I called Durham’s office. The alderman’s secretary asked who I was, what I wanted.
“I’m an investigator,” I said. “Mr. Durham and I met briefly last week. I’m sorry to say that some of the people on the fringe of his extremely wonderful Empower Youth Energy project have shown up as part of a murder investigation I’m working on. Before I give their names to the police, I wanted to do the alderman the courtesy of letting him hear about them from me first.”
The secretary put me on hold. As I waited, I thought again about the Rossys. Maybe I could take a quick run up there to see if the maid, Irina, would talk to me. If she could give the Rossys an alibi for last Friday night, well, it would at least eliminate them from consideration as Fepple’s murderers.
Durham’s secretary came back to the phone. The alderman was in committee meetings until six; he’d meet me at his South Side office at six-thirty before going to a community church meeting. I didn’t want to be alone on Durham’s home turf the way things were shaping up; I told the secretary I’d be at the Golden Glow at six-fifteen. Durham could see me on my ground.
XLVII
Bourbon, with a Twist
I skimmed through my messages, both in my in-box and on-screen. Michael Loewenthal had dropped off the biography of Anna Freud. The day had been so long I’d completely forgotten that conversation. I had also completely forgotten the little dog tags for Ninshubur.
The biography was too fat for me to read clear through in a quest for Paul Hoffman or Radbuka. I looked at the photographs, at Anna Freud sitting next to her father in a café, at the Hampstead nursery where Lotty had washed dishes during the war. I tried to imagine Lotty as a teenager. She would have been idealistic, ardent, but without the patina of irony and briskness which kept the world at arm’s length from her now.
I flipped to the back to look up Radbuka in the index. The name wasn’t there. I checked concentration camps. The second reference was to a paper Freud had written on a group of six children who came to England from Terezin after the war. Six children aged three and four who had lived together as a little unit, looking after one another, forming a bond so tight that the adult authorities didn’t think they could survive apart. No names were mentioned, no other history. It sounded like the group Hoffman-Radbuka had described in his television interview last week, the group where Ulrich had found him, wrenching him away from his little friend Miriam. Could Paul really have been part of it? Or had he appropriated their story to his own?
I went back on-line to see if I could find a copy of the paper Freud had written about the children, “An Experiment in Group Upbringing.” A central research library in London would fax it to me at the cost of a dime a page. Cheap at the price. I entered a credit-card number and sent the order, then looked at my phone messages. The most urgent seemed to be from Ralph, who had called twice—to my cell phone, when I was heading onto the Ryan three hours ago, and just now, when I’d been trying to decipher the less agreeable part of Nesthorn’s past.
He was in a meeting, naturally, but Denise, his secretary, said he badly wanted to see the originals of the material I had shown him this morning.
“I don’t have them,” I said. “I saw them very briefly yesterday, when I made the copies I gave him, but someone else took them for safekeeping. They’re quite valuable documents, I gather. Is it Bertrand Rossy who’d like to look at them, or Ralph himself?”
“I believe Mr. Devereux showed the blowups I made to Mr. Rossy at a meeting this morning, but Mr. Devereux did not indicate whether Mr. Rossy was interested in them.”
“Will you take this message down exactly as I give it to you? Tell Ralph that it is really, honestly true that I don’t have them. Someone else took them. I have no idea where the person who took them is, nor where that person stowed them. Tell him this is not a joke, it is not a way of stalling him. I want those books as badly as he does, but I don’t know where they are.”
I made Denise read the message back to me. I hoped it would convince Rossy, if it was Rossy pushing on Ralph for them, that I truly didn’t have Ulrich’s books. I hoped I hadn’t fingered Lotty in the process. That thought unnerved me. If I had—I couldn’t take time to sit and fret: if I hustled, I could get to the Rossys’ before my appointment with Durham.