Total Recall

XXVII New Disciple

By the time I finished my conversation with Rhea, I was ready to bonk her on the head and take my chances on a self-defense plea. I’d started with the premise that we all wanted what was best for the main players in our little drama and that this meant not just Paul but Calia and Agnes as well. Rhea gave one of those regal nods that made me want to revert to my street-fighting roots. I concentrated on a painting of a Japanese farmyard that hung above her couch and told her about Paul’s two attempts to accost Calia.

“The family is starting to feel as though they’re being stalked,” I said. “Mr. Loewenthal’s lawyer wants him to swear out a peace bond, but I thought if you and I talked, we might head off an extreme confrontation.”

“I don’t believe Paul would stalk anyone,” Rhea said. “He’s not only very gentle, but he’s easily frightened. I’m not saying he wasn’t at Max’s house,” she added as I started to object, “but I imagine him standing in the park like the little match girl in the fairy tale, longing to be part of the festivities he can see through the window, while none of the rich children will acknowledge his existence.”

I smiled, still on my best behavior. “Unfortunately, Calia is a five-year-old-an age where frightened, needy grown-ups are terrifying. Her mother is understandably alarmed, because she thinks someone might be threatening her child. When Paul comes out of the bushes at the two of them, it scares them both. His longing for a family may be making it hard for him to see how his behavior could appear to other people.”

Rhea bent her head, a swanlike gesture that seemed to have a hint of acquiescence in it. “But why won’t Max Loewenthal acknowledge him?”

I wanted to scream, “Because there’s nothing to acknowledge, you fatheaded flea-brain,” but I leaned forward with an expression of great earnestness. “Mr. Loewenthal truly is not related to your client. This morning he showed me the file he kept from his search for missing families in postwar Europe. The file includes a letter from the person who asked him to hunt for the Radbukas. On Sunday, when Paul crashed his party, Mr. Loewenthal offered to go over these papers with him, but Paul didn’t want to make an appointment for a more convenient time. I’m sure Mr. Loewenthal would still be glad for Paul to see the papers if he thought that would set his mind at rest.”

“Have you seen these documents, Don?” Rhea turned to him with a touching display of female fragility. “If you could take a look at them, if you agree with-with Vic, I would feel better.”

Don swelled slightly at her trust in him. I tried not to make a mocking grimace but said I felt sure that Max would want things done as quickly as possible.

“I have a dinner engagement this evening, but if Don’s free, I can ask Max to meet with him,” I added. “In the meantime, it would be shocking if Paul were arrested because of this unhappy misunderstanding. So could you suggest that he stay away from the house until he hears from Mr. Loewenthal? If we could have a phone number where Mr. Loewenthal could reach him?”

Rhea shook her head, a contemptuous little smile at the corners of her mouth. “You really don’t give up, do you? I am not going to let you have my client’s home number or address. He sees you as the person who’s keeping him from his family. If you were to show up on his front step, it would be a major disintegrating event to his fragile sense of self.”

I felt all the muscles in my neck clench with the effort not to lose my temper openly. “I’m not challenging the work you’ve done with him, Rhea. But if I could see the documents he found in his father’s-foster father’s-papers, I could use them to track down who in London might have been part of his family. The journey he thinks he made, from his unknown birthplace to Terezin, and then to London and Chicago, is so tortuous that we might never be able to follow it. But at least the documents that told him his birth name might give a skilled investigator a place to start.”

“You say you’re not challenging my work, but in the next sentence you refer to the journey Paul thinks he made. This is a journey he did make, even though the details were blocked from his conscious mind for fifty years. Like you, I am a skilled investigator, but one with greater experience than you in exploring the past.”

The discreet temple bell chimed; she turned to look at a clock on her desktop. “I need to clear my mind of all this conflict before my next patient arrives. I’ll be certain to tell Paul that he can only expect hostility if he keeps trying to see Max Loewenthal.”

“That will be helpful to all of us,” I said. “I have someone showing Radbuka’s photograph to neighbors of families named Ulrich in the hopes of finding his childhood home. So if he reports back to you that someone is spying on him-it’s true.”

“Families named Ulrich? Why would you want-” She broke off, her dark soft eyes widening, first in bewilderment, then amusement. “If that’s your best investigative effort, Vic, then Paul Radbuka is definitely safe from you.”

I studied her for a moment, chin on hand, trying to decipher what lay behind her amusement. “So Ulrich wasn’t his father’s name after all? I’ll keep that in mind. Don, where should I leave a message for you about whether Max is free to talk to you tonight? At Morrell’s?”

“I’ll ride down with you, Vic, give Rhea a chance to center herself. I have a cell-phone number I can give you.”

He got up with me but lingered inside her consulting room for a private leave-taking. As I left, I noticed another young woman in the waiting room looking eagerly toward the inner door. It was a pity Rhea and I had gotten off to such a bad start: I would have liked to experience her hypnotic techniques to see whether they gave me the same rush they did her patients.

Don caught up with me outside the elevators. When I asked if he knew what the inside joke was about the name Ulrich, he shifted uncomfortably. “Not exactly.”

“Not exactly? You mean you know sort of?”

“Only that it wasn’t his father’s-foster father’s-last name. Not what the name really was. And don’t ask me to find out: Rhea won’t tell me because she knows you’ll try to wheedle it out of me.”

“I guess I should feel flattered that she thinks I’d be able to. Give me your cell-phone number. I’ll call Max and get back to you, but I have to run: like Rhea, I need to center myself before my next appointment.”

In the L going back to my car, I called Mary Louise to tell her she didn’t have to go door-to-door with Radbuka’s picture after all. I couldn’t recap the whole conversation over the noise of the train but told her that it apparently wasn’t his childhood name. She had started south, working her way west and north, and had only reached her third address, so she was happy to call it a day.

As I picked up my car at the Western L stop, I wondered idly what would happen if Rhea Wiell hypnotized Lotty. Where would an elevator to the past take Lotty? From her behavior on Sunday, the monsters on those lower floors were pretty ferocious. It seemed to me, though, that Lotty’s problem wasn’t that she couldn’t remember her monsters but that she couldn’t forget them.

I stopped in the office to check on mail and messages and whether I had any appointments for tomorrow that I’d forgotten. A couple of new things had come up. I entered them into my computer and pulled out my Palm Pilot to download them to the handheld device. As I did so I suddenly thought of Fepple’s mother telling me her gadget-happy son used a device like mine for a diary. If he’d kept his appointments up to date, they should still be sitting in that machine in his office. And I had a key: I could go in happy and legal, with the implicit consent of Rhonda Fepple.

I quickly returned a few phone calls, looked at my e-mail, pulled up the missing persons bulletin board to see that Questing Scorpio hadn’t answered my message, and went south again, to Hyde Park.

Collins, the four-to-midnight guard, recognized me. “Got some other tenants here we could do without if you want a hit list,” he said with heavy humor as I passed.

I smiled weakly and rode up to the sixth floor. I had a hard time getting myself to open the door, not because of the yellow crime-scene tape sealing it, but because I didn’t want to face the remains of Fepple’s life again. I took a breath and tried the handle. A woman in a nurse’s uniform heading to the elevator stopped to watch me. The police or the building management had locked the office. I took out my key and unlocked the door, breaking the yellow tape as I pushed it open.

“I thought that meant you can’t go in,” the woman said.

“You thought right, but I’m a detective.”

She walked over to peer around me into the room, then backed away, her face turning grey. “Oh, my God. Is that what happened in there? Oh, my God, if this is what can go on in this building, I’m getting a job at the hospital, hours or no hours. This is terrible.”

I was just as appalled as she was, even though I more or less knew what to expect. Fepple’s body was gone, but no one had bothered to clean up after him. Pieces of brain and bone had hardened on the chair and desk. Those weren’t visible from the door, but what you could see was the mess of papers, and on top of it, grey fingerprint powder showing up nests of footprints on the floor. The powder had drifted like dirty snow onto the desk, the computer, the strewn papers. I thought briefly of poor Rhonda Fepple, trying to sort through the wreckage. I hoped she had the sense to hire help.

The police hadn’t bothered to shut down the computer. Using a Kleenex to protect my fingers, I hit the ENTER key and brought the system back up. I couldn’t bring myself to sit on Fepple’s chair, or even touch it, so I leaned across the desk to operate the keyboard. Even in my awkward posture, it only took a few minutes to retrieve his computer datebook. On Friday, he’d had a dinner date with Connie Ingram. He’d even added a note: says she wants to discuss Sommers, but she sounds hot for me.

I printed out the entry and scuttled out of the office as fast as I could move. The foul scene, the fetid air, the horrible image of Connie Ingram sounding hot for Fepple, all made me feel like throwing up again. I found a women’s bathroom, which was locked. I stuck Fepple’s door key in, which didn’t turn the lock but did get someone on the inside to open it for me. I swayed over one of the sinks, washing my face in cold water, rinsing my mouth, pushing the worst of the images out of my mind-away from my stomach.

Connie Ingram, the earnest round-faced claims clerk whose company loyalty wouldn’t let me look at her files? Or who was so loyal that she would date a recalcitrant agent and set him up for a hit?

A sudden rage, the culmination of the week’s frustrations, swept over me. Rhea Wiell, Fepple himself, my vacillating client, even Lotty-I was fed up with all of them. And most of all with Ralph and Ajax. Chewing me out for the Durham protest, stiffing me over my request to see the company copy of Aaron Sommers’s file-and staging this charade. Which they’d botched by stealing the guy’s handheld but not wiping the entry out of the computer.

I shoved open the bathroom door and stalked to the elevator, the blood roaring in my head. I zoomed to Lake Shore Drive, honking impatiently at any car daring to turn in front of me, swooping through lights as they turned red-behaving like a mad idiot. On the Drive I covered the five miles to the Grant Park traffic lights in five minutes. The evening rush hour had built in the park, stalling me. I earned the irate whistle of a traffic cop by cutting recklessly around the stack of cars onto one of the side roads, flooring the car up to the Inner Drive.

As I got to the corner of Michigan and Adams, I had to stand on the brakes: the street was a mass of honking, unmoving cars. Now what? I wasn’t going to get near the Ajax building in my car with this kind of blockage. I made an illegal and highly dangerous U-turn and roared back to the Inner Drive. By now I’d had so many near-misses I was coming to my senses. I could hear my father lecturing me on the dangers of driving under the influence of rage. In fact, once when he’d caught me in the act, he’d made me come with him when he had to untangle a crumpled teenager from the steering wheel through his chest. The memory of that made me take the next few blocks sedately. I left the car in an underground garage and walked north to the Ajax building.

As I got to Adams Street, the congestion built. This wasn’t the normal throng of homebound workers but a penned-up crowd. I threaded my way into it with difficulty, moving along the edges of the buildings. Through the jam of people I could hear the megaphones. The protestors had come back to life.

“No deals with slaveowners!” they were shouting, mixed with “No money to mass murderers!” “Economic justice for all” vied with “Boycott Ajax! No deals with thieves.”

So Posner had arrived. In full throttle, by the sound of it. And Durham had apparently come to rally his own troops in person. No wonder the street was backed up. Sidling past the crowd, I climbed up the steps to the Adams L platform so that I could see what was going on.

It wasn’t quite the mob that had created havoc outside the Hotel Pleiades last week, but besides Posner with his Maccabees and Durham with the EYE team, there were a couple of camera crews and a lot of unhappy people who wanted to get home. These last pushed against me on the L steps, snarling at both groups.

“I don’t care what happened a hundred years ago: I want to get home today,” one woman was saying to her companions.

“Yeah. Durham ’s got a point, but no one’s going to pay attention to it if he makes you pay overtime to the day care because you can’t get there on time.”

“And that other guy, that one in the funny hat and the curls and all, what’s his problem?”

“He’s saying Ajax stole life insurance from the Jews, but it all happened a long time ago, so who cares?”

I had thought I’d call Ralph from the street, but there was no way I could carry on a phone conversation in this melee. I climbed down from the platform and made my way along Wabash, past the cops who were trying to keep traffic moving, past the entrances to Ajax where security guards were letting frustrated commuters out one at a time, around the corner on Jackson to the alley behind the building where the buildings had their loading bays. The one for Ajax was still open.

I hoisted myself up to the metal lip where trucks decanted cargo and went inside. An overweight man in Ajax ’s blue security uniform slid off a stool in front of a large console filled with TV screens showing the alley and the building.

“You lost?”

“I’m a fraud investigator. Ralph Devereux-the head of claims-wants to talk to me, but the mob out front is making it impossible to get near the front entrance.”

He looked me over, decided I didn’t look like a terrorist, and called up to Ralph’s office with my name. He grunted a few times into the mouthpiece, then jerked his head to bring me over to the phone.

“Hello, Ralph. How glad I am you’re still here. We need to have a little conversation about Connie Ingram.”

“We do indeed. I wasn’t going to call you until tomorrow, but since you’re here we’ll talk now. And don’t imagine you can come up with any excuse that will make your behavior acceptable.”

“I love you, too, Ralph: I’ll be right up.”

The guard tapped the screens on the console to show me my route: a door at the rear of the loading bay led to a corridor which would take me to the main lobby. Once inside, I paused on my way to the elevators to stare at the dueling demonstrators. Durham, this time in executive navy, had the larger crowd, but Posner was controlling the chanting. As his little band of Maccabees circled past the door, I stood transfixed. Standing at Posner’s left elbow, his childlike face beaming underneath his thinning curls, was Paul Radbuka.