Breakdown (42 page)

“Dick, we’re talking about a guy who’s been murdered, not someone who provided evidence in a money-laundering scheme.”

“You can’t prove that the money has anything to do with his murder. It sounds as though it’s the cash he used to buy the Camaro, am I right?”

I had to agree with that. “But which lawyer got the commission? Eloise?”

“I’m not going to reveal our in-house secrets to you, let alone breach confidentiality laws. And now, if you don’t mind
very
much, I’m already late for dinner with the Chinese trade consul.”

Waiting with him for the elevator, I asked if the note had revealed the client who was providing the cash.

“Even if I knew, it can’t possibly be any of your business.”

“It is my business, Dick. It’s connected to how Leydon Ashford ended up in a terrible heap on the Rockefeller Chapel floor.” Dick and Vic. Leydon used to tease us about our rhyming relationship. “Was the client Sewall Ashford? Or Helen Kendrick?”

“Don’t jump to conclusions, Vic. You might outjump your shadow.”

The elevator arrived just then. Late though it was in the workday, two of Dick’s colleagues were on board. They eyed me curiously but didn’t ask for introductions. Instead, the three discussed their upcoming vacation plans. Dick and his wife were off to Martha’s Vineyard with their three children. One of the colleagues was heading to Thailand, the other to Ethiopia with his church to help build affordable housing.

“I’ll be spending my summer in South Chicago, waiting for someone to build affordable housing there,” I said chirpily.

Dick rolled his eyes while the colleagues backed away from me. Conversation froze for the rest of the journey.

At street level we all separated, Dick into a waiting limo, the colleagues moving toward the suburban rail station, me heading east to pick up the Blue Line. If Dick and I were still married, I could get door-to-door limo service instead of making my tired legs carry me down the grimy stairs to the L platform. Of course, I’d have to wear high heels and makeup instead of my cushioned sandals.

The dim lights in the stairwell made my shadow waver and bounce in front of me. I’d have a hard time outjumping that. But Dick had given me a clue, I realized, as I stuck my CTA card into the magnetic reader. I was assuming the wrong client, or the wrong partner, or both. If Eloise hadn’t been the go-between for Xavier’s cash, then it was likely her gray, self-effacing colleague, Louis whoever. If the client wasn’t Ashford or Kendrick, then—was it Chaim Salanter?

It was like one of those Rubik’s Cubes, where you had to keep turning the sides to fit all those colors together. I’d never been able to line the blocks up right, and this story was the same: I kept finding leftover pieces every time I tried to put them together.

When I got to my office and typed in the code at the street door, fire was pulsing in the windows on the north side. Not a cause for alarm, just a sign that Tessa Reynolds was working late with her blowtorch. She had a commission from a Chinese municipal council to provide them with some enormous metal abstract for their main plaza, and she was working overtime to finish it. Perhaps she was the beneficiary of Dick’s work with the Chinese trade consul.

I resolutely put aside thoughts of vampires and Camaros and put in a couple of hours for my real clients. I was nearing the end of a complex search when my cell phone rang.

“Uh, Ms. Warshawski? This is Ted Austin, I’m the, uh, graduate student you gave those Russian letters to this morning.”

“Have you finished already?”

“They only took me a couple of hours. They’re both to a woman named Jana from her mother. I, uh, I’m e-mailing the translations to you, but they seem like maybe they should go to the Wiesenthal Center or something like that.”

I sat up straight in my chair. “They deal with Nazi war crimes?”

“Not in so many words. They’re mostly just the kind of thing a mother might write, but—well, when you’ve read them, you’ll see what I mean. The translations aren’t super-polished, but after I’d roughed them out, I thought you might want them now. I’ll do a better version in a day or two.”

I opened the e-mail before he’d finished speaking.

Dear Janushka,

So, this is a very strange idea [
or perhaps better word choice: request
], to find out information about this Jew who lived with your grandmother’s brother during the War. I looked at the ad you found and discussed it with your auntie, and she agrees, you want to be careful: ask who is wanting this information. Is it the Jew Salanter himself, wanting to do additional hurt to our family? Or is it truly someone who is seeking to expose the Jew?

He certainly betrayed the great generosity your great-uncle showed him. How strange that he [
the Jew, she means
] and you both ended up in Chicago together—it is as if the Fates had willed that you be there to balance the scales. If there really is money to be had from him maybe it will make up for your hardships in America.

Your brother is still not able to find work, but he comes every day to help me with my injection for the diabetes. Even though he complains greatly, still, he knows I will not give him any money unless he helps me here.

The rest of the letter went on in the same vein, with complaints about a granddaughter who couldn’t be bothered to visit her grandmother. How rude local people were in the shops when you spoke to them in Russian (
Maybe there were difficulties under the Soviet Union, but at least a Russian was treated with respect. Your auntie writes from Kiev that it is much different there, although still many people are without jobs.
)

The second letter began with another litany of complaints about the writer’s swollen legs and the disrespect of her son, her granddaughter, and the concierge in her apartment building, before moving on to the subject of Chaim Salanter.

I don’t know what this detective you found thinks we can give him in the way of proof. In the Second War, you were lucky to find a cabbage leaf to eat; you didn’t look for a piece of paper to write down every event that happened.

I took your letter to my cousin, hoping perhaps your great-uncle confided something more detailed to him, but your cousin’s mind is not stable [
or perhaps reliable
] these days. I mentioned the possibility that we could finally recover some money and live like kings, that my cousin could move out of that terrible room he lives in and reclaim our family’s farm, but he said the Jews have spies everywhere and he believes the man his father befriended is just trying to track us down to do us further damage.

Your great-uncle suffered because of his wartime work. You know this, you know he was sent to a Soviet forced labor camp, and he came back broken in spirit and more bitter than ever that he was betrayed by the Jewish boy he tried to protect. “I should have just sent him to Ponar with his mother,” he used to say. “There is no gratitude anywhere, especially not with the Jews, they’re only out for themselves.” And it is true that we were made to suffer after the war for our service to the Lithuanian Army, I was just a child, but I remember the bitter disgrace we all suffered, and all because of the Jews, really.

Of course, as my mother always said, your uncle was infatuated with the Jewess Salanter. They had enormous sexual powers, those Jewish women, and he fell under her spell, and when he heard of her death he was so infatuated, he took the boy and protected him. My mother and your grandmother both pleaded with him, the danger was enormous, even though your uncle was with the Police Battalion—if his comrades found out he was harboring the boy, the Commandant would not have protected him, but your uncle wouldn’t listen, the boy resembled his mother and Uncle never recovered from his infatuation with her. (Even when he married a Christian woman he would drool with longing for the dead Jewess). But despite all his care for the Jewess’s son, the boy stole Uncle’s savings and ran away. Which shows why we have always believed there are two sides to the story of the Nazi occupation of Lithuania.

Of course, as for proof—you will have to use this information and see what kind of bargain you can create. I will continue to talk vigorously to your cousin [
she means her cousin, the son of the great-uncle—in Russian there’s a specific word that clarifies the relationship
] and explain how our happiness lies in his hand—or in his mouth!

We have not had rain for three weeks and the parks look like dead lands, but I am leaving for Kiev next week to stay with your auntie. What can we do, after all? It’s in God’s hands.

At the end, Ted Austin had included a note about the Lithuanian Police Battalions:

Ms. Warshawski, maybe you already know this, but “police battalions” was the sanitized name given to Lithuanian units that supported the Germans in their extermination campaign against the Lithuanian Jews. They were at least as cruel and ruthless as the German Einsatzkommandos and made it possible for the Nazis to murder the Lithuanian Jews quite rapidly.

I printed out the e-mails and read and reread them. The language made my skin crawl, the whining over how ungrateful everyone was to the writer, how ungrateful the boy Chaim had been to his protector. The story sounded appalling, however you looked at it: Salanter’s mother was murdered, and then he went to live with a member of one of the commando units that had been involved in killing the Jews of Vilna.

I tried to put my emotional reaction aside, tried to figure out the chain that had linked together Wuchnik and Shatka.

My guess was that Helen Kendrick had asked her lawyer to find an investigator to dig up dirt on Salanter, as a way of undermining the Durango campaign. Wuchnik was someone Eloise Napier had worked with before from time to time, and he must have been happy every time an affluent client like Crawford, Mead called for help. He pulled out all the stops, approached the granddaughter, tried to get her to break into Chaim’s computer.

And then Wuchnik had been inspired to place an ad—where? In some publication, or meeting place for Lithuanian immigrants—looking for information about Chaim Salanter’s war experiences. It had been a good strategy. Lithuania is a small country, after all, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine some Lithuanian immigrant might have known him all those years ago.

Shatka had seen the ad and remembered family stories about Salanter, “the Jew.” She’d gotten in touch with Wuchnik. Perhaps she’d used Xavier as a middleman: that would explain why Wuchnik had gone to Ruhetal in the first place.

If Shatka’s great-uncle had taken in the boy Chaim Salanter, then the uncle had done a good deed in a dangerous time and place. What I couldn’t figure out is why Salanter should be trying to hide that history. Was he ashamed of having sought refuge with a member of the ruthless Police Battalions?

Salanter might feel that he’d been a collaborator, even though he’d been too vulnerable to have other choices in such a poisonous situation. But when Lawlor accused him of collaborating with the Nazis in those rants on GEN, perhaps it brought such painful memories back that Salanter couldn’t bear for his daughter or granddaughter to know anything about them.
His face was so scary,
Nia Durango said, the night she and Arielle asked him about his mother.
We were scareder of him than anyone.

I gave up on it. It was past ten by now, and I hadn’t even made a start on the Ruhetal patient database I’d opened twelve hours ago. I was too tired to look at it now, and anyway, I was hungry. I’d pick up a pizza at Aubigné’s on Damen and see how abysmally the Cubs were doing against the Giants.

When I got home and saw the Mercedes sedan parked in front of the building, I pulled up behind it. Pennies from heaven, or something like that. I wanted to talk to Chaim Salanter, and here he was. Of course, I would have liked some time to think through how or what to ask him, but this was a gift. I got out of my car and walked over to the driver’s door.

Gabe Eycks opened the window just far enough that I could see his head. “Mr. Salanter needs to talk to you.”

In the dark, with the Mercedes’s tinted windows, I could see that the car was full, but not who was in it. “Hey, Gabe, you’re right, this is the Twenty-four/seven Detective Agency. Our licensed ops never need to sleep, so you can barge in any hour of the day or night and find them bright, chipper, and ready to detect. All major credit cards accepted.”

Just because I wanted to talk to Salanter didn’t mean I needed to be enthusiastic about yet another imperious summons.

Gabe frowned at me. “We’re all tired, but we wouldn’t have come if it weren’t essential to talk to you. Since you betrayed Mr. Salanter’s trust, it would be better if you dropped your facetious tone.”

A surge of anger rode through me. I turned and marched up the walk to my front door, fed up with the way the Salanters and their team began all our conversations. I heard the thunk of the heavy sedan door closing, and footsteps behind me on the walk, but I didn’t turn, just found my keys in the bottom of my bag and undid the lock.

Eycks said, “Nia Durango and Arielle Zitter’s safety is in question here, and you’ll stay up until we get a reliable promise from you not to jeopardize them further.”

“Yeah, well, I promise. On my cousin Boom-Boom’s jersey, and I don’t get more sacred than that. Now I’m going to bed and you’re going home.” I went on through the door.