Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (53 page)

“We worry about Paul,” I said. “I don’t know if you’ve
noticed, but he lives in a world of his own. He thinks the Nazis are after him.
Did Dr. Herschel tell you when she was talking to you that it would be best if
no one goes in to see him unless I, or his doctor, or the therapist Rhea Wiell
is here, as well? He’ll get so agitated that he could get into serious
respiratory difficulties right now.”

She told me to write up something for the nursing
station. She let me use her computer in the back room, then taped my message up
at the station and said she would make sure the central switchboard routed any
calls or visitors to them.

Before going home, I went to my own office to send
Morrell an e-mail, recounting the events of the day.
So far no one has
beaten me up and left me to die on the Kennedy,
I wrote,
but I’ve been
having a strenuous time.
I finished with an account of the conversation in
Paul’s hospital room.
You’ve done so much work with torture victims—could
this be a dissociative protection, identifying with victims of the Holocaust?
The whole situation is really spooky
.

I ended with the messages of love and longing one
sends to distant lovers. What had sustained Lotty over the years against such
feelings? Had her sense of torment made her think she deserved loneliness and
longing? When I got home, I sat on the back porch with Mr. Contreras and the
dogs for a long time, not talking much, just drawing comfort from their
presence.

In the morning, I decided it was time to visit Ajax
Insurance again. I phoned Ralph from my own office and talked to his secretary,
Denise. As usual, his calendar was full; once again I pleaded my case
forcefully but with charm and goodwill; once again, Denise arranged to fit me
in, twenty minutes from now if I could get to Ajax by nine-thirty. I grabbed my
briefcase with the photocopies from Ulrich’s journals and ran down to the
corner of North for a cab.

When I reached Ralph’s office, Denise told me he would
be back from the chairman’s office in two minutes. She settled me in his
conference room with a cup of coffee, but Ralph came in almost immediately,
pressing his fingers along the corners of his eyes. He looked too tired for
this early in the day.

“Hi, Vic. We have a big exposure in the Carolina flood
zone. I can give you five minutes, and then I have to move on.”

I laid my photocopies on his conference table. “These
are from the journals of Ulrich—Rick—Hoffman, the agent who sold Aaron Sommers
his life-insurance policy all those years ago. Ulrich kept what seems to be a
list of names and addresses, followed by a set of cryptic initials and check
marks. Do they mean anything to you?”

Ralph bent over the papers. “This handwriting is just
about impossible to read. Is there any way to get it clearer?”

“Blowing up the image seems to help. Unfortunately I don’t
have the originals to work with right now, but I can read some of this—I’ve
been looking at it a couple of days.”

“Denise,” he shouted to his secretary. “Can you come
here a minute?”

Denise obediently trotted in, not showing any
annoyance at the peremptory summons, and took a couple of sheets to her copier.
She came back with various sizes of blowups. Ralph looked at them and shook his
head.

“Guy was really cryptic. I’ve seen a lot of agency
files and—Denise!” he shouted again. “Call that gal in claims handling, Connie
Ingram. Get her up here, will you?”

In his normal tone he added to me, “I just remembered
what was odd about that file, that disputed-claim file. Connie’ll know the
answer.” He turned to the page showing the names and addresses. “Omschutz,
Gerstein—are these names? What’s Notvoy?”

“Nestroy, not Notvoy. A woman I know says it’s a
street in Vienna.”

“Austria, you mean? We had an agent on the South Side
selling insurance in Vienna, Austria?”

“It’s possible he started his insurance career there
before the war. I don’t know. I was hoping you’d look at these and be able to
tell whether they were insurance-related or not. A definite no would be almost
as helpful as a definite yes.”

Ralph shook his head, rubbing his forehead again. “I
can’t tell you. If it is insurance, these numbers, the 20/w and the 8/w, they
could refer to a weekly payment—although, hell, I don’t know the German for
week. Maybe it doesn’t start with
w
. Also, what was the currency? Do
these amounts make sense for payment figures? And these others, if this is
insurance, they could be policy numbers, although they don’t look like ones
that I’m familiar with.”

He held it out to me. “Can you read them? What’s the
initial letter, this thing that looks like a bee attacking a flower? And then a
string of numbers, and then—is that a
q
or an
o
? And then there’s
an
L
. Hell, Vic—I don’t have time for this kind of puzzle. It might be
insurance, but I can’t tell. I guess I could ask Rossy—he might know if it’s a
European system, but if it dates to before the war—well, they’ve changed all
their systems since the war. He’s a young guy, wasn’t even born until 1958—he
probably wouldn’t know.”

“I know it seems like it’s just a puzzle,” I
responded. “But I think that insurance agent Fepple was killed because of it.
Yesterday someone who was probably looking for these papers shot Rick Hoffman’s
son.”

Denise came to the conference room door to let Ralph
know Connie Ingram had arrived.

“Connie. Come on in. You doing okay? No more
interviews with the police, I hope. Look, Connie, that claim file that’s been
causing everyone such a headache—Aaron Sommers. There weren’t any personal
notes from the agent in it. Something about it bugged me when I picked it up
from Mr. Rossy, and looking at these, I remembered that’s what was missing.”

He turned to me to explain. “See, Vic, the agent would
work up a sheet, numbers, whatever, he’d have a letter or some notes or
something that would end up in the file—we rely on their private assessment,
especially in life insurance. Guy can have a doctor in his hip pocket to clear
him on a physical, but the agent sees him, sees he lives like me, on French
fries and coffee, and tells the company the prospect either isn’t a good risk
or needs to be rated higher, or whatever. Anyway, there wasn’t anything in the
Sommers file. So, Connie, what’s the story—did you ever see any agent report in
that file when you looked at it? He might have had handwriting like this.”

Ralph handed one of the sheets to Connie. Her eyes
widened and she put a hand over her mouth.

“What is it, Connie?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said quickly. “This writing is so queer
I don’t know how anyone could read it.”

Ralph said, “But did you ever see any notes from the
agent—what was his name? Ulrich Hoffman?—either written or typed? You didn’t?
You’re sure? What happens when we pay a claim—do we deep-six all the background
paper? I find that hard to believe—insurance thrives on paper.”

Denise stuck her head through the doorway. “Your
London call, Mr. Devereux.”

“I’ll take it in my office.” Over his shoulder, as he
left the conference room, he said, “Lloyds, about these flood losses. Leave the
copies there—I’ll show ’em to Rossy. Connie, think carefully about what you saw
in the file.”

I collected my set of copies and handed Denise the
blowups she’d made. Connie scuttled out the door while I was thanking Denise
for her help. I didn’t see Connie when I got to the elevator: either she’d
found a car waiting for her or she was hiding in the women’s bathroom. In case
it was the latter, I moved away from the elevators to admire the view of the
lake. The executive-floor attendant asked if she could help me; I said I was
just collecting my thoughts.

After another five minutes, Connie Ingram appeared,
looking around like a scared rabbit. I was tempted to jump out and yell
boo,
but I waited near the window until the elevator light dinged, then trotted over
to get into the car with her as the doors closed.

She looked at me resentfully as she pushed the button
for thirty-nine. “I don’t have to talk to you. The lawyer said so. He said to
call him if you came around.”

My ears filled as the elevator fell. “You can do it as
soon as you get off. Did he also tell you not to talk to Mr. Devereux? Are you
going to figure out an answer about whether you saw any agency notes in the
file? In case he forgets that he asked—I know he’s got a lot on his mind—I’ll
be calling regularly to remind him.”

The door opened at thirty-nine; she shot out without
responding to my genial farewell. I took the L back to my office, where I found
an e-mail from Morrell.

I realized that even I, who thought I was a
sophisticated traveler, had my expectations of the setting shaped by Rudyard
Kipling. I wasn’t prepared for the starkness, the grandeur—or most especially
the way one feels obliterated by the mountains. You find yourself wanting to
make defiant gestures: I’m here, I’m alive, acknowledge me.

As far as your question about Paul Hoffman or Radbuka,
of course I am not an expert, but I do think someone who has been tortured, as
he apparently was tortured by his father, could become very fragile
emotionally. It would be painful to think your own father tortured you—you
would imagine there must be something terribly wrong with you that provoked
such behavior—children inevitably blame themselves in difficult situations. But
if you could believe you were persecuted because of your historic identity—you
were a Jew, you were from eastern Europe, you survived the death camps—then it
would both glamorize your torture, give it a deeper meaning, and protect you
from the pain of believing you were a terrible child whose father was justified
in assaulting you. That’s how I see it, at any rate.

My beloved Pepperpot, I already miss you more than I
can say. It’s horribly unsettling to have half the population missing from the
landscape. I miss not just your face—I miss seeing women’s faces.

I printed out the section that dealt with Paul and
faxed it to Don Strzepek at Morrell’s home machine with a scrawl,
For what
it’s worth.
I wondered how Don had left things with Rhea last night. Would
he go ahead with his book on recovered memories with her? Or would he wait to
see if Max and Lotty wanted to do a DNA match?

That was a mighty thin thread Paul Hoffman had hung
his identity on, searching the Web for the names in those insurance records of
Ulrich’s until he found a query about one of them. He’d used that thread to
attach himself to England immediately after the war.

Thinking about it reminded me of the picture of Anna
Freud that Paul had hung in his closet. His savior in England. I called up
Max’s house and spoke with Michael Loewenthal—Agnes had been able to reschedule
her appointment at the gallery, so he was minding Calia. He went to the living
room for me and came back with the name of the biography Lotty had brought down
from Max’s study last night.

“We’re coming into Chicago for a last look at the
walruses in the zoo; I’ll drop it off at your office. No, with pleasure, Vic—we
owe you a lot for your care of our petite monster. But I confess to an ulterior
motive: Calia is being a brat about the dog’s collar. We could pick it up.”

I groaned—I’d left the wretched thing in my kitchen. I
told Michael if I didn’t get up to Evanston with it tonight I’d mail it to
Calia in London.

“Sorry, Vic—no need for that much trouble. I’ll stop
by in about an hour with the book. By the way, have you spoken to Lotty? Mrs.
Coltrain called from the clinic, concerned because Lotty had canceled all her
appointments for today.”

I told him our parting last night had been rocky
enough that I hadn’t felt like calling her. But when Michael hung up, I dialed
Lotty’s home number. It rang through to her crisp voice on the machine, giving
various numbers to use if this was a medical emergency, and urging friends to
leave their messages after the tone. I thought uneasily of a lunatic going
around town shooting people to get at Hoffman’s journals. But surely the
doorman wouldn’t let anyone in who didn’t belong there.

I called Mrs. Coltrain, who was at first relieved to
hear from me but became agitated when she found out I didn’t know anything
about Lotty’s situation. “When she’s really ill, she does cancel her
appointments, of course, but she
always
talks to me about it.”

“Did someone else call you?” Worry made my voice sharp.

“No, it’s just—she left a message on the office
answering machine. I couldn’t believe it when I got in, so I took it on myself
to call her at home and then to ask Mr. Loewenthal if she’d said anything to
anyone at the hospital. No one there has heard anything, not even Dr.
Barber—you know they cover for each other in emergencies. One of Dr. Herschel’s
teaching fellows is coming in at noon to look after any acute problems that
come up in here, but—if she isn’t ill, where is she?”

If Max didn’t know, nobody did. I told Mrs. Coltrain
I’d check in at Lotty’s apartment—neither of us saying it, both of us picturing
Lotty lying unconscious on the floor. I found Lotty’s building management in
the phone book and got through to the doorman, who hadn’t seen Dr. Herschel
today.