool for this purpose, not for his own comfort or prestige, God forbid, but for the sake of the six million, because he was their ambassador, he needed to look good while representing them in hotels all over the world, entertaining big shots and so on and so forth, it would be unseemly to usher dignitaries into your basic hotel room in which right in front of their faces would be the bed in which they could imagine him emitting bodily fluids and noises that had no place in polite society, not to mention how it looked in front of potential big donors, especially lady donors like Gloria, whom he was now rousing himself from a snatched sleep on the antique silk sofa wet with his drool to let in.
A quick check of his watch told him that it was past two in the morning, but Gloria made no apologies or excuses. Even at this late hour, she was flawlessly coiffed and dressed like a country club matron at ease in her luxury, having obviously showered since dinner that evening, judging by the fresh luster of her hair, and changed into casual dark slacks and a white tailored shirt unbuttoned at the throat, that great betrayer of age, but in her case still under control, her only jewelry discreet but unquestionably costly pearl and diamond earrings nestled securely somewhere near one of her face-lift seams—as his Blanchie used to say, “We should all look so good at age seventy-plus like Gloria Bacon Lieb.” Having refused his offer of a drink, even a small ethnic toast of slivovitz or a shot of vodka in honor of their host country, the Republic of Polska, asserting, which was either a good or a bad sign, Maurice was not yet sure, that she liked to have a clear head when she talked money, she sat down on one of the gold-framed Louis number-something chairs and crossed her legs, her spike-heeled, toeless, and backless sandal dangling from her foot like an open mouth as Maurice placed a glass of mineral water on the ornate marble coffee table in front of her. This gave him an opening to call her attention to the centerpiece on that table, a silver fountain in the shape of the museum, on the roof of which was an object that resembled a human eyeball from which a constant stream of water, like tears, flowed, and at its base the words, “Lest We Forget,” inscribed in fancy gold script. “Beautiful—no?” Maurice said, displaying it with pride. “One hundred percent sterling, filled on the inside mit ashes from the dead. One of our premiums—yours for only five million dollars, heh heh.” Gloria examined it uncertainly, not touching, keeping her distance as from a contagious animal. “The dripping would drive me crazy,” she said finally. “I’d be running all day to the ladies’.”
Maurice slid to the edge of the sofa, as close as possible to Gloria without actually climbing into her lap, and flashing the clear polish on his manicured fingernails with glints of pearl pink, he anxiously stroked the back of her barely mottled and for her age amazingly tight-skinned hand, as if to soften her recalcitrant mood, to coax her into compliance. “Gloria, darling,” he implored, spraying her with a great burst of saliva, “I want you should go on the wall. You belong on the wall.”
There was no need for him to interpret. She knew exactly what he meant. He meant what she had good-humoredly dubbed to her husband Leon, when they had discussed the matter in advance of this trip, the “gonifs’ wall,” the famous wall in the alcove off the museum’s Hall of Witness where visitors stood waiting for the elevators like steel freight cars to transport them to the virtual Holocaust; many of her best friends were showcased on that wall, Gloria was aware, the whole congregation of operators and machers who had donated a million dollars or more, every little boaster and finagler from Palm Springs to Palm Beach was killing each other to get on that wall—exploit the poor and the wretched, was Gloria’s kept-woman’s suppressed thought, make deals with dictators and tyrants, then cleanse and beautify yourself in the Holocaust, like a ritual bath for your guilt. “Leon is already on the wall,” she responded coldly, refraining nevertheless from wiping Maurice’s spit from her face due to her deeply instilled deference to male sensitivities. “Ah, but Gloria darling,” Maurice shot back, “that’s mit his first wife, mit Rose, may she rest in peace, a lovely lady, I think you knew her. But now, for another lousy million—and what’s a million bucks between old friends like us?—he can go on the wall for a record second time, this time mit you. You should work on him, Gloria darling. Soon there will be no more room, the original Founders’ Wall will be closed for business, we’ll have to put up a backup wall—but for Leon and you, darling, we can maybe still make an exception, we can maybe still squeeze you in.” Even if the wall is packed to the gills, Maurice was thinking, he could sell the same space twice—why not? like plots in a cemetery, just pile them on, do the dead know the difference?—on the model of the sainted filmmaker who sold the same original outtakes of his celebrated movie twice, at a cool quarter million a pop, once to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and once to the competition in the Holy Land—the son of a gun, such a wise guy, despite himself, Maurice shook his head in admiration.
“Okay, I’ll get back to you,” Gloria was saying, and, sliding both hands along her thighs to smooth her trousers, she rose to leave. With astonishing swiftness, Maurice got up too and swooped ahead of her to the door, throwing himself against it with the front of his body facing the room, blocking her way, splaying himself across that exit with his arms outstretched, looking as she approached as if he would surge to the heights of rapture at that moment if only someone would do him a favor and crucify him for the cause. “I’m not letting you out from here,” Maurice cried, breathing heavily, far more heavily, she recalled bitterly, than his protégé Monty, the Holocaust Casanova, earlier this evening, in what now oddly felt to her like a related situation. “I’m not letting you out from here until you give to me two things, Gloria darling. Number one, a promise that you’ll get Leon to go on the wall again mit you for another million. And number two, five million dollars from Mel’s foundation—for a grand total of six million, a very very holy number.”
Gloria shook her head somberly. “Mel gave to Yad Vashem and to Wiesenthal. He didn’t approve of your museum. He thought it was a big mistake to put up a Jewish institution on the Mall in Washington, D.C., on federal land with federal funding. He was against involving the government with the Holocaust, mixing church with state. He said it was bad for the Jews—and more and more I think maybe he was right.”
“Gloria darling, listen to me—for five million bucks, you know what I can give to you? I can give to you the cattle car! You can have the whole cattle car named for Mel and you. Think what an honor! You know, the aut’entic Polish railway car right in the middle from the third floor from the museum just like the one the killers used to ship the Jews to the camps in, it’s the biggest thing in our collection. Just picture it, Gloria darling”—and here Maurice risked removing one of his arms from the door to illustrate in the air what he envisioned in his mind’s eye—“beautiful, top-of-the-line signage with raised lettering that millions of visitors would read as they walk through it to know what it feels like for a minute to be the victim: ‘The Gloria and Melvin Bacon Cattle Car.’ I can just see it! What a privilege, what a memorial to Mel! Believe me, this is something special, this is something one-of-a-kind, this is not an offer I would make to just anybody.”
Maurice was panting so feverishly, he was straining so hard, that Gloria was afraid he would keel over with a heart attack right there in front of her on the precious Aubusson rug of the Papal Suite. For his part, Maurice was ready, though preferably it should not be a fatal one, he was having so much fun. But if she would just give in, it would be worth it, like those fishes he once saw on television that drop their seed and then drop dead. When you thought about it, it wasn’t such a bad way to go.
Gloria stood there in front of him, gazing down at her pedicure. “Why in the world would I ever want a cattle car named for Mel and me?” she said quietly.
“Tell me, tell me what you want, Gloria darling. Whatever you want I’ll give to you. Even if it’s half mine kingdom.” Maurice was almost weeping.
“Okay, Maurice. If you really mean it, since you ask, I’ll tell you what I want. Here’s the deal. For five million bucks from Mel’s foundation? For five million, I want you to bring my Barbara into the museum right away and make her director of education. Then, by the end of one year exactly, after she learns the ropes, I want her named director of the whole museum—the whole kit and caboodle. So that’s what I want. Aren’t you sorry now that you asked? That’s my offer. Take it or leave it.”
Maurice’s arms dropped to his sides with a thump, his entire body wilting before her eyes. “I can’t do it,” he muttered, shaking his head, “I just can’t do it. Your Bunny is a very nice girl, don’t get me wrong, but what does she know from the Holocaust? A kindergarten teacher! I’m not saying this as a criticism from the way you brought her up, God forbid, but what does she even know from Yiddishkeit, from Jewishness? She’s all wrong for the job, that’s the bottom line. She’ll turn the place into a goyische human rights genocide universalist community center, I’m telling you. It would be a tragedy, a terrible betrayal from the six million and from all the survivors. I’m sorry, Gloria darling, it’s impossible, I can’t do it. Five million is very tempting, believe me, but I can’t do it even for five. Ten? Maybe. But definitely not five.”
Gloria paused to consider. “Ten?” she brought out at last. Then lowering her voice, as if for privacy, she went on, “For ten you’d have to throw in a little something extra—something for my Michael. His name on the wall, with an inscription of course.”
God help me, Maurice was thinking, I should have asked for fifteen. “Twenty, I meant,” he blurted out.
Gloria wagged a finger at him. “Now, Maurice Messer, don’t you be such a little piggie.” She cocked her head, set her hands on her hips, and glared at him as at a naughty boy. “Ten million dollars. That’s my final offer. Do we have a deal?”
Maurice regarded her in misery. “She’ll have to be investigated, you should know—like a colonoscopy,” he said, “to make sure she’s clean like a whistle. Are you ready to put her through that? By the FBI, by the CIA, and even more invasion from privacy than that, by mine own personal Roto-Rooter man, mine council lawyer, a very big shtickler for appearances from impropriety, more important than the impropriety itself, like he says, to protect our sacred institution, every piece of toilet paper he collects—to find out if she ever smoked LSD maybe, or maybe hired an illegal nanny from Guatemala.”
Gloria stood there before him in silence. No, Maurice thought, no nanny for Bunny, no skeletons in the closet, because there was no life—no husband, no child, no grandchild for her mother, as for the more blessed members of society such as himself.
“All right already,” Maurice gave in grudgingly. “What can I do? It’s out from mine hands. Okay, so we have a deal. But on one condition—you pay it out in one lump sum, not schlepped out over twenty years like slow torture, kvetching and squeezing like constipation.”
“The first five million the day she’s made head of education,” Gloria said firmly. “The last five on the day she’s sworn in as director. At that time, I’ll also give you the inscription for Michael. And don’t worry, Mr. Chairman,” Gloria added, leaning forward to kiss him lightly on his cushiony nose, “it will be our little secret.”
“That’s all what I get after we were just so lovey-dovey? A kiss on the nose? Mit me you’re so platonic? You think mine sex drive is a raisin? What—you have something against older men? I still have mine original prostate, you should know—in working order, for your information.”
She smiled coquettishly and delivered another kiss, this one launched from a distance off the pads of two slim fingers as she made her way out the door. “And an extra million from Leon,” Maurice grumbled as her perfume wafted by, “don’t forget. To go on the wall. For a grand total from eleven million—also a holy number.”