I switched my house phone over to the answering service while I soaked, obsessively sponging my breasts as if blood had seeped through the pores of my skin. I shampooed my hair several times as well before I finally felt clean enough to leave the tub.
Wrapped in a terry cloth robe, I returned to the living room: I’d dropped the accordion file on the piano bench when I’d run into the apartment. For a long moment I stared down at Ulrich’s disfigured face, which looked even worse for the blood that had seeped onto it.
I’d been wanting to see these papers since Paul showed up at Max’s last Sunday. Now that they were within my reach I almost couldn’t bear to read them. They were like the special present of my childhood birthdays—sometimes wonderful, like the year I got roller skates, sometimes a disappointment, like the year I longed for a bicycle and got a concert dress. I didn’t think I could bear to open the file and find, well, another concert dress.
I finally undid the black ribbon. Two leather-bound books fell out. On the front of each was stamped in peeling gold letters Ulrich Hoffman. So that was why Rhea Wiell had smirked at me: Ulrich was his first name. I could have called every Ulrich who’d ever lived in Chicago and never found Paul’s father.
A black ribbon hung from the middle of one of the books. I set the other down and opened this one to its marker. The paper, and the ornate script on it, looked much the same as the fragment I’d found in Howard Fepple’s office. A person who was fond of himself, that was what the woman at Cheviot Labs had said, using expensive paper for keeping accounting notes. A domestic bully, king only of the tiny empire of his son? Or an SS man in hiding?
The page I was looking at held a list of names, at least twenty, maybe thirty. Even in the difficult script, one name in particular halfway down the page caught my eye:
Next to it, in a hand so heavy it cut through the paper, Paul had written in red, Sofie Radbuka. My mother, weeping for me, dying for me, in heaven all these years praying for me.
My skin crawled. I could hardly bear to look at the page. I had to treat it as a problem, a conundrum, like the time in the PD when I’d represented a man who had skinned his own daughter. His day in court where I did my best, my God, because I’d managed to dissociate myself and treat it as a problem.
All the entries followed the same format: a year with a question mark, and then a number. The only variation I saw was that some had a cross followed by a check mark, others just a cross.
Did this mean they had died in 1943, or ’41? With 72 or 45 something.
I opened the second book. This one held similar information to the scrap I’d found in Fepple’s office, columns of dates, all written European style, most filled in with check marks, while some were blank. What had Howard Fepple been doing with a piece of Ulrich Hoffman’s old Swiss paper?
I sat down hard on the piano bench. Ulrich Hoffman. Rick Hoffman. Was that Paul Radbuka’s father? The old agent from Midway with his Mercedes, and the books he carried around with him to check off who paid him? Whose son had an expensive education, but never amounted to anything? But—had he sold insurance in Germany as well? The man who’d owned these books was an immigrant.
I dug Rhonda Fepple’s number out of my briefcase. Her phone rang six times before the answering machine picked up, with Howard Fepple’s voice eerily asking for me to leave a message. I reminded Rhonda that I was the detective who had been to her house on Monday. I asked her to call me as soon as possible, giving her my cell-phone number, then went back to stare at the books again. If Rick Hoffman and Ulrich were the same man, what did these books have to do with insurance? I tried to match the entries with what I knew of insurance policies, but couldn’t make sense of them. The front of the first book was filled with a long list of names, with a lot of other data that I couldn’t decipher.
The list went on for pages. I shook my head over it. I squinted at the difficult ornate writing, trying to interpret it. What about it had made Paul decide Ulrich was with the Einsatzgruppen? What was it about the name Radbuka that had persuaded him it was his? The papers were in code, he’d screamed at me outside the hospital yesterday—if I believed in Rhea I’d understand it. What had she seen when he’d shown these pages to her?