Total Recall

XXXIX Paul Radbuka and the Chamber of Secrets

Radbuka passed out again as soon as he’d taken in my reassurance. The medics told me to stay in the house until the police came, as the cops would want to question me. I smiled and said sure, no problem, and locked the front door behind them. The cops might come at once, in which case I’d be trapped here. But in case I had a few minutes’ grace I ran back up to the hexagonal room.

I pulled the gloves back on, then looked helplessly at the mess on the floor, at the drawers with papers pulled partway out of file folders. In two minutes what could I possibly find?

I noticed a second, smaller map of Europe over the desk, with a route drawn on in thick black marker, starting in Prague, where Paul had written Terezin in a wobbly hand, moving to Auschwitz, then to the southeast coast of England, and finally a heavily drawn arrow pointing west toward America. Berlin, Vienna, and Lodz were all circled, with question marks near them-I guessed he had marked his putative birthplaces and his reconstructed route through wartime Europe to England and America. So? So?

Faster, girl, don’t waste time. I looked at the key that had dropped out of the comforter when the medics moved him. It was an old-fashioned one with squared-off wards-it could be to any kind of old-fashioned lock. Not a file cabinet, but to one of the rooms, a closet, something in the basement or the third floor, where I hadn’t looked? I wouldn’t have time for that.

This room was his shrine. Something in here that the perpetrators hadn’t found? Not a desk lock, too big for that. No closets anywhere I could see. But these old houses always had closets in the bedrooms. I pulled back the drapes, revealing windows in the three pieces of wall that made up a kind of fake turret here. The drapes hung beyond the windows, covering the whole side of the room. I walked behind them and came on the closet door. The key worked in it perfectly.

When I found a pull cord for an overhead light, I could hardly take in what I was looking at. It was a deep, narrow room, with the same ten-foot ceiling as the bedroom. The left-hand wall was covered in pictures, some in frames, some taped, going up well above my head.

A number were photographs of the man who’d been in the picture in the living room, the one I assumed was Ulrich. These had been terribly disfigured. Heavy red and black swastikas covered them, blocking out the eyes, the mouth. On some Paul had written words: You can see nothing because your eyes are covered-how does it feel when someone does it to you? Cry all you want, Schwule, you’ll never get out of here. How do you feel now you’ve been locked in here all alone? You want some food? Beg for it.

The words were venomous but puerile, the work of a child feeling powerless against a horribly powerful adult. In that interview Paul had given on Global TV, he’d said his father used to beat him, used to lock him up. The slogans scrawled on his father’s photographs, were these the words he’d heard when he’d been locked in here? No matter who Paul was, whether he was Ulrich’s son or a Terezin survivor, if he’d been locked in here, heard that torment, small wonder he was so unstable.

It wasn’t clear whether the room was to punish Ulrich or to serve as Paul’s refuge. Interspersed with Ulrich’s disfigured face were pictures of Rhea. Paul had cut them from magazines or newspapers and then apparently taken them to a studio to have prints made-several shots which had been cut out of newsprint were repeated in glossy, framed photographs. Around these he had draped the things he’d lifted from Rhea’s office. Her scarf, one of her gloves, even some pale lavender tissues. The cup he’d taken from the waiting room stood underneath with a wilted rose in it.

He’d also added memorabilia about Max to the wall. It made my stomach ache, seeing the way he’d accumulated information on Max’s family in one short week: there was a set of photographs of the Cellini Ensemble, with Michael Loewenthal’s face circled. Programs from the Chicago concerts they’d given last week. Photocopies of newspaper articles about Beth Israel Hospital, with Max’s quotes circled in red. Maybe Paul had been heading here to add Ninshubur to the shrine when his assailant shot him.

The whole idea of the place was so horrible I wanted to run away from it. I shuddered convulsively but forced myself to keep looking.

Among the pictures of Rhea was a woman I didn’t recognize, a framed five-by-seven photograph in a silver frame. It showed a middle-aged woman in a dark dress, with large dark eyes and heavy brows over a mouth that was smiling in a kind of wistful resignation. A placard he’d attached to the frame said, My savior in England, but she couldn’t save me enough.

Facing the wall of pictures stood a little fold-up bed, shelves of canned food, a ten-gallon water jug, and a number of flashlights. And underneath the cot an accordion file tied up in a black ribbon. A disfigured photograph of Ulrich was glued to the outside, with the triumphant scrawl, I’ve found you out, Einsatzgruppenführer Hoffman.

Dimly, from the world outside the closet, I heard the insistent ring of the front doorbell. It jolted me awake, away from the horrific symbols of Paul’s obsession. I pulled the picture of his English savior from the wall, stuffed it into the accordion folder, jamming the folder inside my shirt, behind the bloody little dog. I ran down the stairs two at a time, bolted down the hall, and flung myself out the kitchen door.

I lay down in the rank grass, thankful for the protection of the bloodstained coverall. The accordion file pushed unpleasantly into my breasts. I inched my way around the side of the house. I could see the tail end of a cop car, but no one was watching the side of the house: they were expecting to find me, the helpful family friend, within. Still lying in the grass, I looked around for the bush where I’d tossed my picklocks. When I’d retrieved them, I crawled stealthily to the back fence, where I shed the bloodstained boiler suit and my kerchief, stuffing the picklocks into the back pocket of my jeans. I found the boards where I’d watched the cat vanish earlier, pried them apart, and shoved my way through.

As I walked down Lake View Street to my car, I joined the crowd of gapers watching the cops force their way into Radbuka’s house. I tsked to myself in disapproval: I could have shown them how to do it in a much neater way. Also, they should have had someone at the side gate, to watch for anyone trying to leave through the back. These were not the best of Chicago ’s finest.

My front felt damp; looking down I saw that Ninshubur had bled through the sheet and onto my blouse. Having discarded my bloodstained coverall to avoid being conspicuous, I now looked as though I’d played the central role in open-heart surgery. I turned away, clasping my arms across my sodden front, feeling Ninshubur squishing against the accordion file.

Bending over as if in intense stomach pain, I jogged the three blocks to my car. I took my shoes off: they were covered in blood, which I didn’t want to transfer to my car. In fact, they were the same crepe-soled shoes I’d worn when I’d stepped in Howard Fepple’s remains on Monday. Maybe it was time to kiss them good-bye. I pulled a brown paper bag from a nearby garbage canister and stuck them into that. I didn’t have an alternate pair in the trunk, but I could go home and change. I found an old towel in the trunk and a rather rank T-shirt left over from pickup softball this past summer. I pulled the shirt over my bloodstained blouse. Inside the car, I took out the faithful hound and wrapped him in the towel on the seat next to me. His brown glass eyes stared at me balefully.

“You are still a hero, but one badly in need of a bath. And I need to call Tim to tell him about Radbuka.”

Morrell had only been gone two days, and I was already talking to stuffed animals. Not a good sign. Back at Racine Avenue I ran up the stairs in my stocking feet, Ninshubur clutched tightly in one hand.

“Peroxide for you, my friend.” I found the bottle under the sink and poured it liberally onto Ninshubur’s head. It foamed up around his brown eyes. I took a brush and scrubbed hard all over his head and chest, murmuring, “Can this little paw ever be sweet again?”

I left him to soak in a pan of cold water, while I went into the bathroom to turn on the taps in the bathtub. Like the faithful dog Ninshubur, I was smeared in blood. I’d take my blouse-a beloved soft cotton in my favorite dark gold-to the cleaners, but the bra-the rose-and-silver bra Morrell had liked-I bundled into a plastic bag for the garbage. I couldn’t stand the thought of Paul’s blood against my breasts, even if I could get those brown stains out of the silver lace.

While the tub filled I called Tim Streeter up at Max’s to let him know I had the faithful dog and that Paul would definitely not be in a position to bother them before Calia and Agnes boarded the plane on Saturday.

“I’ve got the dog soaking in a basin of peroxide. I’ll put him in the dryer before I leave the house again, and hope he’ll look respectable enough that he won’t freak out Calia when she gets him back.”

Tim let out a sigh of relief. “But who shot Radbuka?”

“A woman. Paul called her Ilse-I didn’t quite get the last name-it sounded something like Bullfin. I’m utterly baffled. By the way, the police don’t know I was in there, and I’d like them to continue in blissful ignorance.”

“I never heard anything about you knowing where the dude lived,” Tim said. “Dropped the dog on the street, did he, bicycling away?”

I laughed. “Something like that. Anyway, I’m going to take a bath. I’ll come up in a couple of hours. I want to show Max a picture and some other stuff. How’s the kid doing?”

She’d fallen asleep in front of the television, watching Arthur. Agnes, who’d canceled her appointment at the gallery, was curled up on the couch next to her daughter. Tim was standing in the playroom doorway where he could see both of them.

“And Michael’s on his way into town. Agnes called him after this latest incident; he wants to stay close until Agnes and Calia fly home on Saturday. He’s already in the air, landing at O’Hare in an hour or so.”

“Even so, I think you should hang on, although there probably isn’t any other risk to Calia,” I said. “Just in case that prize fanatic Posner decides to carry on for his fallen disciple.”

He agreed, but added that baby-sitting was harder work than moving furniture. “I’d rather carry a grand piano up three flights of stairs. At least when you got there you’d know where the piano was, and you’d be done for the day.”

I switched my house phone over to the answering service while I soaked, obsessively sponging my breasts as if blood had seeped through the pores of my skin. I shampooed my hair several times as well before I finally felt clean enough to leave the tub.

Wrapped in a terry cloth robe, I returned to the living room: I’d dropped the accordion file on the piano bench when I’d run into the apartment. For a long moment I stared down at Ulrich’s disfigured face, which looked even worse for the blood that had seeped onto it.

I’d been wanting to see these papers since Paul showed up at Max’s last Sunday. Now that they were within my reach I almost couldn’t bear to read them. They were like the special present of my childhood birthdays-sometimes wonderful, like the year I got roller skates, sometimes a disappointment, like the year I longed for a bicycle and got a concert dress. I didn’t think I could bear to open the file and find, well, another concert dress.

I finally undid the black ribbon. Two leather-bound books fell out. On the front of each was stamped in peeling gold letters Ulrich Hoffman. So that was why Rhea Wiell had smirked at me: Ulrich was his first name. I could have called every Ulrich who’d ever lived in Chicago and never found Paul’s father.

A black ribbon hung from the middle of one of the books. I set the other down and opened this one to its marker. The paper, and the ornate script on it, looked much the same as the fragment I’d found in Howard Fepple’s office. A person who was fond of himself, that was what the woman at Cheviot Labs had said, using expensive paper for keeping accounting notes. A domestic bully, king only of the tiny empire of his son? Or an SS man in hiding?

The page I was looking at held a list of names, at least twenty, maybe thirty. Even in the difficult script, one name in particular halfway down the page caught my eye:

Next to it, in a hand so heavy it cut through the paper, Paul had written in red, Sofie Radbuka. My mother, weeping for me, dying for me, in heaven all these years praying for me.

My skin crawled. I could hardly bear to look at the page. I had to treat it as a problem, a conundrum, like the time in the PD when I’d represented a man who had skinned his own daughter. His day in court where I did my best, my God, because I’d managed to dissociate myself and treat it as a problem.

All the entries followed the same format: a year with a question mark, and then a number. The only variation I saw was that some had a cross followed by a check mark, others just a cross.

Did this mean they had died in 1943, or ’41? With 72 or 45 something.

I opened the second book. This one held similar information to the scrap I’d found in Fepple’s office, columns of dates, all written European style, most filled in with check marks, while some were blank. What had Howard Fepple been doing with a piece of Ulrich Hoffman’s old Swiss paper?

I sat down hard on the piano bench. Ulrich Hoffman. Rick Hoffman. Was that Paul Radbuka’s father? The old agent from Midway with his Mercedes, and the books he carried around with him to check off who paid him? Whose son had an expensive education, but never amounted to anything? But-had he sold insurance in Germany as well? The man who’d owned these books was an immigrant.

I dug Rhonda Fepple’s number out of my briefcase. Her phone rang six times before the answering machine picked up, with Howard Fepple’s voice eerily asking for me to leave a message. I reminded Rhonda that I was the detective who had been to her house on Monday. I asked her to call me as soon as possible, giving her my cell-phone number, then went back to stare at the books again. If Rick Hoffman and Ulrich were the same man, what did these books have to do with insurance? I tried to match the entries with what I knew of insurance policies, but couldn’t make sense of them. The front of the first book was filled with a long list of names, with a lot of other data that I couldn’t decipher.

The list went on for pages. I shook my head over it. I squinted at the difficult ornate writing, trying to interpret it. What about it had made Paul decide Ulrich was with the Einsatzgruppen? What was it about the name Radbuka that had persuaded him it was his? The papers were in code, he’d screamed at me outside the hospital yesterday-if I believed in Rhea I’d understand it. What had she seen when he’d shown these pages to her?

And finally, who was the Ilse Bullfin who had shot him? Was she a figment of his imagination? Had it been a garden-variety housebreaker whom he thought was the SS? Or was it someone who wanted these journals? Or was there something else in the house that the person had taken as she-he-whoever-tossed all those papers around.

Even laying out these questions on a legal pad at my dining room table didn’t help, although it did make me able to look at the material more calmly. I finally put the journals to one side to see if there was anything else in the file. An envelope held Ulrich’s INS documents, starting with his landing permit on June 17, 1947, in Baltimore, with son Paul Hoffman, born March 29, 1941, Vienna. Paul had X’d this out, saying, Paul Radbuka, whom he stole from England. The documents included the name of the Dutch ship they had arrived on, a certification that Ulrich was not a Nazi, Ulrich’s resident-alien permits, renewed at regular intervals, his citizenship papers, granted in 1971. On these, Paul had smeared, Nazi War Criminal: revoke and deport for crimes against humanity. Paul had said on television that Ulrich wanted a Jewish child to help him get into the States, but there wasn’t any reference to Paul’s religion, or to Ulrich’s, in the landing documents.

My brain would work better if I got some rest. It had been a long day, what with finding Paul’s body and his unnerving refuge. I thought of him again as a small child, locked in the closet, terrified, his revenge now as puny as when he’d been a child.