Total Recall

XLVII Bourbon, with a Twist

I skimmed through my messages, both in my in-box and on-screen. Michael Loewenthal had dropped off the biography of Anna Freud. The day had been so long I’d completely forgotten that conversation. I had also completely forgotten the little dog tags for Ninshubur.

The biography was too fat for me to read clear through in a quest for Paul Hoffman or Radbuka. I looked at the photographs, at Anna Freud sitting next to her father in a café, at the Hampstead nursery where Lotty had washed dishes during the war. I tried to imagine Lotty as a teenager. She would have been idealistic, ardent, but without the patina of irony and briskness which kept the world at arm’s length from her now.

I flipped to the back to look up Radbuka in the index. The name wasn’t there. I checked concentration camps. The second reference was to a paper Freud had written on a group of six children who came to England from Terezin after the war. Six children aged three and four who had lived together as a little unit, looking after one another, forming a bond so tight that the adult authorities didn’t think they could survive apart. No names were mentioned, no other history. It sounded like the group Hoffman-Radbuka had described in his television interview last week, the group where Ulrich had found him, wrenching him away from his little friend Miriam. Could Paul really have been part of it? Or had he appropriated their story to his own?

I went back on-line to see if I could find a copy of the paper Freud had written about the children, “An Experiment in Group Upbringing.” A central research library in London would fax it to me at the cost of a dime a page. Cheap at the price. I entered a credit-card number and sent the order, then looked at my phone messages. The most urgent seemed to be from Ralph, who had called twice-to my cell phone, when I was heading onto the Ryan three hours ago, and just now, when I’d been trying to decipher the less agreeable part of Nesthorn’s past.

He was in a meeting, naturally, but Denise, his secretary, said he badly wanted to see the originals of the material I had shown him this morning.

“I don’t have them,” I said. “I saw them very briefly yesterday, when I made the copies I gave him, but someone else took them for safekeeping. They’re quite valuable documents, I gather. Is it Bertrand Rossy who’d like to look at them, or Ralph himself?”

“I believe Mr. Devereux showed the blowups I made to Mr. Rossy at a meeting this morning, but Mr. Devereux did not indicate whether Mr. Rossy was interested in them.”

“Will you take this message down exactly as I give it to you? Tell Ralph that it is really, honestly true that I don’t have them. Someone else took them. I have no idea where the person who took them is, nor where that person stowed them. Tell him this is not a joke, it is not a way of stalling him. I want those books as badly as he does, but I don’t know where they are.”

I made Denise read the message back to me. I hoped it would convince Rossy, if it was Rossy pushing on Ralph for them, that I truly didn’t have Ulrich’s books. I hoped I hadn’t fingered Lotty in the process. That thought unnerved me. If I had-I couldn’t take time to sit and fret: if I hustled, I could get to the Rossys’ before my appointment with Durham.

I drove the two miles back to my apartment and took one of my mother’s diamond drops from the safe. Her photograph on the dresser seemed to watch me sternly: my dad had given her those earrings on their twentieth anniversary. I’d gone with him to the Tucker Company on Wabash when he picked them out and put down a deposit, and I’d gone back with him when he made the final payment.

“I won’t lose it,” I told her photograph. I hurried out of the room, away from her eyes. As I passed the bathroom I caught sight of my own face in the mirrored door. I had forgotten the dust that I’d collected at the Insurance Institute. If I was going to be presentable at the Rossy building, I needed a clean jacket. I took a rose wool-rayon weave that hung loosely, concealing the bulge of my shoulder holster. The herringbone I tossed into the hall closet with my bloodstained gold blouse, then I remembered my idea of profiling Paul’s DNA. In case I wanted to pursue that, I wrapped the gold blouse in a clean plastic bag and put it in my bedroom safe.

An apple from the kitchen would have to do for a late lunch: I was too nervous today to sit still for a proper meal. I saw Ninshubur’s collar on the sink and stuck it in my pocket-I’d try to find time to get up to Evanston with that tonight if I could.

I clattered down the stairs, sketched a wave at Mr. Contreras, who stuck his head out the door when he heard me, and drove across Addison, past Wrigley Field, where the vendors were setting up their carts for one of the Cubs’-mercifully-final games of the season.

From a marginally legal parking space outside their building, I called to the Rossy apartment. Fillida Rossy answered the phone. I hung up and leaned back in the front seat to wait. I could give the project until six, when I’d need to leave for my meeting with the alderman.

At four-thirty, Fillida Rossy came through the front door with her children and their nanny, who was carrying a large gym bag. As she had on Tuesday evening, Fillida was fussing endlessly with their clothes, retying the girl’s sash, smoothing the collar outside the boy’s monogrammed sweater. When he jerked away, she started wrapping the girl’s long hair around her hands, all the time talking to the nanny. She herself was dressed in jeans with a crinkly warm-up jacket.

Someone drove a black Lincoln Navigator to the entrance. While the driver put the gym bag into the back, Fillida held both children tightly, apparently giving some last instructions to the nanny. She climbed into the front seat, without acknowledging the man who held the door and put her bag into the car for her. I waited while the children disappeared up the street with the nanny before crossing over to go into the building.

It was a different doorman on duty this afternoon than the one I’d met on Tuesday. “You just missed Mrs. Rossy; no one’s up there but the maid. She speaks English, but not too great,” he said. When I said that I’d lost one of my earrings at dinner and was hoping Mrs. Rossy had found it, he added, “You can see if she’ll understand you.”

I tried to explain over the house phone who I was and what I wanted. My father’s mother spoke Polish, but my dad didn’t, so the language hadn’t been part of my childhood. Still, a few halting phrases got me upstairs, where I showed Irina the earring. She shook her head, starting to give me a long discourse in Polish. I had to apologize and tell her I didn’t understand.

“I all clean on next day, and don’t see nothing. But at party, I hear you speak Italy, I ask why, if your name Warshawska.” She gave it the Polish pronunciation, with the appropriate ending for a woman.

“My mother was Italian,” I explained. “My father was Polish.”

She nodded. “I understand. Children talk like mother talk. In my family, same. In Mrs. Fillida’s family, same. Mr. Rossy, he speak Italy, English, Germania, France, but children, only Italy, English.”

I clucked sympathetically over the fact that no one in the household could communicate with Irina. “Mrs. Rossy is a good mother, is she, always talking to her children?”

Irina threw up her hands. “When she see children, she always holding, always-like-like cat or dog.” She mimed petting. “Clothes, oh, my God, they has beautiful clothes, much much money. I buy all for my children what she pay on one dress for Marguerita. Children much money but not happy. No has friend. Mister, he very good man, happy, always polite. She, no, she cold.”

“But she doesn’t like to leave the children alone, does she?” I doggedly tried to keep the conversation on track. “I mean, they entertain here, but does she go out and leave the children behind?”

Irina looked at me in surprise. Of course Mrs. Rossy left the children. She was rich, she went to the gym, to go shopping, to see friends. It was only when she was home…

“Last Friday I thought I saw her at a dance at the Hilton Hotel. You know, for charity.” I had to repeat the sentence a couple of different ways before Irina understood me.

She shrugged. “Is possible. Was not here, I not know where she and mister going. I in bed early. Not like today when many people coming for dinner.”

My hint to leave. I tried offering her a tip for her help, but she flung up her hands in disgust. She was sorry about my earring: she would keep looking for it.

As I drove up the street, I passed the children returning from their walk. They were punching at each other from either side of the nanny-happy families, as Tolstoy said.

So the Rossys hadn’t been home on Friday night. That didn’t mean they’d been in Hyde Park shooting Howard Fepple. Still, I could see Fillida phoning him, saying her name was Connie Ingram, persuading him she was hot for him. I could see her coming in with him and all the Lamaze parents-perhaps her husband melting into the group as well-twining herself around Fepple in his chair. Bertrand slips into the office, whacks the back of his head, she puts the SIG’s barrel into his mouth. At the spray of blood and bone, she jumps off, places the gun under his chair. She’s cool, but not cool enough to remember to get his hand on the gun so that the morgue will find gunpowder residue on it.

Then she and Bertrand search the office, find the Sommers file, and take off. Yesterday, Fillida went to Hoffman’s house. How had she found the address when I hadn’t been able to? Oh, of course, through Ulrich. They knew his name: they were looking for him, looking for those records of Edelweiss-Nesthorn sales. It must have made Rossy’s eyes jump out of their sockets when Connie Ingram brought the Sommers file up to Ralph’s office last week. The agent he was looking for, Ulrich Hoffman, right under his nose in Chicago. Maybe it took them a while to figure it out, but eventually they realized if he was dead they could still get his address a bunch of different ways. Old phone books, for instance.

I could see all of this happening. But how could I prove any of it? If I had world enough and time, I could probably find they’d gone to Ameritech for old phone books. The cops hadn’t been able to trace the SIG that killed Fepple. Perhaps Fillida’s friend in the Italian consulate had brought it in with her under diplomatic cover. “Laura, darling, I want to bring my guns with me. The Americans are so bizarre about guns-they all carry them the way we do pocketbooks, but they will make my life a misery of forms if I try to carry my own through customs with me.”

As I cruised down Lake Shore Drive for my meeting with Durham, I thought uneasily about Paul Hoffman in his hospital bed. Where had Fillida Rossy been going on a Friday afternoon with her gym bag? Did she work out this late in the day, or did the bag hold a gun for finishing the job on Paul?

At the lights on Chicago Avenue, I called the hospital: there was a block on his room, so they wouldn’t connect me. That was good. Could they give me a status report? His condition had been upgraded to serious.

When I’d found a meter a few blocks south of the Glow, I called Tim Streeter up at Max’s. Max hadn’t come home from work yet-Posner had been back at the hospital today. The demonstrations had been more subdued, but the board was meeting late to discuss the problem.

Tim was bored; they really didn’t need him any longer. If I could get Calia Ninshubur’s collar they would all be happy.

“Oh, that wretched collar.” I told Tim if I couldn’t get up to Evanston tonight, Calia would have to accept receiving it in the mail when she returned home. More important was my dilemma about Paul’s safety, which I explained to him.

Tim said he’d talk to his brother to see if one of the women on their team would look after Paul for a few days. He himself needed a break from bodyguarding: four days of Calia had turned him prematurely white.

When we finished, I leaned my head wearily against the steering wheel. Too much was going on that I didn’t understand and couldn’t control. Where had Lotty gone? She’d stalked angrily off into the night last night, driven home-and disappeared. I dialed her apartment, where her clipped voice came on again from the machine. “Lotty, please call me if you are picking up your messages. I’m seriously worried.” I called back up to Evanston, intending to leave a message for Max, but he’d just walked in the door.

“ Victoria, have you had any word from Lotty? No? Mrs. Coltrain called, wanting to know if you had been able to get into her apartment.”

“Oh, nuts-calling Mrs. Coltrain back went out of my head-I’m spinning in too many directions right now.” I told Max about my tour through the apartment this morning and asked if he could tell Mrs. Coltrain about it himself.

“If Lotty disappeared of her own free will, how could she leave without letting us know?” I added. “Surely she must know how much this would upset all her friends, not to say Mrs. Coltrain and her clinic staff.”

“She’s seriously disturbed,” Max said. “Something has knocked her off-balance, so that she’s thinking only of some small world, not the bigger one with her friends in it. Her whole behavior is-it’s frightening me, Victoria. I’m tempted to call it some kind of long-delayed post-traumatic breakdown, as if she held so much in for so many decades that it’s hitting her with the force of a tidal wave. If you get any kind of word from her, no matter the hour, let me know at once. As I will you.”

It helped that Max was as troubled as I. Post-traumatic stress-it’s a diagnosis bandied about so glibly these days that one forgets how real and terrifying a condition it is. If Max was right, it could explain Lotty’s unbearable edginess lately, as well as her sudden evaporation. I wished I hadn’t gotten myself bogged down in the trailing tentacles of the investigation: I wanted to find her now. I wanted to console her if that lay within my power. I wanted to bring her back to life. But I was frighteningly aware that I had few powers. I wasn’t an indovina. I was barely making progress slogging through quicksand as an investigator.

I climbed stiffly out of the car. It was six-thirty; I was late for my meeting with the alderman. I walked up the street to the Golden Glow. It’s the closest thing I have to a private club, not that it’s private, but I’ve been a regular for so many years that they let me run a tab that I pay once a month.

Sal Barthele, who owns the place, flashed me a smile but didn’t have time to come around to say hello-the horseshoe mahogany bar, which her brothers and I had helped her retrieve from a Gold Coast mansion when it went under the wrecking ball ten years ago, was three-deep with weary traders. The half dozen little tables with their signature Tiffany lamps were also crowded. I scanned the room but didn’t spot the alderman.

Durham came in just as Jacqueline, who was working the floor, whizzed past me with a full tray. She handed me a glass of Black Label without breaking stride and went on to a table where she served eight drinks without checking the order. I took a deep swallow of scotch, steadying myself from my worries about Lotty, bracing myself to talk to the alderman.

Jacqueline saw me edge my way to the door to greet Durham: she flashed an arm at me, pointing to a table in the corner. Sure enough, just as Durham had given me an easy greeting, the five women clustered at the table hopped up to leave. By the time the alderman and I were sitting down, half the bar had emptied as people ran to catch seven-o’clock trains. I’d wondered if he would come with an escort; now that the room had cleared I could see two youths in their EYE blazers standing just inside the door.

“So, Investigator Warshawski. You are still on your quest to link African-American men with any crime that floats by your nose.” It was a statement, not a question.

“I don’t have to go on a quest,” I said with a gentle smile. “The news gets hand-delivered to me. Colby Sommers has not only been flashing a roll but telling everyone and their dog Rover what he did to-well, I hate to say earn, that demeans the hard work that most people do for a living. Let’s call it scoring.”

“Call it what you want, Ms. Warshawski. Call it what you want, it doesn’t change the ugly truth behind the insinuations.” When Jacqueline hovered briefly in front of us, he ordered Maker’s Mark and a twist; I shook my head-one whisky is my limit when I’m in a tricky conversation.

“People say you’re smart, alderman; people say you’re the one man who can give the mayor a run for his money in the next election cycle. I don’t see it myself. I know Colby Sommers was a lookout when a couple of EYE youths broke into Amy Blount’s apartment earlier this week. When you and I talked on Wednesday, I was wondering about an anonymous tip the cops got, one to frame Isaiah Sommers. Now I know Colby Sommers made that phone call. I know that Isaiah and Margaret Sommers went to Fepple’s agency the Saturday morning his body was lying there, brains and blood all over everything, on your advice. I guess what I don’t know is what Bertrand Rossy could possibly offer you to make you get up to your neck in his problems.”

Durham smiled, a genial smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “You don’t know much, Ms. Warshawski, because there’s no way you can know folks in my ward. It’s no secret that Colby Sommers hates his cousin: everyone along Eighty-seventh Street knows that. If he tried to frame Isaiah for murder and if he got involved in the fringes of hard-core crime, it doesn’t shock me the way it might you: I understand all the indignities, all the centuries of injustice, that make black men turn on themselves, or turn on their own community. I doubt you could ever understand such things. But if Colby has tried to harm his cousin, I’ll make a call to the local police commander, see if I can’t help sort that out so that Isaiah doesn’t suffer needlessly.”

“I hear things, too, alderman.” I twirled the last small mouthful of whisky in my glass. “One of the most interesting is about you and reparations for descendants of slaves. An important issue. A good one to put the mayor in a bind over-he can’t afford to alienate the international business community by pushing it; he can’t afford to look bad to his constituents by ignoring it, especially since he backed the City Council’s condemnation of slavery.”

“So you understand local politics, detective. Maybe that means you’ll vote for me, if I ever run for an office that covers whatever chardonnay district you live in.”

He was deliberately trying to goad me; I gave him a quizzical smile to show I understood the effort even if I didn’t get the reason. “Oh, yes, I understand local politics. I understand it might not look so good if people found out that you only started on your campaign when Bertrand Rossy came to town. When he-persuaded-you to take the spotlight off Joseph Posner and the Holocaust asset issue by banging the drum over reparations for slavery.”

“Those are mighty ugly words, detective, and as you know, I am not a patient man when it comes to people like you slandering me.”

“Slander. Now, that assumes a baseless accusation. If I wanted to take the trouble, or ask, say, Murray Ryerson at the Herald-Star to take the trouble, I’m betting we could find some substantial chunk of change moving from Rossy to you. Either something from him personally, or something on an Ajax corporate check. I’m betting from him personally. And maybe he was even savvy enough to give you cash. But someone will know about it. It’s just a question of digging deep enough.”

He didn’t flinch. “Bertrand Rossy is an important businessman around town, even if he is from Switzerland. And like you say, one of these days I might want to run for mayor of Chicago. It can’t hurt me to have support in the business community. But most important to me is my own community. Where I grew up. And where I know most people by their first names. They’re the Chicagoans who need me, they’re the ones I work for, so I’d best be getting to a meeting with them.”

He drained his glass and signaled for a check, but I waved a hand to Jacqueline, meaning Sal should add it to my bar tab. I didn’t want to be indebted to Alderman Durham for anything, not even one mouthful of scotch whisky.