It’s been two years since he last was in the office on the Park Ring, where he was once a highly regarded attorney. Until the war, a number of his clients continued to consult him surreptitiously: Felix Herschel’s advice was always carefully and intelligently crafted. He knew what could and couldn’t be done even after the Anschluss.
In exchange, he received the gold coins that his wife sewed beneath the buttons in Lottchen’s waistband. When she reached cousin Minna, little Lottchen wrote carefully, Hugo and K?the and I are safe. I still have all my buttons. I love you and miss you, Opa. Minna would have been as likely as the Nazis to steal the small hoard that Felix intended for his granddaughter’s survival; the message told him that she has managed to hold on to her legacy.
Before the war began, Felix tried to persuade his wealthy clients to pay him with visas, to anywhere, Argentina, Cuba, even Iran, but they did not feel so loving toward him that they would use up their own stock of government favors on a Jew’s behalf.
As Herr Herschel stands in the doorway, rotating his arms, the postman arrives. So little mail goes in or out of the Leopoldstadt these days that the arrival of mail is always an occasion. His heart beats faster: perhaps something from his granddaughter. Since the war, they have received two letters from her, twenty-five words, mediated by the Red Cross and still censored. They don’t know if their own letters to her made it through or not.
There is nothing for his family, but the postman has a letter from America addressed to Miss Martina Saginor, 38A Novara Street, Vienna 2, Austria. Herr Herschel carries it upstairs. A letter from America carries with it so many possibilities that he can hardly breathe.
Felix shows the letter to Charlotte, who has finally risen, has combed out her long waterfall of hair and pinned it around her head and is shaking their bedding out over the courtyard. She nods, and he helps her replace the thin blanket. She takes a hairpin from her coiled braid and slits open the envelope.
It’s an official government document, but not the visa they’d been praying for. U.S. Patent D124603, for a ferromagnetic device that can store data. The sketch that Fr?ulein Martina submitted with her application two years ago is attached to the grant, which will expire seventeen years from the date of issue.
Felix cannot bring himself to look at his wife, but she squeezes his hand. “After all,” she says, “if it were a visa, how could we leave Vienna with our darling Sofie somewhere in Europe and in trouble?”
53
KILLER APP
LOTTY WAS VERY pale. When we reached the corner of Novaragasse, she stopped, eyes shut tight. She had last seen this street early one morning when she was nine years old, when her father walked her and her brother and the wailing K?the Saginor to the train station. The police, who treated her deferentially on this visit, had poked bayonets into her teddy bear to make sure her family wasn’t hiding jewels in it.
“Okay,” she said at last, opening her eyes, taking a deep breath.
Herr Lautmann met us at the entrance to Novaragasse 38A. He was from the public works department, the man who provided the permits and the workmen to excavate the cobblestones in the courtyard.
Max had found Lautmann after I announced my intention of flying to Vienna to look for Martina’s patent. Max had been amused: “Vienna is not Chicago, Victoria. You can’t suddenly show up at a building and start dismantling the cobblestones. You need a permit, you need an official, probably two or three officials. Don’t show your gun to the concierge and imagine he or she will want to help you.”
“I’m capable of subtlety, Max,” I answered, full of dignity.
“I’m sure you are,” he said. “I hope one day you’ll show it to me. For this errand, you need someone like me, who speaks German and knows how to steer a boat through a set of bureaucratic locks.”
Max had set about sending e-mails and making phone calls until he was put in touch with Herr Lautmann. A process that might have taken months or years was compressed into a few weeks thanks to Max’s connections in refugee and Holocaust survivor circles.
With Max making all the arrangements, both for the trip and for the excavation, I turned my attention to shoring up relations with the clients I’d been neglecting.
I was also answering a lot of questions from the Cook County state’s attorney. When I suggested to the SA that the dead body in the coach house probably belonged to Gertrud Memler, they contacted the FBI. The Feds were excited: they’d been hunting Memler for fifty years. The trouble was, no one had any DNA samples for comparison.
The infuriating part of the post-Tinney weeks was my inability to get the state’s attorney to pay any attention to Breen’s role in Julius Dzornen’s death, or in my own incarceration by his minions in the root cellar below the coach house kitchen.