Standing on the corner in front of the Cozy Cup Café, I gave Posner a chance to answer. He didn’t say anything, but he was looking worried, nervously chewing his cheek.
“What could it have been? Did he say, Oh, the hospital has been denying medical benefits to Holocaust survivors? No, that would be too crude-the media would have been all over that one. Maybe he said, Oh, Max Loewenthal got some kind of big bond package for the hospital in exchange for helping kill the bill. It sounds crazy, of course, because it is crazy, and in your heart of hearts you know any suggestion Rossy made is crazy. If you didn’t, you’d be blaring it to the world. But Bertrand Rossy would be happy because it would distract public attention from Ajax ’s role in killing the Asset Recovery Act. How am I doing? Is this the story you want me to share with Beth Blacksin and the rest of Chicago? That you’re Bertrand Rossy’s dupe?”
While I was speaking, Radbuka kept trying to interrupt, to say they were here strictly on the issue of Max and his family, but I raised my voice and talked past him.
Posner kept chewing his cheek. “You can’t prove any of this.”
“Very lame, Mr. Posner. After all, you’re making accusations against Beth Israel that you can’t prove. I can prove that you spent fifteen minutes with Bertrand Rossy last night. I don’t have to prove that your conversation followed my story line-I only have to start the story moving around Chicago. The wires and Internet services will take it from there, because Rossy means Edelweiss, which means not only local but also international news.”
“Are you trying to imply that I’m selling out the IHARA Committee?” Posner demanded.
I shook my head. “I don’t know if you are or not. But of course if your group finds out that you wasted precious resources on a wild-goose chase, I don’t expect they’ll be very supportive of your leadership.”
“Whatever you may choose to believe, I take our mission with utter seriousness. Alderman Durham may be on the streets for votes. He may leave the streets for money, but neither of these-”
“You know that Rossy offered him money to shut down his protest?” I interrupted.
He pressed his lips together without answering.
“But you did follow Durham to Rossy’s place last night. Do you follow him every night?”
“Reb Joseph isn’t like you,” Radbuka burst out. “He doesn’t set out to spy on people, make their lives miserable, deny them their rights. Everything he does is aboveboard. Anyone could tell you that Rossy talked to Durham last night: we all saw Durham go over to Rossy’s car when it was stuck in traffic on Adams.”
“What? Did Durham get in with Rossy?”
“No, he leaned over to talk to him. We could all see Rossy’s face when he opened the window, and Leon said, Hey, that’s the guy who’s really running Ajax these-”
“Shut up,” Leon said. “You weren’t asked to take part in this conversation. Go wait in the bus with the rest of the group until Reb Joseph has finished with this woman.”
Radbuka stuck out his lower lip in a babyish pout. “You can’t order me around. I sought out Reb Joseph because he’s doing something for people like me whose lives were destroyed by the Holocaust. I didn’t risk being arrested today so I could be bossed around by a loser like you.”
“Look, Radbuka, you only came along to take advantage-”
“Leon, Paul,” Posner chided them, “this is only grist for this woman’s mill, to see us fighting each other. Save your energies for our common enemies.”
Leon subsided, but Paul wasn’t part of the movement; he didn’t need to obey Posner any more than he did Leon. In one of his rapid mood shifts, he turned angrily on Posner. “I only came along on your march last night and this one today to get help in getting to my family. Now you’re accusing my cousin Max of cutting secret deals with the Illinois legislature. Do you think I’m related to someone who would act like that?”
“No,” I put in quickly, “I don’t think your relatives would do anything so awful. What happened last night, after Durham talked to Rossy on the street? Did they drive off together? Or did the cops take Durham in a separate car?”
“I didn’t know the police took him,” Radbuka said, ignoring shushing gestures from Posner and Leon, responsive as usual to anyone paying him serious attention-even when it was an ostensible enemy like myself. “All I know is Durham went off and got in his own car: we walked down to the corner of Michigan and saw him. It was parked right there in a no-parking zone, but of course he had a policeman guarding it, sleazebag that he is. And Reb Joseph didn’t trust Durham, so he decided to follow him.”
“Very enterprising.” I smiled patronizingly at Posner. “So you skulked around in the bushes outside Rossy’s building until you saw Durham come out. And then Rossy, who’s got a lot of charm, talked you into believing some stupid rumor about the hospital.”
“It wasn’t like that, not at all,” Posner snapped. “When I saw him with Durham, I wanted to see-I’d been aware for some time that Durham was trying to sabotage our efforts to force European banks and insurers to provide redress for the outright theft which they engineered in the wake of-”
“You can assume I understand the underlying issue, Mr. Posner. But Durham didn’t manufacture the grounds for his protest. There’s a growing group of people who believe companies which benefited from African slavery should pay reparations in the same way that companies which benefited from Jewish or Polish slave labor should.”
His beard jutted toward me at an aggressive angle. “That’s a separate issue. We’re concerned about actual money, in bank accounts and unpaid life-insurance policies, that European banks and insurers have stolen. You’ve been working for one black man in Chicago whose claim was denied after he paid up his policy. I’m trying to do the same for tens of thousands of people whose parents thought they were leaving their children a financial cushion. And I wanted to know why Louis Durham showed up outside Ajax so conveniently-he never started campaigning for slave reparations until we started our campaign to force Ajax to pay off life-insurance policies.”
I was startled. “So you thought Rossy was bribing him to march against you? To disrupt operations at his own company? You should take it to Oliver Stone! But I guess you took it to Rossy himself. Did he say, Yes, yes, I confess: if you’ll only picket Beth Israel instead of Ajax I’ll stop giving money to Louis Durham?”
“Are you being stupid on purpose?” Posner spat at me. “Naturally Rossy denied any collusion. But he also assured me he would do a thorough internal search for any policies at Ajax or Edelweiss that belonged to Holocaust victims.”
“And you believed him?”
“I gave him a week. He convinced me he was serious enough to have one week.”
“Then what are you doing here?” I asked. “Why not give the boys some time off?”
“He came to help me.” Paul Radbuka, pink with excitement, turned on me as suddenly as he’d accepted me a moment earlier. “Just because you won’t let me see my family, just because you hired that-that Brownshirt to keep me from talking to my little cousin, that doesn’t mean they’re not my family. Let Max Loewenthal see how it feels to be ostracized for a change.”
“Paul, you really need to understand that he is not related to you. You are not only making them and yourself miserable by stalking Mr. Loewenthal’s family, you are running a serious risk of being arrested. Believe me, life in prison is terrible.”
Radbuka scowled. “Max is the one who belongs in prison, treating me with this kind of contempt.”
I looked at him, baffled about how to penetrate his dense cloud of denial. “Paul, who was Ulrich, really?”
“That was my foster father. Are you going to try to make me confess he was my real father? I won’t! He wasn’t!”