Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

After another five minutes, Connie Ingram appeared, looking around like a scared rabbit. I was tempted to jump out and yell boo, but I waited near the window until the elevator light dinged, then trotted over to get into the car with her as the doors closed.

She looked at me resentfully as she pushed the button for thirty-nine. “I don’t have to talk to you. The lawyer said so. He said to call him if you came around.”

My ears filled as the elevator fell. “You can do it as soon as you get off. Did he also tell you not to talk to Mr. Devereux? Are you going to figure out an answer about whether you saw any agency notes in the file? In case he forgets that he asked-I know he’s got a lot on his mind-I’ll be calling regularly to remind him.”

The door opened at thirty-nine; she shot out without responding to my genial farewell. I took the L back to my office, where I found an e-mail from Morrell.

I realized that even I, who thought I was a sophisticated traveler, had my expectations of the setting shaped by Rudyard Kipling. I wasn’t prepared for the starkness, the grandeur-or most especially the way one feels obliterated by the mountains. You find yourself wanting to make defiant gestures: I’m here, I’m alive, acknowledge me.

As far as your question about Paul Hoffman or Radbuka, of course I am not an expert, but I do think someone who has been tortured, as he apparently was tortured by his father, could become very fragile emotionally. It would be painful to think your own father tortured you-you would imagine there must be something terribly wrong with you that provoked such behavior-children inevitably blame themselves in difficult situations. But if you could believe you were persecuted because of your historic identity-you were a Jew, you were from eastern Europe, you survived the death camps-then it would both glamorize your torture, give it a deeper meaning, and protect you from the pain of believing you were a terrible child whose father was justified in assaulting you. That’s how I see it, at any rate.

My beloved Pepperpot, I already miss you more than I can say. It’s horribly unsettling to have half the population missing from the landscape. I miss not just your face-I miss seeing women’s faces.

I printed out the section that dealt with Paul and faxed it to Don Strzepek at Morrell’s home machine with a scrawl, For what it’s worth. I wondered how Don had left things with Rhea last night. Would he go ahead with his book on recovered memories with her? Or would he wait to see if Max and Lotty wanted to do a DNA match?

That was a mighty thin thread Paul Hoffman had hung his identity on, searching the Web for the names in those insurance records of Ulrich’s until he found a query about one of them. He’d used that thread to attach himself to England immediately after the war.

Thinking about it reminded me of the picture of Anna Freud that Paul had hung in his closet. His savior in England. I called up Max’s house and spoke with Michael Loewenthal-Agnes had been able to reschedule her appointment at the gallery, so he was minding Calia. He went to the living room for me and came back with the name of the biography Lotty had brought down from Max’s study last night.

“We’re coming into Chicago for a last look at the walruses in the zoo; I’ll drop it off at your office. No, with pleasure, Vic-we owe you a lot for your care of our petite monster. But I confess to an ulterior motive: Calia is being a brat about the dog’s collar. We could pick it up.”

I groaned-I’d left the wretched thing in my kitchen. I told Michael if I didn’t get up to Evanston with it tonight I’d mail it to Calia in London.

“Sorry, Vic-no need for that much trouble. I’ll stop by in about an hour with the book. By the way, have you spoken to Lotty? Mrs. Coltrain called from the clinic, concerned because Lotty had canceled all her appointments for today.”

I told him our parting last night had been rocky enough that I hadn’t felt like calling her. But when Michael hung up, I dialed Lotty’s home number. It rang through to her crisp voice on the machine, giving various numbers to use if this was a medical emergency, and urging friends to leave their messages after the tone. I thought uneasily of a lunatic going around town shooting people to get at Hoffman’s journals. But surely the doorman wouldn’t let anyone in who didn’t belong there.

I called Mrs. Coltrain, who was at first relieved to hear from me but became agitated when she found out I didn’t know anything about Lotty’s situation. “When she’s really ill, she does cancel her appointments, of course, but she always talks to me about it.”

“Did someone else call you?” Worry made my voice sharp.

“No, it’s just-she left a message on the office answering machine. I couldn’t believe it when I got in, so I took it on myself to call her at home and then to ask Mr. Loewenthal if she’d said anything to anyone at the hospital. No one there has heard anything, not even Dr. Barber-you know they cover for each other in emergencies. One of Dr. Herschel’s teaching fellows is coming in at noon to look after any acute problems that come up in here, but-if she isn’t ill, where is she?”

If Max didn’t know, nobody did. I told Mrs. Coltrain I’d check in at Lotty’s apartment-neither of us saying it, both of us picturing Lotty lying unconscious on the floor. I found Lotty’s building management in the phone book and got through to the doorman, who hadn’t seen Dr. Herschel today.

“Does someone in the building have keys? Could I get in to see if she’s all right?”

He consulted a list. Lotty had left Max and my names as people to call in any emergency; he guessed the super could let me in if I didn’t have keys. When was I coming? In twenty minutes? He’d get Gerry up from the basement, where he was supervising a boiler-repair crew.

Mary Louise called as I was leaving. She was on the South Side with Gertrude Sommers-yes, the client’s aunt-who wanted to tell me something in person. I’d forgotten about sending Mary Louise down to check on the client’s dubious cousin-I’d left the note for her yesterday afternoon, but so much was going on it seemed like a month ago.

I tried not to sigh audibly. I was tired, and tired of running from one end of Chicago to the other. I told Mary Louise that unless some crisis developed at Lotty’s place, I’d be at Gertrude Sommers’s apartment in about ninety minutes.

The doorman at Lotty’s building had seen me a number of times, but he and Gerry, the building super, still insisted on proof of my identity before Gerry took me up to the eighteenth floor. The precaution, which would normally have made me impatient, gave me some reassurance about Lotty’s safety.

When we got to her apartment, Gerry rang the bell several times before undoing her locks. He went with me through the rooms, but there was no sign of Lotty, and no sign that any violent struggle had taken place.

While Gerry watched in mounting disapproval, I looked through the drawers in the side room that Lotty uses as a home office, and then in Lotty’s bedroom, for Ulrich’s journals. Gerry followed me from room to room while I imagined the places that people conceal things-behind clothes, under rugs and mattresses, inside kitchen cabinets, behind pictures on the wall, slipped in among the books on her own shelves.

“You don’t have a right to be doing that, miss,” he said when I was poking through Lotty’s underwear drawer.

“You married, Gerry? Kids? You know if your wife or one of your daughters was having a dangerous pregnancy who everyone would tell you she should see? Dr. Herschel. Who takes her duties so seriously she never even calls in sick unless she’s running a fever that she thinks would affect her judgment. Now she’s suddenly vanished. I’m hoping for any sign that would tell me whether she left voluntarily or not, whether she packed a bag, anything.”