The Death Instinct

Chapter Nineteen

Telegraphic instructions flew from station to station, east to west, across the United States on the morning of November 18, 1920 – the day after Littlemore found the secret cache of Mexican documents. Their point of origin was the War Department in Washington, DC. The most important of these wires was issued to Fort Houston in San Antonio, Texas. It ordered Major General James G. Harbord, commander of the Unites States Army, Second Division, to mobilize for immediate deployment to the Mexican border.

Colette Rousseau held Younger's hand at the ship's rail, steaming into New York Harbor that same morning. All around them, passengers crooned over the fantastical Manhattan skyline, lit by the morning sun. 'This time, even I think your skyscrapers are beautiful,' said Colette.

Over the course of the voyage, they had discovered certain intimacies about each other. She would insist, at night, on his extinguishing every light and candle before emerging from the dressing room in her slip and darting into bed, where she would pull the bedclothes up to her chin. She had an additional scruple – that he was not to be naked in her presence. She seemed to like it when he took off his shirt, but that was as undressed as she was prepared to have him.

'Strange,' said Younger. 'I was going to say that this time even I find them unsettling.'

From coast to coast, the newspapers that morning were filled with strange items concerning Mexico. There were rumors – unattributed to any official sources – of a military mobilization and of an imminent threat that American-owned oil wells were to be nationalized. From Washington, the following was reported:

The Mexican Embassy issued a statement last night declaring that it had been authorized by General Obregon, President-elect of Mexico, to deny that Elias L. Torres, who last Tuesday extended an invitation to Senator Harding to visit Mexico, was acting on behalf of the Mexican government. 'The Mexican Embassy,' the statement said, 'is in receipt of a telegram from General Obregon, in which he categorically denies that Elias Torres is his representative.'

No further details were offered to explain this curious report.

Also that morning, in an antiseptic room in New York City, with perfectly white walls and a single hospital bed in the middle, a girl with long red hair opened her eyes. She tried to speak, but something in her mouth prevented her from doing so. She would have removed this impediment, but her wrists were tied to the bed rails with leather straps.

'Will she be clean?' asked a male voice. Whoever spoke was out of her sight. She tried to turn her head, but couldn't.

'Yes,' answered a man she could see, wearing a white medical coat. 'The last one wasn't clean.' 'It's acidic. It will clean.'

'Will it hurt?' asked the male voice, out of her sight.

'Probably,' said the man in the white jacket.

'Can you give her something?'

'For the pain – now?'

'Please.'

The white-coated man came to her bedside. She felt his hands on her arm and then the prick of a needle. Presently, her fears and wretchedness subsided. A warmth spread through her body. It felt pleasant, comforting. She wanted more.

The man she hadn't seen – and, as the room began to swim, still couldn't see clearly – now came to her bedside. He gently parted her lips. Between those lips, a gag pulled against her cheeks, tightly tied.

The man inserted something bristly into her mouth. It was a toothbrush. He was brushing her teeth, above and below the gag. He went about it methodically, thoroughly, minutely. He brushed in tiny circles, first her incisors, then her canines, then her molars, front and back, upper and lower.

The doctor had been wrong: it didn't hurt at all. It wasn't even unpleasant. At least not at first. Then she felt a burning on her tongue and in her throat. The gag caused her to choke. Tears began to run from her eyes. The man stroked the tears from her eyes, gently. He parted her hospital gown and looked at her white, soft throat and bosom.

'I like this one,' he said. 'No defects. Can't you give her more?'

'She'll be unconscious,' said the man in the white coat.

'I don't want her unconscious. Can you make her – almost unconscious?'

She felt another prick in her arm. Soon the man with the toothbrush set to work again, finding every crevice and crown of her teeth, cleaning her, cleaning. The paste burned her terribly, but she didn't mind it anymore. The pleasant, generous warmth spread deeper into her limbs and chest and elsewhere. Then everything became confused, tangled, and she couldn't understand what was happening. She was pulled, mentally as well as physically, in two different directions; someone was now scrubbing at her neck and shoulders with the same astringent paste, which hurt and which she wished would stop, but there was also more of the heavenly flooding warmth, which she wanted to last forever.

Littlemore went to Secretary Houston's office first thing that morning. Denied permission to enter, he waited in the hallway, reading the newspapers, until, an hour later, Houston appeared.

'Can't you see I'm busy, Littlemore?' asked Houston as he hurried down the corridor, the detective in his wake.

'Is it the Mexican business, sir?'

'Mexican business?' Houston stopped. 'What do you know about it?'

'Been reading the papers.'

The Secretary set off again, followed by Littlemore. 'Well, what is it?' asked Houston.

'Just wondering who chose the date for the transfer of the gold.'

'What? Why?'

'I think it may unlock the whole puzzle, sir.'

'The date? I don't see why,' said Houston. 'Everyone inside the Department knew when the gold was going to be transferred. In any event, it was before my time. The move had been planned for years. The new Assay Office was designed specifically for the purpose. Long before my time.'

'You didn't have anybody advising you on the date, Mr Houston – making suggestions, reviewing the timing?'

'Advising me on the date? I had nothing to do with it.'

On checking in, Younger immediately had the hotel operator ring police headquarters. Informed that Captain Littlemore no longer worked there, he obtained a number for the detective in Washington. Some minutes later, he reached Littlemore in his Treasury office.

'What are you doing in Washington?' Younger asked.

'Long story,' said Littlemore. 'What were you doing in France?'

'Long story. Did they get the radium out of the McDonald girl?'

'Not exactly. I told her doctor what you said; he looked at me like I was nuts. He said she has syphilis, not radium. And I checked with the Post-Graduate Hospital. They've got no record of her.'

'She doesn't have syphilis. What's the doctor's name?'

'Lyme,' said Littlemore. 'Dr Frederick Lyme at the Sloane Hospital for Women. Listen, Doc – Drobac's out of prison.'

The line crackled; Younger said nothing.

'You still there?' asked Littlemore.

'I'm here,' said Younger. 'What is this, the Perils of Pauline? How can he be out of prison?'

'Because you jumped bail, for Pete's sake,' said Littlemore, 'and took the Miss and the boy with you. His lawyer told the court you fled the country. Whereabouts unknown. The Miss was the complainant. How are we supposed to prosecute a kidnapping when the victims have left the jurisdiction? I told them you'd be back, but the judge ruled we had to let him go.'

'So the murderer's on the street while I'm to stand trial?'

'It's not a trial. It's a bail revocation hearing. The judge ordered it after he heard you were out of the country. If you don't show, your bail gets revoked, a warrant issues for your arrest, and I have to pay up on your bail bond. You got to be there, Doc.'

'I'll be there.'

'Say – I'm catching the afternoon train back to town. Why don't you and the Miss come over for dinner?'

A bellboy rang, delivering to Younger and Colette a packet of telegrams that had arrived during the last week. 'From Freud,' said Younger. 'I let him know where we'd be staying.'

'Open them up,' said Colette eagerly.

The first of the telegrams was sent only a few days after they boarded their ship for New York:

7 Nov. 1920

BOY FINE. TWO BRITISH PUPILS HAVE TAKEN LIKING TO HIM.

VISITED ZOO. STRONGLY SUSPECT INVOLVEMENT OF FATHER IN

BOY'S SYMPTOMS. PLEASE CONSULT MISS ROUSSEAU AND ASK

AGAIN WHETHER SHE RECALLS ANY MISTREATMENT OF HER OR BROTHER AT FATHERS HANDS.

FREUD

'Mistreatment of me?' said Colette. 'That's the second time he's asked. What does he mean?'

Younger, who knew exactly what Freud meant, didn't answer that question. 'What about Luc? Did your father ever – I don't know – beat him?'

'Father doted on Luc. He was the kindest man in the world. What does the next one say?'

Younger opened the second telegram:

11 NOV. 1920

IGNORE PREVIOUS WIRE. BOY HAS BEGUN SPEAKING TO ME. FOR NOW HE

WHISPERS, BUT I EXPECT COMPLETE CURE. WEEKS NOT MONTHS. MORE SHORTLY.

FREUD

'Mon dieu,' said Colette excitedly 'Open the next one.'

Younger did so:

13 NOV. 1920

BOY HAS RECURRENT DREAM. HE IS BACK IN BEDROOM OF HOUSE WHERE BORN.

IT IS MIDDLE OF NIGHT. GOES TO A WINDOW. SEES WOLVES LURKING IN TREE

WATCHING HIM. DREAM IS REVERSAL OF LATENT CONTENT. BOY DREAMS OF

BEING LOOKED AT BECAUSE HE SAW SOMETHING HE WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO SEE.

UNDOUBTEDLY FATHER INVOLVED, BUT ALMOST CERTAINLY ALSO SISTER.

FREUD

Colette was perplexed. 'Why am I involved?' she asked.

'There's one more,' said Younger. He read it:

17 NOV. 1920

SETBACK. LUC HAS STOPPED SPEAKING. WILL NOT COMMUNICATE

WITH ANYONE NOT IN WHISPER NOT IN WRITING NOT EVEN BY

GESTURE. PLEASE URGE MISS ROUSSEAU NOT TO BE ALARMED.

TEMPORARY REGRESSION NOT UNCOMMON IN ANALYSIS. POSSIBLY

POSITIVE SIGN.

FREUD

'How could it be a positive sign?' asked Colette.

'If it was brought on by their getting close to the source of the problem.'

'What does that mean?'

Younger ran a hand through his hair. 'I don't believe in psychoanalysis. I told you.'

'But if you did believe, what would it mean?' 'The way Freud would see it is this,' he said. 'Luc has a memory from early childhood – from a time when he saw something forbidden or wished for something so wrong he had to suppress all consciousness of it. This memory doesn't like to stay hidden; it tries to escape the repression, to force its way into consciousness. That's what produces a patient's symptoms.'

'What don't you believe?' she asked.

'I don't believe in the wishes that Freud attributes to children. And I don't believe in repressed childhood memories coming to light years later. It's like a – like a too-neatly-tied-up ending in a novel.'

Colette considered for a moment – and announced that she trusted Dr Freud.

Newspapermen so crowded the office of Senator Albert Fall that Littlemore was barely able to squeeze in. The reporters' primary question was whether the Senator could confirm that United States troops were deploying to the Mexican border.

'That's right, gentlemen,' said Fall. 'The Second Division is on its way.'

'What are their orders, Mr Senator?'

'Can't say,' answered Fall. 'But let's not get all out of joint. I'm heading to Mexico myself. Going to attend Senor Obregon's inauguration. I'm sure all parties would like to see our disputes resolved peacefully.'

'What will you tell General Obregon, Mr Senator?'

'I'll tell him to keep his hands off our oil. And that having America as your friend is a whole lot smarter than having us as your enemy.'

After the conference, Littlemore voiced surprise at Senator Fall's planned visit to Mexico City. 'Don't you think it might be dangerous, Mr Fall?'

'I'd imagine so,' replied the Senator. 'For somebody.'

On the express to New York, Littlemore read a stack of afternoon newspapers, which, since he knew more than the journalists did, filled him with a sense of unreality but also of foreboding, as if he had a clairvoyant's foreknowledge of an impending catastrophe that could not be averted. In Washington, the papers reported, Roberto Pesqueira, confidential agent of the Mexican Embassy, had to be forcibly restrained at a meeting of American businessmen after insisting on his country's right to its own natural resources. In Los Angeles, Mexicans were purchasing munitions in dangerously large quantities. In Mexico itself, American citizens had begun fleeing the country.

Littlemore next removed from his briefcase the architectural plans for the Assay Office in lower Manhattan. The new vaults of the Assay Building were closer to impregnable than any bank he'd ever seen. They were eighty-five feet below ground, reinforced with three separate layers of steel and concrete, accessible only by a single door through a four-foot-wide tunnel, and surrounded by alarm systems, weapons caches, even food and water supplies in case of siege. The plans had been approved in 1917 by then-Secretary of the Treasury William G. McAdoo. A different Treasury Secretary's signature appeared at the bottom of the other document Littlemore had on his lap.

It was a work order authorizing the transfer of the nation's gold reserves from the Sub-Treasury in New York City to the adjacent Assay Office via overhead bridge commencing the night of September 15, 1920. The detective had found the order crumpled in the back of a filing drawer. It was signed, as Littlemore knew it would be, by Secretary David Houston.

Younger and Colette went to the Littlemores' that night for dinner. 'What are you doing in Washington, Jimmy?' asked Colette. 'It must be very important.'

'Not much – just starting a war,' he replied. They expected him to say more, but he didn't.

After dinner, while the women did the dishes, Younger and Littlemore sat without speaking at the table, the detective scraping his fork back and forth along his dessert plate. 'Littlemore,' said Younger.

'Huh?'

'You're out-silencing me.'

'Wars don't always go the way they're planned, do they?' asked Littlemore.

'They never go the way they're planned,' said Younger.

'Remember when you said that the Wall Street bombing was a way to assassinate the people? What do they want, the assassins? How about those Serbs who assassinated that Austrian duke guy in 1914? What did they want?'

'War.'

'They got it, didn't they?'

'Beyond their wildest dreams.'

The next morning, newspapers reported that Senator Fall, who the previous day had announced his intention to attend the inauguration of General Obregon, had been denied the visa required for entry into Mexico by confidential agent Roberto Pesqueira of the Mexican Embassy In response to questioning, Mr Pesqueira would say only that the Senator was an enemy of the Mexican people.

Meanwhile, the United States army was massing on the Mexican border. Dispatches from Mexico City asserted that President-elect Obregon had come down with a sudden and unexplained illness, preventing him from attending his scheduled preinaugural events.

Colette had arranged a meeting that morning with Mrs William B. Meloney, chairwoman of the Marie Curie Radium Fund. Younger made her pack her things before they left.

'Why?' asked Colette.

'We're changing hotels.' In part this move was precautionary. Younger hadn't told anyone but Freud where he and Colette would be staying, but someone keeping an eye on the harbor might conceivably have spotted them. Or someone monitoring the transatlantic cables might possibly have seen Freud's wires. Younger's chief motivation, however, was pecuniary. He needed cheaper lodging.

They took the subway to Mrs Meloney's house on West Twelfth Street. Younger insisted on accompanying Colette there. Then he headed uptown, making Colette swear not to leave before he returned.

When Littlemore came down from the elevated train on his way to work that morning, he was so deep in thought that he got out at his old station, Grand Street, by mistake. He was halfway to police headquarters before realizing his error. There was something the detective didn't like, but he didn't know what it was.

At the Sloane Hospital for Women on Fifty-ninth Street, Younger gave his name and asked for Dr Frederick Lyme. A short time later,

Younger was greeted by a man of about forty, prematurely gray, with wide-rimmed glasses, a clipboard, and a stethoscope over his white jacket.

'What can I do for you, Dr Younger?' asked Lyme, taking his glasses off and placing them in a pocket.

'I'm here about the McDonald girl. You spoke with a policeman named Littlemore; I'm the one who sent him. The girl has radium inside her neck. She needs an operation immediately.'

'Radium,' said Lyme lightly. 'How could Miss McDonald possibly have gotten radium inside her? I already told the policeman the idea was quite absurd. I have nothing further to say. Good day.'

'Cancer,' said Younger, 'is the most likely cause of the growth on her neck. If she was diagnosed with cancer, she could very well have taken a radium treatment for it. I believe the needle of radium is still in her neck.'

Lyme put his clipboard to his chest: 'Miss McDonald never took any radium treatments, and cancer did not cause her tumor. Syphilis did. Surely you're aware that third-stage syphilis produces gummas – granulomas, growths – which can appear anywhere on the body. Syphilis was also the cause of her dementia. She had already begun raving. She had delusions of persecution. Perhaps she said something?'

'No.'

'Syphilis was found in 1913 to be the cause of general paresis,' said Lyme. 'Or don't you keep up with the literature?'

'I'm familiar with the finding,' said Younger. 'Dr Lyme, I took X-rays of the girl.'

'How? When?'

'When she was at Bellevue. The X-rays clearly indicated the presence of radium.'

'Ridiculous. Your X-ray machine was obviously malfunctioning. Either that or you didn't know how to operate it.'

'I've confirmed the diagnosis with Madame Curie herself in Paris. There was no malfunction; radium produces the specific fluoroscopic pattern I found on her X-rays. At least open up the tumor and have a look. It can't hurt her.'

'It can't help her either,' said Lyme. 'She's dead. Now if you'll excuse me.'

When he finally reached his office on Wall Street, Littlemore had the operator ring Senator Fall's chambers in Washington. It took over an hour before he managed to speak with the Senator. 'What if the Mexican government didn't order the bombing, Mr Fall?' asked the detective. 'What if it was just one or two rogue Mexican officers?'

'You're not getting cold feet, are you, son? The war's going to be a cakewalk. Our boys will be home by Christmas.'

'Obregon says Torres had no connection to the Mexican government,' said Littlemore.

'What do you expect him to say after what you found in Torres's room?' the Senator replied.

'There's no proof, Mr Fall.'

'Courtroom talk. Wars aren't fought in courtrooms. You keep your eye on the ball, son. We got the signature of the Mexican financial minister on letterhead paper and a goddamn terrorist boot camp run by their military. That's more proof than we need.'

'What if it was just some bad apples, not the whole government?'

'I'll be honest with you,' said Fall. 'I don't care if the bombing was ordered by El Presidente de la Republico or El Ministerio de la Financio. What difference would it make? We still got to clean out Mexico City. Hunt down the sons of bitches who bombed us. Wipe out that boot camp. If Obregon wasn't behind it, that means he can't control his bad apples, so we got to put in somebody who can – before they spoil the whole damn barrel.'

Static filled the line.

'Tell you what, son,' said Fall. 'I'm coming up your way to meet with Bill McAdoo on Saturday. Got to figure out what we're going to do about Houston. Tricky business funding a war when your Secretary of the Treasury is being paid off by your enemy. We always have dinner at the Oyster Bar. Why don't you meet us there?'

'The Oyster Bar?' said Littlemore.

'You know the Oyster Bar – in the terminal?'

'Sure, I know it. Sounds good, Mr Fall.'

A short while later, Littlemore was still standing by the telephone.

Younger knocked at the door of Mrs William Meloney s townhouse on West Twelfth Street, which was filled with purring cats and shelves full of testimonials to Marie Curie.

'These are letters,' Mrs Meloney explained to Younger, 'from cancer patients who have been cured with radium therapy. I'm collecting them for Madame Curie when she arrives. One is from a botanist who wants to send Madame Curie an entire hothouse of flowers. We must raise the rest of the money. We simply must.'

'It's all arranged,' said Colette with excitement. 'We're going to visit Mr Brighton's luminous-paint factories tomorrow – one in New Jersey, one in Manhattan. Mrs Meloney says there's a chance at a very large donation.'

'Mr Brighton,' said the older woman knowingly, 'is very close to contributing an even larger amount than he did before. As much as seventy-five thousand dollars. He told me so himself. All it will take is a little feminine push.'

'Seventy-five thousand dollars – can you believe it, Stratham?' said Colette. 'That's more than we need. The radium will be paid for.'

On their way back uptown, Younger told Colette about his visit to Sloane Hospital. 'Lyme insists it was syphilis,' he muttered. 'I should have asked to see the Wassermann test. I've never heard of tertiary syphilis in a girl that age.'

Littlemore walked down the steps of the Sub-Treasury and into Wall Street. Next door, soldiers were still stationed in front of the Assay Office, where deep in basement vaults the nation's gold reserves were stored. He crossed the street to the Morgan Bank.

Wall Street was crowded as always. Though in the way of the hurrying pedestrians, Littlemore walked slowly up and down the length of the sidewalk outside the bank, inspecting the places on its exterior wall where the concrete had been scored and gouged in the bombing.

Everyone had assumed this damage was caused by the bomb and the shrapnel. Littlemore examined the pockmarks more closely. It was strange that they were concentrated below and around a first-floor window. Some of the uneven gouges – particularly the larger ones – might well have been the product of shrapnel, but most of the pockmarks were small and round, as if the concrete had been repeatedly struck by bullets.

Littlemore went next to City Hall. In the basement land offices, he pored over the gas, water, sewer, and subway maps for lower Manhattan. It took him hours. He was pretty certain he wouldn't find anything, and he didn't. Ordinary plumbing, power, and gas lines ran under Wall Street. No sewer pipes crossed from Wall to Pine. A subway had been announced for Nassau Street in 1913, with a station at the corner of Broad and Wall, near where the bomb went off. But unlike the other eighty subway routes announced in 1913, the Nassau line had never been built.

The hotel into which Younger moved was the kind that provided in every room a set of old, unmatching utensils and an electric hot plate. Seeing these implements, Colette declared that she would cook. She took Younger shopping – at a greengrocer's, a butcher's, a baker's. It was, she said, like being in Paris. Or would have been, if there had only been a bottle of wine to buy.

The Littlemores had dinner in their Fourteenth Street apartment all together – parents, grandmother, and innumerable children. Littlemore's mind was not on the meal. Twice he called James Jr by the name of Samuel, which was their youngest boy, and he called Samuel Peter, even though Peter didn't look anything like Samuel, being twice his age. Betty, feeding Lily in the high chair, had never seen her husband so distracted.

'You know,' said Younger to Colette as they ate across their tiny candlelit dining table, 'there's another possibility.'

'Of what?'

'Of how radium cures cancer.' He cut into the chop she had made him. 'What if there's a kind of switch in every one of our cells that turns on or off the process of cell death – and what if radioactivity flips it? In cancer cells, the switch is off; the cells don't die; that's why they keep replicating, endlessly. When radioactivity hits those cells, it turns the switch on, so the cells start dying again. That cures the cancer.'

'But then in good cells, radioactivity would – it would-'

'Turn the switch off,' said Younger. 'Make the cells stop dying. Cause cancer.'

'Radium doesn't cause cancer.'

'How do you know?'

'One medicine can't both cure a disease and cause it. That's impossible.'

'Why?'

'Do you know why you are so suspicious of radioactivity?' asked Colette. 'I think it's because you didn't discover it. If you had been the first to think of God, you'd believe in Him, too.'

In her antiseptic room, the girl with long red hair knew what it meant when the man in the white coat came in. She strained against the leather straps; she tried to scream, but the gag muffled her mouth.

She also knew from the man's presence that she would soon feel the pinprick of a needle in her arm, and after that the gratifying warmth that would spread so comfortably up and down her limbs.

Soon the other man was brushing her teeth again, upper and lower, front and back, taking his time.

A folded note slid under Younger's hotel room door well after midnight. Younger read it, threw on some clothes, and went down to the front desk. 'You're out late,' he said.

'What's the world's strongest acid?' asked Jimmy Littlemore, chewing his toothpick.

'Strongest for what purpose?' asked Younger. 'Cutting through metal.'

'Aqua regia. It's a mixture of nitric and sulfuric acids.' 'Can you travel with it?' asked Littlemore. 'You know, bring it with you?'

'It's safe enough in glass. Why?'

'I might need some help,' said Littlemore. 'Could be a little dangerous. You around tomorrow night?' Younger looked at him. 'It's important, Doc.' 'To whom?' asked Younger. 'To the country. To two countries.' Younger still didn't answer. 'The war,' added Littlemore.

'The war's going to be a mismatch,' said Younger. 'A single division of ours is larger than the entire Mexican army. Our generals could go in blindfolded, and we'd still win it.'

'Not trying to win it,' said Littlemore. 'Trying to stop it.'

The front pages of the newspapers the next morning were full of the escalating crisis in Mexico. President-elect Obregon had not been seen in public for two days. On the border, the United States army, Second Division, had beaten to full war strength. American warplanes had begun crossing into Mexican airspace, patrolling south all the way to Mexico City.

The Wall Street Journal demanded an immediate invasion to protect American interests. So did the governor of the great state of Texas. In Washington, high-ranking gentlemen in the Wilson Administration, together with men whose offices would be correspondingly lofty under Harding, issued a joint statement addressed to General Obregon, President-elect of Mexico. The statement set forth the conditions necessary to a peaceful resolution of the crisis, including an amendment to the Mexican Constitution prohibiting confiscation of American-owned subsoil interests.

According to rumors circulating on both sides of the border, the American war was to commence the next day, with the goal of occupying Mexico City by November twenty-fifth, the day of General Obregon's inauguration. It was widely asserted that the Americans would allow the inauguration to go forward – but with an individual of their own choice taking office.

Younger accompanied Colette once again to Mrs Meloney's house on West Twelfth Street, where a car was waiting to take them to Mr Brighton's luminous-paint factory in Orange, New Jersey. The driver was the redoubtable Samuels. Younger said goodbye, waiting on the curb until he was sure no one had followed them. Then he took the subway uptown. The day was brisk and overcast.

Passing warehouses and slaughterhouses, Younger walked to Tenth Avenue, where he entered Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, the medical school attached to the Sloane Hospital for Women. Younger knew two researchers who worked there. He found one of them – his name was Joseph Johanson – in his laboratory. Younger asked him to call the hospital to see if he could pull the charts on a female patient named McDonald under the care of Dr Frederick Lyme.

'There's no Dr Lyme at Sloane,' replied Johanson.

'There was yesterday,' said Younger. 'I talked to him.'

Johanson looked dubious but made the call. Presently they learned that there was indeed a patient file for a Quinta McDonald, but that all her charts were gone, having been removed on instructions from the family. What remained was a death certificate, which indicated that the patient had died five days previously from syphilis.

'Who signed the death certificate?' asked Younger.

Johanson relayed the question to the nurse, who reported that the signature appeared to be that of an attorney by the name of Gleason. She also said that she had never heard of a Dr Lyme at the hospital.

'Wait a minute: Frederick Lyme – I know that name,' said Johanson after ringing off. He took down from a bookcase a large loose-leaf binder: a directory of the faculty of Columbia University. 'Let me just – here he is. He's not a doctor. He's in physiology. Not even a Ph.D.'

'Why would a physiologist,' asked Younger, 'be treating a patient in your hospital?'

Colette and Mrs Meloney, received like dignitaries by Mr Arnold Brighton at his luminous-paint factory in New Jersey, were each presented with a diamond stickpin – a token, Brighton said, of his appreciation. Mrs Meloney was delighted. Colette tried to look it.

The factory, Brighton proudly showed them, operated under the scrupulous supervision of laboratory scientists, who took care that precisely measured micrograms of radium were properly added to the drums of blue and yellow paint, which were then sealed and spun to ensure uniform hue and dilution. Lead screens separated the radium-infused paint from the rest of the factory floor. Radioactivity detectors were located in various spots to sound an instant alarm in case of a radiation leak.

Mrs Meloney brought up the subject of the Marie Curie Radium Fund.

'Yes, Marie Curie,' said Brighton reverently. 'You can't quantify what the world owes that woman. Even Samuels would have difficulty measuring it. He's a gifted accountant, my Samuels. You wouldn't guess it from looking at him. It just shows you can't judge a man by his cover. Isn't that right, ladies?'

Colette and Mrs Meloney agreed that you could not.

'Was I saying something?' asked Brighton.

'Our debt to Madame Curie,' prompted Mrs Meloney.

'Yes, of course. The profit from my radium mines in Colorado, the profit from my luminous-paint sales – I owe it all to Marie Curie. Of course, I do own a few other little things here and there.'

'Mr Brighton,' Mrs Meloney explained to Colette, 'is one of our nation's great oilmen.'

'That's how we discovered radium in Colorado,' said Brighton cheerfully. 'We were sinking exploratory lines for oil.'

Mrs Meloney gently reminded Brighton of the Fund.

'Fund?' he asked. 'What Fund?'

'The Radium Fund, Mr Brighton.'

'The Fund, the Fund, of course,' he said. 'Marvelous idea, yes – I can't wait to meet Madame Curie. And I can't wait for you to see my factory in Manhattan, where we put the paint on the watch dials. I am one of the largest employers of women in New York, Miss Rousseau, did you know that?'

Colette politely denied such knowledge. With a theatrical sigh, Mrs Meloney declared, 'What a pity that Madame Curie will not be coming to America after all. The Fund is still woefully short of what it needs. Sixty-five thousand dollars short, despite the magnanimous contribution with which you started us off, Mr Brighton.'

'Sixty-five thousand dollars short,' repeated Brighton, with strange good cheer. 'It would be a great relief to know whether I will be making another donation, wouldn't it?'

'We are most eager to know, Mr Brighton,' replied Mrs Meloney.

'No more so than I, Mrs Meloney,' said Brighton. 'No more so than I.'

Colette and Mrs Meloney exchanged glances at this mysterious remark.

Younger called next at Columbia University's Department of Physiology, located on the grand new campus far uptown, where one of the buildings bore his mother’s maiden name. The secretary in the small physiology building confirmed that Frederick Lyme was a member of the faculty.

'What's his specialty?' asked Younger.

'Toxicology,' said the secretary. 'Industrial toxicology.'

'Is he in?'

'Mr Lyme is out all day with clients.'

'Clients?' repeated Younger.

'Yes – the people he consults for.'

'Who would they be?'

'I'm sorry,' said the secretary. 'You'll have to speak with Mr Lyme about that.'

At the Sub-Treasury on Wall Street, Littlemore welcomed into his office a lean, tall, towheaded man with an infectious smile. The fellow was, according to his own estimation, very well indeed. He thanked Littlemore for dealing with the Popes and arranging his release from the Amityville Sanitarium. 'What can I do for you in return, Detective?' asked Edwin Fischer.

'You can meet me uptown tonight,' said Littlemore.

Chapter Twenty

On late November evenings a change comes to the air of lower Manhattan. Biting currents from the Atlantic pour into the harbor at the southern tip of the island. There, the massive skyscrapers function as wind tunnels, channeling and compressing the turbulent air until its force is so great it will halt a grown man in his tracks and, if he doesn't put his shoulders to it, send him reeling.

Littlemore, passing the dark Sub-Treasury Building in the shadows of Wall Street, was used to that wind. The sign of this acquaintance was that he walked at a sixty-degree angle when facing it and never took his hand from his hat. Secretary Houston, arriving by car at the neighboring, brilliantly lit Assay Office, still guarded by a platoon of federal troops, was not used to it. The sign of this unfamiliarity was that he lost his top hat the moment he stepped out of his long black- and-gold Packard.

Another well-dressed gentleman emerged from the car as well. Although their conversation was in whispers, the wind carried snatches to Littlemore, who could hear Houston assuring the man that payment would be forthcoming. The gentleman shook Houston's hand and crossed the street to the Morgan Bank.

Secretary Houston surveyed the rank of infantrymen in the glare of military klieg lights. His top hat lay only a foot from one of the soldiers, who stood at sharp attention, making no motion to come to the Secretary's haberdashery assistance. Houston strode to the building's steps to retrieve his hat, but as if the Secretary were the straight man in a vaudeville prank, at the moment he bent to pick it up, a malicious wind plucked up the hat and spun it into the shadows of the street. It happened to come to rest near the detective, who dusted it off and, stepping into the light, offered it to the Treasury Secretary.

'Agent Littlemore,' said Houston. 'Lurking in wait is becoming habitual with you. I don't think I approve. How did you know I would be here?'

'From your calendar,' replied Littlemore.

'You went through my private calendar?'

'Your secretary left it open on the desk. Was that Mr Lamont, sir?'

'Yes. The bankers are gathering in force tonight. Never a good sign.'

'The war with Mexico?'

'Obviously.'

'Worried about it, Mr Houston?'

'Blast it – why does everyone keep asking me that? I'm worried to the extent that the nation's treasure will be called on. What do you know about this Mexican business? More than what you read in the papers, I think. Where are you getting your information, Littlemore? And what are you doing here?'

'Just wanted to have a look inside the Assay Office, Mr Houston.'

'Why?'

'Maybe the stolen gold's hidden inside there. That would explain why no one saw the getaway truck. They wouldn't have seen a getaway truck if there was no getaway truck.'

'Nonsense. I've been in the Assay Office a dozen times since September sixteenth. The gold's not here.'

The detective scratched the back of his head. 'With nearly a billion dollars of gold in this building, sir, you can tell that the four million we're looking for isn't here?'

'Yes, I can. I can also tell that the period of your usefulness to me has come to an end. But that won't disturb you, since you haven't been working for me for some time already. You're Senator Fall's man, aren't you? What did he promise you?'

'Did you happen to look for the gold in the hidden safe room on the second floor, Mr Houston? The one behind the wall of the superintendent's office?'

A new expression flashed momentarily in Houston's eyes. Littlemore's practiced eye recognized it at once: guilt. Houston whispered angrily: 'How do you know about that room?'

'From the architectural plans, Mr Secretary. You gave them to me. I also found the work order you signed, authorizing Riggs and the rest of your boys to start moving the gold on the night of September fifteenth.'

'What is that supposed to prove?'

'Nothing. Mind if I come with you into the building, sir?'

Houston turned his back to Littlemore and, braving the wind, mounted the stairs, calling out to the two soldiers posted closest to the imposing front door, 'No one enters this building, do you understand me? No one.'

The Secretary's voice sounded strangely thin in the wind-rent air. The soldiers threw each other a glance. As Houston neared the front door, they stepped into his path and blocked hm.

'What is this – a joke?' asked Houston. 'I meant no one else enters the building. Stand aside.'

The soldiers didn't budge.

'I said stand aside,' repeated Houston.

'Sorry, sir,' said one of the infantrymen. 'Orders.'

'Whose orders?'

'Mr Baker's, sir.'

Even from behind, and notwithstanding the Secretary's overcoat, Littlemore could see Houston's entire body realign. 'Mr Baker – the Secretary of War?'

'Yes, sir.'

'You must be mistaken.'

'No, sir.'

'This is an outrage. This is my building. The Secretary of War has no authority to keep the Secretary of the Treasury out of a United States Assay Office.'

'He has authority over us, sir.'

Houston strode forward, daring the soldiers to stop him. They did. Houston attempted to push through; they thrust him bodily backward – two uniformed young men manhandling the sixty-year-old Secretary, who was clad in black tie and tails. Houston fell to the ground, top hat rolling onto the cement, then sailing away once again into the night. When he stood, his face was darkly colored. Houston descended the steps, unsteadily, and made for his car. The driver hurried out and opened the back door. Houston climbed in without a word. Littlemore put his hand on the door as the driver was about to close it.

'I know what you're guilty of, Mr Houston,' said the detective.

'You're fired,' said the Secretary. 'Give me your badge. That's an order.'

Littlemore handed over his badge. This one wasn't as hard to part with as the last.

'Now get away from my vehicle,' ordered Houston.

'And I know what you're not guilty of,' added Littlemore, pressing a large, folded piece of paper into Houston's hand. 'Be there, Mr Secretary. Bring some men.'

Once Houston's car was out of sight, Littlemore walked from the Assay Office to the corner of Broad and Wall Streets. He stopped when he reached Younger, who was leaning against a corner of the Equitable Building, hatless, cigarette smoldering in the sharp wind.

'What was that about?' asked Younger. He was holding two covered paper cups of coffee, which he handed to the detective.

'Just getting myself fired,' said Littlemore. 'I guess it's better this way. Now it won't be a disgrace to the federal government if you and I get arrested.'

'We're committing a crime?'

'Want to pull out? You can.'

'One question,' said Younger. 'Are we going down an elevator into an underwater caisson which is about to be flooded, leaving us no way out except to turn ourselves into human geysers?'

'Nope.'

'Then count me in.'

'Thanks.' The two men headed back down Wall Street toward the Sub-Treasury, leaning into the wind. 'I got to say,' said Littlemore, 'I like this city.'

'What are we doing, exactly?' asked Younger.

'See that little alleyway between the Treasury and the Assay Office? That's where we're going.'

'The soldiers are going to let us through?'

'No chance,' said Littlemore. 'They're not letting anybody in. The alley's locked off" by a fifteen-foot wrought-iron gate. There's another gate just like it at the other end, on Pine Street. More soldiers on that side too.'

'So how do we get there?'

'Got to go up before you come down.' Littlemore led Younger up the Sub-Treasury steps. No soldiers stood guard there; the Treasury Building had been emptied of its gold and would soon be decommissioned. But a night watchman remained outside its doors, and Littlemore greeted the man by name, handing him a cup of coffee. Thanking Littlemore, the guard rapped on the door, which a few moments later was opened by another lonely guard, to whom Littlemore gave the second cup of coffee. Then Littlemore took Younger through the rotunda to a staircase in the rear.

'What do those men think you're doing?' asked Younger.

'I work here,' said Littlemore. 'I'm a T-man, remember? Leastways, I was until a few minutes ago.'

After climbing four and a half flights of stairs Younger and Littlemore stepped out onto a flat rooftop. The wind was so strong it knocked them sideways. They went to a parapet facing the Assay Office, which was only about three yards from them. At their feet were several long coils of rope, attached to the stone crenellations adorning the parapet. Next to the rope was a pile of additional equipment: crowbars, pulleys, friction hitches – all deposited there by Littlemore the night before.

Below them, at street level, was the alleyway between the Treasury and Assay buildings. To the right and left, at either end of the alley, illuminated by klieg lights, infantrymen manned the wrought-iron gate. The soldiers were facing out to the street, their backs to the alley. Gesturing to the pulleys and hitches, Littlemore asked quietly, 'You know how to use this stuff, Doc?'

Younger nodded.

'All right then,' said Littlemore.

The two men knelt down and fitted rope ends through the pulleys. Rappelling is not very difficult even without special equipment; with a friction hitch, which allows the descending man to play out rope at his discretion, it's simple. Younger, who had learned the skill in the army, formed a loop with a short length of his rope and stepped into it with his heel.

Littlemore, picking up the crowbars, followed suit.

The two men rappelled down the side of the Treasury Building, kicking off the wall every ten feet or so in the darkness. The well- oiled pulleys made almost no sound as the rope played through them, but it wouldn't have mattered if they had creaked. The wind's howling would have covered the noise in any event.

'Over here,' whispered Littlemore when they reached the cobblestones. He led Younger to a large manhole cover, which he had first seen the day of the bombing. 'Let's try the crowbars.'

The manhole cover bore the familiar logo of the New York City sewer department.

'We're going into the sewers?' asked Younger.

'This is no sewer,' whispered Littlemore. 'I checked the city maps yesterday. This is how they got rid of the gold – down this hole. That's why there was no getaway truck.'

The manhole cover had two small slats into which Younger and

Littlemore each inserted the bent tip of a crowbar. They tried to pry it up, but the iron circle wouldn't budge.

'Didn't think that would work,' whispered Littlemore. 'It's locked from the inside; you can't open her up from out here.'

'Hence the acid,' replied Younger.

'Yeah – hence,' said Littlemore.

Younger withdrew three slim cases from his coat. The first contained an empty glass beaker, a pencil-thin glass tube, and a pair of laboratory gloves. Inside each of the other two cases, lined with crushed blue velour, was a well-stoppered vial of transparent liquid. Wearing the gloves, Younger opened these vials and poured a portion of each into the beaker, creating the acid he'd described to Littlemore. No chemical reaction attended this admixture – no change of color, no precipitation, no smoke. To the mouth of the beaker Younger now attached the burette – the thin tube – and began drizzling the acid along the perimeter of the manhole cover. Angry bubbling commenced at once on the iron surface, with an accompanying acrid reddish smoke.

'Don't get it in your eyes,' said Younger.

By the time he was halfway around the manhole cover, Younger had exhausted the beaker's supply. He had to mix another few ounces of the aqua regia, requiring him briefly to hand over to Littlemore the two glass vials, unstoppered, while he took apart his apparatus. At that moment, a particularly savage gust of wind blew through the alley.

'Shoot,' whispered Littlemore. Younger looked up. White bubbles were sudsing on the top of the detective's black shoe. Somehow keeping his voice to a whisper, Littlemore gasped, 'It's going through my shoe! Do something, Doc – it's on my foot. It's burning into the bone!'

'That's not my acid,' said Younger.

Littlemore's gasping came to an abrupt halt.

'What is that,' asked Younger, 'baking soda?'

'Anyone else would have fallen for that,' said Littlemore, genuinely annoyed. 'Anyone. How'd you know it was baking soda?'

Younger looked at Littlemore a long time. 'Give me those,' he said, referring to the glass vials in the detective's hands. Soon the entire perimeter of the manhole cover was seething with corrosion. 'Now we wait.'

A few minutes later, Younger rose and took up a crowbar, offering the other to Littlemore. They strained to wrench loose the manhole cover, but with no success. 'Maybe the acid's not strong enough,' said Littlemore.

The two men stood over the manhole cover. Littlemore gave it a stomp with one foot. As he was about to administer another, Younger said, too late, 'I wouldn't do-'

Littlemore s shoe punched loose the acid-cut manhole cover. They could hear it rushing away from them, as if sucked down into a vacuum. For an instant Littlemore remained poised over the now-open manhole, one foot already inside it, body twisting and wavering, struggling for balance. Then he said, 'Shoot' – and fell in.

As Littlemore disappeared down the hole, his flailing arms grabbed Younger's ankle. Younger was almost able to arrest their fall, but he couldn't hold on, and a moment later he too vanished down into the earth, leaving only a crowbar lying across the manhole.

Younger found himself sliding down a chute at an alarming speed. There was no light at all. There was, however, sound: that of his own body smashing into curved walls, and that of Littlemore yelling in front of him. They flew around hairpin bends and sailed over bumps, plummeting downward in the sightless black.

Mr Brighton kept them in suspense all day about his plans for the Radium Fund. Every time Mrs Meloney veered round to the subject, he deflected it – whether artfully or absent-mindedly, Colette couldn't tell.

They dined in the Garret Restaurant, high over the southern tip of Manhattan, overlooking a sanguine sunset on the Hudson. On their way down the elevator, Mrs Meloney declared herself a nervous wreck from eating in so lofty a perch and insisted she must go home. Colette said that she would go as well.

'Don't be silly, dear,' said Mrs Meloney. 'You must visit Mr Brighton's dial factory. He is especially proud of it – and justly so.'

'Please say you will,' said Brighton.

'Is there time?' asked Colette. 'Dr Younger will be waiting for me at Trinity Church at nine-thirty.'

'Waiting at the church?' asked Brighton. 'Why – are you – you're not getting married, are you, Miss Rousseau?'

'Getting married tonight?' laughed Mrs Meloney. 'Mr Brighton, girls do not marry at night. And if they did, they would not spend the day of their wedding visiting paint factories. Not to mention the fact that Trinity Church will be good and locked up at this hour.'

'Oh, dear,' said Brighton. 'There's so much I don't know. But I do have keys to Trinity Church. I'm on the board of directors. Would you like to see the interior, Miss Rousseau? It's very fine.'

'I've seen it, Mr Brighton,' said Colette, who had spent several hours inside the church on September sixteenth.

'Miss Rousseau doesn't want to see the church, Mr Brighton. She wants to see your factory.' Mrs Meloney turned to Colette: 'There's plenty of time, my dear. The factory is quite close by. And from the factory, the church is only round the corner. Now don't disappoint him – or me. Please.'

Mrs Meloney left in a taxi. 'Do you like to walk, Miss Rousseau?' asked Brighton.

Colette was suddenly tongue-tied. So long as Mrs Meloney had been there, Colette had not quite understood herself to be spending time with a man solely in pursuit of his money. Now she did feel that way, and it seemed to infect everything she said or didn't say with a false and hypocritical tinge. 'I like walking very much,' she replied.

Brighton offered her his arm. Colette pretended not to see it, but Brighton didn't see her not seeing it, and left his elbow suspended so long that Colette was obliged finally to take it. Brighton seemed strangely tall walking next to Colette; their gait never managed to synchronize. Samuels maintained a respectful distance behind them.

'We'll be right on time,' said Brighton cheerily. 'My second shift of girls is just finishing up. I do want you to see the factory in action. But you must be cold, Miss Rousseau.'The wind had kicked up bitterly; Colette had not dressed for it. 'Here – I brought another little present for you. They will help keep you warm.'

Brighton drew a gift box from his coat. Inside was a double-tiered diamond necklace matching the stickpin he had given her earlier.

'Oh, dear,' said Brighton, 'it's the choker. I meant to give you the gloves first. Never mind. May I?'

He clasped the necklace on Colette, who, wishing Mr Brighton had spent the money on the Radium Fund instead, stammered out a thank-you, sensing to her dismay that if she didn't accept his gifts, he would never make another contribution to the Fund. It was the first time Colette had ever worn diamonds; they felt cold against her neck. Perhaps she might sell it later and donate the money in his name?

Brighton handed her a second box. This one contained a pair of thin, long-sleeved gloves, the color of fresh cream and made of a leather suppler than any she had touched before. 'Try them on,' he said.

'I can't, Mr Brighton. They're much too-'

'Too long to put on without taking your coat off? Yes of course. Allow me.'

He removed her light overcoat. Not wanting to give offense, she pulled on the gloves, which came up past her elbows. 'My coat, Mr Brighton,' said Colette.

'Yes?'

'Would you please put it back on? I'm cold.'

'Cold – of course – how absurd,' said Brighton. 'There you are. Do you like them?'

She looked at her elegant fingers, clad in ivory leather. 'I don't know what to say.'

'The pleasure is mine, I assure you. Now if I can speak frankly, Miss Rousseau, I know what you want most in the whole world. Mrs

Meloney told me. You want me to help buy radium for Madame Curie. Don't you?'

'Yes, if you're willing, Mr Brighton.'

'I'm most willing!' he cried. 'I'll buy the entire gram myself.'

'You will?' she said excitedly.

'If you will,' he said.

'If I will what?' she asked, excitement giving way to consternation.

'Marry me,' replied Brighton.

Colette didn't know whether to burst into laughter or tears.

'I know I'm not what girls consider handsome,' said Brighton. 'But I'm very rich. I can give you everything you desire. Think about that. Everything is no little thing.'

'We don't even know each other, Mr Brighton.'

'That's not true. I know you perfectly, because you are perfection itself. I don't ask you to love me. That doesn't matter at all. Let me worship you. Say yes, and I will wire one hundred thousand dollars to Mrs Meloney's account this minute.'

The staggering sum hung momentarily in the air. 'But surely you will consider a donation even if I say no?' she asked.

'I will not,' declared Brighton forthrightly. 'I've given twenty-five thousand dollars already, and I did that only to be present at your lecture. Why would I give money to a Frenchwoman I've never met? I have no reason to. But if you marry me, my dear Miss Rousseau, your wish will be my command. Say two grams if you like. Say ten.'

'Ten grams of radium?' she repeated, unable to believe what she had heard.

'From my own mines. Why not? The market value would be a million dollars, but for me the cost would be much less.' When Colette didn't answer, Brighton added, 'Oh my, is all this considered immoral? Am I acting immorally?'

Colette shook her head, her dark brows frowning severely.

'Thank goodness. I never know what's going to be thought immoral. They say people should marry for love. I don't know what they're talking about. I want you to share my home, Miss Rousseau. To travel with me on my train. To be on my arm when I dine with the President. Is it unreasonable that I should want the most beautiful, intelligent, innocent creature on earth to be my wife – or that I should offer her whatever I can to induce her to consent? Here we are at my factory.' Samuels opened the door for them. 'Come in, please. Ah, look at all the girls leaning into their work. What a beautiful sight. But what was I saying? Oh yes. Ten grams of radium, to be used as you direct. Samuels! Prepare a money wire for the account of Mrs William Meloney. I have a telegraph machine here in my office. Say you'll marry me, and I'll wire a hundred thousand at once. Samuels has advised me against it, I want you to know. He says it's rash to pay money in return for your mere promise. In fact Samuels had a very strong misimpression of you at first, Miss Rousseau. I can't begin to tell you what he thought. But if you give me your word, I know you'll keep it. What – are you crying? May I hope with tears of joy?'

Colette begged Mr Brighton for some time by herself.

'Certainly, my dear,' said Brighton. 'Samuels will need a few minutes to prepare the wire.'

Four stories below Wall Street, in a cavernous, unlit, dirt-floored chamber, two men worked an immense blast furnace. Their faces were blackened with soot; each wore a thick, heavy full-length leather apron. One stoked the furnace with large, heavy bars of gold. The other handled a set of iron molds into which flowed a stream of molten yellow metal coursing down a half-pipe from an aperture high up on the furnace. When a newly molded bar of gold was formed and ready, this man would throw it, using tongs, onto a mountain of such bars that filled the subterranean chamber in front of the furnace. Both men wore goggles; in the sparks and unnatural light thrown off by the furnace, their arms and foreheads shone with sweat.

About fifteen feet behind these workmen was a wall, and in this wall was a perfectly round hole, and from this hole came a sound that drew the workmen's puzzled attention. It was a metallic sound, echoing and distant – a faraway clanging. The noise grew louder and louder and still louder until it reached a horrendous pitch and out from the hole shot a large iron disk. It was a manhole cover with jagged edges, and it hit the dirt floor of the chamber at a dangerous speed, rolling past the legs of the astonished smelters, disappearing under their work- table, and climbing the gold bar mountain almost to its pinnacle, at which point it turned round and rolled back down, rattling to rest at the workmen's feet.

The two smelters removed their goggles. They stared down dumbfounded at the intrusive object, then looked at each other: a new sound was coming from the hole in the wall. This sound was not metallic. It was more like a tumbling, with the interspersed shouting of a human voice, and it too began quietly, distantly, only to grow nearer and louder and nearer still until Jimmy Littlemore shot feet first through the hole, followed immediately by Stratham Younger, the two men skidding and rolling in a jumble of arms and legs until they too lay at the smelters' feet.

Littlemore looked up at the two workmen, spat the remains of a toothpick as well as some dirt from his lips, and said, You're under arrest.'

Younger, lying on his stomach, did not know to whom the detective had addressed his remark, but he added, 'In the name of the law.'

Littlemore drew his gun from his shoulder holster and said, 'Drop that thing -' this was a reference to the red-hot tongs – 'and put your hands in the air.'

The speechless smelters complied at once.

Littlemore stood, pulled a set of handcuffs from his back pocket, and tossed them to Younger while keeping his gun trained on the two workmen. 'Cuff one of these guys.'

'Which one?' asked Younger.

'I don't care. The bigger one.'

The workman who had been feeding the furnace was the larger of the two. Younger handcuffed his wrists behind his back. Littlemore turned the other smelter around and pushed him forward a step.

'March, fellas,' said Littlemore, directing them around the furnace and toward the mountain of gold bricks. 'Let's see if this place leads where I think it-' he stopped, interrupting himself. 'Did you hear that, Doc?'

'Hear what?'

Littlemore was looking at the mound of gold, which was about fifteen feet high. Suddenly, at the top of that little mountain, the heads of three men appeared, and next to each one a pistol. The one in the middle had scars running from the corners of his mouth to the corners of his eyes – as if he had recently undergone facial surgery. 'Shoot!' he shouted in a strong Eastern European accent. 'Shoot all!'

'Get down!' cried Littlemore.

The gunmen didn't have a clear shot at either Younger or Littlemore – who each had one of the smelters in front of him – but they evidently didn't care. All three fired, ripping bullets into the bodies of the two workmen as Younger and Littlemore dove for cover. Younger overturned the heavy wood worktable and sat with his back to it. Littlemore crouched behind the furnace.

'A shoot-out,' said Younger as bullets slammed into his table and ricocheted off the blast furnace. 'I'm at a shoot-out without a gun.'

Littlemore craned around the furnace and fired two shots, which kept the gunmen at bay but did nothing else. 'That guy,' he said. 'Was that who I thought it was?'

'Yes,' said Younger. 'Tell me you have another gun.'

'Nope,' said Littlemore. Incoming bullets tore pieces from the bottom of the furnace, causing it to list slightly and to emit a dreadful steam shriek. 'Any ideas, Doc? Any play we can make with Drobac?'

The massive blast furnace was held up by a three-legged base. One of these legs now gave way with a loud crack; the furnace clunked down at a crazy angle.

'Offer him reduced bail?' suggested Younger.

'Good thinking,' replied Littlemore, firing another shot at the mountain of gold.

'I don't think it's very safe,' Younger called out, 'their shooting a lot of bullets into a blast furnace.'

'That's helpful,' said Littlemore, reaching around the crooked furnace and firing his last two shots.

The detective now had to reload. Drobac knew it or guessed it. 'Charge furnace,' he yelled.

All three gunmen came scrambling over the hillock of gold. At the same time a second leg at the base of the huge furnace collapsed, and the entire iron behemoth began to topple away from Littlemore – straight at Younger – with a fantastic screech of bending and breaking metal.

Littlemore and Younger were about to die. Younger was lying exactly where the red-hot furnace, spewing molten gold, would fall to the ground. Littlemore was reloading his revolver as three gunmen rushed at him down a mountain of gold and the furnace that had provided him with cover was toppling over.

Younger saw the manhole cover at his feet. 'Shield,' he shouted, hoisting up the manhole cover and heaving it through the air before diving away as several tons of iron crashed to the dirt floor and a deadly shower of gold barely missed his legs and feet.

In a single motion, Littlemore slapped the new cartridge into his gun, caught the manhole cover, and turned to face the three gunmen just as the furnace fell completely away from him. All three gunmen fired repeatedly at Littlemore, but the manhole cover stopped their bullets, and Littlemore returned fire, killing one, then another, but not the third – Drobac – who slammed into the detective shoulder-first. Littlemore fell hard on his back with the heavy manhole cover on top of his chest, and Drobac on top of the manhole cover.

Littlemore's arms were pinned. Drobac had a knee on the manhole cover, pressing it down on the detective while he brought his gun to Littlemore's temple. Drobac smiled and squeezed the trigger. His gun, however, didn't fire; he too was now out of bullets. Cursing, he threw his gun to the side. 'Is all right,' he said. 'I have other.'

Drobac drew a second gun from his jacket.

'Goodbye, policeman,' he said.

'Hey, Drobac,' said Younger, standing next to the collapsed furnace and kicking at the iron half-pipe sticking out from it.

Drobac turned at the sound of Younger's voice. It's unlikely he understood what he saw: a cast-iron half-pipe, dripping with molten gold, one end attached to the furnace, the other end swinging toward him. The pipe struck him square in the forehead. The blow would have been no more than an annoyance if liquid gold, at a temperature of two thousand degrees, had not coursed down his forehead, his nose, his cheeks, his neck. Drobac tried to scream, but what came out was nothing like a human scream: the yellow metal stream had already burned through the flesh of his cheeks and entered his mouth. He raised his hands to his bubbling face, tried to scream again, fell backward, and, with black smoke rising from his head, lay twitching, smoldering, on the dirt floor.

Littlemore squirmed out from under the manhole cover and scrambled to his feet, staring at the convulsing Drobac. 'Think I should arrest him?' asked Littlemore.

'I think we should get out of here,' said Younger, gesturing toward the fallen iron beast of a furnace. It was glowing red and seemed to be getting redder by the instant. The heat in the room was appalling.

'Jesus – she's going to blow,' said Littlemore. 'There's got to be a door somewhere on the other side of that gold.'

They ran around the mountain of gold bars, passed a table covered with playing cards and whiskey glasses and, at the other end of the subterranean chamber, came to a steel door. There was no knob or handle or latch. They pushed at the door – threw their shoulders into it – but it wouldn't open.

From the furnace, a low sound began to issue, so deep it was like the note of a cathedral organ. Then the note grew deeper still. Out of the two men's sight, a smoldering body, cheekless, lipless, stretched out a hand and grasped a gun lying on the floor nearby

'That's not good,' said Younger, referring to the organ sound filling the air. 'I don't think that's good.'

'Wait a second,' replied Littlemore. He ran back to the card table, grabbed one of the chairs, and returned just as quickly. 'We're going to be all right. I told Houston to listen for us.'

He smashed the chair against the door and did it again and again. The chair broke into pieces, but the door didn't budge.

Next to the furnace, the faceless creature rose slowly to its feet in the pulsing crimson light of the overheated furnace. Several of Drobac's teeth, along with a fragment of his jawbone, were visible.

The low note pulsing from the furnace grew so deep that no man- made musical instrument could have made it. It also began to swell in volume. Littlemore smashed the remains of the broken chair against the door.

Drobac staggered to the side of the mountain of gold. The bellow from the furnace had become so loud that it vibrated the floor and shook Littlemore up and down. Leaning against the gold bricks, Drobac caught sight of Younger at the far door. He raised his pistol with two hands, arms wavering, unsteady.

Littlemore, unable to bear the noise, covered his ears with hands. The steel door remained shut. He and Younger looked at each other.

The gun in Drobac's trembling hands grew still. He squeezed the trigger.

All at the same moment, the furnace exploded, the gun fired, and the door swung open. Younger and Littlemore were blown through the doorway into a corridor crowded with men, as a bullet flew somewhere above their heads. In the furnace room, Drobac's body slammed into the gold bricks and burst into flame, while the wood beams supporting the walls and ceiling were engulfed in fire as well. The beams collapsed; the ceiling caved in. The room was an inferno.

'Shut that damned door,' ordered Secretary Houston at the top of his voice as tongues of fire lashed into the corridor.

The steel door was slammed and bolted, suddenly muffling the deafening rage of fire. The corridor was silent. Younger and Littlemore, rising, found themselves stared at by a half-dozen Secret Servicemen and an equal number of well-dressed bankers, including Thomas Lamont.

'What's in there, Littlemore?' asked Houston.

Lamont, not Littlemore, answered: 'It's nothing but an old abandoned foundation. We closed it up long ago. No one's been in there for decades. I don't know how you even knew where to find it, Houston.'

'I didn't; my man Littlemore told me where to go,' said Houston. 'And he told me to bring Secret Servicemen in case you tried to stop me, Lamont. What did you find, Littlemore?'

'Just some gold,' said Littlemore. 'I'd say about four million dollars' worth.'

There was a buzzing among the well-heeled bankers.

'It's not Morgan gold, I promise you that,' declared Lamont. 'The J. P. Morgan Company has nothing to do with this.'

'Four millions in gold are lying in a room adjoining a sub-basement of the Morgan Bank,' Houston said to Lamont, 'and you say your company doesn't know about it?'

'It was an old foundation under Wall Street,' replied Lamont. 'We don't own the lot. We have nothing to do with it. Any number of people could have tunneled into it.'

One of the other bankers spoke up: 'Maybe it's your gold, Houston. There have been rumors about a theft from the Treasury on September sixteenth.'

'Treasury gold?' said Houston, affecting incredulity. 'Don't be ridiculous. Every ounce of my gold is accounted for and has been since the day I took office. Every bar and every coin. The Treasury has never been breached. Two of you men -' Houston addressed his Secret Service agents – 'stay here and guard this door. No one goes in under any circumstances. Tomorrow when the fire has burnt itself out, we'll see.

My suspicion, Lamont, is that it's another shipment of your contraband Russian gold.'

'I tell you Morgan has nothing to do with it,' said Lamont.

As soon as they were back out on Wall Street, leaving the palatial Morgan Bank, Houston asked Littlemore in a hushed and anxious tone, 'Does the gold have our insignia on it – or did they melt it?'

'Melted almost all of it,' answered Littlemore.

'Thank heavens,' replied Houston.

'If you don't want people to know it's Treasury gold down there, Mr Houston, you'd better plug up the hole in your alley.'

'What hole?' asked Houston.

Littlemore pointed across the street to the alleyway between the Sub-Treasury and the Assay Office, where the wrought-iron gate had been thrown open, and a troop of soldiers were inspecting the open manhole – from which smoke now poured out. Houston was about to hurry there with his remaining Secret Servicemen when he stopped and pulled a badge out of his pocket. 'I'm sorry I doubted you, Littlemore. Take your badge back. I'm reinstating you.'

'No thanks, Mr Houston,' said Littlemore. 'I'm done with the Treasury for a while. Got a little police work I need to do anyway.'

Houston rushed off, leaving Younger and Littlemore by themselves. Younger lit a cigarette. The two men sported filthy faces, dirty hair, and torn, blackened clothing.

'At least it would be police work,' Littlemore muttered, 'if I were a policeman.'

Chapter Twenty-one

Colette wandered, lost in thought, onto the factory floor, a large high-ceilinged open room, where rows and rows of young women, hunched over long tables, used fine-pointed brushes to dab luminescent paint onto the razor-thin hands of fashionable watches. Between every two girls, an electric lamp hung suspended by a long wire from the ceiling, throwing harsh light onto their close and arduous work. But the girls' studious hush was probably due less to concentration than to the entrance of Mr Brighton, their employer, a few minutes before.

Colette herself contributed to their silence as well. A young lady in a diamond choker and elbow-length white gloves – who came in with the owner – was not a typical sight for the working girls. They eyed her warily as she passed among them.

Colette didn't notice. She had only one thought in her head: ten grams of radium. It would change Madame Curie's life. It would save countless people from death. Devoted to science, rather than watch dials or cosmetics, it could yield discoveries about the nature of atoms and energy heretofore undreamed of.

To be sure, it was absurd that Mr Brighton should propose to marry her, having met her only three times in his life. Or was it? She had known she wanted to marry Younger the first day she met him, when he brought the old French corporal out of the battlefield.

Of course she could never marry Mr Brighton. She wasn't obliged to do that, not even for Madame Curie – was she? She owed Madame everything: Madame Curie had taken her in, given her a chance at the Sorbonne, saved her when she was starving. But that didn't mean Colette had to sacrifice her life and happiness for her – did it?

True, she didn't hate Mr Brighton. He might even be a little endearing in his forgetfulness, his childlike enthusiasms. And he was obviously generous. But she would be dreadfully unhappy if she married him. She would die from such unhappiness. No, she wouldn't die. And what did her happiness count against the lives that would be saved, the scientific progress that could be achieved, if she said yes? What right did she have to say no, to live for herself, when millions of young men had given more than their happiness – had given their lives – in the war?

'Don't, Miss,' said one of the girls close by her.

'I'm sorry?' said Colette.

'Don't lean on that,' said the girl. 'It's the lights for the whole factory. Some of us got work to finish. You want us all to be in the dark?'

Colette looked behind her. In the middle of the wall was a metal bar with a red wooden handle – a master light switch, apparently, which she had been on the verge of accidentally shutting off. When she turned round again, Colette became conscious that all the girls were staring at her, and not welcomingly. Several were chewing gum. One or two wiped hair from their eyes with smudged wrists, the better to see Colette's slender arms and her pretty neck effulgent with diamonds. The girl who had spoken seemed the least interested in her. She returned to her work, snipping a stray hair from her paintbrush with the curving blades of a pair of scissors. Then the girl dabbed the brush into a dish of green paint, placed its tip between her lips, and drew it out again, nicely pointed.

'Stop!' cried Colette.

'Who – me?' answered the girl.

'Don't put that in your mouth,' said Colette.

'That's how they teach us, honey,' said the girl. 'You point the brush with your mouth. Sorry if it ain't refined.'

The girls, Colette now saw, were all pointing their brushes the same way – with their lips. 'Where are your gloves?' she asked. 'Don't they give you protective gloves?'

'Only one of us in this room got gloves,' said the girl.

A loud bell rang. The girls jumped from their chairs. Amid an eruption of female talk and laughter, they cleared their desks, putting away paints and brushes and unfinished watch dials. As the girls hurried to the coat rack and made for the door, one of them stopped next to Colette. She glanced furtively about and said, 'Some of us are afraid, ma'am. A couple of girls took ill. The company doctors say it's because they got the big pox, but they weren't the types. They weren't the types at all.'

'What?' said Colette, not understanding the girl's idiomatic English. But the girl hurried away. Colette tried to pull off her leather gloves; they fit her too tightly. She tried to undo the diamond choker, but couldn't find its clasp. She gave up in frustration, and as the working girls emptied out of the factory she ran to Brighton's office, calling out his name.

'Yes, Miss Rousseau?' replied Brighton eagerly as she neared him. 'Are you going to make me the happiest man on earth?'

'The girls are putting the brushes in their mouths,' said Colette.

'Of course they are. That's the secret to our technique.'

'They're swallowing the paint.'

'How wasteful,' replied Brighton. 'Do you remember which ones? Samuels will make a note of it.'

'No – it will poison them,' said Colette.

'You mean the paint?' cried Brighton. 'Not at all. Don't be silly. How could I sell a product to the public if it were too dangerous for my girls to work with?'

'Do you monitor the radiation levels here – as you do at your paint factory?'

'There's no need, my dear.'

'But you can't let them put it in their mouths. It will get into their jaws. It will get into their teeth. It could She broke off in mid- sentence, her breath stopping cold as a series of images cascaded through her mind: a tooth wrapped in cotton, eaten away from within; a girl with a tumor on her jaw; another girl in New Haven, with a greenish aura emanating from her neck. A darkness crossed over Colette's eyes, which she tried to keep out of her voice: 'Oh, I suppose it doesn't matter. When the quantities of radium are so minute, I'm sure it does more harm than good. I mean more good than harm. It's so late, isn't it? My friends will be wondering where I am. Mrs Meloney must be very jealous.'

'Jealous?' said Brighton.

'Of all the radium your girls get on their skin.'

'Oh, yes,' he answered, laughing aloud. 'She would be green with-'

'She knows, sir,' said Samuels, drawing a gun.

No one spoke.

'Oh, my,' said Brighton. 'What does she know, Samuels?'

'Everything.'

'Are you quite sure?' asked Brighton. 'She said Mrs Meloney would be jealous of our girls.'

'She was lying,' said Samuels, gun pointed at Colette.

Brighton shook his head in disappointment. 'It's useless to lie, Miss Rousseau. Samuels can always tell. How he knows is a mystery to me. I never have any idea myself. Samuels, would you please put your gun very close to Miss Rousseau?'

Samuels approached Colette from behind and pressed his gun against the small of her back. Brighton came to her, his body strangely large and poorly knit together. He touched the shiny nail of his little finger to her chin and gently angled her face to one side, so that he could better see her diamond-studded neck. Colette tried not to react.

'Look,' said Brighton appreciatively. 'So clean.'

He stroked the underside of Colette's jaw; he ran his fingernail down her breastbone; he cupped his palms and shaped them around the outside of her chest. Colette, horrified, remained immobile.

'Does she like it, Samuels?' asked Brighton. 'I think she may be nervous. I wish I were better with facial expressions, Miss Rousseau. I have a great deal of trouble understanding them. If only Lyme were here. He has a relaxant that makes girls much more receptive to me. Have you ever been kissed, Miss Rousseau? On the mouth?'

Colette made no response.

'Can you make her answer?' Brighton asked Samuels.

Samuels thrust the gun harder into her spine.

'Yes, I've been kissed,' said Colette.

'But you've never – you've never -?'

Colette didn't reply.

'No, don't answer,' said Brighton. 'You're right not to. The words would dirty your lips. I'm sure you never have. You're purity itself. Now, Miss Rousseau, I'm going to get started. I want to so very badly, and I no longer think we're going to be married. I hope you don't mind that Samuels sees us; just put him right out of your head. Please don't make any violent movements. Samuels might shoot.'

Brighton leaned down, evidently to kiss her. Colette waited as long as she could bear it, even until Brighton's mouth was actually upon her, before she thrust an elbow into Samuels's stomach, pushed Brighton with all her strength – causing the ungainly man to fall to the floor – and bolted from the office. The factory floor was empty now; she rushed through it to the main door. But the doorknob wouldn't turn; it was locked. Desperately, Colette looked around, and she saw something that gave her an idea. If she'd been able to run, she could have reached it in a moment. But a voice froze her.

'Stop where you are, Miss Rousseau,' ordered Brighton. 'Please don't make Samuels shoot you.'

Colette turned. 'Miss McDonald worked here,' she said, 'didn't she?'

'You mean the one with that – thing on her neck?' said Brighton. 'Yes, she did. A lovely girl. I thought for a time she might be my wife, before that hideousness grew on her.'

As Brighton and Samuels came nearer, Colette took a step back from them, along the wall, as if out of fear. 'Radium got into her jaw,' said Colette. 'You knew. You kept it a secret to sell your watches.'

'No, my dear,' replied Brighton earnestly. 'I don't care about the watches. It's the radium itself. If the public were to learn that radium causes that sort of thing to grow on a girl's neck, no one would want any radium products anymore. The price of radium would fall ninety percent – back to what it used to cost. For a mine-owning man like me, that would be a substantial loss. Very substantial.'

'Amelia worked here too,' said Colette, taking another step backward. 'She was losing her teeth.'

'Yes. Most unattractive. I was very angry at her. She was almost your undoing, you know. Samuels was certain Amelia had told you all our secrets. That's why we had to – to take action against you.'

'You had me kidnapped,' she said, still backing away.

'It was the most efficient thing in the world. We had some foreigners in town for another task – Serbs, weren't they, Samuels? – very well suited for the job.'

'You tried to kill me – and then proposed to me?'

'That is one of my great strengths, Miss Rousseau. I admit my mistakes. I learn from them. It was all a misunderstanding. Do you know why Amelia tried to see you at your hotel? It's because some of the girls overheard you at our factory in Connecticut saying that my company was killing people. But you didn't mean my paint was doing any harm. You meant that luminous watches divert radium from medical uses. How preposterous – that misunderstanding nearly killed you! It was I who came to your rescue. You owe your life to me, Miss Rousseau. I saw Samuels's mistake immediately after I heard you at the church. That's why I ordered the attacks against you to stop.' Brighton shook his head ruefully. 'But now look how things have turned out. What a pity. Samuels, can we keep her in the infirmary? If I can't marry her, that would be my second choice.'

'They'll come for her,' said Samuels.

Brighton sighed: 'You're right, as always.' While Samuels kept his gun trained on Colette, Brighton went to a metal barrel positioned on top of a worktable. Opening a tap at its base, he filled a glass measuring cup with greenish paint. 'Since you aren't receptive to me, Miss Rousseau, would you mind at least opening your mouth and holding quite still? Please say you'll cooperate. It will make things so much easier.'

Colette didn't answer. She was touching the wall with her hands behind her back, feeling for something. Where was it?

'Does your silence mean yes?' asked Brighton. 'I would be very impressed with you. Girls are usually so unreasonable. Most people are. I remember as a boy I would propose something perfectly sensible, and my parents would say it was "wrong." They would get that look on their faces. What does it mean – wrong? It's as if they were suddenly speaking in tongues. I don't believe the word has any meaning. I've asked people many times to explain it to me; no one can. They just give examples. It's gibberish. I look at people sometimes, Miss Rousseau, and honestly I think they're all cattle. I may be the only one with a mind of his own. Samuels, open Miss Rousseau's mouth.'

'You're going to make me drink your paint?' asked Colette, aghast, taking another step back

'Please don't be concerned,' said Brighton. 'We've done it before; it works splendidly. The paint will make you sick, and we'll rush you to the Sloane Hospital for Women, where a specialist named Lyme will treat you. He'll give you something that will keep you from speaking. You'll get weaker, and your hair may fall out. That will make you very unattractive, but it's all right – I won't come to visit. You'll be diagnosed with syphilis, I imagine. Then you'll die. It all goes very smoothly, I promise you. Won't you please open your mouth? You'll be doing me a great favor.'

'Mr Brighton, I beg you,' she said, turning her back to him. 'Shoot me now. Get it over with.'

'But I can't,' answered Brighton. 'If we shot you, Miss Rousseau, either your body would have to disappear, which would raise all sorts of questions, or else we'd have to turn you over to the police with bullets in you, which would raise even more. I assure you, the paint is much -'

Brighton never finished this sentence. Colette, her back to the two men, had taken hold of the red wooden handle of the light switch the master switch, which the working girl had warned her of earlier and she plunged the factory into darkness. Immediately she dropped to all fours as shots rang out and bullets ricocheted off the metal plate above her.

'Stop shooting!' ordered Brighton. 'There's nowhere she can go. Get the lights back on.'

Colette could see nothing except the glass measuring cup of radio- luminescent paint in Brighton's hands, glowing greenish yellow, casting an eerie light on his nose and chin. She darted to him, seized the cup with both hands, and threw the paint in his face.

'Get it off me!' yelled Brighton. 'Get it off!'

Colette rushed to the far wall, which had four great windows in it. The dimmest hint of light was coming back to the factory floor. Samuels had thrown the master switch, but the overhead lamps, with their thick filaments, only gradually came to life. Samuels stood next to Brighton with a handkerchief, trying vainly to rub the glowing paint off his employer's face.

'Never mind!' said Brighton. 'Where is she?'

Colette picked up one of the girls' stools and smashed it into the windowpanes, opening a gaping hole. Samuels fired in her direction, but the darkness saved her. She scrambled out of the window, the leather gloves preventing the glass shards from cutting her too deeply, and let herself drop to the street below. Heedless of direction, heart pounding, Colette ran from the factory. She didn't hear anyone pursuing her; still she ran on.

Turning a corner, she found herself on a short, narrow, empty street without a single streetlight. She came to a small park. She ran across it, under several trees, until she reached an old, high, massive stone building with wooden doors. It was Trinity Church. She was at a side entrance: the doors were locked. Breathing hard from running, she beat on the doors with all her might, but no one answered. Again she ran off into the night.

'Got to go to Grand Central,' said Littlemore to Younger as they walked down Wall Street toward the subway station at the corner of Broadway, where, directly facing them at the end of Wall Street, the dim Gothic spires of Trinity Church loomed up in the night sky. 'Want to come?'

'I'm meeting Colette,' said Younger. 'Here at the church.'

'Hope you aren't planning to take her some place fancy,' said Littlemore, looking at Younger's scarred clothing.

'Strange – where is she? She should have been here by now.' They were still a half block from the church, but there was a streetlamp outside its entrance, where Younger had expected Colette to be waiting.

'Say, how's the Miss doing?' asked Littlemore. 'Wasn't she meeting some bigwig tonight?'

'Arnold Brighton.'

'No kidding. You know, I wonder if-'

Littlemore had not finished this sentence when Colette came running frantically around the side of the church. She stopped at the iron lamppost, body heaving for lack of breath. Younger called out her name.

'Stratham?' she answered, full of alarm. Although Colette was visible to the two men, they were in darkness, invisible to her. She set off toward the sound of Younger's voice. 'Thank God.'

The twin doors of Trinity Church burst open, revealing an arched portal flooded with light from within the church. Beneath that arch stood Arnold Brighton, his face a glowing chartreuse orb, his eyes starkly white by contrast. Next to him was Samuels.

'There she is!' cried Brighton, pointing to the figure running down Wall Street. 'Shoot her!'

Samuels fired. Colette disappeared from below one streetlight and reappeared below the next. She hadn't been hit. Younger stepped forward to gather her in, trying to put his back between her and the gunfire even as Samuels fired twice more. Colette fell hard into Younger's arms. He whirled her off her feet and carried her into the darkness of a storefront alcove.

Littlemore had taken cover behind a mailbox, checking all his pockets for a gun, but he had none, having lost his firearm underground. Now he scrambled on all fours to Younger as Samuels's bullets flew over his head. 'Is she all right?' he asked.

'I'm fine,' answered Colette, still in Younger's arms. Samuels held his fire, evidently unable to see his targets.

'You with the girl,' said a different voice directly behind them, boyish but trying to sound commanding. 'Let her go.'

Younger turned. The speaker was a fresh-faced soldier who had come running to investigate the gunshots. He pointed a rifle nervously at Younger, its bayonet much closer to his chest than Younger liked.

'Are you there, Miss Rousseau?' Brighton called out from the glaringly illuminated arch. 'Samuels, do you see her?'

'Oh, give me that,' muttered Younger to the soldier. In one motion, he set Colette on her feet, seized the boy's rifle, kneeled, took aim at the doorway of Trinity Church, and fired. His shot hit Samuels in the joint of his shoulder, nearly amputating his arm.

'You got him, Doc,' said Littlemore.

'Did I?' Younger shifted his aim just slightly.

Samuels fell to his knees, blood flowing prodigiously from his subclavian artery.

'What's the matter with you?' asked Brighton, looking down at his secretary with a mixture of perplexity and indignation. 'It's only one arm. Shoot with the other.'

Younger fired again.

Brighton's eyes opened wide. A dark red circle appeared in the middle of his green forehead. 'Oh, my,' said Brighton, before collapsing.

Younger threw the rifle to the soldier's feet. 'How quickly can you get us an ambulance?' he asked Littlemore. 'Colette's hurt.'

She was in fact badly cut on her legs, and her long-sleeved gloves were ripped in several places, revealing lacerations to her palms and forearms.

'I'll find a car,' said Littlemore, sprinting away. Within a minute, a dozen soldiers were running down Wall Street toward Trinity Church, where the bodies of Brighton and Samuels lay bleeding, and Littlemore had returned in Secretary Houston's Packard. Younger made Colette get inside.

'But they're only scratches,' she protested.

'We're going to a hospital,' said Younger, lowering himself next to her in the backseat.

She looked at him and smiled. 'All right. If you think we should.'

'Which hospital, Doc?' asked Littlemore, behind the wheel.

'Washington Square,' said Younger. 'Wait – I thought you were going to stop a war tonight. Did you?'

'Not yet,' answered Littlemore.

'Well, go stop it.' The two men looked at each other. 'Someone else can drive. She'll be all right. Go.'

'Thanks,' said Littlemore, who persuaded Houston's chauffeur to drive the car.

As they set off, Colette rested her head on Younger's shoulder. She didn't see him wince. 'It's finally over, isn't it?' she asked.

'Yes,' he answered. 'I think it is.'

It wasn't until Younger had failed to respond to the next several things she said that she noticed his closed eyes and touched the back of his shirt and felt it dampening with blood. Colette screamed at the driver to hurry.

At Grand Central Terminal, under the celestial ceiling of the main concourse, Littlemore found Officer Stankiewicz in plain clothes, together with Edwin Fischer, waiting for him at the round central information booth, which was capped by a gold sphere with clocks on all four sides. Littlemore shook hands with Stankiewicz, thanking him for doing unofficial duty. 'Everything okay?' asked Littlemore.

'So far, so good,' said Stankiewicz.

'Anybody make you?' asked Littlemore.

'Hard to tell up here, Cap. Too many people.'

Littlemore nodded. The station was bustling with the comers and goers of a Saturday night in New York City. A constant din of loudspeaker crackle filled the concourse with announcements of train numbers, destinations, and tracks.

'Okay, Stanky,' said Littlemore, 'you're going to Commissioner Enright's place. He's expecting you. Here's the address. And bust it; there's no time to lose. When you get back, meet me downstairs exactly where I showed you. Fischer, you're coming with me.'

Littlemore glanced around the concourse, then tapped his knuckles on the information counter. The attendant, whom the detective greeted by name, shuffled to a gate and let Littlemore and Fischer in.

'Why are we going in the information booth?' asked Fischer. 'Are we looking for information?'

'We're going down to the lower level. If they've got people watching the stairs and ramps, they won't see us.'

In the center of the round booth was a gold pillar with a sliding door, which Littlemore opened. The detective cleared away boxes of old schedules, revealing a narrow spiral staircase.

'A hidden stairwell,' said Fischer. 'I didn't know this was here.'

'You're in for a lot of surprises tonight,' replied Littlemore.

The spiral stairs led past a landing littered with empty liquor bottles. When they arrived at the bottom, they were behind another, smaller information window. Littlemore opened it and joined the throng of passengers in Grand Central's lower level. He led Fischer to an intersection of two broad and crowded corridors, where Officer Roederheusen, also in plain clothes, was waiting in an inconspicuous corner under a tiled, vaulted ceiling. Across the gallery was the Oyster Bar.

'They still in there?' Littlemore asked.

'Yes, sir,' said Roederheusen. 'Still eating.'

'Anybody see you?'

'No, sir.'

'Good job,' said Littlemore. 'Fischer, you and I are going to wait here until the Commissioner comes. Spanky, you go down to Washington Square Hospital on Ninth and see how Miss Rousseau's doing. Just stay put there unless Doc Younger needs anything, in which case you get it for him.'

Twenty minutes later, Stankiewicz returned with Commissioner Enright.

'This had better be good, Littlemore,' said Enright.

'It will be, Commissioner,' replied Littlemore. 'Stand right here, sir. Keep an ear to the wall. You too, Fischer, just like we talked about. Don't move.'

'An ear to the wall?' repeated Enright indignantly.

'Yes, sir. Keep your ear right here.'

The detective crossed the lower-level concourse, wending through the crush of bustling passengers, many of them carrying on in extraordinarily loud voices, as New Yorkers like to do. When he got to the Oyster Bar's entrance, he turned around, confirming that he could no longer see Enright, Roederheusen, or Fischer, who, on the other side of the wide and busy gallery, must have been almost a hundred feet away. Littlemore ducked into the restaurant.

He found them at a table covered with nacreous and crustacean remains: Senator Fall, Mrs Cross, and William McAdoo, the former Treasury Secretary who was now a lawyer. No bottles were visible, but it was clear from the Senator's exuberance that considerable drink had been consumed with the repast.

'Agent Littlemore!' cried Fall. 'Savior of his country. Exposer of corruption. You've missed dinner. You've missed great tidings. You've

– you look ridiculous, son. What have you been doing, spelunking?'

'I need to talk to you, Mr Fall,' said Littlemore.

'Talk away. I think you're getting cold feet, boy, I really do.'

'Can we speak alone, Mr Senator?' replied Littlemore, still standing.

'Anything you want to say to me, Littlemore, you can say in front of my friends.'

'Not this.'

Fall was irritated, but he stood up. 'All right. I'm coming. But first give me one more dose of that dark medicine, woman.'

Mrs Cross inconspicuously removed a flask from her purse and put a splash into Senator Fall's glass. She topped off Mr McAdoo's as well. 'Whiskey, Agent Littlemore?' she asked.

The detective shook his head and, after Fall had downed his drink, led the Senator out of the crowded restaurant. He stopped at a discreet spot against the wall in the terminal concourse, a few feet from the doors of the Oyster Bar. 'I know who stole the gold, Mr Fall,' said Littlemore.

'The Mexicans,' replied Fall. 'You already figured that out.'

'Not the Mexicans, sir.'

'Houston?'

'It was Lamont,' said Littlemore.

'Impossible.'

'I saw the gold tonight. In the basement of the Morgan Bank.'

'Keep your voice down,' whispered Fall. 'You tell anybody yet?'

'Yes, sir,' said Littlemore quietly.

'Who?'

'You.'

'Apart from me, goddamn it,' said Fall.

'You mean Mr Houston?'

'Yes – did you tell Houston?'

'I came straight here, Mr Fall.'

'Good. Let's keep a lid on this, Littlemore. Don't want to cause a panic. Tell you what: Just leave it to me. I'll make sure the right people find out.'

'Got you, Mr Fall. Keep a lid on it. But somebody better talk to Mr Lamont right away.'

'Don't you worry, son – I'll talk to him.'

'What'll you say?' asked Littlemore.

'I'll tell him – why, I'll tell him-' Fall had difficulty finishing the sentence. 'Damn it, you're the one who said I should talk to him.'

'I figured you'd want to tip him off,' said Littlemore.

Fall didn't flinch. 'What did you say?'

'You know when I knew, Senator Fall? It was when you told me that you and Mr McAdoo always have dinner at the Oyster Bar. I realized that Ed Fischer was in Grand Central when you two met here a few months ago, after the Democratic Convention. A lot of people think Fischer's crazy, but everything I heard him say turned out to be true.'

'Are you drunk, Littlemore?'

'Then I saw the whole thing. Finding those Mexican documents was way too easy. Torres's apartment – it was a fake, wasn't it? A setup. That's why you had Mrs Cross come with me – to make sure I'd find the hole in the wall where the documents were hidden. What a sucker I was. Sure, a Mexican envoy is going to bring incriminating documents with him from Mexico in a cardboard tube – nothing else, no files, no suitcases, barely any clothes, just those documents – and then leave them for me in an open wall safe after I knock on his apartment door. Torres wasn't really a Mexican envoy at all, was he? You invented him. That's why Obregon denied the guy's existence.'

Fall took out a cigar. 'You're all twisted up, son. Not thinking straight.'

'From the very start,' said Littlemore, 'Lamont tried to put me onto Mexico. Every time I talked to him, something having to do with Mexico would come up. I just didn't see it. Same with you, Mr Fall. You pretended you thought the Russians were behind it, but you were steering me to Mexico the whole time. Brighton was in on it too, wasn't he? You and he staged that scene in your office for my benefit, when he was complaining about the Mexicans seizing his oil wells. Then Lamont calls me again and conveniently mentions that Mexican

Independence Day is in the middle of September. You were doing the same thing with Flynn, sending him hints about Sacco and Vanzetti, hoping he'd put together their Mexico connection, but he never did. So you had to make me think I'd found proof – the documents in Torres's wall. But they're all fakes. Forgeries.'

Fall lit his cigar, taking his time. He glanced left and right and spoke almost inaudibly: 'The Mexicans bombed us, Littlemore. Massacred us. You're the one who figured it out. Let's say those documents are fake. Let's just say. If that's what Wilson and his Secretary of War needed to see the light and send in the troops, that's the way it had to be.'

'Except the Mexicans weren't behind the bombing,' said Littlemore.

'What are you talking about?'

'You were behind it.'

Fall blew a cloud of smoke over Littlemore's head. 'You think I bombed Wall Street – killed all those people – to steal a little gold from the Treasury? You're out of your mind, boy. No one will believe you.'

'The gold was icing,' said Littlemore. 'The cake was war. Invading Mexico, getting rid of Obregon, installing your own man as president, taking the oil fields. That would have been worth maybe half a billion dollars to your pal Brighton. And a few hundred million more to Lamont. And who knows how much to you.'

'That's big crazy talk, boy. You could get in trouble talking big and crazy like that.'

'You're making a war for their oil.'

'Their oil?' Fall hissed. 'That's our oil you're talking about. We bought it, we paid for it, and now a bunch of Reds are trying to steal it. You think the Mexican people like being ordered around by a gang of God-hating, gun-toting bandits? The Mexicans'll thank us. They'll cheer our boys when we march into Mexico City.'

'Sure they will,' said Littlemore. 'They love the US of A., just like you do.'

At that moment Mr McAdoo came out of the restaurant, along with Mrs Cross, who was carrying Senator Fall's overcoat.

'What's going on, Fall?' asked McAdoo. 'Is there a problem, Mr Littlemore?'

'No problem. Senator Fall and I were just talking about how you and he planned the Wall Street bombing.'

'I beg your pardon?' said McAdoo.

'You were the one who knew about the gold,' Littlemore said to McAdoo. 'You were Secretary of the Treasury in 1917 – before you started working for Brighton. You knew exactly how and when the gold would be moved. You knew Riggs. You probably had him transferred from Washington to New York.'

'Don't answer him, Mac,' said Fall. 'Ignorant talk – that's all it is.'

'Answer him?' said McAdoo. 'I would sue him for slander if it weren't so palpably risible.'

'How much did they promise you?' Littlemore asked McAdoo. 'Or were you just getting back at Wilson?'

McAdoo bristled. 'Why would I want to "get back" at my own father-in-law?'

'Maybe because he took the nomination from you?' answered Littlemore. 'You were going to be the next president of the United States. Must have been so close you could taste it. But Wilson took it away. All because you married his little girl, thinking it was your ticket to the White House. Kind of backfired, that move. Wilson stayed a step ahead of you all the way, didn't he?'

'Let it go,' Fall said to McAdoo. 'He's just baiting you.'

'Woodrow Wilson,' replied McAdoo, 'will go down in history as a president so bedazzled with his role as Europe's peacemaker that he didn't see the war being made against us by our neighbor to the south – the first president since 1812 to permit an attack on American soil.'

'Sure, if only there had been an attack,' said Littlemore. 'But there wasn't. You just made it look that way. You figured you'd hire some men to bomb Wall Street, make it look like the Mexicans did it, rustle up a little war – and come out a billion dollars richer. Lamont owns the land across from the Treasury Building. He digs a tunnel to the one spot where the gold is vulnerable while it's being moved – the overhead bridge between the two buildings. Then on September sixteenth, Mexican Independence Day, you pulled the trigger. You covered your tracks too. Nobody knew. But you made one mistake. You were overheard by Ed Fischer.'

Fall laughed out loud. Then the Senator spoke more quietly: 'That's your evidence? We were overheard by a certified lunatic? I hate to break it to you, son, but I never talk anywhere I can be overheard.'

'You've talked here before. In this corner. Outside the Oyster Bar.'

'How would you know?' replied the Senator. 'And what if I have? Nobody can hear us.'

'Ed Fischer can,' said Littlemore. Lowering his voice to the quietest whisper, the detective added: 'Come on out, Fischer. Tell Mr Fall whether you can hear him.'

'Indeed I can!' cried Edwin Fischer's voice from across the crowded gallery. Soon they could see him practically bounding through the crowd. 'It's just like before,' he said jauntily when he reached them. 'The same voices – out of the air!'

'What on earth?' said McAdoo. 'What is this?'

Fall looked at Fischer as if he were a species of exotic bird that ought to be exterminated. 'Is this your idea of a joke, Littlemore?'

'I don't think Commissioner Enright finds it funny, Mr Senator,' said Littlemore as Fischer was followed by Enright and Stankiewicz. 'Commissioner Enright, could you hear the Senator and Mr McAdoo talking just now?'

'Every word,' said Enright.

'Stanky – did you hear them?'

'Sure did, Cap.'

'Eddie?'

'"I hate to break it to you, son,'" quoted Fischer, imitating Fall's Western twang, '"but I never talk anywhere I can be overheard.'"

'Good gracious,' said Mrs Cross. 'They really could hear you.'

'It's a trick,' said Fall, looking up at the ceiling and down to the floor. 'You got a wire here somewhere. It's a policeman's trick.'

'No wire, Mr Senator,' said Littlemore. 'It is a neat trick though. We detectives discovered it a couple of years ago, after the Terminal opened. If you stand right where we're standing now, just outside the Oyster Bar, folks on the exact opposite side of the hall can hear everything you say, loud and clear, even if you whisper and even if there's a crowd in between. I asked Fischer earlier today if that's where voices came to him.'

'It was my favorite place,' declared Fischer. 'I used to hear so much out of the air.'

'You and Mr McAdoo,' said Littlemore, 'had dinner here in July. Big Bill Flynn was with you. Flynn met Fischer that night – here in Grand Central. Afterward, Fischer came down to his spot over there and listened. The two of you must have been on your way out of the restaurant. You stopped. You whispered, positive that nobody could hear you. But you were wrong.'

'The Treasury owed me millions,' McAdoo protested. 'That's all I ever said. It was a purely hypothetical-'

'Shut up, Mac,' interrupted Fall sharply. His countenance softened into a broad smile: 'Mr Fischer, I don't believe I've had the pleasure. You're the tennis champion, am I right? Heard a lot of fine things about you. Albert Fall's the name. You ever been introduced to me, son? Or to Mr McAdoo here?'

'Never,' replied Fischer, sticking out his hand, 'but I'm delighted to make your acquaintance.'

The Senator didn't shake Fischer's hand: 'Then you can't be sure it was us you heard back in July – especially if the voices you heard were whispering.'

'I didn't say I was sure,' replied Fischer candidly. 'But your voices certainly sound similar.'

Fall laughed again. 'Congratulations,' he said to Littlemore. 'Your evidence is a lunatic who never saw us before but thinks maybe possibly he heard voices similar to ours whispering something last summer. You couldn't indict a flea with that evidence. Mac, Mrs Cross – time to go.'

'If I'd been trying to indict you, Fall,' replied Littlemore. 'I would have waited and brought you down when I had more. Instead I just blew my whole case against you.'

As Mrs Cross draped his overcoat on him, Fall asked, 'And why would you do that?'

'Because I need something from you.'

The Senator chuckled: 'Boy, are you ever mixed up. In future, when you want something from me, I'd recommend you try a different tactic.'

'Really?' said Littlemore. 'I got two witnesses here, one of whom is the Commissioner of the New York Police Department, who will confirm that Fischer could hear you and Mr McAdoo from all the way across the hall and that Fischer recognized your voices as the ones he heard talking about the Wall Street bombing three months before it happened. Not enough to convict, but plenty enough for a newspaper. Especially when people start looking into your Mexican documents. It'll take a while to prove the forgery, but we will. You'll deny you knew they were forged, but my witnesses will tell the papers they heard you say you didn't care if the documents were forged or not. How do you figure the headlines will read? Senator Fall Takes Country to War on Tissue of Lies?'

Fall didn't reply.

'That kind of story could put a serious crimp in a man's legal career, Mr McAdoo,' Littlemore continued. 'Not to mention his getting back into politics.'

'Let's hear what the detective wants,' said McAdoo.

'Meantime,' continued Littlemore, 'those three senators and Mr Houston – the ones who, according to your forged documents, were taking bribes from the Mexican government – I'm guessing they won't let you off the hook so easy, Mr Senator. When they find out what you did, they'll want to hold hearings or something, won't they? With all that going on, I can't see President Harding naming you to his Cabinet. Can you, Mrs Cross?'

'No, I can't,' she agreed.

Fall took a long draw at his cigar. 'What is it you want me to do?'

'Call off the war.'

'I don't make that kind of decision,' said Fall gruffly. 'Harding isn't even president yet.'

'You better find a way, Mr Senator,' said Littlemore. 'Otherwise, you can kiss your Cabinet position goodbye.'

A piece of tobacco leaf was caught between Fall's front teeth. He sucked it in and spat it out to the floor of Grand Central Terminal. He looked at McAdoo, who nodded. 'There will be no war,' said Fall. 'Hope you're proud of yourself, boy.'

The Senator buttoned his overcoat. He turned to go.

'The one thing I'll never understand,' said Littlemore, 'is how you could kill so many of your own countrymen. You didn't need to pick noon. You could've done the bombing anytime – at night. You're not just a traitor, Fall. You're some kind of monster.'

The Senator faced the detective. 'How do you know the bomb was supposed to go off at noon?' he asked. 'Mistakes happen in war. Don't they, McAdoo?'

'Don't ask me,' replied McAdoo. 'I wasn't responsible.'

'Maybe the bombers were told to do their work at a minute after midnight on the sixteenth,' said Fall, 'when the Mexicans would be celebrating their puny independence. Maybe nobody was supposed to die. But maybe the bombers were told twelve-oh-one, and maybe where they came from, twelve-oh-one doesn't mean a minute after midnight.'

Littlemore whistled. 'Your boys blew the bomb twelve hours late. That's why Fischer was off on the date. He heard you say the bomb would go off the night of the fifteenth.'

'Our boys?' asked Fall. 'Don't know what you're talking about, Littlemore. I was just speculating. But let me tell you what ain't speculation: you're handing the Reds the biggest victory they ever had. Oil is mother's milk, son. The countries that have it are going to be big and strong. The ones that don't are going to wither and die. Know how much oil we Americans produced yesterday? One million two hundred thousand barrels. Know how much we consumed? One million six hundred thousand barrels. That's right – every day, we're short four hundred thousand barrels of oil. Where's that extra oil coming from? Mexico. We'll get our oil; trust me on that. One way or the other, we'll get it. This country has enemies, Littlemore. I ain't one of them. Evening, Commissioner.'

Enright said goodbye to the Senator.

Unseen by anyone else, Mrs Cross winked at Littlemore. 'Good night, New York,' she said. 'You do play by the rules, don't you?'

'You really can't connect them?' Commissioner Enright asked Littlemore a few minutes later. 'To the bombing?'

'We've got nothing on them,' said Littlemore. 'The only witness who can tie Fall to the bombing is Fischer here, and no judge will let him testify.'

'How about the gold?' asked Enright. 'Can't we prosecute them for theft?'

'There's no theft if the owner won't admit his property was taken,' said Littlemore. 'Secretary Houston's going to deny that the Treasury got robbed. I saw him do it tonight.'

'I know what to do!' interjected Fischer. 'I'll tell Wilson. He'll be very unhappy with Senator Fall. I'm one of the President's advisers, you know.'

'You did good tonight, Eddie,' replied Littlemore. 'Thanks.'

'You're most welcome. By the way, the Popes are trying to condemn me again.'

'The Popes?' asked Enright.

'I know what he means, Commissioner,' said Littlemore. 'It's okay, Eddie. I'll help you out.'

'Well, perhaps all this will make good crime fiction someday,' observed Enright. 'I might do something with it myself. Mr Flynn is publishing my work, you know.'

'I'm sorry?' said Littlemore. 'Big Bill Flynn?'

'His days as Chief are numbered now that the Republicans are in,' said Enright. 'He's starting a literary magazine. Intends to call it Flynn's. I'm to be his first writer. I'll have several detective stories for him. Set in New York.'

Littlemore had no reply for a moment. Then he said, 'Don't put that in one of your stories, sir.'

'Don't put what?' said Enright.

'That the Police Commissioner of New York City is going to write detective stories for the fat-headed Chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who's starting a literary magazine and naming it after himself after botching the biggest investigation the country's ever seen. Nobody would believe it.'

The Washington Square Hospital was a small, comfortable private facility with only two floors, connected by a wide central marble staircase. Littlemore was taking those stairs two at a time when he came upon Colette on the landing, looking out a large window. She saw him in the reflection and turned to him; the diamond choker, still on her neck, sparkled brilliantly.

'Glad to see you're okay, Miss,' said Littlemore before taking in her expression. 'What's wrong?'

'Nothing,' she answered. 'Everything's fine. He's going to be fine.'

'Who?'

At that moment a surgeon came slowly down the steps, cleaning his hands with a long wet cloth. His sleeves were bloodied. 'Miss Rousseau?' he asked. 'I'm very sorry, but-'

'I don't want to hear it,' Colette shouted, running upstairs. 'He's going to be fine.'

The surgeon shook his head and continued down the stairwell, leaving Littlemore by himself on the landing, trying not to believe the inferences he'd already drawn. Colette's footsteps trailed off down the corridor upstairs.

'Wait a second,' Littlemore called out half a minute later, unsure whether he was addressing Colette or the surgeon, then broke into a run downstairs. 'Wait just a darn second.'

The surgeon stopped midway down the hall: 'Are you a friend of Dr Younger's?' he asked.

'Sure, I'm a friend,' said Littlemore. 'What's wrong with him?'

'He was shot.'

Littlemore saw in his mind's eye Younger stepping between Colette and Samuels's gunfire. 'In the back,' he said.

'Twice,' agreed the surgeon. 'There's nothing I can do for him. I'm sorry. Does he have family?'

'What do you mean, nothing you can do? Operate on him.'

'I have,' said the surgeon, wiping his forehead. 'The bullets struck his ribs and lodged in the thoracic cavity. I don't dare try to extract them, because I don't know where they are. I'll tear his heart and lungs to pieces before I find them.'

'Can't you X-ray him or something?'

'X-rays are useless,' said the surgeon. 'The bullets haven't come to rest. Every breath he takes moves them. By the time we have images, the bullets will be somewhere else. They won't stabilize for at least seventy-two hours.'

'That doesn't sound so bad,' Littlemore said, refusing to accept the grim fatality with which the surgeon spoke. 'Roosevelt kept a bullet in his chest for almost ten years.'

'The situation is like Roosevelt's,' the surgeon reflected, 'except for the infection. Dr Younger's neutrophils are at about eighty percent. He has fever. Roosevelt's wound healed with no infection at all. That was the remarkable thing about it.'

'What are you saying, Doc? Help me out here.'

'I'm saying your friend must recover from his infection,' replied the surgeon. 'We are powerless against this sort of thing. All our instruments, all our science, all our medicines – powerless. He should live through the night. We'll test his blood again tomorrow morning. If the neutrophils decrease, all may yet be well.'

Littlemore tapped at the door and entered a silent hospital room. Colette was standing by the bedside, dousing Younger's forehead with a cold compress. Younger was lying on his stomach, eyes closed, cheek lying directly on the bed, with no pillow. His breathing was shallow, his face unnaturally livid, his entire body shivering.

'How's he doing?' asked Littlemore.

'Well,' said Colette. 'Very well. He's sleeping.'

Neither spoke for a while.

'What are neutrophils, Miss? The doctor was telling me-'

'Doctors are fools,' declared Colette.

Silence again.

'Neutrophils,' said Colette, 'are white blood cells, the most common kind. When there is an infection in the body, the neutrophils increase in number to fight it. Normally, they make up about sixty-five percent of the white cells.'

'How bad is eighty percent?'

'It's not bad; it's good,' said Colette. 'It means he's fighting his infection. His neutrophils will be in the seventies tomorrow, the high seventies. You'll see. Then they will come down more and more each day until they're normal. Did Mr Brighton live?'

'No. Neither did Samuels.' Littlemore looked at Younger's shivering body. 'Did they say anything about the kind of bullets, Miss?'

'Why?'

'It can make a big difference. The worst thing is if the bullets were hollow-points. Those mushroom on contact. They're real bad. Can't even use them in warfare. It's illegal. The bullet that hit Teddy Roosevelt wasn't a hollow-point, so it didn't mushroom when it him. When we policemen heard that, we knew he'd be okay.'

Colette remained quiet a long time. 'That's the word the doctors used,' she said at last. 'They said the bullets mushroomed.'

Before dawn, string-tied stacks of newspapers hit the streets, announcing in bold headlines a reconciliation between the United States and Mexico.

The American army at the border was standing down. Confidential Mexican agent Roberto Pesqueira declared in Washington unequivocally that American investments in his country would not be nationalized. United States law enforcement officers were said to have discovered and foiled a nefarious but unspecified plot to unseat General Obregon.

Younger's blood was drawn first thing that morning. He was still unconscious, but his fever had stabilized, although his body seemed wracked, weakened. Colette was there; Littlemore had gone home to his family.

A half-hour later, the surgeon from the night before came in. 'Eighty-six percent,' he said.

'It's a mistake,' answered Colette. 'No mistake. I'm sorry.'

'It doesn't matter,' said Colette. 'The count will improve by this evening. He's doing better. Much better. I can tell.'

Littlemore and Betty came back to the hospital at sunset. They had been there, one or the other, on and off, throughout the day. Littlemore's face was deeply drawn. They ran into Colette at the front door. 'I'm buying cigarettes,' explained Colette, smiling. 'He asked for them.'

'He's awake?' said Betty.

'Wide-awake,' said Colette. 'He's so much better.'

'I'll get him the smokes, Miss,' replied Littlemore, a tremendous weight lifting from him. 'You go back upstairs.'

'No, it's fine. He said he was hoping to talk to you.'

'To me?' asked Littlemore.

'Yes.'

'Doc doesn't talk to me. He doesn't talk to anybody. His neutrophils went down?'

'They're very strong,' said Colette. 'Ninety-five percent.'

'Ninety-five?' repeated Littlemore dumbly. 'But I thought-'

'It shows how hard he's fighting the infection. It's a good sign. But I think – I think – I think maybe you should hurry, Jimmy.' Colette turned and hid her face from them, but she didn't cry. 'Is there a tobacco nearby?'

'I know a place,' said Betty, understanding the French girl's meaning. 'I'll show you.'

A nurse was preparing a syringe when Littlemore entered the room. 'This will make you much more comfortable,' she said to Younger.

Younger was still lying on his stomach. His face, resting on one cheek, was turned toward the door; he saw Littlemore. His back, exposed from the waist up, had thick plasters in two places. His shining forehead was as pale as his white sheets, and he shook badly. 'No,' he said. His voice was strong, but he made no movement. 'No shot.'

'Afraid of a little shot, a big man like you?' said the nurse. 'Don't worry. You'll feel much better soon.'

Younger tried to lift himself; his arms looked powerful, but evidently it was too painful. He closed his eyes. 'No shot,' he repeated to Littlemore.

'Ma'am,' said Littlemore, 'he doesn't want the shot.'

'It's for his pain,' answered the nurse, paying no attention.

Younger shook his head.

'Sorry, ma'am, can't let you do that,' said Littlemore.

'Doctor's orders,' she replied as if those magic words preempted all further discussion. She tapped the syringe, forced a drop of clear liquid from the needle, and was just about to inject Younger when Littlemore seized her wrist and led her, protesting, out the door.

'Thanks,' said Younger.

Littlemore noticed matches and a packet of cigarettes on a table. 'I thought you were out of smokes.'

'One left,' said Younger.

'Want it?'

'Sure, let's do all the clichés. I reject the morphine. You put a cigarette in my mouth.'

'Is that a yes or a no?'

'No,' said Younger.

'You're not going to die on us, Doc, are you?'

'Thinking about it.'

A silence followed. Younger's teeth began to chatter. With an effort, he brought the noise to a halt.

'How's the job?' asked Younger.

'Job's good,' said Littlemore. 'Don't have one, but it's good.'

'Family?'

'Family's good.'

A steady dripping came from the intravenous tubes on the other side of the bed. They could hear traffic outside the closed window.

'That's good,' said Younger.

'You wanted to talk to me?' asked Littlemore.

'Who told you that?'

'The Miss.'

'Ridiculous,' said Younger. His teeth began to rattle again.

'I'm lighting you that cigarette,' said Littlemore. He did so, fingers not as steady as they usually were. 'There you go.'

'Thanks.' Younger smoked; it settled his clattering teeth. 'You realize there's a silver lining.'

'Oh, yeah – what?'

'If I die fast enough, you'll be in the clear at my hearing tomorrow. They can't make you pay a man's bail bond posthumously.'

'I already talked to the DA,' said Littlemore. 'He dropped the charges against you.'

'Ah. Excellent. Then my death will be completely pointless.'

There was a long pause.

'Good thing I'm not a believer,' said Younger, smoke curling into his eyes.

Another silence.

'Not even to my own family,' said Younger.

'What's that?' asked Littlemore.

'Nothing,' said Younger. 'Ash?'

Littlemore took the cigarette, tamped it into an ashtray, and returned it to Younger's mouth.

'I wasn't kind, Jim,' said Younger quietly.

'What are you talking about?'

'I was never kind. Not to one person. Not even to my family.'

'Sure you were,' said Littlemore. 'You took care of your mom when she got sick. I remember.'

'No, I didn't,' said Younger. 'And my father. All he ever wanted from me was a show of respect. That's all. Never gave it to him.' He laughed through the smoke. 'Funny thing was I did respect him. I wasn't like you. You visit your father every weekend. You make him part of your life. You talk about Washington.'

'My dad?' said Littlemore.

'Yes.'

'My dad?'

Younger looked at him.

'My dad's a drunk,' said Littlemore. 'He's been a drunk his whole life. He cheated. And he was crooked. Got kicked off the force for taking bribes. They took his badge, took his gun. Everything I ever said about him was a lie.'

'I know.'

'I know you know,' said Littlemore. 'But you let me tell my lies.'

Neither spoke.

'That was kind,' added Littlemore.

Younger grimaced. His head jerked back; his teeth clenched. The cigarette broke off, and the lit end flew in a little arc like a miniature rocket, bouncing off the sheet near his chin, then falling to the floor. At the same time, the door to the room opened.

'I'll get that,' said Colette, hurrying in, brushing a hot red ember off the sheet and cleaning up the floor. She placed her palm wordlessly below Younger's lips. From his mouth, he let slip the unsmoked butt end of the cigarette, which fell into her hand. He began to shake again and sweat.

No one said anything.

At last Littlemore asked, 'You in a lot of pain, Doc?'

'I never understood it,' said Younger.

'What?' asked Littlemore.

'Why I was alive. Why any of us were.'

'You understand now?' asked Colette.

Younger nodded. 'Not happiness. Not meaning. It's just-'

He stopped.

'What?' asked Colette.

'War.'

'Only some people aren't fighting,' said Littlemore, remembering something Younger had once said to him.

'No. Everyone's fighting. And I know what it's between, this war.' He looked at Colette.

'What?' asked Littlemore.

'Too late,' said Younger. He lost control of his torso, which began to convulse. Fresh blood appeared on his bandages. Whether the expression on his face was another grimace or a smile, Littlemore couldn't tell.

Colette stared. Betty called for the nurse.

In the middle of the night, Colette knelt alone at Younger's bed. A candle burned on the table. 'Can you hear me?' she whispered.

His eyes were closed. He was still prone, his back rising and falling so shallowly there was hardly any respiration at all. His forehead was drenched. A hollow light glowed in his cheeks.

'If you die,' she said quietly, 'I'll never forgive you.'

He lay there.

Abruptly she stood, letting go his hand. 'Go ahead and die then if you're so weak,' she cried. 'I thought you were strong. You're a weakling. Nothing but a weakling.'

'Not very sympathetic,' he said softly, without opening his eyes.

She gasped and covered her mouth. She took his hand again and whispered in his ear. 'If you live,' she said, 'I'll do anything you want. I'll be your slave.'

'Promise?'

'I promise,' she whispered.

His eyes blinked open – and shut again. 'Incentive. That's good. Nevertheless, I'm dying. You have to go.'

'I'm not going anywhere.'

'Yes, you are,' he said, making a great effort to speak. 'I need to tell you what to do. I won't be awake long enough. Get Littlemore. Tell him to take you to a fishing tackle store.'

'What?'

'Break in if you need to. They'll have maggots – for bait. I should have thought of it before. Make sure they're from blowflies. Anything else will eat me alive. Tell the surgeon to open me up where the bullets entered. Cut as far down as he can. Drop the maggots in. Keep the incision open – use clamps. There's got to be plenty of air. Drain the wounds every couple of hours. After three days, clean them out.'

Dr Salvini, chief surgeon of the Washington Square Hospital, initially objected vigorously to the idea of embedding fly larvae to feast next to his patient's heart. But he knew Younger was dying, and in any event Colette gave him no choice.

'Um, what if they lay eggs in there?' Littlemore asked Colette early the next morning, peering at the seething stew in the troughs of Younger's back.

'First we have to hope they clean out the infection,' she a nswered quietly.

'I know,' said Littlemore, 'but what if the eggs hatch after he's sewed up?'

'They're larvae,' said Colette. 'They can't lay eggs. They only eat.'

'Oh – sounds good,' said Littlemore, swallowing.

How Younger held on over the next forty-eight hours, no one knew. His fever reached a hundred and five. He had no food, nearly no drink. They had to tie him to the bed rails because his convulsions were so violent.

On the third day, his fever broke. When the engorged maggots were flushed out of the wounds, Salvini was astonished to find clean, pink, healthy tissue, with all the necrotic detritus and seepage gone.

They took another set of X-rays. This time, Colette herself computed the depth and location of the bullet fragments – correctly to within a tenth of a centimeter. The bullets had indeed mushroomed, but they were stable and largely intact. Salvini didn't even have to break any more of Younger's ribs to extract them.

The following morning, fresh air and dappled sunlight poured in through the window of Younger's hospital room, the curtains of which were now thrown open, affording a pleasant view of Washington Square Park and its autumnal trees. Younger was awake, propped up by pillows. He had lost weight, but his skin had regained its color, and he could move again.

Colette came in, radiant, carrying a baguette and a paper bag filled with other groceries. 'I found a French bakery,' she said. 'I brought you croissants. Can we live here?'

'Where did you get those diamonds?' he asked, looking at her choker.

Colette shook her head, breaking the baguette. 'These hideous diamonds. I can't get them off. I've even taken my baths with them.'

'I like you in them,' replied Younger. 'I command you to keep them on. Day and night.'

'But I don't want to,' she said. 'Some slave,' he answered. 'Come here.'

She bent to him. Younger reached behind her and – with infuriating male handiness – unclasped the necklace. She kissed his lips. He handed her a telegram brought by Officer Roederheusen from the Commodore Hotel. Colette read it:

26 NOV. 1920

BOY CURED. HAVE BOOKED CABIN FOR HIM S.S. SUSQUEHANNA

ARRIVING NEW YORK 23 DECEMBER IN COMPANY OF YOUR

FRIEND OKTAVIAN KINSKY. PLEASE ADVISE IF THIS PLAN

SUITABLE.

FREUD

Chapter Twenty-two

On December twenty-third, in the icy early morning harbor air, below an overcast sky, they stamped their feet -Younger and Colette; Jimmy and Betty Littlemore – and waited for the steamship Susquehanna. Winter had come. A dusting of overnight snow had given New York City a fairy-tale veneer, belied by the heavy, forbidding waters of the port, dotted with skins of fruit and other refuse.

The men stood on the dock. Colette and Betty conversed near the harbor buildings, which sheltered them from the sharp winds. Younger, whose rib cage was trussed in bandages below his suit, asked the detective for the time.

'Quarter of eight,' said Littlemore, rubbing his hands for warmth. 'Where's your watch?'

'Sold it.'

'Why?'

'To pay the hospital,' said Younger. 'And to pay Freud for Luc's ticket.'

'Does Colette know?'

'She knows I'm cleaned out,' said Younger.

'I can top that. Betty and I are packing up the apartment. Had to choose between paying the rent and feeding the kids. I was for paying the rent, but you know women. At least you can make some dough as a doctor.'

Younger smoked. 'You'll go back to the Police Department. You're a captain in Homicide.'

Littlemore shook his head. 'Department s on a payroll freeze. Maybe next spring.'

'Maybe we could rob a bank,' said Younger. 'How's that girl – the one Brighton was keeping prisoner?'

'Albina? Better. Colette visiting with her helped a lot. Want to know how it all started?'

'Sure.'

'There were three sisters – Amelia, Albina, and Quinta. They all went to work for Brighton in 1917. Within a couple years, girls at his factories started taking sick – their teeth are falling out, they're having trouble walking, there's something wrong with their blood.'

'Anemia,' said Younger.

'Brighton knows it's radium, so he builds a kind of hospital room upstairs in his factory where his own doctor would examine them – except it wasn't a doctor; it was Lyme. When that growth first showed up on Quinta's neck, Lyme told her she had syphilis. Brighton magnanimously offered to treat her for free in the infirmary, but Lyme was just doping her up. Amelia was next. Her teeth were coming loose. But she was tough. When Lyme told her she had syphilis too, she knew it was a lie. She went to Albina and told her something terrible was happening. They snuck Quinta out of the infirmary and got the heck out of the factory. Brighton had men all over looking for them. The girls knew it and were scared. So they went into hiding. Amelia took a bunch of scissors from the factory, which they carried around just in case. Then they heard about Colette. They heard she'd been telling people that the radium paint factories were killing people, and they thought maybe she could help them. You know the rest.'

'Why did Albina take her shirt off in front of Luc?'

'After she followed the Miss to Connecticut? It was her skin: her skin was glowing in the dark. She wanted Colette to see it, but the Miss wasn't there, so she showed Luc instead. She was afraid Brighton had men watching for her in New Haven; that's why she ran. She was right too. They caught her and brought her buck to New York, Darn it – I should have known Amelia's tooth had radium in it,'

'Why?' asked Younger.

'Remember how your radiation detector gizmo lit up when you pointed it at me – right at my chest – in front of the hotel?'

Younger saw it: 'I gave you the tooth.'

'It was in my vest pocket,' said Littlemore.

The two men stood silently for some time. 'What about your senator?' asked Younger.

'Fall? He's doing fine. Going to be in Harding's Cabinet. Not Secretary of State – they're going to give him some less high-profile position, but still in the Cabinet.'

'Who says crime doesn't pay?' said Younger.

'He'll pay. I had a look through Samuels's books. I found a hundred- thousand-dollar cash payment from Brighton to Fall; I'll nail him with it sooner or later. But for now nobody can touch him. He's got something on Harding.'

'What?'

Littlemore looked around to be sure they were out of anyone's earshot. 'Harding's got a woman problem. The Republican Party just paid twenty-five thousand dollars to keep one gal quiet. Now there's another girl in bed with him, and only Fall knows about her.'

'How?'

'Because she works for him. Good-looking girl. Ever since I quit as a T-man, she's been feeding me all kinds of Washington secrets. She says Houston's got something to tell us.'

'Us?'

'Yeah – you and me.'

The men were quiet again for a while.

'You were right about the machine gun,' said Littlemore.

'How's that?'

'Turns out the bombers blew up Wall Street twelve hours after they were supposed to. So they had a little problem: the manhole was locked.

There they were in the alley, with all that gold and no place for it to go. One of them runs across the street and fires his machine gun into a wall of the Morgan Bank, trying to get somebody to open up the manhole. Apparently it worked. I told Commissioner Enright about it, and he sent Lamont a letter telling him to keep those bullet holes unrepaired. He says Morgan can tell everybody it's a memento, but if they repair the holes, he'll arrest them for destroying evidence.' Littlemore looked out to sea. 'Where's that ship?'

'Late.'

'It's funny,' said Littlemore. 'People are already forgetting September sixteenth. When it happened, it was like nothing would ever be the same. The country was frozen. Life was going to be different forever.'

'At least we didn't go to war. A manufactured war on a country that had nothing to do with the bombing – God knows the price we would have paid for that, if you hadn't stopped it.'

'Yeah – I should be famous,' said Littlemore. 'Instead I'm broke.'

'We could go to India.'

'Why India?'

'Poverty is holy in India.' Younger ground out his cigarette under a heel. 'So no one gets punished for it. The bombing.'

'I don't know about that. Where did you and I first see Drobac?'

'At the Commodore Hotel – after they kidnapped Colette,' answered Younger.

'Nope.'

Younger shook his head: 'Where then?'

'A horse-drawn wagon passed you and the Miss and me when we were walking down Nassau Street the morning of September sixteenth. Remember – about three minutes before the bomb went off? With a load so heavy the mare could barely drag it behind her? Drobac was the guy driving that wagon.'

'Bonjour,' said Luc, looking up at his sister that night.

The Susquehanna had arrived twelve hours late. The boy, sprucer and cleaner than Younger had ever seen him, had just come down the gangway, hand in hand with Oktavian Kinsky, into the bright electric lights of the dock. There were no stars in the sky, nor any moon. The cloud cover was too thick.

For an instant Colette was paralyzed. It was the first time she'd heard her brother speak in six years. She could not fit the voice to Luc; it was too mature, too self-possessed, as if a stranger had taken over her brother's body and were speaking through his mouth. Then somehow the voice and the steady eyes and the serious face came together all at once: it was he. She opened her arms and gathered him in.

'Bonjour?' she repeated, hugging him. 'How can it be bonjour in the middle of the night, you goose? And your hair – you let them cut it?'

Luc nodded gravely.

Oktavian greeted Younger and Colette – the Littlemores having departed hours before – like long-lost friends. 'I'm here to start a fleet of hired cars,' Oktavian declared. 'That sort of thing is not frowned on in America, I'm told.'

'On the contrary,' agreed Younger. 'And you'll have to fight off the American ladies, Count, at least the ones I'm going to introduce you to. They worship aristocracy.'

'But you abolished your titles of nobility over a hundred years ago,' said Oktavian.

'People always want what they can't have,' said Younger.

'Not me,' said Colette.

That night, they stayed with Mrs Meloney, who generously opened her home to them. Colette had persuaded Mrs Meloney to help the dial workers at the luminous-paint factories – and the good woman had taken to the business with all her usual industry and alacrity.

At Brighton's Manhattan plant, the dial painters were being tested for radiation exposure. Over half the girls were radioactive, especially in their teeth and jaws; several of them glowed in the dark. Pointing of brushes with the mouth had been forbidden. Protective gloves were made mandatory. Radiation detectors were being installed. Brighton's bank accounts had been seized, and his assets were being held for the benefit of girls who developed illnesses as a result of their work in his factories.

Younger and Colette put Luc to bed. 'I have something to tell you,' the boy said to his sister.

'I know,' answered Colette. 'Dr Freud told us.'

'He told you?'

'Only that you had something to say. He wouldn't tell us what.'

'But now that I'm here,' said Luc, 'I don't want to say it anymore.'

'Sleep for now,' replied Colette. 'Tomorrow you can tell us.'

Tomorrow, however, the boy was still less talkative. Oktavian took rooms at a modest but decent hotel in Manhattan and began looking into the letting and buying of livery vehicles. They said goodbye to him and that evening boarded a train for Boston.

As the train rumbled quietly north, a light snow fell outside their window. 'Luc,' said Colette, 'now is a good time.'

The boy shook his head.

'You can whisper it in my ear, if you want,' said Colette.

'Rubbish,' declared Younger. 'He can't whisper it. He's not a child. He's lived through a war. He saved our lives. You're a man, Luc, not a little girl. Stop this nonsense and speak up.'

Luc frowned. He looked taken aback – and undecided.

Younger pulled out a letter from his jacket. 'This is from Dr Freud,' said Younger. 'You trust Dr Freud, don't you?'

Luc nodded.

'He warns us that you might go quiet in America,' Younger went on. 'He says you'll be worried that your sister doesn't want to hear what you have to say.'

Luc stared steadily at Younger.

'He says we should remind you that he's spent thirty years of his life telling people what they didn't want to hear. He says that the fact that someone doesn't want to hear the truth is very rarely a good reason for silence. He also says that your sister does want to hear what you have to say.'

Luc turned his gaze on Colette. 'You do?' he asked quietly.

'Very much,' said Colette.

'You don't know what it is,' said Luc.

'Whatever it is, I want to hear it.'

'No, you don't.'

'I do,' said Colette.

'No, you don't.'

'Yes, I do.'

'Wonderful,' said Younger. 'The boy speaks for the first time in his life, and the two of you quarrel like schoolchildren.'

'Father was a coward.' Luc had spoken simply but definitively.

Colette started. Her fingers clenched. 'Father? A coward?'

The boy looked at the snowflakes melting on the train's window. 'I was at the house when the Germans came,' he said.

A shadow fell across his sister's face, and she began a question: 'You mean-?'

'Yes,' Luc interrupted her.

'But we-'

'Were in the carpenter's basement,' he completed her sentence. 'I left in the middle of the night. You didn't hear me. I went back to the house. I looked in through the window next to the shed.'

Colette stopped moving altogether. She may even have stopped breathing.

'German soldiers were inside with Father. Three of them. One was tall with blond hair. Do you remember where Mother and Grandmother were hiding?'

'Yes.'

'Father was saying to them, "Please don't kill me. Please don't kill me." He started to cry.'

'That doesn't make him a coward,' she answered.

'Father pointed to the cabinet. I think he was trying to show the Germans where the silver was. They opened the cabinet, but I guess they didn't care about the silver. They turned around and yelled at Father again. The tall one aimed his rifle at him. Father pleaded with them not to shoot.' The train rattled around a curve. 'Then Father pointed to the rug.' 'You saw him point to it?'

'He pointed to it and then he got up and he pulled it away so the German soldiers could see the trapdoor.' Colette said nothing.

'They opened it. They found Mama. And Nana. They hit Mama on the face. Then the tall one shot Father. Another one shot Nana.' 'What did you do?' she asked quietly

'I ran into the house. Mama was screaming. They were holding her down on the floor, pulling at her dress. One of the Germans hit me, I think. I don't remember anything else. The next morning-'

'Don't,' said Colette, putting her arms around her brother and closing her eyes. 'I know.'

'I didn't want to say anything,' said Luc.

They spoke little for the remainder of the ride. Colette said almost nothing at all. In Younger's coat pocket was the letter from Freud, which he hadn't shown her. Colette therefore hadn't seen the little folded note that Freud had included along with it; nor had she read the letter's last paragraph, which said:

Miss Rousseau is keeping something from her brother as well. I believe I know what it is, but it's not for me to say. She'll tell you in her own time. When she does, give her the enclosed note.

As ever, Freud

After they had arrived at Younger's house in Boston and shown Luc his new bedroom and tucked him in, Younger and Colette went to their own bedroom. She let him undress her, which he liked to do. Then he took off his shirt, revealing the thick white bandaging wrapped round and round his chest.

'Is it painful?' she asked.

'Only if I breathe,' he said. 'I'm joking. I don't feel it at all.'

'Can you?' she whispered.

He could. She had to cover her mouth with his hand to keep from waking Luc. She dug her fingernails into his arms. He thought he might be hurting her, but she begged him not to stop.

A long while later, she spoke quietly in the dark: 'I didn't want to say anything either.'

'You knew?' said Younger. 'What your father had done?'

She nodded.

'You saw it too?' he asked.

'No,' she said. 'Father told me himself. The next morning. He was still alive when we found them. He confessed to me. He pleaded with me to forgive him.'

A clock ticked.

'I didn't,' she said. 'I couldn't. Then he was gone.'

Tears ran down her cheeks in silence; Younger could feel them on his chest.

'God help me,' she whispered. 'I didn't forgive my own father.'

'The oldest bear the most,' said Younger.

'Now you know,' she said to him, wiping her eyes. 'Now you know my very last secret.'

Hours later, at daybreak, he was buttoning a shirt when Colette, still lying in bed, asked him a question: 'Did I do everything wrong?'

'I have something for you,' he answered. 'From Freud.'

He gave her the note. She sat up and read it, holding the bed sheet over her chest. She stared at the note a long time before handing it back to him:

My dear Miss Rousseau,

If you are reading this, it means, assuming I'm right, you have revealed to Younger that you knew of your father's unfortunate conduct before your brother told you of it. Do not condemn your father too harshly. A man is not to be judged by his actions at gunpoint.

Neither should you judge yourself True, if you had told your brother what you knew, his condition might possibly have abated sooner. But it might also, perversely, have become more entrenched. The fact is you each tried to protect the other from a truth the other already knew. This was irony, not tragedy.

You may have perceived that your brother has harbored a resentment against you. That is natural. He may have disliked you, or thought he did, for not knowing what he knew (as he believed) and thereby making him keep it a secret. Children expect adults to know what they know; when we disappoint them, they think the worse of us. But then even as adults we eventually come to scorn those from whom we have kept the truth, and we resent those for whom we have made the largest sacrifices. For these reasons, if you are even now undecided about whether to tell your brother that you knew his secret all along, you know what my advice to you would be.

There is one more thing I want to say. You wondered in my presence why you didn't kill the man who murdered your parents. It was from just this fact that I deduced what you were hiding. The reason is simple. You felt, even if you didn't know it, that you would be insulting your father if you did what he lacked the courage to do. It was kindness toward your father that motivated you, not kindness to the murderer. (This also leads me to believe that you feel you wronged your father some time in the past, although the nature of this wrong I'm unable to decipher.) Fortunately, at that moment you were with a man who didn't labor under your compunctions. If you are half as wise as I believe you to be, you won't refuse that man's affections a second time.

Freud

On December 25, 1920, a long-distance telephone connection was established between a private home in Washington, DC, and another in Boston, Massachusetts. It was almost midnight.

'Is that you, Jimmy?' asked Colette. She and Younger both had their ears to the receiver. A Christmas tree stood in front of them, decorated with toy soldiers and glittering hand-painted paper globes.

'It sure is, Miss,' answered Littlemore, voice crackling, 'and Betty too. Is Doc there?'

'I'm here,' said Younger. 'What is it?'

'You wouldn't believe this house we're in. Guy who owns it owns the Washington Post. Wife owns the Hope Diamond. It's a big Christmas party. Secretary Houston invited us down. Harding's here. There's so many senators you'd think it was the Capitol. Lamont’s here too. Looking pretty blue – like a guy who lost millions at the track. But you know what? Things are picking up. In the country, I mean. They got dancing girls here from New York. They're playing a new kind of music. Something in the air. The twenties may not be as bad as I thought.' 'You took the Treasury job again?' asked Younger. 'Nope. We're just guests. Betty's the one who likes Washington now. Probably because Harding's been all over her the whole night.' 'What about you and that Mrs Cross?' replied Betty. 'Not interested,' said Jimmy. 'She is,' replied his wife. 'The harlot.' 'Did you call for any particular reason?' asked Younger. 'It's Christmas, Doc.' 'Merry Christmas.'

'Everybody's giving out presents here,' said Littlemore. 'You're not the only ones,' replied Younger, looking at the diamond on Colette's finger, which had once belonged to his mother. 'Guess what?' said Littlemore. 'You got a present too.' 'I did?' asked Younger. 'From whom?'

'Houston. He asked me if you found the gold with me. I said yes. Then he asked me if you were a law officer.'

'Why?'

'Well, they finally dug it all up, and Lamont swears the gold doesn't belong to Morgan, and Houston swears it doesn't belong to the Treasury, so officially it doesn't belong to anybody. It's unclaimed. They got laws for that. They call it treasure law. The law is that unclaimed gold goes to the finder – unless he's a law officer. I told him you definitely weren't a law officer. Told him you were more a law breaker.'

There was silence on the line.

'Did you hear me, Doc?'

'All the gold goes to the finder?'

'Unless he's a law officer,' said Littlemore.

'How much was there?'

'A little over four million.'

'I can't accept it,' said Younger. 'It belongs to the United States. Tell him I give it back to the Treasury.'

'I already did.'

'You did?' asked Younger.

'I knew you wouldn't accept it.'

'Yes, but you might have let me exercise my own generosity.'

'There's something you don't know,' said Littlemore. 'Back in October, Lamont over at Morgan tried to sneak into the country two million dollars of Russian contraband gold. Customs caught him, but Houston secretly had the Treasury take delivery of it. That was illegal, but Houston didn't want Morgan to take a two-million-dollar loss; he thought it would be bad for the country. Houston was going to have the Treasury pay Morgan for that gold until he found out Lamont was behind the September sixteenth robbery.'

'What are you talking about, Littlemore?' asked Younger.

'Bear with me here. Houston's not going to pay Lamont a dime for the Russian gold now. The Treasury's just going to keep it. Lamont can't object, because the Russian gold was contraband in the first place. So Houston only needs two million more for the Treasury to be made whole.'

'I think I'm following you,' said Younger. The Treasury is short two million million dollars in gold. What's the point?'

'Point is, when I told Houston you wouldn't accept all that gold we found, he says, well, the Treasury's only short two million, so why don't we use the European rule??'

'Which is?'

'Finder gets half. Government gets half.'

Again there was silence.

'I'm not taking anything you don't get,' said Younger. 'As a matter of fact, you weren't a law enforcement officer when we found it. Houston had just fired you.'

'I mentioned that to him.'

'What did he say?' asked Younger.

'You and I are splitting two million dollars of gold. Merry Christmas.'