“Your biography says you started out as a poor boy on the streets of Vilna. You can’t always have believed you had an absolute right to whatever you want.”
“If you’ve read my biography, then you know that I have had to be ruthless in order to survive.” His voice was still soft, but the implied threat was credible.
“You didn’t hire Wuchnik but you think he was investigating you,” I said slowly. “You think he found something to your discredit, or perhaps to your daughter’s or Dr. Durango’s. Is that why you won’t sue Wade Lawlor over the sickening statements he makes about you on his show?”
“Wade Lawlor is an annoying mosquito. People on the left take him far too seriously. I don’t sue him because I’m past eighty; I want to spend my remaining energy on more attractive pursuits than the courts.”
“If that was what you cared about, you wouldn’t have summoned me to dinner, nor waited an hour and a half for me. I don’t know who you wait for, but a PI like me, you’d be up and out of here if I were thirty seconds past due unless you wanted to quash this investigation more than you want to pack for Rio. No, you’ve got something weighing on you. It could be your granddaughter, of course. I’m pretty sure she had met Wuchnik, or at least talked to him, but she refuses to tell me.”
“You can do as you please about who you work for, but I will not allow you to talk to my granddaughter.”
The words were sharp, but something in his movements, a restless moving of his knife and fork, meant he was worried—about what Arielle had done? Or about what might happen to her?
When I didn’t say anything, he added, “I’ll be checking up on you from time to time to make sure you leave her alone.”
“With your highly competent team of investigators.” I got to my feet. “I hope whatever skeleton you’re draping with velvet and sable to keep out of the public gaze isn’t about Sophy Durango. I like her. I’d like to see her in the U.S. Senate and it won’t happen if anything discreditable emerges. Thanks for the Armagnac.”
15.
A HARD DAY’S DAY
DESPITE MY FATIGUE AND MY BLOODY DRESS, I STOPPED AT Lotty’s on my way home. Max was with her. I joined them on the balcony and felt better as soon as I drank some of Lotty’s rich Viennese coffee.
“Why can’t a private club that caters to the wealthy and horticultural make good coffee? Don’t they understand that coffee is a shrub, that the berry requires careful tending?” I complained.
Max laughed, but Lotty swept aside my comment, demanding a report on my meeting with Salanter.
“I hope our conversation doesn’t cost Beth Israel the funding for the Chaim Salanter wing, or whatever he’s pledged to you. He wanted to hire me not to investigate Miles Wuchnik’s death.” I summarized our Byzantine conversation. “The trouble is, I’m committed to looking into, not Wuchnik’s death exactly, but the cases he was working on leading up to his death. Do you know anything about Salanter that I should know before I jump onto a land mine?”
“No,” Max said slowly. “I know next to nothing about his history, and I’m not sure anyone knows those details. He arrived in Chicago around 1950, but I only met him after I became executive director at Beth Israel and started cultivating potential donors. His response was tepid, so I was surprised when he asked me to be a director of the Malina Foundation.”
“His past, that’s his business,” Lotty said crisply.
She’d sat on her own wartime secrets for decades. She would have preferred that they never come to light, but her past had overtaken her and forced her into some partial revelations, and reconciliations. I wondered if the same thing might be happening to Salanter.
“His past is his business,” I agreed, “unless it’s responsible for Miles Wuchnik’s death. Wuchnik was investigating Salanter, or Salanter is afraid he was. What is Salanter afraid that people will find out?”
Neither Max nor Lotty had any ideas, although both agreed he would go to great lengths to protect Arielle, his only grandchild. The Malina Foundation was important to him, too.
“Not important enough to take on the creeps who drove a mob into an attack on the foundation. Not to mention his own granddaughter, besides my cousin and another of her charges.”
Max and Lotty had seen the coverage of the protest but hadn’t realized Petra or Arielle had been assaulted. I explained what had happened, and Salanter’s insistence that I not pursue the matter. “I don’t think the mob knew Arielle was there, or the attack would have been even more savage. As it was, she and one of the other kids were pelted with eggs and paint bombs. So was Petra. I’m worried that these girls will find it hard to recover from such an assault.”
“We should get a private security firm to look after the children in the book groups,” Max said. “At least until this episode blows over.”