'So you're the one who found the circulars,' said Littlemore. 'Did you get a look at the men who mailed them?'
The man shook his head, mouth full.
'Okay, here's what I want to know — when did you first see the circulars? Did you see them when you opened the mailbox or only later, when you got back to the post office?'
The postman blew his nose into a paper napkin. 'Don't know what you're talking about. The box was empty.'
'Empty?' repeated Littlemore. 'The mailbox at Cedar and Broadway? Day of the bombing? Eleven fifty-eight pickup?'
'The eleven fifty-eight? I never made the eleven fifty-eight. Hung my bag up after morning rounds. Too sick. Lucky thing, huh?'
'Did somebody cover for you?'
'Cover for me?' The man laughed into his napkin. 'Fat chance. What's this all about, anyway?'
Littlemore sent the postman away.
Eighty miles away, in a laboratory at Yale University, a human-like creature in a helmet and what looked like an undersea diver's suit was also working on Saturday. The creature was titrating fumaric acid into six tubes of thorium in an attempt to isolate ionium. When this delicate, wearisome task was not quite complete, the creature lumbered out of the laboratory and into the sunshine of a campus courtyard, causing a child to run crying to his perambulating nanny.
The creature took off its gloves and removed its slit-visored helmet. Out shook the long sable hair of Colette Rousseau. She sat on a bench, the brightness of the sun blinding her after the double darkness of the laboratory and her helmet.
Colette and Luc had returned to New Haven early Saturday morning so that she could resume her laboratory duties, from which she had taken two days off. Her experiments were designed to test the existence of ionium, a putative new element that Professor Bertram Boltwood claimed to have discovered — the 'parent of radium,' he called it. Madame Curie did not believe in ionium, judging it to be only a manifestation of thorium. Accordingly, Colette did not believe in ionium either. She had already established that ionium could not be separated from thorium with any of the ordinary precipitants, such as sodium thiosulfate or meta-nitro-benzoic acid. Today she was trying fumaric acid. But her hands had begun to shake within her heavy lead-lined gloves, and she'd had to stop.
She gathered her hair into a long braid, threw it behind one shoulder of her radiation suit, and, using both hands, reached to the nape of her neck. She drew out the chain and locket that always hung at her chest. Turning an ingeniously crafted bezel first one way, then the other, Colette opened the two halves of the locket. Into the palm of her hand fell a thin, tarnished metal oval — like an oblong coin — with two tiny holes punched through it.
One side of this metal oval was bare. Turning it over, Colette let eyes linger on a series of machine-etched letters and numbers: Hans Gruber, Braunau am Inn, 20. 4. 89., 2. Ers. Masch. Gew. K., 3. A.K. Nr. 1128.
Although it was a Saturday, Littlemore saw lights in the Commissioner's office. The detective knocked and entered.
'Captain Littlemore — just the man I wanted to see,' said Commissioner Enright from an armchair by a large window, looking up from a report he'd been reading. Enright was revered by his men. He was the only Police Commissioner in the history of New York City to have risen to that position from the rank and file. 'I've been in touch with the Canadians. They're happy to extradite. Send someone to Ontario to collect this Edwin Fischer.'
'Already on their way, Mr Enright,' said Littlemore.
'That's the spirit. You met with Director Flynn of the Bureau yesterday. What were your impressions?'
'Big Bill's not giving us a thing, Commissioner,' said Littlemore. 'Fischer, for example. Flynn knew Fischer was in custody Wouldn't say where, wouldn't say how he knew. After we turned over all our evidence to them.'
Enright shook his head ruefully. 'It's no more than I expected. That's why I chose you as liaison officer. They have greater resources than we, Littlemore, but not greater brainpower. Keep a step ahead of him. Keep us in it. Flynn found the circulars. Let the next find be ours.' 'I don't like the circulars, sir,' said Littlemore. 'You don't "like" them?'
'Flynn's story doesn't wash. There's no way the bombers got from Wall Street to that mailbox by 11:58. Plus the flyers don't read right. They don't even mention a bombing. If I'm the Wall Street bomber and I want to tell everybody I did it, I'm going to say so. Mr Enright, I'm not even sure the circulars were picked up from a mailbox at all. I just got done with the mailman who would have made the pickup. He went home sick that morning.'
'What are you suggesting, Littlemore?'
'Nothing, sir. All I know is that Flynn s doing everything he can to connect our bombing to the ones from 1918 and 1919. He even said the Chicago Post Office was bombed on the third Thursday of September, so that September 16 was the exact anniversary.' 'Yes, I read that in the Times,' said Enright.
'The Chicago bomb went off on September 4, 1918, Mr Enright. I don't know if that was a Thursday, but it definitely wasn't the third Thursday. I just think we should keep looking.'
'Certainly we should keep looking,' said Enright. 'That's why we're going to speak with Mr Fischer. But I should tell you that on this point I quite agree with General Palmer: the bombing on Wall Street was the work of Bolshevik anarchists. Who else would have done such a thing? The Great War did not end in 1918. It was a mistake to withdraw our troops from Russia; we've allowed them to bring the war to our soil. Wilson is useless, but things will change after the election. Harding will take the war to Lenin's doorstep where it belongs. That's all, Captain.'
Younger returned to Bellevue early the next morning. The hospital was much quieter now: it was no less crowded with patients, but because it was Sunday, fewer medical personnel were on hand, and very little treatment was being given or received.
In a bathroom on the second floor, Younger put a white coat over his suit and tie. Striding down the hall, he entered the room where the X-ray machine was kept, wheeled it out, guided it into an elevator, and came out onto a third-floor corridor, where he called out commandingly for a nurse to assist him. A nurse came running at once.
The unconscious redheaded girl lay in the same room in the same condition — alive but comatose. With the nurse's help, Younger laid the girl's body on the wooden X-ray couch, stomach-down, turning her head to one side. Her profile was uncannily angelic save for the monstrosity protruding from her chin and throat, which looked even more distended and unnatural in the electric light of the hospital room than it had in the darkness of the church. Younger prodded the mass with two gloved fingers, which provoked in him a peculiar, highly nonmedical sensation of disgust. The interior of the growth was soft but granular.
Radiographing an unconscious person was considerably easier, Younger discovered, than a conscious one. There was no difficulty with the subject moving during irradiation. The X-ray tube, clamped inside a box running on casters beneath the table, was easily brought directly below the girl's cheek. Protecting himself with a lead panel, Younger turned on the radiation and adjusted the diaphragm until only the growth fluoresced on the test screen over the girl's head. Then he replaced the test screen with an unexposed photographic plate. He let the radiation course through the girl's body for exactly eight seconds and repeated this process several times, from different angles, using a new plate each time.
The same morning, the Littlemore clan was tumbling out of their Fourteenth Street apartment house on their way to church. The children had been scrubbed and soaped until they shone like sprightly mirrors. Littlemore had their toddler, Lily, on his shoulders. Lily always received special treatment; none of the other children objected, because of her condition.