“Ain’t that something, cookie.” Mr. Contreras looked up from the Sun-Times, where he was circling racing results. “Guy shooting himself just because he come on hard times? No stamina, these young fellas.”
I muttered a weak agreement-ultimately I would tell him that I’d found Fepple, but that would be a long conversation which I didn’t feel up to holding today. I drove the dogs over to the lake, where we ran up to Montrose Harbor and back. Sleep deprivation made my sinuses ache, but the three-mile run loosened my tight muscles. I took the dogs with me down to the office, where they raced around, sniffing and barking as if they had never been inside the place before. Tessa yelled out at me from her studio to get them under control at once before she took a sculpting mallet to them.
When I had them corralled inside my own place, I sat at my desk for a long while without actually moving. When I was little, my granny Warshawski had a wooden toy she’d get out for me when we went to visit. A hunter was in the middle, with a bear on one side and a wolf on the other. When you pushed the button once, the hunter swung around to point his rifle at the wolf while the bear jumped up to threaten him. If you pushed it again, he turned to the bear while the wolf jumped up. Sommers. Lotty. Lotty. Sommers. It was as if I were the hunter in the middle, who kept swerving between the two images. I couldn’t keep track of either one’s problem long enough to focus on it before the other popped up again.
Finally, wearily, I switched on my computer. Sofie Radbuka. Paul had found her in a chat room on the Web. While I was searching, Rhea Wiell called.
“Ms. Warshawski, what did you do to Paul last night? He was waiting outside my office this morning when I got in, weeping, saying you had ridiculed him and kept him from his family.”
“Maybe you could hypnotize him and get him to recover a memory of the truth,” I said.
“If you imagine that is funny, you have such a perverse sense of humor I would believe anything of you.” The vestal virgin had turned so icy her voice could have put out the sacred fire.
“Ms. Wiell, didn’t we agree on as much privacy for Mr. Loewenthal as you demanded for Paul Radbuka? But Paul tracked Max Loewenthal down in his home. Did he think of that all by himself?”
She was human enough to be embarrassed and answered more quietly, “I didn’t give him Max Loewenthal’s name. Paul unfortunately saw it himself in my desk file. When I said you might know one of his relatives, he put two and two together: he’s very quick. But that doesn’t mean he should have been subjected to taunting,” she added, trying to regain the upper hand.
“Paul barged in on a private party, and unnerved everyone by making up three different versions of his life story in as many minutes.” I knew I shouldn’t lose my temper, but I couldn’t keep myself from snapping, “He’s dangerously unstable; I’ve been wanting to ask why you found him a good candidate for hypnotherapy.”
“You didn’t tell me you had special clinical skills when we met on Friday,” Wiell said in a honeyed voice even more irritating than her icy fury. “I didn’t know you could evaluate whether someone was a good candidate for hypnosis. Do you think he was dangerously unstable because he threatened the peace of mind of people who are embarrassed to claim a relationship with him? This morning, Paul told me that they all know who Sofie Radbuka was, but that they refused to tell him, and that you goaded them on. To me this is heartless.”
I took a deep breath, trying to tamp down my annoyance-I needed her help, which would never be forthcoming if I kept her pissed off at me. “Fifty years ago, Mr. Loewenthal looked for a Radbuka family who had lived in Vienna before the war. He didn’t know the family personally: they were acquaintances of Dr. Herschel’s. Mr. Loewenthal undertook to search for any trace of them when he went back to central Europe in 1947 or ’48 to hunt for his own family.”
Mitch gave a short bark and ran to the door. Mary Louise came in, calling out to me about Fepple. I waved to her but kept my attention on the phone.
“When Paul said he was born in Berlin, Mr. Loewenthal said that made it extremely unlikely that Paul was related to the Radbukas he’d looked for all those years back. So Paul instantly offered two alternative possibilities-that he’d been born in Vienna, or even in the Lodz ghetto, where the Viennese Radbukas had been sent in 1941. We all-Mr. Loewenthal, me, and a human-rights advocate named Morrell-thought that if we could see the documents Paul found in his father’s-foster father’s-papers after his death, we could work out whether there was any possibility of a relationship. We also suggested DNA testing. Paul rejected both suggestions with equal vehemence.”
Wiell paused, then said, “Paul says you tried to keep him out of the house, then you brought in a group of children to taunt him by calling him names.”
I tried not to screech into the mouthpiece. “Four little ones came pelting downstairs, caught sight of your patient, and began yelling that he was the big bad wolf. Believe me, every adult within a twenty-foot radius moved rapidly to break that up, but it upset Paul-it would unnerve anyone to have a group of strange kids mock him, but I gather it awoke unpleasant associations in Paul’s mind to his father-foster father… Ms. Wiell, could you persuade Paul to let me or Mr. Loewenthal look at these documents he found in his father’s papers? How else can we trace the connection Paul is making between himself and Mr. Loewenthal?”
“I’ll consider it,” she said majestically, “but after last night’s debacle I don’t trust you to consider the best interests of my patient.”
I made the rudest face I could muster but kept my voice light. “I wouldn’t deliberately do anything that might harm Paul Radbuka. It would be a big help if Mr. Loewenthal could see these documents, since he’s the person with the most knowledge of the history of his friends’ families.” When she hung up, with a tepid response to think about it, I let out a loud raspberry.
Mary Louise looked at me eagerly. “Was that Rhea Wiell? What’s she like in person?”
I blinked, trying to remember back to Friday. “Warm. Intense. Very convinced of her own powers. She was human enough to be excited by Don’s book proposal.”
“Vic!” Mary Louise’s face turned pink. “She is an outstanding therapist. Don’t go attacking her. If she’s a little aggressive in believing her own point of view-well, she’s had to stand up to a lot of public abuse. Besides,” she added shrewdly, “you’re that way yourself. That’s probably why you two rub each other the wrong way.”
I curled my lip. “At least Paul Radbuka shares your view. Says she saved his life. Which makes me wonder what kind of shape he was in before she fixed him: I’ve never been around anyone that frighteningly wobbly.” I gave her a thumbnail sketch of Radbuka’s behavior at Max’s last night, but I didn’t feel like adding Lotty and Carl’s part of the story.
Mary Louise frowned over my report but insisted Rhea would have had a good reason for hypnotizing him. “If he was so depressed that he couldn’t leave his apartment, this at least is a step forward.”
“Stalking Max Loewenthal and claiming to be his cousin is a step forward? Toward what? A bed in a locked ward? Sorry,” I added hastily as Mary Louise huffily turned her back on me. “She clearly has his best interests close at heart. We were all rather daunted by his showing up uninvited at Max’s last night, that’s all.”
“All right.” She hunched a shoulder but turned back to me with a determined smile, changing the subject to ask what I knew about Fepple’s death.
I told her about finding the body. After wasting time lecturing me on breaking into the office, she agreed to call her old superior in the department to find out how the police were treating the case. Her criticism reminded me that I’d stuffed some of Rick Hoffman’s other old files into Fepple’s briefcase, which I’d dumped into the trunk and forgotten. Mary Louise said she supposed she could check up on the beneficiaries, to see whether they’d been properly paid by the company, as long as she didn’t have to answer any questions about where she’d gotten their names.
“Mary Loui
se, you’re not cut out for this work,” I told her when I’d brought Fepple’s canvas case in from my car. “You’re used to the cops, where people are so nervous over your power to arrest that they answer your questions without you needing any finesse.”
“I’d think you could find finesse without lying,” she grumbled, taking the files from me. “Oh, gross, V I. Did you have to spill your breakfast on them?”
One of the folders had a smear of jelly on it, which was now on my hands as well. When I looked deeper into the bag, I saw the remains of a jelly donut mushed up with the papers and other detritus. It was gross. I washed my hands, put on latex gloves, and emptied the case onto a piece of newspaper. Mitch and Peppy were extremely interested, especially in the donut, so I lifted the newspaper onto a credenza.
Mary Louise’s interest was caught; she put on her own pair of gloves to help me sort through the rubble. It wasn’t a very appetizing-or informative-haul. An athletic supporter, so grey and misshapen it was hard to recognize, jumbled in with company reports and Ping-Pong balls. The jelly donut. Another open box of crackers. Mouthwash.
“You know, it’s interesting that there’s no diary, either in here or on his desk,” I said when we’d been through everything.
“Maybe he had so few appointments he didn’t bother with a diary.”
“Or maybe the guy he was seeing Friday night took the diary so no one would see Fepple had an appointment with him. He took that when he grabbed the Sommers file.”
I wondered if wiping the jelly out of the interior of the case would destroy vital clues, but I couldn’t bring myself to dump the contents back into the mess.
Mary Louise pretended to be excited when I went to the bathroom for a sponge. “Gosh, Vic, if you can clean out a briefcase, maybe you can learn to put papers into file jackets.”
“Let’s see: first you get a bucket of water, right?-oh, my, what’s this?” The jelly had glued a thin piece of paper to one side of the case. I had almost pulped it running the sponge over the interior. Now I took the case over to a desk lamp so I could see what I was doing. I turned the case inside out and carefully peeled the page off the side.
It was a ledger sheet, with what looked like a list of names and numbers in a thin, archaic script-which had bloomed like little flowers in the places it was wet. Jelly mixed with water had made the top left part of the page unreadable, but what we could make out looked like this:
“This is why it’s such a mistake to be a housecleaning freak,” I said severely. “We’ve lost part of the document.”
“What is it?” Mary Louise leaned over the desk to see it. “That isn’t Howard Fepple’s handwriting, is it?”
“This script? It’s so beautiful, it’s like engraving-I don’t see him doing it. Anyway, the paper looks old.” It had gilt edging; around the lower right, which had escaped damage, the paper had turned brown with age. The ink itself was fading from black to green.
“I can’t make out the names,” Mary Louise said. “They are names, don’t you think? Followed by a bunch of numbers. What are the numbers? They can’t be dates-they’re too weird. But it can’t be money, either.”
“They could be dates, if they were written European style-that’s how my mother did it-day first, followed by month. If that’s the case, this is a sequence of six weeks, from June 29 to August 3 in an unknown year. I wonder if we could read the names if we enlarged them. Let’s lay this on the copier, where the heat will dry it faster.”
While Mary Louise took care of that, I looked through every page of the company reports in Fepple’s bag, hoping to find another sheet from the ledger, but this was the only one.
XXI Stalker in the Park
Mary Louise started work on the files I’d pulled out of Rick Hoffman’s drawer. I turned back to my computer. I’d forgotten the search I’d entered for Sofie or Sophie Radbuka, but the computer was patiently waiting with two hits: an invitation from an on-line vendor to buy books about Radbuka, and a bulletin board for messages at a family-search site.
Fifteen months earlier, someone using the label Questing Scorpio had posted a query: I am looking for information about Sofie Radbuka, who lived in the United Kingdom in the 1940’s.
Underneath it was Paul Radbuka’s answer, entered about two months ago and filling pages of screen. Dear Questing Scorpio, words can hardly express the excitement I felt when I discovered your message. It was as if someone had turned on a light in a blacked-out cellar, telling me that I am here, I exist. I am not a fool, or a madman, but a person whose name and identity were kept from him for fifty years. At the end of the Second World War, I was brought from England to America by a man claiming to be my father, but in reality he was a committer of the most vile atrocities during the war. He hid my Jewish identity from me, and from the world, yet made use of it to smuggle himself past the American immigration authorities.
He went on to describe the recovery of his memory with Rhea Wiell, going into great detail, including dreams in which he was speaking Yiddish, fragments of memories of his mother singing a lullaby to him before he was old enough to walk, details of his foster father’s abuse of him.
I have been wondering why my foster father tracked me down in England, he concluded, but it must be because of Sofie Radbuka. He might have been her torturer in the concentration camps. She is one of my relatives, perhaps even my mother, or a missing sister. Are you her child? We might be brother and sister. I am yearning for the family I have never known. Please, I implore you, write back to me, to PaulRadbuka@ survivor.com. Tell me about Sofie. If she is my mother or my aunt, or possibly even a sister I never knew existed, I must know.
No follow-up was posted, which wasn’t too surprising: his hysteria came through so clearly in the document that I would have shied away from him myself. I did a search to see if Questing Scorpio had an e-mail address but came up short.
I went back to the chat room and carefully constructed a message: Dear Questing Scorpio, if you have information or questions about the Radbuka family that you would be willing to discuss with a neutral party, you could send them to the law offices of Carter, Halsey, and Weinberg. These were the offices of my own lawyer, Freeman Carter. I included both the street address and the URL for their Web site, then sent an e-mail to Freeman, letting him know what I’d done.
I looked at the screen for a bit, as if it might magically reveal some other information, but eventually I remembered that no one was paying me to find out anything about Sofie Radbuka and settled down to some of the on-line searches that make up the better part of my business these days. The Web has transformed investigative work, making it for the most part both easier and duller.
At noon, when Mary Louise left for class, she said all six policies I’d brought with me from Midway were in order: for the four where the purchaser was dead, the beneficiaries had duly received their benefits. For the two still living, no one had submitted a claim. Three of the policies had been on Ajax paper. Two other companies had issued the other three. So if the Sommers claim had been fraudulently submitted by the agency, it wasn’t a regular occurrence.
Exhaustion made it hard for me to think-about that, or anything else. When Mary Louise had left, waves of fatigue swept over me. I moved on leaden legs to the cot in my supply room, where I fell into a feverish sleep. It was almost three when the phone pulled me awake again. I stumbled out to my desk and mumbled something unintelligible.
A woman asked for me, then told me to hold for Mr. Rossy. Mr. Rossy? Oh, yes, the head of Edelweiss’s U.S. operations. I rubbed my forehead, trying to make blood flow into my brain, then, since I was still on hold, went to the little refrigerator in the hall, which I share with Tessa, for a bottle of water. Rossy was calling my name sharply when I picked up the phone again.
“Buon giorno,” I said, with a semblance of brightness. “Come sta? Che cosa posso fare per Lei?”
He exclaimed over my Italian. “Ralph told me you were fluent; you speak it beautifully-almost without an
accent. Actually, that’s why I called.”
“To speak Italian to me?” I was incredulous.
“My wife-she gets homesick. When I told her I’d met an Italian speaker who shared her love of opera, she wondered if you’d do us the honor of coming to dinner. She was especially fascinated, as I was sure she would be, by the idea of your office among the indovine-p-suchics,” he added in English, correcting himself immediately to “sychics.” “Do I have this correct now?”
“Perfect,” I said absently. I looked at the Isabel Bishop painting on the wall by my desk, but the angular face staring at a sewing machine told me nothing. “It would be a pleasure to meet Mrs. Rossy,” I finally said.
“Is it possible that you could join us tomorrow evening?”
I thought of Morrell, leaving for Rome on a ten A.M. flight, and the hollow I would feel when I saw him off. “As it happens, I’m free.” I copied the address-an apartment building near Lotty’s on Lake Shore Drive -into my Palm Pilot. We hung up on mutual protestations of goodwill, but I frowned at the painted seamstress a long moment, wondering what Rossy really wanted.
The page I’d found in Fepple’s briefcase was dry now. I set the machine to enlarge the copy and came up with letters big enough to read. The original I tucked into a plastic sleeve.
The script was still hard to make out, but I could read Hillel Brodsky, I or G Herstein, and Th. and Aaron Sommers-although it looked like Pommers I knew it had to be my client’s uncle. So this was a list of clients from the Midway Agency-that seemed like a reasonable assumption. What did the crosses mean? That they were dead? That their families had been defrauded? Or both? Perhaps Th. Sommers was still alive.
The dogs, restless from five hours inside, got up and wagged their tails at me. “You guys think we should get in motion? You’re right. Let’s go.” I shut down my system, carefully slid the original of the fragment into my own case, and took Fepple’s briefcase with me back to the car.
Total Recall Page 19