“And someone came today to get those books?”
“Ilse.” He said, “Ilse W?lfin. I knew. She . . . came . . . to the door. First she was friendly. Learned from Mengele. Friends first . . . then torture. She said . . . she was from Vienna. Said Ulrich took these books to America . . . shouldn’t have . . . after the war. I didn’t understand at first . . . then . . . I tried to get . . . to my secret place . . . hide from her . . . pulled out her gun first.”
“What did she look like?” I asked, ignoring an impatient aside from Lotty to stop.
“Fierce. Big hat. Sunglasses. Horrible smile.”
“When he was selling insurance, here in Chicago, did Ulrich talk to you about these books?” I asked, trying to figure out a way to ask if he’d been at the Midway Agency lately, wondering if he’d been stalking Howard Fepple.
“The dead give us life, Ulrich used to say. Remember that . . . you will be rich. He wanted me . . . be . . . doctor . . . wanted me . . . make money from the dead. . . . I didn’t want . . . to live among . . . dead. I didn’t want to stay in . . . closet. . . . Tortured me . . . called me sissy, queer, always in German, always . . . in language of . . . slavery.” Tears started to seep down his face; his breath began coming in labored spurts.
Lotty said, “You need to rest, you need to sleep. We want you to recover. I’m going to leave you now, but before I go, who did you talk to in England? What helped you remember your name was Radbuka?”
His eyes were shut, his face drawn and grey. “His tally of the dead he’d killed himself . . . bragged in his books . . . listed their names. Searched each name . . . on the Internet. . . . Found one . . . in England . . . Sofie . . Radbuka . . . how I knew . . . which name mine . . . and that I was sent to Anna Freud in England . . . after the war. . . . Had to be.”
Lotty kept her hand on his pulse while he fell asleep. The rest of us watched dumbly while Lotty checked the IV drips coming into his arms. When she left the room, Rhea and I followed. Hot spots of color burned in Rhea’s face; she tried to confront Lotty in the hall, but Lotty swept past her to the nurse’s station, where she asked for the charge nurse. She began an interrogation about the drugs Paul was getting.
Don had come out of Paul’s room more slowly than the rest of us. He started a low-voiced conversation with Rhea, his face troubled. Lotty finished with the charge nurse and sailed on down the hall to the elevator. I ran after her, but she looked at me sternly.
“You should have saved your questions, Victoria. There were specific things I was trying to learn, but your questions sidetracked him and finally got him too upset. I wanted to know how he latched on to Anna Freud as his savior, for instance.”
I got in the elevator with her. “Lotty, enough of this crap. Isn’t pushing Carl into the void enough? Do you want to drive Max and me away from you, as well? You got angry the first time Paul mentioned England; I was trying to keep you from losing him. And also—we know what those journals meant to Paul Hoffman. I’d like to know what they meant to Ulrich. Where are they, by the way? I need them.”
“For right now, you’ll have to do without them.”
“Lotty, I can’t do without them. I need to find out what they mean to people who don’t see the dead in them. Someone shot Paul for them. It may be that this fierce woman in sunglasses killed an insurance agent named Howard Fepple for them. His mother’s house was broken into on Tuesday. Someone searched it, probably for these notebooks.”
Amy Blount, I suddenly thought. Her place had been burgled on Tuesday, also. Surely it was too big a coincidence to think it wasn’t connected to these Hoffman journals. She had seen the Ajax archives. What if the fierce woman in sunglasses thought Ulrich Hoffman’s books had landed in the archives and thought perhaps Amy Blount hadn’t been able to resist them? Which meant—it was someone who knew Amy Blount had been in those archives. It all came back to the folks at Ajax. Ralph. Rossy. And Durham on the sideline.
“Anyway,” I added aloud, as the elevator doors opened onto the lobby, “if they mean that much to someone, you’re risking a lot by holding on to them.”
“That is definitely my lookout, not yours, Victoria. I’ll return them to you in a day or so. There’s something I need to look for in them first.” She turned on her heel and stalked away from me, following a hallway signposted to the doctors’ parking area.