Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [101]
“Don’t we?”
“If all United States monetary obligations were called at once, the government would be as helpless and ruined as any bank in the middle of a panic. The system works on confidence. Picture a trickle of worried people coming here to cash in their notes. Picture the trickle turning into a crowd. Picture the crowd turning into a nation, stampeding to get their money before the nation’s metal was exhausted. The government would have to declare bankruptcy. Lending would freeze. Factories would shut down. The entire economy would stop. What would happen next is anyone’s guess. Possibly the states would revert to their former condition of autonomy.”
“I see why you want to keep a lid on the robbery, Mr. Houston.”
“My point exactly. Here we are—this will be your office, Littlemore. Small, but you have your own telephone and access to all files of course. Here’s the key to your desk. In it you’ll find documents concerning the transfer of the gold from the Sub-Treasury in Manhattan to the Assay Office next door—how the bridge was built, who was involved, how it was planned, and so on. It’s for you alone. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” said Littlemore.
Houston lowered his voice: “And I want a complete report on your meeting this afternoon with Senator Fall. Remember, Littlemore, you’re my man in Washington, not his.”
On his way to the Senate Office Building that afternoon, Littlemore treated himself to a look at the Washington Monument. Adjacent to that great and solemn obelisk, he found to his surprise that the city had installed its Public Baths. From there Littlemore continued on the Mall—a straight, grassy, wide-open promenade dotted with important, majestic structures—toward the Capitol. He imagined lords and ladies strolling at a leisurely pace, with small dogs on leashes trotting behind them; in fact the Mall was empty.
At the corner of First and B Street—the address of the Senate Office Building—Littlemore saw only a small nondescript hotel at the weedy edges of the Capitol grounds. The detective was untroubled. He knew that in Washington’s paradoxical cartography, there would be four different intersections where First Street meets B Street—each on a different side of the Capitol. Littlemore turned south and presently came to another corner of First and B. Here he found only a row of tumbledown wooden-frame houses, one attached to the next, with a dirt road in front of them. Garbage filled the road; flies attacked the garbage, and a whiff of unprocessed sewage sang in the nostrils. Negroes sat on the house porches. Not one white man, other than Littlemore, was to be seen. Mosquitoes abounded. Littlemore clapped one of the pests dead, near his face. When he separated his palms, he had framed between his hands the grand dome of the United States Capitol.
It was a good thing Littlemore had left the Treasury at three o’clock. He finally entered the rotunda of the Senate Office Building—which was three stories high, ringed by Corinthian columns, every wall gleaming with white marble and limestone, suffused with natural light from the glazed oculus at the apex of the richly coffered dome—at two minutes to four, just on time.
Albert B. Fall, United States Senator from New Mexico, was a hale man of sixty, tall and hard-drinking, with a drooping Western mustache white with age. Outdoors, he liked to sport a big-rimmed Western hat, mismatching his three-piece Eastern bow-tied suit. His chambers were lavish. When Littlemore was shown in, the Senator was working on his putting stroke, aiming golf balls at an empty milk bottle at least thirty feet away. The Senator’s shots were missing badly.
“Special Agent James Littlemore,” declared Senator Fall without interrupting his practice. He had a large voice—the kind that could carry from an open-air rostrum or fill a legislative