The Death Instinct

Chapter Eight

The morning after the attack, a hundred thousand people gathered on Wall Street.

They came unbidden, drawn by the afterimages of devastation, the lingering proximity of death. Some were gawkers from out of town. Others had employment in the financial district. But most drifted in like wanderers, with no articulate aim, moved by a need they could not have explained, as if being there might somehow supply a void they felt without knowing they felt it.

As a result, the Constitution Day celebration was the largest the country had ever known. Workmen laboring all night erected a wooden platform in front of George Washington's bronze statue. Bunting had been hung in red, white, and blue, festooned with American flags. With a fully armed company of solders still guarding the Treasury Building, the impression created was halfway between a holiday and a siege.

Patriotic speeches were made. America the Beautiful' was sung, tears glistening on thousands of faces. While the words 'sea to shining sea' still echoed in the great canyons of lower Manhattan, a ruddy, white- whiskered brigadier general took the podium. The crowd quieted.

'September sixteenth,' he proclaimed, his voice echoing off the skyscrapers. 'A date America will never forget. September sixteenth – the date on which Americans will say for the rest of time that our country changed forever. September sixteenth. On this spot where we now stand, one of the greatest outrages committed in the history of our country was perpetrated. Are we, as American citizens, going to close our eyes to this infamy? I say no, a thousand times no.'

The word was repeated thousands of times more.

The Brigadier General held up his arms, checking the crowd's cheers: 'The vampires must and will be brought to justice.'

Thunderous applause.

'Ladies and gentlemen, I have spoken this morning with Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer,' he went on, and the name of Palmer brought fresh cheers and foot stamping. 'General Palmer wished to be here himself this morning, but alas it couldn't be. The General desires me to assure you, however, not only that he is on the way to our city at this very moment but that he already knows the identity of the perpetrators of this outrage. Yes, he has their confession – their boastful confession – in hand. And he has a message both for us and for our enemies. General Palmer says, and I quote, that he "will sweep the nation clean of their alien filth"!'

There was a roar of satisfaction and a thrilling chorus of 'Yes! Yes! Yes!' On the stage a young man stepped forward and began the national anthem. A hundred thousand voices made vigorous harmony.

Younger was writing a letter at a small table in the Littlemores' living room when he sensed, rather than heard, Luc behind him.

In the previous hour, Betty Littlemore had clothed, fed, and packed off to school an endless string of little Littlemores. The apartment was still not wholly peaceful: babies cried, toddlers banged cooking pots, and the detective's wife and mother-in-law were discoursing volubly in the kitchen. Younger couldn't understand their Italian, but the topic was evidently a matter on which both women had strong opinions.

Younger turned to face Luc. The boy stood on the other side of the room, perfectly still, saying as usual nothing. His long dirty blond hair was well brushed, and his large observant eyes conveyed preoccupation with a multitude of thoughts, without giving a single one of them away.

'Your sister has told you,' said Younger in French, 'that she plans to take you back to Europe.'

Luc nodded.

'And you're wondering if I intend to change her mind.'

The boy nodded again.

'The answer is no. She knows what's best.'

Luc shook his head – just once, very slightly.

'Yes, she does,' said Younger. He put down his pen, leaned back, looked out the window. Then he turned back to the boy: 'Well, if you are going back to Europe, we shouldn't be wasting time. I'll tell you what: Bring me a newspaper. We'll see when the Yankees are playing. Maybe Ruth will hit his fiftieth today.'

The boy scampered away and returned a moment later, the morning paper in his hands and a disappointed expression on his face.

Younger looked at the page to which Luc had opened the newspaper: the Yankees were on the road and therefore not playing in Yankee Stadium – which the boy apparently understood. 'Can you read English?' asked Younger.

Luc shrugged.

'I see,' said Younger, recalling how, when he was himself a boy, he had once astonished his father by having taught himself to read rudimentary Latin. He also recalled how he used to watch everything that happened in his household, understanding secret expressions on his mother's face that he was not supposed even to have seen. 'Can you speak, Luc? I'm not asking you to talk. I just want to know if you can. Yes or no.'

The boy stared at him, unmoving.

'Right,' said Younger. 'Well, too bad about the Yankees. Let me think – how would you like to go to the roof of the tallest building in the whole world?'

Luc's eyes lit up.

'Go see if your sister will let you,' said Younger. 'And if she'll join us.'

Detective Littlemore might have passed for one of the gentlemen of the press packed into uncomfortable chairs in the Astor Hotel, except that the detective's hands were stuffed in his pockets, while the newsmen's were busy scribbling down the remarks of William Flynn, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who stood at the front of the room next to a chalkboard map of lower Manhattan. Chief Flynn had commandeered several suites of rooms at the Astor, turning them into his personal command center. Littlemore sat in the rear chewing his toothpick, straw hat so far back on his head it looked like he was braving a strong wind.

The pug-nosed, barrel-chested Flynn had massive shoulders, a correspondingly big gut, and surprisingly clean-shaven, fresh-faced cheeks. Dressed in dark suit and tie, his brown hair slicked down, he bore a striking resemblance to a nightclub bouncer. He thought of himself, however, in more militaristic terms. Flynn believed that law enforcement was essentially military in nature and prided himself on knowing how to speak in the argot of the armed forces. 'At approximately oh-twelve-hundred hours yesterday,' said Flynn, tapping the map with a pointer, 'an incendiary device detonated in front of the Morgan Bank at number 23 Wall Street.'

'You mean a bomb?' asked one of the gentlemen of the press.

'That is correct,' said Flynn.

'Captain Carey says it might have been a dynamite truck,' called out another.

'The New York police got zero to do with this investigation,' Flynn shot back. 'The incendiary device was transported to the scene in an animal-powered transport vehicle.'

'A horse and wagon?' called out a newsman.

'Ain't that what I said?' Flynn replied with asperity. 'Now pipe down so's I can deliver myself. I got something important for you boys, and if you'll shut your traps maybe I can get to it. At oh-eleven-thirty yesterday morning, a United States letter carrier opened a mail receptacle here -' he tapped another spot on the chalkboard map – 'at the corner of Cedar and Broadway. The receptacle was empty at that time. At oh-eleven-fifty-eight, the letter carrier made another collection from that same receptacle, at which time he found five circulars' – a word that Chief Flynn pronounced soyculars – "without wrapping of any sort. Three minutes later, the letter carrier heard a loud noise, which was the incendiary device incendiarating. By order of General Palmer, we are making these circulars public, so's the law-abiding people of this country know who their enemies are.'

Flynn handed around five handbills.

'Don't paw at 'em!' Flynn barked. 'Anybody damages one of these, they're going to jail for destruction of evidence. I ain't kidding.'

Each piece of paper was rough and cheap, about seven inches wide by eleven long, and each bore the same red ink-stamped message, the unevenness of which made plain that it had been hand-printed, one letter at a time:

Rimember

We will not tolerate

any longer

Free the political

prisoner or it will be

sure death for all of you

American Anarchist

Fighters

The newsmen copied furiously.

'Cedar and Broadway,' Flynn resumed, using his pointer again, 'is four minutes by foot from the incendiary location. That leaves no doubt about what happened. The anarchists parked their animal-powered vehicle on Wall Street at approximately oh-eleven-fifty-four. When they reached Cedar and Broadway, they placed these circulars into the mail receptacle, three minutes before the explosion.

'It will be recalled,' Flynn went on, 'that the circulars connected with the bomb outrages of 1919 looked just like these here and were signed by the same enemy organization. If any further cooperation was needed, which it ain't, it will also be recalled that the Chicago Post Office bombing of 1918 occurred on the third Thursday' – pronounced toyd Toysday – 'of September, which yesterday was too. The exact anniversary. In other words, these are the same terrorist Bolshevikis who bombed us in 1918 and 1919 – Eye-talians associated with the Galliani organization. There's your story. You print it. I will now read you the names of the wanted.' Reading from what appeared to be an arrest warrant, Flynn continued: 'Carlo Tresca, anarchist leader and known terrorist; Pietro Baldesserotto, anarchist; Serafino Grandi, anarchist and revolutionary; Rugero Bacini, anarchist; Roberto Elia, anarchist.'

The newsmen kept scribbling some time after Flynn had finished his recitation. Then one of them called out, 'Was J. P. Morgan hurt, Chief?'

'What are you – stupid? J. P. Morgan wasn't even in town yesterday,' said Flynn. 'This outrage was not directed at Morgan or any other individual. It was an attack on the American government and the American people and the American way of life. You put that in the papers.'

'What can you tell us about the horse and wagon, Chief?' a newsman asked.

'The witnesses thus far examined,' said Flynn, 'have told us that the horse was facing east, which ain't legal under traffic regulations. But terrorists don't care too much about traffic regulations, do they?' Flynn's torso heaved up and down at the last remark, which he apparently found humorous.

'So you haven't identified the wagon?' asked a reporter.

'They blew it up, you chucklehead,' Flynn shot back, irritated. 'How are we supposed to identify it? It's in a million pieces – and so's the horse. Any more bonehead questions?'

'What about Fischer, Chief?'

'Don't worry about Fischer,' said Flynn.

'Have you caught him yet?'

'Who says I'm looking? NYPD wants Fischer; let them look.'

'But how did he know about the bombing?'

'Who says he knew about it? The postcard never said bomb. And it said the fifteenth, not the sixteenth. I ain't gonna comment on Fischer. If you ask me, he's a mental case who got lucky. Now get out of here, all of you. I got men in the field waiting for orders.'

Under vaulted gold-leaf ceilings, Younger pointed out to Colette and Luc the caricature of old Mr Woolworth himself, carved in stone, counting his fives and dimes. They boarded the express elevator. The boy's eyes fixed in wonder on the winking lights that indicated the breathtaking passage of floors. Only a slight rocking of the car and a whistling of air betrayed the rapidity of their ascent.

Fifty-eight stories up, they emerged through heavy oak doors into a blinding blue sunlight and a wind so fierce Younger had to take Colette around the shoulders and Luc by the hand. The three-sided observation deck was lined with sightseers, coats flapping. At a railing, Younger, Colette, and Luc – on his tiptoes – gazed down on roofs of buildings that were themselves taller than the tallest cathedrals of Europe. Impossibly far below, rivers of mobile humanity – minuscule models of people, cars, buses – flowed and halted en masse to strangely slow rhythms. This was not a bird's-eye view. It was the view of a god witnessing America's breach of the first axiom of divinity, the separation of earth from heaven.

Behind them, the heavy oak doors swung open again, discharging another elevator load of visitors onto the deck. Among the newcomers was a man in a fedora pulled low over his forehead. He walked with a limp, and his clean-shaven face was mottled with scarlet patches – burn marks of some kind.

As the reporters field out of his office, Big Bill Flynn sat down behind a large oak desk, taking up a fountain pen like a man with important documents to sign, although in fact the only papers on his desk were newspapers. Two dark-suited assistants stood behind him, one on either side of his desk, hands behind their backs, feet apart.

Littlemore remained in his seat, toothpick protruding from his mouth, examining one of the handbills. 'Isn't that funny?' he asked of no one in particular, after the last newsman had left.

Flynn addressed one of his deputies: 'What is this guy, deaf?'

'Hey, buddy, you deaf?' asked the deputy.

'"Or it will be sure death for all of you,'" said Littlemore, quoting the hand-stamped message. 'That's what I call a threat, because it says something's going to happen. But how about what already happened? I mean, if you were leaving behind a message after you blew up Wall Street, wouldn't you say something about what you just pulled off? You know, maybe ominous, like "Today was just the beginning." Or throw in a little taunt, like maybe, " We took down Wall Street, next we'll come for all streets.'"

The detective had sung the last words, to the tune of 'Ring Around the Rosey.'

'Who the hell is this guy?' asked Flynn.

'Who the hell are you?' asked a deputy.

'Captain James Littlemore,' said Littlemore. 'NYPD, Homicide. Commissioner Enright asked me to be the Department's liaison officer with the Bureau. I'm supposed to offer you our services.'

'Oh yeah?' said Flynn. 'Well, there ain't going to be no liaison officer, because there ain't going to be no liaisoning. Now get out of here, will you?'

The second of Flynn s assistants leaned down and spoke softly into his superior's ear.

'You don't say,' said Flynn aloud. He leaned back in his chair. 'So you're the guy who turned up Fischer?'

'That's right,' said Littlemore.

'Think you got something there, do you, Littleboy?'

'Could be,' said Littlemore.

'I'll tell you what you got,' said Flynn. 'A crackpot. You'll be interviewing him inside an asylum.'

'I don't know about that,' said Littlemore.

'I do,' replied Flynn. 'He's in one now.'

'Where?'

'You want him. You find out.'

'How do you know?' asked Littlemore.

'Let's just say I got it out of the air,' said Flynn, his torso shaking again. His deputies seemed to consider this remark a witticism; they joined in his laughter.

'Well, I guess I got to congratulate you, Chief Flynn,' said Littlemore, returning to his scrutiny of the handbill, which he now held up in the light over his head. 'Never seen a case this big broken so fast.'

'That's why they pay us the big bucks,' said Flynn.

'Say, Chief,' said Littlemore, 'did you see all those soldiers outside the Treasury Building? I wonder what they're doing there.'

'They're there because I ordered them there,' said Flynn. 'Somebody's got to protect United States property when the police department's got its heads up its pants. Now scram.'

'Yes, sir,' said Littlemore. He stopped in front of the chalkboard map of lower Manhattan and scratched his head. 'Those anarchists, I'll tell you – how do you catch people who can do the impossible?' asked Littlemore.

'What's impossible?' said Flynn.

'Well, they leave their horse and wagon on Wall Street at 11:54 and walk four minutes to the mailbox at Cedar and Broadway – that's what you said, right? Mail gets picked up at 11:58. Bomb goes off at 12:01. How much time is there between 11:54 and 12:01?'

'Seven minutes, genius,' said Flynn.

'Seven minutes,' said Littlemore, shaking his head. 'Now that surprises me, Chief You think they'd leave their bomb ticking for seven whole minutes? I wouldn't hive. I mean, with the horse blocking traffic and all. If it were me, I'd have set my timer for one or two minutes. Because in seven minutes, somebody might move the horse out of there – maybe even discover the bomb.'

'Well, nobody did, did they?' barked Flynn. 'Nothing impossible about that. Get him out of here.'

'Maybe nobody moved the horse,' said Littlemore as the two deputies approached him, 'because it was only there two minutes.'

Flynn signaled his deputies to wait: 'What are you talking about?'

'My men took statements from a lot of folks who were there yesterday, Chief Flynn. Eyewitnesses. The horse and wagon pulled up on Wall Street only one or two minutes before the bomb exploded. Your anarchists, you got to hand it to them. They leave Wall Street at 11:59 or 12:00, and they get to Cedar and Broadway before 11:58, when the mailman picks up their circulars. How do you catch people who can do that?'

No one answered. Flynn stood up. He slicked back his oiled hair. 'So you're a captain, huh? How many men report to you? Six?'

'Enough,' said Littlemore, thinking of Officers Stankiewicz and Roederheusen.

'I got a thousand. And my men ain't like yours. There are two kinds of cops in the NYPD – the ones on the take, and the ones too stupid to realize that everybody else is on the take. Which kind are you?'

'Too stupid,' said Littlemore.

'You look it,' said Flynn. 'But not stupid enough to get in the way of my investigation. Are you?'

Littlemore went to the doorway. 'I don't know; I'm pretty stupid,' he said, shutting the door behind him.

Flynn turned to his deputies. 'Get me a file on that guy,' he said. 'Get me wife, friends, family – everything. And see if Hoover's got anything on him.'

Luc broke free from Younger and ran to the far side of the deck, which looked out on the water. Nearby, a pack of schoolboys shouted to one another about something they saw below. Luc ran toward them.

'Look at him,' said Younger. 'He understands what those boys are saying.'

'Not their words – how could he?' replied Colette.

'He can read the newspaper,' said Younger.

'In English? Impossible,' answered Colette. They stood side by side at the railing and gazed out onto the vast urban panorama. She put her hand on his. 'I wish I didn't have to go back.'

He removed his hand and took out a cigarette.

'You don't care if I leave?' she asked.

'I recommended you to Boltwood. You're leaving him with no one running his laboratory. Of course I care.'

'Oh. Well, I don't like your Professor Boltwood anyway. Do you know what he called Madame Curie the other day? A "detestable idiot.'"

'He's just jealous. Every chemist in the world is jealous of Marie Curie.'

'Men are very cruel when they're jealous.'

'Are they? I wouldn't know.'

No one glancing at the man who had limped into the center of the platform would have seen the dagger in his right hand, tucked invisibly against his inner sleeve. Colette herself might have turned around without recognizing Drobac, whose mass of whiskers was now shaved off. Only his eyes – the small, black, perceptive eyes peering out below his low-cocked hat – could have given him away He held the knife by its blade, one finger caressing its edge. There was no danger of his being cut: as with all good throwing knives, both of its edges were dull. The point alone was sharp.

An experienced practitioner of the knife-throwing art, if he intends to kill, will throw at the victim's heart. Of those organs whose puncturing is virtually certain to cause death, the heart is the largest – saving of course the brain, which is rendered inaccessible by the hard bone of the cranium. The victim's ribs might be thought a significant obstruction, but it isn't so. Provided that the throw is sidearm, not overhand, there is no real difficulty. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the victim's ribs will let the point slip through. Indeed one might almost say they guide it home.

Younger and Colette had their backs to Drobac, as did everyone else on the observation deck, because he stood in the center while they were all at the railings. A good knife-thrower has no compunction about taking aim at his victim's back, which assures, after all, the element of surprise. All that's required is a blade long enough to pass through the soft tissue of the left lung with sufficient metal remaining to pierce the meat of the heart. In the case of a slender victim, a shaft of eight inches will usually do. Colette Rousseau was slender, and the knife in this case was a dagger with a ten-inch steel blade. Drobac's breathing slowed.

'That's good,' shouted Detective Littlemore to a workman operating a pneumatic drill. 'Keep her clear.'

Littlemore was now on Wall Street, in front of the Morgan Bank, where the bomb had exploded the day before. Two uniformed officers – Stankiewicz and Roederheusen – kept pedestrians at bay. Across the street, the Treasury and Assay buildings still looked like an army garrison, with a company of soldiers positioned around them.

The drill bit cracked one cobblestone in the blackened crater, then another. Littlemore signaled the workman to stop. Crouching down, brushing dust and pebbles aside, the detective prized free a horseshoe from the stones. It was a size four shoe; the remains of a shamrock nail were visible. Stankiewicz and Roederheusen peered over his shoulder. Littlemore flipped the shoe over; the letters HSIU were imprinted on it.

'How do you like that?' said Littlemore. 'You boys know what HSIU stands for?'

'No, sir,' said Roederheusen.

'Horse Shoers International Union.'

'Something strange about that, Cap?' asked Stankiewicz.

'Sure is.' Littlemore did not explain what.

On the Woolworth Building observation deck, a clutch of schoolboys erupted with shouts and stampeded at full speed from one side of the deck to the next. Luc chased them, close on their heels; an alarmed schoolteacher trailed after, close on his. Colette cried out her brother's name and broke into a run, certain that Luc was going to trip and tumble over the guard rail.

Drobac smiled. He was still standing, alone and unmoving, in the center of the platform. Colette was running from his right to his left at the far side of the deck. The gusting wind died for an instant, and in that instant he took a single broad step, as a fencer does in a lunge, flinging his knife backhanded. In general, he favored moving targets, which offered more of a challenge. But Colette did not present even that challenge. She had become quite suddenly stationary: Luc had stopped abruptly, bringing the schoolteacher to a halt just behind him, bringing Colette to a similar halt.

The dagger spun in the air exactly three and a half rotations, parallel to the ground, and entered the girl's back. The point slipped through her ribs, puncturing her lung. But it was the right lung, not the left, and as a result the knife point, when it emerged from that lung, never touched her heart.

A knife piercing an individual's back characteristically causes its victim to throw both arms wide and high in the air, to scream, and to fall forward at least a step or two. All that happened here. This was unfortunate, because her forward steps propelled her over the railing. There was still a fair chance her fall might have been arrested by one of the balconies below. It was not to be. Her body, somersaulting, hit a parapet and bounced outward. The collision caused a morsel of concrete to crack loose and fall alongside the girl's body, accompanying her fifty-eight stories to the earth. At exactly the same moment, the girl and the concrete chip hit the sidewalk, which there consisted of a mosaic of colored glass squares. On contact, the concrete chip rebounded several stories high in the air. Considerably heavier, the girl's plummeting body ripped through the colorful glass tiles with a sickening thunderclap, plunging into the subway station below.

Littlemore heard the crash all the way from Wall Street. He listened for an aftermath, for the sounds of riot or terror. Hearing nothing more, he resumed his instructions to his men: 'Stanky, you take this shoe straight to Inspector Lahey.'

'Can I tell the press about it?' asked Stankiewicz.

'Make sure you do,' said Littlemore. 'But the Feds don't touch that shoe, you hear me?'

'Excuse me, Captain,' said Roederheusen. 'Mr O'Neill's still waiting to talk to you.'

Terrified screams rent the rooftop of the Woolworth Building. Schoolboys gaped and yelled in horror. Only Luc was perfectly silent, reaching his hands, with a strange and protective intelligence, to take those of his sister.

The dead girl was the schoolteacher who had stopped short behind Luc. Had Colette taken one more step, Drobac's knife would have found her. But because of the schoolteacher's unexpected halt, the knife had pierced the right lung of the wrong victim – the unlucky schoolteacher – rather than the left lung of its intended target.

The mass of people on the observation deck, not having seen the knife, believed they had witnessed a ghastly accident. A new load of sightseers just then emerging onto the deck added to the confusion. Younger, however, had seen the knife in the schoolteacher's back, and now he saw a man limping toward the heavy oak doors that led to the elevator bank – the only person leaving the platform amid the pandemonium. Drobac glanced back as he passed through the doorway. Younger recognized the small, black eyes at once.

Younger rushed across the deck and through the doorway. Between the closing doors of an elevator car, Younger saw those same black eyes again, peering at him from below a fedora's brim. The narrowing gap between the doors was too small for a man to fit through, but it was large enough for Younger s arm, which he thrust into the car, grabbing Drobac by the lapel. The elevator operator, barking out in surprised protest, reopened the doors. Younger yanked Drobac out and threw him to the floor.

Drobac tried to fight, but it was no contest. Younger beat him and beat him and kept beating him until the bones of his nose, his jaw and even his eye sockets all gave way.

'O'Neill – who's that?' Littlemore asked Officer Roederheusen on a street corner near the Morgan Bank.

'That's him over there, sir. He's been waiting all morning. He says he got a warning about the bomb too.'

'Bring him over. Then go find the mailman who picks up at Cedar and Broadway. And not next week. I want that mailman in my office tomorrow morning, got that?'

'But tomorrow's Saturday,' said Roederheusen.

'What about it?' asked Littlemore.

'Nothing, sir.' Roederheusen crossed the street and returned with a man barely over five feet in height, with a waistline of approximately the same size and whose arms, as he walked, moved like those of a toy soldier. 'Sorry you had to wait, Mr O'Neill,' said Littlemore. 'You have some information for me?'

'Yeah – it was last Thursday, see,' said O'Neill. 'Or else Friday. No, Thursday.'

'Just tell me what happened,' said Littlemore.

'I'm on the train from Jersey, like every morning. This guy, he gets on at Manhattan Transfer and we get to talking. Friendly-like.'

'Describe him,' said Littlemore.

'Nice-looking,' said O'Neill. 'About forty, forty-two, maybe. Never saw him on the train before. Six-footer. Athletic type. Blond. Educated. Tennis racket.'

'Tennis racket?' asked Littlemore.

'Yeah, he was carrying a tennis racket. Anyways, we're in the Hudson Tube, see, and he asks me where I work. I tell him 61 Broadway. He says he works on the same block, at some kind of embassy or something, and we keep talking, this and that, you know, and then he leans over and whispers to me, "Keep away from Wall Street until after the sixteenth.'"

'He said the sixteenth?' asked Littlemore. 'You're sure?'

'Oh yeah. He says it a couple of times. I ask him what he's talking about. He says he works on the sly for the Secret Service and his job is to run down anarchists. Then he goes, "They have 60,000 pounds of explosives and they're going to blow it up." He meant it too. You could tell. It was him, wasn't it, detective? It was Fischer?'

'What did you do?'

'I stayed away from Wall Street on the sixteenth, that's what I did.'

Three Woolworth security personnel, when at last they arrived, tore Younger from the bloodied man and put him -Younger – in handcuffs.

They were not impressed by Younger's claim that the victim of his assault had killed the girl who had just fallen to her death. No one else had seen the murder, and Younger conceded that he hadn't actually witnessed the deed. The guards were equally unmoved by Younger's assertion that the man had kidnapped a different girl the night before – a girl who was still standing outside on the observation deck. On the whole, they seemed to think he was raving.

Colette and Luc were brought forward. Without allowing Younger to speak, the guards asked Colette if she recognized the unconscious man whom Younger had beaten almost to death. She said no. Drobac's gashed face was in fact quite unrecognizable.

'Your husband says this man kidnapped you yesterday,' said one of the guards.

'He's not my husband,' said Colette.

'You lying SOB,' the other security officer remarked.

'I didn't say I was her husband,' said Younger.

Luc, tugging sedulously at Colette's sleeve, got her attention and made signs with his hands. She asked if he was certain; he nodded. 'It is the man who abducted us,' she said to the guards. 'My brother recognizes him.'

The officers, dubious, asked how the boy knew.

Luc made another sign. 'He just knows,' said Colette.

This assertion somehow failed to allay the security officers' doubts. In the end, they took the bloodied man to a hospital – and Younger into custody.

The Morgan Bank, open for business the day after the explosion, looked more like a hospital infirmary than a temple of high finance. Bandaged heads and patched eyes could be seen at every other desk. Clerks limped. Sling-armed men pecked one-handedly at adding machines. A watchman's face was so heavily wrapped that only his eyes and nose were visible.

'Mr Lamont will be with you in a moment,' said a receptionist to Littlemore.

The J. P. Morgan Company was not an ordinary bank. The House of Morgan was a mover of international relations, a maker of history. It was Morgan that saved the United States from ruin in the gold panic of 1895 and again in the bank panic of 1907. It was Morgan that led a consortium of financiers to float a five-hundred-million- dollar loan to the Allies in the Great War, without which they almost certainly could not have won. The old titan J. Pierpont Morgan had died in 1913; his son Jack Jr, who didn't spend as much time at the bank as his father had, relied on one partner in the firm to manage the company's vast assets and worldwide financial interests. That partner was Thomas Lamont!

Littlemore tipped his hat to the dozen uniformed policemen adding their bulk to the bank's security contingent. He also nodded imperceptibly to the additional half-dozen plainclothesmen scattered about the central atrium. Littlemore looked up at the dome far above, where scaffolding allowed workmen to reach its inner recesses. The resounding echo of hammers filled the air.

Below the dome, Mr Lamont – slight, diminutive, expensively but conservatively dressed – was addressing some twenty other men, answering questions like a tour guide. He was the right sort of man to run the House of Morgan: a graduate of Philips Exeter Academy and of Harvard College, a man chosen by Washington to represent the United States at the Paris peace conference of 1919. He had thinning gray hair, large ears, and risk-averse gray-blue eyes. The twenty men whom he addressed were not tourists; they were a grand jury conducting a physical inspection of the effects of the bombing. Pointing up at the dome overhead, where massive cracks in the plaster could be seen, Lamont explained that a team of engineers had pronounced the dome safe and secure.

'Let me add,' he said to the jurors and newsmen encircling him, 'how proud I am today of this firm. We are J. P. Morgan. We don't panic. We opened today at our usual hour, and rest assured, we will continue to do so.'

Lamont shook hands with the jury foreman and ushered the group into the care of an associate. He approached the detective, introduced himself, and asked how he could help.

'Sorry to take your time, Mr Lamont,' said Littlemore. 'It can't be easy for you.'

'Not easy?' replied Lamont, whose normally bland countenance looked overburdened by responsibility. 'With Mr Morgan overseas, the duty of speaking to the families of the dead and wounded has fallen to me. I feel responsible for every one of them. Do you know that our dome very nearly fell? And the entire Exchange almost came down yesterday as well. We were a hair's breadth from complete catastrophe. Thousands would have died. Wall Street would have been ruined. I can't comprehend how this could have happened. If you could be brief, Captain, I'd appreciate it.'

'Okay,' said Littlemore. 'I'd like to know who your enemies are.'

'I'm sorry?'

'Not yours personally. The company's.'

'I don't think I understand,' said Lamont. 'Mr Flynn of the Bureau of Investigation assured me this morning that the explosion was not directed against the Morgan firm in particular.'

'They left the bomb right outside your door, Mr Lamont. They almost brought your building down.'

'That's not how Mr Flynn sees it.'

'Those are facts, sir,' said Littlemore.

'If I'm not mistaken, Captain, this whole tragedy might yet prove the result of an accident on a dynamite wagon. I will not be party to speculation that J. P. Morgan and Company is under attack.'

'When was the last time you heard of a dynamite wagon loaded with a half ton of shrapnel?'

'But who would attack a bank in such a way?' asked Lamont. 'Where is the profit in it? This firm comes to the assistance of people in need all over the world. Who would want to attack us?'

'Let me put it this way, Mr Lamont. My men deal with murders of loan sharks all the time. Your business isn't too different – just bigger. What I always ask is who the shark's been leaning on to pay up. Or whether there's another shark in the water that might want a piece of the action.'

'I see,' said Lamont.

'If you'll forgive the comparison,' said Littlemore.

'I don't,' said Lamont. 'This firm does not "lean on" its debtors, Captain.'

'Sure you don't. And you don't have any enemies either, right? Only friends?'

Lamont didn't answer.

'You hedge your bets for a living, sir,' said Littlemore. 'Every banker does. I'm offering you a hedge. There's a chance the bombers are after your company. Maybe they were sending you a message. Maybe they'll send you another. Do you want to take that chance?'

Lamont lowered his voice: 'No.'

'I might just catch them if you put in a little time helping me out. That'd be a pretty big return for a small investment, Mr Lamont.'

'It would indeed,' Lamont agreed. 'You are independent of Chief Flynn?'

'I'm with the New York Police Department,' said Littlemore. 'We don't take our orders from Mr Flynn.'

'Give the receptionist your card, Captain. You have a card?'

'I've got a card.'

'I'll consider what you've said.'

Dusk had fallen when Littlemore arrived at Younger's detention cell.

'Geez, Doc, you pulverized him,' said the detective, unlocking the barred door. 'He looks like a bulldozer ran over his face.'

Younger put on his jacket and came out of the cell.

'I bailed you,' said the detective. 'Smoke?'

'Thanks,' said Younger. His shirt collar was loose, knuckles bruised. 'Did he get away?'

'No,' replied Littlemore. 'I sent a couple of boys to the hospital as soon as I heard. When the doctors clear him, we'll put him behind bars. I've got him – for now.'

The detective handed a large brown paper envelope to Younger, from which the latter shook out his necktie, watch, wallet, and other personal effects. 'For now?' he asked.

'How do we prove he's Drobac? Even I can't identify the guy after what you did to his face. We're going to need a lot more before his trial rolls around. But that's okay. Trial won't be for another six months.'

'I can identify him,' said Younger, putting on his watch.

'Hate to tell you, but your say-so became a little less weighty when you got yourself charged with attempted murder.'

Younger eyed the detective.

'That's how the DA saw it,' said Littlemore. 'Assault with intent to kill. I was lucky to get you out. The judge wasn't going for it until I mentioned that you were a Harvard man. Harvard man and Harvard professor. And Roosevelt was your cousin. And you slept with Roosevelt's daughter. Okay, I didn't say that.'

'As a matter of fact,' said Younger, looping his tie around his neck, 'I did intend to kill him.'

'No, you didn't.'

'Who does he say he is?'

'Funny thing,' said Littlemore, 'but he's not talking. Seems his mouth is wired shut because somebody broke his jaw in three places. Boy, you better be right.'

'It's Drobac. He was limping. He had marks on his face.'

'Not proof.'

'Can't you take his fingerprints?'

'Did it,' said Littlemore. 'But they have to match something. We got no prints on the knives. No matching prints in the room downtown. No matching prints on the car. No prints at all on Colette's laboratory box. Nothing. He knew what he was doing.'

Neither spoke.

'Why would he come after us?' asked Younger.

'Maybe he wanted to get rid of the people who can finger him.'

'Where is she?' asked Younger, fastening his cufflinks.

'The Miss? Giving her lecture.'

'What?'

'She wouldn't take no for an answer,' said Littlemore. 'Made me get all her samples out of the evidence locker.'

That night A. Mitchell Palmer, the Attorney General of the United States, arrived in Manhattan by special train from the nation's capital.

A long black-and-gold car – a Packard Twin Six Imperial, the kind of car only very rich men could afford – was waiting for him outside Pennsylvania Station. Inside was a dapper gentleman who wore a top hat, with the points of his shirt collar up.

The car took Palmer to the Treasury Building opposite the Morgan Bank on Wall Street. Soldiers, saluting, stepped aside as the two men ascended the marble stairs and passed through the massive portal. A half-hour later, Palmer and the well-dressed gentleman reappeared. The latter led the Attorney General around the colonnade to a narrow alleyway separating the Treasury from the adjacent Assay Building. The alleyway was barred by a tall wrought-iron gate, which had to be unlocked to let the Attorney General through.

The two men walked halfway down that alley, the top-hatted gentleman pointing up to the second floors of the not-quite-abutting buildings. There, one story above the street, what looked strangely like garage doors in midair faced each other across the alley. Attorney General Palmer shook his head grimly, then informed the gentleman that he would be quitting New York the next day. The investigation of the bombing would remain in the hands of Bureau Director Flynn. Palmer himself would travel on to Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, to visit with family.

The Marie Curie Radium Fund held a special lecture presentation on September 17, 1920, in the Saint Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue. The Fund was the brainchild of Mrs William B. Meloney, a well- upholstered lady of a certain age, well known in New York philanthropic and literary circles. Mrs Meloney was a working woman, a newspaper woman, who by virtue of her tireless reporting on Manhattan high society had eventually taken a place in it. Like many American women, Mrs Meloney had avidly followed – indeed she had reported on – the travails of the great Marie Curie of France.

'How outrageous it is,' declared the bow-tied Mrs Meloney from the opulent but somber church chancel, 'that Madame Curie, the world's most eminent scientist, the discoverer of radium, should for mere want of money be prohibited from continuing her investigations – investigations that have already led to the radium cure for our cancers, the radium face and hand creams that eliminate our unsightly blemishes' – Mrs Meloney was, in addition to her other pursuits, editor of a leading woman's magazine – 'and the radium-infused waters that restore conjugal vitality to our husbands.'

The audience, almost exclusively female, applauded warmly.

Mrs Meloney congratulated her listeners for their fortitude in coming out only one day after the terrible tragedy on Wall Street. 'It has always been woman's lot,' she said, 'to persevere when man's violent passions overwhelm him. And persevere we must. The cost of a gram of radium is appalling – a hundred thousand dollars – but the sum must be raised. The honor of America's women has been pledged. I myself pledged it – to Madame Curie herself, at her home in Paris – and it is now the obligation of every one of us to contribute generously to the Fund, or make our husbands contribute.'

As the ladies applauded once again, the front door of the church creaked noisily.

'Thank heavens,' said Mrs Meloney, 'here is Miss Rousseau at last. We were growing concerned, my dear.'

The audience of fashionable ladies swiveled. Colette walked up the cavernous central aisle in silence, a picture of self-consciousness, lugging with two hands the heavy case of sample ores and radioactive elements. She murmured an apology, but her faint voice failed to carry in the huge, dimly lit Gothic church, with its great columns and vaulted ceiling. Colette had expected a few women in a small lecture room, not two hundred in a place of worship, assembled before a pulpit with a larger-than-life-sized crucifixion on the enormous reredos behind it.

'Over the last several weekends,' Mrs Meloney continued, 'along with Miss Rousseali – who studied with Madame Curie herself in Paris and who will shortly enlighten us on "The Wonders of Radium" – I have been making a tour of the largest factories in America where radium products are made. We have sought to impress upon the owners of these factories how much they owe to Madame Curie. Our efforts have not been in vain, as I will soon have the pleasure of announcing to you.'

Here Mrs Meloney exchanged a knowing glance with a plump, impeccably dressed gentleman seated to her left, who gestured to the audience munificently. She then turned the pulpit over to Colette, who, smiling to cover her strenuous effort, hoisted the case of elements up the steps to the chancel.

'Thank you, Mrs Meloney,' said Colette. The pallor of her cheeks was attributed by her audience to her foreign birth. 'It is my warm honor and my privilege to give whatever small assistance I can to the Marie Curie Radium Fund.'

Colette paused, somehow expecting that her audience might applaud the name of Marie Curie. Instead there was a noticeable silence.

'Well, I begin,' she resumed, trying to press flat onto the lectern the curling pages on which she had carefully written out her presentation. 'Twenty-four years ago, Henri Becquerel, a French scientist, placed a dish of uranium crystals next to a wrapped photographic plate in a closed drawer and left them there for over a week. Was he conducting an experiment? No – Monsieur Becquerel was only cleaning up his laboratory, and he forgot where he put his uranium!'

Colette waited for laughter; none came.

'But when he unwrapped the photographic plate, he found an image on it – which should have been impossible, because the plate had not been exposed to light. Thus was the mystery of atomic radiation discovered, quite by accident! Two years later, in 1898, Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre, solved this mystery. Madame Curie proved that uranium's atoms emit invisible rays, and she coined a word for this phenomenon – radioactivity. Working in almost complete isolation, Madame Curie discovered two new elements previously unknown to man. The first she called polonium, after her native Poland; the second and by far the more powerful, she called radium. The potential energy of radium is so great it is almost impossible to describe with normal measures. You are familiar with horsepower? A single gram of radium contains an energy equivalent to that of eighty thousand million horses.'

Colette paused again, expecting a gasp at so enormous a figure. The only sound was the rustling of women's skirts and gloves.

'Such power,' Colette went on, speaking now a little too quickly, 'if released at once, would be enough to destroy every building in New York City in one terrible explosion. But science has found a way to harness radioactivity to save lives rather than destroy. Doctors today insert micrograms of radium, encased in tiny glass nodules, directly into a cancer patient's tumor. In weeks, the tumor is gone. All over the world today, because of radium, people are alive and well who would have died from cancer only a few years ago.' Here was a pronouncement the audience was in fact prepared to applaud, but this time, her nervousness growing, Colette failed to pause. 'Now I will demonstrate for you one of the extraordinary by-products of radioactivity: luminescence.'

'Oh, my child,' said Mrs Meloney, 'you're going to experiment – in church? Do you think that appropriate?'

'It will be only a small demonstration,' said Colette.

'All right,' said Mrs Meloney. 'But let's not demonstrate very long, shall we?'

Gathering two vials from her case, Colette stood awkwardly in the pulpit. The awkwardness lay in the absence of a table. Colette needed to combine the two compounds. Smiling nervously, Colette knelt to the floor and set her materials down. This allowed her to work with both hands; unfortunately it also made her invisible to her audience.

Suddenly there was an outburst of clapping. Colette looked up, puzzled. The ladies' attention was fixed on the plump gentleman behind her, who, beaming jovially, had raised his fists high over his head. From each hand dangled a wristwatch, casting a greenish phosphorescent glow.

'There's your luminescence, Miss Rousseau,' announced the gentleman. 'There's the magic of radium.'

More applause.

'Thank you, sir,' cried Mrs Meloney, 'you are a knight in shining armor. And thank you, Miss Rousseau, for that most educational lecture.'

'But I -' began Colette, who had only just started.

'And now, my friends,' continued Mrs Meloney, 'for the most gratifying portion of this evening's event. In Connecticut last week, I had the pleasure of meeting one of the titans of American industry, whose kindness and sense of public duty are every bit the equal of his eminence in commerce. He is one of this nation's leaders in oil, in mining, and in radium. Please join me in welcoming Mr Arnold Brighton.'

The plump gentleman came up and bowed in all directions to a long ovation. He was completely bald except for a tuft of wiry brown hair above each ear, but fastidiously attired, with shiny trimmed fingernails and gold cufflinks that glittered as he raised his arms to quiet the ladies' applause.

'Thank you, thank you – oh my, where did I put my speech?' Brighton patted his pockets with gleaming fingernails. 'Did I give it to you, Mrs Meloney?'

'To me, Mr Brighton?'

'Oh my. Is Samuels here? He would know where I put it. Well, my competitors always say I lose my head with the ladies. They won't employ women, you know, whereas my luminous dial factories are the largest employers of women in their states. My competitors can't understand how I could employ girls in a factory. My answer is simple. The female wage is lower than the male – significantly lower. Oh, I know what you're thinking. With so many men out of work, especially men who served in the war, don't they deserve the jobs? I beg to differ. Men have wives and children they're expected to support. That costs more. Whereas ninety percent of my girls are unmarried. That costs less. And look at their handiwork – look at these lovely watches. Applying radium paint to such tiny surfaces requires feminine dexterity and cleanliness. Mrs Meloney, will you permit a gentleman to offer you a gift? Or would Mr Meloney object?'

Appreciatively scandalized laughter attended this remark.

'For shame, Mr Brighton,' said Mrs Meloney, but she extended her ample arm coyly, allowing Brighton to secure to her wrist the larger of the two watches, in which violet gemstones were embedded. She held up her arm, displaying the object to the ladies of the audience, who clapped most cordially.

'Mrs Meloney can now tell the time in the blackest hour of night,' said Brighton. 'If the police and firemen of this city had been wearing my watches, they would never have been hindered by the great smoke cloud of yesterday's explosion. They would have had a source of light, requiring no batteries, no fuel, no power source at all. That's the wonder of radium. Now for you, Miss Rousseau, we had to make a special item. Our usual products wouldn't fit the delicacy of your wrist. May I?'

The watch Brighton offered to Colette was encircled with round- brilliant diamonds, refracting every color in the rainbow despite the dim illumination of the church. Uncomfortably, Colette lifted her hand. Brighton fastened his gift to her forearm, the green glow of the luminous watch face reflected in his polished fingernails. He expressed the hope that his present was to her liking. Colette didn't know what to say.

'Your generosity leaves us speechless, Mr Brighton,' said Mrs Meloney. 'Pray continue.'

'Continue?'

'Your contribution, Mr Brighton.'

'My contribution? Oh, my contribution, of course.' Brighton patted his pockets again and withdrew a bank draft from his vest – nearly knocking over the lectern in the process. After a lengthy preface, he declared it his great pleasure to present to the Marie Curie Radium

Fund a check in the amount of twenty-five thousand dollars. Gasps came from the audience, together with loud, sustained applause.

Mrs Meloney thanked her benefactor profusely. She then opened the floor to questions, professing her certainty that many in the audience would have questions for Miss Rousseau.

'Excuse me,' said a woman three pews back, 'but I've been using radium soap every day for the last year, and I still have warts on both my elbows. I'm very upset about it.'

'Oh,' said Colette. 'I'm afraid I don't know much about radium's cosmetic uses.'

Mrs Meloney came to Colette's assistance: 'Have you tried Radior night cream, my dear? It's done wonders for me.'

Another hand went up. 'I have a question for Miss Rousseau. What is the proper dosage of radium water for a sixty-year-old man to restore his vitality?'

'I'm sorry?' said Colette. 'His what?'

'His vitality,' repeated the woman.

Mrs Meloney whispered to Colette, whose livid cheeks reddened.

Afterward, during refreshments, Mrs Meloney complimented Mr Brighton on his height. 'You are so very much bigger than one expects, Mr Brighton,' said the gray-haired Mrs Meloney coquettishly. It was true. From a distance, Brighton looked short, and his countenance suggested an absent-minded professor of mathematics. Up close, he proved much taller; one couldn't quite tell where the height came from. The effect was to make his clumsiness considerably more concerning. 'And your gift,' added Mrs Meloney, showing off her sapphire wristwatch, 'I have never received a present so entrancing.'

'While I,' replied Brighton chivalrously, 'have never received so entrancing a visit to my factory as the one you and your assistant paid me two weeks ago.'

'Heavens, Mr Brighton,' protested Mrs Meloney, 'what would my husband say?'

'Why?' asked Brighton in some alarm. 'Did I do something wrong?'

'Would that men always did such wrong,' Mrs Meloney reassured him. 'I must insist you attend our presentation ceremony, Mr Brighton, when we give Madame Curie her radium next May – if only we can raise the rest of the money. I intend to persuade the Mayor to preside.'

'The Mayor?' said Brighton. 'Why not the President? I'll speak with Harding about it; he'll be in the White House by then. Miss Rousseau, have you seen our nation's capital? I'm going down – oh my, when am I going down? Where's my man Samuels? I can't remember a thing without him. There he is now, the dour fellow. What were you saying, Madam?'

'I, Mr Brighton?' said Mrs Meloney. 'I believe you had just made reference to Mr Harding.'

'Oh, yes – I'm going to Washington to meet with Harding. Why don't you ladies accompany me? I have my own train, you know. Quite comfortable. You and Miss Rousseau will find many eleemosynary organizations in the capital – fertile soil for your Fund.'

'We'd be delighted, wouldn't we, dear?' Mrs Meloney asked Colette.

'Look at Samuels,' said Brighton, vexed. 'He wants me, as usual. Will you excuse me, ladies?'

'What a prepossessing man,' declared Mrs Meloney as Brighton went to his secretary, who draped a coat over his employer's shoulders and whispered in his ear. Most of the women in attendance remained in the church, trading information about which radium products they liked best. 'He has his eye on you, my dear,' Mrs Meloney added.

'On me?' said Colette. 'No – on you, surely, Mrs Meloney.'

'Tush – what am I? An old lady. Look at the watch he gave you. It's diamond. Have you any idea what such a thing is worth?'

'I can't keep it,' confided Colette.

'Why on earth not?' the excitable Mrs Meloney replied.

'It's very wrong to use radium on a watch face, Mrs Meloney. And please, you mustn't encourage these women to use radium cosmetics.'

'Don't tell me you're a radio-skeptic, dear. My husband is a radio-skeptic of the worst sort, but I assure you my Radior night cream has taken a decade off my face. I can see it, even if he can't.'

'It's the cost,' said Colette. 'Companies like Radior have made radium unaffordable to scientists.'

'Tush – my night cream is only ninety-nine cents.'

'Of course, Mrs Meloney, but because so many women pay that ninety-nine cents, a gram of radium now costs over a hundred thousand dollars.'

'I'm afraid you scientists rarely have a firm grasp of economics, dear. The cost of radium determines the price of my Radior night cream, not the reverse.'

'No, Mrs Meloney. Think of all the people buying radium cosmetics and radium watches. The more those products are sold, the less radium there is in the world, and the more precious it becomes.'

'You're making my head spin, Miss Rousseau. All I know is that our Fund is off to a flying start. Let's concentrate on that, shall we?'

'I can't tell you how important this is,' said Colette. 'There's so litde radium. Companies like Mr Brighton's consume over ninety percent of it. They leave next to nothing for science and medicine. What they do leave is too expensive to afford. Thousands of people dying from cancer today will never be treated with radium simply because of the cost. These companies are killing people – literally killing people. I tried to explain that to Mr Brighton when we visited his plant, but I don't think he was listening.'

'I certainly hope not,' said Mrs Meloney. 'He'll withdraw his donation. Can't you be a little nicer to the dear man? Why, I daresay he'd fund the entire gram of radium himself if you would just be kind to him.'

A jovial Mr Brighton returned to bid them adieu, bowing this way and that. 'Samuels says I must be off. Don't forget, Miss Rousseau: you've promised me Washington.' He extended his elbow to the older woman. 'Will you escort me to the door, Mrs Meloney?'

'Why, Mr Brighton – people will think we've just been married,' said Mrs Meloney.

'Very well,' said Brighton, 'then both you ladies must escort me.'

Colette tried to decline this invitation, but Mrs Meloney wouldn't hear of it. Descending from the chancel by a short flight of steps, the three made their way down the central aisle of the nave, at the far end of which Brighton's assistant, Samuels, was handing out products to a small crowd of appreciative, departing ladies.

'You uttered the nefarious name of Radior,' Brighton explained to Mrs Meloney. 'I couldn't let the competition be advertised without a response. We've just started our own line of eye shade. Luminous, of course – as you can see.'

A number of ladies had tried on the shadow and mascara they had received, creating paired circles of phosphorescence that turned the dark portal of the church into a kind of grotto from which nocturnal birds or beasts seemed to peer out. Mrs Meloney apologized to Brighton: she'd had no idea that his company had entered the cosmetics line; she would be sure to mention it in the next issue of The Delineator. She and Mr Brighton were so engrossed in their affable chat, and Colette so provoked by it, that they didn't notice the solitary figure ahead of them, kneeling among the shadowed pews, head down as if in prayer.

'Mrs Meloney – I left my elements by the lectern,' said Colette. 'I should go back for them.'

'Don't be rude, dear,' replied the older woman, pulling firmly on Brighton's arm, who in turn pulled Colette.

The kneeling figure began to stir as they approached. A hood covered its head.

'Yes, don't desert me, Miss Rousseau,' said Brighton. 'I'll have Samuels collect your things.'

Colette didn't answer. Her tongue had gone dry. The hooded figure had stepped into the aisle, blocking their advance. It was a woman. Wispy red hair emerged from the hood. One bony hand rested on a scarf around her neck – hiding something that seemed to bulge out from beneath it.

'Can we help you, dear?' asked Mrs Meloney.

Colette knew she ought to say something, to cry out in warning. But she found herself transfixed. The gaunt creature's eyes seemed to call out to her. They seemed to take in the connection between her and Mr Brighton and Mrs Meloney – the linking of their arms, their apparent unity – and to condemn it. A hand rose up toward Colette, beckoning her. Colette felt herself surrendering. For reasons opaque to her – perhaps it was simply that she was in a church; perhaps it was the accumulated effect of the harrowing incidents of the last two days, breaking down her resistance – Colette felt she had to meet the creature's outstretched hand with kindness, not horror. Whatever the reason, Colette reached out to the shrouded woman. Their fingers made contact.

The touch was repulsive, damp, communicating illness or contagion as if the creature had emerged from a fouled pool and would soon return there. The hooded figure clenched her fingers around Colette's and took a step backward, pulling Colette with her.

'Stop that at once,' said Mrs Meloney, as if addressing children with bad manners.

'Yes, stop that at once,' said Brighton. The hooded girl turned her eyes on him and pointed an outstretched hand at his face. He fell back, letting Colette go. 'Samuels?' said Brighton weakly.

The shrouded woman drew Colette another step back, always keeping one bony, blue-veined hand on the scarf around her neck. Colette didn't resist. It was the wristwatch – the gift from Brighton, now only a few inches from the hooded girl's face – that broke the spell.

In the greenish luminosity of the watch dial, Colette saw eyes that struck her momentarily as sweet, like a doe's. Then the eyes changed. They seemed to become aware of the glinting diamonds at Colette's wrist, and they filled with fire. With sharp nails, the creature began clawing at the watch and its diamond-studded band, scratching Colette's skin, drawing blood. Colette tried vainly to wrest her hand away.

'It's a thief cried Mrs Meloney.

In a fury, the red-haired woman scraped at Colette's flesh and spoke for the first time: 'Give me – give me-

Colette's breath caught in her throat: the woman's voice was guttural, like a man's, only lower in pitch than any man's voice Colette had ever heard. In her thrashing, the woman's scarf fell away from her chin. A pair of thin, colorless lips was the first thing to appear. Then the scarf fell farther down, and Mrs Meloney screamed at the sight, just as Betty Littlemore had.

'My God,' said Colette.

The hooded figure, fixated on the diamond watch, drew from her cloak a shaft of glinting metal – a knife. Colette was now pinioned. Mr Brighton had retreated, but the bold Mrs Meloney had taken his place, evidently believing that she could best render aid to Colette by seizing her free arm and refusing to let go. The redheaded woman, wild-eyed, raised her knife. Colette, with one wrist seized by her assailant, the other by her would-be protector, was helpless.

Mrs Meloney cried out: 'She's going to cut off her arm! Someone help!'

A shot rang out. A bullet ripped into the crucifix behind the pulpit, tearing a shoulder of carved wood off the savior. The hooded woman spun around, holding her knife high above her head. There came another shot, then another. The woman's flashing eyes went still. The knife slipped from her hand. An unnaturally deep groan came from her lips, and blood appeared at the corner of her mouth. Her body collapsed into Colette's arms.

The French girl felt a fleshy, sickening contact as the woman's throat pressed against her own. Shuddering, Colette let the body fall to the

floor. In the church vestibule, Brighton's amanuensis, Samuels, stood with a smoking gun in his hand.

For a long moment, no one moved. Then, from behind Mrs Meloney,

Arnold Brighton poked his head out. 'Oh, well done, Samuels,' he said. 'Well done.'

'Mr Brighton,' said Mrs Meloney reprovingly.

'Yes, Mrs Meloney?'

'You hid behind me.'

'Oh, no, I wasn't hiding,' said Brighton. 'Everyone knew where I was. I was taking cover. Most satisfactory cover, I might add. Most ample cover.'

'You held me, Mr Brighton, when the shots were fired. I tried to run, but you held me fast.'

'You mean – oh, I see what you mean. I benefitted from you without compensating you. How can I repay you? Would a thousand dollars be appropriate? Five thousand?'

'My word,' said Mrs Meloney.

'Samuels, don't just stand there,' said Brighton. 'Clean up. One can't leave a dead body on the floor of a church. Could we pay the trash men to take her, do you suppose?'

'She's still alive,' said Colette, kneeling by the fallen woman.

'She is?' asked Brighton, looking as if he might need to take cover behind Mrs Meloney again.

'Police!' shouted Detective Littlemore, bursting through the front door of the church. 'Drop your weapons!'

The woman's body lay crumpled on the cold stone floor, a dark stain of blood spreading out below it. Younger and Littlemore had arrived just in time to hear cries of 'murder' from ladies fleeing the church. As Mrs Meloney explained to the detective how the mad woman had attacked Colette, and how Mr Samuels had saved them,' Younger sought a pulse in the fallen woman's wrist. He found one, very faint.

Colette knelt next to him. 'Look at her neck,' she said.

Matted, unhealthy red hair masked the woman's face. Grimly but gingerly, Younger pushed the hair away. He saw vacant eyes, a pretty

nose and thin, parted lips. The fraying scarf had regained its place over her neck. Younger pulled it away.

The woman had no chin at all. Where a chin should have been, and where a throat should have been, there was instead an engorged bulbous mass, almost as large as the woman's own head, attached to her neck. It had wrinkles, dimples, lumps, indentations, and many, many veins.

'What in the love of Pete is that?' asked Littlemore.

Chapter Nine

A year before the attack on Wall Street, the President of the United States, sitting on his toilet in the White House, suffered a massive cerebral thrombosis – a clot in the artery feeding his brain. Within moments, the once-visionary Woodrow Wilson became a half-blind invalid, unable to move the left side of his body, including the left side of his mouth.

Wilson's stroke was kept from the public, from his Cabinet, even from his Vice President. It was difficult to say who was supposed to run the country after Wilson s collapse. Indeed it was difficult to say who was running the country. Was it Secretary of State Robert Lansing, who secretly convened the Cabinet in the President's absence? Or was it Wilson's wife, Edith, who counted among her ancestors both Plantagenets and Pocahontas, and who alone had access to the presidential sick room, emerging therefrom with orders that Wilson had supposedly dictated? Or perhaps it was Attorney General Palmer, who secured ever more funds for his Bureau of Investigation, and who imprisoned tens of thousands all over the country as suspected enemies of the nation.

Throughout 1920, the country lurched along in this strange, headless condition. In January, Prohibition took effect. In March, the Senate rejected the League of Nations and, with it, Wilson's vision of America joining an international community of peaceful states and taking center stage in world affairs. Wilson had never persuaded his practical countrymen why America would want to entangle itself in Europe's intrigues and ancient enmities. What, after all, had the United States gained from the last war, in which more than 100,000 American young men had perished to save English and French skins?

Uncertain of their direction, deprived of drink, Americans in 1920 were waiting – for a storm to break the gathering tension, for a new president to be elected in November, for their economy to recover. Americans believed they had brought peace to the world. Surely they were entitled to worry about their own problems now.

There was, however, no peace in the world. In the summer of 1920, great armies still ravaged the earth. In August, a Soviet army marched triumphantly into Poland and even entered Warsaw, its sights set on Germany and beyond. Lenin had reason to be ambitious. Armed communists had seized power in Munich and declared Bavaria a Soviet Republic. The same occurred in Hungary. Right next door to the United States, revolutionaries in Mexico overthrew the American- supported regime, promising to reclaim that nation's gigantic petroleum deposits from the companies – in particular the United States companies – that owned them.

But most Americans in 1920 neither knew nor cared. Most had had their fill of the world. Most – but not all.

On Saturday morning, September 18, two days after the bombing, one day after Colette's lecture in Saint Thomas Church, Younger and Littlemore met at a subway station a couple of blocks from Bellevue Hospital.

Any way to identify the girl?' asked Younger as they set off for the hospital.

'Two-Heads?' said Littlemore. 'We'll probably know in a day or two. With girls, somebody usually comes in to report them missing. Unless she's a hooker, in which case nobody reports her.'

'I have a feeling this one isn't a hooker,' said Younger.

The two men looked at each other.

'Did you check her teeth?' asked Younger.

'To see if she lost a molar? Yeah – I had the same idea. But nope. No missing teeth.'

'Why Colette?'

'You mean why are these things happening to her? That's the question all right. But like I said – don't assume everything's connected.'

'What are you assuming – freak coincidence?'

'I'm not assuming anything. I never assume. If I had to guess, I'd say somebody thinks the Miss is somebody she isn't. Maybe a whole lot of people think she's somebody she isn't.'

Bellevue was a publicly funded hospital, required to take all patients delivered to its door, and the catastrophe on Wall Street had added fresh strains upon its already overtaxed resources. Every corridor was an obstacle course of patients slumped over on chairs or stretched out on gurneys. On the third floor, Younger and Littlemore found the woman from the church in a ward she shared with more than a dozen other female patients. She was breathing but unconscious, veins pulsing on the engorged mass bulging out of her neck. A nurse told them the girl had not regained consciousness since being admitted. One bed away, a hospital physician was administering an injection to another patient. Littlemore asked him if he thought the redheaded woman was going to live.

'I wouldn't know,' said the physician helpfully.

'Who would?' asked Littlemore.

'I would,' said the physician. 'I attend on this ward. But I've had no time to examine her.'

'Mind if I examine her?' asked Younger.

'You're a doctor?' asked the doctor.

'He's a Harvard doctor,' said Littlemore.

'I'd like to get a look at what's inside that neoplasm on her neck,' said Younger. 'Do you have an X-ray machine?'

'Of course we have one,' said the doctor, 'but only the hospital's radiology staff is permitted to use it.'

'Okay,' said Littlemore. 'Where can we find the radiology staff?'

'I'm the hospital's radiology staff,' said the doctor.

Littlemore folded his arms. 'And when could you do an X-ray?'

'In two weeks,' said the doctor. 'I perform X-rays on the first Monday of every month.'

'Two weeks?' repeated Littlemore. 'She could be dead in two weeks.'

'So could five hundred other patients in this hospital,' snapped the doctor. 'I'll have to ask you to excuse me. I'm very busy.'

After the physician had left, Littlemore said, 'Maybe I shouldn't have told him you were a Harvard doctor. I don't know why people resent what they ought to admire. What the heck is that thing on her neck?'

'I don't know, but we might find out pretty soon.' Younger pointed to a thin, bluish vertical fissure that was developing on the distended mass. The fissure ran from the girl's chin to her sternum. 'Whatever's inside may be trying to get out.'

'Great,' said Littlemore.

'It could be a teratoma.'

'What's that?'

'Encapsulated hair or teeth, usually,' said Younger.

'Teeth – like a molar?' asked Littlemore.

'Maybe. Or a twin.'

'What?'

'A twin that was never born,' said Younger. 'Not alive. There's never been a case of a live one.'

'First we see a woman with no head on Wall Street, and now we got one with two. That's what I call – wait a minute. She was a redhead too.'

'The woman with no head? Was a redhead?' asked Younger.

'Her head was. We walked right past it. And I'm pretty sure she was wearing a dress like this girl's. I'll go to the morgue. Maybe she was missing a molar.'

That same morning, newspapers all over the country reported that Edwin Fischer, the man who knew in advance about the Wall Street bombing, was in custody in Hamilton, Ontario, having been adjudged insane by a panel of Canadian magistrates. Fischer had been taken before the Canadian judges by his own brother-in-law, who had read about the now-famous postcards and motored from New York to Toronto in the company of two agents of the United States Department of Justice.

Younger had a look around Bellevue Hospital after the detective left. It wasn't difficult for a doctor to pose as a personage of authority in a large, overcrowded hospital. At any rate it wasn't difficult for Younger, who had learned in the war how to command obedience from subordinates through the simple artifice of acting as if it went without saying that one's orders would be followed.

He found the roentgen equipment on the second floor. It was as he'd hoped: a modern unit, driven by transformer, not induction, and equipped with Coolidge tubes. The milliamperage was clearly marked. He knew he could operate it.

At police headquarters, Officer Roederheusen knocked on Littlemore's door. 'I've got the mailman, Captain,' said Roederheusen. 'The one who picks up at Cedar and Broadway.'

'What are you waiting for?' asked Littlemore. 'Bring him in.'

'Urn, sir, do you think I could have a nickname?'

'A nickname? What for?'

'Stanky has a nickname. And my name's kind of hard for you, sir.'

'Okay. Not a bad idea. I'll call you Spanky.'

'Spanky?'

'As opposed to Stanky. Now bring me that mailman.'

'Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.'

Roederheusen returned in a moment, mailman in tow. Littlemore offered the man a seat, a doughnut, and coffee. The postman, who accepted all these offerings, coughed and sniffled.

'So you're the one who found the circulars,' said Littlemore. 'Did you get a look at the men who mailed them?'

The man shook his head, mouth full.

'Okay, here's what I want to know – when did you first see the circulars? Did you see them when you opened the mailbox or only later, when you got back to the post office?'

The postman blew his nose into a paper napkin. 'Don't know what you're talking about. The box was empty.'

'Empty?' repeated Littlemore. 'The mailbox at Cedar and Broadway? Day of the bombing? Eleven fifty-eight pickup?'

'The eleven fifty-eight? I never made the eleven fifty-eight. Hung my bag up after morning rounds. Too sick. Lucky thing, huh?'

'Did somebody cover for you?'

'Cover for me?' The man laughed into his napkin. 'Fat chance. What's this all about, anyway?'

Littlemore sent the postman away.

Eighty miles away, in a laboratory at Yale University, a human-like creature in a helmet and what looked like an undersea diver's suit was also working on Saturday. The creature was titrating fumaric acid into six tubes of thorium in an attempt to isolate ionium. When this delicate, wearisome task was not quite complete, the creature lumbered out of the laboratory and into the sunshine of a campus courtyard, causing a child to run crying to his perambulating nanny.

The creature took off its gloves and removed its slit-visored helmet. Out shook the long sable hair of Colette Rousseau. She sat on a bench, the brightness of the sun blinding her after the double darkness of the laboratory and her helmet.

Colette and Luc had returned to New Haven early Saturday morning so that she could resume her laboratory duties, from which she had taken two days off. Her experiments were designed to test the existence of ionium, a putative new element that Professor Bertram Boltwood claimed to have discovered – the 'parent of radium,' he called it. Madame Curie did not believe in ionium, judging it to be only a manifestation of thorium. Accordingly, Colette did not believe in ionium either. She had already established that ionium could not be separated from thorium with any of the ordinary precipitants, such as sodium thiosulfate or meta-nitro-benzoic acid. Today she was trying fumaric acid. But her hands had begun to shake within her heavy lead-lined gloves, and she'd had to stop.

She gathered her hair into a long braid, threw it behind one shoulder of her radiation suit, and, using both hands, reached to the nape of her neck. She drew out the chain and locket that always hung at her chest. Turning an ingeniously crafted bezel first one way, then the other, Colette opened the two halves of the locket. Into the palm of her hand fell a thin, tarnished metal oval – like an oblong coin – with two tiny holes punched through it.

One side of this metal oval was bare. Turning it over, Colette let eyes linger on a series of machine-etched letters and numbers: Hans Gruber, Braunau am Inn, 20. 4. 89., 2. Ers. Masch. Gew. K., 3.A.K. Nr. 1128.

Although it was a Saturday, Littlemore saw lights in the Commissioner's office. The detective knocked and entered.

'Captain Littlemore -just the man I wanted to see,' said Commissioner Enright from an armchair by a large window, looking up from a report he'd been reading. Enright was revered by his men. He was the only Police Commissioner in the history of New York City to have risen to that position from the rank and file. 'I've been in touch with the Canadians. They're happy to extradite. Send someone to Ontario to collect this Edwin Fischer.'

'Already on their way, Mr Enright,' said Littlemore.

'That's the spirit. You met with Director Flynn of the Bureau yesterday. What were your impressions?'

'Big Bill's not giving us a thing, Commissioner,' said Littlemore. 'Fischer, for example. Flynn knew Fischer was in custody Wouldn't say where, wouldn't say how he knew. After we turned over all our evidence to them.'

Enright shook his head ruefully. 'It's no more than I expected. That's why I chose you as liaison officer. They have greater resources than we, Littlemore, but not greater brainpower. Keep a step ahead of him. Keep us in it. Flynn found the circulars. Let the next find be ours.' 'I don't like the circulars, sir,' said Littlemore. 'You don't "like" them?'

'Flynn's story doesn't wash. There's no way the bombers got from Wall Street to that mailbox by 11:58. Plus the flyers don't read right. They don't even mention a bombing. If I'm the Wall Street bomber and I want to tell everybody I did it, I'm going to say so. Mr Enright, I'm not even sure the circulars were picked up from a mailbox at all. I just got done with the mailman who would have made the pickup. He went home sick that morning.'

'What are you suggesting, Littlemore?'

'Nothing, sir. All I know is that Flynn s doing everything he can to connect our bombing to the ones from 1918 and 1919. He even said the Chicago Post Office was bombed on the third Thursday of September, so that September 16 was the exact anniversary.' 'Yes, I read that in the Times,' said Enright.

'The Chicago bomb went off on September 4, 1918, Mr Enright. I don't know if that was a Thursday, but it definitely wasn't the third Thursday. I just think we should keep looking.'

'Certainly we should keep looking,' said Enright. 'That's why we're going to speak with Mr Fischer. But I should tell you that on this point I quite agree with General Palmer: the bombing on Wall Street was the work of Bolshevik anarchists. Who else would have done such a thing? The Great War did not end in 1918. It was a mistake to withdraw our troops from Russia; we've allowed them to bring the war to our soil. Wilson is useless, but things will change after the election. Harding will take the war to Lenin's doorstep where it belongs. That's all, Captain.'

Younger returned to Bellevue early the next morning. The hospital was much quieter now: it was no less crowded with patients, but because it was Sunday, fewer medical personnel were on hand, and very little treatment was being given or received.

In a bathroom on the second floor, Younger put a white coat over his suit and tie. Striding down the hall, he entered the room where the X-ray machine was kept, wheeled it out, guided it into an elevator, and came out onto a third-floor corridor, where he called out commandingly for a nurse to assist him. A nurse came running at once.

The unconscious redheaded girl lay in the same room in the same condition – alive but comatose. With the nurse's help, Younger laid the girl's body on the wooden X-ray couch, stomach-down, turning her head to one side. Her profile was uncannily angelic save for the monstrosity protruding from her chin and throat, which looked even more distended and unnatural in the electric light of the hospital room than it had in the darkness of the church. Younger prodded the mass with two gloved fingers, which provoked in him a peculiar, highly nonmedical sensation of disgust. The interior of the growth was soft but granular.

Radiographing an unconscious person was considerably easier, Younger discovered, than a conscious one. There was no difficulty with the subject moving during irradiation. The X-ray tube, clamped inside a box running on casters beneath the table, was easily brought directly below the girl's cheek. Protecting himself with a lead panel, Younger turned on the radiation and adjusted the diaphragm until only the growth fluoresced on the test screen over the girl's head. Then he replaced the test screen with an unexposed photographic plate. He let the radiation course through the girl's body for exactly eight seconds and repeated this process several times, from different angles, using a new plate each time.

The same morning, the Littlemore clan was tumbling out of their Fourteenth Street apartment house on their way to church. The children had been scrubbed and soaped until they shone like sprightly mirrors. Littlemore had their toddler, Lily, on his shoulders. Lily always received special treatment; none of the other children objected, because of her condition.

Betty's mother, a half foot shorter than Betty herself, had joined them as she always did on Sunday mornings, wearing her church hat and keeping an emphatic distance from her son-in-law. In deference to Betty's stronger religious feelings, Littlemore had consented to attend Catholic church on Sundays and to raise his children in that faith, but he never got used to all the crossing. Or the kneeling. Or the confessing. He would bow his head, but he just couldn't cross himself. As a result, Betty's mother displayed her piety every Sunday by pretending she didn't know her son-in-law.

One little Littlemore called out to his father that there was mail. He handed Littlemore a small, square, engraved envelope. Littlemore, removing Lily from his shoulders, explained to his son that whatever the envelope was, it wasn't mail, because the mail didn't come on Sundays.

'Is it a bomb?' asked the boy with genuine curiosity.

'No, it's not a bomb, for Pete's sake,' said Littlemore, trying to sound as if the suggestion were absurd. He exchanged a glance with Betty. 'Bombs are bigger.'

The envelope contained a printed card inviting Littlemore to the Bankers and Brokers Club at seven o'clock that evening. The invitation was from Thomas Lamont.

The detective and his family had not progressed half a block when a chunky man in a dark suit crossed the street and tapped Littlemore on his shoulder. It was one of Director Flynn's deputies.

'I got a message for you,' said the deputy.

'Oh yeah?' said Littlemore. 'Spill it.'

'Chief knows you been questioning United States letter carriers.'

'So?'

'He don't like you questioning United States letter carriers.'

'Is that right? Well, I got a message for Big Bill,' replied Littlemore.

'You tell him the word is mailman. Just mailman. Going to church today?'

'Think you're pretty smart, don't you?' said Flynn s man. He looked at Littlemore s children and then at their mother in her church dress. 'Nice family. Chief knows all about your family. Eye-talian, ain't they?'

Littlemore walked up close to the man. 'You wouldn't be trying to threaten me, would you?'

'We was just wondering why the son of an Irishman would marry an Eye-talian.'

'Nice investigating,' said Littlemore. 'My father isn't Irish.'

'Oh yeah?'

'Yeah.'

'Then how come he drinks like one?' The deputy, a much larger man than Littlemore, laughed richly at his jest, producing the sounds har har har. 'I heard your Pa hasn't been sober since they kicked him off the force.'

Littlemore laughed good-naturedly, shook his head, and turned away. 'Okay, you win round one,' he said before spinning around and leveling the deputy with one punch to his midsection followed by another to his rotund face. The deputy tried to get up, but fell in a stupor back to the sidewalk. 'You might want to work on round two next time.'

Littlemore and his family proceeded to church.

After developing and fixing the exposed plates, Younger thought he must have badly mistaken the machine's milliamperage. There was no image on the plates at all – only a white amorphous cloud, flecked with a seething shadow pattern of a kind Younger had never seen before. On the other hand, the top of the girl's sternum appeared with clarity, suggesting that the film hadn't been overexposed. It was as if the X-rays had simply been unable to pass through whatever was growing inside the girl's neck.

Younger took another set of films. This time he varied the length of irradiation, using both shorter and longer intervals. When the new set of pictures was developed, the results were either useless or identical to the first.

In principle, the fact that a part of the human body was roentgenopaque – impervious to X-rays – wasn't startling. Bones, for example, are roentgenopaque. Nor would it have been unthinkable for the engorgement protruding from the girl's jaw to be composed of solid bone. In advanced rheumatoid arthritis, for example, osseous processes could grow in all sorts of grotesque shapes and at many different places in the afflicted person's body. A bone growth inside the girl's chin and neck would have produced a perfectly white image on Younger's plates.

There were three problems with this theory. First, a bone growth would have shown sharp definition in shape, not the borderless amoeba of white that appeared on this girl's radiograms. Second, bone would not have produced the shadowy, foaming pattern inside the formless white – a pattern that seemed to shift ever so slightly on every plate, as if whatever produced it were constantly altering its position. Finally, Younger had felt the mass with his fingers, pressing on either side of the thin blue fissure. Whatever was inside wasn't bone. It was too pliable – and too evasive, shifting as if to avoid his touch.

Younger considered, swallowing drily, the possibility that something was alive – something impervious to X-rays – inside the girl's neck.

The Bankers and Brokers Club occupied a fine Greco-Roman town- house downtown. At a quarter past seven that evening, on the fourth floor of the club, Littlemore found Thomas Lamont seated alone in the corner of an otherwise crowded, comfortably appointed room, apparently devoted to whist and cigars. The occupants were all men. Littlemore was surprised at the atmosphere – not the cigar smoke, but the conviviality and enjoyment. Business was apparently still good, notwithstanding the bombing.

Lamont, by contrast, was fidgety. He looked as if he wished he were elsewhere. 'A drink, Captain?' he asked. 'Quite legal, you know. Private club.'

'I'm fine,' said Littlemore.

'Ah, on duty, of course,' said Lamont, waving a waiter away'. I thought about what you said on Friday. Are you really sure the criminals were attacking my firm?'

'I never said I was sure, Mr Lamont,' said Littlemore. 'I said that if I were you, I'd want to find out.'

'You asked me if the firm had enemies. There is a man who came to mind after you left. But it cannot get out that I named him. Is that understood?'

Littlemore nodded. The hush of Lamont's voice, coupled with the general noise of card-playing, assured that no one would overhear them. Thick smoke curled around the armchairs and wafted into the coffered ceiling.

'He's a banking man,' Lamont went on, almost whispering. 'A foreigner. Before the war, he was the second wealthiest financier in New York – second to J. P. Morgan, Sr, that is. How he hated Morgan for it. Now he's fallen down, and he blames us for his misfortune. It's ludicrous. He's German, a personal friend of the Kaiser's. His house funded the Kaiser's armies. Naturally his lines of credit dried up when our country declared war against his. What did he expect? But he seems to believe there's a conspiracy even now to deny him funds and that we are its masterminds. He threatened me.'

Lamont looked positively fearful.

'What kind of threat?' asked Littlemore.

'It was at our Democratic campaign dinner. No, it was our Republican dinner – for Harding. We do them both, of course. At any rate, he drew me aside and told me to "watch out" – I'm quoting him, Captain – to "watch out" because "there are those who don't like it when one of the houses combines with the others to deny men capital.'"

'You say he funded the German army?'

'Unquestionably,' said Lamont. 'Clandestine, of course. You won't find his name on any documents. If you ask him, he'll tell you he

loves this country. But he feels no loyalty to us. I doubt he is loyal to any country, even his own. It's in their nature, you know. A Bolshevik, in fact.'

'Wait a minute,' replied Littlemore. 'You're saying the guy's a banker, a friend of the Kaiser-'

'Why, the Kaiser knighted the man. He received the German Cross of the Red Eagle.'

'And a Bolshevik?' asked Littlemore.

'He's a Jew,' Lamont explained.

Roars of laughter erupted across the room. A butler approached.

'Oh, a Jew,' said Littlemore. 'Now I get it. What's his name?'

The butler bent toward Lamont and said, 'The gentleman is back, sir.'

'For heaven's sake, tell him I'm not here,' answered Lamont in obvious annoyance.

'I'm afraid he knows you're here, sir,' said the butler.

'Well, tell him to go away. I don't come to my club to do business. Tell him he must see me at my office.' To Littlemore, he added: 'The new financial agent for Mexico. Won't take no for an answer.'

'The man's name, Mr Lamont,' said Littlemore.

'Senor Pesqueira, I believe. Why?'

'Not him. The man who threatened you.'

'Oh. Speyer. Mr James Speyer.'

'Do you know where I can find him?'

'That's why I asked you here. You may be able to converse with Mr Speyer tonight.'

'He's a member?' asked Littlemore.

'At the Bankers and Brokers?' returned Lamont, incredulous. 'Certainly not. Mr Speyer likes to dine at Delmonico's, which is open to the public. I'm told he's there tonight. It may be your last chance.'

'Why?'

'They say he means to leave the country tomorrow.'

In New Haven, Connecticut, Colette and Luc Rousseau had also attended church that Sunday, near the stately mansions of Hillhouse Avenue. On their way home, they walked around an old cemetery as overstuffed clouds hung thoughtlessly against a gaudy blue sky. Colette tried to hold her brother's hand, but he wouldn't have it.

After the sun had set, back in their small dormitory room, Colette wrote a letter:

19-9-1920

Dear Stratham:

As I write these words Luc is pretending to be you, swinging an imaginary baseball bat. Then he pretends to be that terrible man, jumping around with his hair on fire.

I don't think he minded being kidnapped. He wasn't afraid at all. In fact he is angry because I want to leave America. I would say he isn't speaking to me, if one could say such a thing of a boy who doesn't talk.

Have you found out who that girl was or examined her neck? I have the strangest feeling whenever I think about her. I wish she had just taken that awful watch and run away.

Stratham, you will not believe me when I tell you how much I don't want to go away. I told the girl who lives upstairs about my trip to New York: one bombing, one kidnapping, one knife throwing, one madwoman in a church. She said she would have died from fright. She said I must want to get out of the country as soon as I can. I don't. I want to stay.

But I made a vow, and I have to go. I know you will not like to hear it, but I've never felt about anyone the way I feel about Hans. Seeing him again is more important than anything in the world for me, even if I only see him once more. I'm sorry. But perhaps you won't care at all; I never know with you.

If you do care, I want to ask you something very foolish – a favor I hardly dare set down, given everything you've already done for me. I am the most ungrateful girl who ever lived. Please come with me to Vienna. That's the favor I ask. I truly expect to see Hans once and never again. Whatever happens, I will wish in my heart that you were there with me. Please say you'll come.

With all my affection, Colette

The air at Delmonico s was even thicker with smoke, but less crowded and much more subdued. In the main salon overlooking Fifth Avenue, Littlemore noticed that the usual profusion of diamond earrings and glittering crystal was not in evidence. The bombing remained the chief topic of conversation, but the stunned and speechless horror of September 16 was giving way, among some, to vitriol and rage.

'You know what we should do?' asked one man at a table for four. 'Shoot the Italians one by one until they tell us who did it.'

'Not all of them, Henry, surely.'

'Why not?' retorted Henry. 'If they bomb us, we kill them. Simple as that. That's the only way to stop a terrorist. Hit him where it hurts.'

'Why do they hate us so much?' asked a woman next to Henry.

'Who cares?'

'Deport them, I say,' declared the other man. 'Deport all the Italians, and there's the end of this ghastly bombing. They contribute nothing to society in any event.'

'What about the Delmonicos?' asked the other woman. 'Don't they contribute?'

'Deport all Italians except the Delmonicos!' cried the man, raising a glass in a mock toast.

'No, my steak is overcooked – Delmonico must go too!' cried Henry. The table broke out in laughter. The diners were evidently unaware that the Delmonicos no longer owned Delmonico's.

The headwaiter approached Littlemore. Asking for Mr James Speyer, the detective was led to an interior garden, where stained-glass windows ran from floor to ceiling. At a corner table a man sat alone – a man of about sixty, with hair still mostly black and the doleful eyes of a basset hound. The detective approached the table.

'Name's Littlemore,' said Littlemore. 'New York Police Department. Mind if I sit down?'

'Ah,' said Speyer. 'Finally a face to put on the law. Why would I mind? No man likes to dine alone.' Speyer's accent was distinctly German; before him were the plates and glasses of a fully consumed meal. He went on: 'You know what you've done? You've destroyed this establishment.'

Mr Speyer was evidently inebriated.

'I have a joke with the waiter,' he went on. 'I ask if they have any terrapin. I would never eat it, but I ask. He says no, the terrapin's eighty-sixed; you can't cook terrapin without wine. So I order the porterhouse Bordelaise. He says the Bordelaise is eighty-sixed, because that's illegal as well. We go on and on. Finally I ask him what he does have. He says try an eighty-six.'

Littlemore said nothing.

'An eighty-six – the plain grilled rib-eye,' explained Speyer. 'The one they always used to run out of. Now it's the only thing you can get. Because everything else is Prohibited.'

'We don't make the laws, mister,' said Littlemore. 'I'd like to ask you a couple of questions.'

'Very well,' said Speyer. 'But not here. If you must, let's go to my car.'

Speyer paid his bill and led the detective out onto Forty-fourth Street. A silver four-seater was parked outside. 'Nice, isn't she?' said Speyer. He opened a rear door; the driver started the engine. 'After you, Officer.'

Littlemore climbed inside. The chauffeur, meeting the detective's eyes in the rearview mirror, turned round and asked him who he was.

'It's all right,' said the detective. 'I'm with Mr Speyer.'

'Speyer? Who's that?' asked the driver.

The door that Speyer had graciously opened for the detective was still ajar.

'You're kidding me,' said Littlemore to no one in particular. The detective got out of the vehicle. There was no sign of James Speyer. Disgusted with himself, Littlemore went back into the restaurant and called his men Stankiewicz and Roederheusen.

On Monday morning, September 20, Edwin Fischer arrived at Grand Central Terminal on a train from Canada, in the custody of two New York City policemen. Reporters from every newspaper in the city were waiting for them, together with a considerable crowd.

The good-looking, tow-headed Fischer did not disappoint. He replied to questions with dauntless good cheer, while admonishing his greeters that he had been forbidden to discuss the bombing. Evidently overheated, Fischer removed his cream-colored suit jacket, folded it neatly, and handed it to a nonplussed policeman – revealing a second jacket below the first, this one navy blue.

'How come the two jackets, Fischer?' one reporter called out. 'Cold up in Canada?'

'I always wear two,' Fischer replied brightly, displaying the waistline of a navy blue pair of pants below his outer pair of cream trousers. 'Two full suits, everywhere I go.'

The newsmen exchanged knowing winks: everyone had heard that Fischer was a lunatic. One of them asked why he wore two suits. Fischer explained that as an American, he liked to sport casual attire, while as a member of the French consular establishment, he had to be prepared for greater formality. With a sparkle in his eye, he then exhibited a third outfit below the first two, which appeared to consist of cotton whites suitable for an outdoor gambol. Asked the reason, he responded that shortly after the last time he won the Open, a pushy fellow had challenged him to a game, which he'd had to decline for lack of appropriate costume. After that, he decided always to be ready for a match.

'The Open?' someone asked. 'What Open was that, Ed?'

'Why, the United States Open, of course,' said Fischer.

Titters greeted this assertion. 'You won the US Open, did you, Eddie?' someone called out.

'Oh, yes,' said Fischer with a broad smile. He had excellent teeth. 'Many times.'

Laughter circulated more broadly.

'How many?'

'Lost count after three,' he answered happily.

'Get going,' said one of the policemen, shoving the cream-colored suit jacket back into Fischer's arms.

From Grand Central, Fischer was taken to police headquarters for questioning by Commissioner Enright, Chief Inspector Lahey, and Assistant District Attorney Talley. Captains from the bomb squad and from Homicide, including Littlemore, sat in an array of hard chairs along a wall. Fischer had sociable words for everyone. With the District Attorney, he was especially effusive, asking after not only Talley's own health but that of Mrs Talley as well.

'You know each other?' Commissioner Enright asked.

'We're old friends,' replied Fischer. 'Isn't that right, Talley?'

'I've never met the man, Commissioner,' Talley replied to Enright.

'Listen to that,' said Fischer, smiling broadly and clapping Talley on the back. 'Always the jokester.'

Commissioner Enright shook his head and ordered the interrogation to commence. 'Mr Fischer,' he said, 'tell us how you knew there would be a bombing on Wall Street on the sixteenth of September.'

'Why, I didn't know, did I?' answered Fischer. 'I only knew it would come after the closing bell on the fifteenth.'

'But how? How did you know that?'

'I got it out of the air.'

'The air?'

'Yes – from a voice,' explained Fischer informatively. 'Out of the air.'

'Whose voice?' asked Inspector Lahey.

'I don't know. Perhaps it was a fellow member of the Secret Service. I'm an agent, you know. Undercover.'

'Wait a second,' said District Attorney Talley. 'Did we meet at the Metropolitan awards dinner a few years ago?'

'Did we meet? repeated Fischer. 'We sat next to each other the whole evening. You were the life of the party.'

'Oh, for heaven's sake,' said Enright. 'Please continue.'

'Who's your contact at the Secret Service?' asked Lahey.

'You're asking for his name?' replied Fischer.

'Yes – his name.'

Fischer threw Talley a look implying that Inspector Lahey was either a little ignorant or a little addle-brained, but that it would be impolite to say so: 'Goodness, Inspector. He doesn't tell me his name. What sort of Secret Serviceman would that be?'

'How did you know about the bombing?' asked Talley yet again.

Fischer sighed: 'I got it out of the air.'

'By wireless?' asked Lahey.

'You mean radio? I shouldn't think so. I'm very close to God, you know. Some people resent that.'

After two and a half hours, Commissioner Enright brought the interrogation to an end, no further results having been produced. Fischer was committed to an asylum.

Littlemore collared District Attorney Talley before the latter left police headquarters and asked him whether it was legal for United States army troops to be stationed on a Manhattan street.

'Why not?' replied Talley.

'I never saw infantry in the city before,' said Littlemore. 'I thought they had to call out the National Guard or something – you know, with the Governor's consent.'

'Beats me,' said Talley. 'That'd be federal law. Why don't you ask Flynn's men? They'd probably know.'

Littlemore returned to his office and paced, irritated. Then he cranked up his telephone. 'Rosie,' he said to the operator, 'get me the Metropolitan Tennis Association.'

As Littlemore rung off, Officer Stankiewicz poked his head through the door, holding a sheaf of papers. 'Final casualty list, Cap,' said Stankiewicz. 'Want to see it before it goes out?'

Littlemore leafed through the unevenly typed document, which gave for every man, woman, and child killed or wounded on September 16 a name, address, age, and place of employment, if any. Page after page, hundreds and hundreds of names. Littlemore closed his eyes – and opened them at a knock on his door. Officer Roederheusen poked his head through.

'I found Speyer's ship, sir,' said Roederheusen, unshaven and red- eyed. 'There's a James Speyer booked on the Imperator, leaving tomorrow for Germany at nine-thirty in the morning. I saw the manifest myself.'

'Nice work, Spanky.'

Stankiewicz looked quizzically at Roederheusen.

'I'm Spanky now,' explained Roederheusen proudly.

Littlemore rubbed his eyes and handed the casualty list back to Stankiewicz, whom he waved out of his office. 'What's Speyer been up to?' he asked Roederheusen.

'Nothing, sir,' said Roederheusen. 'He didn't go out all night. This morning at eight he went to work. He's been there all day.'

'Who's on him now?' Littlemore went to his door and shouted, 'Hey, Stanky. Get back in here. Give me that list again.'

The phone rang.

'Two beat officers, sir,' Roederheusen replied as Stankiewicz reentered the office. 'Should I call them off?'

Littlemore answered the telephone. Rosie, the operator, informed him through the telephone that the vice president of the Metropolitan Tennis Association was on the line.

'Put him through.' Littlemore motioned to Stankiewicz to hand him the list. To Roederheusen, he said, 'No. Make sure somebody keeps an eye on Speyer all day. If he makes a move, I want to know.

If he doesn't, you meet me at his house at five tomorrow morning. Yeah, five. Now go home and get some sleep.' Littlemore cradled the receiver between chin and shoulder as he returned to the page of the casualty list devoted to government officers. 'Where's the Treasury guy, Stanky? There was a Treasury guard who died.'

'Hello?' said a man's crackling voice through the receiver.

'If he ain't on that list, Cap, he ain't dead,' said Stankiewicz.

'Hold the line,' said Littlemore into the telephone. 'Know what, Stanky? Don't argue with me today. Go check the handwritten list.'

'The, um, handwritten list?'

'Hello?' said the telephone.

'Hold the line,' Littlemore repeated. To Stankiewicz, he said, 'What do I have to do, spell it for you? You and Spanky made filing cards for all the casualties. I told you to make me a list from those cards. You wrote me the list. I saw it. Then I told you to have the handwritten list typed up. This is the typed list. I'm asking you to go back and check the handwritten list. Okay? The Treasury guy's name began with R; I saw it on his badge. Maybe you missed some others too.'

'Is anybody there?' said the telephone.

'Um, the handwritten list is gone, sir,' said Stankiewicz.

'Hold the god-busted line, will you?' Littlemore yelled into the receiver. He looked at Stankiewicz: 'What do you mean "gone"?'

Stankiewicz didn't answer.

'Okay, Stanky, you threw away the handwritten list. Nice work. How about the filing cards? Don't tell me you threw those away?'

'I don't think so, sir.'

'You better not have. Or you'll be back on patrol next week. Go through every card. This time make sure you get everybody.'

Alone in his office, Littlemore identified himself to the vice president of the Metropolitan Tennis Association and asked whether an Edwin Fischer had ever won the United States Open.

'Edwin Fischer? replied the crackling voice. 'The gentleman in all the newspapers?'

'That's the one,' said Littlemore.

'Did he ever win the United States Open?'

'I asked you first,' replied Littlemore.

'Certainly,' said the vice president.

'How many times?' asked Littlemore.

'How many times?'

'Okay, I'll bite,' said the detective. 'More than three.'

'Oh, yes, it was at least four – mixed doubles. A record, I believe. He was number nine in the country back then. Still has one the best overheads in the game. How on earth did he know about the bombing?'

Littlemore hung up. A messenger entered his office and handed the detective a package containing a written report and an envelope. Inside the envelope was a small white tooth, broken cleanly into two pieces.

Littlemore met Younger in a diner that afternoon, reporting to him over acidic coffee that the redhead at Bellevue Hospital was still unconscious.

'She should have woken up,' said Younger. 'She wasn't shot in the head. There's no injury to her skull.'

'What about her voice?' asked Littlemore. 'Colette says she sounded like a man.'

'The growth on her neck must be impinging on her vocal cords. I took X-rays of her yesterday.'

'How'd you do that?' asked Littlemore.

Younger didn't answer that question: 'The X-rays didn't go through. In fact I've never seen anything like it. I'm going to New Haven tomorrow to see what Colette thinks of the films.'

'New Haven?' answered Littlemore. 'You can't leave the state, Doc. You're on bail for a major felony, remember?'

Younger nodded, apparently unimpressed by the argument. 'This is serious,' added Littlemore. 'They can put you away for jumping bail.'

'I'll keep that in mind.'

'Let me put it this way. If you go, I don't want to know about it. And whatever you do, you got to show up for your court date in a couple of months.'

'Why?'

'Because I posted the bail bond, for Pete's sake. If you don't show, they're going to seize my bank account and everything I own to pay the bond. Plus I'll probably get fired, since a law officer isn't supposed to bail his pal out of the joint in the first place – and especially not if the pal ends up on the lam. Okay? When did you stop caring about the law anyway?'

'If you're about to die in a storm,' answered Younger, 'and you see a barn where you could save yourself, do you stay outside and die

or do you break in, even though it's against the law?'

'Of course you break in,' said Littlemore, 'if you're in the middle of nowhere.'

'Everywhere s the middle of nowhere.'

'No wonder the Miss wants to go back to Europe. You're so cheerful. Well, I got some news for you. The headless girl from Wall Street? They never identified her. She disappeared from the morgue body, head, and all.'

'Why am I not surprised to hear that?' asked Younger.

'The one good thing is that they had already done the autopsy. Guess what: she was missing a molar. Couple of molars, actually. It's not proof, but I'd say we found your Amelia. Found her and lost her, that is. Something else too. Look what my dental guys found.' The detective took out his magnifying glass and, in a handkerchief, two tiny halves of a tooth, which he set down on the table. He let Younger examine them through the magnifying glass. 'That's the tooth Amelia left for the Miss at your hotel. See the holes?'

Pockmarking the internal enamel – the inner surface of the tooth, exposed where it had been broken in two – were dozens of almost microscopic vesicles or pores.

'Caries?' said Younger.

'What's that?' replied Littlemore.

'Tooth decay.'

'Nope. The dental guys said it can't be normal decay because the outside of the tooth is too perfect. No discoloration even. It's like the tooth was being eaten away from within.'

Colette's letter arrived in Younger's hotel room the following morning. He read it lying in bed. The letter provoked in him a wave of contradictory feelings. He both wanted to go with Colette to Vienna and found himself contemptible for having that desire.

What kind of man would accompany a girl halfway across the world to find her long-lost lover? He pictured himself smiling as he was introduced to Hans Gruber. The image filled him with disgust. What exactly was he supposed to do in Vienna? And why exactly did she want him there?

It occurred to him at last that she did not want him there: that her reason for inviting him was simply that she needed money to pay for the trip. The realization made him stare at the ceiling for a long time. Surely not. Surely Colette would never stoop to using him for his money. Would she?

He wondered how, without his help, she intended to pay for the voyage. And he saw, of course, that she had no means.

Chapter Ten

At the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighty-seventh Street, a stone's throw from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, stood a grand mansion in the classical style. On Tuesday morning before the sun had risen, Littlemore instructed Roederheusen to cover the back of that mansion while he approached the front door.

There was no activity in the house. Fifth Avenue was quiet at five in the morning; a lone omnibus clattered down the street. One block north, a limousine idled on the park side of the avenue. Littlemore wondered whether it was Speyer's car, waiting to take him to the harbor.

Littlemore rang the front bell – and rang again and again, when no one answered. At last he heard footsteps on stairs. A light went on in the foyer.

'What is it? Who's there?' called a man's voice from behind the door, with the same German accent Littlemore had heard at Delmonico's.

In his best cockney accent, which was fair, Littlemore said, 'Is there a Mr Speyer in the house? Sailing today on the Imperator? Message for him from the Captain.' The Imperator was a British ship, its crew English.

'The Captain?' asked Speyer, opening the door.

'Yeah,' said Littlemore, pushing through and entering the foyer. 'The Police Captain you played for a sap on Sunday.'

Speyer, in a burgundy satin bathrobe, belted at the waist, fell back a step. 'I wronged you, Officer. I ask your forgiveness.'

'Turn around,' said Littlemore.

Speyer complied, saying, 'I ask you to forgive me.'

Littlemore jangled his handcuffs behind Speyer. 'Give me one good reason not to haul you downtown for absconding from a police officer.'

'I broke faith with you. Please forgive me.'

'Stow the forgiveness thing, will you?' said Littlemore, handcuffing Speyer.

'Sorry,' said Speyer. 'I was required to ask three times today. How much do you want? I'll give you whatever you want.'

'Now you're bribing me? That's five more years in the pen.'

'I beg your pardon. I assumed you were shaking me down.'

'Shaking you down. Pretty good English for a German. What did you do that I'd be shaking you down for?'

'I'm not German,' said Speyer, pronouncing the G in German with a hard Ch. 'I was born in this city. I'm as American as you are.'

'Sure you are,' said the detective. 'That's why you bankrolled the German army after we declared war.'

'Not me – my relatives, who live in Frankfurt. I had nothing to do with it.'

'Then why did your pal the Kaiser make you a knight of the Red Eagle?'

'That was in 1912,' protested Speyer. 'And if that makes a man a traitor, you should have arrested J. P. Morgan. He received the Eagle too.'

For the first time, Littlemore was caught off guard: 'Morgan?'

'Yes. He won it the year before I did.'

'If you're such a patriot,' said the detective, 'why are you skipping out of the country?'

'Skipping out? I'm going to Hamburg to have some very important contracts signed. I'll be home the eighth of October.'

'Show me those contracts,' said Littlemore. 'And your return ticket.'

'In my briefcase,' said Speyer. 'On the dinner table.'

Littlemore, pushing Speyer before him, entered a formal dining room, heavily ornamented, with a Michelangelesque fresco splashed on its ceiling. Oil paintings, large and small, adorned the walls. The detective stopped before a small portrait, so dark he could not at first make out its subject; it depicted an old man with a ruddy face and pouches under his eyes. 'This one must be worth a lot, since you can't even see it. How much does a little thing like this go for?'

'Do you know what that "little thing" is, Officer?' asked Speyer.

'A Rembrandt.'

It was Speyer now who was taken by surprise.

'Saw one just like it at the museum,' added Littlemore.

'I paid a quarter of a million dollars for it.'

Littlemore whistled. On a rectangular table long enough to seat twenty lay an open briefcase. Inside was a ream of bond and debenture documents in English, Spanish, and German. Littlemore flipped through them. 'And who did the full-length picture behind me?' asked the detective, without looking up. 'The one of Mr James Speyer.'

'A boy from the Lower East Side,' said Speyer. 'A student at the Eldridge University Settlement. One of the schools I fund.'

The contracts concerned an enormous sum of money, evidently destined for a Mexican bank – whose chief officer was James Speyer. Littlemore also found an American passport and a ticket on the Cunard White Star sailing for New York City out of Hamburg on October the first.

'Don't you think this is taking things a little far,' asked Speyer, 'for a bottle of wine?'

'What bottle of wine?'

'The one I had at Delmonico's. Isn't that why you came to my table? Isn't that why you're here?'

'Dry laws aren't my department,' said the detective. 'Let me get this straight. Your story is that you ran out on me at Delmonico's because you were afraid I was going to pinch you for boozing?'

'That's right.'

'And what – you thought I'd just let you go?'

'I didn't realize you knew who I was,' said Speyer. 'But now that you do know, I might as well warn you, Officer. I'm a rich man, and a rich man can make life very unpleasant for a policeman who troubles him.'

'Don't give me that. You're broke, Speyer,' said Littlemore. 'You had to sell off two of your bigger paintings recently. You even let go of your old servants.'

Speyer stared at the detective: 'How do you know so much about me?'

'Just using my eyes.' Littlemore pointed to two spots on the wall where the slightest lightening of the wallpaper indicated that smaller portraits were now on display where two larger frames used to hang. 'You wouldn't be answering your own doorbell if you still had the servants a man who lives in this kind of house ought to have. I'd say you're trying to maintain appearances, Speyer. I'd say things are getting desperate. Why didn't you sell the Rembrandt?'

A long pause followed. 'I couldn't let it go,' said Speyer at last. 'What do you want with me?'

'The NYPD provides security when presidential candidates come to town,' answered Littlemore, not untruthfully. 'We have plain-clothesmen at every dinner. You were overheard at one of those dinners threatening a J. P. Morgan man.'

'Nonsense.'

'You deny telling a Morgan partner to watch out because the Morgan firm was combining with others to deny you credit?'

'What? I wasn't threatening Lamont. I was warning him.'

'You might be surprised, Mr Speyer, but the law doesn't draw too fine a distinction between threats and warnings.'

'You don't understand. I was warning Lamont about the Mexicans – despite everything Morgan's done to me. Mexico's new financial agent, he was the one doing the threatening. Making the wildest claims about what would happen to the House of Morgan – to Morgan himself – if they didn't lift the embargo.'

'What embargo?'

'The Morgan embargo against Mexico. You must know about the default?'

'No.'

Speyer shook his head. 'Where to begin? Twenty years ago, J. P. Morgan – the old man – floated the entire Mexican national debt. A big gamble, unheard of for a United States bank. It was a bold wager. Worked out handsomely for a long time. Made Morgan a fortune. But then Mexico had its revolution, and in 1914, the Mexicans defaulted. They haven't paid a penny since. By now they owe hundreds of millions in interest alone. Morgan pressured all the other houses not to lend Mexico any new money until they've paid what they owe on the old.'

'What's wrong with that?' asked Littlemore.

'Wrong? There's no right and wrong in banking. There are only bets, good ones and bad ones. Morgan didn't see the revolution coming. That's why the Morgan people are so unhinged about me.'

'I don't follow you, Mister.'

Speyer took a deep breath. 'I'm betting on the revolutionaries. I'm breaking the embargo. I'm the only one. Lamont knows I have funds lined up, but he doesn't know where the money is coming from. That's why I ran from you on Sunday. I couldn't afford to be arrested. I can't afford the delay – or the publicity.' Speyer sat down awkwardly, his hands still shackled behind him. 'Lamont knows I'll take my money and lend it straight to the Mexicans. He'd do anything he could to stop me.'

Littlemore took this in. 'If Mexico can't afford to pay Morgan, why would you lend them money?'

'Oh, they can afford to pay. They have railroads. They have silver. Most of all, they have oil. More oil than anybody else on earth. I have to make this trip, Officer. It's my last chance. My wife is very ill. If I'm not on the Imperator, I'll lose everything. I promise you I'll be back on the eighth'. I can give you collateral.'

'What kind of collateral?'

'Any kind. Name it.'

Littlemore named it. Speyer swallowed hard.

The same morning, Younger sent Colette a reply to her request that he accompany her to Vienna. His letter could not be faulted for excessive length:

September 21, 1920

No.

– Stratham

Back outside on Fifth Avenue, Littlemore let Roederheusen take the driver's seat of their car. The detective's hands were occupied with a rectangular object wrapped in a heavy blanket. When Roederheusen asked what the object was, Littlemore told him it was a quarter- million-dollar bond.

As they drove off, Littlemore noticed the limousine up the street pulling away as well, in the opposite direction.

Because it was still early, Littlemore decided to spend an hour in a law library. The librarian was eager to help, but she knew less about researching the law than did the detective. They found nothing.

The telephone was ringing when Littlemore arrived at his office. Rosie, the operator, informed him that a Mr Thomas Lamont was on the line – and that he'd been calling all morning.

'Did you speak with Mr Speyer?' asked Lamont when the connection was made.

'You know I did, Lamont. Your man was keeping watch.'

'I see. Well, we do like to keep an eye on things. Did you find out anything?'

'Yeah – I found out I was being used by J. P. Morgan. You were hoping I'd arrest Speyer, or at least hold him up a few days. That way he doesn't get his money abroad, and he can't lend it to the Mexicans.'

The line fell silent for a moment. 'Speyer told you about Mexico?' asked Lamont.

'That's right.'

'What did he tell you?'

'Enough,' said Littlemore.

'We are trying to help Mexico, Captain. A nation cannot simply default on her debt. Mexico will destroy her own future if she persists in this shortsightedness. A debt is a sacred obligation. Mr Speyer, like so many of his kind, cannot understand that. For him a debt is only money.'

'Whereas to you it's religion,' said Littlemore. 'I offered to help you, Lamont. You tried to make me a stooge.'

'I swear to you, Captain, that was not my intention. My sole concern is whether my firm is being attacked – and if so, finding out who is behind it.'

'I don't believe Speyer had anything to do with the bombing, and neither do you.'

'But the man threatened me. He practically warned me he was going to resort to violence. Did you ask him about that?'

'It wasn't a threat. He was trying to warn you about a new financial guy from Mexico – maybe the same guy who came to your club the other night.'

'Who – Pesqueira? What about him?'

'I don't know, Lamont. It's your business, not mine.'

'You can't just let Speyer leave the country, Captain. What if he never comes back?'

At that moment, Officer Stankiewicz poked his head through the door. 'Hey, Cap,' he said, out of breath, 'the Bureau -'

Littlemore silenced him with his palm. 'He'll come back,' he said to Lamont, ringing off. 'What is it, Stanky?'

'The G-men found a guy who serviced the bombers' horse and wagon,' said Stankiewicz. 'They say he's fingered Tresca. Flynn's announcing it to the press in ten minutes.'

'Where?' asked Littlemore, putting on straw hat and jacket.

'In front of the Treasury.'

'Go get that horseshoe,' said Littlemore, setting off down the hall. 'Meet me there.'

On the steps of the United States Treasury, with the statue of George Washington behind him and a phalanx of armed soldiers on either side, Big Bill Flynn of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had his arm around a grizzled workman wearing an oil-stained leather apron. To a small crowd of reporters and photographers, Flynn made the following proclamation:

'What we got here is a major break in the investigation. This fine American is Mr John Haggerty, a horseshoer of over forty years' experience, located by agents of the Bureau under my personal command. Get your pens out, boys; here's your story. On or about the first of this month, an individual appeared in Mr Haggerty's stable on New Chambers Street in the company of a horse and wagon, which horse and wagon was in need of new shoes, and which was outfitted with unusual brass turret rings just like the ones we collected from this plaza after the explosion. Mr Haggerty put size-four shoes on that horse, said shoes being united to said horse by means of shamrock nails and Niagara hoof pads – cooperating in every respect with the evidence we collected here.'

'They didn't collect that stuff, Cap,' whispered Stankiewicz to Littlemore. 'We gave it to them.'

Littlemore motioned him to be quiet.

'In other words, the horse and wagon shoed by Mr Haggerty three weeks ago was the exact same horse and wagon employed by the anarchists to transport their incendiary device here on the sixteenth. The individual who brought that horse into Mr Haggerty's stable was approximately five foot seven inches in height, slight of build, poorly shaven, and very dirty and low in appearance. Ain't that right, Haggerty?'

The stableman nodded gravely.

'And this is the kicker, boys,' added Flynn: 'The individual was

Eye-talian and gave his name as something in the nature of Trescati or Trescare. Ain't that right, Haggerty?'

'Could be,' said Haggerty.

'"Could be"?' whispered Stankiewicz.

'Shh,' said Littlemore.

'In other words,' Flynn went on, 'a spitting description of Carlo Tresca, just like I been saying all along. Okay, boys, take your pictures.'

Flynn shook Haggerty's hand. Cameras popped. The reporters asked Haggerty his age (which was sixty-four), what else he remembered about Tresca (which was very little), and so on. Haggerty answered in gruff monosyllables, addressing each reporter as 'sir.' In short order, Flynn brought matters to a close and moved to take the stableman away.

'Mr Haggerty,' called out Littlemore, 'you a union man?'

'Conference over,' shouted Flynn, recognizing the detective. 'No more questions.'

'But Mr Haggerty must be a union man, Big Bill,' said Littlemore innocently. 'Everybody knows an HSIU label was on the horse's shoes. It was in the papers on Saturday, wasn't it, fellas?'

The members of the press agreed that it was.

Flynn cleared his throat. 'An NYPD detective checking up on the Bureau, huh? That's fresh. How's the Fischer investigation going, Policeman? Heard any voices out of the air lately?'

Several of the reporters laughed.

'Okay, Haggerty,' said Flynn, 'the policeman here wants to know if your shop is union. Is it?'

'Yes, sir – HSIU,' answered Haggerty.

'And you put that label on your shoes, right?' asked Flynn.

'Yes, sir – every one.'

Flynn smiled broadly. 'Got any more smart questions, NYPD?'

'Just one,' called Littlemore, stepping forward through the crowd, carrying⁸ a numbered canvas evidence bag tied with twine. 'I'd like to show Mr Haggerty the actual shoe – the one we pulled out of the

bomb crater. He can tell us if the union label matches the one his shop uses.'

The reporters fell quiet. Flynn hesitated. He obviously wanted to take Haggerty away, but his reluctance to appear doubtful of his own witness's story kept him in place.

Littlemore untied the bag and handed the horseshoe to Haggerty. 'You can see a union label on that shoe, can't you, Mr Haggerty?' asked the detective.

'Yes, sir. HSIU. Same one we use in my shop.'

'There you go!' said Flynn triumphantly, taking the horseshoe from the stableman. 'I'll keep this. Federal evidence. Now let's get going. I'm hungry'

'Which means, Mr Haggerty,' said Littlemore in a loud voice all could hear, 'the shoe that Chief Flynn is holding, the one from the actual bombing, isn't from the horse and wagon you serviced in your shop three weeks ago – am I right?'

'Yes, sir. You're right,' said Haggerty.

The reporters burst into confusion. Flynn shouted above them, 'What's he talking about? The label's a match.'

'The HSIU label on a horseshoe is a surface mark,' said Littlemore. 'Wears away in no time at all. After a few hours, it's barely visible. But the HSIU label on the actual shoe is mint clean. The horse that brought the bomb to Wall Street was new-shod the morning of the attack – the day before at most. Not three weeks ago. Am I right, Mr Haggerty?'

'Yes, sir.'

The following evening, Younger joined Littlemore at a dingy waterfront bar built on a derelict pier near the harbor, where unintimidated rats picked at refuse among the pilings and the detective had to give a password to gain entry. The smoke was so thick, and the lighting so poor, Younger could hardly see the bar counter. 'They got a trapdoor in the back,' said Littlemore as they took a small table in a dark corner. 'Opens right onto the water. When they get raided, they dump all their liquor into a boat and off she goes. Cops never find a thing. If the tide's in, they just dump the liquor into the water. Divers bring it up later.'

'I don't think I've ever seen you break the law before,' said Younger.

'I'm not breaking any laws,' answered Littlemore. 'I'm getting a sassafras.'

'Then why are we here?'

'So you can get a drink,' said Littlemore. 'Looks like you could use one.'

Younger considered the proposition and found it accurate. All day long he had kept checking the hotel desk for a letter or wire from Colette. Every time the clerk informed him that there were no messages, Younger was furious at himself for caring about the girl at all.

Littlemore ordered his soft drink; Younger ordered a whiskey. The waiter brought him a fifth – just the unopened bottle – along with a 'setup,' which was a glass of ice and soda.

'You pour yourself the drink,' Littlemore instructed. 'Then you put the bottle in your coat pocket. If the law comes in, they say they only serve sodas. They can't help it if their customers bring liquor in.'

Younger poured himself a double. He and Littlemore toasted silently. Younger felt vaguely louche with the bottle of whiskey in his pocket – if in fact it was whiskey, which Younger doubted, because it tasted more like rubbing alcohol. He finished his glass and poured himself another. 'Boisterous little place,' he said. 'I like the atmosphere.'

At the bar, men hunched over their drinks, speaking in low voices. Even the bartender was taciturn. A solitary woman wearing a boa nursed a cocktail at one end of the counter; no one approached her. Near the door, the man keeping watch handled a pack of cards by himself at a table – not playing, just shuffling and reshuffling.

'It's the same all over town,' said Littlemore. 'Everybody's still spooked from the bombing. Only place they're not spooked is the Bankers and Brokers Club. They were having a ball when I went there a couple nights ago. I think it was relief – that they weren't the ones who got hit. Guess what: a doctor came to Bellevue today for Two-Heads. He heard about the shooting in the church and recognized her description. Her name's Quinta McDonald. I found out what's wrong with her. The doctor said it was confidential, but I got it out of him. She has syphilis. Apparently syphilis can cause a growth on your body?'

'Tertiary syphilis can,' agreed Younger. He thought about it. 'It could have made her demented as well.'

'That's what her doctor said. It got into her brain. Gave her delusions.'

'I did some work on syphilitic dementia a few years ago. If that's what she has, there's no reversing it and no cure for it.'

'So here's what I'm thinking,' said Littlemore. 'There may not be anything left for the Miss to worry about.'

'How's that?'

'Well, let's start with Amelia, the girl who left the tooth at your hotel. Amelia's in some kind of trouble, and she needs to leave a tooth with somebody she knows to get them to help her. But the clerk delivers the tooth to Colette by mistake. Meanwhile, Drobac's following Amelia. He's hunting whoever she's trying to leave the tooth with. When the tooth gets delivered to Colette, Drobac thinks Colette is his target. So he and his two pals kidnap her. After that, Amelia gets killed by the bomb, Drobac's two pals get killed when we rescue Colette, and Drobac himself is behind bars. That leaves only Two-Heads, the McDonald girl. We don't know why she came after Colette – probably she's just crazy from her syphilis – but it doesn't matter because now she's in a coma. So everybody's either dead, jailed, or otherwise out of commission. Case closed.'

'What about the other redhead?' asked Younger. 'There were two of them outside the police station.'

'Friend of the McDonald girl. Maybe her sister. Nothing to worry about.'

'I thought you didn't make assumptions,' said Younger.

'I don't. I was just trying it out to see how it sounded.'

'How did it sound?'

'Didn't make any kind of sense at all,' said Littlemore.

The two men drank for a long while. Younger could feel the cheap alcohol beginning to work on him.

'So the Miss is going back to Europe?' asked Littlemore.

'You can't tell me,' answered Younger, 'that marriage makes men happy. Do you know one married man who's actually happy?'

'I'm happy.'

'Apart from you.'

Littlemore thought about it. 'No. Do you know any unmarried guys who are happy?'

'No.'

'There you go, then,' said Littlemore.

The men drank.

At another table, a man tried to stand, failed, and fell to the floor, knocking his chair over with him. For a moment Younger thought the sound had been a gunshot. Then he heard more gunfire, but he knew it was inside his head. The recurring image that, ever since the bombing, he could neither forget nor interpret sprang into his mind again, this time with greater clarity. 'I know what I saw on the sixteenth,' he said. 'It wasn't a blackboard. It was someone shooting. When everyone else was running around in a panic, in the middle of all the smoke and dust, someone was firing a machine gun.'

'At what?'

'At a wall. Leaving marks on it.'

'Firing a machine gun at a wall?' said Littlemore. 'In the middle of the bombing?'

'Did I mention that I also saw the shrapnel flying through the air so slowly I could make out the individual pieces?'

'No, you didn't tell me that, and don't mention it again. They'll lock you up with Eddie Fischer.'

Detective Littlemore was restive as he paced the cramped offices shared

by Homicide and Special Crimes. Overcrowded desks vied for space with overstuffed filing cabinets. Typewriters clacked. Men yelled at one another, their complaints mostly jocular. The joking irritated Littlemore. A week had passed since the Wall Street bombing, and they had made no progress. Loose threads dangled everywhere.

There was Fischer, now confined in a sanitarium, whose prescient warnings remained unaccounted for. There was Big Bill Flynn, determined to hang the crime on Italian anarchists even though each piece of evidence Flynn came up with was thin as cheap typing paper. Then there was Attorney General Palmer – or rather, where was Palmer? Everything Littlemore knew about the Attorney General would have predicted Palmer's seizing control of the case, giving press conferences, taking the spotlight. Instead Palmer had passed through town for a night on his way to a family holiday – why? Finally, there was the fact that the attack seemed wholly unmotivated. If there was a target, it appeared to have been the Morgan Bank, yet Littlemore had identified no individual or organization with the right means and motives for attacking Morgan in so blunderbuss a fashion.

'Hey, Spanky,' Littlemore called out.

'Sir?' replied Roederheusen.

'Go over to the Mexican consulate,' said Littlemore, 'and get ahold of a guy named Pesky something or other. Pesky-air-uh, I think. I want to talk to him.'

'Say, Cap,' called out Stankiewicz from his desk, 'I found the cards.'

'What cards?'

'The filing cards we made on Wall Street.' Stankiewicz was holding a stack of handwritten note cards made at the scene of the bombing – one card for each of the dead. 'You remember, you thought there was somebody who was killed who should've been on the casualty list, but he wasn't on the list, so you asked me to find the cards.'

'Give me those,' said Littlemore irritably. He flipped through the note cards. 'The guy was a Treasury guard. Name began with R.'

Littlemore found what he was looking for. 'Here he is: "Riggs, United States Treasury." Now where's that casualty list?'

Stankiewicz fished through the papers piled haphazardly on his desk. 'I had it a second ago.'

'Tell me you didn't lose the casualty list,' said Littlemore.

Stankiewicz handed the detective the stapled, typed, many-paged document.

Littlemore went through it, checking both the alphabetical listing and the page specifically naming government officers killed in the blast. 'No Riggs,' said the detective. 'What happened to "Riggs, United States Treasury"?'

'Guess they missed him.'

'They?' asked Littlemore. 'Who's they? Didn't you type this list?'

'Not exactly.'

'Who did?'

'Um, the Feds did. A couple of agents came over the day after the bombing and asked if we had a list of the dead and wounded. I said sure and let them have a look – you know, at the handwritten list, which we made from the cards. They volunteered to have it typed up for us over the weekend. They said they had typists who would do a nice job. So I-'

'You gave the Feds our list?' asked Littlemore, incredulous.

'I'm not too good with a typewriter, sir. I figured it would come out better this way.'

'You figured you were too lazy,' said Littlemore. 'What kind of Feds? Flynn's boys?'

'No, sir. They were T-men,' said Stankiewicz, using the shorthand name for Treasury agents.

A second letter from Colette arrived on Thursday, but it turned out she must have sent it before receiving Younger's reply. The letter lay open on Younger's hotel room bed:

21-9-1920

Dearest Stratham,

I am finished with your Professor Boltwood. He is going to prevent Yale University from awarding Madame Curie an honorary degree when she comes. He says she is both academically and morally unfit. He is unfit to tie her shoelaces. My one consolation for running his laboratory is that I am disproving his theories. I can't stay on here, no matter what.

But I also have wonderful news! I dared to wire Dr Freud in Vienna, and he has wired back. He says he will see Luc again, and also that he is very eager to see you as well. He says he has a great deal to tell you.

Please, please come. I need you there with me.

Affectionately,

Colette

Younger returned by himself that night to Littlemore's waterfront clip joint. A woman in red lipstick and an orange dress approached while he drank the foul whiskey. 'What about it, handsome?' she said.

'No thanks,' he replied.

Chapter Eleven

The ordinarily genial Police Commissioner Enright liked to drop in on the men he wanted to see. Written summonses appeared only in cases of severest displeasure; they struck dread in the Commissioner's subordinates. On Friday morning at police headquarters, Littlemore received such a summons.

'Is it the Rembrandt in the evidence locker, sir?' asked Littlemore as he walked into the Commissioner's office. 'I can explain.'

Enright, behind his mahogany desk, raised his eyebrows: 'You have a Rembrandt in the evidence locker?'

'Was it the horseshoe, Mr Enright? I couldn't let Flynn get away with that story about Haggerty.'

'I didn't ask you here to play horseshoes, Mr Littlemore, or to discuss portraiture.' Enright got up, his gold watch chain glinting on an extensive waistline, his wavy gray hair abundant over a fleshy, good- natured face. A prodigious reader, an eloquent speaker, and largely self-educated, Enright had the eyes of a man who loved reciting poetry from memory. 'You remember Mayor Hylan, I'm sure, and Mr McAdoo, the President's adviser?'

Littlemore turned and saw those two important gentlemen at the other end of the office. McAdoo was seated, cross-legged, in an armchair, staring imperturbably at the detective, taking his measure. Hylan, standing and fidgeting with a glass object he'd picked up from Enright's bookcase, studiously avoided eye contact.

'Mayor Hylan received a visit from an attorney yesterday, Littlemore,' Enright continued. 'You were the subject of that visit.'

'Me, sir?'

'I want him fired, Enright,' declared Mayor Hylan.

'The attorney,' Enright continued, 'is a man of considerable reputation, well connected to the political establishment of this city. A client of his is currently a guest in one of our custodial facilities.'

'I said I want him fired,' repeated the Mayor, who had decidedly less poetry about him than did the Commissioner. Hylan was a short personage, greasy hair falling over his forehead in continual need of a comb, eyes darting like a squirrel's. A favorite occupation of Mayor Hylan's was railing from a podium, which he did often and poorly. He wore an air of perpetual embattlement, as if enemies were constantly casting outrageous aspersions on his good name. Prior to becoming Mayor of New York, he was an engineer with the Brooklyn Elevated Railroad Company, which discharged him after he nearly ran a locomotive over a supervisor. He had ascended to the mayoralty from nowhere, politically speaking, dredged up from obscurity by Tammany Hall, the doyens of which rightly estimated him a man they could trust. 'And I want that man out of jail. Today.'

'Unfortunately, Mr Mayor,' said the Commissioner, 'much as I wish I could execute your orders without question, I am subservient to another master as well – the law.'

'Don't law me,' retorted Hylan. 'I know the law. Don't forget who you're talking to, Enright. I could have you fired too.'

'That's your prerogative,' answered Enright.

'Let's keep our tempers,' said McAdoo mildly, 'and hear the facts, shall we?'

'This is none of Washington's business,' snapped Mayor Hylan. 'It's city business.'

'On September sixteenth,' answered McAdoo without raising his voice, 'New York City's business became Washington's business. I haven't reached the President today, but my wife thinks Wilson would not be pleased if the Captain were fired.'

'His wife?' asked the Mayor, incredulous. 'His wife? How about your wife, Enright – does she have an opinion? Excuse me, I'll go ask my wife what the President wants.'

'For heaven's sake, Hylan,' said the Commissioner. 'McAdoo's wife is the President's daughter.'

There was a momentary silence.

'Daughter,' Mayor Hylan humphed and wiped his brow with a soiled handkerchief.

Littlemore cleared his throat: 'Um, would I be the Captain everybody's talking about firing?'

Commissioner Enright answered: 'Is it true, Littlemore, that you took a man out of the hospital last week and jailed him even though he had just received major surgery for compound facial fractures?'

'That guy?' responded Littlemore. 'That guy has a fancy lawyer?'

'Yes. His name, I'm told, is Mr John Smith. I'm also told that Mr Smith's assailant is a very close friend of yours. And that you personally secured your friend's release on bail.'

'How'd the lawyer know that?'

'I take it these facts are true.'

'Yes, sir. I think the guy's real name is Drobac, Mr Enright, and I think he may be the Woolworth rooftop killer.'

'May be the killer?' repeated Hylan scornfully. 'Anyone may be the killer.'

'No, sir, Mr Mayor. There are only about fifty people who could be the Woolworth killer. That's how many were on the observation deck at the time of the murder, and over a dozen of them were kids. This guy was there, and he was recognized by an eyewitness as a wanted kidnapper.'

'Allegedly recognized, Captain,' corrected Enright. 'By the man who assaulted him. Whom you released. Your friend. Who is himself charged with attempted murder.'

'Dr Younger's helped the force before, sir,' said Littlemore. 'He's a Harvard man. And he fought in the war.'

'The war,' repeated Enright darkly. 'You know as well I do, Littlemore, that many men who fought have behaved unaccountably and committed criminal assaults since returning home.'

'Not this man,' said Littlemore.

'Enright, ask your Captain,' interjected Hylan, 'what proof he has that Smith committed the Woolworth murder. I'm told there's no evidence whatsoever.'

'Littlemore?' asked Enright.

The detective shifted uncomfortably: 'Okay, I don't have any proof – for now. But Dr Younger definitely identified him as Drobac, who committed a kidnapping and another killing the night before.'

'Bosh – the kidnapped girl herself doesn't recognize the man,' added Hylan. 'Not to mention the fact that she's left the state.'

'She's only in Connecticut,' said Littlemore.

'Yes, in New Haven, I know,' said the Commissioner. 'Is it true that she failed to recognize the man?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Can you identify him, Littlemore?' asked Enright. 'You rescued the kidnapped girl. Could you testify that the man in jail was one of her kidnappers?'

'No, sir,' conceded Littlemore. 'He's a little – uh – banged up at the moment.'

'You see, Enright?' declared Hylan. 'Your own officer can't identify him.'

'Would you say you have probable cause, Littlemore?' asked the Commissioner.

'Probable cause? You're not talking about letting him go, are you, Mr Enright? This guy's dangerous. He's gone after the French girl twice. He might kill her if we let him out.'

Enright sighed: 'You can't presume guilt, Littlemore, and you can't hold a man without probable cause. You know that.'

'We've held plenty of men on a lot less than this, sir,' objected Littlemore. 'We've held them for months.'

'Yes, but in those cases, the men we were holding – well -' Enright did not finish his sentence.

Littlemore did: 'Didn't have a lawyer fancy enough to get a meeting with the Mayor.'

'That's the way of the world,' said the Commissioner.

'Give me a few weeks, sir. I'll nail him.'

'A few weeks?' said Hylan. 'An outrage. I won't tolerate it. I've always stood up for the common man against the interests. There's only one true threat to this Republic – the international bankers, the moneymen, like a giant octopus spreading their slimy legs over all our cities. As long as I'm Mayor, the interests won't rule this city. The common man will have his rights.'

His back to Hylan, Commissioner Enright rolled his eyes. 'I'm sorry to say it, Littlemore,' said Enright, 'but your conduct merits an immediate suspension. Releasing from jail a personal friend charged with attempted murder. Imprisoning his victim without probable cause. Really. You should know better.' The Commissioner was one of those men who, when standing, like to bob up and down on the balls of their feet, hands behind the back. 'However, Mr McAdoo happened to be in my office at the very same time Mayor Hylan came in. As fate would have it, McAdoo was also speaking to me about you. He gave me this.' The Commissioner picked up from his desk several pieces of typed stationery. 'It's a copy of a letter delivered today to President Wilson and every member of his Cabinet in Washington, DC. The letter is from Senator Fall of New Mexico. Do you know Senator Fall?'

'No, sir.'

'A very powerful man,' said Enright. 'He sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and will soon be Secretary of State, in all likelihood, under Mr Harding.'

'What's that got to do with me, sir?' asked Littlemore.

'Can you enlighten Captain Littlemore, McAdoo?' said Enright.

'Certainly,' said McAdoo, putting his fingertips together. His calm demeanor, smooth-backed hair, fine features, and long elegant face contrasted sharply with the uncombed, frowning, and overanxious Mayor. McAdoo spoke with a distinctly Eastern, well-educated accent, with only the occasional twang giving away his Tennessee roots. 'Fall's a fire-breather – and a very effective one. He's been denouncing us – the Wilson Administration, that is – for our failure to respond to the outrage on Wall Street. Fall says that an attack of this magnitude can only have been organized and carried out by a foreign power intent on our destruction – a reference, I assume, to Lenin and his Bolsheviks. He says the bombing was an act of war plainly targeting one of America's most important financial houses, while we in the Administration, far from preparing for war, proclaim that it was the work of a few disorganized Italian malcontents. And then, Captain Littlemore, Senator Fall names you.'

'Me?'

'You. He says that the New York Police Captain closest to the investigation – naming you personally – has in private advised Mr Thomas Lamont of J. P. Morgan and Company that the evidence refutes Flynn's theory of the case and demonstrates a purposeful attack against the Morgan firm.'

'I didn't say demonstrates. I said it was a possibility.'

'You are to be congratulated, Captain Littlemore,' said McAdoo.

'I am?'

'Yes. I share Senator Fall's views in every respect.'

'If you'll excuse me, Mr McAdoo,' said Littlemore, 'I don't get it. I thought Senator Fall was criticizing President Wilson, and I thought you were the President's man.'

'I don't know if I'm his man, Captain,' said McAdoo, 'but I'm certainly in his camp. The President wants this bombing solved. That's all he wants. And he doesn't, to speak frankly, have perfect confidence in Chief Flynn. Flynn works for Attorney General Palmer; together they see a cabal of Italian and Hebrew anarchists lurking everywhere, or at least so they want our citizens to believe. If you, Captain Littlemore, are willing to pursue avenues that Flynn can't or won't, the President is entirely in favor. Many of us agree with Senator Fall that this attack was of a magnitude too great for a handful of impoverished anarchists.'

'Whoever did it wasn't impoverished – I'm pretty sure about that,' said Littlemore.

'Why?' asked Commissioner Enright.

'The horseshoe, sir,' said Littlemore. 'It was brand-new. You could tell from the union mark on it. Shoeing a horse isn't cheap. Nobody poor would ever put brand-new shoes on a horse they're about to blow to pieces. I'd say these guys had plenty of cash behind them.'

'Excellent, Captain,' replied Enright. 'That's how a detective does his job.'

'Making it more likely,' said McAdoo, 'that a foreign power was behind this outrage. If that's true, it must come out, and the enemy must be made to feel the full force of American might. Commissioner, your Captain can't be fired – or suspended. It would look as if we feared war and feared the truth. They would say we'd deliberately eliminated the one man daring to ask what enemy of this country might have massacred our people and attacked our finances. Fall would undoubtedly cast it in that light, and the story would run in every newspaper in the country.'

'I make the decisions in this city,' said the Mayor.

'To be sure, Hylan, to be sure,' replied McAdoo. 'I wouldn't dream of interfering. Nor would I hesitate to urge the Attorney General to revisit your statements in opposition to the late war. The Sedition Act is still in force, I believe.'

Hylan looked stricken. 'I don't care about your Littlemore. Let him stay on. Just give me Smith.'

'And I don't care about your Smith,' said McAdoo. 'Let him go free.'

'I don't know what's wrong with me,' said Enright. 'I seem to be the only one who cares about both Captain Littlemore and Mr Smith. I'm not going to suspend Littlemore -'

'Good,' said McAdoo.

'And I'm not going to release Mr Smith,' said Enright.

'What?' said Hylan.

'You have until Monday, Captain,' replied Enright.

'I'm sorry?' asked Littlemore.

'To obtain probable cause against Smith, if that's in fact his name.'

'But today's Friday, Mr Enright,' said Littlemore.

'And you've had Mr Smith in jail since last Friday, when he should have been in a hospital. By Monday you will have had ten days to collect evidence against him, Littlemore, which is more than adequate. Either you come up with hard evidence by Monday, or you let him go. Will that do, Hylan?'

'That'll do,' grumbled the Mayor.

'That will be all, Captain,' said Enright.

Younger tried to write a letter to Colette, seated at his hotel room desk. How could she love a convicted criminal so devoted to the German cause that he had volunteered to serve in its army? There had to be some reality to love – surely. If a girl loved a man who wasn't the man she thought he was, she didn't really love him – did she?

But perhaps Hans Gruber wasn't the man Younger thought he was. Why shouldn't Gruber be the sweet, devout, ailing soul that Colette remembered? Yes, he was in prison for assault on an innocent victim, but his imprisonment might be a mistake. Younger himself had been jailed for assault only last week. Worse, much worse: Didn't Gruber deserve Colette more than Younger did? Gruber had instantly seen what Younger had taken years to grasp – that his life would be void and dull and pointless and black without her.

The letter he was trying to write, offering Colette reasons not to go to Europe, failed to flow trippingly off his pen. He started, stopped, and started again, crumpling sheets of hotel stationery and throwing them into a wastebasket. Eventually he pulled them out and burned them, one by one, in an ashtray. It had come to him that, with Freud having agreed to treat Luc, Colette would never be dissuaded from going to Vienna.

Younger packed his bags.

Littlemore reexamined the evidence seized from Colette's and Luc's kidnappers. He combed through every item, turned inside out every article of clothing. He looked for laundry marks, for threads of hair, for anything that would connect the jailed man, Drobac, to the kidnapping. All to no avail.

Then he went to the police garage, where he personally re-dusted the criminals' car for fingerprints, both exterior and interior, from tailpipes to steering wheel to ashtrays. This painstaking process took many hours. It proved equally futile, revealing a host of prints, none of which matched the ones taken from the man Younger had assaulted. Frustrated but not beaten, Littlemore went home for the night.

Even as the train conductor announced New Haven as the next stop, Younger still had not decided whether to disembark there or continue on to Boston, the city that had been his home most of his life.

The landscape outside the train's windows had grown increasingly New England. Trees blazed with color. Every bridge over every river, every bend of the coastline, was familiar to him. He had taken the Shore Line into or out of Manhattan too many times.

When the train pulled into New Haven, Younger stepped out on the platform. He smelled the autumn air and dropped into a mailbox a letter for Colette. Under his Boston address, the letter said:

September 24, 1920

I'll come to Vienna, but only on one condition: that you renounce any intention of seeing Hans Gruber.

– Stratham

The whistle blew, the conductor called out, and Younger returned to his seat.

Littlemore spent the next day – Saturday – tracking down and interviewing occupants of the building where the criminals had stayed. No one had anything of value to tell him. He found the owner of that building, but the landlord was equally unhelpful. He cut through the police ropes and reentered the room where Colette and Luc had been taken. On hands and knees, he went over every inch of the room with his magnifying glass. This too was in vain.

Younger woke up Saturday morning in his old bedroom in his old house in the Back Bay. It wasn't the house of his parents – the house he'd grown up in – but a townhouse he'd bought after returning to Boston when his marriage broke up in 1911. It was a handsome place, with fine old furniture, high ceilings, and well-proportioned rooms. Leaving the accumulated mail untouched, he went outside.

What he liked about Boston was that it was such a small town. That was also what he didn't like about it. He walked to the Public Garden, passing rows of townhouses more or less identical to his own, and took a seat on a bench by the lake. It was so placid he could see in it an upside-down double of every swan and paddle boat plying the water. He put a cigarette in his mouth but discovered he had no matches. The fact that he was in Boston with no employment irritated him.

After his divorce, Younger had thrown himself into his scientific work, spending days and nights in a laboratory underneath the Harvard medical school. His field in those days was microscopic infectious agents. He made his scientific name in 1913 by isolating syphilitic spirochetes in the brains of individuals who had died of general paresis, a condition previously believed to be psychiatric in origin. He saw no one. He socialized not at all.

Then something unexpected took place. He had assumed he would be a pariah because of his divorce, which was not proscribed in Boston society, but was not regarded favorably Instead, his social reputation soared. Whether due to his respectable position at Harvard, or the notoriety attaching to his supposed affair in New York, or, most likely, the inheritance that fell into his lap from his mother's Schermerhorn relatives, Younger became a prize commodity in both Boston and New York. At first he refused all invitations. But after two years playing the reclusive scientist, he began to go out. To his surprise, he enjoyed it.

He lent his arm to coveted young women at society events. He kissed their fingers and danced with them as if he were courting. But he never was; the society girls bored him. He preferred actresses, and in New York he was infamously seen with them. Over these years, there were only three women he slept with – and even those he could stand only for short stretches of time. A moment arrived when he was simultaneously the most eligible and most hated man in two cities. Even the actresses generally ended up enraged. Every year, he expected society to revolt against him and put him under a ban. But somehow the number of mothers believing that their daughter might be the one to land him only increased. In 1917, at a party in the Waldorf celebrating the coming out of the pretty Miss Denby, the debutante's charming mother pressed him so assiduously to dance with her daughter that he made a conscious show of partnering with every girl other than Miss Denby. He drank to such excess that he didn't remember leaving the ball and woke the next morning in a hotel room with an unknown female beside him. It turned out to be Mrs Denby.

A few weeks later, the United States declared war. He enlisted at once.

When Younger got back to his townhouse, the afternoon mail had come, and with it a letter from Colette. He opened it still standing in his hallway:

25-9-1920

Dearest Stratham,

I can't do what you ask. I realize now that everything that's happened in America has been a sign telling me to go back to Europe. God must want me to. Vows are sacred. I have to honour mine, no matter how rash or wrong I was to make it. Maybe I will see when I'm there that he is not the one. But God puts these feelings in our hearts: of that I'm sure. I beg you to understand – and to come with me. I need you.

Yours,

Colette

He didn't understand. Why say she 'needed' him when she so obviously didn't? If it was money she needed, he wished she would simply ask him for it outright.

Rummaging through his mail, Younger found a statement from his bank. With a cold eye, he observed that his balance, once a thing of six figures – that was before he'd bought his house – had shrunk to four, and the first of those four was a one. Ever since Younger had come into his inheritance, he had turned over his professor's salary and, later, his soldier's wages to one or another insufferable Bostonian charity. He had lived without thought of money. The bequest having fallen into his lap, he had determined never to let it become an anchor.

He knew he would give it to Colette – the money for her passage – fool though that would make him. All she had to do was ask. He threw on some evening clothes, and went out. At the Post Office, he dropped off the following scribbled reply:

September 25, 1920

Since it's God's will, go with Him.

– Stratham

Littlemore, arriving home late and frustrated Saturday night, found his wife in a state of distress. Her mother, a robust little woman who spoke only Italian, was next to her. 'They came for Joey,' Betty exclaimed, referring to her younger brother.

'Who did?' asked Littlemore.

'You – the police,' answered Betty.

It turned out that policemen had paid a visit to Betty's mother's apartment on the Lower East Side looking for Joey, a dockworker who still lived with his mother. Mrs Longobardi told the police he was out, which was true. They entered and ransacked the apartment, seizing newspapers, magazines, and letters from relatives in Italy.

'They say they're going to arrest him,' Betty concluded. 'Arrest him and deport him.'

'What kind of policemen?' asked Littlemore.' What were they wearing?'

Betty translated this question. The policemen, Mrs Longobardi answered, were wearing dark jackets and ties.

'Flynn,' said Littlemore.

On Sunday morning, Younger didn't wake rested. In fact he didn't wake at all, because he had never gone to sleep. When he got back to his house, unshaven, tie askew, it was well after dawn. Making himself coffee, he decided it was high time he got back to work.

He hadn't written a scientific paper since 1917. He hadn't even contacted Harvard about resuming his professorship. But he did have notes from the experiments he had conducted during the war; there was a paper on the medical use of maggots he wanted to write; and he did have an old set of patients who would probably be delighted to make him their doctor once again. It was time to return to his senses.

He went to his study and began organizing his papers and his finances.

At dusk he jerked awake – having fallen asleep at his desk – heart pounding with a dream whose final image he could still see. Colette had come straight back to America after her Austrian voyage. She had cabled him: she didn't care for Hans Gruber after all; it was he, Younger, whom she loved. He waited for her in Boston Harbor. She came running down from the ship, but when she reached him she froze, her green eyes shrinking from him in horror. He limped to a mirror. In it he saw what she had seen. During her five weeks' absence, he had aged fifty years.

Skipping church and canceling his usual weekly visit to his father in Staten Island, Littlemore returned on Sunday to the police garage. He climbed inside the kidnappers' car and went through it minutely again, even though the vehicle had already been fully searched and inventoried by other policemen. He was rewarded with exactly one discovery. Wedged deep in a crevice between seat back and seat cushion, Littlemore found a scrap of Western Union paper. It was not a telegram, but a receipt, showing only that some message had been sent somewhere by some customer.

With a few weeks at his disposal, and a dozen men pounding the pavement, such a receipt might conceivably have been tracked to its originating office. But Littlemore didn't have the men, he didn't have the time, and sending a telegram obviously didn't count as evidence of a crime.

The telephone rang in Younger's house on Sunday evening. He answered it, cursing himself for hoping it was Colette. It wasn't.

'What are you doing in Boston?' asked Littlemore s voice.

'I live here,' answered Younger.

'I left you messages all weekend at the Commodore. You didn't tell me you were going to Boston.'

'You told me not to tell you if I left town.'

'Oh yeah – good point,' said Littlemore. The detective described the unfortunate turn of events. 'Drobac gets out of prison tomorrow afternoon. I'm sorry, Doc. And I'm worried. Seems like Drobac's lawyer knew all kinds of things about Colette, including that she was up in New Haven. How would he know that? I think they've got somebody tailing the Miss. Or maybe somebody she knows in New Haven reports to these guys, whoever they are. I'll tell you what: after Drobac gets out, I don't know where is safe for her. I think the Miss and her brother should go into hiding.'

Younger rang off, grabbed his coat and hat, and left to make arrangements. When he'd finished, he sent a wire for immediate delivery to Colette:

YOU AND LUC MUST LEAVE AT ONCE STOP DROBAC BEING

RELEASED FROM JAIL TOMORROW STOP GENUINE DANGER

STOP HE KNOWS WHERE YOU ARE STOP I HAVE BOOKED

YOU A CABIN ON THESS WELSHMAN LEAVING NEW YORK

HARBOR FIVE-THIRTY PM MONDAY FOR HAMBURG STOP

LITTLEMORE WILL BE THERE WITH TICKETS STOP TELL NO

ONE REPEAT NO ONE

Because it was a Sunday night, Younger was obliged to pay a king's ransom to get this telegram sent and to have it hand-delivered upon transmission. Unfortunately, Western Union's hastily hired delivery boy in New Haven couldn't distinguish among Yale University's dormitories, and the telegram was slipped under the door of the wrong residence.

Colette, returning to her room Sunday night after working late at the laboratory, found the door unlocked. This dismayed her. She had told Luc over and over to keep the door locked; he didn't listen to anything she said anymore. Colette stepped into the silent darkness of her dormitory room. It shouldn't have been so dark – or silent. Could Luc already be asleep? He never went to bed until she made him.

The air felt damp, heavy, pregnant. She fumbled to turn on a lamp, but couldn't find the switch. Then she heard dripping – as if it were raining, but inside. The sound came from her bedroom.

'Luc?' she called out. No answer came. She felt her way to the bedroom, found a light, switched it on.

The room was empty. The boy's narrow bed was undisturbed. On the ceiling, drops of water were forming and falling into a puddle on the floor.

One flight above lived a graduate student in divinity and his kind wife, who had often taken Luc and watched him when Colette was at work. In fact Luc had a standing invitation from these neighbors to come up to their kitchen for milk and cookies any time he wanted – an invitation he'd taken advantage of more than once. The leak was surely coming from their apartment. Luc must be up there as well, Colette thought.

She went out into the unlit common stairwell of the dormitory building and, groping in the darkness, found the handrail and climbed the steps. A light showed beneath her friends' door. She knocked; the door swung open. The small apartment was bright, silent, and still. The living-room window was open, its curtain fluttering. Colette called out the names of her friends; there was no answer.

Colette's heart began to beat faster. The divinity student and his wife shouldn't have been out; they were always home at night. Colette went to the kitchen, which was empty, but the icebox door was open, which was wrong; one always shut one's icebox door. Then she heard the sound of water running. A door from the kitchen led to the bathroom. Colette looked down: from the bottom of that door, water was seeping out onto the kitchen floor. Colette opened the bathroom door.

No one was there. The bath was running, unattended. The tub was full; water overflowed onto the tile floor. Colette didn't shut off the tap. Instead, for no reason she could have explained, she ran back to the living room, pulled open the window curtain, and looked down into the courtyard outside. Luc was there.

He was standing under a tree near a lamppost, a glass of milk in one hand, a cookie in the other, staring at a female figure who was on her knees, looking into his eyes, her wispy hair tinged red in the lamplight. The girl's lined face was strained and taut. She could almost have been pretty, if the eyes hadn't been so frightful – eyes that had seen something unspeakable or were contemplating something unspeakable. She unbuttoned her dress and pulled it open, showing the boy her throat and her naked chest. Though her face was as taut as a madwoman's, her throat and chest were unmarred, white, soft – almost radiant. The glass slipped from Luc's hands. It fell to the grass, and so didn't break, but for a moment a circle of white milk glistened in the darkness at his feet. The figure stretched out her arms as if beckoning him to her.

Colette cried out from the upstairs window. She ran into the hallway and down the stairs. When she heaved open the heavy front door, other voices in the courtyard were crying an alarm too – but they were calling out to her, not to Luc. The girl under the tree had disappeared.

The other voices belonged to Colette's upstairs neighbors – the divinity student and his wife – who breathlessly declared that they had in their possession a telegram that Colette must read at once. They had been home when an undergraduate came knocking with a message from Western Union erroneously delivered to him. The moment the couple read the urgent wire, they ran off to Colette's laboratory, telling Luc to stay behind and wait; they had rushed so precipitously that the divinity student had left his bathtub running. But when they reached the laboratory, Colette had already left.

After Colette had taken Luc back to their room, after she had read the message, after the neighbors had retired upstairs, she looked at her brother. 'Did she touch you?' asked Colette.

The boy shook his head. He pointed to his neck and made signs with his hands, which Colette understood.

'Yes, I saw it too,' she answered. 'The aura.'

Detective Littlemore returned to the law library early Monday morning. It took him several hours, but he finally found what he was looking for. Armed with this knowledge, he set off for the Astor Hotel, where

Chief Flynn had set up his command post. Littlemore picked up a couple of hot dogs on the way.

Inside the Astor, ignoring the protests of a secretary, Littlemore ambled directly up to Flynn's closed door, outside which his two familiar deputies were standing guard. One of them rubbed his jaw on seeing the detective.

'Big Bill around?' Littlemore asked them. Receiving no answer, Littlemore said, 'I'll just knock, if you don't mind.'

Both deputies placed their hands on Littlemore's chest. 'We mind,' said the one who had been to the detective's house.

'No problem,' said Littlemore, taking a bite of his hot dog. 'I'll come back in a few hours. Got to go to court anyway. Make out an arrest warrant. Say, you know those soldiers Big Bill stationed outside the Treasury Building? Reason I ask is the Posse Comitatus Act. You don't want a dog, do you? I got two.'

The deputies stared at Littlemore.

'See, the Posse Comitatus Act,' continued the detective, 'that's a federal law, and it says that anyone who orders any part of the United States army to deploy on US soil for law enforcement purposes – well, he's breaking the law. Anyone except the President, that is. So do me a favor. Tell Big Bill that Captain Littlemore of the New York Police Department's coming back at five o'clock with a gang of reporters and a warrant for his arrest. And tell him that the reporters are going to want to know what he's hiding inside the Treasury.'

On the fifth floor of the massive, gray, chateau-inspired jail known as the Tombs, the order was given at two-thirty Monday afternoon to unlock a temporary detention cell. The flesh around Drobac's eyes remained swollen and bruised. His mouth was wired shut, and a circular metal apparatus was clamped around his jaw and cheeks.

A well-dressed lawyer, highly satisfied with the proceedings, entered the cell the moment it was unlocked, accompanied by the murderer's surgeon. They each reached for one of the prisoner's arms to assist

him from his cot. Drobac shrugged off their hands and rose on his own.

Littlemore stood a long way off, at the other end of a long corridor, chewing his toothpick, a barred door separating him from the cells. Several guards and officers milled about near him, including Roederheusen and Stankiewicz. Younger, having come down from Boston that morning, was there as well.

'You sure you want to see this?' Littlemore asked him.

Younger nodded.

At the end of the corridor, Drobac emerged from his cell, walking slowly, unaided, his wired chin held ostentatiously high. Lawyer and surgeon followed behind, chatting with each other.

'In that case I'll need your gun, Doc,' said Littlemore in a low voice.

'What gun?' answered Younger just as quietly.

'Right now,' said Littlemore.

Younger didn't move. Slanted light fell on Drobac and his coterie as they approached.

'Boys,' said Littlemore, raising his voice very slightly, 'restrain Dr Younger.'

Roederheusen and Stankiewicz stepped up behind Younger and seized his arms.

Littlemore reached into Younger's jacket, drew out a revolver, and handed it to a prison guard for safekeeping. 'Sorry, Doc. Cuff him.'

Arriving at the barred door, Drobac saw Younger being handcuffed. Their eyes met. If a man can smile with his jaw wired shut, Drobac smiled.

'Open the gate,' ordered Littlemore.

'Don't let him go,' said Younger, hands locked behind his back and arms still in the grasp of Stankiewicz and Roederheusen.

'Open it,' Littlemore repeated.

A guard opened the barred gate. Drobac's lawyer spoke: 'Thank you, Captain. I'm glad my little conversation with the Mayor was so effective, but I shudder to think of all the other impoverished men in here unconstitutionally. Do you enjoy breaking the law, Captain? Sign the release, please.'

A clerk handed Littlemore a clipboard. 'If your client's so poor,' asked the detective, 'who's footing your bill, Mr-?'

'Gleason,' replied the lawyer. 'I charge nothing for a case like this, Captain. It's pro bono publico.'

'Sure it is,' said Littlemore.

'Don't let him out,' said Younger.

'No choice,' said Littlemore, signing the release. 'The law.'

Mr Gleason accepted his copy of the release with relish. He addressed Younger: 'So you're the one who beat my client within an inch of his life. We're pressing charges, you know.'

Younger didn't reply.

'How agonizing it must be,' Gleason continued, 'to stand there believing the fantastic delusions you do. That my client is a highly trained killer. That he's going to pursue the pretty French girl no matter where she runs, from New Haven to Hamburg to the farthest ends of the earth. That one night he'll find her, slip into her bedroom, and cut her throat.'

Younger's straining at his handcuffs only caused Roederheusen and Stankiewicz to hold him more firmly. 'Not if I find him first,' he said.

'You heard that, Captain!' crowed Gleason. 'He threatened my client. I demand that you revoke his bail. He belongs behind bars. I'll have your badge, Captain, if you don't.'

'Get out,' said Littlemore.

'Very well – if you insist,' replied the lawyer. He turned to Younger again: 'My client was in jail ten days. You'll be there twenty years.'

Younger was silenced by these words. Not, however, by the threat; it was the phrase ten days that caught his attention. 'Littlemore,' he said as Gleason guided Drobac toward the stairwell that led to freedom. 'Have him take off his shirt.'

'His shirt?' replied the detective.

'The kidnapper has a mark on the front of his torso,' said Younger. 'A red mark, in the shape of a test tube.'

The guard posted at the stairwell door looked uncertainly at Littlemore, waiting to be told whether to let Drobac pass.

'This is absurd,' said Gleason.

The surgeon spoke up: 'Is the mark visible to the naked eye?'

'Yes,' said Younger.

'I operated on Mr Smith,' the surgeon continued, referring to Drobac, 'and I assure you he has no such mark on his torso.'

'Then he has nothing to fear from taking off his shirt,' said Younger.

'Don't be ridiculous,' said Gleason, pushing past the guard and opening the stairwell door himself. 'You heard the surgeon. My client has been released. Now, if you'll excuse us-'

'Littlemore,' said Younger.

Drobac started to pass through the door held open by his attorney.

'Hold it,' the detective called out. 'Take his shirt off.'

A half-dozen guards pulled Drobac back into the hallway and formed a circle around him.

'You have no authority,' said Gleason.

For the first time, Drobac spoke. 'Is all right,' he said in his Eastern European accent, the wires around his jaw glinting silver. 'I do it. Why not? I hide nothing.'

Littlemore looked at Younger, who raised an eyebrow.

Drobac calmly removed his jacket, slipped off his suspenders, and began unbuttoning his white shirt, never taking his eyes from Younger. When his chest was bare, everyone could see it: under his left ribs, below the thick hair of his chest, slightly angled from the vertical, was the perfect likeness of a test tube, inscribed in a deep red rash.

'How do you like that?' said Littlemore.

Drobac looked down, uncomprehending. 'What – what is?'

'A radium burn,' said Younger. 'They take ten days to emerge. Yours comes from a test tube you stole from the Commodore Hotel and put in your jacket pocket.' 'This is an outrage,' declared Gleason. 'The Mayor will hear of this.'

'Put "Mr Smith" back in his cage,' said Littlemore to the guards.

Drobac, still looking at the red mark on his torso, made a snort that managed to convey both grudging acknowledgment and condescension. 'Is all right,' he said, buttoning his shirt. 'Your prison? Is more like hotel.'

'Glad you like it,' replied Littlemore. 'You're going to be here a long time.'

Drobac only smiled through his glinting steel wires.

Outside the Tombs, Littlemore returned Younger's gun and invited him to the Astor Hotel, where he was going to meet with reporters and Chief Flynn. 'Should be some fun,' said the detective. 'Until I get myself fired.'

Younger declined, saying he had a rendezvous he couldn't miss.

'Say, Doc, do you believe in premonitions?' asked Littlemore.

'No.'

'I'm just thinking about this guy Eddie Fischer. Everybody treats him like he's crazy, but what if he's really psycho?'

'Psychic.'

'Some people believe in premonitions, don't they? Some scientists? How about when you knew the bomb was about to go off on Wall Street before anybody else did? How do you explain that?'

'Something in the air,' replied Younger.

'That's just what Fischer says. He got it "out of the air.'"

'If you want to talk to a believer,' said Younger, 'go to the American Society for Psychical Research. Their office is here in New York somewhere. They're as good as it gets. Ask for Dr Walter Prince.'

'Thanks. I'll do that.'

They stood for a time without speaking.

'Sorry about the cuffs up there,' said Littlemore. 'Just protocol. I know you weren't actually going to shoot the guy.'

'I would have killed him,' said Younger.

'Christ – you can't do that, Doc. War's over.'

Younger nodded. 'Maybe there's always war. Maybe some of us just aren't fighting.'

'Uh-huh,' said Littlemore. 'Or maybe you just wanted to kill somebody.'

'Maybe.'

They shook hands and parted. After Younger's taxi had driven off, another vehicle pulled up beside Littlemore – a black-and-gold Packard. At the same time, two large men in suits converged on the detective from the steps of the Tombs. The rear passenger window of the Packard rolled down. 'Would you mind getting in, Captain?' said a voice from within.

'Depends who's asking,' said Littlemore.

The man nearest the detective put his hand between Littlemore's shoulder blades to guide him into the car. He opened his jacket just enough to let Littlemore see the butt of a gun holstered within.

'That supposed to scare me?' asked Littlemore, reaching with astonishing quickness into the man's jacket, pulling the gun out of his holster, and pointing it at his chin – while at the same time, with his other hand, drawing his own gun from his belt and aiming it at the other man. 'Where do they train you Bureau guys anyway?'

'Please, please, put your weapons away,' said the voice within the car.' I assure you there's no need. These men are not from the Bureau of Investigation. They work for me.'

'And who would you be?' asked Littlemore.

'I'm the secretary.'

'Whose secretary?' asked Littlemore.

'President Wilson's, I suppose. My name is David Houston. I'm Secretary of the Treasury. Please come in, Captain. There's something we need to discuss.'

Littlemore got in the car.

At the harbor, Younger found Colette and Luc waiting on a pier, near the berth of the steamship Welshman. Beside them were three forlorn, ragged-edged pieces of brown leather luggage. The air had already begun to cool; it would be a brisk autumn evening. The ship was boarding.

After they'd greeted one another, Colette described the events of the previous night. 'It's strange,' she said. 'When I first saw her, I was frightened, but later I felt there was nothing to be afraid of.'

Silence hung in the air.

'I didn't expect you,' said Colette, brushing a lock of hair from her face. 'Your telegram said Jimmy.'

Younger nodded. He handed her the tickets.

'They let him out of jail?' she asked. 'The killer?'

'No, he's back in,' said Younger. 'And he won't be coming out for a long time. It doesn't matter. You want to take this ship.'

She looked down at her hands. 'You-' she said.

'We took a wrong turn a long time ago, you and I,' answered Younger. 'All my fault. Better this way. I doubt your soldier deserves you, but you deserve to find out.'

Her gaze fell on the tickets. 'These are for Bremen, not Hamburg.'

Younger had bought a second set of tickets, on a different ship, the George Washington, when he arrived at the port an hour earlier. Drobac's attorney, Gleason, seemed to know that Colette was bound for Hamburg. If so, that meant Colette's pursuers would be expecting her to board the Welshman.

'A first-class cabin,' added Colette, still looking at the tickets. 'We don't need that.'

Younger handed her two more white envelopes. 'This one,' he said, 'has ready money for the trip. The other contains a draft on my accounts in England that you can negotiate at any serious bank in Vienna. No, take it. You can't live on nothing.'

She shook her head and tried to return the envelopes, but Younger wouldn't take them back. He crouched and extended his hand to Luc. The boy hesitated a moment, then held out his own.

'He did it,' said Younger. 'Ruth hit his fiftieth. And fifty-first.'

Luc nodded: he knew it already.

'Take care of your sister,' said Younger. He winked: 'Every girl needs a man taking care of her.'

Secretary Houston led Littlemore up the marble steps, past the soldiers standing at attention, into the Treasury Building. Houston was a gracious and handsome man in his early fifties, his genially crinkled eyes suggesting a friendliness contradicted by everything else about him, particularly the cold soft intelligence of his Southern voice. The detective followed the top-hatted Houston through the rotunda, then down several narrow stairwells. Soldiers lined every flight, every doorway.

They entered a sub-basement and came eventually to a narrow arched stone door, so low they had to stoop passing through it. On the other side, Houston threw a switch; dim electric lights flickered on. They were in a large chamber with a low vaulted ceiling, filled with endless stacks of neatly arranged, crisscrossing bricks, glinting darkly yellow.

Houston led Littlemore on a tour through these stacks of bricks, which, like the shelves in an overfull library, left just enough space for persons to pass between them in single file. There seemed to be miles of them.

It was gold, all gold, as far as the eye could see.

'Pick one up, Captain,' said Houston.

Littlemore removed a bar from the top of the nearest pile. It was inordinately heavy for its size.

'Twenty pounds,' said Houston. 'There is no larger store of gold anywhere on earth. There never has been. Not in the Bank of England, not in the palaces of the Turk, not in the tomb of the Inca. You are looking at the metal reserves of the United States of America, on which the credit of your government, the value of the dollars in your pocket, and ultimately the liquidity of every bank in this country depend. Have you any idea how much gold is here, Captain?'

'Less than there was on the morning of September sixteenth.'

'Most astute. How long have you known?'

'I saw one of your guards lying dead outside the Treasury with a piece of gold in his hands,' said Littlemore. 'I knew you'd been robbed when I found out you tried to erase his name from the casualty list.'

'Yes, a bit heavy-handed, that,' said Houston. He took a deep breath. 'The gold in these vaults is worth approximately nine hundred million dollars. Just think. The bomb, the deaths, the incalculable misery – all that for a bank robbery.'

'That's why Flynn called in the army.'

'It wasn't Flynn,' said Houston dismissively. 'The man is a blowhard. I ordered the soldiers here, and I'm well aware it was against the law to do so. But it would have been criminal not to. I tried to get Wilson's authorization. The President, however, is not – fully active, you know.'

'Why am I here, Mr Houston?' asked the detective.

'We couldn't have you telling the press the Treasury's been robbed, could we?'

'How much did they get?'

'Oh, it's not the dollar value of the loss that counts. Gold doesn't have value because someone will give you dollars for it, Captain. Dollars have value because the United States will give you gold for them. The real value of gold is psychical. It is valuable because men believe it to be valuable. And because they do, gold gives men faith in the government that possesses it – or is believed to possess it. We could lose every ounce of gold in these vaults, and so long as people didn't know of the loss, they would continue to invest in our bonds, trade in our dollars, leave their money in our banks, and so forth. Conversely, we could hold on to every brick, but if people believed the gold reserves of this country were insecure, we could have a panic making 1907 look like a baby's fretting.'

'How'd they do it?'

'You've seen the new building adjacent to this one, Captain – the Assay Office? Deep within it we've built new secure treasure vaults, much more suitable than this musty old basement. The gold is being transferred to the new vaults. We had devised a way to make that transfer without ever having an ounce of gold leave our property.'

'A tunnel?' asked Littlemore.

'No – a bridge. An overhead bridge.'

Littlemore nodded: 'In the alley between the buildings. I saw the doors.'

'Exactly. The bridge connected their second floors. It was built specially to move this gold. Triply reinforced to carry the weight. A moving automatic belt to make the conveyance of so much metal feasible. All without ever exposing a single brick to the outside world. Or so we thought.'

'You were moving the gold on the sixteenth?' asked Littlemore.

'Yes, we were. It was a carefully guarded secret. Or supposed to be. Evidently someone knew. The workmen inside reacted quite well, by the way. When they heard the explosion, they shut the doors on either side of the bridge, as they were trained to do. The only loss was the gold that happened to be on the bridge, which burned and collapsed. The robbers must have had a truck waiting in the alley.'

'How much did you lose?'

'We still don't know exactly,' Houston answered. 'It takes time to recount 138,000 bars. In addition to the gold on the bridge, I lost a man too – the man whose name we want off your lists. He may have gone onto the bridge to try to save the gold.'

'Riggs,' said Littlemore. 'So if the bombing was a robbery, why is Big Bill Flynn chasing anarchists?'

'Nearly no one knows about this robbery, Captain,' said Houston. 'Senator Fall, for example, does not know of it. Neither does Chief Flynn.'

Littlemore thought about that: 'You're afraid the Bureau has a leak.'

'Only a handful of people knew the date on which we were transferring the gold. There are men in the Bureau who knew. Someone betrayed us.'

'Could have been someone inside Treasury,' said Littlemore. 'Could have been Riggs.' '

'I can't rule that out,' replied Houston.

'You must know more or less how much they got away with.'

'Oh, more or less, certainly,' replied Houston. 'A paltry amount. We will hardly notice it, even if we never get it back. Five or six hundred bricks, give or take.'

'Which comes to?' asked the detective.

'In dollars? Perhaps four.'

'Four thousand?'

'Four millions,' said Houston.

The number hung in the air for a moment, echoing. 'What is it you want from me, Mr Secretary?' asked Littlemore.

'Why, just to refrain from telling the press about the robbery. It wouldn't do for the public to learn the United States Treasury has been breached – and certainly not that there are people inside the government with the will and wherewithal to steal the nation's gold. Wouldn't do at all.'

'Too late,' said Littlemore. 'I already told a couple of reporters there was something they might find interesting at the Treasury. Something to do with gold.'

'I know,' said Houston. 'We've received inquiries. That much is all right. I don't mind telling them the gold is here. The financial world is already aware of it. I don't even mind telling the press we've been moving the gold to the Assay vaults. I intend simply to let it out that my men happened to take their lunch break just before the explosion. A simple story. It was noon; the men had shut the doors for lunch; they heard the bomb go off; that was all. A coincidence. The great point is that there was no robbery, no breach in security, no loss of gold. Lunchtime.'

'Think anyone will buy that?' asked Littlemore.

'The gullibility of the common man constantly surprises, Captain. If everyone tells the reporters the same thing, I think we'll be all right. Especially if you tell them. You'll be doing your country a service.'

Littlemore weighed the Secretary's request. 'I want in on your investigation – who knew the gold was being moved, everything you've got on Riggs, who's selling bullion on the black market.'

'Why not?' said Houston. 'You might help. Unlike my other officers, you at least are not a suspect.'

'And one more thing. Get Flynn off my back. Any of Flynn's men come within spitting distance of my wife's family, I tell the press everything I know.'

'That will be more difficult. The Bureau is not under my control.'

'No deal then.' Littlemore put his hat back on and snapped its brim.

It was Houston's turn to weigh his options. 'Consider it done,' he said. 'I'm speaking with General Palmer tonight.'

Colette uttered not a word. She turned away and waved for a porter, who quickly loaded the three tattered suitcases onto his hand truck. The porter set off. Colette, followed by Luc, walked slowly into the crowd.

Younger, lighting a cigarette, gazed past the Welshman to the vast black George Washington, memories boiling up. It had been a great ship once. It had brought Freud to America. It had taken Woodrow Wilson to Europe. It had carried kings and queens and heads of state. Now it was relegated to commercial passenger duty once again. All greatness fades.

Colette stopped. She turned, burst out of the crowd, and ran back to him. 'I'm such a fool,' she said. 'I'm not going.'

'Get on board,' said Younger. 'You'll regret it – you'll resent it – the rest of your life if you don't.'

The ship spoke in an earsplitting blast. Seagulls took flight. The call for all passengers went out.

Colette buried her cheek on his chest.

'Go on,' said Younger. 'It won't be so hard. You can cry on my shoulder in Vienna when we get there.'

She looked at him; he looked back. 'You don't mean it,' she said.

'Why shouldn't I come?' he asked. 'You're in love with me, not Heinrich.'

She didn't deny it.

Younger went on: 'If I let you go by yourself, you might actually marry this convict. Don't think I'm coming for your sake, though. It's Heinrich I'm worried about. You don't do a man any favors by marrying him when you're in love with someone else. You'd be killing him, slowly but surely. Besides -' he removed from his jacket another ticket for passage on the George Washington – 'my bags are already on board.'

Colette's whole body seemed to exhale with relief, and she smiled her most irresistible smile. As the ship steamed out to open sea, the three uncorked a bottle of champagne. Even Luc was allowed to try a little.