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.
XLVII Bourbon, with a Twist
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.
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.”