ALISON WENT TO see her mother and came back with a disturbing picture of her father, one, though, that bore out the reading of his character I’d given Darraugh.
“He seems to be insane, Vic. I mean, literally. He’s marching up and down the halls at home quoting from King Lear, about me, the ungrateful daughter, and threatening revenge on me or any shareholders who challenge him. Jari Liu told me my dad is giving orders that no one can follow. He wants Jari to find a hitman to kill Martin, and then he says he’ll do it himself if no one else has the balls.”
That was so frightening that she agreed to go with me to the state’s attorney. The SA was still reluctant to act, but when the Skokie police found Breen and Durdon creeping up on the Binder house with a full arsenal, the two men were finally arrested on attempted murder charges and weapons violations.
The legal process seemed likely to make my ex-husband, whose firm represented Breen, even richer than he already was. The only positive out of it was that Breen’s wife decided she’d had enough; Constance wasn’t going to stand by her man. She rented studio space not far from Alison’s apartment and began painting seriously again. How well that would work was anyone’s guess, since she still seemed to find answers to many of life’s questions in a Sancerre bottle.
The other plus, one that delighted Max and Lotty as much as it did me, was Martin’s acceptance at Caltech. When he decided to apply, Max and Darraugh both worked their networks to get the college to consider him.
Like Alison, Martin dropped by my apartment and office a number of times in the weeks after we returned from Vienna. We had a lot of conversations about his life, his family history, his legacy from Martina. Should he go to Caltech, or find a job with a computer start-up company?
“If you want to become an Internet billionaire, you have the skills and the smarts to turn computer apps into money,” I said to him. “But if you want to follow Martina, then you should work with the people who can help you understand her work. That patent, that was a throwaway idea for her, don’t you think? Her real passion was for those things you say she wrote down, supersymmetry, how to understand dark matter, all those places where light bends and mortals like me drop our jaws in amazement.”
The January day was cold and bright when Martin stopped by my office to tell me Caltech was letting him start in the middle of the year. He was driving the Subaru out to Pasadena, but he traveled light: his modest wardrobe, his computers, his poster of Feynman and his set of Feynman’s Lectures on Physics.
“You’ve been great, Vic, really great. I know my grandmother hired you—I found your contract when I was packing up her things to put the house on the market. I can’t pay your bill right now, and even if I could it wouldn’t come close to what I owe you for finding Martina’s patent and coming to Tinney to save me and all those things. But if the book makes any money—”
“Stop,” I said. “If the book makes any money you’ll do something in Martina’s memory. Anyway, Dr. Herschel is taking care of my professional fee.”
We’d hired Arthur Harriman, the young German-speaking librarian at the University of Chicago, to translate Martina’s journals. They seemed interesting enough that the Gaudy Press had given Harriman and Martin a contract to write a memoir, threading her story together with the history of nuclear weapons.
One afternoon, I went with Martin to the Special Collections room at the University of Chicago Library. We returned the second page of Ada Byron’s letter to Benjamin Dzornen, which Martin had lifted back in August. We talked to the librarian, Rachel Turley, about the BREENIAC sketch, which I’d sent her. Alison came with us: we had a kind of formal ceremony, in which Alison relinquished any claim to the sketch on Metargon’s part and Ms. Turley thanked us for the bequest, and said she would overlook Martin’s removing a library document.
“Anyway, thank you, Vic,” Martin said the afternoon he stopped at my office. “I’m going to head west now. I’m spending the night in Tinney. Dorothy’s forgiven me for all that mess back in September. She knows it wasn’t my fault or yours, so I’m stopping there on my way to California. Will you visit my mother sometimes? I mean, not take her on, she’s not easy to be with, but just so she’s not completely on her own?”
I promised.
“And Alison. She’s kind of in a difficult place right now. Hard to believe a billionaire could be in a difficult place, but, you know, her father’s been arrested, her mother is still drinking, and she’s kind of on her own. Can you let her know you haven’t forgotten her?”
I promised him that as well. He and Alison had decided that their lives were on such separate tracks these days that a romantic relationship wasn’t possible, but they were remaining friends, as their generation was able to do.
I sympathized with Kitty, angry with a mother whose mind searched the outer reaches of time and space but had little room to spare for a human daughter. Perhaps Martin, inheriting his great-grandmother’s powerful gifts, would forge a life that held more balance.
I waved good-bye to Martin. At the end of the evening, I drove over to Lotty’s apartment. Angel, the doorman, warned me that she had an early surgery call in the morning.
“I have a package for her,” I said, “Something I know she’ll want to see.”
While the librarian, Rachel Turley, had been meeting with Alison and Martin, I had requested a file from the Dzornen papers. I’d performed a little sleight of hand at the photocopy machine. I was preserving, I was confiscating, I was restoring.
When I got off the elevator at her floor, Lotty was waiting for me in her red dragon dressing gown, her face anxious, wondering what new crisis I was bringing to her.
I handed her the packet. When she opened it and saw the letter from her grandfather to Dzornen, written in pencil on the title page of the Radetzkymarsch, she stared at it for a long moment. “Oh, Vic, oh, daughter of my heart. For this—oh, thank you.”