Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [103]
“If I’m not Sam Hill’s mother,” said Senator Fall. “That’s damn good, Littlemore. What else do you know?”
“I know I’m not crazy about politicians telling the rest of the country we can’t drink while they got brand-new bottles of the stuff on their shelves. And I know I don’t back down. I’ll take that whiskey, ma’am, thank you.”
Littlemore drained the tumbler and returned it to her.
“Well, well, well,” said Fall. “Looks like we got a man here after all, Mrs. Cross. All right, Agent Littlemore, let me put my cards on the table. Houston’s got you convinced you’re dealing with a robbery. Ain’t I right?”
Littlemore said nothing.
“Oh, I know all about the gold,” Fall went on. “General Palmer told me about it. So let me see if I have this straight. The bombing was a robbery, so the nation’s not at war. That it? I’ll tell you what—we Western folks must be too plain, because I don’t follow that Washington logic. There was a raid on the nation’s treasure, on top of an attack on our biggest bank, on top of a massacre of the American people—and that means we’re not at war?”
“The robbery looks like an inside job, Mr. Senator,” said Littlemore. “So no, it doesn’t look like we’re at war.”
“Let me tell you something, Agent Littlemore,” said Fall. “The one thing, the one good thing, that Washington does for a man—other than setting him temporarily free from the Missus—is that it makes him an American. I ain’t a New Mexican here, and you ain’t a New Yorker. We’re Americans. You can open your eyes now, see the big picture, do something for your country.”
“I don’t follow you, Mr. Senator.”
“Look around the world today. It’s Bolshevik terrorists everywhere. They took down the Tsar. They took over Germany. Hungary, Austria. They’re crawling all over France and Spain and Italy. Lenin says he’s coming for us. Nobody listens. They already got Mexico, right next door. Now how do the bolshies work? Stand up and fight against you? No. Reason with you? No. They infiltrate. They bomb—and they bribe. That’s their means. That’s what they did in Russia, and it sure worked there. That’s what they’re doing here.”
“You’re saying the bombers were foreign, but they paid off someone in our government to help them?”
“You don’t think the Feds can be bribed?”
“To help foreigners bomb us? That would be treason, Mr. Fall.”
“You got no idea what this town is like, Agent Littlemore. Gaudy and statesmanlike on the outside, rotten to the core on the inside. Ten grand will buy you a U.S. congressman. We senators are a little pricier. Everybody in this town’s got an angle. Everybody’s looking to make out. Even Mrs. Cross here is looking to make out, aren’t you, honey?”
Fall extended his empty shot glass in Mrs. Cross’s direction. She refilled it—and topped it off with milk. He drank it, grimacing.
“This is war, Littlemore. We’re under attack. They blew us to hell on September sixteenth. They blew us to hell!” Fall slammed his fist on his desk; the sound echoed between the bookcases. He lowered his voice: “And they’ll do it again. Why wouldn’t they?”
“You think Russia is behind the bombing, Senator?” asked Littlemore.
“You bet I do. Who else would dare to make war against the United States of America? They know we sent our army into Siberia last year. Why, they practically got the right to attack us back. What other country has a motive? What other country would want to bring us down?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Fall.”
“Well, I do,” said Fall. “Listen to me. I’m going to tell you how history should go, son—how the history of the rest of this century should go. We got a million-plus army of soldiers, trained, ready to be mobilized right now. We could take down this Soviet dictatorship. This is the time. This is the only time. They just got whipped in Poland. They got a civil war on their hands. The Russian people don’t want a dictatorship. Why, Lenin’s got fifty, sixty thousand people in jail already just for speaking up against Bolshevism. The