Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

“I know nothing whatsoever about my birth parents. Some of our six musketeers knew more, although that can be painful, too. My little Miriam, for instance, poor soul, she knew her mother had gone mad and died in the mental hospital at Terezin. But now-Max, you say you know the details of my family life. Who of the Radbukas would be in Berlin in 1942?”

“No one,” Max said with finality. “No brothers, nor parents. I can assure you of that. This is a family which emigrated to Vienna in the years before the First World War. In 1941 they were sent to Lodz, in Poland. The ones who were still alive in 1943 were sent on to the camp where they all perished.”

Paul Ulrich-Radbuka’s face lit up. “But perhaps I was born in Lodz.”

“I thought you knew you’d been born in Berlin,” I blurted out.

“There are so few reliable documents from those times,” he said. “Perhaps they gave me the paper of a boy who died in the camp. Anything like that is possible.”

Talking to him was like walking in the marshes: just when you thought you had a fact to stand on, the ground gave way.

Max looked at him gravely. “None of the Radbukas in Vienna had special standing: they weren’t important socially or artistically, as was typically true of people who were sent to Theresien-to Terezin. Of course there were always exceptions, but I doubt you will find them in this case.”

“So you’re trying to tell me my family doesn’t exist. But I can see it’s just that you’re hiding them from me. I demand to see them in person. I know they will claim me when they meet me.”

“One easy solution to the problem is a DNA test,” I suggested. “Max, Carl, and their English friend could give blood, we could agree on a lab in England or the U.S. and send a sample of Mr.-Mr. Radbuka’s blood there, as well. That would resolve the question of whether he’s related to any of you or to Max’s English friend.”

“I am not uncertain!” Paul exclaimed, his face pink. “You may be; you’re a detective who makes a living by being suspicious. But I will not submit to being treated like a laboratory specimen, the way my people were in that medical laboratory at Auschwitz, the way my little Miriam’s mother was treated. Looking at blood samples is what the Nazis cared about. Heredity, race, all those things, I won’t take part in it.”

“That brings us back to where we started,” I said. “With a document that you alone know about and no way for suspicious detectives like me to verify your certainty. By the way, who is Sofie Radbuka?”

Paul turned sulky. “She was on the Web. Someone in a missing-persons chat room said they wanted information about a Sofie Radbuka who lived in England in the forties. So I wrote saying she must be my mother, and the person never wrote back.”

“Right now we’re all exhausted,” Max said. “Mr. Radbuka, why don’t you write down everything you know about your family? I will get my friend to do the same. You can give me your document and I will give you the other one. Then we can meet again to compare notes.”

Radbuka sat with his lower lip sticking out, not even looking up to acknowledge the suggestion. When Morrell, with a grimace at the clock, said he’d drive him home, Radbuka refused at first to get up.

Max looked at him sternly. “You must leave now, Mr. Radbuka, unless you wish to create a situation in which you would never be able to return here.”

His clown face a tragic mask, Radbuka got to his feet. With Morrell and Don again at his elbows, like wardens in a high-class mental hospital, he shambled sullenly to the door.

Downstairs, the party was over. The waitstaff was cleaning up the remains, vacuuming food from the carpets and washing up the last of the dishes. In the living room, Carl and Michael were debating the tempo in a Brahms nonet, playing passages on the grand piano while Agnes Loewenthal watched from a couch with her legs curled under her.

She looked up when I glanced in the doorway, hurriedly untangling her feet to run over to me before I could follow Morrell and Don outside. “Vic! Who is that extraordinary man? Carl has been beside himself over this intrusion. He went into the sunroom and shouted at Lotty about it until Michael stopped him. What is going on?”

I shook my head. “I honestly don’t know. This guy thinks he spent his childhood in the camps. He says he only recently discovered his birth name was Radbuka, so he came here hoping Max or Carl was related to him, because he thought that one of their friends in England had family of that name.”

“But that doesn’t make sense!” Agnes cried.

Max came down the stairs behind us, his gait heavy with extreme weariness. “So he’s gone, is he, Victoria? No, it doesn’t make sense. Nothing tonight made much sense. Lotty fainting? I’ve watched her take bullets out of people without flinching. What did you think of this creature, Victoria? Do you believe his story? It’s an extraordinary tale.”

I was so tired myself that I was seeing sparks in front of my eyes. “I don’t know what I think. He’s so volatile, moving from tears to triumphal glee and back in thirty seconds. And every time he gets a new piece of information, he changes his story. Where was he born? In Lodz? Berlin? Vienna? I’m staggered that Rhea Wiell would hypnotize someone that unstable-I’d think it would demolish his fragile connection to reality. But-all these symptoms could be caused by exactly what he says happened to him. An infancy spent in Terezin-I don’t know how you’d recover from that.”

In the living room, Michael and Carl were playing the same passage on the piano over and over, with variations in tempo and tone that were too subtle for me. The repetition began grating on me.

The door to the sunroom opened and Lotty came into the hall, pale but composed. “Sorry, Max,” she murmured. “Sorry to leave you alone to deal with him, but I couldn’t face him. Nor could Carl, apparently-he came in to castigate me for refusing to join you upstairs. Now I gather Carl has returned to the world of music, leaving this one in our possession.”

“Lotty.” Max held up a hand. “If you and Carl want to keep fighting, take it someplace else. Neither of you had anything to contribute to what was going on upstairs. But one thing I would like to know-”

The doorbell interrupted him-Morrell, returning with Don.

“He must live close by,” I said. “You were hardly gone a minute.”

Morrell came over to me. “He asked to be dropped at a place where he could get a cab. Which frankly I was happy to do. A little of the guy goes far with me, so I left him in front of the Orrington, where there’s a taxi stand.”

“Did you get his address?”

Morrell shook his head. “I asked when we got into the car, but he announced he would go home by cab.”

“I tried asking for it, too,” Don said, “because of course I want to interview him, but he’d decided we were an untrustworthy bunch.”

“Ah, nuts,” I said. “Now I’m back to square one with finding him. Unless I can track the cab.”

“Did he say anything upstairs?” Lotty asked. “Anything about how he came to think his name was Radbuka?”

I leaned against Morrell, swaying with fatigue. “Just more mumbo jumbo about these mystery documents of his father. Foster father. And how they proved Ulrich was part of the Einsatzgruppen.”

“What’s that?” Agnes asked, her blue eyes troubled.

“Special forces that committed special atrocities in eastern Europe during the war,” Max said tersely. “Lotty, since you’re feeling better, I would like some information from you now: who is Sofie Radbuka? I think you might explain to me, and to Vic here, why it had such an effect on you.”