significant obstruction, but it isn't so. Provided that the throw is sidearm, not overhand, there is no real difficulty. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the victim's ribs will let the point slip through. Indeed one might almost say they guide it home.
Younger and Colette had their backs to Drobac, as did everyone else on the observation deck, because he stood in the center while they were all at the railings. A good knife-thrower has no compunction about taking aim at his victim's back, which assures, after all, the element of surprise. All that's required is a blade long enough to pass through the soft tissue of the left lung with sufficient metal remaining to pierce the meat of the heart. In the case of a slender victim, a shaft of eight inches will usually do. Colette Rousseau was slender, and the knife in this case was a dagger with a ten-inch steel blade. Drobac's breathing slowed.
'That's good,' shouted Detective Littlemore to a workman operating a pneumatic drill. 'Keep her clear.'
Littlemore was now on Wall Street, in front of the Morgan Bank, where the bomb had exploded the day before. Two uniformed officers — Stankiewicz and Roederheusen — kept pedestrians at bay. Across the street, the Treasury and Assay buildings still looked like an army garrison, with a company of soldiers positioned around them.
The drill bit cracked one cobblestone in the blackened crater, then another. Littlemore signaled the workman to stop. Crouching down, brushing dust and pebbles aside, the detective prized free a horseshoe from the stones. It was a size four shoe; the remains of a shamrock nail were visible. Stankiewicz and Roederheusen peered over his shoulder. Littlemore flipped the shoe over; the letters HSIU were imprinted on it.
'How do you like that?' said Littlemore. 'You boys know what HSIU stands for?'
'No, sir,' said Roederheusen.
'Horse Shoers International Union.'
'Something strange about that, Cap?' asked Stankiewicz.
'Sure is.' Littlemore did not explain what.
On the Woolworth Building observation deck, a clutch of schoolboys erupted with shouts and stampeded at full speed from one side of the deck to the next. Luc chased them, close on their heels; an alarmed schoolteacher trailed after, close on his. Colette cried out her brother's name and broke into a run, certain that Luc was going to trip and tumble over the guard rail.
Drobac smiled. He was still standing, alone and unmoving, in the center of the platform. Colette was running from his right to his left at the far side of the deck. The gusting wind died for an instant, and in that instant he took a single broad step, as a fencer does in a lunge, flinging his knife backhanded. In general, he favored moving targets, which offered more of a challenge. But Colette did not present even that challenge. She had become quite suddenly stationary: Luc had stopped abruptly, bringing the schoolteacher to a halt just behind him, bringing Colette to a similar halt.
The dagger spun in the air exactly three and a half rotations, parallel to the ground, and entered the girl's back. The point slipped through her ribs, puncturing her lung. But it was the right lung, not the left, and as a result the knife point, when it emerged from that lung, never touched her heart.
A knife piercing an individual's back characteristically causes its victim to throw both arms wide and high in the air, to scream, and to fall forward at least a step or two. All that happened here. This was unfortunate, because her forward steps propelled her over the railing. There was still a fair chance her fall might have been arrested by one of the balconies below. It was not to be. Her body, somersaulting, hit a parapet and bounced outward. The collision caused a morsel of concrete to crack loose and fall alongside the girl's body, accompanying her fifty-eight stories to the earth. At exactly the same moment, the girl and the concrete chip hit the sidewalk, which there consisted of a mosaic of colored glass squares. On contact, the concrete chip rebounded several stories high in the air. Considerably heavier, the girl's plummeting body ripped through the colorful glass tiles with a sickening thunderclap, plunging into the subway station below.
Littlemore heard the crash all the way from Wall Street. He listened for an aftermath, for the sounds of riot or terror. Hearing nothing more, he resumed his instructions to his men: 'Stanky, you take this shoe straight to Inspector Lahey.'
'Can I tell the press about it?' asked Stankiewicz.
'Make sure you do,' said Littlemore. 'But the Feds don't touch that shoe, you hear me?'
'Excuse me, Captain,' said Roederheusen. 'Mr O'Neill's still waiting to talk to you.'
Terrified screams rent the rooftop of the Woolworth Building. Schoolboys gaped and yelled in horror. Only Luc was perfectly silent, reaching his hands, with a strange and protective intelligence, to take those of his sister.
The dead girl was the schoolteacher who had stopped short behind Luc. Had Colette taken one more step, Drobac's knife would have found her. But because of the schoolteacher's unexpected halt, the knife had pierced the right lung of the wrong victim — the unlucky schoolteacher — rather than the left lung of its intended target.
The mass of people on the observation deck, not having seen the knife, believed they had witnessed a ghastly accident. A new load of sightseers just then emerging onto the deck added to the confusion. Younger, however, had seen the knife in the schoolteacher's back, and now he saw a man limping toward the heavy oak doors that led to the elevator bank — the only person leaving the platform amid the pandemonium. Drobac glanced back as he passed through the doorway. Younger recognized the small, black eyes at once.
Younger rushed across the deck and through the doorway. Between the closing doors of an elevator car, Younger saw those same black eyes again, peering at him from below a fedora's brim. The narrowing gap between the doors was too small for a man to fit through, but it was large enough for Younger s arm, which he thrust into the car, grabbing Drobac by the lapel. The elevator operator, barking out in surprised protest, reopened the doors. Younger yanked Drobac out and threw him to the floor.
Drobac tried to fight, but it was no contest. Younger beat him and beat him and kept beating him until the bones of his nose, his jaw and even his eye sockets all gave way.
'O'Neill — who's that?' Littlemore asked Officer Roederheusen on a street corner near the Morgan Bank.
'That's him over there, sir. He's been waiting all morning. He says he got a warning about the bomb too.'
'Bring him over. Then go find the mailman who picks up at Cedar and Broadway. And not next week. I want that mailman in my office tomorrow morning, got that?'
'But tomorrow's Saturday,' said Roederheusen.
'What about it?' asked Littlemore.
'Nothing, sir.' Roederheusen crossed the street and returned with a man barely over five feet in height, with a waistline of approximately the same size and whose arms, as he walked, moved like those of a toy soldier. 'Sorry you had to wait, Mr O'Neill,' said Littlemore. 'You have some information for me?'
'Yeah — it was last Thursday, see,' said O'Neill. 'Or else Friday. No, Thursday.'
'Just tell me what happened,' said Littlemore.
'I'm on the train from Jersey, like every morning. This guy, he gets on at Manhattan Transfer and we get to talking. Friendly-like.'
'Describe him,' said Littlemore.
'Nice-looking,' said O'Neill. 'About forty, forty-two, maybe. Never saw him on the train before. Six-footer. Athletic type. Blond. Educated. Tennis racket.'
'Tennis racket?' asked Littlemore.
'Yeah, he was carrying a tennis racket. Anyways, we're in the Hudson Tube, see, and he asks me where I work. I tell him 61 Broadway. He says he works on the same block, at some kind of embassy or something, and we keep talking, this and that, you know, and then he leans over and whispers to me, 'Keep away from Wall Street until after the sixteenth.''
'He said the sixteenth?' asked Littlemore. 'You're sure?'
'Oh yeah. He says it a couple of times. I ask him what he's talking about. He says he works on the sly for the Secret Service and his job is to run down anarchists. Then he goes, 'They have 60,000 pounds of explosives and they're going to blow it up.' He meant it too. You could tell. It was him, wasn't it, detective? It was Fischer?'
'What did you do?'
'I stayed away from Wall Street on the sixteenth, that's what I did.'
Three Woolworth security personnel, when at last they arrived, tore Younger from the bloodied man and put him — Younger — in handcuffs.
They were not impressed by Younger's claim that the victim of his assault had killed the girl who had just
