Critical Mass (32 page)

“It was
my
heritage,” Judy yelled. “Kitty hated Martina, she hated her science, I was the person who kept her name alive. I named my child after her to keep her memory green. Taking those papers was
not
stealing; it was preserving!”

Judy “preserved,” Homeland Security “confiscated.” All these pretty names for theft. You hear more euphemisms for lying, cheating, even pedophilia, on the news in a week than you hear truth in a year.

I changed the subject. “Martin used to visit you without Kitty’s knowing back when he was in high school.”

Judy didn’t say anything, but her mouth twitched in a sly smile.

“Martin saw the picture of Martina in her Vienna lab when he was younger,” I persisted, “but something happened that made him come down to Palfry to get the picture and the other papers you’d, uh, preserved after his bar mitzvah. What made him want them?”

“It’s your story, you tell me.” Judy flounced on the pillows, at least as much as she could with her arms in restraints.

“He argued with you over the papers. He tried to take them, you
tried to grab them back, some of them fell into the meth pit where you let them lie. That was when you realized that these papers had more than sentimental value. And then you and Ricky tried selling them online. You thought you had Nazi nuclear secrets, always a popular item. Someone saw the auction and came to collect the papers.”

“It wasn’t me,” she said quickly. “Just Ricky. He saw Martin arguing with me and came down to see what was going on. I told him they were my granny’s heritage, she died in the Holocaust, but Ricky didn’t have any respect. He even sold his own grandmother’s drawer handles, like he thought they were really gold when they were just polished brass. I never would have sold my own granny—”

“Of course not,” I said soothingly. “Who were the buyers? Did Ricky ever actually get any money, or did they just drive up in their Lincoln Navigator and try to collect the papers at gunpoint?”

“You’re so smart, you know everything, you should know that, too.” She began weeping. “I’m in pain, you won’t leave me alone, you won’t help me. I’m supposed to do all the work around here, my mother’s dead, my daddy’s dead, the Dzornens stole my money, and all you want to do is talk, talk, talk. Go away, I hate you, I hate you!”

Lotty tried to put in a few questions of her own, including what Judy wanted us to do with Kitty’s body, but Judy began screaming loudly for meds. “Put old batty Katty in the ground, I don’t care, just get the fuck out of here if you won’t help me.”

I looked at her thin, tormented face, her mouth one large pain-filled gash in her head. She’d worn me out. I looked at Lotty and jerked my head toward the door.

Lotty stayed in the room a bit longer. She came out a few minutes later, looking grim. We didn’t talk on the way back to the parking lot. As I strapped myself into the Audi’s passenger seat, Lotty said she wanted to go to Evanston, meaning to Max’s house.

For once, Lotty drove at a normal pace, didn’t weave around slow-
moving cars on the clogged streets, didn’t race the lights as they turned red. We got to Max’s around seven-thirty. His lovely old home, where he and Térèz, his long-dead wife, had raised their two children, is across the road from Lake Michigan. While Lotty filled him in on our stressful meeting with Judy, I wandered over to the lake.

The sun had set; there were a few families out on the private beach, but no one could really see me. I took off my clothes and folded them on a bench. The water was still warm from our long hot summer. I waded out and let it envelop my naked body. The lake seemed to fold arms of love around me. Jake’s long fingers caressing me, yes, but I thought more of my mother, whose love for me had been both fierce and tender.

Kitty and Judy Binder never had that bond. The invective Judy spewed had been her withdrawal speaking, but a painful wound underlay it. Kitty herself had drunk a toxic mix of worry, anger, loss—her real father, the builder, whoever that was, dead in the war; her birth father refused to acknowledge her; her mother cared more for protons than for Kitty; the grandmother who raised her was murdered in the Holocaust. There’d been precious little love for Kitty to pass on to her own daughter.

I swam to shore and fumbled my way in the darkness to the bench where I’d left my clothes. I found a towel on top of them. Max, or Lotty, had noticed I was swimming.

I dried off and joined them in Max’s rose garden, where he had set out cold roast duck and salads. He and I drank one of his bottles of Echezeaux. We talked of Jake’s West Coast tour and other musical matters.

It was only as Lotty and I were helping him clear the table that I went back to our visit to Judy. “It was my question about ‘duck and cover’ that got through to her. It frightened her. Why?”

“Do you think so?” Lotty said. “All I remember is her cursing me.”

“She was quiet for an instant, and then wondered if I was punishing her because she’d mentioned it. What’s so important about that?”

“It was the slogan of the Civil Defense movies in the fifties,” Max
said. “Térèz and I were furious when we saw them. They had a turtle who laughed and was very jolly, telling children if they crawled under their desks, they would be as safe from fire falling from the sky as a turtle in his shell. Meaning, not safe at all.”

I shook my head, baffled. “I know about the movies, although they’d stopped using them by the time I was in school. What I don’t understand is why Judy thought she was being punished for saying it.”

“That isn’t what Judy said,” Lotty said. “She was laughing because ‘duck and cover’ had worked for her, despite someone—probably Kitty—telling her it was nonsense. Kitty would have ordered Judy not to repeat any of her views on American defense policy at school. You didn’t spend time in Nazi Austria without learning to keep very quiet if you opposed government policies. Not to mention the intense anti-Communist hysteria here during the fifties. If you opposed nuclear weapons you were labeled a Red or Red sympathizer.”

I pictured Judy as a little girl, her mother warning her not to repeat any of the family’s subversive opinions in public, warning her so sternly that in her adult, drug-eaten brain, she thought some terrible punishment was meted out for trumpeting “duck and cover” as a survival strategy.

“It’s as good an explanation as any,” I said. “It’s just—I don’t know—her reaction made me expect something deeper. Maybe it’s because of Homeland Security being on my tail, or Metargon thinking that Martin has absconded with their version of the Stuxnet virus. Is this story about family secrets or nuclear secrets?”

“It could be both,” Max said. “His great-grandmother died when Benjamin Dzornen could have saved her. Edward Breen brought Martina’s Nazi student to the States to do rocket and weapons work. Those connect Martin’s family to nuclear secrets.”

I took a handful of silverware from Lotty to dry. “I feel like I’m in the middle of that old Dylan song:
Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Warshawski-Jones?
”

To the Editor

Physics Today

July 1985

Not since the days of “Duck and Cover” have we seen so much time, money and energy spent on something as futile as President Reagan’s “Star Wars” plan. The Great Communicator knows that money talks: 500 million in immediate cash has gone to the top ten defense contractors to spread across the United States. This doesn’t include some hundred billion in multi-year appropriations for space lasers, secure ground communications, and many other expensive fantasies. I was glad to see Edward Breen’s Metargon company in the top ten: Mr. Breen and I are old collaborators, and I know he will do whatever it takes to make his contractual obligations come true.

Despite the beautiful graphics in your June issue, this initiative is more an exercise in expensive science fiction than in achievable physics and engineering. So far, the only tests of laser weapons in destroying incoming targets have worked within a margin of error for stochastic excursions only, but notwithstanding this, appropriations are happily escalating.

The program is destabilizing, both for our delicate relations with our European allies and with the Soviet Union, thus leading us closer to the preemptive first strikes so dear to defense hawks.

It has only been a short two years since we got to see a leaked Pentagon report, claiming that the U.S. could survive a “protracted,” i.e., five-year-long, nuclear war. Defense Secretary Weinberger’s undersecretary for Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces has said that if the United States had a good civil defense policy, we’d be back to normal within five years of total nuclear war.

Last year on the anniversary of Hiroshima, the United States Energy Secretary went to the Nevada Proving Grounds where he witnessed his first thermonuclear test. He said it was “exciting,” and that he remained committed to a winnable nuclear war.

I had the dubious privilege of spending time at the nuclear weapons proving grounds in Nevada. The ground water there is still undrinkable, the cattle who stray onto the land to graze suffer terrible deformities, and towns a hundred miles away suffer from rare cancers even to this day.

Star Wars apologists have no idea what would happen if we started detonating our weapons on human populations, but the Roman historian Tacitus must surely have seen their vision when he wrote, “They ravage, they slaughter, and call it ‘empire.’ They create a desert and call it ‘peace.’”

Sincerely

Gertrud Memler, Ph.D., Physics, University of Vienna

July 2, 1985

To: All Field Agents

From: Barney Montoya, Senior Agent in Charge

Locate Gertrud Memler. This search has highest priority. She is an embarrassment to the President of the United States and it is a black mark on our Bureau that we have failed to find her during the last twenty-five years.

Our file on her shows she was a Nazi sympathizer or supporter brought into the U.S. in 1946 to help build weapons & rockets, vanished from Nevada 1955. She has a deep cover, surfaces briefly with letters or articles on weapons, but always uses false return addresses.

Stressed with
Physics Today
urgentest that they not print further letters from her without Bureau approval, but editor uncooperative. Resisted search of premises, forced us to produce Federal search warrant. Have put watch on all incoming/outgoing mail from
Physics Today
, but Memler seldom strikes the same publication twice.

Memler moved seamlessly from Nazi collaborator to Communist supporter. She has access to classified documents. Attached is last known photo, with our forensic specialists’ work-up on how she might look today, at age 73. Advise all immigration staff to look at passports; if she’s living outside the country she’s probably traveling under a different name.

29

NIGHT CALLER

I
HAD LOTTY DROP
me under the L tracks at Belmont and Sheffield, four blocks from my home. If someone was watching me, I didn’t want them to put her Audi on their list. Neither of us said much during the ride from Max’s house, but as I opened the passenger door, Lotty spoke.

“Judy’s dramas cause a great deal of damage in the lives around her. Her mother, her son, now it’s your turn to get burned in her fires.”

“Was there any joy, ever, in that household?” I asked. “The picture of Leonard with Martin at the science fair made him look happy and proud of his grandson. Did he feel that way toward his daughter?”

Lotty spoke slowly, thinking back. “When Judy was born, Leonard was as delighted as if someone had handed him a winning lottery ticket. Of course I never was part of the day-to-day life of the family: I can’t tell you what he did when she brought home a C in math, or wasn’t interested in playing the piano. My guess is he didn’t mind; he didn’t care about credentials, or achievement.”

Someone honked behind us; Lotty pulled over to the curb. The fluorescent lights around the station turned her walnut-colored skin green.

“I think Kitty was rather different,” she said. “For all she whined about her real father being a builder, and claimed she didn’t want academics or scientists around her, that was a case of the lady protesting
too much. She wanted her real father to be the Nobel Prize winner. At least, that’s what I believe; I don’t know the secrets of her heart.”

“Poor Judy,” I said, “although poor all of them, really. Sometimes the pain I encounter in my job is more than I can rightly handle.”

Lotty squeezed my hand. “Yes, for me as well.”

As I got out of the car, I could see tears shining in her eyes. I walked home slowly, not worried about tails, just weighted down. So much red wine at the end of a long day hadn’t been a good idea. It makes you mellow for an hour, then it brings you down.

When I got to Racine Avenue, I walked up the opposite side of the street from my building, scanning cars, looking for anyone who was out of place among the dog walkers and homebound bar crawlers. They all seemed innocuous, so when a young woman suddenly appeared on the sidewalk near my front door, my heartbeat spiked. I ducked and rolled without thinking. When she called my name in a soft, doubtful voice I got to my feet, feeling like an idiot.