Read Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 for Free Online

name.” He turned to Morrell. “If I can
impose on you—I’d like to stay for the interview.”
    Like Max, Carl was a short man, not quite as tall as I
am, but where Max smiled good-naturedly on the world around him—often amused by
the human predicament—Carl held himself on alert—a bantam rooster, ready to
take on all comers. Right now, he seemed edgier than usual. I looked at him but
decided not to quiz him in front of Don and Morrell.
    Morrell brought Max herbal tea and poured brandy for
Carl. Finally the station finished its lengthy dissection of the weather and
turned to Beth Blacksin. She was talking to Paul Radbuka in a small meeting
room at the Pleiades. Another woman, with wings of black hair framing her oval
face, was with them.
    Beth Blacksin introduced herself and Paul Radbuka, then
let the camera focus on the other woman. “Also here this evening is Rhea Wiell,
the therapist who has treated Mr. Radbuka and helped him recover his hidden
memories. Ms. Wiell has agreed to talk to me later tonight in a special edition
of ‘Exploring Chicago.’”
    Blacksin turned to the small man. “Mr. Radbuka, how
did you come to discover your true identity? You said in the meeting that it
was in going through your father’s papers. What did you find there?”
    “The man who called himself my father,” Radbuka corrected
her. “It was a set of documents in code. At first I paid no attention to them.
Somehow after he died I lost my own will to live. I don’t understand why,
because I didn’t like him; he was always very brutal to me. But I became so
depressed that I lost my job, I even stopped getting out of bed on many days.
And then I met Rhea Wiell.”
    He turned to the dark-haired woman with a look of
adoration. “It sounds melodramatic, but I believe I owe my life to her. And she
helped me make sense of the documents, to use them to find my missing
identity.”
    “Rhea Wiell is the therapist you found,” Beth prodded
him.
    “Yes. She specializes in recovering memories of events
that people like me block because the trauma around them is so intense.”
    He continued to look at Wiell, who nodded reassuringly
at him. Blacksin stepped him through some of his highlights, the tormenting
nightmares that he had been ashamed to speak of for fifty years, and his
dawning realization that the man who called himself his father might really be
someone completely unrelated to him.
    “We had come to America as DP’s—displaced
persons—after the Second World War. I was only four, and when I was growing up,
this man said we were from Germany.” He gasped for air between sentences, like
an asthmatic fighting to breathe. “But what I’ve finally learned from my work
with Rhea is that his story was only half true. He was from Germany. But
I was a—a camp child, camp survivor. I was from some other place, some country
under Nazi control. This man attached himself to me in the confused aftermath
of the war to get a visa to America.” He looked at his hands as if he were
terribly ashamed of this.
    “And do you feel up to telling us about those
dreams—those nightmares—that led you to Rhea Wiell?” Beth prompted him.
    Wiell stroked Radbuka’s hand in a reassuring fashion.
He looked up again and spoke to the camera with an almost childish lack of
self-consciousness.
    “The nightmares were things that haunted me, things I
couldn’t speak out loud and could experience only in sleep. Terrible things,
beatings, children falling dead in the snow, bloodstains like flowers around
them. Now, thanks to Rhea, I can remember being four years old. We were moving,
this strange angry man and I, we were first on a ship and then on a train. I
was crying, ‘My Miriam, where is my Miriam? I want my Miriam,’ but the man who
kept saying he was ‘ Vati, ’ my father, would hit me and finally I learned
to keep all those cries to myself.”
    “And who was Miriam, Mr. Radbuka?” Blacksin leaned
toward him, her eyes wide with