Critical Mass (15 page)

Kitty wouldn’t have kept her belief in her own royal lineage secret from her family. I could imagine her bragging to her husband, or her complaints to her daughter:
My father won the Nobel Prize, you must get your weak genes from your father’s famil
y.

If Martin was on the trail of something that didn’t add up, was it something he’d discovered about his mother? His grandmother? What
if it had nothing to do with drugs or money, but rather that he feared he had symptoms of a genetic disorder? He’d have gone to his father’s family in Cleveland, but he’d also have tracked down the people he’d been raised to believe were his mother’s family.

Dzornen died in 1969; Ilse survived until 1989 without remarrying. I looked at where their kids had landed. The son had never married, but the two daughters had. They’d produced children and now grandchildren. I counted them: five grandchildren for Benjamin and Ilse, eleven great-grandchildren. One of Dzornen’s daughters had died, but that still left eighteen people who might know something about Martina Saginor and her daughter. They were far-flung—two were in South America, three in Europe, the others spread out across North America.

None of Dzornen’s three children had gone into science. The son, Julius, didn’t seem to have gone into anything. He was about seventy now, living in a coach house near the University of Chicago, without any assets to speak of. In contrast, the surviving daughter lived on the Gold Coast with a tidy portfolio of bonds and a winter place in Arizona.

The computer turned up an old photo of Ilse, Benjamin and the two daughters standing in front of a frame house in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1937, with Ilse visibly pregnant. I tried to remember the snapshot on Kitty Binder’s credenza: Had the girls looked anything like these?

Kitty said her family had all been killed in the war. She also said she had come to Chicago because she’d learned her parents were here. Had she said parents or father? Maybe she tried to find Dzornen, but he rebuffed her: he was an important player in the post-war American scientific world; he wouldn’t have wanted an inconvenient reminder of a protégée/lover who hadn’t survived the war. Or he wasn’t Kitty’s father and she was a nuisance.

Dzornen’s children might know something about Kitty, or Martina,
or even Martin. Julius Dzornen’s coach house was on University Avenue, not far from where I’d been yesterday. It seemed odd to me, the more I thought about it: he didn’t have any visible means of support, he hadn’t strayed far from his parents’ house. It would be quite a detour to visit him before seeing Nadja Hahne at the high school, but I could just fit it in if I really hustled with my to-do list.

I did an hour’s worth of work with the wine retailer, agreeing to help him buy and place discreet surveillance cameras. I talked to the law firm about their receivables, then set up a phone date with a mining company in Saskatchewan. Two hundred dollars of billable hours duly entered in my spreadsheet.

On my way south, the odometer in my Mustang rolled over the hundred-thousand-mile marker. If I was ever going to afford a new car, I’d have to stop racing around the city like this. I suppose some detectives might bill the way lawyers do, for every six minutes spent even in thought on a particular client, but I didn’t think poor Kitty needed to pay for the time I spent driving, let alone my fracas at Freddie Walker’s drug house.

It was still early enough in the day that I made good time to Hyde Park. Julius’s coach house lay behind a square frame house on University Avenue. The top of an ash, its leaves already yellow, towered over the house from the back.

I wondered if I should cross the lawn to get to Julius, then noticed a flagstone path that bordered the fence. I followed it past the big house to a large yard that held a swing set and a badminton net, although the giant ash had sent out so many knobby roots that it would be a challenge to run down stray shots. The coach house stood behind the tree, its windows so covered with ivy that I couldn’t tell if any lights were on inside.

Shrubs along the fence were hung with bird feeders. The birds squawked off at my approach, reminding me unpleasantly of the crows around Derrick Schlafly.

I pounded on the door: there didn’t seem to be a knocker or a bell. Behind the door I could hear faint noises, a radio, perhaps. After three or four minutes of knocking, when I was beginning to wonder if Julius might have died, he suddenly opened the door. He was a short, stocky man with his mother’s high-domed forehead. He had a two-day growth and his eyes were red: too much beer, not enough sleep.

“Mr. Dzornen? My name is V. I. Warshawski. I’m a detective—”

He started to slam the door on me. “No cops without a warrant.”

I stuck my flashlight into the jamb and pushed against his weight. “I’m private, not with the cops.”

“Then there’s no way you can get a warrant, so fuck off. I don’t talk to detectives.”

“Is that the cornerstone of your faith?” I asked. “You made a bedrock decision fifty years ago to eschew all detectives and nothing has ever happened to make you change your mind?”

The door reopened so quickly that I lost my balance and fell into him. For a moment we did a tangled tango of arms, legs, briefcase and flashlight, until he backed up and I fell onto my right side. As I got back to my feet, I saw his face looked white and gluey, as if he had suddenly smeared himself with Crisco.

A worn tan jacket was hanging on a hook behind me. I draped it over his shoulders and led him into his sitting room, where I pushed him down into a frayed armchair. The room was heavy with stale cigarette smoke; an ashtray on the coffee table was overflowing with butts. Other than that, the room wasn’t really untidy, just in need of a good vacuuming. Not that I should judge.

What was surprising was that the walls were covered with photographs and maps of migratory birds. His own observations were written in a finicky script on strips laid across tracking maps. Several binocular cases stood on a ledge next to one of the tiny windows, a worn leather case with “Carl Zeiss” stamped on it and a bigger, more modern case from Nikon.

When Dzornen’s color started to return to normal, I asked, “What happened fifty years ago, Mr. Dzornen?”

“I dropped out of school.”

“Was that because of something a detective did?”

His mouth twisted in a sneer. “Because of something a detective didn’t do.”

I thought this over. “A crime was committed but a detective never solved it and you were framed so you had to quit school?”

“Interesting guess, Detective. Where were you fifty years ago?”

“Lying in my crib, probably. You want to tell me what the detective didn’t do fifty years ago?”

He gave a ferocious grin. “The detective never showed up. Unlike you. You’re incredibly late. What do you want?”

“Did this non-arriving detective have something to do with Kitty Binder?”

“Oh, Kitty.” He made a dismissive gesture. “You been talking to Herta?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Should I?”

“My sister’s always had her undies in a bundle over Kitty. Herta considers herself the guardian of Benjamin Dzornen’s memory. She has a shrine to him in that mausoleum she lives in. She’s always imagined Kitty wants to desecrate the shrine—Herta doesn’t understand Kitty is like her and Ilse, just one more fucked-up refugee from Hitler’s Europe.”

I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. “Does Herta think Kitty Binder wants to attack her?”

“She may worry that Kitty will attack her bank accounts. Did Kitty hire you to pry money out of Herta? Tell her from me that Herta clings tightly to her hoard, only opening her wallet on rare and special occasions.”

“Like when she bought you those?” I gestured toward the binoculars.

He spread his lips in a parody of a smile, showing teeth stained gray by cigarettes. “Not even then. The Zeiss was something my father left me. Social Security paid for the Nikon.”

“Kitty hired me to find Martin, her grandson,” I said. “I thought he might have called on you or your sister before he disappeared.”

“You keep thinking, Detective. It may win you the Nobel Prize, like it did for my old man. But believe me, all those thoughts, and all those prizes, they don’t save you from being really stupid in the end. I try not to think, just watch the birds. They keep you far away from human muck.”

“Very likely.” He was watching me warily behind the patina of world-weary chatter, thinking like mad, but about what? “Did Martin come to see you this summer?”

“Why would he do that?” Julius said.

“Because he saw something that didn’t make sense to him, and I wondered if it was connected to his family’s history, which is possibly also your history.”

“You wonder away, Detective, because, like they say on the TV cop shows, this conversation is over.” He leaned back in the armchair and put on an ostentatious pantomime of a man asleep.

I watched him for a bit, but he didn’t budge: eyes drooped shut, jaw slack, short loud snorts coming from his nose. When I got to my feet and started poking about among the drawers on an old desk, he was up in a flash. He was seventy-something, but he was strong, and he grabbed me hard enough to make me wince. I broke away from him, but didn’t retaliate: he was in the right—I didn’t have any business looking at his papers. And, as he’d said at the outset, I couldn’t produce a warrant.

13

THE DZORNEN EFFECT

T
HIS IS MY
SIXTEENTH
YEAR
of teaching. I’ve had a number of bright students, but Martin Binder is one who stays with me. Such a combination of native talent and poor direction.”

Nadja Hahne was talking to me in a corner of the faculty lounge, where we had to lean our heads almost touching so we could hear each other: at the end of the workday, teachers were blowing off steam, some more loudly than others. Dressed in jeans and a white shirt, with her brown hair falling in unruly wisps around her face, Hahne didn’t look old enough to have been teaching for sixteen years.

“In what way, Ms. Hahne?”

“Nadja,” she said. “I’m ‘Ms. Hahne’ eight hours a day; I need to be a person at the end. They sent Martin into my AP physics class when he got a perfect math score on the PSATs. He should have been in the gifted program from the outset, but some idiot put him in our UTG track.”

I looked blank, and she gave an embarrassed smile.

“One of those horrible private acronyms: Unlikely to Graduate. Martin’s grades were mediocre, because expectations of him had been low both at home and at school. His grandmother had this incomprehensible opposition to his becoming an academic. Anyway, Martin came to me already in love with physics; he saw the shape of it, if you know what I mean.”

I shook my head.

“Physics can be just equations and formulas and graphs: the Maxwell equations for light, the Feynman diagrams for electron spin, that kind of thing. We get plenty of bright kids at this school who understand them. But physics is also a place where you send your mind chasing after the infinite, searching for the harmonies that lie at the heart of nature. That’s what Martin saw.

“He played catch-up for a couple of months, but he was already asking the best questions I got that term. And then, when he’d mastered the background, his mind began leap-frogging ahead of mine. I’m just good enough at what I do to see where he was going. I was able to teach him a few things, but mostly I sat back and enjoyed watching him explore and grow.

“He was my only student ever to score a five on the physics C exam, which only a few kids take, but his grandmother wouldn’t budge on letting him try for a top-tier school. I tried assuring her that Martin would thrive at a good college. I think the grandfather agreed, but he was quite ill and Ms. Binder was adamant that Martin not turn into a, I don’t know what, time-wasting dreamer, I think is what she said. Nothing could budge her. It was unbearably frustrating. Painful, really.” Nadja pounded her fists on her thighs, the frustration still infuriating her.

“What is he like as a person?” I asked. “I talked to the parents of one of his friends; they said he was socially awkward.”

Nadja gave a sad smile. “He talked very little about his home life; I think he disappeared from it into physics. He was a bit awkward, but he had a sweet streak, and he was good-looking in that brooding way that makes girls think they can save a boy.”

“Any girlfriends?” I asked hopefully.

“I don’t think so,” Nadja said. “In high school, anyway, he couldn’t see how to connect to other people’s lives.”

I fiddled with a pencil that was lying on a nearby table. “He’s been
gone without a trace for about ten days. It’s not a secret, but his mother is a drug addict. I’ve been worried that he’s gotten involved in some mess she’s part of; a man was murdered downstate in the house where she was living.”

“Murdered? Oh my God. Was Martin—” She broke off the sentence, her face contracting with worry.

“I don’t know. I followed his mother to the home of a drug dealer on the West Side and ended up in a firefight over there. She disappeared before I could get into the building. I hoped Martin might have talked to you this past summer, told you what was on his mind before he disappeared. His grandmother said something had upset him several weeks before he actually took off, but she doesn’t know what.”

Hahne shook her head unhappily. “After it became clear he was not going to university, Martin stopped talking to me. My guess is he felt ashamed and thought I might be criticizing him. While he was a student, before his college dreams got broken, we’d talk a lot, but it was mostly about abstractions, music sometimes, or heredity. He was so obsessed with questions about hereditary abilities that I asked why he didn’t focus more on biology, but he said wanting answers to one specific question wasn’t the same as being in love with a whole subject. Anyway, I thought he was probably worried about whether he would become an addict, like his mother.”

“It may have been more than that,” I said. “His grandmother was an illegitimate child in Vienna, and she offers conflicting versions of who her birth father might have been. In the version she used to repeat as a child, he was a Nobel Prize–winning scientist—Benjamin Dzornen.”