“I was trying to find what the connection was between, well, your family and mine, through Memler’s history. I got her file through the Freedom of Information Act, but there wasn’t much in it, and she’d completely dropped out of sight after 1953, except for these letters to different magazines she’d sometimes fire off. Memler worked with your grandfather on setting up Metargon-I at the Nevada Proving Grounds when they were just starting to test hydrogen bombs.”
“My grandfather was not a Nazi collaborator!” Alison cried.
“I’m not saying he was,” Martin said quickly. “It was the Cold War; everyone was cutting corners. Anyway, I did a patent search to see what patents had been issued to Dzornen, and none of them connected to the BREENIAC, at least not to that first model they used in Nevada. I looked for Memler and Saginor, and here’s where it got weird. The index said that a patent had been issued to Martina Saginor in 1941, but the database didn’t show it. I wrote the patent office, but when they digitized all the pre-1970 patents, they threw out all the paper files, so they didn’t have any way of locating a file. If it’s not online, it’s like it didn’t exist.”
“So you don’t know what the patent was for?”
He shook his head. “But I keep thinking it must be something like that drawing that’s on Alison’s dad’s wall.”
“If that’s Martina’s work, how did Edward Breen get hold of it?” I asked.
Martin shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“My grandfather didn’t steal the design,” Alison said, her voice quivering on the brink of tears. “He was a brilliant engineer! The BREENIAC was a masterpiece; every history of computers describes it as more elegant than von Neumann’s machine, and ahead of its time. Don’t talk about my family as if we were a group of crooks!”
Martin glanced at her stormy face and turned his attention to his tea, turning the cup round and round in his hands.
“I’m sorry, Alison,” he mumbled. “It’s not a crime to collaborate with someone on a project as big as a new computer design. Steve Jobs didn’t think up the Macintosh all by himself, either.”
“Why did you go dark?” I asked, when Alison didn’t say anything.
“That was after I talked to Mr. Breen. I guess Jari talked to Mr. Breen and Mr. Breen called me. He was in Stockholm, at Metargon’s Swedish plant, and he made me kind of, well, nervous.”
“Did he threaten you?” I asked.
“Not in so many words.” His glance flickered at Alison, sitting very still; he turned back to the tea as if it held the secret of dark matter. “He told me I didn’t know how big a mistake I could be making if I didn’t leave these matters strictly alone. ‘That patent expired in 1970,’ he said, ‘so don’t go imagining there’s money to be made from it.’ Then he went on about national security, nuclear secrets and staying the hell away from Alison, from his daughter.
“I couldn’t tell if he thought I was hoping to get Alison to support me, or if he thought I was going to uncover something shameful from the U.S. bomb program, but he said if I meddled in things that were none of my business he’d know and he’d take appropriate action. He reminded me how easy it was for Metargon to track people. I worked on some of those programs, so I knew he could find me anywhere I left an electronic—not even footprint—toenail fragment.”
“I can’t listen to you talk like this,” Alison burst out, getting up from her chair.
“I’m not saying this to hurt you,” Martin cried.
Alison made a gesture of frustration and ran up the stairs.
“You’re talking about her father,” I tried to explain. “Girls hold their daddies sacred. She doesn’t want to believe you, even though she knows it’s true.”
Martin looked toward the stairs again, but said, “When Mr. Breen hung up, I knew I had to figure out some way of proving that all I cared about was where the first idea for the BREENIAC came from. I mean, nobody could build a computer from that sketch on his workshop wall—it was the central concept, but miles away from workable memory. I knew, though, if I was going to do research, I couldn’t do it online. Even if I created a separate online identity, Metargon could tell if I was mining data that was relevant to the BREENIAC or Edward Breen or any of the people involved in the hydrogen bomb.
“I went down to my mom’s place. I was hoping she still had these papers she’d taken from my gramma’s dresser, and I found them. One of them was this letter from Ada Byron, saying that Martina Saginor had applied for a U.S. patent for ferromagnetic memory back before America entered the war, and the person who found the patent could prove that Martina had created the design for the Metargon-I.
“As soon as I saw Ada Byron’s name, I knew I had this huge clue, because of who she was, in computer history, I mean. So I figured it was a cover name. I went back to Chicago and looked her up in the public library. One of the reference librarians did some work for me; she found Byron’s name listed in the catalog of Dzornen papers.”
“So you went to the University of Chicago and stole the second page of the letter she wrote Benjamin Dzornen when he was dying?” I said.
He flushed. “I’ll give it back. I thought if someone, I don’t know, like Jari Liu, followed the same trail I did, he’d get to the letter—the second page had this address here in Tinney on it. So I came here and passed the tests that Martina left. Then, when Dorothy let me into the workshop, well, then I realized that Ada was really Martina. At first I couldn’t believe it, but the more time I spent down here, the more real it became.”
“How did you figure it out?” I asked.
He grinned suddenly. “It wasn’t hard: she wrote her name in all her workbooks. I thought—I don’t know what I thought, that it was really Gertrud Memler pretending to be Martina, or—I didn’t know. But Martina made a list of all the publications she’d produced back in the 1930s, when she was in Vienna. She wrote out the steps she went through in solving some of the problems, and she said—”
He broke off to pick up an old notebook and flipped through the pages. “See, she wrote it in German and in English: ‘I am putting down all these steps so that anyone can see that it is I, Martina Saginor, who made these discoveries.’ And then, she had the prisms at the beginning and end of all her workbooks. Plus, she had copies of the letters she’d written under Gertrud Memler’s name.”
“So those letters really came from Martina,” I said. “Not a Nazi getting a conscience after seeing the horrors of nuclear weapons. But why did she keep quiet all those years? Why not be in touch with Kitty—with your grandmother—and your mother? Did she come over before the war? Were all the records of her having been in Terezín and Sobibor false?”
Martin shook his head, his thin face troubled. “I don’t know any of that. If she left a personal journal, it’s one of these German notebooks.”
He picked up another old school exercise book and showed us the faded German script. “Her notebooks in English were only about physics. Even at the end of her life, she stayed current with physics; she was thinking about problems in dark matter and supersymmetry. She had a telescope, she kept a star journal; she tried to work on gamma ray bursts.”
Dorothy nodded and spoke for the first time since we’d found the hidden workshop. “She used to invite me out here to look through her telescope—she kept it on that platform outside. She never told me she was really an Austrian scientist, although I could tell she had a bit of an accent.
“Learning who she really was explained something to me. Ada—Martina, I should say, but I knew her as Ada for fifty years—Ada knew more science than I did, with my master’s in chemistry, but she claimed she never went to college. She’d give talks on physics and astronomy over at the high school; she’d let the kids come out and look through her scope, tell them about black holes, make it all come alive for them. She used to tutor the college kids in physics, help them with their problem sets, that kin
d of thing.
“In my early days here, I pushed her to get a degree and try for a job at a big school, but she said she liked small-town life, she liked the slow pace, not having to be competitive or look over her shoulder. I finally let it rest.”
“I wanna see the telescope,” Lily said.
Dorothy laughed. “You can, sugarplum, it’s over at the library for you and any little girl in Tinney to look through.”
I wondered about the skeleton I’d found yesterday. If Martina hid from the FBI under a double identity, as Ada Byron, or sometimes as Gertrud Memler, was that the real Memler, buried in Edward Breen’s old basement? Who had killed her? Who had buried her?
“How did you know to let Martin into the workshop?” I asked Dorothy.
Dorothy gave a bark of a laugh. “Ada said if someone claimed to be from Martina’s family and claimed to know physics, see if they could solve a problem set. Like a prince in an old fairy tale, pulling the sword out of the rock, Martin worked the problems in the first few days after he got here.
“When I saw those problems, after the lawyer gave me all the documents Ada left behind for me, they took me a month and I still couldn’t solve them very elegantly. Ada included a couple of different answer guides and Martin worked out two problems according to what Ada called the best solution; his other three solutions were clumsier but still—he got them in three days! And he knew the Saginor family history; he knew that his grandmother was Martina’s daughter.”
“What are you doing here in the workshop?” I asked Martin. “Hoping to find information on the patent?”
“I’m trying to rebuild the BREENIAC from Martina’s notes, sticking to what she dated from before 1953. I thought if I could prove that Martina designed the first magnetic memory, Mr. Breen would have to stop threatening me. Martina used a special gauge of wire that I don’t think Edward Breen had thought of, so Martina created a more reliable current than he designed, but I can’t quite get it to work.”
It seemed ludicrous to me, completely practical yet utterly impractical, like filling a garage with dry ice to freeze a model rocket. “You need to abandon it for now,” I said. “It’s only a matter of time before Cordell Breen or Homeland Security gallop up to Dorothy’s door; we don’t want to be sitting ducks for them. Why don’t you gather up the most important of her papers and your notes; we’ll get them into safekeeping in Chicago.”
“We’ll go over to my bank in Tinney right now,” Dorothy said. “We can rent a safe-deposit box there. Better than putting them at risk by driving all over Illinois with them.”
Martin tried to protest. “I’m so close, and really, I’m safe down here. It was only Alison remembering my saying I’d use Planck’s constant instead of the fine structure that opened the secret door for you.”
I shook my head. “Metargon and Homeland Security, whoever gets here first, have such sophisticated electronic spyware, they’ll break the code in a second. Or Metargon’s goons will simply take an ax to the wall. You’d be trapped in here.”
Martin’s jaw jutted in obstinacy, when Alison appeared on the stairs. “Martin! Vic! You need to come up! There’s a story on TV about Julius Dzornen and a dead woman!”
50
MALWARE
WHEN WE GOT to the front room, the station had gone to commercials. We watched a woman extol the virtues of a new drinkable yogurt, followed by a man driving an SUV through the La Brea tar pits.
Beth Blacksin, one of Global Entertainment’s news anchors, finally appeared. “Today’s top story is the dramatic discovery of a skeleton that’s been buried underneath the kitchen of a Hyde Park home for at least fifty years, and perhaps longer.”
She was standing in the cellar where I’d been entombed yesterday, gesturing to the hole in the floor where police had dug up the skeleton. I wanted to be outside, breathing real air, but I forced myself to stand next to Alison and watch the screen.
“What makes this story both more tragic and more important is that this coach house was the site of Edward Breen’s original workshop,” Blacksin was saying. “Breen, whose revolutionary computer design led to the creation of the world-famous Metargon company, allowed Julius Dzornen to live here after the Breen family moved to Lake Forest.
“In a statement today, Edward Breen’s son, current Metargon CEO Cordell Breen, said he was shocked that Julius Dzornen had taken advantage of the family’s generosity by murdering a woman and burying her underneath the kitchen.”
Meg took Lily to the kitchen. “She’s only four; she doesn’t need murder and what-all in her life yet.”
The scene switched to Metargon’s headquarters. Breen spoke from his office, the Rothko painting in the background.
“This discovery is a shock to all of us in the Metargon family.” Breen’s mellow baritone was appropriately solemn. “Julius Dzornen’s father, Benjamin, collaborated closely with my own father to design America’s nuclear arsenal. When Julius and I were boys together, everyone thought he would become a scientific giant like his father. Instead, he became depressed and reclusive and dropped out of school.
“Julius often spoke of having committed a terrible crime, but I always assumed he was referring to squandering his scientific gifts. I can’t begin to fathom what made him commit such a heinous murder, but he came to see me on Tuesday night, speaking as if he wanted to confess. In the end, he didn’t reveal his horrible secret, but it was after leaving my house that he drove his car into a ravine on Sheridan Road.”
That was all Breen had to say. After Breen’s speech, Murray Ryerson appeared outside Metargon’s headquarters.
“Police currently have no clues as to the woman’s identity,” Murray said, “but a button found with the body was given to Chicago Fashion Institute historian Eva Kuhn. Kuhn says it’s from a Dior suit cut in 1952, so the dead woman was possibly murdered in ’52 or 1953. Police are anxious to talk to Chicago investigator V. I. Warshawski, who discovered the skeleton yesterday, but has since disappeared. This is Murray Ryerson, live in Northbrook.”
Murray was replaced by a couple of men waist-high in cranberries. Dorothy muted the sound.
My skin turned cold. Cordell Breen had pulled off a very neat stunt. He’d landed Julius with sole responsibility for the dead woman. There was no way to refute him, since Julius was dead. My assumption, that the Breens installed Julius in the coach house to avoid anyone finding the body, was only an assumption, after all.
Alison was jubilant. “See! My father didn’t have anything to do with Julius Dzornen’s death. Durdon wasn’t tampering with his brakes. I shouldn’t have listened to you, Vic, you’ve been making me scared of my own father.”
“Alison, Rory Durdon tried to murder me yesterday.” I was close to screaming in frustration.
Alison’s eyes were bright, as if the effort to live in denial was making her feverish. “Dad sent him down to the coach house to see if Julius Dzornen had taken our sketch. Maybe he overreacted to seeing you there, but that doesn’t mean my father—”
“Dorothy!” It was Meg, calling from the kitchen. “An SUV just pulled up out front. I’m taking Lily over to Gracie’s, see if her mama will let us watch Clifford with her.”
Dorothy said to us, “Go back to the workshop and shut yourselves in. If these men mean trouble, stay in there until I give you an all-clear.”
Martin and I moved quickly back to the basement, but Alison lingered, peering at the street through a crack in the living room curtains. The switch to close the secret entrance was under the worktable. Martin had his finger on it, but waited in a sweaty silence, hoping Alison would come. At the last minute, as the men began hammering on the front door, she ran down the basement steps to join us.
Martin pressed the switch. We watched the sides of the wall slowly move. The edges came together with a series of bumps, and then a click locked them into place.
I turned to the m
onitor on the worktable and saw that the men on the porch were Moe and Curly. “Homeland Security,” I muttered.
“See?” Alison hissed. “My father is not tracking you!”
I was trying not to panic, but I didn’t think I could take being sealed in a basement two days in a row. “Martin, is there another way out?”
“At that far wall, under Martina’s telescope platform.”
Through the mike Martin had embedded in the front door, we heard Dorothy’s gruff voice, demanding to know the men’s business. We watched Moe and Curly whip out their federal credentials. Dorothy said they could talk to her from the front porch, she didn’t let strange men into her house no matter how many badges they flashed at her.
“That Mustang parked out front belongs to a woman who is wanted by the Chicago police, and we have reason to believe you’re harboring another fugitive,” Moe said.
“We can open this door without any trouble,” Curly put in. “We’re giving you a chance to cooperate in an investigation that involves our national security.”
“You watch too many cop shows, young man, if you think that kind of talk impresses me.”
While they were talking, I saw another car pull up behind the SUV. We couldn’t see the driver as he got out of the car, but we watched him bend over to pull a large, oddly shaped bundle out of the backseat. As he came up the walk, I thought at first he was carrying a mannequin, but when he got closer to the house I could see he was holding a woman, a skinny scarecrow of a woman with wild graying curls, her bare legs little more than flesh-covered sticks.
“That’s my mother!” Martin was shocked. “What—how—?”
“With Durdon?” Alison whispered.
Their arrival was also a surprise to Moe and Curly, who stopped haranguing Dorothy to look at them.
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