Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

“I told Vic,” Lotty said. “I told her the Radbukas were one of the families that you inquired about for our group of friends in London.”

I’d been about to suggest to Morrell that we go home, but I wanted to hear what Lotty would say to Max. “Could we sit down?” I asked Max. “I’m dead on my feet.”

“ Victoria, of course.” Max ushered us into the living room, where Carl and Michael were still fiddling with their music.

Michael looked over at us. He told Carl they could finish the discussion on the way to Los Angeles and came over to sit next to Agnes. I pictured Michael with his cello stuck between his legs in an airplane seat, bowing the same twelve measures over and over while Carl played them on his clarinet at a different pace.

“You haven’t eaten, have you?” Morrell said to me. “Let me try to rustle you up a snack-you’ll feel better.”

“You didn’t get dinner?” Max exclaimed. “All this upheaval is erasing ordinary courtesy from my mind.”

He sent one of the waiters to the kitchen for a tray of leftovers and drinks. “Now, Lotty, it’s your turn on the hot seat. I’ve respected your privacy all these years and I will continue to do so. But you need to explain to us why the name Sofie Radbuka rattled you so badly this evening. I know I looked for Radbukas for you in Vienna after the war. Who were they?”

“It wasn’t the name,” Lotty said. “It was the whole aspect of that-” She broke off, biting her lip like a schoolgirl, when she saw Max gravely shake his head.

“It-it was someone at the hospital,” Lotty muttered, looking at the carpet. “At the Royal Free. Who didn’t want their name public.”

“So that was it,” Carl said with a venom that startled all of us. “I knew it at the time. I knew it and you denied it.”

Lotty flushed, a wave of crimson almost as dark as her jacket. “You made such stupid accusations that I didn’t think you deserved an answer.”

“About what?” Agnes asked, as bewildered as I was.

Carl said, “You must have realized by now that Lotty and I were lovers for some years in London. I thought it would be forever, but that’s because I didn’t know Lotty had married medicine.”

“Unlike you and music,” Lotty snapped.

“Right,” I said, leaning over to serve myself scalloped potatoes and salmon from the tray the waiter had brought. “You both had strong senses of vocation. Neither of you would budge. Then what happened?”

“Then Lotty developed TB. Or so she said.” Carl bit off the words.

He turned back to Lotty. “You never told me you were ill. You never said good-bye! I got your letter-letter? A notice in The Times would have told me more!-when I returned from Edinburgh, there it was, that cold, cryptic note. I ran across town. That imbecile landlady in your lodgings-I can still see her face, with the horrible mole on her nose and all the hairs sticking out of it-she told me. She was smirking. From her I learned you were in the country. From her I learned you’d instructed her to forward all your mail to Claire Tallmadge, the Ice Queen. Not from you. I loved you. I thought you loved me. But you couldn’t even tell me good-bye.”

He stopped, panting, then added bitterly, “To this day I do not understand why you let that Tallmadge woman run you around the way she did,” he said to Lotty. “She was so-so supercilious. You were her little Jewish pet. Couldn’t you ever see how she looked down on you? And the rest of that family. The vapid sister, Vanessa, and her insufferable husband, what was his name? Marmalade?”

“Marmaduke,” Lotty said. “As you know quite well, Carl. Besides, you resented anyone I paid more attention to than you.”

“My God, you two,” Max said. “You should join Calia up in the nursery. Could we get to the point?”

“Besides,” Lotty said, flushing again at Max’s criticism, “when I returned to the Royal Free, Claire-Claire felt her friendship with me was inappropriate. She-I didn’t even know she retired until I saw it in the Royal Free newsletter this spring.”

“What did the Radbukas have to do with this?” Don asked.

“I went to see Queen Claire,” Carl snarled. “She told me she was forwarding Lotty’s mail to a receiving office in Axmouth in care of someone named Sofie Radbuka. But when I wrote, my mail was returned to me, with a note scribbled on the envelope that there was no one there by that name. I even took a train out from London one Monday and walked three miles through the countryside to this cottage. There were lights on inside, Lotty, but you wouldn’t answer the door. I stayed there all afternoon, but you never came out.

“Six months went by, and suddenly Lotty was back in London. With no word to me. No response to my letters. No explanation. As if our life together had never taken place. Who was Sofie Radbuka, Lotty? Your lover? Did the two of you sit in there all afternoon laughing at me?”

Lotty was leaning back in an armchair, her eyes shut, the lines in her face sharply drawn. So might she look dead. The thought made me clutch at my stomach.

“Sofie Radbuka no longer existed, so I borrowed her name,” she said in the thread of a voice, not opening her eyes. “It seems stupid now, but we all did unaccountable things in those days. The only mail I accepted was from the hospital-everything else I sent back unread, just as I did your letters. I had a mortal condition. I needed to be alone while I coped with it. I loved you, Carl. But no one could reach me in the alone place I was. Not you, not Max, no one. When I-recovered-I had no capacity for talking to you. It-the only thing I knew to do was draw a line. You-you never seemed inconsolable to me.”

Max went to sit next to her, taking her hand, but Carl got up to pace furiously about the room. “Oh, yes, I had lovers,” he spat over his shoulder. “Lovers aplenty that I wanted you to know about. But it was many years before I fell in love again and by then I was out of practice, I couldn’t make it last. Three marriages in forty years and how many mistresses in between? I’m a byword among women in orchestras.”

“Don’t blame me for that,” Lotty said coldly, sitting up. “You can choose how to act. I don’t bear responsibility for that.”

“Yes, you can choose to be remote as ever. Poor Loewenthal, he wants you to marry him and can’t figure out why you won’t. He doesn’t realize you’re made of scalpels and ligatures, not heart and muscle.”

“Carl, I can manage my own business,” Max said, half laughing, half exasperated. “But returning to the present, if I may, if the Radbukas are gone, how exactly did this man tonight get the name in the first place?”

“Yes,” Lotty agreed. “That’s why I was so startled to hear it.”

“Do you have any sense of how to find that out, Victoria?” Max asked.

I yawned ferociously. “I don’t know. I don’t know how to get him to let me see these mystery documents. The other end of the investigation would be his past. I don’t know what kind of immigration records might survive from ’47 or ’48, when he would have come into this country. If he really was even an immigrant.”

“He is at least a speaker of German,” Lotty said unexpectedly. “When he first arrived, I wondered if any of his story was true-you know, on the tape he claimed to have come here as a small child, speaking German. So I asked him in German if he was brought up on the myth of the Ulrichs as wolflike warriors. He clearly understood me.”

I tried to remember the sequence of remarks in the hall but I couldn’t quite get everything straight. “That’s when he said he wouldn’t speak the language of his slavery, isn’t it?” Another yawn engulfed me. “No more tonight. Carl, Michael, the concert today was brilliant. I hope the rest of the tour goes as well-that this disturbance in the field doesn’t affect your music. Are you going on with them?” I added to Agnes.