Total Recall

XLIV The Lady Vanishes

I wondered if Paul was safe in his hospital room. If Ilse the She-Wolf learned he had survived her shot, would she come back to finish the job? I couldn’t ask for a police posting without explaining about Ulrich’s journals. And my mind boggled at the task of trying to make the cops understand that story, especially when I didn’t fully understand it myself. I finally compromised by going back to the fifth floor to tell the charge nurse that my brother was scared of his attacker coming back to kill him.

“We worry about Paul,” I said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he lives in a world of his own. He thinks the Nazis are after him. Did Dr. Herschel tell you when she was talking to you that it would be best if no one goes in to see him unless I, or his doctor, or the therapist Rhea Wiell is here, as well? He’ll get so agitated that he could get into serious respiratory difficulties right now.”

She told me to write up something for the nursing station. She let me use her computer in the back room, then taped my message up at the station and said she would make sure the central switchboard routed any calls or visitors to them.

Before going home, I went to my own office to send Morrell an e-mail, recounting the events of the day. So far no one has beaten me up and left me to die on the Kennedy, I wrote, but I’ve been having a strenuous time. I finished with an account of the conversation in Paul’s hospital room. You’ve done so much work with torture victims-could this be a dissociative protection, identifying with victims of the Holocaust? The whole situation is really spooky.

I ended with the messages of love and longing one sends to distant lovers. What had sustained Lotty over the years against such feelings? Had her sense of torment made her think she deserved loneliness and longing? When I got home, I sat on the back porch with Mr. Contreras and the dogs for a long time, not talking much, just drawing comfort from their presence.

In the morning, I decided it was time to visit Ajax Insurance again. I phoned Ralph from my own office and talked to his secretary, Denise. As usual, his calendar was full; once again I pleaded my case forcefully but with charm and goodwill; once again, Denise arranged to fit me in, twenty minutes from now if I could get to Ajax by nine-thirty. I grabbed my briefcase with the photocopies from Ulrich’s journals and ran down to the corner of North for a cab.

When I reached Ralph’s office, Denise told me he would be back from the chairman’s office in two minutes. She settled me in his conference room with a cup of coffee, but Ralph came in almost immediately, pressing his fingers along the corners of his eyes. He looked too tired for this early in the day.

“Hi, Vic. We have a big exposure in the Carolina flood zone. I can give you five minutes, and then I have to move on.”

I laid my photocopies on his conference table. “These are from the journals of Ulrich-Rick-Hoffman, the agent who sold Aaron Sommers his life-insurance policy all those years ago. Ulrich kept what seems to be a list of names and addresses, followed by a set of cryptic initials and check marks. Do they mean anything to you?”

Ralph bent over the papers. “This handwriting is just about impossible to read. Is there any way to get it clearer?”

“Blowing up the image seems to help. Unfortunately I don’t have the originals to work with right now, but I can read some of this-I’ve been looking at it a couple of days.”

“Denise,” he shouted to his secretary. “Can you come here a minute?”

Denise obediently trotted in, not showing any annoyance at the peremptory summons, and took a couple of sheets to her copier. She came back with various sizes of blowups. Ralph looked at them and shook his head.

“Guy was really cryptic. I’ve seen a lot of agency files and-Denise!” he shouted again. “Call that gal in claims handling, Connie Ingram. Get her up here, will you?”

In his normal tone he added to me, “I just remembered what was odd about that file, that disputed-claim file. Connie’ll know the answer.” He turned to the page showing the names and addresses. “Omschutz, Gerstein-are these names? What’s Notvoy?”

“Nestroy, not Notvoy. A woman I know says it’s a street in Vienna.”

“ Austria, you mean? We had an agent on the South Side selling insurance in Vienna, Austria?”

“It’s possible he started his insurance career there before the war. I don’t know. I was hoping you’d look at these and be able to tell whether they were insurance-related or not. A definite no would be almost as helpful as a definite yes.”

Ralph shook his head, rubbing his forehead again. “I can’t tell you. If it is insurance, these numbers, the 20/w and the 8/w, they could refer to a weekly payment-although, hell, I don’t know the German for week. Maybe it doesn’t start with w. Also, what was the currency? Do these amounts make sense for payment figures? And these others, if this is insurance, they could be policy numbers, although they don’t look like ones that I’m familiar with.”

He held it out to me. “Can you read them? What’s the initial letter, this thing that looks like a bee attacking a flower? And then a string of numbers, and then-is that a q or an o? And then there’s an L. Hell, Vic-I don’t have time for this kind of puzzle. It might be insurance, but I can’t tell. I guess I could ask Rossy-he might know if it’s a European system, but if it dates to before the war-well, they’ve changed all their systems since the war. He’s a young guy, wasn’t even born until 1958-he probably wouldn’t know.”

“I know it seems like it’s just a puzzle,” I responded. “But I think that insurance agent Fepple was killed because of it. Yesterday someone who was probably looking for these papers shot Rick Hoffman’s son.”

Denise came to the conference room door to let Ralph know Connie Ingram had arrived.

“Connie. Come on in. You doing okay? No more interviews with the police, I hope. Look, Connie, that claim file that’s been causing everyone such a headache-Aaron Sommers. There weren’t any personal notes from the agent in it. Something about it bugged me when I picked it up from Mr. Rossy, and looking at these, I remembered that’s what was missing.”

He turned to me to explain. “See, Vic, the agent would work up a sheet, numbers, whatever, he’d have a letter or some notes or something that would end up in the file-we rely on their private assessment, especially in life insurance. Guy can have a doctor in his hip pocket to clear him on a physical, but the agent sees him, sees he lives like me, on French fries and coffee, and tells the company the prospect either isn’t a good risk or needs to be rated higher, or whatever. Anyway, there wasn’t anything in the Sommers file. So, Connie, what’s the story-did you ever see any agent report in that file when you looked at it? He might have had handwriting like this.”

Ralph handed one of the sheets to Connie. Her eyes widened and she put a hand over her mouth.

“What is it, Connie?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said quickly. “This writing is so queer I don’t know how anyone could read it.”

Ralph said, “But did you ever see any notes from the agent-what was his name? Ulrich Hoffman?-either written or typed? You didn’t? You’re sure? What happens when we pay a claim-do we deep-six all the background paper? I find that hard to believe-insurance thrives on paper.”

Denise stuck her head through the doorway. “Your London call, Mr. Devereux.”

“I’ll take it in my office.” Over his shoulder, as he left the conference room, he said, “Lloyds, about these flood losses. Leave the copies there-I’ll show ’ em to Rossy. Connie, think carefully about what you saw in the file.”

I collected my set of copies and handed Denise the blowups she’d made. Connie scuttled out the door while I was thanking Denise for her help. I didn’t see Connie when I got to the elevator: either she’d found a car waiting for her or she was hiding in the women’s bathroom. In case it was the latter, I moved away from the elevators to admire the view of the lake. The executive-floor attendant asked if she could help me; I said I was just collecting my thoughts.

After another five minutes, Connie Ingram appeared, looking around like a scared rabbit. I was tempted to jump out and yell boo, but I waited near the window until the elevator light dinged, then trotted over to get into the car with her as the doors closed.

She looked at me resentfully as she pushed the button for thirty-nine. “I don’t have to talk to you. The lawyer said so. He said to call him if you came around.”

My ears filled as the elevator fell. “You can do it as soon as you get off. Did he also tell you not to talk to Mr. Devereux? Are you going to figure out an answer about whether you saw any agency notes in the file? In case he forgets that he asked-I know he’s got a lot on his mind-I’ll be calling regularly to remind him.”

The door opened at thirty-nine; she shot out without responding to my genial farewell. I took the L back to my office, where I found an e-mail from Morrell.

I realized that even I, who thought I was a sophisticated traveler, had my expectations of the setting shaped by Rudyard Kipling. I wasn’t prepared for the starkness, the grandeur-or most especially the way one feels obliterated by the mountains. You find yourself wanting to make defiant gestures: I’m here, I’m alive, acknowledge me.

As far as your question about Paul Hoffman or Radbuka, of course I am not an expert, but I do think someone who has been tortured, as he apparently was tortured by his father, could become very fragile emotionally. It would be painful to think your own father tortured you-you would imagine there must be something terribly wrong with you that provoked such behavior-children inevitably blame themselves in difficult situations. But if you could believe you were persecuted because of your historic identity-you were a Jew, you were from eastern Europe, you survived the death camps-then it would both glamorize your torture, give it a deeper meaning, and protect you from the pain of believing you were a terrible child whose father was justified in assaulting you. That’s how I see it, at any rate.

My beloved Pepperpot, I already miss you more than I can say. It’s horribly unsettling to have half the population missing from the landscape. I miss not just your face-I miss seeing women’s faces.

I printed out the section that dealt with Paul and faxed it to Don Strzepek at Morrell’s home machine with a scrawl, For what it’s worth. I wondered how Don had left things with Rhea last night. Would he go ahead with his book on recovered memories with her? Or would he wait to see if Max and Lotty wanted to do a DNA match?

That was a mighty thin thread Paul Hoffman had hung his identity on, searching the Web for the names in those insurance records of Ulrich’s until he found a query about one of them. He’d used that thread to attach himself to England immediately after the war.

Thinking about it reminded me of the picture of Anna Freud that Paul had hung in his closet. His savior in England. I called up Max’s house and spoke with Michael Loewenthal-Agnes had been able to reschedule her appointment at the gallery, so he was minding Calia. He went to the living room for me and came back with the name of the biography Lotty had brought down from Max’s study last night.

“We’re coming into Chicago for a last look at the walruses in the zoo; I’ll drop it off at your office. No, with pleasure, Vic-we owe you a lot for your care of our petite monster. But I confess to an ulterior motive: Calia is being a brat about the dog’s collar. We could pick it up.”

I groaned-I’d left the wretched thing in my kitchen. I told Michael if I didn’t get up to Evanston with it tonight I’d mail it to Calia in London.

“Sorry, Vic-no need for that much trouble. I’ll stop by in about an hour with the book. By the way, have you spoken to Lotty? Mrs. Coltrain called from the clinic, concerned because Lotty had canceled all her appointments for today.”

I told him our parting last night had been rocky enough that I hadn’t felt like calling her. But when Michael hung up, I dialed Lotty’s home number. It rang through to her crisp voice on the machine, giving various numbers to use if this was a medical emergency, and urging friends to leave their messages after the tone. I thought uneasily of a lunatic going around town shooting people to get at Hoffman’s journals. But surely the doorman wouldn’t let anyone in who didn’t belong there.

I called Mrs. Coltrain, who was at first relieved to hear from me but became agitated when she found out I didn’t know anything about Lotty’s situation. “When she’s really ill, she does cancel her appointments, of course, but she always talks to me about it.”

“Did someone else call you?” Worry made my voice sharp.

“No, it’s just-she left a message on the office answering machine. I couldn’t believe it when I got in, so I took it on myself to call her at home and then to ask Mr. Loewenthal if she’d said anything to anyone at the hospital. No one there has heard anything, not even Dr. Barber-you know they cover for each other in emergencies. One of Dr. Herschel’s teaching fellows is coming in at noon to look after any acute problems that come up in here, but-if she isn’t ill, where is she?”

If Max didn’t know, nobody did. I told Mrs. Coltrain I’d check in at Lotty’s apartment-neither of us saying it, both of us picturing Lotty lying unconscious on the floor. I found Lotty’s building management in the phone book and got through to the doorman, who hadn’t seen Dr. Herschel today.

“Does someone in the building have keys? Could I get in to see if she’s all right?”

He consulted a list. Lotty had left Max and my names as people to call in any emergency; he guessed the super could let me in if I didn’t have keys. When was I coming? In twenty minutes? He’d get Gerry up from the basement, where he was supervising a boiler-repair crew.

Mary Louise called as I was leaving. She was on the South Side with Gertrude Sommers-yes, the client’s aunt-who wanted to tell me something in person. I’d forgotten about sending Mary Louise down to check on the client’s dubious cousin-I’d left the note for her yesterday afternoon, but so much was going on it seemed like a month ago.

I tried not to sigh audibly. I was tired, and tired of running from one end of Chicago to the other. I told Mary Louise that unless some crisis developed at Lotty’s place, I’d be at Gertrude Sommers’s apartment in about ninety minutes.