'That's how the DA saw it,' said Littlemore. 'Assault with intent to kill. I was lucky to get you out. The judge wasn't going for it until I mentioned that you were a Harvard man. Harvard man and Harvard professor. And Roosevelt was your cousin. And you slept with Roosevelt's daughter. Okay, I didn't say that.'
'As a matter of fact,' said Younger, looping his tie around his neck, 'I did intend to kill him.'
'No, you didn't.'
'Who does he say he is?'
'Funny thing,' said Littlemore, 'but he's not talking. Seems his mouth is wired shut because somebody broke his jaw in three places. Boy, you better be right.'
'It's Drobac. He was limping. He had marks on his face.'
'Not proof.'
'Can't you take his fingerprints?'
'Did it,' said Littlemore. 'But they have to match something. We got no prints on the knives. No matching prints in the room downtown. No matching prints on the car. No prints at all on Colette's laboratory box. Nothing. He knew what he was doing.'
Neither spoke.
'Why would he come after us?' asked Younger.
'Maybe he wanted to get rid of the people who can finger him.'
'Where is she?' asked Younger, fastening his cufflinks.
'The Miss? Giving her lecture.'
'What?'
'She wouldn't take no for an answer,' said Littlemore. 'Made me get all her samples out of the evidence locker.'
That night A. Mitchell Palmer, the Attorney General of the United States, arrived in Manhattan by special train from the nation's capital.
A long black-and-gold car — a Packard Twin Six Imperial, the kind of car only very rich men could afford — was waiting for him outside Pennsylvania Station. Inside was a dapper gentleman who wore a top hat, with the points of his shirt collar up.
The car took Palmer to the Treasury Building opposite the Morgan Bank on Wall Street. Soldiers, saluting, stepped aside as the two men ascended the marble stairs and passed through the massive portal. A half-hour later, Palmer and the well-dressed gentleman reappeared. The latter led the Attorney General around the colonnade to a narrow alleyway separating the Treasury from the adjacent Assay Building. The alleyway was barred by a tall wrought-iron gate, which had to be unlocked to let the Attorney General through.
The two men walked halfway down that alley, the top-hatted gentleman pointing up to the second floors of the not-quite-abutting buildings. There, one story above the street, what looked strangely like garage doors in midair faced each other across the alley. Attorney General Palmer shook his head grimly, then informed the gentleman that he would be quitting New York the next day. The investigation of the bombing would remain in the hands of Bureau Director Flynn. Palmer himself would travel on to Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, to visit with family.
The Marie Curie Radium Fund held a special lecture presentation on September 17, 1920, in the Saint Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue. The Fund was the brainchild of Mrs William B. Meloney, a well- upholstered lady of a certain age, well known in New York philanthropic and literary circles. Mrs Meloney was a working woman, a newspaper woman, who by virtue of her tireless reporting on Manhattan high society had eventually taken a place in it. Like many American women, Mrs Meloney had avidly followed — indeed she had reported on — the travails of the great Marie Curie of France.
'How outrageous it is,' declared the bow-tied Mrs Meloney from the opulent but somber church chancel, 'that Madame Curie, the world's most eminent scientist, the discoverer of radium, should for mere want of money be prohibited from continuing her investigations — investigations that have already led to the radium cure for our cancers, the radium face and hand creams that eliminate our unsightly blemishes' — Mrs Meloney was, in addition to her other pursuits, editor of a leading woman's magazine — 'and the radium-infused waters that restore conjugal vitality to our husbands.'
The audience, almost exclusively female, applauded warmly.
Mrs Meloney congratulated her listeners for their fortitude in coming out only one day after the terrible tragedy on Wall Street. 'It has always been woman's lot,' she said, 'to persevere when man's violent passions overwhelm him. And persevere we must. The cost of a gram of radium is appalling — a hundred thousand dollars — but the sum must be raised. The honor of America's women has been pledged. I myself pledged it — to Madame Curie herself, at her home in Paris — and it is now the obligation of every one of us to contribute generously to the Fund, or make our husbands contribute.'
As the ladies applauded once again, the front door of the church creaked noisily.
'Thank heavens,' said Mrs Meloney, 'here is Miss Rousseau at last. We were growing concerned, my dear.'
The audience of fashionable ladies swiveled. Colette walked up the cavernous central aisle in silence, a picture of self-consciousness, lugging with two hands the heavy case of sample ores and radioactive elements. She murmured an apology, but her faint voice failed to carry in the huge, dimly lit Gothic church, with its great columns and vaulted ceiling. Colette had expected a few women in a small lecture room, not two hundred in a place of worship, assembled before a pulpit with a larger-than-life-sized crucifixion on the enormous reredos behind it.
'Over the last several weekends,' Mrs Meloney continued, 'along with Miss Rousseali — who studied with Madame Curie herself in Paris and who will shortly enlighten us on 'The Wonders of Radium' — I have been making a tour of the largest factories in America where radium products are made. We have sought to impress upon the owners of these factories how much they owe to Madame Curie. Our efforts have not been in vain, as I will soon have the pleasure of announcing to you.'
Here Mrs Meloney exchanged a knowing glance with a plump, impeccably dressed gentleman seated to her left, who gestured to the audience munificently. She then turned the pulpit over to Colette, who, smiling to cover her strenuous effort, hoisted the case of elements up the steps to the chancel.
'Thank you, Mrs Meloney,' said Colette. The pallor of her cheeks was attributed by her audience to her foreign birth. 'It is my warm honor and my privilege to give whatever small assistance I can to the Marie Curie Radium Fund.'
Colette paused, somehow expecting that her audience might applaud the name of Marie Curie. Instead there was a noticeable silence.
'Well, I begin,' she resumed, trying to press flat onto the lectern the curling pages on which she had carefully written out her presentation. 'Twenty-four years ago, Henri Becquerel, a French scientist, placed a dish of uranium crystals next to a wrapped photographic plate in a closed drawer and left them there for over a week. Was he conducting an experiment? No — Monsieur Becquerel was only cleaning up his laboratory, and he forgot where he put his uranium!'
Colette waited for laughter; none came.
'But when he unwrapped the photographic plate, he found an image on it — which should have been impossible, because the plate had not been exposed to light. Thus was the mystery of atomic radiation discovered, quite by accident! Two years later, in 1898, Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre, solved this mystery. Madame Curie proved that uranium's atoms emit invisible rays, and she coined a word for this phenomenon — radioactivity. Working in almost complete isolation, Madame Curie discovered two new elements previously unknown to man. The first she called polonium, after her native Poland; the second and by far the more powerful, she called radium. The potential energy of radium is so great it is almost impossible to describe with normal measures. You are familiar with horsepower? A single gram of radium contains an energy equivalent to that of eighty thousand million horses.'
Colette paused again, expecting a gasp at so enormous a figure. The only sound was the rustling of women's skirts and gloves.
'Such power,' Colette went on, speaking now a little too quickly, 'if released at once, would be enough to destroy every building in New York City in one terrible explosion. But science has found a way to harness radioactivity to save lives rather than destroy. Doctors today insert micrograms of radium, encased in tiny glass nodules, directly into a cancer patient's tumor. In weeks, the tumor is gone. All over the world today, because of
