He gave her the note. She sat up and read it, holding the bed sheet over her chest. She stared at the note a long time before handing it back to him:
My dear Miss Rousseau,
If you are reading this, it means, assuming I'm right, you have revealed to Younger that you knew of your father's unfortunate conduct before your brother told you of it. Do not condemn your father too harshly. A man is not to be judged by his actions at gunpoint.
Neither should you judge yourself True, if you had told your brother what you knew, his condition might possibly have abated sooner. But it might also, perversely, have become more entrenched. The fact is you each tried to protect the other from a truth the other already knew. This was irony, not tragedy.
You may have perceived that your brother has harbored a resentment against you. That is natural. He may have disliked you, or thought he did, for not knowing what he knew (as he believed) and thereby making him keep it a secret. Children expect adults to know what they know; when we disappoint them, they think the worse of us. But then even as adults we eventually come to scorn those from whom we have kept the truth, and we resent those for whom we have made the largest sacrifices. For these reasons, if you are even now undecided about whether to tell your brother that you knew his secret all along, you know what my advice to you would be.
There is one more thing I want to say. You wondered in my presence why you didn't kill the man who murdered your parents. It was from just this fact that I deduced what you were hiding. The reason is simple. You felt, even if you didn't know it, that you would be insulting your father if you did what he lacked the courage to do. It was kindness toward your father that motivated you, not kindness to the murderer. (This also leads me to believe that you feel you wronged your father some time in the past, although the nature of this wrong I'm unable to decipher.) Fortunately, at that moment you were with a man who didn't labor under your compunctions. If you are half as wise as I believe you to be, you won't refuse that man's affections a second time.
Freud
On December 25, 1920, a long-distance telephone connection was established between a private home in Washington, DC, and another in Boston, Massachusetts. It was almost midnight.
'Is that you, Jimmy?' asked Colette. She and Younger both had their ears to the receiver. A Christmas tree stood in front of them, decorated with toy soldiers and glittering hand-painted paper globes.
'It sure is, Miss,' answered Littlemore, voice crackling, 'and Betty too. Is Doc there?'
'I'm here,' said Younger. 'What is it?'
'You wouldn't believe this house we're in. Guy who owns it owns the Washington Post. Wife owns the Hope Diamond. It's a big Christmas party. Secretary Houston invited us down. Harding's here. There's so many senators you'd think it was the Capitol. Lamont’s here too. Looking pretty blue — like a guy who lost millions at the track. But you know what? Things are picking up. In the country, I mean. They got dancing girls here from New York. They're playing a new kind of music. Something in the air. The twenties may not be as bad as I thought.' 'You took the Treasury job again?' asked Younger. 'Nope. We're just guests. Betty's the one who likes Washington now. Probably because Harding's been all over her the whole night.' 'What about you and that Mrs Cross?' replied Betty. 'Not interested,' said Jimmy. 'She is,' replied his wife. 'The harlot.' 'Did you call for any particular reason?' asked Younger. 'It's Christmas, Doc.' 'Merry Christmas.'
'Everybody's giving out presents here,' said Littlemore. 'You're not the only ones,' replied Younger, looking at the diamond on Colette's finger, which had once belonged to his mother. 'Guess what?' said Littlemore. 'You got a present too.' 'I did?' asked Younger. 'From whom?'
'Houston. He asked me if you found the gold with me. I said yes. Then he asked me if you were a law officer.'
'Why?'
'Well, they finally dug it all up, and Lamont swears the gold doesn't belong to Morgan, and Houston swears it doesn't belong to the Treasury, so officially it doesn't belong to anybody. It's unclaimed. They got laws for that. They call it treasure law. The law is that unclaimed gold goes to the finder — unless he's a law officer. I told him you definitely weren't a law officer. Told him you were more a law breaker.'
There was silence on the line.
'Did you hear me, Doc?'
'All the gold goes to the finder?'
'Unless he's a law officer,' said Littlemore.
'How much was there?'
'A little over four million.'
'I can't accept it,' said Younger. 'It belongs to the United States. Tell him I give it back to the Treasury.'
'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
