Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (21 page)

“Not until I meet Max’s musician friend,” he said
stubbornly. “Not until he tells me to my face that he knows me, remembers the
mother whom I saw pushed alive into a pit of lime.”

Lotty had appeared at the door connecting the living
room to the hall. She pushed her way through the group to my side. “What’s
going on, Victoria?”

“This is the guy calling himself Radbuka,” I muttered
to her. “He got here through some unfortunate fast footwork on his part.”

Behind us, we heard a woman echo Lotty’s question to
someone else in the crowd. And we also heard the response: “I’m not sure; I
think this man may be claiming Carl Tisov is his father or something.”

Radbuka heard her as well. “Carl Tisov? Is that the
name of the musician? Is he here now?”

Lotty’s eyes widened in dismay. I whirled, determined
to deny the rumor before it got started, but the crowd surged forward, the buzz
catching like fire on straw and spreading through the room. Carl’s appearance
at the back of the hall caused a sudden silence.

“What is this?” he asked gaily. “Are you having a
prayer vigil out here, Loewenthal?”

“Is that Carl?” Paul’s face lit up again. “Is it you
who is my cousin? Oh, Carl, I am here, your long-lost relation. Perhaps we are
even brothers? Oh, will you people please move out of the way? I need to get to
him!”

“This is horrifying,” Lotty muttered in my ear. “How
did he get here? How did he decide Carl was related to him?”

The crowd stood frozen with the embarrassment people
get when confronted with an adult whose emotions are running wild. As Paul
tried to push his way through the throng, Calia suddenly appeared at the top of
the hall, shrieking loudly. The other small ones followed, yelling just as
loudly, as she pelted down the stairs. Lindsey was running after them, trying
to reestablish order—some game must have gotten out of hand.

Calia stopped on the lower landing when she realized
the size of her audience. Then she gave a loud whoop of laughter and pointed at
Paul. “Look, it’s the big bad wolf, he’s going to eat my grandpa. He’ll catch
us next.”

All the children took up the chant, pointing at Paul
and screeching, “It’s a wolf, it’s a wolf, it’s the big bad wolf!”

When Paul realized he was the object of their
taunting, he started to tremble. I thought he might cry again.

Agnes Loewenthal elbowed her way through the packed hall.
She stomped up the short flight to the lower landing and scooped up her
daughter.

“You’re over the top just now, young lady. You
littlies were supposed to stay in the playroom with Lindsey: I’m most annoyed
at this behavior. It’s long past time for your bath and bed—you’ve had enough
excitement for the day.”

Calia began to howl, but Agnes marched up to the upper
landing with her. The other children became quiet at once. They tiptoed up the
stairs in front of a red-faced Lindsey.

The lesser drama with the children had unfrozen the
crowd. They let Michael Loewenthal divert them into the front room where coffee
was set up. I saw Morrell, who had appeared in the hall when my attention was
on Calia, talking to Max and Don.

Radbuka was covering his face in distress. “Why is
everyone treating me this way? The wolf, the big bad wolf, that was my foster
father. Ulrich, that’s German for wolf, but it isn’t my name. Who told the
children to call me that?”

“No one,” I said crisply, my sympathy worn completely
thin. “The children were acting out, the way children will. No one here knows
that Ulrich is German for big bad wolf.”

“It isn’t.” I’d forgotten Lotty was standing behind
me. “It’s one of those medieval totemic names, wolflike ruler, something like
that.” She added something in German to Paul.

Paul started to answer her in German, then stuck out
his lower lip, like Calia’s when she was being stubborn. “I will not speak the
language of my slavery. Are you German? Did you know the man who called himself
my father?”

Lotty sighed. “I’m American. But I speak German.”

Paul’s mood shifted upward again; he beamed at Lotty.
“But you are a friend of Max and Carl’s. So I was right to come here. If you
know my family, did you know Sofie Radbuka?”

At that question, Carl turned to stare at him. “Where
the hell did you come up with that name? Lotty, what do you know about this?
Did you bring this man here to taunt Max and me?”

“I?” Lotty said. “I—need to sit down.”

Her face had gone completely white. I was just in time
to catch her as her knees buckled.

Digging Up the Past

M
orrell
helped me support Lotty into the sunroom, where we laid her on a wicker settee.
She hadn’t fainted completely but was still pale and glad to lie down. Max, his
face pinched with worry, covered Lotty with an afghan. Always calm in a crisis,
he sent Don to the housekeeper for a bottle of ammonia. When I’d soaked a
napkin with it and waved it under her nose, Lotty’s color improved. She pushed
herself to a sitting position, urging Max to return to his guests. After
assuring himself that she was really better, he reluctantly went back to the
party.

“Melodrama must be in the air this evening,” Lotty
said, trying unsuccessfully for her usual manner. “I’ve never done that before
in my life. Who brought that extraordinary man here? Surely that wasn’t you,
Victoria?”

“He brought himself,” I said. “He has an eel-like
ability to wiggle into spaces. Including the hospital, where some moron in
admin gave him Max’s home address.”

Morrell coughed warningly, jerking his head at the
shadows on the far side of the room. Paul Radbuka was standing there, just
beyond the edge of the circle of light cast by a floor lamp. Now he darted
forward to stand over Lotty.

“Are you feeling better now? Do you feel like talking?
I think you must know Sofie Radbuka. Who is she? How can I find her? She must
be related to me in some way.”

“Surely the person you are looking for was named
Miriam.” Despite her shaking hands, Lotty pulled herself together to use her
“Princess of Austria” manner.

“My Miriam, yes, I long to find her again. But Sofie
Radbuka, that is a name which was dangled in front of me like a carrot, making
me believe one of my relations must still be alive somewhere. Only now the
carrot has been withdrawn. But I’m sure you know her, why else did you faint
when you heard the name?”

A question whose answer I would have liked to hear
myself, but not in front of this guy.

Lotty raised haughty eyebrows at him. “What I do is no
conceivable business of yours. It was my understanding from the uproar you
caused in the hall that you came to see whether either Mr. Loewenthal or Mr.
Tisov were related to you. Now that you’ve caused a great disturbance, perhaps
you would be good enough to give your address to Ms. Warshawski and leave us in
peace.”

Radbuka’s lower lip stuck out, but before he could dig
his heels in, Morrell intervened. “I’m going to take Radbuka up to Max’s study,
as V I tried to do an hour ago. Max and Carl may join him there later, if
they’re able.”

Don had been sitting quietly in the background, but he
stood up now. “Right. Come on, big guy. Dr. Herschel needs to rest.”

Don put an arm around him. With Morrell at his other
elbow, they moved the unhappy Radbuka to the door, his neck hunched into his
oversize jacket, his face so expressive of bewildered misery that he looked
like a circus clown.

When they’d gone, I turned to Lotty. “Who was Sofie
Radbuka?”

She turned her frosty stare to me. “No one that I know
of.”

“Then why did hearing her name make you faint?”

“It didn’t. My foot caught on the edge of a rug and—”

“Lotty, if you don’t want to tell me, keep it to
yourself, but please don’t make up stupid lies to me.”

She bit her lip, turning her head away from me.
“There’s been far too much emotion in this house today. First Max and Carl
furious with me, and now the man himself shows up. I don’t need you angry with
me as well.”

I sat on the wicker table in front of her settee. “I’m
not angry. But I happened to be alone in the hall when this guy came to the
door, and after ten minutes with him my head was spinning like a hula hoop. If
you faint, or start to faint, then claim nothing was wrong, it makes me even
dizzier. I’m not here to criticize, but you were so upset on Friday you got me
seriously worried. And your agony seems to have started with this guy’s
appearance at the Birnbaum conference.”

She looked back at me, her hauteur suddenly changed to
consternation. “Victoria, I’m sorry—I have been selfish, not thinking of the
effect of my behavior on you. You do deserve some kind of explanation.”

She sat frowning to herself, as if trying to decide
what kind of explanation I deserved. “I don’t know if I can make clear the
relationships of that time in my life. How I came to be so close to Max, and
even Carl.

“There was a group of nine of us refugee children who
became good friends during the war. We met over music; a woman from Salzburg, a
violist who was herself a refugee, came around London and gathered us up. She
saw Carl’s gift, got him lessons, got him into a good music program. There were
various others. Teresz, who eventually married Max. Me. My father had been a
violin player. Café music, not the stuff of the soirées Frau Herbst organized,
but skillful—at least, I think he was skillful, but how can I know, when I only
heard him as a child? Anyway, even though I had no gift myself, I loved hearing
the music at Frau Herbst’s.”

“Was Radbuka the name of one of that group? Why does
Carl care so much? Is it someone he was in love with?”

She smiled painfully. “You would have to ask him that.
Radbuka was the name of—someone else. Max—he had great organizational skills,
even as a young man. When the war ended, he went around London to the different
societies that helped people find out about their families. Then he—went back
to central Europe, looking. That was in—I think it was in ’47, but after all
this time I can’t be sure of the exact year. That was when the Radbuka name
came up—it wasn’t anyone in the group’s actual surname, you see. But that is
why we could ask Max to look. Because we were all so close, not like a family,
like something else, perhaps a combat team who fought together for years.

“For almost all of us, Max’s reports came back with
devastating completeness. No survivors. For the Herschels, the Tisovs, the
Loewenthals—Max found his father and two cousins, and that was another
terrible—” She cut herself off mid-sentence.

“I was starting my medical training. It consumed me to
the exclusion of so much else. Carl always blamed me for—well, let’s just say,
something unpleasant came up around the person from the Radbuka family. Carl
always thought my absorption with medicine made me behave in a fashion which he
regarded as cruel . . . as if his own devotion to music had not been equally
absolute.”

This last sentence she muttered under her breath as an
afterthought. She fell silent. She had never spoken to me of her losses in such
a way, such an emotional way. I didn’t understand what she was trying to say—or
not to say—about the friend from the Radbuka family, but when it became clear
she wouldn’t expand on it, I couldn’t press her.

“Do you know”—I hesitated, trying to think of the
least painful way of asking the question—“do you know what Max learned about
the Radbuka family?”

Her face twisted. “They—he didn’t find any trace of
them. Although traces were hard to find and he didn’t have much money. We all
gave him a bit, but we didn’t have money, either.”

“So hearing this man call himself Radbuka must have
been quite a shock.”

She shuddered and looked at me. “It was, believe me,
it’s been a shock all week. How I envy Carl, able to put the whole world to one
side when he starts to play. Or maybe it’s that he puts the whole world inside
him and blows it out that tube.” She repeated the question she’d asked when she
saw Paul on video. “How old is he, do you think?”

“He says he came here after the war around the age of
four, so he must have been born in ’42 or ’43.”

“So he couldn’t be—does he think he was born in
Theresienstadt?”

I threw up my hands. “All I know about him is from
Wednesday night’s interview. Is Theresienstadt the same as what he calls
Terezin?”

“Terezin is its Czech name; it’s an old fortress
outside Prague.” She added with an unexpected gleam of humor, “That’s Austrian
snobbery, using the German name—a holdover from when Prague was part of the
Hapsburg empire and everyone spoke German. This man tonight, he’s insisting
he’s Czech, not German, by calling it Terezin.”

We sat again in silence. Lotty was withdrawn into her
own thoughts, but she seemed more relaxed, less tortured, than she had for the
past few days. I told her I’d go up to see what I could learn from Radbuka.

Lotty nodded. “If I feel stronger I’ll come up by and
by. Right now—I think I’ll just lie here.”

I made sure she was well-covered in the afghan Max had
provided before turning out the light. When I closed the French doors behind
me, I could see across the hall into the front room, where a dozen or so people
still lingered over brandy. Michael Loewenthal was on the piano bench, holding
Agnes on his lap. Everyone was happy. I went on up the stairs.