Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

I frowned up at him. “They both are. That’s the problem. I can’t quite focus on either of them.”

“ Durham is about the slickest politico in town these days next to the mayor. Be careful how you tangle with him. Say hey to the doc for me, okay?” He squeezed my shoulder affectionately and turned back up the hall.

I’ve known Lotty Herschel since I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. I was a blue-collar girl on an upscale campus, feeling rawly out of place, when I met her-she was providing medical advice to an abortion underground where I volunteered. She took me under her wing, giving me the kind of social skills I’d lost when I lost my mother, keeping me from losing my way in those days of drugs and violent protest, taking time from a dense-packed schedule to cheer my successes and condole over failures. She’d even gone to some college basketball games to see me play-true friendship, since sports of all kind bore her. But it was my athletic scholarship that made my education possible, so she supported my doing my best at it. If she was collapsing now, if something terrible was wrong with her-I couldn’t even finish the thought, it was so frightening to me.

She’d recently moved to a high-rise on the lakefront, to one of the beautiful old buildings where you can watch the sun rise with nothing between you and water but Lake Shore Drive and a strip of park. She used to live in a two-flat a short walk from her storefront clinic, but her one concession to aging was to give up on being a landlady in a neighborhood full of drug-dealing housebreakers. Max and I had both been relieved to see her in a building with an indoor garage.

When I left my car with her doorman, it was only eight o’clock. The day seemed to have been spinning on so long I was sure we must have come round the other side of dark to begin a new one.

Lotty was waiting in the hall for me when I got off the elevator, making a valiant effort at composure. Even though I held the envelope of stills and video out to her, she didn’t snatch it from me but invited me in to her living room, offering me a drink. When I said I only wanted water, she still ignored the envelope, trying to make a joke that I must be ill if I wanted water instead of whisky. I smiled, but the deep circles under her dark eyes disturbed me. I didn’t comment on her appearance, just asking as she turned to go to the kitchen if she would bring me a piece of fruit or cheese.

She seemed to really look at me for the first time. “You haven’t eaten? I can see from the lines on your face that you’re exhausted. Stay in here; I’ll fix you something.”

This was more like her usual brisk manner. I was slightly reassured, slumping against her couch and dozing until she returned with a tray. Cold chicken, carrot sticks, a small salad, and slices of the thick bread a Ukrainian nurse at the hospital bakes for her. I tried not to spring on the food as if I were one of my own dogs.

While I ate, Lotty watched me, as if keeping her eyes from the envelope by an act of will. She kept up a flow of random chatter-had I decided to go away with Morrell for the weekend, would we make it back for Sunday afternoon’s concert, Max was expecting forty or fifty people at his house for dinner afterward, but he-and especially Calia-would miss me if I didn’t come.

I finally interrupted the flow. “Lotty, are you afraid to look at the pictures because of what you will see or because of what you may not see?”

She gave the ghost of a smile. “Acute of you, my dear. A little of both, I think. But-if you will run the tape for me, maybe I am ready to see it. Max warned me that the man was not prepossessing.”

We went to the back bedroom she uses for television and loaded the tape into the VCR. I glanced at Lotty, but the fear in her face was so acute that I couldn’t bear to watch her. As Paul Radbuka recounted his nightmares and his heartbreaking cries for his childhood friend, I kept my eyes glued to him. When we’d seen everything, including the “Exploring Chicago” segment with Rhea Wiell and Arnold Praeger, Lotty asked in a thread of a voice to return to Radbuka’s interview.

I ran it through for her twice more, but when she wanted a third rerun I refused: her face was grey with strain. “You’re torturing yourself with this, Lotty. Why?”

“I-the whole thing is hard.” Even though I was sitting on the floor next to her armchair I could barely make out her words. “Something is familiar to me in what he’s saying. Only I can’t think, because-I can’t think. I hate this. I hate seeing things that make my mind stop working. Do you believe his story?”

I made a helpless gesture. “I can’t fathom it, but it’s so remote from how I want to see life that my mind is rejecting it. I met the therapist yesterday-no, it was today, it just seems like a long time ago. She’s a legitimate clinician, I think, but, well, fanatical. A zealot for her work in general and most particularly for this guy. I told her I wanted to interview Radbuka, to see if he could be related to these people you and Max know, but she’s protecting him. He’s not in the phone book, either as Paul Radbuka or Paul Ulrich, so I’m sending Mary Louise out to all the Ulrichs in Chicago. Maybe he’s still living in his father’s house, or maybe a neighbor will recognize his picture-we don’t know his father’s first name.”

“How old would you say he is?” she asked unexpectedly.

“You mean, could he be the right age for the experiences he’s claiming? You’d be a better judge of that than I, but again, it would be easier to answer if we saw him in person.”

I took the stills out of the envelope, holding the three different shots so that the light shone full on them. Lotty looked at them a long time but finally shook her head helplessly.

“Why did I imagine something definite would jump out at me? It’s what Max said to me. Resemblance is so often a trick of the expression, after all, and these are only photographs, photographs of a picture, really. I would have to see the man, and even then-after all, I’d be trying to match an adult face against a child’s memory of someone who was much younger than this man is now.”

I took her hand in both of mine. “Lotty, what is it you’re afraid of? This is so painful for you it’s breaking my heart. Is it-could he be part of your family? Do you think he’s related to your mother?”

“If you knew anything of those matters, you would know better than to ask such a question,” she said with a flash of her more imperious manner.

“But you do know the Radbuka family, don’t you?”

She laid the pictures on the coffee table as if she were dealing cards and then proceeded to rearrange them, but she wasn’t really looking at them. “I knew some members of the family many years ago. The circumstances-when I last saw them it was extremely painful. The way we parted, I mean, or anyway the whole situation. If this man is-I don’t see how he could be what he says. But if he is, then I owe it to the family to try to befriend him.”

“Do you want me to do some digging? Assuming I can get hold of any information to dig with?”

Her vivid, dark face was contorted with strain. “Oh, Victoria, I don’t know what I want. I want the past never to have happened, or since it did and I can’t change it, I want it to stay where it is, past, dead, gone. This man, I don’t want to know him. But I see I will have to talk to him. Do I want you to investigate him? No, I don’t want you near him. But find him for me, find him so I can talk to him, and you, you-what you can do is try to see what piece of paper convinced him his name was really Paul Radbuka.”

Late that night, her unhappy, contradictory words kept tumbling through my mind. Sometime after two, I finally fell asleep, but in my dreams Bull Durham chased me until I found myself locked up with Paul Radbuka at Terezin, with Lotty on the far side of the barbed wire watching me with hurt, tormented eyes. “Keep him there among the dead,” she cried.