But that didn’t explain their homage to the Jewish lifestyle. There was no way that every member of this town was of Jewish descent, and it was almost impossible to think that the entire town had made a concerted effort to either convert to Judaism or put on a show for his benefit. Jeffrey may have been born Jewish, but he was not as radical or extreme in his beliefs as these people were.
He found himself slightly bothered by what he was seeing, but also very intrigued. Here was an entire town that obviously thought that it was Jewish; think of the possibilities. There might be a story here to tell, there might be a play. But he quickly shoved those thoughts to the back of his mind; he had revenge on his mind, first and foremost, and he had to see that to its end.
He made his exit from the coffee shop and was hit with a chorus of “shalom” by everyone in attendance as he left; the sound startled him a bit. He walked to his car and saw the sheriff standing by it. He was wearing all black with white sneakers and apparently had been working on growing in his payot, the curls that orthodox Jews wear on the sides of their heads.
“Shalom, Mr. Rothstein,” the sheriffgreeted him.
“How are you, Sheriff?” Jeffrey noticed the disappointment on the sheriff ’s face and followed with, “I mean, shalom.”
The sheriff offered his hand and looked at Jeffrey’s car before asking, “How’s the house?”
“Fine, a little quiet, but pretty good.”
“And your car here?”
“Okay, I guess. Why?”
The sheriffwaved offthe question and answered, “You know, the long drive and the service station said that they haven’t seen you yet.”
This troubled Jeffrey a bit, and he asked, “Have you been checking up on me for some reason?”
“Just doing my job to protect the citizens of Zion,” he smiled. “We Zionists are a close-knit bunch.”
The sheriff ’s use of words amused Jeffrey, and he could not help but chuckle a little and smile at the choice. The sheriff appeared to be puzzled by the reaction and even a little bothered by it.
“Did I say something funny?” SheriffPitts pried.
Jeffrey shook his head and said, “It’s just that you referred to yourselves as Zionists when you are actually Zionites.”
This thoroughly confused the sheriff, who just shook his head and extended a hand to Jeffrey and added, “Just let me know if you have any problems out there by yourself or any questions about the town.” He smiled and started to walk away when Jeffrey called out to him.
“I have one question. What’s with everyone acting like they’re Jewish?”
This seemed to infuriate the sheriff who replied, “Acting like we’re Jewish? Do you act like you’re Jewish?”
“No, no, it’s just that …”
“You, of all people, should appreciate the fact that we have been persecuted for over five thousand years!”
“I know, I know; we have had a rough go of things. I didn’t mean to offend anyone.” This was new for Jeffrey. He had never had to explain what he meant without running the risk of being called an anti-Semite before. “I have just never seen a community this dedicated to the Jewish culture before, and that includes Borough Park.”
The sheriff’s eyes went wide, and he quietly asked, “You’ve been to Borough Park? What’s it like? Is it great?”
Jeffrey thought about the questions for a moment and answered, “It’s okay I guess, if you don’t mind overly radical Jewish zealots.”
“Oh, not at all!” Pitts replied happily. “I would love to join them in their fight.”
“Their fight?”
“Against the hordes of rabid goyim surrounding them, trying to destroy the Jewish way of life.”
Jeffrey took one very slow step back as he was beginning to feel that the sheriff was slightly out of his mind, if not misinformed. “Actually, it’s not as bad as it used to be.”
“Well, if they have a place for me to sign up in the fight, you let me know.”
“Oh, I’ll do that, Sheriff.”
Sheriff Pitts smiled broadly in satisfaction and said with delight, “Wonderful! You let me know. Shalom.”
“Uh, yeah, shalom,” Jeffrey answered and quickly turned to his car. He thought that maybe he had been the butt of an elaborate hoax, but after talking to Sheriff Pitts, he was certain that the entire town was all offof their rockers.
He got in his car and headed back to his new home.
* * *
Abby Tisch watched from her bookstore as the new guy in town, a Mr. Jeffrey David Rothstein, spoke with Sheriff Pitts. What they were talking about she was not sure, but she was certain that the sheriff had to have brought her up at least once during the conversation. After all, she had been the only one in the town with the knowledge of what was happening in that house that Rothstein had just purchased. She was the only one who knew that the presence living there was spying on the citizens of Zion, and it was she who knew how to put a stop to it and rid her tiny community of the specter that threatened to destroy them all.
She watched him drive away and knew that she was going to have to pick her moments judiciously. The town was already against her thanks to that terrible Mayor Baker and Sheriff Pitts, but she had just had an encounter with Rabbi Jackson this morning and was sure that he would soon be talking about her as well.
None of this mattered, though, because she knew she was in the right and that her way was the only hope for this town and its salvation. She would either earn the support of the rest of the town, or she would fight this battle on her own; it was her destiny, it was her calling.
She turned back to her book about the legends of vaudeville and thought aloud, “Yes my dear, your time is coming.”
Chapter Seventeen: Sherriff Pitts
First impressions say a lot about a man, and in the case of Jeffrey David Rothstein, this was no different. Sheriff Malcolm Pitts knew that there was nothing going on at the house when he introduced himself to the man, but he wanted to look into his eyes, shake his hand, and get to see into the soul of the man who was now calling Zion his home.
This was not the first time that a celebrity had attempted to make Zion his home. Just a few years earlier, one of those rapper types had bought a cabin up here in the hopes of throwing all kinds of parties away from the hustle and bustle of the city, but it didn’t last long. Complaints started to mount about the commotion at all hours of the evening and an odd smell coming from the property. Sheriff Pitts got a warrant and discovered that this artist, as he liked to call himself, was running an illegal dog-fighting ring. It was promptly shut down, and all of the parties involved were given jail sentences and heavy fines, but not before the police discovered the grave with over one hundred dead dogs in it.
Those were bad times for Sheriff Pitts as a man of the law and the one responsible for securing and keeping the peace in this tiny town, and he took it very seriously. He loved the town of Zion more than any other place on earth and had always tried, along with the town fathers, to find a way to bring the community together, to do something that they could all get behind and do justice to.
So, when word had been leaked that a famous playwright had purchased the old cabin where that odd Richard Kearney had been staying, there was an immediate call to arms to try and embrace their guest and possibly convince him that this town was the place that he was meant to be in.
They did their research and learned everything that they could about him. They purchased his plays and reenacted them in the town community theater, and they read all of the reviews and interviews ever done on the man. They even held a special class after school for anyone in the town who was interested in his likes and dislikes.
The people of Zion were not what you would call worldly in any sense of the word, they were not hip to the trends and the fast ways of the big city folks, and there was nothing about their little town that was anything special other than that it was theirs. Having Jeffrey David Rothstein live there, and maybe even stay, wa
s a shot in the arm for their low morale and self-esteem. It was just the little boost that everyone in the town needed to make them feel like they could hold their heads with the largest of cities and the fanciest of cosmopolitan locales throughout the world.
The Zionites were not the smartest people in the world either, and SheriffPitts knew that, he loved that, and he wanted to protect them all the more for it. It wasn’t even so much that they were not intelligent people as much as they were very innocent. Some said that it was because of the laid-back lifestyle that was so common in upstate New York. Others felt that it was because almost none of their residents ever bothered to travel more than fifty miles away from the town for any reason; there was no need to. They received everything that they could need from deliveries and mail, and they had television and Internet access, so that covered all of their social needs, and when it came to entertaining themselves, they made do with what they had.
There was a large farming community in the surrounding counties who came to town to sell their goods, and the town always made a festival of every growing season’s harvest. They threw elaborate parties for all of the major holidays and made each one of them a celebration for the entire town to enjoy. But it was when they started studying up on Jeffrey David Rothstein and the fact that he was Jewish that their imaginations really took offand when the possibilities became limitless.
For one thing, nobody had ever realized that there were so many festivals to be celebrated that they had never even heard of. What made it even better was that they were all based on scripture, and the town could get behind doing the research together in church.
But that brought up a whole new dilemma for them, which was quickly debated about in a town meeting. The majority of the town were Protestant and firm believers that Christ was the son of God and he was their Lord and Savior, but according to all of this Jewish talk, they no longer had any use for Jesus and that what he was actually doing on earth was causing a big fuss and spreading a lot of trouble around. They now had to decide to not follow his ways and to just stick to what Moses had told them. This was a lot easier than always worrying about offending God because you did not do as his son had preached. With the opportunity of becoming Jewish, they all had a chance to start over and never had to worry about offending God again because they didn’t respect and obey his son. In fact, they realized that as good Jews they would score bonus points for being even more blasphemous and disrespectful; after all, since the Jews were God’s chosen people, they would be smiled upon for turning their backs on that charlatan and turning to the ways of people like Lilith and the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
Sheriff Pitts had been one of the first to suggest that the entire town turn their backs on the religious beliefs of the past and to convert to and embrace Judaism. It was so exciting to think about, and the town was really getting behind the idea. They had originally asked Pitts to become the town’s first rabbi, but he respectfully declined, citing that his responsibilities as sheriffwould interfere way too much; besides, he wanted to sing, and when he heard about the position of cantor, he was hooked.
He practiced every day at the music shop and even went so far as to get singing lessons from the nice Foreman girl. He felt reborn and could not express the feelings of joy and naches that he was feeling at every little thing that happened in his day-today life. Even pulling over traffic offenders was new and exciting to him. He enjoyed saying shalom to the offenders so much more than starting each conversation with, “Do you know how fast you were going?”
He was refreshed to realize that, thanks to the Jewish calendar, the earth wasn’t as old as those fekockteh scientists had said it was, so the odds of it exploding from old age during his lifetime had decreased dramatically. He loved the fact that instead of just one miserable day of nothing on television and long lines at the movie theater, Jews did not limit themselves to celebrating somebody else’s birthday, and instead had an actual festival based on historical and biblical facts that could now be celebrated, and this holiday lasted an incredible eight days. He loved the fact that when all of the goyim were wasting their time with holidays like Labor Day and Halloween, the Jews had Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur; this was really living, and he loved every minute of it.
But his favorite time of the year was around Easter when they played the DeMille classic The Ten Commandments on television, and Christians all over the country sat their children down to learn about how the brave Moses had lead the honorable Israelites out of Egyptian bondage. Little did those Jew-murdering mamzers realize that Moses was Jewish, and he belonged to them.
The only mistake he had made was when he suggested that every man in the town be circumcised again. This was at first seen as a bit of an overreach, but Pitts was quick to point out that all of the men in Zion had been circumcised by goyim doctors, so he thought they had better get a second opinion from a Jewish doctor. Very few of the men in Zion would ever forget the great bris of 2014; he was still a little sore.
So, as he watched Zion’s newest and soon-to-be-favorite son drive away, he could feel the eyes of Abby Tisch watching from her bookstore up the block. She could possibly be a problem if she were allowed to get close enough to Mr. Rothstein, so Sheriff Pitts made a mental note to assign one his deputies to keep an eye on her twenty-four hours a day. There was no way in the world that he was about to let this woman spread her lies and plant her seeds of dissent into the mind and heart of the man whom they so desperately wanted to love them.
Jeffrey David Rothstein was destined to live in this town; he had already united this town in ways that the founding fathers were never able to, and not Abby Tisch, Richard Kearney, if he ever came back, or some troublemaking ghost were going to jeopardize that.
Malcolm Pitts would never allow that. He would never tolerate the mere suggestion of it, and there was no way that anyone was going to destroy what he had worked so hard to build.
He hummed “If I Were a Rich Man” as he walked down the street to the police station, and knew that Abby Tisch was now watching him.
Chapter Eighteen: Music in the Night
His run-in with Sheriff Pitts had been a little unsettling to say the least, and it had left Jeffrey with more questions than he had answers to. He was now aware of the fact that he was being watched by the local authorities for some reason and that he was the source of much gossip. He was also now certain that someone in his inner circle had leaked the information about his buying the house in Zion to begin with.
It could not have been the previous owner, since Jeffrey had used an agent and kept himself anonymous during the process. It could not have been Rachel, because she would never jeopardize what they had by doing anything that would leave her out of control of any situation. So who?
Could it have been Schultz and Fujikawa? He thought that unlikely, since he had had nothing to do or say with either one of them since he had stormed out of the former’s office and exchanged words with the latter at the premier. It could not have been Jacob, because he had dismissed his relationship with his former assistant the same way. It was driving him crazy to think that someone knew more about his comings and goings than he would have liked, but it also motivated him to close up those protective walls that he had been forced to build so many times in the past.
He would basically cut himself off from his new town and their eccentric sheriff until he could determine who was behind the betrayal that had made the citizens of Zion aware of his arrival.
It wasn’t as if that would be a difficult task, anyway. The house was far enough out of town to be left alone unless someone had business there, and it sat far enough off of the road for him to hear anything other than the sounds of nature. He was isolated, and he figured that, for the time being, this was all for the best.
His whole purpose in being here was not to ingratiate himself to his new neighbors; it was to write a new play. He needed to focus on the task at hand, and that was to get his own version of sweet revenge that he so desperately wan
ted ever since Schultz and Fujikawa had systematically attacked his way of life and made him a pariah in the Broadway community.
Distractions were not an option, and he would bury himself in his work the same way that he had done with every other project that he had ever worked on. That was what the secret to his success had been and the method that he had implemented to secure his place as one of the most prolific and successful playwrights the industry had ever known.
His only problem was that he could not focus on anything other than Schultz, Fujikawa, and Jacob Stone, and that bothered him more than anything. Try as he may, he could not get them out of his mind, and they disrupted every creative thought that he mustered. It was as if they were in his head, and whenever he lifted his pen to write down an idea, they were there with a giant eraser to wipe the slate clean and prevent him from getting anything done.
His only solace was that he was falling more in love with his new home than he had anticipated and was confident that the serene surroundings would eventually win the day and help him get back to work and retake what was once his.
The place would have been perfect for him if he had been there twelve years ago when he had suffered his last case of writer’s block, but he had managed to work through that in the rush of New York life, so he was sure that the calming effects of this wonder of peace and quiet would do the trick.
He just couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that he was being watched, and it was becoming an irritant. He had thought that perhaps it was the odd Sheriff Pitts who was behind it, but he was quite certain after a few days that it was neither the sheriff nor any of his deputies.
The sheriffhad said something about watching for anyone in the town coming around, but Jeffrey dismissed that notion also because he had floodlights installed with sensors to alert him to any and all intruders. So far, the only visitors he had had were some rabbits and a skunk in the middle of the night.
The Queen and I Page 10