The Death Instinct (18 page)

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

    'What are you suggesting, Littlemore?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    'So?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    'Oh yeah?'

    'Yeah.'

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

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

    Littlemore and his family proceeded to church.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    'I'm fine,' said Littlemore.

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

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

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

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

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

    Lamont looked positively fearful.

    'What kind of threat?' asked Littlemore.

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

    'You say he funded the German army?'

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

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

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

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

    'And a Bolshevik?' asked Littlemore.

    'He's a Jew,' Lamont explained.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    'Senor Pesqueira, I believe. Why?'

    'Not him. The man who threatened you.'

    'Oh. Speyer. Mr James Speyer.'

    'Do you know where I can find him?'

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

    'He's a member?' asked Littlemore.

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

    'Why?'

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

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