Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (52 page)

“I have Ulrich’s journals,” Lotty said. “I will keep
them safe for you, until you are able to look after them again. But I’m
wondering if you can answer a question for me about them. You wrote a note in
them, next to S. Radbuka’s name, that Sofie Radbuka was your mother. I’m
wondering how you know that.”

“I remembered it,” he said.

I moved next to Lotty and matched my tone to hers.
“When you took Ulrich’s journals to Rhea, she helped you remember that Radbuka
was your real name, didn’t she, Paul? There was a long list of names—Czestvo,
Vostok, Radbuka, and many others. When she hypnotized you, you remembered that
Radbuka was your real name. That must have been a very wonderful but very
frightening moment.”

Across the bed from us, Don gasped and moved
involuntarily away from Rhea, who said to him, “It wasn’t like that. This is
why this conversation must stop now.”

Paul, intent on my question, didn’t hear her. “Yes,
yes, it was. I could see—all the dead. All the people
Einsatzgruppenführer
Hoffman had murdered, falling into the lime pit, screaming—”

Lotty interrupted him. “You have to stay calm, Paul.
Don’t dwell on those painful memories right now. You remembered that past, and
then out of all that list of names, you chose—you remembered—Radbuka.”

Across the bed, Rhea looked murderous. She tried again
to halt the interview, but Paul’s attention was focused on Lotty, not her.

“I knew, because I’d been in England as a small boy.
It had to be.”

“Had to be?” Lotty asked.

He was very sensitive to people’s emotions; when he
heard the unexpected harshness in her voice he flinched and looked away. Before
he could get too upset I changed the subject.

“What led you to know Ulrich was an
Einsatzgruppenführer
?”

“He listed the dead in each family or shtetl that he
was responsible for murdering,” he whispered. “Ulrich . . . always bragged
about the dead. The way he bragged about torturing me. I survived all that
killing. My mother threw me into the woods when she saw them starting to push
people with their bayonets into the lime pit. Some person took me to Terezin,
but of course . . . I didn’t know then . . . that was where we were going.
Ulrich must have known . . . one person got away from him. He . . . found me in
England . . . brought me here . . . to torture me over and over . . . for the
crime of surviving.”

“You were very brave,” I said. “You stood up to him,
you survived. He’s dead. Did you know about those books of his before he died?”

“They were . . . locked up . . . in his desk. Living
room. He . . . beat me . . . when I looked . . . in those drawers . . . when I
was small. . . . When he died . . . I took . . . and kept . . . in my special
place.”

“And someone came today to get those books?”

“Ilse.” He said, “Ilse Wölfin. I knew. She . . . came
. . . to the door. First she was friendly. Learned from Mengele. Friends first
. . . then torture. She said . . . she was from Vienna. Said Ulrich took these
books to America . . . shouldn’t have . . . after the war. I didn’t understand
at first . . . then . . . I tried to get . . . to my secret place . . . hide
from her . . . pulled out her gun first.”

“What did she look like?” I asked, ignoring an
impatient aside from Lotty to stop.

“Fierce. Big hat. Sunglasses. Horrible smile.”

“When he was selling insurance, here in Chicago, did
Ulrich talk to you about these books?” I asked, trying to figure out a way to
ask if he’d been at the Midway Agency lately, wondering if he’d been stalking
Howard Fepple.

“The dead give us life, Ulrich used to say. Remember
that . . . you will be rich. He wanted me . . . be . . . doctor . . . wanted me
. . . make money from the dead. . . . I didn’t want . . . to live among . . .
dead. I didn’t want to stay in . . . closet. . . . Tortured me . . . called me
sissy, queer, always in German, always . . . in language of . . . slavery.”
Tears started to seep down his face; his breath began coming in labored spurts.

Lotty said, “You need to rest, you need to sleep. We
want you to recover. I’m going to leave you now, but before I go, who did you
talk to in England? What helped you remember your name was Radbuka?”

His eyes were shut, his face drawn and grey. “His
tally of the dead he’d killed himself . . . bragged in his books . . . listed
their names. Searched each name . . . on the Internet. . . . Found one . . . in
England . . . Sofie  . . Radbuka . . . how I knew . . . which name mine .
. . and that I was sent to Anna Freud in England . . . after the war. . . . Had
to be.”

Lotty kept her hand on his pulse while he fell asleep.
The rest of us watched dumbly while Lotty checked the IV drips coming into his
arms. When she left the room, Rhea and I followed. Hot spots of color burned in
Rhea’s face; she tried to confront Lotty in the hall, but Lotty swept past her
to the nurse’s station, where she asked for the charge nurse. She began an
interrogation about the drugs Paul was getting.

Don had come out of Paul’s room more slowly than the
rest of us. He started a low-voiced conversation with Rhea, his face troubled.
Lotty finished with the charge nurse and sailed on down the hall to the
elevator. I ran after her, but she looked at me sternly.

“You should have saved your questions, Victoria. There
were specific things I was trying to learn, but your questions sidetracked him
and finally got him too upset. I wanted to know how he latched on to Anna Freud
as his savior, for instance.”

I got in the elevator with her. “Lotty, enough of this
crap. Isn’t pushing Carl into the void enough? Do you want to drive Max and me
away from you, as well? You got angry the first time Paul mentioned England; I
was trying to keep you from losing him. And also—we know what those journals
meant to Paul Hoffman. I’d like to know what they meant to Ulrich. Where are
they, by the way? I need them.”

“For right now, you’ll have to do without them.”

“Lotty, I can’t do without them. I need to find out
what they mean to people who don’t see the dead in them. Someone shot Paul for
them. It may be that this fierce woman in sunglasses killed an insurance agent
named Howard Fepple for them. His mother’s house was broken into on Tuesday.
Someone searched it, probably for these notebooks.”

Amy Blount, I suddenly thought. Her place had been
burgled on Tuesday, also. Surely it was too big a coincidence to think it
wasn’t connected to these Hoffman journals. She had seen the Ajax archives.
What if the fierce woman in sunglasses thought Ulrich Hoffman’s books had
landed in the archives and thought perhaps Amy Blount hadn’t been able to
resist them? Which meant—it was someone who knew Amy Blount had been in those
archives. It all came back to the folks at Ajax. Ralph. Rossy. And Durham on
the sideline.

“Anyway,” I added aloud, as the elevator doors opened
onto the lobby, “if they mean that much to someone, you’re risking a lot by
holding on to them.”

“That is definitely my lookout, not yours, Victoria.
I’ll return them to you in a day or so. There’s something I need to look for in
them first.” She turned on her heel and stalked away from me, following a
hallway signposted to the doctors’ parking area.

Don and Rhea appeared from another elevator, Don
saying, “Don’t you see, sweetheart, this lays you open to the kind of criticism
people like Praeger make, that you lead people to these memories.”

“He knew he had been in England after the war,” she
said. “That isn’t something I thought of or led him to. And those memories of
the lime pits—Don, if you’d been there—I’ve listened to many bone-chilling
memories from my patients, but I’ve never wept before. I’d always kept my
professional detachment. But to see your own mother thrown alive into a pit
she’d been forced at gunpoint to fill with lime, to hear those screams—and then
to know that the man responsible for your own mother’s death had such power
over you, locking you into a small closet, beating you, taunting you—it was
utterly shattering.”

“I can see that,” I said, breaking into this private
conversation. “But there are so many curious leaps in his story. Even if Ulrich
somehow knew this one small boy escaped the lime pit, how did he keep track of
him all through the vicissitudes of war, first in Terezin and then to England?
If Ulrich really was an
Einsatzgruppenführer,
he’d have had plenty of
chances to kill the kid during the war. But on Ulrich’s landing papers, it says
they docked in Baltimore from a Dutch merchant ship which sailed from Antwerp.”

“That doesn’t mean he didn’t start from England,” Rhea
said. “As for your other point, a man with a guilty conscience might do
anything. Ulrich is dead; we can’t ask him why he was so obsessed by this small
boy. But we know he thought having a Jewish child would help him get past
immigration problems in America. So if he knew where Paul was, it was natural
for him to take him, pretending to be his father.”

“Ulrich had an official denazification certificate,” I
objected. “Nor was there any mention of Paul’s Jewishness in the landing
documents.”

“Ulrich probably destroyed those once he was here and
felt safe from prosecution,” Rhea said.

I sighed. “You have a pat answer for everything, but
Paul has a shrine to the Holocaust; it’s filled with books and articles on
survivor experiences. If he’s immersed himself in these, he could be confusing
other people’s histories with his own past. After all, he says he was only
twelve months old when he was sent to Terezin. Would he really know what he’d
been seeing, if in fact he had witnessed his mother and the rest of his town
being murdered in the way he describes?”

“You know nothing about psychology, or about survivors
of torture,” Rhea said. “Why don’t you stick to the things you know about,
whatever those might be.”

“I do understand Vic’s point, Rhea,” Don said. “We
need to talk seriously about your book. Unless there’s something specific in
these journals of Ulrich’s, saying
This boy I brought with me is not my son,
he’s someone named Radbuka
—well, I need to examine them in detail.”

“Don, I thought you were on my side,” Rhea said, her
myopic eyes filling with tears.

“I am, Rhea. That’s why I don’t want you to expose
yourself by publishing a book that has holes someone like Arnold Praeger and
the Planted Memory folks can find so easily. Vic, I know you’re guarding the
originals like the national vault, but would you let me examine them? I could
do so in your office, under your eye.”

I made a face. “Lotty’s walked off with them, which
makes me angry, but also worried—if Paul was shot by someone looking for them,
they’re about as safe to lug around as naked plutonium. She’s promised to return
them by the weekend. I did copy about a dozen pages and you can look at those,
but—I understand the problem.”

“Well, that’s just dandy,” Don said, exasperated. “How
did you get hold of all this material to begin with? How do you know about
Paul’s shrine? You were in his house, weren’t you?”

I nodded reluctantly—the situation was past the point
where I could keep my presence on the scene a secret. “I found him right after
he’d been shot and got the ambulance to him. The place had been ransacked, but
he had a closet hidden behind the drapes in his Holocaust shrine. His assailant
didn’t think to look there. It was a truly dreadful place.”

I described it again, the wall of photographs, the
telltale balloon comments coming out of Ulrich’s mouth. “Those things you say
he took from your office, Rhea, they were there, draped around pictures of
you.”

“I’d like to see it,” Don said. “Maybe there’s some
other crucial piece of evidence you overlooked.”

“You could go in, and welcome,” I said. “Once is
enough for me.”

“Neither of you has a right to violate Paul’s privacy
by going into his house,” Rhea said coldly. “All patients idealize their
therapists to some extent. Ulrich was such a monstrous father that Paul
juxtaposes me against him as an idealized form of the mother he never knew. As
for your going into the house, Vic—you called me this morning wanting his
address. Why do that if you knew where he lived? If he’d been shot, how did you
get inside? Are you sure you weren’t the woman down there shooting him, because
of your rage over his wanting to prove a close relationship with your friends?”

“I didn’t shoot the little goober, even though he was
acting like a great pain in the neck,” I said softly, my eyes hot. “But I do
have a sample of his blood now, on my clothes. I can send it out for a DNA
profile. That will prove once and for all whether he’s related to Max—or Carl
or Lotty.”

She stared at me in dismay. I pushed brusquely past
her before she or Don could speak.

The Lady Vanishes

I
wondered
if Paul was safe in his hospital room. If Ilse the She-Wolf learned he had
survived her shot, would she come back to finish the job? I couldn’t ask for a
police posting without explaining about Ulrich’s journals. And my mind boggled
at the task of trying to make the cops understand that story, especially when I
didn’t fully understand it myself. I finally compromised by going back to the
fifth floor to tell the charge nurse that my brother was scared of his attacker
coming back to kill him.