I tried to nod intelligently, but internally I groaned: Why hadn’t I paid more attention to Professor Wright’s lectures when I was an undergraduate here?
I got Harriman to write what he’d just said and put it in an e-mail to me. When he’d obligingly finished that, I asked him about Nobel Prize winners Martina Saginor might have met, either in Vienna or G?ttingen. “It has to be someone who would have been in Chicago around 1955 or so, because Martina’s daughter came here looking for him.”
This, too, turned out to be a complicated search. Physicists in the 1930s were like migratory birds, flitting from Copenhagen to Cambridge, from California to Columbia, stopping en route in G?ttingen or Berlin and Paris.
Harriman said, “You know, science didn’t get the kind of government research money in those days that we poured into it during the Manhattan Project or the Cold War, but these guys—and gals—must have received money from someone to travel the way they did.”
We looked at the list of Nobel laureates in physics and chemistry from the twenties through 1950. Any number of the laureates might have been in Germany or Vienna when Kitty Binder was born. Most of the European laureates had fled either to England or the U.S. during the war; Harriman said that any of them might have spent time in Chicago. Some, like Fermi, joined the University of Chicago faculty. Others worked here on the Manhattan Project, or had stints in Chicago as visiting scholars.
“Chicago was the hot spot for physics after World War Two. Fermi, Teller, they attracted the next generation of phys whizzes. Would the nationality matter?”
I shook my head. “Saginor had her baby in 1930 or ’31, so the father is someone she met either in Vienna or Germany in ’29 or ’30. From what you’re saying, it could have been anyone from Werner Heisenberg to Robert Oppenheimer.”
“Yes,” Harriman said, “but Heisenberg wasn’t here after the war, so it’s not really such a wide net.”
I didn’t add my private fret: that Kitty’s fantasies about her father might mean he hadn’t been any kind of scientist at all, let alone a Nobel Prize winner. He might really have been a Viennese builder who already had a wife and two other children. The snapshot on Kitty’s credenza could have shown a day at a beach where the wife had been generous enough to include her husband’s lover’s child.
Harriman handed me back my laptop. I was closing the windows he’d opened when I saw the photograph. In the middle of one of the German articles Harriman had found was a copy of the print I’d found in the meth house down in Palfry, the giant metal egg on a tripod with serious men and women staring proudly at the camera.
“What is this? Who are these people?”
Harriman stared at me, my voice was so strangled, but he took back my computer. “An early proton accelerator designed at the Institut für Radiumforschung. What’s so exciting about it?”
“I just saw a print of this picture, in a place where I would bet good money no one ever heard of a proton accelerator, let alone cared about it. Who are the people?”
“There isn’t a caption,” Harriman said, “but they were all at the IRF. I suppose your Martina must be one of the women; that shouldn’t be too hard to work out. The second man from the right, I know his face. I think I’ve seen it in our archives.”
He looked at the clock on the wall. “I have to get to a meeting, but I can do a little checking after lunch. Even if you won’t let me carry a gun, I might be able to track these people down.”
I thanked him profusely: it was a relief to offload even one task. While he vanished into the bowels of the library, I found an empty carrel and sat down to check my messages.
Jari Liu had written back to say that was the only e-mail he had for Martin. He’d tried it himself and gotten the same error message.
Martin’s friend, Toby Susskind, had written me. He didn’t know where Martin was, but he included his own cell phone number. When I called, Toby talked to me in a halting, troubled way about why he and Martin had lost touch.
“Martin wanted to go to college, but his grandma, she was so against it that he ended up staying in Chicago and getting a job. That made it hard for him and me to talk. I mean, I probably wouldn’t have gotten into Rochester if Martin hadn’t helped me write my high school senior project; and, well, it kind of made it hard, if you know what I mean.”
I murmured sympathetically: I could imagine Martin’s hurt, Toby’s embarrassment, the strain on a relationship that had never been close to begin with. I asked Toby whether he knew who might have hosted that August picnic.
“I need to talk to someone who saw Martin around the time he disappeared,” I explained, but Toby said he and Martin had barely seen each other all summer, and anyway, Martin had never talked about his coworkers.
“What did Martin tell you about visiting his mother?” I asked.