Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (42 page)

I stared at the scene for an appalled moment, then
told the guards to keep people away from the door. “Tell them that anyone who
obstructs the entryway is facing a fine. The back exit is free and clear—get
these patients out through there. Send an SOS to the cab companies to use the
rear.”

I watched until the startled guard started giving
orders through his walkie-talkie before I marched down the corridor to Max’s
office. Cynthia Dowling, Max’s secretary, interrupted a heated telephone
exchange when she saw me.

“Cynthia, why doesn’t Max get the cops to arrest that
group of yahoos?”

She shook her head. “The board’s afraid of alienating
major donors. Beth Israel is one of the big Jewish charities in town. Most of
the calls we’ve been getting since Posner hit the news have agreed with you,
but old Mrs. Felstein is one of Posner’s supporters—she survived the war in
hiding in Moldavia, you know, but when she came here she made a fortune in gum
balls. Lately she’s been active in lobbying Swiss banks to release Holocaust
victims’ assets. And she’s pledged twenty million dollars for our new oncology
wing.”

“So if she sees Posner carried off to a paddy wagon
she’ll cancel? But if someone who’s having a heart attack dies because they
can’t get here, you’d face a lawsuit that would more than offset any pledge she
made.”

“That’s Max’s decision. His and the board’s, and of course
they’re aware of the pitfalls.” Her phone console started to blink; she pressed
a button. “Mr. Loewenthal’s office . . . No, I know you have a one-thirty
deadline. As soon as Mr. Loewenthal is available I’ll let him have your
message. . . . Yes, I wish we weren’t in the business of saving lives here; it
would make us better able to drop everything to respond to media deadlines. Mr.
Loewenthal’s office, please hold. . . . Mr. Loewenthal’s office, please hold.”
She looked at me, distracted, with her hand over the phone. “This place is so
inefficient. The stupid temp the clerical pool sent me went to lunch an hour
ago. She’s probably out front enjoying the show, and even though I’m the
executive director’s secretary, the clerical office won’t send me another
backup.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll leave you to it. I have some
questions for Posner—tell Max if you see him that I won’t implicate the
hospital.”

When I got to the main lobby, I elbowed my way through
to the front of the crowd, which was once again pushing against the revolving
doors. As soon as I got outside I saw the reason for their avidity: the
demonstrators had stopped marching and were clumped together behind Joseph
Posner, who was shouting at a small woman in a hospital coat, “You’re the worst
kind of anti-Semite, a traitor to your own people.”

“And you, Mr. Posner, are the worst kind of abuser of
human emotion, exploiting the horrors of Treblinka for your own
aggrandizement.”

I would have known that voice anywhere, anger making
her clip off words like so many cigar ends. I pushed past two of Posner’s
Maccabees to reach her side. “Lotty, what are you doing here? This is a losing
battle—attention is this guy’s meat and drink.”

Posner, his nostrils flaring with anger, his mouth
distorted in defiance, looked like a picture captioned
The gladiator waiting
for the lion
in my childhood
Illustrated History of Rome
.

Lotty, a small but ferocious lion, shook me off. “Mind
your own business for once, Victoria. This man is defaming the dead for his own
glory. And he’s defaming me.”

“Then we’ll take it to a court of law,” I said. “There
are television cameras catching every word on tape.”

“Go ahead, take me to court, if you dare.” Posner
turned as he spoke, to make sure both his supporters and the reporters heard
him. “I don’t care if I spend five years in jail, if that will make the world
understand my people’s cause.”

“Your people?” I kept my voice light, scornful. “Are
you Moses now?”

“Will it make you happier if I call them my
‘followers,’ or my ‘team’? Whatever you call them, they understand that it may
be necessary to suffer or make sacrifices to get where we want to be. They
understand that some of that suffering can take the form of ridicule from
ignorant secularists like yourself, or this doctor here.”

“What about the suffering of patients?” I asked. “An
elderly woman can’t get home after surgery because you’ve blocked the front
door. If her family sues you for millions in damages, will ‘your people’
understand that?”

“Victoria, I don’t need you to fight my battles for
me,” Lotty said, her voice tight with anger. “Or to draw this imbecile’s fire.”

I ignored her. “By the way, Mr. Posner, you know that
‘your people’ have to keep moving—they can be arrested if they stand around
gawking.”

“I hardly need a strange woman to instruct me in the
law,” Posner said, but he gestured to his followers to start circling again.

Paul Radbuka was hovering near Posner’s elbow, his
mobile clown’s face registering first delight at Posner’s rebuttal, derision as
Lotty spoke—and anger as he suddenly recognized me. “Reb Joseph, this
woman—she’s a detective, she’s my enemy, she’s the person who’s turning my
family against me.”

The television crews, which had been focusing their
cameras on Lotty and Posner, suddenly switched to Radbuka and me. Beyond the
lights I heard someone say, “Is that Warshawski, the detective? What’s she
doing here?” Beth Blacksin called excitedly, “Vic, has the hospital hired you
to investigate Posner’s claims? Are you working for Max Loewenthal?”

I cupped my hands around my eyes so I could see past
the glare of the camera lights. “I have a private question for Mr. Posner,
Beth. It’s not anything to do with the hospital.”

I tapped Posner on the arm, telling him I’d like him
to come with me away from the cameras. Posner said sternly that he couldn’t
talk privately with a woman.

I smiled brightly. “Don’t worry: if your impulses get
the better of you I can break one of your arms. Maybe both. But if you prefer,
I can ask my question out loud on camera.”

“Everything I have to say about this Lotty Herschel
and about you, too, can be on camera,” Radbuka butted in. “You think you can
come up here to keep me away from my family, just like you hired that bully to
stay with my little cousin over at Max’s, but you won’t get away with it. Rhea
and Don are going to help me take my story to the world.”

Posner tried to get Radbuka to be quiet, telling him
he’d take care of the detective. To me he added that he had nothing to hide.

“Bertrand Rossy,” I said softly, then looked toward
the cameras and raised my voice. “Beth, I’m asking Mr. Posner about his
meeting—”

With a rough gesture Posner turned his back to the
cameras. “I don’t know what you think you know, but you’d be making a mistake
to talk about him on television.”

“What meeting, Mr. Posner?” one of the reporters
asked. “Is this anything to do with the defeat of the Asset Recovery bill on
Tuesday?”

“You know I’m going to ask you about him, about why
you pulled your demonstration away from Ajax,” I said softly to Posner. “It’s
up to you whether it’s on- or off-mike. You like publicity, and they are using
directional mikes, so if I raise my voice, they’ll pick up our conversation
even if they’re not right on top of us.”

Posner couldn’t afford to look indecisive in front of
his troops. “Just to keep you from defaming my movement on television, I will
talk to you away from the hospital. But not alone.”

He called to another man to join him, ordering the
rest of the group to wait in the group’s bus until he got back. The television
crews watched in astonishment as the demonstrators drifted off toward the
parking lot, then they plunged forward with a babble of excited questions for
Posner and me: what had made him decide to cancel the demonstration?

“We achieved our goals this afternoon,” Posner said
grandly. “We have made the hospital realize that Jewish-backed institutions are
just as liable as secular ones to become complacent and indifferent to Jewish
needs. We will be back, however: Max Loewenthal and Charlotte Herschel can feel
assured of that.”

“What about you, Dr. Herschel? What do you think of
their assertion that you’re keeping Paul Radbuka from his family?”

She curled her lip. “I’m a surgeon with a full-time
practice: I don’t have time for comic books. In fact, this man has kept me from
my patients for long enough.”

She turned on her heel and went back into the
hospital. The reporters surged forward, wanting to know what I’d said to
Posner. Who was my client? Did I suspect fraud in Posner’s group, or in the
hospital? Who was financing the demonstrations?

I told Beth and the other reporters that as soon as I
had interesting information I’d share it with them—but that for right now I
didn’t know about any fraud involving Posner or the hospital.

“But, Beth,” I added, “what brought you up here?”

“We were tipped off, you know how that works,
Warshawski.” She gave me an urchin’s grin. “Not by him, though—a woman called
the station. Could have been anyone, though.”

Posner, annoyed that I’d stolen the limelight, snarled
at me to come with him if I wanted to talk to him: he didn’t have all day to
spend on foolish women with imaginary ideas. He moved rapidly down the drive
with his chosen henchman; I lengthened my stride to catch up with him.

A couple of reporters kept up a halfhearted pursuit.
Radbuka, who hadn’t followed the other demonstrators to the bus, began
declaiming that Max was his cousin but wouldn’t admit it, and I was the beast
of Babylon who was keeping Max from talking to him, but the reporters already
had that story; they weren’t interested in the rerun. If I wasn’t going to give
the cameras raw meat, there wasn’t anything to keep them around Beth Israel any
longer. The crews wrapped up their equipment and headed to their vans.

Amateur Sleuth

T
he crowd,
realizing the show was over because the cameras had disappeared, began drifting
away. By the time Posner and I were at the corner of Catalpa, the driveway in
front of the hospital was almost empty. I laughed to myself: I should send Max
a bill for this.

I turned to see what Radbuka was doing. He stood alone
at the bottom of the drive, his hurt feelings at being abandoned by both Posner
and the cameras darkening his mobile face. He looked around uncertainly, then
ran down the street after us.

I turned back to Posner, who was impatiently tapping
his watch. “So, Mr. Posner. Let’s talk about you and Bertrand Rossy.”

“I have nothing to say about him.” His chin jutted out
at a lofty angle: the Gladiator is not afraid of Death.

“Nothing about your meeting with him last night?
Nothing about how he persuaded you to abandon your protest outside Ajax for one
here at Beth Israel?”

He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “Whoever
told you I met with him is lying. I have private reasons for being here. They
have nothing to do with Rossy.”

“Let’s not start our nice little chat with accusations
about lying: I saw you at Rossy’s place—I had dinner with him and his wife last
night.”

“I didn’t see you!”

“Now, that disclaimer is pretty pure proof that you
were there.” I gave a supercilious smile: Posner was so used to being the daddy
in the story that I figured the way to keep him rattled was to treat him as if
I found him childish.

“Reb Joseph, I don’t think you should talk any more to
this woman,” the sidekick said. “She’s trying to trick you into saying
something that will discredit us. Remember what Radbuka said, that she’s been
keeping him from his family.”

“That’s not true, either,” I said. “I’m eager for Paul
to rejoin his true family. But I’m curious about the situation between your
Holocaust Asset Recovery group and Ajax Insurance. I know you know Preston
Janoff was in Springfield yesterday, killing the Illinois Asset Recovery Act,
so what made you abandon Ajax? I’d think today your wrath against them would be
greater than ever. My bet is that Bertrand Rossy told you something last night,
or offered you a nice little bribe, that made you withdraw from the Loop to
come up here.”

“You’re right, Leon.” Posner turned away from me.
“This woman doesn’t know anything—she’s playing a guessing game to keep us from
disturbing her rich friends at the hospital.”

Even though I was getting tired of being “this woman”
instead of having a name, I kept my voice genial. “I may not know anything, but
I can make guesses that Beth Blacksin at Global will listen to. And believe me,
I did see you at the Rossys’ last night—if I tell her that, she’ll be parked on
your doorstep for a week.”

Posner had turned to leave, but at that he looked back
at me, darting a worried glance at Leon, then up the street to see if the
cameras were there.

I smiled. “I know that you were furious when you got
to Rossy’s place, so I figure it was because you knew he was talking to
Alderman Durham: you were afraid Ajax was going to offer Durham some special
deal that would undercut your movement.