Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [12]
Yet however monstrous, all this murder was directed at public men. Ordinary people felt no personal danger. They felt no need to alter the way they lived. That skin of felt security was burned away when Wall Street went up in flames on September 16, 1920.
Crossing the police barricade, Younger and Littlemore were immediately set upon. A large crowd—much larger than Younger had realized—pressed in at the roadblocks around the blast area. Women with infants in their arms tugged at Younger’s sleeves, begging for news of their husbands. Anxious voices called out in the dusk, wanting to know what had happened.
Littlemore tried to answer every entreaty. He reassured one woman that no children had been killed. To others he explained where they could go to see a list of the casualties. All the rest he advised firmly but without temper to go back home and wait for more news tomorrow.
Even the officers on duty, keeping the crowd at bay, were not immune from the general anxiety. One of them whispered to Littlemore as they passed: “Say, Lieutenant, was it Bolsheviks? They say it was Bolsheviks.”
“Naw, it was a gas pipe, is all,” another officer chimed in, holding up a newspaper as evidence. “Mayor Hylan says so. Ain’t that right, Lieutenant?”
“Give me that,” answered Littlemore.
The detective took the paper, which an on-duty policeman should not have been carrying. It was the Sun’s four-page extra edition. “Can you believe this?” asked Littlemore, reading from the inner pages. “Hylan’s telling everybody it was a busted gas main.”
As both Younger and Littlemore knew, the most important fact about the blackened crater they had seen in the plaza was something that wasn’t there. There was no fissure, no rupture in the pavement, as there would have been had a gas pipe broken and sent a geyser of flame into the street.
“That was a bomb crater,” said Younger.
“That’s sure what it looked like,” replied Littlemore, still reading as they walked.
“That’s what it was,” said Younger. “Will you put the goddamned paper away?”
“Geez,” said the detective, throwing the paper into the backseat.
“Where’s the crank?” asked Younger, in front of the vehicle, eager to get it running.
“You have been away. There’s no crank; they have starter pedals now,” said Littlemore. He saw the worry in Younger’s eyes. “Come on, Doc, she’s fine. She went back to the hotel, took the kid out for dinner, left a message for you at the desk, and they bollixed up the message—that’s all.”
At the corner of Forty-fourth Street and Lexington Avenue, one block from the Commodore Hotel, stood a public establishment called the Bat and Table. Alongside it lay a narrow, unlit alley, which, used primarily for the collection of garbage, was typically empty of an evening. Atypically, it was occupied on the evening of September 16, 1920, by a motorcar with four doors, a closed roof, and an idling engine.
The driver of this vehicle was not a genteel man. He had a fat, round, hairless face shiny with perspiration. His shoulders were so massed up within his threadbare jacket that they left no neck at all. His hat was at least one size too small, so that his ears bulged out beneath it. Although the car was stationary, he kept his hands glued to the steering wheel, and the woman next to him could see thick short thick hairs protruding from his knuckles. That woman was Colette Rousseau, whose hands were tied behind her.
In the backseat was another individual who conveyed an air of uncongeniality less by his musculature, of which he possessed little, than by a pistol, which he pointed at Colette. His small, wiry torso was housed in an over-large checked suit, rank with stale beer. His breath was equally aromatic; it smelled of raw onion.
These two men exchanged words in a language Colette could neither understand nor identify. The driver was