The Death Instinct (38 page)

    'Somebody has to.' A breeze was blowing the curtains of the living- room window. Littlemore looked out: the window opened onto a fire escape. 'That's where he went.'

    The apartment was newly and cheaply furnished. The only decorations were a few wall-hung watercolors of clowns and bulls, along with a vase of flowers sitting on an inexpensive table. Littlemore went through the rooms, the closets, the drawers. He found nothing - only a smattering of clothes and personal effects. Mrs Cross stood in the living room, smoking a cigarette. 'Sharp move,' she said, 'letting him run.'

    'Not looking too smart, am I?' asked Littlemore.

    'Tidy Mexican gentleman,' said Mrs Cross, making use of a clean ashtray on the dining table. 'He might have swept his floor a little better.'

    Littlemore followed her line of sight. At the base of the wall, a small mound of sawdust was visible. Five feet above this sawdust, hanging on the wall, was a watercolor of a bullfight.

    'Got him,' said Littlemore.

    He lifted the picture off its hanger. A hole had been drilled behind it - a hole large enough for a man to stick his hand into. Which is what Littlemore did, drawing out therefrom a cardboard cylinder. The corners of rolled-up documents poked out from either end of the tube. Littlemore pulled the sheets free and flattened them out on the table, holding them down so they didn't curl.

    Some of the documents were photographs. Another was a letter, in

    Spanish, bearing the stamp and letterhead of a Mexican governmental department. One was a diagram.

    'Holy cow,' said Littlemore. 'Holy mother of cow.'

    'Why are we going down the fire escape?' asked Mrs Cross, descending the metal stairs a few treads behind Littlemore.

    'Because if anybody's waiting for us, they'll be out front.'

    'Who would be waiting for us?'

    'If I'm Elias Torres and I left these documents behind, I'm coming back for them. With some friends. And some guns. Hold this.'

    Handing Mrs Cross the cardboard cylinder with the documents inside it, Littlemore let himself down a short metal ladder, at the end of which he had to jump the last several feet to the ground. He was in the building's rear lot, which appeared to be empty.

    'Throw me the tube,' he said quietly, 'and come down.'

    She complied, but when she reached the last rung of the ladder, still some six feet off the ground, she looked at him and said, 'Now what?'

    'Let go,' he answered. 'I'll catch you.'

    She hesitated.

    'Jump, for Christ's sake,' he whispered.

    She did; he caught her. She had one hand on his chest: 'You're stronger than you look.'

    'Is that a compliment?' he asked. 'Don't answer. Just keep quiet.'

    He led Mrs Cross around the apartment house, keeping her behind him, pressing himself against the wall when they came to the street. Peering around the corner, Littlemore saw four men, hats pulled low over their heads, outside the front door of the building. One sat on the hood of the sedan in which Mrs Cross and he had arrived; the man seemed to be carelessly polishing his shoe. Littlemore drew his gun.

    'Wait,' whispered Mrs Cross. 'I'll go. They don't know you're with a woman. I'll pick you up on Avenue of the President.'

    'Where's that?'

    'It's Sixteenth Street.' She pointed the way. Then she walked boldly out into the street, displaying not a hint of anxiety. As she sauntered near the car, the men elbowed each other. One whistled; another asked her questions of a personal nature, which Mrs Cross did not answer. When she let herself into the car and started the engine, the man sitting on the hood leaned over the windshield.

    'Where do you think you're going, honey?' he said. Perhaps he thought she couldn't pull out with a man on her hood. If so, he was mistaken.

    'If you can hang on, you'll find out,' answered Mrs Cross. She put the car into drive and shot from the curb, dumping the man onto the pavement behind her. Without turning to look, she gave the four men a wave of her hand and turned at the first corner. Littlemore, in the meantime, had taken advantage of the distraction to walk off, unnoticed, in the other direction.

    Mrs Cross and Littlemore, coming from opposite directions, met on Sixteenth Street, renamed Avenue of the President by its socially ambitious residents. Littlemore glanced over his shoulder before climbing in the car: no one was following them.

    'Where to?' she asked.

    'Your senator - where would he be right now?'

    'Mr Fall? Home - at the Wardman Park Hotel. It's not far from here.'

    'Go,' said Littlemore. He checked behind them again. 'Not bad, Mrs Cross.'

    'Why did you ask my first name if you aren't going to use it?' she replied.

    The central lobby of the thousand-room Wardman Park on Connecticut Avenue, which sprawled out in several wings on a bucolic sixteen-acre hill, was bright and crowded with brand-new automobiles as well as a throng of onlookers ogling them despite the lateness of the hour.

    'An auto show,' said Littlemore disparagingly. 'The whole world's foul, and all these people can think about is a new car.'

    'Why Agent Littlemore,' said Mrs Cross, 'this is a new and darker tone for you. I thought you looked at things on the bright side.' 'They got a hundred elevators in this place. Which way?' 'Follow me.'

    On the eighth floor, Senator Fall himself opened the door to his rooms, dressed in a dark red smoking jacket. Mrs Cross walked right in, making herself at home. Littlemore stood in the doorway 'You found something?' asked Fall.

    Littlemore nodded.

    'Have you shown it to Houston?'

    'I can't,' said Littlemore.

    As Littlemore spread out the documents on Senator Fall's dining table, Mrs Cross placed two tumblers of whiskey over ice in front of the men. She poured another for herself. 'What are the photographs of?' she asked.

    'Looks like a military training camp somewhere in Mexico,' said Littlemore. 'That's a shooting range there. These are machine rifles. This one shows people working with fuses and detonators.' 'What's this list of names?' asked Fall.

    'I'd say those are people who spent time at the camp. See, it shows how long they spent, what dates, and what weapons training they got. They're from all over the world. They got Italians, Russians - you name it.'

    'It's a goddamn terrorist boot camp,' said Fall, 'right under our noses.' 'Do you see these two names, sir?' asked Littlemore. 'Sacco and Vanzetti,' said Fall.

    'Looks like Flynn was onto something after all,' said Littlemore. Then he placed a different, thicker sheet of paper on top of the others. This one had a pen-and-ink sketch on it, carefully drawn, with arrows and labels in Spanish.

    'My God,' said Fall.

    'What is it?' asked Mrs Cross, sipping her whiskey.

    'A diagram for arranging shrapnel around a bomb loaded in a wagon - a horse-drawn wagon.'

    No one spoke.

    'And that's not even the kicker, Senator Fall. Look at this one.'

    Littlemore pointed to a document bearing the letterhead of the Controller-General of Mexico and, at the bottom, that gentleman's signature. Between these two formalities were several paragraphs of flowery Spanish. Senator Fall read them.

    'You understand what this letter says, son?'

    'Yes, sir. It's an authorization to transfer $1,115,000 to the accounts of three United States senators and one United States Cabinet member.'

    'Are you one of the three, Senator dear?' Mrs Cross asked innocently.

    Fall swatted Mrs Cross on her flank. 'No, I ain't. It's Borah, Cotton Tom Heflin, and Norris - the three biggest friends in Congress of those bandits running Mexico.'

    'Senator Borah - the one having an affair with Alice Roosevelt?'

    'Is that the only thing you women think about?' asked Fall.

    'It might explain why Mr Borah needed extra money,' replied Mrs Cross. 'Which Cabinet member was getting rich?'

    'Mr Houston, of the Treasury,' answered Littlemore.

    Toward midnight, important men began arriving at Senator Fall's apartment at the Wardman Park Hotel. Retiring to a private study, they engaged in discussions from which Littlemore was excluded, although the detective was asked in several times to repeat the circumstances in which he'd found the documents. The meeting went on for hours. To judge from the sharp and raised voices, the discussion was contentious - occasionally acrimonious. At one point, Littlemore heard Senator Fall arguing that President Taft had 'done no less' for Wilson in 1912.

    Mrs Cross identified some of the men to Littlemore: Mr Colby,

    the Secretary of State; Mr Baker, Secretary of War; Mr Daniels, Secretary of the Navy; Mr McAdoo, whom Littlemore had met with Commissioner Enright and the Mayor; and Mr Daugherty, the man expected to be Harding's Attorney General. 'Senator Harding himself would be here,' she said, 'but he's vacationing, lucky man. Not that he would have made any decisions anyway. These are the men who make the decisions.'

    'So this McAdoo - he's the President's son-in-law? He must be as old as Wilson himself.'

    'Girls like older men in this town,' replied Mrs Cross. 'Eleanor must have been about twenty when she became engaged to him. He was over fifty. But a very handsome over-fifty. You don't approve of a girl taking an interest in older men?'

    'Wonder how the President felt about it,' said Littlemore, thinking of his own daughters.

    'They say it broke his heart. Mr McAdoo was a member of Mr Wilson's Cabinet at the time. But Mr Wilson let him go and then, last June, took the Democratic nomination away from him. I believe Mr McAdoo might have been our next president otherwise. Poor Eleanor. I wonder how she feels now.'

    'Wilson fired his own daughter's husband from the Cabinet?'

    'Oh, Mr McAdoo came out all right. He's a very prominent lawyer. He's here because he knows the location of the biggest oil wells in Mexico, which belong to one of his clients. I believe Mr Brighton is an acquaintance of yours? You rode his train to New York. It's quite nice, isn't it?'

    'How does everybody know what I'm doing?' asked Littlemore.

    'Were there any girls on Mr Brighton's train?'

    'No, there weren't.'

    'Too bad. There were the one time I was invited. Well, I'm taking a rest.' It was past two in the morning. At the foot of the stairs, she turned: 'Would you mind coming upstairs, Agent Littlemore? I need to ask you something.'

    Senator Fall's apartment had two floors. Evidently the bedrooms were upstairs. Littlemore went to the stairwell. The motion of Mrs Cross's figure ascending a flight of steps was even harder to turn away from than it was on flat ground. He followed her and found her in a guest bedroom, unfastening her earrings. 'Close the door,' she said.

    'Why?' asked Littlemore.

    'I told you - I need to ask you something.'

    He closed the door. She undid her blond hair and shook it out. 'What's your question, Mrs Cross?' he asked.

    She approached very near him. With her heels, she was almost exactly his height. 'Does Mrs Littlemore know how important her husband's going to be?'

    'Does Mr Cross know how his wife spends her nights?'

    'There is no Mr Cross anymore. He died in the war.'

    'I'm sorry about that, Grace, and I'm flattered, I really am, but I can't. There are rules about this kind of thing.'

    'Rules?' She slipped off her shoes, one at a time, and looked up at him, putting her hands on his chest. 'This is Washington, Agent Littlemore. The rules don't apply here.'

    'Maybe not,' he said, removing her hands. 'But I still play by them.'

    At five-thirty in the morning, the meeting broke up, and the well- dressed gentlemen took their leave. There was little talk, and much seriousness of expression, as the long dark overcoats made their way out of Senator Fall's apartment.

    'I'm too old for this,' said Fall to Littlemore after all had departed, pouring himself another drink and easing himself into a chair. 'The war order will go out tomorrow. It'll take a while to get the troops to the border. I told them we'll need half a million soldiers.'

    'A half million?' repeated Littlemore.

    'Baker thinks we can do it with a fifth as many, because he's not thinking about what we're going to be doing after we win. We're going to have a country to run, for Christ's sake.' Fall took a drink, grimaced. 'Where's Grace? I need milk. Wilson's people don't want to make it public yet that Mexico bombed Wall Street. That's what I was fighting with them about. They're afraid the people will panic if they realize that the enemy can blow the hell out of our cities. I told them the American people aren't a bunch of sissies. They'll demand war when they find out. Anyway, for now Baker's not going to say anything about the bombing. They're going to play it in the papers as a response to Obregon grabbing our mines.'