“ Murray!” I gasped, my gun in my hand before I knew I’d drawn it. “Don’t freak me after a day like this one.”
He put an arm around me. “You’re getting too old for these tall buildings, Warshawski.”
“You’re right about that,” I agreed, putting my gun away. “Without Ralph and Mrs. Coltrain, I’d be on a slab about now.”
“Not to mention Durham,” he said.
“ Durham?” I snapped. “I know he’s painting himself as Mr. Clean, but that lying piece of politician knows he got away with murder!”
“Maybe. Maybe. But I had a few words with the aldercreature this afternoon. Off the record, unfortunately. But he said that last night he looked at you, looked at Rossy, figured he’d better bet on the local talent. Said he’d read some of your file, saw that you often got your butt whipped good but usually landed on top. Who knows, Warshawski-he gets to be mayor, maybe you’ll be police superintendent.”
“And you can run his press office,” I said dryly. “Guy did a lot of mean nasty stuff. Including cheerfully helping frame Isaiah Sommers for Howard Fepple’s murder.”
“He didn’t know it was Isaiah Sommers, not from what my gofers in the police department tell me. I mean, he didn’t know Isaiah was a relative of the Sommers family who he’d helped out back in the ’90’s.” Murray kept his arm around my shoulders. “When he found that out he forced Rossy to settle Gertrude Sommers’s claim. And he tried to get the cops to keep an open mind on the murder investigation. It’s why they didn’t charge Isaiah Sommers. Now it’s your turn. I want to see these mystery journals or ledgers or whatever that the Rossys were stampeding through town trying to find.”
“I want them, too.” I pulled away from his arm and turned to face him. “Lotty’s vanished with them.”
When I told Murray about Lotty’s disappearance after the fracas with Rhea at Paul Hoffman-Radbuka’s bedside, he looked at me somberly. “You’re going to find her, right? Why did she take the books away?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. They told her… something that they didn’t tell anyone else.”
I leaned into my car for my briefcase and found a set of the photocopies I’d made of the journal pages. “You can have this. You can run it if you want.”
He squinted at the sheet in the dim light. “But what does it mean?”
I leaned wearily against my car and pointed at the line that read “Omschutz, K 30 Nestroy (2h.f) N-13426-Ö-L.” “As I understand it, we’re looking at a record for K. Omschutz, who lived at 30 Nestroy Street in Vienna. The 2h.f means he was in apartment 2f at the rear of the building. The numbers are the policy numbers, with a tag meaning it was an Austrian life-insurance policy-Ö for Österreich-the Austrian for Austria. Okay?”
After a minute’s squinting scrutiny he nodded.
“This other sheet just gives the face value of the policy in thousands of Austrian schillings, and the weekly payment schedule. It wasn’t a code. It meant something quite clear to Ulrich Hoffman: he knew he’d sold K. Omschutz a policy with a face value of fifty-four thousand schillings and a weekly payment of twenty schillings a week. As soon as Ralph Devereux at Ajax realized that it applied to prewar life-insurance claims, he put it together with the material that he found on his dead claims handler’s desk. That was what made him blow caution to the winds and storm into Bertrand Rossy’s office this morning.”
Ralph had gone over this with me when I got to the hospital tonight, his mouth twisted in bitter mockery over his recklessness. I was utterly weary of the entire business, but Murray was so excited at getting even a few pages of the Hoffman journals as a scoop that he could hardly contain himself.
“Thanks for letting me scoop the town, Warshawski: I knew you couldn’t stay mad at me forever. What about Rhea Wiell and Paul Hoffman or Radbuka? Beth Blacksin was feeling mighty peeved after she got to the clinic this afternoon and found out that whole business could turn out to be a fraud.”
Blacksin had been hovering behind the cops with the ubiquitous camera crews at the clinic. I’d answered as many questions then as I could so I wouldn’t have to face them later. I told them about the Rossys, about the Holocaust claims and Ulrich’s notebooks.
I didn’t know what Don was planning to do with his book, but I didn’t feel any special desire to protect him. I told the cameras about Paul Hoffman, about the Anna Freud material, about Paul’s chamber of secrets. When Beth’s eyes lit up at the thought of getting that scene on tape, I remembered Lotty’s fury at the way in which books and movies titillate us over the horrors of the past. Don, wanting to put it all in a book for Envision Press. Beth, knowing her contract was coming due, seeing her show’s ratings zoom if she filmed Paul’s private horrors. I told Murray I’d walked out on them mid-sentence.
“I don’t blame you. Getting the news doesn’t mean we have to carry on like jackals at suppertime.”
He opened the car door for me-an unusual act of gallantry. “Let’s go downtown to the Glow, V I. You and I have a lot of catching up to do-on life, not just life insurance.”
I shook my head. “I need to go up to Evanston to see Max Loewenthal. I’ll take a rain check, though.”
Murray leaned down and kissed me full on the lips, then quickly closed my car door. In my rearview mirror I watched him standing there, watching me, until my car had turned down the exit ramp.
LII The Face in the Picture
Beth Israel was near enough to the expressway that I took it up to Evanston. It was past ten now, but Max had wanted to talk things over. He was feeling deeply lonely tonight, since Calia and Agnes had left for London and Michael and Carl had flown west to rejoin the Cellini in San Francisco.
Max fed me cold roast chicken and a glass of St. Emilion, something warm and red for comfort. I told him what I knew, what I was guessing, what I thought the fallout would be. He was more philosophical than I about Alderman Durham, but he was disappointed that Posner hadn’t been implicated in any of the scandal.
“You’re sure he wasn’t playing a role somehow? Something that you could expose that would force him away from the hospital?”
“He’s just a fanatic,” I said, accepting another glass of wine. “Although they’re actually more dangerous than people like Durham, who are playing the game-well, as a game-for power or position or money. But if we catch up with Lotty and find those books of Ulrich’s, then we can publicize those life-insurance policies that Edelweiss or Nesthorn sold during the thirties. We can force the Illinois legislature to revisit the Holocaust Asset Recovery Act. And Posner and his Maccabees will go back downtown to Ajax or the State of Illinois building, which will get him out of your hair.”
“Lotty and the notebooks,” Max repeated, turning his wineglass round and round in his hands. “ Victoria, while Calia was here and I was concerned about her safety, I wasn’t worrying so intensely about Lotty. Also, I see now, now that he’s gone back to the tour, I was protecting myself from Carl’s scorn. Lotty’s high flair for drama, he keeps calling her recent behavior. The way she disappeared on Thursday-Carl says it’s the same thing she did all those years ago in London. Turning her back, walking away without a word. It’s what she did to him, you know, and he says I am a fool if I think that isn’t what she’s doing to me. She leaves, she says nothing for weeks or months, and then perhaps she returns, or perhaps not, but there’s never an explanation.”
“And you think?” I prodded, when he was quiet.
“I think she’s disappeared now for the same reason she disappeared then, whatever that was,” he burst out. “If I was twenty, as Carl was then, I might be as hurt in my own sense of self and less worried about her: one’s passions run higher at twenty. But I am very worried about her. I want to know where she is. I called her brother Hugo in Montreal, but they’ve never been close; he hasn’t heard from her in months and has no idea what’s going through her head, or where she might have run to. Victoria, I know you are worn, I see it in the fine lines around your mouth and
eyes. But can you do anything to find her?”
I massaged my sore shoulders again. “I’m going to the clinic in the morning. Lotty actually did FedEx a packet of dictation to Mrs. Coltrain-she was transcribing it when Fillida Rossy jumped her. Mrs. Coltrain says there’s nothing to indicate where Lotty is-it’s a short tape, leaving instructions about her surgical schedule. But Mrs. Coltrain is going to let me into the clinic in the morning so I can listen to it myself and inspect the wrapping. She hopes it will mean something to me. Also, she says Lotty left papers on her desktop; maybe they’ll tell me something. Beyond that-I can try to ask the Finch or Captain Mallory to pull Lotty’s phone records-they would show who she called the night she disappeared. Airline lists. There are other things I could do, but they won’t happen fast. We’ll hope for something in her own papers.”
Max insisted that I stay the night. “You’re asleep on your feet, Victoria. You shouldn’t be out driving. Unless you’re desperate to go to your own home, you can sleep in my daughter’s old room. There’s even some kind of nightshirt in there that’s clean.”
It was his own fear and loneliness that made him want me there, as much as his concern for my well-being, but both were important reasons to me. I called Mr. Contreras to reassure him of my safety and was glad, actually, to climb one flight of stairs to a bed instead of spending another half hour in my car to reach one.
In the morning, we drove down together to the clinic. Mrs. Coltrain met us at nine, looking as sedately groomed as if Rossys and attempted murder were no more harrowing than sick women and screaming children. Fillida hadn’t broken her arm when she smashed it with the gun stock, but she had given Mrs. Coltrain a deep bruise; her forearm was resting in a sling to protect the damaged area.
She wasn’t quite as calm as she appeared: when she’d settled us at her workstation with the tape player, she confided, “You know, Miss Warshawski, I think I am going to get someone in on Monday to take the doors off those closets in the examining rooms. I don’t think I can go in there without being afraid someone is hiding behind the door.”
That was what Fillida had done: hidden in an examining-room closet until she thought the clinic was empty, and then jumped Mrs. Coltrain at her workstation. When Fillida realized that the notebooks weren’t on the premises, she’d forced Mrs. Coltrain to bring me to the clinic.
Now Mrs. Coltrain played the tape for Max and me, but although we listened to it clear to the end, through half an hour of staticky silence on the second side, neither of us got anything out of it except that Dr. Barber was to take Lotty’s two urgent surgical cases on Tuesday and Mrs. Coltrain was to work with the chief of surgery to reschedule the others.
Mrs. Coltrain took us back to Lotty’s office so I could inspect the papers Lotty had left on her desk. My stomach muscles clenched as we walked down the hall. I expected to find the chaos we’d left behind last night: broken chairs, blood, overturned lamps, and the police mess on top of it. But the broken furniture was gone, the floor and desk were scoured clean, the papers neatly laid on top.
When I exclaimed over the tidiness, Mrs. Coltrain said she had come in early to make things right. “ If Dr. Herschel showed up, she would be so distressed to find all that wreckage. And anyway, I knew I couldn’t face it for thirty seconds, so full of all that violence. Lucy Choi, the clinic nurse, she came in at eight. We gave it a good going-over together. But I kept out all the papers that were on Dr. Herschel’s desk yesterday. You sit down here, Ms. Warshawski, and look them over.”
It felt strange to sit behind Lotty’s desk, in the chair where she had so often greeted me, sometimes brusquely, more often with empathy, but always with a high energy. I turned over the papers. A letter from the archivist at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, dated six years back, telling Dr. Herschel that they regretted not being able to find any records of the people whom she was trying to trace, Shlomo and Martin Radbuka, although they could confirm the deaths of Rudolph and Anna Herschel in 1943. They referred her to several data banks that traced Holocaust victims which might be more helpful. Her correspondence with those other data banks showed that no one had had any useful information for her.
Lotty had also left out a stack of newsletters from the Royal Free Hospital in London, where she’d done her medical training. I turned over the pages. Stuck between two of the sheets was a photograph. It was an old picture, the edges creased from much handling, which showed a very young woman, fair, whose eyes, even in the faded paper, sparkled with life. Her hair was bobbed and curled in the style of the 1920’s. She was smiling with the provocative self-confidence of someone who knows herself beloved, whose desires were seldom denied. It was inscribed on the back, but in German in a heavy European script which I couldn’t decipher.
I handed it to Max, who frowned over it. “I’m not good with this old German, but it’s written to someone named Martin, a love message from-I think it says Lingerl-inscribed in 1928. Then she’s rewritten it to Lotty: Think of me, dearest little Charlotte Anna, and know that I am always thinking of you.”
“Who is this? Dr. Herschel’s mother, do you think?” Mrs. Coltrain picked up the picture respectfully by the edges. “What a beautiful girl she was when this was taken. Dr. Herschel should keep it in a frame on her desk.”
“Perhaps it’s too painful for her to see that face every day,” Max said heavily.
I turned to the newsletters. They were like all such documents, filled with tidbits of information about graduates, amazing achievements of the faculty, status of the hospital, especially under the severe retrenchments forced by the shrinking National Health budgets. Claire Tallmadge’s name jumped out at me from the third one I looked at:
Claire Tallmadge, MRCP, has given up her practice and moved to a flat in Highgate, where she welcomes visits from former students and colleagues. Dr. Tallmadge’s unbending standards earned her the respect of generations of colleagues and students at the Royal Free. We will all sadly miss the sight of her erect presence in her tweed suits moving through the wards, but the Fellowship being established in her honor will keep her name bright among us. Dr. Tallmadge promises to keep busy with writing a history of women’s medical careers in the twentieth century.
Lotty Herschel’s Story:
The Long Road Back
When I reached the rise overlooking the place, I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t move at all. My legs suddenly weakened at the knees and I sat abruptly to keep from falling. After that I remained where I landed, looking over the grey and blowing ground, hugging my knees to my chest.
When I realized I’d left my mother’s photograph behind, I’d become frantic. I searched my suitcase at least a dozen times, and then I called the various hotels where I’d stayed. Many times. “No, Dr. Herschel, we haven’t found it. Yes, we understand the importance.” Even then I couldn’t resign myself to its loss. I wanted her with me. I wanted her to protect me on my journey east as she hadn’t protected me on my journey west, and when I couldn’t find her picture, I almost turned around at Wien-Schwechat Airport. Except at that point I couldn’t imagine where I’d go back to.
I walked the city for two days, trying to see behind its bright modern face the streets of my childhood. The flat on the Renngasse was the one place I recognized, but when I rang the bell, the woman who now lived in it greeted me with contemptuous hostility. She refused to let me inside: anyone could pretend they had been a child in an apartment; she knew better than to fall for confidence tricksters. It must have been the nightmare of this family of squatters, someone like me coming back from the dead to reclaim my home from them.
I made myself go to the Leopoldsgasse, but many of those crumbling old buildings had disappeared, and even though I knew the right intersection to look for, nothing looked familiar to me. My Zeyde, my Orthodox grandfather, had threaded his way through this warren with me one morning to a vendor who sold ham. My Zeyde traded his overcoat for a greased paper full of thin-sliced fatty meat. He wouldn’t touch it him
self, but his grandchildren needed protein; we could not starve to death to uphold the laws of kashruth. My cousins and I ate the pink slices with guilty pleasure. His overcoat fed us for three days.
I tried to re-create that route, but I only ended up at the canal, staring into the filthy water so long that a policeman came to make sure I wasn’t planning to jump.
I rented a car and drove into the mountains, up to the old farmhouse at Kleinsee. Even that I couldn’t recognize. The whole area is a resort now. That place where we went every summer, the days filled with walks, horseback rides, botany lessons with my grandmother, the nights with singing and dancing, my Herschel cousins and I sitting on the stairs peeping into the drawing room where my mother was always the golden butterfly at the center of attention-the meadows were now filled with expensive villas, shops, a ski lift. I couldn’t even find my grandfather’s house-I don’t know if it was torn down or turned into one of the heavily guarded villas I couldn’t see from the road.
And so finally I drove east. If I couldn’t find a trace of my mother or my grandmothers in life, then I would have to visit their graves. Slowly, so slowly other drivers spewed epithets at me-rich Austrian they took me to be from my rental license plates. Even at my slow pace I couldn’t help finally reaching the town. I left the car. Continued on foot, following the signposts in their different languages.
I know people passed me, I felt their shapes go by, some stopping above me, talking at me. Words flew by me, words in many languages, but I couldn’t understand any of them. I was staring at the buildings at the bottom of the hill, the crumbling remnants of my mother’s last home. I was beyond words, beyond feeling, beyond awareness. So I don’t know when she arrived and sat cross-legged next to me. When she touched my hand I thought it was my mother, finally come to claim me, and when I turned, eager to embrace her, my disappointment was beyond recounting.
Total Recall Page 45