Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (37 page)

I told him about my meeting with Rhea Wiell. “She’s
the one person who seems able to exercise some control over him, but for some
reason she isn’t willing to. If you let Don look at your notes from your
difficult trip to Europe after the war, he might persuade her that you really
aren’t related to Paul Radbuka.”

When Max agreed, I left a message on Don’s cell-phone
voice mail, telling him he should call Max.

It was six-thirty—not enough time for me to go home or
to my office before dinner. Maybe I would try to drop in on Lotty, after all,
before going to the Rossys’.

Six-thirty here, one-thirty in the morning in Rome, where
Morrell would be just about landing. He’d spend tomorrow in Rome with the
Humane Medicine team, fly to Islamabad on Thursday, and travel by land into
Afghanistan. For a moment I felt bowed down by desolation: my fatigue, Max’s
worries, Lotty’s turmoil—and Morrell, half a world away. I was too alone in
this big city.

A homeless man selling copies of
Streetwise
danced over to me, hawking his paper. What he saw in my face made him change
his pitch.

“Honey, whatever’s happening to you, it can’t be that
bad. You got a roof over your head, right? You got three squares a day when you
take the time to eat them? Even if your mama’s dead you know she loved you—so
cheer up.”

“Ah, the kindness of strangers,” I said, fishing a
single out of my jacket pocket.

“That’s right. Nothing kinder than strangers, nothing
stranger than kindness. You heard it here first. You have a blessed evening,
and keep that pretty smile coming.”

I won’t say he sent me on my way laughing with
delight, but I did manage to whistle “Whenever I feel afraid” as I walked down
the steps to the garage.

I took Lake Shore Drive north to Belmont, where I got
off and started nosing around for a parking place. Lotty lived half a mile up
the road, but street parking is at such a premium here that I grabbed the first
space I saw. It turned out to be a lucky opening, only half a block from the
Rossys’ front door.

I had kept deferring phoning Lotty on my way north: I
wouldn’t do it from the street downtown because I didn’t want background noise
interfering. I wouldn’t do it from the car because it’s dangerous to drive and
dial. Now—I’d do it as soon as I’d shut my eyes for five minutes, emptied my
mind, gotten the illusion of rest so I could be strong enough for whatever
emotional fastballs Lotty pitched at me.

I pulled the lever so that the front seat was
stretched almost horizontal. As I leaned back, I saw a limo pull up in front of
Rossy’s building. I watched idly, wondering if it was Rossy, being dropped at
home by Ajax’s chairman, ecstatic over today’s favorable vote in Springfield.
Janoff and Rossy would take a limo back from Meigs Field, sharing a drink and a
merry laugh in the backseat. When no one got out after several minutes, I lost
interest—the car was waiting to pick up someone from the building.

Rossy must be pretty ecstatic himself over today’s
vote: Edelweiss Re had acquired Ajax to serve as their U.S. beachhead. They
wouldn’t have been pleased at all if Illinois had voted that they had to scour
their records hunting out policies sold to people who were murdered in Europe—a
search like that would have cost a tidy bundle. Ajax must have tossed a fair
amount of cash at the legislature to get the vote to go their way—but I suppose
they figured that was cheaper than opening up their life-insurance book to
public scrutiny.

Of course, it wasn’t likely that Ajax had sold many
policies in central or eastern Europe in the 1930’s, unless they had a
subsidiary that had done a lot of business there, which I didn’t think was the
case. Insurance, like most business, had been regional before the Second World
War. Still, Edelweiss itself might have had a Holocaust exposure. But as Ajax
chairman Janoff had contended today, waving Amy Blount’s history at the
legislature, Edelweiss had only been a small regional player before the war.

I wondered idly how they’d turned into the
international giant they were today. Maybe they’d made out like bandits during
the war itself—there must have been a lot of money to be made, insuring all the
chemicals and optics and crap the Swiss produced for the German war effort. Not
that it was relevant to the bill that the state was considering, which only
dealt with life insurance, but people vote emotions, not facts. If someone
showed that Edelweiss had gotten rich on the Third Reich’s war machine, the
legislature would punish them by making them open their life-insurance files.

The limo driver opened his door and stood up. I
blinked: it was a Chicago cop. Someone from the city on official business was
up here. When the building door swung open, I sat up, looking to see if the
mayor was coming out. The man who actually emerged made my jaw drop. I’d seen
that bullet head and perfectly tailored navy jacket downtown only two hours
ago. Alderman Louis “Bull” Durham. A lot of powerful people lived on this
stretch of Lake Shore Drive, but I was betting it was Bertrand Rossy he’d been
visiting.

While I was still staring at the front of Rossy’s
building, wondering who was paying off whom, I got a second jolt: a figure in a
bowler hat, tassels visible under his open coat, rose like a jack-in-the-box
from the bushes and marched into the lobby. I got out of my car and moved down
the street so I could see into the front door. Joseph Posner was gesticulating
at the doorman. What on earth was going on?

Party Time?

W
hen I
jogged, panting, into the Rossys’ foyer an hour later, I’d temporarily
forgotten Durham and Posner. My mind was mostly on Lotty, whom I’d once again
left in distress—but I was also very aware that I was late, despite running the
half mile down the street from her apartment. I’d stopped, breathless, at my
car to trade my turtleneck and crepe-soled shoes for the rose silk camisole and
pumps. I stood still while I carefully put on my mother’s earrings, then combed
my hair as I ran across the street. I tried to apply a little makeup in the
elevator on my way to the eleventh floor. Even so, I felt disheveled when I got
off—and worse when my hostess left her other guests to greet me.

Fillida Rossy was a woman in her early thirties,
almost as tall as me. Her raw-silk palazzo pants, with a nubby sweater in the
same dull gold hugging her chest, emphasized both her slenderness and her
wealth. Her dark-blond curls were pulled back from her face with a couple of
diamond clips, and another larger diamond nestled in the hollow above her
breastbone.

She took my outstretched hand in both of hers and
almost caressed it. “My husband has made me so interested in meeting you,
signora,” she said in Italian. “Your talk to him was so full of entertaining
surprises: he told me how you read his palm.”

She led me forward by the hand to greet the other
guests, who included the Italian cultural attaché and his wife—a dark,
vivacious woman around Fillida’s age—a Swiss banking executive and his
wife—both much older—and an American novelist who had lived for many years in
Sorrento.

“This is the detective about whom Bertrand has been
speaking, the one who conducts her business among the palm readers.”

Fillida patted my own palm encouragingly, like a
mother presenting a shy child to strangers. Uncomfortable, I withdrew my hand
and asked where Signor Rossy was.

“Mio marito si comparta scandalosamente,”
she announced with a vivid smile. “He has adopted
American business habits and is on the telephone instead of greeting his guests,
which is scandalous, but he will join us shortly.”

I murmured
“piacere”
to the other guests and
tried to switch my thinking from English, and my conversation with Lotty, to
Italian and the rival merits of Swiss, French, and Italian ski slopes, which was
apparently what they had been discussing when I arrived. The attaché’s wife
exclaimed enthusiastically over Utah and said that of course for Fillida, the
more dangerous the slope the better she liked it.

“When you invited me to your grandfather’s place in
Switzerland our last year in school, I stayed in the lodge while you went down
the most terrifying run I have ever seen—without even getting your hair out of
place, as I remember it. Your grandfather puffed out through his moustache and
pretended to be nonchalant, but he was incredibly proud. Is your little
Marguerita growing up similarly fearless?”

Fillida threw up her hands, with their beautifully
manicured nails, and said her reckless days were behind her. “Now I can hardly
bear to let my babies out of my sight, so I stay with them on the beginner
slopes. What I will do when they pine for the giant runs I don’t know. I’ve
learned to pity my own mother, who suffered agonies over my recklessness.” Her
gaze flickered to the marble mantelpiece, where photographs of her children
were standing—so many of them that the frames were almost stacked on top of one
another.

“Then you won’t want to take them to Utah,” the
banker’s wife said. “But there are good family slopes in New England.”

Skiing wasn’t a subject I knew enough about to
participate—even if I spoke Italian often enough to plunge at once into the
rapid talk. I began to wish I had called to cancel and stayed with Lotty, who
had seemed even more distressed and anxious this evening than she’d been on Sunday.

After I’d seen Posner go into the Rossys’ building,
I’d walked up the street to Lotty’s, not sure whether she would invite me up or
not. After some hesitation, she had let the doorman admit me, but she was
waiting in the hall when I got off the elevator on her floor. Before I could
say anything, she demanded roughly what I wanted. I tried not to let her
harshness hurt me but said I was worrying about her.

She scowled. “As I told you earlier on the phone, I’m
sorry I spoiled Max’s party, but I’m fine now. Did Max send you to check on
me?”

I shook my head. “Max is occupied with Calia’s safety.
He’s not thinking about you right now.”

“Calia’s safety?” Her thick black brows twitched
together. “Max is a doting grandfather, but I don’t think of him as a worrywart.”

“No, he’s not a worrywart,” I agreed. “Radbuka has
been stalking Calia and Agnes.”

“Stalking them? Are you sure?”

“Hanging out across the street, accosting them when
they leave, trying to make Agnes admit that Calia is related to him. Does that
sound like stalking, or just a friendly visit?” I snapped, angry in spite of
myself at her scornful tone.

She pressed her palms into her eyes. “That’s
ridiculous. How can he think she’s related?”

I shrugged. “If any of us knew who he really was, or
who the Radbukas really were, it might make that question easier to answer.”

Her generous mouth set in a hard line. “I don’t owe
any explanation—to you, to Max, least of all to this absurd creature. If he
wants to play at being a survivor of Theresienstadt, let him.”

“Play at? Lotty, do you
know
he’s playing at
it?”

My voice had risen; the door at the opposite end of
the hall opened a crack. Lotty flushed and took me into her own apartment.

“I don’t, of course. But Max—Max didn’t find any
Radbukas when he went to Vienna. After the war, I mean. I don’t believe—I’d
like to know where this bizarre man came up with the name.”

I leaned against the wall, my arms crossed. “I told
you I went out on the Web and found the person looking for information about
Sofie Radbuka. I left my own message, saying he or she should communicate with
my lawyer if they wanted to initiate a confidential conversation.”

Her eyes blazed. “Why did you take it on yourself to
do that?”

“There are two impenetrable mysteries here: Sofie
Radbuka of the 1940’s in England, Paul Radbuka of Chicago today. You want
information about Paul, he wants information about Sofie, but neither of you is
willing to divulge anything. I have to start somewhere.”

“Why? Why do you have to start anywhere? Why don’t you
leave it alone?”

I seized her hands. “Lotty. Stop. Look at yourself.
Ever since this man came on the scene last week, you’ve been demented. You’ve
been howling on the sidewalk and then insisting that the rest of us pay no
attention because there isn’t a problem. I can’t believe this isn’t spilling
over into the operating room. You’re a danger to yourself, your friends, your
patients, carrying on like this.”

She jerked her hands away and looked at me sternly. “I
have never compromised the attention I give my patients. Ever. Even in the
aftermath of the war. Certainly not now.”

“That’s just great, Lotty, but if you think you can go
on like this indefinitely, you’re wrong.”

“That’s my business. Not yours. Now, will you have the
goodness to go back to this Web address and retract your message?”

I chose my words carefully. “Lotty, nothing can
threaten the love I have for you: it’s too deep a part of my life. Max told me
he has always respected the zone of privacy you erected around the Radbuka
family. I would do that, too, if it weren’t for this heartbreaking torment
you’re suffering. That means—if you won’t tell me yourself what is torturing
you, I need to find it out.”