I was certain Martin had tried to contact Julius and Herta Dzornen, but I had no way of knowing if it was before or after he’d been to the Breen mansion. He could have been wanting them to admit their father was also his great-grandfather, and that they needed to fork over Dzornen’s prize money. The King of Sweden gives you a million or so dollars; if Dzornen had invested it wisely there should have been a substantial inheritance. Not, of course, judging by Julius Dzornen’s coach house.
I drew some rabbit ears and whiskers on my legal pad. Lotty thought Dzornen must have paid whatever fees and bribes it took to get Kitty Binder out of Vienna in 1939. That meant he acknowledged her paternity and his children knew it. But so what? They wouldn’t have done away with Martin. Unless Martin had proof that the prize was bogus. I was going around in circles.
Whatever awful secret Martin saw in Edward Breen’s old workshop couldn’t have been a blatant statement from Dzornen that he’d faked his research. That was a big “if,” anyway. It also couldn’t have been a photo of Dzornen’s wife shooting Kitty, since Kitty was still alive. Or she’d shot and only hit an arm or a leg. Basta, Vic! I admonished myself. No wild fancies here!
Edward Breen worked with all those Nazi rocket scientists after the war. Pre-war physics was a small world; even Nazi physicists would have known Dzornen; that photo from the Radium Institute in Vienna showed him and Martina, with Norwegian and German scientists. Those Nazi rocketeers Edward Breen helped bring into the States, they would have known Martina, too. I could imagine the gossip. Oh, Dzornen, he saved his skin but he sacrificed his student. Yes, she died doing slave labor for our rocket program. And then Breen rubbing Dzornen’s face in it.
I tried to picture young Martin seeing a letter about his great-grandmother. Is that what hadn’t added up for him? Nothing to do with his work at Metargon, only the nagging questions about his family?
In that case, maybe he’d trundled downstate to the meth house where his mother was pretending to be in rehab. Look, Mom, we could blackmail the Dzornen family, after all. Not over Dzornen’s research, but over their paternity. Her drug pals liked the idea of easy money; they started blackmailing Herta Dzornen, and she sicced some thugs on them.
I flung my pen onto the seat in disgust. Speculation, speculation, with no knowledge of anything, including Martin Binder’s character.
The rabbits fled into the underbrush, but not because of me. A gray-haired woman had roared into the area, driving my dream car, a red Jaguar XJ12. She let a pale-gold retriever out of the back; the two of them headed for a creek that runs through the woods. That’s what I should be doing, making enough money to spend my days driving my dogs around in Jaguars, not second-guessing someone who understood relativistic principles.
I, too, fled the park. Not for the shrubbery, but for Skokie. I rang Kitty Binder’s doorbell with an aggressive finger. After five minutes, I saw the front window blinds part the width of her fingers. Time passed. I rang again, and finally she opened the door the width of the chain bolt.
“Ms. Binder, has your daughter been here?” I asked, before she could speak. “I found the place where she’d been staying on the West Side of Chicago. When I went there, her pals shot at me. Maybe you saw the story on the news—one of her old friends was arrested, another seems to be badly injured. Judy is pretty toxic right now. If you’ve heard from her, or she’s here, this would be a very good time to call the police.”
She stared at me through the crack in the door, her face frozen in a stew of uneasy emotions: fear, anger, misery. “I told you, no police. The police come and I get killed.”
“Is Judy here?” I said. “Or one of her friends? Have they threatened you? If you let me in, I can help.”
“I don’t want you in my house again,” she said harshly.
“Martin,” I said, desperately trying to keep the conversation alive. “He’s cut off all communications with the world. His boss at Metargon said they haven’t been able to find any ISP—Internet service—addresses he may be using. I talked to Herta and Julius Dzornen yesterday. Martin went to see them but they won’t tell me why. Do you know?”
At that, anger blazed uppermost in her. “Those vermin! Worse than rats or cockroaches, lying, stealing—!”
“What did they lie to you about?” I asked.
“They know, but they pretend that they don’t. It’s been the same story for more than seventy years now.”
“They know what? That Benjamin was your father as well as theirs?”
She turned her head to one side, to hide the tears that had started to well. I was not supposed to see her as weak. “My father, my real father, was a builder. I told you that before.”
“Then why did you go to see Benjamin Dzornen when you got to Chicago?” I asked.