'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 Sub-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.