Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [67]
The French girl felt a fleshy, sickening contact as the woman’s throat pressed against her own. Shuddering, Colette let the body fall to the floor. In the church vestibule, Brighton’s amanuensis, Samuels, stood with a smoking gun in his hand.
For a long moment, no one moved. Then, from behind Mrs. Meloney, Arnold Brighton poked his head out. “Oh, well done, Samuels,” he said. “Well done.”
“Mr. Brighton,” said Mrs. Meloney reprovingly.
“Yes, Mrs. Meloney?”
“You hid behind me.”
“Oh, no, I wasn’t hiding,” said Brighton. “Everyone knew where I was. I was taking cover. Most satisfactory cover, I might add. Most ample cover.”
“You held me, Mr. Brighton, when the shots were fired. I tried to run, but you held me fast.”
“You mean—oh, I see what you mean. I benefitted from you without compensating you. How can I repay you? Would a thousand dollars be appropriate? Five thousand?”
“My word,” said Mrs. Meloney.
“Samuels, don’t just stand there,” said Brighton. “Clean up. One can’t leave a dead body on the floor of a church. Could we pay the trash men to take her, do you suppose?”
“She’s still alive,” said Colette, kneeling by the fallen woman.
“She is?” asked Brighton, looking as if he might need to take cover behind Mrs. Meloney again.
“Police!” shouted Detective Littlemore, bursting through the front door of the church. “Drop your weapons!”
The woman’s body lay crumpled on the cold stone floor, a dark stain of blood spreading out below it. Younger and Littlemore had arrived just in time to hear cries of “murder” from ladies fleeing the church. As Mrs. Meloney explained to the detective how the mad woman had attacked Colette, and how Mr. Samuels had saved them, Younger sought a pulse in the fallen woman’s wrist. He found one, very faint.
Colette knelt next to him. “Look at her neck,” she said.
Matted, unhealthy red hair masked the woman’s face. Grimly but gingerly, Younger pushed the hair away. He saw vacant eyes, a pretty nose and thin, parted lips. The fraying scarf had regained its place over her neck. Younger pulled it away.
The woman had no chin at all. Where a chin should have been, and where a throat should have been, there was instead an engorged bulbous mass, almost as large as the woman’s own head, attached to her neck. It had wrinkles, dimples, lumps, indentations, and many, many veins.
“What in the love of Pete is that?” asked Littlemore.
NINE
A YEAR BEFORE THE ATTACK on Wall Street, the President of the
United States, sitting on his toilet in the White House, suffered a massive cerebral thrombosis—a clot in the artery feeding his brain. Within moments, the once-visionary Woodrow Wilson became a half-blind invalid, unable to move the left side of his body, including the left side of his mouth.
Wilson’s stroke was kept from the public, from his Cabinet, even from his Vice President. It was difficult to say who was supposed to run the country after Wilson’s collapse. Indeed it was difficult to say who was running the country. Was it Secretary of State Robert Lansing, who secretly convened the Cabinet in the President’s absence? Or was it Wilson’s wife, Edith, who counted among her ancestors both Plantagenets and Pocahontas, and who alone had access to the presidential sick room, emerging therefrom with orders that Wilson had supposedly dictated? Or perhaps it was Attorney General Palmer, who secured ever more funds for his Bureau of Investigation, and who imprisoned tens of thousands all over the country as suspected enemies of the nation.
Throughout 1920, the country lurched along in this strange, headless condition. In January, Prohibition took effect. In March, the Senate rejected the League of Nations and, with it, Wilson’s vision of America