He went on to describe the recovery of his memory with Rhea Wiell, going into great detail, including dreams in which he was speaking Yiddish, fragments of memories of his mother singing a lullaby to him before he was old enough to walk, details of his foster father’s abuse of him.
I have been wondering why my foster father tracked me down in England, he concluded, but it must be because of Sofie Radbuka. He might have been her torturer in the concentration camps. She is one of my relatives, perhaps even my mother, or a missing sister. Are you her child? We might be brother and sister. I am yearning for the family I have never known. Please, I implore you, write back to me, to PaulRadbuka@ survivor.com. Tell me about Sofie. If she is my mother or my aunt, or possibly even a sister I never knew existed, I must know.
No follow-up was posted, which wasn’t too surprising: his hysteria came through so clearly in the document that I would have shied away from him myself. I did a search to see if Questing Scorpio had an e-mail address but came up short.
I went back to the chat room and carefully constructed a message: Dear Questing Scorpio, if you have information or questions about the Radbuka family that you would be willing to discuss with a neutral party, you could send them to the law offices of Carter, Halsey, and Weinberg. These were the offices of my own lawyer, Freeman Carter. I included both the street address and the URL for their Web site, then sent an e-mail to Freeman, letting him know what I’d done.
I looked at the screen for a bit, as if it might magically reveal some other information, but eventually I remembered that no one was paying me to find out anything about Sofie Radbuka and settled down to some of the on-line searches that make up the better part of my business these days. The Web has transformed investigative work, making it for the most part both easier and duller.
At noon, when Mary Louise left for class, she said all six policies I’d brought with me from Midway were in order: for the four where the purchaser was dead, the beneficiaries had duly received their benefits. For the two still living, no one had submitted a claim. Three of the policies had been on Ajax paper. Two other companies had issued the other three. So if the Sommers claim had been fraudulently submitted by the agency, it wasn’t a regular occurrence.
Exhaustion made it hard for me to think—about that, or anything else. When Mary Louise had left, waves of fatigue swept over me. I moved on leaden legs to the cot in my supply room, where I fell into a feverish sleep. It was almost three when the phone pulled me awake again. I stumbled out to my desk and mumbled something unintelligible.
A woman asked for me, then told me to hold for Mr. Rossy. Mr. Rossy? Oh, yes, the head of Edelweiss’s U.S. operations. I rubbed my forehead, trying to make blood flow into my brain, then, since I was still on hold, went to the little refrigerator in the hall, which I share with Tessa, for a bottle of water. Rossy was calling my name sharply when I picked up the phone again.
“Buon giorno,” I said, with a semblance of brightness. “ Come sta? Che cosa posso fare per Lei?”
He exclaimed over my Italian. “Ralph told me you were fluent; you speak it beautifully—almost without an accent. Actually, that’s why I called.”
“To speak Italian to me?” I was incredulous.
“My wife—she gets homesick. When I told her I’d met an Italian speaker who shared her love of opera, she wondered if you’d do us the honor of coming to dinner. She was especially fascinated, as I was sure she would be, by the idea of your office among the indovine—p-suchics,” he added in English, correcting himself immediately to “sychics.” “Do I have this correct now?”
“Perfect,” I said absently. I looked at the Isabel Bishop painting on the wall by my desk, but the angular face staring at a sewing machine told me nothing. “It would be a pleasure to meet Mrs. Rossy,” I finally said.
“Is it possible that you could join us tomorrow evening?”
I thought of Morrell, leaving for Rome on a ten A. M. flight, and the hollow I would feel when I saw him off. “As it happens, I’m free.” I copied the address—an apartment building near Lotty’s on Lake Shore Drive—into my Palm Pilot. We hung up on mutual protestations of goodwill, but I frowned at the painted seamstress a long moment, wondering what Rossy really wanted.
The page I’d found in Fepple’s briefcase was dry now. I set the machine to enlarge the copy and came up with letters big enough to read. The original I tucked into a plastic sleeve.