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.'
Chapter Four
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.