The Death Instinct

by Jed Rubenfeld

  'His shirt?' replied the detective.

  'The kidnapper has a mark on the front of his torso,' said Younger. 'A red mark, in the shape of a test tube.'

  The guard posted at the stairwell door looked uncertainly at Littlemore, waiting to be told whether to let Drobac pass.

  'This is absurd,' said Gleason.

  The surgeon spoke up: 'Is the mark visible to the naked eye?'

  'Yes,' said Younger.

  'I operated on Mr Smith,' the surgeon continued, referring to Drobac, 'and I assure you he has no such mark on his torso.'

  'Then he has nothing to fear from taking off his shirt,' said Younger.

  'Don't be ridiculous,' said Gleason, pushing past the guard and opening the stairwell door himself. 'You heard the surgeon. My client has been released. Now, if you'll excuse us-'

  'Littlemore,' said Younger.

  Drobac started to pass through the door held open by his attorney.

  'Hold it,' the detective called out. 'Take his shirt off.'

  A half-dozen guards pulled Drobac back into the hallway and formed a circle around him.

  'You have no authority,' said Gleason.

  For the first time, Drobac spoke. 'Is all right,' he said in his Eastern European accent, the wires around his jaw glinting silver. 'I do it. Why not? I hide nothing.'

  Littlemore looked at Younger, who raised an eyebrow.

  Drobac calmly removed his jacket, slipped off his suspenders, and began unbuttoning his white shirt, never taking his eyes from Younger. When his chest was bare, everyone could see it: under his left ribs, below the thick hair of his chest, slightly angled from the vertical, was the perfect likeness of a test tube, inscribed in a deep red rash.

  'How do you like that?' said Littlemore.

  Drobac looked down, uncomprehending. 'What — what is?'

  'A radium burn,' said Younger. 'They take ten days to emerge. Yours comes from a test tube you stole from the Commodore Hotel and put in your jacket pocket.' 'This is an outrage,' declared Gleason. 'The Mayor will hear of this.'

  'Put "Mr Smith" back in his cage,' said Littlemore to the guards.

  Drobac, still looking at the red mark on his torso, made a snort that managed to convey both grudging acknowledgment and condescension. 'Is all right,' he said, buttoning his shirt. 'Your prison? Is more like hotel.'

  'Glad you like it,' replied Littlemore. 'You're going to be here a long time.'

  Drobac only smiled through his glinting steel wires.

  Outside the Tombs, Littlemore returned Younger's gun and invited him to the Astor Hotel, where he was going to meet with reporters and Chief Flynn. 'Should be some fun,' said the detective. 'Until I get myself fired.'

  Younger declined, saying he had a rendezvous he couldn't miss.

  'Say, Doc, do you believe in premonitions?' asked Littlemore.

  'No.'

  'I'm just thinking about this guy Eddie Fischer. Everybody treats him like he's crazy, but what if he's really psycho?'

  'Psychic.'

  'Some people believe in premonitions, don't they? Some scientists? How about when you knew the bomb was about to go off on Wall Street before anybody else did? How do you explain that?'

  'Something in the air,' replied Younger.

  'That's just what Fischer says. He got it "out of the air.'"

  'If you want to talk to a believer,' said Younger, 'go to the American Society for Psychical Research. Their office is here in New York somewhere. They're as good as it gets. Ask for Dr Walter Prince.'

  'Thanks. I'll do that.'

  They stood for a time without speaking.

  'Sorry about the cuffs up there,' said Littlemore. 'Just protocol. I know you weren't actually going to shoot the guy.'

  'I would have killed him,' said Younger.

  'Christ — you can't do that, Doc. War's over.'

  Younger nodded. 'Maybe there's always war. Maybe some of us just aren't fighting.'

  'Uh-huh,' said Littlemore. 'Or maybe you just wanted to kill somebody.'

  'Maybe.'

  They shook hands and parted. After Younger's taxi had driven off, another vehicle pulled up beside Littlemore — a black-and-gold Packard. At the same time, two large men in suits converged on the detective from the steps of the Tombs. The rear passenger window of the Packard rolled down. 'Would you mind getting in, Captain?' said a voice from within.

  'Depends who's asking,' said Littlemore.

  The man nearest the detective put his hand between Littlemore's shoulder blades to guide him into the car. He opened his jacket just enough to let Littlemore see the butt of a gun holstered within.

  'That supposed to scare me?' asked Littlemore, reaching with astonishing quickness into the man's jacket, pulling the gun out of his holster, and pointing it at his chin — while at the same time, with his other hand, drawing his own gun from his belt and aiming it at the other man. 'Where do they train you Bureau guys anyway?'

  'Please, please, put your weapons away,' said the voice within the car.' I assure you there's no need. These men are not from the Bureau of Investigation. They work for me.'

  'And who would you be?' asked Littlemore.

  'I'm the secretary.'

  'Whose secretary?' asked Littlemore.

  'President Wilson's, I suppose. My name is David Houston. I'm Secretary of the Treasury. Please come in, Captain. There's something we need to discuss.'

  Littlemore got in the car.

  At the harbor, Younger found Colette and Luc waiting on a pier, near the berth of the steamship Welshman. Beside them were three forlorn, ragged-edged pieces of brown leather luggage. The air had already begun to cool; it would be a brisk autumn evening. The ship was boarding.

  After they'd greeted one another, Colette described the events of the previous night. 'It's strange,' she said. 'When I first saw her, I was frightened, but later I felt there was nothing to be afraid of.'

  Silence hung in the air.

  'I didn't expect you,' said Colette, brushing a lock of hair from her face. 'Your telegram said Jimmy.'

  Younger nodded. He handed her the tickets.

  'They let him out of jail?' she asked. 'The killer?'

  'No, he's back in,' said Younger. 'And he won't be coming out for a long time. It doesn't matter. You want to take this ship.'

  She looked down at her hands. 'You-' she said.

  'We took a wrong turn a long time ago, you and I,' answered Younger. 'All my fault. Better this way. I doubt your soldier deserves you, but you deserve to find out.'

  Her gaze fell on the tickets. 'These are for Bremen, not Hamburg.'

  Younger had bought a second set of tickets, on a different ship, the George Washington, when he arrived at the port an hour earlier. Drobac's attorney, Gleason, seemed to know that Colette was bound for Hamburg. If so, that meant Colette's pursuers would be expecting her to board the Welshman.

  'A first-class cabin,' added Colette, still looking at the tickets. 'We don't need that.'

  Younger handed her two more white envelopes. 'This one,' he said, 'has ready money for the trip. The other contains a draft on my accounts in England that you can negotiate at any serious bank in Vienna. No, take it. You can't live on nothing.'

  She shook her head and tried to return the envelopes, but Younger wouldn't take them back. He crouched and extended his hand to Luc. The boy hesitated a moment, then held out his own.

  'He did it,' said Younger. 'Ruth hit his fiftieth. And fifty-first.'

  Luc nodded: he knew it already.

  'Take care of your sister,' said Younger. He winked: 'Every girl needs a man taking care of her.'

  Secretary Houston led Littlemore up the marble steps, past the soldiers standing at attention, into the Treasury Building. Houston was a gracious and handsome man in his early fifties, his genially crinkled eyes suggesting a friendliness contradicted by everything else about him, particularly the cold soft intelligence of his Southern voice. The detective followed the top-hatted Houston through the rotu
nda, then down several narrow stairwells. Soldiers lined every flight, every doorway.

  They entered a sub-basement and came eventually to a narrow arched stone door, so low they had to stoop passing through it. On the other side, Houston threw a switch; dim electric lights flickered on. They were in a large chamber with a low vaulted ceiling, filled with endless stacks of neatly arranged, crisscrossing bricks, glinting darkly yellow.

  Houston led Littlemore on a tour through these stacks of bricks, which, like the shelves in an overfull library, left just enough space for persons to pass between them in single file. There seemed to be miles of them.

  It was gold, all gold, as far as the eye could see.

  'Pick one up, Captain,' said Houston.

  Littlemore removed a bar from the top of the nearest pile. It was inordinately heavy for its size.

  'Twenty pounds,' said Houston. 'There is no larger store of gold anywhere on earth. There never has been. Not in the Bank of England, not in the palaces of the Turk, not in the tomb of the Inca. You are looking at the metal reserves of the United States of America, on which the credit of your government, the value of the dollars in your pocket, and ultimately the liquidity of every bank in this country depend. Have you any idea how much gold is here, Captain?'

  'Less than there was on the morning of September sixteenth.'

  'Most astute. How long have you known?'

  'I saw one of your guards lying dead outside the Treasury with a piece of gold in his hands,' said Littlemore. 'I knew you'd been robbed when I found out you tried to erase his name from the casualty list.'

  'Yes, a bit heavy-handed, that,' said Houston. He took a deep breath. 'The gold in these vaults is worth approximately nine hundred million dollars. Just think. The bomb, the deaths, the incalculable misery — all that for a bank robbery.'

  'That's why Flynn called in the army.'

  'It wasn't Flynn,' said Houston dismissively. 'The man is a blowhard. I ordered the soldiers here, and I'm well aware it was against the law to do so. But it would have been criminal not to. I tried to get Wilson's authorization. The President, however, is not — fully active, you know.'

  'Why am I here, Mr Houston?' asked the detective.

  'We couldn't have you telling the press the Treasury's been robbed, could we?'

  'How much did they get?'

  'Oh, it's not the dollar value of the loss that counts. Gold doesn't have value because someone will give you dollars for it, Captain. Dollars have value because the United States will give you gold for them. The real value of gold is psychical. It is valuable because men believe it to be valuable. And because they do, gold gives men faith in the government that possesses it — or is believed to possess it. We could lose every ounce of gold in these vaults, and so long as people didn't know of the loss, they would continue to invest in our bonds, trade in our dollars, leave their money in our banks, and so forth. Conversely, we could hold on to every brick, but if people believed the gold reserves of this country were insecure, we could have a panic making 1907 look like a baby's fretting.'

  'How'd they do it?'

  'You've seen the new building adjacent to this one, Captain — the Assay Office? Deep within it we've built new secure treasure vaults, much more suitable than this musty old basement. The gold is being transferred to the new vaults. We had devised a way to make that transfer without ever having an ounce of gold leave our property.'

  'A tunnel?' asked Littlemore.

  'No — a bridge. An overhead bridge.'

  Littlemore nodded: 'In the alley between the buildings. I saw the doors.'

  'Exactly. The bridge connected their second floors. It was built specially to move this gold. Triply reinforced to carry the weight. A moving automatic belt to make the conveyance of so much metal feasible. All without ever exposing a single brick to the outside world. Or so we thought.'

  'You were moving the gold on the sixteenth?' asked Littlemore.

  'Yes, we were. It was a carefully guarded secret. Or supposed to be. Evidently someone knew. The workmen inside reacted quite well, by the way. When they heard the explosion, they shut the doors on either side of the bridge, as they were trained to do. The only loss was the gold that happened to be on the bridge, which burned and collapsed. The robbers must have had a truck waiting in the alley.'

  'How much did you lose?'

  'We still don't know exactly,' Houston answered. 'It takes time to recount 138,000 bars. In addition to the gold on the bridge, I lost a man too — the man whose name we want off your lists. He may have gone onto the bridge to try to save the gold.'

  'Riggs,' said Littlemore. 'So if the bombing was a robbery, why is Big Bill Flynn chasing anarchists?'

  'Nearly no one knows about this robbery, Captain,' said Houston. 'Senator Fall, for example, does not know of it. Neither does Chief Flynn.'

  Littlemore thought about that: 'You're afraid the Bureau has a leak.'

  'Only a handful of people knew the date on which we were transferring the gold. There are men in the Bureau who knew. Someone betrayed us.'

  'Could have been someone inside Treasury,' said Littlemore. 'Could have been Riggs.' '

  'I can't rule that out,' replied Houston.

  'You must know more or less how much they got away with.'

  'Oh, more or less, certainly,' replied Houston. 'A paltry amount. We will hardly notice it, even if we never get it back. Five or six hundred bricks, give or take.'

  'Which comes to?' asked the detective.

  'In dollars? Perhaps four.'

  'Four thousand?'

  'Four millions,' said Houston.

  The number hung in the air for a moment, echoing. 'What is it you want from me, Mr Secretary?' asked Littlemore.

  'Why, just to refrain from telling the press about the robbery. It wouldn't do for the public to learn the United States Treasury has been breached — and certainly not that there are people inside the government with the will and wherewithal to steal the nation's gold. Wouldn't do at all.'

  'Too late,' said Littlemore. 'I already told a couple of reporters there was something they might find interesting at the Treasury. Something to do with gold.'

  'I know,' said Houston. 'We've received inquiries. That much is all right. I don't mind telling them the gold is here. The financial world is already aware of it. I don't even mind telling the press we've been moving the gold to the Assay vaults. I intend simply to let it out that my men happened to take their lunch break just before the explosion. A simple story. It was noon; the men had shut the doors for lunch; they heard the bomb go off; that was all. A coincidence. The great point is that there was no robbery, no breach in security, no loss of gold. Lunchtime.'

  'Think anyone will buy that?' asked Littlemore.

  'The gullibility of the common man constantly surprises, Captain. If everyone tells the reporters the same thing, I think we'll be all right. Especially if you tell them. You'll be doing your country a service.'

  Littlemore weighed the Secretary's request. 'I want in on your investigation — who knew the gold was being moved, everything you've got on Riggs, who's selling bullion on the black market.'

  'Why not?' said Houston. 'You might help. Unlike my other officers, you at least are not a suspect.'

  'And one more thing. Get Flynn off my back. Any of Flynn's men come within spitting distance of my wife's family, I tell the press everything I know.'

  'That will be more difficult. The Bureau is not under my control.'

  'No deal then.' Littlemore put his hat back on and snapped its brim.

  It was Houston's turn to weigh his options. 'Consider it done,' he said. 'I'm speaking with General Palmer tonight.'

  Colette uttered not a word. She turned away and waved for a porter, who quickly loaded the three tattered suitcases onto his hand truck. The porter set off. Colette, followed by Luc, walked slowly into the crowd.

  Younger, lighting a cigarette, gazed past the Welshman to the vast black George Washington, memories boiling u
p. It had been a great ship once. It had brought Freud to America. It had taken Woodrow Wilson to Europe. It had carried kings and queens and heads of state. Now it was relegated to commercial passenger duty once again. All greatness fades.

  Colette stopped. She turned, burst out of the crowd, and ran back to him. 'I'm such a fool,' she said. 'I'm not going.'

  'Get on board,' said Younger. 'You'll regret it — you'll resent it — the rest of your life if you don't.'

  The ship spoke in an earsplitting blast. Seagulls took flight. The call for all passengers went out.

  Colette buried her cheek on his chest.

  'Go on,' said Younger. 'It won't be so hard. You can cry on my shoulder in Vienna when we get there.'

  She looked at him; he looked back. 'You don't mean it,' she said.

  'Why shouldn't I come?' he asked. 'You're in love with me, not Heinrich.'

  She didn't deny it.

  Younger went on: 'If I let you go by yourself, you might actually marry this convict. Don't think I'm coming for your sake, though. It's Heinrich I'm worried about. You don't do a man any favors by marrying him when you're in love with someone else. You'd be killing him, slowly but surely. Besides — ' he removed from his jacket another ticket for passage on the George Washington — 'my bags are already on board.'

  Colette's whole body seemed to exhale with relief, and she smiled her most irresistible smile. As the ship steamed out to open sea, the three uncorked a bottle of champagne. Even Luc was allowed to try a little.

  Part 3

  Chapter Twelve

  The United States should have been all fanfare and barnstorm in the autumn of 1920, all marching bands and whistle-stop. Americans were electing a new president, and the excitement always appurtenant to that event should have been redoubled in 1920 because women for the first time had the right to vote. One of the major candidates — the Republican, Senator Warren G. Harding — might even have been nominated with the fairer sex in mind.