The Queen and I (3 page)

“Can we still use plan
B
?” Henry asked.

Jacob shifted in his seat and thought about it for a moment. A lot would depend on whether or not Jeffrey had disavowed him for all of this. If he was still in his mentor’s good graces, the plan could work; if he was not, he would never get close enough to pull it off. It was all up to Jeffrey and whether or not he could find it in his heart to forgive Jacob for bringing him to this very unpleasant meeting.

“I think I can do it, Henry. I’m sure of it.”

* * *

“
Kristallnacht and Noel?
” Rachel asked with horror. “Are you serious? This was the great offer?”

“Apparently,” Jeffrey answered as he poured himself a Scotch and took a seat on her sofa. He had gone straight to her apartment after the meeting and told her everything. She was more than just his girlfriend; in many ways, she was his most trusted business advisor, and he knew she had to be told of this immediately.

“Well, Jacob is fired,” Rachel said more as a statement of fact than a request.

Jeffrey was surprised by this reaction; on his way over, he had not even considered firing Jacob. He was angry at him, but forgave much of it to his hunger to make a name for himself in the business.
Fire Jacob?
The thought was troubling and intriguing at once.

“Do you really think that’s necessary? He made a mistake, maybe I should talk to him first.”

“Screw him,” Rachel snapped. “He showed total disloyalty to you about this and intentionally set you up. Did he give you any inkling that this play was what it was? Did he tell you that this Schultz person is some kind of Nazi descendant or who he
really
is? No!” She walked over to sit next to Jeffrey, took a sip of his Scotch, and said calmly, “I like Jacob as much as you do, but he has to go for this. What happens when it’s time to hire a new assistant someday if you don’t?”

Jeffrey thought about it a moment and quietly made his decision.

* * *

Jeffrey did not take Rachel’s advice, and he welcomed Jacob back with open, if not irritated, arms and invited him to his apartment to discuss when they were going to get back to work. He still was struggling with his writer’s block and honestly had no thoughts percolating in his mind. His decision was simple; he would take some time off, get away for a while, and refresh the soul. Jacob would be given the task of answering messages and reading correspondences.

Jacob was thrilled to know that he did not lose his job, and was all too eager to encourage his boss to go on vacation, take Rachel to the islands, and get away from it all. He would hold down the fort and tackle any problems that should arise.

Jeffrey told Jacob to stay clear of Rachel and to just keep focused on his work until Jeffrey returned in two weeks.

That was more than enough time for Jacob to go through all of Jeffrey’s binders.

Chapter Three: Heinrich

Heinrich Schultz walked across his office to the windows looking out into the city. He savored these moments of calm and clarity that allowed him to think of what his next move would be; he always had a next move to consider.

Herman was beside him almost instantly, rubbing against his leg and purring loudly; his cat had the affection for the big man that only an animal lover can appreciate. That was one of Heinrich’s few noble qualities; he loved animals. While other men of wealth and power throughout the centuries saw it as their divine right to torture and kill God’s creations, Heinrich saw it as his holy responsibility to care for those same animals and to bring to ruin anyone who violated that sacred task.

He had made his fortune through inheritance, but augmented it further through cunning and foresight. His first successful venture was developing a way for people to experience the paranoia of being a minority without having to undergo invasive and corrective surgical procedures. You wouldn’t think that there was a demand for affluent white people to wonder what it was like to be a lower class African American, but white guilt is a powerful thing, and people were willing to pay big money for his little green pill.

His big success came a bit later in life, and it proved to secure that Heinrich would be rich beyond his dreams for the rest of his life. Taking a page from the so-called great men in history, he discovered that men of power love the hunt and are always looking for fresh game that is not only taboo, but rare in comparison. The idea hit him one day when he was leaving a restaurant and was accosted by a homeless man asking for spare change. The relentless man did not know how to take no for an answer and proceeded to not only get on Heinrich’s nerves, but gave him that lightning bolt of vision. Thus, Schultz Exotic Adventures was born.

What he offered was the thrill of the hunt for the most taboo of all animals to kill, the human being. He purchased a small island in the South Pacific and built a five-star quality resort for the social elite and morally corrupt. What was offered was the thrill that most men of such deviant qualities valued above other aspects of their lives, the opportunity to see another human being suffer and run from the powerful.

He spared no expense in building his dream island, whether it was the ten-thousand-dollar-a-night rooms with personal valets to cater to their every need, or the world’s largest waterslide that emptied into a giant vat of whipped cream, complete with swimsuit models drizzling chocolate sauce on their male patrons and throwing little maraschino cherries at them. It was hedonism at its very finest.

The hunt was very simple; every month, a new plane arrived with a dozen homeless men, who had been given the promise that they would be rehabilitated and given jobs with a huge international conglomerate and their training would result in riches that they could only dream of in their past lives.

For the first two weeks, these men were fed, cared for, given physicals, and put on weight-training programs, along with detox treatments from alcohol and other narcotics, until they were deemed fit by a team of medical experts. They were now fit for the hunt.

Once a month for an entire week, these men were released into the island and barred from returning to the resort. During that time, they had only the option of learning to survive or allowing the island to destroy them before the hunters arrived. Once the elite men and women who sought this unique hunt arrived on the island, the former homeless were informed of what was about to happen, and that they had two days to hide. Anyone who survived the entire week was given one million dollars and his freedom, along with a high-ranking job with Schultz Industries.

Heinrich Schultz never had to pay up, however, as no one had ever survived the hunt. To date, there had been over four dozen hunts and at least three hundred homeless men had been killed. Heinrich was fuzzy on the numbers because he never really kept count, nor did he care what they were. The people who were being killed in his tropical paradise were of no consequence to him, and however they spent their last days on earth was entirely their problem.

He smiled as he looked down at Herman and thought how wonderful his life had been. In spite of the shame that his family had suffered as a result of his uncle and his cross-dressing Führer, the Schultz family, formerly the Görings, had made a very nice life for themselves in America and laughed about it when they got together for family reunions, weddings, and the like. Heinrich was proud of what they had accomplished in their ruse to blend in among the Americans, and he relished the fact that their deception had been so thoroughly believed and accepted.

He turned and looked at his Man of the Year award that had been given to him by the Jewish Defense League and allowed a brief chuckle to escape his broad mouth. Everyone had been so successfully fooled by his outward persona that they had absolutely no idea of the horror of a man he was capable of being, the violence he could unleash, and the unenviable night of having to listen to him croon his favorite hits from the fifties when the mood struck.

Now he was faced with a new problem because, for the first time, his charm had not won the day, and he did not know how to respond to this uncomfortable feeling. Never before had a person whom he had reached out to been invited to his personal office, welcomed with the prospect of unspeakable wealth, and even allowed to play with his cat, only to insult him and leave the building without Heinrich getting exactly what he wanted.

Jeffrey David Rothstein had insulted the man, had insulted his idea, and even worse, insulted his cat. It was not something that Heinrich was used to experiencing, and it was certainly not a feeling that he enjoyed.

As he watched the traffic moving along quietly below him, he suddenly thought that defeating Jeffrey at his own game was not going to be enough. It was one thing to see to it that Jacob Stone stole an unfinished manuscript and then rewrote it into the dream that was
Kristallnacht and Noel
; he would have to go beyond ruining the man’s future prospects and destroy his reputation among the Broadway elite, and he would have to crush what was left of his life. There was no going halfway on this; it was all or nothing at all.

Once he had successfully seen his vision brought to life in an award-winning play, he would focus his attention on Jeffrey and see to it that he became the first celebrity contestant in his great hunt on the island. That should fetch even more than the usual ten thousand a night. For the thrill of killing a man who was at the top of his field, he could quadruple the fee.

Jeffrey had no idea what was in store for him. His arrogance would be his downfall, and there was no getting around it. All he had to do was see to it that Stone was the man for the job and up to the task for which he had been hired, but there always needed to be a backup plan, and Heinrich had just the man in mind. He had not worked with him in years, not since boarding school, but he was certain he would bring that little extra something that perhaps Jacob would need if he became stuck while rewriting the manuscript and required some creative motivation.

He bent down and lifted Herman into his arms and nuzzled him gently with his nose and walked back over to his desk. He pushed the intercom button that rested quietly there and told his secretary to get him Mendel Fujikawa.

Chapter Four: To Catch a Hit

Jeffrey and Rachel were safely away in the Caribbean, and Jacob was left to do what he had always done for as long as he had worked for Jeffrey; he answered the phone, returned e-mails, and saw to it that the national and local trade magazines received the obligatory responses to their questions about what inspired the writing genius to come up with such diverse characters and storylines.

With the apartment to himself and all of the work caught up, Jacob had plenty of time to go through his employer’s prized collection of spiral notebooks that contained copies, original transcripts, and working ideas for plays that his boss had been working on. It was a veritable treasure trove of genius at work. Some of these writings had been only known about to Jeffrey, not even Rachel knew about them, and here was Jacob, thumbing through all of them and searching for the one that could best be rewritten into the dream script for Heinrich Schultz.

Finding a completed work was not the problem, most of what was contained inside of these volumes was completed work, the only problem was that Jacob had never written an entire manuscript before, so he needed to find something that was finished and only needed some tweaking in order to become
Kristallnacht and Noel.

Going through the library of Jeffrey David Rothstein was a humbling experience, and Jacob could not believe just how proficient his employer and friend had been without him even knowing about it; he must have done most of his writing when there wasn’t anyone around. This was the work of a man who did not sleep much, and Jacob thought that this explained some of his boss’s idiosyncrasies.

What he was most impressed about was the collective works that were not even published, these masterpieces of creative ingenuity and imagination. He had never been so impressed in his life.

He came across
The Rabbi Rings Twice,
a tale of a female reformed rabbinical student who falls in love with her rabbi. While reading further, he thumbed through
One Shiksa Summer
, about a magical summer in 1950s New York’s Catskills for a group of teenage boys who each share romantic affairs with the new yoga instructor at the resort where they are vacationing. And of course, there was
Ghetto Mishegas.

This soon-to-be masterpiece that was never even whispered to Jacob was about a Jewish shop owner in the Warsaw Ghetto who survived the Nazi occupation by creating and selling Jewish piñatas to sell to the Nazi officers for their children. This was the one that Jacob was going to steal and rewrite into Heinrich’s dream play. The hard part had been done, the script was written; the only things that needed doing now were character changes and some basic storyline alterations. Jacob was supremely confident that he could pull this off.

He was about to call Heinrich when the front doorbell rang, and Jacob’s heart skipped a beat.

Wearing a rain-slicked, black trench coat and a wide-brimmed fedora with a pink feather tucked in the side, he stood at a mere five and a half feet tall, but walked with the air of a man twice his height. He was obviously of Asian descent, but there was something else in his face that Jacob could not yet determine. Who this man was or what he was doing there were both questions Jacob needed answers to, and to the best of his recollection, he had never seen or heard any mention of him during all of those long hours of working with Jeffrey.

The little man barged in past Jacob without even being invited and quickly removed his coat, folding it neatly, and placing it on a chair next to a confused Jacob. He was wearing bright canary-yellow pants with a pink silk shirt and a floral-patterned Kashmir jacket with a canary-yellow handkerchief tucked into the pocket.

“Can I help?”

“Silence!” the mysterious man interrupted Jacob. He turned and slowly walked around Jeffrey’s apartment, rubbing his finger across the table to check for dust and examining pictures hanging on the walls. He stopped in front of the library and the collection of manuscripts and without turning asked, in an accent that could best be described as Yiddish with a hint of Japanese and a little nasally, “So, you found the one?”

Jacob looked back at him with a puzzled expression and asked, “Who are …”

“Silence!” the little man yelled again. “Only I ask the questions.”

He walked to the kitchen and examined the wine cooler for something suitable to his palate and settled on a Chardonnay. He opened the bottle, poured himself a glass, and admired the color in the light of the kitchen before taking a sip and saying in that accent, “I like them woody.”

He walked back into the living area and sat down on the sofa, put his feet up on the coffee table, and removed a pair of ivory-rimmed glasses from his pocket. He gave Jacob an admiring once over and looked as if he was going to ask him to turn around and show him what he looked like from behind, but only said, “I am a friend of Henry. We were schoolboys together, he he.” He winked and chuckled like an adolescent girl. “Is that the play?” He pointed to the notebook in Jacob’s hand. He had not even realized that he was still carrying it. “Let me see.” The stranger ordered seductively.

Jacob gripped the volume tighter than he had been and angrily shot back, “Absolutely not until you tell me who you are, you crazy bastard.”

The little man smiled and said, “I am a friend of Henry’s …”

“I don’t want to hear that bullshit answer again. I swear to God that I’m going to call Henry, and then I’m going to throw you out the window!”

A wicked smile crossed the face of the stranger, and he calmly said, “My name is Mendel Fujikawa.”

Jacob almost dropped the manuscript. The man sitting in front of him could not possibly be Mendel Fujikawa. Jacob had heard of him, everyone in the industry had heard of him. He was the most feared and dreaded drama critic of all time; he was the man who performed more burials than Arlington National Cemetery, and just for fun, he was a coldblooded killer who was said to stalk sports bars looking for testosterone-driven, homophobic men whom he could seduce with his masculine wiles and lure to his lair where he disposed of them.

These were all rumors, of course, since the man had never been tried, convicted, or even charged with anyone’s death. But this could not possibly be him, he was too short. The Mendel Fujikawa who Jacob had heard about was easily over six feet tall, weighed over three hundred pounds, and was black. This had to be some kind of mistake or a joke.

Mendel stood and walked lightly over to Jacob and gently took the manuscript from his hand. He smiled wryly, and for the first time, Jacob noticed that he was wearing pink lipstick and a touch of glitter on his cheeks. He licked his thumb dramatically and began going through the pages, reading quickly, laughing at some parts, and shaking his head at others.

He handed it back to Jacob and said, “We have some cleaning to do before we leave, and then it’s time to get to work. You picked our play.”