Critical Mass

by Sara Paretsky

  I, too, fled the park. Not for the shrubbery, but for Skokie. I rang Kitty Binder’s doorbell with an aggressive finger. After five minutes, I saw the front window blinds part the width of her fingers. Time passed. I rang again, and finally she opened the door the width of the chain bolt.

  “Ms. Binder, has your daughter been here?” I asked, before she could speak. “I found the place where she’d been staying on the West Side of Chicago. When I went there, her pals shot at me. Maybe you saw the story on the news—one of her old friends was arrested, another seems to be badly injured. Judy is pretty toxic right now. If you’ve heard from her, or she’s here, this would be a very good time to call the police.”

  She stared at me through the crack in the door, her face frozen in a stew of uneasy emotions: fear, anger, misery. “I told you, no police. The police come and I get killed.”

  “Is Judy here?” I said. “Or one of her friends? Have they threatened you? If you let me in, I can help.”

  “I don’t want you in my house again,” she said harshly.

  “Martin,” I said, desperately trying to keep the conversation alive. “He’s cut off all communications with the world. His boss at Metargon said they haven’t been able to find any ISP—Internet service—addresses he may be using. I talked to Herta and Julius Dzornen yesterday. Martin went to see them but they won’t tell me why. Do you know?”

  At that, anger blazed uppermost in her. “Those vermin! Worse than rats or cockroaches, lying, stealing—!”

  “What did they lie to you about?” I asked.

  “They know, but they pretend that they don’t. It’s been the same story for more than seventy years now.”

  “They know what? That Benjamin was your father as well as theirs?”

  She turned her head to one side, to hide the tears that had started to well. I was not supposed to see her as weak. “My father, my real father, was a builder. I told you that before.”

  “Then why did you go to see Benjamin Dzornen when you got to Chicago?” I asked.

  Her mouth worked. “My mother. That’s what I wanted to talk to him about. He had been her professor, she revered him. Not me, not her child, I was never important to her. Only those invisible particles she spent day and night with. She saw atoms, but she couldn’t see me. Even the last time we were alone, up in the mountains right before Germany took over Austria, she didn’t care when I tried to show her how I could dance. She wanted me to look at pictures of something invisible in the atmosphere!”

  “That must have been very hard.” I spoke with sincerity: for mothers, balancing between domestic duties and private passions is harder than standing on one toe on the point of a pin. It’s impossible to do it perfectly, but some women get it more wrong than others.

  “My grandmother raised me,” Kitty said fiercely. “She was tough but she cared about me. She made my mother beg for the money so that I could go to London with Charlotte and her brother. And then my grandmother was killed. Phfft, like that! First off to Terezín, then off to Sobibor, then—no record but most likely dead. I found all this out when I went back to Vienna as an interpreter in 1952.”

  “Your mother begged the money to send you to London?” I interrupted. “She got it from Professor Dzornen, didn’t she?”

  Kitty stared at me as if I had wizarding powers. “He said never to tell. He told me when I saw him here, in Chicago, but he made me promise to say nothing to nobody. Anybody. How did you know? Did that smug witch Herta tell you?”

  I smiled sadly. “It was a lucky guess. The war hadn’t started, your mother could still get mail from America.”

  “If you talked about me to Herta, I will fire you at this minute. They were a thousand times more stuck-up than the Herschels. Those Dzornens, to them I was always the seamstress’s granddaughter. When Herta and Bettina were left alone with me, I was supposed to run their errands. They expected me to do up their hair or deliver their little love notes to the stupid boys they dated. They even thought I should clean their shoes, so I threw those into the cesspool.”

  “I didn’t discuss you with Ms. Colonna,” I said. “What did Benjamin Dzornen tell you when you went to the physics department back in 1956?” I asked. “That Martina was dead?”

  She stared at me. “You think you can trick me, Miss Detective? You can’t. All that chapter in my life is finished, I never discuss it. I never talked about the great professor paying my fare to London, you tricked that out of me. For the rest, if anyone asks you, the police, Princess Charlotte Herschel, the FBI, anyone, you can tell them I never discuss it.”

  I had been bending over with my ear to the door to hear her. I was getting a crick in my neck, but there was no way she’d open the door for me, as angry as she was now.

  “But Judy did discuss it, didn’t she,” I said.

  “Judy is crazy, I thought you knew that already. There’s no telling what she might do.”

  “And Martin?”

  “Don’t start telling me lies about Martin. He would never talk to those Dzornens, not for any reason, so stop trying to spread muck on him.”

  “If I’m going to find him, I need a good photograph,” I said, pretending I hadn’t heard her. “Something I can show to people who might have met him. Can you get me a good shot of him?”

  “Do you listen to anything I say?” she hissed. “You and your detecting, you’re as bad as Martina and her atoms! Leave me alone, leave Martin alone. If you want to go into drug houses with Judy, you’re welcome to them!” She slammed the door.

  Did this mean I was fired? It certainly meant I wasn’t going to be paid. A smart woman would have walked away from the whole mess then and there.

  18

  DIARY OF A COLD WARRIOR

  BACK IN MY OFFICE I had a message from Doug Kossel, the Palfry County sheriff. After my conversation with Kitty Binder, I expected the worst, that he had found Martin’s body in the cesspit behind the meth house.

  “Warshawski!” He sounded unnecessarily energetic for the end of a workday. “You big-city gals know how to act. Your police buddy, what’s his name”—there was a pause while he wrestled with paper—“here it is, Downey. He called to talk to me about Schlafly, who definitely did not make a good scarecrow. When I told the Wengers—they farm that cornfield—what the body looked like, even Frank Wenger turned green around the gills. I’m not sure but what he’ll leave that little bit of corn where you found Ricky Schlafly go this year.”

  He laughed so merrily that my eardrums vibrated. “Anyway, Downey told me you created a situation in Chicago, neutralized one bad boy and got two others arrested. What do you do on your day off?”

  “Pitch short relief for the Cubs,” I said, halfheartedly entering into the spirit of the conversation. I regretted it when Kossel erupted in another ear-shattering laugh.

  “Did your guys look at that pit behind the house?” I asked.

  “Couldn’t find anyone who wanted to gear up and wade into it,” he said. “But we raked through it. No bodies, just a lot of empty ether cans and etcetera.”

  And etcetera? Maybe that was an expression unique to Palfry County. “What does Lieutenant Downey reckon?” I asked. “Do you two think that Freddie Walker killed Schlafly?”

  “Not likely. We hoped it could be a falling-out of thieves, but Walker was on his way back from Mexico at the time our ME says Schlafly was shot. Not that Walker wanted to tell us where he’d been, but when he saw it was that or a murder rap, he produced the manifest that showed him on a private plane leaving Juárez at four that same morning. Our ME says the deed was did by six A.M. at the latest, and likely earlier. Kind of hard to tell with the birds pecking out his pecker.”

  I held the phone from my ear just in time to avoid another hearty guffaw. Maybe Kossel was a psychopath who had shot Ricky Schlafly himself and now was enjoying jokes about the dead man’s organs. Pecked his pecker, kayoed
his kidneys, beaked his brains. Or the sheriff was merely one of those nerveless people who can fly bombing missions.

  “Of course, it could have been one of Walker’s boys doing the deed on his behalf. Your lieutenant will look into that; could be the guy whose brains you beat out. Pity, in a way; can’t get a confession out of a man who can’t talk.”

  I was tired of explaining how I’d come to knock “Bullet” Bultman down the stairs. Let Murray and the Palfry County sheriff imagine I’d carefully executed a move that got Bultman’s head to hit on the edge of a stair. Maybe it would make the next punk more hesitant to act when he saw me. Or the next punk would be so freaked he’d shoot me on sight.

  I missed a couple of lines from Kossel, but heard his sign-off line: “We’ll be sending you a subpoena for the inquest, Warshawski, so don’t you go too far away.”

  “I love you, too,” I said, but he’d already hung up.

  I looked at my notes. Freddie Walker had been in Mexico; Metargon heiress Alison Breen was down there helping set up a computer lab. Mexico was a big country, but could they have met? Could she be a spoiled rich drug user? She wouldn’t be the first young person whose parents didn’t know she had a habit.

  I called Jari Liu at Metargon. I started to tell him I’d met his boss earlier in the afternoon, but he already knew.

  “Cordell told me to give you any help you need; we’re very anxious to locate young Martin.”

  That made it easy: I wanted a photo, and I was sure they had a good head shot, given the way he’d quickly added my face to his database. Liu said it would be in my in box by the time I hung up.

  “Anything else?” he asked.

  “A crystal ball,” I said. “Someone who understands Martin Binder’s personality. Mr. Breen thinks he could be reconstructing your Princess Fitora code for the Chinese, or just for Microsoft or Apple.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Liu said sourly. “He chewed my ass pretty hard for not telling him myself that Martin had vanished. It’s so commonplace for cowboy programmers to leave without warning that I didn’t think I needed to do anything more than report it to HR and my own department head. I’m supposed to have guessed if Martin was missing that there was a danger he was selling our secrets to the highest bidder.”

  “You think that’s a real possibility?” I asked.

  “Money didn’t seem important to Martin, but he might be motivated by revenge. Not against Metargon per se, we had a good rap, or I thought we did, but he might want to show the richer, cooler kids that he could grab the spotlight in ways that would be beyond them.”

  “You think he could rebuild your code?”

  “There’s a story about Mozart my old man told me, when he thought I could be another Yo-Yo Ma,” Liu said. “It was a big disappointment when I had a tin ear. Anyway, Mozart, the boy genius, is sitting in the Vatican chapel listening to a mass. The music is jealously guarded: only Vatican musicians get to see the score. Mozart hears it once, goes home, writes out the score.”

  “Even if Martin has that kind of mind where he lays it all out in his head and sees it, Mr. Breen said it would be millions of lines of code,” I objected.

  “We only let people work on a few aspects of a program to avoid the temptation to share it with a bigger world. But with someone like Martin, if he mastered the underlying architecture, he wouldn’t need the whole code to reconstruct a big piece of the program. That’s what Cordell is worried about, but nothing on any of our nerve endings suggests that a third party has seen the code.”

  “You’d have heard?”

  “High-end computing is like any high-stakes game. People are always spying on each other, trying to figure out or steal what the competition is doing. We don’t always hear everything, but especially after talking to Cordell this morning, we’re very much on the watch for it and nothing is bubbling up.”

  I saw that I’d added some razor-edged teeth to my earlier cartoon of a rabbit. Bugs Bunny’s evil twin, ready to eviscerate someone’s viscera. “Mr. Breen says that Princess Fitora has defense applications.”

  Liu sucked in a breath. “If the old man is going to talk out of school, he has a heck of a nerve—never mind, forgot what I was about to say.”

  “To chew you out for dropping the ball on Martin’s disappearance,” I finished for him. “He told me his daughter is in Mexico; a drug dealer who’s connected to my inquiries was down there four days ago. Did you see any signs that Alison might be—”

  “Drugs? Alison? No way. And don’t you dare suggest that to Cordell—you’d be in court so fast your body would be a mile behind your feet. What’s Martin’s connection to drugs?”

  “I didn’t say he was connected to drugs; I said that there’s a dealer connected to my inquiry into him. No one is telling me anything, Mr. Liu; I have to ask whatever questions I can to get a handle on this investigation, even if they annoy you or Mr. Breen.”

  “If you have any evidence that Martin is a drug user—”

  “You’re sure that Alison Breen doesn’t do drugs, but after spending almost two years as Martin Binder’s supervisor, you don’t know whether he does? Something isn’t computing here.”

  Liu paused, then said stiffly, “I’m sure Martin never came to work high, but he’s a very guarded young man. He could conceal a drug problem pretty easily.”

  “You’re a bright computer wizard, Mr. Liu, but you’re also a skilled corporate ball player. I’m sure as soon as we’re done, you’ll be shooting an e-mail to Cordell Breen, suggesting he alert the FBI to Martin’s possible habit.”

  I added a machine gun to my razor-toothed rabbit. “If it turns out you’ve slandered Martin, I won’t threaten to take you to court so fast your clothes will leave your body, but I might find another way of reminding you that everyone in this country has a right to privacy. And a right to be thought innocent until proven guilty. We may wake up tomorrow to find the Bill of Rights applies only to the one percent, but until that happens, Martin gets the same benefit of the doubt as Alison.”

  “You’re right, of course,” Liu said quietly. “I’m sorry, but I’ve known Alison since she was twelve. I only met Martin two years ago. Of course I’m biased, more by my long relationship with her than by her family’s money.”

  I sort of apologized—I didn’t trust his judgment about Alison any more than I did about Martin, but I couldn’t afford to cut off communication lines to Metargon. When he hung up, I clicked on my e-mail. Sure enough, Liu had sent me a head shot, in which Martin looked sober, even anxious. His face had matured but he hadn’t filled out much from the skinny kid at the science fair with his grandfather. Jari Liu had included a second, informal shot of Martin demonstrating something to his other team members. With his high cheekbones and dark curly hair, he looked exotic, like a Cossack, perhaps, certainly erotically appealing. Maybe Alison Breen had tucked him into her suitcase and carried him to Mexico City with her.

  I printed out a dozen copies of both pictures. I’d start tomorrow at the commuter bus stop near Martin’s home, go to the Skokie Swift, see what else I could see.

  I turned my attention back to Darraugh Graham’s assignment. I was in the middle of a complicated conversation with a uranium mine manager when Jeanine Susskind called on my other line. Martin Binder’s friend’s mother, I remembered, missing a couple of sentences from my Canadian contact.

  I called Jeanine back as soon as I finished with the miner.

  “We found that book that Martin gave Voss to return; you wanted to know the title—it was The Secret Diary of a Cold War Conscientious Objector: Arnold Zachny and the American View. We owed five dollars in fines on it and they tried to make me pay for the damage that Martin had done to the book. Never have a teenager, Ms. Warshawski.”

  I could safely promise everyone that there was little likelihood of my taking on that particular challenge. When Jeanine hung up, I looked up the ti
tle. I could see why Voss had found the cover startling; it showed the Statue of Liberty, her mouth taped shut and a hammer and sickle plunged into her heart.

  I dimly remembered the American View, one of the few national publications produced in Chicago. Like The Atlantic, it had been a monthly with a mildly liberal opinion page, publishing short fiction and essays on people or current events. My parents didn’t subscribe to magazines, but I used to read the View sometimes in the law school library when I was working on my JD.

  The Chicago Public Library had a copy of The Secret Diary at their main branch. I was meeting Max and Lotty for dinner at the Pottawattamie Club downtown—Lotty had asked Max to see if any of his old refugee networks had any information on Martina Saginor—so it was easy to stop at the library on my way.

  Since I found myself at the club before Max and Lotty, I sat in the reception area, thumbing through the book, looking for what had interested Martin in it. The Secret Diary wasn’t as much a biography of Arnold Zachny as a history of the View against the background of the Cold War. Zachny had been an early supporter of disarmament; he published a collection of letters from Japanese women on the damage that radioactive fallout had done to their husbands and sons caught in the Pacific when the U.S. exploded hydrogen bombs in the Marshall Islands.

  As I flipped through the pages, a familiar name jumped out at me.

  One of the most curious incidents in the history of the View was its publication of a letter from a woman named Gertrud Memler. Memler had been a high-ranking Nazi engineer brought to the United States in the great Russian-American talent grab at the end of the Second World War. She was a controversial figure: she was the highest-ranking woman employed by the Germans in their nuclear weapons work. In fact, although hard evidence is difficult to find, as a member of the Uranverein (Uranium Club), she was probably in charge of the reactor program near Innsbruck.