Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

An apple from the kitchen would have to do for a late lunch: I was too nervous today to sit still for a proper meal. I saw Ninshubur’s collar on the sink and stuck it in my pocket-I’d try to find time to get up to Evanston with that tonight if I could.

I clattered down the stairs, sketched a wave at Mr. Contreras, who stuck his head out the door when he heard me, and drove across Addison, past Wrigley Field, where the vendors were setting up their carts for one of the Cubs’-mercifully-final games of the season.

From a marginally legal parking space outside their building, I called to the Rossy apartment. Fillida Rossy answered the phone. I hung up and leaned back in the front seat to wait. I could give the project until six, when I’d need to leave for my meeting with the alderman.

At four-thirty, Fillida Rossy came through the front door with her children and their nanny, who was carrying a large gym bag. As she had on Tuesday evening, Fillida was fussing endlessly with their clothes, retying the girl’s sash, smoothing the collar outside the boy’s monogrammed sweater. When he jerked away, she started wrapping the girl’s long hair around her hands, all the time talking to the nanny. She herself was dressed in jeans with a crinkly warm-up jacket.

Someone drove a black Lincoln Navigator to the entrance. While the driver put the gym bag into the back, Fillida held both children tightly, apparently giving some last instructions to the nanny. She climbed into the front seat, without acknowledging the man who held the door and put her bag into the car for her. I waited while the children disappeared up the street with the nanny before crossing over to go into the building.

It was a different doorman on duty this afternoon than the one I’d met on Tuesday. “You just missed Mrs. Rossy; no one’s up there but the maid. She speaks English, but not too great,” he said. When I said that I’d lost one of my earrings at dinner and was hoping Mrs. Rossy had found it, he added, “You can see if she’ll understand you.”

I tried to explain over the house phone who I was and what I wanted. My father’s mother spoke Polish, but my dad didn’t, so the language hadn’t been part of my childhood. Still, a few halting phrases got me upstairs, where I showed Irina the earring. She shook her head, starting to give me a long discourse in Polish. I had to apologize and tell her I didn’t understand.

“I all clean on next day, and don’t see nothing. But at party, I hear you speak Italy, I ask why, if your name Warshawska.” She gave it the Polish pronunciation, with the appropriate ending for a woman.

“My mother was Italian,” I explained. “My father was Polish.”

She nodded. “I understand. Children talk like mother talk. In my family, same. In Mrs. Fillida’s family, same. Mr. Rossy, he speak Italy, English, Germania, France, but children, only Italy, English.”

I clucked sympathetically over the fact that no one in the household could communicate with Irina. “Mrs. Rossy is a good mother, is she, always talking to her children?”

Irina threw up her hands. “When she see children, she always holding, always-like-like cat or dog.” She mimed petting. “Clothes, oh, my God, they has beautiful clothes, much much money. I buy all for my children what she pay on one dress for Marguerita. Children much money but not happy. No has friend. Mister, he very good man, happy, always polite. She, no, she cold.”

“But she doesn’t like to leave the children alone, does she?” I doggedly tried to keep the conversation on track. “I mean, they entertain here, but does she go out and leave the children behind?”

Irina looked at me in surprise. Of course Mrs. Rossy left the children. She was rich, she went to the gym, to go shopping, to see friends. It was only when she was home…

“Last Friday I thought I saw her at a dance at the Hilton Hotel. You know, for charity.” I had to repeat the sentence a couple of different ways before Irina understood me.

She shrugged. “Is possible. Was not here, I not know where she and mister going. I in bed early. Not like today when many people coming for dinner.”

My hint to leave. I tried offering her a tip for her help, but she flung up her hands in disgust. She was sorry about my earring: she would keep looking for it.

As I drove up the street, I passed the children returning from their walk. They were punching at each other from either side of the nanny-happy families, as Tolstoy said.

So the Rossys hadn’t been home on Friday night. That didn’t mean they’d been in Hyde Park shooting Howard Fepple. Still, I could see Fillida phoning him, saying her name was Connie Ingram, persuading him she was hot for him. I could see her coming in with him and all the Lamaze parents-perhaps her husband melting into the group as well-twining herself around Fepple in his chair. Bertrand slips into the office, whacks the back of his head, she puts the SIG’s barrel into his mouth. At the spray of blood and bone, she jumps off, places the gun under his chair. She’s cool, but not cool enough to remember to get his hand on the gun so that the morgue will find gunpowder residue on it.

Then she and Bertrand search the office, find the Sommers file, and take off. Yesterday, Fillida went to Hoffman’s house. How had she found the address when I hadn’t been able to? Oh, of course, through Ulrich. They knew his name: they were looking for him, looking for those records of Edelweiss-Nesthorn sales. It must have made Rossy’s eyes jump out of their sockets when Connie Ingram brought the Sommers file up to Ralph’s office last week. The agent he was looking for, Ulrich Hoffman, right under his nose in Chicago. Maybe it took them a while to figure it out, but eventually they realized if he was dead they could still get his address a bunch of different ways. Old phone books, for instance.

I could see all of this happening. But how could I prove any of it? If I had world enough and time, I could probably find they’d gone to Ameritech for old phone books. The cops hadn’t been able to trace the SIG that killed Fepple. Perhaps Fillida’s friend in the Italian consulate had brought it in with her under diplomatic cover. “Laura, darling, I want to bring my guns with me. The Americans are so bizarre about guns-they all carry them the way we do pocketbooks, but they will make my life a misery of forms if I try to carry my own through customs with me.”

As I cruised down Lake Shore Drive for my meeting with Durham, I thought uneasily about Paul Hoffman in his hospital bed. Where had Fillida Rossy been going on a Friday afternoon with her gym bag? Did she work out this late in the day, or did the bag hold a gun for finishing the job on Paul?

At the lights on Chicago Avenue, I called the hospital: there was a block on his room, so they wouldn’t connect me. That was good. Could they give me a status report? His condition had been upgraded to serious.

When I’d found a meter a few blocks south of the Glow, I called Tim Streeter up at Max’s. Max hadn’t come home from work yet-Posner had been back at the hospital today. The demonstrations had been more subdued, but the board was meeting late to discuss the problem.

Tim was bored; they really didn’t need him any longer. If I could get Calia Ninshubur’s collar they would all be happy.

“Oh, that wretched collar.” I told Tim if I couldn’t get up to Evanston tonight, Calia would have to accept receiving it in the mail when she returned home. More important was my dilemma about Paul’s safety, which I explained to him.

Tim said he’d talk to his brother to see if one of the women on their team would look after Paul for a few days. He himself needed a break from bodyguarding: four days of Calia had turned him prematurely white.