Another calculated risk. I nodded, and she powered up her device. “Six-six-two, six-oh-seven,” she breathed. I typed in the numbers.
We stared at each other in chagrin, feeling we’d run out of chances, when we heard a grinding, scraping noise. I couldn’t help imagining the ceiling falling on us, but it was the wall behind the white shelves: it was slowly sliding open while the shelves remained oddly in place.
The room behind the shelves was bigger than the basement we were standing in. The walls were paneled, the floor covered in tile with Navajo rugs scattered around. A bed was set up in an alcove to one side.
Bright lights shone over a long worktable that was covered in metal and wires. A young man with dark wiry hair stood next to the table, holding a screwdriver, gazing nervously at the open door.
When he saw us, his face relaxed.
“Alison. You remembered Planck’s constant.”
CHICAGO, 1953
In the Workshop
BENJAMIN, WE MUST SPEAK.”
He’s getting out of his car when she appears in the shadows. She can hear the sudden gulp, the intake of air. She may have startled him, but her arrival can’t be a surprise. The Memler will have been to him long ahead of her, and someone will have told him of her own disappearance from the proving grounds.
She knows she’s not public news: she’s read newspapers along her travel route, sometimes heard news on the radio in various bus stations across the Southwest. But she’s vanished from a secure weapons facility; the Memler has told the Americans that she’s a Russian spy. Unless they imagine she was eaten by a bear, they will be looking for her.
It’s taken her a week to get here. The first day, when she climbed down the mountain, she hitchhiked. She figured she had until noon before they realized she was missing and sent out an alarm. She found a ride to Las Vegas, and then went by Greyhound to Albuquerque.
She’s been the hare in front of the hounds for most of the last thirteen years, so she’s adept at hitching along back roads, or hoisting herself into an open boxcar on a slow-moving freight. Away from the proving grounds she even relaxes at times. No soldiers stopping buses, poking through hay, looking for a Jew on the run. Americans are friendly, by and large, even trusting.
A woman in a small Texas town tells Martina she’s known hard times herself, goes into her kitchen for an apple and a sandwich of bread and drippings. The fat on the bread: Sofie Herschel’s nursery, the prism on the floor, flashes through Martina’s head, makes her momentarily weak: Sofie, the nursery, her mother, her daughter, the light itself have all been stolen from her. The Texas woman gives her sugary iced tea to revive her, takes her into the house to lie down on an old sofa that smells of cats and buttered popcorn.
In St. Louis, she mingles with the crowds at the bus depot, buying a boxed lunch, lingering at the women’s toilet, stopping on the benches in the waiting room to pore over an abandoned paper. No one is paying attention. She buys a ticket and finds a seat near the rear exit, wide awake at every stop on the route. The bus rolls into downtown Chicago at nine in the morning.
A nickel in a phone booth gets her the information that Professor Dzornen is in Chicago but is spending the day at the Argonne lab. No, she won’t leave a message, she’ll call again tomorrow.
She rides a bus from the center of the city to the neighborhood around the University of Chicago where Benjamin Dzornen has bought a house, a mansion, she thinks when she walks over to look at it.
She imagines ringing the bell in the middle of the morning, of seeing Ilse Dzornen’s shock giving way to fury: You were supposed to be dead.
There’s no record of a Martina Saginor’s arrival in America: she had found passage to the States on a passport plucked from a purse in a crowded Vienna train station. Martina spent a week in Vienna on her long route from Moldova to America. She hoped her daughter might have returned looking for her. None of the refugee aid societies had any trace of Käthe Saginor, in England or in Austria. Vienna was in ruins, bleak, hunger-filled, mother, aunts, cousins, all dead, nothing to keep Martina, and so she continued west, found a way to get passage on a ship in Lisbon bound for Montreal, slipped across the border to America, to Chicago, to Nevada. How adept she’s become at crossing borders.
She’s sure Benjamin never told Ilse about her arrival fifteen months ago, how stunned he was. His shocked face, his stammer: you survived, anyway, that’s good.
Yes, I survived, by luck first: our train to Sobibor Concentration Camp broke down, we were herded off in the snow, many shot, but the snow was falling thick. I fled to the woods and survived somehow, with partisans, with farmers, until the war’s end found me in Moldova and then detention in paranoid Stalin’s camps and finally the long foot journey across the mountains back to Austria.
What did she want? he asked. My life, my physics, a job, a real job, but he bundled her off to Nevada. So quickly that she was on a train with a security pass before she had spent a night in Chicago. His hollow promise that this was temporary while he found a real place for her.
She’d gone to the university that first time, not to his house. What had she been hoping for? News of Käthe, for sure, but some sign, perhaps a ghostly remnant of his affection for Martina herself that might cause him to sponsor her. None of that remained.
He’d shown no interest in whether Käthe survived the war or not. Perhaps it was guilt for doing so little to help the child. Käthe had been a sullen little girl, using no arts to attract him on the days Martina took her to the Institute. He didn’t want to bring Käthe when he left for America, although Martina pleaded for her child. He apparently hadn’t wanted Martina, either, his brightest student, his ablest colleague as he’d once called her. Had it been Ilse who slammed the door on them, or his own fears or indifference?
Tonight her business is just that: business. She speaks to Benjamin in German; it’s easier, she doesn’t have to organize and reorganize sentences in her head.
“The Memler surely told you she saw me. You must have been expecting me.”
“You can’t speak to me here,” he hisses at her in English.
“I will speak to you anywhere,” she says coldly, still in German. “Do you wish to take me inside? Do you want a moment to call the FBI? Do you know what the Memler did at Innsbruck? Does it matter to you that people were dangled in cages above smelting ovens, that she watched, smiling, while prisoners roasted to death? Or that she had prisoners put in chambers filled with nitrogen to see how they would burst apart? I saw her more than once laughing at the spectacle of a naked prisoner in shackles being raped and then beaten to death. Men as well as women.”
He tries to stop the flow of words but she won’t be quiet.
“And now I find her here, with unfettered access to planes and money, working on a computer whose designs she stole, and I am told that I must not grieve for the past but commend her for being a warrior against Communism. Listen to me, du, I have been in Nazi camps and in Communist camps, and one is not different from the other, except that in the Soviet Union no one tried on purpose to murder me.”
Ilse comes to the front door. “Benjamin! Is that you? Is someone with you? Julius and I ate dinner two hours ago. Everything is cold now.”
“Yes, I know, I’m sorry. We ran late at Argonne,” he shouts back. “I’m just finishing a conversation. I’ll be in right away.”
He turns back to Martina. “What is it you want?”
“I want the rights to my computing machine. I want the Memler denounced as a war criminal and sent to prison or even executed. I want a place in a top lab. I want my daughter. I want American citizenship. My wants are enormous, Benjamin, and I will find a way to satisfy them. I only start with you, I don’t end with you.”
Ilse is still in the doorway, her body a square silhouette, Brünnhilde, ready to slaughter those who wound her, even her own husband. She calls again to Benjamin,
who fumbles in his wallet.
“Do you have money?” he whispers to Martina. “Go to the Shore Drive Motel; it’s only a few blocks away. I’ll call you there.”
“I no longer sit in apartments or hotel rooms waiting for policemen to arrive so that I can be led to the next deportation station. We talk now, you and I, or not at all. Believe me, my next conversations will be with Edward Murrow and Walter Cronkite. Even if you and my department head in Nevada have no interest in the Memler’s war crimes, I believe Mr. Murrow will pay the story some attention.”
Ilse starts down the front steps. “Who is it who’s talking to you, Benjamin? Is it a beggar? Shall I call the police?”
A youth appears behind her in the doorway. “Who is it, Mama?”
Dzornen thrusts Martina into the backseat of the car, calling to his wife and son, “It’s someone from Nevada with an urgent message. I’m driving her over to Breen’s house. I’ll be back in half an hour.”
He climbs into the car, slamming the door shut to signal his fury. “You cannot blackmail me over your child. You never came to me during your pregnancy; for all I know, any man in Göttingen could be your child’s father.”
“Oh, that is beside any point,” Martina says. “I am not here tonight because of my daughter, but because of this Memler monster stealing my machine and giving it to your friend Edward Breen. He has built it and claimed it for his own, and you, you are using it to build a heinous weapon that can kill every mother’s child on this planet. I can control nothing in this world, or very little, so I cannot stop you prostituting yourself for money or power or whatever it is you get from prancing around with men like Edward Teller. But I can stop the Memler from making one more schilling’s profit off my back. That I will do.”
Breen lives only four blocks away; the rest of the short ride is spent in silence. When Benjamin pulls the car over to the curb, he asks Martina what she proposes to say to Breen.
“I will introduce myself. I will see what sort of a man he is.”
The lights are on in the big house on University Avenue. Benjamin rings the front doorbell. A brief wait, then Breen’s son Cordell, named for the Secretary of State for whom Breen once worked, opens the door for them. Cordell knows Professor Dzornen, and tells him his father is in the coach house, which contains his private workshop. Cordell looks curiously at Martina, whose corduroy trousers and hiking boots are stained with travel, but he sends her and Benjamin up the flagstone path to the coach house.
In the workshop, any idea of a polite introduction, a conversation about who Breen is and does he know he created a machine from a stolen design, dies before it is born: Gertrud Memler is in the room.
“The Nazi swine is digging up other people’s acorns?” Martina says to her in German.
Color floods Memler’s face. “You were dreck in Germany and now you are dreck in America. The FBI will be glad to know you have shown your ugly Jewish face.”
“The FBI will be glad to hear how you tortured ugly Jewish faces,” Martina says. “They will also like to hear how you stole my equations and my designs in the middle of your bestiality.” She fingers her face; a scar from Memler’s last assault on her runs across her left cheekbone.
“Oh, your equations, your designs, as if Fermi wrote equations for you alone that no one else in the world was clever enough to understand.”
Martina gives a tight smile and says to Breen in English, “Tell me how you realized the electronic Fermi surfaces were the key to using hysteresis in constructing a ferromagnetic core.”
Breen shakes his head. “My designs and my formulas are patented; I don’t share them with strangers.”
“Forgive me.” Martina bows slightly. “I am Martina Saginor, doctor of philosophy from Göttingen, 1931, working on ferromagnetic properties in crystalline lattices. Professor Dzornen supervised my research. The Memler woman became my own student three years later. She then became my warden when I was a slave labor physicist near Innsbruck. The designs she stole while I was her prisoner are perhaps what you used to build your Metargon-I. I will know as soon as I see your blueprints.”
“So you can claim them for your own?” Breen says, contemptuous. “I wasn’t born yesterday. Anyone can pretend to have made a design once an engineer produces a working model. That’s why we have patent laws in this country.”
He turns to Memler. “Is this the woman you said would come here to blackmail me?”
“The patent laws in your country, yes, I know about them,” Martina says. “That is why I applied for American patents to my initial lattice designs in 1939. When the patent office produces my application, we can compare my drawing to the sketch the Memler stole from me, and to the sketches you made of your own work. We can watch the thief try to wriggle out of this little spiderweb she wove for herself.”
“Dr. Memler has been most helpful in supplying suggestions for my design,” Breen says, “but all the initial ideas and work were my own.”
“Edward!” Memler’s eyes flash. “That is not—that isn’t—you know I only gave them to you because I couldn’t get funding myself.”
“You have American citizenship,” Breen says calmly. “You were well rewarded. The patents are in my name.”
There is a moment’s silence in the coach house. Memler suddenly picks up a chisel and lunges at Martina.
“I should have had the guards kill you in 1942,” she screams. “I wanted to see you hang over a furnace, watch you roast, but they put you on the train instead.”
Benjamin, who’s been standing silent, grabs at Memler but can’t stop her. Martina darts behind a bench and Memler follows her, knocking over vacuum tubes, retorts, burners. Benjamin tries to wrestle with Memler, Breen tries to protect his equipment. Wires and chisels and arms and legs all tangle together.
Breen’s old sidearm, the Colt he carried as an officer in Europe, is on a shelf. They all see it at the same time.
49
ISAAC NEWTON’S OPTICKS
YOU SAW THE BREENIAC SKETCH at Alison’s barbecue,” I said. “We know that, but we don’t know what you did between that and going to your mother’s house three weeks ago.”
We were sitting at the worktable, trying to put the different pieces of the story together. Dorothy was with us: she’d come down the stairs when she realized we’d unlocked the secret entrance.
She nodded sourly when she saw Martin standing a few feet from Alison. The two had run to meet each other, and then stopped, as if both realized the size of the obstacles between them.
Dorothy shouted upstairs to Meg that Martin was okay, and would Meg bring down tea. Meg carried down a pot of hot water, mugs and a bowl with teabags in it, but stomped back up the stairs. She was not going to fraternize with a person who disarmed her, no matter what her aunt chose to do.
“I was doing research,” Martin answered me. “I knew I’d seen the design, you know, the triangles at the bottom of the drawing, before. They’re Newton’s prisms, of course, but besides that.”
“Of course,” I said dryly. “What fool doesn’t recognize Newton’s prisms?”
“Me,” Alison said. “I saw those my whole life and never thought of Newton. Why did you, Martin?”
“His experiment with prisms is the first thing you look at when you start thinking about light.” He spoke matter-of-factly, as if the whole world thought about light the way he did. “I knew I’d seen them drawn like that someplace else. As the party went on and this one guy, Tad, got drunker and more annoying, it came back to me, that they were on some of the papers my mother had, uh, well, stolen from my grandmother. It didn’t add up for me. I knew there had to be a connection between the BREENIAC and my family, but I couldn’t figure out what.”
“Is that when you went to see Benjamin Dzornen’s children?” I asked.
“Yes, but they wouldn’t talk to me.” His mouth bunched in remembered ann
oyance. “See, I was wondering if it was Benjamin Dzornen who had drawn the prisms on the BREENIAC document. I knew he’d worked with Edward Breen on the hydrogen bomb, and it was possible that he’d given the sketch to Edward.
“My gramma always claimed she was Benjamin Dzornen’s daughter, so I wondered if Dzornen had left her some of his papers in his will, you know, as a kind of proof that he was her father. But when I tried to explain this to Julius Dzornen and his sister, they both slammed the door on me.”
His tone of bewildered indignation made him seem younger and more accessible than he’d appeared at first.
“They thought you wanted money,” I said.
“Money?” He was indignant.
“Sorry, but your mom had put the bite on them more than once.”
He closed his eyes, an involuntary reflex to pain. “Of course,” he said, his voice bitter. “Of course, she would have. She always claimed that Herta Dzornen had stolen money from her. I should have put those twos together.”
I cocked my head, thinking I heard footsteps. It was only Lily, the little girl, looking for her aunt Dorothy. She climbed up in the older woman’s lap, clutching the stuffed lion Alison had picked up from the front steps.
I looked at a monitor on the workbench, which was also connected to Martin’s door cams. I worried about lingering here: I worried that someone from Metargon or Homeland Security had seen our location when Alison turned on her iPhone. I wondered, too, whether Breen’s goons had shown him Ada Byron’s obituary.
“Did you talk to my dad before you disappeared?” Alison asked in a small voice.
“I talked to Jari Liu, and he told your dad, I guess, because your dad called me from Stockholm. I was trying to get more information on the history of the Metargon-I. You probably know this, but after the war, your granddad was part of this thing called Operation Paperclip. They brought Nazi rocket and bomb experts over to the U.S., even some who’d committed terrible torture. One of the people Edward kind of whitewashed was this Nazi named Gertrud Memler, who’d been a student of Martina’s.
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