Critical Mass

by Sara Paretsky

  We miss your beloved student, Fräulein Martina, who has been forced to do work far from Vienna. Her mother and aunts have also left us, as have our own daughter and her husband. A letter came for Fräulein Martina that probably is of no importance, but in these unsettled times, I thought I would let you know so that you can notify her when you next speak to her. We placed it in a familiar family setting, the spot where her own little daughter, Käthe, put our Charlotte’s teddy bear.

  With all good wishes for your health, my esteemed Professor, yours truly,

  (Dr.) Felix Herschel

  Lotty’s hands shook as she took the letter from Max. “My Opa, his own handwriting.” She traced his signature with her forefinger. “After the invasion of Poland I never heard from him again, not even Red Cross letters. I kept writing to him from London, to my mother, my grandmother, and never hearing back.”

  Her voice turned bitter. “Now at least I know the order of their dying: first my parents, then my grandparents.”

  She added after another silent moment, “My Opa loved his books, but he had to start burning them to keep us warm. He held back his favorite titles, but he must have run out of writing paper and used this. I was too little to understand literature, but he often showed me Radetzkymarsch, telling me it was one of the greatest novels ever written. That he tore out the title page—I must go to the library, I must see the original.”

  We all sat quietly for a time. Finally I said, “Can you tell me about your teddy bear? Where did Käthe—Kitty—put it?”

  Lotty tried to put her personal distress out of her mind. Her forehead furrowed as she tried to summon memories she had left buried for most of her life.

  “I certainly remember my Teddy. When we were thrown out of my grandmother’s beautiful flat on the Renngasse, we had only a short time to pack. They let us take one small suitcase each. They ransacked the rooms, they stole my Oma’s silver, her jewelry, even my Opa’s World War One military medals. Opa took some of his books; the Nazis didn’t care about books.

  “My Opa told me to choose quickly among my toys, that I could take one, and I chose Teddy. He was a beautiful golden brown, and he was my comfort for many years. He traveled to London with me, and cheered me in my cousin Minna’s soulless house. In the end, when I learned I’d earned an obstetrics fellowship at Northwestern here in Chicago I had him cleaned and repaired for the children’s ward at the Royal Free.”

  “But where did Kitty put him?” I asked. “Why would your grandfather think that so important to mention?”

  “The letter that came to Fräulein Martina must have been important, or your grandfather wouldn’t have written Dzornen about it, right?” Max added. “They didn’t really know each other, did they?”

  “Not as far as I know,” Lotty said. “Of course, my grandfather was a rather important lawyer before the war. Vienna is a small city; professional people crossed paths. My grandparents probably knew the gossip, that Dzornen was Käthe’s father, but the main thing must have been that the letter held something of value, at least to Martina. My Opa knew—must have known by then that they were going to be—that he and my Oma would—would not survive. He was sounding casual, hoping the letter would make it past the censors.”

  “Did Kitty take the bear from you?” I persisted, wishing I didn’t have to push so hard on Lotty. “You said she used to come to the Renngasse flat sometimes, and that you lived across the hall from her when you were forced to move to the other place.”

  The other place, the crowded rooms in the ghetto. I couldn’t say it out loud.

  Lotty’s eyes squeezed shut. “After we moved to the Novaragasse, there was one horrible afternoon when Käthe and I had seen a man pushed from a roof to his death. There were so many shocking sights back then, and I’ve tried not to let them fill my head, but that murder—for some reason that death is connected to my bear, but how?”

  She hugged her arms around her shoulders, shivering. “Oh, Victoria, if I’d known how much pain these memories would bring, I would never have let you within a mile of Kitty Binder or her daughter. Death is hard enough, but all these deaths, all this violence—everything I saw as a child in Vienna, and now Kitty herself—!”

  I took her hands, massaging them between my own. After a moment, Lotty said, “I can’t tell you why the man’s death made Kitty so angry. I don’t remember why we were talking about it, but I was scared that everyone around me would die. We were Jews, we could be thrown from a roof just as that man had been. I think Teddy became my avatar: if I could protect him, I could save my family and myself.”

  She spoke slowly, bringing the memory into focus. “We were in my apartment. I don’t know where my brother and all my cousins were; maybe they were there and I’ve forgotten. I was wrapping my bear in pieces of a torn sheet, pretending they were bandages, as if Teddy was the man who’d been thrown from the building, as if I thought I could pretend he wasn’t dead, just injured.”

  She stopped again, her eyes still shut. “The other adults came into the room, which ones? Why can’t I remember? My Opa was there, but who else? Kitty became so angry with me over the bear that she grabbed him from me. She threw him down the stairs? No, it was out the window. We got him back, of course, or he wouldn’t have come to London with me.”

  “Into the street?” I asked.

  “Possibly into a courtyard,” Max suggested. “That’s how all these European apartment blocks are constructed, even in a ghetto like the Leopoldstadt became. The building sits flush with the street, you walk down a hallway that opens into a courtyard. At least in theory, every apartment would have a view of the courtyard. In a big wealthy building it might include a large garden.”

  Lotty grimaced. “Our courtyard was nothing like that. Any grass was long gone. It was just cobblestones, and racks where people left their bikes, only then the bikes were all stolen from us. People might even dump garbage out their windows. My grandfather tripped on one of the cobblestones when he helped me get my bear back.”

  I think we all held our breath at the same moment, realizing where Felix Herschel had put the document that had come for Martina. The grandfather clock along the far wall sounded ominously loud. One tick, one second, two ticks, four, sixteen, and then decades had passed.

  Would the papers Felix Herschel had hidden still be under the cobblestones where he’d left them? And how could I get permission to look?

  Lotty roused herself to ask about the other letters, the ones from Martina to Dzornen. “Although now I’m not sure I can bear to know. Max, you read them and tell us the substance.”

  Max held them under a lamp, but he still had to squint to read the old script. “The first is about her research, summarizing some articles she’d written that the German science journals wouldn’t accept because of her being a Jew. She wants Dzornen to publish them in American physics journals. The papers show that she is creatively attacking the problem of the unstable nucleus of the U235 atom; if he can publish for her, that may persuade one of the American universities to offer her a position and a visa. ‘Your word carries weight everywhere, Professor. And I will gladly go anywhere, not to such a prestigious university as where you teach. A small laboratory would be sufficient for me.’”

  Lotty’s mouth twisted. “She’s assuring him that she won’t be bothering him and Ilse.”

  Max nodded. “The next letter is after the Anschluss, but before the war began. The laws are strangling Jews—she mentions your family, Lottchen, that they’ve been forced to move into the Novaragasse apartment complex.

  Sofie Herschel manages to be beautiful even while she is starving and wearing the threads of the clothes my mother used to sew her. It’s a mystery to us all, but brings everyone pleasure, especially little Käthe, who has every feminine attribute you always say I was born without. I am determined that Käthe will survive this privation. Herr Dr. Herschel is saving money to send his grandc
hildren to London. If you can send us dollars, I can buy a ticket to send Käthe with Hugo and little Charlotte.

  Max looked at the date again. “You went in June of ’39, yes, Lottchen? This was written in December of ’38, when one could still write a longer letter. The third one is much shorter, in July of ’39, to tell Dzornen that Käthe has made it safely to England and has been sent on to Birmingham. A Jewish family there is taking her in.”

  “And then the war, and then silence.” Lotty’s voice was harsh.

  I wished Jake were here, wished he would play Bach, wished the notes and the strings could reach into the bitter history of the last hundred years and untie the knots that lay at all our centers. Max had the same impulse; he went to his stereo and put in a disc of his own son, Michael, playing Bach’s cello suites.

  While the music filled the room, Max asked, “What do you think Herr Herschel hid for Martina? It couldn’t be money: that would have been confiscated instantly before the letter was ever delivered. And if it had been a visa—I don’t know, but I expect your grandparents would have used it.” Max looked at Lotty.

  “I hope they would have,” she said soberly. “It would be the ultimate twist of a knife in the stomach to know they scrupulously buried a visa in the courtyard where it saved no one’s life at all.”

  Max started to put the photocopies back into the folder, but stopped when he saw the BREENIAC sketch. “What’s this? Something that Lotty’s grandfather sent to Dzornen?”

  “No.” I explained the strange story of the drawing. “The current part of Kitty Binder’s nightmare began when Martin Binder saw this in the Breen family workshop. He recognized that little design from seeing it on some papers his mother had stolen from Kitty.” I pointed to the blurry triangles in the lower right corner.

  Max didn’t say anything, but went into his study for a magnifying glass. As he inspected the paper, Lotty and I drew near, wondering what he was looking at.

  “I’m not an expert,” Max finally said. “But you know that for a number of years after the war, I was involved with refugee groups, searching at first for traces of my own family and then helping others. This paper, it looks like the kind of stock we often saw on letters and pictures people created during the war, especially in the camps. It’s made out of repulped paper that doesn’t have new fiber added, so it disintegrates very quickly. It often came from the cheap newsprint of the papers the guards read and discarded.”

  “Cordell Breen says his father sketched this during a break in a battle; maybe it’s on paper he picked up on the battlefield,” I suggested.

  Max gave an embarrassed laugh. “This paper doesn’t look American to me. ‘Speicher’ sounds so very German to me.”

  “Breen says they never knew who Speicher was, but the family assumed he was a battlefield friend who helped his father with the sketch.”

  Max laid the paper down again. “You say that this is a very rough sketch of a new kind of computer. When I see ‘Speicher’ next to this center grid, I don’t read a person’s name: I read the German word for ‘memory.’ As for the equations, I do not for one minute understand them, but they were written by someone who went to school in the same part of the world where I grew up.”

  44

  HYPERLINK

  AT EIGHT, AS I nodded off for the third time over dinner, Max made me go to bed in a guest room. We had been debating who had written those equations: Gertrud Memler? Martina Saginor? Perhaps Benjamin Dzornen? Max kept repeating that Martina had not survived the war.

  “But that woman at the gas station.” I described the macabre scene when Kitty Binder had driven out to the country with Judy. “She argued with Kitty over whether Judy should be a girlie-girl, and then she argued with the man who arrived.”

  “Victoria, you are so incoherent that you can barely speak, let alone drive,” Max said. “You’ve had a rough day, but besides that, the letter you brought has been a deep shock for Lotty. Let’s stop trying to untangle this knot and get some rest.”

  I protested but Max was insistent. He dug up a nightshirt that his daughter-in-law had left behind on her last visit, found a new toothbrush in his supply cupboard, and pointed me toward a guest room.

  In fact, as soon as I lay down, I fell into a well of sleep deep enough that I didn’t even move within the bedclothes.

  A bit before five, I dreamed I was in the kitchen of Julius Dzornen’s coach house. I opened the giant black trunk that blocked the back door and Judy Binder stood up, the skull beneath her skin stretched in a savage rictus. “Tell her, Warshawski, sell her.”

  “Of course.” My own voice woke me. Root cellar, not root, sell.

  Whatever crime Julius Dzornen had committed, or perhaps witnessed, the evidence was under the kitchen in the coach house. That was why Cordell wanted him to live there, rent-free. To keep him facedown in the evidence. To keep new owners from finding the evidence if they decided to renovate or remove the building.

  I made up the guest bed and left the nightshirt on it, carefully folded. In the kitchen, I helped myself to a grapefruit and a piece of cheese, and scribbled a note of thanks to Max, which I left on the kitchen island next to the coffeepot. He and Lotty were still asleep, or at least, still quietly in bed. I let myself out through the garage, where the door would lock automatically behind me.

  The rain had ended in the night, but the eastern sky was still black when I started south. I drove to my office, not worrying about tails, and left the Subaru in the first space I found near the warehouse.

  I wanted to get down to the coach house while Julius was still in the hospital, but I needed to hide the BREENIAC sketch before I did anything else. Gun in hand, I let myself into my building, turning on every light in both Tessa’s and my rooms to make sure no one was lurking. Twice before, electronically sophisticated thugs had jumped me in my own place. As my pals in Homeland Security had proven, the most sophisticated security is meaningless for someone with the right equipment.

  All was well. Standing at my big worktable, I took the sketch out of its protective wrapper, holding it by its corners with latex gloves. Even so, part of one edge crumbled. I knew flashing light wasn’t good for such an old drawing, but the sketch was too important to send off without a copy. After I’d copied it, I cut two pieces of clear plastic from a roll in Tessa’s storage closet and laid the drawing between them. I put cardboard backing on both sides and taped a note for the Special Collections librarian to the packet.

  Dear Ms. Turley:

  I am sending you this fragile document for safekeeping. It was likely created in Germany or Austria in the 1940s and is the initial sketch for what became Edward Breen’s first computer. Who drew it and who owns it are two great unresolved questions right now, but several murders have been committed in the last month because of it and I want to make sure it stays in a safe location.

  I know this is an imposition, perhaps even a burden, but I am asking you to hold it in the library in some secure place until I can tell you who owns it and whether the library can keep it. I should know within a week.

  Sincerely

  V. I. Warshawski

  I put my packet into an express shipping envelope and went to a twenty-four-hour outlet in the strip mall down the street. I’d handwritten my note to Rachel Turley, just in case there was a Trojan horse monitoring keystrokes on my laptop. At the office store, though, I logged onto a computer so that I could type up a shipping label and handle some of my e-mail.

  If I was going to search more thoroughly into Ada Byron’s identity, I needed to use my subscription databases. This seemed to be the ideal time to do it, while I was logged on to a machine Cordell or the Feds didn’t know about.

  While I waited for LifeStory and my other databases to come up with reports on any Ada Byrons between 1940 and 2010, I checked my e-mail. Jake wanted to know where I was and why I hadn’t been in touch. By the time I finished a
long letter to him, I was getting a signal that results were waiting for me.

  There had been thousands of people named Byron in America during the years bracketed by my search. Twenty-three had actually been named Ada, but none of them cross-referenced with either Benjamin or Julius Dzornen, with the Breens, or with Martina Saginor or Gertrud Memler.

  After reading the skimpy entries available for the Ada Byrons, only one stood out: a woman who had died in Tinney, a small college town in western Illinois, seven years ago. Right around the time of Martin’s bar mitzvah, when Judy Binder had stolen a stack of documents from her mother’s dresser.

  The Huron County Gazette had written an obituary. Byron hadn’t been a computer programmer, just a library clerk at Alexandrine College in Tinney. After retirement, she had volunteered in the town’s schools as a tutor. She’d died at 102, leaving no family. In a big city, her meager biography wouldn’t have merited an obituary, but her advanced age meant she’d been news in Huron County.

  This Ada Byron had been about ten years younger than Benjamin Dzornen. That was all the information my databases could turn up. No sign she’d ever studied physics, no hint that she’d ever left Tinney to work in a lab or a physics department. It was a tenuous link, but she was the only Ada with a date that connected to my story in any way.

  I printed the obituary, then checked my e-mail one last time before logging off. Jake, in LA for the last leg of his tour, wouldn’t be up for six or seven hours, but Murray had written, complaining that I wasn’t answering my phone. I called him on one of my burn phones, surprised that he was awake this early.

  “Warshawski, who has always done the right thing by you in Chicago?”

  “My dog Peppy,” I said.

  “Wrong. Me. I have jumped out on more long limbs than are in all of Cook County’s forest preserves to help you on stories. So why do you hold out on me?”