Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (51 page)

“I guess she knows what she’s doing.” I ignored Carl’s
derisive comment. “I must say, I’d like to watch that confrontation: the
Princess of Austria versus the Little Flower. My money’s on Rhea—she has that
myopia which constitutes a perfect armor. . . . Max, I’ll let you have some
privacy. I know it’s been a long, tough week, even though Paul’s misfortune has
brought you some breathing room. But I wanted to ask you about the
abbreviations in these books. Where are they? I wanted you to see—” I was
shuffling through the papers on the coffee table as I spoke.

“Lotty took them with her,” Carl said.

“She didn’t. She couldn’t have. They’re crucial, those
ledgers.”

“Talk to her, then.” Carl shrugged with supreme
indifference and poured himself another glass of champagne.

“Oh, hell!” I started to get up, intent on running
after Lotty, then thought again of a pinball in motion and sat back down. I
still had the copies I’d made of the journal pages. Although I’d wanted Max to
study the originals, he might figure something out from copies.

He took the pages, Carl leaning over his shoulder. Max
shook his head. “Victoria, you have to remember, we haven’t spoken or read
German at all regularly since we were ten years old. These cryptic entries
could mean anything.”

“What about the numbers, then? If my young historian’s
speculation is correct, that this was some kind of Jewish association, would
the numbers refer to anything special?”

Max hunched his shoulders. “They’re too big to be
members of a family. Too small to be financial numbers. And anyway, the values
jump around quite a bit. They can’t be bank-account numbers, either—maybe
they’re the numbers for safe-deposit boxes.”

“Oh, it’s all a big if.” I slapped the papers against
the table in frustration. “Did Lotty say anything else? I mean besides going to
her office—did she say whether these entries meant anything special to her?
After all, the Radbuka name, that’s the one she knows.”

Carl made a sour face. “Oh, she had one of her typical
histrionic fits. She doesn’t seem to be any more mature than little Calia,
screeching around the living room.”

I frowned. “Do you really, truly not know who Sofie
Radbuka was, Carl?”

He looked at me coldly. “I said everything I know
about it last weekend. I don’t need to expose myself further.”

“Even if Lotty did have a lover with that name, which
I don’t believe—at least, not someone she left school to be with in the
country—why would seeing the name make Lotty so jumpy and tormented all these
years later?”

“The inside of her mind is as opaque to me as—as
Calia’s toy dog. When I was a young man, I thought I did understand her, but
she walked away from me without one word of explanation or farewell, and we had
been lovers for three years.”

I turned helplessly to Max. “Did she say anything when
she saw the name in the book, or did she just leave?”

Max stared in front of him, not looking at me. “She
wanted to know if someone thought she needed to be punished, and if so, didn’t
they realize that self-torture was the most exquisite punishment yet devised,
because victim and tormentor were never separated.”

The silence that followed was so complete we could
hear the waves breaking on Lake Michigan from the far side of the park. I
gathered my papers together carefully, as though they were eggs which would crack
at a false touch, and stood up to go.

Max followed me out to my car. “Victoria, Lotty is
behaving in a way that I can’t fathom. I’ve never seen her like this, except
maybe right after the war, but then we were all—well, the losses we
experienced—for her, as for me, for Carl, for my beloved Teresz, we were all
devastated, so I didn’t notice Lotty as particularly so. For all of us, those
losses are a wound that always hurts in bad weather, so to speak.”

“I can imagine that,” I said.

“Yes, but that’s not what I’m trying to tell you. In
Lotty’s case, in all these years she has never discussed them. She’s always
kept herself energetically focused on the task at hand. Not just nowadays, when
all our lives keep us busy with the present and a more recent past. But never.”

He smacked my car roof, bewildered, astonished at her
reticence. The flat, hard sound contrasted unpleasantly with his low voice.

“Right after the war, there was a sort of shock, and
even for some people a sense of shame about those many, many dead. People—at
least, Jewish people—didn’t talk about it in a public way: we weren’t going to
be victims, hanging around the table for crumbs of pity. Among the survivors of
the dead, oh, we mourned in private. But not Lotty. She was frozen; I think
it’s what made her so ill that year that she left Carl. When she came back from
the country the next winter, she had this patina of briskness that has never
left her. Until now. Until this person Paul whoever he is appeared.

“Victoria, after I lost Teresz I never thought I would
be in love again. And I never imagined with Lotty. She and Carl had been a
couple, a passionate couple; also, my own mind was in the past—I kept thinking
of her as Carl’s girl, despite their long estrangement. But we did come
together in that way, as I know you’ve seen. Our love of music, her passion, my
calm—we seemed to balance each other. But now—” He couldn’t figure out how to
end the sentence. Finally he said, “If she doesn’t return soon—return
emotionally, I mean—we’ll lose each other forever. I can’t cope right now with
more losses from the friends of my youth.”

He didn’t wait for me to say anything but turned on
his heel and went back into the house. I drove soberly back to the city.

Sofie Radbuka. “Probably I couldn’t have saved her
life,” Lotty had said to me. Was this a cousin who had died in the gas
chambers, a cousin whose place on the train to London Lotty had taken? I could
imagine the guilt that would torment you if that had happened: I survived at
her expense. Her parting remark to Max and Carl, about self-torture.

I was following the winding road past Calvary
Cemetery, whose mausoleums separate Evanston from Chicago, when Don Strzepek
called. “Vic—where are you?”

“Among the dead,” I said bleakly. “What’s up?”

“Vic, you need to get down here. Your friend Dr.
Herschel is carrying on in a really outrageous way.”

“Where’s here?”

“What do you mean, where’s—oh, I’m calling from Rhea’s
house. She just left to go to the hospital.”

“Did Dr. Herschel beat her up?” I tried not to sound too
eager.

“Christ, Vic, this is really serious, don’t joke
around, pay attention. Did you know that Paul Radbuka was shot today? Rhea got
the word partway through the afternoon. She’s been terribly upset. For Dr.—”

“Was he killed?” I put in.

“He was fucking lucky. Home invaders shot him in the
heart, but what the surgeon told Rhea was they used a low-enough-caliber gun
that the bullet lodged in the heart without killing him. I don’t understand it
myself, but apparently it does happen. Amazingly enough, he should make a
complete recovery. Anyway, Dr. Herschel somehow got hold of some papers of
Paul’s—” He stopped, as the connection hit him. “Do you know about these?”

“His father’s ledgers? Yes. I was just looking at
them, up at Max Loewenthal’s. I knew Dr. Herschel took them with her.”

“How did Loewenthal get them?”

I pulled into a bus stop on Sheridan Road so I could
concentrate on the conversation. “Maybe Paul brought them up to him so that Max
would understand why they were related.”

I heard him light a cigarette, the quick sucking in of
smoke. “According to Rhea, Paul kept them under lock and key. Not that she’s
been to his house, mind you, but he described his safe place to her. He brought
his books in to show her but he wouldn’t let Rhea, whom he totally trusts, keep
them overnight. I doubt he would have lent them to Loewenthal.”

A Sheridan Road bus pulled up next to me; an exiting
passenger angrily pounded the hood of my car. “Why don’t you give me the
details if you have them. Where did this happen? Did some Beth Israel patient
get fed up at the Posner demonstrations and open fire?”

“No, it was in his home. He’s pretty muzzy now with
anesthetic, but what he’s said to the cops and to Rhea is that a woman came to
the door wanting to talk to him about his father. Foster father.”

I interrupted him. “Don, does he know who shot him?
Can he describe her? Is he sure it’s a woman?”

He paused uncomfortably. “As a matter of fact, he—uh,
well, he’s a little confused on that point. The anesthetic is making him a
little hallucinatory and he says it was someone named Ilse Wölfin. The She-Wolf
of the SS. That’s immaterial. What matters is that Dr. Herschel called Rhea and
told her they needed to talk, that Paul was dangerously unstable if he believed
these papers proved he was Radbuka, and where did he get the idea that Sofie
Radbuka was his mother. Of course, Rhea refused to see her. So Dr. Herschel
announced she was going to Compassionate Heart of Mary to talk to Paul in
person.

“Can you believe it?” His voice went up half an octave
in outrage. “Guy is lucky to be alive, just out of surgery. Hell, she’s a
surgeon, she should know better. Rhea’s gone over there to stop her, but you’re
an old friend, she’ll listen to you. Go stop her, Warshawski.”

“I find this request pretty ironic, Don: I’ve been
begging Rhea for a week to use her influence with Paul Hoffman, as I guess his
name really is, and she’s been stiffing me as if I were a plague carrier. Why
should I help her now?”

“Be your age, Vic. This isn’t a playground. If you
don’t want to keep Dr. Herschel from looking like a fool, you should stop her
from seriously hurting Paul.”

A cop flashed his spotlight on me. I put the Mustang
in gear and turned the corner past a Giordano’s pizza parlor where a bunch of
teenagers were smoking and drinking beer. A woman with short-cropped dark hair
walked past with a Yorkie, who lunged fiercely at the beer-drinkers. I watched
them cross Sheridan Road before I spoke again.

“I’ll meet you at the hospital. What I say to Lotty
depends on what she’s doing when we get there. But you’re going to love Ulrich
Hoffman’s journals. They really are in code, and if Rhea broke it, she’s wasted
on the world of therapy—she ought to be in the CIA.”

Bedside Manners

C
ompassionate
Heart of Mary was perched on the fringe of Lincoln Park, where parking spaces
are so scarce I’ve seen people get into fistfights over them. For the privilege
of sitting in on Lotty and Rhea’s encounter I had to pay the hospital garage
fifteen dollars.

I got to the lobby at the same time as Don Strzepek.
He was still miffed at me over my parting crack. At the reception desk, they
said it was past visiting hours, but when I identified myself as Paul’s
sister—just arrived from Kansas City—they told me I could go up to the fifth floor,
to the postop ward. Don glared at me, bit back a hot denial, and said he was my
husband.

“Very good,” I applauded as we got on the elevator.
“She believed it because we’re clearly having a little marital tiff.”

He gave a reluctant smile. “How Morrell puts up with
you—tell me about Hoffman’s journals.”

I pulled one of the photocopies from my case. He
peered at it while we walked down the hall to Paul’s room. The door was shut; a
nurse in the hallway said a doctor had just gone in to look at him, but as I
was his sister, she guessed it was all right if we joined them.

When we pushed open the door, we heard Rhea. “Paul,
you don’t need to talk to Dr. Herschel if you don’t feel like it. You need to
stay calm and work on healing yourself. There will be plenty of time to talk
later.”

She had placed herself protectively between his bed
and the door, but Lotty had gone around to his right side, threading her way
through all the different plastic bags hanging over him. Despite his greying
curls, Paul looked like a child, his small frame barely showing under the
covers. His rosy cheeks were pale, but he was smiling faintly, pleased to see
Rhea. When Don went to stand next to her, his smile faded. Don noticed it, too,
and moved slightly apart.

“Paul, I’m Dr. Herschel,” Lotty said, her fingers on
his pulse. “I knew the Radbuka family many years ago, in Vienna and in London.
I trained as a doctor in London, and I worked for a time for Anna Freud, whose
work you so greatly admire.”

He turned his hazel eyes from Rhea to Lotty, a tinge
of color coming into his face.

Whatever agitation she’d displayed to Carl and Max,
Lotty was perfectly calm now. “I don’t want you to get excited in any way. So
if your pulse starts to go too fast, we’re going to stop talking at once. Do you
understand that?”

“You should stop talking right now,” Rhea said, not
able to keep anger from disturbing her vestal tranquillity. Don, seeing Paul’s
attention on Lotty, took Rhea’s hand in a reassuring clasp.

“No,” Paul whispered. “She knows my English savior.
She knows my true family. She’ll make my cousin Max remember me. I promise you,
I won’t get agitated.”