Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

The tenth book in the V.I. Warshawski series, 2001

Thanks to Wolfson College, Oxford, where I was a Visiting Scholar in 1997, which enabled me to pursue archival research. Thanks to Dr. Jeremy Black of Wolfson for making my time there possible.

The archives of letters and audiotapes in the Imperial War Museum, London, are an important source about the Kindertransport, England ’s generous acceptance of ten thousand Jewish children from central Europe in the years immediately before the Second World War. As is true of librarians everywhere, those at the Imperial War Museum were extremely helpful-even allowing me into the archives on a day they were closed when I confused an appointment date.

The Royal Free Hospital, London, gave me access to their archives, allowed me to send Lotty Herschel to school there, and were in general most helpful.

Dr. Dulcie Reed, Dr. Lettice Bowen, Dr. Peter Scheuer, and Dr. Judith Levy, all of whom trained in medicine in Great Britain around the same time as Lotty Herschel, were generous in giving me time and information about that period in their lives.

In the case of all archival material, as well as the reminiscences of these four doctors, I have avoided turning people’s real-life experiences into fiction-with the exception of Lotty and her roommates making lingerie out of parachute silk: Dr. Bowen and her friends did this-an amazing feat, as anyone who has ever tried to construct lingerie from scratch will appreciate.

Professor Colin Divall of the Institute of Railway Studies, York, was helpful with information about train routes and timetables in the 1940’s.

Because of the constraints of a novel focusing on Chicago, contemporary crime, and V I Warshawski, I was not able to make as deep a use of any of my English research as I would have wished; perhaps it will find a home in a different story on another day.

In Chicago, Kimball Wright advised me on the guns used in the book. Forensic pathologist Dr. Robert Kirschner was helpful in making accurate the deaths and near deaths of various unfortunate characters; the events described in Chapters 38 and 43 do happen. Sandy Weiss was helpful as always on forensic engineering arcana.

Jolynn Parker did invaluable research on a number of topics, including finding street maps of Jewish neighborhoods of Vienna in the 1930’s. More important, her astuteness as a reader helped me pick my way through some thorny problems as I developed the story line. Jonathan Paretsky helped with German, Yiddish-and star gazing.

Special thanks to Kate Jones for her insightful discussion of this novel, both at its end and at its beginnings.

As always, the first C-dog was there with advice, encouragement-and renewable kneecaps.

This is a work of fiction. No resemblance is intended between any character in this novel and any real person, living or dead, whether in public office, in corporate boardrooms, on the streets, or in any other walk of life. Similarly, all the institutions involved, including Ajax Insurance, Edelweiss Re, Gargette et Cie, are phantasms of the author’s fevered brain and are not intended to resemble any actual existing body. The issues of slave reparations and Holocaust asset recovery are very real; the positions taken on them by characters in the novel do not necessarily reflect the author’s own, nor should they be taken to reflect the positions taken by people in public life who are debating them.

Note: Anna Freud’s “An Experiment in Group Upbringing” is in Volume IV of her collected works. The adult lives of the children she describes are explored in Sarah Moskovitz’s Love Despite Hate.

The cold that winter ate into our bones. You can’t imagine, living where you turn a dial and as much heat as you want glows from the radiator, but everything in England then was fueled by coal and there were terrible shortages the second winter after the war. Like everyone I had little piles of six-penny bits for the electric fire in my room, but even if I’d been able to afford to run it all night it didn’t provide much warmth.

One of the women in my lodgings got a length of parachute silk from her brother, who’d been in the RAF. We all made camisoles and knickers out of it. We all knew how to knit back then; I unraveled old sweaters to make scarves and vests-new wool cost a fortune.

We saw newsreels of American ships and planes bringing the Germans whatever they needed. While we swathed ourselves in blankets and sweaters and ate grey bread with butter substitutes, we joked bitterly that we’d done the wrong thing, bringing the Americans in to win the war-they’d treat us better if we’d lost, the same woman who’d gotten the parachute silk said.

Of course, I had started my medical training, so I couldn’t spend much time wrapped up in bed. Anyway, I was glad to have the hospital to go to-although the wards weren’t warm, either: patients and sisters would huddle around the big stove in the center of the ward, drinking tea and telling stories-we students used to envy their camaraderie. The sisters expected us medical students to behave professionally-frankly, they enjoyed ordering us about. We’d do rounds with two pairs of stockings on, hoping the consultants wouldn’t notice we wore gloves as we trailed after them from bed to bed, listening to symptoms that came from deprivation as much as anything.

Working sixteen or eighteen hours a day without proper food took a toll on all of us. Many of my fellow students succumbed to tuberculosis and were granted leave-the only reason the hospital would let you interrupt your training and come back, as a matter of fact, even though some took more than a year to recover. The new antibiotics were starting to come in, but they cost the earth and weren’t yet widely available. When my turn came and I went to the Registrar, explaining that a family friend had a cottage in Somerset where I could recuperate, she nodded bleakly: we were already down five in my class, but she signed the forms for me and told me to write monthly. She stressed that she would hope to see me in under a year.

In fact, I was gone eight months. I’d wanted to return sooner, but Claire-Claire Tallmadge, who was a senior houseman by then, with a consultancy all but certain-persuaded me I wasn’t strong enough, although I was aching to get back.

When I returned to the Royal Free it felt-oh, so good. The hospital routine, my studies, they were like a balm, healing me. The Registrar actually called me into her office to warn me to slow down; they didn’t want me to suffer a relapse.

She didn’t understand that work was my only salvation. I suppose it had already become my second skin. It’s a narcotic, the oblivion overwork can bring you. Arbeit macht frei-that was an obscene parody the Nazis thought up, but it is possible Arbeit macht betäubt-what? Oh, sorry, I forgot you don’t speak German. They had 1984-type slogans over the entrance to all their camps, and that was what they put over Auschwitz: work will make you free. That slogan was a bestial parody, but work can numb you. If you stop working even for a moment, everything inside you starts evaporating; soon you are so shapeless you can’t move at all. At least, that was my fear.

When I first heard about my family, I became utterly without any grounding at all. I was supposed to be preparing for my higher-school certificate-the diploma we took in those days when we finished high school-the results determined your university entrance-but the exams lost the meaning they’d had for me all during the war. Every time I sat down to read I felt as though my insides were being sucked away by a giant vacuum cleaner.