Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

Their less-agreeable history, would that be? Surely that didn’t refer to selling life insurance whose claims they wouldn’t pay. It must have to do with something else. I wondered if the other articles explained what. I attached them to an e-mail to Morrell, who reads French.

Do either of these articles explain what Nesthorn Insurance did in the forties that made them less agreeable to their European neighbors? How are you coming with getting a permit to travel to the northwest frontier? I hit the SEND key, thinking how strange it was that Morrell, thirteen thousand miles away, could see my words at virtually the same time I sent them.

I leaned back in my chair, eyes closed, seeing Fillida Rossy at dinner, stroking the heavy flatware with the H engraved on the handle. What she owned she touched, clutched-or what she touched, she owned. That restless smoothing of her daughter’s hair, her son’s pajama collar-she had stroked my own hand in the same disquieting way when she brought me forward to meet her guests on Tuesday night.

Could she feel so possessive of the Edelweiss company that she would kill to safeguard it from claimants? Paul Hoffman-Radbuka had been so certain it was a woman who had shot him. Fierce, sunglasses, big hat. Could that have been Fillida Rossy? She was certainly commanding enough behind her languid exterior. I remembered Bertrand Rossy changing his tie after her soft comment that it was rather bold. Her friends, too, had hurried to make sure nothing in the conversation annoyed her.

On the other hand, Alderman Durham kept swimming around the submerged rocks of the story. My client’s cousin Colby, who had done lookout duty for the break-in at Amy Blount’s place and who had fingered my client to the police, was on the fringes of Durham ’s EYE team. The meeting between Durham and Rossy on Tuesday-had Rossy agreed to kill the Holocaust Asset Recovery Act in exchange for Durham giving him a hit woman who could shoot Paul Hoffman-Radbuka? Durham was such a wily political creature, it was hard to believe he’d do something that would so lay him open to blackmail. Nor could I see a sophisticated man like Rossy getting himself tangled up in a hired-murder rap. It was hard to understand why either of them would involve the other in something as crude as the break-in at Amy Blount’s.

I called Durham ’s office. The alderman’s secretary asked who I was, what I wanted.

“I’m an investigator,” I said. “Mr. Durham and I met briefly last week. I’m sorry to say that some of the people on the fringe of his extremely wonderful Empower Youth Energy project have shown up as part of a murder investigation I’m working on. Before I give their names to the police, I wanted to do the alderman the courtesy of letting him hear about them from me first.”

The secretary put me on hold. As I waited, I thought again about the Rossys. Maybe I could take a quick run up there to see if the maid, Irina, would talk to me. If she could give the Rossys an alibi for last Friday night, well, it would at least eliminate them from consideration as Fepple’s murderers.

Durham ’s secretary came back to the phone. The alderman was in committee meetings until six; he’d meet me at his South Side office at six-thirty before going to a community church meeting. I didn’t want to be alone on Durham ’s home turf the way things were shaping up; I told the secretary I’d be at the Golden Glow at six-fifteen. Durham could see me on my ground.

I skimmed through my messages, both in my in-box and on-screen. Michael Loewenthal had dropped off the biography of Anna Freud. The day had been so long I’d completely forgotten that conversation. I had also completely forgotten the little dog tags for Ninshubur.

The biography was too fat for me to read clear through in a quest for Paul Hoffman or Radbuka. I looked at the photographs, at Anna Freud sitting next to her father in a café, at the Hampstead nursery where Lotty had washed dishes during the war. I tried to imagine Lotty as a teenager. She would have been idealistic, ardent, but without the patina of irony and briskness which kept the world at arm’s length from her now.

I flipped to the back to look up Radbuka in the index. The name wasn’t there. I checked concentration camps. The second reference was to a paper Freud had written on a group of six children who came to England from Terezin after the war. Six children aged three and four who had lived together as a little unit, looking after one another, forming a bond so tight that the adult authorities didn’t think they could survive apart. No names were mentioned, no other history. It sounded like the group Hoffman-Radbuka had described in his television interview last week, the group where Ulrich had found him, wrenching him away from his little friend Miriam. Could Paul really have been part of it? Or had he appropriated their story to his own?

I went back on-line to see if I could find a copy of the paper Freud had written about the children, “An Experiment in Group Upbringing.” A central research library in London would fax it to me at the cost of a dime a page. Cheap at the price. I entered a credit-card number and sent the order, then looked at my phone messages. The most urgent seemed to be from Ralph, who had called twice-to my cell phone, when I was heading onto the Ryan three hours ago, and just now, when I’d been trying to decipher the less agreeable part of Nesthorn’s past.

He was in a meeting, naturally, but Denise, his secretary, said he badly wanted to see the originals of the material I had shown him this morning.

“I don’t have them,” I said. “I saw them very briefly yesterday, when I made the copies I gave him, but someone else took them for safekeeping. They’re quite valuable documents, I gather. Is it Bertrand Rossy who’d like to look at them, or Ralph himself?”

“I believe Mr. Devereux showed the blowups I made to Mr. Rossy at a meeting this morning, but Mr. Devereux did not indicate whether Mr. Rossy was interested in them.”

“Will you take this message down exactly as I give it to you? Tell Ralph that it is really, honestly true that I don’t have them. Someone else took them. I have no idea where the person who took them is, nor where that person stowed them. Tell him this is not a joke, it is not a way of stalling him. I want those books as badly as he does, but I don’t know where they are.”

I made Denise read the message back to me. I hoped it would convince Rossy, if it was Rossy pushing on Ralph for them, that I truly didn’t have Ulrich’s books. I hoped I hadn’t fingered Lotty in the process. That thought unnerved me. If I had-I couldn’t take time to sit and fret: if I hustled, I could get to the Rossys’ before my appointment with Durham.

I drove the two miles back to my apartment and took one of my mother’s diamond drops from the safe. Her photograph on the dresser seemed to watch me sternly: my dad had given her those earrings on their twentieth anniversary. I’d gone with him to the Tucker Company on Wabash when he picked them out and put down a deposit, and I’d gone back with him when he made the final payment.

“I won’t lose it,” I told her photograph. I hurried out of the room, away from her eyes. As I passed the bathroom I caught sight of my own face in the mirrored door. I had forgotten the dust that I’d collected at the Insurance Institute. If I was going to be presentable at the Rossy building, I needed a clean jacket. I took a rose wool-rayon weave that hung loosely, concealing the bulge of my shoulder holster. The herringbone I tossed into the hall closet with my bloodstained gold blouse, then I remembered my idea of profiling Paul’s DNA. In case I wanted to pursue that, I wrapped the gold blouse in a clean plastic bag and put it in my bedroom safe.