Critical Mass (51 page)

She met me at the bottom of the stairs, shoulders drooping, tears streaking the dust on her cheeks. “Vic, what made you think Martin was here? I’ve looked everywhere!”

“The cameras in the front door,” I said. “They’re the same as the ones in his bedroom door in Skokie. These two women have computers connected to them: they saw us coming. Meg was at the door before we rang the bell.” I spoke loudly enough for Dorothy to hear me up in the kitchen. I was a detective, people should know when I was detecting.

“Then where is he?” Alison said. “Has he disappeared from here, too?”

“He has to be here, or at least, there must be some sign of him besides the cameras.”

I walked around, testing the walls. This was a real basement, not a root cellar. It even had a couple of small windows, so if Dorothy nailed the door shut we’d be able to scream for help. Although who would hear us?

The usual mechanicals were there, furnace, water heater, a washer and dryer. The floor was made of rough-poured concrete. Since the only lighting was the naked bulb at the top of the stairs and another over the washer, both Alison and I stumbled on the uneven surface.

Dorothy, or perhaps Ada, had put up cheap white shelves that covered the walls next to the washer and dryer. They held gardening tools and enough screwdrivers and pliers for basic repairs, along with the usual detritus of a home: a Christmas tree stand, remnants of a vacuum cleaner, old gym shoes, a moth-eaten bear’s head. Perhaps the most unnerving object was an urn on a low shelf labeled “Mother’s Ashes.”

I lifted the bear’s head, but the urn didn’t move. I unhooked the latches to the top.

“Vic!” Alison was shocked. “You can’t dig through someone’s ashes.”

I ignored her, inspecting a vase with fine ashes in it. Human remains don’t burn down to the kind of neat pile newspapers make. I lifted the vase out. Underneath was a number pad.

“Your turn,” I said to Alison. “What numbers would someone like Martin use to control a door?”

“Vic! What—is there a secret door?”

“There’s a secret something,” I said. “If Martin programmed it, what numbers did he choose?”

“I don’t know. He told me that Feynman broke into all the safes in Los Alamos because he knew that physicists love the fine-structure constant, so I don’t think—unless—and we don’t even know how many digits.”

“Try something,” I said impatiently. “The fine whatever it is, or pi or anything.”

“You usually only get three tries for something like this.” She typed slowly, nervous about making a mistake. Nothing happened. She tried again, even more slowly, but still nothing happened.

“Think back to what Martin said when he talked about Feynman
breaking into people’s safes,” I said. “Take your time. Think if he joked about what constant he—”

“Of course!” Alison’s face lit up. “Only, I don’t know it off the top of my head. Can I turn on my iPhone?”

Another calculated risk. I nodded, and she powered up her device. “Six-six-two, six-oh-seven,” she breathed. I typed in the numbers.

We stared at each other in chagrin, feeling we’d run out of chances, when we heard a grinding, scraping noise. I couldn’t help imagining the ceiling falling on us, but it was the wall behind the white shelves: it was slowly sliding open while the shelves remained oddly in place.

The room behind the shelves was bigger than the basement we were standing in. The walls were paneled, the floor covered in tile with Navajo rugs scattered around. A bed was set up in an alcove to one side.

Bright lights shone over a long worktable that was covered in metal and wires. A young man with dark wiry hair stood next to the table, holding a screwdriver, gazing nervously at the open door.

When he saw us, his face relaxed.

“Alison. You remembered Planck’s constant.”

CHICAGO, 1953

In the Workshop

B
ENJAMIN, WE MUST SPEAK.”

He’s getting out of his car when she appears in the shadows. She can hear the sudden gulp, the intake of air. She may have startled him, but her arrival can’t be a surprise. The Memler will have been to him long ahead of her, and someone will have told him of her own disappearance from the proving grounds.

She knows she’s not public news: she’s read newspapers along her travel route, sometimes heard news on the radio in various bus stations across the Southwest. But she’s vanished from a secure weapons facility; the Memler has told the Americans that she’s a Russian spy. Unless they imagine she was eaten by a bear, they will be looking for her.

It’s taken her a week to get here. The first day, when she climbed down the mountain, she hitchhiked. She figured she had until noon before they realized she was missing and sent out an alarm. She found a ride to Las Vegas, and then went by Greyhound to Albuquerque.

She’s been the hare in front of the hounds for most of the last thirteen years, so she’s adept at hitching along back roads, or hoisting herself into an open boxcar on a slow-moving freight. Away from the proving grounds she even relaxes at times. No soldiers stopping buses, poking through hay, looking for a Jew on the run. Americans are friendly, by and large, even trusting.

A woman in a small Texas town tells Martina she’s known hard
times herself, goes into her kitchen for an apple and a sandwich of bread and drippings. The fat on the bread: Sofie Herschel’s nursery, the prism on the floor, flashes through Martina’s head, makes her momentarily weak: Sofie, the nursery, her mother, her daughter, the light itself have all been stolen from her. The Texas woman gives her sugary iced tea to revive her, takes her into the house to lie down on an old sofa that smells of cats and buttered popcorn.

In St. Louis, she mingles with the crowds at the bus depot, buying a boxed lunch, lingering at the women’s toilet, stopping on the benches in the waiting room to pore over an abandoned paper. No one is paying attention. She buys a ticket and finds a seat near the rear exit, wide awake at every stop on the route. The bus rolls into downtown Chicago at nine in the morning.

A nickel in a phone booth gets her the information that Professor Dzornen is in Chicago but is spending the day at the Argonne lab. No, she won’t leave a message, she’ll call again tomorrow.

She rides a bus from the center of the city to the neighborhood around the University of Chicago where Benjamin Dzornen has bought a house, a mansion, she thinks when she walks over to look at it.

She imagines ringing the bell in the middle of the morning, of seeing Ilse Dzornen’s shock giving way to fury:
You were supposed to be dead.

There’s no record of a Martina Saginor’s arrival in America: she had found passage to the States on a passport plucked from a purse in a crowded Vienna train station. Martina spent a week in Vienna on her long route from Moldova to America. She hoped her daughter might have returned looking for her. None of the refugee aid societies had any trace of Käthe Saginor, in England or in Austria. Vienna was in ruins, bleak, hunger-filled, mother, aunts, cousins, all dead, nothing to keep Martina, and so she continued west, found a way to get passage on a ship in Lisbon bound for Montreal, slipped across the border to America, to Chicago, to Nevada. How adept she’s become at crossing borders.

She’s sure Benjamin never told Ilse about her arrival fifteen months ago, how stunned he was. His shocked face, his stammer: you survived, anyway, that’s good.

Yes, I survived, by luck first: our train to Sobibor Concentration Camp broke down, we were herded off in the snow, many shot, but the snow was falling thick. I fled to the woods and survived somehow, with partisans, with farmers, until the war’s end found me in Moldova and then detention in paranoid Stalin’s camps and finally the long foot journey across the mountains back to Austria
.

What did she want? he asked.
My life, my physics, a job, a real job,
but he bundled her off to Nevada. So quickly that she was on a train with a security pass before she had spent a night in Chicago. His hollow promise that this was temporary while he found a real place for her.

She’d gone to the university that first time, not to his house. What had she been hoping for? News of Käthe, for sure, but some sign, perhaps a ghostly remnant of his affection for Martina herself that might cause him to sponsor her. None of that remained.

He’d shown no interest in whether Käthe survived the war or not. Perhaps it was guilt for doing so little to help the child. Käthe had been a sullen little girl, using no arts to attract him on the days Martina took her to the Institute. He didn’t want to bring Käthe when he left for America, although Martina pleaded for her child. He apparently hadn’t wanted Martina, either, his brightest student, his ablest colleague as he’d once called her. Had it been Ilse who slammed the door on them, or his own fears or indifference?

Tonight her business is just that: business. She speaks to Benjamin in German; it’s easier, she doesn’t have to organize and reorganize sentences in her head.

“The Memler surely told you she saw me. You must have been expecting me.”

“You can’t speak to me here,” he hisses at her in English.

“I will speak to you anywhere,” she says coldly, still in German.
“Do you wish to take me inside? Do you want a moment to call the FBI? Do you know what the Memler did at Innsbruck? Does it matter to you that people were dangled in cages above smelting ovens, that she watched, smiling, while prisoners roasted to death? Or that she had prisoners put in chambers filled with nitrogen to see how they would burst apart? I saw her more than once laughing at the spectacle of a naked prisoner in shackles being raped and then beaten to death. Men as well as women.”

He tries to stop the flow of words but she won’t be quiet.

“And now I find her here, with unfettered access to planes and money, working on a computer whose designs she stole, and I am told that I must not grieve for the past but commend her for being a warrior against Communism. Listen to me,
du
, I have been in Nazi camps and in Communist camps, and one is not different from the other, except that in the Soviet Union no one tried on purpose to murder me.”

Ilse comes to the front door. “Benjamin! Is that you? Is someone with you? Julius and I ate dinner two hours ago. Everything is cold now.”

“Yes, I know, I’m sorry. We ran late at Argonne,” he shouts back. “I’m just finishing a conversation. I’ll be in right away.”

He turns back to Martina. “What is it you want?”

“I want the rights to my computing machine. I want the Memler denounced as a war criminal and sent to prison or even executed. I want a place in a top lab. I want my daughter. I want American citizenship. My wants are enormous, Benjamin, and I will find a way to satisfy them. I only start with you, I don’t end with you.”

Ilse is still in the doorway, her body a square silhouette, Brünnhilde, ready to slaughter those who wound her, even her own husband. She calls again to Benjamin, who fumbles in his wallet.

“Do you have money?” he whispers to Martina. “Go to the Shore Drive Motel; it’s only a few blocks away. I’ll call you there.”

“I no longer sit in apartments or hotel rooms waiting for policemen to arrive so that I can be led to the next deportation station. We talk
now, you and I, or not at all. Believe me, my next conversations will be with Edward Murrow and Walter Cronkite. Even if you and my department head in Nevada have no interest in the Memler’s war crimes, I believe Mr. Murrow will pay the story some attention.”

Ilse starts down the front steps. “Who is it who’s talking to you, Benjamin? Is it a beggar? Shall I call the police?”

A youth appears behind her in the doorway. “Who is it, Mama?”

Dzornen thrusts Martina into the backseat of the car, calling to his wife and son, “It’s someone from Nevada with an urgent message. I’m driving her over to Breen’s house. I’ll be back in half an hour.”

He climbs into the car, slamming the door shut to signal his fury. “You cannot blackmail me over your child. You never came to me during your pregnancy; for all I know, any man in Göttingen could be your child’s father.”

“Oh, that is beside any point,” Martina says. “I am not here tonight because of my daughter, but because of this Memler monster stealing my machine and giving it to your friend Edward Breen. He has built it and claimed it for his own, and you, you are using it to build a heinous weapon that can kill every mother’s child on this planet. I can control nothing in this world, or very little, so I cannot stop you prostituting yourself for money or power or whatever it is you get from prancing around with men like Edward Teller. But I can stop the Memler from making one more schilling’s profit off my back. That I will do.”

Breen lives only four blocks away; the rest of the short ride is spent in silence. When Benjamin pulls the car over to the curb, he asks Martina what she proposes to say to Breen.

“I will introduce myself. I will see what sort of a man he is.”

The lights are on in the big house on University Avenue. Benjamin rings the front doorbell. A brief wait, then Breen’s son Cordell, named for the Secretary of State for whom Breen once worked, opens the door for them. Cordell knows Professor Dzornen, and tells him his father is in the coach house, which contains his private workshop. Cordell looks
curiously at Martina, whose corduroy trousers and hiking boots are stained with travel, but he sends her and Benjamin up the flagstone path to the coach house.

In the workshop, any idea of a polite introduction, a conversation about who Breen is and does he know he created a machine from a stolen design, dies before it is born: Gertrud Memler is in the room.

“The Nazi swine is digging up other people’s acorns?” Martina says to her in German.

Color floods Memler’s face. “You were dreck in Germany and now you are dreck in America. The FBI will be glad to know you have shown your ugly Jewish face.”

“The FBI will be glad to hear how you tortured ugly Jewish faces,” Martina says. “They will also like to hear how you stole my equations and my designs in the middle of your bestiality.” She fingers her face; a scar from Memler’s last assault on her runs across her left cheekbone.