Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (26 page)

“I’ll consider it,” she said majestically, “but after
last night’s debacle I don’t trust you to consider the best interests of my
patient.”

I made the rudest face I could muster but kept my
voice light. “I wouldn’t deliberately do anything that might harm Paul Radbuka.
It would be a big help if Mr. Loewenthal could see these documents, since he’s
the person with the most knowledge of the history of his friends’ families.”
When she hung up, with a tepid response to think about it, I let out a loud
raspberry.

Mary Louise looked at me eagerly. “Was that Rhea
Wiell? What’s she like in person?”

I blinked, trying to remember back to Friday. “Warm.
Intense. Very convinced of her own powers. She was human enough to be excited
by Don’s book proposal.”

“Vic!” Mary Louise’s face turned pink. “She is an
outstanding therapist. Don’t go attacking her. If she’s a little aggressive in
believing her own point of view—well, she’s had to stand up to a lot of public
abuse. Besides,” she added shrewdly, “you’re that way yourself. That’s probably
why you two rub each other the wrong way.”

I curled my lip. “At least Paul Radbuka shares your
view. Says she saved his life. Which makes me wonder what kind of shape he was
in before she fixed him: I’ve never been around anyone that frighteningly
wobbly.” I gave her a thumbnail sketch of Radbuka’s behavior at Max’s last
night, but I didn’t feel like adding Lotty and Carl’s part of the story.

Mary Louise frowned over my report but insisted Rhea
would have had a good reason for hypnotizing him. “If he was so depressed that
he couldn’t leave his apartment, this at least is a step forward.”

“Stalking Max Loewenthal and claiming to be his cousin
is a step forward? Toward what? A bed in a locked ward? Sorry,” I added hastily
as Mary Louise huffily turned her back on me. “She clearly has his best
interests close at heart. We were all rather daunted by his showing up
uninvited at Max’s last night, that’s all.”

“All right.” She hunched a shoulder but turned back to
me with a determined smile, changing the subject to ask what I knew about
Fepple’s death.

I told her about finding the body. After wasting time
lecturing me on breaking into the office, she agreed to call her old superior
in the department to find out how the police were treating the case. Her
criticism reminded me that I’d stuffed some of Rick Hoffman’s other old files
into Fepple’s briefcase, which I’d dumped into the trunk and forgotten. Mary
Louise said she supposed she could check up on the beneficiaries, to see
whether they’d been properly paid by the company, as long as she didn’t have to
answer any questions about where she’d gotten their names.

“Mary Louise, you’re not cut out for this work,” I
told her when I’d brought Fepple’s canvas case in from my car. “You’re used to
the cops, where people are so nervous over your power to arrest that they
answer your questions without you needing any finesse.”

“I’d think you could find finesse without lying,” she
grumbled, taking the files from me. “Oh, gross, V I. Did you have to spill your
breakfast on them?”

One of the folders had a smear of jelly on it, which
was now on my hands as well. When I looked deeper into the bag, I saw the
remains of a jelly donut mushed up with the papers and other detritus. It was
gross. I washed my hands, put on latex gloves, and emptied the case onto a
piece of newspaper. Mitch and Peppy were extremely interested, especially in
the donut, so I lifted the newspaper onto a credenza.

Mary Louise’s interest was caught; she put on her own
pair of gloves to help me sort through the rubble. It wasn’t a very
appetizing—or informative—haul. An athletic supporter, so grey and misshapen it
was hard to recognize, jumbled in with company reports and Ping-Pong balls. The
jelly donut. Another open box of crackers. Mouthwash.

“You know, it’s interesting that there’s no diary,
either in here or on his desk,” I said when we’d been through everything.

“Maybe he had so few appointments he didn’t bother
with a diary.”

“Or maybe the guy he was seeing Friday night took the
diary so no one would see Fepple had an appointment with him. He took that when
he grabbed the Sommers file.”

I wondered if wiping the jelly out of the interior of
the case would destroy vital clues, but I couldn’t bring myself to dump the
contents back into the mess.

Mary Louise pretended to be excited when I went to the
bathroom for a sponge. “Gosh, Vic, if you can clean out a briefcase, maybe you
can learn to put papers into file jackets.”

“Let’s see: first you get a bucket of water,
right?—oh, my, what’s this?” The jelly had glued a thin piece of paper to one
side of the case. I had almost pulped it running the sponge over the interior.
Now I took the case over to a desk lamp so I could see what I was doing. I
turned the case inside out and carefully peeled the page off the side.

It was a ledger sheet, with what looked like a list of
names and numbers in a thin, archaic script—which had bloomed like little
flowers in the places it was wet. Jelly mixed with water had made the top left
part of the page unreadable, but what we could make out looked like this:

“This is why it’s such a mistake to be a housecleaning
freak,” I said severely. “We’ve lost part of the document.”

“What is it?” Mary Louise leaned over the desk to see
it. “That isn’t Howard Fepple’s handwriting, is it?”

“This script? It’s so beautiful, it’s like engraving—I
don’t see him doing it. Anyway, the paper looks old.” It had gilt edging;
around the lower right, which had escaped damage, the paper had turned brown
with age. The ink itself was fading from black to green.

“I can’t make out the names,” Mary Louise said. “They
are names, don’t you think? Followed by a bunch of numbers. What are the
numbers? They can’t be dates—they’re too weird. But it can’t be money, either.”

“They could be dates, if they were written European
style—that’s how my mother did it—day first, followed by month. If that’s the
case, this is a sequence of six weeks, from June 29 to August 3 in an unknown
year. I wonder if we could read the names if we enlarged them. Let’s lay this
on the copier, where the heat will dry it faster.”

While Mary Louise took care of that, I looked through
every page of the company reports in Fepple’s bag, hoping to find another sheet
from the ledger, but this was the only one.

Stalker in the Park

M
ary Louise
started work on the files I’d pulled out of Rick Hoffman’s drawer. I turned
back to my computer. I’d forgotten the search I’d entered for Sofie or Sophie
Radbuka, but the computer was patiently waiting with two hits: an invitation
from an on-line vendor to buy books about Radbuka, and a bulletin board for
messages at a family-search site.

Fifteen months earlier, someone using the label
Questing
Scorpio
had posted a query:
I am looking for information about Sofie
Radbuka, who lived in the United Kingdom in the 1940’s.

Underneath it was Paul Radbuka’s answer, entered about
two months ago and filling pages of screen.
Dear Questing Scorpio, words can
hardly express the excitement I felt when I discovered your message. It was as
if someone had turned on a light in a blacked-out cellar, telling me that I am
here, I exist. I am not a fool, or a madman, but a person whose name and
identity were kept from him for fifty years. At the end of the Second World
War, I was brought from England to America by a man claiming to be my father,
but in reality he was a committer of the most vile atrocities during the war.
He hid my Jewish identity from me, and from the world, yet made use of it to
smuggle himself past the American immigration authorities.

He went on to describe the recovery of his memory with
Rhea Wiell, going into great detail, including dreams in which he was speaking
Yiddish, fragments of memories of his mother singing a lullaby to him before he
was old enough to walk, details of his foster father’s abuse of him.

I have been wondering why my foster father tracked me
down in England,
he concluded,
but
it must be because of Sofie Radbuka. He might have been her torturer in the
concentration camps. She is one of my relatives, perhaps even my mother, or a
missing sister. Are you her child? We might be brother and sister. I am
yearning for the family I have never known. Please, I implore you, write back
to me, to PaulRadbuka@ survivor.com. Tell me about Sofie. If she is my mother
or my aunt, or possibly even a sister I never knew existed, I must know.

No follow-up was posted, which wasn’t too surprising:
his hysteria came through so clearly in the document that I would have shied
away from him myself. I did a search to see if Questing Scorpio had an e-mail
address but came up short.

I went back to the chat room and carefully constructed
a message:
Dear Questing Scorpio, if you have information or questions about
the Radbuka family that you would be willing to discuss with a neutral party,
you could send them to the law offices of Carter, Halsey, and Weinberg.
These were the offices of my own lawyer, Freeman Carter. I included both the
street address and the URL for their Web site, then sent an e-mail to Freeman,
letting him know what I’d done.

I looked at the screen for a bit, as if it might
magically reveal some other information, but eventually I remembered that no
one was paying me to find out anything about Sofie Radbuka and settled down to
some of the on-line searches that make up the better part of my business these
days. The Web has transformed investigative work, making it for the most part
both easier and duller.

At noon, when Mary Louise left for class, she said all
six policies I’d brought with me from Midway were in order: for the four where
the purchaser was dead, the beneficiaries had duly received their benefits. For
the two still living, no one had submitted a claim. Three of the policies had
been on Ajax paper. Two other companies had issued the other three. So if the
Sommers claim had been fraudulently submitted by the agency, it wasn’t a
regular occurrence.

Exhaustion made it hard for me to think—about that, or
anything else. When Mary Louise had left, waves of fatigue swept over me. I
moved on leaden legs to the cot in my supply room, where I fell into a feverish
sleep. It was almost three when the phone pulled me awake again. I stumbled out
to my desk and mumbled something unintelligible.

A woman asked for me, then told me to hold for Mr.
Rossy. Mr. Rossy? Oh, yes, the head of Edelweiss’s U.S. operations. I rubbed my
forehead, trying to make blood flow into my brain, then, since I was still on
hold, went to the little refrigerator in the hall, which I share with Tessa,
for a bottle of water. Rossy was calling my name sharply when I picked up the
phone again.

“Buon giorno,”
I said, with a semblance of brightness. “
Come sta? Che cosa posso fare per
Lei?
”

He exclaimed over my Italian. “Ralph told me you were
fluent; you speak it beautifully—almost without an accent. Actually, that’s why
I called.”

“To speak Italian to me?” I was incredulous.

“My wife—she gets homesick. When I told her I’d met an
Italian speaker who shared her love of opera, she wondered if you’d do us the
honor of coming to dinner. She was especially fascinated, as I was sure she
would be, by the idea of your office among the
indovine
—p-suchics,” he
added in English, correcting himself immediately to “sychics.” “Do I have this
correct now?”

“Perfect,” I said absently. I looked at the Isabel
Bishop painting on the wall by my desk, but the angular face staring at a
sewing machine told me nothing. “It would be a pleasure to meet Mrs. Rossy,” I
finally said.

“Is it possible that you could join us tomorrow
evening?”

I thought of Morrell, leaving for Rome on a ten A. M.
flight, and the hollow I would feel when I saw him off. “As it happens, I’m
free.” I copied the address—an apartment building near Lotty’s on Lake Shore
Drive—into my Palm Pilot. We hung up on mutual protestations of goodwill, but I
frowned at the painted seamstress a long moment, wondering what Rossy really
wanted.

The page I’d found in Fepple’s briefcase was dry now.
I set the machine to enlarge the copy and came up with letters big enough to
read. The original I tucked into a plastic sleeve.