Total Recall Page 8

  I thumbed through my stack of printouts. “Wasn’t the daughter who brought the charges part of Wiell’s private practice?”

  “Yes, but Rhea was still on the state payroll, so the guy could have claimed she was using state office space or facilities for photocopying or whatnot-anything like that would have brought us into a lawsuit. We couldn’t afford that kind of exposure. We had to let her go. Now you tell me, since I’ve been so frank with you, what’s Rhea done that means a PI is interested in her?”

  I’d known I’d have to cough up something. Tit for tat, it’s how you keep information coming to you. “One of her clients was in the news this week. I don’t know if you saw the guy with the recovered memories from the Holocaust? Someone wants to write a book about him and about how Rhea works. I’ve been asked to do some background checking.”

  “One thing Rhea knows better than any other therapist who ever worked for this office, and that’s how to attract attention.” My informant hung up smartly.

  IX Princess of Austria

  So she is a legitimate therapist. Controversial but legitimate,” I said to the glowing tip of Don’s cigarette. “If you did a book with her, you wouldn’t be signing on with a fraud.”

  “Actually, they’re excited enough in New York that I went ahead and scheduled an appointment with the lady. Tomorrow at eleven. If you’re free, want to sit in on it? Maybe she’ll allow you to bring back a report to Dr. Herschel that will help you allay her concerns.”

  “Under the circumstances I can’t imagine that happening. But I would like to meet Rhea Wiell.”

  We were sitting on Morrell’s back porch. It was close to ten, but Morrell was still downtown at a meeting with some State Department officials-I had an uneasy feeling they were trying to persuade him to do some spying while he was in Kabul. I was wrapped in one of Morrell’s old sweaters, drawing some small comfort from it-which made me feel like Mitch and Peppy-the dogs like to have my old socks to play with when I’m out of town. Lotty had brought my day to such a ragged end that I needed what comfort I could find.

  I’d been running since I kissed Morrell good-bye this morning. Even though I still had a dozen urgent tasks, I was too tired to keep going. Before dictating my case notes, before calling Isaiah Sommers, before going home to run the dogs, before heading back to Morrell’s place with a contract for Don Strzepek to cover my queries about Rhea Wiell, I needed to rest. Just half an hour on the portable bed in my back room, I’d thought. Half an hour would make me fit enough to cram another day’s work into the evening. It was almost ninety minutes later that my client roused me.

  “What made you go down to my aunt with all those accusations?” he demanded when the phone dragged me awake. “Couldn’t you respect her widowhood?”

  “What accusations?” My mouth and eyes felt as though they’d been stuffed with cotton.

  “Going to her home and saying she stole money from the insurance company.”

  If I hadn’t been bleary from my nap I might have answered more coolly. But maybe not.

  “I will make every allowance for your aunt’s grief, but that is not what I said. And before you call to accuse me of such abominable behavior, why don’t you ask me what I said.”

  “All right. I’m asking you.” His voice was leaden with suppressed anger.

  “I showed your aunt the canceled check the company issued when a death claim was submitted nine years ago. I asked her what she knew about it. That is not an accusation. A check for her had been made out in care of the Midway Insurance Agency. I couldn’t pretend her name wasn’t on the check. I couldn’t pretend Ajax hadn’t issued it based on a bona fide death certificate. I had to ask her about it.”

  “You should have talked to me first. I’m the person who paid you.”

  “I cannot consult with clients about every step I take in an investigation. I’d never get anything done.”

  “You took my money. You spent it on accusing my aunt. Your contract says I can terminate our arrangement at any time. I am terminating it now.”

  “Fine,” I snapped. “Terminate away. Someone committed fraud with your uncle’s policy. If you want them to get away with it, so be it.”

  “Of course I don’t want that, but I’ll look into the matter on my own, in a way that will respect my aunt. I should have known a white detective would act just like the police. I should have listened to my wife.” He hung up.

  It wasn’t the first time an angry client had fired me, but I’ve never learned to take it with equanimity. I could have done things differently. I should have called him, called him before I went to see his aunt, gotten him on my side. Or at least called him before I went to sleep. I could have kept my temper-my besetting sin.

  I tried to remember exactly what I’d said to his aunt. Damn it, I should do as Mary Louise said, dictate my notes as soon as I finished a meeting. Better late than never: I could start with my phone conversation with the client. Ex-client. I dialed up the word-processing service I use and dictated a summary of the call, adding a letter to Sommers confirming that he’d canceled my services; I’d enclose his uncle’s policy with the letter. When I’d finished with Isaiah Sommers, I dictated notes from my other conversations of the day, working backward from my informant at Family Services to my meeting with Ralph at Ajax.

  Lotty called on the other line when I was halfway through reconstructing my encounter with the insurance agent Howard Fepple. “Max told me about the program he saw with you at Morrell’s last night,” she said, without preamble. “It sounded very disturbing.”

  “It was.”

  “He didn’t know whether to believe the man’s story or not. Did Morrell make a tape of the interview?”

  “Not that I know of. I got a copy of the tape today, which I can-”

  “I want to see it. Will you bring it to my apartment this evening, please.” It came out as a command, not a request.

  “Lotty, this isn’t your operating room. I don’t have time to stop at your place tonight, but in the morning I-”

  “This is a very simple favor, Victoria, which has nothing to do with my operating room. You don’t need to leave the tape with me, but I want to see it. You can stand over me while I watch it.”

  “Lotty, I don’t have the time. I will get copies made tomorrow and let you have one of your very own. But this one is for a client who hired me to investigate the situation.”

  “A client?” She was outraged. “Did Max hire you without either of you talking to me?”

  My forehead felt as though it were squeezed inside a vise. “If he did, that’s between him and me, not you and me. What difference does it make to you?”

  “What difference? That he violated a trust, that’s what matters. When he told me about this person at the conference, this man calling himself Radbuka, I said we shouldn’t act hastily and that I would give him my opinion after I had seen the interview.”

  I took a deep breath and tried to bring my brain into focus. “So the Radbuka name means something to you.”

  “And to Max. And to Carl. From our days in London. Max thought we should hire you to find out about this man. I wanted to wait. I thought Max respected my opinion.”

  She was almost spitting mad, but her explanation made me say gently, “Take it easy, Lotty. Max didn’t hire me. This is a separate matter.”

  I told her about Don Strzepek’s interest in doing a book about Rhea Wiell, showcasing Paul Radbuka’s recovered memory. “I’m sure he wouldn’t object to sharing the tape with you, but I really don’t have time to do it tonight. I still need to finish some work here, go to my own place to look after the dogs, and then I’m going up to Evanston. Do you want me to tell Morrell that you’ll be coming up to view the tape at his place?”

  “I want the dead past to bury the dead,” she burst out. “Why are you letting this Don go digging around in it?”

  “I’m not letting him, and I’m not stopping him. All I’m doing is checking to see whether Rhea Wiell is a ge
nuine therapist.”

  “Then you’re letting, not stopping.”

  She sounded close to tears. I picked my words carefully. “I can only begin to imagine how painful it must be to you to be reminded of the war years, but not everyone feels that way.”

  “Yes, to many people it is a game. Something to romanticize or kitschify or use for titillation. And a book about a ghoul feasting on the remains of the dead only helps make that happen.”

  “If Paul Radbuka is not a ghoul but has a genuine past in the concentration camp he mentioned, then he has a right to claim his heritage. What does the person in your group who’s connected to the Radbukas say about this? Did you talk to him? Or her?”

  “That person no longer exists,” she said harshly. “This is between Max and Carl and me. And now you. And now this journalist, Don whoever he is. And the therapist. And every jackal in New York and Hollywood who will pick over the bones and salivate with pleasure at another shocking tale. Publishers and movie studios make fortunes from titillating the comfortable well-fed middle class of Europe and America with tales of torture.”

  I had never heard Lotty speak in such a bitter way. It hurt, as if my fingers were being run through a grater. I didn’t know what to say, except to repeat my offer to bring her a copy of the tape the next day. She hung up on me.

  I sat at my desk a long time, blinking back tears of my own. My arms ached. I lacked the will to move or act in any meaningful way, but in the end, I picked up the phone and continued dictating my notes to the word-processing center. When I had finished that, I got up slowly, like an invalid, and printed out a copy of my contract for Don Strzepek.

  “Maybe if I talked to Dr. Herschel myself,” Don said now, as we sat on Morrell’s porch. “She’s imagining me as a TV reporter sticking a mike in front of her face after her family’s been destroyed. She’s right in a way, about how we comfortable Americans and Europeans like to titillate ourselves with tales of torture. I shall have to keep that thought in mind as a corrective when I’m working on this book. All the same, maybe I can persuade her that I also have some capacity for empathy.”

  “Maybe. Max will probably let me bring you to his dinner party on Sunday; at least you could meet Lotty in an informal way.”

  I didn’t really see it, though. Usually, when Lotty got on her high horse, Max would snort and say she was in her “Princess of Austria” mode. That would spark another flare from her, but she’d back away from her more extreme demands. Tonight’s outburst had been rawer than that-not the disdain of a Hapsburg princess, but a ragged fury born of grief.

  Lotty Herschel’s Story:

  Four Gold Coins

  My mother was seven months pregnant and weak from hunger, so my father took Hugo and me to the train. It was early in the morning, still dark, in fact: we Jews were trying not to attract any more attention than necessary. Although we had permits to leave, all our documents, the tickets, we could still be stopped at any second. I wasn’t yet ten and Hugo only five, but we knew the danger so well we didn’t need Papa’s command to be silent in the streets.

  Saying good-bye to my mother and Oma had frightened me. My mother used to spend weeks away from us with Papa, but I had never left Oma before. By then of course everyone was living together in a little flat in the Leopoldsgasse-I can’t remember how many aunts and cousins now, besides my grandparents-but at least twenty.

  In London, lying in the cold room at the top of the house, on the narrow iron bed Minna considered appropriate for a child, I wouldn’t think about the cramped space on the Leopoldsgasse. I concentrated on remembering Oma and Opa’s beautiful flat where I had my own white lacy bed, the curtains at the window dotted with rosebuds. My school, where my friend Klara and I were always one and two in the class. How hurt I was-I couldn’t understand why she stopped playing with me and then why I had to leave the school altogether.

  I had whined at first over sharing a room with six other cousins in a place with peeling paint, but Papa took me for a walk early one morning so he could talk to me alone about our changed circumstances. He was never cruel, not like Uncle Arthur, Mama’s brother who actually beat Aunt Freia, besides hitting his own children.

  We walked along the canal as the sun was rising and Papa explained how hard things were for everyone, for Oma and Opa, forced out of the family flat after all these years, and for Mama, with all her pretty jewels stolen by the Nazis and worrying about how her children would be fed and clothed, let alone educated. “Lottchen, you are the big girl in the family now. Your cheerful spirit is Mama’s most precious gift. Show her you are the brave one, the cheerful one, and now that she’s sick with the new baby coming, show her you can help her by not complaining and by taking care of Hugo.”

  What shocks me now is knowing that my father’s parents were also in that flat and how little I remember of them. In fact, I’m pretty sure that it was their flat. They were foreign, you see, from Belarus: they were part of the vast throng of Eastern European Jews who had flocked into Vienna around the time of the First World War.

  Oma and Opa looked down on them. It confuses me, that realization, because I loved my mother’s parents so much. They doted on me, too: I was their precious Lingerl’s beloved child. But I think Oma and Opa despised Papa’s parents, for speaking only Yiddish, not German, and for their odd clothes and religious practices.

  It was a terrible humiliation for Oma and Opa, when they were forced to leave the Renngasse to live in that immigrant Jewish quarter. People used to call it the Matzoinsel, the matzo island, a term of contempt. Even Oma and Opa, when they didn’t think Papa was around, would talk about his family on the Insel. Oma would laugh her ladylike laugh at the fact that Papa’s mother wore a wig, and I felt guilty, because I was the one who had revealed this primitive practice to Oma. She liked to interrogate me about the “customs on the Insel” after I had been there, and then she would remind me that I was a Herschel, I was to stand up straight and make something of my life. And not to use the Yiddish I picked up on the Insel; that was vulgar and Herschels were never vulgar.

  Papa would take me to visit his parents once a month or so. I was supposed to call them Zeyde and Bobe, Grandpa and Grandma in Yiddish, as Opa and Oma are in German. When I think about them now I grow hot with shame, for withholding from them the affection and respect they desired: Papa was their only son, I was the oldest grandchild. But even to call them Zeyde and Bobe, as they requested, seemed disgusting to me. And Bobe’s blond wig over her close-cropped black hair, that seemed disgusting as well.

  I hated that I looked like Papa’s side of the family. My mother was so lovely, very fair, with beautiful curls and a mischievous smile. And as you can see, I am dark, and not at all beautiful. Mischlinge, cousin Minna called me, half-breed, although never in front of my grandparents: to Opa and Oma I was always beautiful, because I was their darling Lingerl’s daughter. It wasn’t until I came to live with Minna in England that I ever felt ugly.

  What torments me is that I can’t recall my father’s sisters or their children at all. I shared a bed with five or maybe six cousins, and I can’t remember them, only that I hated not being in my own lovely white bedroom by myself. I remember kissing Oma and weeping, but I didn’t even say good-bye to Bobe.

  You think I should remember I was only a child? No. Even a child has the capacity for human and humane behavior.

  Each child was allowed one small suitcase for the train. Oma wanted us to take leather valises from her own luggage-those had not been of interest to the Nazis when they stole her silver and her jewels. But Opa was more practical and understood Hugo and I mustn’t attract attention by looking as though we came from a rich home. He found us cheap cardboard cases, which anyway were easier for young children to carry.

  By the day the train left, Hugo and I had packed and repacked our few possessions many times, trying to decide what we couldn’t bear to live without. The night before we left, Opa took the dress I was going to wear on the train out to Oma.
Everyone was asleep, except me: I was lying rigid with nervousness in the bed I shared with the other cousins. When Opa came in I watched him through slits in my closed eyes. When he tiptoed out with the dress, I slid out of bed and followed him to my grandmother’s side. Oma put a finger on her lips when she saw me and silently picked apart the waistband. She took four gold coins from the hem of her own skirt and stitched them into the waist, underneath the buttons.

  “These are your security,” Opa said. “Tell no one, not Hugo, not Papa, not anyone. You won’t know when you will need them.” He and Oma didn’t want to cause friction in the family by letting them know they had a small emergency hoard. If the aunts and uncles knew Lingerl’s children were getting four precious gold coins-well, when people are frightened and living too close together, anything can happen.

  The next thing I knew Papa was shaking me awake, giving me a cup of the weak tea we all drank for breakfast. Some adult had found enough canned milk for each child to get a tablespoon in it most mornings.

  If I had realized I wouldn’t see any of them again-but it was hard enough to leave, to go to a strange country where we knew only cousin Minna, and only that she was a bitter woman who made all the children uncomfortable when she came to Kleinsee for her three-week holiday in the summers-if I’d known it was the last good-bye I wouldn’t have been able to bear-the leaving, or the next several years.

  When the train left it was a cold April day, rain pouring in sheets across the Leopoldsgasse as we walked-not to the central station but a small suburban one that wouldn’t attract attention. Papa wore a long red scarf, which he put on so Hugo and I could spot him easily from the train. He was a café violinist, or had been, anyway, and when he saw us leaning out a window, he whipped out his violin and tried to play one of the Gypsy tunes he had taught us to dance to. Even Hugo could tell misery was making his hand quaver, and he howled at Papa to stop making such a noise.