“It’s got something to do with the skeleton in his father’s workshop,” I answered. “The literal skeleton that I found last month. We’ll never know what happened there, we’ll never know who shot her, but the two sets of fathers and sons, the Breens and the Dzornens, all were part of the burial. It weighed Julius Dzornen down, but it made Cordell Breen think he was so far above the law that he could get away with anything, including murder.
“Breen knew his father had stolen the patent from Martina Saginor, or at least from Gertrud Memler. When Martin challenged him about the BREENIAC sketch, Breen thought Martin was just one more fly to swat. When I got involved and the situation began to spiral out of control, Breen wasn’t thinking anymore; he was just carrying on as if he were, I don’t know, Napoleon or Hitler on their way to Moscow, maybe.”
Darraugh gave his dry bark of a laugh. “Good lesson in there for the rest of us CEOs, Victoria. I’ll talk to the other directors. The girl, what’s her name? Alison? She’s a bright young lady, as well as a major shareholder, but she’s much too inexperienced for the executive floor.”
CHICAGO, 1953
Sacrificial Lamb
DAD? DAD, WHAT’S going on?” It’s Cordell, who’s heard the shouting and fighting in his bedroom across the yard in the main house.
Martina is startled by his appearance. She looks at Cordell, she squeezes the trigger. The noise, impossibly loud, fills the room. Breen grabs the gun from her. It goes off again. The Memler clutches her side, the rage in her face turning to surprise. Blood flowers on the white shirt underneath her Dior suit; she sways for an instant, then collapses onto the workbench.
In the doorway behind Cordell another youth is standing; he’s been sent by his mother to see what Benjamin is doing. He cries in horror, “Papa!”
Edward Breen decided I was to be the sacrifice: he would call the police and report me as a murderer, the end of a fight that started years ago in Vienna. That last statement might be true, but not the first. I am no one’s sacrifice any more times in this life. When Benjamin put up the feeblest of protests to Breen, I walked out of the workshop, and disappeared. Once I was safely away, I wrote Benjamin a promise that I would bother him no longer. Only keep an eye on K?the for me, poor K?the who lives with so much trouble in this world, I begged, but he did not. Only once more did I see him, when our granddaughter was seven: I sought a fugitive meeting near the Argonne Laboratory, to see if our daughter’s child might carry some spark within her.
54
LATE MAIL
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.”