Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

Tessa’s truck was already in our little lot when I pulled in. She’d received a major commission last month and was putting in long hours to build a model of both the piece and the plaza it would occupy. When I passed her studio door she was perched at her outsize drafting table, sketching. She’s testy if interrupted, so I went down the hall to my own office without speaking.

I made a couple of copies of Isaiah Sommers’s uncle’s policy and locked the original in my office safe, where I keep all client documents during an active investigation. It’s really a strongroom, with fireproof walls and a good sturdy door.

Midway Insurance’s address was listed on the policy: they had sold the policy to Aaron Sommers all those years back. If I couldn’t get satisfaction from the company, I’d have to go back to the agent-and hope he remembered what he’d done thirty years ago. I checked the phone book. The agency was still on Fifty-third Street, down in Hyde Park.

I had two queries to complete for bread-and-butter clients. While I sat on hold with the Board of Health, I logged on to Lexis and ProQuest and submitted a search on Rhea Wiell, as well as Paul Radbuka.

My Board of Health connection came on the phone and for once answered all my questions without a lot of hedging. When I’d wrapped up my report I checked back with Lexis. There was nothing on the Radbuka name. I checked my disks of phone numbers and addresses for the U.S. -more up-to-date than Web search engines-and found nothing. When I looked up his father’s name, Ulrich, I got forty-seven matches in the Chicago area. Maybe Paul hadn’t changed his name legally when he became Radbuka.

Rhea Wiell, on the other hand, gave me a lot of hits. She had apparently appeared as an expert witness in a number of trials, but tracking them down so I could get transcripts would be a tedious business. However, I did find she was a clinical social worker, fully accredited by the State of Illinois: at least she had started from an authentic position. I logged off and swept my papers together into my case so I could be on time for my meeting with the head of the Ajax claims department.

I originally met Ralph Devereux early in my life as an investigator. It hasn’t been so many years, but at the time I was the first woman in Chicago, maybe even the country, with a PI license. It was a struggle to get clients or witnesses to treat me seriously. When Ralph took a bullet in his shoulder because he couldn’t believe his boss was a crook, our relationship fractured as abruptly as his scapula.

I hadn’t seen him since; I admit I felt a little nervous anticipation as I rode the L down to Ajax ’s headquarters on Adams Street. When I got off the elevator at the sixty-third floor, I even stopped in the ladies’ room to make sure my hair was combed and my lipstick tidily confined to my mouth.

The executive-floor attendant escorted me down a mile of parquet to Ralph’s corner; his secretary pronounced my name perfectly and buzzed the inner sanctum. Ralph emerged smiling, both arms held out in greeting.

I took his hands in my own, smiling back, trying to hide a twinge of sadness. When I’d met him, Ralph had been a slim-hipped, ardent young man with a shock of black hair falling in his eyes and an engaging grin. His hair was still thick, although liberally tinged with grey, but he had jowls now, and while he wasn’t exactly fat, those slim hips had disappeared into the same past as our brief affair.

I exchanged conventional greetings, congratulating him on his promotion to head of the claims department. “It looks as though you recovered full use of your arm,” I added.

“Just about. It still bothers me when the weather’s damp. I got so depressed after that injury-waiting for it to heal, feeling like a moron for letting it happen at all-that I took to cheeseburgers. The big shake-ups here the last few years haven’t helped any, either. You look great, though. You still running five miles every morning? Maybe I should hire you to coach me.”

I laughed. “You’re already in your first meeting before I get out of bed. You’d have to take a lower-pressure job. The shake-ups you mentioned-those from Edelweiss acquiring Ajax?”

“That came at the end, really. We took a lot of hits in the market at the same time that Hurricane Andrew overwhelmed us. While we were dealing with that, and laying off a fifth of our workforce worldwide, Edelweiss snapped up a chunk of our depressed stock. They were a hostile suitor-I’m sure you followed that in the financial pages-but they certainly haven’t been a hostile master. They seem quite eager to learn how we do things here, rather than wanting to interfere. In fact, the managing director from Zurich who’s looking after Ajax wanted to sit in on my meeting with you.”

His hand in the small of my back, he ushered me into his office, where a man with tortoiseshell glasses, dressed in a pale wool suit and a bold tie, stood when I entered. He was around forty, with a round merry face that seemed to match the tie more than the suit.

“Vic Warshawski, Bertrand Rossy from Edelweiss Re in Zurich. You two should get along well-Vic speaks Italian.”

“Oh, really?” Rossy shook hands. “With the name Warshawski I would have assumed Polish.”

“My mother was from Pitigliano-vicino Orvieto,” I said. “I can only stumble through a few stock phrases of Polish.”

Rossy and I sat in chrome tube chairs next to a glass-topped table. Ralph himself, who had always had an incongruous-seeming taste for modernism, leaned against the edge of the aluminum tabletop he used as a desk.

I asked Rossy the usual things, about where he had acquired his perfect English (he had gone to school in England) and how he liked Chicago (very much). His wife, who was Italian, had found the summer weather oppressive and had taken their two children to her family’s estate in the hills above Bologna.

“She just returned this week with Paolo and Marguerita for the start of the school year here and already I’m better dressed than I was all summer, isn’t that right, Devereux? I could barely persuade her to let me out the front door in this tie this morning.” He laughed loudly, showing dimples at the corners of his mouth. “Now I make a campaign to persuade her to try the Chicago opera: her family have been in the same box at La Scala since it opened in 1778 and she can’t believe a raw young city like this can really produce opera.”

I told him I went to a production once a year in tribute to my mother, who had taken me every fall, but of course I couldn’t compare it to a European opera company. “Nor do I have a family box: it’s the upper gallery for me, what we call the nosebleed section.”

He laughed again. “Nosebleed section. My colloquial American is going to improve for talking to you. We shall all go together one evening, if you can condescend to climb down from the nosebleed section. But I see Devereux looking at his watch-oh, very discreetly, don’t be embarrassed, Devereux. A beautiful woman is an inducement to waste precious business minutes, but Miss Warshawski must have come here for some other purpose than to discuss opera.”

I pulled out the photocopy of the Aaron Sommers policy and explained the events around his aborted funeral. “I thought if I came straight to you with the situation, you could get me an answer fast.”

When Ralph took the photocopy out to his secretary, I asked Rossy if he’d attended yesterday’s Birnbaum conference. “Friends of mine were involved. I’m wondering if Edelweiss is concerned about the proposed Holocaust Asset Recovery Act.”

Rossy put his fingertips together. “Our position is in line with the industry, that however legitimate the grief and the grievances-of both the Jewish and the African-American communities-the expense of a policy search shall be most costly for all policyholders. For our own company, we don’t worry about the exposure. Edelweiss was only a small regional insurer during the war, so the likelihood of involvement with large numbers of Jewish claimants is small.