Death is only the beginning; afterward comes the hard part.
There are three ways to live with the knowledge of death – to keep its terror at bay. The first is suppression: forget it's coming; act as if it isn't. That's what most of us do most of the time. The second is the opposite: memento mori. Remember death. Keep it constantly in mind, for surely life can have no greater savor than when a man believes today is his last. The third is acceptance. A man who accepts death – really accepts it – fears nothing and hence achieves a transcendent equanimity in the face of all loss. All three of these strategies have something in common. They're lies. Terror, at least, would be honest.
But there is another way, a fourth way. This is the inadmissible option, the path no man can speak of, not even to himself, not even in the quiet of his own inward conversation. This way requires no forgetting, no lying, no groveling at the altar of the inevitable. All it takes is instinct.
At the stroke of noon on September 16, 1920, the bells of Trinity Church began to boom, and as if motivated by a single spring, doors flew open up and down Wall Street, releasing clerks and message boys, secretaries and stenographers, for their precious hour of lunch. They poured into the streets, streaming around cars, lining up at favorite vendors, filling in an instant the busy intersection of Wall, Nassau, and Broad, an intersection known in the financial world as the Corner – just that, the Corner. There stood the United States Treasury, with its Greek temple facade, guarded by a regal bronze George Washington.
There stood the white-columned New York Stock Exchange. There, J. P. Morgan's domed fortress of a bank.
In front of that bank, an old bay mare pawed at the cobblestones, hitched to an overloaded, burlap-covered cart – pilotless and blocking traffic. Horns sounded angrily behind it. A stout cab driver exited his vehicle, arms upraised in righteous appeal. Attempting to berate the cartman, who wasn't there, the taxi driver was surprised by an odd, muffled noise coming from inside the wagon. He put his ear to the burlap and heard an unmistakable sound: ticking.
The church bells struck twelve. With the final, sonorous note still echoing, a curious taxi driver drew back one corner of moth-eaten burlap and saw what lay beneath. At that moment, among the jostling thousands, four people knew that death was pregnant in Wall Street: the cab driver; a redheaded woman close by him; the missing pilot of the horse-drawn wagon; and Stratham Younger, who, one hundred fifty feet away, pulled to their knees a police detective and a French girl.
The taxi driver whispered, 'Lord have mercy.'
Wall Street exploded.
Two women, once upon a time the best of friends, meeting again after years apart, will cry out in disbelief, embrace, protest, and immediately take up the missing pieces of their lives, painting them in for one another with all the tint and vividness they can. Two men, under the same conditions, have nothing to say at all.
At eleven that morning, one hour before the explosion, Younger and Jimmy Littlemore shook hands in Madison Square, two miles north of Wall Street. The day was unseasonably fine, the sky a crystal blue. Younger took out a cigarette.
'Been a while, Doc,' said Littlemore.
Younger struck, lit, nodded.
Both men were in their thirties, but of different physical types. Littlemore, a detective with the New York Police Department, was the kind of man who mixed easily into his surroundings. His height was average, his weight average, the color of his hair average; even his features were average, a composite of American openness and good health. Younger, by contrast, was arresting. He was tall; he moved well; his skin was a little weathered; he had the kind of imperfections in a handsome face that women like. In short, the doctor's appearance was more demanding than the detective's, but less amiable.
'How's the job?' asked Younger.
'Job's good,' said Littlemore, a toothpick wagging between his lips.
'Family?'
'Family's good.'
Another difference between them was visible as well. Younger had fought in the war; Littlemore had not. Younger, walking away from his medical practice in Boston and his scientific research at Harvard, had enlisted immediately after war was declared in 1917. Littlemore would have too – if he hadn't had a wife and so many children to provide for.
'That's good,' said Younger.
'So are you going to tell me,' asked Littlemore, 'or do I have to pry it out of you with a crowbar?'
Younger smoked. 'Crowbar.'
'You call me after all this time, tell me you got something to tell me, and now you're not going to tell me?'
'This is where they had the big victory parade, isn't it?' asked Younger, looking around at Madison Square Park, with its greenery, monuments, and ornamental fountain. 'What happened to the arch?'
'Tore it down.'
'Why were men so willing to die?'
'Who was?' asked Littlemore.
'It doesn't make sense. From an evolutionary point of view.' Younger looked back at Littlemore. 'I'm not the one who needs to talk to you. Its Colette.'
'The girl you brought back from France?' said Littlemore.
'She should be here any minute. If she's not lost.'
'What's she look like?'
Younger thought about it: 'Pretty.' A moment later, he added, 'Here she is.'
A double-decker bus had pulled up nearby on Fifth Avenue. Littlemore turned to look; the toothpick nearly fell out of his mouth. A girl in a slim trench coat was coming down the outdoor spiral staircase. The two men met her as she stepped off.
Colette Rousseau kissed Younger once on either cheek and extended a slender arm to Littlemore. She had green eyes, graceful movements, and long dark hair.
'Glad to meet you, Miss,' said the detective, recovering gamely.
She eyed him. 'So you're Jimmy,' she replied, taking him in. 'The best and bravest man Stratham has ever known.'
Littlemore blinked. 'He said that?'
'I also told her your jokes aren't funny,' added Younger.
Colette turned to Younger: 'You should have come to the radium clinic. They've cured a sarcoma. And a rhinoscleroma. How can a little hospital in America have two whole grams of radium when there isn't one in all of France?'
'I didn't know rhinos had an aroma,' said Littlemore.
'Shall we go to lunch?' asked Younger.
Where Colette alighted from the bus, a monumental triple arch had only a few months earlier spanned the entirety of Fifth Avenue. In March of 1919, vast throngs cheered as homecoming soldiers paraded beneath the triumphal Roman arch, erected to celebrate the nation's victory in the Great War. Ribbons swirled, balloons flew, cannons saluted, and – because Prohibition had not yet arrived – corks popped.
But the soldiers who received this hero's welcome woke the next morning to discover a city with no jobs for them. Wartime boom had succumbed to postwar collapse. The churning factories boarded up their windows. Stores closed. Buying and selling ground to a halt. Families were put out on the streets with nowhere to go.
The Victory Arch was supposed to have been solid marble. Such extravagance having become unaffordable, it had been built of wood and plaster instead. When the weather came, the paint peeled, and the arch began to crumble. It was demolished before winter was out – about the same time the country went dry.
The colossal, dazzlingly white and vanished arch lent a tremor of ghostliness to Madison Square. Colette felt it. She even turned to see if someone might be watching her. But she turned the wrong way. She didn't look across Fifth Avenue, where, beyond the speeding cars and rattling omnibuses, a pair of eyes was in fact fixed upon her.
These belonged to a female figure, solitary, still, her cheeks gaunt and pallid, so skeletal in stature that, to judge by appearance, she couldn't have threatened a child. A kerchief hid most of her dry red hair, and a worn-out dress from the previous century hung to her ankles. It was impossible to tell her age: she might have been an innocent fourteen or a bony fifty-five. There was, however, a peculiarity about her eyes. The irises, of the palest blue, were flecked with brownish- yellow impurities like corpses floating in a tranquil sea.
Among the vehicles blocking this woman's way across Fifth Avenue was an approaching delivery truck, drawn by a horse. She cast her composed gaze on it. The trotting animal saw her out of the corner of an eye. It balked and reared. The truck driver shouted; vehicles swerved, tires screeched. There were no collisions, but a clear path opened up through the traffic. She crossed Fifth Avenue unmolested.
Littlemore led them to a street cart next to the subway steps, proposing that they have 'dogs' for lunch, which required the men to explain to an appalled French girl the ingredients of that recent culinary sensation, the hot dog. 'You'll like it, Miss, I promise,' said Littlemore.
'I will?' she replied dubiously.
Reaching the near side of Fifth Avenue, the kerchiefed woman placed a blue-veined hand on her abdomen. This was evidently a sign or command. Not far away, the park's flowing fountain ceased to spray, and as the last jets of water fell to the basin, another redheaded woman came into view, so like the first as almost to be a reflection, but less pale, less skeletal, her hair flowing unhindered. She too put a hand on her abdomen. In her other hand was a pair of scissors with strong, curving blades. She set off toward Colette.
'Ketchup, Miss?' asked Littlemore. 'Most take mustard, but I say ketchup. There you go.'
Colette accepted the hot dog awkwardly. 'All right, I'll try.'
Using both hands, she took a bite. The two men watched. So did the two red-haired woman, approaching from different directions. And so did a third redheaded figure next to a flagpole near Broadway, who wore, in addition to a kerchief over her head, a gray wool scarf wrapped more than once around her neck.
'But it's good!' said Colette. 'What did you put on yours?'
'Sauerkraut, Miss,' replied Littlemore. 'It's kind of a sour, kraut-y-'
'She knows what sauerkraut is,' said Younger.
'You want some?' asked Littlemore.
'Yes, please.'
The woman under the flagpole licked her lips. Hurrying New Yorkers passed on either side, taking no notice of her – or of her scarf, which the weather didn't justify, and which seemed to bulge out strangely from her throat. She raised a hand to her mouth; emaciated fingertips touched parted lips. She began walking toward the French girl.
'How about downtown?' said Littlemore. 'Would you like to see the Brooklyn Bridge, Miss?'
'Very much,' said Colette.
'Follow me,' said the detective, throwing the vendor two bits for a tip and walking to the top of the subway stairs. He checked his pockets: 'Shoot – we need another nickel.'
The street vendor, overhearing the detective, began to rummage through his change box when he caught sight of three strangely similar figures approaching his cart. The first two had joined together, fingers touching as they walked. The third advanced by herself from the opposite direction, holding her thick wool scarf to her throat. The vendor's long fork slipped from his hand and disappeared into a pot of simmering water. He stopped looking for nickels.
'I have one,' said Younger.
'Let's go,' replied Littlemore. He trotted down the stairs. Colette and Younger followed. They were lucky: a downtown train was entering the station; they just made it. Halfway out of the station, the train lurched to a halt. Its doors creaked ajar, snapped shut, then jerked open again. Evidently some latecomers had induced the conductor to let them on.
In the narrow arteries of lower Manhattan – they had emerged at City Hall – Younger, Colette, and Littlemore were swept up in the capillary crush of humanity. Younger inhaled deeply. He loved the city's teemingness, its purposiveness, its belligerence. He was a confident man; he always had been. By American standards, Younger was very wellborn: a Schermerhorn on his mother's side, a close cousin to the Fishes of New York and, through his father, the Cabots of Boston. This exalted genealogy, a matter of indifference to him now, had disgusted him as a youth. The sense of superiority his class enjoyed struck him as so patently undeserved that he'd resolved to do the opposite of everything expected of him – until the night his father died, when necessity descended, the world became real, and the whole issue of social class ceased to be of interest.
But those days were long past, scoured away by years of unstinting work, accomplishment, and war, and on this New York morning, Younger experienced a feeling almost of invulnerability. This was, however, he reflected, probably only the knowledge that no snipers lay hidden with your head in their sights, no shells were screaming through the air to relieve you of your legs. Unless perhaps it was the opposite: that the pulse of violence was so atmospheric in New York that a man who had fought in the war could breathe here, could be.it home, could flex muscles still pricked by the feral after-charge of uninhibited killing – without making himself a misfit or a monster.
'Shall I tell him?' he asked Colette. To their right rose up incomprehensibly tall skyscrapers. To their left, the Brooklyn Bridge soared over the Hudson.
'No, I will,' said Colette. 'I'm sorry to take so much of your time, Jimmy. I should have told you already.'
'I got all the time in the world, Miss,' said Littlemore.
'Well, it's probably nothing, but last night a girl came to our hotel looking for me. We were out, so she left a note. Here it is.' Colette produced a crumpled scrap of paper from her purse. The paper bore a hand-written message, hastily scrawled:
Please I need to see you. They know you're right. I'll come back tomorrow morning at seven-thirty. Please can you help me.
Amelia
'She never came back,' added Colette.
'You know this Amelia?' asked Littlemore, turning the note over, but finding nothing on its opposite side.
'No.'
'"They know you're right"?' said Littlemore. 'About what?'
'I can't imagine,' said Colette.
'There's something else,' said Younger.
'Yes, it's what she put inside the note that worries us,' said Colette, fishing through her purse. She handed the detective a wad of white cotton.
Littlemore pulled the threads apart. Buried within the cotton ball was a tooth – a small, shiny human molar.
A fusillade of obscenities interrupted them. The cause was a parade on Liberty Street, which had halted traffic. All of the marchers were black. The men wore their Sunday best – a tattered best, their sleeves too short – although it was midweek. Skinny children tripped barefoot among their parents. Most were singing; their hymnal rose above the bystanders' taunts and motorists' ire.
'Hold your horses,' said a uniformed officer, barely more than a boy, to one fulminating driver.
Littlemore, excusing himself, approached the officer. 'What are you doing here, Boyle?'
'Captain Hamilton sent us, sir,' said Boyle, 'because of the nigger parade.'
'Who's patrolling the Exchange?' asked Littlemore.
'Nobody. We're all up here. Shall I break up this march, sir? Looks like there's going to be trouble.'
'Let me think,' said Littlemore, scratching his head. 'What would you do on St. Paddy's Day if some blacks were causing trouble? Break up the parade?'
'I'd break up the blacks, sir. Break 'em up good.'
'That's a boy. You do the same here.'
'Yes, sir. All right, you lot,' Officer Boyle yelled to the marchers in front of him, pulling out his nightstick, 'get off the streets, all of you.'
'Boyle!' said Littlemore.
'Sir?'
'Not the blacks.'
'But you said-'
'You break up the troublemakers, not the marchers. Let cars through every two minutes. These people have a right to parade just like anybody else.'
'Yes sir.'
Littlemore returned to Younger and Colette. 'Okay, the tooth is a little strange,' he said. 'Why would someone leave you a tooth?'
'I have no idea.'
They continued downtown. Littlemore held the tooth up in the sunlight, rotated it. 'Clean. Good condition. Why?' He looked at the slip of paper again. 'The note doesn't have your name on it, Miss. Maybe it wasn't meant for you.'
'The clerk said the girl asked for Miss Colette Rousseau,' replied Younger.
'Could be somebody with a similar last name,' suggested Littlemore. 'The Commodore's a big hotel. Any dentists there?'
'In the hotel?' said Colette.
'How did you know we were at the Commodore?' asked Younger.
'Hotel matches. You lit your cigarette with them.'
'Those awful matches,' replied Colette. 'Luc is sure to be playing with them right now. Luc is my little brother. He's ten. Stratham gives him matches as toys.'
'The boy took apart hand grenades in the war,' Younger said to Colette. 'He'll be fine.'
'My oldest is ten – Jimmy Junior, we call him,' said Littlemore. 'Are your parents here too?'
'No, we're by ourselves,' she answered. 'We lost our family in the war.'
They were entering the Financial District, with its granite facades and dizzying towers. Curbside traders in three-piece suits auctioned securities outside in the September sun.
'I'm sorry, Miss,' said Littlemore. 'About your family.'
'It's nothing special,' she said. 'Many families were lost. My brother and I were lucky to survive.'
Littlemore glanced at Younger, who felt the glance but didn't acknowledge it. Younger knew what Littlemore was wondering – how losing your family could be nothing special – but Littlemore hadn't seen the war. They walked on in silence, each pursuing his or her own reflections, as a result of which none of them heard the creature coming up from behind. Even Colette was unaware until she felt the hot breath on her neck. She recoiled and cried out in alarm.
It was a horse, an old bay mare, snorting hard from the weight of a dilapidated, overloaded wooden cart she towed behind her. Colette, relieved and contrite, reached out and crumpled one of the horse's ears. The mare flapped her nostrils appreciatively. Her driver hissed, stinging the horse's flank with a crop. Colette yanked her hand away. The burlap- covered wagon clacked past them on the cobblestones of Nassau Street.
'May I ask you a question?' asked Littlemore.
'Of course,' said Colette.
'Who in New York knows where you're staying?'
'No one.'
'What about the old lady you two visited this morning? The one with all the cats, who likes to hug people?'
'Mrs Meloney?' said Colette. 'No, I didn't tell her which hotel-'
'How could you possibly have known that?' interrupted Younger, adding to Colette: 'I never told him about Mrs Meloney.'
They were approaching the intersection of Nassau, Broad, and Wall Streets – the financial center of New York City, arguably of the world.
'Kind of obvious, actually,' said Littlemore. 'You both have cat fur on your shoes, and in your case, Doc, on your pant cuffs. Different kinds of cat fur. So right away I know you both went some place this morning with a lot of cats. But the Miss also has two long, gray hairs on her shoulder – human hair. So I'm figuring the cats belonged to an old lady, and you two paid a call on her this morning, and the lady must be the hugging kind, because that's how-'
'All right, all right,' said Younger.
In front of the Morgan Bank, the horse-drawn wagon came to a halt. The bells of Trinity Church began to boom, and the streets began to fill with thousands of office workers released from confinement for their precious hour of lunch.
'Anyway,' Littlemore resumed, 'I'd say the strong odds are that Amelia was looking for somebody else, and the clerk mixed it up.'
Horns began honking angrily behind the parked horse cart, the pilot of which had disappeared. On the steps of the Treasury, a redheaded woman stood alone, head wrapped in a kerchief, surveying the crowd with a keen but composed gaze.
'Sounds like she might be in some trouble though,' Littlemore went on. 'Mind if I keep the tooth?'
'Please,' said Colette.
Littlemore dropped the cotton wad into his breast pocket. On Wall Street, behind the horse-drawn wagon, a stout cab driver exited his vehicle, arms upraised in righteous appeal.
'Amazing,' said Younger, 'how nothing's changed here. Europe returned to the Dark Ages, but in America time went on holiday.'
The bells of Trinity Church continued to peal. A hundred and fifty feet in front of Younger, the cab driver heard an odd noise coming from the burlap-covered wagon, and a cold light came to the eyes of the redheaded woman on the steps of the Treasury. She had seen Colette; she descended the stairs. People unconsciously made way for her.
'I'd say the opposite,' replied Littlemore. 'Everything's different. The whole city's on edge.'
'Why?' asked Colette.
Younger no longer heard them. He was suddenly in France, not New York, trying to save the life of a one-armed soldier in a trench filled knee-high with freezing water, as the piercing, rising, fatal cry of incoming shells filled the air.
'You know,' said Littlemore, 'no jobs, everybody's broke, people getting evicted, strikes, riots – then they throw in Prohibition.'
Younger looked at Colette and Littlemore; they didn't hear the shriek of artillery. No one heard it.
'Prohibition,' repeated Littlemore. 'That's got to be the worst thing anybody ever did to this country.'
In front of the Morgan Bank, a curious taxi driver drew back one corner of moth-eaten burlap. The redheaded woman, who had just strode past him, stopped, puzzled. The pupils of her pale blue irises dilated as she looked back at the cab driver, who whispered, 'Lord have mercy.'
'Down,' said Younger as he pulled an uncomprehending Littlemore and Colette to their knees.
Wall Street exploded.
Younger, a man who had witnessed the bombardment at Chateau-Thierry, had never heard a detonation like it. It was literally deafening: immediately after the concussion, there was no sound in the world.
A blue-black cloud of iron and smoke, ominous and pulsing, filled the plaza. Nothing else was visible. There was no way to know what had happened to the human beings within.
From this heavy cloud burst an automobile – a taxicab. Not, however, on the street. The vehicle was airborne.
Younger, from his knees, saw the cab shoot from the cloud of smoke like a shell from a howitzer – and freeze, impossibly, in midair. For a single instant, in perfect silence, the vehicle was suspended twenty feet above the earth, immobile. Then its flight resumed, but slowly now, impossibly slowly, as if the explosion had drained not only sound from the world but speed as well. Everything Younger saw, he saw moving at a fraction of its true velocity. Overhead, the taxi tumbled end over end, gently, silently, aimed directly at Younger, Littlemore, and Colette, growing increasingly huge as it came.
Just then Littlemore and Colette were blown onto their backs by the concussive pressure from the blast. Only Younger, between them, who knew the burst of air pressure was coming and had braced himself for it, remained upright, watching the devastation unfold and the tumbling taxi descend upon them. Somewhere, as if from a distance, he heard Littlemore's voice yelling at him to get down, but Younger only cocked his head as the vehicle passed no more than a few inches above him. Behind him the taxi – without haste or sound – made a gentle landfall, skidding, flipping, embracing a metal lamppost, and bursting into flame.
Next, shrapnel. Iron fragments tore slowly through the air, leaving turbulent currents visible behind them, as if underwater. Younger saw the metal projectiles, red hot, softly destroying push carts, rippling human bodies with infinite patience. Knowing such things cannot be seen by the human eye, he saw them all.
The dark smoke cloud in the plaza was rising now, the color of thunder. It rose and rose, a hundred feet high, blooming and mushrooming as it ascended, blocking the sun. Fires burned inside it and at its edges.
Beneath the smoke, the street reappeared. Engulfed in darkness, though it was noon. And snowing. How snowing? The month, Younger asked himself, what month again?
Not snow: glass. Every window in every building was shattering up to twenty-five stories above, precipitating a snow shower of glass, in tiny bits and jagged shards. Falling softly on overturned cars. On little bundles of clay and flame, which had been men and women seconds before. On people still standing, whose clothing or hair was on fire, and on others, hundreds of others, struggling to get away, colliding, bleeding. Mouths open. Trying to scream, but mute. And barely moving: in the dream-like decelerated world that Younger saw, human motion was excruciating, as if shoes were glued to molten pavement.
All at once, the dense burning cloud overhead blew apart like an enormous firework. Dust and debris still occluded the air, but the glass storm ended. Sound and movement returned to the world.
As they got to their feet, Littlemore spat a broken toothpick out of his mouth, surveying the chaos. 'Can you help me, Doc?'
Younger nodded. He turned to Colette, a question in his eyes. She nodded as well. To Littlemore, Younger said, 'Let's go.'
The three thrust themselves into the stupefied crowd.
At the heart of the carnage, bodies lay everywhere, this way and that, without order or logic. Gritty dust and bits of smoldering paper wafted everywhere. People were streaming and stumbling out from the buildings, coughing, badly burned. From every direction came screams, cries for help and a strange hissing – super-heated metal beginning to cool.
'Jesus mother of Mary,' said Littlemore.
Younger crouched beside what looked like a young woman kneeling in prayer; a pair of scissors lay beside her. Younger tried to speak with her but failed. Colette cried out: the woman had no head.
Littlemore battled farther into the crowd, searching for something. Younger and Colette followed. Suddenly they came upon an open space, a vacant circle of pavement so hot that no one entered it. At their feet was a crater-like depression, fifteen feet in diameter, blackened, shiny, smoking, without crack or fissure. Part of a horse's torn-off cloven hoof was visible, its red-glowing shoe fused between two stones.
Doctor and detective looked at one another. Colette gripped Younger's arm. A pair of wild eyes stared up at her from the pavement: it was the severed head of the decapitated woman, lying in a pool not of blood but of red hair.
Far too many people were now packed into the plaza. Thousands were trying to flee, but thousands more were converging on Wall Street to see what had happened. Rumors of another explosion momentarily gripped a corner of the crowd on Nassau Street, causing a panic that trampled dead and wounded alike.
Littlemore climbed onto an overturned motorcar at the corner of Wall and Broad. This gave him a good four or five feet above the crowd surrounding the vehicle. He called out, asking for attention. He said the words police and captain over and over. The strength and clarity of his voice surprised Younger, but it was to no avail.
Littlemore fired his gun above his head. By the fifth shot, he had the crowd's attention. To Younger's eyes, the people looked more frightened than anything else. 'Listen to me,' shouted Littlemore after identifying himself once again, his voice reassuring in the midst of havoc. 'It's all over now. Do you hear me? It's all over. There's nothing to be afraid of. If you or someone you're with needs a doctor, stay put. I've got a doctor with me. We'll get you taken care of. Now, I want all the policemen here to come forward.'
There was no response.
Under his breath, Littlemore berated Captain Hamilton for ordering his officers on parade duty. 'All right,' he said out loud, 'what about soldiers? Any veterans here?'
'I served, Captain,' a youngster piped out.
'Good lad,' said Littlemore. 'Anybody else? If you served in the war, step forward.'
On all sides of Littlemore, the crowd rippled as men came forward.
'Give 'em room – step back if you didn't serve,' shouted Littlemore, atop his car. Then he added quietly, 'Well, I'll be.'
More than four hundred veterans were mustering to attention.
Littlemore called out to Younger: 'Could you use some men, Doc?'
'Twenty,' returned Younger. 'Thirty if you can spare them.'
Littlemore, commanding his companies, quickly restored order. He cleared the plaza and secured the perimeter, forming a wall of men with instructions to let people out but no gawkers in. Within minutes fire trucks and wagons from the Water Department began to arrive. Littlemore cleared a path for them. Flames were shooting out of windows fourteen stories overhead.
Next came the ambulances and police divisions – fifteen hundred officers in all. Littlemore stationed men at the entrances of every building. From an alleyway next to the Treasury Building, too narrow for the fire trucks, dark smoke poured out, together with the smell of burning wood and something fouler. Littlemore fought his way in, past a blown-out wrought-iron gate, ignoring the shouts of the firemen, looking for survivors. He didn't find any. Instead, in the thick smoke, he saw a great fiery mound of crackling wood. Everything metal pulsed scarlet: the iron gate, ripped from its hinges; a manhole cover; and the copper badge pinned to a corpse lying among the burning timber.
The corpse was a man's. Its right side was utterly unharmed. Its left was charred black, skinless, eyeless, smoldering.
Littlemore looked at the half-man's half-face. The one good eye and half a mouth were peaceful; they reminded him unaccountably of himself. The man's glowing badge indicated that he had been a Treasury officer. Something glinted and steamed in his incinerated hand: it was an ingot of gold, clutched by blackened and smoking fingers.
Younger used his squadron to take charge of the casualties, dead and alive. The walls of the Morgan Bank became his morgue. Younger had to tell the ex-soldiers not to pile the dead in a shapeless heap, but to line them up in even rows, dozen after dozen.
With supplies from a local pharmacy, Colette threw together a temporary dressing station and surgery inside Trinity Church. Shirtsleeves rolled, Younger did what he could, assisted both by Colette and a volunteer Red Cross nurse. He cleaned and stitched; set a bone or two; extracted metal – from one man's thigh, another's stomach.
'Look,' Colette said to Younger at one point, while helping him operate on a man whose bleeding the nurse had not been able to stop. She was referring to an indistinct motion beneath Younger's operating table. 'He's hurt.'
Younger glanced down. A bedraggled terrier, with a little gray beard, was wandering at their feet.
'Tell him to wait his turn like anybody else,' said Younger.
When Colette's silence became conspicuous, Younger looked up from his work: she was dressing the terrier's foreleg.
'What are you doing?' he asked.
Several hundred people sat or lay on the pews of Trinity Church, with blackened faces or bleeding limbs, waiting for an ambulance or medical attention. 'It will only take a minute,' said Colette.
It took five.
'There,' she said, turning the terrier loose. 'All done.'
In mid-afternoon, Littlemore sat at a long table erected in the middle of the plaza, the air still thick with dust and smoke, taking statements from eyewitnesses. Two of his uniformed officers – Stankiewicz and Roederheusen – interrupted him. 'Hey, Cap,' said the former, 'they won't let us into the Treasury.'
Littlemore had instructed his men to inspect the surrounding buildings for people too injured or too dead to get out. 'Who won't?' asked Littlemore.
'Army, sir,' answered Roederheusen, pointing to the Treasury Building, on the steps of which some two hundred armed United States infantrymen had taken up positions. Another company was advancing from the south with fixed bayonets, boots trooping rhythmically on the pavement of Wall Street.
The detective whistled. 'Where'd they come from?'
'Can they order us around, Cap?' asked Stankiewicz, demonstrating a grievance by tipping back the shiny visor of his cap and sticking his chin out.
'Stanky got in a fight, sir,' said Roederheusen.
'It wasn't my fault,' protested Stankiewicz. 'I told the colonel we had to inspect the buildings, and he says, "Step back, civilian," so I says, "Who you calling civilian – I'm NYPD," and he says, "I said step back, civilian, or I'll make you step back," and then this soldier pokes his bayonet right in my chest, so I go for my gun-'
'You did not,' said Littlemore. 'Tell me you didn't draw on a colonel in the United States army.'
'I didn't draw, Cap. I just kinda showed 'em the heater – pulled back my jacket, like you taught us to. Next thing I know, a half-dozen of them are all around me with their bayonets.'
'What happened?' asked Littlemore.
'They made Stanky get on his knees and put his hands behind his head, sir,' said Roederheusen. 'They took his gun.'
'For Pete's sake, Stanky,' said Littlemore. 'How about you, Lederhosen? They take your gun too?'
'It's Roederheusen, sir,' said Roederheusen.
'They took his too,' said Stankiewicz.
'And I didn't even do anything,' said Roederheusen.
Littlemore shook his head. He handed them a stack of blank index cards. 'I'll get your guns back later. Meantime here's what you do. We need a casualty list. I want a separate card for every person. Get names, ages, occupations, addresses, whatever you-'
'Littlemore?' shouted a man's authoritative voice from across the street. 'Come over here, Captain. I need to speak with you.'
The voice belonged to Richard Enright, Commissioner of the New York Police Department. Littlemore trotted across the street, joining a group of four older gentlemen on the sidewalk.
'Captain Littlemore, you know the Mayor, of course,' said Commissioner Enright, introducing Littlemore to John F. Hylan, Mayor of New York City. Hylan's straggly, oily hair was parted in the middle; his small eyes bespoke considerable distress but no great intellectual ability. The Commissioner presented Littlemore to the other two men as well: 'This is Mr McAdoo, who will be reporting to President Wilson in Washington, and this is Mr Lamont, of J. P. Morgan and Company. Are you sure you're all right, Lamont?'
'The window shattered right in front of us,' answered that gentleman, a diminutive well-dressed man with a nasty cut on one arm and a staggered, uncomprehending expression on his otherwise bland face. 'We might have been killed. How could this happen?'
'What did happen?' Mayor Hylan asked Littlemore.
'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.'
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.
'Any dental offices in the hotel?' Littlemore asked the manager while the latter waited for his telephone call to be answered.
'Certainly not,' said the manager. 'The lines are engaged, I'm afraid. Perhaps you'd like to take a seat?'
'I got a better idea,' said Littlemore, dangling a set of handcuffs over the counter. 'You hand over the key or I take you downtown for obstructing a police investigation. That way you can confirm my identity in person.'
The manager handed over the key.
Inside a plush elevator car, the detective and doctor ascended in silence. When the doors finally opened, Younger exited so precipitously he knocked the hat off a man who had been waiting for the car. Younger noticed the man's profuse beard and teeming mustache. But he didn't notice the peculiar way the man's dingy striped jacket tugged down at his shoulders – as if his pockets were loaded with shot.
Younger apologized, reaching for the hat on the carpet. Drobac got to it first.
'Going down,' said the elevator operator.
Whatever Younger hoped or feared to find in Colette's hotel room, he didn't find it. Instead, at the end of an endless corridor, he and Littlemore found – a hotel room. The bed was made. The cot was made. The suitcases were undisturbed. On a coffee table, sprays of burnt matchsticks fanned out in tidy semicircles: the boy's handiwork.
Only Colette's lead-lined laboratory case, lying open and empty in front of her closet, testified to a trespass. Cigarette odor hung in the stifled air.
'That's what they came for,' said Younger grimly. 'That case.'
'Nope,' said the detective, opening closets and checking behind curtains. 'They left the case.'
Younger looked at Littlemore with incredulity and vexation. He took a step toward the open laboratory box.
'Don't touch it, Doc,' the detective added, glancing into the bathroom. 'We'll want to dust it for prints. What was inside?'
'Rare elements,' said Younger. 'For a lecture she was supposed to give. The radium alone was worth ten thousand dollars.'
The detective whistled: 'Who knew?'
'Besides a professor in New Haven, I can think of only one person, and she's no kidnapper.'
Littlemore, checking under the bed, replied: 'The old lady you and Colette visited this morning?'
'That's right.'
With his magnifying glass and a tweezer, the detective began examining, on hands and knees, the carpet surrounding Colette's laboratory case. 'Wait a second. Wait a second.'
'What?' asked Younger.
Littlemore, having pried a bit of cigarette ash from the thick pile of the carpet, was rubbing it between thumb and forefinger. 'This is still warm,' he said. 'Somebody just left.'
Littlemore bolted back into the hall, heading for the elevators. Younger didn't follow. Instead he went to Colette's balcony door and stepped out into the night. Far below, in the light flooding out of the hotel's front doors, Younger saw the man he somehow knew he would see, standing by the curb in his striped suit.
Younger called out: 'You!'
No one heard. Younger was too high up, and the street noise was too great. A car skidded up next to the striped suit, its rear door opening from within. The sudden, swerving halt threw a small body – a little boys body – half out of the car. A moment later, the boy was snatched back inside by invisible hands.
'No,' said Younger. Then he called out at the top of his lungs: 'Stop that car!'
This time Drobac hesitated. He looked up, searching but not finding the source of the cry. No one else took notice. Younger shouted the same futile words again as the man climbed into the backseat, and again as the car sped down Park Avenue, its headlamps and taillamps going suddenly dark, disappearing into the night. Two drops of Younger's blood, flung from his hair as he cried out, drifted downward and broke on the sidewalk not far from where the man had stood.
By the time the echo of Younger's voice had died, Littlemore was back in the room, having heard the doctor's shouts.
'It was the man at the elevator,' said Younger.
'The guy with the hair,' replied Littlemore, 'and the bulging pockets? Are you sure?'
Younger looked at the detective. Then he slowly lifted the coffee table – the one with Luc's matches on it – off the floor and hurled it into a mirrored closet door. There was no satisfying explosion of glass. The mirror only cracked, as did the coffee table. Burnt match- sticks spun in the air, like maple seedpods spiraling down in autumn.
'Jesus, Doc,' said Littlemore.
'You saw something in his pockets,' Younger replied quietly. 'Why didn't you stop him?'
'For having something in his pockets?'
'If you had stationed a single man in front of the hotel,' said Younger, 'we could have caught him.'
'I doubt it,' said Littlemore. 'You know you're bleeding pretty good.'
'What do you mean you doubt it?'
'If I put a uniform outside the front door,' the detective explained, 'the guy doesn't use the front door. He goes out a side door. Or a back door. We would have needed six men minimum.'
'Then why didn't you bring six men?' asked Younger, advancing toward Littlemore.
'Easy, Doc.'
'Why didn't you?'
'You want to know why? Besides the fact that I had no reason to,
I couldn't have gotten six men if I had tried. I couldn't have gotten one. The force is a little busy tonight, in case you hadn't noticed. I'm not even supposed to be here.'
Instead of responding, Younger shoved Littlemore in the chest. 'Go back then.'
"What's the matter with you?' asked Littlemore.
'I'll tell you why you didn't stop him. You weren't paying any goddamned attention.'
'Me? Who waited four hours before noticing that his girlfriend had disappeared when she was supposed to be gone for half an hour?'
'Because you took her,' shouted Younger, taking a straight left jab at Littlemore's head. The detective ducked this blow, but Younger, who know how to fight, had thrown a punch designed to make Littlemore tin just that Younger followed it with a clean right, putting Littlemore on the carpet and taking a lamp down with him.
'Son of a gun,' said Littlemore from the floor, his lip bloody.
He sprang toward Younger, charging low and driving him backward all the way across the room. Younger's head snapped back against the wall. When they came to a standstill, Littlemore had his right fist raised and ready, but Younger was staring blankly over his shoulder.
'How many died today?' asked Younger. 'Thirty?'
'Thirty-six,' said Littlemore, fist still raised.
' Thirty-six,' repeated Younger contemptuously. 'And the whole city's paralyzed. I hate the dead.'
Neither man spoke. Younger sank to a sitting position on the floor. Littlemore sat down near him.
'I'm taking you to a hospital,' said Littlemore.
'Try it.'
'You know I outrank you,' said the detective.
Younger raised an eyebrow.
'Captain beats lieutenant,' added Littlemore.
A police captain doesn't outrank a doughboy in boot camp.'
'Captain beats lieutenant,' repeated Littlemore.
A silence.
'What do you mean you hate the dead?' asked Littlemore.
'Luc wrote that to me – Colette's brother. He doesn't talk. I was – what was I doing? I was reading a book he'd given me. Then he handed me a note that said, "I hate the dead."' Younger looked at the detective. 'Sorry about – about-'
'Slugging me in the jaw?'
'Blaming you,' said Younger. 'It's my fault. My fault they're in America. My fault she went off by herself.'
'We'll get them back,' said Littlemore.
Younger described what he'd witnessed from the balcony. Littlemore asked him what kind of car he had seen. Younger couldn't say. He'd been too far overhead. He couldn't even be sure of the color.
'We'll get them back,' Littlemore repeated.
'How?' asked Younger.
'Here's what we do. I go to headquarters and put out a bulletin. We'll have the whole force looking for this guy by tomorrow. You wait here in case they send a ransom note. Meantime I question the old lady you met with. What's her name?'
'Mrs William B. Meloney. Thirty-one West Twelfth.'
'Maybe she told some other people about the samples Colette brought with her.'
'It's possible,' said Younger.
'So maybe the wrong kind of person found out.' At the doorway, Littlemore added: 'Do me a favor. Patch up your head.'
Liberty, equality, fraternity – terrorist: the word comes from the French Revolution. The Reign of Terror was the name given to Robespierre's ferocious rule. Hundreds of thousands of men and women were branded 'enemies of the state,' jailed, starved, deported, tortured. Forty thousand were executed. 'Virtue and terror,' proclaimed Robespierre, were the two imperatives of the revolution, for 'terror is nothing other than justice prompt, severe, inflexible justice.' Those who supported him were called Terroristes.
A century later, another revolutionary took a similar stand. 'We cannot reject terror,' wrote a man calling himself Lenin; 'it is the one form of military action that may be absolutely essential.' His disciples became the new century's 'terrorists.'
But with a difference. In France, terror had been an instrument of the state. Now terror was directed against the state. Originally, the terrorist was a well-bred French despot, haughtily claiming the authority of law and government. Now the terrorist became a seedy, bearded, furtive murderer – a Slav, a Jew, an Italian planting his crude bomb or hiding a pistol inside his shabby coat. It was one such terrorist, a Serb, who in 1914 assassinated Archduke Hans Ferdinand of Austria, launching the Great War.
The Germans wanted war, undoubtedly, but it would never have materialized without a keenness for battle on the part of ordinary young men all across Europe. Soon enough, their readiness to die for their countries would be rewarded in a hell they had not foreseen, where sulfuric gases ate the flesh off living men crouched ankle-deep in freezing, stagnant water. But in the hot summer of 1914, European men of every class and station wanted nothing more than an opportunity to meet and mete out death on the battlefield.
Comparable feelings grew in the United States, especially when German submarines attacked American merchant ships on the high seas. Even as President Wilson steadfastly maintained neutrality, the drumbeat of war grew ever more incessant.
In the end, a German blunder forced America's hand. In January 1917, Germany telegraphed an encrypted message to the President of Mexico, proposing a joint invasion of the United States. Mexico would regain territories that America had seized from her; Germany would gain the diversion of America's forces. Great Britain intercepted the telegram, decoded it, and delivered it to Wilson. The United States at last declared war. Before long, America would be sending ten thousand men a day to the killing fields of Europe.
Dr Stratham Younger was among the first to arrive, posted as surgeon and, with the rank of lieutenant, as medical officer in a British field hospital in northwest France.
After Littlemore left the hotel room, a wartime recollection visited Younger: Colette bending over a bathtub in a blown-out building, clad in two white towels, one around her torso, the other around her hair, as the steam of hot water filled the air. But he had never seen her that way. In this memory that wasn't a memory, Colette turned toward him with fear in her eyes. She backed away as if he might attack her, asking him if he had forgotten. Forgotten what?
Younger went to the bathroom sink, forcing this pseudo-memory down, only to find in its place a grainy image of a blackboard in a fog or rainstorm, with someone drawing on it, although not with chalk. This memory too, if it was a memory, he suppressed with irritation. He was suddenly sure he was in fact forgetting something – something more immediate.
He rinsed his face. The moment the cold water struck his eyelids, it came to him.
Younger rushed out once more to the darkness of the balcony. He saw Littlemore far below, waiting for his car, just as he'd seen the man in the striped suit waiting before. This time his shouting had effect. Waving his arms, he signaled Littlemore to wait.
Younger burst through the front doors of the hotel onto Forty-second Street. Piled in his arms was an unwieldy collection of hastily gathered items: a curtain rod, stripped from a window; a metal box with dials and switches on it; a pair of long electrical wires; a roll of black tape; and an eight-inch sealed glass tube. He crouched at the sidewalk, where he deposited this load. 'I need your car,' he said to Littlemore, attaching the wires to the glass tube. 'How could I be such a fool?' 'Um – what are you doing?' said the detective. 'This is a radiation detector,' said Younger, connecting the other end of the wires to the metal box. 'Colette was going to use it at her lecture.'
'That's swell. Couple of things I could be taking care of right now, Doc.'
'Every sample in Colette's case is radioactive,' said Younger, connecting the other end of the wires to the metal box. 'Their car is leaving a trail of radioactive particles like bread crumbs. We can't see them. But this thing can – if we hurry.'
Younger flipped a switch on the box. A flash of yellow ignited in the glass tube, accompanied by an explosive blast of static from the box. Just as suddenly, the tube went dark and the box fell quiet. 'Was that supposed to happen?' asked Littlemore. 'Not exactly,' said Younger. 'Radioactivity should produce a blue current. I think.'
Younger picked up the box in one arm and extended the curtain rod out in front of him, with the glass tube taped to its end, as if it were the tip of a divining rod. Nothing happened. He stepped into Park Avenue, probing along the pavement and in the air. A single blue spark flashed inside the glass. 'Got them,' he said.
Younger took a step to his right. Nothing. He took a step the other way: another single blue flash lit the tube, and then another. He followed these sparks – until he was face-to-face with Littlemore, his wand pointing directly into the detective's chest.
'Hello?' said Littlemore.
'It must be because you got so close to the open case,' said Younger. He returned to the street, cars veering to avoid him. He was looking for a signal much stronger than the individual sparks that led him to Littlemore. In the middle of the avenue, a miniature blue firework burst within the glass tube. As he advanced down the avenue, the firework became a steady blue current, and audible clicks emanated from the metal box.
'Well, I'll be,' replied Littlemore for the second time that day.
Moments later they were driving down Park Avenue at full throttle, Littlemore behind the wheel, Younger standing on the running board. Younger held the curtain rod out in front of him, the glass tube at its tip sparkling electric blue in the warm Manhattan night.
In Times Square, the current went dead. 'They turned,' said Younger.
He jumped from the running board, carrying his apparatus, while Littlemore wheeled the car around. Younger searched for a signal. To the north, he found nothing. But when he went to the downtown side of the square, a blue current flickered back to life inside the glass. Soon they were heading south on Broadway. For more than two miles they hurtled down the avenue, the device flashing and clicking steadily.
'Why?' Younger shouted over the car's din.
Littlemore interpreted: 'Why kidnap her?'
Younger nodded.
'They take girls for two reasons,' shouted the detective. 'Money is one.'
What Colette would have done, had she been on her own, she didn't know. When the car finally came to a halt and they pulled her out into an unlit street, the two stupid underlings, Miljan and Zelko, fought with each other constantly. She might have made a run for it – if she had been on her own. But they had her brother too, so any thought of wrenching loose and running was out of the question.
Miljan – the small one, who smelled of onion – was apparently competing with Zelko to be keeper of their female prisoner. Each tried to yank her away from the other, coming to the point of blows until Drobac forced Miljan to take Luc, while Zelko got Colette.
In the warrens of the Lower East Side, Younger had to get down at almost every intersection, hunting for radioactivity through a series of twists and turns in the labyrinthine byways. A few minutes later, on a dark street, the chatter from Younger's device grew so loud he had to dampen it.
'We're close,' said Younger.
Luc was thrown to the floor of an apartment in a decrepit old house, where peeling paint revealed a green mold. Rats scurried behind the walls. Miljan tied the boy to a rusting radiator.
Colette stood in the middle of the room. The beefy, no-necked Zelko had her by the hair, waiting for his orders. Drobac went to a table and wound the hand crank on a phonograph. The cylinder began to turn, and Al Jolson's playful voice, backed by a swing orchestra, came scratchily out of the amplification horn, singing that he had his captain working for him now. Drobac nodded with the beat.
'Is good,' he said. 'American music is good.' He turned the volume as high as it would go.
Suddenly the clicking in Younger's device abated. 'Back,' he said. 'We passed them.'
A few moments later, Younger identified the locus of the radiation: a black sedan, parked in the middle of the block. No one was inside it. The street was lined mostly with warehouses, dark and lifeless. Only one structure showed signs of habitation: an old brick two-story, flat- roofed house. It might once have been a decent family residence, but now it hulked in disrepair. A dingy light shone in several large but dirty windows. Music came from somewhere within.
Younger picked up a faint signal leading from the sedan to the front door of this house. Neither man said a word. Littlemore produced what looked like a ruler from his jacket, along with a small metal pick.
Drobac drew from his pockets a series of objects that Colette knew well: brass flasks, stoppered tubes with colored powders, coruscating pieces of ore. He deposited them on the table next to the blaring phonograph. Then he issued commands to the other two in their unintelligible language, went to the door, and held it open.
Miljan, in his checked suit, smiled nastily. Evidently Drobac had ordered Zelko out of the room. The latter cursed and spat on the floor; despite these indications of complaint, he picked up a chair, carried it out into the corridor, and sat down heavily upon it, his burly arms crossed. Drobac left the room as well and shut the door behind him.
Colette felt a warm, rank breath on her neck.
Gun drawn, Littlemore preceded Younger into a tiled, grimy vestibule. The first floor was devoid of life. Swing music played overhead. Younger picked up a signal going upstairs. Littlemore drew a line across his neck; Younger turned off his clicking device. The stairs were filthy but solid, making little noise as they ascended.
On the second floor, a bare electric bulb dangled from the ceiling, its filaments visible. The big band music romped unnaturally. Human sounds filtered out of the rooms – kitchen clatter, the flush of a toilet. Littlemore, advancing down the hallway, crouched low, peered around a corner, and saw Zelko on a chair, arms folded, at the far end of the corridor. The detective immediately withdrew and led Younger back to the stairwell.
'A lookout,' Littlemore whispered. 'On a chair. End of the hall.'
'Can you take him?' Younger whispered back.
'Sure, I can take him, but then what? The guys inside the room hear the noise. Colette and the kid become hostages – or dead.'
A girl's voice cried out, muffled by the walls. Only one word was intelligible – 'No.' It was a female voice, with a French accent. Then something substantial, perhaps a body, fell to the floor.
Littlemore had to restrain Younger: 'You'll get her shot,' whispered the detective. 'Listen to me. I need a distraction. Noise out in the street. Throw something at their window. Break it. Something loud enough to pull that guy from the chair back inside the room.'
'I'll give you a distraction,' said Younger. But instead of returning down to the street, he went up, mounting a narrow stairway that led to the roof.
Colette had been forced to her knees, half on and half off a thin, soiled mattress. She lay cheek-first against the hard wood floor, hands tied at the small of her back. Miljan, in his oversized checked suit, was behind her, gun in hand.
She smelled his reeking breath and felt one of his hands groping at her waist. Blindly, she kicked out and made satisfying contact with the man's knee. Miljan stifled a cry and hopped in pain on one leg. Rolling over, Colette kicked his other leg. He fell to his knees, and she kicked the gun right out of his hand. Surprised and furious, he chased the pistol, which clattered to the floor near Luc. Just as Miljan reached for it, Luc – still tied to a radiator pipe – kicked it away from him, so that It slid along the floor back toward Colette.
She had worked her tied wrists to the side of her body. Guided by fortune or providence, the sliding gun found its way right into her hands. She had already closed her fingers around it when Miljan stepped on her knuckles as he might have stepped on a cockroach.
She cried out. Even as Miljan ground her hands with the sole of his shoe, still she tried to get a finger onto the pistol's trigger. It was in vain. He ripped the gun away and put it to her temple.
At the top of the stairs, Younger pushed open a rickety door and emerged in the moonlight. He could make out a clothesline hung with sheets; a tipped-over table; a brick chimney at the far end. He went to the edge of the roof overlooking the street. There was no parapet, no rail. The chimney was right next to him. He was, he judged, directly above the room in which Colette and Luc were being held. He tore the curtain rod free from his radiation device, broke the glass tube, and used the jagged glass to hack down the clothesline.
Colette felt a jerk at the back of her dress, followed by a skittering sound: a button, bouncing on the wood floor. Miljan was behind her again. He tore open the top of her dress; more buttons flew loose. Miljan caressed the white skin between her shoulder blades with the muzzle of his pistol. A little clear button twirled like a spinning coin next to Luc. Whatever the boy felt, he didn't show.
Younger stood at the edge of the rooftop, his back to the open air, directly above the window he wanted. He had tied one end of the clothesline to the chimney. Tucked beneath one of his arms was the curtain rod, which, with its broken glass end, had turned into a weapon quite familiar to him: a bayonet. He gave the rope a good tug as a test; it held.
Younger took a deep breath and jumped backward and outward. For a split second he let the rope slip through his fingers. Then he gripped again, the rope went taut, and he swung toward the window. He smashed through it, feet first, in a splintering of dingy glass and brittle pine.
Littlemore, waiting inside, heard the crash and saw Zelko leap from his chair at the end of the corridor. Zelko lumbered into the room. Littlemore ran down the now-empty hall.
Younger hit the floor rolling and came to his feet, bayonet in hand, spitting paint and wood chips. What he saw surprised him: a frail old man in a nightgown, gap-toothed and gape-mouthed, wisps of gray about his head. Younger had broken into the wrong apartment.
Littlemore broke into the right one. The detective, counting on Younger's distraction, had hoped to surprise the men in the room with their backs to him, looking out the window. Instead, as he charged through the door, Miljan and Zelko were staring straight at him. It took them only a second before they opened fire, but that second was enough for Littlemore. Barreling into the room, he dropped to his knees: their shots missed high while he skidded forward on the hardwood floor.
Littlemore knew better than to try for both men, which would have had him wagging his gun back and forth, probably missing both. I le had immediately sized up Zelko as the one to worry about, and the detective sent three bullets into that man's chest, driving him backward into the fireplace.
Miljan kept shooting as Littlemore slid toward him, but he was too frantic. He pulled the trigger too quickly, failing each time to compensate for the gun's recoil. The result was that he missed repeatedly over the detective's head until Littlemore slammed into him, the two of them tumbling down over Zelkos corpse. There was no tussle: Littlemore brought his gun down on Miljans head, knocking him unconscious, and handcuffed him to an iron ring that jutted out from the fireplace.
Younger sprang into the room, pine chips embedded in his hair, fiercely brandishing his bayonet – which sadly was no longer a bayonet, but only a curtain rod, having been denuded of its glass spike at some point during his crash through the window. Colette and Luc looked up at him. The phonograph filled the room with a swing tune.
'Nice distraction, Doc,' said Littlemore, keeping his eyes off Colette, whose dress had fallen off her shoulders, and going instead to Luc to untie him.
Younger went to Colette. A little shake of her head and a tiny smile told him she was all right. He pulled her dress over her shoulders, saw the bruise above her eye, and wanted, inappropriately, to embrace her.
'Do you think you could untie me?' she asked. 'Right.'
'The other man, the one with the beard,' she added. 'Did you catch him?'
Younger and Littlemore looked at each other; then they sensed that someone else was watching them from the doorway. Littlemore moved first. He jumped to his feet, trying to turn and draw his gun in one motion, but he never had a chance. From the open door, Drobac fired a single shot, which sent Littlemore spinning, blood spattering, banging into the table, his gun sailing across the room.
Younger rose much more slowly, back to the door, hands raised to indicate that he had no firearm – although his right hand held the curtain rod. Littlemore lay on the floor, clutching a bloody left shoulder. The gramophone had gone dead when Littlemore crashed into the table. The only sound in the room now was that of a large test tube, on its side, rolling slowly along the tabletop.
Drobac barked something unintelligible at Miljan, who, still handcuffed in the fireplace, gave an answer, equally unintelligible. 'You turn round,' Drobac ordered Younger, in a thick Eastern European accent Younger couldn't identify. 'Before I kill you.'
Younger noticed Luc gesturing solemnly toward the table. The boy's eyes were fixed on the gently rolling, stoppered test tube, which was filled with a crystalline black powder and would in a moment fall off the table right at the feet of the prostrate Littlemore. That black powder was, as Luc evidently knew, uranium dioxide, a substance not only radioactive but pyrophoric, meaning it spontaneously combusts on contact with air.
'Catch that,' Younger said quietly to Littlemore.
'What?' asked the detective.
'Catch that tube.'
Littlemore looked at the table just as the glass test tube rolled off its edge. Reaching out his good right hand, he caught it in midair.
'Now feed me a nice fat one,' Younger continued in a low voice to Littlemore, 'right down Broadway.'
'Shut mouth!' ordered Drobac. 'Where are they? I said turn round. I shoot you in back.'
'All right – I'm turning around,' Younger called out. As he turned to face Drobac, very slowly, he met Littlemore's eyes and nodded. The detective understood what Younger wanted him to do: a 'fat one down Broadway' is baseball slang for a pitch easy to hit. What he didn't understand was why. Nevertheless, shrugging, Littlemore lobbed the test tube into the air a couple of feet in front of Younger. Using the curtain rod as a baseball bat, Younger swung hard and shattered the tube, shooting at Drobac a black cloud of uranium dioxide, which ignited immediately into a fireball.
Drobac was suddenly aflame from the shoulders up, a pillar of particolored fire, blue and green and yellow and crimson. Arms reaching out blindly before him, he staggered into the center of the room, dropping his pistol, clutching at his burning facial hair. Younger seized the man's gun from the floor. Littlemore scrambled across the room and retrieved his own pistol.
Not a moment later, the powder had burned itself out, like flash paper. The fire was gone, leaving only curls of smoke and a charred, striped-suited man standing stock-still in the middle of the room, patting at his face as if to confirm that he still had one. His eyes went from wild to calm to sheepish. No one moved; Younger and Littlemore kept their guns trained on Drobac. The smell of singed hair was everywhere.
Drobac tensed. Slowly he drew a long knife from his jacket.
'You've got to be kidding,' said Littlemore.
Drobac ran straight at the large window, flicking his wrist just before crashing through the very panes that Younger had meant to use as a point of entry minutes before. Littlemore didn't fire on him. Younger did, repeatedly, but his gun, the fugitive's own weapon, had jammed – its mechanism apparently fouled by the flaming uranium dioxide. Littlemore and Younger rushed to the windowsill, where in the shadows they saw a man pick himself off the pavement and run, limping, into the darkness.
'Look!' Colette called out, pointing toward the fireplace.
Miljan was staring into space, eyes wide, transfixed. Drobac, it turned out, had left his knife behind, planted in his associate's heart.
It was a long time before other policemen arrived along with an ambulance to take the bodies. Eventually Littlemore agreed to go to the hospital for his shoulder. After that, the question was where to install Colette and Luc for the night. Littlemore said they couldn't go back to the Commodore Hotel. Betty Littlemore, the detective's wife, who had rushed to the hospital upon learning that her husband had been shot – and then appeared half-annoyed because his wound was so superficial – persuaded everyone to come home to the Littlemores' apartment on Fourteenth Street.
'We'll stop by headquarters on the way,' said Littlemore. 'Statements. Paperwork. Sorry.'
Two hours later, the last police reports were signed. A squad car, empty, engine running, awaited them in the midnight darkness outside the magisterial police headquarters on Centre Street.
In two pairs they descended the steps in darkness: in front the women; behind them, Littlemore and Younger, the latter carrying Luc over his shoulder. Littlemore's jacket hung loosely over his left shoulder, which was trussed in a sling.
An officer called out to Littlemore from the doorway, asking for instructions. Younger and Littlemore turned around to face him. As a result, Luc was looking toward the street, where his sister and Betty were climbing into the police car. What he saw, no one else saw: two female forms, lit up in the glare of the squad car's headlamps. One had red hair fluttering in the midnight breeze; the other wore a kerchief. The first slowly approached the car; her feet were below the beam of light, creating the impression that she was floating. The second remained standing in the headlights; she had a scarf coiled around her neck, which she began to unwrap.
The first woman reached for the handle of Colette's door. Betty saw her, cried out, then looked in front of the car and pointed. Colette, startled by the alarm in Betty's voice, tried to lock her door, but was too late. The catch gave way; the door cracked open. At the same moment, the woman in the headlights finished unwinding her scarf and exposed what lay beneath.
Betty screamed in terror.
Littlemore called out; he and Younger ran down the steps. The red-haired women saw them coming, turned, and disappeared into the darkness. Littlemore gave chase. So did the officer who had asked Littlemore for instructions, and so did a half-dozen other officers, who came rushing from various directions at the sound of Betty's scream. They fanned out, went up and down the block, banged on doors, shined flashlights into parked cars, but found no trace of either woman.
When Littlemore returned to the squad car, Betty's hands were still covering her mouth. 'You saw it?' Betty asked Colette.
'Saw what?' said Colette.
Betty looked stricken, aghast. 'She was a monster, Jimmy.'
'Easy,' said Littlemore.
'It was – growing.'
'What was?' asked Littlemore.
'I don't know,' said Betty. 'It was alive. Like a head, like a baby's head.'
'She was carrying a baby?'
'She wasn't carrying anything!' exclaimed Betty. 'It was attached to her. Like a baby's head, but growing out of her neck.'
A silence followed.
'Let's get out of here,' said Littlemore, helping Betty into the car. He threw the keys to Younger. 'You drive, Doc.'
At two that morning, Younger and Littlemore were drinking bourbon at the detective's kitchen table, a half-empty bottle between them. Everyone else in the apartment was fast asleep.
Littlemore appeared to be counting in his head. 'When you shipped out,' he asked, 'how many kids did Betty and I have?'
Younger didn't reply.
'Whatever it was, it's three more now,' added Littlemore. 'That would make seventy-two.'
'Okay, I'm going to sum up what we've got. We got a tooth, (we got a bomb, we got a kidnapping, and we got two women outside my squad car, one of them with a spare head growing out of her neck. You're wondering how it's all connected, right?'
'Maybe.'
'Well, don't think of it like that. Never assume connections. Take things one at a time. So let me sum up what we got again, one thing at a time: a bunch of crazy stuff that doesn't make any kind of sense.' Littlemore cocked his head. 'You knew that bomb was about to go off. How'd you know that?'
Younger shook his head.
Littlemore swirled the whiskey in his glass. 'A baby can't grow out of a woman's neck, can it?'
Younger shook his head again.
'You don't say much anymore, do you?' asked Littlemore. Younger considered shaking his head, but decided against it. 'So let me get this straight,' replied Littlemore. 'You haven't asked for your professor job back. You're not doing your scientist thing. You haven't started doctoring again. What are you doing?'
'Tempting fate.'
'Not much of a job.'
'I just got back.'
'Yeah, but the war ended two years ago. Where have you been?' Several minutes went by. The men drank. 'Nobody I knows so willing to die,' said Littlemore. 'What's that?'
'This morning you said it didn't make sense that men are so willing to die.'
Younger knew Littlemore was trying to draw him out; that was all right with him. 'You should have seen France in 1918,' said Younger. He got up and lit a cigarette with one of the Littlemores' long stove matches. 'The Brits, the French – they were sick of it by then. Just wanted to survive. Couldn't believe their eyes when the Americans came. Like we'd lived our whole lives starved of the chance to die.'
'I would've been there,' said Littlemore. 'If not for Betty and the kids.'
'It's not just war either,' said Younger. 'Give people a taste of terror, and they lap it up. Why are there roller coasters on Coney Island?'
'Not so people can die,' answered Littlemore.
'So they can feel the terror of death. Rich men, with comfortable lives, kill themselves climbing mountains. Flying aircraft for sport. Do you know what happens when newspapers report that someone died on a Coney Island roller coaster? More people come out to ride the next day.'
'Well, I don't ride coasters.' Littlemore refilled their glasses. 'Why would somebody bomb a street corner? It doesn't figure.'
'Because you're thinking like a policeman. Looking for a motive.'
'Sure am,' said Littlemore.
'What if they just wanted to kill people?'
'Why?'
'Whom do you assassinate,' replied Younger, 'if you hate a whole country? In the old days, it would have been the king. Attack the King of England, you attack England itself. But a president? A presidents just a politician who will be gone in a few years anyway. With a democracy, you have to take assassination out of the palace. You have to assassinate the people.'
Littlemore thought about that. 'Why would they hate us?'
'The whole world hates us.'
'Nobody hates us. Everybody loves America.'
'Germany hates us because we beat them. England and France hate us because we saved them. Russia hates us because we're capitalist. The rest of the world hates us because we're imperialist.'
'That's not a motive,' said Littlemore. 'Say, you never asked me why I needed Colette today.'
'Why did you?'
'There's this guy, Fischer, okay? Couple a days ago, he sends a warning to a banker pal of his telling him to stay out of Wall Street after the fifteenth. Fischer works at some French outfit a few blocks from Wall. So I went there. Took Colette to translate. Now get this: the French got a letter from Fischer yesterday too, warning them to get everybody out because something was going to happen on Wall Street.'
Younger whistled: 'Who is he?'
'Question is where is he. Seems he went AWOL from the French about a month ago. Looks like he's in Canada somewhere. We'll find him: I told the press. A million people will be looking for this guy in a few hours. Know what's funny? Fischer's French boss tore his letter up and threw it away. We had to pull the pieces out of a wastepaper basket. Nobody took this guy seriously.' Littlemore corked the whiskey bottle, laid it on one side, and spun it on the table. 'They're trying to cut us out.'
'The French?'
'The Feds. They're trying to take over the investigation. Big Bill Flynn's here already. Palmer's coming up too.'
A. Mitchell Palmer was the Attorney General of the United States, William J. Flynn the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
'The whole Bureau's coming up to New York,' Littlemore went on, looking like he had a bad taste in his mouth. 'Plus Treasury guys, Secret Service guys – dozens of them. The investigation is "in the hands of the federal government": that's what Big Bill told the boys last night. Flynn. Tell you what – he's no Teddy Roosevelt. Big Bill used to be chief of detectives here a couple years back. Nobody liked him. You know, when I was a kid, all I wanted was to become a federal agent. My dad and I used to talk about how it would be. Still do. I'd work my way up in the Department, then go to DC and work for Roosevelt. Guess it's a good thing I didn't make it. With Palmer and Flynn running the show down there, and the Congress passing Prohibition, I don't know what they're doing in Washington anymore.'
'Too bad about Roosevelt,' said Younger. Unlike the detective, who said Roos-velt, Younger pronounced it Rose-a-velt, as did the Roosevelts. 'What killed T.R. – the bullet they never got out of his chest?'
'No,' said Younger. 'It was his malaria.'
'You ever meet him?' asked Littlemore.
'Once or twice,' said Younger. 'He was a cousin.'
'Everybody's your cousin.'
'Not by blood. And very distant. I'm better acquainted with his i la lighter Alice. That is, I was – briefly – acquainted with her.'
'Don't tell me.'
Younger said nothing.
'Darn it, Doc – Roosevelt's daughter?' cried Littlemore. 'And a beauty girl? Why didn't you marry her?'
'For one thing she had a husband.'
'Doc, Doc, Doc,' said Littlemore. 'T.R.'s daughter. Was this before or after you and Nora?'
'A notorious philanderer,' added Younger. 'You're no philanderer.' 'I meant Alice's husband. But thank you.' 'You're more of a womanizer.'
'Ah. A fine distinction,' said Younger. 'I'm not a womanizer. I don't sleep with them. Unless I like them. Which is rarely. You don't – stray?'
'Me?' Littlemore laughed. 'I always ask what my dad would do. He would never have done something like that, so I don't.'
'How is he – your dad?'
'Good. I still visit with him most every weekend.' Littlemore drummed his fingers on the table. 'What kind of name is Drobac anyway?' Colette had told the police that the kidnapper who escaped – the leader of the three men – had been called Drobac by his confederates. 'And why'd he ask us, "Where are they"? Where are what?'
'Why did he kill his own man?' rejoined Younger.
'That's easy – to keep him from talking.' Littlemore put his heels up on the table, and his voice changed tone. 'But you know what I really don't get?'
'What exactly I'm doing with Colette,' said Younger.
'You bring her back from France,' said Littlemore, warming to the theme, 'but you got her living in Connecticut. You go crazy when she disappears, but you act, I don't know, all proper when she's around.'
'You're wondering when I plan to propose.'
'Why'd you bring her across the Atlantic otherwise? Unless you plan to ruin her.'
'You seem anxious about my marital prospects tonight.'
'Well, are you or aren't you?' asked Littlemore.
'Planning to ruin her? Tried that already,' said Younger. He took a long drink. 'Want to hear about it?'
'Sure.'
In October 1917, Lieutenant Dr Stratham Younger was transferred to the American field hospital in Einville, not far from Nancy, where US Army troops had finally been deployed in the front lines. At that time American soldiers served under French command; Younger ended up treating more Frenchmen than Americans. Throughout the harsh winter and the following spring, attached to the First Division and later to the Second, Younger traversed the Western Front, assigned wherever the need was greatest: the Saint-Mihiel salient, Seicheprey, Chaumont-en-Vexin, Cantigny, the Bois de Belleau.
It was there, near the woods of Belleau, on the outskirts of Chateau- Thierry, that he met Colette.
Dawn was breaking. With a reddening sky came a lull in the savage bombardments of the night. Younger, on foot, emerged from the woods into an open field, dragging a wounded old French corporal to the medical compound. The compound was intact – white tents, tables, and instrument chests all in place – but not a doctor or orderly was III sight. The medical staff had obviously decamped in a hurry.
Noises came from across the field. French infantrymen had gathered at a Red Cross truck. They reminded Younger of children crowding around an ice-cream van, except for an air of male wildness about them.
With the corporal's arm draped over his shoulder, Younger crossed the field through pockets of mist clinging to the rutted soil. A young woman stood outside the truck, hemmed in by a semicircle of boisterous men. Her back to them, she leaned through a window into the cab of the truck. The men called out – in French, which Younger understood invented maladies and mock pleas for treatment. One of them, with a particularly raucous voice, begged the girl to reach inside his shirt; his heart, he said, was pounding and swelling dangerously.
The girl emerged from the cab, a brown bag in her hands. She was slim, graceful, dark-haired, about twenty years old, chin held high, eyes unnaturally green. Dressed in a plain wool skirt and light blue sweater, she was evidently not a nurse.
She spoke to the men. Younger couldn't hear what she said, but he saw her toss her bag to the loudmouthed one, who caught it, dropping his rifle in order to do so, which provoked laughter from the others. The girl spoke again. One by one the men fell silent and, abashed, began skulking away. She had no air of triumph. She looked – weary. Beautiful, distracted, and weary. As the infantrymen dispersed, only Younger was left standing, the wounded corporal resting heavily on a shoulder of his filthy uniform. The girl saw Younger, staring at her. She brushed a lock of hair from her face.
Laying the corporal on the grass – an ancient-looking fellow, with a leather face and grizzled hair, one hand clutching his stomach – Younger strode toward the girl, who drew back a step instinctively. He passed her without a glance and opened the truck's door. Inside he saw two things that surprised him. The first was a boy, no more than eight, sitting in the rear of the cabin, reading a book in the shadows. The second was a complex radiological apparatus, complete with a large glass plate, heavy curtains, and gas ampoules.
Younger turned to the girl. 'Where's your boyfriend?' he asked in French.
'What?'
'Where's the man who operates this X-ray machine?'
'I operate it,' she answered in English.
He looked her up and down: You're one of Madame Curie's girls.'
'Yes.'
'Well, get to work. Unless you want this corporal to die.'
'It's pointless,' she said. 'There's no surgeon. They're all gone.'
'Just make him ready by nightfall.' Younger went to the corporal, said a few low words in the man's ear, and disappeared into the woods the way he had come.
The moon had risen when Younger returned. He found the encampment as it had been that morning: intact but deserted. One of the tents was illuminated by electric light. The truck was parked next to it, engine on, a set of cables running from the vehicle along the ground into the tent. The girl was using the truck's motor for power.
Younger lifted the tent's flap and walked in. All was prepared. The old corporal, whose name was Dubeney, lay asleep on an operating table, face washed, hair combed. Instruments were neatly laid out. Basins of water were at hand. The girl rose from a chair. The little boy was at her feet, still reading. Without a word, she retrieved a set of radiograms and mathematical computations, which she handed to Younger.
He held up the plates to one of the bare electric bulbs. Against a background of white bones and grayish viscera, small black dots and balls stood out with remarkable clarity. When a man took shot in the gut, the greatest danger was not organ damage; it was blood poisoning. In the old days, recovering every fragment of shot was virtually hopeless, and the man was likely to die. With a good set of radiograms, properly computed, any competent surgeon could save him.
Younger washed his hands, wrists, face, and forearms. He took a long time at it, rinsing the dirt and blood from his mind as well as his skin. Meanwhile the girl applied more chloroform to Corporal Dubeney, who pushed at her hands ineffectually until slipping off again. Younger set to work, the silence broken only by his requests for instruments and, a short time after his incision was made, the occasional plank of a metal fragment dropping into a ceramic bowl.
Sweat began to form on Younger's brow.
'Wait,' said the girl in English. It was the first word she had spoken.
While he held his knife aloft, she mopped his brow, then applied the cloth to his cheeks, his jaw, his neck. Younger gazed down at her delicate but serious features. She didn't once look into his eyes.
'What was in the bag?' asked Younger.
'I beg your pardon?'
'You threw the soldiers a bag.'
'Oh. Just groceries. Cheese, mostly. They don't get enough food; they're all hungry. Like a band of mice.'
'What did you tell them?'
'That they should be killing Germans instead of bothering a French girl.'
Younger, nodding, returned to his patient. 'We say mischief.'
The girl frowned as she rinsed the soiled cloth.
'In English,' he said, 'it's a "mischief" of mice. Was it Madame Curie herself who trained you?'
'Yes,' said the girl.
'What did you think of her?'
Her reply was immediate: 'She's the noblest woman alive.'
'Ah, an admirer. Personally, I'm surprised they allow it.'
'What do you mean?'
'An adultress, after all, training young girls-'
'She did not commit adultery,' said the girl sharply. 'He did. Monsieur Langevin is the one who was married, yet he is not blamed. They do not call for him to leave the country. They do not stone his house. Now he has another mistress. Einstein has an illegitimate child – everyone knows it. Why should Madame Curie lose her chair, why should she be threatened with death, when they do the same or worse?'
'Because she is a woman,' said Younger complacently. 'Women should be pure.'
'Men should be pure.'
'And because she's a Jew. Scalpel.'
'What?'
'Scalpel. And a Pole.'
'What does that have to do with it?'
'And her worst crime of all – she won the Nobel Prize not once, hut twice.'
She frowned again. 'I can't tell when you mean what you say.'
'If you want the truth,' said Younger, 'I'm only honest with men. With women I can't be trusted.'
She looked at him.
'Women teach men to lie,' he went on. 'But we're never as good at it as they want us to be. How did you meet Madame Curie?'
After a while, the girl answered: 'I walked into the Sorbonne and told them I wanted to apply in chemistry. I was seventeen. They all laughed at me, because I had no baccalaureate. By chance – or providence, who knows? – Madame came in at that moment. She had overheard. How she terrified them. She looks so old, but very kind. I don't know why, but she took an interest in me when she heard that my father had tutored me in math and science. She asked me questions, so I was able to show her what I knew. She arranged for me to take an entrance exam.'
'Which you passed?' asked Younger.
'I received the highest marks of the year.'
'You should be in class then, not taking X-rays of wounded soldiers.'
'I did to classes, for two years. But then I found out what Madame Was doing for the soldiers. These trucks, they were her idea. She was the first to see how many lives could be saved if we had radioscopes in the field. Everyone said it was impossible, so she designed a unit that could work inside a truck. The government, because they are so stupid, refused to pay, so Madame raised all the money herself. Then the army said it could not spare any men to operate the trucks, no Madame trained girls to do it. Then the government announced that women could not be permitted to drive, so Madame operated the first one herself, daring the government to stop her. She learned to drive; she changed tires; she took the X-rays. When they saw she was saving lives, they finally relented. Now there are over a hundred fifty of us – and our only problem is with the men.'
'The men?'
'Some of them become very – aggressive – in the presence of a woman.'
'They're at war.'
'That's no excuse. We're not the same as the filthy Germans.'
Younger looked at the girl from the corner of his eye. A hardness had come to her face; he had seen a glimmer of it before, when she was speaking to the soldiers, but now it was impenetrable. He went on with his laborious work.
After a long while, she spoke again: 'He is very sweet, this corporal. How did he come to be in your care?'
'Not by my doing,' replied Younger. 'He got lost in the night. Crossed to our line by mistake. Threw himself on me, the poor blighter.'
'Don't listen to him, Mademoiselle,' murmured Corporal Dubeney.
'What – are you awake?' said Younger. 'Nurse, the chloroform.'
'He came into no-man's-land and pulled me out,' said Dubeney. 'In the thick of it.'
'Hallucination,' said Younger.
'He sleeps at the front,' said Dubeney.
'Where's the blasted chloroform?' asked Younger.
'No need, no need, I can't feel a thing,' said Dubeney.
Younger made a sound of annoyance through closed lips. No one spoke.
'I could hardly let my best experiment go to waste,' said Younger. 'Look at his right knee.'
The girl, curious, asked Corporal Dubeney if he minded. When he.' shook his head, she rolled up one of his trouser legs and saw a nasty; wound. 'This needs antiseptic,' she said.
'I've put antiseptic on it,' said Younger. 'Every day. Now look at the other knee.'
When the girl got Dubeney's other pant leg over his knee, she let out a gasp. This knee too was wounded, but there was a seething movement on it. 'What are they?' she asked.
'Maggots. What else do you observe?' asked Younger.
'The wound is clean,' she said.
'Identical wounds, inflicted at the same time on the same man by the same causes. Yet one has healed, while the other has festered. And the wound that has healed has been treated only with maggots. It's not my idea. Men in the field have been using them for years. And this old buzzard, knowing how important his knees are to science, goes and gets himself shot in the stomach. No sense of duty whatever.'
Younger noticed that the little boy had silently taken up a position beside the girl, eyeing raptly Corporal Dubeney's maggoty knee.
'My brother,' she said to Younger. 'His name is Luc.'
The boy had dirty blond hair, quite unlike his sister's, unkempt, and for a boy quite a lot of it, down to his shoulders. His skin was much less white than hers – or perhaps simply much dirtier – but his brown ryes shared a similar severity, equally intelligent but more watchful than the girl's, less distracted. Younger had the feeling the boy saw everything. 'And how old are you, young man?' he asked.
The boy neither looked at Younger nor answered.
'Luc, you are very poorly mannered,' said the girl. 'He doesn't like to speak. So you are the one.'
'I beg your pardon,' said Younger.
'The men have been telling stories of an American doctor who refuses to leave the front lines. Who treats wounded men on the field.'
'I'm not treating them. I'm conducting experiments on them.'
'And who fights, they say.'
'Rubbish.'
'Like the devil,' said Dubeney.
The boy looked up at Younger with interest.
'Can't feel a thing, eh?' said Younger to Dubeney, repositioning his knife and prompting a howl from the old corporal.
Hours later, under the stars, they repacked the girl's truck. She was surprisingly strong for her size. An explosion shook the earth gently beneath them, its firestorm erupting far away, deep in the woods. 'You're not afraid?' asked Younger.
'Of the war?'
'Of being alone with a stranger.'
'No,' she said.
'You're trusting.'
'I never trust men,' she answered. 'That's why I'm not afraid of them.'
'Sound policy,' said Younger. He looked up at the twinkling canopy above. 'I saw something today I'll never forget. An American marine sergeant was ordering his platoon out of a trench. They were outgunned, outmanned, but the sergeant decided to attack. His marines were too afraid to come out. The sergeant said to them – well, it involves a term that shouldn't be used in polite company. Shall I say it?'
'Are you joking?' asked Colette.
'The sergeant yelled, "Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?" His men came out. It was a bloodbath.'
'Did he live, the sergeant?'
'Yes, he did.'
A sound like a banshee's scream was followed by another explosion. This time the blast was closer. The ground shook, and they could see fires burning perhaps a thousand yards away.
'You should get out,' said Younger. 'Tonight. If the Germans break through, they'll be here before morning. They may do worse to a French girl than your soldiers did.'
She said nothing. Younger reshouldered his gear and set off for the woods again – in the direction of the explosions.
It was July, 1918, before he saw her again. Germany had commenced a series of ferocious offensives in France, determined to seize victory before the United States could fully mobilize. Hundreds of thousands of seasoned German troops were pouring in from the east, where Russia's new Bolshevik rulers had surrendered, releasing the Kaiser's armies from the Eastern Front. By the end of May, Germany had pressed the French forces back to the Marne, only fifty miles from Paris.
But there, at Belleau, at Vaux, at Chateau-Thierry, Americans blocked the German advance, charging to their deaths with an abandon unseen in Allied troops since 1914. United States newspapers trumpeted the Yankee victories, wildly exaggerating their importance. The question was whether the new line would hold.
For forty days, the two sides threw wave after wave of firepower and young men into brutal, indecisive combat. Slowly the fighting ground to a halt, reduced to the exchange of blistering shell attacks from well-fortified entrenchments. The pause was ominous. The Germans appeared to be reinforcing again, massing yet more divisions.
In this quiet before the storm, a produce market of dubious legality had sprung up in the village of Crézancy, overlooked by the huge, glinting American guns planted high up on the Moulin Ruiné. Bent and wizened French farmers sold whatever goods they had managed to keep back from government requisitioners.
It was Luc whom Younger saw first. He recognized at once the little boy buying cheese and milk, wordlessly shaking his head at some exorbitant demand and consenting to pay only after receiving an acceptable price. Younger greeted the boy warmly. In a burst of inspiration, he pulled from his pocket a sealed jar crawling with maggots. Luc's eyes opened wide.
'They're larvae,' said Younger in French. 'In a short time, each of these fellows will wrap himself up in a cocoon. A week or two later, the cocoon will break open, and out will crawl – do you know what will crawl out?'
The boy shook his head.
'A fly. A common, bluebottle blowfly.'
This information appeared to boost the boy's already high estimation of the seething mass inside the jar.
'Would you like to know why they're such good friends to wounded men? Because they eat only dead tissue. Living cells have no appeal to them. Here, take the jar. I have more. Very few young men have pet maggots.'
The boy accepted the present and drew something from his own pocket, offering it in exchange.
Younger raised an eyebrow. 'A grenade.'
Luc nodded.
'It's not live, is it?' asked Younger.
Setting down the grubs, Luc engaged the grenade's pin, unscrewed its cap, withdrew the spring, removed the pin, unhinged the nozzle, and held it up in the air.
Younger leaned down, smelled the dry powder within. 'I see. Excellent. Live indeed.'
The boy reversed the process, deftly reassembling the grenade, and offered it again to Younger, who accepted the gift quite carefully. He was thanking Luc when a girl's voice spoke sternly behind him.
'Did you let him touch that?' she asked.
Younger turned to see the boy's sister.
'You want him to think grenades are toys?' she went on angrily. 'So the next time he sees one on the ground, he'll pick it up and play with it?'
Younger glanced at Luc, who plainly didn't want his sister to know he'd been carrying a live grenade around. 'Quite right, Mademoiselle,' said Younger, pocketing the weapon. 'I don't know what I was thinking. Luc, a grenade is not a toy, do you hear me? Only someone completely familiar with how they work should ever touch one.'
'I'm sorry,' she said to Younger, mollified. 'He likes to play with guns and ammunition. He's forever scaring me.'
'I heard you went back to Paris,' Younger answered.
She frowned. Luc tugged her skirt. The girl excused herself, bent toward him, and the boy made hand gestures between their faces – some kind of sign language. Her answer to him was strict: 'Absolutely not. What's the matter with you?' To Younger she explained, 'Now he wants to go to the front with you.'
'I'm afraid that's impossible, given your age, young man,' said Younger. 'Although the way this war is going, you may yet have your chance. But perhaps you'd like to see an American base?'
The boy nodded.
Younger spoke to the girl: 'It would be a great service to us if you came to our base with your truck. We have an X-ray machine, but compared to yours it's primitive. There are many men I could help.'
'All right,' she said. 'I can come this afternoon. But I still – I don't know your name.'
For the next several days, Colette's truck pulled into Younger's field hospital every evening, rumbling up the dirt road in a cloud of dust. With Younger seated beside her, they would set off to various encampments as far away as Lucy-le-Bocage. Dozens of men, wounded but reinserted into their platoons, had not regained their health as they should have. Younger wanted to reexamine them all. Usually the X-rays uncovered nothing, but every now and then, as Younger suspected, the ghostly skeletons showed a minuscule fragment of shell previously missed.
The first time this happened, Colette cried out in triumph. Younger smiled. As they worked at close quarters in the back of the truck, her fingers would frequently touch his when exchanging an instrument. Or her body would brush against him. On every such occasion, she would quickly separate herself, yet Younger had the notion that the contact might have been deliberate.
With the wounded or sickly, Colette was kind, but not particularly gentle or compassionate. With the healthy, she was flint. In part, Younger could see, this brusqueness was self-protection; she was too pretty to interact with soldiers on other terms. But there was more to it. Younger wondered what it would take to soften her.
One evening when Colette was busy with her computations, Younger took advantage of the lull to work by flashlight on some equations of his own. He became conscious after a while that Luc was standing by his side.
The boy handed Younger a book. It was in English, published the previous year. The author was one Toynbee; the title was The German Terror in France. The short volume had been well-thumbed; was it possible the boy could read English?
Younger began paging through the book. It was then that the boy handed him a note saying he hated the dead – the first time Luc had ever communicated to him in this fashion. After that the boy sat down against a tire of the truck, playing with an old toy.
'Where did you get that?' asked Colette suddenly, seeing the book in Younger's hands.
'Your brother gave it to me.'
'Oh.' Her body relaxed. 'He wants me to tell you what happened to our family.'
'You needn't.'
She looked at Luc, who kept playing his game. 'You can read about it if you want,' she said, indicating a place in the book where a page had been dog-eared and a passage underlined. Younger read it:
Sommeilles was completely burnt on Sept. 6th. 'When the incendiarism started,' states the Mayor, 'M. and Mme Adnot (the latter about sixty years old), Mme X (thirty-five or thirty-six years old), whose husband is with the colours, and Mme X's jour children all took refuge in the Adnots' cellars. They were there assassinated under atrocious circumstances. The two women were violated. When the children shrieked, one of them had its head cut off, and two others one arm, while everyone in the cellar was massacred. The children were respectively eleven, five, four and one and a half years old.'
'Great God,' said Younger. 'I pray this wasn't your family.'
'No, but that was our village – Sommeilles,' she said. 'We moved there when I was little – Mother, Father, Grandmother, and I. Luc was born there. When the war started, all our young men went off to the army. The village was defenseless. The night the Germans came, Luc and I were sent to the carpenter's, because he had a hidden basement. That's the reason we lived. The Germans killed everyone, but they never found us. All night long we heard gunshots and screaming. The next day, they were gone. Our house was burned, but still standing. Mother and Father were dead on the floor. Father had put up a heroic light, you could see that. Grandmother was still alive, but not for long. Mother was naked. There was a lot of blood.'
Luc had stopped his game while his sister spoke. When it was clear that she had finished, the boy started playing again.
'Everyone assumes you have to be sad,' said Colette, 'for the rest of your life.'
With the Great War came great disease – unheard-of illness on an unprecedented scale.
The last was the worst: the flu of 1918-19, spreading with the continent-crossing armies, hiding in the warm but broken lungs of homeward-bound soldiers, ultimately killing millions in every corner of the earth. Before the Spanish flu, there had been the agonies of phosgene and mustard gas, which could burn away a man's eyes and his flesh down to the bone. Before the poison gas, there had been the repulsive incapacitations of fungi and parasites attacking men's feet, gangrenes propagating in undrained, rat-infested trenches. But before all this, there was shell shock.
The initial reports of the strange condition were baffling. Seemingly unhurt men presented a congeries of contradictory symptoms: rapidity of breath and inability to breathe, silence and raving, excessive motion and catatonia, refusal to let go their weapons and refusal to touch their weapons. But always nightmares – in case after case, night terrors that woke and alarmed their comrades-in-arms.
Then came symptoms more peculiar still. Deafness, muteness, and blindness; paralyzed fists and legs. All without apparent organic injury.
The French had a name for these men: simulateurs. The British too: malingerers. In fact the earliest treatment prescribed by the English was the firing squad, cowardice being an offense punishable by death in the British army. German doctors, by contrast, used electricity. The avowed theory behind the Germans' electrocution therapy was not that it cured, but that at a sufficiently high voltage it made returning to the front a preferable alternative. The German doctors had, however, overlooked a third option, of which quite a few of their patients took advantage: suicide.
Yet even these compelling disincentives failed to stem the tide. The numbers of afflicted men rose to staggering proportions. Eighty thousand soldiers in Great Britain would eventually be diagnosed with the mysterious ailment. Many of these were officers of high character and, from the British viewpoint, of unimpeachable blood and breeding. As a result, the malingering thesis came finally to be doubted.
The first doctors to take the condition seriously announced that exploding missiles were to blame. The concussive detonations set off by the mighty shells of modern warfare were said to produce micro-hemorrhaging in cerebral blood vessels, causing a neurological paralysis or shock in the brain. Thus was coined the term 'shell shock.'
The name stuck, but not the diagnosis behind it. Too many shell- shocked men had lived through no bombardment at all. It soon became apparent that psychology was more important to their condition than physiology. It became equally apparent that only one psychiatrist on the planet had advanced a theory of mental illness that could explain their symptoms: Sigmund Freud.
Gradually but in growing numbers, physicians the world over – men who had previously regarded psychoanalysis with the deepest distaste and suspicion – began to acknowledge that the Freudian concept of the unconscious alone made sense of shell shock and its treatment. 'Fate would seem to have presented us,' wrote a British physician in 1917, 'with an unexampled opportunity to test the truth of Freud's theory of the unconscious.' The test proved positive.
English, Australian, French, and German doctors reported stunning success treating shell shock victims with psychotherapy. In Britain, military authorities called on Dr Ernest Jones, one of Freud's earliest disciples – who was still barred from hospital practice because of his penchant for discussing improprieties with twelve-year-old girls – to treat what was coming to be called 'war neurosis.' Germany sent a delegation to an international psychoanalytic congress, begging for assistance in dealing with overcrowded shell-shock wards. Freud himself – so long calumniated and ostracized – was asked by the Austrian government to lead an investigation concerning the proper treatment of shell shock. By 1918, there may have been only one man alive who both accepted the truth of psychoanalysis and yet felt that Freudian theory could not explain war neurosis. That man was Sigmund Freud.
'He should be in school,' Colette said of her brother a few days later. She was behind the wheel of her truck, guiding it over badly rutted roads. She had no qualms about discussing Luc in the boy's hearing. 'But he is too – uncooperative. The teachers in Paris thought he was deaf. They also thought he couldn't talk. But he can. I know it.'
In the back of the truck, Luc was playing with his favorite toy again an old fishing reel – mouthing unintelligible sounds as he did so. 'How long has he been like this?' asked Younger.
'There was smoke everywhere after they burned Sommeilles. It got into the carpenter's cellar, but Luc wouldn't come out. That whole day he lay there. Then he caught cold, and that night he started coughing badly I thought I might lose him too. He got better, but he's been this way ever since.'
'Does he ever have trouble breathing – when he runs, for example?'
'Never,' said Colette. 'Everyone says he must have had a pneumonia, but I think it's something else. Something psychological. A "neurosis," perhaps. Have you ever heard of Dr Freud of Vienna?'
'Left at that signpost,' said Younger.
'He's a psychologist, very famous. Everyone says he is the only one to understand war neuroses. And he treats children.'
'Dr Freud of Vienna,' said Younger. 'He has a peculiar theory of what causes neurosis.'
'You've read his work? I couldn't find anything in French.'
'I've read him, and I know him. Personally.'
'But that's wonderful!' cried Colette. 'When the war is over, I am going to write to him. We have no money, but I was hoping he might agree to see Luc. Will you help me?'
'No.'
'You won't? Why not?'
'I don't believe in Freud's psychology,' he said. 'As a matter of fact, I don't believe in psychology at all. Shrapnel, bacteria, sulfur – get them out of a man's system, and you stand a fair chance of making him better. But "neurosis"? Neurosis means "no-diagnosis." How do you know Luc doesn't have a problem in his larynx?'
'I know he can talk. I know it. He just won't.'
'Well, if you're right, then he's shy. I was shy at his age.'
'He's not shy,' said Colette. 'It's as if he is – how to say it? – refusing the world.'
'Perfectly rational, given what he has seen of the world. Pull up over there,'
Colette did so, bringing the truck to a grinding halt. 'Dr Freud's patients get better,' she replied. 'Everyone says so.'
'That doesn't prove his theories are valid.'
'What does it matter, if his patients get better?' she asked.
'In that case, why not give the boy snake oil?'
'I would if it made him better. I would do anything to make him better.'
Younger opened his door. 'There's nothing wrong with your brother's mind,' he said. 'He just needs this – this bloody war to end.'
On July 13, Younger was kept busy overnight at the front, working on some badly wounded men; he wasn't able to return to base until late the next evening. Despite the hour, he commandeered a transport wagon and drove it to the French position where Colette could usually be found. When he got there, she was laundering clothes in the glare of her truck's headlamps.
She ran to him: they stood face-to-face, but didn't touch. 'Where were you?' she asked. 'At the front?'
At a certain point, men in wartime either stop thinking about death or become paralyzed by it. Younger had stopped thinking about it. 'At the moment I'm absent without leave,' he replied. 'Court-martialable offense.'
'Not really?'
'It's all right. My orderly knows where I am. Couldn't let Bastille Day go uncelebrated.' From the rear of his wagon, he pulled out a bottle of dessert wine, two glasses, a tin of foie gras, a blue cheese, a jar of strawberry preserves, fresh butter, and an assortment of English biscuits. 'Not exactly revolutionary,' he observed, 'but the best I could do.'
'Where did you get all this?' she said in wonder.
'Will you allow me, Mademoiselle?'
'With pleasure.'
She laid a blanket on the grass and arranged the articles he had brought. The night was warm. He threw his leather jacket to the ground, put his cap and pistol belt on top of it, and began corkscrewing the wine – but stopped when blood drizzled down his fingers onto the bottle. 'Do you sew by any chance?' he asked.
She lifted his sleeve and gasped at the deep laceration in his forearm. 'Wait here,' she said. When she came back a moment later with suturing thread and a disinfectant alcohol, she added, 'I don't have any anaesthetic.'
'For this?' he replied.
She poured the clear alcohol onto his wound, where it hissed and effervesced, ran a needle through one piece of his bubbling, bleeding skin and then through another, pulling the thread tight thereafter. 'How can you bear it?' she asked.
'I don't feel it,' he said.
'Of course you do,' she replied, continuing to suture.
'I'm indifferent to it.' 'A man who doesn't feel pain can feel no pleasure.'
'I'm indifferent to pleasure too.'
'That's not what the nurses say.'
'I beg your pardon?'
'How long since you've slept?' she asked.
'There's something about you I don't follow, Miss Rousseau. Specifically, your leaving Paris to live in a truck. And don't tell me it was your duty to France.'
'Why not?' she asked, piercing the last lip of open skin. 'Hold still.'
'Because women don't act out of duty to country. There's always a man in it somewhere.'
'You're unforgivable.' She cut the thread, tied it off. 'Done.'
He flexed his hand, nodded, opened the wine, poured her a glass, and offered a toast to womankind. She returned it with a toast to France. They settled down to their meal; she served him. 'You were following a boy, obviously,' Younger resumed. 'He was called to the front, and this was the only way you could go with him. The only question is whether you lost him or he lost you.'
'I wasn't following a boy.'
'My apologies – a man.'
'Not a man either.'
'A girl?'
She threw a cracker at him.
'Sorry, but it doesn't add up,' he said. 'You left the Sorbonne, which must have been the most important thing in your life. You know they won't reenroll you after the war. There will be too many men whose education was interrupted.'
'Yes.' She swept crumbs from the blanket, barely betraying her deep disappointment: 'Even Madame warned me she wouldn't be able to get me back in.'
'Then why did you leave?' asked Younger.
'I couldn't stand the charity any longer.'
He was unable to read the expression in her eyes.
'There are people,' she went on, 'willing to house those of us who have lost our families, willing to feed us. But charity comes at a price. Out here we have a roof over our heads, and I don't have to ask: anyone for bread.'
'What was the price?' asked Younger.
'Dependence.'
'We're all dependent when young. On family, if no one else.'
'To be dependent on your family is a joy,' she said. 'To be dependent on someone else is – different.'
Again she wore her indecipherable expression, but this time Younger deciphered it.
'So,' he said. 'You weren't lying, but I was still right.'
'What do you mean?'
'You weren't following a man when you left Paris. You were escaping one. A man who wanted a return on his charitable investments.'
She looked at him over the rim of her glass.
'You had a – an intimate relationship with him,' said Younger. 'No one can blame you.'
'You are very curious about my relationships.'
'Any girl would have done the same in your place.'
'Maybe an American girl would have. I didn't. You will believe me when I tell you who it was: Monsieur Langevin.'
Paul Langevin was the great French physicist notoriously coupled with Marie Curie in newspaper reports all over the world several years earlier.
'I should have known,' declared Younger. 'You said his name to once before, with more venom than any word I've heard you speak except "German." What did the rascal do?'
'He tried to undress me in the laboratory.'
'Scoundrel. Where should he have done it?'
'You think it's funny? This is the man Madame loved. The man she lost everything for. And he makes love to me almost under her nose.'
'At least he has good taste.'
'I think you are trying to provoke me,' she said. 'It was dreadful. He had put Luc and me up in his house. I thought he was being kind. But then came the laboratory, and then there was more, at night, in his house.'
'By force?'
'No – when I resisted, he would let me go. But he would make me push him away. It was unbearable. If I had left his home without leaving Paris, Madame would have understood everything immediately, no matter what I told her. It would have been agony for her. And she would have hated me.'
'So you learned to drive this truck,' said Younger. 'I couldn't think of any other way. I had to leave the university. He was always finding ways to be near me. Madame would have seen how it was, sooner or later.'
Younger paused to take it in. 'You gave up the Sorbonne to spare her.'
There was a longer silence. 'There are three things I'm going to do in my life,' she said. 'The first is to make Luc better. The second is to graduate from the Sorbonne, for my father. If they don't take me back right after the war, I'll apply and apply again until they do.'
'And the third?'
She smoothed her skirt. Then she studied him. 'Of course it's different for you. You're a man – you've had many girls, and you are applauded for it.'
'Me? I'm as celibate as a Capuchin.'
She laughed mockingly.
'If you're listening to the nurses again,' said Younger, 'they're just jealous because I spend all my time with you.'
'You never married?' she asked.
'I don't believe in marriage.'
'Let me guess why not,' she said. 'Because you think it's against man's nature to be monogamous.
'Marriage looks to the future. Not practical, when you're at war.'
'I have another explanation.' She put her glass down and picked up Younger's leather jacket and military cap. 'It's because you're American.'
'Well?'
'Well, if you were a Frenchman and you got married, you could have as many affairs as you liked. You would consider it your right. But as an American, you would have to be faithful.'
'Would I?'
'American married men are much more faithful. That's what Monsieur de Tocqueville says.' She stood up, trying on the jacket and cap. 'How do I look?'
He didn't answer.
'You don't like me to wear your uniform? All right.' She took the cap from her head and set it on his, tilting it to her liking. 'It suits you better anyway.'
As she adjusted the cap on his head, bent at the waist before him, the lapels of his leather jacket, oversized on her, fell open at her neck, allowing a small silver and mother-of-pearl locket to hang down from her white blouse. He took her wrists and slowly lowered her to the grass.
'What are you doing?' she asked.
He undid the top button of her blouse.
'Don't,' she said.
He kissed her neck.
'No,' she whispered.
He stopped, looked at her. Her fiercely green eyes stared up at him, breathtakingly. The locket rose and fell with her chest. He reached for her shirt. She scrambled away like an animal. When she sat up, on her knees, his pistol was in her hands. But it was also in its holster, which she couldn't shake loose. She flapped the gun furiously, making the gun belt wag like a dog's tail. Finally she thrashed the pistol free and pointed it at him.
'Don't move,' she said.
He raised an eyebrow. 'For the record,' he said, 'I was about to rebutton you.'
'I don't need your help buttoning,' she answered, standing and making good on that claim. He began to get up as well. 'I said don't move.'
He rose, ignoring her command.
'Just get in your car and go,' she said, wriggling out of his leather jacket and throwing it at his feet. 'If you take one step toward me, I'll shoot.'
'Go ahead.' He stepped forward to pick up the jacket. 'Better to die at your hands than in a number of other ways I can think of.'
She never had a chance to reply. The motor of a military vehicle roared nearby, and an open two-seater swung its headlights directly onto them. The vehicle pulled up not ten feet away. Younger's orderly hopped out, leaving the engine running; in the glare of the headlights, Colette was still pointing a pistol at Younger.
'Sorry, sir,' said the orderly. 'Everything all right, sir?'
'What is it, Franklin?'
"They want you back, sir. On the double.'
'Why?' asked Younger.
"Two Jerry runners got captured up near Reems,' said Franklin, referring to the city of Rheims. 'They found messages on them. The attack's coming tonight, sir. The big one.'
'Forgive me, Mademoiselle, but my country requires me,' said Younger, picking up his gun belt from the grass and strapping it on.
She frowned. 'Will they send you to the front?'
He smiled. 'I've never heard such solicitude from someone aiming a deadly weapon at me.' He extended his palm for the pistol. She gave it to him.
'Sir?' asked the private anxiously.
'I'm coming, Franklin,' said Younger. He gazed ruefully at the unfinished repast. 'Maybe the boy can have the rest of this tomorrow. Not the wine.'
Al 11:45 p.m. that night, as American and French generals in Paris enjoyed a dress-uniform dinner at the former home of Baron Charles
Rothschild, the Allied forces at Chateau-Thierry opened fire with everything they had on the invisible German divisions believed to be assembling on the north bank of the Marne. For four hours the Germans took the bombardment, unmoved and unmoving. At 3.30 in the morning, their attack began.
Under cover of a furious counter-barrage – 17,500 rounds of gas shells; thirty-five tons of explosives – unseen German hands began filling the Marne with pontoon bridges. Over these bridges came the storm troopers, in wave after wave. The French 125th was instantly overpowered and fell back pell-mell. By contrast, the naive American forward companies held their ground and were soon wiped out to a man.
The German advance was steady, irresistible, overrunning everything in its path. After two miles, the Germans were funneled between the two ridges rising up on either side of the Surmelin valley. This was an eventuality for which the Americans had prepared. Defying orders from French commanders who refused to acknowledge the possibility of a wholesale Allied retreat, the American Third Division had installed heavy artillery, well fortified, on the Bois d'Aigremont on one side of the valley and the Moulin Ruine on the other, in the rear of the Allied positions. Now these guns rained down on the exposed German infantry. On and on came the German regiments through the enfilade; they died in such great number the soil went red to a depth of six inches.
Younger's dressing station was deluged with casualties. Wagons, both motorized and horse-drawn, shuttled in and out, carrying the wounded, the dead, the dying. In the dark, early hours of July 16, a German officer with shattered ribs was brought in, but Younger, who had barely slept in seventy-two hours, refused to give the officer priority over wounded Allied infantrymen.
'American savages,' the officer remarked, in German.
'Let me think,' replied Younger in the same language as he withdrew a surprisingly long stretch of barbed wire, dripping, from a man's leg. 'Who was it that torpedoed a British hospital ship two weeks ago, then killed the surviving nurses by firing on them in the water? Oh yes, that's right – the Germans.'
The officer spat blood into a handkerchief. 'You Americans are firing on fallen men out there. You are not giving us a chance to surrender. You are killing everybody.'
'Good,' said Younger.
Although the fighting went on for another twenty-four hours, it was clear by the morning of the sixteenth that the German offensive had tailed. On the eighteenth, the Allies launched a stunning counterattack, bolstered by an American fighting force now a million strong. Suddenly the Germans, who only days before had Paris in their sights, were reeling, backpedaling, desperately trying to regroup north of the Marne to avoid a complete rout.
The next dawn, Younger's medical corps was redeployed to Soissons. The encampments of Chateau-Thierry were deserted now. All that remained was rubble, a blown-out church, and the burnt wreckage of a shot-down German Friedrichshafen bomber. The only sounds were those of military transport and the booming of ordnance in the north.
As his company rolled out, Younger looked back at the dirt road on which, for several days, he and Colette had driven, with the silent hoy in the rear of the truck. Then he put the thought from his mind. If a man doesn't look ahead, neither should he look back.
He didn't see her for the remainder of the war.
By August, the Germans were beaten. They knew it; everyone knew it. Yet the war churned on. In early November, Younger was in a bombed-out barracks near Verdun, stooped over an English gunner who had been pinned under a half-ton cannon. The gunner's leg was broken; Younger was trying to reset the fibula. Despite his pain, the man kept looking at his watch.
'Begging your pardon, sir,' said the wounded man at last, 'but will you be much longer?'
'I could just chop it off,' answered Younger. 'That would be faster.'
'The Boches, sir,' whispered the man. 'They're going to shell here in ten minutes.'
'How would you know that, soldier?' asked Younger.
The wounded man glanced about to ensure they were alone. 'It's a – a sort of arrangement, sir.'
'Is it?' Younger looked at the man's eyes to see if he was raving. He did not appear to be.
'They bomb us here for forty minutes, and then we got a spot where we bomb them for forty minutes. Same time, same place, every day. That way nobody's the worse for it.'
Younger stopped what he was doing: 'Your officers consent to this?'
'They don't know,' said the soldier. 'We gunners worked it out amongst ourselves, so to speak. You won't tell, will you, sir?'
Younger considered it: 'No, I won't.'
Two days later, at 5.45 a.m., radiomen scattered throughout France picked up an all-channels signal broadcasting from the Eiffel Tower. It was a message from Marshal Foch, the supreme Allied commander, announcing the war's end. An armistice had been signed. All hostilities were to cease at eleven hundred hours, French time.
By nine that morning, the cease-fire order had been formally transmitted to Allied commanders and communicated to the men in the trenches. Paradoxically, the soldiers with the most to gain from the news were the ones made most anxious by it. Men who had learned to throw themselves month after month headlong into machine-gun fire, numb to personal risk, suddenly feared they might die in the last two hours of the war.
At 10.30, the regiment with which Younger was serving began ferociously shelling German positions across no-man's-land. In an officer's dugout, Younger shouted to a second lieutenant he knew, asking what on earth was happening.
'We're attacking,' said the second lieutenant.
'What?' yelled Younger, refusing to believe he had heard correctly. Then he saw infantrymen filing through the network of intersecting trenches, faces taut, armed and packed for assault. From the direction of the front, he heard commands shouted and machine guns firing – from the German side, meaning that Allied soldiers were already scrambling out over the top.
'This is madness,' said Younger.
The lieutenant shrugged: 'Orders,' he replied.
At 10.56, the command went out to halt the Allied attack. It took approximately two minutes for that order to disseminate from field headquarters to radio command posts to captains in the field. At 10.58, the last Allied guns fell silent. At 10.59, the rain of German artillery let up. An ethereal, fragile silence hung in the air.
Twelve seconds later, Younger heard the whistle of one last incoming shell – by the sound of it, a volley from a long-range 75-millimeter gun. The shot hit close by; the ground shook beneath him, and plugs of dirt fell from the walls. Possibly the shell had found a dugout, perhaps even an inhabited one. All waited with suspended breath. Then they heard the eruption of three Allied howitzers, presumably aimed.it the German gun that had launched the last shell.
'No,' whispered Younger.
Naturally the Germans reciprocated. Soon the air was screaming and shaking again with a full-scale bombardment. The onslaught went on uninhibited for hours. It even featured the explosion of signal flares in the sky, pointless in daytime and harmless in effect. Neither side appeared to have an objective, unless it was to expend every last piece of ammunition in its arsenal.
Eleven thousand men were killed or wounded on November 11, 1918, in fighting that took place after all their commanding officers knew the war was over.
Younger was attached after the armistice to the Allied army of occupation. The border crossing into Germany was a revelation: in enemy country, there were green fields well tended, roofs and chimneys undamaged, cattle fat with sweet grass, farmers' wives round with plentiful harvests. The Allied soldiers – the French especially, but not only they – looked on in disgust, after the ruination of France.
In Bitburg, Younger had hospital duty. He didn't like it. The work was too regular and, if he had to be frank, too safe. One lunchtime in January of the new year, Younger was taken by surprise when an orderly tapped him on the shoulder, told him he had a visitor, and gestured to the refectory doorway, where he saw Colette in her usual wool sweater and long skirt.
He wiped his mouth, went to her. They neither shook hands nor embraced. Soldiers pushed by Younger to enter the huge, raucous mess hall.
'You're alive,' she said.
'So it seems. You're causing a commotion, Miss Rousseau.'
Several of the soldiers rushing through the doorway had skidded to an abrupt stop, causing the ones behind to trip over them, with a chaotic pileup the result, all because of the improbably lovely French girl standing in the doorway.
'On your way, you men – on your way,' said Younger, helping one up from the floor and giving him a shove. 'What brings you to Bitburg?'
'I'm trying to find the German army liaison office. I recognized your company colors outside. I thought I would-' She looked down. 'I wanted to apologize for that night. It was my fault.'
'Your fault?' he said.
She frowned. 'I flirted with you.'
'Yes. My happiest recollection from the war. I know what kind of man you're looking for.'
Her frown grew severer. 'You do?'
'One you can trust,' said Younger. 'You trusted me, and I failed you. I believe I may regret it for the rest of my life. Come on – I'll take you to the liaison office.'
'No. It's all right.'
'Let me,' said Younger. 'They'll treat you better if you're with an American.'
The exterior of the hospital was silent and gray, as were the streets of Bitburg, as was its sky, which seemed perpetually to announce a snowfall that never came. He led her to a squat brick building where a small staff of Germans operated a kind of lost-and-found – not for objects, but for soldiers. A queue of at least a hundred civilians stretched from its front door down the street. Colette, seeing the line, told Younger he should go back. Then someone at the door called out and waved them to the front. The line was for civilians, not army officers.
At the counter, with Younger translating, Colette said she was looking for a soldier named Gruber – Hans Gruber.
The stolid, thick-set German woman behind the counter eyed the French girl without sympathy. 'Reason?' she asked.
Colette explained that she had served in a hospital for flu victims near Paris in the last months of the war. Among the dying was a German prisoner – Hans Gruber. 'He was very sad and very devout. He said his company didn't even know what had happened to him. I promised to try to return his dog tag and belongings to his parents after the war.'
'Give me the tag,' said the woman. 'It is the property of the German state.'
'I didn't bring it,' Colette replied. 'I'm sorry.'
The woman made an expression of contempt. 'Regimental information?'
Colette provided it. She was instructed to come back in seven days. 'Hut I can't,' she said. 'I have a job and – a little brother.'
The woman shrugged and called for the next in line.
'I'll come back, Miss Nightingale,' Younger said to Colette when they were outside.
The reference made no impression on her: 'No, I'll find a way,' she replied.
A sort of mush "began to fall – not snow; more like clumps of congealed rain. 'You have a new job?' he asked.
'Yes,' she said more brightly. 'It starts in March. You were right: the Sorbonne turned me down. But it doesn't matter. I'll get in next year. Anyway, God took pity on me. Madame has offered me a position as a technician at the Radium Institute. I'll learn more there than I would have even at university.'
'God works in mysterious ways.'
She looked at him: 'You don't believe?'
'Why wouldn't I believe? What an outrage – these people who hold up the deaths of a hundred thousand children from the flu and blame it on God. It's not His fault.'
'It's not.' She turned away. Her voice fell: 'They've taken Luc. To a school for recalcitrant children. He was living with me in the basement of the institute. Madame is letting me stay there until my position opens up. It's perfectly nice. There are bathrooms, and books, and hot plates I cook on. But someone reported us to the authorities.'
'Fools,' said Younger. 'What is recalcitrant supposed to mean?'
'The other children are thieves and imbeciles. It's criminal. Luc learns nothing and receives no treatment.'
'He doesn't need treatment. He needs to live.'
'How do you know?' she asked. 'Are you a psychologist?'
He didn't answer.
'You could have helped him get the best treatment in the world,' she said. 'You remember how he used to write notes sometimes? He doesn't even do that anymore. He hasn't communicated with anyone for two months. Oh, why am I telling you this? Why am I here? I hate this country. I have to go – my train is coming.'
She ran away.
He expected to see her the following week. After ten days, he went to the liaison office to find out if she had come back. She hadn't. Younger lit a cigarette and gazed up at Bitburg's perpetually gray sky.
In the spring, when his discharge orders finally came through, he took a train to Paris. At the Radium Institute, he asked for Miss Rousseau. The receptionist told him that Colette was out, but expected back shortly. He waited outside.
The streets of Paris were admirable. Always a tree in the right place. The buildings handsome and large, but never too large. The smell of clean water on pavement. He wondered whether he should move there.
Colette was halfway up the steps before she recognized him. She stopped in astonishment and broke into her most radiant smile, which as quickly disappeared. She was even thinner than she had been. Her cheeks had a pretty pointing of red, but the cause, it seemed to him, might be hunger.
'Come inside,' she said.
He shook his head. They went walking instead. 'Did you find your Hans Gruber?' he asked.
'Not yet.'
'You didn't go back to Bitburg, did you?'
'No, but I will.'
'Because you didn't have money for the train. Have you been eating?'
'I'll be fine in ten days. That's when my job starts. For now I have to save everything for Luc. They don't feed him enough in school. Do I look awful?'
'More beautiful than ever,' said Younger, 'if that's possible. I found your soldier. Hans was Austrian. He volunteered with the Germans when the war broke out. They gave me an address in Vienna. Here.'
He handed her a piece of paper. She stared at it: 'Thank you.'
'How is Luc?' he asked.
'Terrible.'
'Do they ever let him out?'
'Of course. In fact his school goes on holiday at the end of this week. How long will you be in Paris? I know he'd like to see you.'
'I'm leaving this Friday.'
'Oh,' she said. 'Do come and see the institute. We have American soldiers visiting, learning Madame's radiography techniques.'
'I know. That's why I won't go in. I've had enough of the army for a while.'
'But I could introduce you to Madame.'
'No.' They had come to a street with trolley cars rambling on it. 'Well, Miss Rousseau, I don't want to keep you.' She looked up at him: 'Why did you come?' 'I almost forgot. There was something else I meant to give you.' He handed her an envelope from his pocket. It contained a short telegram, which read:
i will accept boy with pleasure as new patient. advise
sister to call on me directly she arrives vienna.
freud
She was speechless.
'You can kill two birds with one stone,' said Younger. 'Take Luc to Freud, and pay a visit to your soldier's family.'
'But I can't. I don't speak German. Where would I stay? I can't even afford the tickets.'
'I speak German,' he replied.
'You would come?'
'Not if you're going to shoot me.'
To his surprise, she threw her arms around his neck. He had the impression she was crying.
Jimmy Littlemore unburdened the kitchen table of his feet. He stretched his good arm, poured two more whiskeys. 'I don't get you, Doc. First you practically rape her-'
'Completely false.'
'You unbuttoned her shirt. What kind of girl did you think she was?'
Younger scrutinized the autumnal color of the bourbon. 'The rules are different in war.'
'She didn't think so,' said Littlemore. 'What I like is how she knows what she's going to do with herself. She wants her sore bun, and she's going to get it.'
'I beg your pardon?'
'That school, the sore bun. Wants it for her dad. That's how I feel about making it to Washington. My dad missed his only shot with the Feds. When Teddy Roosevelt went to DC, my dad could've gone with him. He was the best cop in New York, but he had family, kids – you know. I'll probably never get the shot myself, but if I do, let me tell you, that would make him proud. So when did you find out her soldier boy wasn't dead?'
Younger's glass stopped midway to his mouth. 'How did you know that?'
'The dog tags,' said Littlemore. 'She goes to a German army office to locate a dead soldier, and she leaves the guy's tags back in France? I don't think so. I don't think she has the guy's tags. Why would that he? Because he's not dead.'
'I always said you should have been a detective.'
'She's sweet on the guy, huh? Didn't want you to know?'
Younger took a moment before answering: 'She's in love with him – her Hans. Want to know what happened in Austria?'
'I'm all ears.'
No city in the world was more altered by the Great War than Vienna.
Not physically. Vienna was never invaded during the war, nor shelled, as Paris had been. Not one stone was nicked. What the war had shattered was merely Vienna's soul and its place in the world.
In the spring of 1914, Vienna had been the sun around which revolved a galaxy of fifty million subjects speaking dozens of languages, all bound in fealty to Emperor Franz Josef and the House of Hapsburg. Vienna was rich, and its affairs mattered to the world. Five years later, it was a city of no consequence in a country of no consequence – starving, freezing, its factories shuttered, its emperor a fugitive, its empire abolished, its children deformed by years of malnutrition.
The result was a host of contradictory impressions for travelers arriving there in March of 1919. Riding their cab from the railway station – an elegant, two-horse, tandem carriage – Younger, Colette, and Luc saw under a rising sun a Vienna superficially every bit as grand as it had formerly been. The majestic Ringstrasse, that wide avenue parade of monumentality encircling the old inner city, presented the same invincible visage that it had before the war. The Ring borrowed liberally, and without nice regard for consistency, from the entire Western architectural canon. After trotting by an oversized blazing white Greek Parthenon, their carriage passed a darkly Gothic cathedral, and after that a many-winged neo-Renaissance palazzo. The first was the parliament, the second city hall, the third the world-famous university. Even the inferior buildings of the Ring would have been palaces elsewhere.
But the figures out for a morning stroll on the Ring, though fashionably dressed, did not display the same imperial bearing. Many of the men were maimed; crutches, dangling sleeves, and eye patches were ubiquitous. Even the able-bodied had a vacantness about them. Off the Ring, in smaller streets, children lined up by the hundreds for food packages. At one point Colette and Younger saw a clutch of these children break into a mad rush; the stampede was followed by angry shouting from adults, then by blows, then by trampling.
Colette wanted the cab to drop her off at Hans Gruber's address.
Younger pointed out that, because of the lateness of their train, which was supposed to have arrived the night before, they were in danger of missing their appointment with Freud.
'Can you ask the driver how far away the address is?' she replied. 'Perhaps it's close.'
It wasn't. Colette relented. After she had settled back, disappointed, their driver spoke to her in excellent French: 'Excuse me, Mademoiselle, but if I may: Does France's hatred of the Germans extend to the Viennese?'
'No,' she answered. 'We know you've suffered as much as the rest of us.'
'We do have our troubles,' agreed the driver. 'Have you noticed, sir, what is so disturbing about the dogs in Vienna?'
'I haven't seen any dogs,' replied Younger.
'That's what's so disturbing. The people are eating their dogs. And you must have heard of the sobbing sickness? People begin to sob for no explicable reason – men as well as women – and can't stop. They sob in their sleep; it goes on so long it ends in epileptic fits. When they wake, they have no memory of it. It's our nerves. We've always been nervous, we Viennese – gay but nervous.'
Colette complimented his French.
'Mademoiselle is as generous as she is charming,' replied the coachman. 'I had a Parisian governess as a boy. Here is my card. If you require a cab again, perhaps you will send for me.'
The name engraved on the card was Oktavian Ferdinand Graf Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau.
'You're a nobleman,' said Younger. The word Graf is a title of nobility in German; the von in his last name carried a similar meaning.
'A count, yes, and a most fortunate count at that. I held on to my very last carriage, and it has given me a living. A baron friend of mine sweeps floors in a restaurant. And consider my livery.'
Younger for the first time noticed the driver's once-dignified but now-threadbare uniform.
'It belonged to one of my servants. I was lucky there too: I had a man as short and round as his master. Here we are – the Hotel Bristol.'
'But this – this is much too grand,' said Colette when she saw her room. Luc's eyes fixed on a table dressed in white linen, where a silver tray was piled high with pastries along with two steaming pots – one of coffee, the other of hot chocolate. He wasn't starving like some of Vienna's children, but he wasn't too far from that condition either. His sister added, 'I've never been in a room like this in all my life.'
'And they dare to charge three English pennies for it,' replied Younger. 'Robbery.'
Less than an hour later, in a small but comfortably middle-class apartment house on Berggasse – a narrow, cobbled lane gently sloping down to the Danube canal – a maid let Younger and Colette into Sigmund Freud's empty consultation room. 'I'm so nervous,' Colette whispered.
Younger nodded. Well she might be, he thought: Colette would be both worried and excited about the prospect that Dr Freud might actually be able to help her brother; and she would be eager to make a good impression on the world-famous Viennese physician. But she, Younger reflected, was not the one who had disappointed him.
Freud's consulting room was like a bath into which civilization itself had been poured. Leather-bound volumes lined the walls, and every inch not occupied by books was filled with antiquities and miniature statuary: Greek vases intermixed with Chinese terracottas, Roman intagli with South American figurines and Egyptian bronzes. The room pulsed with a rich fume of cigar and the deep crimson of Oriental carpets, which not only lay thick on the parquet floor, but also draped the end tables and even covered a long couch.
A door opened. A dog, a miniature chow, trotted through it, yapping. The animal was followed by Freud himself, who paused in the doorway ordering the dog away from Younger's and Colette's shoes. The chow obeyed.
'So my boy,' said Sigmund Freud to Younger without introduction, 'you are no longer a psychoanalyst?'
Freud wore a suit and necktie and vest. In his left hand, half-raised, was a cigar between two fingers. He had grown older since Younger last saw him. His gray hair had thinned and receded; his short, pointed beard was now starkly white. Nevertheless, for a man of sixty-three, he remained handsome, fit and robust, with eyes exactly as Younger remembered them – both piercing and sympathetic, scowling and amused.
'Miss Rousseau,' said Younger, 'may I present to you Dr Sigmund Freud? Dr Freud, I thought you might wish to speak with Miss Rousseau before meeting her brother.'
'Delighted, Fraulein,' said Freud. He turned back to Younger: 'But you didn't answer my question.'
'I no longer practice psychology at all, sir.'
'You were a psychoanalyst?' Colette asked Younger.
'Didn't I mention it?' he replied.
'He never told you he was once my most promising follower in America?' asked Freud.
'No,' said Colette.
'Certainly,' said Freud. 'The first time we met, Younger conducted an analysis under my supervision – of the girl who became his wife.'
'Oh yes,' said Colette. 'Of course.'
Younger said nothing.
'He didn't tell you he was married?' asked Freud.
Colette colored. 'He doesn't tell me anything about himself.'
'I see. Well, he isn't married anymore, in case the subject is of interest. But he's told you what analysis consists of, surely?'
'No, not that either.'
'I'd better explain then – take a seat, please,' said Freud, glancing at Younger. Then he called out to his maid, instructed her to bring tea, and eased himself into a comfortable chair. 'You're a scientist, Miss Rousseau?'
'I'm studying to be one. A radiochemist. I'll be working in Madame Curie's institute. My post begins next week.'
'I see. Good. As a scientist, you will easily follow what I'm about to say. When a child is to be analyzed, we've found it necessary for the parent – or guardian, in your case – to be informed in advance of what we analysts do. That's why Younger has given me an opportunity to speak with you first.'
Younger and Colette had left Luc at the hotel. Paula, the Freuds' maid, came in with a tea service.
'All neuroses,' Freud went on as the maid poured tea, 'are caused by memories, typically a memory from long ago, involving a forbidden wish. The wishes from which neurotics suffer are not unique to them. We all had them in our childhood, but with neurotics, something prevents these recollections from being forgotten and disposed of in the ordinary way. They linger in the recesses of the individual's mind – so well hidden that my patients initially are not even conscious of them. The aim of analysis is to make the patient conscious of these repressed memories.'
'In order to forget them?' asked Colette.
'In order to be free of them,' replied Freud. 'But the process is seldom an easy one, because the truth can be difficult to accept. Invariably the patient – and the patient's family – will resist our interpretations, resist them quite forcefully. There can be good reason. Once the truth is out, the family may be changed unalterably.'
Colette frowned. 'The family?'
'Yes. In fact that's often how we know we've arrived at the truth: the patient's family suddenly demands that the analysis come to an end. Although occasionally there are other, stronger proofs. I'll give you an example. I have a patient – like you, French by birth – from a family of considerable rank and wealth. Her complaint is frigidity.'
Younger shifted. The carnal explicitness of psychoanalysis was chief among the reasons Younger didn't like discussing it with Colette.
'In one of her first sessions,' Freud continued, 'this patient, an attractive woman of about forty, described a dream she'd had the night before. She was in the Bois de Boulogne. A couple she knew lay down on a double bed right there in the park, on the green grass by a lake. That was all – nothing more. What would you say that dream meant, Miss Rousseau?'
'I don't know,' answered Colette. 'Do dreams have meaning?'
'Most assuredly. I informed her that she had witnessed a scene of sexual intercourse that she was not supposed to have seen – perhaps more than one – when she was a small child, probably between the ages of three and five. She replied that such a thing was impossible, because she grew up with no mother. But of course she'd had nurses. Suddenly she remembered that her first nurse had left the family abruptly when she was five. She had never known why. I said it was likely this nurse was involved in her dream. So she made inquiries back home.
'She asked everyone, including the longtime servants. They all denied anything untoward in the nurse's departure, and she reported back to me that I must be mistaken. Then she had another dream, in which this very nurse appeared, but with a horse-like face. I told her that this represented – but, Younger, perhaps you know what the second dream represented?'
'No,' answered Younger.
'No? In that case,' replied Freud, 'why don't you tell Miss Rousseau what I said it meant?'
'I'm not sure the subject matter is appropriate.'
'For me?' asked Colette sharply.
'If Miss Rousseau is going to consent to her brother's treatment,' said Freud, 'don't you think she should know what she's consenting to?'
'Very well,' said Younger. 'To begin with, Dr Freud would probably have said that the nurse's horse-like face was an example of condensation: it represented both the nurse herself and the man she slept with.'
'Good,' said Freud, looking genuinely pleased. 'And who was that man?'
'The patient's father was a horseman, I suppose?'
'No,' Freud replied, giving nothing else away
'Did she associate him with horses?'
'Not to my knowledge.'
Younger paused. 'But horses were kept on the property?'
'They had a stable,' said Freud. 'For their carriages.'
'In that case,' Younger reflected, 'I suspect you would have said that the man the nurse slept with was someone involved with those horses – but associated as well in some way with the patient's father.'
'Excellent!' cried Freud. 'I told her that her nurse was in all probability involved with their groomsman, who was in fact related to her father. She answered that she had already questioned the groomsman he was one of the servants who had told her the nurse had done nothing illicit. I said she might wish to question him again.'
'Did she?' asked Colette.
'She did indeed,' replied Freud. 'She went to the man and told him she knew all about his affair with her nurse. Whereupon he confessed everything. Their tryst was the stable. The nurse would feed my patient a syrup that made her very drowsy. They would lay her down on a bed of hay and proceed to their business. The groomsman added, by the way, that the maid was quite hot-blooded – he was afraid sometimes she might die of pleasure. The affair began when my patient was three and continued until she was five, when the lovers were discovered and the maid was dismissed.'
'But that's incredible,' cried Colette. 'Vraiment incroyable.'
'Well done, my boy,' Freud said to Younger, as if he deserved the credit, and rose to indicate that the interview was over. 'You must join us for dinner this evening, both of you. Martha, my wife, especially invites you. Bring your brother, Fraulein. It will give me a better sense of how to proceed.'
Colette said she would be honored.
'Dr Freud,' said Younger, 'might I have a word with you?'
'I was about to ask the same of you. Will you excuse us for five minutes, Miss Rousseau? Younger, come to my study.'
'And how exactly,' asked Freud, seated behind the desk in his private study, which was populated by even more antiquities, 'do you expect me to analyze a boy who can't talk?'
'But you-'
'It's like the beginning of a joke: Did you hear about the mute who went to see Sigmund Freud? Your behavior, my boy, wants analyzing.'
'My behavior?'
Freud raised the lid of a wooden box. 'Cigar?'
'Thank you.'
Freud cut the cigar with fine, delicate scissors. 'Well, you have something to say to me, and I to you. Let's start with what you want to tell me.'
Younger considered how to put it.
'Will you permit me?' asked Freud. 'You want to say, first of all, that bringing the boy to me wasn't your idea.'
Younger didn't reply.
'If it had been your idea,' said Freud, 'you would have explained psychoanalysis to Miss Rousseau, told her you'd practiced it, described its benefits, and so on. You did none of these things. The idea was therefore hers. Moreover, the reason you were reluctant to have the boy analyzed is what you expect me to say about his condition. Miss Rousseau has obviously been the boy's substitute-mother for some time. You expect me to conclude that he therefore wants to sleep with her, and you want me to keep that information from her.'
Younger was astounded. 'There's only one other man alive,' he said, 'whom I constantly ask how he knows what he knows, and he happens to be listening to this story right now.'
'You didn't say that,' said Littlemore, his badly scuffed black shoes once again crossed on top of the kitchen table. 'Don't interrupt like that. It spoils the – uh-'
'Dramatic effect?'
'Yeah. You know, this Freud guy, he should have been a detective. But you mixed things up pretty good there, Doc. You made it sound like, according to your man Freud, Luc wants to sleep with Colette. And he wants to sleep with her because she's been his mom all these years!'
Littlemore broke into a loud laugh. He stopped when he saw Younger's unchanged expression. 'He doesn't think that,' said Littlemore. Younger nodded. 'No, he doesn't,' said Littlemore.
'That's why I stopped practicing psychoanalysis,' answered Younger. 'I told Freud ten years ago I didn't believe in it. That's how he knew what I was thinking.' 'So what did you say?'
'Yes, I'd appreciate it if you didn't tell her that, Dr Freud,' answered Younger. 'She'll believe it's true.'
'Whereas you don't.'
'No, sir.'
Freud smoked his cigar, nodding.
'I'm sorry,' Younger added, 'but I can't persuade myself that Luc's difficulties have anything to do with a desire to sleep with his sister, his mother, or any member of his family. If he has a neurosis at all, it's a sort of war neurosis. Not sexual at all.'
'Not sexual – a diagnosis you base on what evidence? You remind me of the government physicians who attended our conference in Budapest. "Yes, we have to hand it to Freud. Yes, the old man was right about the unconscious after all. Yes, the war neuroses are caused by unconscious memories, just as Freud always said. But that disgusting sexual business? Thank God it has nothing to do with shell shock." In fact not one case of war neurosis has yet been analyzed all the way down to its roots. We don't know what connection it has to childhood wishes. That's why I'm so interested in Miss Rousseau's brother.'
'To see if you can find Oedipus beneath his symptoms?'
'If he's there, why not find him? But don't be so sure what I expect to find. Something else may be hiding in the boy. I've seen something new, Younger – dimly, but I've seen it. Perhaps another ghost in the cellar.'
'What is it?'
'I can't tell you, because I don't know.' Freud tamped ash from his cigar. 'But we haven't gotten to what I wanted to say to you.'
'You want me to reconsider my rejection of the Oedipus complex.'
'I want you to practice psychoanalysis again. Why are you here?'
'Miss Rousseau-'
'Wanted her brother analyzed,' interrupted Freud, 'and you're in love with her, so you said yes to please her. Obviously. Apart from that.'
'Apart from that?'
'Assuming the boy can be analyzed at all, you could have done it yourself. There was no need to travel to Austria. Indeed coming here was illogical given that Miss Rousseau plans to return to Paris shortly;
an analysis cannot be conducted in a week or two, as you well know. It follows that you had another reason for coming.'
'Which was?' asked Younger.
'You wanted to see me,' said Freud.
Younger reflected. There was a long pause before he finally answered: 'That's true.'
'Why?'
'I think to ask you something.'
Freud waited. There was a longer silence.
'I have no -' said Younger, looking for the right word, – 'no more faith.'
'The loss of religious faith,' replied Freud, 'is the beginning of maturity.'
'Not religious faith,' said Younger.
Freud waited.
'The war,' said Younger. 'Millions of men, millions upon millions of young men, killed for nothing. Meaningless slaughter. Countless more crippled and maimed.'
'Ah,' said Freud. 'Yes. Such destruction as we have lived through is very hard to fathom. Everything I believed I knew about the mind falls short in the face of it. But that's still not why you're here.'
Younger didn't reply.
'The war isn't what you want to ask me about,' added Freud.
'I don't see a point anymore,' said Younger. 'I don't see – the possibility of a point. I have thoughts, I have desires, but I no longer see any purpose.' His right fist clenched; he made it relax. 'Can one live without purpose?'
'The demand that your life have a purpose, my boy, is something you acquired from your parents, probably your father – something to be analyzed.'
'To say that,' replied Younger, 'is to concede that there is no purpose.'
'Then I can't help you.'
Another pause.
'You're not smoking,' said Freud, noticing that Younger's cigar was out and offering him a light. 'I've followed your career from afar. Brill has kept me informed. You've done well.'
'Thank you.'
'You fought?' asked Freud.
'Yes.'
'My sons too. Martin is still a prisoner, in Italy.' Freud drew on his cigar. 'I was very sorry to hear about your wife's death. A terrible thing. Do you treat women badly?'
'I beg your pardon?'
'You never remarried. You have an exaggerated idea of female innocence, to judge by your reluctance to speak about sexuality in front of Miss Rousseau. I'm wondering if you habitually mistreat women.'
'Why would I mistreat women?'
'It's a perfectly common reaction. A man who idealizes women not infrequently maintains a low opinion of them at the same time.'
'I don't have a low opinion of women. I have a high opinion of them.'
'I'm only observing. It was after your wife died that you turned away from psychology. You turned away from the mind.'
'I studied the mind,' replied Younger. 'Biologically.'
'That was how you turned away from it – probably a way of striking hack.'
'At whom?'
'At your wife. At me, I suppose. At yourself.'
Younger said nothing.
'You abandoned psychoanalysis,' Freud continued, 'and you mistreat women for the same reason: because of a sense of responsibility for your wife's death.'
'That's absurd. I wasn't responsible for her death.'
'Absurdity is an offense to logic,' said Freud, 'but in the mind logic is not master.'
Colette was no longer in the consulting room when the two men emerged from Freud's study. Younger went outside, but didn't find her on the street either. He walked down Berggasse toward the canal. He thought she might have taken a walk to see the Danube. She wasn't there. Younger stared at the water a long time.
Back at the Hotel Bristol, Younger asked Luc if his sister had returned. The boy shook his head and showed Younger a picture he had drawn.
'Very accomplished,' said Younger. The boy had drawn a tree with many limbs. On several of those branches animals perched, each of them staring at the viewer with large, hungry eyes. 'Are they dogs?'
Luc shook his head.
'Wolves?'
The boy nodded.
'You realize, little man,' said Younger, 'we don't even know if you can speak. Physically, that is.'
Luc looked interested, but disinterested, simultaneously.
'But you know if you can,' said Younger. 'I know you know. And if you can't speak, Luc, there's no reason for you to go to Dr Freud. He's not that kind of doctor.'
The boy remained still.
'But if you can,' Younger continued, 'you could get out of all this very easily. By talking. Get out of seeing the doctor. Get out of that school you're in. Make your sister very happy.'
Luc stared at Younger a long while before turning his drawing over and writing a message on the back. It was only the second time he'd done so with Younger. The page bore two words: You're wrong.
Watching the boy sit down in a corner with one of his books, Younger wondered on which point he'd been wrong. That Luc knew if he could speak? Or that his talking would make his sister happy?
Colette returned to the hotel an hour later.
'You disappeared,' said Younger.
'I went-' she began.
'To the Grubers'.'
'Yes. I walked. But the address wasn't their house,' she replied. 'It wasn't a residence at all. I couldn't find out anything. I'm not even sure what kind of place it was. A concert hall, maybe. Could you help me?'
Younger accompanied her back to the address to translate. It proved to be a music school. A secretary, kind enough to look in the school records, found that a student by the name of Hans Gruber had attended the school – or at least applied to it – in 1914. She gave them a new address, which, they learned from their cab driver, was in the Hutteldorf district, almost two hours away by horse-drawn, although the trip would be faster and cheaper by train. Colette declared that she would go by herself tomorrow.
'Don't be silly. I'll come with you,' said Younger.
That evening, Martha Freud, her sister Minna, and the Freuds' maid Paula all fawned over Luc, pronouncing him the most adorable schmächtige Kerlchen in the world. Martha apologized repeatedly for the meagerness of the dinner fare, which in fact was the opposite of meager, but was extremely simple, as if the Freuds were country farmers.
'The awful war,' said Martha.
'At least the right side won,' declared Freud.
Martha asked how her husband could say such a thing when they had lost everything.
'We didn't lose everything, my dear,' said Freud chidingly.
'Only our life's savings,' replied Martha. 'We had it all in state bonds. The safest possible investment – everyone said so. There were pictures of Emperor Franz Josef on every one.'
'And now they are worth face value,' said Freud.
'They're worth nothing!' said Martha.
'Just what I said, my dear,' answered Freud. 'But our sons are unhurt, and our daughters are happy. True, we don't have Martin home yet, but he's better off where he is. As a prisoner, he's fed every day, while Vienna is starving. My patients pay me in goat's milk and hen's eggs – which has at least kept food on our table. But our movement, Younger, is rich. We received a bequest – a million crowns – from a Hungarian patient. When the money is released, we're going to build free clinics in Berlin and Hungary. Budapest will be our new center. Your old friend Ferenczi has just been appointed professor of psychology there.'
After finishing his meal, Luc was permitted to leave the table. He sat in a corner, absorbed in one of Freud's books.
'Why don't you let the boy stay here a night or two?' Freud asked Colette. 'I can't have proper sessions with him, but if he were under my roof, I could at least observe him.'
Younger found himself inwardly favoring Freud's plan, but not for psychiatric reasons. If the boy stayed with the Freuds, that would leave the two of them – Colette and Younger – alone in the hotel.
'You could stay too, Miss Rousseau,' Freud continued. 'Our nest is empty. Anna is away visiting her sister in Berlin. You could stay in her room.'
Younger spent the night by himself.
Colette was supposed to call at the hotel after breakfast the next morning. She did call after breakfast – but by then it was also after lunch.
'Martha and Minna took Luc to an amusement park,' she said, as if that fact explained the several hours she had been unaccounted for. 'He's so powerful – Dr Freud. Those eyes. He sees everything.'
'I know where you've been,' replied Younger. 'The Hutteldorf.'
'Yes. There was a train station near the Freuds'. I didn't want to trouble you. But-' she raised her eyebrows importuningly.
'You need to go back,' said Younger.
'Could you help me just one more time?' she asked, smiling her prettiest smile. 'I found the building where I think he used to live, but I couldn't understand anyone. I don't think the Grubers live there anymore, but maybe someone can tell us where they've gone. The train is quite fast.'
'Where are his things?' Younger asked her as they rode the metropolitan rail to the Hutteldorf. Vienna's winter had evidently been long and cold: although it was nearly spring, not a tree was yet in bud.
'Things?' answered Colette.
'Your soldier's belongings. Which you were going to return to his family. Did you forget them?'
'Of course not,' she said. 'I told you – I don't think the Grubers live where we're going. Why did you hide it from me – that you were married?'
'I didn't.'
'You never told me.'
'You never asked.'
'Yes I did,' replied Colette. 'You said you didn't believe in marriage.'
'Which was true.'
She looked out the window. 'You tell me nothing. It's just like lying. It is lying.'
'Not speaking isn't lying,' he said.
'It is when it tricks someone. I'd rather you lied. At least if you lied, I'd know you cared what I thought.'
They sat in silence as the train rumbled along the banks of the brown, unstirred Danube. Younger watched her profile. He wondered why or how he saw vulnerability in her, when none showed anywhere on her face or figure. 'I do care,' he said.
'You don't.'
It was a principle with Younger not to say a word more about himself, his past, his thoughts, than he had to – at least not to women. They always asked him to; he never did. Evidently he was losing his principles. 'It was November of 1909,' he said. 'Her name was Nora. Would you like to hear about it?'
'If you don't mind telling me.'
'She was the most beautiful girl I'd ever met,' he continued, 'to that point. Totally different from you. Blonde. So fragile you thought she might break in your hands. Self-destructive too. I guess I liked that. We had a good six months. In my experience, that's not too bad – a good six months. But there were danger signs even then. I remember taking her shopping for wedding gowns. She got it into her head that the mannequin modeling dresses for us – a girl of about sixteen – was mocking her. I made the mistake of asking Nora what the girl had done. She accused me of defending her. I made the further mistake of laughing. That fight lasted two days. But things really began in earnest after the wedding, when she found some notebooks of mine. Psychoanalytic notebooks; case summaries. My women patients tended to – well – they usually began acting as if they were in love with me, which is exactly what's supposed to happen in psychoanalysis. You can ask Freud if you don't believe me.'
'Of course I believe you,' said Colette.
'The notebooks recorded what happened during each hour of analysis: what my patients said to me, my own inner reactions to them, and so forth.'
'And so forth?'
'Yes.'
'You – you liked your patients? And you said so in your notebooks?'
'One of them. Her name was Rachel.'
'Rachel. Was she pretty?'
'Her figure was like yours,' Younger replied. 'So yes, she was pretty.'
'Did she want to sleep with you?'
'She certainly did,' he said.
'You mean you did to her what you tried to do to me – and she let you.'
Younger only looked at Colette.
'I don't blame you,' she said. 'A pretty girl coming to your office every day and lying down on a couch and telling you her secrets? If I were a man, I would have found that – appealing.'
'Many analysts sleep with their patients. Freud doesn't do it. I didn't either.'
'You did with Nora,' said Colette.
'Not before I'd married her. And she wasn't my patient – not really.'
'I see. You didn't do anything with Rachel; you only said in your notebook that you were attracted to her. So you didn't understand why your wife was upset with you.'
'That's right,' said Younger.
'Well, that was very foolish of you.'
'Really? If women want their men never to have been attracted to another girl in all their lives, it's not the men who are being foolish.'
'What did you say to Nora?' asked Colette.
'I chided her for having read my notes, which were confidential. That was an error. She charged me with trying to hide my "romances" from her. She developed an elaborate theory according to which the entire notion of confidentiality in psychoanalysis was designed to allow doctors to have affairs with their female patients. A point came when not an evening would go by without some reference to my "romances." She said that I disgusted her. That I was unfeeling. That I was weak. She began to throw things. First at the walls, then at me.'
'And you were like a stone – impassive.'
'More or less.'
'That must have made her even angrier,' said Colette.
'Yes. She started to hit me. And kick me. At least she tried to.'
'What did you do?'
'Well, she was very young, and she'd been through some nightmarish events. On top of which she was very slight. I found it almost endearing when she tried to hit me. So I took it, suppressing my temper. Actually, I don't think I knew the extent to which my temper required suppression.
'One evening,' Younger went on, 'I came home to find a cheval glass of ours, an antique, a wedding present from my aunt, lying in pieces on the parlor floor. It turned out that Nora had deliberately broken it. That night she fought more furiously than ever. One of her blows landed, and I finally struck her – with the back of my hand, against her cheek. The force of it was stronger than I intended. She fell to the floor. To my astonishment, she apologized. It was the first time she'd ever apologized. She railed at her own folly, praised me for my kindness, and protested her undying love for me. She threw her arms around me and begged my forgiveness. She began to cry. I thought we had finally come to the end of it.
'Instead a pattern had begun. Our quarreling would start again, swell to its old proportions, and then we'd come to blows. Or rather, she would try to land blows until at last I struck her, at which point she would soften and beg to be forgiven. But the strangest thing of all was that I discovered that I could forestall the worst of our quarreling by – a – by cutting straight to the end of the pattern, in our intimate life.'
'I don't understand,' said Colette.
'No, and I'm not going to explain it,' said Younger. 'But it worked. For a while at least; not for long. When we were out in public – on a street, in a theater, anywhere – Nora began flying into rages, accusing me of being attracted to other women. Which I was, naturally, if they were attractive. At first I didn't deny her accusations, but in the end just to quiet her down, I told her she was imagining it – that it was all in her head. She knew I was lying, but she seemed to prefer the lie to the truth.
'Then the young wife of a rich old patient asked me to make a house call. Her husband was dying. I was there a long while. Very sad. When I got home that night, I found myself concealing it from Nora. There was nothing to conceal, but the wife was famously charming – she'd been an actress – and I knew if I told Nora, there would have been an endless night of pointless recriminations. It had all become so boring, so monotonous. So I told her a different story; she believed me. At that moment, I realized I no longer loved my wife.
'About two months later, the same woman called me again. Her husband was dead, and she was resuming her career on Broadway. She said she had a painfulness in her lower back from rehearsals. She asked me to come to her house and have a look at it. I did. After that she asked me to make house calls several times a week. I lied about it recklessly to Nora.
'One day a note from the actress came to our apartment, requesting my presence as soon as possible. Of course Nora saw the note, and of course she understood at once all the lies I'd been telling her. She accused me of the affair; I confessed it. We divorced, scandalously, having been married little more than a year – and the most comic fact was that I hadn't had an affair at all. At least it would have been comic if Nora hadn't died shortly afterward. They wired me the news in Boston. She had fallen from a subway platform into a train. They called it an accident, but I doubt it. The one thing they did discover was that she was with child when she died. Freud says I feel responsible for her death.'
'Do you?' asked Colette.
'It's worse than that. I was happy she was dead. I'm still happy about it, to this day.'
Hutteldorf Station was the end of the line. In the town center of an otherwise bucolic and thickly wooded district stood a few low apartment houses. One of these was Gruber s address, but no one by that name lived there now. Younger discovered nothing useful until he approached a matronly woman sweeping the courtyard.
'Hans Gruber?' she said. 'Who all the girls were mad about? The tall young man with the blond hair and beautiful blue eyes?'
Younger translated this description without comment. Precisely by not reacting to it, Colette acknowledged its accuracy. He thought he saw color rising to her face.
'Of course I remember,' said the woman. 'What a lazy, haughty one he was. He had a stipend – his father had died, maybe? – so he didn't have to work. Wouldn't lift a finger. Just took long walks in the woods, playing his violin any old place. And what a temper. Ordered us around when he was sober, and insulted us when he was drunk.'
'It seems you're devoting a lot of effort,' said Younger to Colette after translating these comments, 'to someone who doesn't much deserve it.'
Colette frowned and shook her head, but didn't answer.
Younger explained their errand to the charwoman and asked if any of the Grubers still lived nearby
'So he's dead,' replied the woman. 'Well, that's another one. No, the family I never knew. He came from one of those river towns in the west, near Bavaria. I don't know where. Ask at the Three Hussars near St. Stephen's. That's where he ate all his dinners. Maybe someone there will know.'
The sun had set when they arrived back in central Vienna. In the taxi Younger asked the driver if he knew a restaurant called the Three Hussars. The driver said the restaurant was closed, but would be open again Thursday.
'It's just as well,' said Colette to Younger. 'I don't want you to come with me. I've taken up too much of your time already.'
'There's a game your brother plays, Fraulein,' Freud said to Colette that evening, 'with a fishing reel and string. He makes sounds when he plays. A sort of ohh and ahh. Do you know what he's saying?'
'Just nonsense,' answered Colette. 'Does the game mean something?'
'It means, for one thing, that there's nothing wrong with his vocal cords,' said Freud.
'To play the same game over and over,' asked Colette, 'is it very bad?'
'It's interesting,' said Freud.
Treating his dog to its walk the next morning, as the early sunshine shimmered off damp cobblestones, Sigmund Freud held the hand of a little French boy. Their conversation was distinctly one-sided. Freud chatted amiably, in French, recounting to Luc tales from Greek and Egyptian mythology. The boy was absorbed, but did not respond.
In a small triangular park, they came on a crowd encircling a man convulsing on the grass. His workingman's clothes were clean, if patched and fraying. His cap, evidently thrown to the ground when the fit began, lay next to his writhing body.
'If you were out with my wife and her sister,' Freud said quietly to the boy, 'they would undoubtedly cover your eyes at this point. Shall I cover your eyes?'
Luc shook his head. He exhibited none of the horror that children typically display in the presence of illness. Some in the crowd, taking pity on an epileptic, dropped coins into the man's cap. Eventually Freud led the boy away.
Luc wore a thoughtful expression. Then he tugged at Freud's hand and looked up at him, a question having formed in his eyes.
'What is it?' asked Freud.
The boy tugged again.
'That won't do, little fellow,' said Freud. 'I can't explain anything if I don't know what's troubling you.'
Luc stared, looked away, stared up at Freud again. Then he began pulling his pockets inside out.
Freud watched him, petting his dog's ears. At last he understood: 'You want to know why I didn't give the man any money?'
Luc nodded.
'Because he didn't do it well enough,' answered Freud.
Younger, alone in Vienna's old quarter, happened the next day on an open-air market, large and well stocked. It was clear that Freud wouldn't take money for treating Luc, so Younger decided to have a delivery made to number 19 Berggasse: fresh fruits and flowers; milk, eggs, chickens, ropes of sausage; wine, chocolates, and a few boxes of tinned goods as well.
But he stayed away from the Freuds' the entire day. There were several old, obscure churches he wanted to see. And there was the fact that Colette was hiding something from him.
'By any chance, Miss Rousseau,' asked Freud that night, 'was German spoken in your family?'
Freud had seen his patients that day, finished his correspondence, added notes to the drafts of two different papers he was working on, and apparently found time in addition to interact with Luc. He was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, where Colette was helping the maid clean up.
'We spoke French of course,' she answered.
'No German at all?' asked Freud. 'When you were a child, perhaps?'
'Grandmother was Austrian – she knew German,' said Colette smiling. 'She used to play a game with us in German when we were very little. She would hide her face behind her hands and say fort, then show us her face again and say da!
'Fort and da – "gone" and "there."'
Colette washed the dishes.
'You're pensive, Fraulein,' he said.
'I'm not,' she replied, looking steadily at her work. 'I was just wishing I could speak German.'
'If what you're concealing,' answered Freud, 'is connected to your brother, Miss Rousseau, I should like to know it. Otherwise, I have no wish to intrude.'
The Three Hussars, located on a quaint, uneven lane in the oldest quarter of Vienna, came alive at eleven-thirty Thursday morning Shutters parted, windows opened, the front door was unlocked, and an aproned waiter, all black and white, came out to sweep the sidewalk. This man was approached by a very pretty French girl, who smiled shyly and was directed by him into the restaurant.
Younger, installed at a cafe down the street, watched and waited.
Ten minutes later, the girl emerged, anxiety furrowing her forehead. Younger followed her.
Every street in Vienna's old quarter leads to a single large square – the Stephansplatz – where stands the cathedral of St. Stephen, massive, dark, Gothic, and impregnable, its roof incongruously striped with red and green zigzags, its south tower as absurdly huge as the left claw of a fiddler crab, dwarfing the rest of the body.
Colette passed through the gigantic wooden doors of the cathedral. She lit a candle, dipped two fingers into a stone bowl of water, crossed herself, took a seat on a lonely pew in the cavernous hall near a column three times her width, and bowed her head. A long while later, she got up and hurried out, never seeing Younger in the shadowy recesses of one of the chapels.
She walked more than a mile, stopping several times to ask for directions, showing a piece of paper that evidently bore an address. Having crossed the Ring and then the canal, she entered a large, ungainly building. It was a police station. After perhaps half an hour, she came out again. Younger, smoking, was waiting for her next to the doorway.
'So your Hans is alive,' he said.
She froze as if a spotlight had picked her out of the darkness. 'You followed me?'
He hadn't answered when a kindly-looking, mutton-chopped police officer hurried out of the station. 'Ah, Mademoiselle, I forgot to tell you,' he said in broken French. 'Visiting hours end at two. They are very strict at the prison. If you're not there before two, you won't see your fiancé until tomorrow.'
'Thank you,' said Colette in the awkward silence that ensued.
'Not at all,' replied the officer, beaming genially. He must have taken Younger for a friend or member of the family, because he said to him, 'So touching, two young people falling in love during the war, one from either side. If a single good thing can come from all the death, maybe this will be it. 'The officer bid Colette goodbye and returned into the station.
'You should have told me,' said Younger. 'I-'
'I'd still have brought you to Vienna. I'd still have introduced you to Freud. I'd probably have paid for your honeymoon. Whatever you'd asked me, I would have given you.'
She surprised him with her answer: 'You want to kill me.'
'I want to marry you.'
She shook her head: 'I can't.'
They looked at each other. 'I'm too late,' said Younger, 'aren't I?'
Colette looked away – then nodded.
Younger dined, despite himself, at the Three Hussars that evening, a wood-beamed, low-ceilinged restaurant with uneven floors and tables barely large enough to fit the enormous schnitzels served to virtually every customer.
When the waiter was clearing his dishes, Younger placed a substantial number of bank notes on the table and told the man that he was looking for an old friend of his named Hans – Hans Gruber – who was in jail and who used to frequent the Three Hussars. The waiter cheerfully remarked that Hans's fiancé had stopped by the restaurant that very day, at lunchtime, adding for good measure that the girl was French, very good-looking and drooling with affection for him – but then Hans was always lucky with the fairer sex.
Younger drove his meat knife through the wad of bank notes, pinning them to the wood table. He stood, towering over the waiter, and his voice came out barely above a whisper: 'What's Hans in for?'
'He was in the rally,' stammered the waiter, although it wasn't clear whether he was more in fear of physical force or pecuniary loss.
'What rally?'
'The league rally. For the Anschluss – the union with Germany.'
'What league?'
'The league.'
Younger left, not because there was no more information to be had, but because he was concerned he might hurt someone if he didn't.
'So,' Freud said to Younger late that night in the splendid lobby of the Hotel Bristol. 'I have a conjecture.'
The statement took a moment to penetrate. Freud was on his feet, hands crossed behind him, coat hanging down from his shoulders, while Younger sat at a low table before an empty snifter of brandy. Freud had been there for more than a minute. Younger hadn't seen him.
'I beg your pardon,' said Younger, coming to his senses.
'My conjecture is that you've discovered what Miss Rousseau has been hiding,' said Freud.
'You knew?' asked Younger.
'Knew what?'
'That she's engaged?'
'Certainly I didn't know. Engaged? Why didn't she tell you?'
Younger shook his head.
'Of the three of you,' said Freud, 'I think I'm analyzing the one who needs it least.'
'Is there a league in Vienna,' asked Younger, 'that marches in favor of union with Germany?'
'The Anti-Semitic League.'
'They call themselves Anti-Semitic?'
'Proudly. In fact most of them are simply anti-Socialist – no more anti-Jewish than anyone else. There was a demonstration a couple of months ago. Several of them were jailed. Why?'
'One of those is Colette's fiancé.'
'I see,' said Freud. 'What are you going to do?'
'Leave Vienna. But I-'
'Yes?
'I'll still pay for her brother's treatment. If you think you can treat him.'
'I don't. I intend to tell Miss Rousseau the same thing tomorrow. The truth is I don't understand his condition; I don't understand the war neuroses at all. It would be wrong of me to pretend otherwise. I know just enough to know how much I don't know. I wish I could analyze the boy at length, but under the circumstances, that's impossible.'
Neither spoke.
'Well,' said Freud, 'I came to thank you heartily and to pass on Martha's and Minna's gratitude as well. You gave us enough to provision a small army. Will you join me walking? It's my only exercise. I have something important to tell you. You'll be pleased to hear it, I promise you.'
They strolled toward the city center, leaving the broad and modern Ringstrasse for streets that grew ever more medieval and tortuous, as if they led backward through the centuries. In a small and irregular square, old townhouses faced the back walls of heavier, administrative buildings. The square was empty, dark. 'This is the Judenplatz,' said Freud. 'It's quite historical. There's a plaque somewhere, over four hundred years old. There it is. Come, let's have a look. You see the relief? That's Christ receiving his baptism in the River Jordan. How's your Latin?'
Younger read from the plaque: '"As the waters of the Jordan cleansed the souls of the baptized, so did the flames of 1421 purge the city of the crimes of the – of the – Hebrew dogs"?'
'Yes. In 1421 Vienna tried to force its Jews to convert. A thousand or so took refuge in a synagogue, barricading the doors. For three days they went without food or water. Then the synagogue burned, Jewish accounts say that the chief rabbi himself ordered the fire, preferring death to conversion. About two or three hundred survived. These were rounded up and taken to the banks of the Danube, where they
were burned alive. Ever thrifty, the Viennese used the stones from the synagogue's foundations for the university, where, for most of my adult life, I sought to attain a professorship.'
'Great God,' said Younger. 'Don't Jews object to this plaque?'
'Would one have to be a Jew?' replied Freud. They began walking again. 'But the answer is no. Not outwardly. The Jews of Vienna strive with their every fiber to feel, to think, to be Austrian. Or German. I include myself. It's a foolish and quite irrational lie we tell ourselves – that they will accept us if only we outdo them in being what they themselves want to be.'
Passing through an alley barely wide enough for two men to walk abreast, they presently entered the spacious Am Hof, where clothing, much of it secondhand, was in daylight sold from stalls beneath giant umbrellas. Now the stalls were empty, the umbrellas folded and bound.
'Repetition is the key,' added Freud.
'To self-deception?'
'To the war neuroses. Did you treat shell shock in the war?'
'No, but I saw it.'
'Did you encounter any cases in which the patient's symptoms corresponded to a traumatic experience he had undergone?'
'Twice. We had a man with a convulsive wink; it turned out he had bayoneted a German in the eye. There was another whose hand was paralyzed. He'd accidentally thrown a grenade into his own platoon.'
'Yes – such cases are exceptional, of course, but illustrative. They undercut all my previous theories.'
'Undercut?' said Younger. 'They're proof of your theories.'
'That's what everyone says. The whole world suddenly respects psychoanalysts because we alone can explain shell shock. Don't mistake me: I'll take the recognition. But it is certainly ironic – being finally accepted on account of the one thing that disproves you.'
'I don't see it, I'm sorry,' said Younger. 'If shell shock victims are acting out suppressed memories, surely that vindicates your theory of the unconscious.'
'Of course,' answered Freud, 'but I'm talking about what's in the unconscious. Shell shock defies my theories because there's no pleasure in it. That's what I wanted to tell you.'
Younger reflected: 'No sexuality?'
'I said you'd be glad to hear it. I don't enjoy acknowledging error, but when the facts don't fit one's theories, one has no choice. The war neurotics behave like masochists – constantly conjuring up their own worst nightmares – except without any corresponding gain in sexual satisfaction. Perhaps they're trying to relieve their fear. Or more likely to find a way to control it. If so, their strategy fails. I suspect there's something else. I sense it in Miss Rousseau's brother. I don't know what it is yet. Pity he doesn't speak. Something dark, almost uncanny. I can't see it, but I can hear it. I hear its voice.'
Jimmy Littlemore bottomed his whiskey glass, but there was nothing; in it. He tried to pour himself another; there was nothing left in the bottle either. Daylight had just begun to show in the windowpanes. 'Okay,' he said slowly 'What happened next?'
'That's all. I left the next day. Went to India.'
'India?'
'Stayed there almost a year.'
Littlemore looked at him: 'Stuck on her, huh?'
Younger didn't answer. India had repelled him – and fascinated him. He kept planning to leave, but stayed on for month after sweltering month, wondering at the snake-headed men of Benares, at the filth of the Ganges where natives washed themselves after bathing their family's corpses, at the harmony of the great palaces and tombs. He knew he remained only because nothing in India reminded him of Colette, whereas in Europe or America everything would have. Eventually, however, Indian girls began reminding him of Colette too.
'Guess it's time to switch to coffee,' said Littlemore. He went to the stove and, with his good arm, set up a percolator. 'What happened to the Miss?'
'She wrote to me. There was a letter waiting when I got back to London. She'd sent it last Christmas. Apparently she'd left Vienna without even going to the prison to see her soldier fiancé. She'd had a conversation with Freud and changed her mind. She returned to Paris, worked at the Radium Institute for six months, and then the Sorbonne finally took her. She was finishing her degree. She asked if I might come down to visit.'
'What did you write back?'
'I didn't write back.'
'Sharp move,' said Littlemore.
Neither spoke.
'Did you ever get to a point with a girl,' asked Younger, 'where you couldn't close your eyes without seeing her? Day and night – awake, asleep? Where you couldn't think of anything without also thinking of her?'
'Nope.'
'I don't advise it,' said Younger.
'Why didn't you write to her?'
'If I were an opium addict, what would you suggest I do – give in to the craving or resist it?'
'Opium's bad for you.'
'So is she.'
'Then what?'
'I came back to America. Last July.'
'But how'd she get here?'
'I recommended her for a position at Yale. A radiochemist named Boltwood was looking for an assistant. She was the best-qualified candidate.'
'You've got to be kidding.'
'She was. By far.'
'Come on – what are you waiting for?' asked Littlemore. 'When are you going to propose?
The kettle began to rattle.
'What is it with you husbands?' asked Younger. 'You think every man wants to be in your condition. I got stuck on the girl. Now I'm unstuck.'
'You said yourself you wanted to marry her. When you were in Vienna.'
'I was wrong. She's too young. She believes in God.'
'I believe in God.'
'Well, I don't want to marry you either.'
'You're just sore because she lied to you about Hans.'
'I'm sore because I wanted her and never had her,' said Younger. 'Freud was right – I do mistreat women. Once I have them, I don't want them anymore. I use them up. I can't stand the sight of them after three months, and I toss them aside. She's better off with Hans. Much better.'
'She doesn't want Hans. She changed her mind.'
'And she'll change it again,' said Younger. He finished off his glass and spoke more quietly: 'You think she's forgotten him – the man she was engaged to? That's not how women work. I'll tell you what's going to happen. She'll go looking for him. Count on it. Sooner or later, she'll realize she needs to see her Hans again – just once – just to be sure.'
Stirrings came from down the hall, then footsteps. The men glanced at each other. Colette entered the room, squinting, wearing a nightgown too large for her, borrowed from Littlemore's wife. Only youth is beautiful at six in the morning; Colette, despite a confusion of hair, was beautiful. Both men rose.
'Morning, Miss,' said Littlemore. 'Coffee?'
'Yes, please – oh, I'll do it; sit down, you two invalids,' she answered. Bursts of hot water were sputtering in the glass button on the coffee pot's lid. Rubbing her eyes, Colette saw the empty whiskey bottle on the table. 'Isn't that illegal here?'
'You can drink it at home,' said Littlemore; 'you just can't buy it or sell it. Great policy. A lot of folks are making spirits in their bathtubs.
Say, I never complimented you, Miss, on that trick you pulled last night – getting them to steal your radium so we could trace you.'
'Thank you, Jimmy,' said Colette. 'I was lucky.'
'She did that on purpose?' asked Younger.
'Sure,' said Littlemore. 'Kind of obvious, Doc. How many times did the kidnappers go to the Miss's hotel room?'
'I don't know – twice?' asked Younger.
'Twice,' agreed Littlemore. 'The first time, they took Luc. They already had him when you called, remember? But when we got there, Drobac was in the hallway with his pockets stuffed, and the ash next to the Miss's case was still warm. In other words, he went back a second time, and that's when he took the elements. So why didn't he take them the first time if they were worth all that dough? Because he didn't know about them. How'd he find out about them? The Miss must have told him. The only question was whether she let it slip by accident or on purpose. Given how smart the Miss is, I had to figure on purpose.'
Younger nodded. 'I'm impressed – doubly impressed.'
'I have to go back, Stratham,' said Colette.
'To the hotel?' asked Younger.
'To Europe.' Colette unplugged the percolator. She poured coffee.
Littlemore looked at Younger.
'You can't – you're in charge of Boltwood's laboratory,' said Younger. 'Don't judge America because of what happened yesterday. It's safe here.'
'It's not that,' she answered. 'I received a letter. From Austria. It was in the mail that Jimmy's friend Spanky brought back from the hotel.'
'Stanky, Miss,' said Littlemore. 'Not Spanky.'
Younger said nothing.
'Who was the letter from?' asked Littlemore.
'From a policeman who helped me once when I was in Vienna,' she replied. 'Hans is getting out of jail, Stratham. In just a few weeks. I have to go back.'