Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

“Very enterprising.” I smiled patronizingly at Posner. “So you skulked around in the bushes outside Rossy’s building until you saw Durham come out. And then Rossy, who’s got a lot of charm, talked you into believing some stupid rumor about the hospital.”

“It wasn’t like that, not at all,” Posner snapped. “When I saw him with Durham, I wanted to see-I’d been aware for some time that Durham was trying to sabotage our efforts to force European banks and insurers to provide redress for the outright theft which they engineered in the wake of-”

“You can assume I understand the underlying issue, Mr. Posner. But Durham didn’t manufacture the grounds for his protest. There’s a growing group of people who believe companies which benefited from African slavery should pay reparations in the same way that companies which benefited from Jewish or Polish slave labor should.”

His beard jutted toward me at an aggressive angle. “That’s a separate issue. We’re concerned about actual money, in bank accounts and unpaid life-insurance policies, that European banks and insurers have stolen. You’ve been working for one black man in Chicago whose claim was denied after he paid up his policy. I’m trying to do the same for tens of thousands of people whose parents thought they were leaving their children a financial cushion. And I wanted to know why Louis Durham showed up outside Ajax so conveniently-he never started campaigning for slave reparations until we started our campaign to force Ajax to pay off life-insurance policies.”

I was startled. “So you thought Rossy was bribing him to march against you? To disrupt operations at his own company? You should take it to Oliver Stone! But I guess you took it to Rossy himself. Did he say, Yes, yes, I confess: if you’ll only picket Beth Israel instead of Ajax I’ll stop giving money to Louis Durham?”

“Are you being stupid on purpose?” Posner spat at me. “Naturally Rossy denied any collusion. But he also assured me he would do a thorough internal search for any policies at Ajax or Edelweiss that belonged to Holocaust victims.”

“And you believed him?”

“I gave him a week. He convinced me he was serious enough to have one week.”

“Then what are you doing here?” I asked. “Why not give the boys some time off?”

“He came to help me.” Paul Radbuka, pink with excitement, turned on me as suddenly as he’d accepted me a moment earlier. “Just because you won’t let me see my family, just because you hired that-that Brownshirt to keep me from talking to my little cousin, that doesn’t mean they’re not my family. Let Max Loewenthal see how it feels to be ostracized for a change.”

“Paul, you really need to understand that he is not related to you. You are not only making them and yourself miserable by stalking Mr. Loewenthal’s family, you are running a serious risk of being arrested. Believe me, life in prison is terrible.”

Radbuka scowled. “Max is the one who belongs in prison, treating me with this kind of contempt.”

I looked at him, baffled about how to penetrate his dense cloud of denial. “Paul, who was Ulrich, really?”

“That was my foster father. Are you going to try to make me confess he was my real father? I won’t! He wasn’t!”

“But Rhea says that Ulrich wasn’t his name.”

His face turned from pink to red. “Don’t try to call Rhea a liar. You’re the liar. Ulrich left behind documents in code. They prove that my name is really Radbuka. If you believed in Rhea you’d understand the code, but you don’t, you’re trying to destroy her, you want to destroy me, I won’t let you, I won’t, I won’t, I won’t!”

I watched in alarm as he began shaking, wondering if he was having a seizure of some kind. When I moved to try to help him, Posner barked at me to keep my distance: he was not going to allow a woman to touch one of his followers, even if Radbuka himself was not aware of the danger a woman’s touch posed. He and Leon supported Radbuka over to a bench at the bus stop. I watched for a moment, but Radbuka seemed to be calming down. I left the men to it and walked slowly up the street back to the hospital, hoping for a word with Max before returning to my office.

“Posner made a certain kind of sense,” I told Max, when his weary secretary got him to give me five minutes, “with his ideas about Ajax bribing Durham to start demonstrating, but really, he must be as crazy as Paul Radbuka to stage a demonstration here. How are things going with your donors?”

Max doesn’t often look his age, but this afternoon his skin was drawn tight and grey across his cheekbones. “I don’t understand any of this, Victoria. Morrell’s friend Don Strzepek came over last night. In good faith I let him look at my old notes; I thought he believed them. Surely a friend of Morrell’s wouldn’t have been abusing my trust?”

“But those notes-they don’t have enough detail about the Radbukas for anyone to know if this guy Paul is a relative or not-unless there’s something in your file I didn’t see?”

He made a tired gesture. “Just that letter of Lotty’s, which you read. Surely Don wouldn’t have used that to encourage Paul to believe he was a relative, would he?”

“I don’t think so, Max,” I said, but not with total confidence: I was remembering the glow in Don’s eyes when he looked at Rhea Wiell. “I can try to talk to him tonight, though, if you’d like.”

“Yes, why don’t you do that.” He sat heavily at his desk, his face an effigy. “I never thought I would be happy to see the last of my family, but I will be glad when Calia and Agnes get on that plane.”

I slowly walked back to my car and drove down to my office, obeying every speed limit, every traffic sign. The morning’s adrenaline-fueled fury was long gone. I stared at the stack of messages Mary Louise had left for me, then caught up with Morrell at his hotel in Rome, where it was nine at night. The conversation both cheered and further depressed me. He said the kinds of things one wants to hear from a lover, especially when the lover is about to go into the land of the Taliban for eight weeks. But when we hung up I felt more forlorn than ever.

I tried to take a nap on the cot in my back room, but my mind wouldn’t shut down. I finally got up again and determinedly went through the messages, returning phone calls. Halfway through the pile was a note to call Ralph at Ajax: the company had decided to make the Sommers family whole. I got back to him at once.

“Mind you, Vic, this is a one-time-only event,” Ralph Devereux warned when I called him. “Don’t expect to make it a habit.”

“Ralph, this is wonderful news-but whose idea was it? Yours? Rossy’s? Did Alderman Durham call and urge you on to do this?”

He ignored me. “And another thing: I would greatly appreciate it if you let me know the next time you sic the cops on my employees.”

“You’re right, Ralph. I got caught up in an emergency at a hospital, but I should have called you. Did they arrest Connie Ingram?”

Mary Louise had left a typed report about Sommers and about Amy Blount which I was trying to scan while I talked: between Mary Louise’s police contacts and Freeman Carter’s skill, the state had let Isaiah Sommers go home, but they’d made it clear he was their front-runner. The trouble was not his prints on the door per se: the Finch said the 911 techs had confirmed what the Twenty-first District cops had told Margaret Sommers: they’d received an anonymous phone tip-probably from a black male-which was what made them print the room.

“No. But they came right here to the building to question her.”

“Right to the sacred halls of Ajax itself?”