Total Recall (A V.I. Warshawski Novel) - Hardcover

Paretsky, Sara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385313667 ISBN 13: 9780385313667

Publisher: Delacorte Press, 2001

Synopsis

The bestselling V.I. Warshawski novels have dazzled readers and earned the acclaim of critics everywhere. “V.I. Warshawski rules,” writes Newsweek, crowning her “the most engaging woman in detective fiction.” Of V.I.’s creator, the Chicago Tribune says “Sara Paretsky has no peer.”

Now Paretsky brings her incomparable storytelling brilliance to her most powerful Warshawski novel yet. Total Recall follows the Chicago P.I. on a road that winds back more than fifty years — and into an intricate maze of wartime lies, heartbreaking secrets, and harrowing retribution.

For V.I., the journey begins with a national conference in downtown Chicago, where angry protesters are calling for the recovery of Holocaust assets. Replayed on the evening news is the scene of a slight man who has stood up at the conference to tell an astonishing story of a childhood shattered by the Holocaust — a story that has devastating consequences for V.I.’s cherished friend and mentor, Lotty Herschel.

Lotty was a girl of nine when she emigrated from Austria to England, one of a group of children wrenched from their parents and saved from the Nazi terror just before the war broke out. Now stunningly — impossibly — it appears that someone from that long-lost past may have returned.

With the help of a recovered-memory therapist, Paul Radbuka has recently learned his true identity. But is he who he claims to be? Or is he a cunning impostor who has usurped someone else’s history ... a history Lotty has tried to forget for over fifty years?

As a frightened V.I. watches her friend unravel, she sets out to help in the only way she can: by investigating Radbuka’s past. Already working on a difficult case for a poor family cheated of their life insurance, she tries to balance Lotty’s needs with her client’s, only to find that both are spiraling into a whirlpool of international crime that stretches from Switzerland and Germany to Chicago’s South Side.

As the atrocities of the past reach out to engulf the living, V.I. struggles to decide whose memories of a terrible war she can trust, and moves closer to a chilling realization of the truth — a truth that almost destroys her oldest friend.

With fierce emotional power, Sara Paretsky has woven a gripping and morally complex novel of crime and punishment, memory and illusion. Destined to become a suspense classic, Total Recall proves once again the daring and compelling genius of Sara Paretsky.

About this title

About the Author

Sara Paretsky is the author of eleven other books, including the bestselling Hard Time, Tunnel Vision, Guardian Angel, and Burn Marks. She lives in Chicago with her husband.

From the Back Cover

“[A] master of the mystery format, Paretsky skillfully expands the form to tackle several convergent themes in a moving novel of discovery and redemption.... Dark, absorbing, probing — Paretsky’s novel explores the complex web of degrees of guilt and complicity surrounding the fate of Holocaust victims and survivors, with Lotty’s story emerging with compelling, terrible clarity and inevitability.”
— Publishers Weekly, starred review

Reviews

Already having established herself as an inventor of the female private eye and a master of the mystery format, Paretsky skillfully expands the form to tackle several convergent themes in a moving novel of discovery and redemption. V.I. "Vic" Warshawski has a traditional mystery to solve: the life insurance policy of black factory worker Aaron Sommers had been faithfully maintained, paid for weekly even when other demands surely seemed of greater urgency. But when Aaron's widow needed to collect, the company denied the claim, saying the policy had been cashed a decade earlier. That leads Vic to Ajax Life Insurance Co. and Ralph Devereux, whom she encountered in her very first case, Indemnity Only (1982). Her investigation is subtly intertwined with another much more personal and wrenching inquiry into the appearance of a man calling himself Paul Radbuka, whose recovered memory as a child survivor of the Holocaust leads him to claim a kinship with Vic's friend Max Loewenthal. Radbuka's claim has an unexpected and drastic affect on Lotty Herschel, Vic's friend and mentor. The twin investigations allow the author to explore simultaneously the issues raised by the Illinois Holocaust Asset Recovery Act and the issue of reparations for the descendants of slaves. Dark, absorbing, probing Paretsky's novel explores the complex web of degrees of guilt and complicity surrounding the fate of Holocaust victims and survivors, with Lotty's story emerging with compelling, terrible clarity and inevitability. (Sept. 11)Forecast: With a six-figure marketing campaign and a subject of universal interest, this novel should bring in lots of new readers who will ensure a healthy run on bestseller lists.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Paretsky is in good form in this new V. I. Warshawski mystery, in which a clever amalgamation of two seemingly unrelated cases tests V. I.'s loyalty as well as her patience and investigative skill. In the first case, a deranged man yearning for contact with relatives who may have survived the Holocaust fixates on a family V. I. knows. His irrational behavior sends V. I.'s mentor and friend, Lotty Herschel, into a frightening tailspin over a long-buried secret that has tormented her since her since her youth in Nazi-controlled Eastern Europe. Concurrently, V. I. is called in to investigate a small-time insurance fraud, which suddenly explodes into a complicated morass of murder and local politics, with its own links to the terrible days of the Nazi regime. V. I. has mellowed somewhat over her years as a Chicago PI, and she steps with particular care here to protect her friends, but that doesn't mean the action's wanting: there are several dead bodies and lots of complications before V. I. works out all the connections. Even then, there are still a few unanswered questions. As usual, the Chicago backdrop is vividly imagined, and V. I. comes across as smart and appealing. Stephanie Zvirin
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Baby-Sitters’ Club

“They wouldn’t even start the funeral service. The church was full, ladies were crying. My uncle was a deacon and he was a righteous man, he’d been a member of that church for forty-seven years when he passed. My aunt was in a state of total collapse, as you can imagine. And for them to have the nerve to say the policy had already been cashed in. When! That’s what I want to know, Ms. Warshawski, when was it ever cashed in, with my uncle paying his five dollars a week for fifteen years like he did, and my aunt never hearing word one of him borrowing against the policy or converting it.”

Isaiah Sommers was a short, square man who spoke in slow cadences as if he were himself a deacon. It was an effort to keep from drowsing off during the pauses in his delivery. We were in the living room of his South Side bungalow, at a few minutes after six on a day that had stretched on far too long already.

I’d been in my office at 8:30, starting a round of the routine searches that make up the bulk of my business, when Lotty Herschel called with an SOS. “You know Max’s son brought Calia and Agnes with him from London, don’t you? Agnes suddenly has a chance to show her slides at a Huron Street gallery, but she needs a minder for Calia.”

“I’m not a baby-sitter, Lotty,” I’d said impatiently; Calia was Max Loewenthal’s five-year-old granddaughter.

Lotty swept imperiously past that protest. “Max called me when they couldn’t find anyone — it’s his housekeeper’s day off. He’s going to that conference at the Hotel Pleiades, although I’ve told him many times that all he’s doing is exposing — but that’s neither here nor there. At any rate, he’s on a panel at ten — otherwise he’d stay home himself. I tried Mrs. Coltrain at my clinic, but everyone’s tied up. Michael is rehearsing all afternoon with the symphony and this could be an important chance for Agnes. Vic — I realize it’s an imposition, but it would be only for a few hours.”

“Why not Carl Tisov?” I asked. “Isn’t he staying at Max’s, too?”

“Carl as a baby-sitter? Once he picks up his clarinet the roof of the house can blow off without his noticing. I saw it happen once, during the V-1 raids. Can you tell me yes or no? I’m in the middle of surgical rounds, and I have a full schedule at the clinic.” Lotty is the chief perinatologist at Beth Israel.

I tried a few of my own connections, including my part-time assistant who has three foster children, but no one could help out. I finally agreed with a surly lack of grace. “I have a client meeting at six on the far South Side, so someone had better be able to step in before five.”

When I drove up to Max’s Evanston home to collect Calia, Agnes Loewenthal was breathlessly grateful. “I can’t even find my slides. Calia was playing with them and stuck them in Michael’s cello, which got him terribly cross, and now the wretched beast can’t imagine where he’s flung them.”

Michael appeared in a T-shirt with his cello bow in one hand. “Darling, I’m sorry, but they have to be in the drawing room — that’s where I was practicing. Vic, I can’t thank you enough — can we take you and Morrell to dinner after our Sunday afternoon concert?”

“We can’t do that, Michael!” Agnes snapped. “That’s Max’s dinner party for Carl and you.”

Michael played cello with the Cellini Chamber Ensemble, the London group started back in the forties by Max and Lotty’s friend Carl Tisov. The Cellini was in Chicago to kick off their biannual international tour. Michael was also scheduled to play some concerts with the Chicago Symphony.

Agnes gave Calia a quick hug. “Victoria, thank you a million times. Please, though, no television. She only gets an hour a week and I don’t think American shows are suitable for her.” She darted back into the drawing room, where we could hear her furiously tossing cushions from the couch. Calia grimaced and clutched my hand.

It was Max who actually got Calia into her jacket and saw that her dog, her doll, and her “favoritest story” were in her day pack. “So much chaos,” he grunted. “You’d think they were trying to launch the space shuttle, wouldn’t you. Lotty tells me you have an evening appointment on the South Side. Perhaps you could meet me in the Pleiades lobby at four-thirty. I should be able to finish up by then so I can collect this whirling dervish from you. If you have a crisis, my secretary will be able to reach me. Victoria, we are grateful.” He walked outside with us, kissing Calia lightly on the head and me on the hand.

“I hope your panel isn’t too painful an outing,” I said.

He smiled. “Lotty’s fears? She’s allergic to the past. I don’t like wallowing in it, but I think it can be healthy for people to understand it.”

I strapped Calia into the backseat of the Mustang. The Birnbaum Foundation, which often underwrites communications issues, had decided to hold a conference on “Christians and Jews: a New Millennium, a New Dialogue.” They came up with the program after Southern Baptists announced plans to send a hundred thousand missionaries to Chicago this past summer to convert the Jews. The Baptist drive fizzled out; only about a thousand stalwart evangelizers showed up. It cost the Baptists something in cancellation fees at the hotels, too, but by then the planning for the Birnbaum conference was well under way.

Max was taking part in the bank-account panel, which infuriated Lotty: he was going to describe his postwar experiences in trying to track down his relatives and their assets. Lotty said he was going to expose his misery for the world at large to stare at. She said it only reinforced a stereotype of Jews as victims. Besides, she would add, dwelling on missing assets only gave people fuel for the second popular stereotype, that all Jews cared about was money. To which Max invariably replied, who cares about money here, really? The Jews? Or the Swiss who refuse to return it to the people who earned it and deposited it? And the fight went on from there. It had been an exhausting summer, being around them.

In the seat behind me, Calia was chattering happily. The private eye as baby-sitter: it wasn’t the first image you got from pulp fiction. I don’t think Race Williams or Philip Marlowe ever did baby-sitting, but by the end of the morning I decided that was because they were too weak to take on a five-year-old.

I started at the zoo, thinking trudging around for an hour would make Calia eager to rest while I did some work in my office, but that proved to be an optimism born of ignorance. She colored for ten minutes, needed to go to the bathroom, wanted to call Grandpapa, thought we should play tag in the hall that runs the length of the warehouse where I lease space, was “terrifically” hungry despite the sandwiches we’d eaten at the zoo, and finally jammed one of my picklocks into the back of the photocopier.

At that point I gave up and took her to my apartment, where the dogs and my downstairs neighbor gave me a merciful respite. Mr. Contreras, a retired machinist, was delighted to let her ride horseback on him in the garden. The dogs joined in. I left them to it while I went up to the third floor to make some calls. I sat at the kitchen table with the back door open so I could keep an ear cocked for when Mr. Contreras’s patience waned, but I did manage to get an hour of work in. After that Calia consented to sit in my living room with Peppy and Mitch while I read her “favoritest” story, The Faithful Dog and the Princess.

“I have a dog, too, Aunt Vicory,” she announced, pulling a blue stuffed one from her day pack. “His name is Ninshubur, like in the book. See, it says, Ninshubur means ‘faithful friend’ in the language of the princess’s people.”

“Vicory” was the closest Calia could get to Victoria when we met almost three years ago. We’d both been stuck with it ever since.

Calia couldn’t read yet, but she knew the story by heart, chanting “For far rather would I die than lose my liberty” when the princess flung herself into a waterfall to escape an evil enchantress. “Then Ninshubur, the faithful hound, leapt from rock to rock, heedless of any danger.” He jumped into the river and carried the princess to safety.

Calia pushed her blue plush dog deep into the book, then threw him on the floor to demonstrate his leap into the waterfall. Peppy, well-bred golden retriever that she was, sat on the alert, waiting for a command to fetch, but her son immediately bounded after the toy. Calia screamed, running after Mitch. Both dogs began to bark. By the time I rescued Ninshubur, all of us were on the brink of tears. “I hate Mitch, he is a bad dog, I am most annoyed at his behavior,” Calia announced.

I was thankful to see that it was three-thirty. Despite Agnes’s prohibition, I plunked Calia in front of the television while I went down the hall to shower and change. Even in the era of casual dress, new clients respond better to professionalism: I put on a sage rayon suit with a rose silk sweater.

When I got back to the living room, Calia was lying with her head on Mitch’s back, blue Ninshubur between his paws. She bitterly resisted restoring Mitch and Peppy to Mr. Contreras.

“Mitch will miss me, he will cry,” she wailed, so tired herself that nothing made sense to her.

“Tell you what, baby: we’ll get Mitch to give Ninshubur one of his dog tags. That way Ninsh...

Edition details

• Publisher: Delacorte Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385313667
• ISBN 13: 9780385313667
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432