Chapter Text
Helen came out of the bedroom we said was mine when we felt like company. It was where we kept the phone that had just interrupted our dinner.
"That was the answering service," she said. "There's a woman who's been calling every five minutes since seven-thirty."
It was almost nine, and I had already added scotch to my coffee.
"Tell them to tell her that we'll see her tomorrow when we open and hang up on her."
"That's what they've been doing. She's persistent."
"That's her problem." I raised the mug to my lips.
"Carol."
I lowered the mug.
Helen was staring down at me with something like reproof in her face, and I knew my evening was shot. She was really the one who picked our clients, and something about a lady who burned nickels to talk to me had clearly appealed to her.
"What?" I asked anyway.
"I told them to tell her to go to our office and that we'd be there in thirty."
"She can wait twelve hours," I said, but I was already standing up and moving for my coat.
"You don't know that yet."
"If this is just some girl sore that her boyfriend has a new girlfriend," I grumbled.
Helen put her hand in the small of my back and guided me to the door. "Then I'll charge her fifteen percent more," she said.
🔍
The tallish woman who was pacing the hallway outside my office door looked between the two of us and asked which one of us was Carol Sturka. I said me and introduced Helen as my secretary, which was true.
Her name was Dr. Zosia Danziger. She got close enough that I had to lift my head so I could meet her eyes, grasped my hands, and said she needed to speak with me urgently.
"What's the idea with dragging me out here after hours?" I asked.
"I am being terrorized," she said. "I want to know by whom and why."
"Inside," Helen said, and pushed between us so she could unlock the door, which she held open.
As Helen moved chairs around, I watched Dr. Danziger take in the office houseplants, paisley curtains, colorful rugs, and matching sofa—all homey, feminine touches that Helen had added to set the kind of people who constituted our clientele at ease—with a dispassionate thoroughness that made me wonder what she did for a living.
I asked that once all three of us were seated—me behind my desk, Dr. Danziger across from me, and Helen at my side with a notepad and pen.
"I'm an instructor at the university here," she explained. "About three months ago, I noticed that things I put in my office were moved when I was out. An eraser would be in one place and then another. Pencil tips were snapped off. My stapler disappeared. I thought it was a colleague playing pranks."
"Did you find these pranks funny?" I asked.
"I ignored them," she said, answering my question by not answering it. She twitched one shoulder up. "I know not all of them are happy that a foreign woman is on the faculty, even in a limited capacity."
"What happened after that?"
"It got worse. Papers went missing. Notes got erased. A stack of exams I had yet to grade vanished entirely."
"What work do you do for the university?"
"I teach calculus to coeds."
"Do you do any research?"
"I used to. Abstract algebra."
"Huh," I said. Algebra had always seemed abstract enough to me, and I didn't get why anyone would need to make it more so. "What good is that?"
Her lips compressed just enough to let me know I'd irritated her. "It can be used in cryptography, if that's what you mean."
It was exactly what I meant.
"And when you say used to, you mean during the war."
She nodded.
A lot of us had done a lot of things during the war, and now our roles had been cut or reduced. Going from top secret war work to being a teacher—not even a professor—probably stung, but she spoke without apparent bitterness.
"Did you do anything when you noticed someone was intruding in your office?"
"No," she said. "I had no proof it was actually happening. The department would have thought I was… blaming others for my own carelessness."
"You didn't want to rock the boat."
"And I didn't want him to know he'd gotten to me," she said.
"You think the person doing this is a man?"
She grimaced. "Two months ago I found this in my desk drawer."
The sheet of paper she handed me bore letters cut and pasted from a magazine. 1 Timothy 2:12.
"I don't understand," Helen said. "A Bible verse?"
"It's the one about women not being suffered to teach," I said. The rest of the passage turned my stomach and I didn't expand on it. "You didn't show this to anyone?"
"I don't have proof that I didn't make it myself," she said. "I don't have proof that I'm not responsible for any of this."
She took a stack of papers out of her purse and handed it over to me. It was topped with half a dozen full color covers torn off pulp magazines; these all featured women who were gagged. Underneath those, she had ten different letters that detailed the obscene and violent things the sender thought should be done to her. There were also half a dozen newspaper articles from the war that were all atrocity reporting about Poland.
"You're Polish?" I asked.
"I'm as American as you are," she said, and again I sensed I had annoyed her. "But I was born in Poland and I take those articles as a list of things that he wishes happened to me. Or as a reminder that I don't belong here."
"All of these were placed in your office?"
"A month ago, they started coming to my apartment. Just shoved under the door."
"Who knows—"
"I don't tell people where I live."
But someone could have gotten her address from the college, if he worked there or was charming enough. One avenue of pursuit.
"Did you ever feel followed? Watched?"
"Yes, but I've never seen anyone or had proof. I could be completely mistaken about that."
There was that word again, proof. I wondered if part of what she wanted from me was certainty.
"Then tonight when I got home, my apartment had been ransacked. That's when I started calling you." She turned her big brown eyes on me, and some protective fire ignited in my chest. "Miss Sturka, is there something you can do about this?"
"Sure," I said. "I can do something about it."
🔍
Ransacked was an understatement. Destroyed was more accurate.
The apartment was small, hardly big enough to contain the mess. Every dish had been smashed, every piece of furniture smashed or slashed, every book eviscerated.
He must have made a hell of a racket. I needed to talk to the neighbors.
There were papers all over the living room floor, most of them ripped in half. I rifled through them and saw German, French, and Russian as well as English. I found several notebooks that were filled with some combination of mathematical notation and what I guessed was Polish. Ink had been poured over all of them.
When I went into the bedroom, I saw the bed and pillows had been knifed up the same as the couch. The dresser had been empty, and every single piece of clothing I saw had been torn or cut to pieces.
This felt dangerous. I was glad she hadn't taken my answering service's no for an answer.
"Someone," I said, when I came back out of the bedroom, "does not like you."
"They weren't just blowing smoke when they said you were smart," Dr. Danziger said.
I took the sarcasm on the chin. "You'll need to call the police," I said.
"I'm not going to do that."
"It's my professional advice. You're paying me for things like that."
"I'm still not going to do it."
Fine. "Is there anything you can tell is missing?"
"Some money," she said. "And I had a gun. An automatic I bought from a pawn shop after the first picture was shoved underneath my door."
"You have a permit for the gun?"
"Yes."
"But you didn't actually carry it."
"No."
"Well, you can't stay here," I said. Before she could tell me I was smart again, I outlined my plan. "There's a hotel around the corner from my office. We'll drive you there, make sure we aren't followed, and you can sign in under my name."
"But—" she began, and cut herself off. "Of course."
Her expression closed again, and I realized I'd said something wrong. I didn't know what she wanted, but I wanted to make sure she got it.
"She doesn't want to be alone," Helen said.
The doctor looked embarrassed but didn't deny it. I ran a mental calculation. "I can stay with you," I said. "We'll get a double. And I'll take my gun."
Helen prodded me in the shoulder. "She's coming home with us." Her voice was firm enough I knew I wouldn't be able to argue my way out of it. "She can take your bed and you can sleep on the couch. With your gun, if you like."
"I will not," I said at the same time Dr. Danziger protested that she could sleep on the couch.
"Nonsense," Helen told us both.
I slept on the couch.