Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [158]
On their way back uptown, Younger told Colette about his visit to Sloane Hospital. “Lyme insists it was syphilis,” he muttered. “I should have asked to see the Wassermann test. I’ve never heard of tertiary syphilis in a girl that age.”
Littlemore walked down the steps of the Sub-Treasury and into Wall Street. Next door, soldiers were still stationed in front of the Assay Office, where deep in basement vaults the nation’s gold reserves were stored. He crossed the street to the Morgan Bank.
Wall Street was crowded as always. Though in the way of the hurrying pedestrians, Littlemore walked slowly up and down the length of the sidewalk outside the bank, inspecting the places on its exterior wall where the concrete had been scored and gouged in the bombing.
Everyone had assumed this damage was caused by the bomb and the shrapnel. Littlemore examined the pockmarks more closely. It was strange that they were concentrated below and around a first-floor window. Some of the uneven gouges—particularly the larger ones—might well have been the product of shrapnel, but most of the pockmarks were small and round, as if the concrete had been repeatedly struck by bullets.
Littlemore went next to City Hall. In the basement land offices, he pored over the gas, water, sewer, and subway maps for lower Manhattan. It took him hours. He was pretty certain he wouldn’t find anything, and he didn’t. Ordinary plumbing, power, and gas lines ran under Wall Street. No sewer pipes crossed from Wall to Pine. A subway had been announced for Nassau Street in 1913, with a station at the corner of Broad and Wall, near where the bomb went off. But unlike the other eighty subway routes announced in 1913, the Nassau line had never been built.
The hotel into which Younger moved was the kind that provided in every room a set of old, unmatching utensils and an electric hot plate. Seeing these implements, Colette declared that she would cook. She took Younger shopping—at a greengrocer’s, a butcher’s, a baker’s. It was, she said, like being in Paris. Or would have been, if there had only been a bottle of wine to buy.
The Littlemores had dinner in their Fourteenth Street apartment all together—parents, grandmother, and innumerable children. Littlemore’s mind was not on the meal. Twice he called James Jr. by the name of Samuel, which was their youngest boy, and he called Samuel Peter, even though Peter didn’t look anything like Samuel, being twice his age. Betty, feeding Lily in the high chair, had never seen her husband so distracted.
You know,” said Younger to Colette as they ate across their tiny candlelit dining table, “there’s another possibility.”
“Of what?”
“Of how radium cures cancer.” He cut into the chop she had made him. “What if there’s a kind of switch in every one of our cells that turns on or off the process of cell death—and what if radioactivity flips it? In cancer cells, the switch is off; the cells don’t die; that’s why they keep replicating, endlessly. When radioactivity hits those cells, it turns the switch on, so the cells start dying again. That cures the cancer.”
“But then in good cells, radioactivity would—it would—”
“Turn the switch off,” said Younger. “Make the cells stop dying. Cause cancer.”
“Radium doesn’t cause cancer.”
“How do you know?”
“One medicine can’t both cure a disease and cause it. That’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“Do you know why you are so suspicious of radioactivity?” asked Colette. “I think it’s because you didn’t discover it. If you had been the first to think of God, you’d believe in Him, too.”
In her antiseptic room, the girl with long red hair knew what it meant when the man in the white coat came in. She strained against the leather straps; she tried to scream, but the gag muffled her mouth.
She also knew from the man’s presence that she would soon feel the pinprick of a needle in her arm, and after that the gratifying warmth that would spread so comfortably up and down her limbs.
Soon the other man