Critical Mass (10 page)

“Of course, everyone knew some garbled version of Judy Binder’s life, so the kids would say things, especially because when he was in kindergarten, Kitty used to send Martin to school in some of Len’s old clothes, cut down, but still very much not children’s clothes. We talked seriously to Toby about not joining in the taunting, but it wasn’t until the rockets that he and Martin spent any time together.”

She broke off to offer me the coffeepot. “Anyway,” she continued when I’d hastily declined, “I suppose Martin took refuge in his
experiments and computers to avoid thinking about his loneliness. In high school he turned out to be quite a good cross-country runner, and a computer whiz, so the kids laid off him, but I don’t think he had real friends. Although I have to say, the senior project Toby did with Martin is probably what got him into Rochester—his math SATs weren’t anywhere near as good as Martin’s.”

“Since Martin’s were perfect they couldn’t have been,” Zachary put in. “That was a surprise to everyone, probably to Martin himself, since he was an odd man out in high school. Kitty thought he had a future as a bookkeeper. The only time she’s ever talked to me, I mean sought me out to talk to me, was to see if I could get Martin a job at my firm.”

“Did you try?” I asked.

“If Martin had been interested I might have gone through the motions, but a computer whiz and an oddball loner to boot—I’d be more afraid he’d hack into client accounts.”

That opened up a different line of thought: Martin had been hacking and the FBI was on his trail.

“Do you think he was a hacker? Would Toby know that?” I asked.

Jeanine made a face. “I don’t think Toby and Martin saw each other more than twice all summer. If Martin started doing something illegal—I don’t know. Toby’s days of running after Martin to be close to his rockets are long gone. It’s hard to know what a boy like Martin might do, though. It’s too bad Kitty wouldn’t let him go to college. She kept saying blue-collar work was the foundation of a good society, and that her father and her husband were wonderful examples of that. She said if Martin went off to college, he’d turn into a scientist, turn arrogant.”

“What’s that about?” I asked. “Is she a fundamentalist, or did a scientist let her down?”

Zachary gave a crack of unkind laughter. “Can you imagine a guy getting close enough to her to let her down?”

Jeanine shook her head reprovingly. “We only knew her when she
was already old. We’ve lived here since Toby was two, but we don’t know anything about her. I think it was something that happened in the war, World War Two, I mean. We have a lot of Holocaust survivors in Skokie, or used to: they’re getting old, they’re dying. Kitty’s odd behavior—it doesn’t seem impossible that it’s connected with the war.”

“She grew up in Vienna,” I said, “but she went to London with the Kindertransport when she was about nine.”

Jeanine nodded. “If she lost everyone she’d left behind, if one of those people was a scientist, she might translate that into a feeling of betrayal by science. She isn’t a fundamentalist, but she still grumbles if there’s something about climate change, or even medical research, on the news. She’ll go out of her way to make sure that everyone around her knows that scientists make things up just to make the people around them feel uncertain about the future.”

“I wondered if her childhood in Vienna explains why she was so insistent about my not talking to the police about Martin.”

“That’s because of Judy,” Zachary said. “We weren’t here in those days, but the Lustics and other families have told us what
that
used to be like—cops on the block every night, Judy coming home coked to the gills, Judy arrested for dealing drugs on the high school grounds. If Kitty doesn’t want you going to the cops it’s because she knows Martin is with Judy.”

“That’s possible,” Jeanine conceded. “But that doesn’t mean Martin’s in a safe place. He might have thought he could handle his mother and her associates and gotten in over his head.”

Someone outside the room sneezed. I went to the doorway and found Voss hovering on the stairwell. Jeanine joined me in the hallway.

“You are a pest, aren’t you?” I said before his mother could scold him. “What did Martin say when he rode off?”

“First he said,
‘Hasta la próxima
.
’
That’s because when I was little he used to play Mexican bandits with me.”

“And then?” I prompted when Voss stopped.

He looked sidelong at his mother. “He asked if I’d take a book back to the library for him, in case he couldn’t get home before it was overdue, so I said sure, and he went inside and came out with the book.”

“And did you?” his mother asked.

He scuffed the stairwell carpet with his bare foot. “I kind of forgot.”

“Then remember now and bring it down here. You know if there’s a fine, you have to pay it.”

Voss ran up the stairs. We heard thuds as he sorted through his room and then silence. Behind us Zach demanded to know what was going on.

“Back in a minute,” Jeanine called to her husband, then yelled up the stairs to Voss to bring the book down.

“I don’t know if it’s teenage boyness, or too much gaming and texting, but he has the attention span of a gnat. Voss! Now!”

We heard a few more thuds and some rustling, but after another minute went by, Jeanine went up the stairs. She came down, exasperated.

“He’s lost the book. I don’t want to solve Martin’s library problems, but I wish Voss could remember what he did with it.”

“Does he know what it was?” I asked.

Voss appeared behind her. “I don’t know,” he said unhappily. “The cover was weird, it showed someone stabbing the Statue of Liberty.”

Bookstore and library staffs’ favorite way to find a title: The cover was red. There was a picture of a shark/puppy/Statue of Liberty.

Jeanine shooed her younger son back to his room. I waited until I heard his door shut before I told her what I’d found yesterday in Palfry.

“I really need to talk to Toby, or to someone Martin would have confided in. It was a mess down there—”

Jeanine looked back into the living room at her husband. This time it was he who gave his head a minatory shake.

“We don’t want you bothering Toby,” Zachary said flatly. “We’ll call him and let you know what he says.”

Like Jari Liu. What was it about my face that made people feel I couldn’t talk to their staff or their children?

“I can’t promise not to talk to your son. I have to find someone who knows what was on Martin’s mind those last weeks he was home. Even if Toby doesn’t know, he could give me names of some of the other people they both know.”

“Toby’s a minor,” Zachary said. “It’s against the law for you to talk to him without our consent.”

“I’m not a cop, Mr. Susskind, I don’t have powers to arrest or try anyone, so that particular law doesn’t apply to me.”

Jeanine murmured an apology as she escorted me to the door.

“I’m used to it in my work,” I said. “If the book Martin handed to Voss turns up, will you call me and let me know the title?”

Jeanine promised. I could see her thinking that if she found the book it would make up for her husband’s brusqueness.

8

DINNER WITH THE KING OF SWEDEN

I
T WAS PAST NINE
when I left the Susskinds’, but I drove down to Lotty’s place anyway. We’d spoken briefly when she got home from the clinic. She hadn’t heard anything new from Judy Binder, but she wanted to know what I’d managed to learn.

“Is the Binder house still dripping in lace?” Lotty asked when we were sitting on the balcony overlooking Lake Michigan.

I’d found the lace oppressive myself but something in Lotty’s voice made me perversely want to defend Kitty Binder. “It’s beautiful work. She told me her grandmother taught her.”

“Yes, Käthe’s grandmother was a skilled seamstress. Embroidery, lace, all those things, besides making dresses and drapes and mending my grandfather’s socks. I used to look down on her, attitudes I picked up from my grandmother, I’m afraid, although of course every woman of my
Oma
’s generation could embroider and even knit. When we all had to survive as best we could in the ghetto, Frau Saginor’s skills were in much higher demand than my grandmother’s gift as a hostess.” Lotty’s voice was tinged with bitterness.

“I was maladroit with Ms. Binder about her family. She had a snapshot of herself with her two sisters—”

“She told you she had sisters?” Lotty interrupted. “She was like me: an only child.”

I felt a lurch of uncertainty. “They were all in bathing suits,” I insisted. “Her parents and the three girls.”

“What did they look like, these
soi-disant
parents?” Lotty demanded.

“I didn’t get that close a look. Plump, jolly. The man had dark hair that was thinning in the middle, the woman, hard to say, she had a big straw hat on.”

“I knew Käthe’s mother. I can remember the fights at Käthe’s home because her mother never remembered to come home in time for dinner. Food didn’t interest Fräulein Martina—Käthe’s mother. She was thin, with an angular, intense face. Anyway, Käthe was like me in another respect. Neither of us had a father on the premises.

“Käthe and I used to have stupid quarrels about whose papa was better. Käthe hated that I at least knew my father, could visit him when my mother chose to live in the tiny flat he shared with his parents and his sisters. Käthe retaliated by making up fantastic stories about her own father.”

Lotty gave a harsh laugh. “We both knew my papa was a street musician, so hers had to be something grand. Käthe used to bore me to tears with her boasts about how he had met Albert Einstein, how he ate dinner with the King of Sweden. Who is this big shot? I would ask, but she couldn’t even put a name to him! One morning I got so sick of hearing about him that I slapped her, and then my
Oma
made me apologize.
I sympathize with the sentiment, Lottchen, but not the method of expression,
she told me.”

“Dinner with the King of Sweden, friends with Einstein—that sounds as though her father, or the man she thought was her father, won the Nobel Prize,” I said.

“Yes, my dear, it didn’t take Einstein himself for me to figure that out,” Lotty said dryly. “My point is, Käthe didn’t have sisters. She has a snapshot of herself as a child with two other girls and their happy
parents, so she’s made up a story about that, just as she used to make up stories about a scientist. Now she believes it’s true.”

“You’re sure of this?” I said. “I know you don’t like her—”

“That wouldn’t cause me to make up my own fairy tales about her!” Lotty snapped. “Her mother taught science in the girls’ technical high school in Vienna, that’s probably why Käthe’s fantasy father was a scientist. I think her mother did research at the Radium Institute there. Maybe Käthe had a crush on one of the masters, or perhaps on someone who visited Fräulein Saginor from the Institute.”

I frowned. “Ms. Binder told me that her father was a builder. She said she didn’t want her grandson going off doing theoretical work because it only leads to trouble. Which story is correct? The Nobel laureate or the builder?”

Lotty made a helpless gesture with her hands. “We were so young when we left Vienna, and the trauma of it all—I can’t begin to tell you what her real history might have been. The family she lived with in England could have been builders—I don’t know anything about them.”

“She said her family had all been killed,” I said. “But she also said she came to Chicago after the war because someone in Vienna told her that her parents were alive and in Chicago. The whole story is so confusing I can’t make head or tail of it, but one thing does seem clear: Kitty’s grandson has disappeared. Also she’s afraid of the police. I’m going to have to go to them, but it will be against her wishes.”

“Oh, this constant harping on the police!” Lotty exclaimed. “Käthe always has to cloak what she’s doing in drama and mystery. It’s the same as pretending her father won the Nobel Prize: she’s so important that the FBI pays attention to her comings and goings. It’s not surprising that Judy went off the rails, living in that madhouse. How Len stood it all those years I can’t fathom.”

“According to the neighbors, the police came to the Binders’ quite a bit during Judy’s adolescence,” I said. “Ms. Binder has probably had enough of their involvement with her family.”

“Yes, but this has been the bee in her bonnet since she first arrived in Chicago. I wasn’t ever to talk to the police about her, because that could get her killed. I put it down at first to survivor paranoia: as you know, I have my own allergies to people in uniforms. Once you’ve seen police beat your own grandfather—never mind that. What’s frustrating about Käthe is that she’d rather not take the trouble to differentiate between the past and the present. Between real threats and imagined ones.”

Lotty was breathing hard. I waited, watching the running lights of the boats on the inky sea beyond. Lotty poured herself another cup of coffee. I’d reluctantly declined a cup of her rich Viennese coffee, such a contrast to the Susskinds’ tepid brew: caffeine is starting to interrupt my sleep at night, but it never seems to bother Lotty.

“What are you going to do?” Lotty asked at last.

“Find the one friend Martin seems to have had in high school. I met his parents tonight; they let drop that their son is in Rochester, so I ought to be able to track down what college he’s attending. I’ll also try to locate some of Judy Binder’s associates. Do you know anyone besides yourself she might have turned to when she was so frightened yesterday morning?”

“I don’t know her well enough for that,” Lotty said. “I’m the person she comes to when she’s in trouble, which started when she was in her teens. I was astonished when she appeared at my clinic the first time, but after that, it became chronic—she had STDs, she was pregnant, she turned up one evening in the middle of a terrifyingly bad drug reaction. She landed in a locked ward for a month that time.

“After that, I didn’t see her for years, really, until the day she showed up pregnant with Martin. I thought then she’d turned her life around: she stayed clean throughout the pregnancy and for four or five months after. It didn’t last, though.”