“You are still a hero, but one badly in need of a bath. And I need to call Tim to tell him about Radbuka.”

Morrell had only been gone two days, and I was already talking to stuffed animals. Not a good sign. Back at Racine Avenue I ran up the stairs in my stocking feet, Ninshubur clutched tightly in one hand.

“Peroxide for you, my friend.” I found the bottle under the sink and poured it liberally onto Ninshubur’s head. It foamed up around his brown eyes. I took a brush and scrubbed hard all over his head and chest, murmuring, “Can this little paw ever be sweet again?”

I left him to soak in a pan of cold water, while I went into the bathroom to turn on the taps in the bathtub. Like the faithful dog Ninshubur, I was smeared in blood. I’d take my blouse-a beloved soft cotton in my favorite dark gold-to the cleaners, but the bra-the rose-and-silver bra Morrell had liked-I bundled into a plastic bag for the garbage. I couldn’t stand the thought of Paul’s blood against my breasts, even if I could get those brown stains out of the silver lace.

While the tub filled I called Tim Streeter up at Max’s to let him know I had the faithful dog and that Paul would definitely not be in a position to bother them before Calia and Agnes boarded the plane on Saturday.

“I’ve got the dog soaking in a basin of peroxide. I’ll put him in the dryer before I leave the house again, and hope he’ll look respectable enough that he won’t freak out Calia when she gets him back.”

Tim let out a sigh of relief. “But who shot Radbuka?”

“A woman. Paul called her Ilse-I didn’t quite get the last name-it sounded something like Bullfin. I’m utterly baffled. By the way, the police don’t know I was in there, and I’d like them to continue in blissful ignorance.”

“I never heard anything about you knowing where the dude lived,” Tim said. “Dropped the dog on the street, did he, bicycling away?”

I laughed. “Something like that. Anyway, I’m going to take a bath. I’ll come up in a couple of hours. I want to show Max a picture and some other stuff. How’s the kid doing?”

She’d fallen asleep in front of the television, watching Arthur. Agnes, who’d canceled her appointment at the gallery, was curled up on the couch next to her daughter. Tim was standing in the playroom doorway where he could see both of them.

“And Michael’s on his way into town. Agnes called him after this latest incident; he wants to stay close until Agnes and Calia fly home on Saturday. He’s already in the air, landing at O’Hare in an hour or so.”

“Even so, I think you should hang on, although there probably isn’t any other risk to Calia,” I said. “Just in case that prize fanatic Posner decides to carry on for his fallen disciple.”

He agreed, but added that baby-sitting was harder work than moving furniture. “I’d rather carry a grand piano up three flights of stairs. At least when you got there you’d know where the piano was, and you’d be done for the day.”

I switched my house phone over to the answering service while I soaked, obsessively sponging my breasts as if blood had seeped through the pores of my skin. I shampooed my hair several times as well before I finally felt clean enough to leave the tub.

Wrapped in a terry cloth robe, I returned to the living room: I’d dropped the accordion file on the piano bench when I’d run into the apartment. For a long moment I stared down at Ulrich’s disfigured face, which looked even worse for the blood that had seeped onto it.

I’d been wanting to see these papers since Paul showed up at Max’s last Sunday. Now that they were within my reach I almost couldn’t bear to read them. They were like the special present of my childhood birthdays-sometimes wonderful, like the year I got roller skates, sometimes a disappointment, like the year I longed for a bicycle and got a concert dress. I didn’t think I could bear to open the file and find, well, another concert dress.

I finally undid the black ribbon. Two leather-bound books fell out. On the front of each was stamped in peeling gold letters Ulrich Hoffman. So that was why Rhea Wiell had smirked at me: Ulrich was his first name. I could have called every Ulrich who’d ever lived in Chicago and never found Paul’s father.

A black ribbon hung from the middle of one of the books. I set the other down and opened this one to its marker. The paper, and the ornate script on it, looked much the same as the fragment I’d found in Howard Fepple’s office. A person who was fond of himself, that was what the woman at Cheviot Labs had said, using expensive paper for keeping accounting notes. A domestic bully, king only of the tiny empire of his son? Or an SS man in hiding?

The page I was looking at held a list of names, at least twenty, maybe thirty. Even in the difficult script, one name in particular halfway down the page caught my eye:

Next to it, in a hand so heavy it cut through the paper, Paul had written in red, Sofie Radbuka. My mother, weeping for me, dying for me, in heaven all these years praying for me.

My skin crawled. I could hardly bear to look at the page. I had to treat it as a problem, a conundrum, like the time in the PD when I’d represented a man who had skinned his own daughter. His day in court where I did my best, my God, because I’d managed to dissociate myself and treat it as a problem.

All the entries followed the same format: a year with a question mark, and then a number. The only variation I saw was that some had a cross followed by a check mark, others just a cross.

Did this mean they had died in 1943, or ’41? With 72 or 45 something.

I opened the second book. This one held similar information to the scrap I’d found in Fepple’s office, columns of dates, all written European style, most filled in with check marks, while some were blank. What had Howard Fepple been doing with a piece of Ulrich Hoffman’s old Swiss paper?

I sat down hard on the piano bench. Ulrich Hoffman. Rick Hoffman. Was that Paul Radbuka’s father? The old agent from Midway with his Mercedes, and the books he carried around with him to check off who paid him? Whose son had an expensive education, but never amounted to anything? But-had he sold insurance in Germany as well? The man who’d owned these books was an immigrant.

I dug Rhonda Fepple’s number out of my briefcase. Her phone rang six times before the answering machine picked up, with Howard Fepple’s voice eerily asking for me to leave a message. I reminded Rhonda that I was the detective who had been to her house on Monday. I asked her to call me as soon as possible, giving her my cell-phone number, then went back to stare at the books again. If Rick Hoffman and Ulrich were the same man, what did these books have to do with insurance? I tried to match the entries with what I knew of insurance policies, but couldn’t make sense of them. The front of the first book was filled with a long list of names, with a lot of other data that I couldn’t decipher.

The list went on for pages. I shook my head over it. I squinted at the difficult ornate writing, trying to interpret it. What about it had made Paul decide Ulrich was with the Einsatzgruppen? What was it about the name Radbuka that had persuaded him it was his? The papers were in code, he’d screamed at me outside the hospital yesterday-if I believed in Rhea I’d understand it. What had she seen when he’d shown these pages to her?

And finally, who was the Ilse Bullfin who had shot him? Was she a figment of his imagination? Had it been a garden-variety housebreaker whom he thought was the SS? Or was it someone who wanted these journals? Or was there something else in the house that the person had taken as she-he-whoever-tossed all those papers around.