“Oh, Lotty, who were the Radbukas?” I cried to the empty room. “Whom do you feel you betrayed?” Not a patient, she’d said that last night. Someone she’d turned her back on whose death consumed her with guilt. It had to have been someone in England—otherwise how had Questing Scorpio gotten the name? A relative was all I could imagine, perhaps a relative who appeared in England after the war that Lotty couldn’t cope with. Someone she had loved in Vienna, but whom the horrors of war had so damaged that Lotty turned away from her. I could see it, could see doing it myself. So why couldn’t she talk to me about it? Did she really think I would judge her?
I checked Questing Scorpio again, but there was still no response to my posting. What else could I do—besides go home to walk the dogs, make dinner, go to bed. Sometimes routine is soothing, but at other times it’s a burden. I searched for Edelweiss on the Web to see if I could come up with any information about Fillida Rossy’s family. I sent the query through both Lexis and ProQuest and went back to the phone, calling Don Strzepek.
He answered my greeting cautiously, remembering that we hadn’t parted very cordially yesterday. “Any word from the intrepid journalist?”
“He’s made it as far as Rome without a scratch. I guess they’re off to Islamabad tomorrow.”
“Don’t worry about him, Vic: he’s been in worse places than Kabul, hard as it is for me to think of any offhand. I mean, it’s not a war zone these days—no one’s going to shoot at him. He may get heckled, but he’s more likely to be the object of curiosity, at least among the kids.”
I felt a little better. “Don, on a different subject—what did you think after you saw Max’s notebooks last night? Do you agree that he didn’t know the Radbukas before he made that trip to Vienna after the war?”
“Yes, it was clearly Dr. Herschel’s connection, more than Max’s. Especially since it was she who fainted at the party on Sunday when she heard Sofie Radbuka’s name. She seemed to have an awful lot of detail about exactly how to hunt down the apartment on the Leopoldsgasse,” he added hesitantly. “I’m wondering if the Radbukas were her family.”
“So Radbuka can start stalking her instead of Max? You know he was at Beth Israel today, with Posner and his Maccabees, screaming to the world that Lotty and Max were trying to keep Holocaust survivors from their birth families?”
“I know it must be painful for them, but Paul really is a tormented spirit, Vic. If he could just find someplace to anchor himself it would calm him down.”
“Have you actually talked to the recovered-memory poster boy yourself?” I asked. “Is there any hope of getting him to show you those papers his father left behind? The ones that proved to him that his father was with the Einsatzgruppen and that he himself was a camp survivor named Radbuka?”
Don paused to make a hissing noise—presumably inhaling smoke. “I did meet him briefly this morning—I guess before he joined Posner at the hospital. He’s pretty agitated these days. Rhea wouldn’t let me ask him too many questions for fear of getting him more upset. He won’t let me see the papers—he seems to think I might be a rival for Rhea’s affection, so he’s clamming up on me.”
I couldn’t suppress a snort of laughter. “I’ve got to hand it to Rhea for sticking with the guy. He’d have me in the locked ward at Elgin within a week if I tried to follow his gyrations around the dance floor. Although of course you are a rival, I can see his point of view. What does Rhea say?”
“She says she can’t betray a patient confidence, which of course I respect her for. Although my old reporter’s instincts make that hard to do.” He gave a little laugh that managed to sound both rueful and admiring. “She encouraged his involvement with Posner because Posner’s giving him a sense of real family. But of course we didn’t know when we saw him they were going to go picket Max at the hospital. I’m seeing her for dinner tonight, so I’ll talk to her about it then.”
I made a little structure out of paper clips while I chose my words. “Don, I asked Radbuka today who Ulrich was, and he had kind of a fit on the street, saying it was his foster father’s name and that I was accusing Rhea of being a liar. But you know, yesterday she made quite a point that Ulrich wasn’t the guy’s name. She even seemed to be laughing at me a little over that.”
He sucked in another lungful of smoke. “I’d forgotten that. I can try to ask her again tonight, but—Vic, I’m not going to play man in the middle between you and Rhea.”
“No, Don, I don’t expect you to.” All I wanted him to do was be on my side, pump her for information, and feed it to me. That wasn’t really asking him to be in the middle. “But if you can persuade her that Max isn’t related to the Radbuka family, maybe she in turn can persuade Paul to stop making a scene up at Beth Israel. Only, Don, for God’s sake, please don’t feed Lotty to Rhea as a substitute for Max. I don’t know if the Radbukas were cousins or patients or enemy aliens in London whom Lotty was close to, but she won’t survive the kind of harassment Paul’s been giving Max.”
I waited for his response, but he wouldn’t promise me anything. I ended up slamming the phone down in disgust.
Before giving up detecting for the day, I also phoned Amy Blount. Mary Louise’s report had said that the break-in at her place had been the work of a pro, not a random smash-and-grab. The padlock on the gate was intact, Mary Louise had written.