Total Recall

LII The Face in the Picture

Beth Israel was near enough to the expressway that I took it up to Evanston. It was past ten now, but Max had wanted to talk things over. He was feeling deeply lonely tonight, since Calia and Agnes had left for London and Michael and Carl had flown west to rejoin the Cellini in San Francisco.

Max fed me cold roast chicken and a glass of St. Emilion, something warm and red for comfort. I told him what I knew, what I was guessing, what I thought the fallout would be. He was more philosophical than I about Alderman Durham, but he was disappointed that Posner hadn’t been implicated in any of the scandal.

“You’re sure he wasn’t playing a role somehow? Something that you could expose that would force him away from the hospital?”

“He’s just a fanatic,” I said, accepting another glass of wine. “Although they’re actually more dangerous than people like Durham, who are playing the game-well, as a game-for power or position or money. But if we catch up with Lotty and find those books of Ulrich’s, then we can publicize those life-insurance policies that Edelweiss or Nesthorn sold during the thirties. We can force the Illinois legislature to revisit the Holocaust Asset Recovery Act. And Posner and his Maccabees will go back downtown to Ajax or the State of Illinois building, which will get him out of your hair.”

“Lotty and the notebooks,” Max repeated, turning his wineglass round and round in his hands. “ Victoria, while Calia was here and I was concerned about her safety, I wasn’t worrying so intensely about Lotty. Also, I see now, now that he’s gone back to the tour, I was protecting myself from Carl’s scorn. Lotty’s high flair for drama, he keeps calling her recent behavior. The way she disappeared on Thursday-Carl says it’s the same thing she did all those years ago in London. Turning her back, walking away without a word. It’s what she did to him, you know, and he says I am a fool if I think that isn’t what she’s doing to me. She leaves, she says nothing for weeks or months, and then perhaps she returns, or perhaps not, but there’s never an explanation.”

“And you think?” I prodded, when he was quiet.

“I think she’s disappeared now for the same reason she disappeared then, whatever that was,” he burst out. “If I was twenty, as Carl was then, I might be as hurt in my own sense of self and less worried about her: one’s passions run higher at twenty. But I am very worried about her. I want to know where she is. I called her brother Hugo in Montreal, but they’ve never been close; he hasn’t heard from her in months and has no idea what’s going through her head, or where she might have run to. Victoria, I know you are worn, I see it in the fine lines around your mouth and eyes. But can you do anything to find her?”

I massaged my sore shoulders again. “I’m going to the clinic in the morning. Lotty actually did FedEx a packet of dictation to Mrs. Coltrain-she was transcribing it when Fillida Rossy jumped her. Mrs. Coltrain says there’s nothing to indicate where Lotty is-it’s a short tape, leaving instructions about her surgical schedule. But Mrs. Coltrain is going to let me into the clinic in the morning so I can listen to it myself and inspect the wrapping. She hopes it will mean something to me. Also, she says Lotty left papers on her desktop; maybe they’ll tell me something. Beyond that-I can try to ask the Finch or Captain Mallory to pull Lotty’s phone records-they would show who she called the night she disappeared. Airline lists. There are other things I could do, but they won’t happen fast. We’ll hope for something in her own papers.”

Max insisted that I stay the night. “You’re asleep on your feet, Victoria. You shouldn’t be out driving. Unless you’re desperate to go to your own home, you can sleep in my daughter’s old room. There’s even some kind of nightshirt in there that’s clean.”

It was his own fear and loneliness that made him want me there, as much as his concern for my well-being, but both were important reasons to me. I called Mr. Contreras to reassure him of my safety and was glad, actually, to climb one flight of stairs to a bed instead of spending another half hour in my car to reach one.

In the morning, we drove down together to the clinic. Mrs. Coltrain met us at nine, looking as sedately groomed as if Rossys and attempted murder were no more harrowing than sick women and screaming children. Fillida hadn’t broken her arm when she smashed it with the gun stock, but she had given Mrs. Coltrain a deep bruise; her forearm was resting in a sling to protect the damaged area.

She wasn’t quite as calm as she appeared: when she’d settled us at her workstation with the tape player, she confided, “You know, Miss Warshawski, I think I am going to get someone in on Monday to take the doors off those closets in the examining rooms. I don’t think I can go in there without being afraid someone is hiding behind the door.”

That was what Fillida had done: hidden in an examining-room closet until she thought the clinic was empty, and then jumped Mrs. Coltrain at her workstation. When Fillida realized that the notebooks weren’t on the premises, she’d forced Mrs. Coltrain to bring me to the clinic.

Now Mrs. Coltrain played the tape for Max and me, but although we listened to it clear to the end, through half an hour of staticky silence on the second side, neither of us got anything out of it except that Dr. Barber was to take Lotty’s two urgent surgical cases on Tuesday and Mrs. Coltrain was to work with the chief of surgery to reschedule the others.

Mrs. Coltrain took us back to Lotty’s office so I could inspect the papers Lotty had left on her desk. My stomach muscles clenched as we walked down the hall. I expected to find the chaos we’d left behind last night: broken chairs, blood, overturned lamps, and the police mess on top of it. But the broken furniture was gone, the floor and desk were scoured clean, the papers neatly laid on top.

When I exclaimed over the tidiness, Mrs. Coltrain said she had come in early to make things right. “ If Dr. Herschel showed up, she would be so distressed to find all that wreckage. And anyway, I knew I couldn’t face it for thirty seconds, so full of all that violence. Lucy Choi, the clinic nurse, she came in at eight. We gave it a good going-over together. But I kept out all the papers that were on Dr. Herschel’s desk yesterday. You sit down here, Ms. Warshawski, and look them over.”

It felt strange to sit behind Lotty’s desk, in the chair where she had so often greeted me, sometimes brusquely, more often with empathy, but always with a high energy. I turned over the papers. A letter from the archivist at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, dated six years back, telling Dr. Herschel that they regretted not being able to find any records of the people whom she was trying to trace, Shlomo and Martin Radbuka, although they could confirm the deaths of Rudolph and A

Lotty had also left out a stack of newsletters from the Royal Free Hospital in London, where she’d done her medical training. I turned over the pages. Stuck between two of the sheets was a photograph. It was an old picture, the edges creased from much handling, which showed a very young woman, fair, whose eyes, even in the faded paper, sparkled with life. Her hair was bobbed and curled in the style of the 1920’s. She was smiling with the provocative self-confidence of someone who knows herself beloved, whose desires were seldom denied. It was inscribed on the back, but in German in a heavy European script which I couldn’t decipher.