'I'm not entirely certain. It's at 65 Broadway, just a block from my offices. Have I committed a crime?'
'No,' answered Littlemore. 'But you're staying here to give these officers a full statement. Boys, I'm taking a quick trip to 65 Broadway. Say, Ketledge, they speak English at this French Commission?' 'I'm sure I don't know,' said Ketledge.
Several hours having passed, Colette announced to Younger that they were almost out of bandages. 'We're running out of antiseptic too. I'll go to the pharmacy.'
'You don't know the way,' said Younger.
'We're not in the trenches anymore, Stratham. I can ask. I have to find a telephone anyway to call Luc. He'll be worried.' 'All right – take my wallet,' Younger replied.
She kissed him on the cheek, then stopped: 'You remember what you said?'
He did: 'That there was no war in America.'
At the foot of the steps she ran into Littlemore. The detective called up to Younger, 'Mind if I borrow the Miss for a half-hour, Doc?'
'Go ahead. But come up here, would you?' said Younger, bent over a patient.
'What is it?' asked the detective, ascending the steps.
'I think I saw something, Littlemore,' said Younger without interrupting his work. 'Nurse, my forehead.'
The nurse wiped Younger's brow; her cloth came off soaked and red.
'That your blood, Doc?' asked Littlemore.
'No,' said Younger untruthfully. Apparently he'd been grazed by a piece of shrapnel when the bomb went off. 'It was just after the blast. Something out of place.'
'What?'
'I don't know. But I think it's important.'
Littlemore waited for Younger to elaborate, but nothing followed. ' That's real helpful, Doc,' said the detective. 'Keep it coming.'
Littlemore trotted back down the stairs, shaking his head, and led Colette away. Younger shook his too, but for a different reason. He could not rid himself of the sensation of being unable to recall something. It was almost there, at the edges of his memory: a fog or storm, a blackboard – a blackboard? – and someone standing in front of it, writing on it, but not with chalk. With a rifle?
'Shouldn't you take a rest, Doctor?' the nurse asked. 'You haven't stopped for even a sip of water.'
'If there's water to spare,' said Younger, 'use it to wash this floor.'
The bells of Trinity Church had tolled seven when Younger finished. The wounded were gone, his nurse gone, the terrier with the little gray beard gone, the dead gone.
The summer evening was incongruously pleasant. A few policemen still collected debris, placing it in numbered canvas bags, but Wall Street was nearly empty. Younger saw Littlemore approaching, covered in dust. Younger’s own shirt and trousers were soaked with blood, browned and caked. He patted his pockets for a cigarette and touched his head above the right ear; his fingertips came away red.
'You don't look so good,' said Littlemore, looking in through the doorway.
'I'm fine,' Younger replied. 'Might have been finer if you hadn't deprived me of my assistant medical officer. You said you only needed her for half an hour.'
'Colette?' asked Littlemore. 'I did.'
'You did what?'
'I brought her back after half an hour. She was going to a drugstore.'
Neither man spoke.
'Where's a telephone?' Younger asked. 'I'll try the hotel.'
Inside the Stock Exchange, Younger called the Commodore Hotel. Miss Rousseau, he was informed, had not been back since the early morning. Younger asked to be put through to her room, to speak with her brother.
'I'm sorry, Dr Younger,' said the receptionist, 'but he hasn't come back either.'
'The boy went out?' asked Younger. 'By himself?'
'By himself?' said the receptionist in a peculiar voice.
'Yes – did he go out by himself?' asked Younger, irritation rising along with concern.
'No, sir. You were with him.'
Chapter Three
The attack on Wall Street of September 16, 1920, was not only the deadliest bombing in the nation's hundred-fifty-year history. It was the most incomprehensible. Who would detonate a six-hundred- pound explosive in one of New York's busiest plazas at the most crowded time of day?
Only one word, according to the New York Times, could describe the perpetrators of such an act: terrorists. The Washington Post opined that the attack was 'an act of war,' demanding an immediate counterattack from the United States Army. But war with what country, what foreign nation, what enemy? There was no answer. In this respect the attack on Wall Street was not only appalling, but appallingly familiar.
Fifteen million souls had perished in the Great War – a number almost beyond human compass. Yet despite this staggering toll, the war had been fathomable. Armies mobilized and demobilized. Countries were invaded and invaders repelled. Men went to the front and, much ol' the time, returned. War had limits. War came to an end.
But by 1920 the world had become used to a new kind of war. It had started a quarter-century earlier, with a wave of assassinations. In 1894, the President of France was murdered; in 1898, the Empress of Austria; in 1900, the King of Italy; in 1901, President McKinley of the United States; in 1912, the Prime Minister of Spain; and of course in 1914, a Hapsburg archduke, launching the great conflagration. Assassination as such was nothing new, but these killings were different.
Most of them lacked any clear, concrete objective. They lacked even the erratic rationality of a festering grudge.
All, however, were somehow the same. All were committed by poor young men, usually foreign, linked by shadowy international networks and sharing in a death-dealing ideology that made them seem almost to welcome their own demise. The assassinations appeared to be an attack on all Western nations, on civilization itself. The perpetrators were called by many names: anarchists, socialists, nationalists, fanatics, extremists, communists. But in the newspapers and in public oratory, one name joined them alclass="underline" 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.