'You mean because you rode in Mr Brighton's train? You're the only policeman in New York who would think there was anything wrong with that.'
'He offered me five thousand dollars. Enough for Lily. He put it in my hand.'
'Did you take it?'
'No.'
The noise of the train receded into the distance. The bedroom was completely silent.
'What did he want you to do?' asked Betty at last.
'Nothing. He wanted to pay me for something I already did.'
'He offered you five thousand dollars for nothing?'
'It was for police work,' said Littlemore. 'I'm sorry, Betty. I couldn't take it.'
'You listen to me, James Littlemore,' said Betty, sitting up. 'Don't you take any dirty money. Not for me, not for Lily, not for anything.'
Littlemore shut his eyes. 'Thanks,' he said.
Betty lay down again. A long while passed.
'Did I make enough of myself, Betty?' asked Littlemore.
'Enough? Nobody works harder than you. You put food on our table every day. You got us an apartment on Fourteenth Street.'
'Mayor Mitchel was mayor of New York City at thirty-four,' said Littlemore. 'Teddy Roosevelt was Police Commissioner at thirty-eight. I can't even afford to fix my own daughter's hearing.'
'They had famous fathers, Jimmy. Your father — ' Betty hesitated — 'well, you did everything on your own.'
Littlemore didn't speak.
'And you're still going places,' said Betty. 'Look at this new job of yours. None of the girls have a husband like mine. You should see the looks in their eyes. You're like a god. Captain Littlemore of the New York Police Department. Special Agent Littlemore of the United States Treasury.'
'Like a god,' said Littlemore, smiling, wiping his eyes in the darkness. 'That's me all right.'
The morning papers confirmed Brighton's complaints. The President-elect of Mexico, General Alvaro Obregon, had ordered troops into American-owned silver mines. He was threatening to do the same with the much more lucrative oil wells, claiming that Americans had bought their subsoil rights through illegal, corrupt transactions with the pre-revolutionary regime.
The American Society for Psychical Research had a perfectly unspiritual office on East Twenty-third Street in Manhattan, lined with scientific publications, most prominently its own. No signs of the occult were anywhere in evidence. Dr Walter Franklin Prince, the acting director, was equally mundane in appearance. He was a largefaced, affable man of about sixty with a receding hairline, and he smoked a pipe with an unusually large bowl.
'Thanks for making time, Dr Prince,' said Littlemore the next morning, shaking Prince's hand. 'Friend of mine told me you were the outfit to talk to about supernatural stuff.'
'Delighted to assist,' replied Prince. 'My secretary, Miss Tubby, tells me you doubt whether Mr Edwin Fischer really could have seen into the future.'
'That's right, but I'm listening.'
'Certainly he could have. Premonitions of disaster are commonplace.
In 1902, I myself dreamed in precise detail of a train wreck four hours before it occurred. In 1912, Mr J. C. Middleton, having purchased tickets for the maiden voyage of the Titanic, dreamed two nights in a row of the ship's foundering and of its passengers drowning in the cold sea. He refused to travel and lived.'
'Didn't happen to tell anybody about his dreams before the ship went down, did he?'
'I wouldn't mention it otherwise. I have no truck with after-the-fact clairvoyants. Mr Middleton was so alarmed that he immediately told his wife and several friends. Their affidavits are in my drawer. I've been looking into the Fischer case myself, and based on the evidence, I'm convinced his premonition was authentic.'
'Fischer says it came to him 'out of the air,'' said Littlemore. 'That make any sense to you?'
'He could not have expressed it more felicitously. When we see a twinkling in the night sky, Captain, what are we seeing?'
'Um — I'm going to say a star.'
'We're seeing the past. The universe as it existed centuries ago. The past surrounds us at every moment, although we can rarely see it. So too with the future. It's all around us, in the form of waves or perturbations quite invisible to the naked eye — like radio waves, actually. Many of us fleetingly detect these currents, for example in the hair on the back of our necks. In time, science will discover their molecular structure. But there can be little doubt about their source.'
'Their source?'
'Death, Captain,' said Dr Prince. 'Death releases this energy into the air. If a true catastrophe is looming, the disturbance becomes such that a sensitive individual may become highly troubled by it. He may be aware of exactly when and where it will occur. He may see an aura around people who are soon to die. Or he may see images of the disaster beforehand, as I did, and as Mr Middleton did. That is what happened to Edwin Fischer.'
Littlemore nodded. He didn't accept, but he didn't judge. 'Can they ever know more?' he asked. 'Like who's behind it?'
'I've never heard of that. There is evidence that the souls of the murdered, reached in the spirit world, can tell you who killed them, but I know of no cases documenting such foreknowledge in the living. Are you interested in contacting a medium? I have a very gifted one.'
'I'll take a rain check on that, Dr Prince.'
'Would it be helpful to know when the attack was conceived?'
'Could be very helpful,' said Littlemore. 'You think Fischer might know?'
'In cases of deliberate slaying, premonitions almost never come before the murderer has formed the intention to kill. Often the initial premonition will come at that very moment. Ask Mr Fischer when he first had his precognition.'
'Thanks, Dr Prince — I may do that.'
In the Astor Hotel, in mid-October 1920, an increasingly belligerent Director Flynn of the Federal Bureau of Investigation held yet another press conference. Flynn's repeated claims of imminent prosecution had not worked to his advantage. The case had not cracked. No one had been charged. An air of skepticism and defeated expectations had begun to infect several gentlemen of the press.
As Flynn saw it, the fault was not his. It lay rather with the newspapers, for reporting his setbacks. Every time one of his leads came to nothing, the newspapers made a story of it, which wasn't the kind of behavior Flynn expected from loyal Americans. Embarrassing the federal government's efforts to defeat its enemies was a criminal offense. That's why Eugene Debs was in jail. Flynn could have hauled any one of these reporters into custody. He knew what they were saying to each other on the telephone — because his agents were listening in. He felt they owed their continuing and undeserved liberty entirely to his largesse.
'Each and every one of you boys,' said Flynn, 'ought to be on your knees in thanks to me. But I ain't going into that today. Instead I'm going to sell more newspapers for you. We got it all sewed up now. Here's your story: yesterday afternoon, my office received information establishing the identity and whereabouts of the political prisoners, which you goons were too busy writing about mental cases to even realize you didn't know who they were.'
Pencils hung frozen in midair as comprehension sought in vain to work its way through this declaration.
'Don't you remember nothing, you saps?' asked Flynn helpfully. ''Free the political prisoners' — that's what the anarchist circulars said. Well now, just who exactly are these political prisoners? Figure that out, and you bust the whole case wide open.'
'But last time you said Tresca did it, Chief,' said a reporter. 'Then Tresca gives a public speech in Brooklyn, and you don't even bring him in. What gives?'
'Why, I ought to show you what gives,' rejoined Flynn, neck straining at the buttoned collar of his white shirt. 'I never said Tresca did it. All's I said was he was a suspect. Got that?'
'Director Flynn,' said another man, less disheveled than the others, 'my readers want me to tell you that you're a fine American.'
'Thank you, Tommy. I appreciate that. You're a fine American.'
