“Violin, ukulele, what difference does it make. He’s still weedy, but you are a goddamn piece of work.” Conrad cut the connection.
There was something pleasing about knowing Conrad was jealous of Jake. I went back to my in box. A law firm I work for wanted an investigation into an imbalance in their receivables; a wine retailer wanted to know if merchandise was disappearing from deliveries before or after they reached their store.
Nadja Hahne, Martin Binder’s high school physics teacher, could see me today after three-thirty; she’d leave my name with the high school security department if I could make it. I e-mailed back an acceptance. The librarian at the University of Chicago had found names for all but one of the eight people in the photo of the metal egg on a tripod.
I called him at once. Even with the way cell phones flatten the emotions in the voice, I could tell Arthur Harriman was excited.
“Do you have the picture in front of you?” he asked.
“I’m standing on the L,” I said. “I can’t get at my computer.”
“Okay, try to visualize it. Remember the five guys who are standing? The one in the middle is Stefan Meyer, who was head of the IRF in the thirties, at least until the Nazis came to power. The lady in the middle, sitting directly in front of him, is a Norwegian physicist who did a lot of experiments with Meyer. Your Martina is on the Norwegian’s left, and Gertrud Memler, one of Martina’s students, is on the other side.
“But I’m sure the man you want is the one standing on Meyer’s left, Benjamin Dzornen. He won the Nobel Prize in 1934 for his work on electron states in transuranic elements, but the point is, he left Vienna in 1936, went to the University of Wisconsin, and then, in 1941, got involved in the Manhattan Project. After the war he spent the rest of his career here, at the University of Chicago.”
“And he obviously knew Martina Saginor, since they’re in the picture together,” I said.
“They all knew each other back then,” Harriman said. “But Dzornen supervised Martina’s thesis. She went to G?ttingen the summer of 1929 to start work on her Ph.D. He was there at the same time and agreed to supervise her so she could finish her work back in Vienna.”
I saw with a jolt that I’d ridden past my L stop; I was heading west alongside the Eisenhower Expressway. Inattentional blindness, a growing affliction in the wired world. I thanked Harriman with more haste than grace and raced up the stairs to cross over to the inbound side.
I was almost ten minutes late to my meeting, which is inexcusable. Worse, I couldn’t resist entering Dzornen’s name into my search engine while I was supposed to be listening to questions about three candidates to head Darraugh’s South American engineering division. I promised to have a report back to the executive committee within five days, but when I left the meeting, I saw I’d written down “Martina Dzornen” instead of one candidate’s name. I had to go back to get the correct name from the internal security chief, who was not one of my fans.
By the time I returned to my office, my search engines had created reports on Benjamin Dzornen. He’d been born in Bratislava in 1896, attended school there, served in the Austrian Army during the First World War. After the war, he’d left Czechoslovakia for Berlin, where he came under the spell of Einstein, Max Planck and their circle.
In Berlin, Dzornen married a German woman, Ilse Rosenzweig, who came from an affluent cultured family. In the 1920s, he moved on to Vienna to work at the Institut für Radiumforschung. He and Ilse had three children, two daughters born in Vienna in the twenties, and a much younger son born after they arrived in the United States.
I scanned down the report: sure enough, he’d been in G?ttingen in 1929, working with Heisenberg on matrix algebra and quantum mechanics. Among the students involved in the project was one M. Saginor, sex not specified.
If Dzornen and Martina had been lovers, then Kitty’s claim that her father dined with the King of Sweden was true. But how could I possibly find out? I imagined creeping into Kitty’s bedroom in the middle of the night for a DNA sample, then darting up to one of Dzornen’s descendants at a party to stick a Q-tip in her mouth. There had to be an easier way.
I sat back in my chair. The question wasn’t whether Dzornen was Kitty’s father. It was whether she believed he was. The family romance, that was what Freud called the belief that you’d been separated at birth from your real parents, who were special, perhaps royal. My Granny Warshawski believed she was descended from Queen Jadwiga of Poland, and that those genes made her superior to every other immigrant working on the killing floor of Chicago’s stockyards.