Total Recall

XLVIII Bodies Building

At the end of the trading day, the South Loop empties fast. The streets take on the forlorn and tawdry look that human spaces acquire when they’ve been abandoned: every piece of garbage, every abandoned can and bottle, stood out on the empty streets. The L screeching overhead sounded as remote and wild as a coyote on the prairie.

I walked the three blocks to my car very fast, looking around every few steps into doorways and alleys, zigging back and forth across the street. Who would come for me first-Fillida Rossy, or Durham ’s EYE gang?

Durham had not only brushed me off, he’d done so with a studied offensiveness that was designed to make me angry. As if he hoped that focusing on racial injustice would keep me from thinking about the specifics of the crimes Colby Sommers was involved in.

So what wasn’t I supposed to think about? It seemed to me I was getting a tolerably clear picture of why Ulrich’s journals mattered. And of how Howard Fepple had been killed. I was also starting to see the connection between Durham and Rossy. They had a beautifully dovetailed set of needs: Rossy handed Durham an attention-getting campaign issue, gave him the cash to fund it, and manipulated the legislature into linking the Holocaust with slave reparations, making it too big an issue for them to touch. Durham in exchange took the spotlight away from Ajax, Edelweiss, and Holocaust asset recovery. It was lovely, in a perverted way.

What I didn’t understand was what Howard Fepple had seen in the Sommers file that made him think he had a big payday coming. I supposed it could have been something to do with Ulrich’s European life-insurance book-that Fepple, like me, like anyone in insurance, knew Edelweiss couldn’t afford an exposure on Holocaust life-insurance policies.

But that didn’t explain how Ulrich had made his money. Thirty years ago he wouldn’t have been blackmailing his Swiss employers, because thirty years ago Holocaust bank accounts and Holocaust life-insurance policies didn’t matter to state legislatures or the U.S. Congress. Ulrich must have been doing something more local. He didn’t seem like a criminal mastermind, just an ugly guy who horribly abused his son and found a quiet way to turn a plug nickel into a silver dollar.

A man lurched out of the shadows in front of me. I didn’t know I could get my hand inside my shoulder holster so fast. When the man asked for the price of a meal, old Ezra filling the air around him, sweat trickled down the back of my neck. I stuck the gun in my jacket pocket and fished in my bag for a dollar, but he’d seen the gun and ran down a side street on unsteady legs.

I drove back to my office, keeping an uneasy eye on the rearview mirror, checking for tails. When I got to Tessa’s and my warehouse, I parked away from the building. I had my gun in my hand when I let myself in. Before settling at my desk, I searched Tessa’s studio, the hall, the bathroom, and all the subdivisions of my office-it’s hard to break in to our building but not impossible.

I put in a call to Terry Finchley at the police department. He’d been Mary Louise’s commanding officer her last three years on the force and was the person she still turned to for inside information on police investigations. I knew he wasn’t involved in the Sommers murder directly, but he knew about the investigation because he’d been getting information about it to Mary Louise. He wasn’t in, either. I hesitated, then left a message for him with the desk sergeant: Colby Sommers is a hanger-on with the EYE team. He knows something about Howard Fepple’s murder; he also was involved in the break-in in Hyde Park where you sent the forensics unit on Wednesday. The sergeant promised to pass it on.

When I switched on my computer, I felt unreasonably let down that Morrell hadn’t responded to my e-mail. Of course, it was the middle of the night in Kabul. And who knew where he was-if he’d gone into the backcountry already, he wouldn’t be anywhere near a phone hookup. Lotty off in some desolate place that I couldn’t penetrate, Morrell at the ends of the earth. I felt horribly alone and sorry for myself.

The fax of Anna Freud’s article on the six toddlers from Terezin had come in. I turned to it resolutely, determined not to wallow in self-pity.

The article was long, but I read it through with total attention. Despite the clinical tone of the piece, the heartbreaking destruction of the children came through clearly-deprived of everything, from parental love to language, fending for themselves as toddlers in a concentration camp, somehow coming together to support one another.

After the war, when the British admitted a number of children from the camps to help them learn to live in a terror-free world, Freud took over the care of these six: they were far too young for any of the other programs. And they were such a tight little group that the social workers were afraid of separating them, afraid of the added trauma that separation would create in their young lives. They were all close, but two had formed a special bond with each other: Paul and Miriam.

Paul and Miriam. Anna Freud, whom Paul Hoffman called his savior in England, cutting her photograph from her biography to hang in his chamber of secrets. Freud’s Paul, born in Berlin in 1942, sent to Terezin at twelve months, just as Paul Hoffman had claimed for himself in the interview on television. The only one of the six about whose family nothing was known. So if your name was Paul, and your father was a German who brutalized you, locked you in a closet, beat you for any signs of feminine character, maybe you would start to think, This is my story, the children in the camps.

But Paul and Miriam weren’t Anna Freud’s children’s real names. In a study of real people, Freud had used code names to protect their privacy. Paul Hoffman hadn’t understood that. He’d read the article, absorbed the story, imagined his little playmate Miriam for whom he cried so piteously on television last week.

The hairs stood up on the back of my neck. I felt an overwhelming desire for my own home and bed, for privacy away from other people’s soul-sickening traumas. I wasn’t up to driving north to Evanston. I put Ninshubur’s little collar in a padded mailer, addressed it to Michael Loewenthal’s London home with a note for customs, used goods, no declared value, and dropped it in a mailbox with some airmail postage. I kept an eye out on the street all the way home, but neither Fillida nor the EYE team seemed to be stalking me.

I was happy when Mr. Contreras waylaid me as I came into the lobby. When he learned I hadn’t eaten all day, except for my apple, he exclaimed, “No wonder you’re discouraged, doll. I got spaghetti on the stove. It ain’t homemade, like you’re used to, but it’s plenty good enough for an empty stomach.”

It was, indeed-I ate two bowls of it. We drove the dogs to a park and let them romp in the dark.

I fell early to sleep. In the night, I had my most dreaded nightmare, the one where I was trying to find my mother and only came on her as she was lowered into her grave, wrapped in so many bandages, with tubes coming from every arm, that she couldn’t see me. I knew she was alive, I knew she could hear me, but she gave no sign. I woke from it weeping, saying Lotty’s name aloud to myself. I lay awake for an hour, listening to sounds from the world outside, wondering what the Rossys were doing, before falling back at last into a fitful sleep.

At seven, I got up to run to the lake with the dogs while Mr. Contreras followed us in my Mustang. The idea that I might be in danger worried him powerfully; I could see he was going to stick close at hand until the Edelweiss business was resolved.

The lake was still warm, even though the September days were drawing short; I went into the water with the dogs. While Mr. Contreras threw sticks for them I swam to the next rock outcropping and back. When I rejoined the three of them I was tired but refreshed, the misery of the previous night eased from my mind.

As we drove home I turned on the radio to catch the news at the top of the hour. Presidential election blah-blah, violence on the West Bank and Gaza blah-blah.

In our top local story, police have released the identity of a woman whose body was found early this morning in the Sundown Meadow Forest Preserve. A Countryside couple came on the body when they were running their dogs in the woods a little before six this morning. Countryside police now tell us that her name was Connie Ingram, thirty-three, of LaGrange. She lived with her mother, who became worried when her daughter did not return from work last night.

“She doesn’t have a boyfriend,” Mrs. Ingram said. “She often stayed late on Fridays to go for a drink with her girlfriends at work, but she always caught the 7:03.”

When her daughter failed to come home by the last train, Mrs. Ingram called local police, who told her they didn’t take a missing person’s report until someone had been gone for seventy-two hours. Still, by the time Mrs. Ingram talked to LaGrange police, her daughter was already dead: the Cook County Medical Examiner estimates that she was strangled around eight P.M.

Ingram had worked at Ajax Insurance in the Loop since graduating from high school. Coworkers say she had recently been troubled by accusations from Chicago police that she was involved in the murder of longtime Ajax insurance agent Howard Fepple earlier this week. Countryside and LaGrange authorities are cooperating fully with the Chicago police in the investigation.

In other local news, a South Side man was shot and killed in an apparent drive-by shooting as he was walking home from the L last night. Colby Sommers had been involved in Alderman Louis Durham’s Empower Youth Energy program as a boy; the alderman said he is sending condolences to the family.

Is the end of summer getting you down? Turn to-

I turned off the radio and pulled over to the curb.

Mr. Contreras looked at me in alarm. “What’s up, doll? She a friend of yours? You’re white as my hair right now.”

“Not a friend-the young woman in the claims department I’ve been telling you about. Yesterday morning when I went down to Ajax, Ralph Devereux taxed her with knowing something about these wretched old journals that Lotty’s wandered off with.”

Connie Ingram disappeared for a few minutes on her way to the elevator. I thought she was hiding from me, but maybe she was in Bertrand Rossy’s office, seeking advice.

Fepple must have sent a sample of his goods to the company: how else had they known he really could blackmail them? He’d sent them to poor little Connie Ingram, because she was in touch with him. She went directly to Bertrand Rossy because Rossy was taking a personal interest in the work she was doing on the Sommers file. It must have been almost unbearably exciting for a claims handler to be pulled out of the pit by the glamorous young executive from the new owners in Zurich. He swore her to secrecy; he knew she wouldn’t betray his interest in the case to Ralph, to her boss Karen Bigelow, to anyone, because he could gauge her excitement pretty clearly.

But she was a company woman; she was worried when she left Ralph’s office. She wanted to be loyal to the claims department, but she needed to consult Rossy first. So what did Rossy do? Arranged a secret meeting with her at the end of the day. (“We can’t talk now, my schedule is full; I’ll pick you up at the bar across the street after work. But don’t tell anyone. We don’t know who in this company we can trust.”) Something like that. Taken her to the forest preserve, where she might have imagined sex with the boss, and strangled her when she turned to smile at him.

The scenario made me shudder in disgust. If I was right. Peppy leaned her head across the backseat and nuzzled me, whimpering. My neighbor wrapped a towel around me.

“You get into the passenger seat, doll, I’m driving you home. Tea, honey, milk, you need that and a hot bath right now.”

I didn’t fight him, even though I knew I couldn’t afford to sit around for very long. While he boiled water for tea and fussed around with bread and eggs I went upstairs to shower.

Standing under the hot water, drifting, my mind turned up what Ralph had said yesterday to Connie. Something like, I didn’t think we ever deep-sixed papers in an insurance company. If Fepple had sent her samples of his wares, so to speak, she’d have kept them.

I turned off the water abruptly and dried myself quickly. Say Rossy took care of the claims master file, cleaning out anything in Ulrich’s handwriting. He’d found the microfiche copy-nothing simpler than for him to roam the floors of the building after hours: just checking on local operations. Hunt for the right drawer, abstract the fiche, and destroy it.

But I’d guess Connie had a desk file-the documents she needed to consult every day on a case while she was actively working on it. It probably hadn’t occurred to Rossy-he’d never done a day’s clerical work in his life. And I bet Fepple’s stuff was in it.

I scrambled into my clothes: jeans, running shoes, and the softly cut blazer to conceal my gun. I ran down the stairs to Mr. Contreras’s place, where I took the time to drink the hot, sweet tea he’d made and eat scrambled eggs. I was impatient to be going-but I owed him the courtesy to sit at the table for fifteen minutes.

While I ate I explained what I wanted to do, muting his protest at my taking off again. The clinching argument in his eyes was that the sooner I got going on Rossy and Ajax, the sooner I’d be able to start looking for Lotty.