Critical Mass

by Sara Paretsky

  “Were you really a student here,” she asked, “or did you say that to get me to talk to you?”

  “I really was a student here,” I assured her. “Undergrad and law. My senior thesis was on connections among the Mob, Chicago politicians and waste haulers and how they made sure the city’s garbage ended up in South Chicago.”

  Her lips rounded in the kind of respect people accord a topic that sounds truly boring to them, but she responded with her name, Olivia, and her own senior paper, on witchcraft narratives in seventeenth-century France.

  “That’s why I’m using Special Collections. Maybe this sounds trivial compared to studying the Mob, but I’ve been learning Medieval French and Latin and reading some of the old French narratives. Anyway, last week, I think it was Thursday, I was having cramps so I was in the bathroom a long time, and the two librarians who were on duty today came in.

  “Ms. Turley, the one you were talking to, asked Ms. Kolberg, did she remember the kid who came in looking at the Dzornen papers a while back. She said he’d called himself Julius Dzornen, and she’d assumed he was like a grandson or great-grandson of Benjamin Dzornen, you know, he worked on the Manhattan Project and was a huge name in physics; they cover his work in the physics core.”

  Olivia paused, waiting for a response; yes, I remembered the physics core.

  “So Ms. Turley said someone else had come in last week, looking for something in the papers, and the box he requested held a genealogy chart. There aren’t any young Dzornens, Ms. Turley said. The only Julius is like seventy or something.

  “Well, I was really eavesdropping by then, because my dad knows Julius Dzornen. I don’t know if you know him, Julius, I mean, but he’s kind of a weird guy, a real loner, but he’s a bird-watcher, and so is my dad, so they see each other out in the Wooded Isle on Sunday mornings. When I saw my folks that night, I mentioned it to my dad, about a young Julius Dzornen being in Special Collections.”

  She looked at me unhappily. “I guess my dad told Julius when they were out birding on Sunday, because Monday morning, Julius Dzornen came into the reading room. He was furious, wanting to know who had been using his name. And of course it’s against library policy to say, like they told you today. So Julius started to go behind the counter, yelling out threats, and someone had to call campus security.”

  Olivia looked up at me, her face crinkled in guilt. “I feel so terrible about it. He’s this pathetic guy whose dad won the Nobel Prize and he doesn’t have any life at all, and it was because of me that he got in trouble. I mean, the librarians thought they were alone in the bathroom; they never would have said anything if they’d known I was in there. Do you think I should tell them?”

  I shook my head. “I wouldn’t. It’s water over the dam. They didn’t mean harm, you didn’t mean harm, let it lie. And I can tell you this much: as of last night, the real Julius was certainly out and about, not under arrest, so I wouldn’t worry about it too much.”

  I kept my tone casual as I added, “Were you in the reading room back at the end of August?”

  Olivia blushed. “My boyfriend broke up with me in August. He was doing research in Avignon and I was in Roussillon, so we were going to meet in Arles and walk the pilgrim road, but the night before we were supposed to meet, he texted me that he’d met someone else. Can you believe that? Breaking up by text without even coming to see me in person? Anyway, I didn’t feel like hiking by myself, so I came home and started doing more work here.”

  I pulled my photos from my bag again. “Any of these guys look familiar?”

  “I’m sure it was him.” Olivia pointed to Martin. “I noticed him mostly because he and I were the only people in the reading room who weren’t like a hundred years old.”

  “You didn’t happen to notice what he was looking at?”

  She grinned, suddenly mischievous. “Like, box seven, folder nine? No. I wouldn’t have known even at the time. You can’t tell across the reading room what anyone is looking at.”

  She looked again at the mug shots I’d laid on the small tabletop. “This guy was in this morning, though I don’t know what he was doing.”

  She tapped Jari Liu’s face with the eraser end of her pencil.

  I half rose in my chair. “Is he still there?”

  “I don’t think so. He only stayed an hour or so.” She blushed again. “I should be translating old French legal documents, not studying the other patrons. Speaking of which, I’ve wasted too much time today. Thanks for the Coke.”

  She got up. “You really won’t mention this, right, about me and the librarians?”

  “What’s that about you and the librarians?” I quizzed her. “I don’t remember you saying anything about them.”

  She left quickly, tossing her can in the recycle bin on her way out. I waited until she was partway up the stairs so she wouldn’t worry that someone saw her giving me information.

  It was after two. I was hungry and I still wanted caffeine, but the Special Collections reading room would close in a few hours. I ate a banana from the snack bar in the coffee shop and hoped that would carry me through the afternoon.

  40

  THE RADETZKY MARCH

  WHEN I RETURNED to Special Collections, Olivia was at a table in the middle of the reading room. I pretended not to see her as I scanned the room for Jari Liu. He wasn’t there. Why were the Chicago librarians so scrupulous? I would have given my 401k, all thirty-seven thousand dollars of it, to know what files Liu had been looking at.

  I spent half an hour compiling a list of the boxes and folders I wanted to see, besides the Ada Byron letter. A note in the file said that most of the correspondence around the Manhattan Project and Dzornen’s involvement in the hydrogen bomb still had a top-secret clearance and was unavailable.

  I saw that Dzornen had held a number of patents, some for improvements to reactor components for the hydrogen bomb, some in X-ray crystallography. Some were for inventions whose application meant nothing to me, cloud chambers, gas spectrometers, one for an improvement to ferromagnetic drum memory.

  Maybe my cynical thought that Breen had hidden the BREENIAC sketch himself was wrong. He’d sent Jari Liu down here to look at Dzornen’s patents, because as soon as Julius said someone was using his name in the library, Breen knew it must have been Martin. Breen wanted to see what patent history Martin was looking at. Or perhaps not.

  Since I could only get a few folders at a time, I first requested the one that held the Ada Byron letter. I also asked for family papers and correspondence from Vienna between 1936, when the Dzornens left for America, and December 1941, when American entry into the war made it impossible to get mail from Europe.

  It was almost three when I got my first set of materials, and the librarians warned me that the reading room closed at four forty-five. The Ada Byron letter wasn’t among them; the clerk explained that they were still locating that box.

  “It’s not missing, is it?” I asked.

  The clerk assured me it was merely in transit. That was helpful: it persuaded me that Jari Liu had come to see the Ada Byron letter. Or left after he’d read it.

  I looked at the genealogy chart, but it only listed the Dzornens I already knew about, Benjamin, Ilse, the three children they’d had together, along with ancestors in what today is the Czech Republic. A handful had made it through the war, but most had died in 1942 or ’43. The chart didn’t mention Kitty Binder or her family. I went quickly through the folders in the family history box, but they all related to Dzornen’s life before Martina became part of it.

  A staff member took those papers from me and handed me the folder that contained Ada Byron’s letter, which was in a sleeve about halfway through the folder. The typed name “Ada Byron” appeared in the upper left corner without a return address and there was no address beyond “Benjamin Dzornen, The Enrico Fermi Institute,” in the middle of the envelope.


  I carefully removed the envelope from the plastic sleeve and took out the letter that was folded inside. It was written on the onionskin paper that I remembered from my childhood when my mother wrote to Italian friends. The text was typed on an old manual by someone not very expert with the keys—a lot of letters had double strikes through them as the writer went back to correct herself. It began without a salutation.

  I was sorry to read about your illness. I think of it as part of the long disease of our century, filled as it has been with suffering and death. There is much I would write you, but I do not know if you will ever see this page; I don’t know who is guarding you from your correspondents. And anyway, what point is there to rehashing those old quarrels, the ones in public or in private? I’m sorry you felt I did not keep my word, but you were the finest scientist of my time and I couldn’t bear to see you abase yourself to those so far beneath you.

  Now, though, all I wish for you is peace, so please know that when you are gone, I will keep your name alive in a green and kind way, remembering you from the days of my youth, when ideas poured so quickly and thickly it was as if I could reach out a hand to touch them. Yours were always the most exhilarating, forcing all of us to see the world in a new and different way. That is how I shall remember you.

  I know that you have always shared my lack of interest in

  The letter ended abruptly there. I looked in the envelope, wondering if there was a second sheet, but didn’t see one. Lack of interest in what? Religion? Politics? Children?

  I put the letter back in its folder and placed it to one side for photocopying. As I closed the folder, I saw that the header on it noted a two-page letter. I took the envelope out again and inspected it. There was nothing else inside.

  I looked through the other documents on the table, to see if it had slipped into another folder, but didn’t see it. I took the folder to the front desk and showed the letter to Rachel Turley. She shook her head, frowning in worry. “You’re sure it didn’t get slipped into other papers on your desk? It’s flimsy paper, after all.”

  “I don’t think so, but you can send someone to look through them in case I missed it.”

  She got up herself and went through the folders on my table one page at a time. I even let her look in my briefcase. I turned out my pockets, but the only paper in them was the FOIA letter about Gertrud Memler that I’d taken from Martin’s room the other night.

  “This is not good,” Turley said. “If we’ve misplaced it, we’re unbearably negligent, but if someone stole it—I guess that makes me negligent as well.”

  She hurried out the door to the reference area, where I saw her in agitated conference with the other librarian. The two disappeared into a back room.

  In a movie, the detective would rub a pencil over the back of the first page and the second would appear, with Ada Byron’s address. In real life, the detective felt like chewing the folder in frustration.

  I stared into the near distance. Someone writing as Ada Byron had known Dzornen a long time, known him as the preeminent scientist of her youth. She hadn’t written under her own name, because she didn’t want Dzornen’s wife or his secretary to throw the letter out unread.

  The conciliatory first paragraph suggested that Ada was really Gertrud Memler. She had attacked Dzornen in public for his support of the H-bomb and his opposition to the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty. Who knew what had happened between them in private?

  Dzornen had slept with Martina Saginor; that probably hadn’t been his only affair with a student. Memler had also been a student at the Radium Institute in Vienna, after all. She became a Nazi, running a nuclear research installation, which meant she was an ambitious and politically savvy Nazi. And on some road to Damascus, the scales had fallen from her eyes and she’d become a pacifist.

  I looked at the clock. I needed to get through a lot more material in a short time; I turned to Dzornen’s mail from 1930 through 1941. He’d had a large correspondence. I felt a vicarious thrill at seeing Einstein’s name on several long letters. Lise Meitner had written Dzornen, as had Fermi, Segrè, Rabi, the whole pantheon of twentieth-century physics. I looked at the letters long enough to see that they were filled with equations or questions about weapons policy. Einstein never wrote, “Sorry about your troubles with Ada, or Gertrud, or Martina, old chap.”

  I took a quick look at the box of patents. Nothing Dzornen invented seemed connected to the BREENIAC machine, at least as far as I could guess from the single-paragraph description at the top.

  Much of the mail to Dzornen from Europe, especially after 1938, was handwritten in German. It was a hard script to decipher when I didn’t know the language to begin with. In the end, I thought I identified three letters that might have been from M. Saginor, although the signature, M. Saginor, might have been “W. Oaginow.”

  Because I wasn’t traveling with my smartphone, I couldn’t photograph them. I put them to one side for photocopying and slowly continued through the thick folders. I looked at the clock: four-fifteen. I was panicking at the slippage of time and my own inability to figure anything out when I picked up a cellophane folder that held the title page of a book. Radetzkymarsch, von Joseph Roth. I thought at first it was in the collection by mistake, but when I turned it over, I saw a letter had been written in pencil on the reverse.

  The text was so faded and difficult that I almost passed it over, but the date caught me up. 17 November 1941, three weeks before Pearl Harbor. The text was beyond me and the signature was maddeningly illegible. The writer had printed the address, though: Novaragasse 38A.

  Novaragasse, Novara Street, was where Lotty and her grandparents had to move when Nazis evicted them from their flat. I squinted at the signature again. It might be “Herschel.” A chill ran down my arms: I was holding a precious piece of Lotty’s history.

  I carried it and the letters from Martina Saginor to the copy machine. My hands were trembling from excitement; I was afraid I might damage the fragile paper.

  Ms. Turley, who’d come into the reading room to remind us we had to wrap things up for the day, saw I was having trouble getting the documents out of their sleeves and came over to help. She took over the letter written on the book title and worked to get the contrast in the faded pencil script as clear as possible. She also helped me copy the three letters from M. Saginor.

  She asked me to wait while she went through the reading room to remind the other researchers that they were about to close. I pulled my papers together and went to the reference stand to wait.

  “Ms. Warshawski, I’m going to talk to the library director about this missing page. We take this kind of disappearance very seriously, and we’ll start an investigation. I just want you to know that.”

  “If you told me who else had been in these archives, I could probably help you track down the paper—unless Jari Liu or the person posing as Julius Dzornen has destroyed it,” I said.

  She flinched. “I can’t tell you, not even under these circumstances. But if you happen on the second page, please let me know at once: we will want to start a criminal prosecution.”

  41

  BIRD MAN OF HYDE PARK

  WHEN I GOT OUTSIDE, the rain had stopped, but the wind was blowing cold through my windbreaker. I jogged over to the coffee bar. While they pulled some shots for me, I took out one of my burn phones to call Lotty. She was still at the clinic, Ms. Coltrain told me, but was going up to Max’s afterward. I left a message that I would meet her there.

  I took a hummus sandwich to eat as I walked back to Martin’s Subaru. I passed the old Breen house on my way up University Avenue. Julius’s Honda was still nowhere in sight. On impulse, I cut through to the alley. Lights were still out in the coach house; there was still no answer to the doorbell. The only life came from the birds, pecking each other away from the feeders.

  Perhaps Julius had tripped and fallen and was lying in a coma. No one seemed
to be watching from the big house, so I got out my picklocks. When I inserted the first wand, the door creaked open. I had my gun in my hand without thinking. I slid in, back to the wall.

  Inside the front room, where I’d talked to Julius before, nothing looked different, except that the pile of cigarette butts was thicker. I passed on through to the kitchen, the only other downstairs room. It also looked ordinary, untouched. In fact, it looked as though it hadn’t been touched since 1950, with its old Formica countertops and Cold War–era refrigerator.

  An outsized black trunk blocked the kitchen door. I opened it, but all it contained were massive sacks of birdseed. It was a safety hazard, blocking the house’s second exit; all the windows had the small mullioned panes that would make escape impossible in a fire. I guess Julius was so depressed that he didn’t care, but it did send a warning shiver down my spine.

  I went up a steep flight of stairs to the bedrooms, two small rooms that overlooked the big house across the lawn. As I watched, two children came out the back door with a set of badminton rackets. Despite the chill wind, they began an energetic if inexpert game.

  How strange it must be for Julius to sit in Edward Breen’s old workshop, looking at a house that had been part of his childhood. He must have come here often when his father and Edward Breen were working together.

  I did a quick search through the two rooms, hoping for a diary, but found nothing except some bird-watchers’ magazines, along with back copies of the Physical Review. Julius might have dropped out of school, but he still kept abreast of the work in his father’s field. That probably would tell an analyst more than it told me.

  When I went back to the ground floor, I saw an old photo album on the card table in the corner, half covering the cigarette butts that overflowed the big tin ashtray. I flipped through the pictures. Julius as a toddler with his two sisters, each holding a chubby hand. Julius with his father, standing in front of Chicago Pile Number One, which Fermi had built for the first nuclear chain reaction in 1942. Benjamin Dzornen in white tie next to President Eisenhower. Ilse Dzornen with Julius and his sisters.