Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (12 page)

“One child and one child only. I told her highness
Madame Butterfly that when she wrote begging for my charity. She may choose to
roll around in the hay with a Gypsy but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have
to look after her children.”

I tried to protest, but she said she could throw me
out on the street. “Better be grateful to me, you little mongrels. I spent all
day persuading the foreman to take Hugo instead of sending him to the child
welfare authorities.”

The foreman, Mr. Nussbaum his name was, actually
turned out to be a good foster father to Hugo; he even set him up in business
many years later. But you can only guess how the two of us felt that day when
he arrived to take Hugo away with him: the last sight either of us had then of
any familiar face of our childhood.

Like the Nazi guards, Minna searched my clothes for
valuables: she refused to believe the penury to which the family was reduced.
Fortunately, my Oma had been clever enough to evade both Nazis and Minna. Those
gold coins helped pay my fees in medical school, but that was a long way ahead,
in a future I didn’t imagine as I sobbed for my parents and my brother.

In the Mind Reader’s Lair

W
hen I
finally woke the next morning, my head was heavy with the detritus of dreams
and difficult sleep. I once read that a year or eighteen months after losing
them, you dream of your dead as they were in their prime. I suppose I must
sometimes dream of my mother as she was in my childhood, vivid and intense, but
last night she was dying, eyes heavy with morphine, face unrecognizable as
disease had leached flesh from bone. Lotty and my mother are such intertwined
strands in my mind that it was almost inevitable that her distress would
overlay my sleep.

Morrell looked at me questioningly when I sat up. He
had come in after I went to bed, but I was tossing, not sleeping. His impending
departure made him feverishly nervous; we made love with a kind of frantic
unsatisfying energy but fell asleep without talking. In the morning light he
traced my cheekbones with his finger and asked if it was his leaving that had
disturbed my sleep.

I gave a twisted smile. “My own stuff this time.” I
gave him a brief synopsis of the previous day.

“Why don’t we go to Michigan for the weekend?” he
said. “We both need a breather. You can’t do anything on a Saturday, anyway,
and we can give each other better comfort away from all these people. I love
Don like a brother, but having him here right now is a bit much. We’ll come
back in time for Michael and Carl’s concert on Sunday.”

My muscles unknotted at the thought, and it sent me
into the day with better energy than my tormented night warranted. After
stopping at home to take the dogs for a swim, I drove into the West Loop to the
Unblinking Eye, the camera and video place I use when only the best will do. I
explained what I wanted to Maurice Redken, the technician I usually work with.

We ran my copy of the Channel 13 video through one of
their machines, watching Radbuka’s naked face as he went through the torments
of his life. When he said, “My Miriam, where is my Miriam? I want my Miriam,”
the camera was right in his face. I froze the image there and asked Maurice to
make prints of that and a couple of other close-ups for me. I was hoping Rhea
Wiell would introduce me to Radbuka, but if she didn’t, the stills would help
Mary Louise and me track him down.

Maurice promised to have both the stills and three
copies of the tape ready for me by the day’s end. It wasn’t quite ten-thirty
when we finished. There wasn’t time for me to go to my office before Don’s
appointment with Rhea Wiell, but I could walk the two miles from the Eye to
Water Tower if I didn’t dawdle—I hate paying Gold Coast parking fees.

Water Tower Place is a shopping mecca on North
Michigan, a favorite drop-off place for tour buses from small Midwestern towns
as well as an oasis for local teens. Threading my way through girls whose
pierced navels showed below their cropped T-shirts and women pushing expensive
baby buggies overflowing with packages, I found Don leaning against the back
entrance. He was so engrossed in his book he didn’t look up when I stopped next
to him. I squinted to read the spine:
Hypnotic Induction and Suggestion: an
Introductory Manual.

“Does this tell you how Ms. Wiell does it?” I asked.

He blinked and closed the book. “It tells me that
blocked memories really can be accessed through hypnosis. Or at least the
authors claim so. Fortunately I only have to see if Wiell has a sellable book
in her, not sort out whether her therapy is legitimate. I’m going to introduce
you as an investigator who may help collect background data if Wiell and the
publisher come to terms. You can say anything you like.”

He looked at his watch and fished a cigarette from his
breast pocket. Although he’d changed clothes, into a pressed open-necked shirt
and a tweed jacket, he still looked half-asleep. I took the book on hypnotic
induction while Don lit his cigarette. Broadly speaking, hypnosis seemed to be
used in two main ways: suggestive hypnosis helped people break bad habits, and
insight or exploratory hypnosis helped them understand themselves better. Recovering
memories was only one small part of using hypnosis in therapy.

Don pinched off the glowing end of his cigarette and
put the stub back in his pocket. “Time to go, Ms. Warshawski.”

I followed him into the building. “This book could
help you end that expensive habit for good.”

He stuck out his tongue at me. “I wouldn’t know what
to do with my hands if I quit.”

We went behind a newsstand on the ground floor, in a
dark alcove which held the elevators to the office floor. It wasn’t exactly
secret, just out of the way enough to keep the shopping hordes from straying
there by mistake. I studied the tenant board. Plastic surgeons, endodontists,
beauty salons, even a synagogue. What an odd combination.

“I called over to the Jane Addams School, as you
suggested,” Don said abruptly when we were alone on an elevator. “First I
couldn’t find anyone who knew Wiell—she did her degree fifteen years ago. But
when I started talking about the hypnotherapy, the department secretary
remembered. Wiell was married then, used her husband’s name.”

We got off the elevator and found ourselves at a point
where four long corridors came together. “What did they think of her at UIC?” I
asked.

He looked at his appointment book. “I think we go
right here. There’s some jealousy—a suggestion she was a charlatan, but when I
pushed it seemed to stem from the fact that social work had made her
rich—doesn’t happen to too many people, I gather.”

We stopped in front of a blond door with Wiell’s name
and professional initials painted on it. I felt a tingle from the idea that
this woman might read my mind. She might know me better than I knew myself. Was
that where hypnotic suggestibility got its start? The urgent desire to be
understood so intimately?

Don pushed the door open. We were in a tiny vestibule
with two shut doors and a third one that was open. This led to a waiting room,
where a sign invited us to sit down and relax. It added that all cell phones
and pagers should be turned off. Don and I obediently pulled out our phones. He
switched his off, but mine had run down again without my noticing.

The waiting room was decorated with such attention to
comfort that it even held a carafe of hot water and a selection of herbal teas.
New Age music tinkled softly; padded chairs faced a four-foot-high fish tank
built into the far wall. The fish seemed to rise and fall in time to the music.

“What do you think this setup costs?” Don was trying
the other two doors. One turned out to be a bathroom; the other was locked.

“I don’t know—installing it took a bundle, but looking
after it wouldn’t take too much. Except for the rent, of course. The nicotine
in your system is keeping you awake. These fish are putting me to sleep.”

He grinned. “You’re going to sleep, Vic: when you wake
up—”

“It isn’t like that, although people are always
nervous at first and imagine the television version.” The locked door had
opened and Rhea Wiell appeared behind us. “You’re from the publishing company,
aren’t you?”

She seemed smaller in person than she had on
television, but her face held the same serenity I’d noticed on screen. She was
dressed as she had been on camera, in soft clothes that flowed like an Indian
mystic’s.

Don shook her hand, unembarrassed, and introduced both
of us. “If you and I decide to work together, Vic may help with some of the
background checking.”

Wiell stood back to let us pass in front of her into
her office. It, too, was designed to put us at ease, with a reclining chair, a
couch, and her own office chair all covered in soft green. Her diplomas hung
behind her desk: the MSW from the Jane Addams School of Social Work, a
certificate from the American Institute of Clinical Hypnosis, and her Illinois
license as a psychiatric social worker.

I perched on the edge of the recliner while Don took
the couch. Wiell sat in her office chair, her hands loosely crossed in her lap.
She looked like Jean Simmons in
Elmer Gantry
.

“When we saw you on Channel Thirteen the other night,
I immediately realized you had a very powerful story to tell, you and Paul
Radbuka,” Don said. “You must have thought about putting it into a book before
I called, hadn’t you?”

Wiell smiled faintly. “Of course I’ve wanted to: if
you saw the whole program, then you’re aware that my work is—misunderstood—in a
number of circles. A book validating the recovery of blocked trauma would be
enormously useful. And Paul Radbuka’s story would be unusual enough—powerful
enough—to force people to pay serious attention to the issue.”

Don leaned forward, chin on his clasped hands. “I’m
new to the subject—my first exposure came two nights ago. I’ve been cramming
hard, reading a manual on hypnotic suggestion, looking at articles about you,
but I’m definitely not up to speed.”

She nodded. “Hypnosis is only one part of a total
therapeutic approach, and it’s controversial because it isn’t understood very
well. The field of memory, what we remember, how we remember, and maybe most
interestingly why we remember—none of that is really known right now. The
research seems exciting to me, but I’m not a scientist and I don’t pretend to
have the time to follow experimental work in depth.”

“Would your book focus exclusively on Paul Radbuka?” I
asked.

“Since Don—I hope you don’t mind my using your first
name?—Don called yesterday, I’ve been thinking it over; I believe I should use
some other case histories, as well, to show that my work with Paul isn’t—well,
the kind of fly-by-night treatment that Planted Memory therapists like to
claim.”

“What do you see as the book’s central point?” Don
patted his jacket pocket reflexively, then pulled out a pen in lieu of his
half-smoked cigarette.

“To show that our memories are reliable. To show the
difference between planted memories and genuine ones. I began going through my
patient files last night after I finished work and found several people whose
histories would make this point quite strongly. Three had complete amnesia
about their childhoods when they started therapy. One had partial memories, and
two had what they thought were continuous memories, although therapy unlocked
new insights for them. In some ways it’s most exciting to uncover memories for
someone who has amnesia, but the harder work is verifying, filling in gaps for
people who have some recall.”

Don interrupted to ask if there was some way to verify
memories that were uncovered in treatment. I expected Wiell to become
defensive, but she responded quite calmly.

“That’s why I earmarked these particular cases. For
each of them there is at least one other person, a witness to their childhood,
who can corroborate what came up in here. For some it’s a brother or sister. In
one case it’s a social worker; for two, there are primary-school teachers.”

“We’d have to get written permission.” Don was making
notes. “For the patients and for their verifiers. Witnesses.”

She nodded again. “Of course their real identities
would be carefully concealed, not just to protect themselves but to protect
family members and colleagues who could be harmed by such narratives. But, yes,
we’ll get written permission.”

“Are these other patients also Holocaust survivors?” I
ventured.

“Helping Paul was an incredible privilege.” A smile
lit her face with a kind of ecstatic joy, so intense, so personal, that I
instinctively shrank back on the recliner away from her. “Most of my clients
are dealing with terrible traumas, to be sure, but within the context of this
culture. To get Paul to that point, to the point of being a little boy speaking
broken German with his helpless playmates in a concentration camp, was the most
powerful experience of my life. I don’t even know how we can do it justice in
print.” She looked at her hands, adding in a choked voice, “I think he’s
recently recovered a fragment of memory of witnessing his mother’s death.”

“I’ll do my best for you,” Don muttered. He, too, had
shifted away from her.