“Your grandmother would slap me every day if she saw the way my apartment looked,” I assured her. “‘Something didn’t add up.’ Could he have been going to the bank?”
She shook her head, her face pinched in misery. “I don’t know. He just said there was something he had to look into. Or look at? I’m not sure; I didn’t pay much attention. I didn’t think it was anything special until he didn’t come home.”
“When did you start getting worried?” I asked.
“That night. Well, the next day. I thought, who knows, maybe he found a girl to spend the night with. Then, when he didn’t come home, I thought maybe he’d gone camping. He would, sometimes, just pack up a light tent and go down to Starved Rock or up to Wisconsin for a few days. He hadn’t taken a vacation since he started the job two years ago—he started right out of high school.”
“Would he go off camping without telling you?”
“He might. Since Len died, Martin doesn’t like to tell me what his plans are. But then when he still hadn’t come back, I thought he’d moved into an apartment. We used to argue about that: he could save so much money living at home, and he has his own nice little apartment down in the basement. I thought he’d moved out but didn’t have the courage to stand up and tell me to my face. Only—he isn’t answering his phone or e-mails or anything.”
“It should be pretty easy to check with his employer,” I said.
She started twisting the thick cables of her sweater around her fingers; her voice sank back to a whisper. “Last week his boss called: Martin hasn’t been to work since the day before he left here. He’s not answering their e-mails or phone calls, either.”
“That sounds really bad,” I said baldly. “What do the police say?”
“I haven’t told them. What would be the point?”
I tried not to shout at her. “The point would be that they could be looking for your grandson. He’s been gone ten days now. No phone calls, right? No postcards or e-mails? No? Then we need to get the police looking for him.”
“No!” she cried. “Just leave him alone. And don’t go calling the police, the police are worse than—never mind—but if you go to the police about my business, I’ll—I’ll sue you!”
I looked at her in bewilderment. It was hard to believe an elderly white woman might be the victim of police harassment. Maybe it was a residue of Austria under Nazi control, when police declared open season on Jews, but her ferocity made me think she was guarding against a more immediate danger.
“Ms. Binder, who are you afraid of? Has one of your daughter’s associates threatened you?”
“No! I don’t want the police involved. What if they—” She cut herself off mid-sentence.
“What if they what?” I demanded sharply.
“People like you think the police are there to help, but I know different, that’s all. We solve our own problems in my family. I don’t need police, I don’t need Charlotte Herschel’s condescension, and I don’t need you!”
I couldn’t budge her from that stance, even though I didn’t mince words about the danger her grandson might be in.
“How did he leave? Car?” I finally asked, thinking that with the plate number I might get state police to help look for him.
“Len bought him a used Subaru, when I—when we said—when Martin agreed that college would be a waste of time and money, but he didn’t take it; it’s still out front.”
She couldn’t imagine how he’d gone; she thought she would have heard a taxi. He might have just walked to the bus stop.
“What did he take with him?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I told you, I wasn’t really paying any attention.”
“Have you looked in his room to see what might be missing?”
She stared at me blankly, as if I’d suggested she sacrifice a sheep to predict the future. When she didn’t respond, I said, in the bright tone you reserve to mask your anger, “Why don’t we go to his room now, and you can tell me whether he took camping gear or a laptop, or what.”
After fiddling with her hands and her sweater for another moment, Kitty got to her feet and stumped off toward the back of the house. I followed her through a dining room crammed with sideboards and more lace into the kitchen. This was where she lived; it held a television, bookshelves, and stacks of unopened mail.
She opened a door to a set of open-backed stairs and led me down them, past the mechanicals, to a wall made of dark-stained wood with a door set in the middle.
“I did most of this work,” Kitty said. “My dad was a builder and you knew when something broke he could fix it. He taught all us girls the same. When I married Len—we met in Vienna; he was working in the army motor pool—I thought he might be like my dad, but Len wasn’t a builder. He was good with machines, but he couldn’t do carpentry. I ended up doing all those kinds of things.” The words might have been part of an ongoing plaint, but it was clear from the way she looked at her knobby fingers that she was proud of her skills.
She pushed open the door to her grandson’s room. A deep voice intoned, “Beware, mortal, you are entering Sovngarde, where Alduin has set a snare for your soul.”
I jumped back and flung a protective arm around Kitty, but she wasn’t disturbed. She even produced a faint smirk at seeing me knocked off balance.
“I’m so used to Martin’s gadgets, I don’t notice them. Martin is a clever boy with engineering projects, so if anyone besides him opens the door, they hear a warning. The message changes; he’s got five or six programmed in.”
Peering closely, I saw a small speaker and two tiny camera eyes mounted into the door frame. Martin must be a clever boy indeed to disguise their mounting so carefully.
When I walked into the room, I thought if Kitty had built this space, she was pretty clever herself. Soffits were set into the low ceiling, with three sets of recessed lights. One illuminated the built-in workstation, which held two computer monitors, a second an alcove where Japanese-style screens were open to show a carefully made bed. The third set of lights covered a separate little living area where Martin and his friends met—if he had any friends, poor guy.
The floor was tiled in a soft-colored stone. I opened a door and saw a bathroom, tiled in the same pale stone. An old tube of toothpaste and a dried-out bar of soap sat on the sink, but a trailing vine, its leaves still thick and green, covered part of the wall next to the shower.
I wondered if Kitty came in to water it, then saw that a little hose hung over it, attached to an electronic timer. “Was this your invention or Martin’s?” I asked.
She gave a half-smile. “That was one of the tricks we learned from my dad. Martin made the electronics for it, though. The last thing we ever did together.”
Back in the bedroom, I poked my head into a walk-in closet, where a lone sports jacket hung. Most of the closet was a storeroom for Martin’s overflow of electronics, old computers that he was hanging on to, a bassoon, some stereo speakers. His whole little apartment was severely bare, as great a contrast as possible to the musty rooms above with their collection of junk.
Two rockets about a yard long, made with a painstaking attention to detail, stood on a shelf above the computers. In between them was a framed snapshot of Martin as a young teen, holding up a plaque that read “First Prize.” His grandfather stood next to him, beaming with pride.
The rockets and photo, with a poster-sized copy of a book jacket over the bed, were the room’s only decoration. The poster showed the laughing face of the author, Richard Feynman, positioned so that his eyes seemed to be looking at the pillows.
“He was Martin’s hero,” Kitty said, noticing me staring at it. “Martin read everything he wrote, which gave him the idea he ought to go to some fancy science school, like the one in California where Feynman taught. We fought about that.”
Feynman’s name was familiar. “A scientist
, right?” I guessed.
“A physicist.” Kitty bit off the word, as if it were something despicable—a symptom of degeneracy, like her daughter’s drug abuse. “He won the Nobel Prize, so I guess he was smart, but what good does that do you? He’s dead like all the rest of them, but Martin doesn’t see it like that. Martin always says Feynman’s work made him immortal.”
Her jaw worked; she kept staring at the photograph. “Of course, Feynman died before Martin was born, but he started reading about him when he was still in junior high, and then he collected everything he could, books and so on. Martin’s first science project, when he was twelve, was trying to show how Feynman figured out what made the space shuttle blow up.
“Martin made six rockets, three with faulty O-rings and three without. He tested them; he wanted the faulty one to crash at the science fair, but he couldn’t make it happen because the atmosphere this near the ground isn’t cold enough, as any fool would have known. So then he tried doing the experiment in dry ice, which Len thought was such a wonderful idea he went out and filled the garage with it. Toby Susskind, one of the neighborhood boys who came around to stare at the rockets, he passed out from the dry ice, and his father acted like I’d murdered him.”
She waved a hand at the models above his workstation. “Those are the last two. Martin kept them after he saw he had to give up the idea. He was that upset, as if it was the end of the world. Len took it seriously, too, even though I told them to forget about it. Rockets. Rockets do nothing but kill people, I said, but that didn’t worry either of them for one second.”
Poor Martin, growing up in this desert. At least his grandfather had entered into his enthusiasms. It must have seemed like a wonderful adventure to the old man, trying to fill a room with enough freezing air to bring down a rocket. And then they’d come inside to Kitty and her bitter, biting comments, colder than a garage full of dry ice.
I changed the subject abruptly, saying I wanted to look through Martin’s papers, and get a look at his computer. Kitty wasn’t happy about that. First she told me it wouldn’t do any good, but when I said, “You never know,” she insisted on pulling up a chair near Martin’s computer monitors to watch me.
“I know Charlotte trusts you, but I never saw you before, I need to watch what you’re doing.”
I couldn’t fault her for her caution with a stranger in her house, but when I warned her it might take some time, she merely clutched the edges of the chair, as if she thought I would carry her out.
In fact, it took no time at all. When I tried to power up the computers, nothing happened. I stared at the screens for a long moment. Martin had a kit of small tools in a tray on his desk. I unscrewed the backs of both CPUs. When I had them open, I saw he’d removed the drives.
Whatever he’d discovered that didn’t add up, he was concerned about it enough that he didn’t want anyone getting a look at his files. I’m not a computer whiz, but Martin was: he must have figured that even if he zeroed out the drives, a pro could reconstruct his files.
When I told Kitty what he’d done, she gave me the vacant look that was starting to get on my nerves. If she’d been my age or younger I would have shouted at her to wake up, be alert, but she was an old woman, she was in trouble, she didn’t need me arguing with her.
In as many ways as I could think of, I tried to get her to remember what else Martin had said his last weeks at home. Nothing else when he left the house that final day? Nothing about friends, or coworkers, or projects he’d been assigned to over the summer? Nothing at the meals they’d shared those last few weeks?
No, it was like him to be withdrawn. He liked to torment her by thinking about equations when she could have used a little company. Didn’t Martin see how lonely she was since Len’s passing?
I finally gave up on it and started looking through the desk drawers. Like the rest of Martin’s monastic space, these were almost empty. He’d kept his notebooks from high school, which included printouts of his history and English essays. He’d written a number of times about Feynman’s life and work. The essays were filled with red ink and comments like, “You need to learn to construct a paragraph and an argument,” or, “See me if you want to rewrite this.”
Other binders contained problem sets, with Martin’s answers written out in a tiny, careful hand. From long-ago calculus classes, I vaguely recognized some of the symbols—derivatives, integrals, polynomials. On one problem set, a teacher wrote, “You might find it easier if you took the following route,” and then included a different series of equations. Almost all were marked “100,” and twice, “Bravo, Martin. Beyond amazing.”
Those comments seemed to be the only thing in his room that showed a connection to the outside world. He had a photo of a rough mountainside tucked into one notebook, but there were no pictures of friends, no remnants of camping trips. A couple of ribbons from cross-country meets where his team had finished second or third, that was it.
For a gregarious boy, this beautifully built hideaway would have made the perfect hangout. For Martin, the isolation must have added another layer of painful loneliness to his life.
“What about his friends?” I asked Kitty.
Kitty started plaiting her fingers together again. “He doesn’t have a lot of friends. There were a bunch of rich kids his age who had summer jobs at the place Martin works; they got on his nerves, thinking because they went to Harvard or places like that, they could look down on him, and then he had to fix their mistakes. That made him plenty mad. But for some reason, they invited him to a barbecue the night their summer jobs were ending. Martin went, but he came home early. I thought it was because the kids were such snobs, but it was that weekend that he started brooding over, well, whatever he was brooding over.”
“Do you know the names of the kids he went to the barbecue with?” I asked. “Maybe he talked to one of them.”
Kitty didn’t know their names; Martin never talked about them, just told her there were seven college kids who’d all worked together. One of the girls lived in a place with a beach and her folks had agreed to let her have a party there, but Kitty didn’t know her name or where exactly the parents lived.
“Did he ever have a girlfriend? Or boyfriend?”
“Martin isn’t a homosexual,” she protested.
Martin could be a Martian who slept with a space squid and his grandmother wouldn’t know, but I kept that remark between me and the model rockets. “Girlfriend, then.”
“Martin didn’t have much luck with girls. I told him it was because he took himself too seriously; girls like a boy to loosen up, not always be talking about theories and whatnot. Believe you me, when you carry on like that, nobody can stand to be around you.”
You hear a lot these days about helicopter parents who can’t stop hovering over their offspring’s every movement. Kitty was more like a mole, burrowed so deep underground she was almost unaware of her grandson.
“There isn’t anyone you can think of who he talked to regularly? What about the boy Toby who passed out in the garage? Did you ask if he knew where Martin had gone?” I said patiently.
“It wouldn’t have done any good.”
Her voice was so low I barely made out the words.
“Ms. Binder, do you know what happened to your grandson?”
She shrugged. “He could be dead, or he just ran away.”
“What aren’t you telling me?” I cried.
She looked at me blankly. “People die or they run away. If you haven’t noticed that, it’s because you’re not paying attention.”
I opened my mouth to protest, then shut it again. Her husband had died, her family was killed in the Second World War, her daughter had run away. Now Martin. From her perspective, she was right.
I asked about her husband’s family, wondering if Martin might have gone to visit them.
Kitty wasn’t in touch with Len’s siste
rs; they’d never gotten along, they all thought she was a gold digger who married Len to get an American passport. “They even blamed me for bringing Len to Chicago, instead of back to Cleveland where they all lived!”
“Why did you come to Chicago?” Personal curiosity took me off track. “Was it because Lotty was here?”
“Charlotte Herschel, one of the princesses of the Renngasse? Don’t make me laugh! No. After the war ended, I went back to Vienna with the British Army to see if anyone was still alive. I heard a rumor at a place my mother used to work that she and my father were in Chicago, so Len and I came here. That was a mistake, but Len got a good job at a big garage, so we stayed. Anyway, what business is it of yours?”
“This is where we started, Ms. Binder. It’s because of your daughter and the ugly murder down at the house where she was living. She thought her life was in danger, and it turns out that ten days ago, her son disappeared. Do you think that’s a coincidence?”
“Yes. Yes, I do,” she snapped. “Judy is a drug addict and a loser, she had two abortions and then when she had Martin, she couldn’t look after him. If it hadn’t been for Len and me, where would that boy be now? I think it’s a total coincidence.”
“Perhaps Martin wouldn’t go out of his way to be in touch with her, but Judy might have tried calling him, you know.”
The lines in her face deepened. “No!” she shouted.
“Who else would your daughter reach out to, besides Lotty, if she was really frightened?”
“You mean who else could she con? After all this time, I’m happy to say I don’t know!”
I hesitated for a moment, then pulled out the photo of the metal pod on stilts.
“Do you know any of these people? I found it in the house where Judy’s been—”
She snatched it from me. “That—oh! So she stole that after Martin’s bar mitzvah, along with my pearl earrings and forty dollars in cash. What was she doing with it?”
“What is it, Ms. Binder?” I asked. “Lotty said the people looked familiar, but she couldn’t remember their names.”
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