“That brings us back to where we started,” I said. “With a document that you alone know about and no way for suspicious detectives like me to verify your certainty. By the way, who is Sofie Radbuka?”
Paul turned sulky. “She was on the Web. Someone in a missing-persons chat room said they wanted information about a Sofie Radbuka who lived in England in the forties. So I wrote saying she must be my mother, and the person never wrote back.”
“Right now we’re all exhausted,” Max said. “Mr. Radbuka, why don’t you write down everything you know about your family? I will get my friend to do the same. You can give me your document and I will give you the other one. Then we can meet again to compare notes.”
Radbuka sat with his lower lip sticking out, not even looking up to acknowledge the suggestion. When Morrell, with a grimace at the clock, said he’d drive him home, Radbuka refused at first to get up.
Max looked at him sternly. “You must leave now, Mr. Radbuka, unless you wish to create a situation in which you would never be able to return here.”
His clown face a tragic mask, Radbuka got to his feet. With Morrell and Don again at his elbows, like wardens in a high-class mental hospital, he shambled sullenly to the door.
XVIII Old Lovers
Downstairs, the party was over. The waitstaff was cleaning up the remains, vacuuming food from the carpets and washing up the last of the dishes. In the living room, Carl and Michael were debating the tempo in a Brahms nonet, playing passages on the grand piano while Agnes Loewenthal watched from a couch with her legs curled under her.
She looked up when I glanced in the doorway, hurriedly untangling her feet to run over to me before I could follow Morrell and Don outside. “Vic! Who is that extraordinary man? Carl has been beside himself over this intrusion. He went into the sunroom and shouted at Lotty about it until Michael stopped him. What is going on?”
I shook my head. “I honestly don’t know. This guy thinks he spent his childhood in the camps. He says he only recently discovered his birth name was Radbuka, so he came here hoping Max or Carl was related to him, because he thought that one of their friends in England had family of that name.”
“But that doesn’t make sense!” Agnes cried.
Max came down the stairs behind us, his gait heavy with extreme weariness. “So he’s gone, is he, Victoria? No, it doesn’t make sense. Nothing tonight made much sense. Lotty fainting? I’ve watched her take bullets out of people without flinching. What did you think of this creature, Victoria? Do you believe his story? It’s an extraordinary tale.”
I was so tired myself that I was seeing sparks in front of my eyes. “I don’t know what I think. He’s so volatile, moving from tears to triumphal glee and back in thirty seconds. And every time he gets a new piece of information, he changes his story. Where was he born? In Lodz? Berlin? Vienna? I’m staggered that Rhea Wiell would hypnotize someone that unstable-I’d think it would demolish his fragile connection to reality. But-all these symptoms could be caused by exactly what he says happened to him. An infancy spent in Terezin-I don’t know how you’d recover from that.”
In the living room, Michael and Carl were playing the same passage on the piano over and over, with variations in tempo and tone that were too subtle for me. The repetition began grating on me.
The door to the sunroom opened and Lotty came into the hall, pale but composed. “Sorry, Max,” she murmured. “Sorry to leave you alone to deal with him, but I couldn’t face him. Nor could Carl, apparently-he came in to castigate me for refusing to join you upstairs. Now I gather Carl has returned to the world of music, leaving this one in our possession.”
“Lotty.” Max held up a hand. “If you and Carl want to keep fighting, take it someplace else. Neither of you had anything to contribute to what was going on upstairs. But one thing I would like to know-”
The doorbell interrupted him-Morrell, returning with Don.
“He must live close by,” I said. “You were hardly gone a minute.”
Morrell came over to me. “He asked to be dropped at a place where he could get a cab. Which frankly I was happy to do. A little of the guy goes far with me, so I left him in front of the Orrington, where there’s a taxi stand.”
“Did you get his address?”
Morrell shook his head. “I asked when we got into the car, but he announced he would go home by cab.”
“I tried asking for it, too,” Don said, “because of course I want to interview him, but he’d decided we were an untrustworthy bunch.”
“Ah, nuts,” I said. “Now I’m back to square one with finding him. Unless I can track the cab.”
“Did he say anything upstairs?” Lotty asked. “Anything about how he came to think his name was Radbuka?”
I leaned against Morrell, swaying with fatigue. “Just more mumbo jumbo about these mystery documents of his father. Foster father. And how they proved Ulrich was part of the Einsatzgruppen.”
“What’s that?” Agnes asked, her blue eyes troubled.
“Special forces that committed special atrocities in eastern Europe during the war,” Max said tersely. “Lotty, since you’re feeling better, I would like some information from you now: who is Sofie Radbuka? I think you might explain to me, and to Vic here, why it had such an effect on you.”
“I told Vic,” Lotty said. “I told her the Radbukas were one of the families that you inquired about for our group of friends in London.”
I’d been about to suggest to Morrell that we go home, but I wanted to hear what Lotty would say to Max. “Could we sit down?” I asked Max. “I’m dead on my feet.”
“ Victoria, of course.” Max ushered us into the living room, where Carl and Michael were still fiddling with their music.
Michael looked over at us. He told Carl they could finish the discussion on the way to Los Angeles and came over to sit next to Agnes. I pictured Michael with his cello stuck between his legs in an airplane seat, bowing the same twelve measures over and over while Carl played them on his clarinet at a different pace.
“You haven’t eaten, have you?” Morrell said to me. “Let me try to rustle you up a snack-you’ll feel better.”
“You didn’t get dinner?” Max exclaimed. “All this upheaval is erasing ordinary courtesy from my mind.”
He sent one of the waiters to the kitchen for a tray of leftovers and drinks. “Now, Lotty, it’s your turn on the hot seat. I’ve respected your privacy all these years and I will continue to do so. But you need to explain to us why the name Sofie Radbuka rattled you so badly this evening. I know I looked for Radbukas for you in Vienna after the war. Who were they?”
“It wasn’t the name,” Lotty said. “It was the whole aspect of that-” She broke off, biting her lip like a schoolgirl, when she saw Max gravely shake his head.
“It-it was someone at the hospital,” Lotty muttered, looking at the carpet. “At the Royal Free. Who didn’t want their name public.”
“So that was it,” Carl said with a venom that startled all of us. “I knew it at the time. I knew it and you denied it.”
Lotty flushed, a wave of crimson almost as dark as her jacket. “You made such stupid accusations that I didn’t think you deserved an answer.”
“About what?” Agnes asked, as bewildered as I was.
Carl said, “You must have realized by now that Lotty and I were lovers for some years in London. I thought it would be forever, but that’s because I didn’t know Lotty had married medicine.”
“Unlike you and music,” Lotty snapped.
“Right,” I said, leaning over to serve myself scalloped potatoes and salmon from the tray the waiter had brought. “You both had strong senses of vocation. Neither of you would budge. Then what happened?”
“Then Lotty developed TB. Or so she said.” Carl bit off the words.
He turned back to Lotty. “You never told me you were ill. You never said good-bye! I got your letter-letter? A notice in The Times would have told me more!-when I returned from E
dinburgh, there it was, that cold, cryptic note. I ran across town. That imbecile landlady in your lodgings-I can still see her face, with the horrible mole on her nose and all the hairs sticking out of it-she told me. She was smirking. From her I learned you were in the country. From her I learned you’d instructed her to forward all your mail to Claire Tallmadge, the Ice Queen. Not from you. I loved you. I thought you loved me. But you couldn’t even tell me good-bye.”
He stopped, panting, then added bitterly, “To this day I do not understand why you let that Tallmadge woman run you around the way she did,” he said to Lotty. “She was so-so supercilious. You were her little Jewish pet. Couldn’t you ever see how she looked down on you? And the rest of that family. The vapid sister, Vanessa, and her insufferable husband, what was his name? Marmalade?”
“Marmaduke,” Lotty said. “As you know quite well, Carl. Besides, you resented anyone I paid more attention to than you.”
“My God, you two,” Max said. “You should join Calia up in the nursery. Could we get to the point?”
“Besides,” Lotty said, flushing again at Max’s criticism, “when I returned to the Royal Free, Claire-Claire felt her friendship with me was inappropriate. She-I didn’t even know she retired until I saw it in the Royal Free newsletter this spring.”
“What did the Radbukas have to do with this?” Don asked.
“I went to see Queen Claire,” Carl snarled. “She told me she was forwarding Lotty’s mail to a receiving office in Axmouth in care of someone named Sofie Radbuka. But when I wrote, my mail was returned to me, with a note scribbled on the envelope that there was no one there by that name. I even took a train out from London one Monday and walked three miles through the countryside to this cottage. There were lights on inside, Lotty, but you wouldn’t answer the door. I stayed there all afternoon, but you never came out.
“Six months went by, and suddenly Lotty was back in London. With no word to me. No response to my letters. No explanation. As if our life together had never taken place. Who was Sofie Radbuka, Lotty? Your lover? Did the two of you sit in there all afternoon laughing at me?”
Lotty was leaning back in an armchair, her eyes shut, the lines in her face sharply drawn. So might she look dead. The thought made me clutch at my stomach.
“Sofie Radbuka no longer existed, so I borrowed her name,” she said in the thread of a voice, not opening her eyes. “It seems stupid now, but we all did unaccountable things in those days. The only mail I accepted was from the hospital-everything else I sent back unread, just as I did your letters. I had a mortal condition. I needed to be alone while I coped with it. I loved you, Carl. But no one could reach me in the alone place I was. Not you, not Max, no one. When I-recovered-I had no capacity for talking to you. It-the only thing I knew to do was draw a line. You-you never seemed inconsolable to me.”
Max went to sit next to her, taking her hand, but Carl got up to pace furiously about the room. “Oh, yes, I had lovers,” he spat over his shoulder. “Lovers aplenty that I wanted you to know about. But it was many years before I fell in love again and by then I was out of practice, I couldn’t make it last. Three marriages in forty years and how many mistresses in between? I’m a byword among women in orchestras.”
“Don’t blame me for that,” Lotty said coldly, sitting up. “You can choose how to act. I don’t bear responsibility for that.”
“Yes, you can choose to be remote as ever. Poor Loewenthal, he wants you to marry him and can’t figure out why you won’t. He doesn’t realize you’re made of scalpels and ligatures, not heart and muscle.”
“Carl, I can manage my own business,” Max said, half laughing, half exasperated. “But returning to the present, if I may, if the Radbukas are gone, how exactly did this man tonight get the name in the first place?”
“Yes,” Lotty agreed. “That’s why I was so startled to hear it.”
“Do you have any sense of how to find that out, Victoria?” Max asked.
I yawned ferociously. “I don’t know. I don’t know how to get him to let me see these mystery documents. The other end of the investigation would be his past. I don’t know what kind of immigration records might survive from ’47 or ’48, when he would have come into this country. If he really was even an immigrant.”
“He is at least a speaker of German,” Lotty said unexpectedly. “When he first arrived, I wondered if any of his story was true-you know, on the tape he claimed to have come here as a small child, speaking German. So I asked him in German if he was brought up on the myth of the Ulrichs as wolflike warriors. He clearly understood me.”
I tried to remember the sequence of remarks in the hall but I couldn’t quite get everything straight. “That’s when he said he wouldn’t speak the language of his slavery, isn’t it?” Another yawn engulfed me. “No more tonight. Carl, Michael, the concert today was brilliant. I hope the rest of the tour goes as well-that this disturbance in the field doesn’t affect your music. Are you going on with them?” I added to Agnes.
She shook her head. “The tour goes on for four more weeks. Calia and I will stay with Max another five days, then return directly to England. She should be in kindergarten right now, but we wanted her to have this time with her Opa.”
“By which time I will also know the story of Ninshubur the faithful hound by heart.” Max smiled, although his eyes remained grave.
Morrell took me by the hand. We stumbled out to his car together while Don trailed behind us, getting in a few lungfuls of nicotine. An Evanston patrol car was inspecting Morrell’s car stickers: the town makes money by having capricious parking regulations. Morrell was outside his own parking zone, but we got into the car before the man actually wrote a ticket.
I slumped against the front seat. “I’ve never been around so much emotion for so many hours.”
“Exhausting,” Morrell agreed. “I don’t think this man Paul is a fraud, do you?”
“Not in the sense that he’s deliberately trying to con us,” I murmured, my eyes shut. “He sincerely believes what he’s saying, but he’s alarming; he believes a new thing at the drop of a hat.”
“It’s a hell of a story, one way or another,” Don said. “I wonder if I should go to England to check up on the Radbuka family.”
“That gets you kind of far from your book with Rhea Wiell,” I said. “And as Morrell advised me yesterday, is it really necessary to go sleuthing after Lotty’s past?”
“Only insofar as it seems to have invaded the present,” Don answered. “I thought she was lying, didn’t you? About it being someone at the Royal Free, I mean.”
“I thought she was making it clear it was her business, not ours,” I said sharply, as Morrell pulled into the alley behind his building.
“That history between Lotty and Carl.” I shivered as I followed Morrell down the hall to the bedroom. “Lotty’s pain, Carl’s, too, but Lotty feeling so alone she couldn’t tell her lover she was dying. I can’t bear it.”
“Tomorrow’s my last day here,” Morrell complained. “I have to pack, and I have to spend the day again with State Department officials. Instead of with you, my darling, as I would prefer. I could have done with less trauma tonight and more sleep.”
I flung my clothes onto a chair, but Morrell hung his suit tidily in the closet. He did at least leave his weekend bag to unpack in the morning.
“You’re a little like Lotty, Vic.” Morrell held me in the dark. “If something goes amiss with you, don’t creep away to a cottage under a fake name to lick your wounds alone.”
They were a comfort, those words, with his departure so close, with the turbulence of the last few hours still shaking me. They spread around me in the dark, those words, calming me into sleep.
Lotty Herschel’s Story:
V-E Day
I took Hugo to Piccadilly Circus for the V-E Day celebrations. Masses of people, fireworks, a speech by the king broadcast over loudspeakers-the crowd was euphoric. I shared some of the feeling-although for me complete
euphoria was impossible. It wasn’t just because of the newsreels of Belsen and other camps that had sickened the English that spring: stories of death had been floating in from Europe with the immigrant community for some time. Even Minna had been furious over some of the MPs’ callous response to the men who had escaped from Auschwitz when it was first being built.
I would get impatient with Hugo, because he couldn’t remember Oma and Opa, or even Mama, very clearly. He hardly remembered any German, whereas I had to hang on to the language because that’s what Cousin Minna spoke at home. In 1942 she had married Victor, a horrid old man who she was sure was going to inherit the glove factory. He had a stroke before the owner died and it went to someone else, so there she was, stuck with an elderly sick husband and no money. But he was from Hamburg, so of course they spoke German to each other. It took me longer than Hugo to learn English, longer to fit in at school, longer to feel at home in England.
For Hugo, coming to England at five, life began with the Nussbaum family. They treated him like a son. In fact, Mr. Nussbaum wanted to adopt Hugo, but that upset me so much that the Nussbaums dropped the idea. I see things differently now, see Hugo’s turning to them, trusting them, as the natural state of a five-year-old, not an abandonment of my parents-and of me. Probably if I’d lived with someone who cherished me, my reaction to the idea would have been different-although Mr. Nussbaum was always very kind to me and tried to include me in his regular Sunday outings with my brother.
But I was especially angry with Hugo on V-E Day, because he thought the end of the war meant he would have to return to Austria. He didn’t want to leave the Nussbaums or his friends at school, and he was hoping I would explain to Mama and Papa that he would only come for the summers.
I realize now my anger was partly fueled by my own anxieties. I longed for the loving family I’d lost, longed to put Cousin Minna and her constant criticism behind me, but I, too, had friends and a school that I didn’t want to leave. I was turning sixteen, with two years to work toward my higher-school certificate. I could see that it would be as hard to return to Austria as it had been to come to England six years earlier-harder, since the ruin of war might make it impossible for me to finish school there.
Total Recall Page 17
