Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (17 page)

“Victoria, I’m trying to be civilized, but have you
not had my messages this afternoon?”

I explained that I hadn’t had a chance to check with
my answering service. “In about fifteen minutes I’m talking to a reporter about
the charges that Bull Durham’s been flinging at me, so I was trying to organize
my response into sincere, succinct nuggets.”

“Bull Durham? The man who’s been protesting the
Holocaust Asset Recovery Act? Don’t tell me he’s involved now with Paul
Radbuka!”

I blinked. “No. He’s involved in a case I’ve been
working on. Insurance fraud involving a South Side family.”

“And that takes precedence over responding to messages
from me?”

“Lotty!” I was outraged. “Alderman Durham handed out
flyers today defaming me. He marched around a public space bellowing insults
about me through a bullhorn. It doesn’t seem extraordinary that I had to
respond to that. I walked into my office five minutes ago. I haven’t even seen
my messages.”

“Yes, I see,” she said. “I—but I need some support,
too. I want to see this man’s video, Victoria. I want to know that you’re
trying to help me. That you won’t aban—that you won’t forget our—”

Her voice was panicky; she was flailing about for
words in a way that made my insides twist. “Lotty, please, how could I forget
our friendship? Or ever abandon you? As soon as I finish with this interview,
I’ll be right over. Say in an hour?”

When we hung up I checked my messages. She’d phoned
three times. Beth Blacksin had phoned once, to say she’d love to talk to me but
could I come to the Global building, since she was jammed up with editing all
the interviews and demonstrations of the day. She’d seen Murray Ryerson—he’d
join us at the studio. I thought wistfully of my cot in the back room but
gathered up my things and drove back downtown.

Beth spent twenty minutes taping me while she and
Murray peppered me with questions. I was being careful not to implicate my
client, but I freely tossed them Howard Fepple’s name—it was time someone
besides me started pushing on him. Beth was gleeful enough to get this
exclusive new source that she happily shared what she had with me, but neither
she nor Murray had any idea who had given Durham the information on the
Birnbaums.

“I got thirty seconds with the alderman, who says it’s
common knowledge,” Murray said. “I talked to the Birnbaum legal counsel, who
said it’s overblown ancient history. I couldn’t get to the woman who wrote
their history, Amy Blount—someone at Ajax suggested it was her.”

“I talked to her,” I said smugly. “I’d bet hard
against her. It has to be another Ajax insider. Or maybe someone in the
Birnbaum company with a grudge. You talk to Bertrand Rossy? I gather he’s
fulminating—the Swiss probably aren’t used to street demonstrations. If Durham
hadn’t libeled me, I’d be chortling over it.”

“You know that piece we did on Wednesday on Paul
Radbuka?” Beth said, changing the subject to something she cared about
personally. “We’ve had about a hundred and thirty e-mails from people who say
they know his little friend Miriam. My assistant’s tracking them down. Most of
them are unstable glory-seekers, but it will be such a coup if one of them
turns out to be the real deal. Just think if we reunite them on-air!”

“I hope you’re not building that up on-air,” I said
sharply. “It may turn out to be just that: air.”

“What?” Beth stared at me. “You think he made up his
friend? No, Vic, you’re wrong about that.”

Murray, whose six-eight frame had been curled against
a filing cabinet, suddenly stood up straight and began pelting me with
questions: what inside dope did I have on Paul Radbuka? What did I know about
his playmate Miriam? What did I know about Rhea Wiell?

“Nothing on all of the above,” I said. “I haven’t
talked to the guy. But I met Rhea Wiell this morning.”

“She’s not a fraud, Vic,” Beth said sharply.

“I know she’s not. She’s not a fraud and she’s not a
con artist. But she believes in herself so intensely that—I don’t know, I can’t
explain it,” I finished helplessly, struggling to articulate why her look of
ecstasy when she discussed Paul Radbuka had unnerved me so much. “I agree—it
doesn’t seem possible that someone as experienced as Wiell could be conned.
But—well, I guess I won’t have an opinion until I meet Radbuka,” I finished
lamely.

“When you do, you’ll really believe in him,” Beth
promised.

She left a minute later to edit my remarks for the ten
o’clock news. Murray tried to talk me into a drink. “You know, Warshawski, we
work together so well, it’d be a shame not to get back in the habit.”

“Oh, Murray, you sweet-talker, you, I can see how
badly you need your own private angle on this stuff. I can’t stay tonight—it’s
vital that I get to Lotty Herschel’s place in the next half hour.”

He followed me down the hall to the security station
while I handed in my pass. “What’s the real story for you here, Warshawski?
Radbuka and Wiell? Or Durham and the Sommers family?”

I frowned up at him. “They both are. That’s the
problem. I can’t quite focus on either of them.”

“Durham is about the slickest politico in town these
days next to the mayor. Be careful how you tangle with him. Say hey to the doc
for me, okay?” He squeezed my shoulder affectionately and turned back up the
hall.

I’ve known Lotty Herschel since I was an undergraduate
at the University of Chicago. I was a blue-collar girl on an upscale campus,
feeling rawly out of place, when I met her—she was providing medical advice to
an abortion underground where I volunteered. She took me under her wing, giving
me the kind of social skills I’d lost when I lost my mother, keeping me from
losing my way in those days of drugs and violent protest, taking time from a
dense-packed schedule to cheer my successes and condole over failures. She’d
even gone to some college basketball games to see me play—true friendship,
since sports of all kind bore her. But it was my athletic scholarship that made
my education possible, so she supported my doing my best at it. If she was
collapsing now, if something terrible was wrong with her—I couldn’t even finish
the thought, it was so frightening to me.

She’d recently moved to a high-rise on the lakefront,
to one of the beautiful old buildings where you can watch the sun rise with
nothing between you and water but Lake Shore Drive and a strip of park. She
used to live in a two-flat a short walk from her storefront clinic, but her one
concession to aging was to give up on being a landlady in a neighborhood full
of drug-dealing housebreakers. Max and I had both been relieved to see her in a
building with an indoor garage.

When I left my car with her doorman, it was only eight
o’clock. The day seemed to have been spinning on so long I was sure we must
have come round the other side of dark to begin a new one.

Lotty was waiting in the hall for me when I got off
the elevator, making a valiant effort at composure. Even though I held the
envelope of stills and video out to her, she didn’t snatch it from me but
invited me in to her living room, offering me a drink. When I said I only
wanted water, she still ignored the envelope, trying to make a joke that I must
be ill if I wanted water instead of whisky. I smiled, but the deep circles
under her dark eyes disturbed me. I didn’t comment on her appearance, just
asking as she turned to go to the kitchen if she would bring me a piece of
fruit or cheese.

She seemed to really look at me for the first time.
“You haven’t eaten? I can see from the lines on your face that you’re
exhausted. Stay in here; I’ll fix you something.”

This was more like her usual brisk manner. I was
slightly reassured, slumping against her couch and dozing until she returned
with a tray. Cold chicken, carrot sticks, a small salad, and slices of the
thick bread a Ukrainian nurse at the hospital bakes for her. I tried not to
spring on the food as if I were one of my own dogs.

While I ate, Lotty watched me, as if keeping her eyes
from the envelope by an act of will. She kept up a flow of random chatter—had I
decided to go away with Morrell for the weekend, would we make it back for
Sunday afternoon’s concert, Max was expecting forty or fifty people at his
house for dinner afterward, but he—and especially Calia—would miss me if I
didn’t come.

I finally interrupted the flow. “Lotty, are you afraid
to look at the pictures because of what you will see or because of what you may
not see?”

She gave the ghost of a smile. “Acute of you, my dear.
A little of both, I think. But—if you will run the tape for me, maybe I am
ready to see it. Max warned me that the man was not prepossessing.”

We went to the back bedroom she uses for television
and loaded the tape into the VCR. I glanced at Lotty, but the fear in her face
was so acute that I couldn’t bear to watch her. As Paul Radbuka recounted his
nightmares and his heartbreaking cries for his childhood friend, I kept my eyes
glued to him. When we’d seen everything, including the “Exploring Chicago”
segment with Rhea Wiell and Arnold Praeger, Lotty asked in a thread of a voice
to return to Radbuka’s interview.

I ran it through for her twice more, but when she
wanted a third rerun I refused: her face was grey with strain. “You’re
torturing yourself with this, Lotty. Why?”

“I—the whole thing is hard.” Even though I was sitting
on the floor next to her armchair I could barely make out her words. “Something
is familiar to me in what he’s saying. Only I can’t think, because—I can’t
think. I hate this. I hate seeing things that make my mind stop working. Do you
believe his story?”

I made a helpless gesture. “I can’t fathom it, but
it’s so remote from how I want to see life that my mind is rejecting it. I met
the therapist yesterday—no, it was today, it just seems like a long time ago.
She’s a legitimate clinician, I think, but, well, fanatical. A zealot for her
work in general and most particularly for this guy. I told her I wanted to
interview Radbuka, to see if he could be related to these people you and Max
know, but she’s protecting him. He’s not in the phone book, either as Paul
Radbuka or Paul Ulrich, so I’m sending Mary Louise out to all the Ulrichs in
Chicago. Maybe he’s still living in his father’s house, or maybe a neighbor
will recognize his picture—we don’t know his father’s first name.”

“How old would you say he is?” she asked unexpectedly.

“You mean, could he be the right age for the
experiences he’s claiming? You’d be a better judge of that than I, but again,
it would be easier to answer if we saw him in person.”

I took the stills out of the envelope, holding the
three different shots so that the light shone full on them. Lotty looked at
them a long time but finally shook her head helplessly.

“Why did I imagine something definite would jump out
at me? It’s what Max said to me. Resemblance is so often a trick of the
expression, after all, and these are only photographs, photographs of a
picture, really. I would have to see the man, and even then—after all, I’d be
trying to match an adult face against a child’s memory of someone who was much
younger than this man is now.”

I took her hand in both of mine. “Lotty, what is it
you’re afraid of? This is so painful for you it’s breaking my heart. Is
it—could he be part of your family? Do you think he’s related to your mother?”

“If you knew anything of those matters, you would know
better than to ask such a question,” she said with a flash of her more
imperious manner.

“But you do know the Radbuka family, don’t you?”

She laid the pictures on the coffee table as if she
were dealing cards and then proceeded to rearrange them, but she wasn’t really
looking at them. “I knew some members of the family many years ago. The
circumstances—when I last saw them it was extremely painful. The way we parted,
I mean, or anyway the whole situation. If this man is—I don’t see how he could
be what he says. But if he is, then I owe it to the family to try to befriend
him.”

“Do you want me to do some digging? Assuming I can get
hold of any information to dig with?”

Her vivid, dark face was contorted with strain. “Oh,
Victoria, I don’t know what I want. I want the past never to have happened, or
since it did and I can’t change it, I want it to stay where it is, past, dead,
gone. This man, I don’t want to know him. But I see I will have to talk to him.
Do I want you to investigate him? No, I don’t want you near him. But find him
for me, find him so I can talk to him, and you, you—what you can do is try to
see what piece of paper convinced him his name was really Paul Radbuka.”

Late that night, her unhappy, contradictory words kept
tumbling through my mind. Sometime after two, I finally fell asleep, but in my
dreams Bull Durham chased me until I found myself locked up with Paul Radbuka
at Terezin, with Lotty on the far side of the barbed wire watching me with
hurt, tormented eyes. “Keep him there among the dead,” she cried.

English Lessons

School still had three weeks to go when Hugo and I
reached London, but Minna didn’t think it worthwhile to register me, since my
lack of English would keep me from understanding any lessons. She set me to
doing chores in the house and then in the neighborhood: she would write a
shopping list in her slow English script, spelling the words under her
breath—incorrectly, as I saw when I learned to read and write in the new
language. She would give me a pound and send me to the corner shop to buy a
chop for dinner, a few potatoes, a loaf of bread. When she got home from work
she would count the change twice to make sure I hadn’t robbed her. Still, each
week she gave me sixpence in pocket money.