Page 3 of The Dreidl Disaster

This was easy. “Remove Flaire Hutton from this assignment in Briarwood permanently and fix this. You made this mistake; it’s your responsibility to smooth the ruffled feathers, not the least of which belong to Jennifer and Peter Cohen.”

There wasn’t an ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ or a ‘we’ll see’ or any other sort of equivocation. It was, “Yes, Mayor. I’ll get back to you as soon as I have a solution in hand.”

While Livvy didn’t like the lack of definite timing, she liked the certainty in Stevens’s voice. She could tie it to the fact that the Cohens were involved, or she could just chalk it up to her insistence. It didn’t matter; it was going to be done.

And the cause of the Hanukkah failure was going to be out of Briarwood. For good.

*

Artur Rabinovitch hadbeen back in the States for a month. The outreach program he’d run with the Mitzvah Alliance in Eastern Europe was set up and running well without him.

“You can come back and help later,” Jacob, his friend and erstwhile partner on this project, had told him. “Door’s open.”

Meddling friends. He had a bunch of them. Five years before, Abe and Leo had yelled at him about how he’d been working too hard, then encouraged him to run with the idea he and Jacob had come up with: on-the-ground resources for people who needed them. It had brought him back to life, stress directed toward something that could make a difference on a global scale.

But now, five years later, he was back in New York. Problems related to his next job and settling back into life were shoved into a box to be dealt with much later.

Now?

He had a fourteen-ounce tube of sour cream in a custom fridge, waiting for him. The garage was cool, and on his knees he could watch the cleanser work on the black spokes of the wheels of his sports car. The cleanser wasn’t going to turn purple, like if the wheels of the car were silver, but he was hoping to see…something.

And he had nothing else to do.

Except, of course, pick up the dessert he was bringing to Abe’s.

But that wasn’t for a while.

Artur hadn’t had a day like this in a long time, and he’d planned to enjoy every bit of it. He took a deep breath, looked at the wheels and waited. The timer he’d set was about to go off when his phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Is this Artur Rabinovitch?”

“Yes,” he said. “How can I help you?”

“John Stevens. VP, public relations for the New York Empires. How are you?”

He stood up, moved himself and the rag away from the car. There was no way he’d be able to have this conversation while buffing the car.

Empires. Empires.

Artur had intertwined his career with the Empires a few times, the last a brief conversation before he headed off to work for the Mitzvah Alliance. Now that he was back in New York, and only the day before he’d responded to an email that had been burning a hole in his inbox, from someone on John Stevens’s staff, setting a meeting for Monday.

Which meant something was fishy. Because nobody randomly asked him how he was, and nobody who wasn’t already in a crisis jumped over an already scheduled meeting.

But it wasn’t up to him to determine what Stevens wanted. His role at this point was only to listen. So, he did. “I’m fine,” he said. “How can I help you?”

“We’ve got a situation on our hands,” the other man said. “And I know you have a meeting on Monday with HR, but this is…well.”

Stevens sounded nervous.

This wasn’t just fishy, it washerring.

He wasn’t going to make Monday’s meeting; that calendar date was going to be dust. But all he said was. “Yes?”

“Can you come in? I know it’s a lot to ask but…”

And even though he wasn’t sure what was going on, he knew he didn’t have another alternative if this man was going to be his boss. “Sure,” he said. “It’s fine.”

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