To: Agent Luke Erlichman
Chicago Office
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Luke: How in hell did a letter get published in a national magazine about animal testing at the Nevada Proving Grounds? And who the fuck is Gertrud Memler? Congress has received thousands of letters demanding hearings, or an end to using animals in nuclear tests and we’re catching heat. Even RFK is demanding to know who this Memler is and whether she’s a reliable source.
Find out soonest how this leak happened. The Boss is not happy.
Cal
July 28, 1962
Letter from:
Agent Luke Erlichman
Chicago Office
Federal Bureau of Investigation
To: Cal Hooper
Special Agent in Charge
Washington
Cal: Magazine produced letter and envelope for Gertrud Memler, return address in Ft. George, Utah. Dispatched agent Titheredge to find and silence her, but no record of a Gertrud Memler in any phone books, churches, etc. The return address was a local cemetery.
Looked up Memler in our files. An Austrian scientist by that name entered the country in 1946, was assigned to weapons and rocket development at Nevada because of WW II experience with German proto-atomic bomb work. Find nothing in her file after 1953. Was she civilian-relocated? Did she marry?
The Secret Diary included a long passage from Arnold Zachny’s diary, where he wrote about the day the FBI came in to seize his files and to order him never to print any letters he received from Memler. The passage ended with a photocopy of another telegram between FBI agents in Chicago and Washington.
August 2, 1962
Private letter from Cal Hooper
Washington, DC
Luke Erlichman
6937 S. South Shore Drive
Chicago
Cal, for your own good as well as mine, do your fucking damnedest to find Memler. From now on, set up a mail intercept for both American View and Zachny’s home correspondence. Can’t have a loose cannon publishing secret signals to Uncle Nicky* on our watch.
My librarian at the University of Chicago had identified Gertrud Memler as one of the women sitting around the pod in the old photo I’d found in Palfry. Memler worked with Martina Saginor and Benjamin Dzornen, both of whom were Jews. Then she’d become a Nazi, overseeing a weapons lab, and had ended her life in the United States, a deeply and skillfully hidden anti-nuclear activist. If she was still alive, she’d be at least a hundred, probably more, so it was a safe bet she’d made it to her grave without FBI detection.
If Martin was hunting for a connection between Dzornen and his great-grandmother, he would have tried to find Memler. Had he seen something at the Breen house that made him think he could find Memler where the FBI had failed?
I was so lost in thought that I gave a strangled cry when Max tapped me on the shoulder. Lotty was with him; we exchanged the usual greetings and went into the private dining room Max had reserved.
When I’d gone through the different scenarios I was imagining, Max groaned and clutched his head. “Victoria, you’re making me dizzy. Is Martin murdering drug dealers who got his mother in trouble? Is he avenging his great-grandmother for having her work stolen? Or is he selling secrets to the Chinese or the Israelis or perhaps Google? No wonder you can’t make any headway. You need to pick one path and follow it.”
“Yeah, if I could get a single reliable fact out of anyone I would,” I snapped. “I have two facts, call it three. After going to a barbecue at the home of Metargon’s owner, Martin announced that something didn’t add up. His high school physics teacher says he said that when either his answer, or the problem itself, seemed wrong. He stayed at work for few weeks after the barbecue, then he disappeared, giving a book on Gertrud Memler and the Cold War to a neighbor kid to take back to the library. The other fact is that his mother’s on the lam. She’s run from two drug houses and has also disappeared. Are the drugs and the Cold War connected? Are he and his mother connected?”
A waiter was hovering; Max interrupted me long enough to put in our dinner orders.
“My semi-fact is that Martin went to see Benjamin Dzornen’s two surviving legitimate children. To top it all off, this afternoon Kitty all but fired me. I can’t keep up an expensive search if she’s fired me, but I can’t leave Martin to hang out to dry, either. Just in case it’s drug dealers he’s messing with, not century-old missing scientists.”
I showed him and Lotty the passage about Gertrud Memler that I’d just been reading. “You said you might be able to work some of your old refugee networks. Is there any way you could track down the Memler woman?”