Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

Ms. Blount was home. In her polite, aloof way she acknowledged that we’d met. When I explained that I wanted to ask some questions about Ajax, she turned from aloof to frosty.

“Mr. Rossy’s secretary has already asked me those questions. I find them offensive. I won’t answer them from you any more than from him.”

“Sorry, Ms. Blount, I wasn’t very clear. Ajax didn’t send me to you. I don’t know what questions Rossy wants to ask you, but they’re probably different from mine. Mine come from a client who’s trying to find out what happened to a life-insurance policy. I don’t think you know the answer, but I’d like to talk to you because-” Because of what? Because I was so frustrated at being stiffed by Fepple, defamed by Durham, that I was clutching at any straw? “Because I cannot figure out what’s going on and I’d like to talk to someone who understands Ajax. I’m in the neighborhood; I could stop by now for ten minutes if you can spare the time.”

After a pause, she said coldly she would hear what I had to say but couldn’t promise she’d answer any questions.

She lived in a shabby courtyard building on Cornell, the kind of haphazardly maintained property that students can afford. Even so, as I knew from the plaint of an old friend whose son was starting medical school down here, Blount probably paid six or seven hundred a month for the broken glass on the sidewalk, her badly hung lobby door, and the hole in the stairwell wall.

Blount stood in the open door to her studio apartment, watching while I climbed the third flight of stairs. Here at home, her dreadlocks hung loosely about her face. Instead of the prim tweed suit she’d worn to Ajax, she had on jeans and a big shirt. She ushered me in politely but without cordiality, waving a hand at a hardwood chair while seating herself in the swivel desk chair at her work station.

Except for a futon with a bright kente cover and a print of a woman squatting behind a basket, the room was furnished with monastic severity. It was lined on all sides by white pasteboard bookshelves. Even the tiny eating alcove had shelves fitted around a clock.

“Ralph Devereux told me you had a degree in economic history. Is that how you came to be involved with writing the Ajax history?”

She nodded without speaking.

“What did you do your dissertation on?”

“Is this relevant to your client’s story, Ms. Warshawski?”

I raised my brows. “Polite conversation, Ms. Blount. But that’s right, you said you wouldn’t answer any questions. You said you had already heard from Bertrand Rossy, so you know that Alderman Durham has had Ajax under-”

“His secretary,” she corrected me. “Mr. Rossy is too important to call me himself.”

Her voice was so toneless that I couldn’t be sure whether her intent was ironic. “Still, he made the questions take place. So you know Durham ’s picketing the Ajax building, claiming that Ajax and the Birnbaums owe restitution to the African-American community for the money they both made from slavery. I suppose Rossy accused you of supplying Durham the information out of the Ajax archives.”

She nodded fractionally, her eyes wary.

“The other piece of Durham ’s protest concerns me personally. Have you encountered the Midway Insurance Agency over in the bank building? Howard Fepple is the rather ineffectual present owner, but thirty years ago one of his father’s agents sold a policy to a man named Sommers.” I outlined the Sommers family problem. “Now Durham has hold of the story. Based on your work at Ajax, I’m wondering if you have any ideas on who might give the alderman such detailed inside information about both the company history and this current claim. Sommers complained to the alderman, but the Durham protest had one detail that I don’t think Sommers would have known: the fact that Ajax insured the Birnbaum Corporation in the years before the Civil War. I’m assuming that information is accurate, or Rossy wouldn’t have called you. Had his secretary call you.”

When I paused, Blount said, “It is, sort of. That is, the original Birnbaum, the one who started the family fortune, was insured by Ajax in the 1850’s.”

“What do you mean, sort of?” I asked.

“In 1858, Mordecai Birnbaum lost a load of steel plows he was sending to Mississippi when the steamship blew up on the Illinois River. Ajax paid for it. I suppose that’s what Alderman Durham is referring to.” She spoke in a rapid monotone. I hoped when she lectured to students she had more animation, or they’d all be asleep.

“Steel plows?” I repeated, my attention diverted. “They existed before the Civil War?”

She smiled primly. “John Deere invented the steel plow in 1830. In 1847 he set up his first major plant and retail store here in Illinois.”

“So the Birnbaums were already an economic power in 1858.”

“I don’t think so. I think it was the Civil War that made the family fortune, but the Ajax archives didn’t include a lot of specifics-I was guessing from the list of assets being insured. The Birnbaum plows were only a small part of the ship’s cargo.”

“In your opinion, who could have told Durham about Birnbaum’s plow shipment?”

“Is this a subtle way to get me to confess?”

She could have asked the question in a humorous vein-but she didn’t. I made an effort not to lose my own temper in return. “I’m open to all possibilities, but I have to consider the available facts. You had access to the archives. Perhaps you shared the data with Durham. But if you didn’t, perhaps you have some ideas on who did.”

“So you did come here to accuse me.” She set her jaw in an uncompromising line.

I sank my face into my hands, suddenly tired of the matter. “I came here hoping to get better information than I have. But let it be. I have an interview with Channel Thirteen to discuss the whole sorry business; I need to go home to change.”

She tightened her lips. “Do you plan to accuse me on air?”

“I actually didn’t come here to accuse you of anything at all, but you’re so suspicious of me and my motives that I can’t imagine you’d believe any assurances I gave you. I came here hoping that a trained observer like you would have seen something that would give me a new way to think about what’s going on.”

She looked at me uncertainly. “If I told you I didn’t give Durham the files, would you believe me?”

I spread my hands. “Try me.”

She took a breath, then spoke rapidly, looking at the books over her computer. “I happen not to support Mr. Durham’s ideas. I am fully cognizant of the racial injustices that still exist in this country. I have researched and written about black economic and commercial history, so I am more familiar with the history of these injustices than most: they run deep, and they run wide. I took the job of writing that Ajax history, for instance, because I’m having a hard time getting academic history or economics programs to pay attention to me, outside of African-American studies, which are too often marginalized for me to find interesting. I need to earn something while I’m job-hunting. Also, the Ajax archives will make an interesting monograph. But I don’t believe in focusing on African-Americans as victims: it makes us seem pitiable to white America, and as long as we are pitiable we will not be respected.” She flushed, as if embarrassed to reveal her beliefs to a stranger.

I thought of Lotty’s angry vehemence with Max on the subject of Jews as victims. I nodded slowly and told Blount that I could believe her.

“Besides,” she added, her color still deepened, “it would seem immoral to me to make the Ajax files available to an outsider, when they had trusted me with their private documents.”