Critical Mass (11 page)

“Do you know who the father was? Would she have stayed in touch with him?”

Lotty lifted her arms in a helpless gesture. “I was her doctor, not her confidante. Besides, Judy slept around so much that she probably didn’t know which particular man was responsible for the pregnancy. The miracle to me is that Martin has turned out to have a brilliant mind. If a drug addict was the responsible, or rather, the irresponsible man, the risk of brain damage was high.”

“Yep,” I said. “Kid got perfect math scores on his SATs. Not too much brain damage there, just a lot of psychic damage from living with your old friend.”

“Victoria, please. You’re hurting me in a sore point.” She hesitated, twisting her coffee cup in her fingers. “Judy asked if I would adopt Martin when she realized she couldn’t look after him. I told her I’d help her find a good family for him, but I had an active surgical practice; if I’d taken him, a nanny would have raised him.”

I reached across the metal table to squeeze her hand, but she pulled it away.

“Don’t tell me I did the right thing. A nanny would have been better than Käthe, but before I could do anything, Judy had given the baby to her parents.”

In the dim light coming from the living room I saw her mouth twist in a bitter line. “She felt I betrayed her: I’ve only seen her twice since that day. She and I both appeared at Martin’s bar mitzvah, and again at Len’s funeral. She didn’t look well, either time. She must be around your age, but she looked worn and old enough to be your mother. At Len’s funeral, she said she was going to live on a farm, to see if life in the country would help her get clean and sober. I wanted to believe her. Of course I was deluding myself, the way one does when confronting someone whom you feel you’ve let down. You hope their problems will solve themselves without you. I hope she hasn’t dragged her son into her unhealthy world.”

“I don’t think so. He’s twenty—if he’d been going down that road someone would have seen signs by now.”

I told Lotty what Martin had said to Kitty about uncovering an arithmetic error, and my speculation about whether Martin thought his mother had been stealing from him.

“I’m thinking he rode his bike down to Palfry to confront her. But why did he and Judy both disappear? I don’t think he was with her when she screamed at you for help.”

“What can you do?” Lotty asked.

“I have someone in the public defender’s office tracing any associates of the man whose body I discovered. Martin disassembled his computers, so there’s no way to hack into them to find a trail there, but if I can get a working e-mail address I may be able to find out where he’s been logging in from. And then, I guess I’ll see if I can find out whether there’s any possibility that Kitty Binder’s parents were here right after the war. Martin probably heard tales about them when he was growing up—he might have tried to track them down. What was Kitty’s birth name?”

“Saginor,” Lotty said. “But remember, that was her mother: we don’t know her father.”

“It’s easy to get a list of Nobel laureates,” I said. “Someone who won the prize between 1920 and 1939, that should fit the bill. Unless her father was a builder. Perhaps he was a builder who dined with the King of Sweden, though: he wasn’t a Nobel laureate, but simply the king’s carpenter.”

Lotty laughed at that, but her face remained worried as she ushered me through her apartment to the elevator.

As I drove home, I remembered, a bit belatedly, that I’d promised Kitty Binder I’d keep her affairs confidential. I also remembered vowing not to let other people put their problems into the center of my stage. One more day, I vowed: one more day on the Binder-Saginor mystery and then I’d turn my back on them.

It was close to eleven when I got home, but I stayed up another hour to talk to Jake Thibaut, the bass player I’ve been seeing for the last few
years. One of the chamber groups he belongs to was on tour along the West Coast. They had started in Alaska and were working their way south to San Diego. They’d made it as far as Victoria on Vancouver Island.

His absence made my schedule easier in some ways, but it also meant I was lonely at the end of a long day. I waited up until his concert had ended, so we could exchange news of the day. His had definitely been more fun than mine: the concert, held in a refurbished church, had been a major success. Tomorrow, on their day off, a friend was taking them out deep-sea fishing.

“If I catch a salmon I’ll send it home to you.”

“I’ll prop it up at the dining room table and talk to it over dinner; that will make us both forget we miss you.”

I casually mentioned the dog I’d rescued from a meth house, and he groaned. “No more dogs, V.I., please. Peppy’s mellow, but I can only just tolerate Mitch; a third dog and we’re going to do some serious talking.”

“A third dog and I’ll be in a witness relocation program,” I assured him. “Don’t you care that I was risking life and limb in a meth house?”

“Victoria Iphigenia, what can I do about that? If I told you to steer clear of them you’d do your cactus imitation. Anyway, I’m three thousand miles away. Even if I were right next to you, I know you’re the person on our team who takes down meth dealers, not me. I’d be worrying about my fingers and you’d have to protect both of us.”

I had to laugh. I abandoned the effort to extract worried cluckings from him and moved on to Kitty Binder and her missing family.

That did get his attention. “You say Lotty told you this Kitty’s birth name was Saginor? Was she related to a Viennese musician named Elsa Saginor?”

“I don’t know.” I was surprised. “Who is that?”

“She was one of the Terezín musicians. She played flute, but she composed, also; some of her music was in the scores from the camp
they discovered several years ago. We perform it from time to time. It’s rather intricate, fugal but in a serialist style. The fun thing, if it isn’t sacrilegious to talk about having fun with death camp music, is to lay about ten tracks of the recording over each other and then play live against the backing. It’s exhilarating to concentrate so hard.”

I wondered if mentioning a musical aunt would make Kitty Binder unbend with me, or if she would purse her lips still further and utter some pithy condemnation of people who had their mouths on their flutes instead of their eyes on the prize.

Before we hung up, Jake said, “Don’t get in over your head, V.I. I miss you. I’d hate like hell to spend the rest of my life missing you instead of just the next three weeks.”

9

SHADOW OF THE THIN MAN

I
N MY DREAMS,
Jake was playing his bass for the King of Sweden, who said he would perish in the death camps if he didn’t build a new kitchen for him by morning. “Keep your head in the clouds,” the king cried, “or I will cut it off.”

I spent a strenuous night, fighting the king, hiding Jake’s bass, getting lost in the clouds. When I got up in the morning, I was almost as tired as when I’d gone to bed. I went for a long run, on my own, without the dogs, to clean out my head.

Jake’s response to my poor rescued Rottweiler had rankled a bit, but it also hit home. It was a strain to look after two big dogs, even with Mr. Contreras’s help; I didn’t often have enough time to do the meditative running I enjoy. A third dog would make it impossible.

After four miles, I was moving in an easy rhythm that made me want to keep going all the way to the Indiana border. It was hard to turn around and face a day in a chair, but I was one of those people who keep their feet on the ground, their shoulder to the wheel, their nose to the grindstone. What a boring person I must be.

While I showered, I mapped out a program for the day. Track down Martin’s friend Toby Susskind to see if he could tell me anything about where Martin had gone. Library work on Nobel Prize winners to guess a father for Kitty Binder: Martin Binder might have gone hunting his putative family. I’d round out this fun-fest by following up with my
pal from the PD’s office, to see if he’d unearthed any of my dead meth maker’s associates.

It would have been easier to find Toby if I’d had his cell phone, but I finally learned he was a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The school wouldn’t give me a phone number for him, but they let me have his college e-mail address, since that was essentially public information. While I waited for him to answer my e-mail, I started my search through the list of Nobel laureates from the 1920s and thirties.

It wasn’t the slam-dunk search I’d been imagining. I went down to the University of Chicago science library so I could use their reference support, assuming I’d be in and out within an hour. That wasn’t my biggest mistake of the day, just the first.

By digging deep I found some mentions of Martina Saginor in an essay—in German—on women at the Institut für Radiumforschung in Vienna. I didn’t want to wait for Max or Lotty to translate the article for me, so I took the file to the reference desk, where they called up a kid from the back who read German. With his wire-rimmed glasses and white shirt under a sweater-vest, he made me think of William Henry, the young wannabe criminologist in
The Thin Man.

He said he was Arthur Harriman; I said I was V. I. Warshawski. When I explained that I was a detective, trying to machete my way through seventy or so years of undergrowth to the trail of a dead physicist, Harriman became even more like William Henry
.
“We’re hunting a missing person? Was she a German spy? Do I need to know how to use a gun?”

“You need to be able to read German, which I don’t.” I handed him my laptop, with the German essay on the screen.

“This sounds interesting,” Harriman said after he’d scrolled through part of the article. “The Institut für Radiumforschung, that was the Radiation Research Institute. Vienna wanted to compete with Paris and Cambridge and Copenhagen in the quest for the secrets of the atom. What’s amazing is that forty percent of the Viennese research
staff were women, compared to practically none in the U.S. or the rest of Europe—even including Irène Curie’s lab, which hired a lot of women.”

He scrolled down the page until he got to Saginor. “Your lady taught chemistry and math in the Technische Hochschule for girls from 1926 to 1938. In between she went off to Germany, to Göttingen, to do a Ph.D. in physics, and then she became a researcher at the IRF. Göttingen was where Heisenberg developed the special algebra of quantum mechanics. Everyone in physics came there at some time or other. Oppenheimer, Fermi, everyone.”

“Does it say anything about Saginor’s personal life?” I asked. “Did she have children, a husband, any of that kind of detail?”

He read through to the end of the essay. “Nothing about her personal life. After Germany annexed Austria and imposed the Nazi race laws, Saginor lost her high school teaching job, but for some reason the IRF didn’t fire its Jewish staff right away. Not clear why. Then in 1941 Saginor got detailed to the Uranverein.”

“Which was?”

Harriman clicked on a couple of links. I waited while he read some other documents, his lips moving as he translated to himself. “It means ‘Uranium Club’ literally, but these were the research locations where Germany tried to develop the physics and engineering to build an atom bomb. There were six Verein labs in Germany, one in Austria; your lady got sent to one in the Austrian Alps.”

He read some more, still muttering to himself. “So. In 1942, with things going badly on the Russian front, Germany was running out of money for its bomb project. Besides, Hitler never really believed splitting the atom was possible. Shows why it’s a mistake to let your research be dictated by a dictator.”

He gave a half-grin at his little pun, but became serious again as he finished reading. “Sorry to say, but Saginor got shipped east in 1943, after the reactor in Austria was shut down. Saginor was sent first to
Terezín, then put on a forced march going east from there, probably heading for Sobibor. She must have died along the march route, since that’s the last record of her.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to push away the image of a poorly clad woman dying in the snow. “Does that mean that before she died, she worked on the German equivalent of the Manhattan Project?” I asked. “I didn’t know they had one.”

“Oh, yes. It was a mad global arms race,” Harriman said cheerfully.

“But—was she doing weapons work in Vienna, at this IRF place?”

“No, no.” He put down my laptop. “She was like everyone else doing physics in the thirties: she was trying to understand the interior of the atom. In the essay you found, the one about women at the Radiation Institute, one of her old coworkers says Saginor was a dedicated researcher.”

He looked at the screen again and clicked back to the first article. “She used to come into the Institute at the end of her high school teaching day and start running experiments. The woman they quote in the article says that Saginor never seemed to eat—they served coffee and cakes in the common area, but Martina could hardly bear to leave her lab. This other woman thought Martina’s main interest had been in neutron interaction with heavy nuclei, but thirties physicists, chemists, geologists, they all crisscrossed each other’s interests all the time.”

He tapped the screen. “I can see why she was drafted into the Uranverein, although it was as slave labor. Saginor may have been one of the early believers in fission, because already in 1937 she seemed to be experimenting with different materials, trying to come up with a way to capture the resonance cross sections of uranium and thorium without a lot of background noise.”

I tried to nod intelligently, but internally I groaned: Why hadn’t I paid more attention to Professor Wright’s lectures when I was an undergraduate here?

I got Harriman to write what he’d just said and put it in an e-mail to
me. When he’d obligingly finished that, I asked him about Nobel Prize winners Martina Saginor might have met, either in Vienna or Göttingen. “It has to be someone who would have been in Chicago around 1955 or so, because Martina’s daughter came here looking for him.”