Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

I got in the elevator with her. “Lotty, enough of this crap. Isn’t pushing Carl into the void enough? Do you want to drive Max and me away from you, as well? You got angry the first time Paul mentioned England; I was trying to keep you from losing him. And also-we know what those journals meant to Paul Hoffman. I’d like to know what they meant to Ulrich. Where are they, by the way? I need them.”

“For right now, you’ll have to do without them.”

“Lotty, I can’t do without them. I need to find out what they mean to people who don’t see the dead in them. Someone shot Paul for them. It may be that this fierce woman in sunglasses killed an insurance agent named Howard Fepple for them. His mother’s house was broken into on Tuesday. Someone searched it, probably for these notebooks.”

Amy Blount, I suddenly thought. Her place had been burgled on Tuesday, also. Surely it was too big a coincidence to think it wasn’t connected to these Hoffman journals. She had seen the Ajax archives. What if the fierce woman in sunglasses thought Ulrich Hoffman’s books had landed in the archives and thought perhaps Amy Blount hadn’t been able to resist them? Which meant-it was someone who knew Amy Blount had been in those archives. It all came back to the folks at Ajax. Ralph. Rossy. And Durham on the sideline.

“Anyway,” I added aloud, as the elevator doors opened onto the lobby, “if they mean that much to someone, you’re risking a lot by holding on to them.”

“That is definitely my lookout, not yours, Victoria. I’ll return them to you in a day or so. There’s something I need to look for in them first.” She turned on her heel and stalked away from me, following a hallway signposted to the doctors’ parking area.

Don and Rhea appeared from another elevator, Don saying, “Don’t you see, sweetheart, this lays you open to the kind of criticism people like Praeger make, that you lead people to these memories.”

“He knew he had been in England after the war,” she said. “That isn’t something I thought of or led him to. And those memories of the lime pits-Don, if you’d been there-I’ve listened to many bone-chilling memories from my patients, but I’ve never wept before. I’d always kept my professional detachment. But to see your own mother thrown alive into a pit she’d been forced at gunpoint to fill with lime, to hear those screams-and then to know that the man responsible for your own mother’s death had such power over you, locking you into a small closet, beating you, taunting you-it was utterly shattering.”

“I can see that,” I said, breaking into this private conversation. “But there are so many curious leaps in his story. Even if Ulrich somehow knew this one small boy escaped the lime pit, how did he keep track of him all through the vicissitudes of war, first in Terezin and then to England? If Ulrich really was an Einsatzgruppenführer, he’d have had plenty of chances to kill the kid during the war. But on Ulrich’s landing papers, it says they docked in Baltimore from a Dutch merchant ship which sailed from Antwerp.”

“That doesn’t mean he didn’t start from England,” Rhea said. “As for your other point, a man with a guilty conscience might do anything. Ulrich is dead; we can’t ask him why he was so obsessed by this small boy. But we know he thought having a Jewish child would help him get past immigration problems in America. So if he knew where Paul was, it was natural for him to take him, pretending to be his father.”

“Ulrich had an official denazification certificate,” I objected. “Nor was there any mention of Paul’s Jewishness in the landing documents.”

“Ulrich probably destroyed those once he was here and felt safe from prosecution,” Rhea said.

I sighed. “You have a pat answer for everything, but Paul has a shrine to the Holocaust; it’s filled with books and articles on survivor experiences. If he’s immersed himself in these, he could be confusing other people’s histories with his own past. After all, he says he was only twelve months old when he was sent to Terezin. Would he really know what he’d been seeing, if in fact he had witnessed his mother and the rest of his town being murdered in the way he describes?”

“You know nothing about psychology, or about survivors of torture,” Rhea said. “Why don’t you stick to the things you know about, whatever those might be.”

“I do understand Vic’s point, Rhea,” Don said. “We need to talk seriously about your book. Unless there’s something specific in these journals of Ulrich’s, saying This boy I brought with me is not my son, he’s someone named Radbuka-well, I need to examine them in detail.”

“Don, I thought you were on my side,” Rhea said, her myopic eyes filling with tears.

“I am, Rhea. That’s why I don’t want you to expose yourself by publishing a book that has holes someone like Arnold Praeger and the Planted Memory folks can find so easily. Vic, I know you’re guarding the originals like the national vault, but would you let me examine them? I could do so in your office, under your eye.”

I made a face. “Lotty’s walked off with them, which makes me angry, but also worried-if Paul was shot by someone looking for them, they’re about as safe to lug around as naked plutonium. She’s promised to return them by the weekend. I did copy about a dozen pages and you can look at those, but-I understand the problem.”

“Well, that’s just dandy,” Don said, exasperated. “How did you get hold of all this material to begin with? How do you know about Paul’s shrine? You were in his house, weren’t you?”

I nodded reluctantly-the situation was past the point where I could keep my presence on the scene a secret. “I found him right after he’d been shot and got the ambulance to him. The place had been ransacked, but he had a closet hidden behind the drapes in his Holocaust shrine. His assailant didn’t think to look there. It was a truly dreadful place.”

I described it again, the wall of photographs, the telltale balloon comments coming out of Ulrich’s mouth. “Those things you say he took from your office, Rhea, they were there, draped around pictures of you.”

“I’d like to see it,” Don said. “Maybe there’s some other crucial piece of evidence you overlooked.”

“You could go in, and welcome,” I said. “Once is enough for me.”

“Neither of you has a right to violate Paul’s privacy by going into his house,” Rhea said coldly. “All patients idealize their therapists to some extent. Ulrich was such a monstrous father that Paul juxtaposes me against him as an idealized form of the mother he never knew. As for your going into the house, Vic-you called me this morning wanting his address. Why do that if you knew where he lived? If he’d been shot, how did you get inside? Are you sure you weren’t the woman down there shooting him, because of your rage over his wanting to prove a close relationship with your friends?”

“I didn’t shoot the little goober, even though he was acting like a great pain in the neck,” I said softly, my eyes hot. “But I do have a sample of his blood now, on my clothes. I can send it out for a DNA profile. That will prove once and for all whether he’s related to Max-or Carl or Lotty.”

She stared at me in dismay. I pushed brusquely past her before she or Don could speak.

I wondered if Paul was safe in his hospital room. If Ilse the She-Wolf learned he had survived her shot, would she come back to finish the job? I couldn’t ask for a police posting without explaining about Ulrich’s journals. And my mind boggled at the task of trying to make the cops understand that story, especially when I didn’t fully understand it myself. I finally compromised by going back to the fifth floor to tell the charge nurse that my brother was scared of his attacker coming back to kill him.