Dorothy shouted upstairs to Meg that Martin was okay, and would Meg bring down tea. Meg carried down a pot of hot water, mugs and a bowl with teabags in it, but stomped back up the stairs. She was not going to fraternize with a person who disarmed her, no matter what her aunt chose to do.
“I was doing research,” Martin answered me. “I knew I’d seen the design, you know, the triangles at the bottom of the drawing, before. They’re Newton’s prisms, of course, but besides that.”
“Of course,” I said dryly. “What fool doesn’t recognize Newton’s prisms?”
“Me,” Alison said. “I saw those my whole life and never thought of Newton. Why did you, Martin?”
“His experiment with prisms is the first thing you look at when you start thinking about light.” He spoke matter-of-factly, as if the whole world thought about light the way he did. “I knew I’d seen them drawn like that someplace else. As the party went on and this one guy, Tad, got drunker and more annoying, it came back to me, that they were on some of the papers my mother had, uh, well, stolen from my grandmother. It didn’t add up for me. I knew there had to be a connection between the BREENIAC and my family, but I couldn’t figure out what.”
“Is that when you went to see Benjamin Dzornen’s children?” I asked.
“Yes, but they wouldn’t talk to me.” His mouth bunched in remembered annoyance. “See, I was wondering if it was Benjamin Dzornen who had drawn the prisms on the BREENIAC document. I knew he’d worked with Edward Breen on the hydrogen bomb, and it was possible that he’d given the sketch to Edward.
“My gramma always claimed she was Benjamin Dzornen’s daughter, so I wondered if Dzornen had left her some of his papers in his will, you know, as a kind of proof that he was her father. But when I tried to explain this to Julius Dzornen and his sister, they both slammed the door on me.”
His tone of bewildered indignation made him seem younger and more accessible than he’d appeared at first.
“They thought you wanted money,” I said.
“Money?” He was indignant.
“Sorry, but your mom had put the bite on them more than once.”
He closed his eyes, an involuntary reflex to pain. “Of course,” he said, his voice bitter. “Of course, she would have. She always claimed that Herta Dzornen had stolen money from her. I should have put those twos together.”
I cocked my head, thinking I heard footsteps. It was only Lily, the little girl, looking for her aunt Dorothy. She climbed up in the older woman’s lap, clutching the stuffed lion Alison had picked up from the front steps.
I looked at a monitor on the workbench, which was also connected to Martin’s door cams. I worried about lingering here: I worried that someone from Metargon or Homeland Security had seen our location when Alison turned on her iPhone. I wondered, too, whether Breen’s goons had shown him Ada Byron’s obituary.
“Did you talk to my dad before you disappeared?” Alison asked in a small voice.
“I talked to Jari Liu, and he told your dad, I guess, because your dad called me from Stockholm. I was trying to get more information on the history of the Metargon-I. You probably know this, but after the war, your granddad was part of this thing called Operation Paperclip. They brought Nazi rocket and bomb experts over to the U.S., even some who’d committed terrible torture. One of the people Edward kind of whitewashed was this Nazi named Gertrud Memler, who’d been a student of Martina’s.
“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.