The Queen and I Read Online Free Page B

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