Critical Mass (43 page)

“This is not good,” Turley said. “If we’ve misplaced it, we’re unbearably negligent, but if someone stole it—I guess that makes me negligent as well.”

She hurried out the door to the reference area, where I saw her in agitated conference with the other librarian. The two disappeared into a back room.

In a movie, the detective would rub a pencil over the back of the first page and the second would appear, with Ada Byron’s address. In real life, the detective felt like chewing the folder in frustration.

I stared into the near distance. Someone writing as Ada Byron had known Dzornen a long time, known him as the preeminent scientist of her youth. She hadn’t written under her own name, because she didn’t want Dzornen’s wife or his secretary to throw the letter out unread.

The conciliatory first paragraph suggested that Ada was really Gertrud Memler. She had attacked Dzornen in public for his support of the H-bomb and his opposition to the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty. Who knew what had happened between them in private?

Dzornen had slept with Martina Saginor; that probably hadn’t been his only affair with a student. Memler had also been a student at the Radium Institute in Vienna, after all. She became a Nazi, running a nuclear research installation, which meant she was an ambitious and politically savvy Nazi. And on some road to Damascus, the scales had fallen from her eyes and she’d become a pacifist.

I looked at the clock. I needed to get through a lot more material in a short time; I turned to Dzornen’s mail from 1930 through 1941. He’d had a large correspondence. I felt a vicarious thrill at seeing Einstein’s name on several long letters. Lise Meitner had written Dzornen, as had Fermi, Segrè, Rabi, the whole pantheon of twentieth-century physics. I looked at the letters long enough to see that they were filled with equations or questions about weapons policy. Einstein never wrote, “Sorry about your troubles with Ada, or Gertrud, or Martina, old chap.”

I took a quick look at the box of patents. Nothing Dzornen invented seemed connected to the BREENIAC machine, at least as far as I could guess from the single-paragraph description at the top.

Much of the mail to Dzornen from Europe, especially after 1938, was handwritten in German. It was a hard script to decipher when I didn’t know the language to begin with. In the end, I thought I identified three letters that might have been from M. Saginor, although the signature, M. Saginor, might have been “W. Oaginow.”

Because I wasn’t traveling with my smartphone, I couldn’t photograph them. I put them to one side for photocopying and slowly continued through the thick folders. I looked at the clock: four-fifteen. I was panicking at the slippage of time and my own inability to figure anything out when I picked up a cellophane folder that held the title page of a book.
Radetzkymarsch
, von Joseph Roth. I thought at first it was in the collection by mistake, but when I turned it over, I saw a letter had been written in pencil on the reverse.

The text was so faded and difficult that I almost passed it over, but the date caught me up. 17 November 1941, three weeks before Pearl Harbor. The text was beyond me and the signature was maddeningly illegible. The writer had printed the address, though: Novaragasse 38A.

Novaragasse, Novara Street, was where Lotty and her grandparents had to move when Nazis evicted them from their flat. I squinted at the signature again. It might be “Herschel.” A chill ran down my arms: I was holding a precious piece of Lotty’s history.

I carried it and the letters from Martina Saginor to the copy machine. My hands were trembling from excitement; I was afraid I might damage the fragile paper.

Ms. Turley, who’d come into the reading room to remind us we had to wrap things up for the day, saw I was having trouble getting the documents out of their sleeves and came over to help. She took over the letter written on the book title and worked to get the contrast in the faded pencil script as clear as possible. She also helped me copy the three letters from M. Saginor.

She asked me to wait while she went through the reading room to remind the other researchers that they were about to close. I pulled my papers together and went to the reference stand to wait.

“Ms. Warshawski, I’m going to talk to the library director about this missing page. We take this kind of disappearance very seriously, and we’ll start an investigation. I just want you to know that.”

“If you told me who else had been in these archives, I could probably help you track down the paper—unless Jari Liu or the person posing as Julius Dzornen has destroyed it,” I said.

She flinched. “I can’t tell you, not even under these circumstances. But if you happen on the second page, please let me know at once: we will want to start a criminal prosecution.”

41

BIRD MAN OF HYDE PARK

W
HEN I GOT OUTSIDE,
the rain had stopped, but the wind was blowing cold through my windbreaker. I jogged over to the coffee bar. While they pulled some shots for me, I took out one of my burn phones to call Lotty. She was still at the clinic, Ms. Coltrain told me, but was going up to Max’s afterward. I left a message that I would meet her there.

I took a hummus sandwich to eat as I walked back to Martin’s Subaru. I passed the old Breen house on my way up University Avenue. Julius’s Honda was still nowhere in sight. On impulse, I cut through to the alley. Lights were still out in the coach house; there was still no answer to the doorbell. The only life came from the birds, pecking each other away from the feeders.

Perhaps Julius had tripped and fallen and was lying in a coma. No one seemed to be watching from the big house, so I got out my picklocks. When I inserted the first wand, the door creaked open. I had my gun in my hand without thinking. I slid in, back to the wall.

Inside the front room, where I’d talked to Julius before, nothing looked different, except that the pile of cigarette butts was thicker. I passed on through to the kitchen, the only other downstairs room. It also looked ordinary, untouched. In fact, it looked as though it hadn’t been touched since 1950, with its old Formica countertops and Cold War–era refrigerator.

An outsized black trunk blocked the kitchen door. I opened it, but all it contained were massive sacks of birdseed. It was a safety hazard, blocking the house’s second exit; all the windows had the small mullioned panes that would make escape impossible in a fire. I guess Julius was so depressed that he didn’t care, but it did send a warning shiver down my spine.

I went up a steep flight of stairs to the bedrooms, two small rooms that overlooked the big house across the lawn. As I watched, two children came out the back door with a set of badminton rackets. Despite the chill wind, they began an energetic if inexpert game.

How strange it must be for Julius to sit in Edward Breen’s old workshop, looking at a house that had been part of his childhood. He must have come here often when his father and Edward Breen were working together.

I did a quick search through the two rooms, hoping for a diary, but found nothing except some bird-watchers’ magazines, along with back copies of the
Physical Review.
Julius might have dropped out of school, but he still kept abreast of the work in his father’s field. That probably would tell an analyst more than it told me.

When I went back to the ground floor, I saw an old photo album on the card table in the corner, half covering the cigarette butts that overflowed the big tin ashtray. I flipped through the pictures. Julius as a toddler with his two sisters, each holding a chubby hand. Julius with his father, standing in front of Chicago Pile Number One, which Fermi had built for the first nuclear chain reaction in 1942. Benjamin Dzornen in white tie next to President Eisenhower. Ilse Dzornen with Julius and his sisters.

In the middle of the book, just after the last of the photos, was a roughly torn square of paper, so fragile with age that it would crumble if I touched it. The left side was filled with equations. Most of the page was covered by a drawing that looked like a deep-fat— No. It was a
pencil sketch of a ferromagnetic core for a computer, showing the direction of electric currents through the wires that extended from it. “Speicher” was printed next to it in tiny faded letters, and on the left side, some fifteen rows of equations appeared. In the bottom right was a small design so faded that I could only guess it showed a pair of linked triangles.

I stared at it in utter bewilderment. How had Julius come by the BREENIAC sketch? It had already disappeared before he got to the Breen mansion last night.

I couldn’t think straight about this. I’d been assuming that Cordell Breen had hidden the sketch himself, putting the blame on Martin for its disappearance. Maybe Julius was a regular visitor to the Lake Forest estate. He lived here in Edward Breen’s old coach house, the two men had grown up together. I suppose Breen’s wife or housekeeper could have let Julius in if he showed up unexpectedly one day; they’d assume he was an acceptable, if not a welcome, visitor of Cordell’s.

Was this the crime that Julius felt weighed down by, this BREENIAC drawing? Or the computer itself?

I undid the binder rings in the album and lifted out the page that the sketch lay on. I carefully slipped it into the folder with the letters I’d copied at the library. When I caught up with Julius, telling him I had the drawing might finally persuade him to talk to me.

On my way out, I used my picks to do up the double lock on the front door. The children, a girl and a boy about eight and ten, stopped their game to stare at me.

“Your mom home?” I asked.

The girl yelled “Mom” several times, without bothering to go up to the house. After the third shout, a young woman appeared, still in work clothes, wiping her hands on a kitchen towel, a phone tucked between her shoulder and her ear.

I walked over and introduced myself; the woman told her phone she’d get back to it and gave her name in turn, Melanie Basier.

“I’m looking for Julius Dzornen, Ms. Basier, and I’m worried because he hasn’t surfaced today. His front door was unlocked; do you know if that’s normal for him?”

Ms. Basier made a face. “I think he usually locks it, but to tell you the truth, I try not to pay too much attention to him.”

“I don’t know him well,” I said. “Is he disruptive?”

“Nothing like that, just—he’s so strange. He’s never worked, he lives on disability or something. My husband doesn’t mind him; he says I’m being unreasonable. The two of them talk about birds—Julius has all those feeders up—but—” She gave a nervous laugh. “I always think he’s one of those guys who looks quiet on the outside but turns out to be an ax murderer.”

“Disturbing,” I agreed. “Why do you let him live here?”

“It wasn’t our idea: he was already here when we moved in. Our house was cheap because of the bizarre legal arrangement about the coach house. We could never have afforded it otherwise, but I sometimes wish we’d moved to South Shore or even Forest Park, where we wouldn’t have such a creepy man on our property.”

My brows went up. “It sounds extraordinary. How on earth did this deal get set up?”

“It was in old Edward Breen’s will. He didn’t sell the coach house when he moved out in 1961, just the big house. When Julius’s mother died, the Breens said he could move into the coach house and live the rest of his life there. If he dies or moves out, we have the first right to buy it from the Breen family, thank God! Anyway, we bought here three years ago when my husband took a job in the anthropology department, and I guess that’s why he’s okay with Julius—my husband looks at him as if he were a science project.”

Her phone rang and she started talking into it.

“Ms. Basier—I’ll get out of your hair in a minute, but when did you last see Julius?”

She told her phone she’d be right with it and put a hand over the face. “I can’t remember. Sunday, maybe, when he got back from bird-watching. He started making a huge racket out in the alley. When my husband went to look, he was breaking china into a garbage can. I didn’t see him myself. Okay? I’ve got to go.”

She started talking to her phone again.

“Was someone else in the coach house today? Someone besides me?”

“Cece, someone keeps interrupting me; I’ll have to call you back.” Basier turned to me. “I’m at work all day. Does it matter?”

“It does, rather. Julius Dzornen’s half sister was murdered last week and I’m investigating her death.”

Basier looked at her children, her expression changing from annoyance to alarm. “You think he killed her?”

“No. But there’s something in his and her past that has been weighing him down, making him the disturbed and disturbing man he is. I think someone was in his house while he was out today, but it’s hard to tell. You could call the police, of course, but with no sign of a break-in they won’t do much about making it a crime scene.”

Basier bit her lip, looked at the children again, and asked me to wait where I could keep an eye on them. She went into the house and returned with a young woman, about college age.

“Mindy is one of my husband’s graduate students; she does a little housework for us and looks after the kids between the end of school and dinner,” Basier explained.

I went through my spiel again. Yes, Mindy had been in the kitchen around one o’clock and seen someone at Julius’s door.

“I think it was the police, though, checking up on him, because the man turned around as he was opening the door, and I saw he was wearing a shoulder holster. I was kind of freaked out, seeing a gun, but then
I looked out front and saw the police car double-parked outside. So I went back to work.”

When I’d thanked the two women, Ms. Basier was still worried enough to ask Mindy to stay outside with the children. She wasn’t worried enough to stop talking to her phone: as I rounded the corner of the house I heard her having an animated conversation with it.

42

CRASH LANDING

T
HE MAN WHO LOST CONTROL
of his car on Sheridan Road early this morning when it flipped over into a ravine has been identified as Julius Dzornen, only son of Nobel Prize–winning physicist Benjamin Dzornen. He is in critical condition at Evanston Hospital.”