Critical Mass (18 page)

I nodded: Kitty might have stopped pestering the Dzornens, but she had talked about them in front of her daughter. Junkies know no shame; Judy would have seen the Dzornens as a potential revenue stream.

“Judy tried to get money out of you,” I said.

Herta nodded, her mouth pursed into a tight rosebud. “More than once: first when she was young, around twenty. She came back several times. She tried—never mind that. My husband was a lawyer; he sent her about her business very quickly.”

“You said Ms. Binder’s mother didn’t survive the war,” I said. “Do you know what became of her? What made Ms. Binder think her mother was still alive and working in Chicago?”

“Oh, she likes to dramatize herself!” Herta flung up her hands in a contemptuous gesture. “I don’t know specifically what became of Fräulein Saginor, why she didn’t leave Austria when it was still possible.”

“But you heard your parents discuss her situation,” I suggested.

“Oh, often,” Herta agreed. “Papa was always rather softhearted. Mama had to look out for the welfare of the whole family.”

“Your father wanted to bring her with him?” I said. “And your mother wouldn’t allow it?”

Herta’s face was heavily powdered, but I could still see her cheeks redden. “Fräulein Saginor was not a family member; there was no way the Americans would allow her to come on our visa. Papa wanted to bring her as a research assistant, but what would she have lived on, even if the visa had been issued?
He
didn’t have independent resources to pay a stipend, the way the head of the Institute did. You do understand that there were many more Jews trying to leave Europe than there were countries willing to take them in.”

“Yes, but the great scientists all found homes; look at your own father,” I said.

“That’s the point,” Herta said, her tone contemptuous. “My father was a great scientist. Martina Saginor was not. As sad as her fate may seem, it wasn’t possible in that climate to find a lab willing to offer her a place.”

“Maybe she was a great scientist who had a gender handicap,” I suggested.

“Yes, that’s what Käthe wanted to believe, too,” Herta said, “that my father abandoned Martina Saginor because he was jealous of her abilities, or my mother was jealous of her for this imaginary affair. The drug addict daughter said the same thing when she showed up. She said Papa owed it to her because Mama’s jealousy murdered her grandmother!”

She added savagely, “My father was not the father of this stupid Binder woman. Martina Saginor lived in a ghetto filled with poor Jews from Eastern Europe; likely she spent the night with a vagrant junk dealer or some such, and wanted to pretend it was a more glamorous story. Benjamin Dzornen never betrayed my mother, and he was far too honorable to have an affair with one of his students. If you put anything out in public suggesting otherwise, my husband’s law firm will file a suit of libel against you!”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “It’s a comforting tale, anyway. But Martin Binder, Kitty’s grandson, has he been in touch with you?”

She eyed me with a wariness that made me think of her brother.

I added, “I know he visited your brother, but Julius wouldn’t tell me what they discussed.”

“Then there is nothing further for me to say to you on the subject,” Herta said.

It was meant as a conversation ender, but I ignored it, asking instead about Julius’s strange comment. “Your brother said a detective should have come fifty years ago and didn’t. What did he mean?”

Relief that I was abandoning the subject of her father and Martina Saginor took the anger out of Herta’s face, replaced by a look of sorrow, or puzzlement. Perhaps both.

“Something went wrong between him and Papa, but neither of them ever said what. That happened before Käthe showed up, about three years earlier. Julius had followed Papa like a duckling before that, loving science in the same way Papa did, and then, suddenly, it was over. Julius started making ugly remarks to Papa at the dinner table, and Papa would sit there, not responding. Mama tried to make Julius stop, but Papa would only shrug his shoulders and disappear into his study. I’m sure the change in Julius hastened Papa’s death.”

I got to my feet, handing her a card. “Call me if you remember why Martin Binder came to see you.”

On my way to the door, I stopped again to look at Dzornen’s Nobel medal. “I’ll never be this close to a Nobel Prize again,” I said.

Herta came over to stand next to me. She picked up the shallow box and unhooked its glass lid so that I could touch the medallion. I ran my fingertips over the figures on the coin’s reverse side, two women draped in the robes of classical antiquity.
You were there when the King of Sweden handed you to him,
I addressed the medal in my head.
What was in his heart? Was Kitty Binder his daughter?

I handed the prize back to Herta. Thinking again of the snapshot in Kitty Binder’s living room, I said, “You hated the times you had to play with Kitty, back when you were girls in Vienna. Do you remember ever taking her to the beach on an outing with your parents?”

Herta laughed scornfully. “There are no beaches in Vienna, just the Danube running through it. Since the end of the Habsburg Empire, Austria has been a little landlocked country.”

“A trip to the park, then, you, Bettina, and your parents.”

“I don’t know what you’re implying, perhaps that my father let Käthe into our family, but I assure you, we never took her on any private outings. And anyway, I don’t remember Papa going anywhere with us, even when we went to Mama’s family’s summer home in Sumperk. The Institut für Radiumforschung, that was his life, not his wife and daughters.”

Her tone changed from contempt to bitterness. I might be a vulgar American who didn’t know the map of Austria, but it was her father who’d let her down. As I rode to the lobby, I tossed a nickel. Tails, Benjamin Dzornen had never slept with any of his students. Heads, he was Kitty Binder’s father. Three times in a row, I lifted my hand and saw Thomas Jefferson’s profile. Conclusive proof.

15

THE DOCTOR’S DILEMMA

I
CALLED LOTTY
when I got home. “I just left Herta Colonna’s apartment,” I said. “You might have met in Vienna when you were eight or nine and she was Herta Dzornen. She and her sister Bettina were Benjamin Dzornen’s daughters.”

“I don’t remember them,” Lotty answered. “Dzornen—that name is familiar. Isn’t he a scientist?”

“Nobel Prize, Manhattan Project. Martina Saginor’s thesis adviser back when he was part of some radium institute in Vienna.”

“Oh!” I heard Lotty suck in a breath. “He was Käthe’s—Kitty’s—father?”

“She thinks he was; Herta says her father was an honorable man who would never have had affairs, least of all with a student. Herta repeated what you said, that when Kitty first came to Chicago, she made a royal nuisance of herself. She pestered the Dzornens, she had a tantrum at the University of Chicago; she even went out to the lab in Argonne to a new pile, whatever that is, and made a fuss. Benjamin put some sort of pressure on her; Herta claims not to know what, but after that, Kitty left the family alone.

“Judy arrived years later as Act Two, trying to extort money from Herta, maybe from the sister Bettina as well, although she had moved to the West Coast. I’m pretty sure Martin went to see both Herta and
her brother, Julius. Neither will admit it, but their body language is talking loudly. And Julius is an odd duck.”

I was disappointed that Lotty didn’t know the family—I was hoping she might know why Julius thought a detective should have shown up fifty years ago.

“He feels guilty about something,” Lotty said. “You don’t need to be Oprah’s tame psychiatrist to realize that, but it could be anything. Did he see his father do something unspeakable? Or was his father unable to protect him from assault? Hyde Park was a dangerous community in the 1950s. Can you uncover violent crimes from that era?”

“Only with more blood, sweat and whatever than I can provide. Maybe not even then—the police don’t create files for all the nonproductive calls they respond to. That’s more in the nature of communal knowledge at the district.”

“Would knowing what happened fifty years ago help you find Martin?” Lotty asked.

“How can I say? I had one idea that may be really far-fetched, but what if Julius discovered that his father’s Nobel Prize was bogus?”

“Bogus?” Lotty’s voice crackled across the line. “These prizes are genuine, it’s not like saying you served with the Navy SEALs, thinking no one could check the story. You are one person, the eyes of the world are on you.”

“Bogus is the wrong word,” I conceded. “Herta was very belligerent about Martina Saginor not being a good scientist. But Martina was Dzornen’s student: What if he took credit for work that she really did? Dzornen let Martina and Kitty languish in Vienna while he spent the war safely in the U.S. Julius was apparently another gifted math and science student. If he went back through old research papers and found that his father stole Martina Saginor’s work, that would completely end his respect for his father. It also explains why Dzornen never discussed the matter with his wife or daughter.”

“I suppose Martin Binder might have stumbled on the same evidence, if it were available,” Lotty said doubtfully, “but why would he then disappear?”

“Maybe Herta killed him to preserve her father’s memory,” I suggested flippantly. “She has a photograph of herself as a kid in the mountains carrying a hunting rifle.”

“All the wealthy Jewish women back then aped the rich Gentiles. They stalked deer, they shot rabbits. My grandparents had a place in the mountains where friends used to come to shoot, although my grandparents didn’t. My
Oma
Herschel didn’t like blood sports.”

I brought the conversation back to Martina. “Do you remember something, anything, from your childhood, an argument you overheard, that might show Martina was angry or bitter over her professor’s award?”

“Oh, Victoria, I was eight or nine the last time I saw her. That she was in love with science I remember because she used to take Käthe and me to her laboratory. At home she was awkward, but at the Institute, her eyes came to life. Whether she was as gifted as she was enthusiastic, how can I possibly know? What attention did you pay to adult conversations when you were that age?”

I had to admit she was right: children sift out the things that aren’t essential to them.

“It must have been Professor Dzornen who sent the money for Käthe to join Hugo and me on the Kindertransport to London,” Lotty said. “The decision for her to go came at the very last minute. My grandfather would not have sent Käthe at the expense of my cousins: he had money only for my brother and me, and then suddenly Käthe was part of the journey. If Professor Dzornen was her father, he did at least save her. Maybe that’s how he ended her pestering when she came to Chicago eighteen years later: he told her he’d saved her life and that was all she got from him.”

We talked it over for several fruitless minutes, but we had to agree
in the end that the Metargon slogan applied to us. We had no data, we couldn’t prove any of our speculations.

“It’s my bedtime, Victoria. My alarm rings at four tomorrow morning.”

Before I hung up, I asked if she had any idea where Judy might have gone.

“All I can say is that if she’s running from one drug dealer to another, you must not chase her: your next encounter with one of them may not end as easily for you as yesterday’s did.”

I agreed soberly as she hung up. The last epitaph any of us wants is for our friends to be standing over our grave saying, “I told you so.”

I needed to work smarter, harder, faster. Any trail Martin had left was all but obliterated. The older and colder that trail grew, the more unpaid time I’d be spending trying to sniff it out. Trouble was, I couldn’t think of any smarter, faster, harder angles to follow.

In the morning, my fears diminished, as they often do in sunlight. The dogs and I loped over to the lake without interference. After we’d all swum, I put on my old cutoffs. I had no meetings scheduled—it was a day for digging in the data mines, and I could dress for comfort.

Before I started work for my bread-and-butter clients, I couldn’t resist calling Arthur Harriman, the German-speaking librarian at the University of Chicago. When I suggested my theory that Benjamin Dzornen might have stolen his student’s work, Harriman became quite excited: Nick and Nora come to life for him. He said his physics wasn’t strong enough to analyze the work, but he had a friend who was writing her dissertation on Dzornen; he’d ask if she’d ever seen any sign of Dzornen stealing his students’ work.

I settled happily into research that I was knowledgeable enough to analyze: no Dzornen-Pauli effects, just garden-variety fraud. It was ten-forty, when I was in the middle of a long conversation with a project manager at a Saskatchewan mine, that my computer began to chime at me. My answering service, which picks up calls when I don’t
answer, had an incoming one that they thought was urgent. I looked at the monitor. Cordell Breen wanted to talk to me ASAP.

I clicked a box on the screen so the answering service would know I’d seen the message. While I finished my Canadian call, which took another fifteen minutes, Breen called again. Twice.

I typed up my notes before I forgot them, then looked up Breen. Of course: I was getting too old for this work. When I’d been at Metargon labs three days ago, I’d seen a picture of Edward Breen accepting an award from President Reagan for some fancy reactor design. Cordell was his son; he’d taken over Metargon after Edward died.

I called Cordell Breen at once, hoping the urgent messages meant he knew where Martin was. His secretary apologized, but the shoe was on the other foot: Mr. Breen wanted to know if I’d found Martin Binder. He hadn’t realized Martin was missing until his daughter told him about it. Mr. Breen would appreciate it if I’d come to his office as soon as possible so we could discuss what I was doing.

I felt so let down that I replied rather stiffly that I didn’t have any time today, unless he wanted to talk on the phone. The secretary put me on hold; in another moment a man’s warm baritone came on the line.