That meant that it was Martina Saginor, Gertrud Memler or Benjamin Dzornen who’d created the design, not Edward Breen. The little logo, the triangles in the bottom right corner, was the designer’s signature. Swing, thud, rest.
When Martin saw the triangles, he recognized them from the documents his mother had stolen from his grandmother. Swing, thud, rest.
He talked to Cordell, asked him about the triangles. That’s what didn’t add up for him: the same triangles on the BREENIAC design and on his family documents. That conversation put Breen on the alert, made him look for Martin, pretending to Jari Liu that he was worried Martin would take Metargon’s secrets public. Edward Breen had been an engineer, he was clever and saw the potential for the ferromagnetic memory, but he wasn’t brilliant: he didn’t work out the idea from the hysteresis equations the way the actual inventor had. Swing, thud, rest.
When King Derrick posted that nuclear secret document on the Virtual-Bidder website, he signed his death warrant. Cordell Breen couldn’t afford for the document to fall into public hands. He got Rory Durdon to sniff around Palfry County to find the deputy-most-likely-to-be-bribed. Swing, thud, rest.
Maybe Glenn Davilats was already taking kickbacks from other meth houses, so Durdon knew it would be easy to sell him on digging himself deeper into the pit on the far side of law and order. However the relationship was cemented, the two men arrived before dawn at the Schlafly house and killed Ricky. Maybe Cordell had sent them to kill Martin—he was the person connecting the dots, after all.
The Navigator that Judy had driven back to Chicago had been leased to Metargon. I’d double-check it if I ever—when I got out of here. Swing, thud, rest.
Poor Julius Dzornen. He’d been involved in the death of the woman in the cellar, and the secret so weighed on him that he’d lost the ability to function. It was as if the Breens had Tasered his spirit.
What really did him in was his father’s complicity. “Did Benjamin Dzornen kill you?” I asked my companion. “Or was it Edward Breen? Did the two men make Julius kill you, or bury you? You haunted him for many years.”
My flashlight battery was giving out and I could only see the side of the trunk dimly.
Swing, thud, rest. The trunk was turning gray. I blinked, sat. Hallucinating, not good. I put a finger on the gray spot: it was a hole, light was seeping in from the kitchen. I was shivering now with a feverish excitement. I took the crowbar and used what was left of my muscles to pry out a chunk from the side. It peeled away like a sardine tin, the metal siding hanging loose like a great lip.
I lay on my back with my boots against the opening. Kicked, kicked again, felt more of the metal give. It wasn’t a very big hole, but it was wide enough for me to slither through. I landed in an awkward heap on the old linoleum.
Sunshine on Lake Michigan had never looked as clean and bright as the dim light seeping in through the ivy-shrouded windows. I lay for several minutes, soaking it in, breathing in must and mold on the linoleum as if it were bottled oxygen.
An old industrial clock over the sink told me the time. Three P.M. I’d climbed into the crate six hours ago. Time to get help, time to move on. I turned on the kitchen tap, held my head under the stream of water, gulped down great mouthfuls.
I didn’t want to move, but Durdon and Davilats might come back at any second. If they’d broken into my office, the combination I’d given them wouldn’t open my safe. They could blow it open, but it was possible they’d come back to torture the actual combination out of me. Or the BREENIAC sketch’s actual location.
I took my flashlight and my picklocks to the Subaru with me, but left the digging tools where they were: my shoulder muscles were too watery to lift the pickax again. My back felt as though someone were shooting Tasers up and down the cervical vertebrae.
As I stumbled through the front door, Ms. Basier was getting out of the Volvo with her daughter. The two stared at me without speaking, then scuttled into the house. When I looked at myself in the Subaru’s rearview mirror, I didn’t blame them. Standing under Julius’s kitchen tap, I’d turned the dirt in my hair and skin into mud. My clothes were also caked with dirt. My eyes looked like portals to the Inferno.
I drove slowly, sticking to side streets all the way north. It took over an hour to cover the twelve miles, but by taking the slow route, I could rest my sore back against the seat.
When I got home, Mr. Contreras started haranguing me almost before he had his front door open. He hadn’t heard from me since I left the apartment two days ago, he didn’t know why I couldn’t let him know for a change, and here was young Sunny Breen—he stopped short when I swayed and half fell onto the bottom stair.
Peppy came over and started licking the mud from my face. Mr. Contreras’s scolding changed to clucking. Behind him, I heard Alison Breen cry out, “Oh, what happened, oh, please don’t tell me that it was my father who did this.”
I was too tired to open my eyes. “Rory Durdon,” I said. “Rory Durdon and a bent cop he picked up downstate.”
I heard her start to sob but I just curled up against the stairwell wall, an arm around the dog.
“What happened, doll, how’d you get like this?” Mr. Contreras asked.
“The guy who drove us up to Lake Forest the other night,” I said. My lips were so thick that the words came out slowly, like cold molasses from a bottle. “Rory Durdon. His cop buddy Tasered me. Then they locked me inside a root cellar. I couldn’t get a phone signal down there. I had to hack my way out.”
“Tasered you? Oh, no!” Alison cried. “I was afraid—after the reporter came, Mother called Dad—she and I, we were both worried—I can’t believe—oh, what is happening?”
“She can’t talk right now,” Mr. Contreras told her, adding to me, “We need to get you cleaned up, doll. Can you make it up the stairs to your own bath or do you want to use mine down here?”
The third floor seemed a great distance away, but I wanted to be in my own place, to get into clean clothes and throw these away. I unlaced my boots; Mr. Contreras got down on the bottom step next to me to pull them off. Without their weight on my feet, I managed to push myself up the stairs.
Alison followed anxiously behind me, asking questions, but I felt as though I were in a swamp in some alien world, unable to think or speak. Mr. Contreras took my keys the third time I dropped them and opened my front door for me. He turned on the taps in the bathtub. When I started to unbutton my shirt, though, he left hastily, shutting the door behind him.
I sat in the tub under the shower, rinsing the mud out of my hair. When I finally felt clean, I filled the tub and lay back, almost comatose, letting the hot water soak into my ripped-up muscles. The place in my pectoral where I’d pulled out the dart was an angry red, but my thigh only showed a small pink circle.
When the water turned cold I finally stepped out and wrapped up in a fluffy dressing gown that Jake had given me for my birthday. In the living room, Mr. Contreras handed me a mug of hot tea that was half milk and filled with sugar. I gulped it down gratefully. Alison took the mug to the kitchen to refill it and came back with a plate of poached eggs on toast.
Mr. Contreras watched me eat, nodding seriously at each mouthful I swallowed. When I’d finished, and was starting to fall asleep, he gave me a shamefaced look but said, “You ain’t going to like this, cookie, but I called the doc. She’s going to come by to look at you on her way home from the hospital.”
“It’s okay,” I yawned. “We’ll have a party.”
The eggs and the sugary tea had revived me enough that I was able to give him and Alison a more coherent description of what had happened in the coach house. Alison’s sensitive mouth quivered, but she had herself in hand and didn’t turn my experience into her own drama.
When I finished, I said to her, “I heard you say a reporter had been to the house. Was that Murray? Murray Ryerson, I mean?”
She flung up her hands. “I don’t remember his name. He’s big, with reddish hair, and a Mercedes convertible?”
“Yes, that’s Murray. He came out to ask why Julius Dzornen had been at the house Tuesday night, didn’t he?”
“Mother didn’t know what Mr. Dzornen and Dad talked about, but when she called Dad over at Metargon, he came roaring home. He’s never done that, not when I fell as a kid and broke my arm, not even when Mother started hemorrhaging after her second miscarriage, so I was pretty tense.
“First he threw the reporter out, then he started shouting at Mother, how could she be so stupid as to have let him inside to begin with. And Mother said, she said—” Alison’s eyes got bigger and her voice wavered.
“What?” Mr. Contreras demanded.
“She said Tuesday night she’d heard Durdon banging away in the garage; it’s beneath her studio. She’d gone down and seen him under Mr. Dzornen’s car! Dad was so furious he almost hit her! Then Dad said he’d better not find out that Warshawski—Vic, I mean—had taken the BREENIAC sketch and I said how could she, because it was already gone when she was up at the house on Tuesday! And he said he was sending Durdon down to Hyde Park to make sure she hadn’t taken it from the coach house, and the whole thing was so insane I couldn’t bear to be around them. I couldn’t go to any of my friends’ houses, even if they were home, I can’t tell anyone what’s going on, so I drove down here.”
Her voice petered out. Mr. Contreras patted her hand comfortingly. Lotty rang the bell about then. When the old man went to buzz her in, I asked if he’d bring my iPad back with him: I wasn’t up to talking to the police, but I needed to alert them to the skeleton I’d uncovered in the coach house—especially before Alison’s father had another brainstorm and sent Durdon down to dig it up and dispose of it.
I wrote an e-mail to Conrad Rawlings in the Fourth District, putting Murray Ryerson in the blind copy line.
I’m leaving police business to the police, but this morning I stumbled on a body buried in the cellar of a Hyde Park coach house. I would have written you sooner, but two goons, one named Rory Durdon who works for Cordell Breen, the other a Palfry County sheriff’s deputy named Glenn Davilats, Tasered me and locked me in the cellar. It’s a long story, but you might want to dig up the body before Cordell Breen comes down himself to haul it away.
Ciao, Vic
Lotty came in as I was hitting the send key. She’d spent six hours in the operating room and was tired herself. She forbore from any barbed words, just inspected the wound sites with gentle fingers. I’d gotten the whole dart out of my thigh, but the point of the other one had broken off in my shoulder. Lotty injected me with a topical anesthetic and pulled it out, covered both wounds with an antibiotic salve and gave me a course of antibiotics to take.
“I will say this is a first in our acquaintance, Victoria,” she announced when she’d finished. “No drownings, shootings, stabbings or acid, but a poison dart. Worthy of Sherlock Holmes, no?”
“Something like that,” I mumbled. “My shoulders—I’ve torn up those muscles from digging up part of a skeleton, and then whacking the side out of my prison.”
“Yes, you’ll feel that for some weeks, I’m afraid.”
“Can you do something for me? I can’t afford to lie in bed for weeks, or even days.”
“Even if I could implant new muscles in you, it would take months for them to take hold,” Lotty said. “Let Nature take her course for once in your obstinate life.”
I shook my head. There was something I needed to do, something urgent, and I couldn’t remember what it was.
“I need to be able to act. I need to drive, I need to hold my own if I’m attacked again. I can’t do anything right now but sit like a squawking bird! Can’t you give me something, whatever modern miracle steroid they inject into football players to get them back into the lineup?”
“What, so your joints can rot like a football player’s in another decade?” Lotty’s eyes turned darker with anger.
I looked at her gravely. “If Martin is still alive and I can save him, I need to risk my joints. It’s not as though I take cortisone every week.”
She frowned. “Even if I wanted to let you get this kind of injection, it must be done in a hospital with an X-ray machine guiding the anesthesiologist’s hand. Even so, it would take several days before you’d be strong enough to be up and about. I can give you a muscle relaxant, but it will knock you out very quickly. You’ll sleep a long time. If you’re worried about your safety, you may not wake up easily.”
“Will I be better in the morning?”
“Oh, even if you aren’t, you will be rested enough to throw yourself in front of a herd of raging elephants, or jump from a plane without a parachute, or some other action that will prove to you that you’re outside the usual laws of human mortality,” Lotty said crossly.
“I’ll stay with her,” Alison told Lotty. “After all, it’s because of my dad that she went through all this.”
She turned her earnest young face to mine. “I hate to bother you when you’re so tired, but was the BREENIAC sketch in the coach house?”
The BREENIAC sketch. Was that the urgent action I had to take? No, I’d shipped the drawing to the Special Collections librarian this morning. Durdon and Davilats had taken the copy from my pocket. Along with the obituary of Ada Byron.
The two goons didn’t know enough of the story to connect the dots, but if Cordell Breen saw the obituary, he’d be off to Tinney, Illinois, like one of his father’s rockets. And if there was any evidence about Martina Saginor or Gertrud Memler, or even why the BREENIAC sketch mattered so much, Breen would destroy it before I could get there.
NEVADA, 1953
The Lost Lover
THE MOUNTAIN AIR at night bites her skin. She used to love that sharp high-altitude cold. Back when she climbed the Wildspitze, she slept on the mountainside so she could start her cosmic ray experiments at first sun. Stepping out of her sleeping bag, jumping into a glacier lake, leaping out and running naked around the meadow to dry herself, she would feel braced, embraced by the air. She thought she could taste the air; it was tingly, like sekt wine, but lighter, crisper.
In those days, she encountered the physical world like a lover. Photons and gamma rays, cold air, steep climbs, all exhilarated her. She lies now on foreign ground, watching the stars. The constellations are the same that her papa showed her when she was a little girl, but they don’t pulse with the life she once found in them.
She crumbles the soil underneath her fingers. There is no point to the work she is doing here; it’s the same mind-numbing drudgery she performed at Uranverein 7. There is more food, her shoes fit, the body is properly housed, but the same high fences, the same guards surround her every morning when she walks from her room to her lab. Her mind is turning to a desert as arid as the one at the bottom of this mountain.
Once men discovered they could use the atom to make bombs, they lost the excitement of the hunt for its secrets. Even her own work has been degraded by the quest for a bomb. The array she had designed, why had she put it on paper to begin with? Tempting the gods, who will always laugh in your face.
“I know you, Fräulein Martina,” the woman Memler had snarled the morning she was sent from Innsbruck to the east. “You can’t stop drawing and scribbling and imagining equations and machines. I want them now. You will have no use for them, after all, when you reach your journey’s end.”
She had stared unflinching at the younger woman. Why had she not noticed the coarseness of her expression when Memler applied for a place in her lab at the Radium Institute in 1934? Why had she assumed that this young woman shared her passion for unfolding Nature’s heart?
Benjamin was right, after all, when he said Martina lacked something essential for human relations. He had meant love, perhaps he’d meant she should adore him, but what she was really lacking was judg
ment.
She had shaken her head a little in the cave at Innsbruck, sad at her own blindness, but the Memler interpreted that as insolence. Her guards stripped the dress from Martina and easily found her papers, sewn into the hem. The sight of her own coarse stitches made Martina think of her mother. Even in a slave labor camp you don’t have to sew as if you had donkey’s hooves instead of human fingers, she heard Mama saying, and smiled, careful this time to keep her expression to herself. Still, that interior smile allowed her to watch impassively as the Memler put her papers inside a notebook.
The guard flung Martina’s dress at her feet. After she put it on, and put on the threadbare joke of a coat, she said, “My last words to you as your professor, Fräulein Memler: you cannot think clearly or do meaningful research if you are consumed by rage or spite.”
Memler struck her hard across the cheekbone with her ring-crusted fingers, and Martina felt the blood lace down her face. So her poor body still had some blood in it. Her monthly flow dried up long ago and she wondered sometimes if her whole body had turned to something inanimate, a piece of skin filled with sawdust.
“I should lock you in the pit,” Memler growled, but the guard reminded her that the transport to Vienna was waiting: they’d already given the escort the number of prisoners who were in transit. Locking up one prisoner meant redoing all the paperwork.
It was Martina’s last sight of Memler, rubbing her rings, as if the blow to her professor’s face had also cut her own fingers. Her last sight until six days ago.
The Memler’s thick flaxen hair has darkened; she’s cut her obscenely fat Hitler-Jugend braid into a fashionable Debbie Reynolds perm, but her posture—the obsequious bob of the head to the senior man in the group, the arrogant gesture to the work crew—Martina would have known her anywhere.
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