Martin had reached the courtyard ahead of the other men. He picked up the bag and kept his foot on the cobblestone where it landed.
Lotty thanked the woman, talking to her at length. Judging by the way she was using her arms, she was describing herself as a small child living here, explaining why she had thrown her bag. The woman nodded, put a hand on Lotty’s arm, eyes bright with tears. She gestured at Alison and me with her free hand—“Ihre T?chter?”
Lotty smiled, but shook her head. Down in the courtyard, Herr Lautmann set his work crew to digging up the cobblestones. We quickly drew a crowd, the usual assortment of drunks, out-of-work men offering to help, women with children too young to be in school.
The crew worked quickly, prying up about a dozen stones in a circle around where Lotty’s purse had landed. They dug up the ground underneath and sifted it through a large kind of grater. There was an amazing assortment of detritus, old pens, hairclips, the head to a porcelain doll. As they finished shaking dirt from their findings, they stacked them neatly on a small tarp.
The packet lay under the stone nearest the building. They handed it to Herr Lautmann, who gave it to Lotty.
A square of oilcloth was wrapped around a piece of black silk that had turned a rusty green. “I think this was from an umbrella,” Lotty said, fingering the silk. “The oilcloth—where did they get that, I wonder? Cut from an old mackintosh, perhaps.”
We all bent to stare at the envelope inside, with the three-cent U.S. stamps on it, and the address, typed on a manual machine: Miss Martina Saginor, 38A Novara Street, Vienna 2, Austria.
Dear Miss Saginor:
I am pleased to inform you that the United States Office of Patents has issued you U.S. Patent Nr D124603, for a ferromagnetic device that can store data. This patent will be in effect for seventeen years from the date of issue, which is May 13, 1941.
Please let me know if I may be of further service to you in the future.
Yours sincerely,
Lester Tulking
Patent Attorney
Attached to the letter was the official notice from the Patent Office, and a copy of Martina’s drawing, a grid that looked like it might hold potatoes in a deep-fat fryer with wires dangling from it, the word “Speicher,” in neat printing, a series of equations, and the twin prisms in the bottom right-hand corner.
Alison stared at it. “It’s the BREENIAC sketch. It’s true: we did steal it from her.”
Lotty rewrapped the patent and gave it to Martin, who didn’t quite know what to do with it. At Max’s suggestion, we went back to the Imperial Hotel’s business office, where Martin scanned the patent documents. We sent a copy to Murray, with photographs Martin had taken of the courtyard on Novaragasse and the excavation process. I wrote out a history of the patent, and what we were able to guess, or piece together, of how Edward Breen had acquired it, and told Murray he had a twenty-four-hour exclusive before we put the story out on YouTube.
After that, we spent another three days in Vienna. Max took Lotty to see her grandparents’ old flat on the Renngasse, the place where she’d lived until the Nazis forced her family into the ghetto. They also visited her grandfather’s office on the Park Ring, where the earnest young lawyer using it today took them to lunch and let them linger behind her grandfather’s rolltop desk.
Jake and I wandered through the city’s parks, where we met his musician friends for drinks that lasted until dinner and then became informal recitals at one apartment or another.
Martin dragged Alison to the Institut für Radiumforschung. The director of the Institute patiently let Martin tour the place. Apparently Martin’s enthusiasm for quarks and leptons was such that he was allowed to sit in on an Institute seminar, which seemed to thrill him even more than recovering Martina’s patent.
By the time we returned to Chicago, Metargon’s stock had halved in value. One of Metargon’s outside directors was my own most important client, Darraugh Graham. The afternoon after our return, Darraugh summoned me for a private meeting to find out how much I could verify of the stories that were now circulating in the financial pages.
We talked so late into the afternoon that we ended up at the second-floor bar in the Trefoil Hotel on Delaware, drinking their legendary Armagnac. By the time we finished, Darraugh said that it was all deeply troubling.
“That history, that patent, it’s water over the dam by now,” Darraugh said. “Don’t know why Breen would be so obsessed with it.”