Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [11]
“I’m sorry, Dr. Younger,” said the receptionist, “but he hasn’t come back either.”
“The boy went out?” asked Younger. “By himself?”
“By himself?” said the receptionist in a peculiar voice.
“Yes—did he go out by himself?” asked Younger, irritation rising along with concern.
“No, sir. You were with him.”
THREE
THE ATTACK ON WALL STREET of September 16, 1920, was not only the deadliest bombing in the nation’s hundred-fifty-year history. It was the most incomprehensible. Who would detonate a six-hundred-pound explosive in one of New York’s busiest plazas at the most crowded time of day?
Only one word, according to the New York Times, could describe the perpetrators of such an act: terrorists. The Washington Post opined that the attack was “an act of war,” demanding an immediate counterattack from the United States Army. But war with what country, what foreign nation, what enemy? There was no answer. In this respect the attack on Wall Street was not only appalling, but appallingly familiar.
Fifteen million souls had perished in the Great War—a number almost beyond human compass. Yet despite this staggering toll, the war had been fathomable. Armies mobilized and demobilized. Countries were invaded and invaders repelled. Men went to the front and, much of the time, returned. War had limits. War came to an end.
But by 1920 the world had become used to a new kind of war. It had started a quarter-century earlier, with a wave of assassinations. In 1894, the President of France was murdered; in 1898, the Empress of Austria; in 1900, the King of Italy; in 1901, President McKinley of the United States; in 1912, the Prime Minister of Spain; and of course in 1914, a Hapsburg archduke, launching the great conflagration. Assassination as such was nothing new, but these killings were different. Most of them lacked any clear, concrete objective. They lacked even the erratic rationality of a festering grudge.
All, however, were somehow the same. All were committed by poor young men, usually foreign, linked by shadowy international networks and sharing in a death-dealing ideology that made them seem almost to welcome their own demise. The assassinations appeared to be an attack on all Western nations, on civilization itself. The perpetrators were called by many names: anarchists, socialists, nationalists, fanatics, extremists, communists. But in the newspapers and in public oratory, one name joined them all: terrorist.
In 1919, the bombings on American soil began. On April 28, a small brown package was delivered to the Mayor of Seattle, who had recently broken up a general strike. The return address said “Gimbel Brothers”; a handwritten label promised “Novelty—a sample.” Inside lay a wooden tube that was indeed a novelty. It contained an acid detonator and a stick of dynamite. The crude bomb failed to explode. But the next day an identical novelty, delivered to the home of a former United States senator, blew off the hands of the unlucky housemaid who opened it.
The following evening, riding home from work in a New York subway, a mail clerk reading the newspaper realized that he had seen over a dozen similar packages that very day. Rushing back to the post office, he found these parcels still undelivered—for insufficient postage. Eventually, thirty-six “novelty” package bombs were discovered, targeting an eclectic roster of personages including John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan.
A month later, synchronized explosions lit up the night in eight different American cities at the same hour. The targets were houses—of an Ohio mayor, a Massachusetts legislator, a New York judge. By far the boldest of these attacks was the blast at the home of the nation’s Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, in Washington, D.C. Here the bomber blundered. As he mounted Palmer’s front steps, his explosive detonated while still in his hands, leaving only scattered body fragments for the police to pick through.
Palmer responded with sweeping raids, his G-men breaking down doors all over America, whether by day or