Quantum

23

At two-thirty Nolan and his grandfather met Detective Ptashnik in the lobby of a nondescript municipal building on Ypsilanti’s East Side that housed, among other things, the offices of the Washtenaw County Medical Examiner.

‘Thank you for coming down so quickly,’ Ptashnik said, greeting them as he extended his hand.

‘It’s not a problem,’ Martin assured the detective.

‘If you’ll both follow me, we’ll be meeting with Dr Porter back in the morgue. She’s expecting us.’

They followed Ptashnik through a painted steel door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY and down an antiseptic corridor dimly lit with cool fluorescent lights.

Martin broke the silence. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you something, Detective.’

‘Go right ahead.’

‘After all this time, how did you come to the conclusion that this might be my friend Johann?’

‘We found some ID with the remains.’

‘And where did you find him?’

‘In the base of a demolished smokestack not fifty yards from where, according to the report you filed, you last saw him.’

Martin paled slightly, horrified at the thought of Wolff’s body lying buried for years just outside his shop in West Engineering.

The short walk ended at the entrance to the medical examiner’s office suite.

‘Hey, Martha,’ Ptashnik shouted in a friendly voice, poking his head into the reception area. ‘I’ve got a pair of visitors that I’m taking back to see Bev.’

‘She’s expecting you.’

‘Thanks.’

Ptashnik led them through a pair of doors clad in stainless-steel protective plates. The room was brightly lit, cold and sterile. The only splash of color amid the whites and muted grays was the strawberry-blond tresses of the woman waiting inside.

‘Dr Beverly Porter,’ Ptashnik said, ‘I’d like to introduce Martin and Nolan Kilkenny.’

‘A pleasure, gentlemen, though not under the best of circumstances.’

‘Dr Porter, the disappearance of my friend has been like an old wound that refuses to completely heal.’

‘I hope this will bring you some closure, sir.’

Porter led them into a procedure room where a shrouded figure lay beneath a halo of task lights on a stainless-steel table.

‘A word of warning, gentlemen. The body is not in the best of condition.’

‘Body?’ Nolan questioned. ‘There’s more than just a skeleton left after all this time?’

‘The section of tunnel where the body was found acted like a vault, keeping the space inside cool and dry for over fifty years. The environment inside was ideal for preservation. Still, what you are about to see may be a bit of a shock,’ Porter explained.

Nolan and Martin both nodded, mentally preparing themselves for an unholy sight. Porter picked up the edge of the cloth and respectfully exposed the head of the corpse. What they saw looked much like an Egyptian mummy — a figure all flesh and bone with the skin shriveled, dark and stiff. Wisps of light brown hair still clung to the head, a subtle reminder that this was once a living person.

Nolan exhaled quietly. In combat, he’d seen more than his share of mangled bodies and gruesome remains — the images in his memory far worse than what he now beheld.

‘May I?’ Martin asked, indicating that he’d like a closer look.

Porter stepped back to give him room. Martin gazed down at the withered face and compared what he saw with his memories.

‘It’s Johann,’ he said with a mix of sadness and relief.

‘Are you sure?’ Ptashnik asked.

‘Aye, as sure as I can be.’

Martin took out a handkerchief, dabbed at a stray tear, and blew his nose. ‘How did he die?’

‘He was murdered,’ Ptashnik said with absolute certainty. ‘His killer nearly decapitated him.’

‘Who the hell would want to do a thing like that?’ Martin asked angrily. ‘Was he robbed?’

‘That was our initial thought, but then we found that he still had his briefcase and a wallet with ten bucks in it.’

‘If it wasn’t for money, then why?’

‘Grandpa, what about the rumors?’ Nolan asked.

‘Rumors?’ Ptashnik repeated.

‘After Johann disappeared, there was talk about how perhaps the government found out he’d done something during the war and deported him or imprisoned him or simply had him killed. Others said maybe some dark past was catching up with him, and he ran away. It was all a load of hooey; the government cleared him of any wrongdoing before they let him in the country.’

‘Detective, you said that Wolff’s briefcase was buried with him. Can we see it?’ Nolan requested.

‘Why?’

‘A few weeks ago a physicist I’m working with — a guy named Ted Sandstrom — inherited a collection of letters written by Johann Wolff. Some of the material contained in those letters deals with Wolff’s theoretical research. The man who bequeathed these letters, a physicist named Raphaele Paramo, believed that they might help Sandstrom solve a technological problem he’s encountered in his own work. After reading the letters, Sandstrom agrees that the answer he’s looking for may be somewhere in Wolff’s research. Until today, I haven’t found any information that could lead me to Wolff or his research. I’m hoping that there might be something in his briefcase that will help.’

‘Since you two are the closest thing we have to a next of kin, I don’t see any harm,’ Ptashnik answered. ‘Where are his personal effects, Bev?’

‘They’re boxed and waiting to go to the state police crime lab. I know this isn’t a great time to ask, but who’ll be taking care of the arrangements? I’ll be finished with Mr Wolff by the weekend.’

‘I’ll take care of everything,’ Martin volunteered. ‘The funeral parlor in Dexter will be giving you a call. Thank you for the respect you’ve shown my friend.’

‘You’re welcome.’

As the Kilkennys followed Ptashnik out of the procedure room, Porter gently placed the shroud back over Wolff’s head.

In the anteroom, Ptashnik located the box Porter had set aside for him on a metal gurney.

‘Before you touch anything, I’d like you to put these on,’ Ptashnik said as he pulled out a pair of white latex gloves from a wall-mounted dispenser. ‘I’m going to have the lab people take a look at this to see if they can find any evidence that might identify the killer.’

Nolan and his grandfather complied with the request; Martin’s thick callused hands pushed the limits of the glove’s claim that one size fits all.

Ptashnik pulled out a pocketknife and slit the tape seal around the cardboard lid. Martin looked down into the open box. Each article of Wolff’s clothing was individually sealed in labeled clear-plastic bags. He looked over the tie, the long coat.

‘This is what Johann was wearing the last time I saw him,’ Martin said. ‘He must have been killed that very night.’

The collars of Wolff’s shirt, blazer, and overcoat were black with long-dried blood.

‘Butchery,’ Martin said angrily. ‘A horrible way for a man to die.’

Martin laid each of the bagged garments aside gently, as if the spirit of his friend were still somehow connected with his belongings. Brittle mud caked the front of Wolff’s coat and pants; the toes of the shoes were scuffed and muddied.

‘It was a foul night,’ Martin recalled. ‘The ground was still soggy from the rains we’d had the day before. Friday afternoon it finally got cold enough to snow. There was a foot on the ground by Saturday morning.’

‘Which worked in the killer’s favor,’ Ptashnik said, absorbing Martin’s recollections. ‘You reported him missing on Saturday afternoon, but the earliest the police would have started making inquiries would have been on Monday. The snow would’ve covered any evidence of the crime over the weekend, and then the workmen came back and filled in the hole.’

Martin pulled out Wolff’s battered leather briefcase from the bottom of the cardboard box.

‘Here it is, Nolan,’ Martin announced.

Ptashnik opened the seal on the evidence bag, and Nolan carefully pulled out the briefcase. He then undid the clasp that secured the top flap over the interior compartment. The dark brown leather was cracked and dirty. He lifted the flap and looked inside.

‘When I left him, Johann told me that he had some paperwork and a little correspondence to finish up,’ Martin said.

Inside, Nolan saw an envelope and six hardbound notebooks. He fished out the envelope. ‘It’s another letter to Raphaele Paramo. May I open it?’

Ptashnik nodded his approval.

Nolan carefully ran his gloved thumb under the envelope’s seal; the brittle glue released at the lightest touch. He pulled out the folded pages and laid them on the gurney.

‘It’s like the others,’ Nolan said. ‘He covers the personal stuff first, then dives into the physics. Take a look at this, Grandpa. He’s telling Paramo about his engagement to Elli.’

Martin quickly read the first part of the letter and smiled. ‘He was a happy man when he wrote this.’

As Martin read the letter, Nolan pulled a notebook out of the briefcase.

‘Johann always kept a notebook with him wherever he went,’ Martin recalled. ‘He was a very private man, particularly with regard to his work. Some of his colleagues thought he was a bit paranoid, and perhaps he was. After all those years of living with the Gestapo looking over his shoulder, I can understand how he might be guarded about what he was thinking. I’m just wondering, what if he dreamed up something brilliant — like Einstein did. There’s a lot of prima donnas running around in a place like Michigan, people who might be a bit put out if a Young Turk like Johann were to show them up.’

‘You think one of his colleagues might have killed him out of professional jealousy?’ Ptashnik asked.

Martin shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know. I’m just trying to make sense of something that doesn’t make any sense at all. Johann enjoyed what he did; he even tried to explain to me a little about what he was working on, but it flew right over my poor brain. It just seems to me that the only real thing of value Johann had was what he carried around in his head and what he put in his notebooks.’

‘It’s hard to believe this has been underground for over fifty years,’ Nolan said.

The binding cracked loudly as Nolan opened the volume; the pages were still white and showed little deterioration. The first page contained a few carefully drawn sketches and some accompanying text.

‘What do you make of that?’ Martin asked.

‘The drawings are mathematical, but I’ve never seen an algorithm that generates an image that looks like that. One thing’s for sure, Wolff could draw.’

‘That he could,’ Martin agreed. ‘He had quite a good fist, like a draftsman.’

Nolan scanned the text — written in the same precise hand that authored the Paramo letters — but found nothing his mind could latch onto.

‘This is gibberish,’ Nolan said.

‘What do you mean, lad?’ Martin asked.

‘The text. Take a close look at it.’

Curious, Martin and Ptashnik glanced down at the open notebook. The tiny characters Wolff had so precisely drawn on the page were an apparently random mix of letters, numbers, and Greek mathematical symbols. Nolan studied the composition of the page as a whole. Each character was equally spaced, as if laid out on a grid. The page was the result of a deliberate, precise effort.

‘Maybe he was dyslexic,’ Ptashnik offered wryly.

‘I don’t think so,’ Nolan mused. ‘Wolff took his time with these characters; look how carefully each one is drawn.’

‘Looks like calligraphy,’ Ptashnik noted.

‘Actually, I think it’s cryptography.’

‘Say again?’

‘I’m no expert in this field, but I’ve seen enough encrypted text to think that’s what we’re looking at here.’

‘Why would Wolff do that?’ Ptashnik wondered.

‘Well, he was a physicist,’ Nolan replied. ‘What big physics project was going on in the 1940s?’

‘The bomb,’ Ptashnik quickly offered.

‘No,’ Martin growled, shaking his head. ‘Johann wasn’t working on any bombs. He hated the damn things. He once told me that during the war he did everything he could to keep Hitler from getting the bomb. He was quite proud of that.’

‘Okay, bad example,’ Nolan admitted. ‘But you get the idea. Raphaele Paramo once told his wife that Johann Wolff was the most brilliant mind he’d ever met. Coming from a guy who hung out with a lot of very smart people, that’s some high praise. What if he was working on something just as important as the bomb?’

‘Nolan, Johann wasn’t working for anybody on anything. He was an assistant professor teaching first-year physics. Anyway, if his notebooks were so valuable, why are they still here?’

‘Good point.’ Ptashnik took a look inside the briefcase. ‘There’s no mud in here, and the letter and the notebooks are all clean. This was a violent killing, and it took place in a muddy pit. The killer had to have been right down in there with his victim. Whatever the motive, I don’t think the killer was interested in Wolff’s briefcase. You said that the world of physics wasn’t all that big. What if it wasn’t something he was working on but something he knew? I don’t think the Russians had the bomb back in ’forty-eight. Maybe he knew somebody who was helping them.’

‘The Russians didn’t detonate their first bomb until September of 1949,’ Martin recalled. ‘In 1950 Fuchs, the Rosenbergs, and others were arrested for selling atomic secrets to the Russians.’

Ptashnik shook his head and smiled.

‘Don’t argue with my grandfather, Detective. He’s got a memory like an elephant.’

‘And the girth to match,’ Martin said with a wink.

Nolan carefully turned the next few pages of Wolff’s notebook; each was similar to the first.

‘The only thing on any of these pages that I recognize are the dates he’s put in the upper corners. Here’s twenty-two-eight-forty-six.’

‘Twenty-two-eight-forty-six?’ Ptashnik inquired.

‘The twenty-second of August 1946,’ Nolan explained. ‘He’s using European notation: day-month-year.’

Nolan pulled the remaining notebooks out of the briefcase and checked the dates on each.

Martin was curious. ‘What are you looking for, Nolan?’

‘His last entry.’

The sixth book started with the latest date he’d found. Thumbing through the blank pages in the back, he reached Wolff’s last entry about halfway through the volume.

‘Ten-twelve-forty-eight,’ Nolan read. ‘Ten December.’

‘That’s the last day I saw him,’ Martin recalled.

‘And likely the day he was murdered,’ Ptashnik added.

As Nolan slowly closed the notebook, he noticed some writing on the thick front endpaper. He opened the cover to expose the page and found a series of carefully written mathematical equations. Nolan recognized some of the functions, but others were used in ways that were unfamiliar to him.

‘What you got there?’ Ptashnik asked.

‘I’m not sure, but at least it’s in plain text. Maybe this is the algorithm Wolff used to encode his notebooks.’

Martin flipped open the first notebook, then glanced back at the one in his grandson’s hands. ‘Take a look at this, Nolan. I think this page is the same as that one.’

A quick check revealed that all the notebooks bore the same formula on the front endpaper.

‘What are you thinking?’ Martin asked, completely confused.

‘I’d say there’s a pretty good chance that this is Wolff’s cipher. Now if we just had the key, we could decode all this. Detective, what are you going to do with the notebooks?’

‘The techs will take a look at them for physical evidence, then we’ll put ’em in the evidence storage center with anything else we collect. Why?’

‘Can I make a suggestion?’

‘Shoot.’

‘These notebooks are old and potentially valuable. Why don’t you take them over to the Preservation Lab at the university library? The people there know how to handle old books.’

‘That’s probably not a bad idea. We’ve used their services on cases before. I’ll arrange it with our techs.’

‘Also, I’d like to get a copy of the letter, to put with the others he wrote to Paramo. If you like, I can get you copies of what we have.’

‘Are they written in code?’

‘Plain English. They’re a mix of personal stuff and physics. I don’t know if they’ll be of much help to you, but there’s a lot of day-to-day commentary. Maybe there’s something in there that you’ll find useful.’

‘I’d appreciate that,’ Ptashnik acknowledged.

‘Can I ask a favor in return?’

‘Depends on what the favor is.’

‘While the books are at the lab,’ Nolan explained, ‘I’d like to have some work done on them for my project.’

‘What kind of work?’

‘Nothing destructive, I promise. I just want to scan the pages into the computer for analysis. Raphaele Paramo thought enough of Wolff to suggest that a stack of letters from the guy might help the physicist I’m working with solve a very complex problem. So I want to know what Wolff was working on.’

‘All right,’ Ptashnik relented. ‘Just keep me posted on what you find.’