Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [190]
Nevertheless, some of the most incredible events described in The Death Instinct are not open to serious question. The remarkable tale of Edwin Fischer, for example, is established fact. His advance warnings, repeated to many different people, of a bombing on Wall Street after the close of business on September fifteenth or on the sixteenth are still unexplained. (All the peculiar details I mention about him—his four tennis championships, his multiple suits, his statement that he learned of the bombing “out of the air,” his subsequent detention in an asylum, and so on—are completely factual.) If Fischer had advance knowledge of the bombing, which historians do not accept, it would suggest that there were men behind the attack belonging to a circle quite different from that of the penurious Italian anarchists usually said to be responsible.
Although it is not well known, Fischer was, as mentioned in my book, indeed in contact with federal government agents several years before the bombing. But my account of his further dealings with the Bureau of Investigation, along with the story told at the end of The Death Instinct, in which Littlemore figures out that the voices Fischer heard “out of the air” came to him outside the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal, is entirely fictitious. It is a fact, however, that whispers can be heard across that concourse at the spot I describe.
The Marie Curie Radium Fund, led by the indomitable Mrs. William B. Meloney, eventually succeeded in purchasing a gram of radium for Madame Curie, who traveled to the United States in 1921 to receive the gift from President Harding. In addition to being the Sorbonne’s first woman professor and the first winner of two Nobel Prizes—one in Physics in 1903, the other in Chemistry in 1911—Madame Curie remains today the only woman to have accomplished the double-Nobel feat and the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields. Radiation exposure very probably caused her cataracts in 1920 and almost certainly caused her death from aplastic anemia (or perhaps leukemia) in 1934.
While my protagonists—Younger, Littlemore, Colette, and Luc—are fictional, many of those with whom they interact are not, such as Police Commissioner Enright, Treasury Secretary Houston, New York City Mayor Hylan, “Big Bill” Flynn, and Dr. Walter Prince (of the American Society for Psychical Research). There was also a real Mrs. Grace Cross who apparently had an affair with Warren Harding, but the character bearing her name is not otherwise based on the actual person.
Arnold Brighton is a fictitious character. Edward Doheny was the real oilman who backed Fall’s efforts to make war on Mexico and paid him at least $100,000 in bribes, for which Fall would later become the first Cabinet member ever to be imprisoned for a crime committed while in office. The real head of the U.S. Radium Corporation in 1920, at whose New Jersey factory Quinta Maggia McDonald and her sisters worked, was Arthur Roeder. There is absolutely no reason to believe that either Doheny or Roeder had anything to do with the Wall Street bombing.
By contrast, the tragic poisoning of the radium dial painters is well established. In several respects the true facts are worse than my description. Up to one hundred twelve dial painters may have died as a result of “pointing” their brushes with their lips—a practice not abolished until 1925. Many more suffered painful, debilitating illnesses.
The Maggia sisters—Quinta, Amelia, and Albina—were among the victims. (Although I use these three women’s names in my book, my characters do not correspond to the real-life women, and the story I tell about their escape from the radium factory, their being hunted, and their efforts to communicate with Colette, is complete invention.) Amelia died in 1922, the first of the dial painters known to have perished from radium poisoning. When her body was exhumed in 1927, it was still radioactive. A handful of women, including Quinta and Albina, sued U.S. Radium in the mid-twenties, but the