Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

She shook her head. “The tour goes on for four more weeks. Calia and I will stay with Max another five days, then return directly to England. She should be in kindergarten right now, but we wanted her to have this time with her Opa.”

“By which time I will also know the story of Ninshubur the faithful hound by heart.” Max smiled, although his eyes remained grave.

Morrell took me by the hand. We stumbled out to his car together while Don trailed behind us, getting in a few lungfuls of nicotine. An Evanston patrol car was inspecting Morrell’s car stickers: the town makes money by having capricious parking regulations. Morrell was outside his own parking zone, but we got into the car before the man actually wrote a ticket.

I slumped against the front seat. “I’ve never been around so much emotion for so many hours.”

“Exhausting,” Morrell agreed. “I don’t think this man Paul is a fraud, do you?”

“Not in the sense that he’s deliberately trying to con us,” I murmured, my eyes shut. “He sincerely believes what he’s saying, but he’s alarming; he believes a new thing at the drop of a hat.”

“It’s a hell of a story, one way or another,” Don said. “I wonder if I should go to England to check up on the Radbuka family.”

“That gets you kind of far from your book with Rhea Wiell,” I said. “And as Morrell advised me yesterday, is it really necessary to go sleuthing after Lotty’s past?”

“Only insofar as it seems to have invaded the present,” Don answered. “I thought she was lying, didn’t you? About it being someone at the Royal Free, I mean.”

“I thought she was making it clear it was her business, not ours,” I said sharply, as Morrell pulled into the alley behind his building.

“That history between Lotty and Carl.” I shivered as I followed Morrell down the hall to the bedroom. “Lotty’s pain, Carl’s, too, but Lotty feeling so alone she couldn’t tell her lover she was dying. I can’t bear it.”

“Tomorrow’s my last day here,” Morrell complained. “I have to pack, and I have to spend the day again with State Department officials. Instead of with you, my darling, as I would prefer. I could have done with less trauma tonight and more sleep.”

I flung my clothes onto a chair, but Morrell hung his suit tidily in the closet. He did at least leave his weekend bag to unpack in the morning.

“You’re a little like Lotty, Vic.” Morrell held me in the dark. “If something goes amiss with you, don’t creep away to a cottage under a fake name to lick your wounds alone.”

They were a comfort, those words, with his departure so close, with the turbulence of the last few hours still shaking me. They spread around me in the dark, those words, calming me into sleep.

Lotty Herschel’s Story:

V-E Day

I took Hugo to Piccadilly Circus for the V-E Day celebrations. Masses of people, fireworks, a speech by the king broadcast over loudspeakers-the crowd was euphoric. I shared some of the feeling-although for me complete euphoria was impossible. It wasn’t just because of the newsreels of Belsen and other camps that had sickened the English that spring: stories of death had been floating in from Europe with the immigrant community for some time. Even Minna had been furious over some of the MPs’ callous response to the men who had escaped from Auschwitz when it was first being built.

I would get impatient with Hugo, because he couldn’t remember Oma and Opa, or even Mama, very clearly. He hardly remembered any German, whereas I had to hang on to the language because that’s what Cousin Minna spoke at home. In 1942 she had married Victor, a horrid old man who she was sure was going to inherit the glove factory. He had a stroke before the owner died and it went to someone else, so there she was, stuck with an elderly sick husband and no money. But he was from Hamburg, so of course they spoke German to each other. It took me longer than Hugo to learn English, longer to fit in at school, longer to feel at home in England.

For Hugo, coming to England at five, life began with the Nussbaum family. They treated him like a son. In fact, Mr. Nussbaum wanted to adopt Hugo, but that upset me so much that the Nussbaums dropped the idea. I see things differently now, see Hugo’s turning to them, trusting them, as the natural state of a five-year-old, not an abandonment of my parents-and of me. Probably if I’d lived with someone who cherished me, my reaction to the idea would have been different-although Mr. Nussbaum was always very kind to me and tried to include me in his regular Sunday outings with my brother.

But I was especially angry with Hugo on V-E Day, because he thought the end of the war meant he would have to return to Austria. He didn’t want to leave the Nussbaums or his friends at school, and he was hoping I would explain to Mama and Papa that he would only come for the summers.

I realize now my anger was partly fueled by my own anxieties. I longed for the loving family I’d lost, longed to put Cousin Minna and her constant criticism behind me, but I, too, had friends and a school that I didn’t want to leave. I was turning sixteen, with two years to work toward my higher-school certificate. I could see that it would be as hard to return to Austria as it had been to come to England six years earlier-harder, since the ruin of war might make it impossible for me to finish school there.

Miss Skeffing, the headmistress at the Camden High School for Girls, was on the board at the Royal Free Hospital. She had encouraged me to do the science course that would prepare me for medical-school entrance. I didn’t want to leave her, or the chance to read medicine. Although I saw very little of Claire these days, since she was starting her junior houseman rotation, I didn’t want to leave her, either. After all, it was Claire’s example that made me stand up to Cousin Minna and insist on applying to the Camden school. Minna was furious-she wanted me to leave school at fourteen to help make money in the glove factory. But I reminded her that since she wouldn’t recommend my father for a job in 1939, she had a nerve expecting me to quit school to take one now.

She and Victor also tried to put a stop to my going to meet friends for Miss Herbst’s music evenings. During the war years, those evenings were a lifesaver. Even for someone like me, with no musical ability, there was always something to do-we staged operas, held impromptu glees. Even during the Blitz, when you found your way around London by guess, I would slam out of Minna’s house and move through the black streets to Miss Herbst’s flat.

Sometimes I’d go by bus: that was an adventure, because the buses had to obey the blackout, so you wouldn’t know one was coming until it was almost on top of you, and then you’d have to guess where to get off. Once on the way home, I guessed wrong and landed miles away from Minna’s. A street warden found me and let me spend the night in their shelter. It was great fun, drinking watery cocoa with the wardens while they talked over football scores, but my little adventure left Minna more sour than ever.

Much as we were worried about our families, none of us-not just me or Hugo, but no one in that group at Miss Herbst’s-wanted to resume life in German. We saw it as the language of humiliation. Germany or Austria or Czechoslovakia were the places where we’d seen our beloved grandparents forced to scrub the paving stones on their hands and knees while crowds stood around jeering and throwing things at them. We even changed the spelling of our names: I turned Lotte into Lotty; Carl used a C instead of the K he’d been born with.

On V-E night, after the king’s speech, I put Hugo on the tube back to Golders Green, where the Nussbaums lived, and met up with Max and some of the others in Covent Garden to wait for Carl, who’d gotten a job with the Sadlers Wells orchestra, which was playing that night. Thousands of people were in Covent Garden, the one place in London you could get a drink in the middle of the night.