Total Recall

by Sara Paretsky

  “No, Don, I don’t expect you to.” All I wanted him to do was be on my side, pump her for information, and feed it to me. That wasn’t really asking him to be in the middle. “But if you can persuade her that Max isn’t related to the Radbuka family, maybe she in turn can persuade Paul to stop making a scene up at Beth Israel. Only, Don, for God’s sake, please don’t feed Lotty to Rhea as a substitute for Max. I don’t know if the Radbukas were cousins or patients or enemy aliens in London whom Lotty was close to, but she won’t survive the kind of harassment Paul’s been giving Max.”

  I waited for his response, but he wouldn’t promise me anything. I ended up slamming the phone down in disgust.

  Before giving up detecting for the day, I also phoned Amy Blount. Mary Louise’s report had said that the break-in at her place had been the work of a pro, not a random smash-and-grab. The padlock on the gate was intact, Mary Louise had written.

  Someone had run a torch around it, taking the gate apart: the scorch marks on the kitchen door were obvious. Because you were interested in her connection to Ajax, I asked her specifically about any Ajax documents. She didn’t have originals; she had scanned various 19th-century files to a floppy, which was missing. In fact, all her dissertation notes were missing. The perps damaged her computer as well. Nothing else was gone, not even her sound system. I talked Terry into sending down a proper forensics crew, but we’re still not likely to find the perps.

  I commiserated with Ms. Blount over her misery, then asked if her paper files had been tampered with.

  “Oh, yes, those are gone, too, all my research notes. Who could want them? If I’d known I was sitting on such hot material I’d have published my dissertation by now; I’d have a real job, instead of hanging on in this rathole writing diddly corporate histories.”

  “Ms. Blount, what papers had you copied from the Ajax files?”

  “I did not take classified internal documents. I did not hand confidential company information to Alderman Durham-”

  “Ms. Blount, please, I know this has been a tough twenty-four hours, but don’t jump on me. I’m asking for quite a different reason. I’m trying to figure out what is going on at Ajax Insurance these days.”

  I explained what had been happening since I’d visited her on Friday-primarily Fepple’s death, Sommers’s problems, Connie Ingram’s name appearing on Fepple’s appointment register. “The real oddity was the fragment of a document I found.”

  She listened carefully to everything I said, but my description of the handwritten document didn’t sound like anything she’d seen. “I’ll be glad to look at it-I could come by your office tomorrow sometime. Offhand it sounds like something out of an old ledger, but I can’t interpret all those marks unless I see them. If it has your client’s name on it, it would be recent, at least by my standards. The papers I copied dated from the 1850’s, because my research is on the economics of slavery.”

  She was suddenly depressed again. “All that material is missing. I suppose I can go back to the archives and recopy it. It’s the sense of violation that gets me down. And the pointlessness of it all.”

  XXXVII My Kingdom for an Address

  Melancholy gave me a restless night’s sleep. I got up at six to run the dogs. I was in my office by eight-thirty, even though I stopped for breakfast again at the diner, even though I made a detour to Lotty’s clinic on my way down. I didn’t see her-she was still at the hospital making rounds.

  As soon as Mary Louise came in, I sent her to the South Side to see if any of Sommers’s friends could help figure out who had fingered him. I called Don Strzepek back, to see if he’d had any luck-or I’d had any luck-in getting Rhea to take Paul’s harassment of Max seriously.

  He gave an embarrassed cough. “She said she thought it was a sign of strength in him that he was making new friends, but she could see that he might need a greater sense of proportion.”

  “So she’ll talk to him?” I couldn’t keep the impatience out of my voice.

  “She says she’ll bring it up at his next regular appointment, but she can’t take on the role of managing her patients’ lives: they need to function in the real world, fall, pick themselves up, like everyone else. If they can’t do that, then they need more help than she can give them. She’s so amazing,” he crooned, “I’ve never known anyone like her.”

  I cut him short halfway through his love song, asking him if that high-six-figure book advance was clouding his objectivity on Paul Radbuka. He hung up, hurt: I wasn’t willing to discover Rhea’s good points.

  I was still snarling to myself over that conversation when Murray Ryerson called from the Herald-Star. Beth Blacksin had told him about my private conversation with Posner yesterday at the demonstration.

  “For old times’ sake, V I,” he wheedled me. “Far off the record. What was that about?”

  “Far off the record, Murray? May Horace Greeley rise from the dead and wither your testicles if you talk even to your mother about this, let alone Blacksin?”

  “Scout’s honor, Warshawski.”

  He had never betrayed such a confidence in the past. “Off the record, I don’t know what it means, but Posner and Durham both had private audiences with Bertrand Rossy, the managing director of Edelweiss Re, who’s in Chicago overseeing their takeover of Ajax. I was wondering if Rossy had offered Posner something to get him to stop protesting at Ajax and move on to Beth Israel, but I didn’t get anywhere with asking Posner. He might talk to you-women scare him.”

  “Maybe it’s just you, V I-you scare me and I’m twice Posner’s size. Durham, though-no one’s ever pinned anything on him, even though the mayor has the cops sticking to him like his underwear. Guy’s one smooth operator. But if I learn something splendid about either of them I promise I’ll share.”

  I felt a little better when I’d hung up: it was good to have some kind of ally. I took the L downtown to meet with clients who actually were paying me to do sophisticated work on their behalf and got back to my office a little before two. The phone was ringing as I unlocked the door. I got to it just as the answering service did. It was Tim Streeter; in the background I could hear Calia howling.

  “Tim-what’s going on?”

  “We have a small situation here, Vic. I’ve been trying to call you for the last few hours, but you didn’t have your phone on. Our pal was back this morning. I have to admit, my guard was down; I assumed he was concentrating on Posner these days. Anyway, you know he goes everywhere by bicycle? Calia and I were in the park on the swings, when he came roaring across the grass on his bike. He grabbed at Calia. Of course I had her in my arms before he touched her, but he got that Nibusher, you know, that little blue dog she takes everywhere.”

  Behind him I could hear Calia scream, “Not Nibusher, he’s Ninshubur the faithful hound. He misses me, he needs me right now, I want him now, Tim!”

  “Oh, hell,” I said. “Max needs to get a restraining order on this guy-he’s like a disintegrating Roman candle these days. And that damned therapist is zero help-not to mention Strzepek. I should have been following Paul, made sure I got his home address. Will you call your brother and tell him I want him ready to tail Radbuka home from Posner’s office or Rhea Wiell’s, or wherever he next pops up?”

  “Will do. I couldn’t follow him out of the park, of course, because I needed to stay with the kid. This is not a good situation.”

  “Max and Agnes know? Okay, let me talk to Calia for a minute.”

  At first Calia refused to talk to “Aunt Vicory.” She was tired, she was scared, and she was reacting the way kids do, digging her heels in, but when Tim said I had a message about Nebbisher she reluctantly came to the phone.

  “Tim is very naughty. He let the bad man take Ninshubur and now he says his name wrong.”

  “Tim feels bad that he didn’t look after Ninshubur for you, sugar. But before you go to bed tonight, I’ll try to have your doggy back to you. I’m leaving my office right now to start looking, okay?”

&nb
sp; “Okay, Aunt Vicory,” she said in a resigned voice.

  When Tim came back on the line, he thanked me for drying up the tears-he’d been starting to feel desperate. He’d reached Agnes at her gallery appointment; she was on her way home, but he’d rather protect the Israeli prime minister in Syria than look after another five-year-old.

  I drummed my fingers on the desktop. I called Rhea Wiell, who was fortunately between appointments. When I explained the situation and said it would be really helpful if we could get the dog back today, she said she would bring it up with Paul when she saw him Friday morning.

  “Of course, Vic, all he wants it for is as a talisman of the family that he sees as denying his ties to them. In the early days of his treatment with me, he would take little things from my office, thinking I didn’t see him doing it: cups from the waiting room, or one of my scarves. As he became stronger, he stopped doing that.”

  “You know him better than I do, Rhea, but poor Calia is only five. I think her needs come first here. Could you call him now and urge him to return it? Or let me have his phone number so I can call him?”

  “I hope you’re not making up this whole episode in an effort to try to get his home number from me, Vic. Under the circumstances, I doubt you, of all people, could persuade him to see you. He has an appointment with me in the morning; I’ll talk to him about it then. I know Don is convinced that Max Loewenthal is not related to Paul, but Max certainly holds the key to Paul’s door to his European relatives. If you could get Max to agree to see him-”

  “Max offered to see him when Paul crashed the party on Sunday. He doesn’t want to see Max-he wants Max to embrace him as a family member. If you could get Paul to let us look at his family papers-”

  “No,” she said sharply. “I thought as soon as you called that you’d come up with some other way of trying to wheedle me into letting you see those, and I was right. I will not violate Paul’s privacy. He endured too many violations as a child for me to do that to him.”

  She hung up on me. Why couldn’t she see her prize exhibit belonged in the locked ward at Menard? Or on heavy doses of antipsychotics.

  That irritated thought gave me an idea. I looked up the number for Posner’s Holocaust Asset Recovery Committee on Touhy. When a man answered, I pushed my nose down to make my voice sound nasal.

  “This is Casco Pharmacy in River Forest,” I said. “I need to reach Mr. Paul Radbuka.”

  “He doesn’t work here,” the man said.

  “Oh, dear. We’re filling his prescription for Haldol, but we don’t have his address. He left this phone number. You don’t know where we can reach him, do you? We can’t fill a prescription for this kind of drug without an address.”

  “Well, you can’t use our address; he’s not on staff here.”

  “Very good, sir, but if you do have some way for me to reach him? This is the only phone number he gave us.”

  The man put the receiver down with a bang. “ Leon, did that guy Radbuka fill out a form when he came in on Tuesday? We’re starting to get his phone calls, and I, for one, have no wish to act as his answering service.”

  I heard talk back and forth on the floor, most of it complaining about Radbuka and why did Reb Joseph want to burden them with such a difficult person. I heard Leon, the trusted henchman Posner brought with him to our talk outside the hospital yesterday, rebuke them for questioning Reb Joseph’s judgment, before picking up the phone himself.

  “Who is this?”

  “Casco Pharmacy in River Forest. We have a prescription for Haldol we’re trying to fill for Mr. Paul Radbuka and we need his home address. This is a powerful antipsychotic drug; we cannot dispense it without some way of reaching him.” I spoke in a nasal singsong, as if I’d been trained to reel off the bureaucratic litany by heart.

  “Yeah, well, can you make a note in your records not to use this number? This is a business office where he sometimes does volunteer work, but we can’t take his messages. Here’s his home address.”

  My heart was beating as hard as if I were hearing a message from my lover. I copied down a number on Roslyn Street, then read it back, forgetting in my excitement to use my nasal singsong. But what difference did that make now? I had what I wanted. And I hadn’t needed to break Rhea Wiell’s jaw to get it.

  XXXVIII Heartbreak House

  Roslyn was a tiny street, barely a block long, that emptied onto Lincoln Park. Radbuka’s house was on the south side, near the park end. It was an old greystone whose front, like most of the houses in this exclusive block, was set close to the street. I wanted to smash down the door, charge in, and forcibly confront Radbuka, but I made as discreet a survey as I could. This close to Lincoln Park, a lot of joggers, dogwalkers, and other athletes kept passing me, even though it was still a bit early in the afternoon for people to be home from work.

  The front door was a massive piece of wood, with a peephole making it possible for Radbuka to study his visitors. Keeping myself out of its range, I rang the bell, vigorously, leaning on it for four or five minutes. When there wasn’t an answer, I couldn’t resist the idea of going inside to see if I could find the documents that proved to him that Radbuka was his name. I tried the front door-it would be ridiculous to risk being spotted breaking and entering if I could get in easily-but the brass knob didn’t turn.

  I didn’t want to stand with my picklocks in full view of so many joggers; I’d have to go in through the back. I’d had to park three blocks from Roslyn Street. I returned to my car and took a navy coverall from a box in the back. A patch on the left pocket proclaimed People’s Power Service. That and a tool belt completed an easy piece of camouflage. I took them into the women’s rest room in the conservatory and came out a minute later, my hair covered in a blue kerchief, looking like a piece of the service woodwork the Yuppies would overlook.

  Back at Radbuka’s house, I tried the bell again, then went up a narrow strip of flagstones along the house’s east side leading to the back. It was bisected by a ten-foot-high gate with a lock set in the middle. The lock was a complex dead bolt. I crouched down with my picklocks, trying to ignore the passersby in the hopes they would do the same to me.

  I was sweating freely by the time I got the tumblers pressed back. The lock had to be opened by a key no matter which side of the gate you were on; I wedged a piece of paper into the bolt hole to keep the tongue from reengaging.

  The lots on Roslyn were narrow-barely wider than the houses themselves-but deep, without the service alleys and garages that run between most streets in the city. An eight-foot-high wooden fence, somewhat dilapidated, separated the garden from the street behind.

  Paul’s father must have made a fortune doing whatever he did for the son to afford this house on this street, but either depression or lack of money made Paul let it go. The garden was a tangle of overgrown bushes and knee-high weeds. As I waded through them to the kitchen entrance, several cats snarled at me and moved off. A shiver ran down my spine.

  The lock here seemed identical to the gate, so I used the same combination of picks and had it open in less than a minute. Before going into the kitchen, I pulled on a pair of latex gloves. Just so I wouldn’t forget to do it later, I grabbed a dish towel from above the sink and wiped the outside knob on the back door.

  The kitchen cabinets and appliances hadn’t been replaced in a good thirty years. The pilots on the old stove glowed blue in the dim light; the enamel was chipped down to metal along the edges of the oven door. The cabinets were the kind of thick brown pressed wood that had been popular in my childhood.

  Paul had eaten breakfast here this morning: the milk hadn’t begun to curdle in the cereal bowl he’d left on the table. The room was cluttered with old newspapers and mail; a 1993 calendar still hung near the pantry. But it wasn’t filthy. Paul seemed to keep on top of his dishes, more or less, which was more than could be said for me much of the time.

  I went down the hall, past a dining room with a substantial table that could have seated
sixteen. A breakfront held a collection of china, a delicate pattern of blue flowers on a creamy background. It looked as though there was enough china to give sixteen people a five-course meal without stopping to wash any plates, but the dust on the dishes showed that nothing like that had been attempted recently.

  All of the rooms on the ground floor were like this, filled with heavy, carved furniture, but covered in dust. Haphazard stacks of paper stood everywhere. In the living room, I found a copy of the Süddeutsche Zeitung dating back to 1989.

  A photograph on the wall by the fireplace showed a boy and a man in front of a cottage, with a lake in the background. The boy was presumably Paul, around ten or eleven, the man presumably Ulrich, a barrel-chested, balding figure who stood next to his son, smiling but stern. Paul was looking anxiously up at his father, but Ulrich stared straight ahead at the camera. You wouldn’t look at the picture and say, Oh, these two must be related-either physically or by love.

  A sitting room next to the main living room had apparently served as Ulrich’s study. Originally he’d probably decorated it to look like some period-film version of an English country library, with a double leather kneehole desk, a leather armchair, and shelves for books covered in tooled leather-a complete Shakespeare, a complete Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope in English, and Goethe and Schiller in German. The books had been flung about with a furious hand; pages were crumpled, spines broken-a wanton display of destruction.

  The same violent hand had taken the desk apart: the drawers stood open, papers pulled from them and tossed on the floor. Had Paul done this, attacking his dead father by pounding on his possessions? Or had someone been searching the house ahead of me? And for what? Who besides me cared about the papers linking Ulrich to the Einsatzgruppen? Or had Ulrich had other secrets?

  I couldn’t take the time right now to sift through the books and papers, especially since I didn’t know what I was looking for. I’d have to get Mary Louise and the Streeter brothers to sort them later, if we could get Paul out of the house long enough.