Critical Mass (57 page)

The packet lay under the stone nearest the building. They handed it to Herr Lautmann, who gave it to Lotty.

A square of oilcloth was wrapped around a piece of black silk that had turned a rusty green. “I think this was from an umbrella,” Lotty said, fingering the silk. “The oilcloth—where did they get that, I wonder? Cut from an old mackintosh, perhaps.”

We all bent to stare at the envelope inside, with the three-cent U.S. stamps on it, and the address, typed on a manual machine: Miss Martina Saginor, 38A Novara Street, Vienna 2, Austria.

Dear Miss Saginor:

I am pleased to inform you that the United States Office of Patents has issued you U.S. Patent Nr D124603, for a ferromagnetic device that can store data. This patent will be in effect for seventeen years from the date of issue, which is May 13, 1941.

Please let me know if I may be of further service to you in the future.

Yours sincerely,

Lester Tulking
Patent Attorney

Attached to the letter was the official notice from the Patent Office, and a copy of Martina’s drawing, a grid that looked like it might hold potatoes in a deep-fat fryer with wires dangling from it, the word “Speicher,” in neat printing, a series of equations, and the twin prisms in the bottom right-hand corner.

Alison stared at it. “It’s the BREENIAC sketch. It’s true: we did steal it from her.”

Lotty rewrapped the patent and gave it to Martin, who didn’t quite know what to do with it. At Max’s suggestion, we went back to the Imperial Hotel’s business office, where Martin scanned the patent documents. We sent a copy to Murray, with photographs Martin had taken of the courtyard on Novaragasse and the excavation process. I wrote out a history of the patent, and what we were able to guess, or piece together, of how Edward Breen had acquired it, and told Murray he had a twenty-four-hour exclusive before we put the story out on YouTube.

After that, we spent another three days in Vienna. Max took Lotty to see her grandparents’ old flat on the Renngasse, the place where she’d lived until the Nazis forced her family into the ghetto. They also visited her grandfather’s office on the Park Ring, where the earnest young lawyer using it today took them to lunch and let them linger behind her grandfather’s rolltop desk.

Jake and I wandered through the city’s parks, where we met his musician friends for drinks that lasted until dinner and then became informal recitals at one apartment or another.

Martin dragged Alison to the Institut für Radiumforschung. The director of the Institute patiently let Martin tour the place. Apparently Martin’s enthusiasm for quarks and leptons was such that he was allowed to sit in on an Institute seminar, which seemed to thrill him even more than recovering Martina’s patent.

By the time we returned to Chicago, Metargon’s stock had halved in value. One of Metargon’s outside directors was my own most important
client, Darraugh Graham. The afternoon after our return, Darraugh summoned me for a private meeting to find out how much I could verify of the stories that were now circulating in the financial pages.

We talked so late into the afternoon that we ended up at the second-floor bar in the Trefoil Hotel on Delaware, drinking their legendary Armagnac. By the time we finished, Darraugh said that it was all deeply troubling.

“That history, that patent, it’s water over the dam by now,” Darraugh said. “Don’t know why Breen would be so obsessed with it.”

“It’s got something to do with the skeleton in his father’s workshop,” I answered. “The literal skeleton that I found last month. We’ll never know what happened there, we’ll never know who shot her, but the two sets of fathers and sons, the Breens and the Dzornens, all were part of the burial. It weighed Julius Dzornen down, but it made Cordell Breen think he was so far above the law that he could get away with anything, including murder.

“Breen knew his father had stolen the patent from Martina Saginor, or at least from Gertrud Memler. When Martin challenged him about the BREENIAC sketch, Breen thought Martin was just one more fly to swat. When I got involved and the situation began to spiral out of control, Breen wasn’t thinking anymore; he was just carrying on as if he were, I don’t know, Napoleon or Hitler on their way to Moscow, maybe.”

Darraugh gave his dry bark of a laugh. “Good lesson in there for the rest of us CEOs, Victoria. I’ll talk to the other directors. The girl, what’s her name? Alison? She’s a bright young lady, as well as a major shareholder, but she’s much too inexperienced for the executive floor.”

CHICAGO, 1953

Sacrificial Lamb

D
AD? DAD, WHAT’S
going on?” It’s Cordell, who’s heard the shouting and fighting in his bedroom across the yard in the main house.

Martina is startled by his appearance. She looks at Cordell, she squeezes the trigger. The noise, impossibly loud, fills the room. Breen grabs the gun from her. It goes off again. The Memler clutches her side, the rage in her face turning to surprise. Blood flowers on the white shirt underneath her Dior suit; she sways for an instant, then collapses onto the workbench.

In the doorway behind Cordell another youth is standing; he’s been sent by his mother to see what Benjamin is doing. He cries in horror, “Papa!”

Edward Breen decided I was to be the sacrifice: he would call the police and report me as a murderer, the end of a fight that started years ago in Vienna. That last statement might be true, but not the first. I am no one’s sacrifice any more times in this life. When Benjamin put up the feeblest of protests to Breen, I walked out of the workshop, and disappeared. Once I was safely away, I wrote Benjamin a promise that I would bother him no longer. Only keep an eye on Käthe for me, poor Käthe who lives with so much trouble in this world, I begged, but he did not. Only once more did I see him, when our granddaughter was seven: I sought a fugitive meeting near the Argonne Laboratory, to see if our daughter’s child might carry some spark within her.

54

LATE MAIL

A
LISON WENT TO
see her mother and came back with a disturbing picture of her father, one, though, that bore out the reading of his character I’d given Darraugh.

“He seems to be insane, Vic. I mean, literally. He’s marching up and down the halls at home quoting from
King Lear
, about me, the ungrateful daughter, and threatening revenge on me or any shareholders who challenge him. Jari Liu told me my dad is giving orders that no one can follow. He wants Jari to find a hitman to kill Martin, and then he says he’ll do it himself if no one else has the balls.”

That was so frightening that she agreed to go with me to the state’s attorney. The SA was still reluctant to act, but when the Skokie police found Breen and Durdon creeping up on the Binder house with a full arsenal, the two men were finally arrested on attempted murder charges and weapons violations.

The legal process seemed likely to make my ex-husband, whose firm represented Breen, even richer than he already was. The only positive out of it was that Breen’s wife decided she’d had enough; Constance wasn’t going to stand by her man. She rented studio space not far from Alison’s apartment and began painting seriously again. How well that would work was anyone’s guess, since she still seemed to find answers to many of life’s questions in a Sancerre bottle.

The other plus, one that delighted Max and Lotty as much as it did
me, was Martin’s acceptance at Caltech. When he decided to apply, Max and Darraugh both worked their networks to get the college to consider him.

Like Alison, Martin dropped by my apartment and office a number of times in the weeks after we returned from Vienna. We had a lot of conversations about his life, his family history, his legacy from Martina. Should he go to Caltech, or find a job with a computer start-up company?

“If you want to become an Internet billionaire, you have the skills and the smarts to turn computer apps into money,” I said to him. “But if you want to follow Martina, then you should work with the people who can help you understand her work. That patent, that was a throwaway idea for her, don’t you think? Her real passion was for those things you say she wrote down, supersymmetry, how to understand dark matter, all those places where light bends and mortals like me drop our jaws in amazement.”

The January day was cold and bright when Martin stopped by my office to tell me Caltech was letting him start in the middle of the year. He was driving the Subaru out to Pasadena, but he traveled light: his modest wardrobe, his computers, his poster of Feynman and his set of Feynman’s
Lectures on Physics.

“You’ve been great, Vic, really great. I know my grandmother hired you—I found your contract when I was packing up her things to put the house on the market. I can’t pay your bill right now, and even if I could it wouldn’t come close to what I owe you for finding Martina’s patent and coming to Tinney to save me and all those things. But if the book makes any money—”

“Stop,” I said. “If the book makes any money you’ll do something in Martina’s memory. Anyway, Dr. Herschel is taking care of my professional fee.”

We’d hired Arthur Harriman, the young German-speaking librarian at the University of Chicago, to translate Martina’s journals. They
seemed interesting enough that the Gaudy Press had given Harriman and Martin a contract to write a memoir, threading her story together with the history of nuclear weapons.

One afternoon, I went with Martin to the Special Collections room at the University of Chicago Library. We returned the second page of Ada Byron’s letter to Benjamin Dzornen, which Martin had lifted back in August. We talked to the librarian, Rachel Turley, about the BREENIAC sketch, which I’d sent her. Alison came with us: we had a kind of formal ceremony, in which Alison relinquished any claim to the sketch on Metargon’s part and Ms. Turley thanked us for the bequest, and said she would overlook Martin’s removing a library document.

“Anyway, thank you, Vic,” Martin said the afternoon he stopped at my office. “I’m going to head west now. I’m spending the night in Tinney. Dorothy’s forgiven me for all that mess back in September. She knows it wasn’t my fault or yours, so I’m stopping there on my way to California. Will you visit my mother sometimes? I mean, not take her on, she’s not easy to be with, but just so she’s not completely on her own?”

I promised.

“And Alison. She’s kind of in a difficult place right now. Hard to believe a billionaire could be in a difficult place, but, you know, her father’s been arrested, her mother is still drinking, and she’s kind of on her own. Can you let her know you haven’t forgotten her?”

I promised him that as well. He and Alison had decided that their lives were on such separate tracks these days that a romantic relationship wasn’t possible, but they were remaining friends, as their generation was able to do.

I sympathized with Kitty, angry with a mother whose mind searched the outer reaches of time and space but had little room to spare for a human daughter. Perhaps Martin, inheriting his great-grandmother’s powerful gifts, would forge a life that held more balance.

I waved good-bye to Martin. At the end of the evening, I drove over
to Lotty’s apartment. Angel, the doorman, warned me that she had an early surgery call in the morning.

“I have a package for her,” I said, “Something I know she’ll want to see.”

While the librarian, Rachel Turley, had been meeting with Alison and Martin, I had requested a file from the Dzornen papers. I’d performed a little sleight of hand at the photocopy machine. I was preserving, I was confiscating, I was restoring.

When I got off the elevator at her floor, Lotty was waiting for me in her red dragon dressing gown, her face anxious, wondering what new crisis I was bringing to her.

I handed her the packet. When she opened it and saw the letter from her grandfather to Dzornen, written in pencil on the title page of the
Radetzkymarsch
,
s
he stared at it for a long moment. “Oh, Vic, oh, daughter of my heart. For this—oh, thank you.”

TINNEY, ILLINOIS

Finding the Harmonies

S
HE KNOWS THE JANUARY AIR
is cold, but her bulky coat gets in her way when she’s making adjustments to the lenses. She doesn’t shiver as she unwraps her telescope. It’s as if she were eighteen again on the Wildspitze, embracing the glacier water.

The heavens lie open above her and her heart, that aged frail muscle, stirs as it always has at the purity of light.

Benjamin said to her on their last night in Göttingen, “You are not human, Martina. One does not lie with a lover to talk about spectral lines, one seeks the comfort afforded by our human bodies. It’s as if you have no feelings in you.”

“I was never a cold person, Benjamin,” she says tonight: like many old people who live alone, she doesn’t realize that she’s thinking out loud. “But my passions were too intense for you. I thought you shared my longing for the harmonies. I thought with you I might find the place where the music is so pure that the sound itself could ravage you, if it didn’t first shatter your mind. These bodies, yes, we live inside these bodies and must tend to them, but I wanted to be inside the numbers, inside the function where it approaches the limit. I long for
the stars. I know their red shift and their spectral lines, but I don’t want to describe them: I want to be inside the light.”

She’s weeping now, her tears turning to ice crystals on her lashes. And then, because it seems the most natural thing in the world, she unbuttons her jacket and her shirt and lies on the deck, opening her arms to the heavens.