Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (33 page)

“What time is your appointment?” I asked.

“One-fifteen. Are you—when is yours?”

If my watch was right, it wasn’t quite ten after. “I’m
a drop-in. I’m hoping Ms. Wiell will have a break in her schedule this
afternoon. How long have you been seeing her? Has she been helpful?”

“Very.” She didn’t say anything else for a minute, but
as I continued to watch the fish and the silence built, she added, “Rhea’s
helped me become aware of parts of my life that were shut away from me before.”

“I’ve never been hypnotized,” I said. “What’s it
like?”

“Are you afraid? I was, too, before my first session,
but it’s not like they show it in the movies. It’s like riding an elevator down
into the middle of your own past. You can get off on these different floors and
explore them, only with the safety of having Rhea right next to you, instead
of—well, being alone, or being with the monsters who were there when you had to
live through the time originally.”

The door to the inner room opened. The woman
immediately turned to watch for Rhea, who came out with Don Strzepek. The two
were laughing in a kind of easy intimacy. Don looked wide awake, while Rhea,
instead of her flowing jacket and trousers, had put on a red dress that fit
snugly around the bodice. When she saw me she flushed and withdrew slightly
from Don.

“Have you come to see me? I have another appointment
right now.” For the first time in our brief acquaintance her smile held genuine
warmth. I didn’t take it personally—I knew it was the overflow from Don—but it
made my own response more natural.

“Something rather serious has come up. I can wait
until you’re free, but we ought to talk.”

She turned to the waiting patient. “Isabel, I’m not
going to start your session late, but I need one moment alone with this woman.”

When I moved with her to the entrance to her inner
room, Don trailed after me. “Paul Radbuka has started stalking Mr. Loewenthal’s
family. I’d like to talk to you about strategies for managing the situation.”

“Stalking? That’s a fairly extreme criticism. You may
be misinterpreting his behavior, but even if you are, we definitely should
discuss it.” She went behind her desk to look at her calendar. “I can fit you
in at two-thirty for fifteen minutes.”

She nodded regally to me, but when she glanced at Don
her expression softened again. When she walked us out to the waiting area, it
was to him that she said, “I’ll see you at two-thirty, then.”

“Looks as though things are going well with your
book,” I said once we were out in the hall.

“Her work is fascinating,” Don said. “I let her
hypnotize me yesterday. It was wonderful, like floating in a warm ocean in a
totally secure boat.”

I watched him reflexively touch his breast pocket
while we waited for an elevator. “Have you stopped smoking? Or remembered
buried secrets about your mother?”

“Don’t be sarcastic, Vic. She put me in a light trance
so I could see what it was like, not a deeper one for memory recovery. Anyway,
she never uses a deeper trance until she’s worked with a patient long enough to
make sure they trust each other. And to make sure the patient’s strong enough
to survive the process. Arnold Praeger and the Planted Memory guys will
definitely be sorry they’ve tried to trash her reputation when this book comes
out.”

“She’s put some kind of spell on you,” I teased as we
rode to the lobby. “I’ve never heard you abandon journalistic caution before.”

He flushed. “There are legitimate grounds for concern
with any therapeutic method. I’ll make that clear in the text. This isn’t an
apology for Rhea but a chance for people to understand the validity of recovered-memory
work. I’ll give the Planted Memory camp their say. But they’ve never taken the
time to understand Rhea’s methods.”

Don had first met Rhea Wiell when I did, four days
ago, and he was already a true believer. I wondered why her spell didn’t work
on me. When we met on Friday, she’d realized I approached her with skepticism,
not Don’s admiration, but she hadn’t tried to charm me out of it. I’d thought
perhaps she didn’t try as hard with women as with men, but the young patient in
the waiting room was clearly also a votary. Was Mary Louise right? Did Rhea and
I instinctively distrust each other because we both wanted to command the
situation? Or was my gut telling me there was a problem with Rhea? I didn’t
think she was a charlatan, but I did wonder if a steady diet of adulation from
people like Paul Radbuka had gone to her head.

“Earth to Vic—for the third time, do you want coffee
while we wait?”

I realized with a jolt that we were standing outside
the elevators on the ground floor. “Is that what hypnosis is like?” I asked.
“You become so lost in your own space that you lose awareness of the outside
world?”

Don steered me outside so he could light a cigarette.
“You’re asking a novice. But I think they consider losing yourself like that
akin to a trance. It’s called imaginative dissociation, something like that.”

I stood upwind from him while he finished his
cigarette, checking in again first with Tim Streeter, who said there was
nothing new to report, and then with my answering service. By the time I’d
returned a couple of client calls, Don was ready to move into the hotel for a
cup of coffee. In the tree-filled terrace at the Ritz, I got him to give me a
digest of the research he’d been doing the last four days.

He had a wealth of data about the way in which
hypnosis had been used to treat people with traumatic symptoms. One man who’d
had terrible fantasies about having his neck wrenched off his shoulders turned
out to have seen his mother hanging herself when he was three: his father was
able to confirm all the details that the son produced under hypnosis. The
father had never discussed them with his son, hoping that the boy had been too
young to understand what he was watching. There were also plenty of documented
cases of people hearing what was said around them under total anesthesia and
being able to reconstruct whole operating-room conversations through hypnosis.
Rhea herself had worked with a number of incest victims whose memories
recovered under hypnosis had been validated by siblings or other adults.

“We’re going to be using several pairs in one
chapter—the holder of memory and the suppressor of memory. But of course the
most interesting chapter will be about Radbuka. So neither Rhea nor I is at all
happy to have you questioning the validity of what he’s saying.”

I rested my chin on my hands and looked at him
squarely. “Don, I don’t doubt the value of hypnosis, or the validity of
recovered memories, under certain strict guidelines. I sit on the board of a
women’s shelter, and I’ve witnessed the phenomenon myself.

“But in Radbuka’s case, it’s a question of who he
is—emotionally and, well, genealogically, for want of a better word. Max
Loewenthal isn’t lying when he says the Radbukas aren’t related to him, but
Paul Radbuka so desperately wants the relationship to exist that he can’t pay
attention to reality. I can understand it, understand how growing up with an
abusing father would make him reach out to other relatives. If I could just
have access to some background information about him, I might be able to track
down where—if at all—his life intersects with any of Max’s London circle.”

“But he doesn’t want you to have that information. He
called Rhea at noon while I was with her to say you were doing everything you
could to bar him from his family. He implored her not to give you any details
about him.”

“That explains why she’s so cold to me. I’m sure it’s
to her credit that she’s so protective of her patients. But you were at Max’s
on Sunday—you saw what Radbuka was like. Even assuming all the things he
remembered in hypnosis are true—it doesn’t mean he’s related to Max just
because he wants that to be so.” I tried to lighten the conversation by adding,
“That would bring Rhea’s work to the level of Timothy Leary on acid, talking to
his chromosomes to recover his previous incarnations.”

“Vic!” Don protested. “You really mustn’t reduce this
kind of therapy to a Jay Leno routine. A week ago I might have made the same
kind of cheap joke, but—if you’d seen this process up close, learned about the
kinds of things people grapple with as they unblock the past—you’d be more
respectful, I guarantee it. In the case of Radbuka, too, Rhea knows the guy has
a lot of problems. She’s genuinely worried about what you’re trying to do to
him.”

I looked at my watch and signaled for the check. “Don,
I know you’ve only met me a few times during this past year, but do you think
your friend Morrell would be in love with me if I was the kind of monster who
deliberately drove a wedge between a war orphan and his family?”

Don smiled ruefully. “Oh, hell, Vic. Of course not.
But you’re very close to Loewenthal and his friends. Your own judgment could be
distorted by your desire to protect them.”

I was tempted to believe Rhea Wiell had given Don some
posthypnotic suggestion to eschew me and all my works. But the real spell came
from a deeper, more fundamental source, I realized, watching his eyes light up
when I said it was time to cross back over to the office building. As my father
used to say, never try to stop a man with an ax, or a man in love.

New Disciple

B
y the time
I finished my conversation with Rhea, I was ready to bonk her on the head and
take my chances on a self-defense plea. I’d started with the premise that we
all wanted what was best for the main players in our little drama and that this
meant not just Paul but Calia and Agnes as well. Rhea gave one of those regal
nods that made me want to revert to my street-fighting roots. I concentrated on
a painting of a Japanese farmyard that hung above her couch and told her about
Paul’s two attempts to accost Calia.

“The family is starting to feel as though they’re
being stalked,” I said. “Mr. Loewenthal’s lawyer wants him to swear out a peace
bond, but I thought if you and I talked, we might head off an extreme confrontation.”

“I don’t believe Paul would stalk anyone,” Rhea said.
“He’s not only very gentle, but he’s easily frightened. I’m not saying he
wasn’t at Max’s house,” she added as I started to object, “but I imagine him
standing in the park like the little match girl in the fairy tale, longing to
be part of the festivities he can see through the window, while none of the
rich children will acknowledge his existence.”

I smiled, still on my best behavior. “Unfortunately,
Calia is a five-year-old—an age where frightened, needy grown-ups are
terrifying. Her mother is understandably alarmed, because she thinks someone
might be threatening her child. When Paul comes out of the bushes at the two of
them, it scares them both. His longing for a family may be making it hard for
him to see how his behavior could appear to other people.”

Rhea bent her head, a swanlike gesture that seemed to
have a hint of acquiescence in it. “But why won’t Max Loewenthal acknowledge
him?”

I wanted to scream, “Because there’s nothing to
acknowledge, you fatheaded flea-brain,” but I leaned forward with an expression
of great earnestness. “Mr. Loewenthal truly is not related to your client. This
morning he showed me the file he kept from his search for missing families in
postwar Europe. The file includes a letter from the person who asked him to
hunt for the Radbukas. On Sunday, when Paul crashed his party, Mr. Loewenthal
offered to go over these papers with him, but Paul didn’t want to make an
appointment for a more convenient time. I’m sure Mr. Loewenthal would still be
glad for Paul to see the papers if he thought that would set his mind at rest.”

“Have you seen these documents, Don?” Rhea turned to
him with a touching display of female fragility. “If you could take a look at
them, if you agree with—with Vic, I would feel better.”

Don swelled slightly at her trust in him. I tried not
to make a mocking grimace but said I felt sure that Max would want things done
as quickly as possible.

“I have a dinner engagement this evening, but if Don’s
free, I can ask Max to meet with him,” I added. “In the meantime, it would be
shocking if Paul were arrested because of this unhappy misunderstanding. So
could you suggest that he stay away from the house until he hears from Mr.
Loewenthal? If we could have a phone number where Mr. Loewenthal could reach
him?”

Rhea shook her head, a contemptuous little smile at
the corners of her mouth. “You really don’t give up, do you? I am not going to
let you have my client’s home number or address. He sees you as the person who’s
keeping him from his family. If you were to show up on his front step, it would
be a major disintegrating event to his fragile sense of self.”

I felt all the muscles in my neck clench with the
effort not to lose my temper openly. “I’m not challenging the work you’ve done
with him, Rhea. But if I could see the documents he found in his
father’s—foster father’s—papers, I could use them to track down who in London
might have been part of his family. The journey he thinks he made, from his
unknown birthplace to Terezin, and then to London and Chicago, is so tortuous
that we might never be able to follow it. But at least the documents that told
him his birth name might give a skilled investigator a place to start.”