Critical Mass (42 page)

I needed an intern. I needed Martin Binder—I didn’t think Kitty had ever hired a nanny for him, but maybe Ada Byron was an old lover of Benjamin Dzornen who’d kept an eye on Martin for him. I looked her up online.

According to six million hits on Metar-Quest, she was the long-dead daughter of the poet Byron. Ada played such an important role in
the history of computers and programming, they’d even named a computer language for her. Since she’d been dead now for about a hundred sixty years, it was hard to see how she’d written to Benjamin Dzornen in 1969, or to Kitty a mere seven years ago.

Martin knew who she was; he’d disappeared to go look for her. Or he’d been killed, a nasty voice whispered in my inner ear. I rubbed my forehead. The more I learned the stupider I felt.

“Martin, why couldn’t you have laid down a trail of bread crumbs for me?” I snarled.

I went back to the catalog record for Dzornen’s papers, but I’d had an exhausting morning and was having trouble keeping my eyes open. Philip Marlowe depended on his trusty pint of rye to get him going after he’d been sandbagged. My detecting was fueled by espresso. The coffee bar I’d gone to a week ago was only a ten-minute walk away.

On my way from the reading desk, I saw a young woman who’d been near me when I’d been showing the head shots to the librarians. She was giving me the same sideways glance she’d given the pictures. I walked into the exhibition space, stopping in front of a newer Bible, a mere six hundred years old, written in Hebrew and Latin. I pretended to study it, long enough for a hesitating person to make up her mind.

When I saw her walking toward the reading room exit, I moved slowly out into the hall. In the long corridor, I stood in rapt attention in front of a description of the exhibit. Finally, I heard the door open behind me. I waited another second, then turned to look.

The woman appeared to be about Alison Breen’s age. She was wearing the frayed jeans and motorcycle boots that are the uniform du jour among Millennials. She moved from foot to foot but couldn’t figure out what to say.

“I went to school here, but I never knew they had a Bible that was thirteen hundred years old,” I said. “I also never knew about Fermi
surfaces. I sometimes think I wasted my scholarship by focusing on languages and politics.”

She gave a nervous smile. “I heard part of your conversation with the librarian, about the Dzornen papers, you know.”

“I don’t know how much you heard, but I’m a detective.” I showed her my ID and gave her a thumbnail sketch of Kitty Binder’s death and my search for Martin.

“And you really think knowing who was pretending to be Julius Dzornen will help you find this lady’s murderer?” She was twisting a strand of hair, looking around to make sure no one was listening.

“I don’t know,” I said frankly. “But I’ve been putting a lot of muscle into searching for Martin Binder and I’m not getting very far. If you know something, I can promise I will not reveal that I learned it from you.”

“This is going to sound stupid,” she warned me.

“I’ve been a detective for over twenty years and I’ve learned that the smallest, silliest things can be the most important. Would you like to get coffee so you don’t have to worry about who’s listening to you?”

She nodded gratefully and led me along the corridor to the main part of the library. I followed her down a flight of stairs to a coffee shop. It was a Spartan space, part of the old stacks with tables and chairs and bright fluorescent lights. She let me buy her a cola, but I forwent coffee when I saw what it looked like. We sat in a corner where we could make sure no one was eavesdropping.

“Were you really a student here,” she asked, “or did you say that to get me to talk to you?”

“I really was a student here,” I assured her. “Undergrad and law. My senior thesis was on connections among the Mob, Chicago politicians and waste haulers and how they made sure the city’s garbage ended up in South Chicago.”

Her lips rounded in the kind of respect people accord a topic that sounds truly boring to them, but she responded with her name, Olivia,
and her own senior paper, on witchcraft narratives in seventeenth-century France.

“That’s why I’m using Special Collections. Maybe this sounds trivial compared to studying the Mob, but I’ve been learning Medieval French and Latin and reading some of the old French narratives. Anyway, last week, I think it was Thursday, I was having cramps so I was in the bathroom a long time, and the two librarians who were on duty today came in.

“Ms. Turley, the one you were talking to, asked Ms. Kolberg, did she remember the kid who came in looking at the Dzornen papers a while back. She said he’d called himself Julius Dzornen, and she’d assumed he was like a grandson or great-grandson of Benjamin Dzornen, you know, he worked on the Manhattan Project and was a huge name in physics; they cover his work in the physics core.”

Olivia paused, waiting for a response; yes, I remembered the physics core.

“So Ms. Turley said someone else had come in last week, looking for something in the papers, and the box he requested held a genealogy chart. There aren’t any young Dzornens, Ms. Turley said. The only Julius is like seventy or something.

“Well, I was really eavesdropping by then, because my dad knows Julius Dzornen. I don’t know if you know him, Julius, I mean, but he’s kind of a weird guy, a real loner, but he’s a bird-watcher, and so is my dad, so they see each other out in the Wooded Isle on Sunday mornings. When I saw my folks that night, I mentioned it to my dad, about a young Julius Dzornen being in Special Collections.”

She looked at me unhappily. “I guess my dad told Julius when they were out birding on Sunday, because Monday morning, Julius Dzornen came into the reading room. He was furious, wanting to know who had been using his name. And of course it’s against library policy to say, like they told you today. So Julius started to go behind
the counter, yelling out threats, and someone had to call campus security.”

Olivia looked up at me, her face crinkled in guilt. “I feel so terrible about it. He’s this pathetic guy whose dad won the Nobel Prize and he doesn’t have any life at all, and it was because of me that he got in trouble. I mean, the librarians thought they were alone in the bathroom; they never would have said anything if they’d known I was in there. Do you think I should tell them?”

I shook my head. “I wouldn’t. It’s water over the dam. They didn’t mean harm, you didn’t mean harm, let it lie. And I can tell you this much: as of last night, the real Julius was certainly out and about, not under arrest, so I wouldn’t worry about it too much.”

I kept my tone casual as I added, “Were you in the reading room back at the end of August?”

Olivia blushed. “My boyfriend broke up with me in August. He was doing research in Avignon and I was in Roussillon, so we were going to meet in Arles and walk the pilgrim road, but the night before we were supposed to meet, he texted me that he’d met someone else. Can you believe that? Breaking up by text without even coming to see me in person? Anyway, I didn’t feel like hiking by myself, so I came home and started doing more work here.”

I pulled my photos from my bag again. “Any of these guys look familiar?”

“I’m sure it was him.” Olivia pointed to Martin. “I noticed him mostly because he and I were the only people in the reading room who weren’t like a hundred years old.”

“You didn’t happen to notice what he was looking at?”

She grinned, suddenly mischievous. “Like, box seven, folder nine? No. I wouldn’t have known even at the time. You can’t tell across the reading room what anyone is looking at.”

She looked again at the mug shots I’d laid on the small tabletop.
“This guy was in this morning, though I don’t know what he was doing.”

She tapped Jari Liu’s face with the eraser end of her pencil.

I half rose in my chair. “Is he still there?”

“I don’t think so. He only stayed an hour or so.” She blushed again. “I should be translating old French legal documents, not studying the other patrons. Speaking of which, I’ve wasted too much time today. Thanks for the Coke.”

She got up. “You really won’t mention this, right, about me and the librarians?”

“What’s that about you and the librarians?” I quizzed her. “I don’t remember you saying anything about them.”

She left quickly, tossing her can in the recycle bin on her way out. I waited until she was partway up the stairs so she wouldn’t worry that someone saw her giving me information.

It was after two. I was hungry and I still wanted caffeine, but the Special Collections reading room would close in a few hours. I ate a banana from the snack bar in the coffee shop and hoped that would carry me through the afternoon.

40

THE RADETZKY MARCH

W
HEN I RETURNED
to Special Collections, Olivia was at a table in the middle of the reading room. I pretended not to see her as I scanned the room for Jari Liu. He wasn’t there. Why were the Chicago librarians so scrupulous? I would have given my 401k, all thirty-seven thousand dollars of it, to know what files Liu had been looking at.

I spent half an hour compiling a list of the boxes and folders I wanted to see, besides the Ada Byron letter. A note in the file said that most of the correspondence around the Manhattan Project and Dzornen’s involvement in the hydrogen bomb still had a top-secret clearance and was unavailable.

I saw that Dzornen had held a number of patents, some for improvements to reactor components for the hydrogen bomb, some in X-ray crystallography. Some were for inventions whose application meant nothing to me, cloud chambers, gas spectrometers, one for an improvement to ferromagnetic drum memory.

Maybe my cynical thought that Breen had hidden the BREENIAC sketch himself was wrong. He’d sent Jari Liu down here to look at Dzornen’s patents, because as soon as Julius said someone was using his name in the library, Breen knew it must have been Martin. Breen wanted to see what patent history Martin was looking at. Or perhaps not.

Since I could only get a few folders at a time, I first requested the one that held the Ada Byron letter. I also asked for family papers and
correspondence from Vienna between 1936, when the Dzornens left for America, and December 1941, when American entry into the war made it impossible to get mail from Europe.

It was almost three when I got my first set of materials, and the librarians warned me that the reading room closed at four forty-five. The Ada Byron letter wasn’t among them; the clerk explained that they were still locating that box.

“It’s not missing, is it?” I asked.

The clerk assured me it was merely in transit. That was helpful: it persuaded me that Jari Liu had come to see the Ada Byron letter. Or left after he’d read it.

I looked at the genealogy chart, but it only listed the Dzornens I already knew about, Benjamin, Ilse, the three children they’d had together, along with ancestors in what today is the Czech Republic. A handful had made it through the war, but most had died in 1942 or ’43. The chart didn’t mention Kitty Binder or her family. I went quickly through the folders in the family history box, but they all related to Dzornen’s life before Martina became part of it.

A staff member took those papers from me and handed me the folder that contained Ada Byron’s letter, which was in a sleeve about halfway through the folder. The typed name “Ada Byron” appeared in the upper left corner without a return address and there was no address beyond “Benjamin Dzornen, The Enrico Fermi Institute,” in the middle of the envelope.

I carefully removed the envelope from the plastic sleeve and took out the letter that was folded inside. It was written on the onionskin paper that I remembered from my childhood when my mother wrote to Italian friends. The text was typed on an old manual by someone not very expert with the keys—a lot of letters had double strikes through them as the writer went back to correct herself. It began without a salutation.

I was sorry to read about your illness. I think of it as part of the long disease of our century, filled as it has been with suffering and death. There is much I would write you, but I do not know if you will ever see this page; I don’t know who is guarding you from your correspondents. And anyway, what point is there to rehashing those old quarrels, the ones in public or in private? I’m sorry you felt I did not keep my word, but you were the finest scientist of my time and I couldn’t bear to see you abase yourself to those so far beneath you.

Now, though, all I wish for you is peace, so please know that when you are gone, I will keep your name alive in a green and kind way, remembering you from the days of my youth, when ideas poured so quickly and thickly it was as if I could reach out a hand to touch them. Yours were always the most exhilarating, forcing all of us to see the world in a new and different way. That is how I shall remember you.

I know that you have always shared my lack of interest in

The letter ended abruptly there. I looked in the envelope, wondering if there was a second sheet, but didn’t see one. Lack of interest in what? Religion? Politics? Children?

I put the letter back in its folder and placed it to one side for photocopying. As I closed the folder, I saw that the header on it noted a two-page letter. I took the envelope out again and inspected it. There was nothing else inside.

I looked through the other documents on the table, to see if it had slipped into another folder, but didn’t see it. I took the folder to the
front desk and showed the letter to Rachel Turley. She shook her head, frowning in worry. “You’re sure it didn’t get slipped into other papers on your desk? It’s flimsy paper, after all.”

“I don’t think so, but you can send someone to look through them in case I missed it.”

She got up herself and went through the folders on my table one page at a time. I even let her look in my briefcase. I turned out my pockets, but the only paper in them was the FOIA letter about Gertrud Memler that I’d taken from Martin’s room the other night.