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 hospitaclass="underline" 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.
When we finished, I leaned my head wearily against the steering wheel. Too much was going on that I didn’t understand and couldn’t control. Where had Lotty gone? She’d stalked angrily off into the night last night, driven home-and disappeared. I dialed her apartment, where her clipped voice came on again from the machine. “Lotty, please call me if you are picking up your messages. I’m seriously worried.” I called back up to Evanston, intending to leave a message for Max, but he’d just walked in the door.
“ Victoria, have you had any word from Lotty? No? Mrs. Coltrain called, wanting to know if you had been able to get into her apartment.”
“Oh, nuts-calling Mrs. Coltrain back went out of my head-I’m spinning in too many directions right now.” I told Max about my tour through the apartment this morning and asked if he could tell Mrs. Coltrain about it himself.
“If Lotty disappeared of her own free will, how could she leave without letting us know?” I added. “Surely she must know how much this would upset all her friends, not to say Mrs. Coltrain and her clinic staff.”
“She’s seriously disturbed,” Max said. “Something has knocked her off-balance, so that she’s thinking only of some small world, not the bigger one with her friends in it. Her whole behavior is-it’s frightening me, Victoria. I’m tempted to call it some kind of long-delayed post-traumatic breakdown, as if she held so much in for so many decades that it’s hitting her with the force of a tidal wave. If you get any kind of word from her, no matter the hour, let me know at once. As I will you.”
It helped that Max was as troubled as I. Post-traumatic stress-it’s a diagnosis bandied about so glibly these days that one forgets how real and terrifying a condition it is. If Max was right, it could explain Lotty’s unbearable edginess lately, as well as her sudden evaporation. I wished I hadn’t gotten myself bogged down in the trailing tentacles of the investigation: I wanted to find her now. I wanted to console her if that lay within my power. I wanted to bring her back to life. But I was frighteningly aware that I had few powers. I wasn’t an indovina. I was barely making progress slogging through quicksand as an investigator.