2 Grand Delusion Read Free Page B

stories. Dennis was a loud opinionated guy, which made him a good advocate for troubled youth, but also made him a royal pain in the ass. "So I take it you're not with me on this," I interrupted.
    Dennis blinked, taken aback at being cut off in mid-harangue. Then he gave me a small tentative smile, strangely at odds with his previous demeanor, and said, "Sorry, Jacob."
    "No sweat. Always good to have a sixties retro around to keep us yuppie scum on our toes."
    I headed out the door, with Dennis calling after me, "Man, the sixties are coming back! You oughta listen to these kids!"
    I did listen as I walked up the street, but all I heard was a discussion of skateboarding techniques. I wondered, would the 60s ever really come back . . . and if they did, would an old fart like me be truly happy about it?
    I wondered, also, if there might be some other unspoken reason why Dennis wasn't signing my petition. After all, Pop was one of the foot patrolmen for the beat that included Arcturus—and Pop knew how to read a signature.
     
    I headed over to Cherry Street to try to get hold of Lia Kalmus. Maybe Dennis hadn't come through, I thought, but one signature from Lia would be worth a hundred signatures from ordinary mortals.
    You see, five days a week, Lia was a mild-mannered billing clerk at Saratoga Hospital. But when she got off work, she put on her Superwoman cape and magically transformed into the president of the Save Our West Side Association.
    Lia was of average height and weight, with light blond hair, but she was emphatically not a pretty woman, due to a horrible burn scar that discolored the left half of her face and gave her left eye a bloodshot, drooping look. Rumor had it that when she was a child in Estonia forty-some years ago, her house was burned down as punishment for her father's political dissidence.
    Possibly in response to her scar, Lia made no effort to look good. She cut her hair short and wore clothes that looked like they came from Kmart's half-price bin. Nevertheless, she didn't seem like an unhappy woman. S.O.S. was her family.
    When she came to the front door to answer my knock, she was on a cordless phone doing her community organizing thing. She waved me inside.
    I'd never been in her house before, and I glanced around. The place was chock full of velvet-covered sofas, quasi-Chippendale chairs, and ornate paintings and statues of a host of saints that my Jewish eyes didn't recognize (of course, maybe they were special Estonian saints). I've noticed this with other people who live alone: They tend to load up their houses with all kinds of stuff . Some of Lia's stuff was probably expensive, paid for with all the money she saved by not having kids, but I still didn't like it much.
    Meanwhile she was talking on the phone. Or rather, shouting. "You have to come to the meeting tonight! Look, I don't give a hoot about your niece's piano recital, I don't care if she's the next Liberace for God's sake, this is the future of the West Side we're talking about!"
    I couldn't help grinning. I pitied the poor soul on the other end of the line, feeling the brunt of a Lia Kalmus onslaught.
    After successfully browbeating the other person into submission, Lia hung up the phone and started working on me. "Now, of course you're coming tonight, right? Eight o'clock."
    "Well—"
    "You've got to come. It's our most important meeting of the year. We're voting on whether to accept the Grand Hotel proposal."
    I had to admit, this truly was a big deal.
    Every city or neighborhood has some issue that defines its future. For us, the issue was: What do we do with the Grand Hotel?
    The Grand Hotel was a four-story affair on Washington Street in the heart of the West Side that had housed visitors to Saratoga for over a century. Now when I say "Grand Hotel," please don't be misled into imagining a grand hotel. And when I say "visitors," don't think "Vanderbilts." No, the hotel in question was the domicile of choice for over-the-hill