Total Recall

by Sara Paretsky

  “I’ve got the dog soaking in a basin of peroxide. I’ll put him in the dryer before I leave the house again, and hope he’ll look respectable enough that he won’t freak out Calia when she gets him back.”

  Tim let out a sigh of relief. “But who shot Radbuka?”

  “A woman. Paul called her Ilse-I didn’t quite get the last name-it sounded something like Bullfin. I’m utterly baffled. By the way, the police don’t know I was in there, and I’d like them to continue in blissful ignorance.”

  “I never heard anything about you knowing where the dude lived,” Tim said. “Dropped the dog on the street, did he, bicycling away?”

  I laughed. “Something like that. Anyway, I’m going to take a bath. I’ll come up in a couple of hours. I want to show Max a picture and some other stuff. How’s the kid doing?”

  She’d fallen asleep in front of the television, watching Arthur. Agnes, who’d canceled her appointment at the gallery, was curled up on the couch next to her daughter. Tim was standing in the playroom doorway where he could see both of them.

  “And Michael’s on his way into town. Agnes called him after this latest incident; he wants to stay close until Agnes and Calia fly home on Saturday. He’s already in the air, landing at O’Hare in an hour or so.”

  “Even so, I think you should hang on, although there probably isn’t any other risk to Calia,” I said. “Just in case that prize fanatic Posner decides to carry on for his fallen disciple.”

  He agreed, but added that baby-sitting was harder work than moving furniture. “I’d rather carry a grand piano up three flights of stairs. At least when you got there you’d know where the piano was, and you’d be done for the day.”

  I switched my house phone over to the answering service while I soaked, obsessively sponging my breasts as if blood had seeped through the pores of my skin. I shampooed my hair several times as well before I finally felt clean enough to leave the tub.

  Wrapped in a terry cloth robe, I returned to the living room: I’d dropped the accordion file on the piano bench when I’d run into the apartment. For a long moment I stared down at Ulrich’s disfigured face, which looked even worse for the blood that had seeped onto it.

  I’d been wanting to see these papers since Paul showed up at Max’s last Sunday. Now that they were within my reach I almost couldn’t bear to read them. They were like the special present of my childhood birthdays-sometimes wonderful, like the year I got roller skates, sometimes a disappointment, like the year I longed for a bicycle and got a concert dress. I didn’t think I could bear to open the file and find, well, another concert dress.

  I finally undid the black ribbon. Two leather-bound books fell out. On the front of each was stamped in peeling gold letters Ulrich Hoffman. So that was why Rhea Wiell had smirked at me: Ulrich was his first name. I could have called every Ulrich who’d ever lived in Chicago and never found Paul’s father.

  A black ribbon hung from the middle of one of the books. I set the other down and opened this one to its marker. The paper, and the ornate script on it, looked much the same as the fragment I’d found in Howard Fepple’s office. A person who was fond of himself, that was what the woman at Cheviot Labs had said, using expensive paper for keeping accounting notes. A domestic bully, king only of the tiny empire of his son? Or an SS man in hiding?

  The page I was looking at held a list of names, at least twenty, maybe thirty. Even in the difficult script, one name in particular halfway down the page caught my eye:

  Next to it, in a hand so heavy it cut through the paper, Paul had written in red, Sofie Radbuka. My mother, weeping for me, dying for me, in heaven all these years praying for me.

  My skin crawled. I could hardly bear to look at the page. I had to treat it as a problem, a conundrum, like the time in the PD when I’d represented a man who had skinned his own daughter. His day in court where I did my best, my God, because I’d managed to dissociate myself and treat it as a problem.

  All the entries followed the same format: a year with a question mark, and then a number. The only variation I saw was that some had a cross followed by a check mark, others just a cross.

  Did this mean they had died in 1943, or ’41? With 72 or 45 something.

  I opened the second book. This one held similar information to the scrap I’d found in Fepple’s office, columns of dates, all written European style, most filled in with check marks, while some were blank. What had Howard Fepple been doing with a piece of Ulrich Hoffman’s old Swiss paper?

  I sat down hard on the piano bench. Ulrich Hoffman. Rick Hoffman. Was that Paul Radbuka’s father? The old agent from Midway with his Mercedes, and the books he carried around with him to check off who paid him? Whose son had an expensive education, but never amounted to anything? But-had he sold insurance in Germany as well? The man who’d owned these books was an immigrant.

  I dug Rhonda Fepple’s number out of my briefcase. Her phone rang six times before the answering machine picked up, with Howard Fepple’s voice eerily asking for me to leave a message. I reminded Rhonda that I was the detective who had been to her house on Monday. I asked her to call me as soon as possible, giving her my cell-phone number, then went back to stare at the books again. If Rick Hoffman and Ulrich were the same man, what did these books have to do with insurance? I tried to match the entries with what I knew of insurance policies, but couldn’t make sense of them. The front of the first book was filled with a long list of names, with a lot of other data that I couldn’t decipher.

  The list went on for pages. I shook my head over it. I squinted at the difficult ornate writing, trying to interpret it. What about it had made Paul decide Ulrich was with the Einsatzgruppen? What was it about the name Radbuka that had persuaded him it was his? The papers were in code, he’d screamed at me outside the hospital yesterday-if I believed in Rhea I’d understand it. What had she seen when he’d shown these pages to her?

  And finally, who was the Ilse Bullfin who had shot him? Was she a figment of his imagination? Had it been a garden-variety housebreaker whom he thought was the SS? Or was it someone who wanted these journals? Or was there something else in the house that the person had taken as she-he-whoever-tossed all those papers around.

  Even laying out these questions on a legal pad at my dining room table didn’t help, although it did make me able to look at the material more calmly. I finally put the journals to one side to see if there was anything else in the file. An envelope held Ulrich’s INS documents, starting with his landing permit on June 17, 1947, in Baltimore, with son Paul Hoffman, born March 29, 1941, Vienna. Paul had X’d this out, saying, Paul Radbuka, whom he stole from England. The documents included the name of the Dutch ship they had arrived on, a certification that Ulrich was not a Nazi, Ulrich’s resident-alien permits, renewed at regular intervals, his citizenship papers, granted in 1971. On these, Paul had smeared, Nazi War Criminal: revoke and deport for crimes against humanity. Paul had said on television that Ulrich wanted a Jewish child to help him get into the States, but there wasn’t any reference to Paul’s religion, or to Ulrich’s, in the landing documents.

  My brain would work better if I got some rest. It had been a long day, what with finding Paul’s body and his unnerving refuge. I thought of him again as a small child, locked in the closet, terrified, his revenge now as puny as when he’d been a child.

  XL Confession

  I slept heavily, but unpleasantly, tormented by dreams of being locked in that little closet with swastikaed faces leering down at me, with Paul dancing dementedly outside the door like Rumpelstiltskin, crying, “You’ll never know my name.” It was a relief when my answering service brought me back to life at five: a woman named Amy Blount had called. She said she had offered to look at a document for me and could stop by my office in half an hour or so if that was convenient.

  I really wanted to get up to Max’s. On the other hand, Mary Louise would have left a report on her day’s interviews with Isaiah Sommers’s friends and neighbors. Come t
o think of it, Ulrich Hoffman’s books might mean something to Amy Blount: after all, she was a historian. She understood odd documents.

  I put Ninshubur in the dryer and called Ms. Blount to say I was on my way to my office. When I got there, I made copies of some of the pages in Ulrich’s books, including the one with Paul’s heavy marginalia.

  While I waited for Ms. Blount, I looked over Mary Louise’s neatly typed report. She had drawn a succession of blanks on the South Side. None of Isaiah Sommers’s friends or coworkers could think of anyone with a big enough grudge against him to finger him to the cops.

  His wife is an angry woman, but at the bottom I believe she is on his side-I don’t think she set him up. Terry Finchley tells me the police right now have two competing theories:

  1. Connie Ingram did it because Fepple tried to assault her. They don’t like this because they believe what she says about not going to his office. They do like it because her only alibi is her mother, who sits in front of the tube most nights. They also can’t get around the forensic evidence showing that Fepple (or someone) entered his “hot” date in his computer on Thursday, when everyone agrees Fepple was still alive.

  2. Isaiah Sommers did it because he thought Fepple was robbing his family of ten thousand dollars they all could use. They like this better, because they can actually put Sommers at the scene. They can’t prove he ever owned a 22-caliber SIG, but they can’t trace the gun anyway. Terry says they’d risk going to court if they could completely discount Connie as a suspect; he also says they know that with Freeman Carter and you acting for Sommers, they need to have cast-iron evidence. They know Mr. Carter would demolish them in court since they can’t put the SIG in Sommers’s hands any more than anyone else’s.

  The only odd thing here is Sommers’s cousin Colby-this is his other uncle’s son, the one he told you might have stolen the policy to begin with; he hangs on the fringe of Durham’s Empower Youth Energy. He’s been flashing cash lately, and everyone is surprised, because he never has any.

  This can’t be the original life-insurance money, I scribbled on the page, because that was cashed in almost a decade ago. I don’t know if it’s significant or not, but poke at it tomorrow morning, see if you can find anyone who knows where he got it.

  As I dropped the report back on Mary Louise’s desk, Amy Blount came to the door. She had on her professional wardrobe, the prim tweed suit with a severe blue shirt. Her dreadlocks were once again tied back from her face. With the formal attire her manner had become more guarded again, but she took Ulrich’s two journals and looked at them carefully, comparing them with the photocopy of the fragment I’d found in Fepple’s office.

  She looked up with a rueful smile that made her seem more approachable. “I hoped I was going to perform some kind of hocus-pocus on this, impress you beyond expression-but I can’t. If you hadn’t told me you’d found it in a German man’s home, I’d have guessed some Jewish organization-the names all look Jewish to me, at least the ones on the document you found in the Midway Insurance office. Someone was keeping track of these people, marking off when they died; only Th. Sommers is still alive.”

  “You think Sommers is a Jewish name?” I was startled: I only associated it with my client.

  “In this context, yes-it’s there with Brodsky and Herstein, after all.”

  I looked at the paper again myself. Could this be a different Aaron Sommers altogether? Was that why the policy had been paid out? Because Fepple’s father, or the other agent, had confused my client’s uncle with someone else with the same name? But if it was just a case of simple confusion-why had someone cared enough to steal all the papers relating to the Sommers family?

  “I’m sorry,” I said, realizing I’d missed what else she’d been saying. “The dates?”

  “What are they? Attendance records? Payment records? It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to say they were written by a European person. And you know the man was German. Other than that, I can’t help you. I didn’t find anything like this in the files I looked at, but of course Ajax has company files, not client records.”

  She didn’t seem quite ready to leave, so I asked her if she had heard any further accusations from Bertrand Rossy about feeding Ajax material to Alderman Durham. She played with a large turquoise ring on her index finger, twisting it and looking at it under the light.

  “That was a strange event,” she said. “I suppose that’s really why I wanted to come by. To ask your opinion-or to trade professional opinions. I hoped I could tell you something about your document so that you could give me your opinion about a conversation.”

  I was intrigued. “You did your best, I’ll do mine.”

  “This-is not an easy thing for me to tell you, and you would oblige me by promising to keep it confidential. That is, not to act on it.”

  I frowned. “Without knowing in advance-I can’t promise that if it makes me party to a crime, or if the information would help clear my client of a potential murder charge.”

  “Oh! Your Mr. Sommers, you mean, your non-Jewish Mr. Sommers. It’s not that kind of information. It’s-it’s political. It could be damaging politically, and embarrassing. For me to be known as someone who gave out the information.”

  “Then I can safely promise you that I will hold what you say in confidence,” I said gravely.

  “It concerns Mr. Durham,” she said, her eyes on her ring. “As a matter of fact, he did ask me to give him documents from the Ajax files. He knew I was working on their history-everybody did. Mr. Janoff-you know, the chairman of Ajax-was quite gracious about introducing me to people at the gala they held for their hundred-fiftieth anniversary, even if he was a bit patronizing-you know how they do it, ‘Here’s the little gal who wrote up our history.’ If I’d been white, or a man, would he have introduced me as ‘the little guy’? But at any event, I met the mayor, I even met the governor, and some of the aldermen, including Mr. Durham. The day after the gala he-Mr. Durham, that is-called. He wanted me to give him anything I had found in the archives which would support his claim. I told him it wasn’t mine to give, and that even if it were, I didn’t believe in the politics of victimhood.”

  She looked up briefly. “He didn’t take offense. Instead-well, I don’t know if you’ve met him in person, but he can have a great deal of charm, and he exercised it on me. I also was-relieved-that he didn’t start haranguing me as a race traitor, or something of that ilk, as people do sometimes when you don’t go in lockstep with them. He said he would leave the door open for further discussions.”

  “And has he?” I prodded, when she stopped.

  “He called me this morning and said he would take it as a favor if I would overlook his having asked me for the material. He said it had been out of line for him, and he was embarrassed to think that I might have thought of him as a man who would behave with such little attention to ethics.”

  She turned her head away. “Now that I’m here, this seems-you know someone stole all my research notes.”

  “And you’re worrying whether he might have engineered the theft? And that he’s called to ask you to lay off because he already has what he needs?”

  She nodded, miserable, still unable to look at me. “When he called this morning, I was only annoyed. I thought, How gullible do you believe I really am, although I didn’t say it.”

  “You want my professional opinion? Just with that bit of information-I’d agree with you. You see an empty cream jug and a cat licking its whiskers-you don’t need to be Marie Curie to add two and two together. But there’s another little wrinkle on this.”

  I told her about Rossy and Durham talking in the middle of Tuesday afternoon’s demonstration and Durham going up to Rossy’s apartment an hour later. “I’ve wondered if Ajax was trying to buy off Durham. Now-your news makes me wonder if Durham was trying to blackmail Rossy. Was there anything in the data that Edelweiss would pay blackmail to keep quiet?”

  “I didn’t see anything that struck me as that kind of
secret. Nothing on Holocaust files, for instance, or even a serious slavery exposure. But there were hundreds of pages of archives, things I copied that I thought I might look at later for a different project, for instance. I’d have to be able to see them. And of course I can’t.” She turned her head so I wouldn’t see the tears of frustration.

  Durham and Rossy. What had brought them together? Posner had said it was only after he had started demonstrating outside Ajax that Durham began his campaign-but that didn’t prove anything except Durham ’s flair for the limelight.

  I leaned forward. “You’re a trained thinker. I told you yesterday what’s been going on around here. Now Durham ’s demonstration has completely stopped. He was a big presence at the Ajax building last week and up to Tuesday afternoon, when Rossy spoke to him. I called his office: they say they’re pleased that Ajax blocked the Holocaust Asset Recovery Act since it didn’t include an African slave reparations section. So they’re putting their demonstrations on hold.”

  She flung up her hands. “It could be that simple. I suppose it could have nothing to do with my papers at all. I see it’s a complicated problem. I’m sorry to say that I have another appointment-I’m teaching a seminar at the Newbery Library at seven-but if you can give me one of the photocopies I’ll study it later. If something occurs to me, I’ll call you.”

  I walked out with her, locking everything carefully. I brought the photocopies I’d made along with the two books themselves. I wanted Max to look at the material to see if he understood the German. The original might be easier for him to decipher than a photocopy.

  I stopped at home to collect Ninshubur from the dryer. The little dog was still slightly damp, and he was a paler blue than he used to be, but the stains around his head and left side were almost gone: a week of being dragged around by a child would soon mix enough dirt into his fur to make the faint line of blood unnoticeable. Before I left, I tried Rhonda Fepple again, but she was either still out, or not up to answering the phone. I left my name and cell-phone number a second time.