Saul laughed and added, “What is it about bubbe logic that seems so truthful when we are children and so ludicrous once we achieve maturity?”
“They’re bubbe, who are we to think that anything they say is not one hundred percent honest?”
Saul nodded and invited Jeffrey to follow him into the kitchen. After seating, he watched as the ghost happily prepared breakfast for him, all the while regaling him with stories of the way the theater used to be before it became a business for corporate America.
In Saul’s day, the theater was a bastion for creativity and entertainment; it was where the true special people of the world used their talents to entertain the masses for little more than the delight of doing it, and it was where many a career was born for someone from modest and humble beginnings.
“Is that what happened for you?” Jeffrey asked, hoping that he did not ask the wrong question.
Saul smiled and replied, “I was bigger than anything anyone had seen for a time. I was the Esther Williams of the stage, and the crowds loved me.”
“Where did you perform?”
“Mainly on vaudeville,” Saul answered, and Jeffrey was pleasantly surprised that the ghost was being so forthright with his answers. “The Shlomo Theater was a second home for me.”
Jeffrey’s eyes brightened at the mention of the theater where he had run so many of his plays and where Heinrich Schultz had just cancelled his current one. “I know that theater. I’ve had a lot of success there.”
“Ever look in the last stall of the ladies room?”
“Uh no, I haven’t had the chance.”
Saul laughed and continued, “Probably wouldn’t do you any good anyway; by now they’ve probably painted it a few times.”
He served Jeffrey a breakfast of over-easy eggs and some toasted challah bread and sat across from him, watching Jeffrey eat. It appeared that something was on his mind, but Jeffrey decided not to press the issue.
“I was thinking,” Saul said. “This revenge that you want, why don’t you just focus on writing a play that would be so successful it would outshine anything they did?”
Jeffrey shrugged his shoulders and answered, “It’s a bit complicated, Saul. These men went after me personally and tried to ruin everything I’ve worked so hard for. I want to watch them squirm a little for my own gratification.”
“Suit yourself, but this kind of mishegas can blow up in your face if you’re not careful.”
The two of them sat in silence for a time, and Jeffrey wanted to tell Saul that he was going into town, but had a nagging feeling that the ghost would want to come with him. That would pose a major problem when it came to his privacy and the research that Jeffrey needed to do.
He now knew what Saul’s last name was, he knew that he had performed on vaudeville, and he could see every time that he looked at him that his guest was fond of wearing women’s clothing. His search to learn a bit more of the personal information he was afraid to ask should not be too difficult to learn, and he decided he would just state it as a matter of fact that he was going into town. He did not have to tell Saul why, he merely had to say that he would be gone for the better part of the afternoon. Maybe the large ghost would surprise him and say that he had plans of his own.
He finished breakfast and went upstairs to shower and get dressed, making Saul promise that he was not going to follow or spy on him while doing either. He came down and informed the big ghost of his plans to go into Zion, and to his happy surprise, Saul was only too eager for him to get out of the house as he said he was working on a special dinner that he wanted to be a surprise.
Jeffrey left Saul in the house and walked to his car, noticing that there were some scattered pieces of paper strewn around the property with a foreign language written on them; it looked like Yiddish.
Entering Zion again made Jeffrey feel like he was more in Disneyland than he was in upstate New York. The way the town was decorated in all things Jewish had a certain showman’s quality to it that left you expecting to see food carts set up selling latkes and sweet-and-sour meatballs, while finding other booths offering three throws to dunk the rabbi.
Everything about his new home told him that these people led a very sheltered life and that they desperately wanted to feel like they were as important as the outside world. If that meant ingratiating themselves to a pseudo celebrity like Jeffrey David Rothstein, then they were going to see to it that they were successful in their plans and that he would soon come to love the town as much as they did.
He had no problem finding the library and parked about a block away, so that if anyone recognized his car they might be thrown off. He wanted privacy for his research, and the last thing he needed was for word to spread that he was in a centralized setting like the library; he would immediately be swamped with gawkers and such.
He wore sunglasses and a New York Mets baseball cap for disguise and went to the front desk to ask about the computer service they had set up. The librarian did not seem to recognize him and happily escorted him to one of only two computers the library had at its disposal. She informed him that there was an hour time limit for fairness purposes and that he would have to re-up every time his allotted time ran out.
Jeffrey typed in his search on Google and was given a list of people matching the name Saul Milick. They ranged in professions from deli owner to butcher, rabbi to lawyer, and even one who was the CEO of a yarmulke manufacturer. He scrolled down the search result list and finally came across the match he was looking for, Saul Milick, the actor.
It gave a brief biography of the man, offered a few black-and-white pictures, gave the years he had been alive, and also when he’d worked in the theater.
Saul had been born in East New York in 1895 and got his first job in the theater at the age of twenty. He served briefly in World War I and returned home after being shot in the buttocks. He got a job at the Shlomo Theater and quickly rose in the ranks of the vaudeville scene due to his hilarious renditions of the Kaiser and his eventual appearances in drag to the delight of the patrons from all over the city.
He was twice nominated for vaudeville awards that Jeffrey had never even heard of, and was named Performer of the Year five consecutive years. He was loved by all of his coworkers and fellow actors, and was one of the few who embraced the popularity of movies being produced with sound. He led a movement of his fellow vaudevillians to encourage the theater owners to begin recording the performances for distribution across the country.
He was the one who had decided that it would go a long way for morale if they visited the troops. This happened before the USO came into existence, and he was the first to encourage fellow performers to give freely of their time for charitable events and the needy.
When films began to take over the industry and Broadway entered its renaissance, there became less and less of a need for vaudeville, and many of its performers were cast aside for more photogenic and box office savvy stars to make their names.
Jeffrey read that Saul had been certain he would reap the rewards of the success of the movie picture with sound since he had been such a proponent for the medium, but once the film industry began to take off, Saul was left out in the cold and quickly forgotten. The belief among the inner circle in the show business industry was that he was not marketable enough, and the rumors of his homosexuality conspired to work against him.
While there were many gay men and women in Hollywood at the time, they were discreet enough to leave their personal lives subject for rumor and speculation, where Saul was very outspoken about his lifestyle and did not care who knew. It was his own arrogance that sparked the fires of his downfall, and he was forced to watch as other, less popular stars went on to bigger and better things and he was left to wallow in mediocrity in theaters that were only frequented by the fringes of society and those looking for cheap tricks and favors from the performers.
He had had enough by 1948 and was found dead by a dear friend, a Ms. Ruby Goldschmidt, also a drag
queen in his Gravesend, Brooklyn home. His cause of death was by suicide. He had slit his wrists and drawn a warm bath. The man who had pleased and delighted so many for so many years, who had helped so many in the industry, died alone and broke without so much as an obituary in the local newspapers.
Jeffrey sat back and absorbed all of the information he had just taken in about his new friend, and he was overcome with profound sadness that this very talented man, who had inspired so many, was left out in the cold and shunned by those who he had thought of as his friends. It was not that dissimilar to what Jeffrey was going through. He too was being disavowed by those whom he had made money for and those whose careers were a direct result of his benevolence.
There was much in common between Jeffrey David Rothstein and Saul Milick. The two of them had given everything to the theater and to entertaining people, and when they experienced hard times, they were cast aside by those same people who had taken advantage of their talents for so long.
Jeffrey was beginning to get a new understanding as to why Saul was so eager to become friends with him and why he was so passionate about helping Jeffrey. It was who Saul was; he had been a very giving person in life and that had only carried over to his afterlife as well. And what made Saul happiest was helping a struggling actor or anyone who was involved with the theater.
His purpose in life had been performing, and now in death he had been given a second chance to rewrite history and get the satisfaction of reclaiming his rightful place among the greats throughout the history of the theater. This was his time, and Jeffrey was the way he would find this success.
Jeffrey knew that he was assuming a great deal about what motivated Saul, but considering everything that he just read, he was certain he was on the right path. It was time for Jeffrey to get back to work, and it was obvious now that fate had thrown him the bone that he needed to reclaim what was his.
Heinrich Schultz and Mendel Fujikawa had made a mistake that they were not yet aware of. They had crossed the man who now had a ghost in his back pocket—but not just any ghost, the ghost of Saul Milick, and even more importantly and frightening to those who would dared stand against him, the ghost of Esther Feltcher.
Chapter Twenty-Six: The Hunt
Everything was exactly how Jeffrey had left it, not a single piece of paper, not a dirty sock, and not even the front door had been touched until Louis Grecko arrived at his home.
The large man casually walked through the apartment as if he had been there a thousand times before, opening the refrigerator, going through drawers, and even using the bathroom to relieve himself. Nothing was sacred when he had a job to do, and no obstacle or clue was too minute to take note of when he was hunting his next victim.
Schultz had made it quite clear that Louis was not in any way to kill Jeffrey or do him serious harm, but that did not change the determination of this evil and sadistic man from using all of his acquired skills throughout the years to hunt, capture, and deliver him to his employer.
Very little else in his life other than music, the theater, and his mother brought as great a source of pleasure to Louis than the hunt. It fed him, drove him, and he liked to think that it was what kept his boyish spirit intact, although his boyhood had been a rough one full of pain and abuse.
He walked passed one of Jeffrey’s mirrors and looked at his face. It was a source of great shame for him when he dwelt on it, but that shame also fed his hunger to cause pain to others and make them see that he was actually beautiful, one of God’s great creations; only the small minded and shallow saw him in any other light. That is what his mother had always told him, and that is what he came to believe in more than anything else in his life. What his mother told him had always come true, and she had never lied to him. She could make all of the misery in his life fade into nothingness with just a smile, and could chase away the demons with a well-placed song.
It was the music that visited him at night when he was alone in the darkness and there was nobody else in his world. When he roamed the streets looking for his next prey, or when he sat in his bedroom and looked across the alley at the widow in her apartment undressing when she thought that she was alone, it was the music that guided him.
Many listened to music, especially the kind you heard during a Broadway show, and heard only the score and the lyrics. Louis heard the true meanings of the songs, the hidden messages that the composer wanted only Louis to hear and bring to life. Every song had a message, and every message had a victim at the end of it. With all of the music that had been written and performed over the years, and all of the hidden words that were yet to be deciphered, Louis was quite sure he would live long enough to hear every one of those messages.
He had listened to the original score from Wicked after he had had his meeting with Heinrich and the little sissy, and heard the words the music was trying to tell anyone who could hear. It wanted Louis to find this Jeffrey David Rothstein for Heinrich, but it did not want Louis to deliver him; it wanted Louis to cause him a new kind of pain and to cause further destruction to anyone who stood in his way.
Much in the same way that the Good Witch of the North and the Wicked Witch of the West had once been friends, their lives intertwined with one another. Louis and his mother had their lives melded with that of Heinrich Schultz, and only through a separation of that bond could Louis ever truly achieve the greatness that the music told him he was destined for.
His mother had made her mark when she was young and worked for the Mossad, running all sorts of intelligence and espionage missions for the Israeli government. His father had been a small-time prizefighter who moved on to become a world-renowned mime, but Louis was the one who destiny was calling. It was Louis who was going to do something truly special with his life and leave a trail of death and destruction in his wake that had never been seen or heard of before.
Up until now, if his life had been a Broadway show, it would have closed before the curtain had a chance to drop during the first performance. But now with the rewrite taking place from the music, his life was about to take on the change he had always known it was meant to.
He opened a bottle of Jeffrey’s wine and chugged it down in three gulps. He had never liked wine, the acidic aftertaste, which he had once heard was something called tannin, the way it made him feel afterwards, or the way others perceived wine drinkers but this was his way of violating his prey. He was not one of the beautiful people and knew he never would be. He was not like Jeffrey David Rothstein or Heinrich Schultz or the little sissy man; he was nothing like them or Jeffrey’s girlfriend who stood smiling in the picture in front of him.
She was gorgeous, something only God could have created, standing there in her bikini with those dazzling sea-green eyes and sandy blonde hair. Her form was tight and athletic, and her skin was bronzed and smooth. Louis found himself salivating at her mere photo, and knew that he would have to pay her a visit. She would be his aria and the muse of his greatest work to date. What he had done to the young couple a few days ago was nothing compared to what he would do to her. With her, he was going to take his time.
The music truly loved Louis, because it had given him not only the clarity to know that he must take Jeffrey for himself, but it provided him with his girlfriend as a gift to keep forever. He would never kill her; he would remake her in his divine image that only the words told him. He would show her the Way, and the Way would make the two of them whole.
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Anti-Playwright
The air was getting cooler in Zion as the seasons announced their change from summer to autumn, and Jeffrey was beginning to understand why so many fellow writers took to living in the country as their residence of choice as opposed to the city. There was a quiet calm to almost everything that the residents of the larger metropolises could only dream about. There was no hustle and bustle and certainly no rush hour.
He looked up at the perfect blue sky and thought about what it was that he would say to Saul when he got home no
w that he was in possession of this knowledge of the ghost’s life and eventual demise.
Saul had seemed to be such a cheery and pleasant entity in the short time that Jeffrey had known him, and the thought that he could have become so alone and so much in despair to the point that he took his own life was difficult for him to accept. But the words did not lie, the proof was that Saul was in fact a ghost, and there was no denying that.
He thought about the script that he had been neglecting, and came to the realization that he was still without a viable idea on what he was going to write or how he was going to convince his former backers who had abandoned him to once again dig into their pockets and support another project by the onetime prince of Broadway.
As he approached his car, he noticed two men were hovering around it, looking into the windows and speaking in hush tones. They were nothing much to look at and could have quite easily blended into any other small town in America with their baseball caps, stained work shirts, faded jeans, and of course, the five o’clock shadow.
One of them looked up as Jeffrey approached and motioned for his companion to take notice. The two of them were of medium build, and with the exception of their age differences, they could have quite easily passed as brothers. Jeffrey smiled courteously at them as he fumbled for his car keys, all the while wondering what new form of dreck was waiting for him now.
“Shalom, gentlemen,” Jeffrey said, noting how this seemed to be the acceptable mode of greeting in Zion.
The younger of the two spit and replied, “Save that Jew talk for a Jew.”
“There’s a Jew around, Sean?” the other asked. At least Jeffrey now knew one of their names, so that gave him a bit of an upper hand.
“Yeah, you dummy! Right in front of us.” He pointed to Jeffrey and readjusted his cap. “Big time city Jew no less.”
The Queen and I Page 16