Total Recall

XXXVIII Heartbreak House

Roslyn was a tiny street, barely a block long, that emptied onto Lincoln Park. Radbuka’s house was on the south side, near the park end. It was an old greystone whose front, like most of the houses in this exclusive block, was set close to the street. I wanted to smash down the door, charge in, and forcibly confront Radbuka, but I made as discreet a survey as I could. This close to Lincoln Park, a lot of joggers, dogwalkers, and other athletes kept passing me, even though it was still a bit early in the afternoon for people to be home from work.

The front door was a massive piece of wood, with a peephole making it possible for Radbuka to study his visitors. Keeping myself out of its range, I rang the bell, vigorously, leaning on it for four or five minutes. When there wasn’t an answer, I couldn’t resist the idea of going inside to see if I could find the documents that proved to him that Radbuka was his name. I tried the front door-it would be ridiculous to risk being spotted breaking and entering if I could get in easily-but the brass knob didn’t turn.

I didn’t want to stand with my picklocks in full view of so many joggers; I’d have to go in through the back. I’d had to park three blocks from Roslyn Street. I returned to my car and took a navy coverall from a box in the back. A patch on the left pocket proclaimed People’s Power Service. That and a tool belt completed an easy piece of camouflage. I took them into the women’s rest room in the conservatory and came out a minute later, my hair covered in a blue kerchief, looking like a piece of the service woodwork the Yuppies would overlook.

Back at Radbuka’s house, I tried the bell again, then went up a narrow strip of flagstones along the house’s east side leading to the back. It was bisected by a ten-foot-high gate with a lock set in the middle. The lock was a complex dead bolt. I crouched down with my picklocks, trying to ignore the passersby in the hopes they would do the same to me.

I was sweating freely by the time I got the tumblers pressed back. The lock had to be opened by a key no matter which side of the gate you were on; I wedged a piece of paper into the bolt hole to keep the tongue from reengaging.

The lots on Roslyn were narrow-barely wider than the houses themselves-but deep, without the service alleys and garages that run between most streets in the city. An eight-foot-high wooden fence, somewhat dilapidated, separated the garden from the street behind.

Paul’s father must have made a fortune doing whatever he did for the son to afford this house on this street, but either depression or lack of money made Paul let it go. The garden was a tangle of overgrown bushes and knee-high weeds. As I waded through them to the kitchen entrance, several cats snarled at me and moved off. A shiver ran down my spine.

The lock here seemed identical to the gate, so I used the same combination of picks and had it open in less than a minute. Before going into the kitchen, I pulled on a pair of latex gloves. Just so I wouldn’t forget to do it later, I grabbed a dish towel from above the sink and wiped the outside knob on the back door.

The kitchen cabinets and appliances hadn’t been replaced in a good thirty years. The pilots on the old stove glowed blue in the dim light; the enamel was chipped down to metal along the edges of the oven door. The cabinets were the kind of thick brown pressed wood that had been popular in my childhood.

Paul had eaten breakfast here this morning: the milk hadn’t begun to curdle in the cereal bowl he’d left on the table. The room was cluttered with old newspapers and mail; a 1993 calendar still hung near the pantry. But it wasn’t filthy. Paul seemed to keep on top of his dishes, more or less, which was more than could be said for me much of the time.

I went down the hall, past a dining room with a substantial table that could have seated sixteen. A breakfront held a collection of china, a delicate pattern of blue flowers on a creamy background. It looked as though there was enough china to give sixteen people a five-course meal without stopping to wash any plates, but the dust on the dishes showed that nothing like that had been attempted recently.

All of the rooms on the ground floor were like this, filled with heavy, carved furniture, but covered in dust. Haphazard stacks of paper stood everywhere. In the living room, I found a copy of the Süddeutsche Zeitung dating back to 1989.

A photograph on the wall by the fireplace showed a boy and a man in front of a cottage, with a lake in the background. The boy was presumably Paul, around ten or eleven, the man presumably Ulrich, a barrel-chested, balding figure who stood next to his son, smiling but stern. Paul was looking anxiously up at his father, but Ulrich stared straight ahead at the camera. You wouldn’t look at the picture and say, Oh, these two must be related-either physically or by love.

A sitting room next to the main living room had apparently served as Ulrich’s study. Originally he’d probably decorated it to look like some period-film version of an English country library, with a double leather kneehole desk, a leather armchair, and shelves for books covered in tooled leather-a complete Shakespeare, a complete Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope in English, and Goethe and Schiller in German. The books had been flung about with a furious hand; pages were crumpled, spines broken-a wanton display of destruction.

The same violent hand had taken the desk apart: the drawers stood open, papers pulled from them and tossed on the floor. Had Paul done this, attacking his dead father by pounding on his possessions? Or had someone been searching the house ahead of me? And for what? Who besides me cared about the papers linking Ulrich to the Einsatzgruppen? Or had Ulrich had other secrets?

I couldn’t take the time right now to sift through the books and papers, especially since I didn’t know what I was looking for. I’d have to get Mary Louise and the Streeter brothers to sort them later, if we could get Paul out of the house long enough.

Radbuka’s silver mountain bike stood in the formal tiled entryway. So he’d come back here after snatching Ninshubur. Perhaps the morning’s emotional upheaval had exhausted him and he’d tucked himself in bed with the little blue dog.

I went up a carved wood staircase to the second floor and started with the rooms at the south end of the hall, where the stairway opened. The biggest, with its set of heavy silver brushes monogrammed with a curlicue U and what looked like either an H or a K, must have belonged to Ulrich. The bedstead and wardrobe were massive carved pieces that might have been three hundred years old. Had Ulrich brought all this heavy furniture with him from Germany, from some opulent wartime looting? Or was buying them his sign to himself of success in the New World?

The musty smell in the room made me doubt that Paul had changed the linens since his father’s death those six or seven years ago. I poked through the wardrobe and dresser drawers, wondering if Ulrich had left anything in his pockets or tucked beneath his severe pajamas. I was beginning to get discouraged. An old house filled with stuff that hadn’t been sorted out in thirty years-I doubted if seven maids with seven mops could get through it in under a year.

My spirits flagging, I went across the hall. Fortunately, that room and another further up the passage were both empty, not even holding bedsteads-no houseguests for the Ulrichs. Paul’s own bedroom was the last one on the left. It was the only room in the house with new furniture. He had made an effort to spruce it up-perhaps to separate himself from his father-with the most extreme, angular examples of modern Danish design. I looked through it carefully but didn’t see Ninshubur. So had he gone out again-to Rhea?-carrying the dog with him as a trophy?

A bathroom separated Paul’s bedroom from a hexagonal room overlooking the rank back garden. Heavy drapes in a dull bronze shut out any outside light. I flipped on the overhead light to reveal an extraordinary sight.

A large map of Europe was attached to one wall. Red pins were stuck into it. When I got close enough to read the lettering, I saw they marked the concentration camps of the Nazi era, the big ones like Treblinka and Auschwitz, and others like Sobibor and Neuengamme that I’d never heard of. Another, smaller map next to it showed the paths of the Einsatzgruppen through eastern Europe, with Einsatzgruppe B circled and underlined in red.

Other walls had the photographs of horror we’ve all become used to: emaciated bodies in striped clothes lying on boards; faces of children, their eyes large with fear, crammed into railway cars; helmeted guards with Alsatians snarling at people behind barbed wire; the chilling smoke from crematorium chimneys.

So startled was I by this display that I noticed the most shocking sight almost as an afterthought. I think my brain first saw it as one more garish exhibit, but it was horribly real: crumpled face-forward beneath the bronze drapes lay Paul Radbuka, blood staining the floor around his out-flung right arm.

I stood frozen for an interminable second before darting around the papers littering the floor to kneel next to him. He was lying partly on his left side. He was breathing in rasping, shallow gasps, bloody bubbles popping out of his mouth. The left side of his shirt was soaked with blood that had formed a pool on the floor beneath him. I ran to the bedroom and grabbed the comforter and a sheet. My own knees were stained now with blood, my right hand as well from where I’d pushed against the floor while feeling for his pulse. I returned to Radbuka, draping the comforter over him, turning him gently within its warmth so I could see where the blood was coming from.

I ripped his shirt open. The dog Ninshubur, greeny-brown with blood, fell out. I tore a length of sheet and pressed it against Radbuka’s chest. Blood continued to come from a wound on the left side, but it was oozing, not spurting: he wasn’t bleeding from an artery. When I lifted the pad I could see an ugly gash near the breastbone, the telltale jagged tear of bullet into flesh.

I tore another piece of sheet and made a pad, which I pressed firmly against the hole, then tied it into place with a long strip. I wrapped him in the comforter, head to toe, leaving just enough of his face showing that he could get oxygen through the labored breaths he was taking. “Keep you warm, buddy, until the paramedics get here.”

The only phone I remembered was in the living room. I ran back down the stairs, leaving a trail of bloodstains on the carpet, and called 911. “The front door will be open,” I said. “This is an extreme emergency, gunshot wound to the chest, victim unconscious, breath shallow. Paramedics should come up the stairs to the north end of the floor.”

I waited for a confirmation, then unlocked the front door and ran back upstairs to Radbuka. He was still breathing, wheezing as he exhaled, gasping as he sucked in air. I felt the pad; it seemed to be holding. As I adjusted the comforter, I felt a lump in his pocket that must be his wallet. I pulled it out, wondering if it would have some proof of identity that would let me know his birth name.

No driver’s license. An ATM card for the Fort Dearborn Trust in the name of Paul Radbuka. A MasterCard, same bank, same name. A card saying that in an emergency one should call Rhea Wiell, at her office. No insurance card, nothing to show any other identity. I slipped the wallet gently back into his pocket.

It dawned on me that I didn’t look my best, with my latex gloves now red with blood and my picklocks in my tool belt. If the cops came with the paramedics, I didn’t want to have to answer awkward questions about how I got in. I ran into the bathroom, washed my gloved hands quickly but thoroughly, and opened one of the windows in Paul’s bedroom. I tossed the picklocks at an overgrown shrub in the garden, disturbing a cat that took off with a heart-stopping yowl. It disappeared between two broken boards in the back fence.

Back in the room with Paul, I picked up Ninshubur. “Did you save his life, you poor little bloodstained hound? How’d you do it?”

I inspected the damp plush figure. It was the dog tags I’d given Calia for him. One of them was bent and dimpled where the bullet had struck. They were too soft to stop or deflect a bullet, but maybe they’d helped slow it down.

“I know you’re a piece of evidence, but-I doubt you’d tell a forensics team much. We’ll get you cleaned up and back to your little girl, I think.”

I couldn’t think of a better way to secure Ninshubur than the one Paul had used: I wrapped him in the last piece of sheet, unbuttoned my coveralls, and tucked him inside my blouse. I listened to Paul’s breath and checked my watch: four minutes since I’d called. One more minute and I’d call again.

I got up and looked at the rest of the shrine, wondering what the shooter had wanted so badly that he-or she, of course-had shot Paul to get it. Whoever had rifled Ulrich’s study had looked in here with the same ferocious impatience. The books were hurled open in the same horrifying fashion. I didn’t touch them, in case there were fingerprints, but they seemed to be a major collection of Holocaust writings: memoirs, histories ranging from Elie Wiesel to William Shirer, with everything in between. I saw Lucy Dawidowicz’s War Against the Jews flung against Judith Isaacson’s Seed of Sarah. If Paul had read this stuff day after day, he might have had a hard time distinguishing his memories from everyone else’s.

I was starting down the stairs to use the phone again when I finally heard footsteps in the front hall and a loud shout. “Up here,” I called, taking off the latex gloves and stuffing them in a pocket.

The paramedics trotted up with their stretcher. I directed them to the end of the hall, following so as not to get in their way.

“You his wife?” the medics asked.

“No, a family friend,” I said. “I was supposed to collect something from him and walked in on this-this chaos. He isn’t married, doesn’t have any family that I know of.”

“Can you come to the hospital to fill out the forms?”

“He’s got independent means; he can pay the bill himself if necessary. I think his wallet has something in it about whom to notify in an emergency. What hospital will you take him to?”

“Compassionate Heart-they’re the closest. Go to the reception desk in the ER to fill out the forms when you get there. Can you help take this blanket away? We’re going to shift him to the stretcher.”

When I picked up the comforter, a key fell out-something Paul had been holding that had dropped from his flaccid grasp. I squatted to pick it up while they slid him to the stretcher. Being moved jolted him briefly awake. His eyes flickered open, not quite focusing, and he saw me kneeling at face level.

“Hurts. Who… you?”

“I’m one of Rhea’s friends, Paul, remember?” I said soothingly. “You’re going to be okay. Do you know who shot you?”

“Ilse,” he said on a rasping breath. “Ilse… Bullfin. Rhea. Tell… Rhea. SS know where…”

“Bullfin?” I repeated doubtfully.

“No,” he said, correcting me in a weak, impatient voice. I still couldn’t make out the last name clearly. The paramedics started down the hall: every second counted. I trotted along to the top of the stairs. As they started down, Paul thrashed on the stretcher, trying to focus on me with his cloudy eyes. “Rhea?”

“I’ll make sure she knows,” I said. “She’ll look after you.” It seemed a harmless enough comfort to offer him.