Maybe Cordell Breen was right and I wasn’t enough of a detective for a case this intellectual. “What’s next to the drawings? Could it be something else that he saw?”
She made a helpless gesture. “I studied everything near where Martin had been standing. There’s the original drawing Granddad made for the Metargon-I core, just a sketch of the idea, when he was sitting on some battlefield during the war. That’s what’s on the wall. There’s a letter from Stan Ulam, the mathematician, saying that Granddad’s proposal for memory registers was bold and revolutionary, but they were too far down the road at IAS to change designs, especially when it wasn’t clear that the Fermi surfaces could be calculated accurately.”
I definitely would not gain anything from Alison stepping me through the computer’s design: a Fermi surface already was more complicated than anything I could follow.
“A few weeks after your party, Martin went downstate to where his mother was living,” I said. “That was when they argued over these papers that have disappeared. Did he ever talk to you about her?”
“You mean, her being a drug addict? Yes, it weighed on him. It was why he didn’t think he should have children, in case they turned into crackheads. I couldn’t convince him that addiction wasn’t genetically determined.”
“He didn’t say anything about wanting to talk to his mother that night at your party?”
She shook her head. “He did say me not telling my parents about him and me was like him not telling his gran that he sometimes visits his mother. He didn’t tell his grandmother about us, either, although he said that was because she had gotten so strange, he just didn’t want to introduce me unless, well, you know, if we got really serious.”
I rubbed my gritty eyes. The coffee hadn’t helped; I was unbearably tired. “Yes, well, speaking of that, it’s going to be impossible to keep your parents from knowing you’re in town right now. Someone—this Ramona you mentioned—will have seen you leave your place in Mexico. Even if she doesn’t report that to your dad, they’ll put out an APB on you in Mexico City when they can’t find you. If you used a credit card to buy your ticket, you already left a trail. If Homeland Security is, in fact, watching this building, they’ll ID you from surveillance photos.”
Alison’s shoulders sagged in misery. Mr. Contreras went to put an arm around her but frowned at me. “Why get her all upset, cookie? She’s here, we got to figure out what to do with her.”
“She can’t stay here,” I fretted. “We’re too exposed, too vulnerable. Ditto for taking her down to my office.”
Mr. Contreras started to protest reflexively that he could look after Alison, but stopped himself mid-sentence. “I could if it was just ordinary punks, but not when it’s the government and her dad and all. Come on, doll, put on your thinking cap. You gotta have some kind of hideout.”
I gave him a tired smile. “Like Br’er Rabbit’s briar patch? Whatever you do, don’t throw me in there?”
The words conjured up an unexpected chain of associations. “I may know a place at that. Come on, Ms. Breen. Let’s put on some disguises.”
30
PLAYING DRESS-UP
YOU BOYS KNOW how to get to Union Station? You sure I don’t need to ride downtown with you?” Mr. Contreras said loudly.
“Come on, Grandpa, we’ve made this trip a million times.” That was Alison, who made a compact boy in jeans and a T-shirt. A backward baseball cap covered her glossy hair.
“I don’t know,” the old man fretted. “It’s late, there are perverts on the train. I should ride down with you.”
“You’ve got the dogs, Grandpa. No one’s gonna mess with us.” My cousin Boom-Boom’s old hockey jersey was a little heavy on a warm night, but it hid my breasts; away from the streetlights, with my own baseball cap, I could pass for the older grandson, who was nineteen now and a freshman at Northern Illinois.
Mr. Contreras clapped my shoulder in a hearty squeeze, hugged Alison, who squirmed away from him just as his own younger grandson might. He blundered around the station entrance with the dogs. This gave me a chance to see if any of the late-night riders who cursed him for not controlling his animals were keeping up with us. It was hard to be absolutely certain, but I was ninety-five percent sure we were clear.
I’d only sketched out the scene, but Alison and my neighbor had risen nobly to their roles. I fed my CTA pass through the machine and lolled at the bottom of the stairs, reading the notices. When I heard an outbound train approaching, I grabbed Alison’s arm and we sprinted up the stairs. The doors were closing as we jumped on board.