The Death Instinct

by Jed Rubenfeld

  'I have something for you,' he answered. 'From Freud.'

  He gave her the note. She sat up and read it, holding the bed sheet over her chest. She stared at the note a long time before handing it back to him:

  My dear Miss Rousseau,

  If you are reading this, it means, assuming I'm right, you have revealed to Younger that you knew of your father's unfortunate conduct before your brother told you of it. Do not condemn your father too harshly. A man is not to be judged by his actions at gunpoint.

  Neither should you judge yourself True, if you had told your brother what you knew, his condition might possibly have abated sooner. But it might also, perversely, have become more entrenched. The fact is you each tried to protect the other from a truth the other already knew. This was irony, not tragedy.

  You may have perceived that your brother has harbored a resentment against you. That is natural. He may have disliked you, or thought he did, for not knowing what he knew (as he believed) and thereby making him keep it a secret. Children expect adults to know what they know; when we disappoint them, they think the worse of us. But then even as adults we eventually come to scorn those from whom we have kept the truth, and we resent those for whom we have made the largest sacrifices. For these reasons, if you are even now undecided about whether to tell your brother that you knew his secret all along, you know what my advice to you would be.

  There is one more thing I want to say. You wondered in my presence why you didn't kill the man who murdered your parents. It was from just this fact that I deduced what you were hiding. The reason is simple. You felt, even if you didn't know it, that you would be insulting your father if you did what he lacked the courage to do. It was kindness toward your father that motivated you, not kindness to the murderer. (This also leads me to believe that you feel you wronged your father some time in the past, although the nature of this wrong I'm unable to decipher.) Fortunately, at that moment you were with a man who didn't labor under your compunctions. If you are half as wise as I believe you to be, you won't refuse that man's affections a second time.

  Freud

  On December 25, 1920, a long-distance telephone connection was established between a private home in Washington, DC, and another in Boston, Massachusetts. It was almost midnight.

  'Is that you, Jimmy?' asked Colette. She and Younger both had their ears to the receiver. A Christmas tree stood in front of them, decorated with toy soldiers and glittering hand-painted paper globes.

  'It sure is, Miss,' answered Littlemore, voice crackling, 'and Betty too. Is Doc there?'

  'I'm here,' said Younger. 'What is it?'

  'You wouldn't believe this house we're in. Guy who owns it owns the Washington Post. Wife owns the Hope Diamond. It's a big Christmas party. Secretary Houston invited us down. Harding's here. There's so many senators you'd think it was the Capitol. Lamont’s here too. Looking pretty blue — like a guy who lost millions at the track. But you know what? Things are picking up. In the country, I mean. They got dancing girls here from New York. They're playing a new kind of music. Something in the air. The twenties may not be as bad as I thought.' 'You took the Treasury job again?' asked Younger. 'Nope. We're just guests. Betty's the one who likes Washington now. Probably because Harding's been all over her the whole night.' 'What about you and that Mrs Cross?' replied Betty. 'Not interested,' said Jimmy. 'She is,' replied his wife. 'The harlot.' 'Did you call for any particular reason?' asked Younger. 'It's Christmas, Doc.' 'Merry Christmas.'

  'Everybody's giving out presents here,' said Littlemore. 'You're not the only ones,' replied Younger, looking at the diamond on Colette's finger, which had once belonged to his mother. 'Guess what?' said Littlemore. 'You got a present too.' 'I did?' asked Younger. 'From whom?'

  'Houston. He asked me if you found the gold with me. I said yes. Then he asked me if you were a law officer.'

  'Why?'

  'Well, they finally dug it all up, and Lamont swears the gold doesn't belong to Morgan, and Houston swears it doesn't belong to the Treasury, so officially it doesn't belong to anybody. It's unclaimed. They got laws for that. They call it treasure law. The law is that unclaimed gold goes to the finder — unless he's a law officer. I told him you definitely weren't a law officer. Told him you were more a law breaker.'

  There was silence on the line.

  'Did you hear me, Doc?'

  'All the gold goes to the finder?'

  'Unless he's a law officer,' said Littlemore.

  'How much was there?'

  'A little over four million.'

  'I can't accept it,' said Younger. 'It belongs to the United States. Tell him I give it back to the Treasury.'

  'I already did.'

  'You did?' asked Younger.

  'I knew you wouldn't accept it.'

  'Yes, but you might have let me exercise my own generosity.'

  'There's something you don't know,' said Littlemore. 'Back in October, Lamont over at Morgan tried to sneak into the country two million dollars of Russian contraband gold. Customs caught him, but Houston secretly had the Treasury take delivery of it. That was illegal, but Houston didn't want Morgan to take a two-million-dollar loss; he thought it would be bad for the country. Houston was going to have the Treasury pay Morgan for that gold until he found out Lamont was behind the September sixteenth robbery.'

  'What are you talking about, Littlemore?' asked Younger.

  'Bear with me here. Houston's not going to pay Lamont a dime for the Russian gold now. The Treasury's just going to keep it. Lamont can't object, because the Russian gold was contraband in the first place. So Houston only needs two million more for the Treasury to be made whole.'

  'I think I'm following you,' said Younger. The Treasury is short two million million dollars in gold. What's the point?'

  'Point is, when I told Houston you wouldn't accept all that gold we found, he says, well, the Treasury's only short two million, so why don't we use the European rule??'

  'Which is?'

  'Finder gets half. Government gets half.'

  Again there was silence.

  'I'm not taking anything you don't get,' said Younger. 'As a matter of fact, you weren't a law enforcement officer when we found it. Houston had just fired you.'

  'I mentioned that to him.'

  'What did he say?' asked Younger.

  'You and I are splitting two million dollars of gold. Merry Christmas.'

  Author's Note

  The wall street bombing of September 16,1920, would remain the most destructive act of terrorism in the United States until the Oklahoma bombing of 1995. Unlike the latter, however, and unlike the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Wall Street bombing was never solved. Its perpetrators were never caught. No one was ever prosecuted. In 1944 the Federal Bureau of Investigation concluded that the explosion 'would appear' to have been 'the work of Italian anarchists or Italian terrorists,' but this was conjecture, and the identity of those responsible remains unknown to this day.

  Let me emphasize that my 'solution' to this mystery is imaginary. There is absolutely no historical evidence for the notion that the true masterminds behind the bombing were Senator Albert Bacon Fall, Thomas W. Lamont of the J. P. Morgan Co., or former Treasury Secretary William G. McAdoo. These men are real historical figures; the latter two are properly credited with significant public service and important accomplishments. The background facts that I recount about them are true. My story, however, about their responsibility for the Wall Street bombing is just that — a story.

  What then is real and what imaginary in The Death Instinct? The principle I tried to follow was simple. The action of the book — the perils of its protagonists, the evildoing they uncover — is fiction. The world in which that action takes place is fact.

  Thus the backdrop of events and circumstances against which The Death Instinct unfolds is true. At the very moment of the explosion on Wall Street, and directly opposite, almost a billion dollars in United States gold was indeed in transit from the old S
ub-Treasury to the adjacent Assay Office via a wooden overhead bridge. A few miles away, a hundred working women would have been painting luminous watch dials, using their lips to point their poisonous brushes. In Washington, DC, Senator Fall was in fact machinating, nearly successfully, to bring about a war with Mexico that would have enriched himself and his powerful friends in the oil industry. Meanwhile, in war-devastated Europe, Sigmund Freud had just arrived at a new understanding of the human soul, according to which every individual is born with two fundamental instincts — one aiming at life and love, the other at death.

  On the other hand, the theft of the Treasury's gold described in The Death Instinct is invented. The United States has always denied that any gold was lost. The accepted account is that the simultaneity of the bombing and the gold transfer was mere coincidence and that the workmen moving the precious metal happened to take their lunch break, closing up the heavy doors on either side of the bridge, moments before the explosion.

  From the great occurrences like the bombing, to the petite Curie radiological truck driven by Colette, the world described in The Death Instinct is as real as I could make it, every detail based on actual historical sources. Readers who learn in these pages that thousands of soldiers were needlessly killed on November 11, 1918 — after their commanding officers already knew of the armistice — can be confident that this fact is documented in numerous reliable accounts. If I quote a newspaper, the quotation is verbatim or, if edited, only very slightly for style, without alteration of content. If I offer particular images from the September sixteenth explosion, every one of them is drawn from contemporaneous accounts: a taxi was in fact blown into the air; a woman's head was severed from her body; the pockmarked walls of the Morgan Bank can still be seen today. Even the outrageous forgeries I describe, purporting to show that the Mexican government had paid bribes to three anti-interventionist United States senators, are historically based, although these forgeries would not be circulated until a few years later, in another failed effort to spur an American invasion of Mexico.

  To be sure, I can't vouch for the truth of the historical materials on which I rely. When I quote Toynbee describing German atrocities in France in 1914, readers can be sure the quotation is exact, but they can't know — and I don't know — whether Toynbee's account is itself correct. The ultimate validity of historical sources must be left to historians.

  Nevertheless, some of the most incredible events described in The Death Instinct are not open to serious question. The remarkable tale of Edwin Fischer, for example, is established fact. His advance warnings, repeated to many different people, of a bombing on Wall Street after the close of business on September fifteenth or on the sixteenth are still unexplained. (All the peculiar details I mention about him — his four tennis championships, his multiple suits, his statement that he learned of the bombing 'out of the air,' his subsequent detention in an asylum, and so on — are completely factual.) If Fischer had advance knowledge of the bombing, which historians do not accept, it would suggest that there were men behind the attack belonging to a circle quite different from that of the penurious Italian anarchists usually said to be responsible.

  Although it is not well known, Fischer was, as mentioned in my book, indeed in contact with federal government agents several years before the bombing. But my account of his further dealings with the Bureau of Investigation, along with the story told at the end of The Death Instinct, in which Littlemore figures out that the voices Fischer heard 'out of the air' came to him outside the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal, is entirely fictitious. It is a fact, however, that whispers can be heard across that concourse at the spot I describe.

  The Marie Curie Radium Fund, led by the indomitable Mrs William B. Meloney, eventually succeeded in purchasing a gram of radium for

  Madame Curie, who traveled to the United States in 1921 to receive the gift from President Harding. In addition to being the Sorbonne's first woman professor and the first winner of two Nobel Prizes — one in Physics in 1903, the other in Chemistry in 1911 Madame Curie remains today the only woman to have accomplished the double-Nobel feat and the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields. Radiation exposure very probably caused her cataracts in 1920 and almost certainly caused her death from aplastic anemia (or perhaps leukemia) in 1934.

  While my protagonists — Younger, Littlemore, Colette, and Luc — are fictional, many of those with whom they interact are not, such as Police Commissioner Enright, Treasury Secretary Houston, New York City Mayor Hylan, 'Big Bill' Flynn, and Dr Walter Prince (of the American Society for Psychical Research). There was also a real Mrs Grace Cross who apparently had an affair with Warren Harding, but the character bearing her name is not otherwise based on the actual person.

  Arnold Brighton is a fictitious character. Edward Doheny was the real oilman who backed Fall's efforts to make war on Mexico and paid him at least $100,000 in bribes, for which Fall would later become the first Cabinet member ever to be imprisoned for a crime committed while in office. The real head of the US Radium Corporation in 1920, at whose New Jersey factory Quinta Maggia McDonald and her sisters worked, was Arthur Roeder. There is absolutely no reason to believe that either Doheny or Roeder had anything to do with the Wall Street bombing.

  By contrast, the tragic poisoning of the radium dial painters is well established. In several respects the true facts are worse than my description. Up to one hundred twelve dial painters may have died as a result of 'pointing' their brushes with their lips — a practice not abolished until 1925. Many more suffered painful, debilitating illnesses.

  The Maggia sisters — Quinta, Amelia, and Albina — were among the victims. (Although I use these three women's names in my book, my characters do not correspond to the real-life women, and the story I tell about their escape from the radium factory, their being hunted, and their efforts to communicate with Colette, is complete invention.) Amelia died in 1922, the first of the dial painters known to have perished from radium poisoning. When her body was exhumed in 1927, it was still radioactive. A handful of women, including Quinta and Albina, sued US Radium in the mid-twenties, but the law did not treat them well. In 1928, terminally ill, Quinta received a modest cash payment and an extravagant $600 annuity 'for life'; she died less than two years later. Albina lived until 1946.

  The corporation apparently suppressed or even falsified a report demonstrating that its officers knew of radium's danger to the dial painters. At one point a medical specialist from Columbia University volunteered to conduct independent examinations of the complaining women and concluded that they were either in excellent health or that their symptoms were due to syphilis or other illnesses unrelated to their employment. That specialist, Frederick Flinn, neglected to mention that he was not actually a doctor — and that he was being paid by US Radium. My character Frederick Lyme engages in similar misdeeds, but his further nefarious conduct is imaginary.

  Sigmund Freud first articulated his theory of the death instinct in a short book called Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published in 1920. Understood as a drive of pure aggression, a kind of lust for killing and destruction, the notion of a death instinct might raise questions about the goodness of human nature, but would otherwise be simple enough to comprehend. Freud insisted, however, that the instinct is fundamentally and originally directed at the self's own destruction. As a result, his death drive is regarded as a much more difficult and controversial proposition — although self-destructiveness is surely a phenomenon almost as familiar as aggression.

  By and large, the psychoanalytic world since Freud has been happy to forget about the death instinct or at any rate to deemphasize it. Melanie Klein was an important exception; so was Jacques Lacan, who considered the death instinct central to psychoanalysis, although he sought to prize the instinct free from the biological foundations Freud had given it. Another exception is Andre Green, also a French psychoanalyst, whose excellent recent book on the death instinct — Pounquel les
pulsions de destruction ou de mort? (Editions du Panama, 2007) by contrast explicitly connects Freud's theory to apoptosis, the biological process of programmed' cell death or cell suicide.' I have Freud draw the same connection in a conversation with Colette, perhaps, a little anachronistically. Although apoptosis was known to scientists by the late nineteenth century (called at that time 'chromatolysis'), its connection to cancer was not established until the late twentieth.

  Readers familiar with Freud's work will recognize the famous fort-da game that figures so prominently in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The unnamed boy who plays the game in Freud's essay has been identified as Freud's grandson Ernst; his mother was the Sophie whose death Freud so deeply mourned in 1920. There is another place in my book where Luc assumes the role of one of Freud's grandsons. The anecdote I tell about Freud, Luc, and the beggar feigning epilepsy was told to me by Clement Freud — brother of the painter Lucian Freud — and appears in the late Sir Clement's autobiography, Freud Ego.

  The astonishing story Freud recounts to Colette and Younger demonstrating the accuracy of one of his dream interpretations — in which Freud correctly deduces that a patient witnessed an affair between the patient's nurse and a family groomsman when the patient was about four years old — is entirely true, or at any rate is attested to by the patient herself, Princess Marie Bonaparte. Princess Marie, however, did not begin her consultation with Freud until 1925, so the story is not in correct time sequence in my book. As in The Interpretation of Murder, many of Freud's statements in The Death Instinct are drawn from his actual writings. Although it is common today to refer to Freud's death drive by the name of Thanatos' (after a Greek god of death), Freud never did so in his writings, and accordingly that term does not appear in my pages. He does refer to the death goddess Atropos in 'The Theme of the Three Caskets,' a 1913 essay that contains the key to the symbolism of The Death Instinct. Freud lived in Vienna until 1938, when he narrowly escaped Nazi persecution. He died in England in 1939.