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
I N 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 mypal 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.
“This sounds interesting,” Harriman said after he’d scrolled through part of the article. “The Institut für Radiumforschung, that was the Radiation Research Institute. Vienna wanted to compete with Paris and Cambridge and Copenhagen in the quest for the secrets of the atom. What’s amazing is that forty percent of the Viennese researchstaff were women, compared to practically none in the U.S. or the rest of Europe—even including Irène Curie’s lab, which hired a lot of women.”
He scrolled down the page until he got to Saginor. “Your lady taught chemistry and math in the Technische Hochschule for girls from 1926 to 1938. In between she went off to Germany, to Göttingen,
9
SHADOW OF THE THIN MAN
I N 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 mypal 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.
“This sounds interesting,” Harriman said after he’d scrolled through part of the article. “The Institut für Radiumforschung, that was the Radiation Research Institute. Vienna wanted to compete with Paris and Cambridge and Copenhagen in the quest for the secrets of the atom. What’s amazing is that forty percent of the Viennese researchstaff were women, compared to practically none in the U.S. or the rest of Europe—even including Irène Curie’s lab, which hired a lot of women.”
He scrolled down the page until he got to Saginor. “Your lady taught chemistry and math in the Technische Hochschule for girls from 1926 to 1938. In between she went off to Germany, to Göttingen,
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