Critical Mass (34 page)

“Of course I didn’t mean it,” she added, “but why wouldn’t he write back? Why didn’t he tell me he was going dark? All these weeks in Mexico, I thought he was avoiding me, until I got the message from Jari. Jari said he’d gone into Martin’s ISP servers, he’d tracked Martin’s e-mails and his cell phone. Martin hadn’t sent any messages since the day he disappeared, and he hasn’t been in his in box, either on his cell phone or his e-mails—Jari found five addresses for him. They’re all untouched.”

I drummed my fingers on the couch arm. “I’d like to see your grandfather’s workshop: I want to know what Martin saw.”

“I can’t take you up there! I don’t want Dad to know I’m here. Besides, if it was the Metargon-I design he was looking at, like Tad said, anyone can see it: it’s in every beginning computer engineering textbook, where they step you through the history. What von Neumann and Bigelow did at Princeton, what Rajchman did at RCA, and what Edward Breen did in his old coach house.” Despite her distress, she couldn’t help ending on a note of pride.

“If we looked at the drawings, would I be able to follow them?” I asked.

“I could step you through them, but I don’t know what the model or the drawings would tell you,” she said. “I don’t know what they told Martin, or even if that is what he was looking at.”

Maybe Cordell Breen was right and I wasn’t enough of a detective for a case this intellectual. “What’s next to the drawings? Could it be something else that he saw?”

She made a helpless gesture. “I studied everything near where Martin had been standing. There’s the original drawing Granddad made for the Metargon-I core, just a sketch of the idea, when he was sitting
on some battlefield during the war. That’s what’s on the wall. There’s a letter from Stan Ulam, the mathematician, saying that Granddad’s proposal for memory registers was bold and revolutionary, but they were too far down the road at IAS to change designs, especially when it wasn’t clear that the Fermi surfaces could be calculated accurately.”

I definitely would not gain anything from Alison stepping me through the computer’s design: a Fermi surface already was more complicated than anything I could follow.

“A few weeks after your party, Martin went downstate to where his mother was living,” I said. “That was when they argued over these papers that have disappeared. Did he ever talk to you about her?”

“You mean, her being a drug addict? Yes, it weighed on him. It was why he didn’t think he should have children, in case they turned into crackheads. I couldn’t convince him that addiction wasn’t genetically determined.”

“He didn’t say anything about wanting to talk to his mother that night at your party?”

She shook her head. “He did say me not telling my parents about him and me was like him not telling his gran that he sometimes visits his mother. He didn’t tell his grandmother about us, either, although he said that was because she had gotten so strange, he just didn’t want to introduce me unless, well, you know, if we got really serious.”

I rubbed my gritty eyes. The coffee hadn’t helped; I was unbearably tired. “Yes, well, speaking of that, it’s going to be impossible to keep your parents from knowing you’re in town right now. Someone—this Ramona you mentioned—will have seen you leave your place in Mexico. Even if she doesn’t report that to your dad, they’ll put out an APB on you in Mexico City when they can’t find you. If you used a credit card to buy your ticket, you already left a trail. If Homeland Security is, in fact, watching this building, they’ll ID you from surveillance photos.”

Alison’s shoulders sagged in misery. Mr. Contreras went to put an
arm around her but frowned at me. “Why get her all upset, cookie? She’s here, we got to figure out what to do with her.”

“She can’t stay here,” I fretted. “We’re too exposed, too vulnerable. Ditto for taking her down to my office.”

Mr. Contreras started to protest reflexively that he could look after Alison, but stopped himself mid-sentence. “I could if it was just ordinary punks, but not when it’s the government and her dad and all. Come on, doll, put on your thinking cap. You gotta have some kind of hideout.”

I gave him a tired smile. “Like Br’er Rabbit’s briar patch? Whatever you do, don’t throw me in there?”

The words conjured up an unexpected chain of associations. “I may know a place at that. Come on, Ms. Breen. Let’s put on some disguises.”

30

PLAYING DRESS-UP

Y
OU BOYS KNOW
how to get to Union Station? You sure I don’t need to ride downtown with you?” Mr. Contreras said loudly.

“Come on, Grandpa, we’ve made this trip a million times.” That was Alison, who made a compact boy in jeans and a T-shirt. A backward baseball cap covered her glossy hair.

“I don’t know,” the old man fretted. “It’s late, there are perverts on the train. I should ride down with you.”

“You’ve got the dogs, Grandpa. No one’s gonna mess with us.” My cousin Boom-Boom’s old hockey jersey was a little heavy on a warm night, but it hid my breasts; away from the streetlights, with my own baseball cap, I could pass for the older grandson, who was nineteen now and a freshman at Northern Illinois.

Mr. Contreras clapped my shoulder in a hearty squeeze, hugged Alison, who squirmed away from him just as his own younger grandson might. He blundered around the station entrance with the dogs. This gave me a chance to see if any of the late-night riders who cursed him for not controlling his animals were keeping up with us. It was hard to be absolutely certain, but I was ninety-five percent sure we were clear.

I’d only sketched out the scene, but Alison and my neighbor had risen nobly to their roles. I fed my CTA pass through the machine and lolled at the bottom of the stairs, reading the notices. When I heard an
outbound train approaching, I grabbed Alison’s arm and we sprinted up the stairs. The doors were closing as we jumped on board.

We were both tense. We didn’t talk during the milk-run up to Howard. Alison, who felt at ease navigating the labyrinth of Mexico City, had never been on the L; she kept looking around with a nervous frown anytime a late-night beggar started a sales pitch in our car. We were lucky at Dempster—we just made the Skokie Swift’s last run of the day.

At the end of the line we had a mile walk to Kitty Binder’s. Boom-Boom’s jersey hid not only my breasts but my picklocks, a flashlight and my gun. By the time we got to the bungalow on Kedvale, the flashlight was hitting my rib cage in an unpleasant way.

It was well past midnight and the little houses were shut down for the night, or so I hoped. The last thing we needed was for an insomniac dog-walker to spot us.

Alison’s nervousness increased when she saw the police tapes and a Cook County State’s Attorney seal on the doors. “If we get caught, won’t they put us in prison?” she whispered.

“If we get caught, you hop off like a bunny; if anyone stops you, say that I kidnapped you,” I muttered: a prison-yard guttural doesn’t carry the way whispers do.

The authorities hadn’t bothered to seal the garage, which had a back door with a simple lock. While Alison held the flashlight in an unsteady hand, I quickly undid the tumblers. We were inside within thirty seconds. I put a hand over her mouth as she started to speak, counted eight slow breaths in my head. No one shouted out or tried the doorknob behind us.

I used the flashlight sparingly, since the garage had a couple of skylights in the roof. We could see a workbench where Len had kept his tools. They were dusty now, but chisels and wrenches were laid out on a cloth in careful size order. He’d hung pictures of himself with his grandson across the wall behind the bench. I’d seen the one with Martin and the rockets, but others showed the two of them playing ball, or
working on a car together. Alison gave a crow of delight when she saw them and insisted on taking them down from the wall to carry into the house with her.

On the far side of the bench, a door led into the kitchen. It, too, was easy to open. Strange that Kitty, with her fears, and all the dead bolts on her front and back doors, had left this easy route into her home. Odd, too, that the intruders, who’d torn up the house with a ruthless hand, had left the garage alone. Maybe they’d found what they were looking for inside, or maybe they hadn’t been looking for anything. If these were drug dealers going after Judy Binder they might have trashed the place on principle—or lack thereof.

Inside the house, the crime scene hadn’t been touched. Books and papers were still strewn across the floor. What I hadn’t noticed when I ran through here on Friday was that the intruders had also emptied flour and sugar canisters and dumped the contents of the freezer. The food was beginning to rot. A trail of ants led from under the back door, which had been boarded over, to the spilled sugar.

Alison wrinkled her nose in disgust. “This smells as bad as the barrios I pass on my way to one of our schools. We can’t stay here.”

“Unless you want to call a cab and go home, we don’t have a lot of choice right now. Let’s do some cleaning, my sister,” I said. “It’ll make it all seem bearable.”

I didn’t want to run appliances or turn on lights that might alert someone to our presence. I stopped Alison as she switched on the exhaust fan. Inside the basement door was a rack that held brooms and mops, garbage bags and Clorox. I set to work with a grim will. After a moment of staring at me like a tragedy queen, Alison gave her head a shake, dislodging the baseball cap and her shiny chestnut hair, and joined me.

“Martin’s room is downstairs,” I said softly. “I think he has blackout curtains, so we ought to be able to clean in there more easily.”

Alison volunteered to take care of that while I finished the kitchen
and Kitty’s bedroom. I helped her down the stairs with the flash, warning her there would be dried blood on the floor. The disarray in Martin’s suite wasn’t as horrible as the kitchen because he’d left so few belongings behind. Alison looked less miserable as she started to explore the space her sometime lover had grown up in.

I left Alison fingering Martin’s rockets and went up to the second floor. I put Kitty’s mattress back on her bed, hung clothes in the closet, folded her stretched-out bras and torn underpants into a drawer. What rule says you have to give up beautiful underwear after you collect Social Security?

I couldn’t bear to sleep in the bed, even though Kitty hadn’t been killed there. It was an atavistic revulsion to death, or perhaps to Kitty’s tormented life.

I found a second bedroom across the hall, painted white, with white and pink curtains. It must have been Judy Binder’s childhood room, but it looked as though Len had moved in here for the last years of his life. The bookshelf held World War II histories, especially the rocket and A-bomb projects. He’d also tucked away some Loren Estleman westerns.

Len had displayed more photos in here. Their frames had been ripped apart, but the pictures were more or less intact. One was of Judy at five or so, sitting on a trike, grinning up at the camera with her front teeth missing. In another, an eight- or nine-year-old Judy was posed on an armchair, stroking a cat.

It was hard to reconcile the angry scarecrow of a woman in restraints at the hospital with this active little girl. What happened to that child on the tricycle? Living with someone as unbalanced as Kitty would create uncertainty in a child, but why had Judy fled into narcotics? Or was it one of those things that happened without her realizing what she was doing? Looking for love, for warmth through sex, getting high, getting higher, leaving the atmosphere and not being able to reenter planet earth.

I swept the glass and broken frames into another garbage bag, straightened the rug, looked in the dresser drawers. These were empty, which explained why the chaos in the other rooms hadn’t been replicated here. I made up Len’s bed with sheets I found in a hall closet. They were so worn they were transparent down the middle, but they were clean.

I wanted to fall on my head into the bed, but I went down to the basement to check on Alison. She was sleeping soundly, despite having all the lights on. Her day had started in Mexico City almost twenty-four hours ago: she was entitled. She had scrubbed the floor around Martin’s bed and replaced Feynman’s
Lectures on Physics
to pride of place on his desk.

She didn’t waken as I moved around the room turning off the lights. When I got to the desk lamp, I saw an envelope sticking out of Volume II of the
Lectures.
It was from the Department of Commerce, and dated the week before Martin’s disappearance.

Dear Mr. Binder:

Your request under the Freedom of Information Act for documents pertaining to Martina Saginor returned no results. Your request for documents pertaining to Gertrud Memler produced one letter, which is attached.

The attachment was a photocopy of a letter from the Inspector-General’s office in the Department of Commerce to the Office of Immigration and Naturalization.

We are applying for an expedited visa for Austrian national (Dr.) Gertrud Memler. Dr. Memler worked at the weapons installation in the Austrian Alps, near the city of Innsbruck, helping design Reactor I-IX. She was trained as a chemical engineer and was sent to the Innsbruck facility to conduct underground tests of early prototypes of weapons.

Major Edward Breen of the Office of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency has affirmed that Dr. Memler’s role at Innsbruck was in the area of pure research. He has made certain that she was a member of the Nazi Party only because it was necessary if she was to work in any kind of university or research facility.

The Innsbruck facility included a major bomb production facility. Memler shared working and living conditions with the women who were brought to the facility as conscripts, working as forced labor in weapons production. Memler says that while perhaps in some places, such workers were malnourished, that was never the case in Innsbruck. Nor did Memler ever witness or hear about beatings or other severe punishments meted out against anyone brought there as forced labor. In any event, she was never in charge of any work details; her assignment was strictly in the field of pure research.