Critical Mass (24 page)

“A man was pushed off a building,” Käthe says loudly. “We told you on the way home, but you wouldn’t listen. We saw it. These other men
picked him up and threw him off, just as if he was a doll, and they laughed. They said he’d been an ugly Jew when he was alive and now he was pretty because he was a dead Jew! And your stupid atoms won’t save you from someone doing that to you.”

“That’s enough coarse talk to your mother,” Frau Herschel says sharply, adding to Fräulein Martina, “Your own mother is frightened; we all are frightened, so Frau Saginor says these things. I tell her that Käthe repeats them, and that perhaps she shouldn’t complain about you quite so much, but—”

Fräulein Martina smiles as Frau Herschel breaks off, mid-sentence. “I know what Mama says: that if I loved my child as much as I love physics, Käthe wouldn’t complain about my work. I’m sorry that I didn’t notice the man who was pushed yesterday. What a terrible thing for the children to have seen.

“The trouble is, we had to leave the lab early on account of the curfew, but my mind stayed in the library, not with what was happening on the street. My mother is right: that’s my biggest fault, not seeing what’s in front of me. Or second-biggest.”

The biggest, according to Frau Saginor, being Martina’s coldness, but even as she speaks to Frau Herschel, Martina’s mind scurries from her daughter and the dead man, back to the Institute library.

“I hadn’t been able to find a reference I was looking for,” she tries to explain. “It was an old paper by a German chemist, Ida Noddack; I finally tracked it down this afternoon. No one paid attention to it when she published it, because she criticized Fermi’s study of uranium decay, and his work is supposed to be beyond criticism. Still, when I first read it, I did wonder if we should redo Fermi’s experiments, and go down to elements below lead. When I suggested as much to Professor Dzornen, he said we didn’t have the resources and that we had to accept Fermi’s results. Anyway, there’s no better experimentalist in physics today. But Noddack suggested that U-235 doesn’t decay into trans-uranic elements, but into—”

Käthe interrupts her mother with a loud scream. She grabs the teddy bear from Herr Herschel, darts to the window and hurls the bear down to the courtyard. “Now he’s dead, and a good thing, too, ugly Jew bear. No more useless
klatsch-klatsch-klatsch
from his stupid mouth!”

The shock in all the adult faces makes Käthe run from the room, trailing her knitting. Little Charlotte, stunned only for a second, leaps up and follows her. The adults hear the two girls kicking and shouting in the hall.

Herr Herschel goes out and separates them. He speaks with a sternness that is unusual for him. “Käthe, you must go to your own home now. We will see you again for lessons when you can behave in a civilized fashion.”

He pulls his granddaughter away from the Saginor child, shocked to see her small face contorted with such hatred. It’s not enough that the Austrians hate us, we have to hate each other, he thinks. The antipathy between little Charlotte and Käthe seemed to date from birth, long before the Nazis took over Austria, but the way they all have to live now, five or more people to a room, makes everyone edgy.

The Matzo Island, Frau Herschel used to call the Leopoldstadt where the Saginors live. Like most people of her age and class, she’d been contemptuous of the slum which poor Jews from the eastern reaches of the Habsburg Empire had flooded in the days after the Great War. She doesn’t use that phrase now that they are living there themselves.

On the Matzo Island, their daughter flirted and pouted and danced and sang with Moishe Radbuka, a violinist. No one could resist Sophie when she acted irresistible, least of all a Matzo violinist. The violinist gave Sophie Herschel a baby, whom she called little Charlotte, an olive branch to her mother, who seized on the infant with glad hands. When Martina Saginor had a baby only a few months later, no one knew who had given it to her.

“Martina, such an odd child, an odder woman, one wonders how the child Käthe was conceived,” Frau Herschel used to say. “Perhaps some explosion in the lab produced a baby.”

Tonight, instead of punishing little Charlotte for fighting like a ghetto cat, as her grandmother wishes, Herr Herschel carries her down four flights of stairs and out into the courtyard. They find Teddy, dirty from the mud and the slops on the cobblestones, but otherwise intact.

Herr Herschel picks up a scrap of paper torn from a magazine and wipes the bear with clumsy fingers. Perhaps his wife can clean Teddy with one of the mysterious concoctions she is able to manufacture out of their minute rations.

He pulls Lotte to him. She trips and stumbles on one of the loose cobblestones, but bites back a cry because she knows Käthe is watching, ready to make fun of her for her clumsiness.

Herr Herschel bends to replace the loose stone. The ground underneath has subsided, leaving a sizable hole; all the stones in this section of the courtyard are loose. Courtyard—what a grand name for a small circle that has nothing courtly about it at all, just dead trees and bare glass-shard-filled earth where grass once grew. Only the stench of rotting waste connects it to a medieval court.

He puts an arm around his granddaughter and leads her back into the building.

21

DOWN ON THE FARM

P
RIVATE EYES ARE
REQUIRED
to tell local LEOs when we’re about to start stalking or staking out on their territory. In Chicago, I don’t bother: the cops would either snarl at me to get out of their hair, or tie me up for hours in useless interrogations about my investigations. In Palfry, though, I began my day at Doug Kossel’s headquarters. In a county like this, everyone knows everyone. If the first person I questioned didn’t rat me out to the sheriff, the second would for sure.

“Your funeral,” he said. “No one’s talked to me about the boy, but if he’s putting the same things up his nose as his ma, he likely sneaked in and out when the farmers were sleeping. This is an early-to-bed kind of place, you know.”

I nodded meekly: there was no point in offering the sheriff my version of Martin Binder. The sheriff’s office was in the city-county building at the south end of Main Street. I’d found a parking space without any trouble: the Buy-Smart outside town had decimated Palfry’s stores even before the economy collapsed. Now there was just a handful of survivors: a small drugstore that did a brisk business in alcohol and lottery tickets, a dusty furniture store, and a few diners.

I’d left Chicago at six, covering the hundred miles down I-55 in under two hours, but as the sheriff had said, this was an early-to-bed town. People had been working their fields since before sunrise. At
eight-thirty, they were taking a break at Lazy Susan’s Coffee Shop, which looked like the one lively place on the street.

When I walked inside, heads turned. Strangers were rare enough down here to merit a second look, but I was merely another woman in jeans whose dark hair showed flecks of white, nothing out of the ordinary. Conversations resumed.

Lazy Susan’s was a no-frills kind of place. Padded red banquettes along the walls, tubular chairs around Formica tables in the middle, paper placemats, and a couple of waitresses who dashed around far too quickly to be called lazy anything. Most of the tables were filled, but I found an empty stool at the counter.

“What’ll yours be, hon?” A waitress appeared out of nowhere, pouring coffee into my mug without asking.

The flimsy placemats had the menus printed on them. Eggs, hash browns, waffles. I’d had coffee before leaving Chicago, but I realized I was famished.

“A short stack and OJ,” I said.

She didn’t write it down, just hollered it to the griddleman behind her and zipped off to her next battle station.

“How’s the dog?”

I turned to see a woman in uniform standing behind me. Jenny Orlick, her badge read. One of the deputies who’d come when I found Ricky Schlafly’s body in the cornfield. She’d done a better job than me—I wouldn’t have recognized her again.

“She’s on the mend, Deputy. Would you like her when she’s shed her heartworm larvae? She seems to have a sweet disposition.”

“No dog from that hellhole can have a sweet disposition,” Orlick said. “Anyway, I have three cats who would rip her to ribbons within a week. Is that why you came down? To find her a home?”

I pulled Martin Binder’s picture out of my briefcase. “I’m hoping someone around here might have spotted him. I need to find him.”

“Is he a Chicago kid? Why would he be down here?”

“He’s the son of a woman from the meth house.” I gave Orlick a quick thumbnail of Martin’s disappearance, his grandmother’s murder, the drug house in Chicago where I’d flushed Judy Binder earlier in the week.

Orlick frowned over Martin’s face. “I think I’d remember him, he looks so, well, New Yorky. We only have two Jewish families here in Palfry, so he’d kind of stand out, if you know what I mean. If you want, I’ll take it over to the Buy-Smart, put it up on their bulletin board. At the County office, too, if you have an extra.”

I pulled a half-dozen copies out of my case and printed my cell phone number on the bottom of each one. My short stack arrived as Jenny’s partner, Glenn Davilats, came over to clap her on the shoulder and tell her it was time to roll. Both of them looked better than they had when we’d met at the cornfield.

“This here’s my number,” Orlick said, handing me a card from the Palfry County sheriff’s department. “I’ll call you if I hear anything, but you get in touch if anything gets squirrelly, or if you find another druggie with his pecker getting pecked.”

“Pecker pecking” must be a local idiom, not a sign that the sheriff was a psychopath. Jenny and her partner took off, but my waitress and one of my counter-mates had heard our conversation, which meant it spread through the coffee shop at warp speed. While I ate my pancakes, most of the people in Lazy Susan’s stopped by to look at Martin’s picture. None of them admitted to having seen him before.

As the diner cleared out, the waitresses took a breather. Two went outside for a smoke, but the third perched on the stool next to mine.

“You really a detective?” she asked.

I nodded. “These pancakes are delicious. Housemade?”

She grinned. “You flattering me because Jenny Orlick told you I’m Susie Foyle?”

I shook my head. “Lazy Susan? How come? Stevedores on the waterfront don’t work as hard as you.”

She was pleased by the compliment, but said, “Oh, you know, it’s how the two words come together. When I was a kid, my brothers used to tease me, calling me Lazy Susie. How come you want to find this Martin kid?” she asked.

“His granny raised him,” I said. “He disappeared two weeks ago. His granny died in my arms night before last. I owe it to her to find him.”

Susie nodded soberly. “A lot of that going around. Not grandmas dying in your arms, I mean, but grandmas having to raise their own kids’ children. We see it down here as much as you do in Chicago. It’s hard.”

She picked up the picture and stared at it. “I haven’t seen the boy, but I’m sure he was in town, even though everyone’s saying ‘no,’ to you. One of those rumors that zips around, you know how that goes. If I was you, I’d talk to the Wengers. They have the farm closest to the Schlafly place.”

“The sheriff told me it’s a quarter mile away, that no one there saw anything.”

Susie grinned again. “Don’t know why he’d say that. If you think every farmer in the county doesn’t keep track of the comings and goings of the neighbors up to a mile away, that only proves you’re a city girl. I should know—I grew up on one of those farms. The gossip could crush a combine. By the way, you never did tell me if you were really a detective.”

“Private.” I took my license out of my wallet to show her, and handed her one of my cards.

“Well, V. I. Warshawski, good luck to you. If you’re still around at lunchtime, I bet you’ve never tasted as good a BLT as what I serve here.”

She sketched a map on the back of one of her placemats, showing me how to get to the Wengers’ house. She also told me to put Martin’s photo on the corkboard by the front entrance. I found a place in between ads for a used tractor, an offer to exchange haircuts for fresh
vegetables, and an announcement of the Palfry County haybale-throwing contest.

In my car I studied Susie’s map. East of town, toward the Schlafly place, then right at a crossroads, left to a county road that ran parallel to the one in front of Schlafly’s. I took a minute to look up the family on my iPad. Frank and Roberta, early fifties; one child, Warren, a high school senior, still at home; two daughters who’d moved away, one to St. Louis, the other to Columbus, Ohio.

Before going to the Wenger farm, I detoured past the Schlafly place. There were no crime scene tapes, either at the house or the field, just the broken stalks to show where the county van had driven in to collect Ricky Schlafly’s body. The house looked abandoned, but I walked around the perimeter, checking for any movement behind the windows that weren’t boarded over. I hoped the sheriff had gotten someone to remove the dead Rottweiler from the kitchen.

The road to the Wengers’ was a badly pitted gravel track. I went slowly, to preserve my tires. I had to pull over to the verge a couple of times as pickups roared past me, covering the Mustang with a fine white dust. As I bumped along, I passed a hand-painted sign telling me that the Wengers’ Prairie Market was straight ahead. Fresh eggs, flowers, tomatoes and “notionals,” whatever those might be.

The corn on either side of the car looked brown and tired, signs of the terrible drought gripping Illinois. Blackbirds and crows were darting through the stalks, even though I couldn’t see any ears worth harvesting. Unless there was another body in there.

When I’d been down here before, Frank or Roberta had been on a tractor in the distance, but the fields were empty this morning. I was in luck when I pulled into the yard: a man was working on a tractor parked in front of a dilapidated outbuilding. Beyond him was another building with a bit of a parking lot around it, a large picture window, and a sign proclaiming “Wenger’s Prairie Market.”