Then he went to the police garage, where he personally re-dusted the criminals' car for fingerprints, both exterior and interior, from tailpipes to steering wheel to ashtrays. This painstaking process took many hours. It proved equally futile, revealing a host of prints, none of which matched the ones taken from the man Younger had assaulted. Frustrated but not beaten, Littlemore went home for the night.
Even as the train conductor announced New Haven as the next stop, Younger still had not decided whether to disembark there or continue on to Boston, the city that had been his home most of his life.
The landscape outside the train's windows had grown increasingly New England. Trees blazed with color. Every bridge over every river, every bend of the coastline, was familiar to him. He had taken the Shore Line into or out of Manhattan too many times.
When the train pulled into New Haven, Younger stepped out on the platform. He smelled the autumn air and dropped into a mailbox a letter for Colette. Under his Boston address, the letter said:
September 24, 1920
I'll come to Vienna, but only on one condition: that you renounce any intention of seeing Hans Gruber.
— Stratham
The whistle blew, the conductor called out, and Younger returned to his seat.
Littlemore spent the next day — Saturday — tracking down and interviewing occupants of the building where the criminals had stayed. No one had anything of value to tell him. He found the owner of that building, but the landlord was equally unhelpful. He cut through the police ropes and reentered the room where Colette and Luc had been taken. On hands and knees, he went over every inch of the room with his magnifying glass. This too was in vain.
Younger woke up Saturday morning in his old bedroom in his old house in the Back Bay. It wasn't the house of his parents — the house he'd grown up in — but a townhouse he'd bought after returning to Boston when his marriage broke up in 1911. It was a handsome place, with fine old furniture, high ceilings, and well-proportioned rooms. Leaving the accumulated mail untouched, he went outside.
What he liked about Boston was that it was such a small town. That was also what he didn't like about it. He walked to the Public Garden, passing rows of townhouses more or less identical to his own, and took a seat on a bench by the lake. It was so placid he could see in it an upside-down double of every swan and paddle boat plying the water. He put a cigarette in his mouth but discovered he had no matches. The fact that he was in Boston with no employment irritated him.
After his divorce, Younger had thrown himself into his scientific work, spending days and nights in a laboratory underneath the Harvard medical school. His field in those days was microscopic infectious agents. He made his scientific name in 1913 by isolating syphilitic spirochetes in the brains of individuals who had died of general paresis, a condition previously believed to be psychiatric in origin. He saw no one. He socialized not at all.
Then something unexpected took place. He had assumed he would be a pariah because of his divorce, which was not proscribed in Boston society, but was not regarded favorably Instead, his social reputation soared. Whether due to his respectable position at Harvard, or the notoriety attaching to his supposed affair in New York, or, most likely, the inheritance that fell into his lap from his mother's Schermerhorn relatives, Younger became a prize commodity in both Boston and New York. At first he refused all invitations. But after two years playing the reclusive scientist, he began to go out. To his surprise, he enjoyed it.
He lent his arm to coveted young women at society events. He kissed their fingers and danced with them as if he were courting. But he never was; the society girls bored him. He preferred actresses, and in New York he was infamously seen with them. Over these years, there were only three women he slept with — and even those he could stand only for short stretches of time. A moment arrived when he was simultaneously the most eligible and most hated man in two cities. Even the actresses generally ended up enraged. Every year, he expected society to revolt against him and put him under a ban. But somehow the number of mothers believing that their daughter might be the one to land him only increased. In 1917, at a party in the Waldorf celebrating the coming out of the pretty Miss Denby, the debutante's charming mother pressed him so assiduously to dance with her daughter that he made a conscious show of partnering with every girl other than Miss Denby. He drank to such excess that he didn't remember leaving the ball and woke the next morning in a hotel room with an unknown female beside him. It turned out to be Mrs Denby.
A few weeks later, the United States declared war. He enlisted at once.
When Younger got back to his townhouse, the afternoon mail had come, and with it a letter from Colette. He opened it still standing in his hallway:
25-9-1920
Dearest Stratham,
I can't do what you ask. I realize now that everything that's happened in America has been a sign telling me to go back to Europe. God must want me to. Vows are sacred. I have to honour mine, no matter how rash or wrong I was to make it. Maybe I will see when I'm there that he is not the one. But God puts these feelings in our hearts: of that I'm sure. I beg you to understand — and to come with me. I need you.
Yours,
Colette
He didn't understand. Why say she 'needed' him when she so obviously didn't? If it was money she needed, he wished she would simply ask him for it outright.
Rummaging through his mail, Younger found a statement from his bank. With a cold eye, he observed that his balance, once a thing of six figures — that was before he'd bought his house — had shrunk to four, and the first of those four was a one. Ever since Younger had come into his inheritance, he had turned over his professor's salary and, later, his soldier's wages to one or another insufferable Bostonian charity. He had lived without thought of money. The bequest having fallen into his lap, he had determined never to let it become an anchor.
He knew he would give it to Colette — the money for her passage — fool though that would make him. All she had to do was ask. He threw on some evening clothes, and went out. At the Post Office, he dropped off the following scribbled reply:
September 25, 1920
Since it's God's will, go with Him.
— Stratham
Littlemore, arriving home late and frustrated Saturday night, found his wife in a state of distress. Her mother, a robust little woman who spoke only Italian, was next to her. 'They came for Joey,' Betty exclaimed, referring to her younger brother.
'Who did?' asked Littlemore.
'You — the police,' answered Betty.
It turned out that policemen had paid a visit to Betty's mother's apartment on the Lower East Side looking for Joey, a dockworker who still lived with his mother. Mrs Longobardi told the police he was out, which was true. They entered and ransacked the apartment, seizing newspapers, magazines, and letters from relatives in Italy.
'They say they're going to arrest him,' Betty concluded. 'Arrest him and deport him.'
'What kind of policemen?' asked Littlemore.' What were they wearing?'
Betty translated this question. The policemen, Mrs Longobardi answered, were wearing dark jackets and ties.
'Flynn,' said Littlemore.
On Sunday morning, Younger didn't wake rested. In fact he didn't wake at all, because he had never gone to sleep. When he got back to his house, unshaven, tie askew, it was well after dawn. Making himself coffee, he decided it was high time he got back to work.
He hadn't written a scientific paper since 1917. He hadn't even contacted Harvard about resuming his professorship. But he did have notes from the experiments he had conducted during the war; there was a paper on the medical use of maggots he wanted to write; and he did have an old set of patients who would probably be delighted to make him their doctor once again. It was time to return to his senses.