Total Recall

by Sara Paretsky

  “I’ve always been way too impulsive, Ralph, but-you can’t fling accusations at me without something more to go on than my unorthodox methods. Also, you need to face the fact that someone was in that drawer. Your and Ms. Bigelow’s solution is a Band-Aid: the team investigating Fepple’s murder should know that someone stole that microfiche. You should get them in here, regardless of the PR consequences. As for Connie Ingram, she should answer those questions, but you can show you’re a good guy by alerting Ajax ’s legal team. Make sure senior counsel is with her when she’s questioned. She seems to trust Ms. Bigelow; have Bigelow sit in on the interrogation. A lot will hinge on when her name was entered into Fepple’s computer. And whether she has an alibi for last Friday night.”

  The elevator door pinged. As I got on, Ralph asked me casually where I’d been on Friday night.

  “With friends who will vouch for me.”

  “Your friends would, Vic,” Ralph said sourly.

  “Cheer up.” I put a hand in between the doors to keep them from closing. “Connie Ingram’s mother will do the same for her. And Ralph? Trust your instinct on that Sommers file: if your sixth sense is telling you something isn’t quite right, try to figure it out, will you?”

  The street was quiet by the time I reached the lobby. The bulk of homebound commuters were gone, making it pointless for Posner and Durham to parade their troops. A few extra cops lingered at the intersection, but except for flyers scattered along the curb, there was no sign of the mob that had been here when I arrived. I’d missed a chance to tail Radbuka home. Radbuka, whose father’s name hadn’t been Ulrich.

  On my way to the garage I stopped in a doorway to call Max, partly to tell him I didn’t think Radbuka would be around tonight, partly to see if he’d be willing to show Don the papers about his search for the Radbuka family.

  “This Streeter fellow is very good with the little one,” Max said. “It’s been a big help to have him here. I think we’ll ask him to stay on tonight, even if you know that this man calling himself Radbuka won’t be coming around.”

  “You should keep Tim, no question: I can’t guarantee Radbuka won’t bother you, just that he’s attached himself to Joseph Posner for the moment. I saw him marching with Posner outside the Ajax building an hour ago-and I’m betting that’s making him feel accepted enough to keep him away from you overnight-but he’s a loose cannon; he could come shooting back.”

  I told him about my meeting with Rhea Wiell. “She’s the one person who seems able to exercise some control over him, but for some reason she isn’t willing to. If you let Don look at your notes from your difficult trip to Europe after the war, he might persuade her that you really aren’t related to Paul Radbuka.”

  When Max agreed, I left a message on Don’s cell-phone voice mail, telling him he should call Max.

  It was six-thirty-not enough time for me to go home or to my office before dinner. Maybe I would try to drop in on Lotty, after all, before going to the Rossys’.

  Six-thirty here, one-thirty in the morning in Rome, where Morrell would be just about landing. He’d spend tomorrow in Rome with the Humane Medicine team, fly to Islamabad on Thursday, and travel by land into Afghanistan. For a moment I felt bowed down by desolation: my fatigue, Max’s worries, Lotty’s turmoil-and Morrell, half a world away. I was too alone in this big city.

  A homeless man selling copies of Streetwise danced over to me, hawking his paper. What he saw in my face made him change his pitch.

  “Honey, whatever’s happening to you, it can’t be that bad. You got a roof over your head, right? You got three squares a day when you take the time to eat them? Even if your mama’s dead you know she loved you-so cheer up.”

  “Ah, the kindness of strangers,” I said, fishing a single out of my jacket pocket.

  “That’s right. Nothing kinder than strangers, nothing stranger than kindness. You heard it here first. You have a blessed evening, and keep that pretty smile coming.”

  I won’t say he sent me on my way laughing with delight, but I did manage to whistle “Whenever I feel afraid” as I walked down the steps to the garage.

  I took Lake Shore Drive north to Belmont, where I got off and started nosing around for a parking place. Lotty lived half a mile up the road, but street parking is at such a premium here that I grabbed the first space I saw. It turned out to be a lucky opening, only half a block from the Rossys’ front door.

  I had kept deferring phoning Lotty on my way north: I wouldn’t do it from the street downtown because I didn’t want background noise interfering. I wouldn’t do it from the car because it’s dangerous to drive and dial. Now-I’d do it as soon as I’d shut my eyes for five minutes, emptied my mind, gotten the illusion of rest so I could be strong enough for whatever emotional fastballs Lotty pitched at me.

  I pulled the lever so that the front seat was stretched almost horizontal. As I leaned back, I saw a limo pull up in front of Rossy’s building. I watched idly, wondering if it was Rossy, being dropped at home by Ajax ’s chairman, ecstatic over today’s favorable vote in Springfield. Janoff and Rossy would take a limo back from Meigs Field, sharing a drink and a merry laugh in the backseat. When no one got out after several minutes, I lost interest-the car was waiting to pick up someone from the building.

  Rossy must be pretty ecstatic himself over today’s vote: Edelweiss Re had acquired Ajax to serve as their U.S. beachhead. They wouldn’t have been pleased at all if Illinois had voted that they had to scour their records hunting out policies sold to people who were murdered in Europe-a search like that would have cost a tidy bundle. Ajax must have tossed a fair amount of cash at the legislature to get the vote to go their way-but I suppose they figured that was cheaper than opening up their life-insurance book to public scrutiny.

  Of course, it wasn’t likely that Ajax had sold many policies in central or eastern Europe in the 1930’s, unless they had a subsidiary that had done a lot of business there, which I didn’t think was the case. Insurance, like most business, had been regional before the Second World War. Still, Edelweiss itself might have had a Holocaust exposure. But as Ajax chairman Janoff had contended today, waving Amy Blount’s history at the legislature, Edelweiss had only been a small regional player before the war.

  I wondered idly how they’d turned into the international giant they were today. Maybe they’d made out like bandits during the war itself-there must have been a lot of money to be made, insuring all the chemicals and optics and crap the Swiss produced for the German war effort. Not that it was relevant to the bill that the state was considering, which only dealt with life insurance, but people vote emotions, not facts. If someone showed that Edelweiss had gotten rich on the Third Reich’s war machine, the legislature would punish them by making them open their life-insurance files.

  The limo driver opened his door and stood up. I blinked: it was a Chicago cop. Someone from the city on official business was up here. When the building door swung open, I sat up, looking to see if the mayor was coming out. The man who actually emerged made my jaw drop. I’d seen that bullet head and perfectly tailored navy jacket downtown only two hours ago. Alderman Louis “Bull” Durham. A lot of powerful people lived on this stretch of Lake Shore Drive, but I was betting it was Bertrand Rossy he’d been visiting.

  While I was still staring at the front of Rossy’s building, wondering who was paying off whom, I got a second jolt: a figure in a bowler hat, tassels visible under his open coat, rose like a jack-in-the-box from the bushes and marched into the lobby. I got out of my car and moved down the street so I could see into the front door. Joseph Posner was gesticulating at the doorman. What on earth was going on?

  XXX Party Time?

  When I jogged, panting, into the Rossys’ foyer an hour later, I’d temporarily forgotten Durham and Posner. My mind was mostly on Lotty, whom I’d once again left in distress-but I was also very aware that I was late, despite running the half mile down the street from her apartment. I’d stopped, breathless, at my car
to trade my turtleneck and crepe-soled shoes for the rose silk camisole and pumps. I stood still while I carefully put on my mother’s earrings, then combed my hair as I ran across the street. I tried to apply a little makeup in the elevator on my way to the eleventh floor. Even so, I felt disheveled when I got off-and worse when my hostess left her other guests to greet me.

  Fillida Rossy was a woman in her early thirties, almost as tall as me. Her raw-silk palazzo pants, with a nubby sweater in the same dull gold hugging her chest, emphasized both her slenderness and her wealth. Her dark-blond curls were pulled back from her face with a couple of diamond clips, and another larger diamond nestled in the hollow above her breastbone.

  She took my outstretched hand in both of hers and almost caressed it. “My husband has made me so interested in meeting you, signora,” she said in Italian. “Your talk to him was so full of entertaining surprises: he told me how you read his palm.”

  She led me forward by the hand to greet the other guests, who included the Italian cultural attaché and his wife-a dark, vivacious woman around Fillida’s age-a Swiss banking executive and his wife-both much older-and an American novelist who had lived for many years in Sorrento.

  “This is the detective about whom Bertrand has been speaking, the one who conducts her business among the palm readers.”

  Fillida patted my own palm encouragingly, like a mother presenting a shy child to strangers. Uncomfortable, I withdrew my hand and asked where Signor Rossy was.

  “Mio marito si comparta scandalosamente,” she announced with a vivid smile. “He has adopted American business habits and is on the telephone instead of greeting his guests, which is scandalous, but he will join us shortly.”

  I murmured “piacere” to the other guests and tried to switch my thinking from English, and my conversation with Lotty, to Italian and the rival merits of Swiss, French, and Italian ski slopes, which was apparently what they had been discussing when I arrived. The attaché’s wife exclaimed enthusiastically over Utah and said that of course for Fillida, the more dangerous the slope the better she liked it.

  “When you invited me to your grandfather’s place in Switzerland our last year in school, I stayed in the lodge while you went down the most terrifying run I have ever seen-without even getting your hair out of place, as I remember it. Your grandfather puffed out through his moustache and pretended to be nonchalant, but he was incredibly proud. Is your little Marguerita growing up similarly fearless?”

  Fillida threw up her hands, with their beautifully manicured nails, and said her reckless days were behind her. “Now I can hardly bear to let my babies out of my sight, so I stay with them on the beginner slopes. What I will do when they pine for the giant runs I don’t know. I’ve learned to pity my own mother, who suffered agonies over my recklessness.” Her gaze flickered to the marble mantelpiece, where photographs of her children were standing-so many of them that the frames were almost stacked on top of one another.

  “Then you won’t want to take them to Utah,” the banker’s wife said. “But there are good family slopes in New England.”

  Skiing wasn’t a subject I knew enough about to participate-even if I spoke Italian often enough to plunge at once into the rapid talk. I began to wish I had called to cancel and stayed with Lotty, who had seemed even more distressed and anxious this evening than she’d been on Sunday.

  After I’d seen Posner go into the Rossys’ building, I’d walked up the street to Lotty’s, not sure whether she would invite me up or not. After some hesitation, she had let the doorman admit me, but she was waiting in the hall when I got off the elevator on her floor. Before I could say anything, she demanded roughly what I wanted. I tried not to let her harshness hurt me but said I was worrying about her.

  She scowled. “As I told you earlier on the phone, I’m sorry I spoiled Max’s party, but I’m fine now. Did Max send you to check on me?”

  I shook my head. “Max is occupied with Calia’s safety. He’s not thinking about you right now.”

  “Calia’s safety?” Her thick black brows twitched together. “Max is a doting grandfather, but I don’t think of him as a worrywart.”

  “No, he’s not a worrywart,” I agreed. “Radbuka has been stalking Calia and Agnes.”

  “Stalking them? Are you sure?”

  “Hanging out across the street, accosting them when they leave, trying to make Agnes admit that Calia is related to him. Does that sound like stalking, or just a friendly visit?” I snapped, angry in spite of myself at her scornful tone.

  She pressed her palms into her eyes. “That’s ridiculous. How can he think she’s related?”

  I shrugged. “If any of us knew who he really was, or who the Radbukas really were, it might make that question easier to answer.”

  Her generous mouth set in a hard line. “I don’t owe any explanation-to you, to Max, least of all to this absurd creature. If he wants to play at being a survivor of Theresienstadt, let him.”

  “Play at? Lotty, do you know he’s playing at it?”

  My voice had risen; the door at the opposite end of the hall opened a crack. Lotty flushed and took me into her own apartment.

  “I don’t, of course. But Max-Max didn’t find any Radbukas when he went to Vienna. After the war, I mean. I don’t believe-I’d like to know where this bizarre man came up with the name.”

  I leaned against the wall, my arms crossed. “I told you I went out on the Web and found the person looking for information about Sofie Radbuka. I left my own message, saying he or she should communicate with my lawyer if they wanted to initiate a confidential conversation.”

  Her eyes blazed. “Why did you take it on yourself to do that?”

  “There are two impenetrable mysteries here: Sofie Radbuka of the 1940’s in England, Paul Radbuka of Chicago today. You want information about Paul, he wants information about Sofie, but neither of you is willing to divulge anything. I have to start somewhere.”

  “Why? Why do you have to start anywhere? Why don’t you leave it alone?”

  I seized her hands. “Lotty. Stop. Look at yourself. Ever since this man came on the scene last week, you’ve been demented. You’ve been howling on the sidewalk and then insisting that the rest of us pay no attention because there isn’t a problem. I can’t believe this isn’t spilling over into the operating room. You’re a danger to yourself, your friends, your patients, carrying on like this.”

  She jerked her hands away and looked at me sternly. “I have never compromised the attention I give my patients. Ever. Even in the aftermath of the war. Certainly not now.”

  “That’s just great, Lotty, but if you think you can go on like this indefinitely, you’re wrong.”

  “That’s my business. Not yours. Now, will you have the goodness to go back to this Web address and retract your message?”

  I chose my words carefully. “Lotty, nothing can threaten the love I have for you: it’s too deep a part of my life. Max told me he has always respected the zone of privacy you erected around the Radbuka family. I would do that, too, if it weren’t for this heartbreaking torment you’re suffering. That means-if you won’t tell me yourself what is torturing you, I need to find it out.”

  Her expression turned so stormy I thought she was going to blow up again, but she mastered herself and spoke quietly. “Mrs. Radbuka represents a part of my past of which I am ashamed. I-turned my back on her. She died while I was ignoring her. I don’t know that I could have saved her. I mean, probably I couldn’t have saved her. But-I abandoned her. The circumstances don’t matter; it’s only my behavior that you need to know about.”

  I knit my brow. “I know she wasn’t part of your group in London, or Max would know her. Was she a patient?”

  “My patients-I can treat them because our roles are so defined. It’s when people are outside that box that I become less reliable. I’ve never stinted a patient, not ever, not even in London when I was ill, when it was bitterly cold, when other students whisked through consultations
as fast as possible. It’s a relief, a salvation, to be in the hospital, to be the doctor, not the friend or the wife or the daughter, or someone else utterly unreliable.”

  I took her hands again. “Lotty, you’ve never been unreliable. I’ve known you since I was eighteen. You’ve always been present, warm, compassionate, a true friend. You’re beating yourself up for some sin that doesn’t exist.”

  “It’s true we’ve been friends this long time, but you aren’t God; you don’t know all my sins-any more than I know yours.” She spoke dryly, not the dryness of irony but as if she were too worn out for feeling. “But if this man, this man who thinks he’s one of the Radbukas, is threatening Calia-Calia is the mirror of Teresz. When I look at her-Teresz was the great beauty in our group. Not only that, she had great charm. Even at sixteen, when the rest of us were gauche. When I look at Calia, Teresz comes back so vividly. If I really thought harm might come to Calia-”

  She wouldn’t finish the sentence. If she really thought harm would come to Calia, she would finally tell me the truth? Or-what?

  In the silence that hung between us, I caught sight of the time and blurted out that I had to be at dinner. I didn’t like the tautness in Lotty’s face as she escorted me back to the elevator. Running down Lake Shore Drive to the Rossys’, I felt it was I who was the unreliable friend.

  Now, in a living room weighted down with bronze sculpture, nubbed-silk upholstery, enormous oil paintings, as I listened to the glittery chatter of skiing and whether a city like Chicago could possibly produce first-class opera, I felt utterly untethered from the world around me.

  XXXI Rich Tastes

  I moved away from the chatter to the French windows. They stood open so that guests could pass through the heavy drapes to stand on a small balcony. Lake Michigan lay in front of me, a black hole in the fabric of the night, visible only as a blot between the winking lights of airplanes heading for O’Hare and headlights of cars on the road below. I shivered.