Critical Mass

“I hope they would have,” she said soberly. “It would be the ultimate twist of a knife in the stomach to know they scrupulously buried a visa in the courtyard where it saved no one’s life at all.”

 

 

Max started to put the photocopies back into the folder, but stopped when he saw the BREENIAC sketch. “What’s this? Something that Lotty’s grandfather sent to Dzornen?”

 

“No.” I explained the strange story of the drawing. “The current part of Kitty Binder’s nightmare began when Martin Binder saw this in the Breen family workshop. He recognized that little design from seeing it on some papers his mother had stolen from Kitty.” I pointed to the blurry triangles in the lower right corner.

 

Max didn’t say anything, but went into his study for a magnifying glass. As he inspected the paper, Lotty and I drew near, wondering what he was looking at.

 

“I’m not an expert,” Max finally said. “But you know that for a number of years after the war, I was involved with refugee groups, searching at first for traces of my own family and then helping others. This paper, it looks like the kind of stock we often saw on letters and pictures people created during the war, especially in the camps. It’s made out of repulped paper that doesn’t have new fiber added, so it disintegrates very quickly. It often came from the cheap newsprint of the papers the guards read and discarded.”

 

“Cordell Breen says his father sketched this during a break in a battle; maybe it’s on paper he picked up on the battlefield,” I suggested.

 

Max gave an embarrassed laugh. “This paper doesn’t look American to me. ‘Speicher’ sounds so very German to me.”

 

“Breen says they never knew who Speicher was, but the family assumed he was a battlefield friend who helped his father with the sketch.”

 

Max laid the paper down again. “You say that this is a very rough sketch of a new kind of computer. When I see ‘Speicher’ next to this center grid, I don’t read a person’s name: I read the German word for ‘memory.’ As for the equations, I do not for one minute understand them, but they were written by someone who went to school in the same part of the world where I grew up.”

 

 

 

 

 

44

 

 

HYPERLINK

 

 

AT EIGHT, AS I nodded off for the third time over dinner, Max made me go to bed in a guest room. We had been debating who had written those equations: Gertrud Memler? Martina Saginor? Perhaps Benjamin Dzornen? Max kept repeating that Martina had not survived the war.

 

“But that woman at the gas station.” I described the macabre scene when Kitty Binder had driven out to the country with Judy. “She argued with Kitty over whether Judy should be a girlie-girl, and then she argued with the man who arrived.”

 

“Victoria, you are so incoherent that you can barely speak, let alone drive,” Max said. “You’ve had a rough day, but besides that, the letter you brought has been a deep shock for Lotty. Let’s stop trying to untangle this knot and get some rest.”

 

I protested but Max was insistent. He dug up a nightshirt that his daughter-in-law had left behind on her last visit, found a new toothbrush in his supply cupboard, and pointed me toward a guest room.

 

In fact, as soon as I lay down, I fell into a well of sleep deep enough that I didn’t even move within the bedclothes.

 

A bit before five, I dreamed I was in the kitchen of Julius Dzornen’s coach house. I opened the giant black trunk that blocked the back door and Judy Binder stood up, the skull beneath her skin stretched in a savage rictus. “Tell her, Warshawski, sell her.”

 

“Of course.” My own voice woke me. Root cellar, not root, sell.

 

Whatever crime Julius Dzornen had committed, or perhaps witnessed, the evidence was under the kitchen in the coach house. That was why Cordell wanted him to live there, rent-free. To keep him facedown in the evidence. To keep new owners from finding the evidence if they decided to renovate or remove the building.

 

I made up the guest bed and left the nightshirt on it, carefully folded. In the kitchen, I helped myself to a grapefruit and a piece of cheese, and scribbled a note of thanks to Max, which I left on the kitchen island next to the coffeepot. He and Lotty were still asleep, or at least, still quietly in bed. I let myself out through the garage, where the door would lock automatically behind me.

 

The rain had ended in the night, but the eastern sky was still black when I started south. I drove to my office, not worrying about tails, and left the Subaru in the first space I found near the warehouse.