Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (38 page)

Her expression turned so stormy I thought she was
going to blow up again, but she mastered herself and spoke quietly. “Mrs.
Radbuka represents a part of my past of which I am ashamed. I—turned my back on
her. She died while I was ignoring her. I don’t know that I could have saved
her. I mean, probably I couldn’t have saved her. But—I abandoned her. The circumstances
don’t matter; it’s only my behavior that you need to know about.”

I knit my brow. “I know she wasn’t part of your group
in London, or Max would know her. Was she a patient?”

“My patients—I can treat them because our roles are so
defined. It’s when people are outside that box that I become less reliable.
I’ve never stinted a patient, not ever, not even in London when I was ill, when
it was bitterly cold, when other students whisked through consultations as fast
as possible. It’s a relief, a salvation, to be in the hospital, to be the
doctor, not the friend or the wife or the daughter, or someone else utterly
unreliable.”

I took her hands again. “Lotty, you’ve never been
unreliable. I’ve known you since I was eighteen. You’ve always been present, warm,
compassionate, a true friend. You’re beating yourself up for some sin that
doesn’t exist.”

“It’s true we’ve been friends this long time, but you
aren’t God; you don’t know all my sins—any more than I know yours.” She spoke
dryly, not the dryness of irony but as if she were too worn out for feeling.
“But if this man, this man who thinks he’s one of the Radbukas, is threatening
Calia—Calia is the mirror of Teresz. When I look at her—Teresz was the great
beauty in our group. Not only that, she had great charm. Even at sixteen, when
the rest of us were gauche. When I look at Calia, Teresz comes back so vividly.
If I really thought harm might come to Calia—”

She wouldn’t finish the sentence. If she really
thought harm would come to Calia, she would finally tell me the truth? Or—what?

In the silence that hung between us, I caught sight of
the time and blurted out that I had to be at dinner. I didn’t like the tautness
in Lotty’s face as she escorted me back to the elevator. Running down Lake
Shore Drive to the Rossys’, I felt it was I who was the unreliable friend.

Now, in a living room weighted down with bronze
sculpture, nubbed-silk upholstery, enormous oil paintings, as I listened to the
glittery chatter of skiing and whether a city like Chicago could possibly
produce first-class opera, I felt utterly untethered from the world around me.

Rich Tastes

I
moved away
from the chatter to the French windows. They stood open so that guests could
pass through the heavy drapes to stand on a small balcony. Lake Michigan lay in
front of me, a black hole in the fabric of the night, visible only as a blot
between the winking lights of airplanes heading for O’Hare and headlights of
cars on the road below. I shivered.

“Are you cold, Signora Warshawski? You shouldn’t linger
in the night air.” Bertrand Rossy had come through the window behind me.

I turned. “I don’t often have the chance to see the
view this clearly.”

“Since I’ve been remiss in attending to my guests, I
can scarcely chide you for avoiding them, as well, but I hope you will join us
now.” He held the curtain for me, giving me no choice really except to return
to the gathering.

“Irina,” he called in English to a woman in a
traditional maid’s uniform, “Signora Warshawski needs a glass of wine.”

“I gather you spent the day saving millions of dollars
for your shareholders,” I said, also switching to English. “That must have been
very gratifying, having the legislature support you so quickly.”

He laughed, his dimples showing. “Oh, I was there only
as an observer. I was most impressed with Preston Janoff, most impressed. He is
quite cool under attack.”

“An eleven-to-two vote in committee sounds like the
attack of the tabby cats.”

He laughed again. “Attack of the tabby cats! What an
original way you have of expressing yourself.”

“What is it,
caro
?” Fillida Rossy, who had come
to me herself with a glass of wine, took her husband’s arm. “What is making you
laugh so gaily?”

Rossy repeated my remark; Fillida smiled sweetly and
echoed it again in English. “I must remember that. An attack of the tabby cats.
Who were they attacking?”

I felt remarkably foolish and gulped my wine as Rossy
explained the legislature’s vote.

“Ah, yes, you told me when you got in. How clever of
you to know firsthand about these legislative matters, signora. I must wait for
Bertrand’s reports.” She straightened his tie. “Darling, this lightning bolt is
so bold, don’t you think?”

“How did you know the vote so exactly?” Rossy asked.
“By more divination?”

“I saw the news in Janoff’s conference room. About
other things I’m woefully ignorant.”

“Such as?” He pressed his wife’s fingers, an assurance
that she was the real center of his attention.

“Such as why Louis Durham would need to meet with you
at home after the vote. I didn’t think he and Ajax’s senior staff were on such
cozy terms. Or why that mattered to Joseph Posner.”

Fillida turned to me. “You are indeed an
indovina,
signora. I laughed when Bertrand said you had read his palm, but this is
remarkable, that you know so much of our private business.”

Her voice was soft, uncritical, but under her poised,
remote gaze I felt embarrassed. I had imagined this as a bold stroke; now it
seemed merely crude.

Rossy spread his hands. “Life in Chicago is not so
different after all from Bern and Zurich: here as there it seems that the
personal touch with city governors is helpful in the smooth running of the
company. As to Mr. Posner—one understands his disappointment after today’s
vote.” He clasped my shoulder lightly, as Laura Bugatti, the attaché’s wife,
joined us. “
Allora
. Why do we discuss matters which no one else
understands?”

Before I could respond, two children of about five and
six came in under the watchful eye of a woman in a grey nurse’s uniform. They
were both very blond, the girl with a thick mane of hair down her back. They
were dressed for bed in nightwear that had kept a team of embroiderers busy for
a month. Fillida bent over to kiss them good night and to instruct them to say
good night to Zia Laura and Zia Janet. Zia Laura was the attaché’s wife, Zia
Janet the American novelist. Both came to kiss the children while Fillida
smoothed her daughter’s long hair around her shoulders.

“Giulietta,” she said to the nanny, “we must put a
rosemary rinse in Marguerita’s hair; it’s too coarse after a day in these
Chicago winds.”

Bertrand scooped his daughter up to carry her off to
bed. Fillida folded down the collar of her son’s pajama top and handed him to
the nurse. “I will be in later, my darlings, but I must feed our guests or they
will soon faint from hunger. Irina,” she added to the maid in the same soft
voice, “I want to serve now.”

She asked Signor Bugatti to escort me in, giving his
wife to the Swiss banker. On our way across the hall to the paneled dining room
I stopped to admire an old grandfather clock, whose face showed the solar
system. It struck nine as I was watching, and the sun and planets began
revolving around the earth.

“Enchanting, isn’t it?” Signor Bugatti said. “Fillida
has exquisite taste.”

If the paintings and little bits of sculpture lining
the rooms were hers, she not only had exquisite taste but plenty of money to
indulge it. She had a whimsical side, too: next to a child’s painting of the
ocean she had placed snapshots of her children at the beach.

Laura exclaimed over it. “Oh, look, here’s your little
Paolo at Samos last summer. He’s adorable! Are you letting him swim in Lake
Michigan?”

“Please,” Fillida said, putting up a hand to adjust
the photograph of her son. “He longs to go in. Don’t suggest it—the pollution!”

“Anyone who can brave the Adriatic can tolerate Lake
Michigan,” the banker said, and everyone laughed. “Do you agree, Signora
Warshawski?”

I smiled. “I often swim in the lake myself, but
perhaps my system has built up a tolerance for our local pollution. At least
we’ve never isolated cholera in our coastal waters here in Chicago.”

“Oh, but Samos, that’s not the same as Naples,” said
the American novelist, the “Aunt Janet” who had kissed an unwilling Paolo good
night a few minutes ago. “It’s so typical of an American to feel superior about
life here without experiencing Europe. America has to be number one in
everything, even clean coastal waters. In Europe, one cares much more for the
well-rounded life.”

“So when a German firm becomes America’s largest
publisher, or a Swiss company buys Chicago’s biggest insurer, they’re not
really concerned with market domination?” I asked. “It’s a by-product of the
well-rounded life?”

The banker laughed while Rossy, who’d just rejoined
us—in a different, more subdued tie—said, “Perhaps Janet should have said that
Europeans mask an interest in medals or winning behind a cloak of civilization.
It’s bad manners to show off one’s accomplishments—they should emerge casually,
by chance, under cover of other conversation.”

“Whereas Americans are confirmed braggarts,” the
novelist persisted. “We’re rich, we’re powerful, everyone must bend to our way
of doing things.”

Irina brought in mushroom soup, pale brown with cream
drizzled in the shape of a mushroom cap. She was a silent, efficient woman whom
I first assumed had come with the Rossys from Switzerland, until I realized
that Fillida and Rossy always broke into English to talk to her.

The table conversation ran on in Italian for several
caustic moments on the deficiencies of American power and American manners. I
felt my hackles rise: it’s one of those funny things, that no one likes the
family to be criticized by outsiders, even when the family is a collection of
lunatics or bullies.

“So today’s vote in the Illinois legislature wasn’t
about withholding life-insurance benefits from beneficiaries of Holocaust
victims—it was about keeping America from imposing its standards on Europe?” I
said.

The cultural attaché leaned across the table toward
me. “In a manner of speaking, yes, signora. This black counselor—what is his
name? Dur’am?—he makes a valid point in my eyes. Americans are so eager to
condemn at a distance—the atrocities of a war which were truly atrocious, no
one denies it—but Americans are not willing to examine their own atrocities at
home, in the matter of Indians or of African slaves.”

The maid removed the soup dishes and brought in roast
veal loin with an array of vegetables. The dinner plates were cream-colored
porcelain, heavily encrusted in gold with a large
H
in the
middle—perhaps for Fillida Rossy’s birth name, although offhand I couldn’t
think of Italian names beginning with
H
.

Laura Bugatti said that despite Mafia terrorism in
Italy or Russia, most European readers preferred to be shocked by American
violence than their homegrown brand.

“You’re right.” The banker’s wife spoke for the first
time. “My family won’t discuss violence in Zurich, but they are always quizzing
me about murders in Chicago. Are you finding this true now with this murder in
your husband’s firm, Fillida?”

Fillida ran her fingers over the ornate filigree on
her knife. She ate very little, I noticed—not surprising that she had deep
hollows around her breastbone. “
D’accordo.
This murder was reported in
the Bologna paper, I suppose because they knew I was living here. My mother has
been phoning every morning, demanding that I send Paolo and Marguerita back to
Italy where they’ll be safe. In vain I tell her the murder was twenty miles
from my front door, in a part of town most unsavory—which you could find
certainly in Milan. Perhaps even in Bologna, although I can hardly believe it.”

“Not in your own hometown, eh,
cara
?” Bertrand
said. “If it is your home it must be the best town, with nothing unsavory about
it.”

He was laughing, saluting his wife with his wineglass,
but she frowned at him. He scowled and put his glass down, turning to the
banker’s wife. Fillida’s soft voice apparently carried a lot of wallop—no
Bologna jokes at this dinner table—change your tie when she criticizes
it—change the subject when she’s annoyed at this one.

Laura Bugatti, noticing Fillida’s irritation, quickly
exclaimed in a girlish breathless voice, “Murder in Bertrand’s firm? How come I
know nothing about this? You are keeping important cultural information from
me,” she pouted at her husband.

“One of the agents selling insurance for Ajax was
found dead in his office,” the banker replied to her. “Now the police are
saying he was murdered, not suicided as they first thought. You worked for him,
didn’t you, Signora Warshawski?”

“Against him,” I corrected. “He held the key to a
disputed—” I fumbled for words: my Italian had never been geared to financial
discussions. Finally I turned to Rossy, who translated
life-insurance claim
for me.

“Yes, anyway, he held the key to such a disputed claim
with Ajax, and I could never get him to reveal what he knew.”