Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

“Of my own family, well, I found a cousin in one of the DP camps. I tried to persuade him to come to England with me, but he was determined to return to Vienna. Where he did live out the rest of his life. At the time no one knew what would happen with the Russians and Austria, but in the end it worked out fine for my cousin. But he was always very reclusive after the war. I had looked up to him so as a child; he was eight years older than me, it was hard to see him so fearful, so withdrawn.”

I stood silent, sickened by the images he was conjuring, before bursting out, “Then why did Lotty use the name Sofie Radbuka? I-that episode-the picture of Carl going to the country, looking for her cottage, Lotty staying behind the doors and using the name of a dead person-it’s very unnerving. And it doesn’t sound like Lotty.”

Max rubbed his eyes. “Everyone has unaccountable moments in their lives. It may be that Lotty thought she was responsible for the loss or death of this Sofie Radbuka, whether it was a cousin or a patient. When Lotty thought she might be dying herself-well, we were all living difficult lives then, working hard, coping with the loss of our families. The deprivation in England after the war was still acute, too-we had our own bomb sites to clean up. There were coal shortages, bitter weather, no one had any money, food and clothes were still rationed. Lotty might have snapped under the strain, overidentified with this Radbuka woman.

“I do remember when Lotty came back from that illness. It was in winter, maybe February. She had lost a lot of weight. But she brought a dozen eggs and a half pound of butter back from the country with her and invited Teresz and me and the rest of our lot over for tea. She scrambled all the eggs up with the butter and we had a wonderful feast, and at one point she announced she would never again let her life be held hostage. She was so fierce we all rather backed away. Carl refused to come, of course; it was years before he would speak to her again.”

I told him about the bulletin board I’d found with Questing Scorpio’s entry. “So there definitely was someone in England by that name in the forties, but my feeling is that Paul Radbuka’s response was so intense that Scorpio didn’t write back. I posted a message saying Scorpio could get in touch with Freeman Carter if there was something confidential to discuss.”

Max shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. I don’t know what any of it means. I just wish Lotty would either tell me what she’s tormenting herself with-or stop carrying on in such a dramatic fashion.”

“Have you spoken to her since Sunday night? I tried talking to her last night, but she bit my head off.”

Max grunted. “This is one of those weeks where I wonder what keeps our friendship together. She’s an important surgeon; she’s sorry she was momentarily under the weather at my delightful party, but she’s fine now, thanks very much, and she needs to make rounds.”

The doorbell rang. Tim Streeter had arrived. He was a tall, rangy guy with a handlebar moustache and an engaging smile. Max called to Agnes, who quickly relaxed under Tim’s calm air of confidence, while Calia, after a momentary suspicion, promptly announced he was a “lawrus” because of his giant moustache and offered to throw him dead fish. Tim made her squeal with laughter by blowing spluttery air through his moustache points. Max, much relieved, took off for the hospital.

Tim toured the premises, looking for vulnerable spots, then crossed the street to the park with Calia so she could play with the dogs. Calia brought Ninshubur with her, proudly showing Mitch and Peppy that her dog had tags just like theirs. “Ninshubur is Mitch’s mummy,” she announced.

After seeing the skillful way Tim kept between Calia and any passersby, seeming to make it part of a game instead of alarming the child, Agnes returned to the house to set up her paints. When the dogs had run the edge off their energy, I told Tim I needed to move on.

“There’s not an imminent threat, as I understand it,” he drawled.

“A hyper-emotional guy flailing around-not threatening directly, but making everyone uncomfortable,” I agreed.

“Then I think I can do it on my own. I’ll set up a camp bed in that sunroom: it’s the one place with vulnerable windows. You’ve got the photos of the stalker, right?”

In the confusion of getting Morrell to O’Hare, I’d left my briefcase at his place. I had a set of photos in it, which I said I’d drop off in an hour or two on my way into the city. Calia pouted when I called the dogs to me, but Tim blew through his moustache and gave a walruslike bark. She turned her back on us and demanded that he bark again if he wanted another fish.

Lotty Herschel’s Story:

Quarantine

I reached the cottage on a day so hot that not even the bees could bear it. A man who’d ridden the bus with me from Seaton Junction carried my suitcase up the road for me. When he finally left me, after asking for the eighth or ninth time if I was sure I could manage, I sat exhausted on the door-stone, letting the sun burn through my jumper. I’d darned it so many times that it was more mending thread than cotton at this point.

It had been hot in London, too, but a horrible city heat, where the yellow skies pushed down on you so hard your head began to buzz as if it were filled with cotton wool. At night I sweated so much that sheet and nightgown both were wet when I got up in the morning. I knew I needed to eat, but between the heat and the lethargy my physical condition induced it was hard to force food down.

When Claire examined me, she told me brusquely that I was starving myself to death. “Any infection on the wards could kill you in a week, the condition you’re in right now. You need to eat. You need to rest.”

Eat and rest. When I lay in bed at night, feverish nightmares consumed me. I kept seeing my mother, too weak from hunger and pregnancy to walk down the stairs with us when Hugo and I left Vienna. The baby died of malnutrition at two months. Nadia, they’d called her, meaning hope. They would not be hopeless. I knew the baby died because my father wrote to tell me. A Red Cross letter, with the prescribed twenty-five words, that reached me in March, 1940. The last letter from him.

I had hated the baby when my mother was pregnant because it took her from me: no more games, no more songs, only her eyes getting bigger in her head. Now this poor little sister whom I’d never seen haunted me, reproaching me for my nine-year-old jealousy. In the night as I sweated in the thick London air, I could hear her feeble cries growing faint with malnutrition.

Or I’d see my Oma, her thick silvery-blond hair, about which she was so vain that she refused to bob it. In her apartment on the Renngasse I would sit with her at night while the maid brushed it, the ends so long my grandmother could sit on them. But now, in my misery, I would see her, shaved as my father’s mother had always been under her wig. Which image tormented me more? My Oma, shaved and helpless, or my father’s mother, my Bobe, whom I refused to kiss good-bye? As I grew thinner and weaker in the London heat, that last morning in Vienna grew so loud in my head that I could hardly hear the world around me.

The cousins with whom I shared a bed, not coming to England, staying in bed, refusing to get up to walk to the station with us. Oma and Opa would pay for Lingerl’s children, but not the daughters of my father’s sisters, those dark girls with nut-shaped faces whom I so closely resembled. Oh, the money, Opa had no money anymore, except that little hoard of coins. The coins that bought me my medical training could have bought my cousins’ lives. My Bobe stretching her arms out to me, her beloved Martin’s daughter, and I with my Oma’s jealous eyes on me giving her only a formal curtsy in farewell. I lay in bed weeping, begging my granny to forgive me.