Total Recall

by Sara Paretsky

  “I know she’s not. She’s not a fraud and she’s not a con artist. But she believes in herself so intensely that-I don’t know, I can’t explain it,” I finished helplessly, struggling to articulate why her look of ecstasy when she discussed Paul Radbuka had unnerved me so much. “I agree-it doesn’t seem possible that someone as experienced as Wiell could be conned. But-well, I guess I won’t have an opinion until I meet Radbuka,” I finished lamely.

  “When you do, you’ll really believe in him,” Beth promised.

  She left a minute later to edit my remarks for the ten o’clock news. Murray tried to talk me into a drink. “You know, Warshawski, we work together so well, it’d be a shame not to get back in the habit.”

  “Oh, Murray, you sweet-talker, you, I can see how badly you need your own private angle on this stuff. I can’t stay tonight-it’s vital that I get to Lotty Herschel’s place in the next half hour.”

  He followed me down the hall to the security station while I handed in my pass. “What’s the real story for you here, Warshawski? Radbuka and Wiell? Or Durham and the Sommers family?”

  I frowned up at him. “They both are. That’s the problem. I can’t quite focus on either of them.”

  “ Durham is about the slickest politico in town these days next to the mayor. Be careful how you tangle with him. Say hey to the doc for me, okay?” He squeezed my shoulder affectionately and turned back up the hall.

  I’ve known Lotty Herschel since I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. I was a blue-collar girl on an upscale campus, feeling rawly out of place, when I met her-she was providing medical advice to an abortion underground where I volunteered. She took me under her wing, giving me the kind of social skills I’d lost when I lost my mother, keeping me from losing my way in those days of drugs and violent protest, taking time from a dense-packed schedule to cheer my successes and condole over failures. She’d even gone to some college basketball games to see me play-true friendship, since sports of all kind bore her. But it was my athletic scholarship that made my education possible, so she supported my doing my best at it. If she was collapsing now, if something terrible was wrong with her-I couldn’t even finish the thought, it was so frightening to me.

  She’d recently moved to a high-rise on the lakefront, to one of the beautiful old buildings where you can watch the sun rise with nothing between you and water but Lake Shore Drive and a strip of park. She used to live in a two-flat a short walk from her storefront clinic, but her one concession to aging was to give up on being a landlady in a neighborhood full of drug-dealing housebreakers. Max and I had both been relieved to see her in a building with an indoor garage.

  When I left my car with her doorman, it was only eight o’clock. The day seemed to have been spinning on so long I was sure we must have come round the other side of dark to begin a new one.

  Lotty was waiting in the hall for me when I got off the elevator, making a valiant effort at composure. Even though I held the envelope of stills and video out to her, she didn’t snatch it from me but invited me in to her living room, offering me a drink. When I said I only wanted water, she still ignored the envelope, trying to make a joke that I must be ill if I wanted water instead of whisky. I smiled, but the deep circles under her dark eyes disturbed me. I didn’t comment on her appearance, just asking as she turned to go to the kitchen if she would bring me a piece of fruit or cheese.

  She seemed to really look at me for the first time. “You haven’t eaten? I can see from the lines on your face that you’re exhausted. Stay in here; I’ll fix you something.”

  This was more like her usual brisk manner. I was slightly reassured, slumping against her couch and dozing until she returned with a tray. Cold chicken, carrot sticks, a small salad, and slices of the thick bread a Ukrainian nurse at the hospital bakes for her. I tried not to spring on the food as if I were one of my own dogs.

  While I ate, Lotty watched me, as if keeping her eyes from the envelope by an act of will. She kept up a flow of random chatter-had I decided to go away with Morrell for the weekend, would we make it back for Sunday afternoon’s concert, Max was expecting forty or fifty people at his house for dinner afterward, but he-and especially Calia-would miss me if I didn’t come.

  I finally interrupted the flow. “Lotty, are you afraid to look at the pictures because of what you will see or because of what you may not see?”

  She gave the ghost of a smile. “Acute of you, my dear. A little of both, I think. But-if you will run the tape for me, maybe I am ready to see it. Max warned me that the man was not prepossessing.”

  We went to the back bedroom she uses for television and loaded the tape into the VCR. I glanced at Lotty, but the fear in her face was so acute that I couldn’t bear to watch her. As Paul Radbuka recounted his nightmares and his heartbreaking cries for his childhood friend, I kept my eyes glued to him. When we’d seen everything, including the “Exploring Chicago” segment with Rhea Wiell and Arnold Praeger, Lotty asked in a thread of a voice to return to Radbuka’s interview.

  I ran it through for her twice more, but when she wanted a third rerun I refused: her face was grey with strain. “You’re torturing yourself with this, Lotty. Why?”

  “I-the whole thing is hard.” Even though I was sitting on the floor next to her armchair I could barely make out her words. “Something is familiar to me in what he’s saying. Only I can’t think, because-I can’t think. I hate this. I hate seeing things that make my mind stop working. Do you believe his story?”

  I made a helpless gesture. “I can’t fathom it, but it’s so remote from how I want to see life that my mind is rejecting it. I met the therapist yesterday-no, it was today, it just seems like a long time ago. She’s a legitimate clinician, I think, but, well, fanatical. A zealot for her work in general and most particularly for this guy. I told her I wanted to interview Radbuka, to see if he could be related to these people you and Max know, but she’s protecting him. He’s not in the phone book, either as Paul Radbuka or Paul Ulrich, so I’m sending Mary Louise out to all the Ulrichs in Chicago. Maybe he’s still living in his father’s house, or maybe a neighbor will recognize his picture-we don’t know his father’s first name.”

  “How old would you say he is?” she asked unexpectedly.

  “You mean, could he be the right age for the experiences he’s claiming? You’d be a better judge of that than I, but again, it would be easier to answer if we saw him in person.”

  I took the stills out of the envelope, holding the three different shots so that the light shone full on them. Lotty looked at them a long time but finally shook her head helplessly.

  “Why did I imagine something definite would jump out at me? It’s what Max said to me. Resemblance is so often a trick of the expression, after all, and these are only photographs, photographs of a picture, really. I would have to see the man, and even then-after all, I’d be trying to match an adult face against a child’s memory of someone who was much younger than this man is now.”

  I took her hand in both of mine. “Lotty, what is it you’re afraid of? This is so painful for you it’s breaking my heart. Is it-could he be part of your family? Do you think he’s related to your mother?”

  “If you knew anything of those matters, you would know better than to ask such a question,” she said with a flash of her more imperious manner.

  “But you do know the Radbuka family, don’t you?”

  She laid the pictures on the coffee table as if she were dealing cards and then proceeded to rearrange them, but she wasn’t really looking at them. “I knew some members of the family many years ago. The circumstances-when I last saw them it was extremely painful. The way we parted, I mean, or anyway the whole situation. If this man is-I don’t see how he could be what he says. But if he is, then I owe it to the family to try to befriend him.”

  “Do you want me to do some digging? Assuming I can get hold of any information to dig with?”

  Her vivid, dark face was contorted with stra
in. “Oh, Victoria, I don’t know what I want. I want the past never to have happened, or since it did and I can’t change it, I want it to stay where it is, past, dead, gone. This man, I don’t want to know him. But I see I will have to talk to him. Do I want you to investigate him? No, I don’t want you near him. But find him for me, find him so I can talk to him, and you, you-what you can do is try to see what piece of paper convinced him his name was really Paul Radbuka.”

  Late that night, her unhappy, contradictory words kept tumbling through my mind. Sometime after two, I finally fell asleep, but in my dreams Bull Durham chased me until I found myself locked up with Paul Radbuka at Terezin, with Lotty on the far side of the barbed wire watching me with hurt, tormented eyes. “Keep him there among the dead,” she cried.

  Lotty Herschel’s Story:

  English Lessons

  School still had three weeks to go when Hugo and I reached London, but Minna didn’t think it worthwhile to register me, since my lack of English would keep me from understanding any lessons. She set me to doing chores in the house and then in the neighborhood: she would write a shopping list in her slow English script, spelling the words under her breath-incorrectly, as I saw when I learned to read and write in the new language. She would give me a pound and send me to the corner shop to buy a chop for dinner, a few potatoes, a loaf of bread. When she got home from work she would count the change twice to make sure I hadn’t robbed her. Still, each week she gave me sixpence in pocket money.

  Hugo, whom I saw on Sundays, was already chattering in English. I felt humiliated, the big sister not able to speak because Minna kept me barricaded behind a wall of German. She hoped day to day that I would be sent back to Vienna. “Why waste your time on English when you may leave in the morning?”

  The first time she said it my heart skipped a beat. “Mutti und Oma, haben sie dir geschrieben? They wrote you? I can go home?”

  “I haven’t heard from Madame Butterfly,” Minna spat. “In her own good time she will remember you.”

  Mutti had forgotten me. It hit my child’s heart like a fist. A year later, when I could read English, I despised the children’s books we were given in school, with their saccharine mothers and children. “My mother would never forget me. She loves me even though she is far away, and I pray every night to see her again, as I know she is praying for me and watching over me.” That’s what the girls in Good Wives or English Orphans would have said to Cousin Minna, boldly defiant in their trembling little-girl voices. But they didn’t understand anything about life, those little girls.

  Your own mother lies in bed, too worn to get up to kiss you good-bye when you get on a train, leave your city, your home, your Mutti and Oma, behind. Men in uniforms stop you, look in your suitcase, put big ugly hands on your underwear, your favorite doll, they can take these things if they want, and your mother is lying in bed, not stopping them.

  Of course I knew the truth, knew that only Hugo and I could get visas and travel permits, that grown-ups weren’t allowed to go to England unless someone in England gave them a job. I knew the truth, that the Nazis hated us because we were Jews, so they took away Opa’s apartment with my bedroom: some strange woman was living there now with her blond child in my white-canopied bed-I had gone early one morning on foot to look at the building, with its little sign, Juden verboten. I knew these things, knew that my mama was hungry as we all were, but to a child, your parents are so powerful, I still half believed my parents, my Opa, would rise up and make everything go back the way it used to be.

  When Minna said my mother would remember me in her own good time, she only voiced my deepest fear. I had been sent away because Mutti didn’t want me. Until September, when the war started and no one could leave Austria anymore, Minna would say that at regular intervals.

  Even today I’m sure she did this because she so resented my mother, Lingerl, the little butterfly with her soft gold curls, her beautiful smile, her charming manners. The only way Minna could hurt Lingerl was to hurt me. Perhaps the fact that my mother never knew made Minna twist the knife harder: she was so furious that she couldn’t stab Lingerl directly that she kept on at me. Maybe that’s why she was so hateful when we got the news about their fate.

  The one thing I knew for sure my first summer in London, the summer of ’39, was what my papa told me, that he would come if I could find him a job. Armed with a German-English dictionary, which I found in Minna’s sitting room, I spent that summer walking up and down the streets near Minna’s house in Kentish Town. My cheeks stained with embarrassment, I would ring doorbells and struggle to say, “Mine vater, he need job, he do all job. Garden, he make garden. House, he clean house. Coal, he bring coal, make house warm.”

  Eventually I ended up at the house behind Minna’s. I had been watching it from my attic window because it was so different from Minna’s. Hers was a narrow frame structure whose neighbors almost touched on the east and west sides. The garden was a cold oblong, as narrow as the house and only holding a few scraggly raspberry bushes. To this day I won’t eat raspberries…

  Anyway, the house behind was made of stone, with a large garden, roses, an apple tree, a little patch of vegetables, and Claire. I knew her name because her mother and her older sister would call to her. She sat on a swing-bench under their pergola, her fair hair pulled away from her ears to hang down her back, while she pored over her books.

  “Claire,” her mother would call. “Teatime, darling. You’ll strain your eyes reading in the sun.”

  Of course, I didn’t understand what she was saying at first, although I could make out Claire’s name, but the words were repeated every summer, so my memory blurs all those summers; in my memory I understand Mrs. Tallmadge perfectly from the start.

  Claire was studying because next year she would take her higher-school certificate; she wanted to read medicine-again, I only learned this later. The sister, Vanessa, was five years older than Claire. Vanessa had some refined little job, I don’t remember what now. She was getting ready to be married that summer; that I understood clearly-all little girls understand brides and weddings, from peeping over railings at them. I would watch Vanessa come into the garden: she wanted Claire to try on a dress or a hat or admire a swatch of fabric, and finally, when she could get her sister’s attention no other way, she would snatch Claire’s book. Then the two would chase each other around the garden until they ended up in a laughing heap back under the pergola.

  I wanted to be part of their life so desperately that at night I would lie in bed making up stories about them. Claire would be in some trouble from which I would rescue her. Claire would somehow know the details of my life with Cousin Minna and would boldly confront Minna, accuse her of all her crimes, and rescue me. I don’t know why it was Claire who became my heroine, not the mother or the bride-maybe because Claire was closer to my age, so I could imagine being her. I only know that I would watch the sisters laughing together and burst into tears.

  I put off their house until last because I didn’t want Claire to pity me. I pictured my papa as a servant in her house; then she would never sit laughing with me on the swing. But in the letters that still passed between England and Vienna that summer, Papa kept reminding me that he needed me to get him a job. All these years later I am still bitter that Minna couldn’t find a place for him at the glove factory. It’s true it wasn’t her factory, but she was the bookkeeper, she could talk to Herr Schatz. Every time I brought it up she screamed that she wasn’t going to have people pointing a finger at her. During the war, the glove factory was working treble shifts to supply the army…

  Finally, one hot August morning, when I had seen Claire go into the garden with her books, I rang their doorbell. I thought if Mrs. Tallmadge answered I could manage to speak to her; if Claire was in the garden I was safe from having to face my idol. Of course it was a maid who came to the door-I should have expected that, since all of the bigger houses in our neighborhood had maids. And even the small, ugly ones like Minna’s
had at least a charwoman to do the heavy cleaning.

  The maid said something too fast for me to understand. I only knew her tone was angry. Quickly, as she started to shut the door in my face, I blurted out in broken English that Claire wanted me.

  “Claire ask, she say, you come.”

  The maid shut the door on me, but this time she told me to wait, a word I had learned in my weeks of doorbell ringing. By and by Claire came back with the maid.

  “Oh, Susan, it’s the funny little girl from over the way. I’ll talk to her-you go on.” When Susan disappeared, sniffing, Claire bent over and said, “I’ve seen you watching me over the wall, you queer little monkey. What do you want?”

  I stammered out my story: father needed job. He could do anything.

  “But Mother looks after the garden, and Susan cleans the house.”

  “Play violin. Sister-” I pantomimed Vanessa as a bride, making Claire burst into gales of laughter. “He play. Very pretty. Sister like.”

  Mrs. Tallmadge appeared behind her daughter, demanding to know who I was and what I wanted. She and Claire had a conversation that went on for some time, which I couldn’t follow at all, except to recognize Hitler’s name, and the Jews, of course. I could see that Claire was trying to persuade Mrs. Tallmadge but that the mother was obdurate-there was no money. When my English became fluent, when I got to know the family, I learned that Mr. Tallmadge had died, leaving some money-enough to maintain the house and keep Mrs. Tallmadge and her daughters in respectable comfort-but not enough for extravagance. Sponsoring my father would have been extravagant.

  At one point Claire turned to ask me about my mother. I said, Yes, she would come, too, but Claire wanted to know what kind of work my mother could perform. I stared blankly, unable to imagine such a thing. Not just because she had been sick with her pregnancy, but no one expected my mother to work. You wanted her around to make you gay, because she danced and talked and sang more beautifully than anyone. But even if my English had allowed me to express those ideas, I knew they would be a mistake.