Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

“Max and Agnes know? Okay, let me talk to Calia for a minute.”

At first Calia refused to talk to “Aunt Vicory.” She was tired, she was scared, and she was reacting the way kids do, digging her heels in, but when Tim said I had a message about Nebbisher she reluctantly came to the phone.

“Tim is very naughty. He let the bad man take Ninshubur and now he says his name wrong.”

“Tim feels bad that he didn’t look after Ninshubur for you, sugar. But before you go to bed tonight, I’ll try to have your doggy back to you. I’m leaving my office right now to start looking, okay?”

“Okay, Aunt Vicory,” she said in a resigned voice.

When Tim came back on the line, he thanked me for drying up the tears-he’d been starting to feel desperate. He’d reached Agnes at her gallery appointment; she was on her way home, but he’d rather protect the Israeli prime minister in Syria than look after another five-year-old.

I drummed my fingers on the desktop. I called Rhea Wiell, who was fortunately between appointments. When I explained the situation and said it would be really helpful if we could get the dog back today, she said she would bring it up with Paul when she saw him Friday morning.

“Of course, Vic, all he wants it for is as a talisman of the family that he sees as denying his ties to them. In the early days of his treatment with me, he would take little things from my office, thinking I didn’t see him doing it: cups from the waiting room, or one of my scarves. As he became stronger, he stopped doing that.”

“You know him better than I do, Rhea, but poor Calia is only five. I think her needs come first here. Could you call him now and urge him to return it? Or let me have his phone number so I can call him?”

“I hope you’re not making up this whole episode in an effort to try to get his home number from me, Vic. Under the circumstances, I doubt you, of all people, could persuade him to see you. He has an appointment with me in the morning; I’ll talk to him about it then. I know Don is convinced that Max Loewenthal is not related to Paul, but Max certainly holds the key to Paul’s door to his European relatives. If you could get Max to agree to see him-”

“Max offered to see him when Paul crashed the party on Sunday. He doesn’t want to see Max-he wants Max to embrace him as a family member. If you could get Paul to let us look at his family papers-”

“No,” she said sharply. “I thought as soon as you called that you’d come up with some other way of trying to wheedle me into letting you see those, and I was right. I will not violate Paul’s privacy. He endured too many violations as a child for me to do that to him.”

She hung up on me. Why couldn’t she see her prize exhibit belonged in the locked ward at Menard? Or on heavy doses of antipsychotics.

That irritated thought gave me an idea. I looked up the number for Posner’s Holocaust Asset Recovery Committee on Touhy. When a man answered, I pushed my nose down to make my voice sound nasal.

“This is Casco Pharmacy in River Forest,” I said. “I need to reach Mr. Paul Radbuka.”

“He doesn’t work here,” the man said.

“Oh, dear. We’re filling his prescription for Haldol, but we don’t have his address. He left this phone number. You don’t know where we can reach him, do you? We can’t fill a prescription for this kind of drug without an address.”

“Well, you can’t use our address; he’s not on staff here.”

“Very good, sir, but if you do have some way for me to reach him? This is the only phone number he gave us.”

The man put the receiver down with a bang. “ Leon, did that guy Radbuka fill out a form when he came in on Tuesday? We’re starting to get his phone calls, and I, for one, have no wish to act as his answering service.”

I heard talk back and forth on the floor, most of it complaining about Radbuka and why did Reb Joseph want to burden them with such a difficult person. I heard Leon, the trusted henchman Posner brought with him to our talk outside the hospital yesterday, rebuke them for questioning Reb Joseph’s judgment, before picking up the phone himself.

“Who is this?”

“Casco Pharmacy in River Forest. We have a prescription for Haldol we’re trying to fill for Mr. Paul Radbuka and we need his home address. This is a powerful antipsychotic drug; we cannot dispense it without some way of reaching him.” I spoke in a nasal singsong, as if I’d been trained to reel off the bureaucratic litany by heart.

“Yeah, well, can you make a note in your records not to use this number? This is a business office where he sometimes does volunteer work, but we can’t take his messages. Here’s his home address.”

My heart was beating as hard as if I were hearing a message from my lover. I copied down a number on Roslyn Street, then read it back, forgetting in my excitement to use my nasal singsong. But what difference did that make now? I had what I wanted. And I hadn’t needed to break Rhea Wiell’s jaw to get it.

Roslyn was a tiny street, barely a block long, that emptied onto Lincoln Park. Radbuka’s house was on the south side, near the park end. It was an old greystone whose front, like most of the houses in this exclusive block, was set close to the street. I wanted to smash down the door, charge in, and forcibly confront Radbuka, but I made as discreet a survey as I could. This close to Lincoln Park, a lot of joggers, dogwalkers, and other athletes kept passing me, even though it was still a bit early in the afternoon for people to be home from work.

The front door was a massive piece of wood, with a peephole making it possible for Radbuka to study his visitors. Keeping myself out of its range, I rang the bell, vigorously, leaning on it for four or five minutes. When there wasn’t an answer, I couldn’t resist the idea of going inside to see if I could find the documents that proved to him that Radbuka was his name. I tried the front door-it would be ridiculous to risk being spotted breaking and entering if I could get in easily-but the brass knob didn’t turn.

I didn’t want to stand with my picklocks in full view of so many joggers; I’d have to go in through the back. I’d had to park three blocks from Roslyn Street. I returned to my car and took a navy coverall from a box in the back. A patch on the left pocket proclaimed People’s Power Service. That and a tool belt completed an easy piece of camouflage. I took them into the women’s rest room in the conservatory and came out a minute later, my hair covered in a blue kerchief, looking like a piece of the service woodwork the Yuppies would overlook.

Back at Radbuka’s house, I tried the bell again, then went up a narrow strip of flagstones along the house’s east side leading to the back. It was bisected by a ten-foot-high gate with a lock set in the middle. The lock was a complex dead bolt. I crouched down with my picklocks, trying to ignore the passersby in the hopes they would do the same to me.

I was sweating freely by the time I got the tumblers pressed back. The lock had to be opened by a key no matter which side of the gate you were on; I wedged a piece of paper into the bolt hole to keep the tongue from reengaging.

The lots on Roslyn were narrow-barely wider than the houses themselves-but deep, without the service alleys and garages that run between most streets in the city. An eight-foot-high wooden fence, somewhat dilapidated, separated the garden from the street behind.

Paul’s father must have made a fortune doing whatever he did for the son to afford this house on this street, but either depression or lack of money made Paul let it go. The garden was a tangle of overgrown bushes and knee-high weeds. As I waded through them to the kitchen entrance, several cats snarled at me and moved off. A shiver ran down my spine.