Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (55 page)

I shook my head. “These numbers don’t mean anything to
me. But other things are starting to make a horrible kind of sense.”

Except for what her husband’s insurance policy had to
do with all this. I would give a month’s pay, and put icing on it, if I could
see what Howard Fepple had found when he looked at Aaron Sommers’s file. But if
Ulrich had sold insurance for Edelweiss before the war, if he’d been one of
those men coming into the ghetto on his bicycle on Friday afternoons, as Carl
had been describing last night—but Edelweiss had been a small regional carrier
before the war. So they said. So they said in “One Hundred Fifty Years of
Life.”

I got up abruptly. “I will get your nephew Isaiah
cleared of all charges against him, one way or another, although exactly how
I’ll do that I have to say I honestly don’t know right this minute. As for your
nephew Colby—I’m not a fan of housebreaking, or people supplying others with
guns for crimes. However, I have a feeling that Colby’s in more danger from his
accomplices than he is from the law. I have to go now. If my suspicions are
correct, the heart of this mystery is downtown, or maybe in Zurich, not here.”

Ancient History

I
n my car, I
turned my phone back on and called Amy Blount. “I have a different question for
you today. The section of your Ajax history where you talked about
Edelweiss—where did you get that material?”

“The company gave it to me.”

I made a U-turn, one hand on the wheel, one on the
phone. I braked to avoid a cat that suddenly streaked across the road. A little
girl followed, screaming its name. The car fishtailed. I dropped the phone and
pulled over to the curb, my heart pounding. I had been lucky not to hit the
girl.

“Sorry—I’m demented right now, trying to do too many
things at once, and driving stupidly,” I said when I’d recovered enough to
reestablish the connection. “Were these archival records? Financials, anything
like that?”

“A summary of financials. All they wanted on Edelweiss
was that little bit at the end. The book is really about Ajax, so I didn’t see
the need to look at Edelweiss archives.” She was defensive.

“What was in the summary?”

“High-level numbers. Assets and reserves, principal
offices. Year-by-year, though. I don’t remember the details. I suppose I could
ask the Ajax librarian.”

A couple of men came out of a derelict courtyard. They
looked at the Mustang and then at me and gave a thumbs-up gesture for both of
us. I smiled and waved.

“I need a way to find out if they had an office in
Vienna before the war.” Edelweiss’s numbers didn’t matter, come to think of it:
maybe they really had been a small regional player in the thirties. But they
could still have been selling insurance to people who were obliterated in the
war’s blistering furnaces.

“The Illinois Insurance Institute has a library which
might have something that would help you,” Amy Blount suggested. “I used it
when I was doing research for the Ajax book. They have a strange hodgepodge of
old insurance documents. They’re in the Insurance Exchange building, you know,
on West Jackson.”

I thanked her and hung up. My phone rang as I was
negotiating the merge onto the Ryan at Eighty-seventh, but nearly hitting that
child a few minutes ago made me keep my attention on the road. Although I
couldn’t stop speculating about Edelweiss. They bought Ajax, a coup, acquiring
America’s fourth-largest property-casualty insurer at fire-sale prices. And
then found themselves facing legislation demanding recovery of Holocaust-era
assets, including life-insurance policies. Their investment could have turned
from gold mine to bankruptcy court if they had a huge arrears of unpaid
life-insurance claims all coming due at once.

Swiss banks were fighting tooth and claw to keep heirs
of Holocaust victims from claiming assets deposited in the frantic years before
the war. European insurers were stonewalling just as hard. It must be
relatively rare for children to know their parents had insurance. Even if
others, like Carl, had been sent downstairs with money to pay the agent, I was
betting he was unusual in knowing what company held his father’s policy. When
my father died, it was only on going through his papers that I found his life insurance.

When not only your family, but your house, maybe even
your entire town, has been obliterated—you’d have no records to turn to. And if
you did, the company would treat you the way it had Carl: denying the claim
because you couldn’t present a death certificate. They really were a prize
group of bastards, those banks and insurers.

My phone rang again, but I picked it up only to switch
it off. If those books of Hoffman’s contained a list of life-insurance policies
bought by people like Carl’s father or Max’s, people who died in Treblinka or
Auschwitz, it wasn’t such a large list that Edelweiss would lose much from
paying the claims. All it would do is give several hundred people the knowledge
that their parents or grandparents had bought policies and give them the policy
numbers. It wasn’t as if there’d be a stampede on Edelweiss assets.

Unless, of course, states began passing Holocaust
Asset Recovery Acts, such as the one Ajax torpedoed last week. The company
would have had to make an audited search of its policy files—of all the hundred
or so companies that made up the Ajax group, now including Edelweiss—and prove
that it wasn’t sitting on policies belonging to the dead of the war in Europe.
That might have cost them a bundle.

Would Fepple have grasped this possibility? Could he
have found enough information in Aaron Sommers’s file to use it in an attempt
at blackmail? He’d been excited at a way to make money. If this was it, was it
a big enough reason for someone at Ajax to kill him? And who would have been
the triggerman? Ralph? The jolly Bertrand? His soft-as-steel wife?

I accelerated around a couple of triple-trailer semis,
impatient to start gathering any kind of information. Right now I was building
a house from cards; I needed facts, good hard mortar and cement. Turning onto
Jackson Boulevard, heading east into the Loop, I drummed my fingers on the
steering wheel in an agony of impatience at every stoplight. Just west of the
river, under the shadow of Union Station and its disreputable surrounding bars,
I found an empty meter. I jammed in a fistful of quarters and ran the four
blocks east to the Insurance Exchange.

The exchange is a tired old building near the
southwest corner of the Loop, and the Illinois Insurance Institute proved to be
one of the tireder offices in it. Old-fashioned hanging lights held a couple of
malfunctioning fluorescent bulbs, which blinked in an irritating way on the
woman who sat inside the entrance. She squinted up at me from a mailing she was
assembling, like an owl who isn’t used to seeing strangers in its neck of the
forest. When I explained that I was trying to find out how big Edelweiss
Insurance had been in the 1930’s and whether they’d had an office in Vienna,
she sighed and put down the sheaf of papers she was folding.

“I don’t know that kind of thing. You can look in the
library if you want, but I’m afraid I can’t take time to help you.”

She pushed back her chair and opened the door to a
murky room in the back. It was stuffed beyond the fire-code limit with shelves
of books and papers.

“Things are kind of in chronological order,” she said,
waving an arm vaguely toward the left corner. “The further back you go in time
the more likely they are to be in order—most people only come here to consult
current documents, and it’s hard for me to find the time to keep them
organized. It would be a real help if you’d leave everything in the same shape
you find it. If you want copies of anything, you can use my machine, but it’s a
dime a page.”

The ringing phone sent her scurrying back to the front
room. I went to the corner she’d waved at. For such a small space, it held a
depressing amount of material—shelves of
National Underwriter
and
Insurance
Blue Books;
speeches to the American Insurance Institute; addresses to
international insurance congresses; hearings before the U.S. Congress to see
whether ships sunk in the Spanish–American War had to be covered under marine
policies.

I moved along as fast as I could, using a set of
rolling stairs to climb up and down, until I found the section with documents
dating to the 1920’s and ’30’s. I flipped through them. More speeches, more
congressional hearings, this time on insurance benefits for World War I
veterans. My hands were black with dust when I suddenly found it: a squat fat
book, whose blue cover had faded to grey.
Le Registre des Bureaux des
Compagnies d’Assurance Européennes,
printed in Genève in 1936.

I don’t read French well—unlike Spanish, it’s not
close enough to Italian for me to follow a novel—but a list of European
insurance-company offices didn’t demand a linguist. I was almost holding my
breath when I took it underneath the dim lamp in the middle of the room, where
I squinted painfully at the tiny print. The book’s organization was difficult
to figure out in bad light, in a language I didn’t know, but I finally saw they
had grouped offices by country and then by asset size.

In Switzerland the biggest company in 1935 had been
Nesthorn, followed by Swiss Re, Zurich Life, Winterer, and a bunch of others.
Edelweiss was far down on the list, but it had a footnote, which was in even
smaller type than the body of the report. Even tilting the page to see it under
different light, holding it so close to my nose I sneezed a half dozen times, I
couldn’t make out the tiny print. I looked toward the front room. The
overworked factotum was apparently still stuffing letters into envelopes; it
would be a shame to disturb her by asking to borrow the book. I tucked it into
my briefcase, thanked her for her help, and told her I’d probably be back in
the morning.

“What time do you open up?”

“Usually not until ten, but Mr. Irvine, he’s the
executive director, he sometimes comes in in the mornings. . . .Oh, my, look at
your lovely jacket. I’m sorry, everything in there is so filthy, but it’s just
me; I don’t have time to dust all those old books.”

“That’s okay,” I said heartily. “It will clean.” I
hoped: my lovely silk–wool herringbone now looked as though it had been dyed
grey by an inexpert hand.

I ran all the way back to my car and could hardly bear
the traffic that slowed me on my way back to my office. At my desk, I used a
magnifying glass to pick my way through the French footnote as best I could:
the acquisition recent of Edelweiss A.G. by Nesthorn A.G., the most big company
in Switzerland, would appear in the year following, when the Edelweiss numbers
would not be something—seen? available? It didn’t matter. Until that time,
something something company reportage would be independent.

A merger between Nesthorn and Edelweiss, and now the
company was called Edelweiss. I didn’t understand that part, but I went on to
the listing of offices. Edelweiss had three, one each in Basel, Zurich, and
Bern. Nesthorn had twenty-seven. Two in Vienna. One in Prague, one in
Bratislava, three in Berlin. They had an office in Paris, which had done a
brisk business. The Viennese office, on Porzellangasse, had led the pack of
twenty-seven in sales, with a 1935 volume almost thirty percent greater than
any of its closest competitors. Had that been Ulrich Hoffman’s territory,
riding around on his bicycle, entering names in his ornate script? Doing a
land-office business among families worried that the anti-Jewish laws in
Germany would soon affect them, as well?

Those numbers in Ulrich’s books that started with
N
could be Nesthorn life-insurance policies. And after the merger with
Edelweiss—I turned to my computer and logged on to Lexis-Nexis.

The results for my previous search on Edelweiss were
there, but these were only contemporary documents. I scanned them anyway. They
told me about the acquisition of Ajax, Edelweiss’s decision to participate in a
forum on European insurance companies and dormant Holocaust life-insurance
policies. There were reports on third-quarter earnings, reports on their
acquisition of a London merchant bank. The Hirs family was still the majority
shareholder with eleven percent of the outstanding shares. So the
H
on
Fillida Rossy’s china was her grandfather’s name. The grandfather with whom she
used to ski those difficult slopes in Switzerland. A reckless risk-taker behind
her soft voice and fussing over rosemary rinses for her daughter’s golden mane.

I saved this set of results and started a new search,
looking for old background on Nesthorn
and
Edelweiss. The database
didn’t go back far enough for articles about the merger. I let the phone ring
through to my answering service as I struggled with a vocabulary and grammar
too complex for my primitive ability.

La revue de l’histoire financière et commerciale
for July 1979 had an article that seemed to be about
German companies trying to establish markets in the countries they had occupied
during the war.
Le nouveau géant économique
was making its neighbors
nervous. In one paragraph, the article commented that,
on voudrait savoir,
the biggest company of insurance Swiss had changed its name from Nesthorn to
Edelweiss, because there are too many persons who remember them from their
histoire
peu agréable
.