Critical Mass (23 page)

I woke up slowly, from a great distance. I’d been deep in sleep, back in a scene from my early childhood, when my mother had made cocoa to comfort me after an attack by some neighborhood bullies. Mr. Contreras was staring down at me, his faded brown eyes anxious. When I turned my head on the pillow, I saw Lotty behind him. I shut my eyes, hoping to recapture my mother’s face, but it was gone.

I opened my leaden lids again and pushed myself up in the bed, pulling the covers up to my waist so I could sit cross-legged without embarrassing Mr. Contreras.

“Have you come to tell me you were right?” I spoke past Mr. Contreras’s shoulder to Lotty. “If I had called the Skokie police, Kitty Binder would still be alive.”

Lotty pushed past Mr. Contreras to stand next to me. “I came to make sure you were all right,” she said. “It was a long and painful night. I heard about it from Helen Langston at Glenbrook.”

“I don’t know her,” I said. “She must be the one person who didn’t interrogate me last night.”

I had spent hours with the Skokie police, and then Ferret Downey from the CPD had shown up, wanting his own rundown. Murray Ryerson had picked up the story on his scanner; he’d been waiting by my
car when the cops finished with me. He went with me to Glenbrook Hospital to see if they would tell us anything about Judy Binder’s condition, but she was still in surgery. In the waiting room there, I recited my lines for the third time. The only good thing about going over my bad decision so often was it started to feel remote, as if I were just reporting a movie plot.

“Helen—Dr. Langston—is the surgeon who repaired Judy’s intestines,” Lotty said.

“She survived?”

“She had so many drugs in her that they protected her from shock. Cocaine, meth, but mostly oxycodone. The anesthesiologist had a tough job figuring out what he could safely administer.” Lotty’s mouth flattened in an angry line. “The police talked to Judy when she finally left the recovery room, but she could remember nothing, not who had been in the house, not why they shot her or bludgeoned her mother. All she could do was laugh like a little girl and say, ‘Duck and cover, she never believed in duck and cover, but it works, it’s the best.’”

“Duck and cover?” Mr. Contreras repeated, bewildered. “Is that a hunting slogan? Is this Judy saying someone was stalking her ma?”

“Judy’s conversation is so unfathomable that I’m afraid I stopped trying to understand it many years ago.” Lotty produced a bleak smile. “I need to talk to Victoria alone.”

I saw the hurt in my neighbor’s face and squeezed his hand. “It’s okay. It’s better if we’re alone when she gets what she has to say off her chest. Do you want to wait in the living room?”

“I’ll take the dogs out, doll.” Mr. Contreras made a gallant effort to maintain his equanimity. “The doc didn’t want me bringing ’em upstairs.”

When he’d left, Lotty and I stared gravely at each other.

“I should have listened to you,” I said. “Anything you want to say about my hotheadedness, or pigheadedness, go ahead: I deserve it.”

Lotty sat on the edge of the bed. There were lines in her face I had never noticed; she was getting old, another thing I was powerless to stop.

“After you left the Pottawattamie Club last night, I did call the Skokie police,” she said. “They promised to send a car by the house, but when I checked back, they said they hadn’t seen anything. Apparently because of Judy, neighbors have called them a number of times over the years, but the family never let them in. Last night, when the police rang the bell and no one answered, they assumed it was another false alarm. I don’t know if Judy’s life is worth the time and skill and money we’re investing in her, but she would be lying there dead next to her mother if you hadn’t acted with your usual rash—your usual spiritedness.”

“The end justifies my means?” I said, my voice cracking. “I don’t know, Lotty. Right now I feel as though I should retreat to a cave above Kabul and eat twigs until I die.”

“You would do it for two days, then you would get tired of seeing women assaulted for going to school, or burned for running away from a forced marriage. You’d go out and break open some Taliban heads and then it would get ugly very quickly, I’m afraid,” she said with a flash of wry humor.

She played with the fringe on the bedcover. Not like Lotty to be nervous enough to braid and unbraid threads. “Kitty and I were almost the same age, with almost the same history, I told you that. Illegitimate daughters raised by our mothers’ parents. My grandparents adored my mother and treated me as another little princess, but Kitty’s grandmother, Frau Saginor, had no patience with Martina—her daughter, you know, Martina Saginor. Frau Saginor looked after Kitty, but I don’t think she was a warm—”

Lotty interrupted herself, shaking her head. “That isn’t what I wanted to say. The truth is, I knew nothing about them. Frau Saginor sewed for my
Oma
, my granny, along with other wealthy families in
our quarter. I looked down on Kitty because my
Oma
looked down on Frau Saginor. Probably I brought out the worst in both Kitty and her grandmother.

“Fräulein Martina, that’s what we called Frau Saginor’s daughter, Fräulein Martina fascinated me. I’m sure it was partly because Kitty and Frau Saginor despised her. But also, Fräulein Martina would show us the wonderful apparatus she built at her Institute. She showed me the way light broke through the prism in my nursery windows, and explained spectral lines and the photoelectric effect to us. Kitty would react almost violently when Martina started talking about experiments with light.”

Lotty gave a tight, bitter smile. “If the two were to come into my clinic today, I would tell Martina that her daughter was desperate for the affection and attention Martina was lavishing on prisms and gamma rays, but at eight and nine, I just knew I could outshine Kitty in nature studies, so I was a bit of a show-off, and a bit of a little bitch, grabbing her mother’s attention to myself. Still, it was Fräulein Martina who first made me interested in the mysteries of the universe.”

Lotty bit her lips, angry with herself. “What I’m trying to say is that I carried my old Viennese class attitudes against Kitty with me to London, and then to the New World. When she showed up again, I couldn’t listen to her story. She may have been right when she accused me of responding to Judy’s cries for help as a way of snubbing her.”

She took a deep breath. “Victoria, will you put aside any thought of a cave until you have found Martin Binder? I need you to do this for me; I will pay your fee. I delivered Martin. Also Judy. On those grounds alone Kitty never forgave me. She came to me because she was frightened; someone told her I had exceptional skill, but it’s not a good idea for your childhood nemesis to see you splayed and bleeding in a delivery room.”

I held her hand, as I had done with Kitty Binder last night. “I’ll do my best, Lotty.”

We sat quietly for some minutes, then she asked awkwardly whether Kitty had been dead when I reached the house.

“I don’t want a description of the mayhem, but I hope she died in peace,” Lotty said, “not in great pain.”

“She spoke in German.” During the long night that followed Kitty Binder’s death, I had forgotten those terrible last minutes with her. “I recorded her in case she was saying something that would help track her assailants.”

I got out of bed, pulling on a pair of jeans so that I wouldn’t embarrass Mr. Contreras, and retrieved my bag from where I’d dropped it on my way into my home this morning.

Lotty took the phone from me and played the recording several times. “This isn’t anything to do with who killed her. She’s saying, ‘Granny, what did it all mean?’ Then she adds, ‘What was the point of it all?’”

She turned my phone over and over in her hands. “It’s so painful, Victoria. Kitty had a difficult life, and then to die like that, thinking her life had no point! If you’ve lost everyone, and then you give birth to a drug addict and your only grandson has run away, perhaps to become a terrorist or a traitor—life would feel meaningless!”

“My reaction is less cosmic,” I said dryly. “First, Kitty thought she was with her granny, so she died feeling comforted. Second, what if it’s not her life she’s asking about, but something specific—what it was her home invaders came hunting for—why did it matter so much to them?”

Lotty put my phone down. “I hope you’re right. It would be a help, to me, anyway. How can you find out?”

“Cordell Breen, who owns the company where Martin has been working, doesn’t think a solo op like me is much use, but I am willing to do legwork. People who rely on technology sometimes miss the small and obvious. I had been thinking of canvassing for Martin at bus stops, but it’s been two weeks; the trail is cold up here. I’m going to drive back to the place Judy was living, and see if anyone in the town remembers Martin.”

VIENNA, 1938

Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, Turn Around

L
ITTLE CHARLOTTE IS
wrapping her teddy bear’s head in bandages. “He fell from the building,
Opa
, and hurt his head,” she explains to her grandfather.

“It burst open like a rotten pumpkin,” Käthe laughs. “Juice and seeds all over the ground.”

Frau Herschel frowns. “Language, Käthe!”

“That’s what happened to this man who got pushed off the building yesterday. Everybody who was there laughed and one man said that, that his head was a rotten pumpkin, a rotten Jew pumpkin head. I can take a knife and slice open Teddy to show you.”

Ever since the Germans attacked Austria, Käthe has been talking back to Frau Herschel. It’s as if seeing the rudeness of Austrian Christians to the Herschels makes her feel that she can attack them as well.

“Where was that, Lotte?” Grandfather asks his granddaughter.

“By Fräulein Martina’s lab. She took us there yesterday for science lessons. It was fun. We got to see the films she made of the insides of atoms, you know, the ones she took when we all went to the mountains for the Easter holiday. But Käthe got bored, she’s so
stupid
that sitting through science class bores her own pumpkin-seed head.”

“You’re the pumpkin head,” Käthe shouts. “I’m smart enough to know that science gets you nowhere. You have to have money to get
away from the Nazis, or show them your titties. Science will only get you killed.”

“Charlotte! Käthe!”
Oma
says sternly. “I will not have this language from you. We may have to live in the ghetto, but we will not speak like the ghetto.”

Little Charlotte apologizes to her grandmother with a curtsy, but Käthe bends over her knitting, her lips pressed in a furious scowl.

They have been doing a literature lesson with Grandfather Herschel, reciting lines from Schiller that neither girl understands. Herr Herschel is teaching the children German and literature now that the schools have expelled Jewish students. Fräulein Martina is supposed to teach science and mathematics, but she often forgets how young they are. She talks to them about alpha particles and electrons. She wonders aloud about the instability of the uranium nucleus, and has the girls count scintillations in her lab.

Frau Herschel, “Big Charlotte,” doesn’t like it; she doesn’t like her granddaughter coming home with stained fingers, her pinafore smelling oddly of chemicals and the stink of the cigars that the men in the Radium Institute smoke. Herr Herschel agrees that with water scarce and laundry soap almost nonexistent, it is a nuisance, but working in the lab keeps little Charlotte from worrying too much.

This evening, after the literature lesson, they are waiting for Käthe’s grandmother to get back from trying to trade her embroidered napkins for food.

Grandfather takes Teddy from little Charlotte. “I’m sure your bandages will make him well very soon, Lotte. So Fräulein Martina took you to her lab yesterday and let you play with atoms?”

“It’s not like that,
Opa
. Atoms are too tiny to see, and then they have tinier things inside them. You can’t play with them, not like they were Teddy, but you can study them; then you know how sunlight is made. Fräulein Martina showed us on a piece of paper, black lines from the sun. See, there’s this atom in the sun called helium, and when you
make it on earth you have radiation. Then you see the lines it makes on a piece of paper, it’s like a ghost, so they call it ‘Spectral.’”

“Those lines won’t keep you warm in the winter when there’s no coal,” Käthe says. “So what’s the point?”

A laugh from the doorway startles all of them; they turn to see Käthe’s mother standing there.

“Lotte,
Liebling
, the lines are from a spectrum of light that the sun and the stars emanate, that’s why they’re called spectral, but I like the idea that the ghost of the sun’s explosions makes them. And you, my little daughter, you’ve been listening too hard to your own
Oma
,
nicht wahr?
”

Fräulein Martina comes forward to her daughter and tries to smooth the wisps of hair that have escaped from her braid, but Käthe jerks her head away.

“
Oma
is right,” Käthe says, small chin at an obstinate angle. “We can’t eat your atoms.”

“Everything you eat is made up of atoms,” Fräulein Martina says, “but I understand what your
Oma
is telling you. Still, they pay me a little stipend at the Institute; that helps put some atoms in your bellies.”

“What did the girls see yesterday?” Frau Herschel pulls Fräulein Martina back to the doorway to ask in an undervoice. “Käthe said something about a man falling from a building?”

Fräulein Martina looks at the two girls. In the tiny room where the Herschels now live, it’s impossible to have a private conversation: the same thing is true in her own flat, across the hall. She thought, growing up, that her parents’ four rooms were tiny and squalid compared to the large light flat where the Herschels lived on the Renngasse. Now the new government has moved three other families into her home. She and her mother mourn their lost rooms just as much as Frau Herschel grieves for her ten rooms and private baths.