Total Recall

XLIII Bedside Manners

Compassionate 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.”

“I have Ulrich’s journals,” Lotty said. “I will keep them safe for you, until you are able to look after them again. But I’m wondering if you can answer a question for me about them. You wrote a note in them, next to S. Radbuka’s name, that Sofie Radbuka was your mother. I’m wondering how you know that.”

“I remembered it,” he said.

I moved next to Lotty and matched my tone to hers. “When you took Ulrich’s journals to Rhea, she helped you remember that Radbuka was your real name, didn’t she, Paul? There was a long list of names-Czestvo, Vostok, Radbuka, and many others. When she hypnotized you, you remembered that Radbuka was your real name. That must have been a very wonderful but very frightening moment.”

Across the bed from us, Don gasped and moved involuntarily away from Rhea, who said to him, “It wasn’t like that. This is why this conversation must stop now.”

Paul, intent on my question, didn’t hear her. “Yes, yes, it was. I could see-all the dead. All the people Einsatzgruppenführer Hoffman had murdered, falling into the lime pit, screaming-”

Lotty interrupted him. “You have to stay calm, Paul. Don’t dwell on those painful memories right now. You remembered that past, and then out of all that list of names, you chose-you remembered-Radbuka.”

Across the bed, Rhea looked murderous. She tried again to halt the interview, but Paul’s attention was focused on Lotty, not her.

“I knew, because I’d been in England as a small boy. It had to be.”

“Had to be?” Lotty asked.

He was very sensitive to people’s emotions; when he heard the unexpected harshness in her voice he flinched and looked away. Before he could get too upset I changed the subject.

“What led you to know Ulrich was an Einsatzgruppenführer?”

“He listed the dead in each family or shtetl that he was responsible for murdering,” he whispered. “Ulrich… always bragged about the dead. The way he bragged about torturing me. I survived all that killing. My mother threw me into the woods when she saw them starting to push people with their bayonets into the lime pit. Some person took me to Terezin, but of course… I didn’t know then… that was where we were going. Ulrich must have known… one person got away from him. He… found me in England… brought me here… to torture me over and over… for the crime of surviving.”

“You were very brave,” I said. “You stood up to him, you survived. He’s dead. Did you know about those books of his before he died?”

“They were… locked up… in his desk. Living room. He… beat me… when I looked… in those drawers… when I was small… When he died… I took… and kept… in my special place.”

“And someone came today to get those books?”

“Ilse.” He said, “Ilse Wölfin. I knew. She… came… to the door. First she was friendly. Learned from Mengele. Friends first… then torture. She said… she was from Vienna. Said Ulrich took these books to America… shouldn’t have… after the war. I didn’t understand at first… then… I tried to get… to my secret place… hide from her… pulled out her gun first.”

“What did she look like?” I asked, ignoring an impatient aside from Lotty to stop.

“Fierce. Big hat. Sunglasses. Horrible smile.”

“When he was selling insurance, here in Chicago, did Ulrich talk to you about these books?” I asked, trying to figure out a way to ask if he’d been at the Midway Agency lately, wondering if he’d been stalking Howard Fepple.

“The dead give us life, Ulrich used to say. Remember that… you will be rich. He wanted me… be… doctor… wanted me… make money from the dead… I didn’t want… to live among… dead. I didn’t want to stay in… closet… Tortured me… called me sissy, queer, always in German, always… in language of… slavery.” Tears started to seep down his face; his breath began coming in labored spurts.

Lotty said, “You need to rest, you need to sleep. We want you to recover. I’m going to leave you now, but before I go, who did you talk to in England? What helped you remember your name was Radbuka?”

His eyes were shut, his face drawn and grey. “His tally of the dead he’d killed himself… bragged in his books… listed their names. Searched each name… on the Internet… Found one… in England… Sofie… Radbuka… how I knew… which name mine… and that I was sent to Anna Freud in England… after the war… Had to be.”

Lotty kept her hand on his pulse while he fell asleep. The rest of us watched dumbly while Lotty checked the IV drips coming into his arms. When she left the room, Rhea and I followed. Hot spots of color burned in Rhea’s face; she tried to confront Lotty in the hall, but Lotty swept past her to the nurse’s station, where she asked for the charge nurse. She began an interrogation about the drugs Paul was getting.

Don had come out of Paul’s room more slowly than the rest of us. He started a low-voiced conversation with Rhea, his face troubled. Lotty finished with the charge nurse and sailed on down the hall to the elevator. I ran after her, but she looked at me sternly.

“You should have saved your questions, Victoria. There were specific things I was trying to learn, but your questions sidetracked him and finally got him too upset. I wanted to know how he latched on to Anna Freud as his savior, for instance.”

I got in the elevator with her. “Lotty, enough of this crap. Isn’t pushing Carl into the void enough? Do you want to drive Max and me away from you, as well? You got angry the first time Paul mentioned England; I was trying to keep you from losing him. And also-we know what those journals meant to Paul Hoffman. I’d like to know what they meant to Ulrich. Where are they, by the way? I need them.”

“For right now, you’ll have to do without them.”

“Lotty, I can’t do without them. I need to find out what they mean to people who don’t see the dead in them. Someone shot Paul for them. It may be that this fierce woman in sunglasses killed an insurance agent named Howard Fepple for them. His mother’s house was broken into on Tuesday. Someone searched it, probably for these notebooks.”

Amy Blount, I suddenly thought. Her place had been burgled on Tuesday, also. Surely it was too big a coincidence to think it wasn’t connected to these Hoffman journals. She had seen the Ajax archives. What if the fierce woman in sunglasses thought Ulrich Hoffman’s books had landed in the archives and thought perhaps Amy Blount hadn’t been able to resist them? Which meant-it was someone who knew Amy Blount had been in those archives. It all came back to the folks at Ajax. Ralph. Rossy. And Durham on the sideline.

“Anyway,” I added aloud, as the elevator doors opened onto the lobby, “if they mean that much to someone, you’re risking a lot by holding on to them.”

“That is definitely my lookout, not yours, Victoria. I’ll return them to you in a day or so. There’s something I need to look for in them first.” She turned on her heel and stalked away from me, following a hallway signposted to the doctors’ parking area.

Don and Rhea appeared from another elevator, Don saying, “Don’t you see, sweetheart, this lays you open to the kind of criticism people like Praeger make, that you lead people to these memories.”

“He knew he had been in England after the war,” she said. “That isn’t something I thought of or led him to. And those memories of the lime pits-Don, if you’d been there-I’ve listened to many bone-chilling memories from my patients, but I’ve never wept before. I’d always kept my professional detachment. But to see your own mother thrown alive into a pit she’d been forced at gunpoint to fill with lime, to hear those screams-and then to know that the man responsible for your own mother’s death had such power over you, locking you into a small closet, beating you, taunting you-it was utterly shattering.”

“I can see that,” I said, breaking into this private conversation. “But there are so many curious leaps in his story. Even if Ulrich somehow knew this one small boy escaped the lime pit, how did he keep track of him all through the vicissitudes of war, first in Terezin and then to England? If Ulrich really was an Einsatzgruppenführer, he’d have had plenty of chances to kill the kid during the war. But on Ulrich’s landing papers, it says they docked in Baltimore from a Dutch merchant ship which sailed from Antwerp.”

“That doesn’t mean he didn’t start from England,” Rhea said. “As for your other point, a man with a guilty conscience might do anything. Ulrich is dead; we can’t ask him why he was so obsessed by this small boy. But we know he thought having a Jewish child would help him get past immigration problems in America. So if he knew where Paul was, it was natural for him to take him, pretending to be his father.”

“Ulrich had an official denazification certificate,” I objected. “Nor was there any mention of Paul’s Jewishness in the landing documents.”

“Ulrich probably destroyed those once he was here and felt safe from prosecution,” Rhea said.

I sighed. “You have a pat answer for everything, but Paul has a shrine to the Holocaust; it’s filled with books and articles on survivor experiences. If he’s immersed himself in these, he could be confusing other people’s histories with his own past. After all, he says he was only twelve months old when he was sent to Terezin. Would he really know what he’d been seeing, if in fact he had witnessed his mother and the rest of his town being murdered in the way he describes?”

“You know nothing about psychology, or about survivors of torture,” Rhea said. “Why don’t you stick to the things you know about, whatever those might be.”

“I do understand Vic’s point, Rhea,” Don said. “We need to talk seriously about your book. Unless there’s something specific in these journals of Ulrich’s, saying This boy I brought with me is not my son, he’s someone named Radbuka-well, I need to examine them in detail.”

“Don, I thought you were on my side,” Rhea said, her myopic eyes filling with tears.

“I am, Rhea. That’s why I don’t want you to expose yourself by publishing a book that has holes someone like Arnold Praeger and the Planted Memory folks can find so easily. Vic, I know you’re guarding the originals like the national vault, but would you let me examine them? I could do so in your office, under your eye.”

I made a face. “Lotty’s walked off with them, which makes me angry, but also worried-if Paul was shot by someone looking for them, they’re about as safe to lug around as naked plutonium. She’s promised to return them by the weekend. I did copy about a dozen pages and you can look at those, but-I understand the problem.”

“Well, that’s just dandy,” Don said, exasperated. “How did you get hold of all this material to begin with? How do you know about Paul’s shrine? You were in his house, weren’t you?”

I nodded reluctantly-the situation was past the point where I could keep my presence on the scene a secret. “I found him right after he’d been shot and got the ambulance to him. The place had been ransacked, but he had a closet hidden behind the drapes in his Holocaust shrine. His assailant didn’t think to look there. It was a truly dreadful place.”

I described it again, the wall of photographs, the telltale balloon comments coming out of Ulrich’s mouth. “Those things you say he took from your office, Rhea, they were there, draped around pictures of you.”

“I’d like to see it,” Don said. “Maybe there’s some other crucial piece of evidence you overlooked.”

“You could go in, and welcome,” I said. “Once is enough for me.”

“Neither of you has a right to violate Paul’s privacy by going into his house,” Rhea said coldly. “All patients idealize their therapists to some extent. Ulrich was such a monstrous father that Paul juxtaposes me against him as an idealized form of the mother he never knew. As for your going into the house, Vic-you called me this morning wanting his address. Why do that if you knew where he lived? If he’d been shot, how did you get inside? Are you sure you weren’t the woman down there shooting him, because of your rage over his wanting to prove a close relationship with your friends?”

“I didn’t shoot the little goober, even though he was acting like a great pain in the neck,” I said softly, my eyes hot. “But I do have a sample of his blood now, on my clothes. I can send it out for a DNA profile. That will prove once and for all whether he’s related to Max-or Carl or Lotty.”

She stared at me in dismay. I pushed brusquely past her before she or Don could speak.