I checked Questing Scorpio again, but there was still no response to my posting. What else could I do-besides go home to walk the dogs, make dinner, go to bed. Sometimes routine is soothing, but at other times it’s a burden. I searched for Edelweiss on the Web to see if I could come up with any information about Fillida Rossy’s family. I sent the query through both Lexis and ProQuest and went back to the phone, calling Don Strzepek.

He answered my greeting cautiously, remembering that we hadn’t parted very cordially yesterday. “Any word from the intrepid journalist?”

“He’s made it as far as Rome without a scratch. I guess they’re off to Islamabad tomorrow.”

“Don’t worry about him, Vic: he’s been in worse places than Kabul, hard as it is for me to think of any offhand. I mean, it’s not a war zone these days-no one’s going to shoot at him. He may get heckled, but he’s more likely to be the object of curiosity, at least among the kids.”

I felt a little better. “Don, on a different subject-what did you think after you saw Max’s notebooks last night? Do you agree that he didn’t know the Radbukas before he made that trip to Vienna after the war?”

“Yes, it was clearly Dr. Herschel’s connection, more than Max’s. Especially since it was she who fainted at the party on Sunday when she heard Sofie Radbuka’s name. She seemed to have an awful lot of detail about exactly how to hunt down the apartment on the Leopoldsgasse,” he added hesitantly. “I’m wondering if the Radbukas were her family.”

“So Radbuka can start stalking her instead of Max? You know he was at Beth Israel today, with Posner and his Maccabees, screaming to the world that Lotty and Max were trying to keep Holocaust survivors from their birth families?”

“I know it must be painful for them, but Paul really is a tormented spirit, Vic. If he could just find someplace to anchor himself it would calm him down.”

“Have you actually talked to the recovered-memory poster boy yourself?” I asked. “Is there any hope of getting him to show you those papers his father left behind? The ones that proved to him that his father was with the Einsatzgruppen and that he himself was a camp survivor named Radbuka?”

Don paused to make a hissing noise-presumably inhaling smoke. “I did meet him briefly this morning-I guess before he joined Posner at the hospital. He’s pretty agitated these days. Rhea wouldn’t let me ask him too many questions for fear of getting him more upset. He won’t let me see the papers-he seems to think I might be a rival for Rhea’s affection, so he’s clamming up on me.”

I couldn’t suppress a snort of laughter. “I’ve got to hand it to Rhea for sticking with the guy. He’d have me in the locked ward at Elgin within a week if I tried to follow his gyrations around the dance floor. Although of course you are a rival, I can see his point of view. What does Rhea say?”

“She says she can’t betray a patient confidence, which of course I respect her for. Although my old reporter’s instincts make that hard to do.” He gave a little laugh that managed to sound both rueful and admiring. “She encouraged his involvement with Posner because Posner’s giving him a sense of real family. But of course we didn’t know when we saw him they were going to go picket Max at the hospital. I’m seeing her for dinner tonight, so I’ll talk to her about it then.”

I made a little structure out of paper clips while I chose my words. “Don, I asked Radbuka today who Ulrich was, and he had kind of a fit on the street, saying it was his foster father’s name and that I was accusing Rhea of being a liar. But you know, yesterday she made quite a point that Ulrich wasn’t the guy’s name. She even seemed to be laughing at me a little over that.”

He sucked in another lungful of smoke. “I’d forgotten that. I can try to ask her again tonight, but-Vic, I’m not going to play man in the middle between you and Rhea.”

“No, Don, I don’t expect you to.” All I wanted him to do was be on my side, pump her for information, and feed it to me. That wasn’t really asking him to be in the middle. “But if you can persuade her that Max isn’t related to the Radbuka family, maybe she in turn can persuade Paul to stop making a scene up at Beth Israel. Only, Don, for God’s sake, please don’t feed Lotty to Rhea as a substitute for Max. I don’t know if the Radbukas were cousins or patients or enemy aliens in London whom Lotty was close to, but she won’t survive the kind of harassment Paul’s been giving Max.”

I waited for his response, but he wouldn’t promise me anything. I ended up slamming the phone down in disgust.

Before giving up detecting for the day, I also phoned Amy Blount. Mary Louise’s report had said that the break-in at her place had been the work of a pro, not a random smash-and-grab. The padlock on the gate was intact, Mary Louise had written.

Someone had run a torch around it, taking the gate apart: the scorch marks on the kitchen door were obvious. Because you were interested in her connection to Ajax, I asked her specifically about any Ajax documents. She didn’t have originals; she had scanned various 19th-century files to a floppy, which was missing. In fact, all her dissertation notes were missing. The perps damaged her computer as well. Nothing else was gone, not even her sound system. I talked Terry into sending down a proper forensics crew, but we’re still not likely to find the perps.

I commiserated with Ms. Blount over her misery, then asked if her paper files had been tampered with.

“Oh, yes, those are gone, too, all my research notes. Who could want them? If I’d known I was sitting on such hot material I’d have published my dissertation by now; I’d have a real job, instead of hanging on in this rathole writing diddly corporate histories.”

“Ms. Blount, what papers had you copied from the Ajax files?”

“I did not take classified internal documents. I did not hand confidential company information to Alderman Durham-”

“Ms. Blount, please, I know this has been a tough twenty-four hours, but don’t jump on me. I’m asking for quite a different reason. I’m trying to figure out what is going on at Ajax Insurance these days.”

I explained what had been happening since I’d visited her on Friday-primarily Fepple’s death, Sommers’s problems, Connie Ingram’s name appearing on Fepple’s appointment register. “The real oddity was the fragment of a document I found.”

She listened carefully to everything I said, but my description of the handwritten document didn’t sound like anything she’d seen. “I’ll be glad to look at it-I could come by your office tomorrow sometime. Offhand it sounds like something out of an old ledger, but I can’t interpret all those marks unless I see them. If it has your client’s name on it, it would be recent, at least by my standards. The papers I copied dated from the 1850’s, because my research is on the economics of slavery.”

She was suddenly depressed again. “All that material is missing. I suppose I can go back to the archives and recopy it. It’s the sense of violation that gets me down. And the pointlessness of it all.”