Jeanine looked back into the living room at her husband. This time it was he who gave his head a minatory shake.
“We don’t want you bothering Toby,” Zachary said flatly. “We’ll call him and let you know what he says.”
Like Jari Liu. What was it about my face that made people feel I couldn’t talk to their staff or their children?
“I can’t promise not to talk to your son. I have to find someone who knows what was on Martin’s mind those last weeks he was home. Even if Toby doesn’t know, he could give me names of some of the other people they both know.”
“Toby’s a minor,” Zachary said. “It’s against the law for you to talk to him without our consent.”
“I’m not a cop, Mr. Susskind, I don’t have powers to arrest or try anyone, so that particular law doesn’t apply to me.”
Jeanine murmured an apology as she escorted me to the door.
“I’m used to it in my work,” I said. “If the book Martin handed to Voss turns up, will you call me and let me know the title?”
Jeanine promised. I could see her thinking that if she found the book it would make up for her husband’s brusqueness.
8
DINNER WITH THE KING OF SWEDEN
IT WAS PAST NINE when I left the Susskinds’, but I drove down to Lotty’s place anyway. We’d spoken briefly when she got home from the clinic. She hadn’t heard anything new from Judy Binder, but she wanted to know what I’d managed to learn.
“Is the Binder house still dripping in lace?” Lotty asked when we were sitting on the balcony overlooking Lake Michigan.
I’d found the lace oppressive myself but something in Lotty’s voice made me perversely want to defend Kitty Binder. “It’s beautiful work. She told me her grandmother taught her.”
“Yes, Käthe’s grandmother was a skilled seamstress. Embroidery, lace, all those things, besides making dresses and drapes and mending my grandfather’s socks. I used to look down on her, attitudes I picked up from my grandmother, I’m afraid, although of course every woman of my Oma’s generation could embroider and even knit. When we all had to survive as best we could in the ghetto, Frau Saginor’s skills were in much higher demand than my grandmother’s gift as a hostess.” Lotty’s voice was tinged with bitterness.
“I was maladroit with Ms. Binder about her family. She had a snapshot of herself with her two sisters—”
“She told you she had sisters?” Lotty interrupted. “She was like me: an only child.”
I felt a lurch of uncertainty. “They were all in bathing suits,” I insisted. “Her parents and the three girls.”
“What did they look like, these soi-disant parents?” Lotty demanded.
“I didn’t get that close a look. Plump, jolly. The man had dark hair that was thinning in the middle, the woman, hard to say, she had a big straw hat on.”
“I knew Käthe’s mother. I can remember the fights at Käthe’s home because her mother never remembered to come home in time for dinner. Food didn’t interest Fräulein Martina—Käthe’s mother. She was thin, with an angular, intense face. Anyway, Käthe was like me in another respect. Neither of us had a father on the premises.
“Käthe and I used to have stupid quarrels about whose papa was better. Käthe hated that I at least knew my father, could visit him when my mother chose to live in the tiny flat he shared with his parents and his sisters. Käthe retaliated by making up fantastic stories about her own father.”
Lotty gave a harsh laugh. “We both knew my papa was a street musician, so hers had to be something grand. Käthe used to bore me to tears with her boasts about how he had met Albert Einstein, how he ate dinner with the King of Sweden. Who is this big shot? I would ask, but she couldn’t even put a name to him! One morning I got so sick of hearing about him that I slapped her, and then my Oma made me apologize. I sympathize with the sentiment, Lottchen, but not the method of expression, she told me.”
“Dinner with the King of Sweden, friends with Einstein—that sounds as though her father, or the man she thought was her father, won the Nobel Prize,” I said.
“Yes, my dear, it didn’t take Einstein himself for me to figure that out,” Lotty said dryly. “My point is, Käthe didn’t have sisters. She has a snapshot of herself as a child with two other girls and their happy parents, so she’s made up a story about that, just as she used to make up stories about a scientist. Now she believes it’s true.”
“You’re sure of this?” I said. “I know you don’t like her—”
“That wouldn’t cause me to make up my own fairy tales about her!” Lotty snapped. “Her mother taught science in the girls’ technical high school in Vienna, that’s probably why Käthe’s fantasy father was a scientist. I think her mother did research at the Radium Institute there. Maybe Käthe had a crush on one of the masters, or perhaps on someone who visited Fräulein Saginor from the Institute.”
I frowned. “Ms. Binder told me that her father was a builder. She said she didn’t want her grandson going off doing theoretical work because it only leads to trouble. Which story is correct? The Nobel laureate or the builder?”
Lotty made a helpless gesture with her hands. “We were so young when we left Vienna, and the trauma of it all—I can’t begin to tell you what her real history might have been. The family she lived with in England could have been builders—I don’t know anything about them.”
“She said her family had all been killed,” I said. “But she also said she came to Chicago after the war because someone in Vienna told her that her parents were alive and in Chicago. The whole story is so confusing I can’t make head or tail of it, but one thing does seem clear: Kitty’s grandson has disappeared. Also she’s afraid of the police. I’m going to have to go to them, but it will be against her wishes.”
“Oh, this constant harping on the police!” Lotty exclaimed. “Käthe always has to cloak what she’s doing in drama and mystery. It’s the same as pretending her father won the Nobel Prize: she’s so important that the FBI pays attention to her comings and goings. It’s not surprising that Judy went off the rails, living in that madhouse. How Len stood it all those years I can’t fathom.”
“According to the neighbors, the police came to the Binders’ quite a bit during Judy’s adolescence,” I said. “Ms. Binder has probably had enough of their involvement with her family.”
“Yes, but this has been the bee in her bonnet since she first arrived in Chicago. I wasn’t ever to talk to the police about her, because that could get her killed. I put it down at first to survivor paranoia: as you know, I have my own allergies to people in uniforms. Once you’ve seen police beat your own grandfather—never mind that. What’s frustrating about Käthe is that she’d rather not take the trouble to differentiate between the past and the present. Between real threats and imagined ones.”
Lotty was breathing hard. I waited, watching the running lights of the boats on the inky sea beyond. Lotty poured herself another cup of coffee. I’d reluctantly declined a cup of her rich Viennese coffee, such a contrast to the Susskinds’ tepid brew: caffeine is starting to interrupt my sleep at night, but it never seems to bother Lotty.
“What are you going to do?” Lotty asked at last.
“Find the one friend Martin seems to have had in high school. I met his parents tonight; they let drop that their son is in Rochester, so I ought to be able to track down what college he’s attending. I’ll also try to locate some of Judy Binder’s associates. Do you know anyone besides yourself she might have turned to when she was so frightened yesterday morning?”
“I don’t know her well enough for that,” Lotty said. “I’m the person she comes to when she’s in trouble, which started when she was in her teens. I was astonished when she appeared at my clinic the first time, but after that, it became chronic—she had STDs, she was pregnant, she turned up one evening in the middle of a terrifyingly bad drug reac
tion. She landed in a locked ward for a month that time.
“After that, I didn’t see her for years, really, until the day she showed up pregnant with Martin. I thought then she’d turned her life around: she stayed clean throughout the pregnancy and for four or five months after. It didn’t last, though.”
“Do you know who the father was? Would she have stayed in touch with him?”
Lotty lifted her arms in a helpless gesture. “I was her doctor, not her confidante. Besides, Judy slept around so much that she probably didn’t know which particular man was responsible for the pregnancy. The miracle to me is that Martin has turned out to have a brilliant mind. If a drug addict was the responsible, or rather, the irresponsible man, the risk of brain damage was high.”
“Yep,” I said. “Kid got perfect math scores on his SATs. Not too much brain damage there, just a lot of psychic damage from living with your old friend.”
“Victoria, please. You’re hurting me in a sore point.” She hesitated, twisting her coffee cup in her fingers. “Judy asked if I would adopt Martin when she realized she couldn’t look after him. I told her I’d help her find a good family for him, but I had an active surgical practice; if I’d taken him, a nanny would have raised him.”
I reached across the metal table to squeeze her hand, but she pulled it away.
“Don’t tell me I did the right thing. A nanny would have been better than Käthe, but before I could do anything, Judy had given the baby to her parents.”
In the dim light coming from the living room I saw her mouth twist in a bitter line. “She felt I betrayed her: I’ve only seen her twice since that day. She and I both appeared at Martin’s bar mitzvah, and again at Len’s funeral. She didn’t look well, either time. She must be around your age, but she looked worn and old enough to be your mother. At Len’s funeral, she said she was going to live on a farm, to see if life in the country would help her get clean and sober. I wanted to believe her. Of course I was deluding myself, the way one does when confronting someone whom you feel you’ve let down. You hope their problems will solve themselves without you. I hope she hasn’t dragged her son into her unhealthy world.”
“I don’t think so. He’s twenty—if he’d been going down that road someone would have seen signs by now.”
I told Lotty what Martin had said to Kitty about uncovering an arithmetic error, and my speculation about whether Martin thought his mother had been stealing from him.
“I’m thinking he rode his bike down to Palfry to confront her. But why did he and Judy both disappear? I don’t think he was with her when she screamed at you for help.”
“What can you do?” Lotty asked.
“I have someone in the public defender’s office tracing any associates of the man whose body I discovered. Martin disassembled his computers, so there’s no way to hack into them to find a trail there, but if I can get a working e-mail address I may be able to find out where he’s been logging in from. And then, I guess I’ll see if I can find out whether there’s any possibility that Kitty Binder’s parents were here right after the war. Martin probably heard tales about them when he was growing up—he might have tried to track them down. What was Kitty’s birth name?”
“Saginor,” Lotty said. “But remember, that was her mother: we don’t know her father.”
“It’s easy to get a list of Nobel laureates,” I said. “Someone who won the prize between 1920 and 1939, that should fit the bill. Unless her father was a builder. Perhaps he was a builder who dined with the King of Sweden, though: he wasn’t a Nobel laureate, but simply the king’s carpenter.”
Lotty laughed at that, but her face remained worried as she ushered me through her apartment to the elevator.
As I drove home, I remembered, a bit belatedly, that I’d promised Kitty Binder I’d keep her affairs confidential. I also remembered vowing not to let other people put their problems into the center of my stage. One more day, I vowed: one more day on the Binder-Saginor mystery and then I’d turn my back on them.
It was close to eleven when I got home, but I stayed up another hour to talk to Jake Thibaut, the bass player I’ve been seeing for the last few years. One of the chamber groups he belongs to was on tour along the West Coast. They had started in Alaska and were working their way south to San Diego. They’d made it as far as Victoria on Vancouver Island.
His absence made my schedule easier in some ways, but it also meant I was lonely at the end of a long day. I waited up until his concert had ended, so we could exchange news of the day. His had definitely been more fun than mine: the concert, held in a refurbished church, had been a major success. Tomorrow, on their day off, a friend was taking them out deep-sea fishing.
“If I catch a salmon I’ll send it home to you.”
“I’ll prop it up at the dining room table and talk to it over dinner; that will make us both forget we miss you.”
I casually mentioned the dog I’d rescued from a meth house, and he groaned. “No more dogs, V.I., please. Peppy’s mellow, but I can only just tolerate Mitch; a third dog and we’re going to do some serious talking.”
“A third dog and I’ll be in a witness relocation program,” I assured him. “Don’t you care that I was risking life and limb in a meth house?”
“Victoria Iphigenia, what can I do about that? If I told you to steer clear of them you’d do your cactus imitation. Anyway, I’m three thousand miles away. Even if I were right next to you, I know you’re the person on our team who takes down meth dealers, not me. I’d be worrying about my fingers and you’d have to protect both of us.”
I had to laugh. I abandoned the effort to extract worried cluckings from him and moved on to Kitty Binder and her missing family.
That did get his attention. “You say Lotty told you this Kitty’s birth name was Saginor? Was she related to a Viennese musician named Elsa Saginor?”
“I don’t know.” I was surprised. “Who is that?”
“She was one of the Terezín musicians. She played flute, but she composed, also; some of her music was in the scores from the camp they discovered several years ago. We perform it from time to time. It’s rather intricate, fugal but in a serialist style. The fun thing, if it isn’t sacrilegious to talk about having fun with death camp music, is to lay about ten tracks of the recording over each other and then play live against the backing. It’s exhilarating to concentrate so hard.”
I wondered if mentioning a musical aunt would make Kitty Binder unbend with me, or if she would purse her lips still further and utter some pithy condemnation of people who had their mouths on their flutes instead of their eyes on the prize.
Before we hung up, Jake said, “Don’t get in over your head, V.I. I miss you. I’d hate like hell to spend the rest of my life missing you instead of just the next three weeks.”
9
SHADOW OF THE THIN MAN
IN MY DREAMS, Jake was playing his bass for the King of Sweden, who said he would perish in the death camps if he didn’t build a new kitchen for him by morning. “Keep your head in the clouds,” the king cried, “or I will cut it off.”
I spent a strenuous night, fighting the king, hiding Jake’s bass, getting lost in the clouds. When I got up in the morning, I was almost as tired as when I’d gone to bed. I went for a long run, on my own, without the dogs, to clean out my head.
Jake’s response to my poor rescued Rottweiler had rankled a bit, but it also hit home. It was a strain to look after two big dogs, even with Mr. Contreras’s help; I didn’t often have enough time to do the meditative running I enjoy. A third dog would make it impossible.
After four miles, I was moving in an easy rhythm that made me want to keep going all the way to the Indiana border. It was hard to turn around and face a day in a chair, but I was one of those people who keep their feet on the ground, their shoulder to the wheel, their nose to the grindstone. What a boring person I must be.
While I showered, I mapped out a program for the day. Track down Martin’s friend Toby Susskind to see if he could tell me anything about where Martin had gone. Library work on Nobel Prize winners to guess a father for Kitty Binder: Martin Binder might have gone hunting his putative family. I’d round out this fun-fest by following up with my pal from the PD’s office, to see if he’d unearthed any of my dead meth maker’s associates.
It would have been easier to find Toby if I’d had his cell phone, but I finally learned he was a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The school wouldn’t give me a phone number for him, but they let me have his college e-mail address, since that was essentially public information. While I waited for him to answer my e-mail, I started my search through the list of Nobel laureates from the 1920s and thirties.
It wasn’t the slam-dunk search I’d been imagining. I went down to the University of Chicago science library so I could use their reference support, assuming I’d be in and out within an hour. That wasn’t my biggest mistake of the day, just the first.
By digging deep I found some mentions of Martina Saginor in an essay—in German—on women at the Institut für Radiumforschung in Vienna. I didn’t want to wait for Max or Lotty to translate the article for me, so I took the file to the reference desk, where they called up a kid from the back who read German. With his wire-rimmed glasses and white shirt under a sweater-vest, he made me think of William Henry, the young wannabe criminologist in The Thin Man.
He said he was Arthur Harriman; I said I was V. I. Warshawski. When I explained that I was a detective, trying to machete my way through seventy or so years of undergrowth to the trail of a dead physicist, Harriman became even more like William Henry. “We’re hunting a missing person? Was she a German spy? Do I need to know how to use a gun?”
“You need to be able to read German, which I don’t.” I handed him my laptop, with the German essay on the screen.
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