Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (43 page)

“Rossy refused at first to see you at all when you
showed up in the lobby, but you threatened over the house phone to expose him
for doing business with Durham. Even so, Rossy said he wouldn’t see you if
Durham learned you were there. You arrived at Rossy’s place angry, but by the
time you and he finished, you were all smiles again. So Rossy gave you
something. Not money, perhaps. But information. He knows you’re aggressive with
Jewish-run institutions that you think are too secular, so maybe he told you something
that combined both insurance and one of Chicago’s leading Jewish charities,
Beth Israel. You should bring your protest up here, he told you, force the
media to shine a light on the hospital and Max Loewenthal.”

Standing on the corner in front of the Cozy Cup Café,
I gave Posner a chance to answer. He didn’t say anything, but he was looking
worried, nervously chewing his cheek.

“What could it have been? Did he say, Oh, the hospital
has been denying medical benefits to Holocaust survivors? No, that would be too
crude—the media would have been all over that one. Maybe he said, Oh, Max
Loewenthal got some kind of big bond package for the hospital in exchange for
helping kill the bill. It sounds crazy, of course, because it is crazy, and in
your heart of hearts you know any suggestion Rossy made is crazy. If you
didn’t, you’d be blaring it to the world. But Bertrand Rossy would be happy
because it would distract public attention from Ajax’s role in killing the
Asset Recovery Act. How am I doing? Is this the story you want me to share with
Beth Blacksin and the rest of Chicago? That you’re Bertrand Rossy’s dupe?”

While I was speaking, Radbuka kept trying to
interrupt, to say they were here strictly on the issue of Max and his family,
but I raised my voice and talked past him.

Posner kept chewing his cheek. “You can’t prove any of
this.”

“Very lame, Mr. Posner. After all, you’re making
accusations against Beth Israel that you can’t prove. I
can
prove that
you spent fifteen minutes with Bertrand Rossy last night. I don’t have to prove
that your conversation followed my story line—I only have to start the story
moving around Chicago. The wires and Internet services will take it from there,
because Rossy means Edelweiss, which means not only local but also international
news.”

“Are you trying to imply that I’m selling out the
IHARA Committee?” Posner demanded.

I shook my head. “I don’t know if you are or not. But
of course if your group finds out that you wasted precious resources on a
wild-goose chase, I don’t expect they’ll be very supportive of your
leadership.”

“Whatever you may choose to believe, I take our
mission with utter seriousness. Alderman Durham may be on the streets for
votes. He may leave the streets for money, but neither of these—”

“You know that Rossy offered him money to shut down
his protest?” I interrupted.

He pressed his lips together without answering.

“But you did follow Durham to Rossy’s place last
night. Do you follow him every night?”

“Reb Joseph isn’t like you,” Radbuka burst out. “He
doesn’t set out to spy on people, make their lives miserable, deny them their
rights. Everything he does is aboveboard. Anyone could tell you that Rossy
talked to Durham last night: we all saw Durham go over to Rossy’s car when it
was stuck in traffic on Adams.”

“What? Did Durham get in with Rossy?”

“No, he leaned over to talk to him. We could all see
Rossy’s face when he opened the window, and Leon said, Hey, that’s the guy
who’s really running Ajax these—”

“Shut up,” Leon said. “You weren’t asked to take part
in this conversation. Go wait in the bus with the rest of the group until Reb
Joseph has finished with this woman.”

Radbuka stuck out his lower lip in a babyish pout.
“You can’t order me around. I sought out Reb Joseph because he’s doing
something for people like me whose lives were destroyed by the Holocaust. I
didn’t risk being arrested today so I could be bossed around by a loser like
you.”

“Look, Radbuka, you only came along to take
advantage—”

“Leon, Paul,” Posner chided them, “this is only grist
for this woman’s mill, to see us fighting each other. Save your energies for
our common enemies.”

Leon subsided, but Paul wasn’t part of the movement;
he didn’t need to obey Posner any more than he did Leon. In one of his rapid
mood shifts, he turned angrily on Posner. “I only came along on your march last
night and this one today to get help in getting to my family. Now you’re
accusing my cousin Max of cutting secret deals with the Illinois legislature.
Do you think I’m related to someone who would act like that?”

“No,” I put in quickly, “I don’t think your relatives
would do anything so awful. What happened last night, after Durham talked to
Rossy on the street? Did they drive off together? Or did the cops take Durham
in a separate car?”

“I didn’t know the police took him,” Radbuka said,
ignoring shushing gestures from Posner and Leon, responsive as usual to anyone
paying him serious attention—even when it was an ostensible enemy like myself.
“All I know is Durham went off and got in his own car: we walked down to the
corner of Michigan and saw him. It was parked right there in a no-parking zone,
but of course he had a policeman guarding it, sleazebag that he is. And Reb
Joseph didn’t trust Durham, so he decided to follow him.”

“Very enterprising.” I smiled patronizingly at Posner.
“So you skulked around in the bushes outside Rossy’s building until you saw
Durham come out. And then Rossy, who’s got a lot of charm, talked you into
believing some stupid rumor about the hospital.”

“It wasn’t like that, not at all,” Posner snapped.
“When I saw him with Durham, I wanted to see—I’d been aware for some time that
Durham was trying to sabotage our efforts to force European banks and insurers
to provide redress for the outright theft which they engineered in the wake of—”

“You can assume I understand the underlying issue, Mr.
Posner. But Durham didn’t manufacture the grounds for his protest. There’s a
growing group of people who believe companies which benefited from African
slavery should pay reparations in the same way that companies which benefited
from Jewish or Polish slave labor should.”

His beard jutted toward me at an aggressive angle.
“That’s a separate issue. We’re concerned about actual money, in bank accounts
and unpaid life-insurance policies, that European banks and insurers have
stolen. You’ve been working for one black man in Chicago whose claim was denied
after he paid up his policy. I’m trying to do the same for tens of thousands of
people whose parents thought they were leaving their children a financial cushion.
And I wanted to know why Louis Durham showed up outside Ajax so conveniently—he
never started campaigning for slave reparations until we started our campaign
to force Ajax to pay off life-insurance policies.”

I was startled. “So you thought Rossy was bribing him
to march against you? To disrupt operations at his own company? You should take
it to Oliver Stone! But I guess you took it to Rossy himself. Did he say, Yes,
yes, I confess: if you’ll only picket Beth Israel instead of Ajax I’ll stop
giving money to Louis Durham?”

“Are you being stupid on purpose?” Posner spat at me.
“Naturally Rossy denied any collusion. But he also assured me he would do a
thorough internal search for any policies at Ajax or Edelweiss that belonged to
Holocaust victims.”

“And you believed him?”

“I gave him a week. He convinced me he was serious
enough to have one week.”

“Then what are you doing here?” I asked. “Why not give
the boys some time off?”

“He came to help me.” Paul Radbuka, pink with
excitement, turned on me as suddenly as he’d accepted me a moment earlier.
“Just because you won’t let me see my family, just because you hired that—that
Brownshirt to keep me from talking to my little cousin, that doesn’t mean
they’re not my family. Let Max Loewenthal see how it feels to be ostracized for
a change.”

“Paul, you really need to understand that he is not
related to you. You are not only making them and yourself miserable by stalking
Mr. Loewenthal’s family, you are running a serious risk of being arrested.
Believe me, life in prison is terrible.”

Radbuka scowled. “Max is the one who belongs in
prison, treating me with this kind of contempt.”

I looked at him, baffled about how to penetrate his
dense cloud of denial. “Paul, who was Ulrich, really?”

“That was my foster father. Are you going to try to
make me confess he was my real father? I won’t! He wasn’t!”

“But Rhea says that Ulrich wasn’t his name.”

His face turned from pink to red. “Don’t try to call
Rhea a liar. You’re the liar. Ulrich left behind documents in code. They prove
that my name is really Radbuka. If you believed in Rhea you’d understand the
code, but you don’t, you’re trying to destroy her, you want to destroy me, I
won’t let you, I won’t, I won’t, I won’t!”

I watched in alarm as he began shaking, wondering if he
was having a seizure of some kind. When I moved to try to help him, Posner
barked at me to keep my distance: he was not going to allow a woman to touch
one of his followers, even if Radbuka himself was not aware of the danger a
woman’s touch posed. He and Leon supported Radbuka over to a bench at the bus
stop. I watched for a moment, but Radbuka seemed to be calming down. I left the
men to it and walked slowly up the street back to the hospital, hoping for a
word with Max before returning to my office.

“Posner made a certain kind of sense,” I told Max,
when his weary secretary got him to give me five minutes, “with his ideas about
Ajax bribing Durham to start demonstrating, but really, he must be as crazy as
Paul Radbuka to stage a demonstration here. How are things going with your
donors?”

Max doesn’t often look his age, but this afternoon his
skin was drawn tight and grey across his cheekbones. “I don’t understand any of
this, Victoria. Morrell’s friend Don Strzepek came over last night. In good
faith I let him look at my old notes; I thought he believed them. Surely a
friend of Morrell’s wouldn’t have been abusing my trust?”

“But those notes—they don’t have enough detail about
the Radbukas for anyone to know if this guy Paul is a relative or not—unless there’s
something in your file I didn’t see?”

He made a tired gesture. “Just that letter of Lotty’s,
which you read. Surely Don wouldn’t have used that to encourage Paul to believe
he was a relative, would he?”

“I don’t think so, Max,” I said, but not with total
confidence: I was remembering the glow in Don’s eyes when he looked at Rhea
Wiell. “I can try to talk to him tonight, though, if you’d like.”

“Yes, why don’t you do that.” He sat heavily at his
desk, his face an effigy. “I never thought I would be happy to see the last of
my family, but I will be glad when Calia and Agnes get on that plane.”

Rigmarole: New Word for
the Same Old Story

I
slowly
walked back to my car and drove down to my office, obeying every speed limit,
every traffic sign. The morning’s adrenaline-fueled fury was long gone. I
stared at the stack of messages Mary Louise had left for me, then caught up
with Morrell at his hotel in Rome, where it was nine at night. The conversation
both cheered and further depressed me. He said the kinds of things one wants to
hear from a lover, especially when the lover is about to go into the land of
the Taliban for eight weeks. But when we hung up I felt more forlorn than ever.

I tried to take a nap on the cot in my back room, but
my mind wouldn’t shut down. I finally got up again and determinedly went
through the messages, returning phone calls. Halfway through the pile was a
note to call Ralph at Ajax: the company had decided to make the Sommers family
whole. I got back to him at once.

“Mind you, Vic, this is a one-time-only event,” Ralph
Devereux warned when I called him. “Don’t expect to make it a habit.”

“Ralph, this is wonderful news—but whose idea was it?
Yours? Rossy’s? Did Alderman Durham call and urge you on to do this?”

He ignored me. “And another thing: I would greatly
appreciate it if you let me know the next time you sic the cops on my
employees.”

“You’re right, Ralph. I got caught up in an emergency
at a hospital, but I should have called you. Did they arrest Connie Ingram?”

Mary Louise had left a typed report about Sommers and
about Amy Blount which I was trying to scan while I talked: between Mary
Louise’s police contacts and Freeman Carter’s skill, the state had let Isaiah
Sommers go home, but they’d made it clear he was their front-runner. The
trouble was not his prints on the door per se: the Finch said the 911 techs had
confirmed what the Twenty-first District cops had told Margaret Sommers: they’d
received an anonymous phone tip—probably from a black male—which was what made
them print the room.

“No. But they came right here to the building to
question her.”

“Right to the sacred halls of Ajax itself?”

When he sputtered a request to can the sarcasm, that
it disrupted everyone’s workday to have cops in the building, I added, “Connie Ingram
was lucky, lucky to be a white female. Maybe it’s embarrassing to have the cops
question you in your office, but they took my client away from his workstation
in cuffs. They hauled him over to Twenty-ninth and Prairie for a chat in a
windowless room with a bunch of guys watching through the one-way glass. He’s
only eating at home tonight because I hired him the best criminal lawyer in
town.”