Total Recall

XLVI Ancient History

In my car, I turned my phone back on and called Amy Blount. “I have a different question for you today. The section of your Ajax history where you talked about Edelweiss-where did you get that material?”

“The company gave it to me.”

I made a U-turn, one hand on the wheel, one on the phone. I braked to avoid a cat that suddenly streaked across the road. A little girl followed, screaming its name. The car fishtailed. I dropped the phone and pulled over to the curb, my heart pounding. I had been lucky not to hit the girl.

“Sorry-I’m demented right now, trying to do too many things at once, and driving stupidly,” I said when I’d recovered enough to reestablish the connection. “Were these archival records? Financials, anything like that?”

“A summary of financials. All they wanted on Edelweiss was that little bit at the end. The book is really about Ajax, so I didn’t see the need to look at Edelweiss archives.” She was defensive.

“What was in the summary?”

“High-level numbers. Assets and reserves, principal offices. Year-by-year, though. I don’t remember the details. I suppose I could ask the Ajax librarian.”

A couple of men came out of a derelict courtyard. They looked at the Mustang and then at me and gave a thumbs-up gesture for both of us. I smiled and waved.

“I need a way to find out if they had an office in Vienna before the war.” Edelweiss’s numbers didn’t matter, come to think of it: maybe they really had been a small regional player in the thirties. But they could still have been selling insurance to people who were obliterated in the war’s blistering furnaces.

“The Illinois Insurance Institute has a library which might have something that would help you,” Amy Blount suggested. “I used it when I was doing research for the Ajax book. They have a strange hodgepodge of old insurance documents. They’re in the Insurance Exchange building, you know, on West Jackson.”

I thanked her and hung up. My phone rang as I was negotiating the merge onto the Ryan at Eighty-seventh, but nearly hitting that child a few minutes ago made me keep my attention on the road. Although I couldn’t stop speculating about Edelweiss. They bought Ajax, a coup, acquiring America ’s fourth-largest property-casualty insurer at fire-sale prices. And then found themselves facing legislation demanding recovery of Holocaust-era assets, including life-insurance policies. Their investment could have turned from gold mine to bankruptcy court if they had a huge arrears of unpaid life-insurance claims all coming due at once.

Swiss banks were fighting tooth and claw to keep heirs of Holocaust victims from claiming assets deposited in the frantic years before the war. European insurers were stonewalling just as hard. It must be relatively rare for children to know their parents had insurance. Even if others, like Carl, had been sent downstairs with money to pay the agent, I was betting he was unusual in knowing what company held his father’s policy. When my father died, it was only on going through his papers that I found his life insurance.

When not only your family, but your house, maybe even your entire town, has been obliterated-you’d have no records to turn to. And if you did, the company would treat you the way it had Carl: denying the claim because you couldn’t present a death certificate. They really were a prize group of bastards, those banks and insurers.

My phone rang again, but I picked it up only to switch it off. If those books of Hoffman’s contained a list of life-insurance policies bought by people like Carl’s father or Max’s, people who died in Treblinka or Auschwitz, it wasn’t such a large list that Edelweiss would lose much from paying the claims. All it would do is give several hundred people the knowledge that their parents or grandparents had bought policies and give them the policy numbers. It wasn’t as if there’d be a stampede on Edelweiss assets.

Unless, of course, states began passing Holocaust Asset Recovery Acts, such as the one Ajax torpedoed last week. The company would have had to make an audited search of its policy files-of all the hundred or so companies that made up the Ajax group, now including Edelweiss-and prove that it wasn’t sitting on policies belonging to the dead of the war in Europe. That might have cost them a bundle.

Would Fepple have grasped this possibility? Could he have found enough information in Aaron Sommers’s file to use it in an attempt at blackmail? He’d been excited at a way to make money. If this was it, was it a big enough reason for someone at Ajax to kill him? And who would have been the triggerman? Ralph? The jolly Bertrand? His soft-as-steel wife?

I accelerated around a couple of triple-trailer semis, impatient to start gathering any kind of information. Right now I was building a house from cards; I needed facts, good hard mortar and cement. Turning onto Jackson Boulevard, heading east into the Loop, I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel in an agony of impatience at every stoplight. Just west of the river, under the shadow of Union Station and its disreputable surrounding bars, I found an empty meter. I jammed in a fistful of quarters and ran the four blocks east to the Insurance Exchange.

The exchange is a tired old building near the southwest corner of the Loop, and the Illinois Insurance Institute proved to be one of the tireder offices in it. Old-fashioned hanging lights held a couple of malfunctioning fluorescent bulbs, which blinked in an irritating way on the woman who sat inside the entrance. She squinted up at me from a mailing she was assembling, like an owl who isn’t used to seeing strangers in its neck of the forest. When I explained that I was trying to find out how big Edelweiss Insurance had been in the 1930’s and whether they’d had an office in Vienna, she sighed and put down the sheaf of papers she was folding.

“I don’t know that kind of thing. You can look in the library if you want, but I’m afraid I can’t take time to help you.”

She pushed back her chair and opened the door to a murky room in the back. It was stuffed beyond the fire-code limit with shelves of books and papers.

“Things are kind of in chronological order,” she said, waving an arm vaguely toward the left corner. “The further back you go in time the more likely they are to be in order-most people only come here to consult current documents, and it’s hard for me to find the time to keep them organized. It would be a real help if you’d leave everything in the same shape you find it. If you want copies of anything, you can use my machine, but it’s a dime a page.”

The ringing phone sent her scurrying back to the front room. I went to the corner she’d waved at. For such a small space, it held a depressing amount of material-shelves of National Underwriter and Insurance Blue Books; speeches to the American Insurance Institute; addresses to international insurance congresses; hearings before the U.S. Congress to see whether ships sunk in the Spanish-American War had to be covered under marine policies.

I moved along as fast as I could, using a set of rolling stairs to climb up and down, until I found the section with documents dating to the 1920’s and ’30’s. I flipped through them. More speeches, more congressional hearings, this time on insurance benefits for World War I veterans. My hands were black with dust when I suddenly found it: a squat fat book, whose blue cover had faded to grey. Le Registre des Bureaux des Compagnies d’Assurance Européennes, printed in Genève in 1936.

I don’t read French well-unlike Spanish, it’s not close enough to Italian for me to follow a novel-but a list of European insurance-company offices didn’t demand a linguist. I was almost holding my breath when I took it underneath the dim lamp in the middle of the room, where I squinted painfully at the tiny print. The book’s organization was difficult to figure out in bad light, in a language I didn’t know, but I finally saw they had grouped offices by country and then by asset size.

In Switzerland the biggest company in 1935 had been Nesthorn, followed by Swiss Re, Zurich Life, Winterer, and a bunch of others. Edelweiss was far down on the list, but it had a footnote, which was in even smaller type than the body of the report. Even tilting the page to see it under different light, holding it so close to my nose I sneezed a half dozen times, I couldn’t make out the tiny print. I looked toward the front room. The overworked factotum was apparently still stuffing letters into envelopes; it would be a shame to disturb her by asking to borrow the book. I tucked it into my briefcase, thanked her for her help, and told her I’d probably be back in the morning.

“What time do you open up?”

“Usually not until ten, but Mr. Irvine, he’s the executive director, he sometimes comes in in the mornings…Oh, my, look at your lovely jacket. I’m sorry, everything in there is so filthy, but it’s just me; I don’t have time to dust all those old books.”

“That’s okay,” I said heartily. “It will clean.” I hoped: my lovely silk-wool herringbone now looked as though it had been dyed grey by an inexpert hand.

I ran all the way back to my car and could hardly bear the traffic that slowed me on my way back to my office. At my desk, I used a magnifying glass to pick my way through the French footnote as best I could: the acquisition recent of Edelweiss A.G. by Nesthorn A.G., the most big company in Switzerland, would appear in the year following, when the Edelweiss numbers would not be something-seen? available? It didn’t matter. Until that time, something something company reportage would be independent.

A merger between Nesthorn and Edelweiss, and now the company was called Edelweiss. I didn’t understand that part, but I went on to the listing of offices. Edelweiss had three, one each in Basel, Zurich, and Bern. Nesthorn had twenty-seven. Two in Vienna. One in Prague, one in Bratislava, three in Berlin. They had an office in Paris, which had done a brisk business. The Viennese office, on Porzellangasse, had led the pack of twenty-seven in sales, with a 1935 volume almost thirty percent greater than any of its closest competitors. Had that been Ulrich Hoffman’s territory, riding around on his bicycle, entering names in his ornate script? Doing a land-office business among families worried that the anti-Jewish laws in Germany would soon affect them, as well?

Those numbers in Ulrich’s books that started with N could be Nesthorn life-insurance policies. And after the merger with Edelweiss-I turned to my computer and logged on to Lexis-Nexis.

The results for my previous search on Edelweiss were there, but these were only contemporary documents. I scanned them anyway. They told me about the acquisition of Ajax, Edelweiss’s decision to participate in a forum on European insurance companies and dormant Holocaust life-insurance policies. There were reports on third-quarter earnings, reports on their acquisition of a London merchant bank. The Hirs family was still the majority shareholder with eleven percent of the outstanding shares. So the H on Fillida Rossy’s china was her grandfather’s name. The grandfather with whom she used to ski those difficult slopes in Switzerland. A reckless risk-taker behind her soft voice and fussing over rosemary rinses for her daughter’s golden mane.

I saved this set of results and started a new search, looking for old background on Nesthorn and Edelweiss. The database didn’t go back far enough for articles about the merger. I let the phone ring through to my answering service as I struggled with a vocabulary and grammar too complex for my primitive ability.

La revue de l’histoire financière et commerciale for July 1979 had an article that seemed to be about German companies trying to establish markets in the countries they had occupied during the war. Le nouveau géant économique was making its neighbors nervous. In one paragraph, the article commented that, on voudrait savoir, the biggest company of insurance Swiss had changed its name from Nesthorn to Edelweiss, because there are too many persons who remember them from their histoire peu agréable.

Their less-agreeable history, would that be? Surely that didn’t refer to selling life insurance whose claims they wouldn’t pay. It must have to do with something else. I wondered if the other articles explained what. I attached them to an e-mail to Morrell, who reads French.

Do either of these articles explain what Nesthorn Insurance did in the forties that made them less agreeable to their European neighbors? How are you coming with getting a permit to travel to the northwest frontier? I hit the SEND key, thinking how strange it was that Morrell, thirteen thousand miles away, could see my words at virtually the same time I sent them.

I leaned back in my chair, eyes closed, seeing Fillida Rossy at dinner, stroking the heavy flatware with the H engraved on the handle. What she owned she touched, clutched-or what she touched, she owned. That restless smoothing of her daughter’s hair, her son’s pajama collar-she had stroked my own hand in the same disquieting way when she brought me forward to meet her guests on Tuesday night.

Could she feel so possessive of the Edelweiss company that she would kill to safeguard it from claimants? Paul Hoffman-Radbuka had been so certain it was a woman who had shot him. Fierce, sunglasses, big hat. Could that have been Fillida Rossy? She was certainly commanding enough behind her languid exterior. I remembered Bertrand Rossy changing his tie after her soft comment that it was rather bold. Her friends, too, had hurried to make sure nothing in the conversation annoyed her.

On the other hand, Alderman Durham kept swimming around the submerged rocks of the story. My client’s cousin Colby, who had done lookout duty for the break-in at Amy Blount’s place and who had fingered my client to the police, was on the fringes of Durham ’s EYE team. The meeting between Durham and Rossy on Tuesday-had Rossy agreed to kill the Holocaust Asset Recovery Act in exchange for Durham giving him a hit woman who could shoot Paul Hoffman-Radbuka? Durham was such a wily political creature, it was hard to believe he’d do something that would so lay him open to blackmail. Nor could I see a sophisticated man like Rossy getting himself tangled up in a hired-murder rap. It was hard to understand why either of them would involve the other in something as crude as the break-in at Amy Blount’s.

I called Durham ’s office. The alderman’s secretary asked who I was, what I wanted.

“I’m an investigator,” I said. “Mr. Durham and I met briefly last week. I’m sorry to say that some of the people on the fringe of his extremely wonderful Empower Youth Energy project have shown up as part of a murder investigation I’m working on. Before I give their names to the police, I wanted to do the alderman the courtesy of letting him hear about them from me first.”

The secretary put me on hold. As I waited, I thought again about the Rossys. Maybe I could take a quick run up there to see if the maid, Irina, would talk to me. If she could give the Rossys an alibi for last Friday night, well, it would at least eliminate them from consideration as Fepple’s murderers.

Durham ’s secretary came back to the phone. The alderman was in committee meetings until six; he’d meet me at his South Side office at six-thirty before going to a community church meeting. I didn’t want to be alone on Durham ’s home turf the way things were shaping up; I told the secretary I’d be at the Golden Glow at six-fifteen. Durham could see me on my ground.