“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
THIS 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.”
“Oh!” Nadja’s eyes opened wide. “He discovered the Dzornen-Pauli effect; the equations are remarkable.”
I grinned. “I’ll take your word for it. Anyway
, Kitty Binder seems troubled enough about her parentage that Martin likely grew up with a lot of questions about his own background. Not to mention the fact that there seems to be no way of knowing who his own birth father was.”
Hahne played with the wispy ends of her hair. “Martin’s mother did phone the school a couple of times, asking about him, or wanting to talk to him. The principal told me, since he knew I was the teacher who was closest to Martin. I guess his mother was pretty high every time she phoned. The two of us had to inform the grandmother, since she was Martin’s legal guardian. She said not to let Martin know.”
I nodded. “The grandmother thinks Martin obeyed her and never saw his mother, but I’m betting he did; kids need to see their parents. They keep hoping they’ll get love, even if the parent is as unstable as Judy Binder.”
“Did Ms. Binder, the grandmother, I mean, hire you to find Martin?” Hahne asked.
“At least for today,” I said. “First Kitty—Ms. Binder, the grandmother—told me to leave Martin alone, but then she asked me to find him. I have a dozen wildly incompatible theories, but one of them is that Martin might have gone off the skids and started killing people he imagines as corrupting his mother.”
“I refuse to believe that!” Hahne flushed to the roots of her mousy hair. “He wasn’t that kind of boy. Socially awkward, but not—not unstable!”
A couple of people chatting nearby looked at us curiously, wondering what I could be saying to upset her. I didn’t challenge Hahne: Martin was her special student.
“If he didn’t disappear to hunt for his mother, where else could he be?” I asked. “His grandmother says something happened his final weeks at home that upset him. The last thing she remembers him saying was that something didn’t add up. He left for a few hours in the morning, came home for a short time, then took off for good.”
Hahne frowned. “That sounds as though he was analyzing a problem, not planning revenge. He used that phrase when he couldn’t make sense of a problem or a theory, if he thought his approach was off-base, or if he thought the theory wasn’t right.”
“Martin hasn’t been in touch with you? If he has, if you know he’s safe, I won’t pry, but—here he’s disappeared, while his mother is jumping from one drug house to another with a posse of furious meth makers behind her.” I leaned forward in my intensity; Hahne shrank back into her chair.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just that the people she hangs with are absolutely ruthless. If what doesn’t add up in Martin’s mind has to do with her or them, I need to know.”
Hahne spread her hands helplessly. “If I knew, I’d tell you, but honestly, Martin hasn’t talked to me since he left high school.”
We talked a little longer about Martin, his infatuation with Feynman, his gift as a musician—he played bassoon, although he sometimes fooled around with bongo drums just because Feynman had.
“I always told him the ugly duckling turns into a swan,” Hahne said, escorting me to the door. “I still believe it. If he’s in trouble of some kind, if you find him and he needs any kind of support, legal, financial, anything, you must let me know at once.”
I promised, but drove away from the school more worried than when I’d arrived. An arithmetic problem. Something he couldn’t make sense of, but in an intellectual way? Of course, Hahne felt a maternal protectiveness toward her gifted awkward student; she might not want to recognize a fissure in him that would break under the wrong pressure.
Still, there was the fact that he’d emptied his computers. Something didn’t add up, but he couldn’t bear for anyone else to know about it? But who would look at his machines, besides his grandmother? She might make a scornful remark about people who waste their time on theories, but I couldn’t picture her hacking into his files.
I was equally puzzled by Julius Dzornen’s behavior. He’d stonewalled me completely about whether Martin had come to see him before disappearing, which made me believe that he had. To ask him—what? What could Martin have said that would make his great-uncle—if Julius was, indeed, Kitty’s half brother—clam up?
Just as baffling was what had derailed Julius fifty years ago, so much that he’d dropped out of school and almost fainted at the sight of a detective. He was seventy-three or -four now. Something in his teen years, or his early twenties.
I pulled over at a gas station on Irving Park and found his sister Herta’s phone number. Herta Dzornen Colonna. I started to dial the number but hesitated; I wanted her to see me and it’s so easy to say no and end the conversation when you’re on the phone. Besides, a cell phone with the trucks roaring down the nearby expressway was a recipe for unsuccessful communication.
I drove down to the Gold Coast, thirty miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic. I found a parking space near Herta’s building, one of the grand duchesses of Chicago apartments that line Lake Shore Drive East. They face the lake and Oak Street Beach, with mortgages that would take a blue-collar woman like me a hundred thirty-five years to pay off.
I was stiff from my long drive. After feeding quarters into the ticket machine—twenty-five for an hour—I went to the little garden that separates the duchesses from the beach and stretched my shoulders. And thought about how to get past Herta Dzornen’s doorman.
INNSBRUCK, 1942
Pebbles in a Bottomless Well
AFTER MONTHS OF cold and starvation, all the prisoners hallucinate. Platters of beautiful food appear just out of reach. Parents and old lovers blur with the faces of other prisoners or even guards. Old enemies appear in the shadows on the cave walls.
One day Martina thinks she sees her high school mathematics professor, Herr Papp, examining her work.
“But you are blind,” she says out loud.
A guard pulls out the short whip that they all carry and snaps it hard enough to produce a whistle. “I see you perfectly, you lazy cunt. No talking to the other prisoners.”
She’s trying to measure the purity of a piece of carbon, but her hands are weak from hunger. The cold and damp in the cave also affect the balances so that it’s almost impossible to get the weight correct. As she returns to the task in front of her the last time she saw Herr Papp comes to her.
She had visited his shabby three-room apartment near the Volksgarten when he finally answered her letter. It had taken him so long to respond that she wondered if he had died, or thought she was writing as a prank: he had been a sarcastic professor, belittling the girls in his classes. In response, several of the students in Martina’s year had sent him flowery love letters signed with the names of cabaret singers or dancers at the opera.
By the time she wrote him, she was a full-fledged researcher at the Institut für Radiumforschung, although she couldn’t afford to quit her day job, teaching physics and mathematics at the Technische Hochschule.
When she arrived at Herr Papp’s apartment, a housekeeper waited at the top of the stairs. The woman didn’t acknowledge Martina’s “Grüss Gott,” except to gesture to the open door, disapproval lines dug deep around her mouth.
Herr Papp didn’t stand when Martina went over to greet him. Out of old habit, before sitting in a chair near his own, she curtsied to him—really no more gracefully than she’d done for Frau Herschel twenty-five years earlier.
Herr Papp’s thin voice with its sarcastic inflection hadn’t changed. “Ah, yes, you were the young lady who always worked out her problem sets so thoroughly. I remember that you sat so upright I sometimes wondered if your mother had tied a backboard beneath your jacket. And you are still upright. Please sit down so that your voice is at my level.”
It wasn’t until she sat that Martina realized he was blind. After the housekeeper poured tea for them both, the woman sat next to him, guiding his hand to the cup, placing a piece of cake on his fork, making sure he had control of the fork before releasing her hold, wiping the front of his frayed jacket when he spilled tea or cake.
It must have been the housekeeper who had written the reply for him: Martina had been surprised by the round, careful letters, not the spiky script in the notes that used to show her a more economical way of solving a problem.
“I never thought of you as the kind of young lady who paid visits to the elderly or the infirm,” Herr Papp said. “You struck me as the kind of single-minded person who is rather like the hypotenuse, taking the shortest distance between her present location and a goal.”
His words echoed her mother’s in such an alarming way that Martina was silenced for a moment. Not that Frau Saginor would ever refer to a hypotenuse, but her rages against her daughter’s obsession with mathematics and science always had this at their core: Martina was selfish, thoughtless, what she wanted came ahead of the needs of anyone around her.
Frau Saginor used to keep up a stream of hopes that Martina might fail her exams, a barrage of demands that she quit her studies and get a job as a bookkeeper or a shop assistant. “That would help put food on the table and pay for Papa’s medicines.”
This was when Martina was seventeen. Papa had been in the early stages of tuberculosis, coughing up so much blood every day that it was hard to know how his body was able to produce more. But even in his weakness, Papa told Martina over and over that he wanted her in school. On the table next to the bed, he kept those of her essays and problem sets that had been marked “100 out of 100,” or “First Prize in the mathematics section.” Until the last few days of his life, he read them in the long watches of the night when he couldn’t sleep.
Martina used to work out her math problems sitting next to him, and if he was still awake when she finished, she would play for him: her flute had also won her a prize. She often played at three in the morning, making the neighbors pound on the thin walls between the tenements.
“Even in Vienna, Mozart has enemies,” Papa used to joke.
It was Papa who had learned about the Technische Hochschule for girls. He was a carpenter who’d worked on the building when it went up in 1912. After Martina had come home dazed by the rainbow in Frau Herschel’s nursery, Papa brought back bits of leaded glass left over from a job site so that he and Martina could make prisms. He brought home books on light and color that he found in secondhand shops. When Martina was seven, the two of them re-created Newton’s experiments with sunlight, making a rainbow out of one prism, using a second prism to turn the rainbow back into white sunlight.
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