Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [152]
“What’s happening?” asked Colette. They were descending the grand red-carpeted stairwell into an Edwardian ballroom. Dancers whirled around the floor.
“The United States has elected a new president,” said Younger.
“Who won?”
“A man named Harding.”
They took a seat at a table in silence.
“What’s the matter?” she asked him.
“Nothing.”
“All right,” she said. “Then ask me to dance.”
He did.
Well after midnight, they returned to their luxurious stateroom. “Only one room for both of us?” she asked him, cheeks flushed. “Monsieur is very presumptuous. Is my corruption never to end?”
The next morning, in their cabin bed, she was happier than he had ever seen her. Lying on their backs, she made him extend a leg in the air and put hers alongside it. She tried to persuade him that despite the difference in their overall height, her leg was almost as long as his. Certainly it was smoother and more appealing in shape.
In the afternoon, however, as they strolled through the ship’s exotic outdoor palm court—open to first-class passengers only—she grew contemplative. “What does Dr. Freud mean,” she asked, “when he says I may be the cause of Luc’s condition?”
“I don’t know,” said Younger, telling the truth.
“I always thought I could take care of him.”
“You did take care of him.”
“But what if I did the wrong thing keeping him with me all these years?” she asked. “What if I wanted him to be different? What if I wanted him to be mute?”
“Why?”
“So that I wouldn’t have to be alone.”
“Oh, stop it,” Younger replied. “Pure self-indulgence.”
“You’re the one who said I didn’t love him.”
“I never said that,” replied Younger.
“You said it with your eyes,” she answered. “Because I left Luc behind when I took the train to Braunau. You thought killing Hans Gruber was more important to me than taking care of my own brother.”
Younger didn’t answer. He hadn’t thought any such thing, but she must have.
“If I had died,” she said, “you would have raised him, wouldn’t you?”
“That’s why you wanted me to come to Vienna.”
She tightened her grasp around his arm. “You would have done it—raised him—wouldn’t you?”
“If you had died chasing Heinrich?”
“Yes.”
“No, I would have put him in a home for deaf-mutes. Where he belongs. So that he wouldn’t remind me of you. But then he couldn’t have reminded me of you because I would have killed myself. Besides, you wouldn’t have wanted me to raise him: I’m a pauper. Have I mentioned to you how much I have left?”
“No.”
“I don’t have anything left. Our stateroom took the last of it. Fortunately, that comes with meals for two, so we won’t starve until we reach America.” He stopped, disengaged himself from her arm, and put his hands in his pockets. “I’m serious. I’m ashamed of my poverty. I should have told you about it. I’m not penniless. I still have my house in Boston, and I believe Harvard will take me back as a professor. But I seduced you under false pretenses. No, I did. The worst cad could not have behaved more basely. All this luxury—first-class cabins, grand ballrooms—you’ll never see it again. You’d be perfectly justified to leave me now that you know the actual state of things.”
“What a long speech,” she said, taking his arm again. “And so foolish. I like you much better poor.”
PART IV
NINETEEN
TELEGRAPHIC INSTRUCTIONS FLEW from station to station, east to west, across the United States on the morning of November 18, 1920—the day after Littlemore found the secret cache of Mexican documents. Their point of origin was the War Department in Washington, D.C. The most important of these wires was issued to Fort Houston in San Antonio, Texas. It ordered Major General James G. Harbord, commander of the Unites States Army, Second Division, to mobilize for immediate deployment to the Mexican border.
Colette Rousseau held Younger’s hand at the ship’s rail, steaming into New York Harbor