Critical Mass (2 page)

Margaret Elliot of Scotland discussed the education high school girls received in chemistry and physics in the 1930s.

Vicki Hill assisted with the German used by Kitty Binder and Lotty Herschel in this novel.

Jonathan Paretsky, who has reviewed trial records for drug cases, helped describe the drug-manufacturing subculture, especially meth production. He also researched federal warrantless searches and the action of chapter 26 for me.

I’m indebted to the late Stan Ovshinsky for the motto “In God We trust, all others show data.”

Karen Pendleton was my inspiration for the offerings at Wenger’s Prairie Market.

The technical description of the Innsbruck reactor is copied loosely from Giacomo Grasso et al., “Neutronics Study of the 1945 Haigerlich B-VIII Nuclear Reactor,”
Physics in Perspective
, September 2009.

All mistakes in this novel are completely the creation of the author, as are all the fictional events. Although some historic figures are mentioned in passing, such as Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller, the main players on my stage are complete fabrications whose strutting and fretting are due to me alone.

VIENNA, 1913

And There Was Light

O
H.”
The syllable is a soft cry of ecstasy. She has never seen colors like those on the floor, red running into orange, yellow, green. The purple is so rich, like grape juice, she wants to jump into it. When she runs over to look, the colors disappear. Her mouth rounds with bafflement: she thought Frau Herschel had painted the rainbow on the floor. Then she sees it reappear on her arm. Against the starched white of her sailor shirt, she can see the purple, which the wooden floor had swallowed. She strokes it and watches the color ripple on her hand.

“Martina!” her mother whispers harshly. “Your manners.”

She turns reluctantly and bobs a curtsy to Frau Herschel. Her black boots hold her ankles so stiffly that she can’t move well and she almost falls. Her mother frowns, desperate for her awkward child to make a good impression on her employer.

Birgit, the
Kindermädchen
, doesn’t bother to hide a smirk. Little Sophie Herschel doesn’t laugh, just pirouettes in her white slippers and sinks into a deep curtsy in front of Martina’s mother.

“I believe the child hasn’t even noticed the rocking horse,” Frau Herschel says, laughter barely covering her annoyance. “But Sophie will help her. You may leave her here in the nursery, Frau Saginor. You can go down to the sewing room to begin the white work. Birgit will feed Martina when she brings Sophie her lunch.”

The six-year-olds are left to stare at each other. Sophie’s hair is the
color of flax and is arranged in sausage curls tied away from her face with a rose ribbon. Martina’s black hair is plaited, pulled so hard from her face that you can see white half-moons of skin behind her ears. Sophie is in a dress beautifully embroidered and smocked by Martina’s mother, but Martina herself wears a sailor top and dark skirt. Even if there were money at home for the fine thread and fabric in Sophie’s dresses—which there isn’t—it wouldn’t do for Frau Saginor’s daughter to be seen in such delicate clothes.

Later, the little girls will spend so much time together that they won’t remember this first meeting, not the meanness of Sophie, flaunting one expensive toy after another, nor of the nursery maid Birgit, giving Martina a piece of bread with goose fat for lunch while Sophie has thick soup and an orange, nor of Martina upstaging Sophie with Signor Caperelli, the Italian who was teaching music to many of Vienna’s bourgeois children.

“And this one? She play also?” Signor Caperelli asks Birgit, after yawning over Sophie’s haphazard performance for half an hour.

“She is just the sewing woman’s child, brought in to amuse Fräulein Sophie,” Birgit sniffs.

“But at home I play on my auntie’s flute,” Martina says. She is made bold by the foreign man’s obvious disappointment with Sophie and sees a chance to pay the other girl back for her snubs.

Signor Caperelli produces a child-sized flute from the carpetbag that holds his music. Martina blows on it to warm it, as her auntie has taught her. She shuts her eyes and sees the rainbow spilling onto the nursery floor. Each color has a note and she plays the rainbow, or tries to. She wants to cry, because she hasn’t made the sounds come out to match the colors. She hands the flute back, scarlet with shame.

Signor Caperelli laughs. “Your auntie, she love the noise of Herr Schoenberg? To my ear, he is not making music!”

When Martina doesn’t answer, still staring at the floor, Caperelli rummages in his bag again and extracts a sheet of simple music. “You
can read the notes, yes? Give this to your auntie. At your little age, already you are in love with sound, but now you learn to make a song, not the howling of cats on the Prater like Herr Schoenberg make,
sì
?”

In later years, Martina remembers none of that, although the flute will always calm her. She remembers only the rainbow on the floor, and the discovery that the cut glass in the nursery windows created it.

1

HELL’S KITCHEN

T
HE SUN SCORCHED
my back through my thin shirt. It was September, but out on the prairie, the heat still held a midsummer ferocity.

I tried the gate in the cyclone fence, but it was heavily padlocked; when I pushed hard to see if it would open enough for me to slide through, the metal burned my fingers. A camera and a microphone were mounted on top of the gatepost, but both had been shot out.

I backed away and looked around the empty landscape. Mine had been the only car on the gravel county road as I bumped my way from the turnoff in Palfry. Except for the crows circling and diving into the brown cornstalks across the road, I was completely alone. I felt tiny and vulnerable under the blue bowl of the sky. It closed over the earth in all directions, seeming to shut out air, to let in nothing but light and heat.

Despite dark glasses and a visored cap, my eyes throbbed from the glare. As I walked around the house, looking for a break in the fence, purple smoke rings danced in front of me.

The house was old and falling down. Glass had broken out, or been shot out, of most of the windows. Someone had nailed slabs of plywood over them, but hadn’t put much effort into the job: in several places the wood swung free, secured by only a couple of nails. Behind the plywood, someone had stuffed pieces of cardboard or tatty cloth around the broken panes.

The steel fence had revolving spikes on top to discourage trespassers like me. Signs warned of guard dogs, but I didn’t hear any barking or snuffling as I walked the perimeter.

In front, the house was close to the fence and to the road, but in the back the fence enclosed a large stretch of land. An old shed had collapsed in one corner. A giant pit, filled with refuse and stinking of chemicals, had been dug near the shed. Jugs, spray cans of solvent, and all the other fixings of a meth operation fought with coffee grounds and chicken bones for top stench.

It was behind the shed that I found the opening I needed. Someone had been there before me with heavy steel cutters, taking out a piece of fence wide enough for a car to drive through. The cuts were recent, the steel along the pointed ends shiny, unlike the dull gray of the rest of the metal. As I passed between the cuts, the skin on my neck prickled with something more than heat. I wished I’d brought my gun with me, but I hadn’t known I was coming to a drug house when I left Chicago.

Whoever cut the fence had dealt with the back door in a similarly economic way, kicking it in so that it hung on one hinge. The smell that rolled out the open door—metallic, like iron, mixed with rotting meat—was all too easy to recognize. I pulled my shirt up over my nose and looked cautiously inside. A dog lay just beyond the doorway, his chest blown open. Some large-caliber something had taken him down as he tried to protect the losers he lived with.

“Poor old Rottweiler, your mama never meant you to guard a drug house, did she?” I whispered. “Not your fault, boy, wrong place, wrong time, wrong people.”

Flies were busy in his wounds; the ends of his ribs were already exposed, patches of white beneath the black of dried blood and muscle. Insects had eaten out his eyes. I felt my lunch start to rise up and made it down the steps in time to throw up in the pit by the shed.

I went back to my car on wobbly legs and collapsed on the front seat. I drank some water from the bottle I’d brought with me. It was as
hot as the air and tasted rubbery, but it settled my stomach a bit. I sat for some minutes watching a farmer move up and down a remote field, dust billowing around him. He was too far away for me to hear. The only sound came from the wind in the corn, and the crows circling above it.

When my legs and stomach calmed down, I took the big beach towel I use for my dogs from the backseat. In the trunk I found an old T-shirt that I slit open so I could tie it over my nose and mouth. Armed with this makeshift mask, I returned to the house. I waved the towel hard enough to dislodge most of the flies, then covered the dog.

When I stepped over his body, it was into a kitchen from hell. A scarred wooden hutch, once painted white, was filled with spray cans of starter fluid, drain cleaner, jars part-full of ugly-looking liquids, eye droppers, Vicks inhalers, and gallon jugs labeled “muriatic acid.” A makeshift lab hood with an exhaust vent had been constructed over the hutch. Half buried in the filth were a number of industrial face masks.

Whoever had kicked in the door had also pulled linoleum from the floor and pried up some of the rotting boards underneath. I squatted and pointed my flashlight through an opening between the exposed joists. Water heater, furnace, stood on the dirt floor below me, but no bodies as far as I could tell. Cool air rose from the basement, along with a smell of leaf mold that seemed wholesome in contrast to the chemicals around me.

I straightened and played my light around the room. It was hard to tell how much of the shambles had been caused by the dog killers and how much by the natives.

I stepped over jugs that had been knocked to the floor, skirted a couple of plug-in heaters, and moved into the rooms beyond.

It was an old farmhouse, with a front room that had once been a formal parlor, judging by the remnants of decorative tiles around the
empty fireplace. These had been pried out of the mantel and shattered. Someone had held target practice against an old rolltop desk. An angry hand had smashed the drawers and scattered papers around the floor.

I stooped to look at them. Most were past-due notices from the county for taxes and for garbage pickup. The Palfry Public Library wanted a copy of
Gone With the Wind
that Agnes Schlafly had checked out in 1979.

Scraps of photos were all that remained of a savagely mangled album. When I dropped it back on the scrap heap, it dislodged one intact picture. It was an old photo, bleached and scarred from its time in the meth house, which showed a dozen or so people gathered around a large metal egg balanced on a giant tripod. It looked like a cartoon version of a pod landing from outer space, but the group around it stared at the camera with solemn pride. Three women, in the longer skirts and thick-heeled shoes of the 1930s, sat in the middle; five men stood behind them, all in jackets and ties.

I frowned over it, wondering what the metal egg could possibly be. Pipes ran through it; perhaps it was the prototype of a machine to ferry milk from cow to refrigerated storage. Just because it was an oddity, I stuck it into my bag.

The adjacent room contained a couple of card tables and some chairs with broken backs. Empty pizza cartons, chicken bones, and a bowl of cereal that was growing mold: I could see it as a Bosch still life.

A staircase led to a second floor; tucked underneath it was a stopped-up toilet. A better detective than I might have looked inside, but the smell told me more than I wanted to know.

Three bedrooms were built under the eaves at the top of the stairs. Two of them held only mattresses and plastic baskets. These had been upended, spilling dirty clothes over the floor. The mattresses had been slit, so that hunks of batting covered the clothes.

There’d been an actual bed and a dresser in the third bedroom, but
these, too, had been ripped apart. An eight-by-ten of a young woman holding a baby had been torn from the frame, which itself had been broken in half and tossed onto the shredded bedclothes.

I picked up the photo, cautiously, by the edges. The print was so faded that I couldn’t make out the woman’s face, but she had a halo of dark curls. I slipped the picture into my shoulder bag along with the one of the milk pod.

A large poster of Judy Garland, with the caption
Somewhere Over the Rainbow
, hung by one corner over the bedstead, the tape ripped away from the other edges. I wondered if that was the drug user’s joke: “way up high.” It was hard to imagine a meth addict as a purveyor of irony, but it’s easy to be judgmental about people you’ve never met.

The few clothes in the closet—a gold evening gown, a velvet jacket that had once been maroon, and a pair of designer jeans—had also been slit.

“You got somebody pretty pissed off, didn’t you,” I murmured to whoever wore those clothes. My voice sounded odd in the dismembered room.

If there’d been anything to find in this ruined house, the dog’s killers already had it. In my days with the public defender’s office, I used to see this kind of destruction with depressing frequency.

Most likely the invaders had been hunting for more drugs. Or they felt the drug dealers had done them out of something. The addicts I’d known would have traded their mother’s wedding ring for a single hit and then come back to shoot up the place so they could retrieve their jewelry. I’d represented one woman who killed her own son when he couldn’t get back the ring he’d traded for a rock of crack.

I climbed down the steep stairs and found the door that led to the basement. I walked partway down the stairs, but a spider the size of my hand scuttling from my flashlight kept me from descending all the way. I shone my flash around but didn’t see signs of blood or battle.