I looked at the clock. I needed to get through a lot more material in a short time; I turned to Dzornen’s mail from 1930 through 1941. He’d had a large correspondence. I felt a vicarious thrill at seeing Einstein’s name on several long letters. Lise Meitner had written Dzornen, as had Fermi, Segrè, Rabi, the whole pantheon of twentieth-century physics. I looked at the letters long enough to see that they were filled with equations or questions about weapons policy. Einstein never wrote, “Sorry about your troubles with Ada, or Gertrud, or Martina, old chap.”
I took a quick look at the box of patents. Nothing Dzornen invented seemed connected to the BREENIAC machine, at least as far as I could guess from the single-paragraph description at the top.
Much of the mail to Dzornen from Europe, especially after 1938, was handwritten in German. It was a hard script to decipher when I didn’t know the language to begin with. In the end, I thought I identified three letters that might have been from M. Saginor, although the signature, M. Saginor, might have been “W. Oaginow.”
Because I wasn’t traveling with my smartphone, I couldn’t photograph them. I put them to one side for photocopying and slowly continued through the thick folders. I looked at the clock: four-fifteen. I was panicking at the slippage of time and my own inability to figure anything out when I picked up a cellophane folder that held the title page of a book. Radetzkymarsch, von Joseph Roth. I thought at first it was in the collection by mistake, but when I turned it over, I saw a letter had been written in pencil on the reverse.
The text was so faded and difficult that I almost passed it over, but the date caught me up. 17 November 1941, three weeks before Pearl Harbor. The text was beyond me and the signature was maddeningly illegible. The writer had printed the address, though: Novaragasse 38A.
Novaragasse, Novara Street, was where Lotty and her grandparents had to move when Nazis evicted them from their flat. I squinted at the signature again. It might be “Herschel.” A chill ran down my arms: I was holding a precious piece of Lotty’s history.
I carried it and the letters from Martina Saginor to the copy machine. My hands were trembling from excitement; I was afraid I might damage the fragile paper.
Ms. Turley, who’d come into the reading room to remind us we had to wrap things up for the day, saw I was having trouble getting the documents out of their sleeves and came over to help. She took over the letter written on the book title and worked to get the contrast in the faded pencil script as clear as possible. She also helped me copy the three letters from M. Saginor.
She asked me to wait while she went through the reading room to remind the other researchers that they were about to close. I pulled my papers together and went to the reference stand to wait.
“Ms. Warshawski, I’m going to talk to the library director about this missing page. We take this kind of disappearance very seriously, and we’ll start an investigation. I just want you to know that.”
“If you told me who else had been in these archives, I could probably help you track down the paper—unless Jari Liu or the person posing as Julius Dzornen has destroyed it,” I said.
She flinched. “I can’t tell you, not even under these circumstances. But if you happen on the second page, please let me know at once: we will want to start a criminal prosecution.”
41
BIRD MAN OF HYDE PARK
WHEN I GOT OUTSIDE, the rain had stopped, but the wind was blowing cold through my windbreaker. I jogged over to the coffee bar. While they pulled some shots for me, I took out one of my burn phones to call Lotty. She was still at the clinic, Ms. Coltrain told me, but was going up to Max’s afterward. I left a message that I would meet her there.
I took a hummus sandwich to eat as I walked back to Martin’s Subaru. I passed the old Breen house on my way up University Avenue. Julius’s Honda was still nowhere in sight. On impulse, I cut through to the alley. Lights were still out in the coach house; there was still no answer to the doorbell. The only life came from the birds, pecking each other away from the feeders.
Perhaps Julius had tripped and fallen and was lying in a coma. No one seemed to be watching from the big house, so I got out my picklocks. When I inserted the first wand, the door creaked open. I had my gun in my hand without thinking. I slid in, back to the wall.
Inside the front room, where I’d talked to Julius before, nothing looked different, except that the pile of cigarette butts was thicker. I passed on through to the kitchen, the only other downstairs room. It also looked ordinary, untouched. In fact, it looked as though it hadn’t been touched since 1950, with its old Formica countertops and Cold War–era refrigerator.
An outsized black trunk blocked the kitchen door. I opened it, but all it contained were massive sacks of birdseed. It was a safety hazard, blocking the house’s second exit; all the windows had the small mullioned panes that would make escape impossible in a fire. I guess Julius was so depressed that he didn’t care, but it did send a warning shiver down my spine.