Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [125]
“I trust you.”
“That’s why you’re acting like I’m about to rape you.”
She drew farther back into the shadowy corner of the bunk, clutching the silver chain she always wore around her neck.
He could not have explained his own violence. If it was rage, he had felt its kind only a few times, during the war. He reached down, took her by the wrists, pulled her up standing before him, and yanked the chain from her neck. She said nothing. He spoke quietly, his words just audible over the noise of the locomotive: “I admire it—I do. You lied to me for years. You did it so well, pretending to be aggrieved at how much I kept from you. And now you play the little God-fearing virgin again, with your cross in your hands and your faith that He’ll protect you. Didn’t anyone tell you that good Christian girls don’t hunt a man down for six years to kill him?”
“It’s not a cross,” she said.
He opened his palm: at the end of the silver chain was a locket.
“It’s how I knew his name,” said Colette. She took the locket from him, prized its two halves apart along a tiny hinge, and removed from within a small thin metal oval. “When we found Mother, her fist was clenched. I opened it, one finger at a time. This was inside. She had torn it off the man who—who killed her.”
Younger held the little oval: it was a soldier’s dog tag. Angling it, he made out the etched letters spelling Hans Gruber.
“I wore it every day,” she said, “since 1914. If I had told you the truth, would you have let me come to Vienna to find him?”
He didn’t answer.
“Wouldn’t you have tried to stop me?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She turned to the compartment’s window and twisted at its catch. It wouldn’t turn. She pulled at it with both hands. Finally the upper pane dropped open, and a ferocious wind blew in with the roar of the rushing night. She fell back into his arms, her long black hair blowing about, getting in her eyes and his. He saw the delicate line of her cheek and the anxious radiance of her eyes looking up at him, flickering in the candlelight. He held her close, so close her chest was pressing against his, and put his lips to hers. For a moment her whole body surrendered to him; then she pushed herself away, took the dog tag from him, and flung it out the open window. It disappeared into the night without a trace, without a sound.
She turned to face him, shivering in the cold air that swirled through the compartment, hair billowing, bare shoulders catching the light of the candle. He could see that she wouldn’t resist him. If he put his hands on her, she would let him: Was it a debt she felt she owed him? He glanced at the slumbering form of the boy and shut the window.
For his part, Luc—not asleep—waited for the unpleasant sound of kissing or other things that grown-ups do. It never came. Instead he heard the door open and close as Younger left the compartment.
FIFTEEN
IT IS OFTEN wondered by Americans, not to mention residents of the nation’s capital, whether the city of Washington is in the District of Columbia or is the District of Columbia. The answer in 1920 was neither. There was no city of Washington.
When the United States first placed its capital on the banks of the Potomac River between Maryland and Virginia at the end of the eighteenth century, the land devoted to the enterprise was a perfectly shaped square, or diamond, each side of which was exactly ten miles in length. The whole of this diamond was called the territory of Columbia. In that territory were three municipalities: the early settlement of Georgetown, the formerly Virginian city of Alexandria, and the new capital city of Washington.
More than a half century later, as the United States struck numerous futile compromises between North and South, one such bargain was negotiated in the territory of Columbia. Alexandria, poor and intensely pro-slavery, was retroceded back to the slave state of Virginia, while the trade in human property was abolished everywhere else in the territory. As a result, the capital lost its geometric perfection as well as