Read Online Weekend by Andrew Neiderman, Tania Grossinger - Free Book Online Page B

rounded up right away and a private place to interrogate them.”
    “You’re not panicking already, are you?”
    “No, Mr. Lawrence, just doing my job. Bob Halloran will give you their names.” He handed Halloran the phone. He listened for a moment, then gave Jonathan the requested information.
    “You can meet with them in a storeroom down the hall.”
    “How long will it take to round them up?”
    “Security should find the Puerto Ricans within a matter of minutes. There’s not many places they hang out around the hotel. With Margret, it might prove more difficult. She tends to get involved with lots of people,” he said with a wink.
    Each minute seemed like an hour. For Christ’s sake, Bruce thought, I hope they hurry up. We could be playing with fire and it might already be too late.
    “Thar she blows,” Charlotte Fein said, pointing to the Congress hotel a few miles away. The slim brunette stood up from her seat near the front of the bus and raised both hands toward the ceiling. Then she bent forward in a “Praise be to Allah” fashion and there was a roar of laughter from the crowd on the Shortline’s Catskill Express. Her girlfriend, Fern Rosen, tugged on her skirt.
    “Sit down, you idiot.”
    “Idiot? Have you no respect for the temple of love? If Mohammed could have his mountain, there’s no reason we can’t have ours too!”
    Fern shook her head incredulously and looked out the window, still not believing she had let her mother talk her into this
mishigas
in the first place. Less confident and shyer than most girls who came to the Congress, it was not an experience she particularly looked forward to.
    “Why not just relax and enjoy yourself,” Charlotte said. “Don’t be so nervous all the time. Remember our mission,” she whispered, loud enough so that everyone within twelve rows could hear, “We’re under orders. We’re to find two nice Jewish boys, fall in love and get engaged before the end of the weekend.”
    “Or else they won’t let us back across the George Washington Bridge,” Fern added, surprised at her own contribution to this inane conversation.
    “Ah,” Charlotte said, “you had the same lecture before you left, too, I see.”
    “What do you think? Here I am, twenty-three years old, a book-keeper at Mutual Life and date an average of once a month. In my mother’s and her neighbor’s eyes, that makes me a social retard.”
    “It’s the same with me,” Charlotte volunteered. “The whole time at dinner, every night, I sit and listen to what my mother was doing by the time she was my age. There she was, twenty-five years old, raising three kids, slaving like a
shvartsa
to keep a clean house, and sacrificing her life so her husband could get ahead with his. Why is it, do you think, that according to Jewish wives, no Jewish husbands ever made it on their own?”
    “At the rate I’m going,” Fern said, “I doubt I’ll ever find out.”
    “Well,” Charlotte went on philosophically. “I don’t think we can lose anything by trying. I’ve been here a couple of times before but never came away with anything worthwhile. But that was when I lived in the Bronx and was considered GU—Geographically Undesirable. Who knows, now that I’m in Manhattan …”
    “Yet so many marriages and romances are supposed to get started in the mountains. I just read about it in
Coronet. Time
had a story on it, too.”
    “I read an article also,” Charlotte laughed. “It was in
Ripley’s Believe It or Not.
With me it always ends up Not.” She gestured toward the bus driver with her eyes. “Who knows, we may have to settle for him on the way back.”
    Fern hid her smile in her copy of the
Post.
    “How come you’re still reading? We’re almost there. Aren’t you even a little bit excited? After all, it’s your first time.”
    “I’m excited, I’m excited,” Fern pretended, actually not the least bit excited at the prospect of being typed as just another of a number of