'She's still alive,' said Colette, kneeling by the fallen woman.
'She is?' asked Brighton, looking as if he might need to take cover behind Mrs Meloney again.
'Police!' shouted Detective Littlemore, bursting through the front door of the church. 'Drop your weapons!'
The woman's body lay crumpled on the cold stone floor, a dark stain of blood spreading out below it. Younger and Littlemore had arrived just in time to hear cries of 'murder' from ladies fleeing the church. As Mrs Meloney explained to the detective how the mad woman had attacked Colette, and how Mr Samuels had saved them,' Younger sought a pulse in the fallen woman's wrist. He found one, very faint.
Colette knelt next to him. 'Look at her neck,' she said.
Matted, unhealthy red hair masked the woman's face. Grimly but gingerly, Younger pushed the hair away. He saw vacant eyes, a pretty nose and thin, parted lips. The fraying scarf had regained its place over her neck. Younger pulled it away.
The woman had no chin at all. Where a chin should have been, and where a throat should have been, there was instead an engorged bulbous mass, almost as large as the woman's own head, attached to her neck. It had wrinkles, dimples, lumps, indentations, and many, many veins.
'What in the love of Pete is that?' asked Littlemore.
Chapter Nine
A year before the attack on Wall Street, the President of the United States, sitting on his toilet in the White House, suffered a massive cerebral thrombosis — a clot in the artery feeding his brain. Within moments, the once-visionary Woodrow Wilson became a half-blind invalid, unable to move the left side of his body, including the left side of his mouth.
Wilson's stroke was kept from the public, from his Cabinet, even from his Vice President. It was difficult to say who was supposed to run the country after Wilson s collapse. Indeed it was difficult to say who was running the country. Was it Secretary of State Robert Lansing, who secretly convened the Cabinet in the President's absence? Or was it Wilson's wife, Edith, who counted among her ancestors both Plantagenets and Pocahontas, and who alone had access to the presidential sick room, emerging therefrom with orders that Wilson had supposedly dictated? Or perhaps it was Attorney General Palmer, who secured ever more funds for his Bureau of Investigation, and who imprisoned tens of thousands all over the country as suspected enemies of the nation.
Throughout 1920, the country lurched along in this strange, headless condition. In January, Prohibition took effect. In March, the Senate rejected the League of Nations and, with it, Wilson's vision of America joining an international community of peaceful states and taking center stage in world affairs. Wilson had never persuaded his practical countrymen why America would want to entangle itself in Europe's intrigues and ancient enmities. What, after all, had the United States gained from the last war, in which more than 100,000 American young men had perished to save English and French skins?
Uncertain of their direction, deprived of drink, Americans in 1920 were waiting — for a storm to break the gathering tension, for a new president to be elected in November, for their economy to recover. Americans believed they had brought peace to the world. Surely they were entitled to worry about their own problems now.
There was, however, no peace in the world. In the summer of 1920, great armies still ravaged the earth. In August, a Soviet army marched triumphantly into Poland and even entered Warsaw, its sights set on Germany and beyond. Lenin had reason to be ambitious. Armed communists had seized power in Munich and declared Bavaria a Soviet Republic. The same occurred in Hungary. Right next door to the United States, revolutionaries in Mexico overthrew the American- supported regime, promising to reclaim that nation's gigantic petroleum deposits from the companies — in particular the United States companies — that owned them.
But most Americans in 1920 neither knew nor cared. Most had had their fill of the world. Most — but not all.
On Saturday morning, September 18, two days after the bombing, one day after Colette's lecture in Saint Thomas Church, Younger and Littlemore met at a subway station a couple of blocks from Bellevue Hospital.
Any way to identify the girl?' asked Younger as they set off for the hospital.
'Two-Heads?' said Littlemore. 'We'll probably know in a day or two. With girls, somebody usually comes in to report them missing. Unless she's a hooker, in which case nobody reports her.'
'I have a feeling this one isn't a hooker,' said Younger.
The two men looked at each other.
'Did you check her teeth?' asked Younger.
'To see if she lost a molar? Yeah — I had the same idea. But nope. No missing teeth.'
'Why Colette?'
'You mean why are these things happening to her? That's the question all right. But like I said — don't assume everything's connected.'
'What are you assuming — freak coincidence?'
'I'm not assuming anything. I never assume. If I had to guess, I'd say somebody thinks the Miss is somebody she isn't. Maybe a whole lot of people think she's somebody she isn't.'
Bellevue was a publicly funded hospital, required to take all patients delivered to its door, and the catastrophe on Wall Street had added fresh strains upon its already overtaxed resources. Every corridor was an obstacle course of patients slumped over on chairs or stretched out on gurneys. On the third floor, Younger and Littlemore found the woman from the church in a ward she shared with more than a dozen other female patients. She was breathing but unconscious, veins pulsing on the engorged mass bulging out of her neck. A nurse told them the girl had not regained consciousness since being admitted. One bed away, a hospital physician was administering an injection to another patient. Littlemore asked him if he thought the redheaded woman was going to live.
'I wouldn't know,' said the physician helpfully.
'Who would?' asked Littlemore.
'I would,' said the physician. 'I attend on this ward. But I've had no time to examine her.'
'Mind if I examine her?' asked Younger.
'You're a doctor?' asked the doctor.
'He's a Harvard doctor,' said Littlemore.
'I'd like to get a look at what's inside that neoplasm on her neck,' said Younger. 'Do you have an X-ray machine?'
'Of course we have one,' said the doctor, 'but only the hospital's radiology staff is permitted to use it.'
'Okay,' said Littlemore. 'Where can we find the radiology staff?'
'I'm the hospital's radiology staff,' said the doctor.
Littlemore folded his arms. 'And when could you do an X-ray?'
'In two weeks,' said the doctor. 'I perform X-rays on the first Monday of every month.'
'Two weeks?' repeated Littlemore. 'She could be dead in two weeks.'
'So could five hundred other patients in this hospital,' snapped the doctor. 'I'll have to ask you to excuse me. I'm very busy.'
After the physician had left, Littlemore said, 'Maybe I shouldn't have told him you were a Harvard doctor. I don't know why people resent what they ought to admire. What the heck is that thing on her neck?'
'I don't know, but we might find out pretty soon.' Younger pointed to a thin, bluish vertical fissure that was developing on the distended mass. The fissure ran from the girl's chin to her sternum. 'Whatever's inside may be trying to get out.'
'Great,' said Littlemore.
'It could be a teratoma.'
'What's that?'
'Encapsulated hair or teeth, usually,' said Younger.
'Teeth — like a molar?' asked Littlemore.
'Maybe. Or a twin.'
'What?'
'A twin that was never born,' said Younger. 'Not alive. There's never been a case of a live one.'
'First we see a woman with no head on Wall Street, and now we got one with two. That's what I call — wait a minute. She was a redhead too.'
'The woman with no head? Was a redhead?' asked Younger.
'Her head was. We walked right past it. And I'm pretty sure she was wearing a dress like this girl's. I'll go to the morgue. May
be she was missing a molar.'
That same morning, newspapers all over the country reported that Edwin Fischer, the man who knew in advance about the Wall Street bombing, was in custody in Hamilton, Ontario, having been adjudged insane by a panel of Canadian magistrates. Fischer had been taken before the Canadian judges by his own brother-in-law, who had read about the now-famous postcards and motored from New York to Toronto in the company of two agents of the United States Department of Justice.
Younger had a look around Bellevue Hospital after the detective left. It wasn't difficult for a doctor to pose as a personage of authority in a large, overcrowded hospital. At any rate it wasn't difficult for Younger, who had learned in the war how to command obedience from subordinates through the simple artifice of acting as if it went without saying that one's orders would be followed.
He found the roentgen equipment on the second floor. It was as he'd hoped: a modern unit, driven by transformer, not induction, and equipped with Coolidge tubes. The milliamperage was clearly marked. He knew he could operate it.
At police headquarters, Officer Roederheusen knocked on Littlemore's door. 'I've got the mailman, Captain,' said Roederheusen. 'The one who picks up at Cedar and Broadway.'
'What are you waiting for?' asked Littlemore. 'Bring him in.'
'Urn, sir, do you think I could have a nickname?'
'A nickname? What for?'
'Stanky has a nickname. And my name's kind of hard for you, sir.'
'Okay. Not a bad idea. I'll call you Spanky.'
'Spanky?'
'As opposed to Stanky. Now bring me that mailman.'
'Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.'
Roederheusen returned in a moment, mailman in tow. Littlemore offered the man a seat, a doughnut, and coffee. The postman, who accepted all these offerings, coughed and sniffled.
'So you're the one who found the circulars,' said Littlemore. 'Did you get a look at the men who mailed them?'
The man shook his head, mouth full.
'Okay, here's what I want to know — when did you first see the circulars? Did you see them when you opened the mailbox or only later, when you got back to the post office?'
The postman blew his nose into a paper napkin. 'Don't know what you're talking about. The box was empty.'
'Empty?' repeated Littlemore. 'The mailbox at Cedar and Broadway? Day of the bombing? Eleven fifty-eight pickup?'
'The eleven fifty-eight? I never made the eleven fifty-eight. Hung my bag up after morning rounds. Too sick. Lucky thing, huh?'
'Did somebody cover for you?'
'Cover for me?' The man laughed into his napkin. 'Fat chance. What's this all about, anyway?'
Littlemore sent the postman away.
Eighty miles away, in a laboratory at Yale University, a human-like creature in a helmet and what looked like an undersea diver's suit was also working on Saturday. The creature was titrating fumaric acid into six tubes of thorium in an attempt to isolate ionium. When this delicate, wearisome task was not quite complete, the creature lumbered out of the laboratory and into the sunshine of a campus courtyard, causing a child to run crying to his perambulating nanny.
The creature took off its gloves and removed its slit-visored helmet. Out shook the long sable hair of Colette Rousseau. She sat on a bench, the brightness of the sun blinding her after the double darkness of the laboratory and her helmet.
Colette and Luc had returned to New Haven early Saturday morning so that she could resume her laboratory duties, from which she had taken two days off. Her experiments were designed to test the existence of ionium, a putative new element that Professor Bertram Boltwood claimed to have discovered — the 'parent of radium,' he called it. Madame Curie did not believe in ionium, judging it to be only a manifestation of thorium. Accordingly, Colette did not believe in ionium either. She had already established that ionium could not be separated from thorium with any of the ordinary precipitants, such as sodium thiosulfate or meta-nitro-benzoic acid. Today she was trying fumaric acid. But her hands had begun to shake within her heavy lead-lined gloves, and she'd had to stop.
She gathered her hair into a long braid, threw it behind one shoulder of her radiation suit, and, using both hands, reached to the nape of her neck. She drew out the chain and locket that always hung at her chest. Turning an ingeniously crafted bezel first one way, then the other, Colette opened the two halves of the locket. Into the palm of her hand fell a thin, tarnished metal oval — like an oblong coin — with two tiny holes punched through it.
One side of this metal oval was bare. Turning it over, Colette let eyes linger on a series of machine-etched letters and numbers: Hans Gruber, Braunau am Inn, 20. 4. 89., 2. Ers. Masch. Gew. K., 3. A.K. Nr. 1128.
Although it was a Saturday, Littlemore saw lights in the Commissioner's office. The detective knocked and entered.
'Captain Littlemore — just the man I wanted to see,' said Commissioner Enright from an armchair by a large window, looking up from a report he'd been reading. Enright was revered by his men. He was the only Police Commissioner in the history of New York City to have risen to that position from the rank and file. 'I've been in touch with the Canadians. They're happy to extradite. Send someone to Ontario to collect this Edwin Fischer.'
'Already on their way, Mr Enright,' said Littlemore.
'That's the spirit. You met with Director Flynn of the Bureau yesterday. What were your impressions?'
'Big Bill's not giving us a thing, Commissioner,' said Littlemore. 'Fischer, for example. Flynn knew Fischer was in custody Wouldn't say where, wouldn't say how he knew. After we turned over all our evidence to them.'
Enright shook his head ruefully. 'It's no more than I expected. That's why I chose you as liaison officer. They have greater resources than we, Littlemore, but not greater brainpower. Keep a step ahead of him. Keep us in it. Flynn found the circulars. Let the next find be ours.' 'I don't like the circulars, sir,' said Littlemore. 'You don't "like" them?'
'Flynn's story doesn't wash. There's no way the bombers got from Wall Street to that mailbox by 11:58. Plus the flyers don't read right. They don't even mention a bombing. If I'm the Wall Street bomber and I want to tell everybody I did it, I'm going to say so. Mr Enright, I'm not even sure the circulars were picked up from a mailbox at all. I just got done with the mailman who would have made the pickup. He went home sick that morning.'
'What are you suggesting, Littlemore?'
'Nothing, sir. All I know is that Flynn s doing everything he can to connect our bombing to the ones from 1918 and 1919. He even said the Chicago Post Office was bombed on the third Thursday of September, so that September 16 was the exact anniversary.' 'Yes, I read that in the Times,' said Enright.
'The Chicago bomb went off on September 4, 1918, Mr Enright. I don't know if that was a Thursday, but it definitely wasn't the third Thursday. I just think we should keep looking.'
'Certainly we should keep looking,' said Enright. 'That's why we're going to speak with Mr Fischer. But I should tell you that on this point I quite agree with General Palmer: the bombing on Wall Street was the work of Bolshevik anarchists. Who else would have done such a thing? The Great War did not end in 1918. It was a mistake to withdraw our troops from Russia; we've allowed them to bring the war to our soil. Wilson is useless, but things will change after the election. Harding will take the war to Lenin's doorstep where it belongs. That's all, Captain.'
Younger returned to Bellevue early the next morning. The hospital was much quieter now: it was no less crowded with patients, but because it was Sunday, fewer medical personnel were on hand, and very little treatment was being given or received.
In a bathroom on the second floor, Younger put a white coat over his suit and tie. Striding down the hall, he entered the room where the X-ray machine was kept, wheeled it out, guided it into an elevator, and came out onto a third-floor corridor, where he called out commandingly for a nurse to assist him. A nurse came running at once.
The unconscious redheaded gi
rl lay in the same room in the same condition — alive but comatose. With the nurse's help, Younger laid the girl's body on the wooden X-ray couch, stomach-down, turning her head to one side. Her profile was uncannily angelic save for the monstrosity protruding from her chin and throat, which looked even more distended and unnatural in the electric light of the hospital room than it had in the darkness of the church. Younger prodded the mass with two gloved fingers, which provoked in him a peculiar, highly nonmedical sensation of disgust. The interior of the growth was soft but granular.
Radiographing an unconscious person was considerably easier, Younger discovered, than a conscious one. There was no difficulty with the subject moving during irradiation. The X-ray tube, clamped inside a box running on casters beneath the table, was easily brought directly below the girl's cheek. Protecting himself with a lead panel, Younger turned on the radiation and adjusted the diaphragm until only the growth fluoresced on the test screen over the girl's head. Then he replaced the test screen with an unexposed photographic plate. He let the radiation course through the girl's body for exactly eight seconds and repeated this process several times, from different angles, using a new plate each time.
The same morning, the Littlemore clan was tumbling out of their Fourteenth Street apartment house on their way to church. The children had been scrubbed and soaped until they shone like sprightly mirrors. Littlemore had their toddler, Lily, on his shoulders. Lily always received special treatment; none of the other children objected, because of her condition.
Betty's mother, a half foot shorter than Betty herself, had joined them as she always did on Sunday mornings, wearing her church hat and keeping an emphatic distance from her son-in-law. In deference to Betty's stronger religious feelings, Littlemore had consented to attend Catholic church on Sundays and to raise his children in that faith, but he never got used to all the crossing. Or the kneeling. Or the confessing. He would bow his head, but he just couldn't cross himself. As a result, Betty's mother displayed her piety every Sunday by pretending she didn't know her son-in-law.
The Death Instinct Page 16