Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [59]
“What did you do?”
“I stayed away from Wall Street on the sixteenth, that’s what I did.”
Three Woolworth security personnel, when at last they arrived, tore Younger from the bloodied man and put him—Younger—in handcuffs.
They were not impressed by Younger’s claim that the victim of his assault had killed the girl who had just fallen to her death. No one else had seen the murder, and Younger conceded that he hadn’t actually witnessed the deed. The guards were equally unmoved by Younger’s assertion that the man had kidnapped a different girl the night before—a girl who was still standing outside on the observation deck. On the whole, they seemed to think he was raving.
Colette and Luc were brought forward. Without allowing Younger to speak, the guards asked Colette if she recognized the unconscious man whom Younger had beaten almost to death. She said no. Drobac’s gashed face was in fact quite unrecognizable.
“Your husband says this man kidnapped you yesterday,” said one of the guards.
“He’s not my husband,” said Colette.
“You lying SOB,” the other security officer remarked.
“I didn’t say I was her husband,” said Younger.
Luc, tugging sedulously at Colette’s sleeve, got her attention and made signs with his hands. She asked if he was certain; he nodded. “It is the man who abducted us,” she said to the guards. “My brother recognizes him.”
The officers, dubious, asked how the boy knew.
Luc made another sign. “He just knows,” said Colette.
This assertion somehow failed to allay the security officers’ doubts. In the end, they took the bloodied man to a hospital—and Younger into custody.
The Morgan Bank, open for business the day after the explosion, looked more like a hospital infirmary than a temple of high finance. Bandaged heads and patched eyes could be seen at every other desk. Clerks limped. Sling-armed men pecked one-handedly at adding machines. A watchman’s face was so heavily wrapped that only his eyes and nose were visible.
“Mr. Lamont will be with you in a moment,” said a receptionist to Littlemore.
The J. P. Morgan Company was not an ordinary bank. The House of Morgan was a mover of international relations, a maker of history. It was Morgan that saved the United States from ruin in the gold panic of 1895 and again in the bank panic of 1907. It was Morgan that led a consortium of financiers to float a five-hundred-million-dollar loan to the Allies in the Great War, without which they almost certainly could not have won. The old titan J. Pierpont Morgan had died in 1913; his son Jack Jr., who didn’t spend as much time at the bank as his father had, relied on one partner in the firm to manage the company’s vast assets and worldwide financial interests. That partner was Thomas Lamont.
Littlemore tipped his hat to the dozen uniformed policemen adding their bulk to the bank’s security contingent. He also nodded imperceptibly to the additional half-dozen plainclothesmen scattered about the central atrium. Littlemore looked up at the dome far above, where scaffolding allowed workmen to reach its inner recesses. The resounding echo of hammers filled the air.
Below the dome, Mr. Lamont—slight, diminutive, expensively but conservatively dressed—was addressing some twenty other men, answering questions like a tour guide. He was the right sort of man to run the House of Morgan: a graduate of Philips Exeter Academy and of Harvard College, a man chosen by Washington to represent the United States at the Paris peace conference of 1919. He had thinning gray hair, large ears, and risk-averse gray-blue eyes. The twenty men whom he addressed were not tourists; they were a grand jury conducting a physical inspection of the effects of the bombing. Pointing up at the dome overhead, where massive cracks in the plaster could be seen, Lamont explained that a team of engineers had pronounced the dome safe and secure.
“Let me add,” he said to the jurors and newsmen encircling him, “how