The Misfortune Cookie: An Esther Diamond Novel Read Free

gall, to treat a woman that way? A man who pursued a woman to her apartment that night! A man who told her he wanted to get back together . . . Or together for the first time, I guess, since they’d never really been . . . That is to say, we’d always . . . But we never . . . Oh, forget it.
    Where was I?
    Oh, right, working at Bella Stella on New Year’s Eve.
    The restaurant, which did good business even in lean times, had been a gift to Stella Butera, its owner, from her lover Handsome Joey Gambello. This generous gesture may not have been wholly disinterested, since Bella Stella was rumored to launder money for the Gambello crime family. I had never met Handsome Joey, who got whacked right there in the restaurant a few years before Stella hired me.
    Stella Butera was a fair employer, and since she wanted servers who had performance skills, she accepted that our acting careers were more important to us than waiting tables. Prior to becoming a semi-regular staffer at Bella Stella a couple of years ago, I had been fired from several demeaning, poorly paid jobs by managers who were unwilling to accommodate my occasional scheduling requests so I could go to an audition, or who were enraged when I wanted to spend two days acting in a guest role on a television show more than I wanted to work the underpaid shifts they refused to let me have off. Stella, by contrast, was accommodating about that sort of thing. She also understood that actors come and go from day jobs, depending on whether or not we’ve got acting work. So I was able to rotate in and out of the staff at Stella’s pretty comfortably.
    Most of the time, that was. By the time the limited run had ended for
The Vampyre,
an Off-Broadway play I was working in through late November, Stella’s staff was so packed with musical theater majors coming home from college for the holidays that she had very little work for me in December. And one or two shifts per week wasn’t going to cover my rent—especially not in Manhattan. I live in a rent-controlled apartment that’s rapidly surrendering to entropy and located in the seedier part of the West Thirties; but in New York, that just means it’s very expensive rather than catastrophically ruinous.
    So, facing the cold and harsh reality of my living expenses, I had taken a job in December playing Santa’s Jewish elf at Fenster & Co., a famous old department store in Midtown. Depending on your point of view, this was either a blessing or a curse, since it meant I was around to foil a deviously demented and deadly scheme to destroy the store, the Fenster family, and (incidentally) much of New York City.
    Despite my role in saving the volatile Fenster family (and a large swath of Manhattan’s retail industry) from annihilation, I felt certain the Fensters would never want me back in their employ, even if they still had a retail empire next Christmas—which was by no means certain, now that one of their own family members had been exposed as a key culprit in the series of high-profile heists which had wrecked the season of love, joy, and shopping this year. And, in fact, I was perfectly comfortable with no longer being wanted at Fenster & Co. (whereas no longer being wanted by the arresting officer in that mess was making me a little crazy these days), since I was still undecided about which experience had been more horrifying: working the sales floor of Fenster’s as an elf during the holidays, or confronting a voracious solstice demon rising from a hell dimension there.
    In any case, elf season was now over—much like my train wreck of a love life—and no one really hires new staff between Christmas and New Year’s, never mind holding auditions. (In fact, with the business so dead at this time of year, my agent was in Wisconsin until early January, reluctantly visiting his family and probably drinking a little human blood. But that’s another story.) However, on the day I realized that my food supply had