Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [145]
“They got a hundred elevators in this place. Which way?”
“Follow me.”
On the eighth floor, Senator Fall himself opened the door to his rooms, dressed in a dark red smoking jacket. Mrs. Cross walked right in, making herself at home. Littlemore stood in the doorway. “You found something?” asked Fall.
Littlemore nodded.
“Have you shown it to Houston?”
“I can’t,” said Littlemore.
As Littlemore spread out the documents on Senator Fall’s dining table, Mrs. Cross placed two tumblers of whiskey over ice in front of the men. She poured another for herself. “What are the photographs of ?” she asked.
“Looks like a military training camp somewhere in Mexico,” said Littlemore. “That’s a shooting range there. These are machine rifles. This one shows people working with fuses and detonators.”
“What’s this list of names?” asked Fall.
“I’d say those are people who spent time at the camp. See, it shows how long they spent, what dates, and what weapons training they got. They’re from all over the world. They got Italians, Russians—you name it.”
“It’s a goddamn terrorist boot camp,” said Fall, “right under our noses.”
“Do you see these two names, sir?” asked Littlemore.
“Sacco and Vanzetti,” said Fall.
“Looks like Flynn was onto something after all,” said Littlemore. Then he placed a different, thicker sheet of paper on top of the others. This one had a pen-and-ink sketch on it, carefully drawn, with arrows and labels in Spanish.
“My God,” said Fall.
“What is it?” asked Mrs. Cross, sipping her whiskey.
“A diagram for arranging shrapnel around a bomb loaded in a wagon—a horse-drawn wagon.”
No one spoke.
“And that’s not even the kicker, Senator Fall. Look at this one.”
Littlemore pointed to a document bearing the letterhead of the Controller-General of Mexico and, at the bottom, that gentleman’s signature. Between these two formalities were several paragraphs of flowery Spanish. Senator Fall read them.
“You understand what this letter says, son?”
“Yes, sir. It’s an authorization to transfer $1,115,000 to the accounts of three United States senators and one United States Cabinet member.”
“Are you one of the three, Senator dear?” Mrs. Cross asked innocently.
Fall swatted Mrs. Cross on her flank. “No, I ain’t. It’s Borah, Cotton Tom Heflin, and Norris—the three biggest friends in Congress of those bandits running Mexico.”
“Senator Borah—the one having an affair with Alice Roosevelt?”
“Is that the only thing you women think about?” asked Fall.
“It might explain why Mr. Borah needed extra money,” replied Mrs. Cross. “Which Cabinet member was getting rich?”
“Mr. Houston, of the Treasury,” answered Littlemore.
Toward midnight, important men began arriving at Senator Fall’s apartment at the Wardman Park Hotel. Retiring to a private study, they engaged in discussions from which Littlemore was excluded, although the detective was asked in several times to repeat the circumstances in which he’d found the documents. The meeting went on for hours. To judge from the sharp and raised voices, the discussion was contentious—occasionally acrimonious. At one point, Littlemore heard Senator Fall arguing that President Taft had “done no less” for Wilson in 1912.
Mrs. Cross identified some of the men to Littlemore: Mr. Colby, the Secretary of State; Mr. Baker, Secretary of War; Mr. Daniels, Secretary of the Navy; Mr. McAdoo, whom Littlemore had met with Commissioner Enright and the Mayor; and Mr. Daugherty, the man expected to be Harding’s Attorney General. “Senator Harding himself would be here,” she said, “but he’s vacationing, lucky man. Not that he would have made any decisions anyway. These are the men who make the decisions.”
“So this McAdoo—he’s the President’s son-in-law? He must be as old as Wilson himself.”
“Girls like older men in this town,” replied Mrs. Cross. “Eleanor must have been about twenty when she became engaged to him. He was over fifty. But a very handsome over-fifty. You don’t approve of a girl taking an interest in older men?”
“Wonder how the President felt about