“The company gave it to me.”
I made a U-turn, one hand on the wheel, one on the phone. I braked to avoid a cat that suddenly streaked across the road. A little girl followed, screaming its name. The car fishtailed. I dropped the phone and pulled over to the curb, my heart pounding. I had been lucky not to hit the girl.
“Sorry—I’m demented right now, trying to do too many things at once, and driving stupidly,” I said when I’d recovered enough to reestablish the connection. “Were these archival records? Financials, anything like that?”
“A summary of financials. All they wanted on Edelweiss was that little bit at the end. The book is really about Ajax, so I didn’t see the need to look at Edelweiss archives.” She was defensive.
“What was in the summary?”
“High-level numbers. Assets and reserves, principal offices. Year-by-year, though. I don’t remember the details. I suppose I could ask the Ajax librarian.”
A couple of men came out of a derelict courtyard. They looked at the Mustang and then at me and gave a thumbs-up gesture for both of us. I smiled and waved.
“I need a way to find out if they had an office in Vienna before the war.” Edelweiss’s numbers didn’t matter, come to think of it: maybe they really had been a small regional player in the thirties. But they could still have been selling insurance to people who were obliterated in the war’s blistering furnaces.
“The Illinois Insurance Institute has a library which might have something that would help you,” Amy Blount suggested. “I used it when I was doing research for the Ajax book. They have a strange hodgepodge of old insurance documents. They’re in the Insurance Exchange building, you know, on West Jackson.”
I thanked her and hung up. My phone rang as I was negotiating the merge onto the Ryan at Eighty-seventh, but nearly hitting that child a few minutes ago made me keep my attention on the road. Although I couldn’t stop speculating about Edelweiss. They bought Ajax, a coup, acquiring America’s fourth-largest property-casualty insurer at fire-sale prices. And then found themselves facing legislation demanding recovery of Holocaust-era assets, including life-insurance policies. Their investment could have turned from gold mine to bankruptcy court if they had a huge arrears of unpaid life-insurance claims all coming due at once.
Swiss banks were fighting tooth and claw to keep heirs of Holocaust victims from claiming assets deposited in the frantic years before the war. European insurers were stonewalling just as hard. It must be relatively rare for children to know their parents had insurance. Even if others, like Carl, had been sent downstairs with money to pay the agent, I was betting he was unusual in knowing what company held his father’s policy. When my father died, it was only on going through his papers that I found his life insurance.
When not only your family, but your house, maybe even your entire town, has been obliterated—you’d have no records to turn to. And if you did, the company would treat you the way it had Carl: denying the claim because you couldn’t present a death certificate. They really were a prize group of bastards, those banks and insurers.
My phone rang again, but I picked it up only to switch it off. If those books of Hoffman’s contained a list of life-insurance policies bought by people like Carl’s father or Max’s, people who died in Treblinka or Auschwitz, it wasn’t such a large list that Edelweiss would lose much from paying the claims. All it would do is give several hundred people the knowledge that their parents or grandparents had bought policies and give them the policy numbers. It wasn’t as if there’d be a stampede on Edelweiss assets.
Unless, of course, states began passing Holocaust Asset Recovery Acts, such as the one Ajax torpedoed last week. The company would have had to make an audited search of its policy files—of all the hundred or so companies that made up the Ajax group, now including Edelweiss—and prove that it wasn’t sitting on policies belonging to the dead of the war in Europe. That might have cost them a bundle.
Would Fepple have grasped this possibility? Could he have found enough information in Aaron Sommers’s file to use it in an attempt at blackmail? He’d been excited at a way to make money. If this was it, was it a big enough reason for someone at Ajax to kill him? And who would have been the triggerman? Ralph? The jolly Bertrand? His soft-as-steel wife?