MY SLEEP WAS FILLED with unquiet dreams, with Freddie, Vire and Bullet chasing me through a cornfield filled with dead bodies, while Judy Binder played hide-and-seek behind the cornstalks. She was giggling, taunting me: You’ll never find me, you’ll never find my son.
I got up early again, but this time drove the dogs to the lake for a swim. When I’d showered and changed, Mr. Contreras offered to buy me breakfast at the Belmont Diner.
“I’d love to,” I said, “as long as we don’t talk about Murray or the abandoned Rottweiler.”
“Yeah, doll, but you know, that dog has to live a quiet life until she gets rid of her heartworm, which means I could—”
I cut him off ruthlessly. He managed to make it all the way through a plate of French toast without a word about the Rottweiler. It was only when I ordered a BLT to take along for my lunch that he brought her up again.
I brushed his forehead with my lips. “I’m on my way downtown. Later, my friend. Thanks for the breakfast.”
My first appointment was with my most important client, Darraugh Graham. I parked at my office and took the L into the Loop. It was the morning rush hour; all the seats were taken, so I leaned against a pole, my briefcase wedged between my feet. I pulled out my phone to check my messages, joining the other commuters in focusing on a world far from the one we were looking at.
I wondered if any of the other passengers were getting furious texts from police sergeants, demanding that they call at once. That was not only the first message on my phone, but the fifth, sixth and ninth. I knew it would be a stressful conversation, so best get it over with before Conrad Rawlings had a whole day to create a head of steam. As it was, he’d already built up plenty:
Had he or had he not told me not to go into that apartment on my own? He’d had to do major damage control with Ferret Downey, to assure him that if I’d killed Bullet, it had been a complete accident.
“Do not call me again for favors, Warshawski. I am fed up to my back teeth with your recklessness. The next time you want to go up against a West Side drug lord, take that weedy violin player you’re dating.”
“Understood, Sergeant. No more favors. Got it. Although Jake plays the bass, not a violin.”
“Violin, ukulele, what difference does it make. He’s still weedy, but you are a goddamn piece of work.” Conrad cut the connection.
There was something pleasing about knowing Conrad was jealous of Jake. I went back to my in box. A law firm I work for wanted an investigation into an imbalance in their receivables; a wine retailer wanted to know if merchandise was disappearing from deliveries before or after they reached their store.
Nadja Hahne, Martin Binder’s high school physics teacher, could see me today after three-thirty; she’d leave my name with the high school security department if I could make it. I e-mailed back an acceptance. The librarian at the University of Chicago had found names for all but one of the eight people in the photo of the metal egg on a tripod.
I called him at once. Even with the way cell phones flatten the emotions in the voice, I could tell Arthur Harriman was excited.
“Do you have the picture in front of you?” he asked.
“I’m standing on the L,” I said. “I can’t get at my computer.”
“Okay, try to visualize it. Remember the five guys who are standing? The one in the middle is Stefan Meyer, who was head of the IRF in the thirties, at least until the Nazis came to power. The lady in the middle, sitting directly in front of him, is a Norwegian physicist who did a lot of experiments with Meyer. Your Martina is on the Norwegian’s left, and Gertrud Memler, one of Martina’s students, is on the other side.
“But I’m sure the man you want is the one standing on Meyer’s left, Benjamin Dzornen. He won the Nobel Prize in 1934 for his work on electron states in transuranic elements, but the point is, he left Vienna in 1936, went to the University of Wisconsin, and then, in 1941, got involved in the Manhattan Project. After the war he spent the rest of his career here, at the University of Chicago.”
“And he obviously knew Martina Saginor, since they’re in the picture together,” I said.
“They all knew each other back then,” Harriman said. “But Dzornen supervised Martina’s thesis. She went to Göttingen the summer of 1929 to start work on her Ph.D. He was there at the same time and agreed to supervise her so she could finish her work back in Vienna.”
I saw with a jolt that I’d ridden past my L stop; I was heading west alongside the Eisenhower Expressway. Inattentional blindness, a growing affliction in the wired world. I thanked Harriman with more haste than grace and raced up the stairs to cross over to the inbound side.
I was almost ten minutes late to my meeting, which is inexcusable. Worse, I couldn’t resist entering Dzornen’s name into my search engine while I was supposed to be listening to questions about three candidates to head Darraugh’s South American engineering division. I promised to have a report back to the executive committee within five days, but when I left the meeting, I saw I’d written down “Martina Dzornen” instead of one candidate’s name. I had to go back to get the correct name from the internal security chief, who was not one of my fans.
By the time I returned to my office, my search engines had created reports on Benjamin Dzornen. He’d been born in Bratislava in 1896, attended school there, served in the Austrian Army during the First World War. After the war, he’d left Czechoslovakia for Berlin, where he came under the spell of Einstein, Max Planck and their circle.
In Berlin, Dzornen married a German woman, Ilse Rosenzweig, who came from an affluent cultured family. In the 1920s, he moved on to Vienna to work at the Institut für Radiumforschung. He and Ilse had three children, two daughters born in Vienna in the twenties, and a much younger son born after they arrived in the United States.
I scanned down the report: sure enough, he’d been in Göttingen in 1929, working with Heisenberg on matrix algebra and quantum mechanics. Among the students involved in the project was one M. Saginor, sex not specified.
If Dzornen and Martina had been lovers, then Kitty’s claim that her father dined with the King of Sweden was true. But how could I possibly find out? I imagined creeping into Kitty’s bedroom in the middle of the night for a DNA sample, then darting up to one of Dzornen’s descendants at a party to stick a Q-tip in her mouth. There had to be an easier way.
I sat back in my chair. The question wasn’t whether Dzornen was Kitty’s father. It was whether she believed he was. The family romance, that was what Freud called the belief that you’d been separated at birth from your real parents, who were special, perhaps royal. My Granny Warshawski believed she was descended from Queen Jadwiga of Poland, and that those genes made her superior to every other immigrant working on the killing floor of Chicago’s stockyards.
Kitty wouldn’t have kept her belief in her own royal lineage secret from her family. I could imagine her bragging to her husband, or her complaints to her daughter: My father won the Nobel Prize, you must get your weak genes from your father’s family.
If Martin was on the trail of something that didn’t add up, was it something he’d discovered about his mother? His grandmother? What if it had nothing to do with drugs or money, but rather that he feared he had symptoms of a genetic disorder? He’d have gone to his father’s family in Cleveland, but he’d also have tracked down the people he’d been raised to believe were his mother’s family.
Dzornen died in 1969; Ilse survived until 1989 without remarrying. I looked at where their kids had landed. The son had never married, but the two daughters had. They’d produced children and now grandchildren. I counted them: five grandchildren for Benjamin and Ilse, eleven great-grandchildren. One of Dzornen’s daughters had died, but that still left eighteen people who might know something about Martina Saginor and her daughter. They were far-flung—two were in South America, three in Europe, the others spread out across North America.
None of Dzornen’s three children had gone into science. The son, Julius, didn’t seem to have gone into anything. He was about seventy now, living in a coach house near the University of Chicago, without any assets to speak of. In contrast, the surviving daughter lived on the Gold Coast with a tidy portfolio of bonds and a winter place in Arizona.
The computer turned up an old photo of Ilse, Benjamin and the two daughters standing in front of a frame house in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1937, with Ilse visibly pregnant. I tried to remember the snapshot on Kitty Binder’s credenza: Had the girls looked anything like these?
Kitty said her family had all been killed in the war. She also said she had come to Chicago because she’d learned her parents were here. Had she said parents or father? Maybe she tried to find Dzornen, but he rebuffed her: he was an important player in the post-war American scientific world; he wouldn’t have wanted an inconvenient reminder of a protégée/lover who hadn’t survived the war. Or he wasn’t Kitty’s father and she was a nuisance.
Dzornen’s children might know something about Kitty, or Martina, or even Martin. Julius Dzornen’s coach house was on University Avenue, not far from where I’d been yesterday. It seemed odd to me, the more I thought about it: he didn’t have any visible means of support, he hadn’t strayed far from his parents’ house. It would be quite a detour to visit him before seeing Nadja Hahne at the high school, but I could just fit it in if I really hustled with my to-do list.
I did an hour’s worth of work with the wine retailer, agreeing to help him buy and place discreet surveillance cameras. I talked to the law firm about their receivables, then set up a phone date with a mining company in Saskatchewan. Two hundred dollars of billable hours duly entered in my spreadsheet.
On my way south, the odometer in my Mustang rolled over the hundred-thousand-mile marker. If I was ever going to afford a new car, I’d have to stop racing around the city like this. I suppose some detectives might bill the way lawyers do, for every six minutes spent even in thought on a particular client, but I didn’t think poor Kitty needed to pay for the time I spent driving, let alone my fracas at Freddie Walker’s drug house.
It was still early enough in the day that I made good time to Hyde Park. Julius’s coach house lay behind a square frame house on University Avenue. The top of an ash, its leaves already yellow, towered over the house from the back.
I wondered if I should cross the lawn to get to Julius, then noticed a flagstone path that bordered the fence. I followed it past the big house to a large yard that held a swing set and a badminton net, although the giant ash had sent out so many knobby roots that it would be a challenge to run down stray shots. The coach house stood behind the tree, its windows so covered with ivy that I couldn’t tell if any lights were on inside.
Shrubs along the fence were hung with bird feeders. The birds squawked off at my approach, reminding me unpleasantly of the crows around Derrick Schlafly.
I pounded on the door: there didn’t seem to be a knocker or a bell. Behind the door I could hear faint noises, a radio, perhaps. After three or four minutes of knocking, when I was beginning to wonder if Julius might have died, he suddenly opened the door. He was a short, stocky man with his mother’s high-domed forehead. He had a two-day growth and his eyes were red: too much beer, not enough sleep.
“Mr. Dzornen? My name is V. I. Warshawski. I’m a detective—”
He started to slam the door on me. “No cops without a warrant.”
I stuck my flashlight into the jamb and pushed against his weight. “I’m private, not with the cops.”
“Then there’s no way you can get a warrant, so fuck off. I don’t talk to detectives.”
“Is that the cornerstone of your faith?” I asked. “You made a bedrock decision fifty years ago to eschew all detectives and nothing has ever happened to make you change your mind?”
The door reopened so quickly that I lost my balance and fell into him. For a moment we did a tangled tango of arms, legs, briefcase and flashlight, until he backed up and I fell onto my right side. As I got back to my feet, I saw his face looked white and gluey, as if he had suddenly smeared himself with Crisco.
A worn tan jacket was hanging on a hook behind me. I draped it over his shoulders and led him into his sitting room, where I pushed him down into a frayed armchair. The room was heavy with stale cigarette smoke; an ashtray on the coffee table was overflowing with butts. Other than that, the room wasn’t really untidy, just in need of a good vacuuming. Not that I should judge.
What was surprising was that the walls were covered with photographs and maps of migratory birds. His own observations were written in a finicky script on strips laid across tracking maps. Several binocular cases stood on a ledge next to one of the tiny windows, a worn leather case with “Carl Zeiss” stamped on it and a bigger, more modern case from Nikon.
When Dzornen’s color started to return to normal, I asked, “What happened fifty years ago, Mr. Dzornen?”
“I dropped out of school.”
“Was that because of something a detective did?”
His mouth twisted in a sneer. “Because of something a detective didn’t do.”
I thought this over. “A crime was committed but a detective never solved it and you were framed so you had to quit school?”
“Interesting guess, Detective. Where were you fifty years ago?”
“Lying in my crib, probably. You want to tell me what the detective didn’t do fifty years ago?”
He gave a ferocious grin. “The detective never showed up. Unlike you. You’re incredibly late. What do you want?”
“Did this non-arriving detective have something to do with Kitty Binder?”
“Oh, Kitty.” He made a dismissive gesture. “You been talking to Herta?”
“Not yet,” I said. “Should I?”
“My sister’s always had her undies in a bundle over Kitty. Herta considers herself the guardian of Benjamin Dzornen’s memory. She has a shrine to him in that mausoleum she lives in. She’s always imagined Kitty wants to desecrate the shrine—Herta doesn’t understand Kitty is like her and Ilse, just one more fucked-up refugee from Hitler’s Europe.”
I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. “Does Herta think Kitty Binder wants to attack her?”
“She may worry that Kitty will attack her bank accounts. Did Kitty hire you to pry money out of Herta? Tell her from me that Herta clings tightly to her hoard, only opening her wallet on rare and special occasions.”
“Like when she bought you those?” I gestured toward the binoculars.
He spread his lips in a parody of a smile, showing teeth stained gray by cigarettes. “Not even then. The Zeiss was something my father left me. Social Security paid for the Nikon.”
“Kitty hired me to find Martin, her grandson,” I said. “I thought he might have called on you or your sister before he disappeared.”
“You keep thinking, Detective. It may win you the Nobel Prize, like it did for my old man. But believe me, all those thoughts, and all those prizes, they don’t save you from being really stupid in the end. I try not to think, just watch the birds. They keep you far away from human muck.”
“Very likely.” He was watching me warily behind the patina of world-weary chatter, thinking like mad, but about what? “Did Martin come to see you this summer?”
“Why would he do that?” Julius said.
“Because he saw something that didn’t make sense to him, and I wondered if it was connected to his family’s history, which is possibly also your history.”
“You wonder away, Detective, because, like they say on the TV cop shows, this conversation is over.” He leaned back in the armchair and put on an ostentatious pantomime of a man asleep.
I watched him for a bit, but he didn’t budge: eyes drooped shut, jaw slack, short loud snorts coming from his nose. When I got to my feet and started poking about among the drawers on an old desk, he was up in a flash. He was seventy-something, but he was strong, and he grabbed me hard enough to make me wince. I broke away from him, but didn’t retaliate: he was in the right—I didn’t have any business looking at his papers. And, as he’d said at the outset, I couldn’t produce a warrant.