The Death Instinct (39 page)

    'What are they going to do about Mr Houston and the three senators?'

    'Nothing yet.'

    'I thought they wouldn't. All we've got is an authorization from the Mexicans to transfer funds. It's not proof any money ever changed hands. It's not proof of any crime at all. We need more.'

    'You've done your country a great service, son.'

    'Thank you, Mr Senator,' said Littlemore.

    The sun was rising when Littlemore left. The November air was sharp and clean; the smell of burning leaves was everywhere. Littlemore walked the two miles back to his hotel. When he got there, he showered, trying to figure out how he would behave around Secretary Houston and what he'd need to do at the Treasury. He stayed under the steaming water a long time.

Chapter Eighteen

    I think you must like keeping me in the dark,' Colette said to Younger in their lurching airplane, shouting to make herself heard over the propeller's roar.

    Younger had refused to give Colette any explanation of his changing their destination from Bremen to Paris except to say that he had questions only Marie Curie might be able to answer. Far below he could see the twisting Danube, whose course the pilot was evidently following. 'Yes, it must be frustrating,' he replied to Colette, 'when you've been such a model of transparency yourself.'

    When they finally reached Paris, they passed so close to Mr Eiffel's tower they seemed almost about to graze it. At the airstrip a few other planes warmed themselves in the afternoon sun, haphazardly arranged, and there was even a ticket office, but the entire place was deserted. The pilot, himself a Parisian, eventually gave them a lift to the city center in a ramshackle car.

    Colette pointed out favorite sights as they crossed the bridge to the Trocadero and its spectacular crab-shaped Oriental palace, where, around calm reflecting pools, top-hatted men and parasol-carrying women promenaded. She gave the pilot directions to the Radium Institute. 'You must remember,' she said to Younger, 'that Madame is not in the best health anymore, and her sight is failing.' Colette shook her head. 'They almost rumored her to death a few years ago. Now she is the toast of Paris, and they all try to pretend it never happened.'

    Viewed from the Rue Pierre Curie, the Radium Institute looked more like a comfortable bourgeois house than a scientific laboratory. 'When I first went through these doors and saw Madame s equipment inside,' said Colette, 'I thought it must be the grandest, finest laboratory in the world. Then I saw your marble halls of science in America. It must seem like nothing to you.'

    Inside the equipment was indeed of very high quality: banks of electrometers, gas burners, twisted-necked glass beakers, all sparkling with scrupulously maintained sterility. Colette, after greeting old friends, eventually led Younger to the doorway of a room with a high ceiling, a large window, and a desk rather than a laboratory table. A gray-haired woman stood inside this room, instructing an assistant who was carefully packing equipment into a box.

    Colette knocked on the open door and said, 'Madame?'

    Marie Curie turned and stared: 'Who is it?'

    'It's Colette, Madame,' said Colette.

    'My child,' cried Madame Curie, beaming with delight. 'Come here. Come here at once.'

    Marie Curie, fifty-two, looked older. Her upper lip was pinched with little vertical lines, her hands were spotted, her fingertips red. She wore her gray hair in a tight bun. A simple black dress covered her entirely, from tight collar to long sleeves to floor-length skirt. Her posture, however, was straight and proud, and she had one of those brows so clear, so fine, that it conveys a serenity beyond the slings and arrows of human misfortune.

    'These dreadful cataracts,' Madame Curie went on. 'My surgery is next month. The doctors promise me a complete recovery. Let me look at you close up - why, you're lovelier than ever.'

    Colette introduced Younger and explained to Madame Curie that he wished to ask her a few questions, if she could spare the time.

    'Dr Stratham Younger,' said Madame Curie, shaking his hand. 'I know that name. Were you one of the soldiers who took training with us last year?'

    'No, Madame, but I treated many with your X-ray units in France. America owes you an unrepayable debt.'

    'I remember now,' she said. 'You were the one who initiated the entire program. I saw your name in the correspondence. I can't thank you enough. Your army kept us afloat last year when we had no other funding.'

    Colette looked at Younger in surprise.

    'The benefit was ours,' replied Younger. 'Your mobile radiological apparatus is far superior to anything we have. Which I only knew because Miss Rousseau was kind enough to volunteer her services to our men.'

    'You never told me you worked with Americans,' Madame Curie said to Colette. 'We all have our secrets, don't we? Let me make some tea. How do you find America, my child?'

    'Anything is possible there,' answered Colette. 'For good or bad - that's how one feels. You should see their radium refinery. Black smoke pours from the chimneys. Trucks roll up one after the other, depositing ore brought by train from mines in Colorado, two thousand miles away. The factory runs day and night - using your isolation process, Madame. They work with an ore called carnotite, not pitchblende. They say there is enough carnotite in America to make nine hundred grams of radium.'

    Madame Curie went still for a long moment. 'Nine hundred grams,' she said at last. 'What I might do with ten. Forgive me. I'm not bitter. But you know that Pierre and I could have patented our discoveries long ago, when no one on earth had ever heard of radium or dreamt of radioactivity. Everyone told us to take out patents on our isolation processes, but we refused. That's not what science is for. Radium belongs to all mankind. Still, had we behaved a little more selfishly, I would not be without radium today, and with just a little radium we could do such things - cure so many - save the infant who might have grown up to be the next Newton. I have none left at all now. Only radon vapor. We have so many experiments waiting to be performed. Patients by the dozen whom we turn away.'

    No one spoke.

    'And how is the irrepressible Mrs Meloney?' Madame Curie asked Colette, resuming her energetic and cheerful tone. 'She is certainly one of your anything-is-possible Americans. Is there any chance she'll raise enough money to buy a gram of radium for us?'

    'I'm afraid the fund is still short, Madame,' said Colette sadly. 'Very short.'

    'Well, I never believed it would happen,' replied Madame Curie. 'She has a good heart, Mrs Meloney, but she is not very scientific in her thinking. Don't worry. If there is no American gram of radium for us, I won't be unhappy. I won't have to travel across the ocean and make a lot of speeches. You know how I hate that sort of thing. I'm much too tired for it. But what can I do for you, Dr Younger?'

    'I had hoped,' said Younger, 'with your permission, Madame, that I might make a drawing for you. I took some radiographs of a young woman's neck not long ago. The X-rays made a pattern I had never seen before. I can draw it, though, and I was hoping you might be able to tell me if it means anything to you.'

    'Madame is not a roentgenologist, Stratham,' Colette chided him. 'She works with radium, not X-rays.'

    'It's quite all right,' replied Madame Curie. 'Let him make us his drawing. I'm curious.'

    Younger was given pen and paper; he proceeded to draw. He filled a page with the strange, undulating, cross-hatched shadow pattern that he had seen after X-raying the McDonald girl. When he had finished, Madame Curie held the sheet of paper close to her eyes, then far away, then close again. 'The X-rays,' she said, 'didn't pass through the woman's neck.'

    'Exactly,' replied Younger. 'Something blocked them.'

    'Or rather interfered with them,' replied Madame Curie. 'You're sure what you saw were X-rays of a person - not an object of some kind?'

    'I took them myself. The young woman had a growth on her neck and jaw. Granular. Larger than any such growth I'd ever seen.'

    'I know this pattern. Quite well.'

    'It's radium, isn't it?' asked Younger.

    'Radium?' repeated Colette.

    'Without question,' said Madame Curie.

    'But how-?' asked Colette.

    'Radium is roentgenopaque - impervious to X-rays,' explained Madame Curie. 'What's more, the gamma rays emitted by radium atoms have physical properties virtually identical to X-rays. As a result, the two sets of waves interfere with one another. When an object containing radium is X-rayed, what we see is an interference pattern - this pattern.'

    'What would happen,' asked Younger, 'to a person who had radium inside her body for an extended period of time?'

    Madame Curie set the drawing down. 'You must understand one thing about radium,' she said, 'how little we comprehend it. Nature kept it hidden for so very long. Within the atoms of radium, there is a cauldron of forces we can't see, a source of almost immeasurable power. Somehow the release of these atomic forces has profound effects on living things. On inanimate lead, radioactivity has hardly any impact at all. On a piece of lifeless paper, the same. But on the living, the effect is profound, unpredictable. Administered properly, it holds unprecedented medical potential. I myself discovered the radium treatment for cancer; in France, when we insert a needle of radium into a cancerous tumor, it is referred to as Curietherapy.'

    'In America too, Madame,' said Colette.

    'Some think that radioactivity may be the long-sought fountain of youth,' Madame Curie went on. 'Unquestionably it has curative power. But radium is also one of the most dangerous elements on earth. Its radiation seems to interact in some unknown fashion with the molecular structure of life itself. It is a fearsome poison. If a person were to ingest it in any quantity, the case would be hopeless. There is absolutely no means of destroying the substance once it enters the human body.'

    Outside the Radium Institute, Colette said, 'But how could Miss McDonald have radium inside her?'

    'On September sixteenth,' answered Younger, 'where were you before you met Littlemore and me - before we all went down to Wall Street?'

    'I had just visited the radium clinic,' said Colette, 'at the Post-Graduate Hospital.'

    'Where they use Curietherapy,' he said. 'You were telling Littlemore and me about it that morning. I knew the McDonald girl didn't have syphilis.'

    'What are you saying?'

    'She has cancer. A cancer of the neck or jaw.'

    'Wait - you think she was a patient at the radium clinic?'

    'Let's say Miss McDonald had cancer. If her doctors knew what they were doing, they would have sent her to the Post-Graduate Hospital for treatment; it's the best radium clinic in the city. But something might have gone wrong there. Maybe they botched the treatment and couldn't find the needle of radium they put inside her. Didn't I read about the Post-Graduate Hospital losing ten thousand dollars' worth of radium not long ago? Maybe they lost it inside that girl's neck. After a few weeks, she'd be in agony. She goes back to the clinic and begs them for help. They deny any wrongdoing; they refuse to admit their mistake. Suddenly she sees you. Somehow she gets it into her head that you can help her. She decides to follow you.'

    'How could I help her?'

    'I don't know, but what other explanation is there?'

    A thought occurred to Colette: 'But Amelia left us the note at our hotel the night before - for the kidnapping ring, according to you. You're saying Miss McDonald had no connection to Amelia?'

    'I don't know. But someone has to remove the radium from Miss McDonald's neck. God knows what it will do to her. I'll wire Littlemore.'

    They found an international cable office in the Place de la Concorde. Younger dashed off a telegram to Littlemore:

    
MCDONALD GIRL HAS NEEDLE OF RADIUM IN NECK STOP CHECK

    WITH POST-GRADUATE HOSPITAL ON TWENTIETH STREET TO SEE

    IF SHE WAS PATIENT THERE STOP THEY MAY KNOW WHERE IN

    NECK RADIUM IS STOP RADIUM MUST BE REMOVED AT ONCE

    REPEAT AT ONCE

    'The radiation will burn her throat away,' said Younger as they waited on line for the telegraph operator. 'It could have reached her brain by now. That's probably why she can't regain consciousness.'

    'There's no evidence that radium has any effect on the brain,' objected Colette. 'You always overstate radium's danger. Madame is exposed to more radiation than anyone, and she doesn't wear one of your diver's suits.'

    'Madame Curie didn't seem particularly healthy to me. She's pale as a lamb. Fatigued. You told me her blood pressure is low.'

    'She's a scientist. She stays inside all day.'

    'Or else she's anemic,' said Younger. 'She probably has radiation in her bloodstream after all these years.'

    'Next you'll say radium caused her cataracts.'

    'How do you know it didn't?'

    Younger sent the cable. Outside the office, Colette saw a hotel on the other side of the Place de la Concorde. 'Can we get rooms there?' she asked.

    'The Crillon?' said Younger, flinching inwardly. 'Why not?'

    At Marie Curie's invitation, they attended a crowded dinner party that evening: a celebration of Poland's newfound independence and miraculous victory against the Bolsheviks. The celebration was held in a small apartment - Younger never found out whom it belonged to - where the guests ate standing up. Toasts were raised, a great deal of

    Polish was spoken, and an even greater quantity of flavored vodka was drunk.