Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

The lock here seemed identical to the gate, so I used the same combination of picks and had it open in less than a minute. Before going into the kitchen, I pulled on a pair of latex gloves. Just so I wouldn’t forget to do it later, I grabbed a dish towel from above the sink and wiped the outside knob on the back door.

The kitchen cabinets and appliances hadn’t been replaced in a good thirty years. The pilots on the old stove glowed blue in the dim light; the enamel was chipped down to metal along the edges of the oven door. The cabinets were the kind of thick brown pressed wood that had been popular in my childhood.

Paul had eaten breakfast here this morning: the milk hadn’t begun to curdle in the cereal bowl he’d left on the table. The room was cluttered with old newspapers and mail; a 1993 calendar still hung near the pantry. But it wasn’t filthy. Paul seemed to keep on top of his dishes, more or less, which was more than could be said for me much of the time.

I went down the hall, past a dining room with a substantial table that could have seated sixteen. A breakfront held a collection of china, a delicate pattern of blue flowers on a creamy background. It looked as though there was enough china to give sixteen people a five-course meal without stopping to wash any plates, but the dust on the dishes showed that nothing like that had been attempted recently.

All of the rooms on the ground floor were like this, filled with heavy, carved furniture, but covered in dust. Haphazard stacks of paper stood everywhere. In the living room, I found a copy of the Süddeutsche Zeitung dating back to 1989.

A photograph on the wall by the fireplace showed a boy and a man in front of a cottage, with a lake in the background. The boy was presumably Paul, around ten or eleven, the man presumably Ulrich, a barrel-chested, balding figure who stood next to his son, smiling but stern. Paul was looking anxiously up at his father, but Ulrich stared straight ahead at the camera. You wouldn’t look at the picture and say, Oh, these two must be related-either physically or by love.

A sitting room next to the main living room had apparently served as Ulrich’s study. Originally he’d probably decorated it to look like some period-film version of an English country library, with a double leather kneehole desk, a leather armchair, and shelves for books covered in tooled leather-a complete Shakespeare, a complete Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope in English, and Goethe and Schiller in German. The books had been flung about with a furious hand; pages were crumpled, spines broken-a wanton display of destruction.

The same violent hand had taken the desk apart: the drawers stood open, papers pulled from them and tossed on the floor. Had Paul done this, attacking his dead father by pounding on his possessions? Or had someone been searching the house ahead of me? And for what? Who besides me cared about the papers linking Ulrich to the Einsatzgruppen? Or had Ulrich had other secrets?

I couldn’t take the time right now to sift through the books and papers, especially since I didn’t know what I was looking for. I’d have to get Mary Louise and the Streeter brothers to sort them later, if we could get Paul out of the house long enough.

Radbuka’s silver mountain bike stood in the formal tiled entryway. So he’d come back here after snatching Ninshubur. Perhaps the morning’s emotional upheaval had exhausted him and he’d tucked himself in bed with the little blue dog.

I went up a carved wood staircase to the second floor and started with the rooms at the south end of the hall, where the stairway opened. The biggest, with its set of heavy silver brushes monogrammed with a curlicue U and what looked like either an H or a K, must have belonged to Ulrich. The bedstead and wardrobe were massive carved pieces that might have been three hundred years old. Had Ulrich brought all this heavy furniture with him from Germany, from some opulent wartime looting? Or was buying them his sign to himself of success in the New World?

The musty smell in the room made me doubt that Paul had changed the linens since his father’s death those six or seven years ago. I poked through the wardrobe and dresser drawers, wondering if Ulrich had left anything in his pockets or tucked beneath his severe pajamas. I was beginning to get discouraged. An old house filled with stuff that hadn’t been sorted out in thirty years-I doubted if seven maids with seven mops could get through it in under a year.

My spirits flagging, I went across the hall. Fortunately, that room and another further up the passage were both empty, not even holding bedsteads-no houseguests for the Ulrichs. Paul’s own bedroom was the last one on the left. It was the only room in the house with new furniture. He had made an effort to spruce it up-perhaps to separate himself from his father-with the most extreme, angular examples of modern Danish design. I looked through it carefully but didn’t see Ninshubur. So had he gone out again-to Rhea?-carrying the dog with him as a trophy?

A bathroom separated Paul’s bedroom from a hexagonal room overlooking the rank back garden. Heavy drapes in a dull bronze shut out any outside light. I flipped on the overhead light to reveal an extraordinary sight.

A large map of Europe was attached to one wall. Red pins were stuck into it. When I got close enough to read the lettering, I saw they marked the concentration camps of the Nazi era, the big ones like Treblinka and Auschwitz, and others like Sobibor and Neuengamme that I’d never heard of. Another, smaller map next to it showed the paths of the Einsatzgruppen through eastern Europe, with Einsatzgruppe B circled and underlined in red.

Other walls had the photographs of horror we’ve all become used to: emaciated bodies in striped clothes lying on boards; faces of children, their eyes large with fear, crammed into railway cars; helmeted guards with Alsatians snarling at people behind barbed wire; the chilling smoke from crematorium chimneys.

So startled was I by this display that I noticed the most shocking sight almost as an afterthought. I think my brain first saw it as one more garish exhibit, but it was horribly real: crumpled face-forward beneath the bronze drapes lay Paul Radbuka, blood staining the floor around his out-flung right arm.

I stood frozen for an interminable second before darting around the papers littering the floor to kneel next to him. He was lying partly on his left side. He was breathing in rasping, shallow gasps, bloody bubbles popping out of his mouth. The left side of his shirt was soaked with blood that had formed a pool on the floor beneath him. I ran to the bedroom and grabbed the comforter and a sheet. My own knees were stained now with blood, my right hand as well from where I’d pushed against the floor while feeling for his pulse. I returned to Radbuka, draping the comforter over him, turning him gently within its warmth so I could see where the blood was coming from.

I ripped his shirt open. The dog Ninshubur, greeny-brown with blood, fell out. I tore a length of sheet and pressed it against Radbuka’s chest. Blood continued to come from a wound on the left side, but it was oozing, not spurting: he wasn’t bleeding from an artery. When I lifted the pad I could see an ugly gash near the breastbone, the telltale jagged tear of bullet into flesh.

I tore another piece of sheet and made a pad, which I pressed firmly against the hole, then tied it into place with a long strip. I wrapped him in the comforter, head to toe, leaving just enough of his face showing that he could get oxygen through the labored breaths he was taking. “Keep you warm, buddy, until the paramedics get here.”

The only phone I remembered was in the living room. I ran back down the stairs, leaving a trail of bloodstains on the carpet, and called 911. “The front door will be open,” I said. “This is an extreme emergency, gunshot wound to the chest, victim unconscious, breath shallow. Paramedics should come up the stairs to the north end of the floor.”