Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

“His savior in England, you can see he’s labeled it,” I said. “I couldn’t help wondering-well, do you know her?”

Carl frowned at the dark, wistful face. “ London,” he said slowly. “I don’t remember who, except that it’s a long time ago, during the war years maybe, or right after.”

“He had this on this wall, in the middle of his shrine to the therapist he worships?” Lotty said in a high queer voice.

“You know who she is?” I asked.

Lotty looked grim. “I know who she is-I can even show you the book where he found this picture, if Max has it on his shelves. But why-”

She interrupted herself to dart from the room. We heard her running up the stairs, her tread as always light, that of a young woman.

Max looked at the picture. “I don’t recognize the face. This isn’t the doctor in London Lotty worshiped as a child, is it?”

Carl shook his head. “Claire Tallmadge was very fair-the perfect English rose. I always thought that was part of Lotty’s infatuation with her. It used to make my blood boil, how Lotty would let that family call her ‘the little monkey.’ Victoria, let’s see these books you brought with you.”

I handed over the accordion file. Max and Carl recoiled from the disfigured face on the front of it.

“Who is this?” Carl demanded.

“Paul’s father,” I said. “Paul had a ton of photographs of him in that secret room, all marked up like this. Not the blood-that got there when I took it away with me.”

Lotty returned with a book, which she held open at a page of photographs. “Anna Freud.”

We all stared from Paul’s picture to the identical shot on the page, dumbfounded, until Carl said, “Of course. You took me to hear her speak, but she looked different-this is such an intimate picture.”

“She was a refugee from Vienna, like us,” Lotty explained. “I admired her to an extraordinary degree. I even volunteered at the nursery she ran in Hampstead during the war, you know, washing dishes, the kind of thing an unskilled teenager could do. Minna used to lash out at me-well, never mind that. For a time I imagined I would follow Anna Freud and become an analyst myself, but-well, never mind that, either. Why is this man claiming her as his savior? Does he imagine he was in the Hampstead nursery?”

The rest of us could only shake our heads, bewildered.

“What about these?” I handed over the ledgers.

“Ulrich,” Max breathed, looking at the peeling gold leaf stamped on the front. “How stupid of me to forget it is more often a first name than a last. No wonder you couldn’t find him. What are these?”

“I think they must have something to do with insurance,” I said, “but you can see that Paul had put them in here with the label Einsatzgruppenführer Ulrich Hoffman. Since they were locked in his secret room, I’m assuming these documents convinced him his name was Radbuka, but I frankly don’t get it. I showed them to a young historian who’s been working in the Ajax archives; she said it looked like a Jewish organization’s ledgers. Would that be possible?”

Max picked up the second volume and squinted at it. “It’s been a long time since I tried reading this kind of old-fashioned German handwriting. These are addresses, I think. It could be some kind of Jewish welfare association, I suppose, a list of names and addresses-perhaps the group all bought insurance together. I don’t understand the other numbers, though. Unless your historian friend is right: maybe S. Radbuka brought sixty-five people with her and K. Omschutz brought fifty-four.” He shook his head, unsatisfied with that explanation, and looked back at the books. “Schrei. What city has a street called-oh, Johann Nestroy. The Austrian fairy-tale writer. Is this Vienna, Lotty? I don’t remember either Nestroy or Schreigassen.”

Lotty’s skin looked waxen. She took the book from Max, her arms jerky, as if she were a marionette. She looked at the page where he was pointing, her finger moving slowly along the lines, reading the names under her breath.

“ Vienna? Yes, it should be Vienna. Leopoldsgasse, Untere Augarten Strasse. You don’t remember those streets? Where was your family driven after the Anschluss?” Her voice was a harsh squawk.

“We lived on Bauernmarkt,” Max said. “We weren’t relocated, although we had three other families, all strangers, pushed into our flat. I can’t say I’ve wanted to keep these street names in my head all these years. I’m surprised you remember them.”

His voice was pregnant with meaning. Lotty looked at him grimly. I hastily intervened before they could start fighting.

“This looks like the same paper stock and the same handwriting I found on a sheet of paper in the bag of a dead insurance agent on the South Side, which is why I’m assuming these are insurance documents. The old agent was named Rick Hoffman, and I’m betting he’s Paul’s father-stepfather or whatever. Would Rick be a nickname for Ulrich?”

“It could be.” Max smiled wryly. “If he wanted to fit into America, he would have picked a name everyone could pronounce instead of something alien like Ulrich.”

“If he sold insurance, he would have felt a special incentive to fit in,” I said.

“Ah, yes, I do believe this is an insurance journal.” Carl turned to a page that was filled with names and dates with check marks, like the fragment in Fepple’s office. “Didn’t your family buy insurance like this, Loewenthal? The agent came into the ghetto every Friday on his bicycle; my father and all the other men would pay their twenty or thirty korunas and the agent marked them off in his book. You don’t remember such a thing? Oh, well, you and Lotty came from the haute bourgeoisie. These weekly payments, they were for people on small incomes. My father found the whole process humiliating, that he couldn’t afford to go to an office, pay his money up front, like an important man-he used to send me down with the coins tightly wrapped in a twist of newspaper.” He started looking through the pages of tiny ornate writing.

“My father bought his policy through an Italian company. In 1959 it occurred to me that I should claim that life insurance. Not that it was so much money, but why should the company get to keep it? I went through a long rigmarole. But they were adamant that without the death certificate, and without the policy number, they would do nothing for me.” His mouth twisted bitterly. “I hired someone-I was in a position to hire someone-who went back through the company’s records and found the policy number for me, but even so, they never would pay it because I couldn’t present the death certificate. They are incredible thieves, in their glass skyscrapers with their black ties and tails. I make it an absolute policy that the Cellini accepts no money from any insurance companies. The management is livid over it, but I think: it could be my father’s coins wrapped in a scrap of newspaper that they’re using to buy their way onto artistic boards. They won’t sit on mine.”

Max nodded in sympathy; Lotty murmured, “All money has someone’s blood on it, I suppose.”

“Do you think these numbers are insurance sales, then?” I asked, after a respectful pause. “And the crosses, that means the person died? He put a check against those he could confirm, perhaps.” In my bag on the floor my cell phone started to ring. It was Rhonda Fepple, speaking in the drugged, half-dead voice of the newly bereaved. Had there been an arrest? The police didn’t tell her anything.

I took the phone out to the kitchen with me and told her the progress of the investigation, if such it could be called, before asking her if Rick Hoffman had been German.

“German?” she repeated, as if I had asked if he were from Pluto. “I don’t remember. I guess he was foreign, now that you mention it-I remember Mr. Fepple swearing out some legal forms for him when Mr. Hoffman wanted to become a citizen.”