Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [99]
Littlemore did not try, after a time, to answer these questions. He just scraped the toe of his shoe against the sidewalk until his wife fell silent. “I’m sorry, Betty,” he said at last. “I should have talked to you first.”
“You really want it, don’t you?” she asked.
“Been hoping for this kind of break my whole life,” he said.
She handed him a folded piece of paper from her pocket. “It came today,” she said. “It says how much we’d have to pay for Lily’s operation.”
Lily, the Littlemores’ one-and-a-half-year-old, had been born with a slight but complete atresia of her external auditory canals. In other words, at the center of her tiny, pretty, and seemingly healthy ears, where the aperture ought to have been, there was instead a membrane and probably, below it, a bone. The toddler responded well to sound, but if she was ever to hear and speak properly, she would have to have surgery—and soon. The surgery in turn required a specialist. The specialist required money.
“Two thousand dollars?” said Littlemore. “To make a little opening?”
“Two thousand for each ear,” answered Betty.
Littlemore reread the letter: his wife was right, as usual. “That settles it,” he said. “I’ve got to take the Treasury job. It pays almost double what I’m making now.”
“Jimmy,” said Betty. “It’s just the opposite. We’ll never have four thousand dollars, wherever you work. We’re going to have to put her in a special school. They say we have to start using sign language with her right now. They got a school for that on Tenth Street. Free. It’s the only one in the country.”
Littlemore frowned. He looked up and down Fourteenth Street—at the fine large buildings on the corners of the avenues, and at the plainer, smaller, walk-ups between them, in one of which was his own apartment. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll turn the job down.”
Winning an argument invariably had a palliative effect on Betty Littlemore, who at once took her husband’s side. “Maybe we wouldn’t have to move,” she said.
“That’s right,” replied Littlemore hopefully. “A lot of the investigating is going to be up here in New York anyway.”
In the end, it was decided that Littlemore would put it to Secretary Houston that he would need to split his time between New York and Washington. Houston turned out to be extremely accommodating. In Washington, Littlemore would have an office in the Treasury Department. In Manhattan, he would work out of the Sub-Treasury on Wall Street. The federal government would even pay for his train travel.
A man exiting Union Station in the District of Columbia—the largest railway station in the world when it opened, with marble floors and gold leaf dripping from its barrel-vaulted ceiling a hundred feet high—found himself, on a Sunday evening in October 1920, in a raw, vast, undeveloped plaza, with a fountain plunked down in the center and a few cars meandering dustily around it, unhindered by lanes or any law-like regularities of direction. Men were playing baseball on an adjacent weedy field. Across the plaza squatted a few dozen temporary dormitories, thrown up hastily during the war.
The effect was of leaving civilization for a wilderness outpost. Three blocks away stood the nation’s Capitol, its dome tinted crimson in the failing sun—another monumental structure surrounded by an expanse of unbuilt land.
Jimmy Littlemore looked at the Capitol with a sense of awe, a suitcase in one hand and a briefcase in the other. It was his first time in Washington. He had a New Yorker’s expectation that a throng of taxicabs would be jostling outside the station’s doors, vying for passengers. There wasn’t a single one.
As Littlemore was wondering how he would get to his hotel, he noticed a black car parked a short distance away, with a tall blonde woman leaning against one of its doors, smoking through a long cigarette holder. She was about thirty, dressed in business