Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [16]
“You know I outrank you,” said the detective.
Younger raised an eyebrow.
“Captain beats lieutenant,” added Littlemore.
“A police captain doesn’t outrank a doughboy in boot camp.”
“Captain beats lieutenant,” repeated Littlemore.
A silence.
“What do you mean you hate the dead?” asked Littlemore.
“Luc wrote that to me—Colette’s brother. He doesn’t talk. I was—what was I doing? I was reading a book he’d given me. Then he handed me a note that said, ‘I hate the dead.’ ” Younger looked at the detective. “Sorry about—about—”
“Slugging me in the jaw?”
“Blaming you,” said Younger. “It’s my fault. My fault they’re in America. My fault she went off by herself.”
“We’ll get them back,” said Littlemore.
Younger described what he’d witnessed from the balcony. Littlemore asked him what kind of car he had seen. Younger couldn’t say. He’d been too far overhead. He couldn’t even be sure of the color.
“We’ll get them back,” Littlemore repeated.
“How?” asked Younger.
“Here’s what we do. I go to headquarters and put out a bulletin. We’ll have the whole force looking for this guy by tomorrow. You wait here in case they send a ransom note. Meantime I question the old lady you met with. What’s her name?”
“Mrs. William B. Meloney. Thirty-one West Twelfth.”
“Maybe she told some other people about the samples Colette brought with her.”
“It’s possible,” said Younger.
“So maybe the wrong kind of person found out.” At the doorway, Littlemore added: “Do me a favor. Patch up your head.”
FOUR
LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY—TERRORIST: the word comes from the French Revolution.
The Reign of Terror was the name given to Robespierre’s ferocious rule. Hundreds of thousands of men and women were branded “enemies of the state,” jailed, starved, deported, tortured. Forty thousand were executed. “Virtue and terror,” proclaimed Robespierre, were the two imperatives of the revolution, for “terror is nothing other than justice—prompt, severe, inflexible justice.” Those who supported him were called Terroristes.
A century later, another revolutionary took a similar stand. “We cannot reject terror,” wrote a man calling himself Lenin; “it is the one form of military action that may be absolutely essential.” His disciples became the new century’s “terrorists.”
But with a difference. In France, terror had been an instrument of the state. Now terror was directed against the state. Originally, the terrorist was a well-bred French despot, haughtily claiming the authority of law and government. Now the terrorist became a seedy, bearded, furtive murderer—a Slav, a Jew, an Italian planting his crude bomb or hiding a pistol inside his shabby coat. It was one such terrorist, a Serb, who in 1914 assassinated Archduke Hans Ferdinand of Austria, launching the Great War.
The Germans wanted war, undoubtedly, but it would never have materialized without a keenness for battle on the part of ordinary young men all across Europe. Soon enough, their readiness to die for their countries would be rewarded in a hell they had not foreseen, where sulfuric gases ate the flesh off living men crouched ankle-deep in freezing, stagnant water. But in the hot summer of 1914, European men of every class and station wanted nothing more than an opportunity to meet and mete out death on the battlefield.
Comparable feelings grew in the United States, especially when German submarines attacked American merchant ships on the high seas. Even as President Wilson steadfastly maintained neutrality, the drumbeat of war grew ever more incessant.
In the end, a German blunder forced America’s hand. In January 1917, Germany telegraphed an encrypted message to the President of Mexico, proposing a joint invasion of the United States. Mexico would regain territories that America had seized from her; Germany would gain the diversion of America’s forces. Great Britain intercepted the telegram, decoded it, and delivered it to Wilson. The United States at last declared war. Before long, America would be sending ten thousand men a day to the killing fields of Europe.
Dr. Stratham Younger was