They whooshed downstairs in the glass elevator. Outside, Peter surged toward the curb and stuck out his hand. “There’s a system,” he explained once they’d climbed into the taxi. “You have to find the biggest building on the street and get ahead of it. Most people don’t think of that. They just stand in front of their buildings and wait.”
“Doesn’t the building with the most people also have the most cabs emptying out?” Slava said.
Peter scratched the wisps sprouting from his chin and admitted that Slava had a point.
They continued in silence. They hadn’t spoken since the competition. They hadn’t spoken much before, either, but now their distance had an ill-feeling cast. At Thirty-Fourth, Peter turned to Slava. “Can we clear the air?” He extended a hand.
Slava nodded and took it. Despite his near translucence, Peter had a firm, dry clasp. “Thanks,” Peter said. “I’m glad.”
“Tell me what it takes,” Slava said.
Peter looked at him quizzically.
“They publish everything you give them.”
Peter threw his head back, flattered and exasperated. “About one out of ten things I give them.”
“What does it take?”
“What difference does it make?” Peter said. “You don’t like what I write, anyway.”
Slava, confronted with the truth, said nothing.
“There’s a style,” Peter said. “It’s not your style.”
“I want it to be my style,” Slava said.
“You don’t,” Peter said. “Otherwise, it would be.”
Despite the choking weather, the press conference was taking place outside. Slava didn’t understand why Settledecker was passing up the opportunity to be photographed inside, next to the cattle cars and shoe piles advertised by the banners lining the drive to the museum. Slava had skimmed the Times story before walking out with Peter: Australian Settledecker (he owned a quarter of some sparsely settled territory in the country’s hinterland), “the unapologetic mastermind of controversial publicity campaigns that have succeeded in compelling United Nations resolutions, the return of looted art, and university firings.” In resentment, Slava had declined to peruse Beau’s article.
On a broad gray dais, Settledecker swung his long arms and scratched his beard. He wore an ill-fitting three-piece suit. You could see his ankles when he gestured with special intensity.
“What’s with the suit?” Peter said. “He looks like a tailor from the shtetl.” He pronounced “shtetl” carefully, as if he had learned the word that morning in the Encyclopedia of Jewish History in the fact-checkers’ library.
Peter had instincts; he was right without knowing it. The vest, the striped shirt underneath it, the usually fastidious beard allowed to go unkempt: Settledecker was subtly channeling a poor Jew.
There were three rows of black folding chairs to the side of the dais, filled with pensioners holding on to reedy bouffants in the suffocating wind off the Hudson. By the cheap jackets shielding them from the clandestine ravages of the breeze, by the gold teeth sparkling in the strong sun, by the dazed faces — you knew. Nashi. Russians all.
Slava made the next observation in his notepad with astonishment: Underneath the jackets, they wore prison uniforms. Striped prison uniforms. They could have been from a Halloween store. Numbers had been embroidered on the chests, yellow stars taped beneath them. Some of the seniors, worried about the lost impact of stars concealed by outerwear, had un-Velcroed the six-pointed stars and were trying to affix them to their overcoats.
They snacked: cylinders of cookies, bread-and-cheese sandwiches, yogurt. Behind the seating, a long table covered in white tablecloths held bowls of sandwiches and bottles of water for the postcoital repast. The seated periodically turned to make sure no one was making unauthorized advances on the food. On the rim of the meadow, penny-colored seniors visiting from Florida paused to take in their less well-preserved contemporaries on camcorder.
“Why would they put all these old people in the heat?” Slava said to Peter.
“You think they could fit this arrangement inside?” Peter said, his pen moving fluidly down his notepad. “I’m going to walk around.” He nodded toward the chairs.
Two young women were trying to attach a large banner that said “Remembrance” to a fence behind the dais. It kept kicking up in the wind. Settledecker yelled at them from the platform, the coils of his hair leaping and crouching. Eventually, he gave up and began to choreograph a camera crew unfolding its mantises. He shouted for an assistant to weigh down the napkin towers on the serving tables.
Peter was bent above a turtle-faced pensioner. “Look at that kikele,” the older man was shouting, pointing his sailing cap at Settledecker. “Ai-ai-ai. You have to admire how far a Jew can go in this country.”
Peter looked at Slava and smiled dumbly, pointing his pen at Turtle-Face. The Devickis, nobles of Poland, had partaken of Russian boar and timber but hadn’t bothered with the language. Peter was straining for the dim corners of long-unvisited brain rooms where a grandmother or grandfather once used words that shared more than they didn’t with Russian. From where in Poland had Peter’s ancestors come? Slava would have to ask him. Minsk had been the western edge of the Soviet Union until 1939, the villages west of it Polish territory. If it wasn’t for transliteration and history, he and Peter could have been countrymen. Peter could have been Slava’s Slav twin.
Slava was about to start across to help when one of Settledecker’s assistants appeared before them. She knelt in front of the old man, her black top hot just to look at. Settledecker seemed to surround himself only with women. Peter said something to the girl, then looked back at Slava, thumbs up.
At last everything was ready — the seniors seated, the assistants lined up behind Settledecker, the cameramen staring into their viewfinders. Settledecker scratched at his beard and approached the microphone, his modest potbelly jiggling. Cautiously, he tapped the head, as if it were the first microphone of his life.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. He swiveled to face the rows of folding chairs. “Survivors,” he nodded. He returned his gaze to the cameras and looked ahead without speaking. All at once there was too much silence. Settledecker coughed. Then he turned back to the folding chairs. The pensioners were motionless. Settledecker rolled his eyes and, half turning, hissed to someone behind him. One of the assistants ran down the steps of the dais and whispered into the ear of the woman in the corner chair of the first row. Oi-oi-oi. The woman slapped her forehead and pulled at the nylon jacket of the woman next to her. “Poshli, Roza, my idyom!” Let’s go, Roza, we’re moving.
The first row followed with discipline. Then the second, waiting patiently until the first had filed out. Settledecker nodded from the stage. The lead woman, the assistant’s hand gently steering her back, began to mount the platform. Roza and the rest followed. Ghosts, they were going to file past Settledecker as he spoke.
“Ladies and gen—” Settledecker started again, but a tugboat blared from the Hudson. He opened his hands to the sky. “We will begin, of course, only when God wills it.” Light laughter from the grass. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. He half turned again: “Survivors.” He pointed at the cameras. “And I do call them survivors. Because they are. I am going to pose a question to you. Any of you. You, sir.” He selected a cameraman. “Imagine your country — our country — is invaded. Imagine our conquerors — and make no mistake, we’ve been conquered — our conquerors have no special feeling for Americans, but it’s New Yorkers they really dislike. Oh, they really hate them. Difficult to imagine, isn’t it?” Another round of laughter. “The rest of America is more or less autonomous, but New Yorkers they herd into concentration camps.” Settledecker lifted his hand and began to count on his fingers. “Starvation. Disease. Extermination. Gas chambers. You see what I’m getting at. Sir, where are you from?”