Total Recall

by Sara Paretsky

  “Is he the big bad wolf?” Calia demanded.

  “No, he’s a big good teddy bear,” I said. “You’ll see: you and your mama will both find him irresistible.”

  Max sat next to Calia, trying not to let his anxiety shine through as obviously as Agnes’s. When I asked him what he could tell me about the Radbuka family he’d known in London, he got up again, taking me away from the eating alcove. He kept turning to look at Calia while he spoke.

  “I didn’t know them. Lotty has always claimed they were an acquaintance merely, and I have acquiesced in that.”

  Calia climbed down from the table, announcing she was through with breakfast, she was tired of the house, she was going outside now.

  “When your grandpapa and I are through talking we’ll go across to the park with the dogs,” I said. “You hold tight for ten more minutes.” I mouthed “television” at Agnes, who made a sour face but took Calia upstairs to the universal baby-sitter.

  “You think the Radbukas were relations or close friends of Lotty’s?” I said to Max.

  “It’s what I said Sunday night. Lotty always made it clear that one didn’t discuss the Radbukas with her. I assume that’s why she gave me the information about them in writing, to preclude any discussion. I don’t know who they were.”

  He moved Calia’s dishes to the sink and sat back down at the table. “Yesterday I went through such files as I have from that trip I made to central Europe after the war. I was looking for so many people that nothing stands out very clearly in my mind. Lotty had given me her grandparents’ address on the Renngasse-that was where she lived before the Anschluss-a very tony address which had been taken over in ’38 by people who wouldn’t talk to me. I concentrated most of my energy in Vienna on my own family, and then I wanted to get to Budapest to look for Teresz’s people. We weren’t married then, of course, we were still very young.”

  His voice faded into memory. After a minute he shook his head with a sad little smile and continued. “Anyway, the notes I have about the Radbukas-well, let me get them.”

  While he went up to his study I helped myself to fruit and rolls from his refrigerator. He came back in a couple of minutes with a thick binder. He thumbed through it, opening it to a sheet of cheap grey paper encased in plastic. Even though the ink was fading to brown, Lotty’s distinctive script-spiky and bold-was unmistakable.

  Dear Max,

  I admire your courage in taking this trip. Vienna for me represents a world I can’t bear to return to, even if the Royal Free would grant me a leave of absence. So thank you for going, since I am as desperate for a conclusive answer as everyone else. I told you about my grandparents. If by a miracle they have survived and have been able to return to their home, it is Renngasse 7, third-floor front.

  I want to ask you also to look for any record of another family from Vienna, named Radbuka. This is for someone at the Royal Free who sadly cannot recollect many details. For instance, the man’s first name was Shlomo but the person doesn’t know his wife’s name, or even if they would have been registered with some kind of Germanized names. They had a son called Moishe, born around 1900, one daughter named Rachel, two other daughters whose names the person isn’t sure of-one might be Eva-and a number of grandchildren of our generation. Also, the address isn’t certain: it was on the Leopoldsgasse, near the Untere Augarten Strasse end: you turn right from U.A. onto L-gasse, then it’s the second turning on your right, into the interior courtyard, and on the third floor at the back. I realize that’s a hopeless way to describe what may now be a pile of rubble, but it’s the best I can do. But please, I ask you to treat it as seriously as your search for our own families, please make every effort to see what trace you can find of them.

  I am on duty tonight and tomorrow night both, so I won’t be able to see you in person before you leave.

  The remainder of the letter gave the names of some of Lotty’s aunts and uncles and concluded with, I’m enclosing a gold prewar five-Krone piece to help pay for your journey.

  I blinked: gold coins sound romantic, exotic, and wealthy. “I thought Lotty was a poor student, barely able to make her tuition and rooming payments.”

  “She was. She had a handful of gold coins that her grandfather had helped her smuggle out of Vienna: giving one of them to me meant wearing her coat and socks to bed in lieu of heat that winter. Maybe that contributed to her getting so sick the next year.”

  Abashed, I returned to the main question. “So you don’t have any idea who in London asked Lotty for help?”

  He shook his head. “It could have been anyone. Or it could have been Lotty herself, searching for relatives. I wondered if it might be one of her cousins’ names: she and Hugo were sent to England; the Herschels had been quite well off before the Anschluss. They still had some resources, but Lotty once or twice mentioned very poor cousins who stayed behind. But I also thought it might be someone who was in England illegally, someone Lotty felt honor-bound to protect. I didn’t have anything to go on, mind you. But one imagines something and that was the picture I painted to myself… or maybe it was Teresz’s idea. I can’t remember now. Of course Radbuka might have been a patient or colleague from the Royal Free for whom Lotty felt similarly protective.”

  “I suppose I could get in touch with the Royal Free, see if they have lists that date back to ’47,” I said doubtfully. “What did you find in Vienna? Did you go to-to-” I looked at Lotty’s note and stumbled through the pronunciation of the German street names.

  Max flipped through the binder to the back, where he pulled a cheap notebook from its own plastic cover. “I looked at my notes, but they don’t tell me much. Bauernmarkt, where my own family lived, had been badly hit in the bombing. I know I did walk all through that area, through what they used to call the Matzoinsel, where the eastern European Jews gathered when they immigrated during the early years of the century. I’m sure I tried to find the place on the Leopoldsgasse. But the site of so much desolation was too depressing. My notes I kept for news from the different agencies I visited.”

  He opened the notebook carefully, so as not to tear the fragile paper. “Shlomo and Judit Radbuka: deported to Lodz 23 February 1941 with Edith-I think that’s the name Lotty thought might be Eva-Rachel, Julie, and Mara. And a list of seven children, two to ten years old. Then I had a job tracking down what happened in the Lodz ghetto. Poland was a very difficult country then-it wasn’t yet under communist control, but while some people were quite helpful, there were also ferocious pogroms against the remnants of the Jewish community. It was the same story of desolation and deprivation that existed all over Europe: Poland lost a fifth of its population to the war. I nearly turned tail a half dozen times, but finally I did get hold of some of the records of the ghetto authority. The Radbukas all were deported to a death camp in June of 1943. None of them survived.

  “Of my own family, well, I found a cousin in one of the DP camps. I tried to persuade him to come to England with me, but he was determined to return to Vienna. Where he did live out the rest of his life. At the time no one knew what would happen with the Russians and Austria, but in the end it worked out fine for my cousin. But he was always very reclusive after the war. I had looked up to him so as a child; he was eight years older than me, it was hard to see him so fearful, so withdrawn.”

  I stood silent, sickened by the images he was conjuring, before bursting out, “Then why did Lotty use the name Sofie Radbuka? I-that episode-the picture of Carl going to the country, looking for her cottage, Lotty staying behind the doors and using the name of a dead person-it’s very unnerving. And it doesn’t sound like Lotty.”

  Max rubbed his eyes. “Everyone has unaccountable moments in their lives. It may be that Lotty thought she was responsible for the loss or death of this Sofie Radbuka, whether it was a cousin or a patient. When Lotty thought she might be dying herself-well, we were all living difficult lives then, working hard, coping with the loss of our families. The deprivation in England after the w
ar was still acute, too-we had our own bomb sites to clean up. There were coal shortages, bitter weather, no one had any money, food and clothes were still rationed. Lotty might have snapped under the strain, overidentified with this Radbuka woman.

  “I do remember when Lotty came back from that illness. It was in winter, maybe February. She had lost a lot of weight. But she brought a dozen eggs and a half pound of butter back from the country with her and invited Teresz and me and the rest of our lot over for tea. She scrambled all the eggs up with the butter and we had a wonderful feast, and at one point she announced she would never again let her life be held hostage. She was so fierce we all rather backed away. Carl refused to come, of course; it was years before he would speak to her again.”

  I told him about the bulletin board I’d found with Questing Scorpio’s entry. “So there definitely was someone in England by that name in the forties, but my feeling is that Paul Radbuka’s response was so intense that Scorpio didn’t write back. I posted a message saying Scorpio could get in touch with Freeman Carter if there was something confidential to discuss.”

  Max shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. I don’t know what any of it means. I just wish Lotty would either tell me what she’s tormenting herself with-or stop carrying on in such a dramatic fashion.”

  “Have you spoken to her since Sunday night? I tried talking to her last night, but she bit my head off.”

  Max grunted. “This is one of those weeks where I wonder what keeps our friendship together. She’s an important surgeon; she’s sorry she was momentarily under the weather at my delightful party, but she’s fine now, thanks very much, and she needs to make rounds.”

  The doorbell rang. Tim Streeter had arrived. He was a tall, rangy guy with a handlebar moustache and an engaging smile. Max called to Agnes, who quickly relaxed under Tim’s calm air of confidence, while Calia, after a momentary suspicion, promptly announced he was a “lawrus” because of his giant moustache and offered to throw him dead fish. Tim made her squeal with laughter by blowing spluttery air through his moustache points. Max, much relieved, took off for the hospital.

  Tim toured the premises, looking for vulnerable spots, then crossed the street to the park with Calia so she could play with the dogs. Calia brought Ninshubur with her, proudly showing Mitch and Peppy that her dog had tags just like theirs. “Ninshubur is Mitch’s mummy,” she announced.

  After seeing the skillful way Tim kept between Calia and any passersby, seeming to make it part of a game instead of alarming the child, Agnes returned to the house to set up her paints. When the dogs had run the edge off their energy, I told Tim I needed to move on.

  “There’s not an imminent threat, as I understand it,” he drawled.

  “A hyper-emotional guy flailing around-not threatening directly, but making everyone uncomfortable,” I agreed.

  “Then I think I can do it on my own. I’ll set up a camp bed in that sunroom: it’s the one place with vulnerable windows. You’ve got the photos of the stalker, right?”

  In the confusion of getting Morrell to O’Hare, I’d left my briefcase at his place. I had a set of photos in it, which I said I’d drop off in an hour or two on my way into the city. Calia pouted when I called the dogs to me, but Tim blew through his moustache and gave a walruslike bark. She turned her back on us and demanded that he bark again if he wanted another fish.

  Lotty Herschel’s Story:

  Quarantine

  I reached the cottage on a day so hot that not even the bees could bear it. A man who’d ridden the bus with me from Seaton Junction carried my suitcase up the road for me. When he finally left me, after asking for the eighth or ninth time if I was sure I could manage, I sat exhausted on the door-stone, letting the sun burn through my jumper. I’d darned it so many times that it was more mending thread than cotton at this point.

  It had been hot in London, too, but a horrible city heat, where the yellow skies pushed down on you so hard your head began to buzz as if it were filled with cotton wool. At night I sweated so much that sheet and nightgown both were wet when I got up in the morning. I knew I needed to eat, but between the heat and the lethargy my physical condition induced it was hard to force food down.

  When Claire examined me, she told me brusquely that I was starving myself to death. “Any infection on the wards could kill you in a week, the condition you’re in right now. You need to eat. You need to rest.”

  Eat and rest. When I lay in bed at night, feverish nightmares consumed me. I kept seeing my mother, too weak from hunger and pregnancy to walk down the stairs with us when Hugo and I left Vienna. The baby died of malnutrition at two months. Nadia, they’d called her, meaning hope. They would not be hopeless. I knew the baby died because my father wrote to tell me. A Red Cross letter, with the prescribed twenty-five words, that reached me in March, 1940. The last letter from him.

  I had hated the baby when my mother was pregnant because it took her from me: no more games, no more songs, only her eyes getting bigger in her head. Now this poor little sister whom I’d never seen haunted me, reproaching me for my nine-year-old jealousy. In the night as I sweated in the thick London air, I could hear her feeble cries growing faint with malnutrition.

  Or I’d see my Oma, her thick silvery-blond hair, about which she was so vain that she refused to bob it. In her apartment on the Renngasse I would sit with her at night while the maid brushed it, the ends so long my grandmother could sit on them. But now, in my misery, I would see her, shaved as my father’s mother had always been under her wig. Which image tormented me more? My Oma, shaved and helpless, or my father’s mother, my Bobe, whom I refused to kiss good-bye? As I grew thinner and weaker in the London heat, that last morning in Vienna grew so loud in my head that I could hardly hear the world around me.

  The cousins with whom I shared a bed, not coming to England, staying in bed, refusing to get up to walk to the station with us. Oma and Opa would pay for Lingerl’s children, but not the daughters of my father’s sisters, those dark girls with nut-shaped faces whom I so closely resembled. Oh, the money, Opa had no money anymore, except that little hoard of coins. The coins that bought me my medical training could have bought my cousins’ lives. My Bobe stretching her arms out to me, her beloved Martin’s daughter, and I with my Oma’s jealous eyes on me giving her only a formal curtsy in farewell. I lay in bed weeping, begging my granny to forgive me.

  I could hardly talk to Carl these days. Anyway, he wasn’t much in London for me to talk to. In the spring the orchestra went to Holland to perform; he’d spent most of June and July in Bournemouth and Brighton, where his fledgling chamber group was engaged to play a series of promenade concerts. The few nights we’d had together this summer ended with my walking away, walking across London from his little flat to my bed-sitter, walking away from an energy and optimism that seemed incomprehensible to me.

  Only on the wards did the images recede. When I changed the dressings on an old man’s ulcerated wound or carefully cut open the newspapers in which some East End mother had stitched her sick baby, I could be present, in London, with people whose needs I could meet. When five of my classmates were on medical leave that winter I’d stepped up my work pace to pick up the slack. The teaching staff didn’t like me: I was too serious, too intense. But they recognized my skill with patients, even in my second year.

  I think that was why Claire had come looking for me. She’d shown up at the Royal Free for a conference-actually on the new drugs that were starting to come in for tuberculosis. Afterward, some professor probably suggested that a word from her might carry weight with me: get Miss Herschel to relax, take part in some of her year’s sports or dramatics. It will make her a better-rounded person and ultimately a better doctor.

  In the normal round of life our paths no longer crossed. Claire still lived with her mother, but since I’d left Cousin Minna’s I never ran into her. Claire was doing her senior houseman’s year at St. Anne’s in Wembley, which meant long days covering casualty as well
as the post-op and disease wards-women, even women like Claire Tallmadge, got the dregs of the housemen’s jobs in those days. When I looked up and saw her across the room, I collapsed.

  Carl often accused me of being in love with Claire. Oh, I was, but not in the way he imagined: not erotically, but with the infatuation a child has for an adulated adult. I suppose the flattery of my mimicry, even to the point of following her to the Royal Free, kept Claire paying a kind of attention to me. That was why it was so painful later, when she cut me off. But at that particular moment, it was more our different schedules, our different homes, that kept us apart.

  Still, I was startled when she wrote me the following week, the week after I’d collapsed in front of her, to offer me the cottage. When I crossed London by train and bus to meet her for tea, she told me Ted Marmaduke and his brother Wallace had bought the cottage to use when they went sailing. After Wallace was killed at El Alamein, Ted didn’t sail much. Vanessa hated boats; the country, real country, bored her. But Ted wouldn’t sell the place; he even paid a local farm couple to keep the yard and premises in some kind of order. Claire said he imagined using it again when he and Vanessa had children-he pictured five or six children who would grow up to share his love of sports. Since they’d been married a decade now without even one robust blond child, I had a feeling that Vanessa’s will would prevail here as in other matters, but it wasn’t my business. I didn’t care much about Ted and Vanessa’s lives.

  “Ted never liked me,” I said, when Claire explained that her brother-in-law was offering me the place so that I could get the fresh air and food I needed. “Why would he let me have his country house? Isn’t that the kind of encroachment he always warned you against?”

  I used to hear Ted criticizing Claire for her involvement with me. Crouching behind the garden wall, I’d hear him say she should be careful, my kind would only take advantage, Claire replying that I was a funny little monkey without a mother, and what possible advantage could I take? Ted’s brother Wallace, another tall blond man with a hearty laugh, putting in that she’d be surprised, people like me were always encroaching: You’re young, Claire, inclined to think you know better than the rest of us. I assure you when you’ve seen the world a bit you’ll think differently.