Nadja Hahne was talking to me in a corner of the faculty lounge, where we had to lean our heads almost touching so we could hear each other: at the end of the workday, teachers were blowing off steam, some more loudly than others. Dressed in jeans and a white shirt, with her brown hair falling in unruly wisps around her face, Hahne didn’t look old enough to have been teaching for sixteen years.
“In what way, Ms. Hahne?”
“Nadja,” she said. “I’m ‘Ms. Hahne’ eight hours a day; I need to be a person at the end. They sent Martin into my AP physics class when he got a perfect math score on the PSATs. He should have been in the gifted program from the outset, but some idiot put him in our UTG track.”
I looked blank, and she gave an embarrassed smile.
“One of those horrible private acronyms: Unlikely to Graduate. Martin’s grades were mediocre, because expectations of him had been low both at home and at school. His grandmother had this incomprehensible opposition to his becoming an academic. Anyway, Martin came to me already in love with physics; he saw the shape of it, if you know what I mean.”
I shook my head.
“Physics can be just equations and formulas and graphs: the Maxwell equations for light, the Feynman diagrams for electron spin, that kind of thing. We get plenty of bright kids at this school who understand them. But physics is also a place where you send your mind chasing after the infinite, searching for the harmonies that lie at the heart of nature. That’s what Martin saw.
“He played catch-up for a couple of months, but he was already asking the best questions I got that term. And then, when he’d mastered the background, his mind began leap-frogging ahead of mine. I’m just good enough at what I do to see where he was going. I was able to teach him a few things, but mostly I sat back and enjoyed watching him explore and grow.
“He was my only student ever to score a five on the physics C exam, which only a few kids take, but his grandmother wouldn’t budge on letting him try for a top-tier school. I tried assuring her that Martin would thrive at a good college. I think the grandfather agreed, but he was quite ill and Ms. Binder was adamant that Martin not turn into a, I don’t know what, time-wasting dreamer, I think is what she said. Nothing could budge her. It was unbearably frustrating. Painful, really.” Nadja pounded her fists on her thighs, the frustration still infuriating her.
“What is he like as a person?” I asked. “I talked to the parents of one of his friends; they said he was socially awkward.”
Nadja gave a sad smile. “He talked very little about his home life; I think he disappeared from it into physics. He was a bit awkward, but he had a sweet streak, and he was good-looking in that brooding way that makes girls think they can save a boy.”
“Any girlfriends?” I asked hopefully.
“I don’t think so,” Nadja said. “In high school, anyway, he couldn’t see how to connect to other people’s lives.”
I fiddled with a pencil that was lying on a nearby table. “He’s been gone without a trace for about ten days. It’s not a secret, but his mother is a drug addict. I’ve been worried that he’s gotten involved in some mess she’s part of; a man was murdered downstate in the house where she was living.”
“Murdered? Oh my God. Was Martin—” She broke off the sentence, her face contracting with worry.
“I don’t know. I followed his mother to the home of a drug dealer on the West Side and ended up in a firefight over there. She disappeared before I could get into the building. I hoped Martin might have talked to you this past summer, told you what was on his mind before he disappeared. His grandmother said something had upset him several weeks before he actually took off, but she doesn’t know what.”
Hahne shook her head unhappily. “After it became clear he was not going to university, Martin stopped talking to me. My guess is he felt ashamed and thought I might be criticizing him. While he was a student, before his college dreams got broken, we’d talk a lot, but it was mostly about abstractions, music sometimes, or heredity. He was so obsessed with questions about hereditary abilities that I asked why he didn’t focus more on biology, but he said wanting answers to one specific question wasn’t the same as being in love with a whole subject. Anyway, I thought he was probably worried about whether he would become an addict, like his mother.”
“It may have been more than that,” I said. “His grandmother was an illegitimate child in Vienna, and she offers conflicting versions of who her birth father might have been. In the version she used to repeat as a child, he was a Nobel Prize–winning scientist—Benjamin Dzornen.”
“Oh!” Nadja’s eyes opened wide. “He discovered the Dzornen-Pauli effect; the equations are remarkable.”