Critical Mass (20 page)

“Someone is supposed to be keeping an eye on her for me, but I suppose Alison could have worked her way around that; she has a trust fund. I’m going to get the FBI to start hunting Martin. If he is in Mexico with my girl, they’ll sort that out pretty fast. In the meantime, if you get any whiff of where he is, I want to know at once.”

“Are you proposing to hire me, Mr. Breen?” I asked. “If you become my client, I’ll certainly report my findings to you—as long as working for you doesn’t conflict with my existing client.”

He paused again, then gave a smile that must have opened a lot of cookie jars for him. “Yes, yes, I see your point. I doubt a solo operator who doesn’t have great computer skills can track down a computer-savvy guy like Martin, but if you do, I would be prepared to offer a, well, call it a reward. A reward for knowing where he is.”

“I’ll think about it.” I got up. “As I said, I can tell you nothing without my client’s permission, but with that proviso, I’ll let you know when I’ve located Martin. Assuming the Feds don’t shoot him, or anything drastic like that.”

Breen thought that was amusing enough to tell me I had a good investigative palate, after all, but we both knew he thought I had as much chance of finding Martin as I did of explaining relativistic models of matrix theory to a kennel of Chihuahuas.

17

V.I. CAN’T TURN TRICKS

I
PASSED A FOREST
preserve on my way to the expressway and pulled into it. The trees were starting to turn; despite the continued warm days, summer was over. Ahead lay Chicago’s winter roulette: last year’s mild one or the previous year’s endless snow and bitter cold?

Sitting in my car, watching the squirrels and birds without really seeing them, I tried to parse my conversation with Cordell Breen.

Martin Binder had gone dark. Breen thought that was to keep anyone from finding where he’d absconded with Metargon’s precious code. Call that possibility A. I started to type it into my iPad, then thought of Breen’s boast about Metargon’s hacking skills. If Breen believed I knew where Martin was, he’d sic Liu on my computer.

I pulled a pen and a legal pad from my briefcase—change is good, but old-fashioned ways still have merit. Possibility A: Martin Binder was in Shanghai or Tehran, or even Tel Aviv, reconstructing a million or two lines of the code that allowed Princess Fitora to fight off five attackers.

Liu had touted the system as a breakthrough for people with stroke or spinal cord damage. Breen had suggested the project had defense applications. I tried to imagine what those might be.

My mother had hated guns and weapons of all kinds. My father’s service weapon had to be locked each night in a high cupboard, away from my cousin Boom-Boom’s enterprising fingers. No toy weapons
could be used in our yard or house, but Boom-Boom would grab a doughnut and fit it in his hand like a gun. Humans can turn anything into weapons.

If Metargon was a world leader in computer design and applications, they could easily design a cyberwar virus; perhaps that was what really lay behind blinking at Princess Fitora’s sword-arm.

Which led me to possibility B: far from trying to sell Metargon’s code to the Chinese, Martin had realized he was actually helping design a cyberwar system, some kind of advanced Stuxnet worm. He had vanished until he could come up with a WikiLeaks style of publicizing what the company was doing.

Martin was at that age, the cusp of adulthood, where idealism runs strong. Someone like him, who didn’t have friends to give him ballast, might go in any direction—join a jihad or the Peace Corps, or drop out of sight in a monastery.

I’d been alone in the parking area, sitting so still that rabbits were hopping close to my car. I know they destroy gardens, but their soft brown fur and dark liquid eyes make them seem innocent, helpless.

“What do you think?” I asked through my window. “Unabomber or ultra-idealist?”

They didn’t stop nibbling. I was overlooking something obvious, they seemed to be telling me.

A third possibility lay in whatever Martin had seen in old Edward Breen’s workshop. It had to do with Benjamin Dzornen, because that was what had made Cordell Breen tense up. But if it was something shameful, Edward wouldn’t have put it up on the wall. Or he had pulled a fast one on Dzornen; Dzornen had written in protest and Edward framed the letter to remind himself that even if he didn’t have that beautiful gold medallion, he was smarter than a Nobel laureate.

If I could find Alison, would she tell me whether something in the workshop had upset Martin? There were only twenty million or so people in Mexico City; it shouldn’t be too hard to locate her.

I drummed my fingers on my steering wheel. I needed to know whom Martin had gone to see right before he vanished. It couldn’t have been Cordell because Cordell was in Bar Harbor. It might have been Jari Liu; Liu could have put on a good show of feigned astonishment or worry when I saw him at the lab three days ago.

I was certain Martin had tried to contact Julius and Herta Dzornen, but I had no way of knowing if it was before or after he’d been to the Breen mansion. He could have been wanting them to admit their father was also his great-grandfather, and that they needed to fork over Dzornen’s prize money. The King of Sweden gives you a million or so dollars; if Dzornen had invested it wisely there should have been a substantial inheritance. Not, of course, judging by Julius Dzornen’s coach house.

I drew some rabbit ears and whiskers on my legal pad. Lotty thought Dzornen must have paid whatever fees and bribes it took to get Kitty Binder out of Vienna in 1939. That meant he acknowledged her paternity and his children knew it. But so what? They wouldn’t have done away with Martin. Unless Martin had proof that the prize was bogus. I was going around in circles.

Whatever awful secret Martin saw in Edward Breen’s old workshop couldn’t have been a blatant statement from Dzornen that he’d faked his research. That was a big “if,” anyway. It also couldn’t have been a photo of Dzornen’s wife shooting Kitty, since Kitty was still alive. Or she’d shot and only hit an arm or a leg.
Basta
, Vic! I admonished myself. No wild fancies here!

Edward Breen worked with all those Nazi rocket scientists after the war. Pre-war physics was a small world; even Nazi physicists would have known Dzornen; that photo from the Radium Institute in Vienna showed him and Martina, with Norwegian and German scientists. Those Nazi rocketeers Edward Breen helped bring into the States, they would have known Martina, too. I could imagine the gossip.
Oh, Dzornen, he saved his skin but he sacrificed his student. Yes, she died doing slave labor for our rocket program.
And then Breen rubbing Dzornen’s face in it.

I tried to picture young Martin seeing a letter about his great-grandmother. Is that what hadn’t added up for him? Nothing to do with his work at Metargon, only the nagging questions about his family?

In that case, maybe he’d trundled downstate to the meth house where his mother was pretending to be in rehab. Look, Mom, we could blackmail the Dzornen family, after all. Not over Dzornen’s research, but over their paternity. Her drug pals liked the idea of easy money; they started blackmailing Herta Dzornen, and she sicced some thugs on them.

I flung my pen onto the seat in disgust. Speculation, speculation, with no knowledge of anything, including Martin Binder’s character.

The rabbits fled into the underbrush, but not because of me. A gray-haired woman had roared into the area, driving my dream car, a red Jaguar XJ12. She let a pale-gold retriever out of the back; the two of them headed for a creek that runs through the woods. That’s what I should be doing, making enough money to spend my days driving my dogs around in Jaguars, not second-guessing someone who understood relativistic principles.

I, too, fled the park. Not for the shrubbery, but for Skokie. I rang Kitty Binder’s doorbell with an aggressive finger. After five minutes, I saw the front window blinds part the width of her fingers. Time passed. I rang again, and finally she opened the door the width of the chain bolt.

“Ms. Binder, has your daughter been here?” I asked, before she could speak. “I found the place where she’d been staying on the West Side of Chicago. When I went there, her pals shot at me. Maybe you saw the story on the news—one of her old friends was arrested, another seems to be badly injured. Judy is pretty toxic right now. If you’ve heard from her, or she’s here, this would be a very good time to call the police.”

She stared at me through the crack in the door, her face frozen in a stew of uneasy emotions: fear, anger, misery. “I told you, no police. The police come and I get killed.”

“Is Judy here?” I said. “Or one of her friends? Have they threatened you? If you let me in, I can help.”

“I don’t want you in my house again,” she said harshly.

“Martin,” I said, desperately trying to keep the conversation alive. “He’s cut off all communications with the world. His boss at Metargon said they haven’t been able to find any ISP—Internet service—addresses he may be using. I talked to Herta and Julius Dzornen yesterday. Martin went to see them but they won’t tell me why. Do you know?”

At that, anger blazed uppermost in her. “Those vermin! Worse than rats or cockroaches, lying, stealing—!”

“What did they lie to you about?” I asked.

“They know, but they pretend that they don’t. It’s been the same story for more than seventy years now.”

“They know what? That Benjamin was your father as well as theirs?”

She turned her head to one side, to hide the tears that had started to well. I was not supposed to see her as weak. “My father, my real father, was a builder. I told you that before.”

“Then why did you go to see Benjamin Dzornen when you got to Chicago?” I asked.

Her mouth worked. “My mother. That’s what I wanted to talk to him about. He had been her professor, she revered him. Not me, not her child, I was never important to her. Only those invisible particles she spent day and night with. She saw atoms, but she couldn’t see me. Even the last time we were alone, up in the mountains right before Germany took over Austria, she didn’t care when I tried to show her how I could dance. She wanted me to look at pictures of something invisible in the atmosphere!”

“That must have been very hard.” I spoke with sincerity: for mothers, balancing between domestic duties and private passions is harder
than standing on one toe on the point of a pin. It’s impossible to do it perfectly, but some women get it more wrong than others.

“My grandmother raised me,” Kitty said fiercely. “She was tough but she cared about me. She made my mother beg for the money so that I could go to London with Charlotte and her brother. And then my grandmother was killed. Phfft, like that! First off to Terezín, then off to Sobibor, then—no record but most likely dead. I found all this out when I went back to Vienna as an interpreter in 1952.”

“Your mother begged the money to send you to London?” I interrupted. “She got it from Professor Dzornen, didn’t she?”

Kitty stared at me as if I had wizarding powers. “He said never to tell. He told me when I saw him here, in Chicago, but he made me promise to say nothing to nobody. Anybody. How did you know? Did that smug witch Herta tell you?”

I smiled sadly. “It was a lucky guess. The war hadn’t started, your mother could still get mail from America.”

“If you talked about me to Herta, I will fire you at this minute. They were a thousand times more stuck-up than the Herschels. Those Dzornens, to them I was always the seamstress’s granddaughter. When Herta and Bettina were left alone with me, I was supposed to run their errands. They expected me to do up their hair or deliver their little love notes to the stupid boys they dated. They even thought I should clean their shoes, so I threw those into the cesspool.”

“I didn’t discuss you with Ms. Colonna,” I said. “What did Benjamin Dzornen tell you when you went to the physics department back in 1956?” I asked. “That Martina was dead?”

She stared at me. “You think you can trick me, Miss Detective? You can’t. All that chapter in my life is finished, I never discuss it. I never talked about the great professor paying my fare to London, you tricked that out of me. For the rest, if anyone asks you, the police, Princess Charlotte Herschel, the FBI, anyone, you can tell them I never discuss it.”

I had been bending over with my ear to the door to hear her. I was getting a crick in my neck, but there was no way she’d open the door for me, as angry as she was now.

“But Judy did discuss it, didn’t she,” I said.

“Judy is crazy, I thought you knew that already. There’s no telling what she might do.”

“And Martin?”

“Don’t start telling me lies about Martin. He would never talk to those Dzornens, not for any reason, so stop trying to spread muck on him.”

“If I’m going to find him, I need a good photograph,” I said, pretending I hadn’t heard her. “Something I can show to people who might have met him. Can you get me a good shot of him?”

“Do you listen to anything I say?” she hissed. “You and your detecting, you’re as bad as Martina and her atoms! Leave me alone, leave Martin alone. If you want to go into drug houses with Judy, you’re welcome to them!” She slammed the door.

Did this mean I was fired? It certainly meant I wasn’t going to be paid. A smart woman would have walked away from the whole mess then and there.

18

DIARY OF A COLD WARRIOR

B
ACK IN MY OFFICE
I had a message from Doug Kossel, the Palfry County sheriff. After my conversation with Kitty Binder, I expected the worst, that he had found Martin’s body in the cesspit behind the meth house.

“Warshawski!” He sounded unnecessarily energetic for the end of a workday. “You big-city gals know how to act. Your police buddy, what’s his name”—there was a pause while he wrestled with paper—“here it is, Downey. He called to talk to me about Schlafly, who definitely did not make a good scarecrow. When I told the Wengers—they farm that cornfield—what the body looked like, even Frank Wenger turned green around the gills. I’m not sure but what he’ll leave that little bit of corn where you found Ricky Schlafly go this year.”