I liked that, because it meant that was why Ricky Schlafly was murdered. Ricky overheard mother and son arguing. He figured Judy was sitting on valuable documents. For any dopehead, something was valuable if it could be sold or bartered for drugs.
Ricky tried to sell the documents. I’d never met him alive, but I assumed he was as lazy and greedy as the addicts I used to represent. He wouldn’t have done anything subtle, like gone to archivists with offers of important papers. He’d have gone straight to eBay or Craigslist, and then anyone would have known about the documents: Julius Dzornen, some other drug dealer or even Homeland Security, come to think of it.
Downtown, I left the L to ride a bus down to Hyde Park. If Chicago really had rapid transit, I wouldn’t drive so much: the fifteen-mile run from my home down to the university took eighty minutes.
At the library, they let me inside with Leydon’s driver’s license. I couldn’t borrow books, but I could use the collection, including the computers.
I logged on first to the online auction site Virtual-Bidder. I tried to imagine how Schlafly might have thought. He probably hadn’t known Martina Saginor’s name, but I started with her, anyway, tried Benjamin Dzornen, moved to physics in Vienna, and finally hit pay dirt, so to speak, with “Nuclear Weapons,” where there were hundreds of thousands of hits: manuals from the Nevada Proving Grounds, photos from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, videos of old movies with names like Atomic Bomb.
A seller named King Derrick had been offering “Authentic Nazi Nuclear Secrets.” King Derrick, ruler of the Empire of the Damned. I saw his decimated body again, the eyeballs gone, the crows circling, and shivered.
Starting bid for his authentic secrets was suggested at a hundred dollars, but the auction had been shut down. A large red-and-black banner covered most of the page, announcing that the auction had been in violation of Virtual-Bidder rules. Behind the banner, parts of a screen shot that King Derrick had called “Proof of real Nazi weapons secrets” were visible.
If keff = 1, then . . . is critical. If neutrons . . . added . . . by . . . external . . . and if the system is not quenched by a strong . . . absorber, they can trigger an explosion. An external Ra-Be neutron . . . at Innsbruck emitted S0 = 106 neutrons/second . . . know the neutron-mul . . .
At the bottom of the page was a small circle with a kind of design in it. It seemed to be interlocking triangles with another symbol that was too blurry on the screen image to make out. I wondered if it might be some symbol of authentication that collectors of Nazi memorabilia looked for.
The part of the text visible behind the banner meant nothing to me, except that it concerned the weapons facility where Martina had spent part of the war. A weapons expert would know whether it proved they’d been building the bomb in Innsbruck. Was this why Homeland Security was on my case? Not because of Martin and the Metargon code, but because they thought I knew something about nuclear weapons?
I stopped looking at auction sites and began searching the Web. Homeland Security had access to all my log-in information, which meant if they were in fact monitoring me, they’d know when I went to one of my subscription databases. That limited me to the standard search engines, Yahoo, Dogpile, Metar-Quest. Once again, I started with my Viennese scientists.
I got too many hits on Benjamin Dzornen to bother with them. There was nothing for Martina Saginor, except for a mention in tandem with Memler in a book on women at the Radium Institute in Vienna during the 1920s and 1930s. The library had a copy. I closed my search: the library periodically wipes the buffers clean, but I didn’t want to leave any of my pages open.
The book was in the science library. I was curious enough to trudge across the campus to the science quad. Arthur Harriman, my young science librarian, was working the desk when I stopped to get permission to go into the stacks.
“Nora! I wondered when you’d come back,” Harriman said. “Have you found the missing warheads?”
“Like the purloined letter, they were right out in the nuclear stockpile where anyone could see them.” I tried to get into the spirit of the joke.
“You know, I told you I’d ask this friend of mine who’s writing her dissertation on Dzornen about whether he’d stolen your lady’s work, and she pooh-poohed that. Dzornen’s prize was for work he did before your Ms. Saginor became his student.”
Another blind alley, then. I thanked him for remembering to ask, and got a day pass from him. After a few more tedious Nick-and-Nora jokes, I went into the stacks to read about women in Viennese physics.
I sat cross-legged on the floor with the book, checking only the pages where Martina was mentioned. I found a brief bio: she’d been born before World War I to a working-class family, won a scholarship at a new Technische Hochschule für M?dchen when she was twelve. (With the highest mathematics score in the city. I thought of Martin with his stratospheric test scores.) She taught at the same school from 1928 to 1938, did a Ph.D. in physics at G?ttingen in 1929–1930.