“I’ll see that someone rebuilds Martin’s great-grandmother’s workshop, if you want,” she promised. “It feels like, oh, sacred space, this lady who survived the Nazis, working here all these years, staying involved with physics and looking at the stars. Wouldn’t you like to see it restored to how it was before they tore it up today?”
Dorothy said gruffly that they’d think about it. “But I still don’t understand what they were after, why they had to attack Lily and do all that damage.”
“Breen was protecting Metargon’s reputation,” I said.
“But he’s destroying it!” Alison cried. “When people learn what he’s been doing, they’ll lose confidence in him as CEO.”
“I’m not defending him,” I said. “He’s indefensible. I’m just trying to understand what’s been driving him. I think it’s his idea of Metargon’s reputation as the great innovator in computing and technology. Metargon, ‘beyond energy.’ ‘Where the future lies behind.’ Those are your company’s mottos.
“When Wall Street learns that your grandfather didn’t create the BREENIAC, that he stole the design from a Holocaust survivor, it’s what I said earlier—people will lose confidence in you. The public isn’t going to be very forgiving, either.”
“But why were they chasing me?” Martin asked. “I knew Mr. Breen was upset about the prisms, but he didn’t know they were Martina’s signature.”
“But he did know. He wanted all of Martina’s surviving papers so he could destroy any evidence connecting her to the BREENIAC sketch. Besides, he wanted the copy of the patent that was mailed to Martina. You said the Patent Office’s copy of it had disappeared, that there’s a record of her getting the patent for the design in 1941, but no trace of the actual document in their files. This long after the fact, we’ll never know what happened to it, but I’m betting that Edward Breen, who had a lot of contacts in Washington, got someone to remove the file for him back when he realized he could make a fortune from the stolen BREENIAC sketch.”
“Why did they think I would have something?” Martin persisted.
“If the documents that were mailed to Martina in 1941 survived the war, Cordell thought you’d lead him to them.”
Martin shook his head. “I never saw those, either here or in the papers from Martina that my mom stole.”
“I know where they are,” I said. “At least, I know where they were in November 1941.”
VIENNA, NOVEMBER 1941
Letter from America
EVER SINCE THE children left for England, the overcrowded flat on the Novaragasse has felt empty, hollow. But now, two years into the war, it is truly empty. His beloved daughter, Sofie, his Butterfly, weak from her difficult pregnancy, was taken from him yesterday, along with her husband and his parents and all the aunts and nephews and cousins.
A father should be able to protect his daughter. A father should not sit uselessly by as men point weapons at his daughter and force her to her feet. A father should not have to see his daughter so thin and weak from malnourishment that her breastbone and ribs protrude like a plucked pigeon, but so he has done. He wants to sit on Sofie’s mattress and tear his hair out, wailing. He eyes the bedding, neatly folded by his wife after their beloved’s departure, her hands trembling, folding the thin blanket and stroking it over and over as if it still held her child. If he sits and howls he will never get to his feet again and his poor Charlotte will be left to cope on her own.
Felix Herschel blinks back tears, puts on his one remaining suit and shirt—the others long since bartered for food—and follows a lifetime of habit. He shaves in cold water, brushes his teeth, boils water to make a cup of ersatz coffee for Charlotte.
At least little Lotte is safe in England, with her brother and K?the Saginor. Before the war began, before Europe was sealed, they received two letters from their Lottchen. He worries constantly about how his wife’s cousin Minna is treating their darling. Minna is an angry woman, always jealous of his wife, spiteful toward Sofie. He worries that she will abuse their little Charlotte, but what choice did they have? Only the children were allowed visas into England.
He goes down the four flights of stairs and stands in the street to do the breathing exercises that have been part of his morning routine since he was a university student at the turn of the century. He tries as much as possible to follow his decades-old schedule: shaving, dressing for the day, bringing his wife her morning coffee.