The Death Instinct (3 page)

    'Don't know yet, sir,' said Littlemore. 'Working on it.'

    'What are we going to do about Constitution Day?' whispered the Mayor anxiously.

    'Tomorrow is September seventeenth, Littlemore - Constitution Day,' said Commissioner Enright. The Commissioner was a man of imposing and appealing girth, with abundant waves of gray hair and unexpectedly sensitive eyes. 'The celebrations were to take place right here tomorrow morning, in front of the Exchange. Mayor Hylan wants to know if the plaza will be ready by then.'

    'She'll be clear by eight this evening,' said Littlemore.

    'There you are, Hylan,' replied Enright. 'I told you Littlemore would get the job done. You can hold the celebration or not, just as you wish.'

    'Will it be safe - safe for a large gathering?' asked the Mayor.

    'I can't guarantee that, sir,' said Littlemore. 'You can never guarantee safety with a big crowd.'

    'I just don't know,' replied Mayor Hylan, wringing his hands. 'Will we look foolish if we cancel? Or more foolish if we proceed?'

    McAdoo answered: 'I haven't reached the President yet, but I've spoken at length with Attorney General Palmer, and he urges you to carry on. Speeches should be given, citizens should assemble - the larger the assembly, the better. Palmer says we must show no fear.'

    'Fear?' asked Hylan fearfully. 'Of what?'

    'Anarchists, obviously,' said McAdoo. 'But which anarchists? That's the question.'

    'Let's not jump to conclusions,' said Enright.

    'Palmer will give a speech himself,' said McAdoo, a handsome, slender, tight-lipped man with a fine strong nose and hair still black despite his age, 'if he arrives in time.'

    'General Palmer's coming to New York?' asked Littlemore.

    'I expect he'll want to head the investigation,' said McAdoo.

    'Not my investigation,' said Commissioner Enright.

    'There can be only one investigation,' said McAdoo.

    'If we're having a big event here tomorrow morning, Mr Enright,' said Littlemore, 'we'll need extra men on the street. Three or four hundred.'

    'Why - is there going to be another explosion?' exclaimed the alarmed Mayor.

    'Calm down, Hylan,' said Enright. 'Someone will hear you.'

    'Just a precaution, Mr Mayor,' said Littlemore. 'We don't want a riot.'

    'Four hundred extra men?' said Mayor Hylan incredulously. 'At time and a half for overtime? Where's the money going to come from?'

    'Don't worry about the money,' said Lamont, pulling himself to his full diminutive height. 'The J. P. Morgan Company will pay for it. We must all go about our business. We can't have the world thinking Wall Street isn't safe. It would be a disaster.'

    'What do you call
this?'
asked Hylan, gesturing around them.

    'How are your people, Lamont?' said Enright. 'How many did you lose?'

    'I don't know yet,' said Lamont grimly. 'Junius - J.P. Jr's son - was right in the way of it.'

    'He wasn't killed, was he?' asked Enright.

    'No, but his face was a bleeding mess. There's only one thing I know for certain: the Morgan Bank will open for business as usual tomorrow morning at eight o'clock sharp.'

    Commissioner Enright nodded. 'There we are then,' he said. 'Business is usual. That will be all, Captain Littlemore.'

    When Littlemore returned to the table where his men were interviewing witnesses, Stankiewicz was waiting for him with a businessman who was sweating profusely. 'Hey, Cap,' said Stankiewicz, 'you better talk to this guy. He says he has evidence.'

    'I swear to you I didn't know,' said the businessman anxiously. 'I thought it was a joke.'

    'What's he talking about, Stanky?' Littlemore asked.

    'This, sir,' said Stankiewicz, handing Littlemore a postcard bearing a Toronto postmark, dated September 11,1920, and addressed to George

    F. Ketledge at 2 Broadway, New York, New York. The postcard bore a short message:

Greetings:

Get out of Wall Street as soon as the gong strikes at 3 o'clock Wednesday, the fifteenth. Good luck,

Ed

    'You're Ketledge?' Littlemore asked the businessman. 'That's right.'

    'When'd you get this?' asked Littlemore.

    'Yesterday morning, the fifteenth. I never imagined it was serious.' 'Who's Ed?'

    'Edwin Fischer,' said Ketledge. 'Old friend. Employee of the French High Commission.' 'What's that?'

    'I'm not entirely certain. It's at 65 Broadway, just a block from my offices. Have I committed a crime?'

    'No,' answered Littlemore. 'But you're staying here to give these officers a full statement. Boys, I'm taking a quick trip to 65 Broadway. Say, Ketledge, they speak English at this French Commission?' 'I'm sure I don't know,' said Ketledge.

    Several hours having passed, Colette announced to Younger that they were almost out of bandages. 'We're running out of antiseptic too. I'll go to the pharmacy.'

    'You don't know the way,' said Younger.

    'We're not in the trenches anymore, Stratham. I can ask. I have to find a telephone anyway to call Luc. He'll be worried.' 'All right - take my wallet,' Younger replied.

    She kissed him on the cheek, then stopped: 'You remember what you said?'

    He did: 'That there was no war in America.'

    At the foot of the steps she ran into Littlemore. The detective called up to Younger, 'Mind if I borrow the Miss for a half-hour, Doc?'

    'Go ahead. But come up here, would you?' said Younger, bent over a patient.

    'What is it?' asked the detective, ascending the steps.

    'I think I saw something, Littlemore,' said Younger without interrupting his work. 'Nurse, my forehead.'

    The nurse wiped Younger's brow; her cloth came off soaked and red.

    'That your blood, Doc?' asked Littlemore.

    'No,' said Younger untruthfully. Apparently he'd been grazed by a piece of shrapnel when the bomb went off. 'It was just after the blast. Something out of place.'

    'What?'

    'I don't know. But I think it's important.'

    Littlemore waited for Younger to elaborate, but nothing followed. ' That's real helpful, Doc,' said the detective. 'Keep it coming.'

    Littlemore trotted back down the stairs, shaking his head, and led Colette away. Younger shook his too, but for a different reason. He could not rid himself of the sensation of being unable to recall something. It was almost there, at the edges of his memory: a fog or storm, a blackboard - a blackboard? - and someone standing in front of it, writing on it, but not with chalk. With a rifle?

    'Shouldn't you take a rest, Doctor?' the nurse asked. 'You haven't stopped for even a sip of water.'

    'If there's water to spare,' said Younger, 'use it to wash this floor.'

    The bells of Trinity Church had tolled seven when Younger finished. The wounded were gone, his nurse gone, the terrier with the little gray beard gone, the dead gone.

    The summer evening was incongruously pleasant. A few policemen still collected debris, placing it in numbered canvas bags, but Wall Street was nearly empty. Younger saw Littlemore approaching, covered in dust. Younger’s own shirt and trousers were soaked with blood, browned and caked. He patted his pockets for a cigarette and touched his head above the right ear; his fingertips came away red.

    'You don't look so good,' said Littlemore, looking in through the doorway.

    'I'm fine,' Younger replied. 'Might have been finer if you hadn't deprived me of my assistant medical officer. You said you only needed her for half an hour.'

    'Colette?' asked Littlemore. 'I did.'

    'You did what?'

    'I brought her back after half an hour. She was going to a drugstore.'

    Neither man spoke.

    'Where's a telephone?' Younger asked. 'I'll try the hotel.'

    Inside the Stock Exchange, Younger called the Commodore Hotel. Miss Rousseau, he was informed, had not been back since the early morning. Younger asked to be put through to her room, to speak with her brother.

    'I'm sorry, Dr Younger,' said the receptionist, 'but he hasn't come back either.'

    'The boy went out?' asked Younger. 'By himself?'

    'By himself?' said the receptionist in a peculiar voice.

    'Yes - did he go out by himself?' asked Younger, irritation rising along with concern.

    'No, sir. You were with him.'

Chapter Three

    The attack on Wall Street of September 16, 1920, was not only the deadliest bombing in the nation's hundred-fifty-year history. It was the most incomprehensible. Who would detonate a six-hundred- pound explosive in one of New York's busiest plazas at the most crowded time of day?

    Only one word, according to the
New York Times,
could describe the perpetrators of such an act:
terrorists.
The
Washington Post
opined that the attack was 'an act of war,' demanding an immediate counterattack from the United States Army. But war with what country, what foreign nation, what enemy? There was no answer. In this respect the attack on Wall Street was not only appalling, but appallingly familiar.

    Fifteen million souls had perished in the Great War - a number almost beyond human compass. Yet despite this staggering toll, the war had been fathomable. Armies mobilized and demobilized. Countries were invaded and invaders repelled. Men went to the front and, much ol' the time, returned. War had limits. War came to an end.

    But by 1920 the world had become used to a new kind of war. It had started a quarter-century earlier, with a wave of assassinations. In 1894, the President of France was murdered; in 1898, the Empress of Austria; in 1900, the King of Italy; in 1901, President McKinley of the United States; in 1912, the Prime Minister of Spain; and of course in 1914, a Hapsburg archduke, launching the great conflagration. Assassination as such was nothing new, but these killings were different.

    Most of them lacked any clear, concrete objective. They lacked even the erratic rationality of a festering grudge.

    All, however, were somehow the same. All were committed by poor young men, usually foreign, linked by shadowy international networks and sharing in a death-dealing ideology that made them seem almost to welcome their own demise. The assassinations appeared to be an attack on all Western nations, on civilization itself. The perpetrators were called by many names: anarchists, socialists, nationalists, fanatics, extremists, communists. But in the newspapers and in public oratory, one name joined them all:
terrorist.

    In 1919, the bombings on American soil began. On April 28, a small brown package was delivered to the Mayor of Seattle, who had recently broken up a general strike. The return address said 'Gimbel Brothers'; a handwritten label promised 'Novelty - a sample.' Inside lay a wooden tube that was indeed a novelty. It contained an acid detonator and a stick of dynamite. The crude bomb failed to explode. But the next day an identical novelty, delivered to the home of a former United States senator, blew off the hands of the unlucky housemaid who opened it.

    The following evening, riding home from work in a New York subway, a mail clerk reading the newspaper realized that he had seen over a dozen similar packages that very day. Rushing back to the post office, he found these parcels still undelivered - for insufficient postage. Eventually, thirty-six 'novelty' package bombs were discovered, targeting an eclectic roster of personages including John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan.

    A month later, synchronized explosions lit up the night in eight different American cities at the same hour. The targets were houses - of an Ohio mayor, a Massachusetts legislator, a New York judge. By far the boldest of these attacks was the blast at the home of the nation's Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, in Washington, DC. Here the bomber blundered. As he mounted Palmer's front steps, his explosive detonated while still in his hands, leaving only scattered body fragments for the police to pick through.

    Palmer responded with sweeping raids, his G-men breaking down doors all over America, whether by day or under cover of night. Thousands were rounded up, detained, or deported, with or without charge. Telephones were tapped. Mail was intercepted. Suspects were 'forcefully interrogated.' The perpetrators, however, were never identified.

    Yet however monstrous, all this murder was directed at public men. Ordinary people felt no personal danger. They felt no need to alter the way they lived. That skin of felt security was burned away when Wall Street went up in flames on September 16, 1920.

    Crossing the police barricade, Younger and Littlemore were immediately set upon. A large crowd - much larger than Younger had realized - pressed in at the roadblocks around the blast area. Women with infants in their arms tugged at Younger's sleeves, begging for news of their husbands. Anxious voices called out in the dusk, wanting to know what had happened.

    Littlemore tried to answer every entreaty. He reassured one woman that no children had been killed. To others he explained where they could go to see a list of the casualties. All the rest he advised firmly but without temper to go back home and wait for more news tomorrow.

    Even the officers on duty, keeping the crowd at bay, were not immune from the general anxiety. One of them whispered to Littlemore as they passed: 'Say, Lieutenant, was it Bolsheviks? They say it was bolsheviks.'

    'Naw, it was a gas pipe, is all,' another officer chimed in, holding up a newspaper as evidence. 'Mayor Hylan says so. Ain't that right, Lieutenant?'

    'Give me that,' answered Littlemore.

    The detective took the paper, which an on-duty policeman should not have been carrying. It was the
Sun's
four-page extra edition. 'Can you believe this?' asked Littlemore, reading from the inner pages. 'Hylan's telling everybody it was a busted gas main.'

    As both Younger and Littlemore knew, the most important fact about the blackened crater they had seen in the plaza was something that wasn't there. There was no fissure, no rupture in the pavement, as there would have been had a gas pipe broken and sent a geyser of flame into the street.

    'That was a bomb crater,' said Younger.

    'That's sure what it looked like,' replied Littlemore, still reading as they walked.

    'That's what it was,' said Younger. 'Will you put the goddamned paper away?'

    'Geez,' said the detective, throwing the paper into the backseat.

    'Where's the crank?' asked Younger, in front of the vehicle, eager to get it running.

    'You
have
been away. There's no crank; they have starter pedals now,' said Littlemore. He saw the worry in Younger's eyes. 'Come on, Doc, she's fine. She went back to the hotel, took the kid out for dinner, left a message for you at the desk, and they bollixed up the message - that's all.'

    At the corner of Forty-fourth Street and Lexington Avenue, one block from the Commodore Hotel, stood a public establishment called the Bat and Table. Alongside it lay a narrow, unlit alley, which, used primarily for the collection of garbage, was typically empty of an evening. Atypically, it was occupied on the evening of September 16, 1920, by a motorcar with four doors, a closed roof, and an idling engine.

    The driver of this vehicle was not a genteel man. He had a fat, round, hairless face shiny with perspiration. His shoulders were so massed up within his threadbare jacket that they left no neck at all. His hat was at least one size too small, so that his ears bulged out beneath it. Although the car was stationary, he kept his hands glued to the steering wheel, and the woman next to him could see thick short thick hairs protruding from his knuckles. That woman was Colette Rousseau, whose hands were tied behind her.

    In the backseat was another individual who conveyed an air of uncongeniality less by his musculature, of which he possessed little, than by a pistol, which he pointed at Colette. His small, wiry torso was housed in an overlarge checked suit, rank with stale beer. His breath was equally aromatic; it smelled of raw onion.

    These two men exchanged words in a language Colette could neither understand nor identify. The driver was evidently named Zelko; the man in the backseat, Miljan. Colette said nothing. A slight bruise showed over her left eye.

    A rear door opened. Into the backseat a boy was flung headlong, followed quickly by another man, taller than the other two, dressed not well, but better, in a striped suit that was once a decent piece of gentlemen's apparel. He had so much facial hair, copious and black, that his mouth was invisible; his eyes peered out from a thicket of eyebrow and whisker. He slammed the door behind him and barked orders in the same unidentifiable language; the other two men called him Drobac.

    Evidently Drobac s orders were to tie up the boy and get the car moving. At least that's what the other two began to do. In French, Colette asked Luc if he was hurt. He shook his head. She went on quietly but quickly, 'It's all a mistake. Soon they will realize and let us go.'

    Miljan spat a few incomprehensible sentences that stank of onion. Drobac silenced him with a curt shout.

    'They can't understand us in French,' Colette whispered rapidly to Luc. 'He didn't find the box, did he? Just nod, yes or no.'

    Drobac barked unintelligibly; the driver, Zelko, jerked the car to a halt. '
Quelle boîte
?' said Drobac, in French. 'What box?'

    Colette, who had been facing her brother in the rear seat, now swung back around, her eyes fixed on the street ahead.

    'What box?' Drobac repeated.

    'It's nothing - only my brother's toy box,' said Colette too quickly. 'His precious toys, he is always worried about them.'

    'Toy box. Yes. Toy box.' Drobac grabbed Luc by the shirt collar and placed the barrel of a gun to the boy's head. Colette screamed. One of Zelko's hairy-knuckled hands flew to her face, slapping her. 'You lie again,' said Drobac, keeping his pistol in contact with the temple of the struggling boy, 'I kill him.'

    'Please - I beg you - it's something for sick people,' entreated Colette. 'It's extremely valuable - I mean, valuable for curing people. It won't be valuable to you. You'll never be able to sell it. Everyone will know it's stolen.'

    Drobac gave a command to Zelko, who swung the vehicle into reverse. They headed back to the unlit alley beside the Bat and Table. Drobac smiled. So, inwardly and imperceptibly, did Colette.

    Younger, at the front desk of the Commodore Hotel, learned from the reception clerk that no one was in Miss Rousseau's room. Neither the lady nor her brother had returned. 'My key,' said Younger, wondering if they might have gone to his room. 'And you are?' asked the clerk. 'Dr Stratham Younger,' said Younger.

    'Certainly, sir,' said the clerk. 'Might I ask for some identification?' Younger reached for his wallet before remembering that he had given it to Colette. 'I don't have any.'

    'I see,' said the clerk. 'Perhaps you'd like to speak with the house manager?'

    'Get him,' said Younger.

    The clerk's information - that no one was in Miss Rousseau's room - was incorrect. Twelve stories overhead, a man with black whiskers all around his face and black gloves on his hands stood before Colette's open closet, looking with irritation at a leather-lined case, the size of a small trunk. The case, Drobac had discovered, was too heavy for him to carry inconspicuously through the lobby and out of the hotel. Laboring, he worked the unwieldy box off the shelf and lowered it to the floor.

    The ornate hotel lobby was strangely hushed. People huddled in anxious knots, below palm trees and between marble columns, whispering, disbelieving, each describing where they had been when they heard or heard about the catastrophic explosion on Wall Street. It was the same everywhere, Younger had noticed as he and Littlemore drove uptown: people were paralyzed, as if the reverberations of the blast were still propagating up and down the city, shaking the ground, confusing the air.

    He felt perversely like shouting at them. This was not death, he wanted to say. They had no idea what death looked like.

    'You are the man claiming to be Dr Younger?' asked the hotel manager, a tall, bespectacled man in white gloves and evening attire.

    'No,' said Younger evenly. 'I
am
Dr Younger.'

    The manager, eyeing distastefully Younger's blood-spattered suit, removed the conical receiver from the front desk telephone and held it in suspense as if it were a weapon. 'On the contrary,' he said. 'I personally gave Dr Younger his key two hours ago, after receiving incontestable proofs of identity.' Into the receiver, he added primly to the hotel operator, 'Get me the police.'

    'They're already here,' answered a voice behind Younger. Littlemore, having parked his car, now joined Younger at the front desk. He displayed his badge. 'Dr Younger's wallet's been stolen. You gave his key to an impostor.'

    The manager regarded the disheveled and dust-covered Littlemore with undiminished suspicion. He scrutinized Littlemore's badge through his spectacles and, still holding the telephone receiver to his ear, declared his intention to speak with the police to 'confirm the detective's identity.'

    Cigarette protruding dangerously close to his jungle of beard, Drobac rifled the contents of Colette's laboratory case. He found two flasks, a half-dozen rubber-stoppered test tubes filled with bright green and yellow powders, and several jagged-edged pieces of ore. These rocks, as large as sirloin steaks, were jet-black, but they glistened as if made of congealed oil, and they were marbled with rich veins of gleaming gold and silver. Drobac stuffed his pockets, leaving nothing behind.