Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

“Russian mountain?” I mixed yogurt and granola with orange slices. “Is this helping you get ready to ask searching comments of Posner and Durham?”

He grinned. “I’m sharpening my wits. If you were going to do some fast checking on the therapist who was on television last night, where would you start?”

I leaned against the counter while I ate. “I’d search the accreditation databases for therapists to see if she was licensed and what her training was. I’d go to ProQuest-she and the guy from the memory foundation have been mixing it up-there might be some articles about her.”

Don scribbled a note on the corner of the crossword-puzzle clues. “How long would it take you to do it for me? And how much would you charge?”

“Depends on how deep you wanted to go. The basics I could do pretty fast, but I charge a hundred dollars an hour with a five-hour initial minimum. How generous is Gargette’s expenses policy?”

He tossed the pencil aside. “They have four hundred cost accountants in their head office at Rheims just to make sure editors like me don’t eat more than a Big Mac on the road, so they’re not too likely to spring for a private investigator. Still, this could be a really big book. If she is who she says she is-if the guy is who he says he is. Could you do some checking for me on spec?”

I was about to agree when I thought of Isaiah Sommers, carefully counting out his twenties. I shook my head unhappily. “I can’t make exceptions for friends. It makes it hard for me to charge strangers.”

He pulled out a cigarette and tapped it on the paper. “Okay. Can you do some checking and trust me for the money?”

I grimaced. “Yeah. I guess. I’ll bring a contract back with me tonight.”

He returned to the porch. I finished my breakfast and ran water over the bowl-Morrell would have a fit if he came home to find case-hardened yogurt on it-then followed Don out the back door: my car was parked in the alley behind the building. Don was reading the news but looked up to say good-bye. On my way down the back stairs the word came to me from nowhere. “Roller coaster. If it’s the same in French as Italian, a Russian mountain is a roller coaster.”

“You’ve already earned your fee.” He picked up his pencil and turned back to the crossword page.

Before going to my office, I swung by Global Entertainment’s studios on Huron Street. When the company moved into town a year ago, they bought a skyscraper in the hot corridor just northwest of the river. Their Midwest regional offices, where they control everything from a hundred seventy newspapers to a big chunk of the broadband DSL business, are on the upper levels, with their studios on the ground floor.

Global executives are not my biggest fans in Chicago, but I’ve worked with Beth Blacksin since before the company took over Channel 13. She was on the premises, editing a segment for the evening news. She ran out to the lobby in the sloppy jeans she can’t wear on-air, greeting me like a long-lost friend-or, anyway, a valuable source.

“I was riveted by your interview yesterday with that guy Radbuka,” I said. “How’d you find him?”

“Warshawski!” Her expressive face came alive with excitement. “Don’t tell me he’s been murdered. I’m getting to a live mike.”

“Calm down, my little newshound. As far as I know he’s still on the planet. What can you tell me about him?”

“You’ve found out who the mysterious Miriam is, then.”

I took her by the shoulders. “Blacksin, calm down-if you’re able. I’m purely on a fishing expedition right now. Do you have an address you’d be willing to give out? For him, or for the therapist?”

She took me with her past the security station to a warren of cubicles where the news staff had desks. She went through a stack of papers next to her computer and found the standard waiver sheet people sign when they give interviews. Radbuka had listed a suite number at an address on North Michigan, which I copied down. His signature was large and untidy, kind of the way he’d looked in his too-big suit. Rhea Wiell, by contrast, wrote in a square, almost printlike hand. I copied out the spelling of her name. And then noticed that Radbuka’s address was the same as hers. Her office at Water Tower.

“Could you get me a copy of the tape? Your interview, and the discussion between the therapist and the guy from the antihypnosis place? That was good work, pulling them together at the last minute.”

She grinned. “My agent’s happy-my contract’s coming up in six weeks. Praeger has a real bee in his bonnet about Wiell. They’ve been adversaries on a bunch of cases, not just in Chicago but all around the country. He thinks she’s the devil incarnate and she thinks he’s the next thing to a child molester himself. They’ve both had media training-they looked civilized on camera, but you should have heard them when the camera wasn’t rolling.”

“What did you think of Radbuka?” I asked. “Up close and personal, did you believe his story?”

“Do you have proof he’s a fraud? Is that what this is really about?”

I groaned. “I don’t know anything about him. Zippo. Niente. Nada. I can’t say it in any more languages. What was your take on him?”

Her eyes opened wide. “Oh, Vic, I believed him completely. It was one of the most harrowing interviews I’ve ever done-and I talked to people after Lockerbie. Can you imagine growing up the way he did and then finding the man who claimed to be your father was like your worst enemy?”

“What was his father-foster father’s name?”

She scrolled through the text on her screen. “Ulrich. Whenever Paul referred to him, he always used the man’s German name, instead of ‘Daddy’ or ‘Father’ or something.”

“Do you know what he found in Ulrich’s papers that made him realize his lost identity? In the interview he said they were in code.”

She shook her head, still looking at the screen. “He talked about working it through with Rhea and getting the correct interpretation. He said they proved to him that Ulrich had really been a Nazi collaborator. He talked a lot about how brutal Ulrich had been to him, beating him for acting like a sissy, locking him in a closet when he was away at work, sending him to bed without food.”

“There wasn’t a woman on the scene? Or was she a participant in the abuse?” I asked.

“Paul says Ulrich told him that his mother-or Mrs. Ulrich, anyway-had died in the bombing of Vienna as the war was ending. I don’t think Mr. Ulrich ever married here, or even had women to the house. Ulrich and Paul seemed to have been a real pair of loners. Papa went to work, came home, beat Paul. Paul was supposed to be a doctor, but he couldn’t handle pressure, so he ended up as an X-ray technician, which earned more ridicule. He never moved out of his father’s house. Isn’t that creepy? Staying with him even when he was big enough to earn his own living?”

That was all she could, or at least all she would, tell me. She promised to messenger over a tape of the various segments with Radbuka, as well as the meeting between the therapists, to my office later in the day.

I still had time before my appointment at Ajax to do some work in my office. It was only a few miles north and west of Global-but a light-year away in ambience. No glass towers for me. Three years ago a sculptor friend had invited me to share a seven-year lease with her for a converted warehouse on Leavitt. Since the building was a fifteen-minute drive from the financial district where most of my business lies and the rent was half what you pay in those gleaming high-rises, I’d signed on eagerly.

When we moved in, the area was still a grimy no-man’s-land between the Latino neighborhood farther west and a slick Yuppie area nearer the lake. At that time, bodegas and palm readers vied with music stores for the few retail spaces in what had been an industrial zone. Parking abounded. Even though the Yuppies are starting to move in, building espresso bars and boutiques, we still have plenty of collapsing buildings and drunks. I was against further gentrification-I didn’t want to see my rent skyrocket when the current lease expired.