The Queen and I

by Russell Andresen

  As the theater emptied, Jeffrey caught sight of his three new nemeses as they joyfully received the accolades that they so deeply craved and were now the targets of. Jacob made eye contact for the first time during the evening, and with a smug expression, slowly shook his head disapprovingly, while next to him Mendel Fujikawa blew a kiss.

  Chapter Eight: Phases

  Henry, Jacob, and Mendel sat around Henry’s palatial apartment on the upper West Side of Manhattan basking in the glory of the most successful night any of them had ever experienced in their lifetimes—and that was saying something.

  Heinrich was a billionaire ten times over and succeeded in everything that he did, and Jacob had been a part of each of Jeffrey’s last five plays, yet the feeling of tonight’s success far outshone anything that they had ever accomplished.

  Mendel weighed his success in a far more vindictive manner; he took pleasure in ruining others, and although the success of this evening was very sweet on the palate, it paled in comparison to the sweetness that would soon follow once he was done with Jeffrey and his insufferable girlfriend.

  Heinrich refilled Jacob’s glass with a gorgeous single malt, and the two of them reclined on the largest and softest leather sofa Jacob had ever seen. Herman quickly came over to be with his owner. The only reason the cat was allowed on the furniture was because he had been declawed in both the front and back paws, Heinrich’s way of maintaining order with the unruly animal kingdom.

  Mendel casually thumbed through a trade magazine while sipping on a bottle of Pellegrino, his eyes furtive as he read up on the latest starlet and learned more about the current sexiest man alive. He looked up only occasionally to give the appearance that he was a part of the conversation, but in reality, he could not be further away in his mind; he just could not get his altercation with Jeffrey out of his head.

  At one time, he had been actually quite fond of Jeffrey and respected him as a writer. He had even secretly hoped that the two of them would one day collaborate on a project together, but after what Jeffrey had done to his play Sayonara Skokie, there could be no forgiveness. Jeffrey was going to pay, and Heinrich was the one who was going to make it possible for Mendel to realize his revenge. Phase one had been accomplished; they had written a smash hit with one of Jeffrey’s own scripts. The little ruse that Heinrich and Jacob had pulled off perfectly had left the unsuspecting author that much more vulnerable. He never even imagined that the first thing Jeffrey would do was leave town, making it that much easier to defraud him.

  Phase two was about to be pulled off with nothing more than a few phone calls, e-mails, and some well-placed cash gifts in the hands of those who craved money over their craft. Jeffrey would be shunned in the Broadway community, and he would never understand why. He would have his suspicions, of course, but he would never be able to pin any of it on Mendel, Heinrich, or Jacob.

  Jacob was the one who intrigued Mendel the most. The animosity that this man had for his former mentor was rare indeed. Usually when one harbored such distaste for another human being there were signs, telltale clues that alerted the potential victim that something was not kosher. But in this case, Jeffrey appeared to be thoroughly surprised by the betrayal and even hurt; how amusing.

  “I am so proud of you, Jacob,” Heinrich said in his deep, booming voice. “It was everything that I had hoped it would be, and now I can include Broadway as another obstacle conquered.” He lifted his glass to his author.

  “Maybe we should make a toast to Jeffrey.”

  “Pfft! He had nothing to do with it; if the original play was that good, he would have produced it.”

  “What is she wearing?” Mendel asked no one in particular, lost in his own world.

  Henry and Jacob gave him a puzzled look and continued, “The next phase of our little plan will begin in the morning when he loses his venue for A Dreidel Spins in Yonkers. He’ll never see that coming, huh?” Henry chuckled to himself again and stroked Herman.

  “It’s his own damn fault, you know,” Jacob started. “All the man ever had to do was show me just a little appreciation and respect, and I would never have even come to you when you first contacted me.” He shook his head with disgust. “When he made a toast to me that night, I could have spit in his face. All of those years and all I get is a toast?”

  “Another actress with breast cancer, what are they eating out there in California?” Mendel was talking to himself again.

  “You are getting your revenge, Jacob. Just be patient and enjoy the show.”

  “I have every intention of enjoying every moment of it. Maybe I’ll write a play about it someday.”

  “Ja, and I’ll produce it!” Heinrich roared into laughter. “And when we are done with ruining his career, I am going to take so much pleasure in ruining his life.”

  “Why does he wear those pants? He’s never been circumcised,” Mendel remarked with disgust.

  Jacob looked at his drink intently and asked, “I was wondering, do we really have to send him to the island? I mean, ruining his career is pretty bad.”

  “You have your idea of revenge, I have mine.”

  “This woman wouldn’t know the difference between Fiddler on the Roof and a fiddler crab.” Mendel’s private conversation with himself continued.

  “The man insulted my cat, and nobody insults Herman; isn’t that right, Herman?” Henry made kissing sounds at his adoring feline.

  “I just thought.”

  “Don’t think,” Mendel interrupted, now a part of the conversation, “It makes our schmekels itch.”

  * * *

  The dark clouds continued to move in over Jeffrey and everything he touched. After he realized that he had been robbed of one of his scripts, he looked through his entire library to see if anything else was missing and found that he had not lost anything else, but either Mendel or Jacob had vandalized certain scripts, leaving entire acts of the play illegible. Since Jeffrey did all of his work by hand, he was left without copies. It was infuriating to the point of numbness.

  To add further insult to his professional injury, he had just received word that the Shlomo Theater that was housing A Dreidel Spins in Yonkers had been bought by an anonymous buyer, who insisted on closing the theater immediately for massive renovations, so the play would have to take a hiatus until they could find a suitable replacement. As luck would have it, no theater was available.

  He knew that Heinrich Schultz had to be behind this, and undoubtedly Mendel Fujikawa had sunk his teeth into this perverse little game that they were playing. What he wasn’t sure of was how much, if any of this, was Jacob’s doing.

  Try as he may, he just could not bring himself to accept that his former assistant’s betrayal could possibly run any deeper than simple theft. It just was not like the man whom he had gotten to know so closely over the last decade. But how well did he actually know him?

  He thought about that for a minute and realized that he wasn’t even sure if Jacob’s parents were alive. He had no idea what his girlfriend’s name was, if he even had one, and knew next to nothing about the man’s personal interests. For all intents and purposes Jacob was a stranger, and that was Jeffrey’s fault and no one else’s.

  This was definitely a hit to his system and the way he did business, but he figured that everyone went through bad times in their lives, everyone got knocked down from time to time, and when that happened, it was not how hard you got hit, but how often you kept getting up.

  This was a phase, and Jeffrey knew that this too would eventually pass, but the real question was just how long this run of bad luck forced upon him by the vindictive Heinrich Schultz and Mendel Fujikawa would last. Jeffrey had no choice but to remain positive and work at getting his life back on the track that it had been on before he left for that fateful vacation.

  But the problem with that was he had no idea what he was going to do next; he was suffering from an extreme case of writer’s block and was certain that the collection of plays in his library were
not ready for Broadway yet. Each and every one of them demanded a certain level of tweaking that he just was incapable of giving them right now. He sat alone in his study at night and stared at page after page of the words that he himself had written and not a thing came to mind about what to add or take away. He was helpless in his own world.

  He gritted his teeth at the thought of what was being done to him and searched for that determination that had always gotten him through every other crisis in his life, every long night of staring at a blank page, and the horrible, chopped-liver shortage of 1997.

  Schultz, Fujikawa, and Jacob Stone may have thought they had beaten Jeffrey, that he was about to submit and beg for mercy, and that he was on the precipice of acknowledging defeat, but they were wrong. He would fight them with everything he had. He knew that he was a better man than the three of them combined and that his talent would win the day. The fans would come back and the accolades would once again ring out his name; he just wasn’t sure how long it was going to take for him to find those words, the momentum, and the fighter’s heart to retake what was his.

  Broadway had been his kingdom for a long time, he had been the darling of the Great White Way since his early twenties, and now here, in his mid-forties and beginning to feel the stress of the years on his creative half, he was afraid that he no longer possessed the heart or the desire to fight back the way he thought he was capable of. The truth was that he had never really had to fight hard for anything in his life, and now that a fight was in front of him, staring him in the eye, it scared the hell out of him.

  He looked at the contact list on his phone and thought that maybe he could find an old backer who could fight the wealth of Heinrich Schultz for Jeffrey and give the large kraut a taste of his own medicine, but quickly realized that the majority of his backers over the years were older people who mainly wanted to prove to their kids that you can’t take it with you. None of them had the killer spirit or the desire to fight somebody else’s battles. He knew that the first step in winning this war was to beat them at his own game, and that game was to write another play, even though A Dreidel Spins in Yonkers was still viable.

  What he needed to do was write something that was so ear searing and distasteful that the audiences would be clamoring to be the first to see it. He needed to dig deep and find that man whom he thought had once resided in the depths of his soul, the one who was evil and vindictive, the one who could hurt another with his words and his work without batting an eye, the one whose only song in his heart was Hail the Conquering King.

  He stared at his blank page, and that man was nowhere to be found.

  Chapter Nine: Ups and Downs

  Peaks and valleys, ups and downs, highs and lows—whatever your choice of words were, that is how best to describe the meteoric rise of Jacob Stone while trying to accurately depict the plight of Jeffrey David Rothstein.

  Where Jacob was the toast of the town, being invited to one party after another, the favorite target of the paparazzi, and the object of desire for a new legion of adoring fans, Jeffrey was as low as a man could possibly be in the short period of time that it took to send his career into a tailspin. He was unable to find a new venue for A Dreidel Spins in Yonkers, so his latest masterpiece quietly went away and out of the thoughts of even the most avid Broadway enthusiasts. He tried to find backers to help him keep the show running as a national production, touring from one city to another, but the same people who had backed him on every other venture now mysteriously wanted nothing to do with him or his future projects.

  Whatever it was that he sought and wherever he did it, he was met with the same negative responses and treated as if he were carrying a communicable disease with no cure. He was the proverbial pickled herring in the punch bowl, and it felt terrible. His only bright spot was that Rachel had not left him.

  He had briefly been certain of the possibility that she would do as every other girlfriend had, discard him in favor of being with the new flavor of the month named Jacob Stone.

  Just the thought of Jacob made him sick to his stomach, but not as bad as the people whom his former assistant had now associated himself with. Heinrich and Mendel had been very thorough in their dismantling of Jeffrey’s reputation and career options. There was even a story floating around in some circles that implied Jeffrey had a secret double life as a transvestite-reformed rabbi named Esther Jacobovits. The more Jeffrey protested, the more people believed the lie.

  While Jacob was busy appearing on talk show after talk show, Jeffrey struggled to get his accountant on the phone to find out where and how his money had been vanishing. He had never been one to spend a lot of his earnings, as he lived a very simple life considering his fame, but not having his money where it was supposed to be was driving him to the bottle, and that was not like him.

  Guest appearances and signings of the novelizations of his plays were cancelled; the press wanted nothing to do with him other than the sordid stories being manufactured about him regarding late night visits from Chinese delivery boys and long hours behind closed doors from visiting Jehovah’s Witnesses who left looking the worse for the wear.

  He began staying up later than he usually did and was becoming an addict to the late night infomercials that transfixed his attention and left him selling off shares of various stocks so that he could supplement his bank account in order to purchase items that he did not need or use. His ability to set the timer on his chicken and forget it did not help him fight his way out of his depression or get him back to the writing that had made him so happy for the better part of his life.

  He watched Jacob appear on late night talk shows and imagined dragging his half-naked body through a pool of elephant excrement and covering him with half-starved dung beetles. He always smiled when he had thoughts like that and wondered if that was wrong or if he was just being childish, and that is when it hit him; he was going about things all wrong.

  He was spending too much time trying to maintain the higher moral code and not dropping to the depths of cruelty and vindictiveness that he was now victim to; he was attempting to be the better man, the bigger man, but what he truly needed to do was feed on that little something inside of him that was craving the cruel and unusual. The person he had always believed he was, perhaps, was not the man he should be. What was needed was to feed the beast, nurture the demon, and find out what the hell was planned for him next so that he could prevent it.

  He continued to think about ways to accomplish this and determined that if it was evil and cruelty that his enemies wanted, then that was exactly what they were going to get. Jeffrey was nothing if not cunning, and he was more than capable of tapping his own inner necromancer to eliminate his foes and bring them to their knees.

  He spent the large part of his free time watching old Hitchcock films, reading Stephen King, and scouring the Internet for ideas of ways to get back at his foes and to elevate his career at the same time, when it occurred to him that he would once again get back to his writing. It made all the sense in the world. It was his best weapon and one that he had honed since childhood. He could wield it with the depth skill of a neurosurgeon, he could fire it with pinpoint accuracy, and when he hit his target, none could withstand the damage that ensued.

  Jeffrey’s biggest problem was finding a way to get back to his writing again; he still was suffering from an extreme case of writer’s block and nothing that he tried seemed to work. He tried a change of scenery; writing in the park, at the New York Public Library, even on the subway, but none of it helped. It was not until a late night of watching infomercials and scanning the Internet that he came across the possible solution to his problems—a cabin on a lake in upstate New York.

  He had come across it on one of those auction sites, and the place looked perfect. It was just outside of a small town named Zion, was nestled in the woods on the shore of a perfectly peaceful-looking lake, and the price appeared to be too good to be true, way below market value. This could be the answer to his dil
emma.

  He quickly checked his accounts, made a phone call to his broker to dump some stocks for extra cash purposes, and contacted the real estate agent showing the house. With any luck, he would move in within the next couple of weeks and be back at work doing what he did best—writing the kind of play that left the audience wanting more and feeling like they had just been in the presence of greatness. The subjects of his new masterpiece would be the treacherous Heinrich Schultz and Mendel Fujikawa. If they thought they had gotten the best out of Jeffrey, they were sorely mistaken and were about to learn this the hard way. You know what they say about revenge, Jeffrey was already savoring the flavor, and he had not even tasted it yet.

  In the morning, he contacted his real estate agent and quickly and quietly saw to the arrangements of getting out of the city so as not to arouse any attention from the trio who were trying to destroy his life. He was single minded in purpose now, and it felt good. He knew what needed to be done and how to see it through. He could practically feel the creative juices flowing again, and it was almost orgasmic.

  * * *

  Richard Kearney walked back into the house that had almost driven him mad and wandered through its hallways and rooms looking for any personal possessions that he might have left behind. The home had sold quickly, and he was grateful for that. What made the sale even better was that the buyer had not personally inspected the place himself. Rather, he sent an appraiser to inspect the property for him and to make a counteroffer that Richard was only too happy to settle for. If he wanted the house, Richard would have practically given it to him.