Total Recall

XLII Lotty’s Perfect Storm

I stared out the kitchen window at the dark garden. The same person who shot Paul must have broken into Rhonda Fepple’s house. They-she? Ilse Wölfin?-had killed Fepple. Not because of the Sommers file, but for some altogether different reason-to get the fragment from Ulrich Hoffman’s ledgers I’d found in Fepple’s bag. And then they’d careened around Chicago, looking for the rest of the books.

Howard Fepple, excited over the next big thing that was going to make him rich, had put the bite on a lethal hand. I shook my head. Fepple didn’t know about Hoffman’s journals: he’d gotten roused by something he saw in the Sommers policy file. He’d been excited, he’d told his mother she’d be driving a Mercedes of her own, he’d found out how Rick Hoffman made money from his lousy client list. Not because of the ledgers.

Behind me I heard raised voices, the front door slam, a car start.

Could it be simpler than that? Could Paul Hoffman-Radbuka have murdered Fepple? Maybe he was deluded enough to imagine that Fepple was part of his father’s Einsatzgruppe. But then-who had shot Paul? I couldn’t make sense of any of it. Gerbil on treadmill, going round and round. What had Fepple noticed that I wasn’t getting? Or what paper had he seen that his murderer had taken away? These secret papers of Paul’s which I thought would explain everything had only left me more confused.

I went back to an earlier issue. There had been an Aaron Sommers on the fragment of Ulrich’s journals I’d found in Fepple’s bag. Was that my client’s uncle? Or had there been two Aaron Sommerses-one Jewish, one black?

Connie Ingram had talked to Fepple. That was a point of certainty-even if she’d never gone to see him, she had spoken to him. He had entered her name in his appointment software. Maybe she really had gone to Fepple’s office-under Ralph’s orders? I recoiled from the thought. Under Rossy’s orders? If I showed Connie Ingram a copy of Ulrich’s journals, would she tell me whether she’d seen something like this in Fepple’s copy of the Sommers file?

I went back to the living room. Lotty had left.

“She gets more bizarre every time I see her,” Carl complained. “She looked at that page where your lunatic had written in red that Sofie Radbuka was his mother in heaven, made a melodramatic speech, and took off.”

“To do what?”

“She decided to go visit the therapist, Rhea Wiell,” Max said. “Frankly, I think it’s high time someone talked to the woman. That is, I know you’ve tried to do so, Victoria, but Lotty-she’s in a professional position to confront her.”

“Is Lotty going to try to see Rhea tonight?” I asked. “It’s a little late to pay an office visit, I’d think. Her home address is unlisted.”

“Dr. Herschel was going to go to her own clinic,” Tim said from the corner where he’d been silently watching the rest of us. “She said she had some kind of directory in her office that ought to provide Ms. Wiell’s home address.”

“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.”