In another section, detailing Martina’s career, I read:
Saginor’s unpublished work was nearly all destroyed in a purge of the Institute’s files during the Nazi era, probably at the command of her onetime student, the Nazi weapons expert Gertrud Memler, so we can rely only on a few surviving notebooks and the articles Saginor published between 1931 and 1938.
Saginor was like Fermi in believing in her strong intuitions about physical phenomena. The effort to downgrade her abilities stems partly from L. F. Bates’ troubling visit to the Radium Institute in 1934, and partly from Memler’s efforts to extinguish her former professor’s memory.
I put the book back on the shelf and leaned against the metal divider. Lotty said Kitty resented her mother’s absorption in physics; would knowing that someone rated Martina’s abilities highly have pleased Kitty? She was more likely to have been anguished: the bio made no mention of a child. It wasn’t because Martina had kept Kitty’s birth a secret—not only Lotty, but Dzornen’s two daughters had played with Kitty when they were little girls together. Whatever stigma might have attached to illegitimacy in 1930s Vienna, Martina hadn’t tried to hide the child. Any more than Lotty’s grandparents had hidden her.
The real interest in the story, at least for me, was Gertrud Memler. Kitty’s murder had made me forget the book I’d been looking at right before she called for help, The Secret Diary of a Cold War Conscientious Objector. Memler had figured in that, as well.
Memler had survived the war intact, coming to the States with Operation Paperclip after the war, working on nuclear weapons, and then she suddenly vanished, reappearing under cover to attack U.S. nuclear policy. Perhaps watching actual bombs explode in Nevada, doing actual damage to dogs and people, had given Memler a Saul-like conversion.
I’d been sitting too long; my brain was turning to glue. I got up and stretched, bending backward in the stacks, undoing the knots in my spine one at a time.
Outside, we were having one of those golden afternoons that Chicago sometimes gets in September. I walked several miles before going to a bus stop at the northeast end of the neighborhood, near the expressway and the lake. While I waited, I put my phone back together.
I had seven messages, one from Jake, wondering where I was; he’d missed talking to me the last few nights. Lotty had called to say that Judy Binder was in a stable enough condition to be moved out of intensive care.
I phoned Jake while I stood on an overpass looking at Lake Michigan. Calm seas, lover’s voice, I felt happy. The bus came while we were talking. I hung up, not wanting to share my private words with a bus full of strangers.
Once we got downtown, I flagged a cab home. Enough carbon-saving virtue. I called Lotty from the taxi. The driver, speaking into his own phone in a language I didn’t recognize, certainly was paying no attention to me, and very little to the traffic on Lake Shore Drive.
“Can I see Judy?” I asked Lotty.
“You can if you want,” Lotty said, “but she’s apparently in a rather ugly frame of mind.”
I said I wanted to see if Judy could remember anything about the attack.
“Helen Langston, the surgeon who treated her at Glenbrook, says Judy doesn’t remember it. Helen doesn’t think it’s trauma-induced amnesia. She thinks it’s because Judy had so much oxycodone in her system that she couldn’t process anything going on around her.”
“If I ask her about her ‘duck and cover’ remark, maybe it will trigger something,” I suggested.
“I’ll go with you,” Lotty said. “I haven’t been able to bring myself to visit her alone; I’m angry with her, for the wreck she’s made of her own life, and, really, for putting Kitty in death’s path, and there is no point in going into her hospital room and upbraiding her. Are you at home or in your office?”
“Heading home.” I’d have to face my office, to see what Homeland Security had done to it in the name of protecting America, but that could wait until morning.
“I’ll pick you up in half an hour.”
Lotty hung up before I could protest that I would drive. I’d had so many life-threatening adventures in the last week that I supposed riding with Lotty might seem tame. Lotty had a kind of “stand your ground” approach to other drivers: if she didn’t intimidate them first, they might force her from the road. One thing about letting Lotty drive, she’d give anyone tailing me a workout.