Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (56 page)

Their less-agreeable history, would that be? Surely
that didn’t refer to selling life insurance whose claims they wouldn’t pay. It
must have to do with something else. I wondered if the other articles explained
what. I attached them to an e-mail to Morrell, who reads French.

Do either of these articles explain what Nesthorn
Insurance did in the forties that made them
less agreeable
to their European neighbors? How are you coming with
getting a permit to travel to the northwest frontier?
I hit the SEND key,
thinking how strange it was that Morrell, thirteen thousand miles away, could
see my words at virtually the same time I sent them.

I leaned back in my chair, eyes closed, seeing Fillida
Rossy at dinner, stroking the heavy flatware with the
H
engraved on the
handle. What she owned she touched, clutched—or what she touched, she owned.
That restless smoothing of her daughter’s hair, her son’s pajama collar—she had
stroked my own hand in the same disquieting way when she brought me forward to
meet her guests on Tuesday night.

Could she feel so possessive of the Edelweiss company
that she would kill to safeguard it from claimants? Paul Hoffman-Radbuka had
been so certain it was a woman who had shot him. Fierce, sunglasses, big hat.
Could that have been Fillida Rossy? She was certainly commanding enough behind
her languid exterior. I remembered Bertrand Rossy changing his tie after her
soft comment that it was rather bold. Her friends, too, had hurried to make
sure nothing in the conversation annoyed her.

On the other hand, Alderman Durham kept swimming
around the submerged rocks of the story. My client’s cousin Colby, who had done
lookout duty for the break-in at Amy Blount’s place and who had fingered my
client to the police, was on the fringes of Durham’s EYE team. The meeting
between Durham and Rossy on Tuesday—had Rossy agreed to kill the Holocaust
Asset Recovery Act in exchange for Durham giving him a hit woman who could
shoot Paul Hoffman-Radbuka? Durham was such a wily political creature, it was
hard to believe he’d do something that would so lay him open to blackmail. Nor
could I see a sophisticated man like Rossy getting himself tangled up in a
hired-murder rap. It was hard to understand why either of them would involve
the other in something as crude as the break-in at Amy Blount’s.

I called Durham’s office. The alderman’s secretary
asked who I was, what I wanted.

“I’m an investigator,” I said. “Mr. Durham and I met
briefly last week. I’m sorry to say that some of the people on the fringe of
his extremely wonderful Empower Youth Energy project have shown up as part of a
murder investigation I’m working on. Before I give their names to the police, I
wanted to do the alderman the courtesy of letting him hear about them from me
first.”

The secretary put me on hold. As I waited, I thought
again about the Rossys. Maybe I could take a quick run up there to see if the
maid, Irina, would talk to me. If she could give the Rossys an alibi for last
Friday night, well, it would at least eliminate them from consideration as
Fepple’s murderers.

Durham’s secretary came back to the phone. The
alderman was in committee meetings until six; he’d meet me at his South Side
office at six-thirty before going to a community church meeting. I didn’t want
to be alone on Durham’s home turf the way things were shaping up; I told the
secretary I’d be at the Golden Glow at six-fifteen. Durham could see me on my
ground.

Bourbon, with a Twist

I
skimmed
through my messages, both in my in-box and on-screen. Michael Loewenthal had
dropped off the biography of Anna Freud. The day had been so long I’d
completely forgotten that conversation. I had also completely forgotten the
little dog tags for Ninshubur.

The biography was too fat for me to read clear through
in a quest for Paul Hoffman or Radbuka. I looked at the photographs, at Anna
Freud sitting next to her father in a café, at the Hampstead nursery where
Lotty had washed dishes during the war. I tried to imagine Lotty as a teenager.
She would have been idealistic, ardent, but without the patina of irony and
briskness which kept the world at arm’s length from her now.

I flipped to the back to look up
Radbuka
in the
index. The name wasn’t there. I checked
concentration camps
. The second
reference was to a paper Freud had written on a group of six children who came
to England from Terezin after the war. Six children aged three and four who had
lived together as a little unit, looking after one another, forming a bond so
tight that the adult authorities didn’t think they could survive apart. No
names were mentioned, no other history. It sounded like the group
Hoffman-Radbuka had described in his television interview last week, the group
where Ulrich had found him, wrenching him away from his little friend Miriam.
Could Paul really have been part of it? Or had he appropriated their story to
his own?

I went back on-line to see if I could find a copy of
the paper Freud had written about the children, “An Experiment in Group
Upbringing.” A central research library in London would fax it to me at the
cost of a dime a page. Cheap at the price. I entered a credit-card number and
sent the order, then looked at my phone messages. The most urgent seemed to be
from Ralph, who had called twice—to my cell phone, when I was heading onto the
Ryan three hours ago, and just now, when I’d been trying to decipher the less
agreeable part of Nesthorn’s past.

He was in a meeting, naturally, but Denise, his
secretary, said he badly wanted to see the originals of the material I had
shown him this morning.

“I don’t have them,” I said. “I saw them very briefly
yesterday, when I made the copies I gave him, but someone else took them for
safekeeping. They’re quite valuable documents, I gather. Is it Bertrand Rossy
who’d like to look at them, or Ralph himself?”

“I believe Mr. Devereux showed the blowups I made to
Mr. Rossy at a meeting this morning, but Mr. Devereux did not indicate whether
Mr. Rossy was interested in them.”

“Will you take this message down exactly as I give it
to you? Tell Ralph that it is really, honestly true that I don’t have them.
Someone else took them. I have no idea where the person who took them is, nor
where that person stowed them. Tell him this is not a joke, it is not a way of
stalling him. I want those books as badly as he does, but I don’t know where
they are.”

I made Denise read the message back to me. I hoped it
would convince Rossy, if it was Rossy pushing on Ralph for them, that I truly
didn’t have Ulrich’s books. I hoped I hadn’t fingered Lotty in the process.
That thought unnerved me. If I had—I couldn’t take time to sit and fret: if I
hustled, I could get to the Rossys’ before my appointment with Durham.

I drove the two miles back to my apartment and took
one of my mother’s diamond drops from the safe. Her photograph on the dresser
seemed to watch me sternly: my dad had given her those earrings on their
twentieth anniversary. I’d gone with him to the Tucker Company on Wabash when
he picked them out and put down a deposit, and I’d gone back with him when he
made the final payment.

“I won’t lose it,” I told her photograph. I hurried
out of the room, away from her eyes. As I passed the bathroom I caught sight of
my own face in the mirrored door. I had forgotten the dust that I’d collected
at the Insurance Institute. If I was going to be presentable at the Rossy
building, I needed a clean jacket. I took a rose wool–rayon weave that hung loosely,
concealing the bulge of my shoulder holster. The herringbone I tossed into the
hall closet with my bloodstained gold blouse, then I remembered my idea of
profiling Paul’s DNA. In case I wanted to pursue that, I wrapped the gold
blouse in a clean plastic bag and put it in my bedroom safe.

An apple from the kitchen would have to do for a late
lunch: I was too nervous today to sit still for a proper meal. I saw
Ninshubur’s collar on the sink and stuck it in my pocket—I’d try to find time
to get up to Evanston with that tonight if I could.

I clattered down the stairs, sketched a wave at Mr.
Contreras, who stuck his head out the door when he heard me, and drove across
Addison, past Wrigley Field, where the vendors were setting up their carts for
one of the Cubs’—mercifully—final games of the season.

From a marginally legal parking space outside their
building, I called to the Rossy apartment. Fillida Rossy answered the phone. I
hung up and leaned back in the front seat to wait. I could give the project
until six, when I’d need to leave for my meeting with the alderman.

At four-thirty, Fillida Rossy came through the front
door with her children and their nanny, who was carrying a large gym bag. As
she had on Tuesday evening, Fillida was fussing endlessly with their clothes,
retying the girl’s sash, smoothing the collar outside the boy’s monogrammed
sweater. When he jerked away, she started wrapping the girl’s long hair around
her hands, all the time talking to the nanny. She herself was dressed in jeans
with a crinkly warm-up jacket.

Someone drove a black Lincoln Navigator to the
entrance. While the driver put the gym bag into the back, Fillida held both
children tightly, apparently giving some last instructions to the nanny. She
climbed into the front seat, without acknowledging the man who held the door
and put her bag into the car for her. I waited while the children disappeared
up the street with the nanny before crossing over to go into the building.

It was a different doorman on duty this afternoon than
the one I’d met on Tuesday. “You just missed Mrs. Rossy; no one’s up there but
the maid. She speaks English, but not too great,” he said. When I said that I’d
lost one of my earrings at dinner and was hoping Mrs. Rossy had found it, he
added, “You can see if she’ll understand you.”

I tried to explain over the house phone who I was and
what I wanted. My father’s mother spoke Polish, but my dad didn’t, so the
language hadn’t been part of my childhood. Still, a few halting phrases got me
upstairs, where I showed Irina the earring. She shook her head, starting to
give me a long discourse in Polish. I had to apologize and tell her I didn’t
understand.

“I all clean on next day, and don’t see nothing. But
at party, I hear you speak Italy, I ask why, if your name Warshawska.” She gave
it the Polish pronunciation, with the appropriate ending for a woman.

“My mother was Italian,” I explained. “My father was
Polish.”

She nodded. “I understand. Children talk like mother
talk. In my family, same. In Mrs. Fillida’s family, same. Mr. Rossy, he speak
Italy, English, Germania, France, but children, only Italy, English.”

I clucked sympathetically over the fact that no one in
the household could communicate with Irina. “Mrs. Rossy is a good mother, is
she, always talking to her children?”

Irina threw up her hands. “When she see children, she
always holding, always—like—like cat or dog.” She mimed petting. “Clothes, oh,
my God, they has beautiful clothes, much much money. I buy all for my children
what she pay on one dress for Marguerita. Children much money but not happy. No
has friend. Mister, he very good man, happy, always polite. She, no, she cold.”

“But she doesn’t like to leave the children alone,
does she?” I doggedly tried to keep the conversation on track. “I mean, they
entertain here, but does she go out and leave the children behind?”

Irina looked at me in surprise. Of course Mrs. Rossy
left the children. She was rich, she went to the gym, to go shopping, to see
friends. It was only when she was home . . .

“Last Friday I thought I saw her at a dance at the
Hilton Hotel. You know, for charity.” I had to repeat the sentence a couple of
different ways before Irina understood me.

She shrugged. “Is possible. Was not here, I not know
where she and mister going. I in bed early. Not like today when many people
coming for dinner.”

My hint to leave. I tried offering her a tip for her
help, but she flung up her hands in disgust. She was sorry about my earring:
she would keep looking for it.

As I drove up the street, I passed the children
returning from their walk. They were punching at each other from either side of
the nanny—happy families, as Tolstoy said.

So the Rossys hadn’t been home on Friday night. That
didn’t mean they’d been in Hyde Park shooting Howard Fepple. Still, I could see
Fillida phoning him, saying her name was Connie Ingram, persuading him she was
hot for him. I could see her coming in with him and all the Lamaze
parents—perhaps her husband melting into the group as well—twining herself
around Fepple in his chair. Bertrand slips into the office, whacks the back of
his head, she puts the SIG’s barrel into his mouth. At the spray of blood and
bone, she jumps off, places the gun under his chair. She’s cool, but not cool
enough to remember to get his hand on the gun so that the morgue will find
gunpowder residue on it.

Then she and Bertrand search the office, find the
Sommers file, and take off. Yesterday, Fillida went to Hoffman’s house. How had
she found the address when I hadn’t been able to? Oh, of course, through
Ulrich. They knew his name: they were looking for him, looking for those
records of Edelweiss–Nesthorn sales. It must have made Rossy’s eyes jump out of
their sockets when Connie Ingram brought the Sommers file up to Ralph’s office
last week. The agent he was looking for, Ulrich Hoffman, right under his nose
in Chicago. Maybe it took them a while to figure it out, but eventually they
realized if he was dead they could still get his address a bunch of different
ways. Old phone books, for instance.