'You mean — oh, I see what you mean. I benefitted from you without compensating you. How can I repay you? Would a thousand dollars be appropriate? Five thousand?'
'My word,' said Mrs Meloney.
'Samuels, don't just stand there,' said Brighton. 'Clean up. One can't leave a dead body on the floor of a church. Could we pay the trash men to take her, do you suppose?'
'She's still alive,' said Colette, kneeling by the fallen woman.
'She is?' asked Brighton, looking as if he might need to take cover behind Mrs Meloney again.
'Police!' shouted Detective Littlemore, bursting through the front door of the church. 'Drop your weapons!'
The woman's body lay crumpled on the cold stone floor, a dark stain of blood spreading out below it. Younger and Littlemore had arrived just in time to hear cries of 'murder' from ladies fleeing the church. As Mrs Meloney explained to the detective how the mad woman had attacked Colette, and how Mr Samuels had saved them,' Younger sought a pulse in the fallen woman's wrist. He found one, very faint.
Colette knelt next to him. 'Look at her neck,' she said.
Matted, unhealthy red hair masked the woman's face. Grimly but gingerly, Younger pushed the hair away. He saw vacant eyes, a pretty nose and thin, parted lips. The fraying scarf had regained its place over her neck. Younger pulled it away.
The woman had no chin at all. Where a chin should have been, and where a throat should have been, there was instead an engorged bulbous mass, almost as large as the woman's own head, attached to her neck. It had wrinkles, dimples, lumps, indentations, and many, many veins.
'What in the love of Pete is that?' asked Littlemore.
Chapter Nine
A year before the attack on Wall Street, the President of the United States, sitting on his toilet in the White House, suffered a massive cerebral thrombosis — a clot in the artery feeding his brain. Within moments, the once- visionary Woodrow Wilson became a half-blind invalid, unable to move the left side of his body, including the left side of his mouth.
Wilson's stroke was kept from the public, from his Cabinet, even from his Vice President. It was difficult to say who was supposed to run the country after Wilson s collapse. Indeed it was difficult to say who was running the country. Was it Secretary of State Robert Lansing, who secretly convened the Cabinet in the President's absence? Or was it Wilson's wife, Edith, who counted among her ancestors both Plantagenets and Pocahontas, and who alone had access to the presidential sick room, emerging therefrom with orders that Wilson had supposedly dictated? Or perhaps it was Attorney General Palmer, who secured ever more funds for his Bureau of Investigation, and who imprisoned tens of thousands all over the country as suspected enemies of the nation.
Throughout 1920, the country lurched along in this strange, headless condition. In January, Prohibition took effect. In March, the Senate rejected the League of Nations and, with it, Wilson's vision of America joining an international community of peaceful states and taking center stage in world affairs. Wilson had never persuaded his practical countrymen why America would want to entangle itself in Europe's intrigues and ancient enmities. What, after all, had the United States gained from the last war, in which more than 100,000 American young men had perished to save English and French skins?
Uncertain of their direction, deprived of drink, Americans in 1920 were waiting — for a storm to break the gathering tension, for a new president to be elected in November, for their economy to recover. Americans believed they had brought peace to the world. Surely they were entitled to worry about their own problems now.
There was, however, no peace in the world. In the summer of 1920, great armies still ravaged the earth. In August, a Soviet army marched triumphantly into Poland and even entered Warsaw, its sights set on Germany and beyond. Lenin had reason to be ambitious. Armed communists had seized power in Munich and declared Bavaria a Soviet Republic. The same occurred in Hungary. Right next door to the United States, revolutionaries in Mexico overthrew the American- supported regime, promising to reclaim that nation's gigantic petroleum deposits from the companies — in particular the United States companies — that owned them.
But most Americans in 1920 neither knew nor cared. Most had had their fill of the world. Most — but not all.
On Saturday morning, September 18, two days after the bombing, one day after Colette's lecture in Saint Thomas Church, Younger and Littlemore met at a subway station a couple of blocks from Bellevue Hospital.
Any way to identify the girl?' asked Younger as they set off for the hospital.
'Two-Heads?' said Littlemore. 'We'll probably know in a day or two. With girls, somebody usually comes in to report them missing. Unless she's a hooker, in which case nobody reports her.'
'I have a feeling this one isn't a hooker,' said Younger.
The two men looked at each other.
'Did you check her teeth?' asked Younger.
'To see if she lost a molar? Yeah — I had the same idea. But nope. No missing teeth.'
'Why Colette?'
'You mean why are these things happening to her? That's the question all right. But like I said — don't assume everything's connected.'
'What are you assuming — freak coincidence?'
'I'm not assuming anything. I never assume. If I had to guess, I'd say somebody thinks the Miss is somebody she isn't. Maybe a whole lot of people think she's somebody she isn't.'
Bellevue was a publicly funded hospital, required to take all patients delivered to its door, and the catastrophe on Wall Street had added fresh strains upon its already overtaxed resources. Every corridor was an obstacle course of patients slumped over on chairs or stretched out on gurneys. On the third floor, Younger and Littlemore found the woman from the church in a ward she shared with more than a dozen other female patients. She was breathing but unconscious, veins pulsing on the engorged mass bulging out of her neck. A nurse told them the girl had not regained consciousness since being admitted. One bed away, a hospital physician was administering an injection to another patient. Littlemore asked him if he thought the redheaded woman was going to live.
'I wouldn't know,' said the physician helpfully.
'Who would?' asked Littlemore.
'I would,' said the physician. 'I attend on this ward. But I've had no time to examine her.'
'Mind if I examine her?' asked Younger.
'You're a doctor?' asked the doctor.
'He's a Harvard doctor,' said Littlemore.
'I'd like to get a look at what's inside that neoplasm on her neck,' said Younger. 'Do you have an X-ray machine?'
'Of course we have one,' said the doctor, 'but only the hospital's radiology staff is permitted to use it.'
'Okay,' said Littlemore. 'Where can we find the radiology staff?'
'I'm the hospital's radiology staff,' said the doctor.
Littlemore folded his arms. 'And when could you do an X-ray?'
'In two weeks,' said the doctor. 'I perform X-rays on the first Monday of every month.'
'Two weeks?' repeated Littlemore. 'She could be dead in two weeks.'
'So could five hundred other patients in this hospital,' snapped the doctor. 'I'll have to ask you to excuse me. I'm very busy.'
After the physician had left, Littlemore said, 'Maybe I shouldn't have told him you were a Harvard doctor. I don't know why people resent what they ought to admire. What the heck is that thing on her neck?'
'I don't know, but we might find out pretty soon.' Younger pointed to a thin, bluish vertical fissure that was developing on the distended mass. The fissure ran from the girl's chin to her sternum. 'Whatever's inside may be trying to get out.'
'Great,' said Littlemore.
