“The end justifies my means?” I said, my voice cracking. “I don’t know, Lotty. Right now I feel as though I should retreat to a cave above Kabul and eat twigs until I die.”
“You would do it for two days, then you would get tired of seeing women assaulted for going to school, or burned for running away from a forced marriage. You’d go out and break open some Taliban heads and then it would get ugly very quickly, I’m afraid,” she said with a flash of wry humor.
She played with the fringe on the bedcover. Not like Lotty to be nervous enough to braid and unbraid threads. “Kitty and I were almost the same age, with almost the same history, I told you that. Illegitimate daughters raised by our mothers’ parents. My grandparents adored my mother and treated me as another little princess, but Kitty’s grandmother, Frau Saginor, had no patience with Martina—her daughter, you know, Martina Saginor. Frau Saginor looked after Kitty, but I don’t think she was a warm—”
Lotty interrupted herself, shaking her head. “That isn’t what I wanted to say. The truth is, I knew nothing about them. Frau Saginor sewed for my Oma, my granny, along with other wealthy families in our quarter. I looked down on Kitty because my Oma looked down on Frau Saginor. Probably I brought out the worst in both Kitty and her grandmother.
“Fräulein Martina, that’s what we called Frau Saginor’s daughter, Fräulein Martina fascinated me. I’m sure it was partly because Kitty and Frau Saginor despised her. But also, Fräulein Martina would show us the wonderful apparatus she built at her Institute. She showed me the way light broke through the prism in my nursery windows, and explained spectral lines and the photoelectric effect to us. Kitty would react almost violently when Martina started talking about experiments with light.”
Lotty gave a tight, bitter smile. “If the two were to come into my clinic today, I would tell Martina that her daughter was desperate for the affection and attention Martina was lavishing on prisms and gamma rays, but at eight and nine, I just knew I could outshine Kitty in nature studies, so I was a bit of a show-off, and a bit of a little bitch, grabbing her mother’s attention to myself. Still, it was Fräulein Martina who first made me interested in the mysteries of the universe.”
Lotty bit her lips, angry with herself. “What I’m trying to say is that I carried my old Viennese class attitudes against Kitty with me to London, and then to the New World. When she showed up again, I couldn’t listen to her story. She may have been right when she accused me of responding to Judy’s cries for help as a way of snubbing her.”
She took a deep breath. “Victoria, will you put aside any thought of a cave until you have found Martin Binder? I need you to do this for me; I will pay your fee. I delivered Martin. Also Judy. On those grounds alone Kitty never forgave me. She came to me because she was frightened; someone told her I had exceptional skill, but it’s not a good idea for your childhood nemesis to see you splayed and bleeding in a delivery room.”
I held her hand, as I had done with Kitty Binder last night. “I’ll do my best, Lotty.”
We sat quietly for some minutes, then she asked awkwardly whether Kitty had been dead when I reached the house.
“I don’t want a description of the mayhem, but I hope she died in peace,” Lotty said, “not in great pain.”
“She spoke in German.” During the long night that followed Kitty Binder’s death, I had forgotten those terrible last minutes with her. “I recorded her in case she was saying something that would help track her assailants.”
I got out of bed, pulling on a pair of jeans so that I wouldn’t embarrass Mr. Contreras, and retrieved my bag from where I’d dropped it on my way into my home this morning.
Lotty took the phone from me and played the recording several times. “This isn’t anything to do with who killed her. She’s saying, ‘Granny, what did it all mean?’ Then she adds, ‘What was the point of it all?’”
She turned my phone over and over in her hands. “It’s so painful, Victoria. Kitty had a difficult life, and then to die like that, thinking her life had no point! If you’ve lost everyone, and then you give birth to a drug addict and your only grandson has run away, perhaps to become a terrorist or a traitor—life would feel meaningless!”
“My reaction is less cosmic,” I said dryly. “First, Kitty thought she was with her granny, so she died feeling comforted. Second, what if it’s not her life she’s asking about, but something specific—what it was her home invaders came hunting for—why did it matter so much to them?”
Lotty put my phone down. “I hope you’re right. It would be a help, to me, anyway. How can you find out?”
“Cordell Breen, who owns the company where Martin has been working, doesn’t think a solo op like me is much use, but I am willing to do legwork. People who rely on technology sometimes miss the small and obvious. I had been thinking of canvassing for Martin at bus stops, but it’s been two weeks; the trail is cold up here. I’m going to drive back to the place Judy was living, and see if anyone in the town remembers Martin.”
VIENNA, 1938
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, Turn Around
LITTLE CHARLOTTE IS wrapping her teddy bear’s head in bandages. “He fell from the building, Opa, and hurt his head,” she explains to her grandfather.
“It burst open like a rotten pumpkin,” Käthe laughs. “Juice and seeds all over the ground.”
Frau Herschel frowns. “Language, Käthe!”
“That’s what happened to this man who got pushed off the building yesterday. Everybody who was there laughed and one man said that, that his head was a rotten pumpkin, a rotten Jew pumpkin head. I can take a knife and slice open Teddy to show you.”
Ever since the Germans attacked Austria, Käthe has been talking back to Frau Herschel. It’s as if seeing the rudeness of Austrian Christians to the Herschels makes her feel that she can attack them as well.
“Where was that, Lotte?” Grandfather asks his granddaughter.
“By Fräulein Martina’s lab. She took us there yesterday for science lessons. It was fun. We got to see the films she made of the insides of atoms, you know, the ones she took when we all went to the mountains for the Easter holiday. But Käthe got bored, she’s so stupid that sitting through science class bores her own pumpkin-seed head.”
“You’re the pumpkin head,” Käthe shouts. “I’m smart enough to know that science gets you nowhere. You have to have money to get away from the Nazis, or show them your titties. Science will only get you killed.”
“Charlotte! Käthe!” Oma says sternly. “I will not have this language from you. We may have to live in the ghetto, but we will not speak like the ghetto.”
Little Charlotte apologizes to her grandmother with a curtsy, but Käthe bends over her knitting, her lips pressed in a furious scowl.
They have been doing a literature lesson with Grandfather Herschel, reciting lines from Schiller that neither girl understands. Herr Herschel is teaching the children German and literature now that the schools have expelled Jewish students. Fräulein Martina is supposed to teach science and mathematics, but she often forgets how young they are. She talks to them about alpha particles and electrons. She wonders aloud about the instability of the uranium nucleus, and has the girls count scintillations in her lab.
Frau Herschel, “Big Charlotte,” doesn’t like it; she doesn’t like her granddaughter coming home with stained fingers, her pinafore smelling oddly of chemicals and the stink of the cigars that the men in the Radium Institute smoke. Herr Herschel agrees that with water scarce and laundry soap almost nonexistent, it is a nuisance, but working in the lab keeps little Charlotte from worrying too much.
This evening, after the literature lesson, they are waiting for Käthe’s grandmother to get back from trying to trade her embroidered napkins for food.
Grandfather takes Teddy from little Charlotte. “I’m sure your bandages will make him well very soon, Lotte. So Fräulein Mart
ina took you to her lab yesterday and let you play with atoms?”
“It’s not like that, Opa. Atoms are too tiny to see, and then they have tinier things inside them. You can’t play with them, not like they were Teddy, but you can study them; then you know how sunlight is made. Fräulein Martina showed us on a piece of paper, black lines from the sun. See, there’s this atom in the sun called helium, and when you make it on earth you have radiation. Then you see the lines it makes on a piece of paper, it’s like a ghost, so they call it ‘Spectral.’”
“Those lines won’t keep you warm in the winter when there’s no coal,” Käthe says. “So what’s the point?”
A laugh from the doorway startles all of them; they turn to see Käthe’s mother standing there.
“Lotte, Liebling, the lines are from a spectrum of light that the sun and the stars emanate, that’s why they’re called spectral, but I like the idea that the ghost of the sun’s explosions makes them. And you, my little daughter, you’ve been listening too hard to your own Oma, nicht wahr?”
Fräulein Martina comes forward to her daughter and tries to smooth the wisps of hair that have escaped from her braid, but Käthe jerks her head away.
“Oma is right,” Käthe says, small chin at an obstinate angle. “We can’t eat your atoms.”
“Everything you eat is made up of atoms,” Fräulein Martina says, “but I understand what your Oma is telling you. Still, they pay me a little stipend at the Institute; that helps put some atoms in your bellies.”
“What did the girls see yesterday?” Frau Herschel pulls Fräulein Martina back to the doorway to ask in an undervoice. “Käthe said something about a man falling from a building?”
Fräulein Martina looks at the two girls. In the tiny room where the Herschels now live, it’s impossible to have a private conversation: the same thing is true in her own flat, across the hall. She thought, growing up, that her parents’ four rooms were tiny and squalid compared to the large light flat where the Herschels lived on the Renngasse. Now the new government has moved three other families into her home. She and her mother mourn their lost rooms just as much as Frau Herschel grieves for her ten rooms and private baths.
“A man was pushed off a building,” Käthe says loudly. “We told you on the way home, but you wouldn’t listen. We saw it. These other men picked him up and threw him off, just as if he was a doll, and they laughed. They said he’d been an ugly Jew when he was alive and now he was pretty because he was a dead Jew! And your stupid atoms won’t save you from someone doing that to you.”
“That’s enough coarse talk to your mother,” Frau Herschel says sharply, adding to Fräulein Martina, “Your own mother is frightened; we all are frightened, so Frau Saginor says these things. I tell her that Käthe repeats them, and that perhaps she shouldn’t complain about you quite so much, but—”
Fräulein Martina smiles as Frau Herschel breaks off, mid-sentence. “I know what Mama says: that if I loved my child as much as I love physics, Käthe wouldn’t complain about my work. I’m sorry that I didn’t notice the man who was pushed yesterday. What a terrible thing for the children to have seen.
“The trouble is, we had to leave the lab early on account of the curfew, but my mind stayed in the library, not with what was happening on the street. My mother is right: that’s my biggest fault, not seeing what’s in front of me. Or second-biggest.”
The biggest, according to Frau Saginor, being Martina’s coldness, but even as she speaks to Frau Herschel, Martina’s mind scurries from her daughter and the dead man, back to the Institute library.
“I hadn’t been able to find a reference I was looking for,” she tries to explain. “It was an old paper by a German chemist, Ida Noddack; I finally tracked it down this afternoon. No one paid attention to it when she published it, because she criticized Fermi’s study of uranium decay, and his work is supposed to be beyond criticism. Still, when I first read it, I did wonder if we should redo Fermi’s experiments, and go down to elements below lead. When I suggested as much to Professor Dzornen, he said we didn’t have the resources and that we had to accept Fermi’s results. Anyway, there’s no better experimentalist in physics today. But Noddack suggested that U-235 doesn’t decay into trans-uranic elements, but into—”
Käthe interrupts her mother with a loud scream. She grabs the teddy bear from Herr Herschel, darts to the window and hurls the bear down to the courtyard. “Now he’s dead, and a good thing, too, ugly Jew bear. No more useless klatsch-klatsch-klatsch from his stupid mouth!”
The shock in all the adult faces makes Käthe run from the room, trailing her knitting. Little Charlotte, stunned only for a second, leaps up and follows her. The adults hear the two girls kicking and shouting in the hall.
Herr Herschel goes out and separates them. He speaks with a sternness that is unusual for him. “Käthe, you must go to your own home now. We will see you again for lessons when you can behave in a civilized fashion.”
He pulls his granddaughter away from the Saginor child, shocked to see her small face contorted with such hatred. It’s not enough that the Austrians hate us, we have to hate each other, he thinks. The antipathy between little Charlotte and Käthe seemed to date from birth, long before the Nazis took over Austria, but the way they all have to live now, five or more people to a room, makes everyone edgy.
The Matzo Island, Frau Herschel used to call the Leopoldstadt where the Saginors live. Like most people of her age and class, she’d been contemptuous of the slum which poor Jews from the eastern reaches of the Habsburg Empire had flooded in the days after the Great War. She doesn’t use that phrase now that they are living there themselves.
On the Matzo Island, their daughter flirted and pouted and danced and sang with Moishe Radbuka, a violinist. No one could resist Sophie when she acted irresistible, least of all a Matzo violinist. The violinist gave Sophie Herschel a baby, whom she called little Charlotte, an olive branch to her mother, who seized on the infant with glad hands. When Martina Saginor had a baby only a few months later, no one knew who had given it to her.
“Martina, such an odd child, an odder woman, one wonders how the child Käthe was conceived,” Frau Herschel used to say. “Perhaps some explosion in the lab produced a baby.”
Tonight, instead of punishing little Charlotte for fighting like a ghetto cat, as her grandmother wishes, Herr Herschel carries her down four flights of stairs and out into the courtyard. They find Teddy, dirty from the mud and the slops on the cobblestones, but otherwise intact.
Herr Herschel picks up a scrap of paper torn from a magazine and wipes the bear with clumsy fingers. Perhaps his wife can clean Teddy with one of the mysterious concoctions she is able to manufacture out of their minute rations.
He pulls Lotte to him. She trips and stumbles on one of the loose cobblestones, but bites back a cry because she knows Käthe is watching, ready to make fun of her for her clumsiness.
Herr Herschel bends to replace the loose stone. The ground underneath has subsided, leaving a sizable hole; all the stones in this section of the courtyard are loose. Courtyard—what a grand name for a small circle that has nothing courtly about it at all, just dead trees and bare glass-shard-filled earth where grass once grew. Only the stench of rotting waste connects it to a medieval court.
He puts an arm around his granddaughter and leads her back into the building.
21
DOWN ON THE FARM
PRIVATE EYES ARE REQUIRED to tell local LEOs when we’re about to start stalking or staking out on their territory. In Chicago, I don’t bother: the cops would either snarl at me to get out of their hair, or tie me up for hours in useless interrogations about my investigations. In Palfry, though, I began my day at Doug Kossel’s headquarters. In a county like this, everyone knows everyone. If the first person I questioned didn’t rat me out to the sheriff, the second would for sure.
“Your funeral,” he said.
“No one’s talked to me about the boy, but if he’s putting the same things up his nose as his ma, he likely sneaked in and out when the farmers were sleeping. This is an early-to-bed kind of place, you know.”
I nodded meekly: there was no point in offering the sheriff my version of Martin Binder. The sheriff’s office was in the city-county building at the south end of Main Street. I’d found a parking space without any trouble: the Buy-Smart outside town had decimated Palfry’s stores even before the economy collapsed. Now there was just a handful of survivors: a small drugstore that did a brisk business in alcohol and lottery tickets, a dusty furniture store, and a few diners.
I’d left Chicago at six, covering the hundred miles down I-55 in under two hours, but as the sheriff had said, this was an early-to-bed town. People had been working their fields since before sunrise. At eight-thirty, they were taking a break at Lazy Susan’s Coffee Shop, which looked like the one lively place on the street.
When I walked inside, heads turned. Strangers were rare enough down here to merit a second look, but I was merely another woman in jeans whose dark hair showed flecks of white, nothing out of the ordinary. Conversations resumed.
Lazy Susan’s was a no-frills kind of place. Padded red banquettes along the walls, tubular chairs around Formica tables in the middle, paper placemats, and a couple of waitresses who dashed around far too quickly to be called lazy anything. Most of the tables were filled, but I found an empty stool at the counter.
“What’ll yours be, hon?” A waitress appeared out of nowhere, pouring coffee into my mug without asking.
The flimsy placemats had the menus printed on them. Eggs, hash browns, waffles. I’d had coffee before leaving Chicago, but I realized I was famished.
“A short stack and OJ,” I said.
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