Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (46 page)

“Who is this?”

“Casco Pharmacy in River Forest. We have a
prescription for Haldol we’re trying to fill for Mr. Paul Radbuka and we need
his home address. This is a powerful antipsychotic drug; we cannot dispense it
without some way of reaching him.” I spoke in a nasal singsong, as if I’d been
trained to reel off the bureaucratic litany by heart.

“Yeah, well, can you make a note in your records not
to use this number? This is a business office where he sometimes does volunteer
work, but we can’t take his messages. Here’s his home address.”

My heart was beating as hard as if I were hearing a
message from my lover. I copied down a number on Roslyn Street, then read it
back, forgetting in my excitement to use my nasal singsong. But what difference
did that make now? I had what I wanted. And I hadn’t needed to break Rhea
Wiell’s jaw to get it.

Heartbreak House

R
oslyn was a
tiny street, barely a block long, that emptied onto Lincoln Park. Radbuka’s
house was on the south side, near the park end. It was an old greystone whose
front, like most of the houses in this exclusive block, was set close to the
street. I wanted to smash down the door, charge in, and forcibly confront
Radbuka, but I made as discreet a survey as I could. This close to Lincoln
Park, a lot of joggers, dogwalkers, and other athletes kept passing me, even
though it was still a bit early in the afternoon for people to be home from
work.

The front door was a massive piece of wood, with a
peephole making it possible for Radbuka to study his visitors. Keeping myself
out of its range, I rang the bell, vigorously, leaning on it for four or five
minutes. When there wasn’t an answer, I couldn’t resist the idea of going
inside to see if I could find the documents that proved to him that Radbuka was
his name. I tried the front door—it would be ridiculous to risk being spotted
breaking and entering if I could get in easily—but the brass knob didn’t turn.

I didn’t want to stand with my picklocks in full view
of so many joggers; I’d have to go in through the back. I’d had to park three
blocks from Roslyn Street. I returned to my car and took a navy coverall from a
box in the back. A patch on the left pocket proclaimed
People’s Power
Service
. That and a tool belt completed an easy piece of camouflage. I took
them into the women’s rest room in the conservatory and came out a minute
later, my hair covered in a blue kerchief, looking like a piece of the service
woodwork the Yuppies would overlook.

Back at Radbuka’s house, I tried the bell again, then
went up a narrow strip of flagstones along the house’s east side leading to the
back. It was bisected by a ten-foot-high gate with a lock set in the middle.
The lock was a complex dead bolt. I crouched down with my picklocks, trying to
ignore the passersby in the hopes they would do the same to me.

I was sweating freely by the time I got the tumblers
pressed back. The lock had to be opened by a key no matter which side of the
gate you were on; I wedged a piece of paper into the bolt hole to keep the
tongue from reengaging.

The lots on Roslyn were narrow—barely wider than the
houses themselves—but deep, without the service alleys and garages that run
between most streets in the city. An eight-foot-high wooden fence, somewhat
dilapidated, separated the garden from the street behind.

Paul’s father must have made a fortune doing whatever
he did for the son to afford this house on this street, but either depression
or lack of money made Paul let it go. The garden was a tangle of overgrown bushes
and knee-high weeds. As I waded through them to the kitchen entrance, several
cats snarled at me and moved off. A shiver ran down my spine.

The lock here seemed identical to the gate, so I used
the same combination of picks and had it open in less than a minute. Before
going into the kitchen, I pulled on a pair of latex gloves. Just so I wouldn’t
forget to do it later, I grabbed a dish towel from above the sink and wiped the
outside knob on the back door.

The kitchen cabinets and appliances hadn’t been replaced
in a good thirty years. The pilots on the old stove glowed blue in the dim
light; the enamel was chipped down to metal along the edges of the oven door.
The cabinets were the kind of thick brown pressed wood that had been popular in
my childhood.

Paul had eaten breakfast here this morning: the milk
hadn’t begun to curdle in the cereal bowl he’d left on the table. The room was
cluttered with old newspapers and mail; a 1993 calendar still hung near the
pantry. But it wasn’t filthy. Paul seemed to keep on top of his dishes, more or
less, which was more than could be said for me much of the time.

I went down the hall, past a dining room with a
substantial table that could have seated sixteen. A breakfront held a
collection of china, a delicate pattern of blue flowers on a creamy background.
It looked as though there was enough china to give sixteen people a five-course
meal without stopping to wash any plates, but the dust on the dishes showed
that nothing like that had been attempted recently.

All of the rooms on the ground floor were like this,
filled with heavy, carved furniture, but covered in dust. Haphazard stacks of
paper stood everywhere. In the living room, I found a copy of the
Süddeutsche
Zeitung
dating back to 1989.

A photograph on the wall by the fireplace showed a boy
and a man in front of a cottage, with a lake in the background. The boy was
presumably Paul, around ten or eleven, the man presumably Ulrich, a
barrel-chested, balding figure who stood next to his son, smiling but stern.
Paul was looking anxiously up at his father, but Ulrich stared straight ahead
at the camera. You wouldn’t look at the picture and say, Oh, these two must be
related—either physically or by love.

A sitting room next to the main living room had
apparently served as Ulrich’s study. Originally he’d probably decorated it to
look like some period-film version of an English country library, with a double
leather kneehole desk, a leather armchair, and shelves for books covered in
tooled leather—a complete Shakespeare, a complete Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope
in English, and Goethe and Schiller in German. The books had been flung about
with a furious hand; pages were crumpled, spines broken—a wanton display of
destruction.

The same violent hand had taken the desk apart: the drawers
stood open, papers pulled from them and tossed on the floor. Had Paul done
this, attacking his dead father by pounding on his possessions? Or had someone
been searching the house ahead of me? And for what? Who besides me cared about
the papers linking Ulrich to the
Einsatzgruppen
? Or had Ulrich had other
secrets?

I couldn’t take the time right now to sift through the
books and papers, especially since I didn’t know what I was looking for. I’d
have to get Mary Louise and the Streeter brothers to sort them later, if we
could get Paul out of the house long enough.

Radbuka’s silver mountain bike stood in the formal
tiled entryway. So he’d come back here after snatching Ninshubur. Perhaps the
morning’s emotional upheaval had exhausted him and he’d tucked himself in bed
with the little blue dog.

I went up a carved wood staircase to the second floor
and started with the rooms at the south end of the hall, where the stairway
opened. The biggest, with its set of heavy silver brushes monogrammed with a
curlicue
U
and what looked like either an
H
or a
K
, must
have belonged to Ulrich. The bedstead and wardrobe were massive carved pieces
that might have been three hundred years old. Had Ulrich brought all this heavy
furniture with him from Germany, from some opulent wartime looting? Or was
buying them his sign to himself of success in the New World?

The musty smell in the room made me doubt that Paul
had changed the linens since his father’s death those six or seven years ago. I
poked through the wardrobe and dresser drawers, wondering if Ulrich had left
anything in his pockets or tucked beneath his severe pajamas. I was beginning
to get discouraged. An old house filled with stuff that hadn’t been sorted out
in thirty years—I doubted if seven maids with seven mops could get through it
in under a year.

My spirits flagging, I went across the hall.
Fortunately, that room and another further up the passage were both empty, not
even holding bedsteads—no houseguests for the Ulrichs. Paul’s own bedroom was
the last one on the left. It was the only room in the house with new furniture.
He had made an effort to spruce it up—perhaps to separate himself from his
father—with the most extreme, angular examples of modern Danish design. I
looked through it carefully but didn’t see Ninshubur. So had he gone out
again—to Rhea?—carrying the dog with him as a trophy?

A bathroom separated Paul’s bedroom from a hexagonal
room overlooking the rank back garden. Heavy drapes in a dull bronze shut out
any outside light. I flipped on the overhead light to reveal an extraordinary
sight.

A large map of Europe was attached to one wall. Red
pins were stuck into it. When I got close enough to read the lettering, I saw
they marked the concentration camps of the Nazi era, the big ones like
Treblinka and Auschwitz, and others like Sobibor and Neuengamme that I’d never
heard of. Another, smaller map next to it showed the paths of the
Einsatzgruppen
through eastern Europe, with
Einsatzgruppe B
circled and underlined in
red.

Other walls had the photographs of horror we’ve all
become used to: emaciated bodies in striped clothes lying on boards; faces of
children, their eyes large with fear, crammed into railway cars; helmeted
guards with Alsatians snarling at people behind barbed wire; the chilling smoke
from crematorium chimneys.

So startled was I by this display that I noticed the
most shocking sight almost as an afterthought. I think my brain first saw it as
one more garish exhibit, but it was horribly real: crumpled face-forward
beneath the bronze drapes lay Paul Radbuka, blood staining the floor around his
out-flung right arm.

I stood frozen for an interminable second before
darting around the papers littering the floor to kneel next to him. He was
lying partly on his left side. He was breathing in rasping, shallow gasps,
bloody bubbles popping out of his mouth. The left side of his shirt was soaked
with blood that had formed a pool on the floor beneath him. I ran to the
bedroom and grabbed the comforter and a sheet. My own knees were stained now
with blood, my right hand as well from where I’d pushed against the floor while
feeling for his pulse. I returned to Radbuka, draping the comforter over him,
turning him gently within its warmth so I could see where the blood was coming
from.

I ripped his shirt open. The dog Ninshubur,
greeny-brown with blood, fell out. I tore a length of sheet and pressed it
against Radbuka’s chest. Blood continued to come from a wound on the left side,
but it was oozing, not spurting: he wasn’t bleeding from an artery. When I lifted
the pad I could see an ugly gash near the breastbone, the telltale jagged tear
of bullet into flesh.

I tore another piece of sheet and made a pad, which I
pressed firmly against the hole, then tied it into place with a long strip. I
wrapped him in the comforter, head to toe, leaving just enough of his face
showing that he could get oxygen through the labored breaths he was taking.
“Keep you warm, buddy, until the paramedics get here.”

The only phone I remembered was in the living room. I
ran back down the stairs, leaving a trail of bloodstains on the carpet, and
called 911. “The front door will be open,” I said. “This is an extreme
emergency, gunshot wound to the chest, victim unconscious, breath shallow.
Paramedics should come up the stairs to the north end of the floor.”

I waited for a confirmation, then unlocked the front
door and ran back upstairs to Radbuka. He was still breathing, wheezing as he
exhaled, gasping as he sucked in air. I felt the pad; it seemed to be holding.
As I adjusted the comforter, I felt a lump in his pocket that must be his
wallet. I pulled it out, wondering if it would have some proof of identity that
would let me know his birth name.

No driver’s license. An ATM card for the Fort Dearborn
Trust in the name of Paul Radbuka. A MasterCard, same bank, same name. A card
saying that in an emergency one should call Rhea Wiell, at her office. No
insurance card, nothing to show any other identity. I slipped the wallet gently
back into his pocket.

It dawned on me that I didn’t look my best, with my
latex gloves now red with blood and my picklocks in my tool belt. If the cops
came with the paramedics, I didn’t want to have to answer awkward questions
about how I got in. I ran into the bathroom, washed my gloved hands quickly but
thoroughly, and opened one of the windows in Paul’s bedroom. I tossed the
picklocks at an overgrown shrub in the garden, disturbing a cat that took off
with a heart-stopping yowl. It disappeared between two broken boards in the
back fence.

Back in the room with Paul, I picked up Ninshubur.
“Did you save his life, you poor little bloodstained hound? How’d you do it?”

I inspected the damp plush figure. It was the dog tags
I’d given Calia for him. One of them was bent and dimpled where the bullet had
struck. They were too soft to stop or deflect a bullet, but maybe they’d helped
slow it down.