I was getting into my car when I decided to go upstairs to my safe for my Smith & Wesson. Someone was shooting guns awfully close to me. If they started firing right at me, I wanted to be able to shoot back.
XLI Family Party
As I drove north, I turned on the local news. Police were anxious to speak to the woman who had admitted paramedics to the home of a Lincoln Park shooting victim.
She told paramedics she was a family friend but didn’t give a name. By the time police arrived to investigate the crime scene, she had fled, shedding the navy service coverall she was wearing. It’s possible she belonged to a cleaning service and surprised a robbery in progress, since no obvious valuables were missing. The police are not releasing the name of the victim, who is in critical condition following surgery to remove a bullet from his heart.
Dang. Why hadn’t I thought to say I was with a cleaning service? My navy coverall had been perfect for it. Hopefully the paramedics thought I was an illegal immigrant who had fled to avoid revealing my papers to the cops. Hopefully I hadn’t left my prints on anything. Hopefully the person who had shot Paul hadn’t been hanging around the house when I walked up to it.
To my surprise, when I got to Max’s, not only was Michael Loewenthal there but also Carl Tisov-and Lotty. The strain was still evident in the lines around Lotty’s mouth and forehead, but she and Carl actually seemed to be laughing together.
Agnes Loewenthal greeted me exuberantly. “I know I shouldn’t be so pleased that someone’s lying in hospital, but I’m ecstatic-Christmas and my birthday tied up in one gorgeous package. And Michael here to enjoy it with us.”
Carl bowed to me with an extravagant flourish and handed me a glass of champagne. They were all drinking, except Lotty, who seldom touches alcohol.
“You came with Michael?” I asked.
He nodded. “Max is after all my oldest friend on the planet. If anything happened-well, a child is more important than one concert more or less. And Lotty even decided the same thing about one operation more or less. Then we got here and found we could relax, that that delusional menace won’t be around again, at least not while the little one is here.”
Before I could respond, Calia hurled herself into the living room, yelling, “Give me my Ninshubur!” Agnes promptly went to her, urging her to display a few manners.
I pulled the dog from my briefcase. “Your little puppy had a big adventure today. He saved a man’s life, and he had to have a bath: he’s still a bit damp.”
She grabbed the dog from me. “I know, I know, he jumpted into the river and carried the princess to safety. He’s wet because ‘Ninshubur, the faithful hound, leapt from rock to rock, heedless of any danger.’ Did that bad man take his collar? Where are his tags like Mitch? Now Mitch won’t know him.”
“I took off his collar to give him his bath. I’ll get it back to you tomorrow.”
“You’re bad, Aunt Vicory, you stoled Ninshubur’s collar.” She butted my leg.
“Aunt Vicory is good,” Agnes remonstrated. “She went to a lot of trouble to get your little dog back. I want to hear you say thank you.”
Calia ignored her, running around the room like a demented bumblebee, bouncing off furniture, off Michael, off me, and off Tim, who had appeared with a tray of sandwiches. Excitement over the sudden arrival of her father, whom she hadn’t expected to see for some time, and excitement over the day’s events had sent her completely over the top. At any rate, she didn’t need my explanation of why her dog was damp and stained-it fit perfectly with the story of the faithful hound.
Michael and Agnes tolerated her antics for about three minutes before marching upstairs with her to the nursery suite. When they had gone, Max asked for a detailed capitulation of the events around Paul’s shooting. I told him everything, including the frightening display devoted to himself and his family in Paul’s closet.
“So you don’t know who could have shot Paul?” Max said, when I’d finished.
I shook my head. “And I don’t even know if it was someone who was after the books I found in that dreadful closet. Maybe the fact that he was telling everyone he had papers proving his father was with the Einsatzgruppen made some real Nazi conspirators seek him out. They didn’t know he was a lunatic-they thought he was on to them. So they shot him. The evil temptress, of course, Ilse Bullfin, seduced Paul in order to get him to open the front door.”
“Who?” Max demanded sharply.
“Didn’t I tell you? I asked him who shot him, and he said a woman named Ilse. I know I didn’t get the last name quite right. It sounded kind of like Bullfin.”
“Could it have been Wölfin?” Max asked, saying the name in a fast, low voice.
I strained to hear the difference between what he said and what Paul had said. “Vull, you’re saying, not Bull? Yes, I suppose it could be-the two sounds are very close. Is she German? Do you know her?”
“Ilse Wölfin-Ilse Koch, known as the She-Wolf. A most monstrous concentration-camp guard. If that’s who this poor devil thinks shot him-umph. I’d like to lay all this in front of a psychologist-this shrine, his obsession with the Holocaust. I don’t suppose he’d let anyone besides this Rhea Wiell actually talk to him, but I don’t know if you could even count on it being a woman who shot him. I don’t know enough about delusions-he might confuse an assailant with an SS guard, but would he still know the difference between a man and a woman? What do you think, Lotty?”
Lotty shook her head, the lines of strain deeper in her face. “That kind of pathology is beyond me. We only know he’s been deluding himself for a week about his relations with you-but confusing you with his brother hasn’t made him think you were his mother, after all.”
Max shifted uneasily. “What hospital did you say he was going to? Compassionate Heart? I could send someone over there-he’s so eager to be listened to he might talk to another doctor.”
“But that doctor could not tell you any revelations this man Paul might make,” Lotty protested. “You have no standing to get someone to reveal patient confidences to you.”
Max looked absurdly guilty: he had clearly been planning to send a friend from Beth Israel who might, as a favor to Max, violate the standards of confidentiality.
“But what’s in these books that made him keep them secret?” Carl said. “Do they show some reason to believe that’s why he was shot?”
I pulled the accordion file out of my briefcase. I’d forgotten the picture of the woman I’d taken along. I laid it on the coffee table in front of the three.
“His savior in England, you can see he’s labeled it,” I said. “I couldn’t help wondering-well, do you know her?”
Carl frowned at the dark, wistful face. “ London,” he said slowly. “I don’t remember who, except that it’s a long time ago, during the war years maybe, or right after.”
“He had this on this wall, in the middle of his shrine to the therapist he worships?” Lotty said in a high queer voice.
“You know who she is?” I asked.
Lotty looked grim. “I know who she is-I can even show you the book where he found this picture, if Max has it on his shelves. But why-”
She interrupted herself to dart from the room. We heard her running up the stairs, her tread as always light, that of a young woman.
Max looked at the picture. “I don’t recognize the face. This isn’t the doctor in London Lotty worshiped as a child, is it?”
Carl shook his head. “Claire Tallmadge was very fair-the perfect English rose. I always thought that was part of Lotty’s infatuation with her. It used to make my blood boil, how Lotty would let that family call her ‘the little monkey.’ Victoria, let’s see these books you brought with you.”
I handed over the accordion file. Max and Carl recoiled from the disfigured face on the front of it.
“Who is this?” Carl demanded.
“Paul’s father,” I said. “Paul had a ton of photographs of him in that secret room, all marked up like this. Not the blo
od-that got there when I took it away with me.”
Lotty returned with a book, which she held open at a page of photographs. “Anna Freud.”
We all stared from Paul’s picture to the identical shot on the page, dumbfounded, until Carl said, “Of course. You took me to hear her speak, but she looked different-this is such an intimate picture.”
“She was a refugee from Vienna, like us,” Lotty explained. “I admired her to an extraordinary degree. I even volunteered at the nursery she ran in Hampstead during the war, you know, washing dishes, the kind of thing an unskilled teenager could do. Minna used to lash out at me-well, never mind that. For a time I imagined I would follow Anna Freud and become an analyst myself, but-well, never mind that, either. Why is this man claiming her as his savior? Does he imagine he was in the Hampstead nursery?”
The rest of us could only shake our heads, bewildered.
“What about these?” I handed over the ledgers.
“Ulrich,” Max breathed, looking at the peeling gold leaf stamped on the front. “How stupid of me to forget it is more often a first name than a last. No wonder you couldn’t find him. What are these?”
“I think they must have something to do with insurance,” I said, “but you can see that Paul had put them in here with the label Einsatzgruppenführer Ulrich Hoffman. Since they were locked in his secret room, I’m assuming these documents convinced him his name was Radbuka, but I frankly don’t get it. I showed them to a young historian who’s been working in the Ajax archives; she said it looked like a Jewish organization’s ledgers. Would that be possible?”
Max picked up the second volume and squinted at it. “It’s been a long time since I tried reading this kind of old-fashioned German handwriting. These are addresses, I think. It could be some kind of Jewish welfare association, I suppose, a list of names and addresses-perhaps the group all bought insurance together. I don’t understand the other numbers, though. Unless your historian friend is right: maybe S. Radbuka brought sixty-five people with her and K. Omschutz brought fifty-four.” He shook his head, unsatisfied with that explanation, and looked back at the books. “Schrei. What city has a street called-oh, Johann Nestroy. The Austrian fairy-tale writer. Is this Vienna, Lotty? I don’t remember either Nestroy or Schreigassen.”
Lotty’s skin looked waxen. She took the book from Max, her arms jerky, as if she were a marionette. She looked at the page where he was pointing, her finger moving slowly along the lines, reading the names under her breath.
“ Vienna? Yes, it should be Vienna. Leopoldsgasse, Untere Augarten Strasse. You don’t remember those streets? Where was your family driven after the Anschluss?” Her voice was a harsh squawk.
“We lived on Bauernmarkt,” Max said. “We weren’t relocated, although we had three other families, all strangers, pushed into our flat. I can’t say I’ve wanted to keep these street names in my head all these years. I’m surprised you remember them.”
His voice was pregnant with meaning. Lotty looked at him grimly. I hastily intervened before they could start fighting.
“This looks like the same paper stock and the same handwriting I found on a sheet of paper in the bag of a dead insurance agent on the South Side, which is why I’m assuming these are insurance documents. The old agent was named Rick Hoffman, and I’m betting he’s Paul’s father-stepfather or whatever. Would Rick be a nickname for Ulrich?”
“It could be.” Max smiled wryly. “If he wanted to fit into America, he would have picked a name everyone could pronounce instead of something alien like Ulrich.”
“If he sold insurance, he would have felt a special incentive to fit in,” I said.
“Ah, yes, I do believe this is an insurance journal.” Carl turned to a page that was filled with names and dates with check marks, like the fragment in Fepple’s office. “Didn’t your family buy insurance like this, Loewenthal? The agent came into the ghetto every Friday on his bicycle; my father and all the other men would pay their twenty or thirty korunas and the agent marked them off in his book. You don’t remember such a thing? Oh, well, you and Lotty came from the haute bourgeoisie. These weekly payments, they were for people on small incomes. My father found the whole process humiliating, that he couldn’t afford to go to an office, pay his money up front, like an important man-he used to send me down with the coins tightly wrapped in a twist of newspaper.” He started looking through the pages of tiny ornate writing.
“My father bought his policy through an Italian company. In 1959 it occurred to me that I should claim that life insurance. Not that it was so much money, but why should the company get to keep it? I went through a long rigmarole. But they were adamant that without the death certificate, and without the policy number, they would do nothing for me.” His mouth twisted bitterly. “I hired someone-I was in a position to hire someone-who went back through the company’s records and found the policy number for me, but even so, they never would pay it because I couldn’t present the death certificate. They are incredible thieves, in their glass skyscrapers with their black ties and tails. I make it an absolute policy that the Cellini accepts no money from any insurance companies. The management is livid over it, but I think: it could be my father’s coins wrapped in a scrap of newspaper that they’re using to buy their way onto artistic boards. They won’t sit on mine.”
Max nodded in sympathy; Lotty murmured, “All money has someone’s blood on it, I suppose.”
“Do you think these numbers are insurance sales, then?” I asked, after a respectful pause. “And the crosses, that means the person died? He put a check against those he could confirm, perhaps.” In my bag on the floor my cell phone started to ring. It was Rhonda Fepple, speaking in the drugged, half-dead voice of the newly bereaved. Had there been an arrest? The police didn’t tell her anything.
I took the phone out to the kitchen with me and told her the progress of the investigation, if such it could be called, before asking her if Rick Hoffman had been German.
“German?” she repeated, as if I had asked if he were from Pluto. “I don’t remember. I guess he was foreign, now that you mention it-I remember Mr. Fepple swearing out some legal forms for him when Mr. Hoffman wanted to become a citizen.”
“And his son, was his name Paul?”
“Paul? I think so. That could be right, Paul Hoffman. Yes, that’s right. What? Did Paul come around and kill my boy? Was he jealous because Howie inherited the agency?”
Could Paul Hoffman-Radbuka be a murderer? He was such a confused person, but-murderer? Still, maybe he had thought Howard Fepple was part of some Einsatzgruppen conspiracy-if he knew Fepple had one of Ulrich’s old ledger books, he might be crazy enough to think he had to destroy Fepple. It seemed absurd, but everything involving Paul Radbuka-Hoffman defied reason.
“Wouldn’t your son have mentioned it, if he’d seen Paul Hoffman recently?”
“He might not have, if he had some secret plan in mind,” Rhonda said listlessly. “He liked to keep secrets to himself; they made him feel important.”
That seemed too sad an epitaph. More to brace myself than her, I asked if she had anyone to talk to, to help her through this time-a sister or a minister, perhaps.
“Everything seems so unreal since Howie died, I can’t make myself feel anything. Even getting the house broken into didn’t upset me like you’d think it would.”
“When did that happen?” Her tone was as apathetic as if she were reciting a grocery list, but the information jolted me.
“I think it was the day after-after they found him. Yes, because it wasn’t yesterday. What day would that be?”
“Tuesday. Did they take anything?”
“There’s nothing here to take, really, but they stole my boy’s computer. I guess gangs from the city come out here looking for things to steal to sell for drugs. The police didn’t do anything. Not that I care, really. None of it matters now-I wasn’t ever going to use a home computer, that’s for sure.”
XLII Lotty’s Perfect Storm
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I stared out the kitchen window at the dark garden. The same person who shot Paul must have broken into Rhonda Fepple’s house. They-she? Ilse Wölfin?-had killed Fepple. Not because of the Sommers file, but for some altogether different reason-to get the fragment from Ulrich Hoffman’s ledgers I’d found in Fepple’s bag. And then they’d careened around Chicago, looking for the rest of the books.
Howard Fepple, excited over the next big thing that was going to make him rich, had put the bite on a lethal hand. I shook my head. Fepple didn’t know about Hoffman’s journals: he’d gotten roused by something he saw in the Sommers policy file. He’d been excited, he’d told his mother she’d be driving a Mercedes of her own, he’d found out how Rick Hoffman made money from his lousy client list. Not because of the ledgers.
Behind me I heard raised voices, the front door slam, a car start.
Could it be simpler than that? Could Paul Hoffman-Radbuka have murdered Fepple? Maybe he was deluded enough to imagine that Fepple was part of his father’s Einsatzgruppe. But then-who had shot Paul? I couldn’t make sense of any of it. Gerbil on treadmill, going round and round. What had Fepple noticed that I wasn’t getting? Or what paper had he seen that his murderer had taken away? These secret papers of Paul’s which I thought would explain everything had only left me more confused.
I went back to an earlier issue. There had been an Aaron Sommers on the fragment of Ulrich’s journals I’d found in Fepple’s bag. Was that my client’s uncle? Or had there been two Aaron Sommerses-one Jewish, one black?
Connie Ingram had talked to Fepple. That was a point of certainty-even if she’d never gone to see him, she had spoken to him. He had entered her name in his appointment software. Maybe she really had gone to Fepple’s office-under Ralph’s orders? I recoiled from the thought. Under Rossy’s orders? If I showed Connie Ingram a copy of Ulrich’s journals, would she tell me whether she’d seen something like this in Fepple’s copy of the Sommers file?
Total Recall Page 36