JUDY HAD LEFT intensive care, but she was still in serious condition. The ward head warned Lotty and me that she was screaming a great deal, demanding morphine or oxycodone for her pain.
“It’s hard to know how to regulate her meds, because of her addiction. We’ve been weaning her from her morphine drip and switching to channel blockers, but it’s hard to tell if those are working since she keeps demanding more morphine. We’ve had to put her in restraints because she was scratching her arms open.”
“I was afraid of this.” Lotty frowned.
The ward head took us to Judy Binder’s room. She was attached to machines that monitored her fast-beating heart, administered fluids, checked her breathing. Her eyes were shut, but I didn’t think she was asleep. Her cloud of gray-streaked curls moved on the pillow as she twitched and groaned. Her face was red and puffy, her lips swollen.
“Is she allergic to something in her medications?” I asked.
Lotty and the ward head exchanged sour looks. “Opiate withdrawal,” the ward head said. “She’s got a very long rehabilitation in front of her. She isn’t going to make a good recovery from the bullet wound if she doesn’t take drug rehab seriously. Once we get her physically stable here, she’s got to go into a good residential program.”
Lotty went up to the bedside and put two fingers on Judy’s pulse. I could see the raw welts on Judy’s arms where she’d been clawing herself. Her eyes fluttered open at Lotty’s touch.
“Dr. Lotty! I knew I could count on you. I’m in terrible pain, I need morphine, or oxy. Vicodin will do if the dose is strong enough. I can’t sleep, my gut is on fire. Get me back my morphine pump.”
Lotty ignored her demand. “This is V. I. Warshawski, Judy. She saved your life.”
Judy barely looked at me. “Thanks, I guess, for saving me for this torture chamber. Dr. Lotty, I need my morphine, I need it now, you can’t come here and not help me.”
“I’m not your doctor here, Judy, I’m just a visitor. Ms. Warshawski needs to ask you—”
“That cunt, that bitch, she told you to say no, didn’t she?”
Judy’s voice rose. I was taken aback briefly, thinking she meant me, but then realized she was looking past us to the ward head.
“She’s one of those women from Belsen, isn’t she, pretending to be a nurse, but she’s really a Nazi and a torturer. You know, you’re a Holocaust survivor, don’t side with her. Get her fired, you’re a surgeon, they’ll do what you say. Fire her fucking mean ass and get me my pump.”
“Ms. Binder,” I said, “I’m sorry to intrude when you’re in pain and when you’re grieving.”
“Damn straight I’m in pain. And grief, too.”
“Because of your mother?” I asked.
“Anyone with a mother like that would grieve over it,” she snarled.
“You don’t remember seeing her get shot? I’m afraid she wasn’t as fortunate as you: she died of her wounds.”
“Batty Kitty has gone to God? I’m sure He’ll be thrilled. And her real father, he’ll be ecstatic when she shows up. Who the fuck are you and why can’t you mind your own business?”
I wanted to yank the IV lines out of her and throttle her, but I kept my voice even. “Duck and cover. The night you were shot, you said that duck and cover worked the best, even though she never believed in it. Was that your mother who never believed in it?”
“I’m in pain,” Judy screamed. “I’m in pain and you want to interrogate me. You’re not a fucking cop. I don’t have to tell you fucking anything.” She thrashed in her restraints so violently that she knocked the oxygen tube from her nose.
“Of course you don’t,” I said. “You were very smart to get under your son’s bed like that. ‘Duck and cover’ saved your life. Who told you it was a bad idea?”
For a moment, Judy stopped tugging at her restraints. I couldn’t read the expression in her eyes, the pupils were so dilated, but when she spoke, her voice was soft and dull.
“Did I really say that? Is that why you won’t give me my morphine?”
I tried to assure her that no one was punishing her, that I admired her creativity hiding from her attackers, but her restless twitching began again. She shied from the “duck and cover” topic, and couldn’t or wouldn’t say who had shot her and her mother.
“You were pretty amazing back in Palfry,” I said, “getting away from the guys who killed Ricky Schlafly. That took real guts.”
Judy focused on me for the first time, her dark eyes large circles in her emaciated face: the Palfry debacle was something real in her mind that momentarily made her forget her desperate need for narcotics. “Not guts, I was terrified,” she whispered. “They shot Bowser. I was asleep and suddenly Bowser started barking. Ricky yelled that he was tired of the damned dog barking at nothing, but I looked out the window and there was this black SUV. I yelled at Ricky to wake up, get his shotgun. These men got out of the SUV and shot out the camera. Then they cut a big hole in the security fence and broke down the back door.
“Bowser tried to jump them but they shot him, Ricky and I were sitting on the stairs watching, it was so terrible. Delilah, she was always a ’fraidy-cat, Ricky used to kick her for running away, or kick me for loving her, she took off when they shot Bowser.”
Delilah, that was the waif Mr. Contreras and I were supporting.
Judy started gasping for air. Lotty put the oxygen tube back in her nose. After a bit her breathing became less labored.
“Delilah is going to be okay,” I said. “I brought her back to Chicago; she’s in the hospital right now.”
Judy’s eyes opened, a startled expression that turned wary: Was I trustworthy, or was I using the dog to con her?
“How did you get away?” I asked.
“When Ricky saw them shoot Bowser he undid the locks in the front door and ran outside. They chased him into the cornfield and I got in their SUV and drove up to Chicago.”
“Very cool head,” I said. “So you drove up to Freddie Walker’s place in Austin. Where’d you leave the SUV?”
“I gave it to Freddie. It was a Lincoln, brand-new, but he said it was too hot to sell as a whole car, so he had his boys strip it for parts.”
That was why Freddie had let her crash, I guess, and why he let her get high on his product. A brand-new Navigator’s parts would bring a nice little chunk of change.
“The people who shot Bowser and Ricky, were there two of them?”
She nodded vigorously. “I didn’t know them; they weren’t any of the local meth heads who Ricky sometimes fought with. This is too hard, remembering all that, I’m in pain, I’m giving you shit for nothing. At least Freddie gave me oxy for the SUV.”
“Yeah, you’re in a hard place,” I said, putting as much sympathy as I could into my voice. “I went back to Palfry and found the old dresser that Ricky tossed into the meth pit. I found the bank account that Benjamin Dzornen set up for your mother.”
“Those Dzornen shitheads? Are you working for them? That goddamn bitch Herta stole my money. Her daddy wanted me to go to college but she took that money and gave it to her children. If you’re working for her you can fuck yourself and her in the bargain.”
“I’m not working for the Dzornens. The last time I tried to talk to Herta Dzornen, she threw me out because I called her out for disrespecting your mother’s family.”
I spoke loudly and slowly. Judy eyed me warily.
“How did Martin find out about the money?” I asked. “Did you tell him, or was it your mother?”
“Oh, no, you don’t. Meds, meds, meds, meds,” Judy chanted. “You don’t get something for nothing. Get me some oxy, get me morph, and I’ll get you answers.”
Lotty and I exchanged looks and head shakes, which Judy saw.
“Yeah, you two bitches, you think God left you in charge of the planet, but He didn’t.”
“Ms. Binder,” I tried one last time, “your son came to visit you down in Palfry a few weeks ago. You argued over some documents. I know you had the bank passbook, the photo of Martina in the lab with Dzornen and Gertrud Memler. Wasn’t there also some document about the work Martina was doing at Innsbruck? You took those when you came to Martin’s bar mitzvah seven years ago—”
“It was my heritage,” Judy yelled. “Kitty hated Martina, she hated her science, I was the person who kept her name alive. I named my child after her to keep her memory green. Taking those papers was not stealing; it was preserving!”
Judy “preserved,” Homeland Security “confiscated.” All these pretty names for theft. You hear more euphemisms for lying, cheating, even pedophilia, on the news in a week than you hear truth in a year.
I changed the subject. “Martin used to visit you without Kitty’s knowing back when he was in high school.”
Judy didn’t say anything, but her mouth twitched in a sly smile.
“Martin saw the picture of Martina in her Vienna lab when he was younger,” I persisted, “but something happened that made him come down to Palfry to get the picture and the other papers you’d, uh, preserved after his bar mitzvah. What made him want them?”
“It’s your story, you tell me.” Judy flounced on the pillows, at least as much as she could with her arms in restraints.
“He argued with you over the papers. He tried to take them, you tried to grab them back, some of them fell into the meth pit where you let them lie. That was when you realized that these papers had more than sentimental value. And then you and Ricky tried selling them online. You thought you had Nazi nuclear secrets, always a popular item. Someone saw the auction and came to collect the papers.”
“It wasn’t me,” she said quickly. “Just Ricky. He saw Martin arguing with me and came down to see what was going on. I told him they were my granny’s heritage, she died in the Holocaust, but Ricky didn’t have any respect. He even sold his own grandmother’s drawer handles, like he thought they were really gold when they were just polished brass. I never would have sold my own granny—”
“Of course not,” I said soothingly. “Who were the buyers? Did Ricky ever actually get any money, or did they just drive up in their Lincoln Navigator and try to collect the papers at gunpoint?”
“You’re so smart, you know everything, you should know that, too.” She began weeping. “I’m in pain, you won’t leave me alone, you won’t help me. I’m supposed to do all the work around here, my mother’s dead, my daddy’s dead, the Dzornens stole my money, and all you want to do is talk, talk, talk. Go away, I hate you, I hate you!”
Lotty tried to put in a few questions of her own, including what Judy wanted us to do with Kitty’s body, but Judy began screaming loudly for meds. “Put old batty Katty in the ground, I don’t care, just get the fuck out of here if you won’t help me.”
I looked at her thin, tormented face, her mouth one large pain-filled gash in her head. She’d worn me out. I looked at Lotty and jerked my head toward the door.
Lotty stayed in the room a bit longer. She came out a few minutes later, looking grim. We didn’t talk on the way back to the parking lot. As I strapped myself into the Audi’s passenger seat, Lotty said she wanted to go to Evanston, meaning to Max’s house.
For once, Lotty drove at a normal pace, didn’t weave around slow-moving cars on the clogged streets, didn’t race the lights as they turned red. We got to Max’s around seven-thirty. His lovely old home, where he and Térèz, his long-dead wife, had raised their two children, is across the road from Lake Michigan. While Lotty filled him in on our stressful meeting with Judy, I wandered over to the lake.
The sun had set; there were a few families out on the private beach, but no one could really see me. I took off my clothes and folded them on a bench. The water was still warm from our long hot summer. I waded out and let it envelop my naked body. The lake seemed to fold arms of love around me. Jake’s long fingers caressing me, yes, but I thought more of my mother, whose love for me had been both fierce and tender.
Kitty and Judy Binder never had that bond. The invective Judy spewed had been her withdrawal speaking, but a painful wound underlay it. Kitty herself had drunk a toxic mix of worry, anger, loss—her real father, the builder, whoever that was, dead in the war; her birth father refused to acknowledge her; her mother cared more for protons than for Kitty; the grandmother who raised her was murdered in the Holocaust. There’d been precious little love for Kitty to pass on to her own daughter.
I swam to shore and fumbled my way in the darkness to the bench where I’d left my clothes. I found a towel on top of them. Max, or Lotty, had noticed I was swimming.
I dried off and joined them in Max’s rose garden, where he had set out cold roast duck and salads. He and I drank one of his bottles of Echezeaux. We talked of Jake’s West Coast tour and other musical matters.
It was only as Lotty and I were helping him clear the table that I went back to our visit to Judy. “It was my question about ‘duck and cover’ that got through to her. It frightened her. Why?”
“Do you think so?” Lotty said. “All I remember is her cursing me.”
“She was quiet for an instant, and then wondered if I was punishing her because she’d mentioned it. What’s so important about that?”
“It was the slogan of the Civil Defense movies in the fifties,” Max said. “Térèz and I were furious when we saw them. They had a turtle who laughed and was very jolly, telling children if they crawled under their desks, they would be as safe from fire falling from the sky as a turtle in his shell. Meaning, not safe at all.”
I shook my head, baffled. “I know about the movies, although they’d stopped using them by the time I was in school. What I don’t understand is why Judy thought she was being punished for saying it.”
“That isn’t what Judy said,” Lotty said. “She was laughing because ‘duck and cover’ had worked for her, despite someone—probably Kitty—telling her it was nonsense. Kitty would have ordered Judy not to repeat any of her views on American defense policy at school. You didn’t spend time in Nazi Austria without learning to keep very quiet if you opposed government policies. Not to mention the intense anti-Communist hysteria here during the fifties. If you opposed nuclear weapons you were labeled a Red or Red sympathizer.”
I pictured Judy as a little girl, her mother warning her not to repeat any of the family’s subversive opinions in public, warning her so sternly that in her adult, drug-eaten brain, she thought some terrible punishment was meted out for trumpeting “duck and cover” as a survival strategy.
“It’s as good an explanation as any,” I said. “It’s just—I don’t know—her reaction made me expect something deeper. Maybe it’s because of Homeland Security being on my tail, or Metargon thinking that Martin has absconded with their version of the Stuxnet virus. Is this story about family secrets or nuclear secrets?”
“It could be both,” Max said. “His great-grandmother died when Benjamin Dzornen could have saved her. Edward Breen brought Martina’s Nazi student to the States to do rocket and weapons work. Those connect Martin’s family to nuclear secrets.”
I took a handful of silverware from Lotty to dry. “I feel like I’m in the middle of that old Dylan song: Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Warshawski-Jones?”
Physics Today
July 1985
Not since the days of “Duck and Cover” have we seen so much time, money and energy spent on something as futile as President Reagan’s “Star Wars” plan. The Great Communicator knows that money talks: 500 million in immediate cash has gone to the top ten defense contractors to spread across the United States. This doesn’t include some hundred billion in multi-year appropriations for space lasers, secure ground communications, and many other expensive fantasies. I was glad to see Edward Breen’s Metargon company in the top ten: Mr. Breen and I are old collaborators, and I know he will do whatever it takes to make his contractual obligations come true.
Despite the beautiful graphics in your June issue, this initiative is more an exercise in expensive science fiction than in achievable physics and engineering. So far, the only tests of laser weapons in destroying incoming targets have worked within a margin of error for stochastic excursions only, but notwithstanding this, appropriations are happily escalating.
The program is destabilizing, both for our delicate relations with our European allies and with the Soviet Union, thus leading us closer to the preemptive first strikes so dear to defense hawks.
It has only been a short two years since we got to see a leaked Pentagon report, claiming that the U.S. could survive a “protracted,” i.e., five-year-long, nuclear war. Defense Secretary Weinberger’s undersecretary for Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces has said that if the United States had a good civil defense policy, we’d be back to normal within five years of total nuclear war.
Last year on the anniversary of Hiroshima, the United States Energy Secretary went to the Nevada Proving Grounds where he witnessed his first thermonuclear test. He said it was “exciting,” and that he remained committed to a winnable nuclear war.
I had the dubious privilege of spending time at the nuclear weapons proving grounds in Nevada. The ground water there is still undrinkable, the cattle who stray onto the land to graze suffer terrible deformities, and towns a hundred miles away suffer from rare cancers even to this day.
Star Wars apologists have no idea what would happen if we started detonating our weapons on human populations, but the Roman historian Tacitus must surely have seen their vision when he wrote, “They ravage, they slaughter, and call it ‘empire.’ They create a desert and call it ‘peace.’”
Sincerely
Gertrud Memler, Ph.D., Physics, University of Vienna
July 2, 1985
To: All Field Agents
From: Barney Montoya, Senior Agent in Charge
Locate Gertrud Memler. This search has highest priority. She is an embarrassment to the President of the United States and it is a black mark on our Bureau that we have failed to find her during the last twenty-five years.
Our file on her shows she was a Nazi sympathizer or supporter brought into the U.S. in 1946 to help build weapons & rockets, vanished from Nevada 1955. She has a deep cover, surfaces briefly with letters or articles on weapons, but always uses false return addresses.
Stressed with Physics Today urgentest that they not print further letters from her without Bureau approval, but editor uncooperative. Resisted search of premises, forced us to produce Federal search warrant. Have put watch on all incoming/outgoing mail from Physics Today, but Memler seldom strikes the same publication twice.
Memler moved seamlessly from Nazi collaborator to Communist supporter. She has access to classified documents. Attached is last known photo, with our forensic specialists’ work-up on how she might look today, at age 73. Advise all immigration staff to look at passports; if she’s living outside the country she’s probably traveling under a different name.