Total Recall

by Sara Paretsky

  A voice from the stage asked him to identify himself.

  “Oh. My name is Paul-Paul Radbuka. I was brought here after the war when I was four years old by a man who called himself my father.”

  Max sucked in his breath, while Carl exclaimed, “What! Who is this?”

  Don and Morrell both turned to stare.

  “You know him?” I asked.

  Max clamped my wrist to hush me while the little figure in front of us continued to speak. “He took everything away from me, most especially my memories. Only recently have I come to know that I spent the war in Terezin, the so-called model concentration camp that the Germans named Theresienstadt. I thought I was a German, a Lutheran, like this man Ulrich who called himself my father. Only after he died, when I went through his papers, did I find out the truth. And I say it is wrong, it is criminally wrong, to take away from people the identity which is rightfully theirs.”

  The station let a few seconds’ silence develop, then Dennis Logan, the anchor, appeared in a split screen with Beth Blacksin. “It’s a most extraordinary story, Beth. You caught up with Mr. Radbuka after the session, didn’t you? We’ll be showing your exclusive interview with Paul Radbuka at the end of our regular newscast. Coming up, for fans who thought the Cubs couldn’t sink lower, a surprising come-from-ahead loss today at Wrigley.”

  IV Memory Plant

  Do you know him?” Don asked Max, muting the sound as yet another round of ads came up.

  Max shook his head. “I know the name, but not this man. It’s just-it’s a most unusual name.” He turned to Morrell. “If I can impose on you-I’d like to stay for the interview.”

  Like Max, Carl was a short man, not quite as tall as I am, but where Max smiled good-naturedly on the world around him-often amused by the human predicament-Carl held himself on alert-a bantam rooster, ready to take on all comers. Right now, he seemed edgier than usual. I looked at him but decided not to quiz him in front of Don and Morrell.

  Morrell brought Max herbal tea and poured brandy for Carl. Finally the station finished its lengthy dissection of the weather and turned to Beth Blacksin. She was talking to Paul Radbuka in a small meeting room at the Pleiades. Another woman, with wings of black hair framing her oval face, was with them.

  Beth Blacksin introduced herself and Paul Radbuka, then let the camera focus on the other woman. “Also here this evening is Rhea Wiell, the therapist who has treated Mr. Radbuka and helped him recover his hidden memories. Ms. Wiell has agreed to talk to me later tonight in a special edition of ‘Exploring Chicago.’”

  Blacksin turned to the small man. “Mr. Radbuka, how did you come to discover your true identity? You said in the meeting that it was in going through your father’s papers. What did you find there?”

  “The man who called himself my father,” Radbuka corrected her. “It was a set of documents in code. At first I paid no attention to them. Somehow after he died I lost my own will to live. I don’t understand why, because I didn’t like him; he was always very brutal to me. But I became so depressed that I lost my job, I even stopped getting out of bed on many days. And then I met Rhea Wiell.”

  He turned to the dark-haired woman with a look of adoration. “It sounds melodramatic, but I believe I owe my life to her. And she helped me make sense of the documents, to use them to find my missing identity.”

  “Rhea Wiell is the therapist you found,” Beth prodded him.

  “Yes. She specializes in recovering memories of events that people like me block because the trauma around them is so intense.”

  He continued to look at Wiell, who nodded reassuringly at him. Blacksin stepped him through some of his highlights, the tormenting nightmares that he had been ashamed to speak of for fifty years, and his dawning realization that the man who called himself his father might really be someone completely unrelated to him.

  “We had come to America as DP’s-displaced persons-after the Second World War. I was only four, and when I was growing up, this man said we were from Germany.” He gasped for air between sentences, like an asthmatic fighting to breathe. “But what I’ve finally learned from my work with Rhea is that his story was only half true. He was from Germany. But I was a-a camp child, camp survivor. I was from some other place, some country under Nazi control. This man attached himself to me in the confused aftermath of the war to get a visa to America.” He looked at his hands as if he were terribly ashamed of this.

  “And do you feel up to telling us about those dreams-those nightmares-that led you to Rhea Wiell?” Beth prompted him.

  Wiell stroked Radbuka’s hand in a reassuring fashion. He looked up again and spoke to the camera with an almost childish lack of self-consciousness.

  “The nightmares were things that haunted me, things I couldn’t speak out loud and could experience only in sleep. Terrible things, beatings, children falling dead in the snow, bloodstains like flowers around them. Now, thanks to Rhea, I can remember being four years old. We were moving, this strange angry man and I, we were first on a ship and then on a train. I was crying, ‘My Miriam, where is my Miriam? I want my Miriam,’ but the man who kept saying he was ‘Vati,’ my father, would hit me and finally I learned to keep all those cries to myself.”

  “And who was Miriam, Mr. Radbuka?” Blacksin leaned toward him, her eyes wide with empathy.

  “Miriam was my little playmate, we had been together since-since I was twelve months old.” Radbuka began to cry.

  “When she arrived at the camp with you, isn’t that right?” Beth said.

  “We spent two years in Terezin together. There were six of us, the six musketeers I think of us now, but my Miriam, she was my special-I want to know she is still alive someplace, still healthy. And maybe she remembers her Paul as well.” He cupped his face in his hands; his shoulders shook.

  Rhea Wiell’s face loomed suddenly between him and the camera. “Let’s finish here, Beth. That’s all Paul can handle today.”

  As the camera pulled back from them, Dennis Logan, the station anchor, spoke over the scene. “This sad, sad story continues to haunt not only Paul Radbuka but thousands of other Holocaust survivors. If any of you think you know Paul’s Miriam, call the number on our screen, or go to our Web site, www.Globe-All.com. We’ll make sure Paul Radbuka gets your message.”

  “How disgusting,” Carl burst out when Morrell muted the set again. “How can anyone expose himself like that?”

  “You sound like Lotty,” Max murmured. “I suppose his hurt is so great that he isn’t aware that he’s exposing himself.”

  “People like to talk about themselves,” Don put in. “That’s what makes a journalist’s job easy. Does his name mean something to you, Mr. Loewenthal?”

  Max looked at him quizzically, wondering how Don knew his name. Morrell stepped in to perform introductions. Don explained that he had come out to cover the conference and recognized Max from today’s program.

  “Did you recognize the guy-Radbuka, wasn’t it? The name or the person?” he added.

  “You’re a journalist who would like me to talk about myself to you?” Max said sharply. “I have no idea who he is.”

  “He was like a child,” Carl said. “Utterly unself-conscious about what he was saying, even though he was recounting the most appalling events.”

  The phone rang again. It was Michael Loewenthal, saying that if his father had Calia’s dog to please come home with it.

  Max gave a guilty start. “ Victoria, may I call you in the morning?”

  “Of course.” I went into the back to get a card from my case so that Max would have my cell-phone number, then I walked out to the car with him and Carl. “Did you two recognize the guy?”

  Under the street lamp I saw Max look at Carl. “The name. I thought I recognized the name-but it doesn’t seem possible. I’ll call you in the morning.”

  When I went back inside, Don was in purdah again with a cigarette. I joined Morrell in the kitchen, where he was washing Carl’s brandy glass. “Did they
tell all away from the prying ears of journalism?”

  I shook my head. “I’m beat, but I’m curious, too, about the therapist. Are you guys going to stay up for the special segment with her?”

  “Don is panting for it. He thinks she may be his career-saving book.”

  “You’d better believe it,” Don called through the screen door. “Although the guy would be hard to work with-his emotions seem awfully volatile.”

  We all returned to the living room just as the “Exploring Chicago” logo came up on the screen. The show’s regular announcer said they had a special program for us tonight and turned the stage over to Beth Blacksin.

  “Thank you, Dennis. In this special edition of ‘Exploring Chicago,’ we have the opportunity to follow up on the exciting revelations we heard earlier today, exclusively on Global Television, when a man who came here as a boy from war-torn Europe told us how therapist Rhea Wiell helped him recover memories he had buried alive for fifty years.”

  She ran a few segments from Radbuka’s speech to the convention, followed by excerpts from her own interview with him.

  “We’re going to follow up on today’s extraordinary story by talking to the therapist who worked with Paul Radbuka. Rhea Wiell has been having remarkable success-and started remarkable controversy, I might add-with her work in helping people get access to forgotten memories. Memories they’ve usually forgotten because the pain of remembering them is too great. We don’t bury happy memories so deep, do we, Rhea?”

  The therapist had changed into a soft green outfit that suggested an Indian mystic. She nodded with a slight smile. “We don’t usually suppress memories of ice-cream sodas or romps on the beach with our friends. The memories we push away are the ones that threaten us in our core as individuals.”

  “Also with us is Professor Arnold Praeger, the director of the Planted Memory Foundation.”

  The professor was given due face time to say that we lived in an era that celebrated victims, which meant people needed to prove they had suffered more terribly than anyone else. “Such people seek out therapists who can validate their victimization. A small number of therapists have helped a large number of would-be victims remember the most shocking events: they begin recalling satanic rituals, sacrificing pets that never even existed, and so on. Many families have been terribly damaged by these planted memories.”

  Rhea Wiell laughed softly. “I hope you are not going to suggest that any of my patients have recovered memories of satanic sacrifices, Arnold.”

  “You’ve certainly encouraged some of them to demonize their parents, Rhea. They’ve ruined their parents’ lives by accusing them of the most heinous brutality-accusations which can’t be proved true in a court of law because the only witnesses to them are your patients’ imaginations.”

  “You mean the only witness besides the parent who thought he was safe from ever being found out,” Wiell said, keeping her voice gentle as a contrast to Praeger’s sharp speech.

  Praeger cut her off. “In the case of this man whose tape we just watched, the father is dead and can’t even be summoned to speak on his own behalf. We’re told about documents in code, but I wonder what key you used to break the code? And whether someone like me would get the same result if I looked at the documents.”

  Wiell shook her head, smiling gently. “My patients’ privacy is sacrosanct, Arnold, you know that. These are Paul Radbuka’s documents. Whether anyone else can see them is his decision alone.”

  Blacksin stepped in here to draw the conversation back to what recovered memories actually were. Wiell talked a little about post-traumatic stress disorder, explaining that there are a number of symptoms that people share after trauma, whether it’s from battle-as soldiers or civilians-or experiencing other fragmenting events, like sexual assault.

  “Children who’ve been sexually abused, adults who’ve been tortured, soldiers who’ve endured battle, all share some common problems: depression, inability to sleep, inability to trust people around them or form close connections.”

  “But people can be depressed and have sleep disorders without having been abused,” Praeger snapped. “When someone comes into my office complaining of those symptoms, I am very careful about forming an opinion of the root cause: I don’t immediately suggest he’s been tortured by Hutu terrorists. People are at their most dependent and vulnerable with psychotherapists. It is all too easy to suggest things to them which they come ardently to believe. We like to think that our memories are objective and accurate, but unfortunately, it’s very easy to create memories of events that never took place.”

  He went on to summarize research on planted, or created, memories that showed how people were persuaded they had taken part in marches or demonstrations when there was objective evidence that they’d never been in the city where the demonstration was held.

  A little before eleven, Blacksin cut the argument short. “Until we truly understand the workings of the human mind, this debate will continue between people of goodwill. Why don’t each of you take thirty seconds to summarize your positions, before we say good night. Ms. Wiell?”

  Rhea Wiell looked at the camera with a wide, serious gaze. “We often like to dismiss other people’s horrible memories, not because we’re not compassionate. And not because we don’t want to be victims. But because we’re afraid to look inside ourselves. We’re afraid to find out what lies hidden-what we’ve done to other people, or what has happened to us. It takes a lot of courage to take a journey to the past. I would never start someone on that journey who wasn’t strong enough to make it to the end. I certainly never let them travel that dangerous road alone.”

  After that, Professor Praeger’s rebuttal sounded cruel and unfeeling. If the rest of the viewing audience was like me, they wanted Wiell back, wanted her to say they were strong enough to travel to the past, and good or interesting enough that she would guide them on the way.

  When the camera faded to commercials, Morrell switched off the set. Don rubbed his hands.

  “This woman has book, six figures, written all over her. I’ll be a hero in Paris and New York if I get her before Bertelsmann or Rupert Murdoch does. If she’s legitimate. What do you two think?”

  “Remember the shaman we met in Escuintla?” Morrell said to Don. “He had the same expression in his eyes. As if he saw into the most secret thoughts of your mind.”

  “Yes.” Don shuddered. “What a horrible trip. We spent eighteen hours underneath a pigsty outwaiting the army. That was when I decided I’d be happier working full-time at Envision Press and letting people like you hog the glory, Morrell. So to speak. You think she’s a charlatan?”

  Morrell spread his hands. “I don’t know anything about her. But she certainly believes in herself, doesn’t she?”

  A yawn split my face. “I’m too tired to have an opinion. But it should be easy enough to check her credentials in the morning.”

  I pushed myself upright on leaden legs. Morrell said he’d join me in a minute. “Before Don gets too carried away with this new book, I want to go over a few things about my own.”

  “In that case, Morrell, we’re doing it outside. I’m not dueling with you over contracts without nicotine.”

  I don’t know how late the two of them sat up: I was asleep almost before the door out to the porch closed behind them.

  V Sniffing for a Scent

  W hen I got back from my run the next morning, Don was where I’d left him the night before: on the back porch with a cigarette. He was even wearing the same jeans and rumpled green shirt.

  “You look horribly healthy. It makes me want to smoke more in self-defense.” He sucked in a final mouthful of smoke, then ground the butt tidily on a broken piece of pottery Morrell had given him. “Morrell said you’d operate the coffee thingy for me; I suppose you know he’s gone into town to see someone or other at the State Department.”

  I knew: Morrell had gotten up when I did, at six-thirty. As his departure date loomed, he’d stopped sle
eping well-several times in the night I’d woken to find him staring rigidly at the ceiling. In the morning, I slid out of bed as quietly as possible, going to the guest bathroom in the hall to wash, then using his study to leave a message for Ralph Devereux, head of claims at Ajax Insurance, asking for a meeting at his earliest convenience. By the time I finished that, Morrell was up. While I did my stretches and drank a glass of juice, he answered his mail. When I left for my run, he was deep in an on-line chat with Humane Medicine in Rome.

  My return route took me past Max’s lakefront home. His Buick was still in the driveway, as were two other cars, presumably Carl’s and Michael’s rentals. There didn’t seem to be any signs of life: musicians go to bed late and get up late. Max, who usually is at work by eight, must be following his son’s and Carl’s rhythms.

  I stared at the house, as if the windows would lead me to the secret thoughts of the men inside. What had the man on television last night meant to Max and Carl? They had at least recognized the name, I was pretty sure of that. Had one of their London friends been part of the Radbuka family? But Max had made it clear last night that he wasn’t ready to talk about that. I shouldn’t try to trespass. I shook out my legs and finished my run.

  Morrell had a semicommercial espresso machine. Back in his apartment, I made cappuccinos for Don and myself before showering. While I dressed, I checked my own messages. Ralph had called from Ajax and would be delighted to squeeze me in at a quarter of twelve. I put on the rose silk sweater and sage skirt I’d worn yesterday. It gets complicated spending part of my life at Morrell’s-the clothes I want are always in my own apartment when I’m with him, or in his place when I’m home.

  Don had moved to the kitchen eating island with the Herald-Star when I came in. “If they took you for a ride on a Russian mountain in Paris, where would you be?”

  “Russian mountain?” I mixed yogurt and granola with orange slices. “Is this helping you get ready to ask searching comments of Posner and Durham?”