Total Recall

by Sara Paretsky

  XXVI Hypnotic Suggestion

  Outside, I turned the corner and went into the comparative quiet of the alley to check in with Tim Streeter. He was at the zoo with Calia. Radbuka had appeared in the park again as they were getting into Tim’s car, but Tim had found him more annoying than alarming.

  “Of course we both know that stalkers turn violent, but at least as far as today went, he seemed more bewildered than menacing: he kept saying he only wanted a chance to speak to Max, to find out about his true family. But Calia started shrieking, which brought Agnes to the scene. She yelled for the cops, who did eventually come, she says-I’d already taken off after him. I did tell Radbuka he would have to leave, that Max was swearing out a peace bond, which meant he could be arrested for hanging around the premises.”

  I blinked. “Is Max doing that?”

  “I called the hospital and told him he really should. Anyway, everyone seems calm now. Agnes stayed at home to paint: I called my brother and told him to get up to look after the house. I wanted to get the kid out so that Agnes doesn’t freak thinking her daughter’s life is in imminent danger. Which it isn’t. Guy is a nuisance, but he’s physically no match for any of us.”

  I frowned, worried. “Could he have followed you to the zoo?”

  “No. He was on a bike. My brother phoned from the house half an hour ago to say he did a thorough search of Max’s garden and the park across the street and didn’t see any sign of Radbuka.”

  “How’s Calia now?”

  “Fine. We’re looking at real walruses-I’m supposed to be getting tips on how to beg for fish. Seeing me cool keeps her cool.”

  A delivery truck backed into the alley, its insistent beep making it impossible to hear anything else Tim was saying. I bellowed that I’d check at Max’s later.

  I skirted the edge of the truck, feeling unusually ineffectual. I hadn’t made any progress on Radbuka’s past. I hadn’t done anything for the Sommers family. Lotty, whose state was alarming me, wouldn’t talk to me. Rossy’s apartment was near hers on Lake Shore Drive. I supposed I could try to drop in on her tonight on my way to dinner, but I couldn’t think of a way to get her to confide in me.

  I crossed Michigan Avenue to the statue garden by the Art Institute, where I called the office to see whether Mary Louise was making any progress showing Radbuka’s photo to neighbors of the various Ulrich families listed around town. She’d been trying to dodge the assignment, but when I told her about Radbuka lurking around Max’s she agreed we needed some kind of wedge. If she could find someone who knew Radbuka when he was still Ulrich, that might give us a starting point.

  The easiest wedge would clearly come from getting Rhea Wiell to help out. Since I was in the Loop already, I decided to pay a surprise visit: maybe she’d be more responsive in person than on the phone. And if she wouldn’t give me background material on her patient, maybe she’d at least help come up with a strategy for controlling him.

  I walked the length of Michigan Avenue to Water Tower Place, stopping partway up for something the shop called a vegetarian sandwich. The mild day had drawn a throng of office workers outside for lunch. I sat on a marble slab between a guy buried in a paperback and a couple of women who were smoking while denouncing someone’s horrible behavior in asking them to fill out a second set of time sheets.

  The sandwich turned out to be a thick roll with a few slices of eggplant and peppers. I crumbled up part of the roll for the sparrows who were pecking hopefully at my feet. Out of nowhere a dozen pigeons appeared, trying to muscle the sparrows aside.

  The guy with the paperback looked at me in disgust. “You’re only encouraging pests, you know.” He dog-eared his page and got up.

  “I wonder if you’re right.” I stood as well. “I always thought my work was keeping them at bay, but you may be on to something.”

  His disgust changed to alarm and he turned hastily into the office building behind us. I crumbled the rest of the bread for the birds. It was almost one o’clock. Morrell would be over the Atlantic now, away from land, away from me. I felt a little hollow below my diaphragm and increased my pace, as if I could leave loneliness behind me.

  At Rhea Wiell’s office, a young woman was sitting in the waiting room, her hands nervously clutching a cup of herbal tea. I sat down and studied the fish in the aquarium while the woman darted suspicious looks at me.

  “What time is your appointment?” I asked.

  “One-fifteen. Are you-when is yours?”

  If my watch was right, it wasn’t quite ten after. “I’m a drop-in. I’m hoping Ms. Wiell will have a break in her schedule this afternoon. How long have you been seeing her? Has she been helpful?”

  “Very.” She didn’t say anything else for a minute, but as I continued to watch the fish and the silence built, she added, “Rhea’s helped me become aware of parts of my life that were shut away from me before.”

  “I’ve never been hypnotized,” I said. “What’s it like?”

  “Are you afraid? I was, too, before my first session, but it’s not like they show it in the movies. It’s like riding an elevator down into the middle of your own past. You can get off on these different floors and explore them, only with the safety of having Rhea right next to you, instead of-well, being alone, or being with the monsters who were there when you had to live through the time originally.”

  The door to the inner room opened. The woman immediately turned to watch for Rhea, who came out with Don Strzepek. The two were laughing in a kind of easy intimacy. Don looked wide awake, while Rhea, instead of her flowing jacket and trousers, had put on a red dress that fit snugly around the bodice. When she saw me she flushed and withdrew slightly from Don.

  “Have you come to see me? I have another appointment right now.” For the first time in our brief acquaintance her smile held genuine warmth. I didn’t take it personally-I knew it was the overflow from Don-but it made my own response more natural.

  “Something rather serious has come up. I can wait until you’re free, but we ought to talk.”

  She turned to the waiting patient. “Isabel, I’m not going to start your session late, but I need one moment alone with this woman.”

  When I moved with her to the entrance to her inner room, Don trailed after me. “Paul Radbuka has started stalking Mr. Loewenthal’s family. I’d like to talk to you about strategies for managing the situation.”

  “Stalking? That’s a fairly extreme criticism. You may be misinterpreting his behavior, but even if you are, we definitely should discuss it.” She went behind her desk to look at her calendar. “I can fit you in at two-thirty for fifteen minutes.”

  She nodded regally to me, but when she glanced at Don her expression softened again. When she walked us out to the waiting area, it was to him that she said, “I’ll see you at two-thirty, then.”

  “Looks as though things are going well with your book,” I said once we were out in the hall.

  “Her work is fascinating,” Don said. “I let her hypnotize me yesterday. It was wonderful, like floating in a warm ocean in a totally secure boat.”

  I watched him reflexively touch his breast pocket while we waited for an elevator. “Have you stopped smoking? Or remembered buried secrets about your mother?”

  “Don’t be sarcastic, Vic. She put me in a light trance so I could see what it was like, not a deeper one for memory recovery. Anyway, she never uses a deeper trance until she’s worked with a patient long enough to make sure they trust each other. And to make sure the patient’s strong enough to survive the process. Arnold Praeger and the Planted Memory guys will definitely be sorry they’ve tried to trash her reputation when this book comes out.”

  “She’s put some kind of spell on you,” I teased as we rode to the lobby. “I’ve never heard you abandon journalistic caution before.”

  He flushed. “There are legitimate grounds for concern with any therapeutic method. I’ll make that clear in the text. This isn’t an apology for Rhea but a chance for people to
understand the validity of recovered-memory work. I’ll give the Planted Memory camp their say. But they’ve never taken the time to understand Rhea’s methods.”

  Don had first met Rhea Wiell when I did, four days ago, and he was already a true believer. I wondered why her spell didn’t work on me. When we met on Friday, she’d realized I approached her with skepticism, not Don’s admiration, but she hadn’t tried to charm me out of it. I’d thought perhaps she didn’t try as hard with women as with men, but the young patient in the waiting room was clearly also a votary. Was Mary Louise right? Did Rhea and I instinctively distrust each other because we both wanted to command the situation? Or was my gut telling me there was a problem with Rhea? I didn’t think she was a charlatan, but I did wonder if a steady diet of adulation from people like Paul Radbuka had gone to her head.

  “Earth to Vic-for the third time, do you want coffee while we wait?”

  I realized with a jolt that we were standing outside the elevators on the ground floor. “Is that what hypnosis is like?” I asked. “You become so lost in your own space that you lose awareness of the outside world?”

  Don steered me outside so he could light a cigarette. “You’re asking a novice. But I think they consider losing yourself like that akin to a trance. It’s called imaginative dissociation, something like that.”

  I stood upwind from him while he finished his cigarette, checking in again first with Tim Streeter, who said there was nothing new to report, and then with my answering service. By the time I’d returned a couple of client calls, Don was ready to move into the hotel for a cup of coffee. In the tree-filled terrace at the Ritz, I got him to give me a digest of the research he’d been doing the last four days.

  He had a wealth of data about the way in which hypnosis had been used to treat people with traumatic symptoms. One man who’d had terrible fantasies about having his neck wrenched off his shoulders turned out to have seen his mother hanging herself when he was three: his father was able to confirm all the details that the son produced under hypnosis. The father had never discussed them with his son, hoping that the boy had been too young to understand what he was watching. There were also plenty of documented cases of people hearing what was said around them under total anesthesia and being able to reconstruct whole operating-room conversations through hypnosis. Rhea herself had worked with a number of incest victims whose memories recovered under hypnosis had been validated by siblings or other adults.

  “We’re going to be using several pairs in one chapter-the holder of memory and the suppressor of memory. But of course the most interesting chapter will be about Radbuka. So neither Rhea nor I is at all happy to have you questioning the validity of what he’s saying.”

  I rested my chin on my hands and looked at him squarely. “Don, I don’t doubt the value of hypnosis, or the validity of recovered memories, under certain strict guidelines. I sit on the board of a women’s shelter, and I’ve witnessed the phenomenon myself.

  “But in Radbuka’s case, it’s a question of who he is-emotionally and, well, genealogically, for want of a better word. Max Loewenthal isn’t lying when he says the Radbukas aren’t related to him, but Paul Radbuka so desperately wants the relationship to exist that he can’t pay attention to reality. I can understand it, understand how growing up with an abusing father would make him reach out to other relatives. If I could just have access to some background information about him, I might be able to track down where-if at all-his life intersects with any of Max’s London circle.”

  “But he doesn’t want you to have that information. He called Rhea at noon while I was with her to say you were doing everything you could to bar him from his family. He implored her not to give you any details about him.”

  “That explains why she’s so cold to me. I’m sure it’s to her credit that she’s so protective of her patients. But you were at Max’s on Sunday-you saw what Radbuka was like. Even assuming all the things he remembered in hypnosis are true-it doesn’t mean he’s related to Max just because he wants that to be so.” I tried to lighten the conversation by adding, “That would bring Rhea’s work to the level of Timothy Leary on acid, talking to his chromosomes to recover his previous incarnations.”

  “Vic!” Don protested. “You really mustn’t reduce this kind of therapy to a Jay Leno routine. A week ago I might have made the same kind of cheap joke, but-if you’d seen this process up close, learned about the kinds of things people grapple with as they unblock the past-you’d be more respectful, I guarantee it. In the case of Radbuka, too, Rhea knows the guy has a lot of problems. She’s genuinely worried about what you’re trying to do to him.”

  I looked at my watch and signaled for the check. “Don, I know you’ve only met me a few times during this past year, but do you think your friend Morrell would be in love with me if I was the kind of monster who deliberately drove a wedge between a war orphan and his family?”

  Don smiled ruefully. “Oh, hell, Vic. Of course not. But you’re very close to Loewenthal and his friends. Your own judgment could be distorted by your desire to protect them.”

  I was tempted to believe Rhea Wiell had given Don some posthypnotic suggestion to eschew me and all my works. But the real spell came from a deeper, more fundamental source, I realized, watching his eyes light up when I said it was time to cross back over to the office building. As my father used to say, never try to stop a man with an ax, or a man in love.

  XXVII New Disciple

  By the time I finished my conversation with Rhea, I was ready to bonk her on the head and take my chances on a self-defense plea. I’d started with the premise that we all wanted what was best for the main players in our little drama and that this meant not just Paul but Calia and Agnes as well. Rhea gave one of those regal nods that made me want to revert to my street-fighting roots. I concentrated on a painting of a Japanese farmyard that hung above her couch and told her about Paul’s two attempts to accost Calia.

  “The family is starting to feel as though they’re being stalked,” I said. “Mr. Loewenthal’s lawyer wants him to swear out a peace bond, but I thought if you and I talked, we might head off an extreme confrontation.”

  “I don’t believe Paul would stalk anyone,” Rhea said. “He’s not only very gentle, but he’s easily frightened. I’m not saying he wasn’t at Max’s house,” she added as I started to object, “but I imagine him standing in the park like the little match girl in the fairy tale, longing to be part of the festivities he can see through the window, while none of the rich children will acknowledge his existence.”

  I smiled, still on my best behavior. “Unfortunately, Calia is a five-year-old-an age where frightened, needy grown-ups are terrifying. Her mother is understandably alarmed, because she thinks someone might be threatening her child. When Paul comes out of the bushes at the two of them, it scares them both. His longing for a family may be making it hard for him to see how his behavior could appear to other people.”

  Rhea bent her head, a swanlike gesture that seemed to have a hint of acquiescence in it. “But why won’t Max Loewenthal acknowledge him?”

  I wanted to scream, “Because there’s nothing to acknowledge, you fatheaded flea-brain,” but I leaned forward with an expression of great earnestness. “Mr. Loewenthal truly is not related to your client. This morning he showed me the file he kept from his search for missing families in postwar Europe. The file includes a letter from the person who asked him to hunt for the Radbukas. On Sunday, when Paul crashed his party, Mr. Loewenthal offered to go over these papers with him, but Paul didn’t want to make an appointment for a more convenient time. I’m sure Mr. Loewenthal would still be glad for Paul to see the papers if he thought that would set his mind at rest.”

  “Have you seen these documents, Don?” Rhea turned to him with a touching display of female fragility. “If you could take a look at them, if you agree with-with Vic, I would feel better.”

  Don swelled slightly at her trust in him. I tried not to make a mocking grima
ce but said I felt sure that Max would want things done as quickly as possible.

  “I have a dinner engagement this evening, but if Don’s free, I can ask Max to meet with him,” I added. “In the meantime, it would be shocking if Paul were arrested because of this unhappy misunderstanding. So could you suggest that he stay away from the house until he hears from Mr. Loewenthal? If we could have a phone number where Mr. Loewenthal could reach him?”

  Rhea shook her head, a contemptuous little smile at the corners of her mouth. “You really don’t give up, do you? I am not going to let you have my client’s home number or address. He sees you as the person who’s keeping him from his family. If you were to show up on his front step, it would be a major disintegrating event to his fragile sense of self.”

  I felt all the muscles in my neck clench with the effort not to lose my temper openly. “I’m not challenging the work you’ve done with him, Rhea. But if I could see the documents he found in his father’s-foster father’s-papers, I could use them to track down who in London might have been part of his family. The journey he thinks he made, from his unknown birthplace to Terezin, and then to London and Chicago, is so tortuous that we might never be able to follow it. But at least the documents that told him his birth name might give a skilled investigator a place to start.”

  “You say you’re not challenging my work, but in the next sentence you refer to the journey Paul thinks he made. This is a journey he did make, even though the details were blocked from his conscious mind for fifty years. Like you, I am a skilled investigator, but one with greater experience than you in exploring the past.”

  The discreet temple bell chimed; she turned to look at a clock on her desktop. “I need to clear my mind of all this conflict before my next patient arrives. I’ll be certain to tell Paul that he can only expect hostility if he keeps trying to see Max Loewenthal.”

  “That will be helpful to all of us,” I said. “I have someone showing Radbuka’s photograph to neighbors of families named Ulrich in the hopes of finding his childhood home. So if he reports back to you that someone is spying on him-it’s true.”