“So you don’t know who could have shot Paul?” Max said, when I’d finished.

I shook my head. “And I don’t even know if it was someone who was after the books I found in that dreadful closet. Maybe the fact that he was telling everyone he had papers proving his father was with the Einsatzgruppen made some real Nazi conspirators seek him out. They didn’t know he was a lunatic-they thought he was on to them. So they shot him. The evil temptress, of course, Ilse Bullfin, seduced Paul in order to get him to open the front door.”

“Who?” Max demanded sharply.

“Didn’t I tell you? I asked him who shot him, and he said a woman named Ilse. I know I didn’t get the last name quite right. It sounded kind of like Bullfin.”

“Could it have been Wölfin?” Max asked, saying the name in a fast, low voice.

I strained to hear the difference between what he said and what Paul had said. “Vull, you’re saying, not Bull? Yes, I suppose it could be-the two sounds are very close. Is she German? Do you know her?”

“Ilse Wölfin-Ilse Koch, known as the She-Wolf. A most monstrous concentration-camp guard. If that’s who this poor devil thinks shot him-umph. I’d like to lay all this in front of a psychologist-this shrine, his obsession with the Holocaust. I don’t suppose he’d let anyone besides this Rhea Wiell actually talk to him, but I don’t know if you could even count on it being a woman who shot him. I don’t know enough about delusions-he might confuse an assailant with an SS guard, but would he still know the difference between a man and a woman? What do you think, Lotty?”

Lotty shook her head, the lines of strain deeper in her face. “That kind of pathology is beyond me. We only know he’s been deluding himself for a week about his relations with you-but confusing you with his brother hasn’t made him think you were his mother, after all.”

Max shifted uneasily. “What hospital did you say he was going to? Compassionate Heart? I could send someone over there-he’s so eager to be listened to he might talk to another doctor.”

“But that doctor could not tell you any revelations this man Paul might make,” Lotty protested. “You have no standing to get someone to reveal patient confidences to you.”

Max looked absurdly guilty: he had clearly been planning to send a friend from Beth Israel who might, as a favor to Max, violate the standards of confidentiality.

“But what’s in these books that made him keep them secret?” Carl said. “Do they show some reason to believe that’s why he was shot?”

I pulled the accordion file out of my briefcase. I’d forgotten the picture of the woman I’d taken along. I laid it on the coffee table in front of the three.

“His savior in England, you can see he’s labeled it,” I said. “I couldn’t help wondering-well, do you know her?”

Carl frowned at the dark, wistful face. “ London,” he said slowly. “I don’t remember who, except that it’s a long time ago, during the war years maybe, or right after.”

“He had this on this wall, in the middle of his shrine to the therapist he worships?” Lotty said in a high queer voice.

“You know who she is?” I asked.

Lotty looked grim. “I know who she is-I can even show you the book where he found this picture, if Max has it on his shelves. But why-”

She interrupted herself to dart from the room. We heard her running up the stairs, her tread as always light, that of a young woman.

Max looked at the picture. “I don’t recognize the face. This isn’t the doctor in London Lotty worshiped as a child, is it?”

Carl shook his head. “Claire Tallmadge was very fair-the perfect English rose. I always thought that was part of Lotty’s infatuation with her. It used to make my blood boil, how Lotty would let that family call her ‘the little monkey.’ Victoria, let’s see these books you brought with you.”

I handed over the accordion file. Max and Carl recoiled from the disfigured face on the front of it.

“Who is this?” Carl demanded.

“Paul’s father,” I said. “Paul had a ton of photographs of him in that secret room, all marked up like this. Not the blood-that got there when I took it away with me.”

Lotty returned with a book, which she held open at a page of photographs. “Anna Freud.”

We all stared from Paul’s picture to the identical shot on the page, dumbfounded, until Carl said, “Of course. You took me to hear her speak, but she looked different-this is such an intimate picture.”

“She was a refugee from Vienna, like us,” Lotty explained. “I admired her to an extraordinary degree. I even volunteered at the nursery she ran in Hampstead during the war, you know, washing dishes, the kind of thing an unskilled teenager could do. Minna used to lash out at me-well, never mind that. For a time I imagined I would follow Anna Freud and become an analyst myself, but-well, never mind that, either. Why is this man claiming her as his savior? Does he imagine he was in the Hampstead nursery?”

The rest of us could only shake our heads, bewildered.

“What about these?” I handed over the ledgers.

“Ulrich,” Max breathed, looking at the peeling gold leaf stamped on the front. “How stupid of me to forget it is more often a first name than a last. No wonder you couldn’t find him. What are these?”

“I think they must have something to do with insurance,” I said, “but you can see that Paul had put them in here with the label Einsatzgruppenführer Ulrich Hoffman. Since they were locked in his secret room, I’m assuming these documents convinced him his name was Radbuka, but I frankly don’t get it. I showed them to a young historian who’s been working in the Ajax archives; she said it looked like a Jewish organization’s ledgers. Would that be possible?”

Max picked up the second volume and squinted at it. “It’s been a long time since I tried reading this kind of old-fashioned German handwriting. These are addresses, I think. It could be some kind of Jewish welfare association, I suppose, a list of names and addresses-perhaps the group all bought insurance together. I don’t understand the other numbers, though. Unless your historian friend is right: maybe S. Radbuka brought sixty-five people with her and K. Omschutz brought fifty-four.” He shook his head, unsatisfied with that explanation, and looked back at the books. “Schrei. What city has a street called-oh, Johann Nestroy. The Austrian fairy-tale writer. Is this Vienna, Lotty? I don’t remember either Nestroy or Schreigassen.”

Lotty’s skin looked waxen. She took the book from Max, her arms jerky, as if she were a marionette. She looked at the page where he was pointing, her finger moving slowly along the lines, reading the names under her breath.

“ Vienna? Yes, it should be Vienna. Leopoldsgasse, Untere Augarten Strasse. You don’t remember those streets? Where was your family driven after the Anschluss?” Her voice was a harsh squawk.

“We lived on Bauernmarkt,” Max said. “We weren’t relocated, although we had three other families, all strangers, pushed into our flat. I can’t say I’ve wanted to keep these street names in my head all these years. I’m surprised you remember them.”

His voice was pregnant with meaning. Lotty looked at him grimly. I hastily intervened before they could start fighting.

“This looks like the same paper stock and the same handwriting I found on a sheet of paper in the bag of a dead insurance agent on the South Side, which is why I’m assuming these are insurance documents. The old agent was named Rick Hoffman, and I’m betting he’s Paul’s father-stepfather or whatever. Would Rick be a nickname for Ulrich?”

“It could be.” Max smiled wryly. “If he wanted to fit into America, he would have picked a name everyone could pronounce instead of something alien like Ulrich.”

“If he sold insurance, he would have felt a special incentive to fit in,” I said.

“Ah, yes, I do believe this is an insurance journal.” Carl turned to a page that was filled with names and dates with check marks, like the fragment in Fepple’s office. “Didn’t your family buy insurance like this, Loewenthal? The agent came into the ghetto every Friday on his bicycle; my father and all the other men would pay their twenty or thirty korunas and the agent marked them off in his book. You don’t remember such a thing? Oh, well, you and Lotty came from the haute bourgeoisie. These weekly payments, they were for people on small incomes. My father found the whole process humiliating, that he couldn’t afford to go to an office, pay his money up front, like an important man-he used to send me down with the coins tightly wrapped in a twist of newspaper.” He started looking through the pages of tiny ornate writing.