The Death Instinct (23 page)

    'I'm sorry?' asked Littlemore.

    'To obtain probable cause against Smith, if that's in fact his name.'

    'But today's Friday, Mr Enright,' said Littlemore.

    'And you've had Mr Smith in jail since last Friday, when he should have been in a hospital. By Monday you will have had ten days to collect evidence against him, Littlemore, which is more than adequate. Either you come up with hard evidence by Monday, or you let him go. Will that do, Hylan?'

    'That'll do,' grumbled the Mayor.

    'That will be all, Captain,' said Enright.

    Younger tried to write a letter to Colette, seated at his hotel room desk. How could she love a convicted criminal so devoted to the German cause that he had volunteered to serve in its army? There had to be some reality to love - surely. If a girl loved a man who wasn't the man she thought he was, she didn't really love him - did she?

    But perhaps Hans Gruber wasn't the man
Younger
thought he was. Why shouldn't Gruber be the sweet, devout, ailing soul that Colette remembered? Yes, he was in prison for assault on an innocent victim, but his imprisonment might be a mistake. Younger himself had been jailed for assault only last week. Worse, much worse: Didn't Gruber deserve Colette more than Younger did? Gruber had instantly seen what Younger had taken years to grasp - that his life would be void and dull and pointless and black without her.

    The letter he was trying to write, offering Colette reasons not to go to Europe, failed to flow trippingly off his pen. He started, stopped, and started again, crumpling sheets of hotel stationery and throwing them into a wastebasket. Eventually he pulled them out and burned them, one by one, in an ashtray. It had come to him that, with Freud having agreed to treat Luc, Colette would never be dissuaded from going to Vienna.

    Younger packed his bags.

    Littlemore reexamined the evidence seized from Colette's and Luc's kidnappers. He combed through every item, turned inside out every article of clothing. He looked for laundry marks, for threads of hair, for anything that would connect the jailed man, Drobac, to the kidnapping. All to no avail.

    Then he went to the police garage, where he personally re-dusted the criminals' car for fingerprints, both exterior and interior, from tailpipes to steering wheel to ashtrays. This painstaking process took many hours. It proved equally futile, revealing a host of prints, none of which matched the ones taken from the man Younger had assaulted. Frustrated but not beaten, Littlemore went home for the night.

    Even as the train conductor announced New Haven as the next stop, Younger still had not decided whether to disembark there or continue on to Boston, the city that had been his home most of his life.

    The landscape outside the train's windows had grown increasingly New England. Trees blazed with color. Every bridge over every river, every bend of the coastline, was familiar to him. He had taken the Shore Line into or out of Manhattan too many times.

    When the train pulled into New Haven, Younger stepped out on the platform. He smelled the autumn air and dropped into a mailbox a letter for Colette. Under his Boston address, the letter said:

September 24, 1920

I'll come to Vienna, but only on one condition: that you renounce any intention of seeing Hans Gruber.

- Stratham

    The whistle blew, the conductor called out, and Younger returned to his seat.

    Littlemore spent the next day - Saturday - tracking down and interviewing occupants of the building where the criminals had stayed. No one had anything of value to tell him. He found the owner of that building, but the landlord was equally unhelpful. He cut through the police ropes and reentered the room where Colette and Luc had been taken. On hands and knees, he went over every inch of the room with his magnifying glass. This too was in vain.

    Younger woke up Saturday morning in his old bedroom in his old house in the Back Bay. It wasn't the house of his parents - the house he'd grown up in - but a townhouse he'd bought after returning to Boston when his marriage broke up in 1911. It was a handsome place, with fine old furniture, high ceilings, and well-proportioned rooms. Leaving the accumulated mail untouched, he went outside.

    What he liked about Boston was that it was such a small town. That was also what he didn't like about it. He walked to the Public Garden, passing rows of townhouses more or less identical to his own, and took a seat on a bench by the lake. It was so placid he could see in it an upside-down double of every swan and paddle boat plying the water. He put a cigarette in his mouth but discovered he had no matches. The fact that he was in Boston with no employment irritated him.

    After his divorce, Younger had thrown himself into his scientific work, spending days and nights in a laboratory underneath the Harvard medical school. His field in those days was microscopic infectious agents. He made his scientific name in 1913 by isolating syphilitic spirochetes in the brains of individuals who had died of general paresis, a condition previously believed to be psychiatric in origin. He saw no one. He socialized not at all.

    Then something unexpected took place. He had assumed he would be a pariah because of his divorce, which was not proscribed in Boston society, but was not regarded favorably Instead, his social reputation soared. Whether due to his respectable position at Harvard, or the notoriety attaching to his supposed affair in New York, or, most likely, the inheritance that fell into his lap from his mother's Schermerhorn relatives, Younger became a prize commodity in both Boston and New York. At first he refused all invitations. But after two years playing the reclusive scientist, he began to go out. To his surprise, he enjoyed it.

    He lent his arm to coveted young women at society events. He kissed their fingers and danced with them as if he were courting. But he never was; the society girls bored him. He preferred actresses, and in New York he was infamously seen with them. Over these years, there were only three women he slept with - and even those he could stand only for short stretches of time. A moment arrived when he was simultaneously the most eligible and most hated man in two cities. Even the actresses generally ended up enraged. Every year, he expected society to revolt against him and put him under a ban. But somehow the number of mothers believing that their daughter might be the one to land him only increased. In 1917, at a party in the Waldorf celebrating the coming out of the pretty Miss Denby, the debutante's charming mother pressed him so assiduously to dance with her daughter that he made a conscious show of partnering with every girl other than Miss Denby. He drank to such excess that he didn't remember leaving the ball and woke the next morning in a hotel room with an unknown female beside him. It turned out to be Mrs Denby.

    A few weeks later, the United States declared war. He enlisted at once.

    When Younger got back to his townhouse, the afternoon mail had come, and with it a letter from Colette. He opened it still standing in his hallway:

        25-9-1920

Dearest Stratham,

I can't do what you ask. I realize now that everything that's happened in America has been a sign telling me to go back to Europe. God must want me to. Vows are sacred. I have to honour mine, no matter how rash or wrong I was to make it. Maybe I will see when I'm there that he is not the one. But God puts these feelings in our hearts: of that I'm sure. I beg you to understand - and to come with me. I need you.

Yours,

Colette

    He didn't understand. Why say she 'needed' him when she so obviously didn't? If it was money she needed, he wished she would simply ask him for it outright.

    Rummaging through his mail, Younger found a statement from his bank. With a cold eye, he observed that his balance, once a thing of six figures - that was before he'd bought his house - had shrunk to four, and the first of those four was a one. Ever since Younger had come into his inheritance, he had turned over his professor's salary and, later, his soldier's wages to one or another insufferable Bostonian charity. He had lived without thought of money. The bequest having fallen into his lap, he had determined never to let it become an anchor.

    He knew he would give it to Colette - the money for her passage - fool though that would make him. All she had to do was ask. He threw on some evening clothes, and went out. At the Post Office, he dropped off the following scribbled reply:

September 25, 1920

Since it's God's will, go with Him.

- Stratham

    Littlemore, arriving home late and frustrated Saturday night, found his wife in a state of distress. Her mother, a robust little woman who spoke only Italian, was next to her. 'They came for Joey,' Betty exclaimed, referring to her younger brother.

    'Who did?' asked Littlemore.

    'You - the police,' answered Betty.

    It turned out that policemen had paid a visit to Betty's mother's apartment on the Lower East Side looking for Joey, a dockworker who still lived with his mother. Mrs Longobardi told the police he was out, which was true. They entered and ransacked the apartment, seizing newspapers, magazines, and letters from relatives in Italy.

    'They say they're going to arrest him,' Betty concluded. 'Arrest him and deport him.'

    'What kind of policemen?' asked Littlemore.' What were they wearing?'

    Betty translated this question. The policemen, Mrs Longobardi answered, were wearing dark jackets and ties.

    'Flynn,' said Littlemore.

    On Sunday morning, Younger didn't wake rested. In fact he didn't wake at all, because he had never gone to sleep. When he got back to his house, unshaven, tie askew, it was well after dawn. Making himself coffee, he decided it was high time he got back to work.

    He hadn't written a scientific paper since 1917. He hadn't even contacted Harvard about resuming his professorship. But he did have notes from the experiments he had conducted during the war; there was a paper on the medical use of maggots he wanted to write; and he did have an old set of patients who would probably be delighted to make him their doctor once again. It was time to return to his senses.

    He went to his study and began organizing his papers and his finances.

    At dusk he jerked awake - having fallen asleep at his desk - heart pounding with a dream whose final image he could still see. Colette had come straight back to America after her Austrian voyage. She had cabled him: she didn't care for Hans Gruber after all; it was he, Younger, whom she loved. He waited for her in Boston Harbor. She came running down from the ship, but when she reached him she froze, her green eyes shrinking from him in horror. He limped to a mirror. In it he saw what she had seen. During her five weeks' absence, he had aged fifty years.

    Skipping church and canceling his usual weekly visit to his father in Staten Island, Littlemore returned on Sunday to the police garage. He climbed inside the kidnappers' car and went through it minutely again, even though the vehicle had already been fully searched and inventoried by other policemen. He was rewarded with exactly one discovery. Wedged deep in a crevice between seat back and seat cushion, Littlemore found a scrap of Western Union paper. It was not a telegram, but a receipt, showing only that some message had been sent somewhere by some customer.

    With a few weeks at his disposal, and a dozen men pounding the pavement, such a receipt might conceivably have been tracked to its originating office. But Littlemore didn't have the men, he didn't have the time, and sending a telegram obviously didn't count as evidence of a crime.

    The telephone rang in Younger's house on Sunday evening. He answered it, cursing himself for hoping it was Colette. It wasn't.

    'What are you doing in Boston?' asked Littlemore s voice.

    'I live here,' answered Younger.

    'I left you messages all weekend at the Commodore. You didn't tell me you were going to Boston.'

    'You told me not to tell you if I left town.'

    'Oh yeah - good point,' said Littlemore. The detective described the unfortunate turn of events. 'Drobac gets out of prison tomorrow afternoon. I'm sorry, Doc. And I'm worried. Seems like Drobac's lawyer knew all kinds of things about Colette, including that she was up in New Haven. How would he know that? I think they've got somebody tailing the Miss. Or maybe somebody she knows in New Haven reports to these guys, whoever they are. I'll tell you what: after Drobac gets out, I don't know where is safe for her. I think the Miss and her brother should go into hiding.'

    Younger rang off, grabbed his coat and hat, and left to make arrangements. When he'd finished, he sent a wire for immediate delivery to Colette:

    
YOU AND LUC MUST LEAVE AT ONCE STOP DROBAC BEING

    RELEASED FROM JAIL TOMORROW STOP GENUINE DANGER

    STOP HE KNOWS WHERE YOU ARE STOP I HAVE BOOKED