'What do you expect him to say after what you found in Torres's room?' the Senator replied.
'There's no proof, Mr Fall.'
'Courtroom talk. Wars aren't fought in courtrooms. You keep your eye on the ball, son. We got the signature of the Mexican financial minister on letterhead paper and a goddamn terrorist boot camp run by their military. That's more proof than we need.'
'What if it was just some bad apples, not the whole government?'
'I'll be honest with you,' said Fall. 'I don't care if the bombing was ordered by El Presidente de la Republico or El Ministerio de la Financio. What difference would it make? We still got to clean out Mexico City. Hunt down the sons of bitches who bombed us. Wipe out that boot camp. If Obregon wasn't behind it, that means he can't control his bad apples, so we got to put in somebody who can — before they spoil the whole damn barrel.'
Static filled the line.
'Tell you what, son,' said Fall. 'I'm coming up your way to meet with Bill McAdoo on Saturday. Got to figure out what we're going to do about Houston. Tricky business funding a war when your Secretary of the Treasury is being paid off by your enemy. We always have dinner at the Oyster Bar. Why don't you meet us there?'
'The Oyster Bar?' said Littlemore.
'You know the Oyster Bar — in the terminal?'
'Sure, I know it. Sounds good, Mr Fall.'
A short while later, Littlemore was still standing by the telephone.
Younger knocked at the door of Mrs William Meloney s townhouse on West Twelfth Street, which was filled with purring cats and shelves full of testimonials to Marie Curie.
'These are letters,' Mrs Meloney explained to Younger, 'from cancer patients who have been cured with radium therapy. I'm collecting them for Madame Curie when she arrives. One is from a botanist who wants to send Madame Curie an entire hothouse of flowers. We must raise the rest of the money. We simply must.'
'It's all arranged,' said Colette with excitement. 'We're going to visit Mr Brighton's luminous-paint factories tomorrow — one in New Jersey, one in Manhattan. Mrs Meloney says there's a chance at a very large donation.'
'Mr Brighton,' said the older woman knowingly, 'is very close to contributing an even larger amount than he did before. As much as seventy-five thousand dollars. He told me so himself. All it will take is a little feminine push.'
'Seventy-five thousand dollars — can you believe it, Stratham?' said Colette. 'That's more than we need. The radium will be paid for.'
On their way back uptown, Younger told Colette about his visit to Sloane Hospital. 'Lyme insists it was syphilis,' he muttered. 'I should have asked to see the Wassermann test. I've never heard of tertiary syphilis in a girl that age.'
Littlemore walked down the steps of the Sub-Treasury and into Wall Street. Next door, soldiers were still stationed in front of the Assay Office, where deep in basement vaults the nation's gold reserves were stored. He crossed the street to the Morgan Bank.
Wall Street was crowded as always. Though in the way of the hurrying pedestrians, Littlemore walked slowly up and down the length of the sidewalk outside the bank, inspecting the places on its exterior wall where the concrete had been scored and gouged in the bombing.
Everyone had assumed this damage was caused by the bomb and the shrapnel. Littlemore examined the pockmarks more closely. It was strange that they were concentrated below and around a first-floor window. Some of the uneven gouges — particularly the larger ones — might well have been the product of shrapnel, but most of the pockmarks were small and round, as if the concrete had been repeatedly struck by bullets.
Littlemore went next to City Hall. In the basement land offices, he pored over the gas, water, sewer, and subway maps for lower Manhattan. It took him hours. He was pretty certain he wouldn't find anything, and he didn't. Ordinary plumbing, power, and gas lines ran under Wall Street. No sewer pipes crossed from Wall to Pine. A subway had been announced for Nassau Street in 1913, with a station at the corner of Broad and Wall, near where the bomb went off. But unlike the other eighty subway routes announced in 1913, the Nassau line had never been built.
The hotel into which Younger moved was the kind that provided in every room a set of old, unmatching utensils and an electric hot plate. Seeing these implements, Colette declared that she would cook. She took Younger shopping — at a greengrocer's, a butcher's, a baker's. It was, she said, like being in Paris. Or would have been, if there had only been a bottle of wine to buy.
The Littlemores had dinner in their Fourteenth Street apartment all together — parents, grandmother, and innumerable children. Littlemore's mind was not on the meal. Twice he called James Jr by the name of Samuel, which was their youngest boy, and he called Samuel Peter, even though Peter didn't look anything like Samuel, being twice his age. Betty, feeding Lily in the high chair, had never seen her husband so distracted.
'You know,' said Younger to Colette as they ate across their tiny candlelit dining table, 'there's another possibility.'
'Of what?'
'Of how radium cures cancer.' He cut into the chop she had made him. 'What if there's a kind of switch in every one of our cells that turns on or off the process of cell death — and what if radioactivity flips it? In cancer cells, the switch is off; the cells don't die; that's why they keep replicating, endlessly. When radioactivity hits those cells, it turns the switch on, so the cells start dying again. That cures the cancer.'
'But then in good cells, radioactivity would — it would-'
'Turn the switch off,' said Younger. 'Make the cells stop dying. Cause cancer.'
'Radium doesn't cause cancer.'
'How do you know?'
'One medicine can't both cure a disease and cause it. That's impossible.'
'Why?'
'Do you know why you are so suspicious of radioactivity?' asked Colette. 'I think it's because you didn't discover it. If you had been the first to think of God, you'd believe in Him, too.'
In her antiseptic room, the girl with long red hair knew what it meant when the man in the white coat came in. She strained against the leather straps; she tried to scream, but the gag muffled her mouth.
She also knew from the man's presence that she would soon feel the pinprick of a needle in her arm, and after that the gratifying warmth that would spread so comfortably up and down her limbs.
Soon the other man was brushing her teeth again, upper and lower, front and back, taking his time.
A folded note slid under Younger's hotel room door well after midnight. Younger read it, threw on some clothes, and went down to the front desk. 'You're out late,' he said.
'What's the world's strongest acid?' asked Jimmy Littlemore, chewing his toothpick.
'Strongest for what purpose?' asked Younger. 'Cutting through metal.'
'Aqua regia. It's a mixture of nitric and sulfuric acids.' 'Can you travel with it?' asked Littlemore. 'You know, bring it with you?'
'It's safe enough in glass. Why?'
'I might need some help,' said Littlemore. 'Could be a little dangerous. You around tomorrow night?' Younger looked at him. 'It's important, Doc.' 'To whom?' asked Younger. 'To the country. To two countries.' Younger still didn't answer. 'The war,' added Littlemore.
'The war's going to be a mismatch,' said Younger. 'A single division of ours is larger than the entire Mexican army. Our generals could go in blindfolded, and we'd still win it.'
'Not trying to win it,' said Littlemore. 'Trying to stop it.'
The front pages of the newspapers the next morning were full of the escalating crisis in Mexico. President- elect Obregon had not been seen in public for two days. On the border, the United States army, Second Division, had beaten to full war strength. American warplanes had begun crossing into Mexican airspace, patrolling south all the way to Mexico City.
The Wall Street Journal demanded an immediate invasion to protect American interests. So did the governor of the great state of Texas. In Washington, high-ranking gentlemen in the Wilson Administration, together with men whose offices would be correspondingly lofty under Harding, issued a joint statement addressed to General Obregon, President-elect of Mexico. The statement set forth the conditions necessary to a peaceful resolution of the
