Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [176]
“I figured you’d want to tip him off,” said Littlemore.
Fall didn’t flinch. “What did you say?”
“You know when I knew, Senator Fall? It was when you told me that you and Mr. McAdoo always have dinner at the Oyster Bar. I realized that Ed Fischer was in Grand Central when you two met here a few months ago, after the Democratic Convention. A lot of people think Fischer’s crazy, but everything I heard him say turned out to be true.”
“Are you drunk, Littlemore?”
“Then I saw the whole thing. Finding those Mexican documents was way too easy. Torres’s apartment—it was a fake, wasn’t it? A setup. That’s why you had Mrs. Cross come with me—to make sure I’d find the hole in the wall where the documents were hidden. What a sucker I was. Sure, a Mexican envoy is going to bring incriminating documents with him from Mexico in a cardboard tube—nothing else, no files, no suitcases, barely any clothes, just those documents—and then leave them for me in an open wall safe after I knock on his apartment door. Torres wasn’t really a Mexican envoy at all, was he? You invented him. That’s why Obregón denied the guy’s existence.”
Fall took out a cigar. “You’re all twisted up, son. Not thinking straight.”
“From the very start,” said Littlemore, “Lamont tried to put me onto Mexico. Every time I talked to him, something having to do with Mexico would come up. I just didn’t see it. Same with you, Mr. Fall. You pretended you thought the Russians were behind it, but you were steering me to Mexico the whole time. Brighton was in on it too, wasn’t he? You and he staged that scene in your office for my benefit, when he was complaining about the Mexicans seizing his oil wells. Then Lamont calls me again and conveniently mentions that Mexican Independence Day is in the middle of September. You were doing the same thing with Flynn, sending him hints about Sacco and Vanzetti, hoping he’d put together their Mexico connection, but he never did. So you had to make me think I’d found proof—the documents in Torres’s wall. But they’re all fakes. Forgeries.”
Fall lit his cigar, taking his time. He glanced left and right and spoke almost inaudibly: “The Mexicans bombed us, Littlemore. Massacred us. You’re the one who figured it out. Let’s say those documents are fake. Let’s just say. If that’s what Wilson and his Secretary of War needed to see the light and send in the troops, that’s the way it had to be.”
“Except the Mexicans weren’t behind the bombing,” said Littlemore.
“What are you talking about?”
“You were behind it.”
Fall blew a cloud of smoke over Littlemore’s head. “You think I bombed Wall Street—killed all those people—to steal a little gold from the Treasury? You’re out of your mind, boy. No one will believe you.”
“The gold was icing,” said Littlemore. “The cake was war. Invading Mexico, getting rid of Obregón, installing your own man as president, taking the oil fields. That would have been worth maybe half a billion dollars to your pal Brighton. And a few hundred million more to Lamont. And who knows how much to you.”
“That’s big crazy talk, boy. You could get in trouble talking big and crazy like that.”
“You’re making a war for their oil.”
“Their oil?” Fall hissed. “That’s our oil you’re talking about. We bought it, we paid for it, and now a bunch of Reds are trying to steal it. You think the Mexican people like being ordered around by a gang of God-hating, gun-toting bandits? The Mexicans’ll thank us. They’ll cheer our boys when we march into Mexico City.”
“Sure they will,” said Littlemore. “They love the U.S. of A., just like you do.”
At that moment Mr. McAdoo came out of the restaurant, along with Mrs. Cross, who was carrying Senator Fall’s overcoat.
“What’s going on, Fall?” asked McAdoo. “Is there a problem, Mr. Littlemore?”
“No problem. Senator Fall and I were just talking about how you and he planned the Wall Street bombing.”
“I beg your pardon?” said McAdoo.
“You were the one who knew about the gold,” Littlemore said to McAdoo. “You