Critical Mass (6 page)

She waved a hand at the models above his workstation. “Those are the last two. Martin kept them after he saw he had to give up the idea. He was that upset, as if it was the end of the world. Len took it seriously, too, even though I told them to forget about it. Rockets. Rockets do nothing but kill people, I said, but that didn’t worry either of them for one second.”

Poor Martin, growing up in this desert. At least his grandfather had entered into his enthusiasms. It must have seemed like a wonderful adventure to the old man, trying to fill a room with enough freezing air to bring down a rocket. And then they’d come inside to Kitty and her bitter, biting comments, colder than a garage full of dry ice.

I changed the subject abruptly, saying I wanted to look through Martin’s papers, and get a look at his computer. Kitty wasn’t happy about that. First she told me it wouldn’t do any good, but when I said, “You never know,” she insisted on pulling up a chair near Martin’s computer monitors to watch me.

“I know Charlotte trusts you, but I never saw you before, I need to watch what you’re doing.”

I couldn’t fault her for her caution with a stranger in her house, but when I warned her it might take some time, she merely clutched the edges of the chair, as if she thought I would carry her out.

In fact, it took no time at all. When I tried to power up the computers, nothing happened. I stared at the screens for a long moment. Martin had a kit of small tools in a tray on his desk. I unscrewed the backs of both CPUs. When I had them open, I saw he’d removed the drives.

Whatever he’d discovered that didn’t add up, he was concerned about it enough that he didn’t want anyone getting a look at his files. I’m not a computer whiz, but Martin was: he must have figured that even if he zeroed out the drives, a pro could reconstruct his files.

When I told Kitty what he’d done, she gave me the vacant look that was starting to get on my nerves. If she’d been my age or younger I would have shouted at her to wake up, be alert, but she was an old woman, she was in trouble, she didn’t need me arguing with her.

In as many ways as I could think of, I tried to get her to remember what else Martin had said his last weeks at home. Nothing else when he left the house that final day? Nothing about friends, or coworkers, or projects he’d been assigned to over the summer? Nothing at the meals they’d shared those last few weeks?

No, it was like him to be withdrawn. He liked to torment her by thinking about equations when she could have used a little company. Didn’t Martin see how lonely she was since Len’s passing?

I finally gave up on it and started looking through the desk drawers. Like the rest of Martin’s monastic space, these were almost empty. He’d kept his notebooks from high school, which included printouts of his history and English essays. He’d written a number of times about Feynman’s life and work. The essays were filled with red ink and comments like, “You need to learn to construct a paragraph and an argument,” or, “See me if you want to rewrite this.”

Other binders contained problem sets, with Martin’s answers written out in a tiny, careful hand. From long-ago calculus classes, I vaguely recognized some of the symbols—derivatives, integrals, polynomials. On one problem set, a teacher wrote, “You might find it easier if you took the following route,” and then included a different series of equations. Almost all were marked “100,” and twice, “Bravo, Martin. Beyond amazing.”

Those comments seemed to be the only thing in his room that showed a connection to the outside world. He had a photo of a rough
mountainside tucked into one notebook, but there were no pictures of friends, no remnants of camping trips. A couple of ribbons from cross-country meets where his team had finished second or third, that was it.

For a gregarious boy, this beautifully built hideaway would have made the perfect hangout. For Martin, the isolation must have added another layer of painful loneliness to his life.

“What about his friends?” I asked Kitty.

Kitty started plaiting her fingers together again. “He doesn’t have a lot of friends. There were a bunch of rich kids his age who had summer jobs at the place Martin works; they got on his nerves, thinking because they went to Harvard or places like that, they could look down on him, and then he had to fix their mistakes. That made him plenty mad. But for some reason, they invited him to a barbecue the night their summer jobs were ending. Martin went, but he came home early. I thought it was because the kids were such snobs, but it was that weekend that he started brooding over, well, whatever he was brooding over.”

“Do you know the names of the kids he went to the barbecue with?” I asked. “Maybe he talked to one of them.”

Kitty didn’t know their names; Martin never talked about them, just told her there were seven college kids who’d all worked together. One of the girls lived in a place with a beach and her folks had agreed to let her have a party there, but Kitty didn’t know her name or where exactly the parents lived.

“Did he ever have a girlfriend? Or boyfriend?”

“Martin isn’t a homosexual,” she protested.

Martin could be a Martian who slept with a space squid and his grandmother wouldn’t know, but I kept that remark between me and the model rockets. “Girlfriend, then.”

“Martin didn’t have much luck with girls. I told him it was because he took himself too seriously; girls like a boy to loosen up, not always be talking about theories and whatnot. Believe you me, when you carry on like that, nobody can stand to be around you.”

You hear a lot these days about helicopter parents who can’t stop hovering over their offspring’s every movement. Kitty was more like a mole, burrowed so deep underground she was almost unaware of her grandson.

“There isn’t anyone you can think of who he talked to regularly? What about the boy Toby who passed out in the garage? Did you ask if he knew where Martin had gone?” I said patiently.

“It wouldn’t have done any good.”

Her voice was so low I barely made out the words.

“Ms. Binder, do you know what happened to your grandson?”

She shrugged. “He could be dead, or he just ran away.”

“What aren’t you telling me?” I cried.

She looked at me blankly. “People die or they run away. If you haven’t noticed that, it’s because you’re not paying attention.”

I opened my mouth to protest, then shut it again. Her husband had died, her family was killed in the Second World War, her daughter had run away. Now Martin. From her perspective, she was right.

I asked about her husband’s family, wondering if Martin might have gone to visit them.

Kitty wasn’t in touch with Len’s sisters; they’d never gotten along, they all thought she was a gold digger who married Len to get an American passport. “They even blamed me for bringing Len to Chicago, instead of back to Cleveland where they all lived!”

“Why did you come to Chicago?” Personal curiosity took me off track. “Was it because Lotty was here?”

“Charlotte Herschel, one of the princesses of the Renngasse? Don’t make me laugh! No. After the war ended, I went back to Vienna with the British Army to see if anyone was still alive. I heard a rumor at a place my mother used to work that she and my father were in Chicago, so Len and I came here. That was a mistake, but Len got a good job at a big garage, so we stayed. Anyway, what business is it of yours?”

“This is where we started, Ms. Binder. It’s because of your daughter and the ugly murder down at the house where she was living. She thought her life was in danger, and it turns out that ten days ago, her son disappeared. Do you think that’s a coincidence?”

“Yes. Yes, I do,” she snapped. “Judy is a drug addict and a loser, she had two abortions and then when she had Martin, she couldn’t look after him. If it hadn’t been for Len and me, where would that boy be now? I think it’s a total coincidence.”

“Perhaps Martin wouldn’t go out of his way to be in touch with her, but Judy might have tried calling him, you know.”

The lines in her face deepened. “No!” she shouted.

“Who else would your daughter reach out to, besides Lotty, if she was really frightened?”

“You mean who else could she con? After all this time, I’m happy to say I don’t know!”

I hesitated for a moment, then pulled out the photo of the metal pod on stilts.

“Do you know any of these people? I found it in the house where Judy’s been—”

She snatched it from me. “That—oh! So she stole that after Martin’s bar mitzvah, along with my pearl earrings and forty dollars in cash. What was she doing with it?”

“What is it, Ms. Binder?” I asked. “Lotty said the people looked familiar, but she couldn’t remember their names.”

“Of course she couldn’t: she was a Herschel. The rest of the world was beneath her notice. Just go! You’ve hurt me enough for one day.” She thrust the photo inside her sweater, her face squeezed into a tight knot of misery.

I put one of my cards next to the rockets. “If you change your mind about your daughter, or if you want me to help you find your grandson, let me know.”

5

COMPUTER GAMES

I
BRUSHED PAST KITTY
and left Martin’s room, but before I reached the basement stairs, she called to me. “Ms. Detective! Don’t run off.”

I went back to Martin’s den. After a certain amount of backing and forthing, she decided she wanted to hire me to find her grandson. I told her I’d get her a standard contract, but that my rates were a hundred dollars an hour. She backed and forthed some more, but in the end, her worries about her grandson trumped her worries about money and contracts. She told me she’d pay for two full days’ work and then we’d see how I’d done. I also managed to dig out the name of the company where Martin had been working: Metargon, some ten miles north of the house.

When I got back outside, my body felt as though someone had tied me to a wall and thrown rocks at me. I wanted to go to bed for a year or two until my muscles stopped aching, but after slumping in my car for a time, I pulled away from the curb. As I left Kedvale Street, I saw the blinds twitch in Kitty’s front window.

Since I was already north, I decided to go to Metargon first, to see what they knew about their missing computer tech. Before I turned onto the expressway, I looked up the company on my iPad. I’d heard of them, of course, because their game box, the Metar-Genie, was an industry leader, and their search engine, Metar-Quest, was coming up the ranks as a rival to Google. I hadn’t known, though, that Metargon
was big in energy technologies. They were defense contractors, they had plants in seventeen countries around the world. Martin had worked in their computer research lab, just the place for a young man with a passion for rockets and computers.

I had an easy drive at this time of day, but once I got to Waukegan Road, it was difficult to spot the building. Every big-box retailer on the planet has an outlet along Waukegan. Sprinkled among them are giant fast-food outlets. Their signs flash and dazzle in a muscular competition for notice, but Metargon didn’t draw attention to itself. I finally parked outside a Kentucky Fried and made my way down the street on foot, looking for street numbers.

Metargon had wrapped itself in a forest of evergreens. I found the sign and the address on a small plaque attached to a set of high rolling gates. On the left, at driver’s-window height, was a phone. I picked it up and told the scratchy voice at the other end that I was hoping to speak to someone about one of their computer techs. The voice asked me to spell Martin’s name, then put me on hold.

While I waited, the gates rolled open and a few cars came out; a UPS truck pulled up behind me and got buzzed through. I was tempted to walk in behind it, but I continued to hold and in another minute my virtue was rewarded: the voice was replaced by someone who announced himself in an incomprehensible squawk, but added he’d meet me in the lobby in twenty.

The gates rolled open and I walked into an industrial park totally at odds with the clamor on the street outside. The lab looked like the latest thing in functional modernity, steel and glass, solar panels on the roof, white screens at the windows to minimize the heat. Beyond the drive, a pond surrounded by marsh grasses created a completely different mood, contemplation, peace. As I crossed the parking lot toward the main entrance, I saw a man emerge from a copse on the pond’s far side. He stopped to stare at the water.

Since I had twenty minutes to fill I went over to stare at the water
myself. I could see carp lazing about under the surface. Ducks were hunting for food in the reeds, and the ubiquitous geese, the rats of the urban parkscape, were waddling along the bank. If you had to come up with an idea for a new kind of energy or rocket, the water and the birds might bring you to that calm interior space where creativity lives. Staring, thinking about nothing—my neck muscles began to relax from Kitty’s battering.

I finally made my way back to the research building. A burnished sculpture of indeterminate shape stood outside the entrance, next to a metal sign that read “Metargon: Where the Future Lies Behind.” I wondered how much they had paid a branding company to come up with that cryptic slogan.

The entrance doors were locked; I announced myself again through an intercom and was buzzed into a small lobby. A semicircle of tan leather chairs and hassocks made up a waiting area. Two people sat there, one thumbing through a magazine, the other typing on her laptop. On the other side of the lobby stood a glossy wooden counter, where a woman handled an intercom and phone bank. I gave her my card, told her someone had promised to talk to me about Martin Binder.

“Oh, yes, that would be Jari Liu. I’ll let him know you’re here.”

I wandered around the small space, looking at awards and pictures or models of machinery: the Orestes booster rockets which had sent up modules to probe the reaches of the galaxy (Metargon photovoltaics powered the space probe); a mock-up of a nuclear reactor (Metargon’s first plant, designed with a unique core, still powering southern Illinois); the Presidential Freedom Medal, awarded to Metargon’s founder by Ronald Reagan.