Critical Mass (16 page)

“Oh!” Nadja’s eyes opened wide. “He discovered the Dzornen-Pauli effect; the equations are remarkable.”

I grinned. “I’ll take your word for it. Anyway, Kitty Binder seems troubled enough about her parentage that Martin likely grew up with a lot of questions about his own background. Not to mention the fact
that there seems to be no way of knowing who his own birth father was.”

Hahne played with the wispy ends of her hair. “Martin’s mother did phone the school a couple of times, asking about him, or wanting to talk to him. The principal told me, since he knew I was the teacher who was closest to Martin. I guess his mother was pretty high every time she phoned. The two of us had to inform the grandmother, since she was Martin’s legal guardian. She said not to let Martin know.”

I nodded. “The grandmother thinks Martin obeyed her and never saw his mother, but I’m betting he did; kids need to see their parents. They keep hoping they’ll get love, even if the parent is as unstable as Judy Binder.”

“Did Ms. Binder, the grandmother, I mean, hire you to find Martin?” Hahne asked.

“At least for today,” I said. “First Kitty—Ms. Binder, the grandmother—told me to leave Martin alone, but then she asked me to find him. I have a dozen wildly incompatible theories, but one of them is that Martin might have gone off the skids and started killing people he imagines as corrupting his mother.”

“I refuse to believe that!” Hahne flushed to the roots of her mousy hair. “He wasn’t that kind of boy. Socially awkward, but not—not unstable!”

A couple of people chatting nearby looked at us curiously, wondering what I could be saying to upset her. I didn’t challenge Hahne: Martin was her special student.

“If he didn’t disappear to hunt for his mother, where else could he be?” I asked. “His grandmother says something happened his final weeks at home that upset him. The last thing she remembers him saying was that something didn’t add up. He left for a few hours in the morning, came home for a short time, then took off for good.”

Hahne frowned. “That sounds as though he was analyzing a
problem, not planning revenge. He used that phrase when he couldn’t make sense of a problem or a theory, if he thought his approach was off-base, or if he thought the theory wasn’t right.”

“Martin hasn’t been in touch with you? If he has, if you know he’s safe, I won’t pry, but—here he’s disappeared, while his mother is jumping from one drug house to another with a posse of furious meth makers behind her.” I leaned forward in my intensity; Hahne shrank back into her chair.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just that the people she hangs with are absolutely ruthless. If what doesn’t add up in Martin’s mind has to do with her or them, I need to know.”

Hahne spread her hands helplessly. “If I knew, I’d tell you, but honestly, Martin hasn’t talked to me since he left high school.”

We talked a little longer about Martin, his infatuation with Feynman, his gift as a musician—he played bassoon, although he sometimes fooled around with bongo drums just because Feynman had.

“I always told him the ugly duckling turns into a swan,” Hahne said, escorting me to the door. “I still believe it. If he’s in trouble of some kind, if you find him and he needs any kind of support, legal, financial, anything, you must let me know at once.”

I promised, but drove away from the school more worried than when I’d arrived. An arithmetic problem. Something he couldn’t make sense of, but in an intellectual way? Of course, Hahne felt a maternal protectiveness toward her gifted awkward student; she might not want to recognize a fissure in him that would break under the wrong pressure.

Still, there was the fact that he’d emptied his computers. Something didn’t add up, but he couldn’t bear for anyone else to know about it? But who would look at his machines, besides his grandmother? She might make a scornful remark about people who waste their time on theories, but I couldn’t picture her hacking into his files.

I was equally puzzled by Julius Dzornen’s behavior. He’d stonewalled me completely about whether Martin had come to see him
before disappearing, which made me believe that he had. To ask him—what? What could Martin have said that would make his great-uncle—if Julius was, indeed, Kitty’s half brother—clam up?

Just as baffling was what had derailed Julius fifty years ago, so much that he’d dropped out of school and almost fainted at the sight of a detective. He was seventy-three or -four now. Something in his teen years, or his early twenties.

I pulled over at a gas station on Irving Park and found his sister Herta’s phone number. Herta Dzornen Colonna. I started to dial the number but hesitated; I wanted her to see me and it’s so easy to say no and end the conversation when you’re on the phone. Besides, a cell phone with the trucks roaring down the nearby expressway was a recipe for unsuccessful communication.

I drove down to the Gold Coast, thirty miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic. I found a parking space near Herta’s building, one of the grand duchesses of Chicago apartments that line Lake Shore Drive East. They face the lake and Oak Street Beach, with mortgages that would take a blue-collar woman like me a hundred thirty-five years to pay off.

I was stiff from my long drive. After feeding quarters into the ticket machine—twenty-five for an hour—I went to the little garden that separates the duchesses from the beach and stretched my shoulders. And thought about how to get past Herta Dzornen’s doorman.

INNSBRUCK, 1942

Pebbles in a Bottomless Well

A
FTER MONTHS OF
cold and starvation, all the prisoners hallucinate. Platters of beautiful food appear just out of reach. Parents and old lovers blur with the faces of other prisoners or even guards. Old enemies appear in the shadows on the cave walls.

One day Martina thinks she sees her high school mathematics professor, Herr Papp, examining her work.

“But you are blind,” she says out loud.

A guard pulls out the short whip that they all carry and snaps it hard enough to produce a whistle. “I see you perfectly, you lazy cunt. No talking to the other prisoners.”

She’s trying to measure the purity of a piece of carbon, but her hands are weak from hunger. The cold and damp in the cave also affect the balances so that it’s almost impossible to get the weight correct. As she returns to the task in front of her the last time she saw Herr Papp comes to her.

She had visited his shabby three-room apartment near the Volksgarten when he finally answered her letter. It had taken him so long to respond that she wondered if he had died, or thought she was writing as a prank: he had been a sarcastic professor, belittling the girls in his classes. In response, several of the students in Martina’s year had sent him flowery love letters signed with the names of cabaret singers or dancers at the opera.

By the time she wrote him, she was a full-fledged researcher at the Institut für Radiumforschung, although she couldn’t afford to quit her day job, teaching physics and mathematics at the Technische Hochschule.

When she arrived at Herr Papp’s apartment, a housekeeper waited at the top of the stairs. The woman didn’t acknowledge Martina’s
“Grüss Gott,”
except to gesture to the open door, disapproval lines dug deep around her mouth.

Herr Papp didn’t stand when Martina went over to greet him. Out of old habit, before sitting in a chair near his own, she curtsied to him—really no more gracefully than she’d done for Frau Herschel twenty-five years earlier.

Herr Papp’s thin voice with its sarcastic inflection hadn’t changed. “Ah, yes, you were the young lady who always worked out her problem sets so thoroughly. I remember that you sat so upright I sometimes wondered if your mother had tied a backboard beneath your jacket. And you are still upright. Please sit down so that your voice is at my level.”

It wasn’t until she sat that Martina realized he was blind. After the housekeeper poured tea for them both, the woman sat next to him, guiding his hand to the cup, placing a piece of cake on his fork, making sure he had control of the fork before releasing her hold, wiping the front of his frayed jacket when he spilled tea or cake.

It must have been the housekeeper who had written the reply for him: Martina had been surprised by the round, careful letters, not the spiky script in the notes that used to show her a more economical way of solving a problem.

“I never thought of you as the kind of young lady who paid visits to the elderly or the infirm,” Herr Papp said. “You struck me as the kind of single-minded person who is rather like the hypotenuse, taking the shortest distance between her present location and a goal.”

His words echoed her mother’s in such an alarming way that
Martina was silenced for a moment. Not that Frau Saginor would ever refer to a hypotenuse, but her rages against her daughter’s obsession with mathematics and science always had this at their core: Martina was selfish, thoughtless, what she wanted came ahead of the needs of anyone around her.

Frau Saginor used to keep up a stream of hopes that Martina might fail her exams, a barrage of demands that she quit her studies and get a job as a bookkeeper or a shop assistant. “That would help put food on the table and pay for Papa’s medicines.”

This was when Martina was seventeen. Papa had been in the early stages of tuberculosis, coughing up so much blood every day that it was hard to know how his body was able to produce more. But even in his weakness, Papa told Martina over and over that he wanted her in school. On the table next to the bed, he kept those of her essays and problem sets that had been marked “100 out of 100,” or “First Prize in the mathematics section.” Until the last few days of his life, he read them in the long watches of the night when he couldn’t sleep.

Martina used to work out her math problems sitting next to him, and if he was still awake when she finished, she would play for him: her flute had also won her a prize. She often played at three in the morning, making the neighbors pound on the thin walls between the tenements.

“Even in Vienna, Mozart has enemies,” Papa used to joke.

It was Papa who had learned about the Technische Hochschule for girls. He was a carpenter who’d worked on the building when it went up in 1912. After Martina had come home dazed by the rainbow in Frau Herschel’s nursery, Papa brought back bits of leaded glass left over from a job site so that he and Martina could make prisms. He brought home books on light and color that he found in secondhand shops. When Martina was seven, the two of them re-created Newton’s experiments with sunlight, making a rainbow out of one prism, using a second prism to turn the rainbow back into white sunlight.

Mama watched, tight-lipped, then dragged Martina to the table to work on her embroidery. Martina always bunched the thread, broke it, split it. Her practice work on scraps of linen made Mama fume.

Papa suggested to Martina that she learn to sign her name in embroidery stitches: something special, that she could use when she signed her school papers. Martina created a design that used Newton’s prisms as a symbol of herself, but the result when she sewed it was as abominable as the rest of her work. Mama wouldn’t let her stop sewing, but she gave up on any idea of Martina ever helping her in the workshop.

Papa learned about scholarships to the Technische Hochschule. He and Mama argued late into the night about fit jobs for girls, and whether Martina was becoming conceited because of her schooling, but when Martina was twelve and Austria was losing the war, she sat the scholarship and entrance exams. She was first in the city in mathematics. The next year, the first year after the war had ended, Papa escorted her to the lofty stone building on Elisabethstrasse.

Martina was wearing the uniform of the school, sewn by her mother with meticulous care: anger over husband and daughter for reaching above themselves was one thing, but none of the wealthy burghers’ daughters would ever taunt Martina for her clothes.

The streetcar was jammed with people going to work or looking for work, but when Papa helped Martina down from the high step, they had to pass clots of unemployed men who gathered daily on the streets. Many were still in their Imperial uniforms, ragged from four years on one front or another, and now the only clothes they owned. Like most Viennese, they were bewildered at losing the war, bewildered at loss of empire and emperor in one stroke of the French, American and British pens. A skinny Jewish girl in an upper-class school’s uniform would be an easy target for rage.

That was when Martina learned to hold herself so erect that she herself looked like the Empress: aloof, untouchable. Better than a backboard in her jacket.

Even now in the cave in the Austrian Alps, her posture infuriates the guards, who want her to bow her head, to grovel to them. She has been beaten more than once for her unbreakable arrogance.

In that visit to Herr Papp, his blindness seemed to give him a sixth sense for the emotions. Although Martina sat still, spine straight, he knew his words about her behaving like a hypotenuse hit a mark.

He laughed softly, a sound like dry leaves rustling underfoot. “Single-mindedness is not a crime, Fräulein Saginor. They say that the great Newton could go days without sleep, holding a problem in his mind like a kaleidoscope, turning it over until the array of colored pebbles showed him the pattern he was seeking in nature. So it is not a crime, Fräulein, for you to come here because you want something. I just question what an old blind mathematics professor can offer you, since you don’t even want Frau Werfel’s cake.”

It was true: Martina seldom thought about food in those days, and the cake looked unappetizing. For form’s sake she ate a bite, but it was so rich she quickly washed it down with tea.

“Leibniz,” she said.

“Leibniz?” Herr Papp echoed, incredulous. “You surely have not come here to discuss a seventeenth-century mathematician, not when you have the University of Vienna and the Institut für Radiumforschung available to you.”

“Do you see English—does anyone read English journals to you?” Martina asked.