Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (24 page)

“Tomorrow’s my last day here,” Morrell complained. “I
have to pack, and I have to spend the day again with State Department
officials. Instead of with you, my darling, as I would prefer. I could have
done with less trauma tonight and more sleep.”

I flung my clothes onto a chair, but Morrell hung his
suit tidily in the closet. He did at least leave his weekend bag to unpack in
the morning.

“You’re a little like Lotty, Vic.” Morrell held me in
the dark. “If something goes amiss with you, don’t creep away to a cottage
under a fake name to lick your wounds alone.”

They were a comfort, those words, with his departure
so close, with the turbulence of the last few hours still shaking me. They spread
around me in the dark, those words, calming me into sleep.

V-E Day

I took Hugo to Piccadilly Circus for the V-E Day
celebrations. Masses of people, fireworks, a speech by the king broadcast over
loudspeakers—the crowd was euphoric. I shared some of the feeling—although for
me complete euphoria was impossible. It wasn’t just because of the newsreels of
Belsen and other camps that had sickened the English that spring: stories of
death had been floating in from Europe with the immigrant community for some
time. Even Minna had been furious over some of the MPs’ callous response to the
men who had escaped from Auschwitz when it was first being built.

I would get impatient with Hugo, because he couldn’t
remember Oma and Opa, or even Mama, very clearly. He hardly remembered any
German, whereas I had to hang on to the language because that’s what Cousin
Minna spoke at home. In 1942 she had married Victor, a horrid old man who she
was sure was going to inherit the glove factory. He had a stroke before the
owner died and it went to someone else, so there she was, stuck with an elderly
sick husband and no money. But he was from Hamburg, so of course they spoke
German to each other. It took me longer than Hugo to learn English, longer to
fit in at school, longer to feel at home in England.

For Hugo, coming to England at five, life began with
the Nussbaum family. They treated him like a son. In fact, Mr. Nussbaum wanted
to adopt Hugo, but that upset me so much that the Nussbaums dropped the idea. I
see things differently now, see Hugo’s turning to them, trusting them, as the
natural state of a five-year-old, not an abandonment of my parents—and of me.
Probably if I’d lived with someone who cherished me, my reaction to the idea
would have been different—although Mr. Nussbaum was always very kind to me and
tried to include me in his regular Sunday outings with my brother.

But I was especially angry with Hugo on V-E Day,
because he thought the end of the war meant he would have to return to Austria.
He didn’t want to leave the Nussbaums or his friends at school, and he was
hoping I would explain to Mama and Papa that he would only come for the
summers.

I realize now my anger was partly fueled by my own
anxieties. I longed for the loving family I’d lost, longed to put Cousin Minna
and her constant criticism behind me, but I, too, had friends and a school that
I didn’t want to leave. I was turning sixteen, with two years to work toward my
higher-school certificate. I could see that it would be as hard to return to
Austria as it had been to come to England six years earlier—harder, since the
ruin of war might make it impossible for me to finish school there.

Miss Skeffing, the headmistress at the Camden High
School for Girls, was on the board at the Royal Free Hospital. She had
encouraged me to do the science course that would prepare me for medical-school
entrance. I didn’t want to leave her, or the chance to read medicine. Although
I saw very little of Claire these days, since she was starting her junior houseman
rotation, I didn’t want to leave her, either. After all, it was Claire’s
example that made me stand up to Cousin Minna and insist on applying to the
Camden school. Minna was furious—she wanted me to leave school at fourteen to
help make money in the glove factory. But I reminded her that since she
wouldn’t recommend my father for a job in 1939, she had a nerve expecting me to
quit school to take one now.

She and Victor also tried to put a stop to my going to
meet friends for Miss Herbst’s music evenings. During the war years, those
evenings were a lifesaver. Even for someone like me, with no musical ability,
there was always something to do—we staged operas, held impromptu glees. Even
during the Blitz, when you found your way around London by guess, I would slam
out of Minna’s house and move through the black streets to Miss Herbst’s flat.

Sometimes I’d go by bus: that was an adventure,
because the buses had to obey the blackout, so you wouldn’t know one was coming
until it was almost on top of you, and then you’d have to guess where to get
off. Once on the way home, I guessed wrong and landed miles away from Minna’s.
A street warden found me and let me spend the night in their shelter. It was
great fun, drinking watery cocoa with the wardens while they talked over
football scores, but my little adventure left Minna more sour than ever.

Much as we were worried about our families, none of
us—not just me or Hugo, but no one in that group at Miss Herbst’s—wanted to
resume life in German. We saw it as the language of humiliation. Germany or
Austria or Czechoslovakia were the places where we’d seen our beloved
grandparents forced to scrub the paving stones on their hands and knees while
crowds stood around jeering and throwing things at them. We even changed the
spelling of our names: I turned Lotte into Lotty; Carl used a C instead of the
K he’d been born with.

On V-E night, after the king’s speech, I put Hugo on
the tube back to Golders Green, where the Nussbaums lived, and met up with Max
and some of the others in Covent Garden to wait for Carl, who’d gotten a job
with the Sadlers Wells orchestra, which was playing that night. Thousands of
people were in Covent Garden, the one place in London you could get a drink in
the middle of the night.

Someone was passing bottles of champagne through the
crowd. Max and the rest of our group put our personal worries to one side and
became riotous with the other revelers. No more bombs, no more blackouts, no
more minuscule bits of butter once a week—although of course that was ignorant
optimism; rationing went on for years.

Carl eventually found us sitting on an overturned
barrow in St. Martin’s Lane. The owner, who sold fruit, was a little drunk. He
was carving apples carefully into slices and feeding them to me and another
girl in our group, who later became utterly suburban, bred corgis, and voted
Conservative. At the time she was the most sophisticated of our set, wearing
lipstick, dating American servicemen, and getting nylons for her pains, while I
darned my cotton stockings, feeling like a dowdy schoolgirl next to her.

Carl bowed grandly to the barrow owner and took a
slice of apple out of the man’s hand. “I will feed Miss Herschel,” he said, and
held the piece of apple out to me. I suddenly became aware of his fingers, as
if they were actually touching my body. I put my hand around his wrist to guide
the apple to my mouth.

Case Closed

T
he dreams
woke me in the grey light of predawn. Nightmares of Lotty lost, my mother
dying, faceless figures chasing me through tunnels, while Paul Radbuka watched,
alternating between weeping and manic laughter. I lay sweating, my heart
pounding. Next to me, Morrell slept, his breath coming out in soft little
snorts, like a horse clearing its nose. I moved into the shelter of his arms.
He clung to me in sleep for a few minutes, then rolled over without waking.

By and by my heart rate returned to normal, but
despite yesterday’s fatigues I couldn’t get back to sleep. All of last night’s
tormented confessions churned in my head like clothes pounding in a washing
machine. Paul Radbuka’s emotions were so slippery, so intense, that I couldn’t
figure out how to respond to him; Lotty and Carl’s history was just as
overwhelming.

It didn’t surprise me to hear that Max wanted to marry
Lotty, although neither of them had ever mentioned it around me. I seized on
the small problem instead of the large, wondering if Lotty was so used to her
solitary life that she preferred to be on her own. Morrell and I had talked
about living together, but even though we’d both been married in our younger
days, we couldn’t quite agree on giving up our privacy. For Lotty, who’d always
lived on her own, it would be an even harder move.

It was clear that Lotty was hiding something about the
Radbuka family, but I had no way of knowing what. It wasn’t her mother’s
family—she’d been startled by that suggestion, almost affronted. Perhaps some
poor immigrant family whose fate had mattered terribly to her? People have
unexpected sources of shame and guilt, but I couldn’t imagine something that
would shock me so much it would make me turn against her . . . something she
wouldn’t even tell Max.

What if Sofie Radbuka had been a patient whose care
she had bungled during her medical training? Sofie Radbuka had died, or was in
a vegetative coma; Lotty blamed herself and pretended to have tuberculosis so
she could go to the country to recuperate. She’d taken Radbuka’s name in some
kind of guilt storm that had her overidentifying with the patient. Aside from
the fact that it contradicted everything I knew about Lotty, it still wouldn’t
turn me from her.

The notion that she’d pretended to have TB so she
could go to the country and carry on an affair with a Sofie Radbuka—or
anyone—was ludicrous. She could have had an affair in London without
jeopardizing a training program that women in the forties entered only with
great difficulty.

It unnerved me to see Lotty teetering on the edge of
collapse. I tried to recite Morrell’s good advice: that I should not sleuth
after her; that if she didn’t want to tell me her secrets, it was her demons,
not my failure, that made her keep them to herself.

I should stick to my business, anyway, to exploring
the kind of financial shenanigan that Isaiah Sommers had hired me to untangle.
Not that I’d done much about that situation, either, other than get him to stir
up Bull Durham to denounce me in public.

It was only five-forty. I could do one little thing
for Isaiah Sommers. Which Morrell would holler about if he knew. I sat up.
Morrell sighed but didn’t move. Pulling on the jeans and sweatshirt out of my
overnight bag, I tiptoed out of the room with my running shoes. Morrell had
absconded with my cell phone and picklocks. I went back to the room for his
backpack, which I took to his study with me—I didn’t want the clanking of keys
to wake him. I left a note on his laptop:
Gone to the city for an early
appointment. See you tonight for supper? Love, V.

Morrell’s place was only six blocks from the Davis L
stop. I walked across, in company with other early commuters, joggers, people
out with their dogs. Amazing how many people were on the streets, and how many
looked fresh and fit. The sight of my own red-stained eyes in the bathroom
mirror had made me flinch—the Madwoman of Chaillot let loose upon the town.

The express trains for the morning rush were running;
in twenty minutes I was at my own stop, Belmont, a few blocks from my
apartment. My car was out front, but I needed to shower and change so that I
looked less like the ghost of my own nightmares. I crept in quietly, hoping the
dogs wouldn’t recognize my step. Trouser suit, crepe-soled shoes. Peppy gave a
sharp bark as I tiptoed back outside, but I didn’t slow down.

I stopped at a coffee bar on my way to Lake Shore
Drive for a large orange juice and an even larger cappuccino. It was almost
seven now; the morning commute had begun in earnest, but I still made it to
Hyde Park before seven-thirty.

I gave a perfunctory nod to the guard at the entrance
to the Hyde Park Bank building. It wasn’t the same man Fepple had warned
against me on Friday. This man gave me a cursory glance over his newspaper but
didn’t challenge me: I was professionally dressed, I knew where I was going. To
the sixth floor, where I pulled on latex gloves to start work on Fepple’s
locks. I was so tense, listening for the elevator, that it took me a moment to
realize the locks were already open.

I slipped into the office, snarling as I tripped once
more on the torn corner of linoleum. Fepple was behind his desk. In the pale
light coming through the window, I thought he’d fallen asleep in his chair. I
hesitated at the door, then decided to put a bold face on it, wake him, force
him to hand over the Sommers file. I switched on the overhead light. And saw
that Fepple would never speak to anyone again. His mouth was missing. The side
of his head, the carpet of freckled skin, nothing left of them but a smear of
bone and brain and blood.

I sat abruptly on the floor. Head between my knees.
Even with my nose muffled I thought I could smell blood. My gorge rose. I
willed my mind to other matters: I couldn’t add my vomit to the crime scene.

I don’t know how long I sat like that, until voices in
the hall made me realize how precarious my position was: in an office with a
dead man, with picklocks in my pocket and latex gloves on my hands. I stood up,
so fast that my head swam again, but I shook off the faintness and turned the
dead bolt to lock myself in.

Trying to make it a clinical exercise, I edged around
the desk to look at Fepple. A gun had fallen to the floor just below where his
right arm dangled. I squinted at it: a twenty-two SIG Trailside. So he had shot
himself? Because whatever he’d seen in the Sommers file had unbalanced his
mind? His computer was still on, in a suspend state. Suppressing my nausea, I gingerly
stretched an arm past his left side, using a picklock to bring up the screen so
that I wouldn’t disturb any evidence. A block of text came back to life.