Her mouth worked. “My mother. That’s what I wanted to talk to him about. He had been her professor, she revered him. Not me, not her child, I was never important to her. Only those invisible particles she spent day and night with. She saw atoms, but she couldn’t see me. Even the last time we were alone, up in the mountains right before Germany took over Austria, she didn’t care when I tried to show her how I could dance. She wanted me to look at pictures of something invisible in the atmosphere!”
“That must have been very hard.” I spoke with sincerity: for mothers, balancing between domestic duties and private passions is harder than standing on one toe on the point of a pin. It’s impossible to do it perfectly, but some women get it more wrong than others.
“My grandmother raised me,” Kitty said fiercely. “She was tough but she cared about me. She made my mother beg for the money so that I could go to London with Charlotte and her brother. And then my grandmother was killed. Phfft, like that! First off to Terezín, then off to Sobibor, then—no record but most likely dead. I found all this out when I went back to Vienna as an interpreter in 1952.”
“Your mother begged the money to send you to London?” I interrupted. “She got it from Professor Dzornen, didn’t she?”
Kitty stared at me as if I had wizarding powers. “He said never to tell. He told me when I saw him here, in Chicago, but he made me promise to say nothing to nobody. Anybody. How did you know? Did that smug witch Herta tell you?”
I smiled sadly. “It was a lucky guess. The war hadn’t started, your mother could still get mail from America.”
“If you talked about me to Herta, I will fire you at this minute. They were a thousand times more stuck-up than the Herschels. Those Dzornens, to them I was always the seamstress’s granddaughter. When Herta and Bettina were left alone with me, I was supposed to run their errands. They expected me to do up their hair or deliver their little love notes to the stupid boys they dated. They even thought I should clean their shoes, so I threw those into the cesspool.”
“I didn’t discuss you with Ms. Colonna,” I said. “What did Benjamin Dzornen tell you when you went to the physics department back in 1956?” I asked. “That Martina was dead?”
She stared at me. “You think you can trick me, Miss Detective? You can’t. All that chapter in my life is finished, I never discuss it. I never talked about the great professor paying my fare to London, you tricked that out of me. For the rest, if anyone asks you, the police, Princess Charlotte Herschel, the FBI, anyone, you can tell them I never discuss it.”
I had been bending over with my ear to the door to hear her. I was getting a crick in my neck, but there was no way she’d open the door for me, as angry as she was now.
“But Judy did discuss it, didn’t she,” I said.
“Judy is crazy, I thought you knew that already. There’s no telling what she might do.”
“And Martin?”
“Don’t start telling me lies about Martin. He would never talk to those Dzornens, not for any reason, so stop trying to spread muck on him.”
“If I’m going to find him, I need a good photograph,” I said, pretending I hadn’t heard her. “Something I can show to people who might have met him. Can you get me a good shot of him?”
“Do you listen to anything I say?” she hissed. “You and your detecting, you’re as bad as Martina and her atoms! Leave me alone, leave Martin alone. If you want to go into drug houses with Judy, you’re welcome to them!” She slammed the door.
Did this mean I was fired? It certainly meant I wasn’t going to be paid. A smart woman would have walked away from the whole mess then and there.
18
DIARY OF A COLD WARRIOR
BACK IN MY OFFICE I had a message from Doug Kossel, the Palfry County sheriff. After my conversation with Kitty Binder, I expected the worst, that he had found Martin’s body in the cesspit behind the meth house.
“Warshawski!” He sounded unnecessarily energetic for the end of a workday. “You big-city gals know how to act. Your police buddy, what’s his name”—there was a pause while he wrestled with paper—“here it is, Downey. He called to talk to me about Schlafly, who definitely did not make a good scarecrow. When I told the Wengers—they farm that cornfield—what the body looked like, even Frank Wenger turned green around the gills. I’m not sure but what he’ll leave that little bit of corn where you found Ricky Schlafly go this year.”
He laughed so merrily that my eardrums vibrated. “Anyway, Downey told me you created a situation in Chicago, neutralized one bad boy and got two others arrested. What do you do on your day off?”
“Pitch short relief for the Cubs,” I said, halfheartedly entering into the spirit of the conversation. I regretted it when Kossel erupted in another ear-shattering laugh.
“Did your guys look at that pit behind the house?” I asked.
“Couldn’t find anyone who wanted to gear up and wade into it,” he said. “But we raked through it. No bodies, just a lot of empty ether cans and etcetera.”