Critical Mass (56 page)

There is nothing for his family, but the postman has a letter from America addressed to Miss Martina Saginor, 38A Novara Street, Vienna 2, Austria. Herr Herschel carries it upstairs. A letter from America carries with it so many possibilities that he can hardly breathe.

Felix shows the letter to Charlotte, who has finally risen, has combed out her long waterfall of hair and pinned it around her head and is shaking their bedding out over the courtyard. She nods, and he helps her replace the thin blanket. She takes a hairpin from her coiled braid and slits open the envelope.

It’s an official government document, but not the visa they’d been praying for. U.S. Patent D124603, for a ferromagnetic device that can store data. The sketch that Fräulein Martina submitted with her application two years ago is attached to the grant, which will expire seventeen years from the date of issue.

Felix cannot bring himself to look at his wife, but she squeezes his hand. “After all,” she says, “if it were a visa, how could we leave Vienna with our darling Sofie somewhere in Europe and in trouble?”

53

KILLER APP

L
OTTY WAS VERY
pale. When we reached the corner of Novaragasse, she stopped, eyes shut tight. She had last seen this street early one morning when she was nine years old, when her father walked her and her brother and the wailing Käthe Saginor to the train station. The police, who treated her deferentially on this visit, had poked bayonets into her teddy bear to make sure her family wasn’t hiding jewels in it.

“Okay,” she said at last, opening her eyes, taking a deep breath.

Herr Lautmann met us at the entrance to Novaragasse 38A. He was from the public works department, the man who provided the permits and the workmen to excavate the cobblestones in the courtyard.

Max had found Lautmann after I announced my intention of flying to Vienna to look for Martina’s patent. Max had been amused: “Vienna is not Chicago, Victoria. You can’t suddenly show up at a building and start dismantling the cobblestones. You need a permit, you need an official, probably two or three officials. Don’t show your gun to the concierge and imagine he or she will want to help you.”

“I’m capable of subtlety, Max,” I answered, full of dignity.

“I’m sure you are,” he said. “I hope one day you’ll show it to me. For this errand, you need someone like me, who speaks German and knows how to steer a boat through a set of bureaucratic locks.”

Max had set about sending e-mails and making phone calls until he was put in touch with Herr Lautmann. A process that might have
taken months or years was compressed into a few weeks thanks to Max’s connections in refugee and Holocaust survivor circles.

With Max making all the arrangements, both for the trip and for the excavation, I turned my attention to shoring up relations with the clients I’d been neglecting.

I was also answering a lot of questions from the Cook County state’s attorney. When I suggested to the SA that the dead body in the coach house probably belonged to Gertrud Memler, they contacted the FBI. The Feds were excited: they’d been hunting Memler for fifty years. The trouble was, no one had any DNA samples for comparison.

The infuriating part of the post-Tinney weeks was my inability to get the state’s attorney to pay any attention to Breen’s role in Julius Dzornen’s death, or in my own incarceration by his minions in the root cellar below the coach house kitchen.

The SA said it was ridiculous to think that the head of a company like Metargon, which paid eight million in state income taxes last year, would be involved in the kind of crime I was describing. As for the man Durdon, Mr. Breen had made it clear that he was led astray by some overzealous Homeland Security agents when Durdon was hunting for missing computer code.

“Eight million in taxes, but two hundred thousand in campaign contributions, which is more to your point,” I snapped. “Will Breen continue to try to murder Martin Binder, or can young Binder go peacefully about his business?”

The assistant state’s attorney advised me to tone down my language. Mr. Breen had issued a formal apology for suspecting Martin Binder of trying to sell proprietary code. If Metargon was prepared to let matters rest, I should leave things alone, too.

At least Sheriff Kossel down in Palfry was taking matters seriously. He was trying to get the Palfry County state’s attorney to file murder charges against Deputy Davilats and Durdon. I promised Kossel that I would testify if he was able to bring either or both men to trial.

In the days after Tinney, I was spending my small squares of free time with Jake, who’d returned from the West Coast. Lying on his couch, listening to him practice, or lying with him in bed after a late night of music and dancing, was restoring my spirit.

Alison decided to take a leave of absence from Harvard. She thought first of returning to Mexico City, to the program she was setting up, but the more she talked about it with me, the more tainted it felt to her.

“It’s so corporate: I was providing them with Metargon products—it’s like using a charity as a front for turning Mexican schoolkids into Metargon customers. We give the kids Metar-Genies and then they have to buy the apps and the games from us. I need time away from all that corporate stuff. And then, too, with my dad bringing in the FBI when he thought Martin might be in Mexico City with me—they don’t trust me now.”

She rented an apartment in the Ravenswood neighborhood, about a mile from where I live, and entertained herself by finding furniture at estate sales. When she learned about the Vienna expedition, she wanted to join us.

“You don’t think my dad will come after you in Austria, do you, Vic?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It depends on how much that patent matters to him.”

I’d gone back to using my own phone and my own computer identity—conducting business in secret is almost impossible and sucks up way too much time and energy.

If Breen was still obsessed with forestalling any publication of Martina’s patent, he was almost certainly tracking Max’s and my e-mails. Which meant he was also tracking Max’s exchanges with Herr Lautmann in Vienna.

I didn’t see Alison often after we left Tinney, but she dropped into my office from time to time to use me as a sounding board. When she
persuaded Max that she had a legitimate need to be present at the Novaragasse excavation, she stopped by to talk to me about Martin.

“I know he has a right to be there, too: it’s his great-grandmother, after all. But he won’t let me buy him a ticket.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“How can it be good? He has so many expenses, and no job right now. My dad fired him, he’s put a lot of negative words out with other software companies, which means Martin is having trouble getting work. His mom is in serious rehab, you know, and even though she’s got Medicaid, Martin’s paying all the extra expenses.”

When Judy Binder was judged strong enough to leave the Tinney hospital, she moved into a halfway house in Chicago with the dog Delilah. It was her idea: rescuing Martin had been a turning point for her, or the last point in a turn that started when her mother died in an effort to protect her.

“Delilah and I, we’ve been through a lot together. She’ll look after me,” she told Martin when he heroically offered to let her join him in the Skokie house. She was still volatile, hot-tempered, often mean-spirited; her recovery went in fits and starts. You don’t change a thirty-five-year habit in a week, after all, but Martin reported that she seemed seriously committed to the process.

Mr. Contreras was disappointed when he realized we couldn’t keep Delilah, but Judy’s halfway house was only a half-dozen L stops north of us. He took to riding up to see the dog, impervious to Judy’s mood swings. Just the fact that she had a regular visitor was also a help in her recovery.

When Max agreed that Martin could be part of the trip, Alison gave up her first-class ticket to ride coach with him. And with me. And with Jake.

“I’ve been too laissez-faire about letting you go off into oubliettes and dungeons,” Jake said. “My attitude was that as long as you knew what you were doing I wouldn’t interfere. Especially since interfering
carries a high probability of losing my bowing arm, or even my fingering.”

We were lying in bed, his long fingers on my breasts. Bowing and fingering gave him a magician’s touch on my body and I rolled over to lie on top of him.

“Nothing’s changed. I still know what I’m doing and I would be distraught if anything happened to your fingers. I’d love it if you came, but I don’t need you to do so.”

“Victoria Iphigenia, you jump off cliffs not knowing if you packed a parachute. I’m coming to Vienna so I can play a dirge if someone drops your body into the Danube.”

And so there were four of us in coach, five if you counted Jake’s bass, which required its own seat. We arrived in Vienna late in the afternoon. While Max pampered Lotty in the Imperial Hotel, the rest of us stayed more modestly in a pension Jake knew from his professional trips here.

We were only a few miles from the Novaragasse, and could have gone by tram, or even on foot. However, Max—concerned about how well Lotty would weather her return to the old ghetto—hired a car, which picked us up after breakfast the morning after our arrival.

We drove around the Ring, so-called because it circled the city where the fortifications used to stand. We passed streets where the gray buildings stood wedged so tightly together that we couldn’t make out the sun. It was depressing to see the same gang graffiti that cover Chicago bridges and walls on apartments and bridges here.

Once we crossed the Danube Canal, which was a sullen gray, not the oompah-pah blue of the tired old waltz, we were in the Leopoldstadt, the section of Vienna that Hitler had turned into a ghetto. The car dropped us on a side street, near a memorial to the deportees from the Leopoldstadt. Lotty wanted to see if her family’s names were included among the victims.

“They called it the ‘Mazzesinsel,’” Max said, “the ‘Matzo Island,’
because so many Jews lived here. Freud grew up here and so did Billy Wilder, the physicist Lise Meitner, oh, many famous people.”

When Lotty found her family—Herr Doktor Felix Herschel (1884–1942) und Frau Doktor Charlotte Herschel (1887–1942); Mordecai Radbuka (1908–1942); Sofie Herschel Radbuka (1907–1941); Ariadne Radbuka (1940–1940)—she called to Martin, who’d been standing apart from the rest of us, as if he didn’t feel he belonged.

“Here is your grandmother’s grandmother—the woman who raised Kitty, just as she raised you.”

We all crowded respectfully closer to look at the inscription:
Liesl Saginor (1885–1942).

“Her husband had died of tuberculosis, I think it was, soon after Kitty and I were born; that’s why they’re not on this wall. They were so young,” Lotty said. “Even my grandparents, and Kitty’s grandmother, were younger than I am now.”

She took a map from her handbag. “I don’t remember these streets, though I walked them every day for more than a year. Of course, then the shops were empty. All this food, these stores filled with electronics—our shops were our grandparents, bartering a book or a coat for a loaf of bread.”

Martin hesitantly held out a hand. She let him take her arm and the two of them studied the map. Novaragasse was only a few short streets away. When we got to 38A, Herr Lautmann was there with a couple of workmen carrying picks and shovels.

“It looks familiar but not the same,” Lotty said.

“Bomb damage,” Herr Lautmann said. “This street was bombed badly; these apartment buildings, some could be—what is the word—
gerettet
?”

“Salvaged,” Max supplied.

“Yes, some could be salvaged, but some were new-built.”

We went up four flights of stairs, Lotty shutting her eyes, letting
memory guide her feet to the right door. A Turkish family lived in her family’s old apartment now. The woman who answered the door, a toddler in her arms, was at first alarmed at the sight of so many Europeans, but after Lotty spoke to her in German for a few minutes, she nodded, said something to Lotty, who turned to us.

“The women can come in, but the men must stay in the hall; there is no man home right now, and the neighbors will talk. Max, you and Martin and Herr Lautmann can go below and I will throw something, see where it lands.”

The Turkish woman stepped aside and spoke again to Lotty; I made out the word “coffee,” but Lotty declined.

Alison and I followed her inside. The apartment was filled with furniture and bright hangings. A large TV stood in one corner, with a map of Turkey framed above it. Two children were watching German cartoons.

“Very different from when I was here,” Lotty said. “My six Radbuka cousins, Hugo, my parents, my grandparents, we were crowded onto four mattresses. We had a few chairs, no drapes, nothing to hang on the walls.”

She spoke again to the woman in German, and we were allowed to go to a back room that overlooked the courtyard. The yard was a small irregular circle, with bicycles, baby buggies and a few outdoor grills covering the cobblestones. Lotty emptied her handbag, handing the contents to me. She opened the window and tossed the bag down.

Martin had reached the courtyard ahead of the other men. He picked up the bag and kept his foot on the cobblestone where it landed.

Lotty thanked the woman, talking to her at length. Judging by the way she was using her arms, she was describing herself as a small child living here, explaining why she had thrown her bag. The woman nodded, put a hand on Lotty’s arm, eyes bright with tears. She gestured at Alison and me with her free hand—“
Ihre Töchter?”

Lotty smiled, but shook her head. Down in the courtyard, Herr
Lautmann set his work crew to digging up the cobblestones. We quickly drew a crowd, the usual assortment of drunks, out-of-work men offering to help, women with children too young to be in school.

The crew worked quickly, prying up about a dozen stones in a circle around where Lotty’s purse had landed. They dug up the ground underneath and sifted it through a large kind of grater. There was an amazing assortment of detritus, old pens, hairclips, the head to a porcelain doll. As they finished shaking dirt from their findings, they stacked them neatly on a small tarp.