The Death Instinct

'Fools,' said Younger. 'What is recalcitrant supposed to mean?'

'The other children are thieves and imbeciles. It's criminal. Luc learns nothing and receives no treatment.'

'He doesn't need treatment. He needs to live.'

'How do you know?' she asked. 'Are you a psychologist?'

He didn't answer.

'You could have helped him get the best treatment in the world,' she said. 'You remember how he used to write notes sometimes? He doesn't even do that anymore. He hasn't communicated with anyone for two months. Oh, why am I telling you this? Why am I here? I hate this country. I have to go — my train is coming.'

She ran away.

He expected to see her the following week. After ten days, he went to the liaison office to find out if she had come back. She hadn't. Younger lit a cigarette and gazed up at Bitburg's perpetually gray sky.

In the spring, when his discharge orders finally came through, he took a train to Paris. At the Radium Institute, he asked for Miss Rousseau. The receptionist told him that Colette was out, but expected back shortly. He waited outside.

The streets of Paris were admirable. Always a tree in the right place. The buildings handsome and large, but never too large. The smell of clean water on pavement. He wondered whether he should move there.

Colette was halfway up the steps before she recognized him. She stopped in astonishment and broke into her most radiant smile, which as quickly disappeared. She was even thinner than she had been. Her cheeks had a pretty pointing of red, but the cause, it seemed to him, might be hunger.

'Come inside,' she said.

He shook his head. They went walking instead. 'Did you find your Hans Gruber?' he asked.

'Not yet.'

'You didn't go back to Bitburg, did you?'

'No, but I will.'

'Because you didn't have money for the train. Have you been eating?'

'I'll be fine in ten days. That's when my job starts. For now I have to save everything for Luc. They don't feed him enough in school. Do I look awful?'

'More beautiful than ever,' said Younger, 'if that's possible. I found your soldier. Hans was Austrian. He volunteered with the Germans when the war broke out. They gave me an address in Vienna. Here.'

He handed her a piece of paper. She stared at it: 'Thank you.'

'How is Luc?' he asked.

'Terrible.'

'Do they ever let him out?'

'Of course. In fact his school goes on holiday at the end of this week. How long will you be in Paris? I know he'd like to see you.'

'I'm leaving this Friday.'

'Oh,' she said. 'Do come and see the institute. We have American soldiers visiting, learning Madame's radiography techniques.'

'I know. That's why I won't go in. I've had enough of the army for a while.'

'But I could introduce you to Madame.'

'No.' They had come to a street with trolley cars rambling on it. 'Well, Miss Rousseau, I don't want to keep you.' She looked up at him: 'Why did you come?' 'I almost forgot. There was something else I meant to give you.' He handed her an envelope from his pocket. It contained a short telegram, which read: i will accept boy with pleasure as new patient. advise sister to call on me directly she arrives vienna. freud

She was speechless.

'You can kill two birds with one stone,' said Younger. 'Take Luc to Freud, and pay a visit to your soldier's family.'

'But I can't. I don't speak German. Where would I stay? I can't even afford the tickets.'

'I speak German,' he replied.

'You would come?'

'Not if you're going to shoot me.'

To his surprise, she threw her arms around his neck. He had the impression she was crying.

Jimmy Littlemore unburdened the kitchen table of his feet. He stretched his good arm, poured two more whiskeys. 'I don't get you, Doc. First you practically rape her-'

'Completely false.'

'You unbuttoned her shirt. What kind of girl did you think she was?'

Younger scrutinized the autumnal color of the bourbon. 'The rules are different in war.'

'She didn't think so,' said Littlemore. 'What I like is how she knows what she's going to do with herself. She wants her sore bun, and she's going to get it.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'That school, the sore bun. Wants it for her dad. That's how I feel about making it to Washington. My dad missed his only shot with the Feds. When Teddy Roosevelt went to DC, my dad could've gone with him. He was the best cop in New York, but he had family, kids — you know. I'll probably never get the shot myself, but if I do, let me tell you, that would make him proud. So when did you find out her soldier boy wasn't dead?'

Younger's glass stopped midway to his mouth. 'How did you know that?'

'The dog tags,' said Littlemore. 'She goes to a German army office to locate a dead soldier, and she leaves the guy's tags back in France? I don't think so. I don't think she has the guy's tags. Why would that he? Because he's not dead.'

'I always said you should have been a detective.'

'She's sweet on the guy, huh? Didn't want you to know?'

Younger took a moment before answering: 'She's in love with him — her Hans. Want to know what happened in Austria?'

'I'm all ears.'

Chapter Seven

No city in the world was more altered by the Great War than Vienna.

Not physically. Vienna was never invaded during the war, nor shelled, as Paris had been. Not one stone was nicked. What the war had shattered was merely Vienna's soul and its place in the world.

In the spring of 1914, Vienna had been the sun around which revolved a galaxy of fifty million subjects speaking dozens of languages, all bound in fealty to Emperor Franz Josef and the House of Hapsburg. Vienna was rich, and its affairs mattered to the world. Five years later, it was a city of no consequence in a country of no consequence — starving, freezing, its factories shuttered, its emperor a fugitive, its empire abolished, its children deformed by years of malnutrition.

The result was a host of contradictory impressions for travelers arriving there in March of 1919. Riding their cab from the railway station — an elegant, two-horse, tandem carriage — Younger, Colette, and Luc saw under a rising sun a Vienna superficially every bit as grand as it had formerly been. The majestic Ringstrasse, that wide avenue parade of monumentality encircling the old inner city, presented the same invincible visage that it had before the war. The Ring borrowed liberally, and without nice regard for consistency, from the entire Western architectural canon. After trotting by an oversized blazing white Greek Parthenon, their carriage passed a darkly Gothic cathedral, and after that a many-winged neo-Renaissance palazzo. The first was the parliament, the second city hall, the third the world-famous university. Even the inferior buildings of the Ring would have been palaces elsewhere.

But the figures out for a morning stroll on the Ring, though fashionably dressed, did not display the same imperial bearing. Many of the men were maimed; crutches, dangling sleeves, and eye patches were ubiquitous. Even the able-bodied had a vacantness about them. Off the Ring, in smaller streets, children lined up by the hundreds for food packages. At one point Colette and Younger saw a clutch of these children break into a mad rush; the stampede was followed by angry shouting from adults, then by blows, then by trampling.

Colette wanted the cab to drop her off at Hans Gruber's address.

Younger pointed out that, because of the lateness of their train, which was supposed to have arrived the night before, they were in danger of missing their appointment with Freud.

'Can you ask the driver how far away the address is?' she replied. 'Perhaps it's close.'

It wasn't. Colette relented. After she had settled back, disappointed, their driver spoke to her in excellent French: 'Excuse me, Mademoiselle, but if I may: Does France's hatred of the Germans extend to the Viennese?'