She turned to face him, shivering in the cold air that swirled through the compartment, hair billowing, bare shoulders catching the light of the candle. He could see that she wouldn't resist him. If he put his hands on her, she would let him: Was it a debt she felt she owed him? He glanced at the slumbering form of the boy and shut the window.
For his part, Luc — not asleep — waited for the unpleasant sound of kissing or other things that grown-ups do. It never came. Instead he heard the door open and close as Younger left the compartment.
Chapter Fifteen
It is often wondered by Americans, not to mention residents of the nation's capital, whether the city of Washington is in the District of Columbia or is the District of Columbia. The answer in 1920 was neither. There was no city of Washington.
When the United States first placed its capital on the banks of the Potomac River between Maryland and Virginia at the end of the eighteenth century, the land devoted to the enterprise was a perfectly shaped square, or diamond, each side of which was exactly ten miles in length. The whole of this diamond was called the territory of Columbia. In that territory were three municipalities: the early settlement of Georgetown, the formerly Virginian city of Alexandria, and the new capital city of Washington.
More than a half century later, as the United States struck numerous futile compromises between North and South, one such bargain was negotiated in the territory of Columbia. Alexandria, poor and intensely pro-slavery, was retroceded back to the slave state of Virginia, while the trade in human property was abolished everywhere else in the territory. As a result, the capital lost its geometric perfection as well as about a third of its hundred square miles. Meanwhile, the cities of Georgetown and Washington grew to a point where they began to encroach. Accordingly, in the 1870s, Congress repealed the charters of those two municipalities, combining them instead, together with the rest of the territory, into a single District of Columbia.
From that point on, there was, formally speaking, no city of
Washington at all. But no one has ever scrupled over that nicety, and Washington continues to be spoken of and believed in by all, just as if it were a real city.
'Progress report, Littlemore,' said Treasury Secretary Houston in his mild Carolinian voice on a late October morning, having summoned the detective to his sumptuous office, which was larger than many New York apartments Littlemore knew. 'I should very much like to claim some progress just now.'
'In time for the election?' asked Littlemore.
'Correct.'
'I wish I had more for you, Mr Houston.' Littlemore was frustrated; none of his leads was panning out. 'My boys still haven't found anybody who saw the getaway truck leaving the alley after the bombing. But they will. Somebody had to have seen it. Meantime, I've been investigating everybody who had anything to do with the gold transfer. The only one that sticks out is Riggs, and he's gone.'
'Riggs?' asked Houston. Who's that?'
'Your officer who died on September sixteenth.'
'Oh, yes. What about him?'
'Riggs applied for a passport last July,' said Littlemore. 'Planning a little foreign travel.'
'So he was one of the criminals!' declared Houston.
'Looks like it,' said Littlemore. 'Unfortunately I can't find anybody who knew him. No wife. No family. He was hired by Treasury here in Washington in 1917. Transferred to New York last year. Who would have transferred him, sir?'
'I have no idea. I became Secretary only this year.'
'Could you find out?'
'I don't see why not.'
Littlemore rubbed his chin. 'I wonder if they could have taken the gold out by sea. The harbor's right near Wall Street. Have we been checking the ships sailing out of New York?'
'Have we?' said Houston. 'Customs inspects every single container of cargo loaded onto outgoing ships. Gold is very heavy, Littlemore. It would be impossible to get twelve thousand pounds of gold onto a vessel without our knowledge.'
'Okay, let's say they didn't sail it out. They took it away in their truck. What then? You're the expert, Mr Houston. If you're sitting on all that metal, what do you do with it?'
'Melt it down. Re-bar it.'
'Why?'
'Every Treasury bar is engraved with our marks. To sell that gold, the thieves need to erase those marks, and the only way to do that is to melt it down. Once melted and re-barred, gold is untraceable. That's what they do with Soviet metal.'
'The Russians have gold?'
'Vast amounts — from the Tsars' treasure houses. It's contraband. Can't be sold anywhere in the civilized world. Even I'm not allowed to buy it. What the Russians do is smuggle it here by ship, melt it, bar it, and then sell it to us.'
'Us? You mean the Treasury?'
'Certainly. The United States Treasury will buy any and all gold presented to it, no matter in what quantity, and we pay the best price of any country in the world. Except for Russian gold, which we won't touch — provided we can identify it as Russian. We just intercepted a shipment the other day. Didn't you read about it? Over two million dollars in Russian metal hidden on a Swedish ocean liner. Customs found it. I sent the Swedes packing. The ship's back at sea now, taking the Russian gold home with it.'
'Mr Houston, you better bring that ship back in.'
'What for?'
'Classic bait and switch,' said Littlemore. 'That Swedish ship sailed out of New York carrying a cargo of gold with your authorization. But maybe beneath a few bars of Russian metal, the rest of it wasn't Russian. Maybe it was your gold — the stolen gold.'
'I don't believe it.'
'Bring that ship back in, Mr Houston. Then we'll know for sure.'
'I can't intercept a ship on the high seas and haul it back to New York.'
'Why not? Send out a few cruisers. We used to do it all the time during the war.'
'We're not at war now, Littlemore. It's very delicate these days. Tensions are high. We don't want an international incident, for heaven's sake.'
'Then just board her, Mr Houston. Open the crates of gold. Check the bars and make sure they're Russian. That's all.'
'Don't tell me how to do my job,' said Houston. 'We're talking about a passenger ship. A thousand people aboard. It would be in every newspaper all over world if I were wrong. And what would I say I was looking for? Stolen Treasury gold — and let everyone know about the theft?'
'You don't have to say. People will think you're looking for arms or something.'
'It's pure speculation. I'm not going to send the United States Navy on a wild-goose chase.' He drummed his fingers on his desk. 'What did Fall want from you?'
'To let him know if I found evidence linking the robbery to Russia.'
'He'd like that, wouldn't he?' Houston grunted contemptuously. 'Warmonger.'
It was a privilege of federal officials that they received priority over civilians when placing long-distance telephone calls. For example, an agent making a call to New York from the Treasury in Washington could usually reach his party in less than a quarter-hour. More important, ever since the federal government seized control of the nation's telephone companies in 1918 and began dictating rates, such calls were essentially free of charge.
Littlemore took advantage of these perquisites to call the American
Society for Psychical Research. A short time later, an operator rang him back with Dr Walter Prince on the line.
'Question for you, Doctor,' said Littlemore. 'Did you by any chance talk to Ed Fischer after I met you in your office?'
'Certainly,' said Dr Prince, his voice distant and broken up by the accumulated static of two hundred miles of telephone wire. 'I visited him at the sanitarium later that very day.'