According to his sister Herta, Julius adulated Benjamin and was showing the potential for his father’s scientific gifts. Then bam! Kitty arrived and blew his vision of his father apart. Julius would have been about sixteen then, a vulnerable age. He went through the motions for a few years, but by the time he was twenty, he couldn’t even keep up the motions. He dropped out of school, dropped out of life.
A security guard came over to me, wanting to know if I was lost or in trouble. I realized I’d been walking in circles around the parking lot in my agitation. “I’m just upset about the person I’ve been visiting.”
The guard watched until I got back in the car and shut the door.
The trouble with the scenario that I’d been imagining was it didn’t include the Breens. Julius had gone to Cordell Breen last night. Cordell had mocked him for letting this ancient crime consume him. That wasn’t why Julius had gone to Lake Forest, though: he’d arrived at the Breens’ furious because someone used his identity at the university library.
My thinking was like a suitcase with bra straps and sweater sleeves sticking out the sides. Every idea I had left me with unpackable loose ends.
I picked up my pen again and managed to scribble down Judy’s saga. I included her childhood memories, but also wrote down her more recent past, namely Martin’s arrival at the meth house. When he found the papers Judy had filched from her mother’s bureau drawer, he was beside himself. The papers should have come to him, and Judy should have known they were important because they came from Ada Byron. The name meant nothing to Judy, and it meant nothing to me.
I drove down to Lotty’s clinic. As usual on her office days, the place was packed, mostly with women and children. The handful of men looked awkward; what are we doing in this women’s space? their bodies seemed to ask.
Ms. Coltrain, the clinic manager, greeted me with her usual calm. I gave her a note to hand in to Lotty. In a couple of minutes, Jewel Kim came out to get me, much to the annoyance of everyone else who was waiting. I smiled apologetically but followed Jewel into Lotty’s office. Lotty herself came in almost immediately, brusque, she didn’t like to be interrupted in the middle of seeing patients.
“I never heard of an Ada Byron that I remember. Could she have been the person Kitty lived with in England?” Lotty asked.
“Judy says their name was Painter. But she described a very strange event when she was seven.”
Lotty looked at her watch. “Can’t this wait?”
“Probably,” I said, “but I’m here now.”
I told her about the drive to the country and the adults who’d caught her in their angry net. “Judy couldn’t describe the woman, just that she was old. Could it have been Martina?”
“I don’t see how,” Lotty said, frowning. “She was sent from Terezín to Sobibor. That was a death march and there was no record of her in any of the refugee reports; Max checked his networks when Kitty first showed up here in 1956. Last week, he got the Holocaust Museum in Washington to search their records, too. There’s nothing about Martina Saginor among the Terezín or Sobibor survivors.”
I told her my alternate idea, about Gertrud Memler. Lotty looked disgusted. “A Nazi slobbering with guilt twenty years too late and thinking everyone should bow down and accept her conversion? If Benjamin Dzornen worked with her, then he was truly despicable. The only one I pity is the son, Julius, carrying his father’s burden all this time.”
Lotty picked up a chart from her desk. “If that’s all you wanted, this definitely could have waited until tonight.”
38
NEIGHBORHOOD GOSSIP
I FELT SORRY for Julius Dzornen, too, but I wished he would talk to me. I didn’t imagine he’d gotten much satisfaction last night from Cordell Breen, when he accused Breen of using his name to dig into the university’s archives. If I could learn who’d been impersonating Julius, and what documents they’d been reading, maybe I’d figure out something, like why the BREENIAC sketch mattered so much, or what the little design in its right corner meant. If I presented Julius with a platter of information, I’d have a better lever to pry his old crime out of him.
Before driving to the South Side, I swung by my office. I wanted to see if any of the librarians could recognize who’d impersonated Julius, so I dug up online shots of Cordell Breen and Jari Liu. I wondered about Durdon, Breen’s driver-cum-attack-dog, although I didn’t picture him as an archival research kind of guy. Anyway, I couldn’t find a photo of him, just his first name, Rory, and his age, forty-three. I couldn’t even find out where he’d grown up.