I shut my eyes, slowed my breathing, tried to picture the redacted, bleached page. Bombs had been mentioned. A chemical engineer. A redacted name hadn’t witnessed something. A city of Inns. I couldn’t remember anything else.
I looked up “City of Inns.” Many towns advertised themselves as “cities of inns,” but Innsbruck popped up on the second results page. Innsbruck is in Austria. Martina Saginor, Lotty, Kitty Binder and Martina’s student Gertrud Memler had all come from Austria. And during the Second World War, according to the young librarian at the University of Chicago, the Nazi war machine had tried building nuclear reactors near Innsbruck. I liked it.
I found an article on the Innsbruck weapons site in the Journal of Science and War. In 1940, no one knew if you could have a self-sustaining chain reaction, which apparently was essential for turning atoms into bombs. Physicists like Heisenberg in Germany and Fermi in America built nuclear reactors to see if they could create a chain reaction. As we all know now, Fermi could do it; Heisenberg couldn’t.
Japan and England had also been trying to build a bomb; our history books never mentioned that. Every war room everywhere wanted the most devastating way to obliterate as many women, children, men, dogs and trees as they could.
Herta Dzornen said Martina had been dragooned into weapons work during the war, probably at Innsbruck. I knew I was creating a monumental pyramid without straw, but I wondered if Martin filed a Freedom of Information request about Martina. No, that didn’t make sense; she died before the war ended. The U.S. wouldn’t have files on her. If anything, Martin would have searched for her in the Holocaust Museum. He must have been looking for Gertrud Memler, Martina’s Nazi student-turned-anti-nuke-activist—he’d learned about her in the book about the Cold War.
But if the Commerce Department document was something Martin had gotten through the Freedom of Information Act, he wouldn’t have been fighting his mother over it. Unless he brought it with him to show her, to demand what she knew about Memler or Martina. I could see Kitty, bitter toward both Martina and science, stonewalling her grandson. He’d had a last-ditch hope his mother might know something, drug-addled though she was.
More guesswork. I had a whole five pages in the Binder file devoted to “useless speculations.”
The bank book was more promising. It had been an old-fashioned passbook, created long before the Internet. I can still remember going every week to the Steel City Bank and watching my mother carefully push across the stacks of quarters she’d earned from giving music lessons. The teller would count them and enter the amount by hand in her passbook. My favorite part was the red date stamp that went next to the entry.
An old passbook from a Lincolnwood bank could have been Kitty’s, stolen by Judy. It was possible that Benjamin Dzornen had set it up to buy her silence back when she was creating such a stink on the South Side. The notion was a stretch, but a tempting one.
I put on a pair of good trousers, a knit top and a red-and-gold scarf and headed out. My first stop was the garage on Lawrence Avenue I use. Even though it was Sunday, Luke Edwards, who must be the most lugubrious mechanic on the planet, was in the shop, taking a transmission apart. He looked at the trunk as if I personally had taken a crowbar to the lock.
“Why’d you go and do that, Warshawski?”
“Just one of those fits that overtakes me sometimes, Luke, where I feel like taking an ax to my ride. How long do you reckon to fix it?”
“Depends how long it takes me to find the replacement parts. You know these older Mustangs, the fittings are different, can’t just order them from Ford.”
“But you’ll shake a few branches and see what falls out. I can’t lock the car with the trunk open. Any way to set the alarm on the door with the trunk lock broken?”
Luke gave me a withering look. “Of course not, Warshawski: anyone can get into the car through the trunk, so what would the point be? I’ll call you next week. It ain’t the car your old Trans Am was, but I’d still like to see you take better care of it.”
I grinned ferociously, in lieu of popping him one, and drove down to the Gold Coast. I called Herta Dzornen Colonna’s apartment while sitting in my car across the street from the entrance.
“Ms. Colonna: it’s V. I. Warshawski. We met last week.”
“Met? You call barging in on me ‘meeting me’?”
“I’m about to barge in on you again. I know that your father created a savings account for Kitty Binder. Can we talk about that?”
She was silent for a moment, then whispered, “What is it you want? Are you trying to get money out of me?”
“No, ma’am. All I want is information. Can I come upstairs to talk to you in person? Or do you want to continue this on the phone?”
“You’re outside my home,” she cried. “Oh, don’t do this to me!”