Durango made an impatient gesture. “This is completely irrelevant to Nia and Arielle, and how the news of their flying to Israel leaked out.”
“Perhaps.” I swallowed some of the whisky—the alcohol, or maybe the sugar, gives a jolt of wakefulness before it numbs you. “But going back to the ad Shatka responded to, the ad for information about a Jewish refugee from Lithuania whose name Shatka recognized. She wrote her mother, her mother wrote back. I don’t know what Shatka said, but I found two aerograms from her mother to her. A Chicago graduate student translated the Russian for me earlier this evening. Shatka’s mother can’t give chapter and verse, but she does talk about the man’s history in a believable way.”
Everyone was staring at Salanter, who continued to sit like a small Buddha in the corner of my couch.
I pulled the printout of Ted Austin’s e-mail from my bag and held the pages out to Salanter. “I don’t understand what’s in this history that’s so shameful you would forbid your granddaughter to discuss it. But you have put great energy into keeping your past to yourself. Did Jana Shatka come to you? Or Miles Wuchnik?”
“If you are asking whether they tried to buy my silence, you are correct. The man Wuchnik wanted to meet me, he wanted to give me the opportunity to bid on the information in here”—he took the printout from me and shook it—“against whoever his other buyer was. I didn’t see the letters, but Wuchnik described their content. I never met him personally, of course, but he persuaded Wren Balfour to bring me to the phone. There isn’t much in here, the half memories of a bitter woman who doesn’t know anything firsthand.”
“But when he died, and you learned I was involved, you tried to bribe me into not investigating his murder,” I said. “Didn’t you realize that would raise red flags, make me want to know what you were concealing?”
Salanter shrugged. “If Wuchnik had found information out about me, then I knew it was only a matter of time before it appeared on Wade Lawlor’s TV show. Killing the detective would have solved no problems. I wasn’t thinking broadly enough when I met with you—I was concerned about my daughter and granddaughter’s peace of mind, and that made my approach to you narrow. And ill-advised, as it turns out, but my one experience of a private detective had been Wuchnik—I imagined all were like the one.”
This sounded like a noble apology, an invitation to believe he thought I was his equal in broad thinking, but he was a master juggler; if I paid too much attention to the ball in the air I’d miss the two he was whipping into his pocket.
“You frightened Nia and Arielle when they asked about your past, so much so that they even concealed from their mothers the fact that they’d been approached to try to uncover the information,” I said. “If you could react so vehemently to your own granddaughter, I don’t believe you’d have just shrugged off an approach from an outsider.”
“So you think I murdered Wuchnik. Even if that had been my impulse, I would have needed help, and getting help, even from Gabe, would have exposed me to a domino of potential blackmailers.”
He crumpled the printout into a ball, saying with sudden savagery, “Let the whole damned world read these. Let them share the affronted outrage of this mealymouthed peasant woman: the Jew was ungrateful after all her uncle did for him. And after he fell under the spell of those sexually potent Jewesses, who were alluring even while they were starving to death in the ghetto. They were so wanton, so lacking in . . . in humanness that they were willing to lie with a pig at night so their children could get a little something to eat in a man-made famine.”
He flung the balled-up paper at Max. “So the bastard spent time in a Soviet gulag—for the wrong reasons but, by God, it was a righteous judgment.”
Max unfolded the printout and read it, then handed it to Lotty, with a murmured comment I couldn’t hear, although it was probably a warning that she would find the material distressing. As she read it she took his hand and squeezed it tightly. When she’d finished with it, she didn’t speak but passed the printout to Sophy Durango.
“Of course, there’s nothing in there but the usual dreary stereotypes.” Max made a face. And so this man Shatka was your mother’s—” He broke off, fumbling for a word: lover, rapist.