Critical Mass

“You would do it for two days, then you would get tired of seeing women assaulted for going to school, or burned for running away from a forced marriage. You’d go out and break open some Taliban heads and then it would get ugly very quickly, I’m afraid,” she said with a flash of wry humor.

 

She played with the fringe on the bedcover. Not like Lotty to be nervous enough to braid and unbraid threads. “Kitty and I were almost the same age, with almost the same history, I told you that. Illegitimate daughters raised by our mothers’ parents. My grandparents adored my mother and treated me as another little princess, but Kitty’s grandmother, Frau Saginor, had no patience with Martina—her daughter, you know, Martina Saginor. Frau Saginor looked after Kitty, but I don’t think she was a warm—”

 

Lotty interrupted herself, shaking her head. “That isn’t what I wanted to say. The truth is, I knew nothing about them. Frau Saginor sewed for my Oma, my granny, along with other wealthy families in our quarter. I looked down on Kitty because my Oma looked down on Frau Saginor. Probably I brought out the worst in both Kitty and her grandmother.

 

“Fr?ulein Martina, that’s what we called Frau Saginor’s daughter, Fr?ulein Martina fascinated me. I’m sure it was partly because Kitty and Frau Saginor despised her. But also, Fr?ulein Martina would show us the wonderful apparatus she built at her Institute. She showed me the way light broke through the prism in my nursery windows, and explained spectral lines and the photoelectric effect to us. Kitty would react almost violently when Martina started talking about experiments with light.”

 

Lotty gave a tight, bitter smile. “If the two were to come into my clinic today, I would tell Martina that her daughter was desperate for the affection and attention Martina was lavishing on prisms and gamma rays, but at eight and nine, I just knew I could outshine Kitty in nature studies, so I was a bit of a show-off, and a bit of a little bitch, grabbing her mother’s attention to myself. Still, it was Fr?ulein Martina who first made me interested in the mysteries of the universe.”

 

Lotty bit her lips, angry with herself. “What I’m trying to say is that I carried my old Viennese class attitudes against Kitty with me to London, and then to the New World. When she showed up again, I couldn’t listen to her story. She may have been right when she accused me of responding to Judy’s cries for help as a way of snubbing her.”

 

She took a deep breath. “Victoria, will you put aside any thought of a cave until you have found Martin Binder? I need you to do this for me; I will pay your fee. I delivered Martin. Also Judy. On those grounds alone Kitty never forgave me. She came to me because she was frightened; someone told her I had exceptional skill, but it’s not a good idea for your childhood nemesis to see you splayed and bleeding in a delivery room.”

 

I held her hand, as I had done with Kitty Binder last night. “I’ll do my best, Lotty.”

 

We sat quietly for some minutes, then she asked awkwardly whether Kitty had been dead when I reached the house.

 

“I don’t want a description of the mayhem, but I hope she died in peace,” Lotty said, “not in great pain.”

 

“She spoke in German.” During the long night that followed Kitty Binder’s death, I had forgotten those terrible last minutes with her. “I recorded her in case she was saying something that would help track her assailants.”

 

I got out of bed, pulling on a pair of jeans so that I wouldn’t embarrass Mr. Contreras, and retrieved my bag from where I’d dropped it on my way into my home this morning.

 

Lotty took the phone from me and played the recording several times. “This isn’t anything to do with who killed her. She’s saying, ‘Granny, what did it all mean?’ Then she adds, ‘What was the point of it all?’”

 

She turned my phone over and over in her hands. “It’s so painful, Victoria. Kitty had a difficult life, and then to die like that, thinking her life had no point! If you’ve lost everyone, and then you give birth to a drug addict and your only grandson has run away, perhaps to become a terrorist or a traitor—life would feel meaningless!”

 

“My reaction is less cosmic,” I said dryly. “First, Kitty thought she was with her granny, so she died feeling comforted. Second, what if it’s not her life she’s asking about, but something specific—what it was her home invaders came hunting for—why did it matter so much to them?”

 

Lotty put my phone down. “I hope you’re right. It would be a help, to me, anyway. How can you find out?”

 

“Cordell Breen, who owns the company where Martin has been working, doesn’t think a solo op like me is much use, but I am willing to do legwork. People who rely on technology sometimes miss the small and obvious. I had been thinking of canvassing for Martin at bus stops, but it’s been two weeks; the trail is cold up here. I’m going to drive back to the place Judy was living, and see if anyone in the town remembers Martin.”

 

 

 

 

 

VIENNA, 1938

 

Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, Turn Around