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.