Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (23 page)

I shook my head. “I honestly don’t know. This guy
thinks he spent his childhood in the camps. He says he only recently discovered
his birth name was Radbuka, so he came here hoping Max or Carl was related to
him, because he thought that one of their friends in England had family of that
name.”

“But that doesn’t make sense!” Agnes cried.

Max came down the stairs behind us, his gait heavy
with extreme weariness. “So he’s gone, is he, Victoria? No, it doesn’t make
sense. Nothing tonight made much sense. Lotty fainting? I’ve watched her take
bullets out of people without flinching. What did you think of this creature,
Victoria? Do you believe his story? It’s an extraordinary tale.”

I was so tired myself that I was seeing sparks in
front of my eyes. “I don’t know what I think. He’s so volatile, moving from
tears to triumphal glee and back in thirty seconds. And every time he gets a
new piece of information, he changes his story. Where was he born? In Lodz?
Berlin? Vienna? I’m staggered that Rhea Wiell would hypnotize someone that
unstable—I’d think it would demolish his fragile connection to reality. But—all
these symptoms
could
be caused by exactly what he says happened to him.
An infancy spent in Terezin—I don’t know how you’d recover from that.”

In the living room, Michael and Carl were playing the
same passage on the piano over and over, with variations in tempo and tone that
were too subtle for me. The repetition began grating on me.

The door to the sunroom opened and Lotty came into the
hall, pale but composed. “Sorry, Max,” she murmured. “Sorry to leave you alone
to deal with him, but I couldn’t face him. Nor could Carl, apparently—he came
in to castigate me for refusing to join you upstairs. Now I gather Carl has
returned to the world of music, leaving this one in our possession.”

“Lotty.” Max held up a hand. “If you and Carl want to
keep fighting, take it someplace else. Neither of you had anything to
contribute to what was going on upstairs. But one thing I would like to know—”

The doorbell interrupted him—Morrell, returning with
Don.

“He must live close by,” I said. “You were hardly gone
a minute.”

Morrell came over to me. “He asked to be dropped at a
place where he could get a cab. Which frankly I was happy to do. A little of
the guy goes far with me, so I left him in front of the Orrington, where
there’s a taxi stand.”

“Did you get his address?”

Morrell shook his head. “I asked when we got into the
car, but he announced he would go home by cab.”

“I tried asking for it, too,” Don said, “because of
course I want to interview him, but he’d decided we were an untrustworthy
bunch.”

“Ah, nuts,” I said. “Now I’m back to square one with
finding him. Unless I can track the cab.”

“Did he say anything upstairs?” Lotty asked. “Anything
about how he came to think his name was Radbuka?”

I leaned against Morrell, swaying with fatigue. “Just
more mumbo jumbo about these mystery documents of his father. Foster father.
And how they proved Ulrich was part of the
Einsatzgruppen
.”

“What’s that?” Agnes asked, her blue eyes troubled.

“Special forces that committed special atrocities in
eastern Europe during the war,” Max said tersely. “Lotty, since you’re feeling
better, I would like some information from you now: who is Sofie Radbuka? I
think you might explain to me, and to Vic here, why it had such an effect on
you.”

“I told Vic,” Lotty said. “I told her the Radbukas
were one of the families that you inquired about for our group of friends in
London.”

I’d been about to suggest to Morrell that we go home,
but I wanted to hear what Lotty would say to Max. “Could we sit down?” I asked
Max. “I’m dead on my feet.”

“Victoria, of course.” Max ushered us into the living
room, where Carl and Michael were still fiddling with their music.

Michael looked over at us. He told Carl they could
finish the discussion on the way to Los Angeles and came over to sit next to
Agnes. I pictured Michael with his cello stuck between his legs in an airplane
seat, bowing the same twelve measures over and over while Carl played them on
his clarinet at a different pace.

“You haven’t eaten, have you?” Morrell said to me.
“Let me try to rustle you up a snack—you’ll feel better.”

“You didn’t get dinner?” Max exclaimed. “All this
upheaval is erasing ordinary courtesy from my mind.”

He sent one of the waiters to the kitchen for a tray
of leftovers and drinks. “Now, Lotty, it’s your turn on the hot seat. I’ve
respected your privacy all these years and I will continue to do so. But you
need to explain to us why the name Sofie Radbuka rattled you so badly this
evening. I know I looked for Radbukas for you in Vienna after the war. Who were
they?”

“It wasn’t the name,” Lotty said. “It was the whole
aspect of that—” She broke off, biting her lip like a schoolgirl, when she saw
Max gravely shake his head.

“It—it was someone at the hospital,” Lotty muttered,
looking at the carpet. “At the Royal Free. Who didn’t want their name public.”

“So that was it,” Carl said with a venom that startled
all of us. “I knew it at the time. I knew it and you denied it.”

Lotty flushed, a wave of crimson almost as dark as her
jacket. “You made such stupid accusations that I didn’t think you deserved an
answer.”

“About what?” Agnes asked, as bewildered as I was.

Carl said, “You must have realized by now that Lotty
and I were lovers for some years in London. I thought it would be forever, but
that’s because I didn’t know Lotty had married medicine.”

“Unlike you and music,” Lotty snapped.

“Right,” I said, leaning over to serve myself
scalloped potatoes and salmon from the tray the waiter had brought. “You both
had strong senses of vocation. Neither of you would budge. Then what happened?”

“Then Lotty developed TB. Or so she said.” Carl bit
off the words.

He turned back to Lotty. “You never told me you were
ill. You never said good-bye! I got your letter—letter? A notice in
The
Times
would have told me more!—when I returned from Edinburgh, there it
was, that cold, cryptic note. I ran across town. That imbecile landlady in your
lodgings—I can still see her face, with the horrible mole on her nose and all
the hairs sticking out of it—she told me. She was smirking. From
her
I
learned you were in the country. From
her
I learned you’d instructed her
to forward all your mail to Claire Tallmadge, the Ice Queen. Not from you. I
loved you. I thought you loved me. But you couldn’t even tell me good-bye.”

He stopped, panting, then added bitterly, “To this day
I do not understand why you let that Tallmadge woman run you around the way she
did,” he said to Lotty. “She was so—so supercilious. You were her little Jewish
pet. Couldn’t you ever see how she looked down on you? And the rest of that
family. The vapid sister, Vanessa, and her insufferable husband, what was his
name? Marmalade?”

“Marmaduke,” Lotty said. “As you know quite well,
Carl. Besides, you resented anyone I paid more attention to than you.”

“My God, you two,” Max said. “You should join Calia up
in the nursery. Could we get to the point?”

“Besides,” Lotty said, flushing again at Max’s
criticism, “when I returned to the Royal Free, Claire—Claire felt her
friendship with me was inappropriate. She—I didn’t even know she retired until
I saw it in the Royal Free newsletter this spring.”

“What did the Radbukas have to do with this?” Don
asked.

“I went to see Queen Claire,” Carl snarled. “She told
me she was forwarding Lotty’s mail to a receiving office in Axmouth in care of
someone named Sofie Radbuka. But when I wrote, my mail was returned to me, with
a note scribbled on the envelope that there was no one there by that name. I
even took a train out from London one Monday and walked three miles through the
countryside to this cottage. There were lights on inside, Lotty, but you wouldn’t
answer the door. I stayed there all afternoon, but you never came out.

“Six months went by, and suddenly Lotty was back in
London. With no word to me. No response to my letters. No explanation. As if
our life together had never taken place. Who was Sofie Radbuka, Lotty? Your
lover? Did the two of you sit in there all afternoon laughing at me?”

Lotty was leaning back in an armchair, her eyes shut,
the lines in her face sharply drawn. So might she look dead. The thought made
me clutch at my stomach.

“Sofie Radbuka no longer existed, so I borrowed her
name,” she said in the thread of a voice, not opening her eyes. “It seems
stupid now, but we all did unaccountable things in those days. The only mail I
accepted was from the hospital—everything else I sent back unread, just as I
did your letters. I had a mortal condition. I needed to be alone while I coped
with it. I loved you, Carl. But no one could reach me in the alone place I was.
Not you, not Max, no one. When I—recovered—I had no capacity for talking to
you. It—the only thing I knew to do was draw a line. You—you never seemed
inconsolable to me.”

Max went to sit next to her, taking her hand, but Carl
got up to pace furiously about the room. “Oh, yes, I had lovers,” he spat over
his shoulder. “Lovers aplenty that I wanted you to know about. But it was many
years before I fell in love again and by then I was out of practice, I couldn’t
make it last. Three marriages in forty years and how many mistresses in
between? I’m a byword among women in orchestras.”

“Don’t blame me for that,” Lotty said coldly, sitting
up. “You can choose how to act. I don’t bear responsibility for that.”

“Yes, you can choose to be remote as ever. Poor
Loewenthal, he wants you to marry him and can’t figure out why you won’t. He
doesn’t realize you’re made of scalpels and ligatures, not heart and muscle.”

“Carl, I can manage my own business,” Max said, half
laughing, half exasperated. “But returning to the present, if I may, if the
Radbukas are gone, how exactly did this man tonight get the name in the first
place?”

“Yes,” Lotty agreed. “That’s why I was so startled to
hear it.”

“Do you have any sense of how to find that out,
Victoria?” Max asked.

I yawned ferociously. “I don’t know. I don’t know how
to get him to let me see these mystery documents. The other end of the
investigation would be his past. I don’t know what kind of immigration records
might survive from ’47 or ’48, when he would have come into this country. If he
really was even an immigrant.”

“He is at least a speaker of German,” Lotty said
unexpectedly. “When he first arrived, I wondered if any of his story was
true—you know, on the tape he claimed to have come here as a small child,
speaking German. So I asked him in German if he was brought up on the myth of
the Ulrichs as wolflike warriors. He clearly understood me.”

I tried to remember the sequence of remarks in the
hall but I couldn’t quite get everything straight. “That’s when he said he
wouldn’t speak the language of his slavery, isn’t it?” Another yawn engulfed
me. “No more tonight. Carl, Michael, the concert today was brilliant. I hope
the rest of the tour goes as well—that this disturbance in the field doesn’t
affect your music. Are you going on with them?” I added to Agnes.

She shook her head. “The tour goes on for four more
weeks. Calia and I will stay with Max another five days, then return directly
to England. She should be in kindergarten right now, but we wanted her to have
this time with her Opa.”

“By which time I will also know the story of Ninshubur
the faithful hound by heart.” Max smiled, although his eyes remained grave.

Morrell took me by the hand. We stumbled out to his
car together while Don trailed behind us, getting in a few lungfuls of
nicotine. An Evanston patrol car was inspecting Morrell’s car stickers: the
town makes money by having capricious parking regulations. Morrell was outside
his own parking zone, but we got into the car before the man actually wrote a
ticket.

I slumped against the front seat. “I’ve never been
around so much emotion for so many hours.”

“Exhausting,” Morrell agreed. “I don’t think this man
Paul is a fraud, do you?”

“Not in the sense that he’s deliberately trying to con
us,” I murmured, my eyes shut. “He sincerely believes what he’s saying, but
he’s alarming; he believes a new thing at the drop of a hat.”

“It’s a hell of a story, one way or another,” Don
said. “I wonder if I should go to England to check up on the Radbuka family.”

“That gets you kind of far from your book with Rhea
Wiell,” I said. “And as Morrell advised me yesterday, is it really necessary to
go sleuthing after Lotty’s past?”

“Only insofar as it seems to have invaded the
present,” Don answered. “I thought she was lying, didn’t you? About it being
someone at the Royal Free, I mean.”

“I thought she was making it clear it was her
business, not ours,” I said sharply, as Morrell pulled into the alley behind
his building.

“That history between Lotty and Carl.” I shivered as I
followed Morrell down the hall to the bedroom. “Lotty’s pain, Carl’s, too, but
Lotty feeling so alone she couldn’t tell her lover she was dying. I can’t bear
it.”