Critical Mass

by Sara Paretsky

  When Memler came to the States after the war, she was assigned to projects at the Nevada Proving Grounds under the aegis of the Nobel Laureate Benjamin Dzornen. She disappeared in 1953 and was never seen again. However, from time to time, she would write letters to learned journals or to newspapers. These letters were vehemently anti-nuclear in content. Her about-face, from Innsbruck overseer to anti-nuclear activist, was extraordinary.

  The FBI tried unsuccessfully to trace her, since she was privy to U.S. nuclear secrets. She may have defected to the Soviet Union; one of their embassy attachés could have posted letters for her. A letter that Memler wrote to the View and the FBI’s response show their futile efforts to track her down.

  May 1962

  To Arnold Zachny

  Editor

  American View

  Re: Edward Teller and The Danger of Fallout

  Dr. Teller is widely known as the “Father of the Hydrogen Bomb.” In his recent essay in your magazine, he assures us, as a good father should, that his child poses no threat to the well-being of other children on this planet. He writes that radioactive fallout from nuclear tests is no more dangerous to our long-term health than being a few ounces overweight. The fear of radiation is irrational, Dr. Teller concludes, and has led Americans to the dangerous place of ending the thousands of tests of hydrogen and atom bombs that we have detonated on the ground, on the sea and in the air.

  Like many parents whose children behave mischievously, Dr. Teller has either been too busy or too blind to see what damage his little darling is doing. Perhaps all the time he spends in Washington, fighting to continue nuclear testing, means he hasn’t had time to go to the Nevada Proving Grounds to see the impact of his child on human and animal life.

  I, to my sorrow, spent some time in these proving grounds. This is what I saw: it was routine for the United States Army to expose its soldiers to bombs being detonated less than a mile away. They were given no protective gear, not even sunglasses, just told to put their hands over their ears and stand with their backs to the blast.

  It was routine for the United States Navy to put pigs, sheep, and dogs, chained in cages, at Ground Zero of these tests. Animals at Ground Zero are obliterated. Those chained in cages further away come back to U.S. Navy labs with the skin ulcerated and peeling from their bodies.

  The data on the health of humans, both soldiers and civilians, exposed to this much radiation is a secret jealously guarded by our government, but I saw the burns on their skin myself. If Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not give us enough data on the high (60 percent) probability of developing bone or blood cancers for survivors of an atomic bomb, one test at Nevada should have told us all we need to know about Dr. Teller’s baby’s tremendous destructive power.

  The first time we slaughtered dogs should have been the last. They were guilty of no crime except their inexplicable love for humans, which let them follow us into cages where they were left to die in terrible fear. But we could not stop with one test, we continued to do many hundred others, with dogs, sheep, pigs, whose screams will follow me to my grave, as much as the screams of prisoners at the Uranverein weapons and reactor plant.

  Civilians as far as 135 miles away have begun developing terrible cancers in numbers disproportionate to their population. We see this, but we continue to build bigger bombs, enough now to obliterate the entire human race many times over.

  If I had produced a child this dangerous, I would not go around the world bragging about being its father.

  Sincerely

  Gertrud Memler, Ph.D., Physics

  July 16, 1962

  Telegram from: Cal Hooper

  Special Agent in Charge

  Washington

  To: Agent Luke Erlichman

  Chicago Office

  Federal Bureau of Investigation

  Luke: How in hell did a letter get published in a national magazine about animal testing at the Nevada Proving Grounds? And who the fuck is Gertrud Memler? Congress has received thousands of letters demanding hearings, or an end to using animals in nuclear tests and we’re catching heat. Even RFK is demanding to know who this Memler is and whether she’s a reliable source.

  Find out soonest how this leak happened. The Boss is not happy.

  Cal

  July 28, 1962

  Letter from:

  Agent Luke Erlichman

  Chicago Office

  Federal Bureau of Investigation

  To: Cal Hooper

  Special Agent in Charge

  Washington

  Cal: Magazine produced letter and envelope for Gertrud Memler, return address in Ft. George, Utah. Dispatched agent Titheredge to find and silence her, but no record of a Gertrud Memler in any phone books, churches, etc. The return address was a local cemetery.

  Looked up Memler in our files. An Austrian scientist by that name entered the country in 1946, was assigned to weapons and rocket development at Nevada because of WW II experience with German proto-atomic bomb work. Find nothing in her file after 1953. Was she civilian-relocated? Did she marry?

  The Secret Diary included a long passage from Arnold Zachny’s diary, where he wrote about the day the FBI came in to seize his files and to order him never to print any letters he received from Memler. The passage ended with a photocopy of another telegram between FBI agents in Chicago and Washington.

  August 2, 1962

  Private letter from Cal Hooper

  Washington, DC

  Luke Erlichman

  6937 S. South Shore Drive

  Chicago

  Cal, for your own good as well as mine, do your fucking damnedest to find Memler. From now on, set up a mail intercept for both American View and Zachny’s home correspondence. Can’t have a loose cannon publishing secret signals to Uncle Nicky* on our watch.

  My librarian at the University of Chicago had identified Gertrud Memler as one of the women sitting around the pod in the old photo I’d found in Palfry. Memler worked with Martina Saginor and Benjamin Dzornen, both of whom were Jews. Then she’d become a Nazi, overseeing a weapons lab, and had ended her life in the United States, a deeply and skillfully hidden anti-nuclear activist. If she was still alive, she’d be at least a hundred, probably more, so it was a safe bet she’d made it to her grave without FBI detection.

  If Martin was hunting for a connection between Dzornen and his great-grandmother, he would have tried to find Memler. Had he seen something at the Breen house that made him think he could find Memler where the FBI had failed?

  I was so lost in thought that I gave a strangled cry when Max tapped me on the shoulder. Lotty was with him; we exchanged the usual greetings and went into the private dining room Max had reserved.

  When I’d gone through the different scenarios I was imagining, Max groaned and clutched his head. “Victoria, you’re making me dizzy. Is Martin murdering drug dealers who got his mother in trouble? Is he avenging his great-grandmother for having her work stolen? Or is he selling secrets to the Chinese or the Israelis or perhaps Google? No wonder you can’t make any headway. You need to pick one path and follow it.”

  “Yeah, if I could get a single reliable fact out of anyone I would,” I snapped. “I have two facts, call it three. After going to a barbecue at the home of Metargon’s owner, Martin announced that something didn’t add up. His high school physics teacher says he said that when either his answer, or the problem itself, seemed wrong. He stayed at work for few weeks after the barbecue, then he disappeared, giving a book on Gertrud Memler and the Cold War to a neighbor kid to take back to the library. The other fact is that his mother’s on the lam. She’s run from two drug houses and has also disappeared. Are the drugs and the Cold War connected? Are he and his mother connected?”

  A waiter was hovering; Max interrupted me long enough to put in our dinner orders.

  “My semi-fact is that Martin went to see Benjamin Dzo
rnen’s two surviving legitimate children. To top it all off, this afternoon Kitty all but fired me. I can’t keep up an expensive search if she’s fired me, but I can’t leave Martin to hang out to dry, either. Just in case it’s drug dealers he’s messing with, not century-old missing scientists.”

  I showed him and Lotty the passage about Gertrud Memler that I’d just been reading. “You said you might be able to work some of your old refugee networks. Is there any way you could track down the Memler woman?”

  Max rolled his eyes. “When Lotty talked to me, I was thinking more of Martina in Vienna, seeing where she might have gone when the Innsbruck facility was shut down. None of my networks is better than the FBI, believe me.”

  “Okay. Find out what happened to Martina. That might bring some comfort to Kitty, anyway.”

  My phone rang as he started to ask for more details. I looked at the screen. “Kitty Binder,” I mouthed, and turned away from the table to take the call.

  “Is this the detective?” she demanded, without preamble. “They’re stalking me again.”

  “Who is, Ms. Binder?”

  “The people who always do. I want you to come over.”

  “I’m almost an hour away, Ms. Binder: it’s best if you dial 911.”

  “Don’t you understand?” she screeched. “The police are the problem. You keep saying you want to help. I need your help now.” She hung up.

  “Käthe is paranoid,” Lotty said when I repeated the conversation. “I keep telling you that. If she won’t call the police, you must do so yourself.”

  “You know what the guy says in Catch-22: just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t following you. Someone killed Judy Binder’s housemate five days ago; if they think Judy’s gone back to her mother, then Kitty is in real trouble.”

  “All the more reason to phone the police!” Lotty said.

  “She thinks they’re part of the problem.” I got to my feet.

  “The problem they’re part of is her paranoia,” Lotty cried. “I told you that earlier, this has been her song and dance since she arrived in this country, that the police or the FBI were stalking her.”

  “Lotty, this is how I get to where you become furious with me. I can call the police, but I can’t leave her quaking in terror behind those dead bolts.”

  Lotty’s eyes were filled with pain. “I do understand that, Victoria. But can’t you take five minutes to ask if there is a better way, an easier way, to solve the problem?”

  My own face contorted in lines of misery, but I left the club. Half a dozen times on the road, I started to dial 911 and stopped. Kitty Binder was paranoid. There was nothing to be lost in calling in the pros, except any fragile confidence she might be feeling in me.

  19

  BLEEDING OUT

  WHEN I PULLED up in front of the Binder house, lights were on in the basement and the top floor but not the ground level. I took the flashlight out of my car and went up the walk to the front door. It was shut and locked. I leaned on the bell but didn’t get an answer.

  I didn’t like this. This afternoon, she’d parted the living room blinds, and that was when she wasn’t expecting me.

  I ran to the back of the house. The kitchen door was swinging on its hinges. I took the extra seconds to call 911. Home invasion on Kedvale in Skokie, I reported.

  “The Binder residence?” the dispatcher said. “We just sent a squad car past and they didn’t see anything.”

  “Back door,” I said. “It’s been forced open.”

  The dispatcher promised to send another car, but her tone lacked enthusiasm. I didn’t have my gun, but I didn’t want to wait for the posse. I made myself as small a target as possible and edged into the kitchen. Crouching, I fumbled for light switches, slipped on something and fell. I turned on my flashlight. All the books and papers that had been stacked on the kitchen table were strewn across the floor; I’d slipped on a loose sheet of paper.

  I found the light switch and started calling Kitty’s name. No one was on the ground floor, but in the front room the lace had been ripped apart, the little knickknacks smashed. In the bedrooms on the upper floor, the same savage hands had undone the bedding, slit the mattresses, upended the bureau drawers.

  I stumbled back down the stairs, to the basement, to Martin’s suite. Kitty lay on the floor, next to her grandson’s bed. She’d been beaten about the neck and arms; her head was bleeding heavily.

  Her eyes fluttered open when she felt my fingers on her neck. “Oma?” she whispered. “Oma?”

  “It’s the detective, Ms. Binder,” I said gently. “Hold on; I’m calling an ambulance.”

  I kept an arm around her while I once more called 911.

  “We’re sending someone,” the dispatcher said, “but it will be a few minutes.”

  “An ambulance,” I snapped. “To the basement. A woman has been badly beaten, she’s close to death. Make it happen.”

  “Oma, wozu das alles?” Kitty whispered.

  I turned on the recorder on my phone, still holding her; the German might be important.

  Her breathing grew harsher. “Das war ja alles sinnlos.”

  The ambulance came a moment later, but the EMT crew shook their heads grimly; Kitty was already dead. I moved aside as they shifted her body onto the stretcher, but couldn’t find the strength to get to my feet. While I sat, head on my knees, I watched blood spool from under the bed. It took me a long instant to realize there was another body under there, but when I finally alerted the crew, they lifted the bed away from the wall.

  A scarecrow of a woman lay there, her breath coming in shallow raspy bursts. Her dark curly hair was streaked with gray, her skin dry and flaking. Blood oozed from her abdomen. Judy Binder. Kitty had died protecting her daughter.

  20

  WHAT DID IT ALL MEAN?

  A ROUGH HAND SHOOK my shoulder. “Doll, wake up! Sorry to bust in on you in bed, but here’s the doc, worried sick about you.”

  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.”