Breakdown (44 page)

“So my father and my older brother fled east, into the Soviet Union, where they fought with the partisans, only to perish in Stalin’s gulags after the war—news I learned long after the war’s end, news I learned only after years of seeking their fate. It was easier to recover my grandfather’s paintings than to discover my father’s grave, but in the end I found both.” He broke off, panting.

Gabe left the room; I heard him in the kitchen, finding a glass, running the tap, but, like the other three in the room, I couldn’t move, couldn’t take my eyes from Salanter. When Gabe returned, Salanter sat up to drink some water, then leaned back on the couch again.

“The rest of us, my mother, my sister, and I, stayed behind to be slaughtered, with the eager help of the local populace. In Poland, the ghettos existed for several years before final deportations, but in Lithuania, most Jews were murdered almost at once, before the end of that first summer of the occupation, prodded to their execution by Lithuanian police auxiliaries.”

He squeezed his eyes shut again. “My mother—I suppose every boy thinks his mother is beautiful, so I was like all boys. My mother and my sister were the most beautiful women in the world. In that single way I agree with the cretin Wade Lawlor, when he weeps on television about his beautiful murdered sister. My sister and my mother were beautiful and they, too, were murdered. Marched off to Ponar Forest and shot, on Yom Kippur, dumped into one of the oil storage tanks the fleeing Red Army had left behind.

“But for the three months of the summer, when we were crowded into a ghetto in Vilna, Zudymas helped himself to my mother. Sometimes at night, sometimes in broad daylight. She submitted, in exchange for extra food for me and my sister, or because she was powerless, or because we all heard the shots of the executions, all summer long, and she thought, sex with this pig will save my children’s lives. And it did. Or, at least, it saved mine. Not my sister’s.”

The five of us had to lean forward to hear him, his voice had grown so low.

“The day of the Yom Kippur massacre—all was confusion. We were ordered to line up, to march, and Zudymas, with his fellow villagers in the Police Battalion, they swaggered along next to us. He had spent the previous night with my mother, but he whipped her along with the rest of the women. She flung herself at his feet, she begged him, if not to save her, then to save my sister and myself.

“I have always been small, and although I was thirteen then, I still looked like a child of nine or ten. When we reached the forest—not far, it was not far enough away—Zudymas suddenly snatched me from the line of marchers. I begged to stay with my sister and my mother, but she—that was the last I saw of her—go, save yourself, live to be a man, she called to me in Yiddish. It was over so fast I didn’t have time to think. I tried to run but Zudymas caught me easily and carried me to his farm. Where he kept me, my benefactor, my savior. Missing my mother, he satisfied himself with me. Locked me in the basement when he reported for his duties, came home at night to my small body. Yes, this is a story that I long for my granddaughter to know.”

His face was waxen. No one could speak, until, some minutes later, Sophy Durango said timidly, “But you managed to escape?”

“Oh, that. Yes.” He brushed the air with his hands, as if the escape were of no importance. “The night came where he was so used to my small, compliant presence that he didn’t lock me in again. While he slept, I took the money from his trousers and fled. He had helped keep me captive by depriving me of clothes, so I took his Sunday suit as well.

“I must have seemed a comical sight, scampering through the woods in clothes twice my size. But I found an old rag dealer on the outskirts of Vilna who was glad to trade me some children’s clothes for his Sunday suit. I tried to join the partisans but they wouldn’t have me, I was too small, so I started living by my wits on the streets of Vilna. I hoped I might come on Zudymas by stealth and kill him, but the opportunity never arrived. I made some money, the war ended, I bribed my way onto a freighter to Sweden. From there to Chicago.”

He gave a laugh that wasn’t completely bitter. “My whole life, eighty-three years, collapsed into a few sentences. Now you know. You know why I let Lawlor’s chatter roll off me—it’s not that I’m indifferent, but the worst has already happened to me. Until the harm to Arielle made me see that fate always has another card up her sleeve, another way to make you dance to someone else’s melody. I would kill someone, yes, to protect Arielle. But not to preserve my own reputation.”

He was quiet again but finally said, “I would take some of your whisky now, Ms. Warshawski.”

I went to the dining room and brought my mother’s red Venetian glasses out. Five remain whole of the eight she wrapped in her clothes to carry with her from Umbria to Cuba to Chicago. A sixth has been glued back together by expert hands. I drank from that, poured into the undamaged glasses for everyone else, including Lotty, who almost never drinks spirits.

Salanter drank, and some of the waxiness left his face. “So, Ms. Warshawski, we came to accuse you of betraying my family and instead you get the story of my life. You told me last week that anyone who wanted to dig it up could find it, and you were right, of course. Zudymas, his family have their own version that they doubtless tell everyone—the Jew betrayed our uncle, took a vast fortune from him; now he lives like a king in America. And you will create your own version to tell for your own ends—my history is in the open air now, I have no control over it.”

“I’m not like King Midas’s reeds,” I said. “No one will hear your story from me, nor should they. Everyone in this room has some greater or lesser version of it, after all—my own mother—you’re drinking from the wineglass she brought with her when she fled Italy in 1939. And, yes, she loved Mozart. But this is Handel.”

I went to my stereo and put in the CD Jake Thibaut had made for me from my mother’s old reel-to-reel tapes.
“Vieni, o figlio,”
we heard Gabriella’s rich pure voice.
The child’s eyes are closed. He is lost to me, lost forever.

43.

ALAS, POOR SISTER

W
E ALL SAT IN A NUMBED SILENCE UNTIL
S
ALANTER, HIS NUT-BROWN
face still pale, pushed himself to his feet. “Gabe, I would return home. Loewenthal? Sophy? Dr. Herschel?”

He tried to speak with his usual authority, but his voice, for once, betrayed his age. He didn’t fight off the protective arm Gabe offered as he walked slowly to the door.

Salanter paused briefly in the doorway to say to me, “My mother was a pianist. She, too, loved Mozart.”

Sophy Durango left with Gabe and Salanter, but Lotty and Max stayed behind. They sat on the couch, not quite touching.

Lotty looked at her watch. “Thank God we do no surgery on Friday. I would not guarantee anyone’s health if I had to cut into her tomorrow morning.”

Her own voice was heavy with fatigue. We were all exhausted from the emotions of the past hour.

“How come you were with Salanter tonight?” I stirred myself to ask. “I didn’t think you knew him well.”

“We don’t,” Max agreed. “But I was at Lotty’s when Salanter’s minion Gabe arrived. He came up to explain that Salanter and Dr. Durango were on their way here to demand a reckoning from you about their girls. Salanter thought Lotty would have a better chance of talking you round than he would himself, or Dr. Durango—she was too distressed about her daughter to feel she could speak calmly. I came along because you and Lotty are both volatile compounds.”

He grinned. “Salanter has pledged ten million to the hospital. I didn’t want one of you blowing him up before he wrote the check.”

I shadow-punched him, but we all laughed, and some of the strain went out of the room.

“I do apologize, Victoria,” Lotty said. “It wasn’t well done of us—of me—to assume the worst of you. I know you wouldn’t deliberately put a child in harm’s way, but sometimes you are so single-minded in your search for answers that you don’t always think of the consequences.

“But when Chaim started to reveal his history—we were safe in London, while he was—enduring—Lithuania. It was hard not to think of my own mother, to wonder what she might—” Her face crumpled.

Max took her in his arms. After a moment he looked over her head at me. “Do you believe him? I mean, do you believe he didn’t murder that detective, that Wuchnik?”

I grimaced. “I don’t think he did, if for no other reason than the one he gave—that he’d have left himself open to an endless chain of blackmail, because he’s not physically strong enough to have moved Wuchnik’s body around. But if Salanter didn’t commit the murders, then who did? And why?”

I wondered again about the two lawyers in Dick’s firm. If Louis Ormond and Elaine Napier had worked together, perhaps they could have done it. I couldn’t picture it, though. The murderer was more likely the person who’d sent sixteen thousand to the firm to pay off Xavier Jurgens, for—of course. I’d been an idiot not to see it sooner.

“Xavier killed Wuchnik,” I said.

“What?” Max blinked at me. “I don’t know what you are talking about, Victoria.”

“Xavier Jurgens. He’s the man who died in the Camaro where I found Salanter’s granddaughter. Someone sent my ex-husband’s law firm fifteen thousand in cash to deliver to Xavier. I think Xavier was hired to kill Wuchnik, or at least to play a role in the murder. Fifteen grand was a huge amount to Xavier, practically a year’s pay after taxes. And then, I’m guessing, the killer became worried that Xavier would track him down, or maybe Xavier, or his lover, Jana, did track him down. It’s all so murky.”

“It’s too complicated,” Max complained. “X hires Y to murder Z and then Y blackmails X. This sounds like Agatha Christie, Victoria, which I can never follow even when I’m wide awake, and I’m very nearly in a coma right now.”

“Does it matter? Do you have to know?” Lotty said. “The police, after all—”

“Yes, the police, after all,” I interrupted. “Finchley may put it all together, but if he doesn’t do it soon, I worry about the safety of the girls in the Carmilla club.”

Lotty protested that she didn’t know what I was talking about, so I tried to explain my belief that the murderer had found Kira Dudek’s cell phone with his picture on it. “He used the phone to bring Arielle to the cemetery. I think he probably destroyed Arielle’s phone, or the police or the FBI would have found it through GPS tracking. Unless they’ve stopped paying attention to the attack because they’re assuming it was Xavier Jurgens who lured her there and then killed himself. I, however, think it was a third party.”

“You don’t always know better than the police,” Lotty said crossly.

“I know, darling,” I said gently. “Anyway, Max is right—it’s way too late to try to think about this tortuous business now. If you want to spend the night, I’ll let you into Jake’s place—there are clean sheets on his bed.”

Max and Lotty murmured to each other: toothbrushes, night clothes, all those things they wouldn’t have here. They decided to return to Lotty’s. I walked them down to the corner of Belmont to catch a cab, my gun loose in a belt holster, despite Lotty’s protest: she cannot bear the sight of guns.

When I got back home, Mr. Contreras and the dogs were waiting on the stoop. I had to assuage his hurt feelings at being omitted from tonight’s drama. The conversation took all my meager stock of patience. I knew he deserved some kind of answer—his loyalty and care are not qualities I dismiss lightly—but I also didn’t want to violate Chaim Salanter’s privacy any further.

“Salanter’s granddaughter’s life is at stake, so he isn’t acting like the high-stakes options player—he’s as scared and frantic as you would be if someone was threatening Petra.”

That proved to be the wrong tack: if Petra was being threatened, Mr. Contreras would be out moving heaven and earth to save her, not jauntering around Chicago harassing private eyes. I agreed that he was twice, if not thrice, the man Salanter was, that Salanter might know how to manipulate the stock market but he couldn’t begin to navigate a real fight with real pipe wrenches. Mr. Contreras let himself be persuaded and finally, long after one o’clock, I fell into bed.

As late as the night had been, I still forced myself out of bed at eight the next morning. If my late-night inspiration had been correct, that someone had hired Xavier to kill Wuchnik, and then killed Xavier in turn, I couldn’t lie around in bed waiting for him to do more damage.

Before logging on to my machine, I called the Dudeks’ apartment to check on Kira and Lucy. Their mother answered the phone; after a few linguistic gymnastics, she put Teodoro Martinez on the line. The girls were still asleep, he said. He was keeping a close eye on them wherever they went but couldn’t shake the feeling that now and again, someone was watching them.

“I talked to Gabe Eycks and he agreed to send someone over today to put in a few surveillance cameras,” he said. “You been in this building? It’s a mugger’s paradise. They’ll put a camera on the fire escape outside Mom’s window, one on the back door, and one in the hallway, and I hope that’ll make me feel better about going to bed at night.”

We were hanging up when he added, “Just so you know, Eycks contracted our firm for a week’s work, which means that if you need me after next Wednesday, you’ll have to talk to him.”

Today was Friday. I wondered if I could possibly sort out this tangled business in five days. I felt panicky when I hung up. Not the best frame of mind for good detective work.

I did half an hour of stretches, trying to persuade my weary legs and arms that a good workout was the equivalent of ten hours’ sleep. And that caffeine would make up any remaining deficit.

It didn’t really work, but I resolutely settled myself at the dining room table with my laptop, looking at the list of inmates that the Department of Corrections had placed at Ruhetal. Most people in the forensic wing are there for a short time only; if they are psychotic, they are medicated until they are mentally stable enough to plead. I was assuming that anyone Leydon had wanted to talk to in the locked wing was there after a successful insanity or incompetency plea. And I was hoping I could find someone whose incarceration was linked to arson.