BACK IN MY OFFICE I had a message from Doug Kossel, the Palfry County sheriff. After my conversation with Kitty Binder, I expected the worst, that he had found Martin’s body in the cesspit behind the meth house.
“Warshawski!” He sounded unnecessarily energetic for the end of a workday. “You big-city gals know how to act. Your police buddy, what’s his name”—there was a pause while he wrestled with paper—“here it is, Downey. He called to talk to me about Schlafly, who definitely did not make a good scarecrow. When I told the Wengers—they farm that cornfield—what the body looked like, even Frank Wenger turned green around the gills. I’m not sure but what he’ll leave that little bit of corn where you found Ricky Schlafly go this year.”
He laughed so merrily that my eardrums vibrated. “Anyway, Downey told me you created a situation in Chicago, neutralized one bad boy and got two others arrested. What do you do on your day off?”
“Pitch short relief for the Cubs,” I said, halfheartedly entering into the spirit of the conversation. I regretted it when Kossel erupted in another ear-shattering laugh.
“Did your guys look at that pit behind the house?” I asked.
“Couldn’t find anyone who wanted to gear up and wade into it,” he said. “But we raked through it. No bodies, just a lot of empty ether cans and etcetera.”
And etcetera? Maybe that was an expression unique to Palfry County. “What does Lieutenant Downey reckon?” I asked. “Do you two think that Freddie Walker killed Schlafly?”
“Not likely. We hoped it could be a falling-out of thieves, but Walker was on his way back from Mexico at the time our ME says Schlafly was shot. Not that Walker wanted to tell us where he’d been, but when he saw it was that or a murder rap, he produced the manifest that showed him on a private plane leaving Juárez at four that same morning. Our ME says the deed was did by six A.M. at the latest, and likely earlier. Kind of hard to tell with the birds pecking out his pecker.”
I held the phone from my ear just in time to avoid another hearty guffaw. Maybe Kossel was a psychopath who had shot Ricky Schlafly himself and now was enjoying jokes about the dead man’s organs. Pecked his pecker, kayoed his kidneys, beaked his brains. Or the sheriff was merely one of those nerveless people who can fly bombing missions.
“Of course, it could have been one of Walker’s boys doing the deed on his behalf. Your lieutenant will look into that; could be the guy whose brains you beat out. Pity, in a way; can’t get a confession out of a man who can’t talk.”
I was tired of explaining how I’d come to knock “Bullet” Bultman down the stairs. Let Murray and the Palfry County sheriff imagine I’d carefully executed a move that got Bultman’s head to hit on the edge of a stair. Maybe it would make the next punk more hesitant to act when he saw me. Or the next punk would be so freaked he’d shoot me on sight.
I missed a couple of lines from Kossel, but heard his sign-off line: “We’ll be sending you a subpoena for the inquest, Warshawski, so don’t you go too far away.”
“I love you, too,” I said, but he’d already hung up.
I looked at my notes. Freddie Walker had been in Mexico; Metargon heiress Alison Breen was down there helping set up a computer lab. Mexico was a big country, but could they have met? Could she be a spoiled rich drug user? She wouldn’t be the first young person whose parents didn’t know she had a habit.
I called Jari Liu at Metargon. I started to tell him I’d met his boss earlier in the afternoon, but he already knew.
“Cordell told me to give you any help you need; we’re very anxious to locate young Martin.”
That made it easy: I wanted a photo, and I was sure they had a good head shot, given the way he’d quickly added my face to his database. Liu said it would be in my in box by the time I hung up.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“A crystal ball,” I said. “Someone who understands Martin Binder’s personality. Mr. Breen thinks he could be reconstructing your Princess Fitora code for the Chinese, or just for Microsoft or Apple.”
“Yeah, I know,” Liu said sourly. “He chewed my ass pretty hard for not telling him myself that Martin had vanished. It’s so commonplace for cowboy programmers to leave without warning that I didn’t think I needed to do anything more than report it to HR and my own department head. I’m supposed to have guessed if Martin was missing that there was a danger he was selling our secrets to the highest bidder.”
“You think that’s a real possibility?” I asked.
“Money didn’t seem important to Martin, but he might be motivated by revenge. Not against Metargon per se, we had a good rap, or I thought we did, but he might want to show the richer, cooler kids that he could grab the spotlight in ways that would be beyond them.”
“You think he could rebuild your code?”
“There’s a story about Mozart my old man told me, when he thought I could be another Yo-Yo Ma,” Liu said. “It was a big disappointment when I had a tin ear. Anyway, Mozart, the boy genius, is sitting in the Vatican chapel listening to a mass. The music is jealously guarded: only Vatican musicians get to see the score. Mozart hears it once, goes home, writes out the score.”
“Even if Martin has that kind of mind where he lays it all out in his head and sees it, Mr. Breen said it would be millions of lines of code,” I objected.
“We only let people work on a few aspects of a program to avoid the temptation to share it with a bigger world. But with someone like Martin, if he mastered the underlying architecture, he wouldn’t need the whole code to reconstruct a big piece of the program. That’s what Cordell is worried about, but nothing on any of our nerve endings suggests that a third party has seen the code.”
“You’d have heard?”
“High-end computing is like any high-stakes game. People are always spying on each other, trying to figure out or steal what the competition is doing. We don’t always hear everything, but especially after talking to Cordell this morning, we’re very much on the watch for it and nothing is bubbling up.”
I saw that I’d added some razor-edged teeth to my earlier cartoon of a rabbit. Bugs Bunny’s evil twin, ready to eviscerate someone’s viscera. “Mr. Breen says that Princess Fitora has defense applications.”
Liu sucked in a breath. “If the old man is going to talk out of school, he has a heck of a nerve—never mind, forgot what I was about to say.”
“To chew you out for dropping the ball on Martin’s disappearance,” I finished for him. “He told me his daughter is in Mexico; a drug dealer who’s connected to my inquiries was down there four days ago. Did you see any signs that Alison might be—”
“Drugs? Alison? No way. And don’t you dare suggest that to Cordell—you’d be in court so fast your body would be a mile behind your feet. What’s Martin’s connection to drugs?”
“I didn’t say he was connected to drugs; I said that there’s a dealer connected to my inquiry into him. No one is telling me anything, Mr. Liu; I have to ask whatever questions I can to get a handle on this investigation, even if they annoy you or Mr. Breen.”
“If you have any evidence that Martin is a drug user—”
“You’re sure that Alison Breen doesn’t do drugs, but after spending almost two years as Martin Binder’s supervisor, you don’t know whether he does? Something isn’t computing here.”
Liu paused, then said stiffly, “I’m sure Martin never came to work high, but he’s a very guarded young man. He could conceal a drug problem pretty easily.”
“You’re a bright computer wizard, Mr. Liu, but you’re also a skilled corporate ball player. I’m sure as soon as we’re done, you’ll be shooting an e-mail to Cordell Breen, suggesting he alert the FBI to Martin’s possible habit.”
I added a machine gun to my razor-toothed rabbit. “If it turns out you’ve slandered Martin, I won’t threaten to take you to court so fast your clothes will leave your body, but I might find another way of reminding you that everyone in this country has a right to privacy. And a right to be thought innocent until proven guilty. We may wake up tomorrow to find the Bill of Rights applies only to the one percent, but until that happens, Martin gets the same benefit of the doubt as Alison.”
“You’re right, of course,” Liu said quietly. “I’m sorry, but I’ve known Alison since she was twelve. I only met Martin two years ago. Of course I’m biased, more by my long relationship with her than by her family’s money.”
I sort of apologized—I didn’t trust his judgment about Alison any more than I did about Martin, but I couldn’t afford to cut off communication lines to Metargon. When he hung up, I clicked on my e-mail. Sure enough, Liu had sent me a head shot, in which Martin looked sober, even anxious. His face had matured but he hadn’t filled out much from the skinny kid at the science fair with his grandfather. Jari Liu had included a second, informal shot of Martin demonstrating something to his other team members. With his high cheekbones and dark curly hair, he looked exotic, like a Cossack, perhaps, certainly erotically appealing. Maybe Alison Breen had tucked him into her suitcase and carried him to Mexico City with her.
I printed out a dozen copies of both pictures. I’d start tomorrow at the commuter bus stop near Martin’s home, go to the Skokie Swift, see what else I could see.
I turned my attention back to Darraugh Graham’s assignment. I was in the middle of a complicated conversation with a uranium mine manager when Jeanine Susskind called on my other line. Martin Binder’s friend’s mother, I remembered, missing a couple of sentences from my Canadian contact.
I called Jeanine back as soon as I finished with the miner.
“We found that book that Martin gave Voss to return; you wanted to know the title—it was The Secret Diary of a Cold War Conscientious Objector: Arnold Zachny and the American View. We owed five dollars in fines on it and they tried to make me pay for the damage that Martin had done to the book. Never have a teenager, Ms. Warshawski.”
I could safely promise everyone that there was little likelihood of my taking on that particular challenge. When Jeanine hung up, I looked up the title. I could see why Voss had found the cover startling; it showed the Statue of Liberty, her mouth taped shut and a hammer and sickle plunged into her heart.
I dimly remembered the American View, one of the few national publications produced in Chicago. Like The Atlantic, it had been a monthly with a mildly liberal opinion page, publishing short fiction and essays on people or current events. My parents didn’t subscribe to magazines, but I used to read the View sometimes in the law school library when I was working on my JD.
The Chicago Public Library had a copy of The Secret Diary at their main branch. I was meeting Max and Lotty for dinner at the Pottawattamie Club downtown—Lotty had asked Max to see if any of his old refugee networks had any information on Martina Saginor—so it was easy to stop at the library on my way.
Since I found myself at the club before Max and Lotty, I sat in the reception area, thumbing through the book, looking for what had interested Martin in it. The Secret Diary wasn’t as much a biography of Arnold Zachny as a history of the View against the background of the Cold War. Zachny had been an early supporter of disarmament; he published a collection of letters from Japanese women on the damage that radioactive fallout had done to their husbands and sons caught in the Pacific when the U.S. exploded hydrogen bombs in the Marshall Islands.
As I flipped through the pages, a familiar name jumped out at me.
One of the most curious incidents in the history of the View was its publication of a letter from a woman named Gertrud Memler. Memler had been a high-ranking Nazi engineer brought to the United States in the great Russian-American talent grab at the end of the Second World War. She was a controversial figure: she was the highest-ranking woman employed by the Germans in their nuclear weapons work. In fact, although hard evidence is difficult to find, as a member of the Uranverein (Uranium Club), she was probably in charge of the reactor program near Innsbruck.
When Memler came to the States after the war, she was assigned to projects at the Nevada Proving Grounds under the aegis of the Nobel Laureate Benjamin Dzornen. She disappeared in 1953 and was never seen again. However, from time to time, she would write letters to learned journals or to newspapers. These letters were vehemently anti-nuclear in content. Her about-face, from Innsbruck overseer to anti-nuclear activist, was extraordinary.
The FBI tried unsuccessfully to trace her, since she was privy to U.S. nuclear secrets. She may have defected to the Soviet Union; one of their embassy attachés could have posted letters for her. A letter that Memler wrote to the View and the FBI’s response show their futile efforts to track her down.
May 1962
To Arnold Zachny
Editor
American View
Re: Edward Teller and The Danger of Fallout
Dr. Teller is widely known as the “Father of the Hydrogen Bomb.” In his recent essay in your magazine, he assures us, as a good father should, that his child poses no threat to the well-being of other children on this planet. He writes that radioactive fallout from nuclear tests is no more dangerous to our long-term health than being a few ounces overweight. The fear of radiation is irrational, Dr. Teller concludes, and has led Americans to the dangerous place of ending the thousands of tests of hydrogen and atom bombs that we have detonated on the ground, on the sea and in the air.
Like many parents whose children behave mischievously, Dr. Teller has either been too busy or too blind to see what damage his little darling is doing. Perhaps all the time he spends in Washington, fighting to continue nuclear testing, means he hasn’t had time to go to the Nevada Proving Grounds to see the impact of his child on human and animal life.
I, to my sorrow, spent some time in these proving grounds. This is what I saw: it was routine for the United States Army to expose its soldiers to bombs being detonated less than a mile away. They were given no protective gear, not even sunglasses, just told to put their hands over their ears and stand with their backs to the blast.
It was routine for the United States Navy to put pigs, sheep, and dogs, chained in cages, at Ground Zero of these tests. Animals at Ground Zero are obliterated. Those chained in cages further away come back to U.S. Navy labs with the skin ulcerated and peeling from their bodies.
The data on the health of humans, both soldiers and civilians, exposed to this much radiation is a secret jealously guarded by our government, but I saw the burns on their skin myself. If Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not give us enough data on the high (60 percent) probability of developing bone or blood cancers for survivors of an atomic bomb, one test at Nevada should have told us all we need to know about Dr. Teller’s baby’s tremendous destructive power.
The first time we slaughtered dogs should have been the last. They were guilty of no crime except their inexplicable love for humans, which let them follow us into cages where they were left to die in terrible fear. But we could not stop with one test, we continued to do many hundred others, with dogs, sheep, pigs, whose screams will follow me to my grave, as much as the screams of prisoners at the Uranverein weapons and reactor plant.
Civilians as far as 135 miles away have begun developing terrible cancers in numbers disproportionate to their population. We see this, but we continue to build bigger bombs, enough now to obliterate the entire human race many times over.
If I had produced a child this dangerous, I would not go around the world bragging about being its father.
Sincerely
Gertrud Memler, Ph.D., Physics
Telegram from: Cal Hooper
Special Agent in Charge
Washington
To: Agent Luke Erlichman
Chicago Office
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Luke: How in hell did a letter get published in a national magazine about animal testing at the Nevada Proving Grounds? And who the fuck is Gertrud Memler? Congress has received thousands of letters demanding hearings, or an end to using animals in nuclear tests and we’re catching heat. Even RFK is demanding to know who this Memler is and whether she’s a reliable source.
Find out soonest how this leak happened. The Boss is not happy.
Cal
July 28, 1962
Letter from:
Agent Luke Erlichman
Chicago Office
Federal Bureau of Investigation
To: Cal Hooper
Special Agent in Charge
Washington
Cal: Magazine produced letter and envelope for Gertrud Memler, return address in Ft. George, Utah. Dispatched agent Titheredge to find and silence her, but no record of a Gertrud Memler in any phone books, churches, etc. The return address was a local cemetery.
Looked up Memler in our files. An Austrian scientist by that name entered the country in 1946, was assigned to weapons and rocket development at Nevada because of WW II experience with German proto-atomic bomb work. Find nothing in her file after 1953. Was she civilian-relocated? Did she marry?
The Secret Diary included a long passage from Arnold Zachny’s diary, where he wrote about the day the FBI came in to seize his files and to order him never to print any letters he received from Memler. The passage ended with a photocopy of another telegram between FBI agents in Chicago and Washington.
August 2, 1962
Private letter from Cal Hooper
Washington, DC
Luke Erlichman
6937 S. South Shore Drive
Chicago
Cal, for your own good as well as mine, do your fucking damnedest to find Memler. From now on, set up a mail intercept for both American View and Zachny’s home correspondence. Can’t have a loose cannon publishing secret signals to Uncle Nicky* on our watch.
My librarian at the University of Chicago had identified Gertrud Memler as one of the women sitting around the pod in the old photo I’d found in Palfry. Memler worked with Martina Saginor and Benjamin Dzornen, both of whom were Jews. Then she’d become a Nazi, overseeing a weapons lab, and had ended her life in the United States, a deeply and skillfully hidden anti-nuclear activist. If she was still alive, she’d be at least a hundred, probably more, so it was a safe bet she’d made it to her grave without FBI detection.
If Martin was hunting for a connection between Dzornen and his great-grandmother, he would have tried to find Memler. Had he seen something at the Breen house that made him think he could find Memler where the FBI had failed?
I was so lost in thought that I gave a strangled cry when Max tapped me on the shoulder. Lotty was with him; we exchanged the usual greetings and went into the private dining room Max had reserved.
When I’d gone through the different scenarios I was imagining, Max groaned and clutched his head. “Victoria, you’re making me dizzy. Is Martin murdering drug dealers who got his mother in trouble? Is he avenging his great-grandmother for having her work stolen? Or is he selling secrets to the Chinese or the Israelis or perhaps Google? No wonder you can’t make any headway. You need to pick one path and follow it.”
“Yeah, if I could get a single reliable fact out of anyone I would,” I snapped. “I have two facts, call it three. After going to a barbecue at the home of Metargon’s owner, Martin announced that something didn’t add up. His high school physics teacher says he said that when either his answer, or the problem itself, seemed wrong. He stayed at work for few weeks after the barbecue, then he disappeared, giving a book on Gertrud Memler and the Cold War to a neighbor kid to take back to the library. The other fact is that his mother’s on the lam. She’s run from two drug houses and has also disappeared. Are the drugs and the Cold War connected? Are he and his mother connected?”
A waiter was hovering; Max interrupted me long enough to put in our dinner orders.
“My semi-fact is that Martin went to see Benjamin Dzornen’s two surviving legitimate children. To top it all off, this afternoon Kitty all but fired me. I can’t keep up an expensive search if she’s fired me, but I can’t leave Martin to hang out to dry, either. Just in case it’s drug dealers he’s messing with, not century-old missing scientists.”
I showed him and Lotty the passage about Gertrud Memler that I’d just been reading. “You said you might be able to work some of your old refugee networks. Is there any way you could track down the Memler woman?”
Max rolled his eyes. “When Lotty talked to me, I was thinking more of Martina in Vienna, seeing where she might have gone when the Innsbruck facility was shut down. None of my networks is better than the FBI, believe me.”
“Okay. Find out what happened to Martina. That might bring some comfort to Kitty, anyway.”
My phone rang as he started to ask for more details. I looked at the screen. “Kitty Binder,” I mouthed, and turned away from the table to take the call.
“Is this the detective?” she demanded, without preamble. “They’re stalking me again.”
“Who is, Ms. Binder?”
“The people who always do. I want you to come over.”
“I’m almost an hour away, Ms. Binder: it’s best if you dial 911.”
“Don’t you understand?” she screeched. “The police are the problem. You keep saying you want to help. I need your help now.” She hung up.
“Käthe is paranoid,” Lotty said when I repeated the conversation. “I keep telling you that. If she won’t call the police, you must do so yourself.”
“You know what the guy says in Catch-22: just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t following you. Someone killed Judy Binder’s housemate five days ago; if they think Judy’s gone back to her mother, then Kitty is in real trouble.”
“All the more reason to phone the police!” Lotty said.
“She thinks they’re part of the problem.” I got to my feet.
“The problem they’re part of is her paranoia,” Lotty cried. “I told you that earlier, this has been her song and dance since she arrived in this country, that the police or the FBI were stalking her.”
“Lotty, this is how I get to where you become furious with me. I can call the police, but I can’t leave her quaking in terror behind those dead bolts.”
Lotty’s eyes were filled with pain. “I do understand that, Victoria. But can’t you take five minutes to ask if there is a better way, an easier way, to solve the problem?”
My own face contorted in lines of misery, but I left the club. Half a dozen times on the road, I started to dial 911 and stopped. Kitty Binder was paranoid. There was nothing to be lost in calling in the pros, except any fragile confidence she might be feeling in me.