Total Recall

by Sara Paretsky

  His eyes were shut, his face drawn and grey. “His tally of the dead he’d killed himself… bragged in his books… listed their names. Searched each name… on the Internet… Found one… in England… Sofie… Radbuka… how I knew… which name mine… and that I was sent to Anna Freud in England… after the war… Had to be.”

  Lotty kept her hand on his pulse while he fell asleep. The rest of us watched dumbly while Lotty checked the IV drips coming into his arms. When she left the room, Rhea and I followed. Hot spots of color burned in Rhea’s face; she tried to confront Lotty in the hall, but Lotty swept past her to the nurse’s station, where she asked for the charge nurse. She began an interrogation about the drugs Paul was getting.

  Don had come out of Paul’s room more slowly than the rest of us. He started a low-voiced conversation with Rhea, his face troubled. Lotty finished with the charge nurse and sailed on down the hall to the elevator. I ran after her, but she looked at me sternly.

  “You should have saved your questions, Victoria. There were specific things I was trying to learn, but your questions sidetracked him and finally got him too upset. I wanted to know how he latched on to Anna Freud as his savior, for instance.”

  I got in the elevator with her. “Lotty, enough of this crap. Isn’t pushing Carl into the void enough? Do you want to drive Max and me away from you, as well? You got angry the first time Paul mentioned England; I was trying to keep you from losing him. And also-we know what those journals meant to Paul Hoffman. I’d like to know what they meant to Ulrich. Where are they, by the way? I need them.”

  “For right now, you’ll have to do without them.”

  “Lotty, I can’t do without them. I need to find out what they mean to people who don’t see the dead in them. Someone shot Paul for them. It may be that this fierce woman in sunglasses killed an insurance agent named Howard Fepple for them. His mother’s house was broken into on Tuesday. Someone searched it, probably for these notebooks.”

  Amy Blount, I suddenly thought. Her place had been burgled on Tuesday, also. Surely it was too big a coincidence to think it wasn’t connected to these Hoffman journals. She had seen the Ajax archives. What if the fierce woman in sunglasses thought Ulrich Hoffman’s books had landed in the archives and thought perhaps Amy Blount hadn’t been able to resist them? Which meant-it was someone who knew Amy Blount had been in those archives. It all came back to the folks at Ajax. Ralph. Rossy. And Durham on the sideline.

  “Anyway,” I added aloud, as the elevator doors opened onto the lobby, “if they mean that much to someone, you’re risking a lot by holding on to them.”

  “That is definitely my lookout, not yours, Victoria. I’ll return them to you in a day or so. There’s something I need to look for in them first.” She turned on her heel and stalked away from me, following a hallway signposted to the doctors’ parking area.

  Don and Rhea appeared from another elevator, Don saying, “Don’t you see, sweetheart, this lays you open to the kind of criticism people like Praeger make, that you lead people to these memories.”

  “He knew he had been in England after the war,” she said. “That isn’t something I thought of or led him to. And those memories of the lime pits-Don, if you’d been there-I’ve listened to many bone-chilling memories from my patients, but I’ve never wept before. I’d always kept my professional detachment. But to see your own mother thrown alive into a pit she’d been forced at gunpoint to fill with lime, to hear those screams-and then to know that the man responsible for your own mother’s death had such power over you, locking you into a small closet, beating you, taunting you-it was utterly shattering.”

  “I can see that,” I said, breaking into this private conversation. “But there are so many curious leaps in his story. Even if Ulrich somehow knew this one small boy escaped the lime pit, how did he keep track of him all through the vicissitudes of war, first in Terezin and then to England? If Ulrich really was an Einsatzgruppenführer, he’d have had plenty of chances to kill the kid during the war. But on Ulrich’s landing papers, it says they docked in Baltimore from a Dutch merchant ship which sailed from Antwerp.”

  “That doesn’t mean he didn’t start from England,” Rhea said. “As for your other point, a man with a guilty conscience might do anything. Ulrich is dead; we can’t ask him why he was so obsessed by this small boy. But we know he thought having a Jewish child would help him get past immigration problems in America. So if he knew where Paul was, it was natural for him to take him, pretending to be his father.”

  “Ulrich had an official denazification certificate,” I objected. “Nor was there any mention of Paul’s Jewishness in the landing documents.”

  “Ulrich probably destroyed those once he was here and felt safe from prosecution,” Rhea said.

  I sighed. “You have a pat answer for everything, but Paul has a shrine to the Holocaust; it’s filled with books and articles on survivor experiences. If he’s immersed himself in these, he could be confusing other people’s histories with his own past. After all, he says he was only twelve months old when he was sent to Terezin. Would he really know what he’d been seeing, if in fact he had witnessed his mother and the rest of his town being murdered in the way he describes?”

  “You know nothing about psychology, or about survivors of torture,” Rhea said. “Why don’t you stick to the things you know about, whatever those might be.”

  “I do understand Vic’s point, Rhea,” Don said. “We need to talk seriously about your book. Unless there’s something specific in these journals of Ulrich’s, saying This boy I brought with me is not my son, he’s someone named Radbuka-well, I need to examine them in detail.”

  “Don, I thought you were on my side,” Rhea said, her myopic eyes filling with tears.

  “I am, Rhea. That’s why I don’t want you to expose yourself by publishing a book that has holes someone like Arnold Praeger and the Planted Memory folks can find so easily. Vic, I know you’re guarding the originals like the national vault, but would you let me examine them? I could do so in your office, under your eye.”

  I made a face. “Lotty’s walked off with them, which makes me angry, but also worried-if Paul was shot by someone looking for them, they’re about as safe to lug around as naked plutonium. She’s promised to return them by the weekend. I did copy about a dozen pages and you can look at those, but-I understand the problem.”

  “Well, that’s just dandy,” Don said, exasperated. “How did you get hold of all this material to begin with? How do you know about Paul’s shrine? You were in his house, weren’t you?”

  I nodded reluctantly-the situation was past the point where I could keep my presence on the scene a secret. “I found him right after he’d been shot and got the ambulance to him. The place had been ransacked, but he had a closet hidden behind the drapes in his Holocaust shrine. His assailant didn’t think to look there. It was a truly dreadful place.”

  I described it again, the wall of photographs, the telltale balloon comments coming out of Ulrich’s mouth. “Those things you say he took from your office, Rhea, they were there, draped around pictures of you.”

  “I’d like to see it,” Don said. “Maybe there’s some other crucial piece of evidence you overlooked.”

  “You could go in, and welcome,” I said. “Once is enough for me.”

  “Neither of you has a right to violate Paul’s privacy by going into his house,” Rhea said coldly. “All patients idealize their therapists to some extent. Ulrich was such a monstrous father that Paul juxtaposes me against him as an idealized form of the mother he never knew. As for your going into the house, Vic-you called me this morning wanting his address. Why do that if you knew where he lived? If he’d been shot, how did you get inside? Are you sure you weren’t the woman down there shooting him, because of your rage over his wanting to prove a close relationship with your friends?”

  “I didn’t shoot the little goober, even though he was acting like a great pain in the neck,” I said softly, my
eyes hot. “But I do have a sample of his blood now, on my clothes. I can send it out for a DNA profile. That will prove once and for all whether he’s related to Max-or Carl or Lotty.”

  She stared at me in dismay. I pushed brusquely past her before she or Don could speak.

  XLIV The Lady Vanishes

  I wondered if Paul was safe in his hospital room. If Ilse the She-Wolf learned he had survived her shot, would she come back to finish the job? I couldn’t ask for a police posting without explaining about Ulrich’s journals. And my mind boggled at the task of trying to make the cops understand that story, especially when I didn’t fully understand it myself. I finally compromised by going back to the fifth floor to tell the charge nurse that my brother was scared of his attacker coming back to kill him.

  “We worry about Paul,” I said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he lives in a world of his own. He thinks the Nazis are after him. Did Dr. Herschel tell you when she was talking to you that it would be best if no one goes in to see him unless I, or his doctor, or the therapist Rhea Wiell is here, as well? He’ll get so agitated that he could get into serious respiratory difficulties right now.”

  She told me to write up something for the nursing station. She let me use her computer in the back room, then taped my message up at the station and said she would make sure the central switchboard routed any calls or visitors to them.

  Before going home, I went to my own office to send Morrell an e-mail, recounting the events of the day. So far no one has beaten me up and left me to die on the Kennedy, I wrote, but I’ve been having a strenuous time. I finished with an account of the conversation in Paul’s hospital room. You’ve done so much work with torture victims-could this be a dissociative protection, identifying with victims of the Holocaust? The whole situation is really spooky.

  I ended with the messages of love and longing one sends to distant lovers. What had sustained Lotty over the years against such feelings? Had her sense of torment made her think she deserved loneliness and longing? When I got home, I sat on the back porch with Mr. Contreras and the dogs for a long time, not talking much, just drawing comfort from their presence.

  In the morning, I decided it was time to visit Ajax Insurance again. I phoned Ralph from my own office and talked to his secretary, Denise. As usual, his calendar was full; once again I pleaded my case forcefully but with charm and goodwill; once again, Denise arranged to fit me in, twenty minutes from now if I could get to Ajax by nine-thirty. I grabbed my briefcase with the photocopies from Ulrich’s journals and ran down to the corner of North for a cab.

  When I reached Ralph’s office, Denise told me he would be back from the chairman’s office in two minutes. She settled me in his conference room with a cup of coffee, but Ralph came in almost immediately, pressing his fingers along the corners of his eyes. He looked too tired for this early in the day.

  “Hi, Vic. We have a big exposure in the Carolina flood zone. I can give you five minutes, and then I have to move on.”

  I laid my photocopies on his conference table. “These are from the journals of Ulrich-Rick-Hoffman, the agent who sold Aaron Sommers his life-insurance policy all those years ago. Ulrich kept what seems to be a list of names and addresses, followed by a set of cryptic initials and check marks. Do they mean anything to you?”

  Ralph bent over the papers. “This handwriting is just about impossible to read. Is there any way to get it clearer?”

  “Blowing up the image seems to help. Unfortunately I don’t have the originals to work with right now, but I can read some of this-I’ve been looking at it a couple of days.”

  “Denise,” he shouted to his secretary. “Can you come here a minute?”

  Denise obediently trotted in, not showing any annoyance at the peremptory summons, and took a couple of sheets to her copier. She came back with various sizes of blowups. Ralph looked at them and shook his head.

  “Guy was really cryptic. I’ve seen a lot of agency files and-Denise!” he shouted again. “Call that gal in claims handling, Connie Ingram. Get her up here, will you?”

  In his normal tone he added to me, “I just remembered what was odd about that file, that disputed-claim file. Connie’ll know the answer.” He turned to the page showing the names and addresses. “Omschutz, Gerstein-are these names? What’s Notvoy?”

  “Nestroy, not Notvoy. A woman I know says it’s a street in Vienna.”

  “ Austria, you mean? We had an agent on the South Side selling insurance in Vienna, Austria?”

  “It’s possible he started his insurance career there before the war. I don’t know. I was hoping you’d look at these and be able to tell whether they were insurance-related or not. A definite no would be almost as helpful as a definite yes.”

  Ralph shook his head, rubbing his forehead again. “I can’t tell you. If it is insurance, these numbers, the 20/w and the 8/w, they could refer to a weekly payment-although, hell, I don’t know the German for week. Maybe it doesn’t start with w. Also, what was the currency? Do these amounts make sense for payment figures? And these others, if this is insurance, they could be policy numbers, although they don’t look like ones that I’m familiar with.”

  He held it out to me. “Can you read them? What’s the initial letter, this thing that looks like a bee attacking a flower? And then a string of numbers, and then-is that a q or an o? And then there’s an L. Hell, Vic-I don’t have time for this kind of puzzle. It might be insurance, but I can’t tell. I guess I could ask Rossy-he might know if it’s a European system, but if it dates to before the war-well, they’ve changed all their systems since the war. He’s a young guy, wasn’t even born until 1958-he probably wouldn’t know.”

  “I know it seems like it’s just a puzzle,” I responded. “But I think that insurance agent Fepple was killed because of it. Yesterday someone who was probably looking for these papers shot Rick Hoffman’s son.”

  Denise came to the conference room door to let Ralph know Connie Ingram had arrived.

  “Connie. Come on in. You doing okay? No more interviews with the police, I hope. Look, Connie, that claim file that’s been causing everyone such a headache-Aaron Sommers. There weren’t any personal notes from the agent in it. Something about it bugged me when I picked it up from Mr. Rossy, and looking at these, I remembered that’s what was missing.”

  He turned to me to explain. “See, Vic, the agent would work up a sheet, numbers, whatever, he’d have a letter or some notes or something that would end up in the file-we rely on their private assessment, especially in life insurance. Guy can have a doctor in his hip pocket to clear him on a physical, but the agent sees him, sees he lives like me, on French fries and coffee, and tells the company the prospect either isn’t a good risk or needs to be rated higher, or whatever. Anyway, there wasn’t anything in the Sommers file. So, Connie, what’s the story-did you ever see any agent report in that file when you looked at it? He might have had handwriting like this.”

  Ralph handed one of the sheets to Connie. Her eyes widened and she put a hand over her mouth.

  “What is it, Connie?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said quickly. “This writing is so queer I don’t know how anyone could read it.”

  Ralph said, “But did you ever see any notes from the agent-what was his name? Ulrich Hoffman?-either written or typed? You didn’t? You’re sure? What happens when we pay a claim-do we deep-six all the background paper? I find that hard to believe-insurance thrives on paper.”

  Denise stuck her head through the doorway. “Your London call, Mr. Devereux.”

  “I’ll take it in my office.” Over his shoulder, as he left the conference room, he said, “Lloyds, about these flood losses. Leave the copies there-I’ll show ’ em to Rossy. Connie, think carefully about what you saw in the file.”

  I collected my set of copies and handed Denise the blowups she’d made. Connie scuttled out the door while I was thanking Denise for her help. I didn’t see Connie when I got to the elevator: eithe
r she’d found a car waiting for her or she was hiding in the women’s bathroom. In case it was the latter, I moved away from the elevators to admire the view of the lake. The executive-floor attendant asked if she could help me; I said I was just collecting my thoughts.

  After another five minutes, Connie Ingram appeared, looking around like a scared rabbit. I was tempted to jump out and yell boo, but I waited near the window until the elevator light dinged, then trotted over to get into the car with her as the doors closed.

  She looked at me resentfully as she pushed the button for thirty-nine. “I don’t have to talk to you. The lawyer said so. He said to call him if you came around.”

  My ears filled as the elevator fell. “You can do it as soon as you get off. Did he also tell you not to talk to Mr. Devereux? Are you going to figure out an answer about whether you saw any agency notes in the file? In case he forgets that he asked-I know he’s got a lot on his mind-I’ll be calling regularly to remind him.”

  The door opened at thirty-nine; she shot out without responding to my genial farewell. I took the L back to my office, where I found an e-mail from Morrell.

  I realized that even I, who thought I was a sophisticated traveler, had my expectations of the setting shaped by Rudyard Kipling. I wasn’t prepared for the starkness, the grandeur-or most especially the way one feels obliterated by the mountains. You find yourself wanting to make defiant gestures: I’m here, I’m alive, acknowledge me.

  As far as your question about Paul Hoffman or Radbuka, of course I am not an expert, but I do think someone who has been tortured, as he apparently was tortured by his father, could become very fragile emotionally. It would be painful to think your own father tortured you-you would imagine there must be something terribly wrong with you that provoked such behavior-children inevitably blame themselves in difficult situations. But if you could believe you were persecuted because of your historic identity-you were a Jew, you were from eastern Europe, you survived the death camps-then it would both glamorize your torture, give it a deeper meaning, and protect you from the pain of believing you were a terrible child whose father was justified in assaulting you. That’s how I see it, at any rate.