The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9 Part 37

"He has a history?"

"It's enough. Been into Russia. Got involved with all that pro-Cuba noise down south-"

"But enough of a history to make this thing stick?"

"Christ, are you serious? Machinery we have in place could make anything stick to anyone."

"No one's questioning your belief in this thing, George ... but we have the whole world out there. The whole world has to believe whatever we tell them. History has demonstrated that in such circ.u.mstances people just grasp whatever is given them. They need something, anything ... we deliver it, and they will accept it."

"I agree. Remember Hitler ... bigger the lie the more easily it will be believed."

"But you're sure we can present it in such a way as it will be accepted?"

"Acceptance is not what we're looking for. When did we ever look for acceptance? We obscure everything. We give them one thing, and if they start to question it then we simply give them fifteen or twenty other possibilities, and no one will know what to believe."

"Point taken."

"Good. So we have our man. Now it's a question of when."

We came out the following morning just before ten, and I remember speaking to Connally in the parking lot before we went back to the suite. I spoke to John Nance Garner as well, just for a little while. He was a good man. I always liked him. One time he told me that his job was something like a pitcher of warm spit.

A little while later Lyndon came up and introduced us to his sister, and then at eleven-thirty or so we flew down to Love Field. We left in the motorcade about five minutes before noon. The sun was high and bright. The air was fresh. The people would have already gathered to see me, and perhaps, if I was honest I wanted to see them. Every once in a while it was good to be reminded of why.

Jackie didn't like the heat. Didn't like it in Mexico, didn't like it in Texas. She ran with the program, but she got lost amongst the Communications Agency people with their codenames and unintelligible language. I remember seeing Clint Hill on the running board, back and forth, back and forth, sweating like a pig on barbecue day. His name was Dazzle, and then there was Deacon and Daylight and Domino, and they had these handheld radios, all this talk going back and forth about Volunteer in Varsity with Velvet and Venus ...

The circus started then. I remember waving, coming out of Main and Poydras and waving like a maniac. I was saying "Thank you, thank you ...", and then I glanced at Governor Connally's wife, Nellie, and the expression on her face was like I was crazy, like she was thinking, What the h.e.l.l's he doing? Doesn't he understand these people can't hear him? It was just force of habit. I didn't think about it. Perhaps it was nothing more than the way I'd been raised. I kept on waving. I kept on thanking people. We went down Lamar and Austin, and then we hit Main and Market, and h.e.l.l if the place didn't look like c.r.a.p. Bail-bond shops, a line of bars and gyms, and then there was the courthouse and the Records Building, and it was then that I felt the unnerving sense of premonition.

I looked up at the sky. Just for a second. A single heartbeat. It was blue, almost perfect, almost cloudless, and I believed it was possible for a hole to open right up and s.n.a.t.c.h me from the earth.

I felt insignificant.

I felt like nothing.

I felt no more important than a breath of air.

"We'll look at when in a moment."

"But we have to decide on the when. Until we make a decision on when we won't have a location. Without a location-"

"He's right. We need a location."

"There's two bills coming through the House in the summer. I can't risk having any difficulty-"

"There are no favorites here. We have to look at when it's going to work, gentlemen, not whether it suits some individual agenda."

"The overall agenda is the thing here, no question about it."

"I think it should be near to Christmas. Once the worst of the panic is over it'll be the holiday season. Something to take people's minds off of it."

"I agree. Not before the end of the summer, not too close to Christmas."

"Which gives us October or November."

"So let's take a look at what we have in October and November. You have the schedule there?"

"I think I have a copy in my case."

I didn't figure I was paying that much attention to it, but looking back it comes right at me. We went into Elm Street, and then we hit Houston and the motorcade was cut up into a three-part zig-zag - SS 100 X up front, Halfback and Varsity behind us, and then lastly there was the VIP bus and the signals car. I remember seeing Kinney then, right there on the b.u.mper, and I remember how hot the sun felt. The underpa.s.s was right ahead of us and I thought how nice it would be to drive beneath it and feel the shade it would afford. I heard Nellie say to Jackie, "We're almost through. It's just beyond that." She pointed to the tunnel, and I saw her turn and look in that direction.

And the premonition arrived.

It was quiet and slow and insidious.

I saw images. Images of Lawson, Greer, Roy Kellerman. I saw Nellie's horrified face. The impression of a dark-haired woman at a switchboard as all the lights came on simultaneously, and then throwing her hands up in despair as the exchange overloaded and shut down. And though these images lasted no more than a heartbeat it must have registered on my face, because I remember Jackie leaning towards me and asking if I was OK. "Sure," I said, "just a little hot," and I recall running my finger around the inside of my s.h.i.+rt collar and being aware of how much I was sweating.

I thought of John Junior and the way he complained about the heat when we took him to Hyannisport.

I thought of all the children, especially the one we had lost.

Jackie had changed after. That was the time she needed me the most, and that was the time I was the furthest away.

"So we're agreed on the South?"

"The South it is."

"They're going to take a beating. People're gonna say it couldn't have happened in the North ..."

"h.e.l.l. The South always takes a beating, but you know what they say."

"The South will rise again."

"I'm not sure about Texas."

"Not so sure about what? The place itself or the people?"

"The people ... how they will react."

"You can't predict people. Doesn't matter who they are."

"Texas is the best place. He's in Texas in the third week of November."

"A month before Christmas."

"A month is good. Not too close, not too far away."

"Country'll be through the worst of it within a month."

"I still don't like Texas-"

"Who the h.e.l.l does like Texas?"

"I'm from Texas ... my whole G.o.dd.a.m.ned family's from Texas."

"See what I mean?"

"This is a democracy here. We'll take a vote on it."

James Rowley Secret Service Chief, Jerry Behn Head of the White House Detail; both of these guys were ultimately responsible for anything that might happen, either to me, my family, or those in Halfback and Varsity.

Later, amongst the details, I would consider how their lives would be from that point forward. How do you live with such a failure? You accept a responsibility. You a.s.sume the burden of duty. And then you fail. And no small failure, but a failure the world would never forget.

How do you live with such a thing?

When you wake perhaps chilled, in the cool half-light of nascent dawn; as you stand at the window looking into darkness and feel the memory of all of this crawling back inside you like a ghost what do you tell yourself?

What words can you say that will a.s.suage what you feel?

Do such words exist?

Even I can see the moment now, the moment we approached the overpa.s.s, and then there was the sound, and it could have been anything, a cherry bomb, a car backfiring, and the guys weren't used to hearing a sound like that in such an open s.p.a.ce. The Secret Service undertook two courses a year in outdoor shooting at the National Arboretum, a wide-open s.p.a.ce with its own particular acoustical anomalies. They didn't know what gunfire sounded like when it reverberated between buildings, but that's what it was, and they had no idea, and all I felt was this sudden tension in my neck, and I remember reaching up my hands and trying to determine why there was an awkward tension around my throat, and I recalled how I had looked up at the cloudless blue sky, and how I had imagined a hole opening right up and how I could be s.n.a.t.c.hed from the earth by some invisible hand ...

And in that moment I thought of her. I thought of her. Of how I'd felt when I'd heard she was dead. I thought of Marilyn. Of how she was gone. Gone for good. Of how I'd known it would happen, but I had not known when, or by what means, or the month or week or day or hour. But I had known. There was no way she would come back. And maybe, just maybe, I felt that I had created my own justice for letting that happen.

An eye for an eye.

The bullet went through the back of my neck.

It skidded across my right lung, it ripped my windpipe, exited through my throat. It kept on going. A hole had been punched through the sky and inevitability came tearing through.

Everyone was looking everywhere.

Everyone was looking at everyone else waiting for someone to tell them what had happened. No one knew, no one could be sure, and I just sat there for a moment wondering why I felt the way I did. I figured it was the heat, that I was dehydrated, and that maybe I was going to faint. Jackie turned and looked at me, and then there was another shot, and that's when the pigeons took off band-tailed pigeons, first in twos and threes and fours, and then a vast wave of them, like a cloud, and I remember sensing them overhead, and I could hear them, a sound like helicopters, and I remember thinking, Helicopters? I don't remember anyone saying anything about helicopters ..., and then there was a tugging sensation at the back of my head, and I remember reaching up my hand to ease the sensation, and when my hand reached the back of my skull I realized it wasn't there.

The hole in the sky was in the back of my head.

I half-smiled.

I think I half-smiled.

Strange how the mind plays tricks.

"So everyone knows what they have to do."

"Who's dealing with Lyndon and Walter Jenkins?"

"I am ... that's my baby."

"And Bobby ... what's the deal with him?"

"We have the Hickory Hill birthday party on the twentieth ... he'll stay back. He'll not go down to Dallas there with them."

"Who else do we have?"

"Clifton, Kilduff, G.o.dfrey-"

"Get me a list together. You can do that?"

"Sure I can."

"So get me a list together ... I'll work out who speaks to who, who'll need to know what on the day."

"No problem."

"Anything else for now?"

"No, I don't think so."

"So we'll meet again in a week."

My perspective changed.

Suddenly, irreversibly.

I had never believed in out-of-body phenomena, but I had the unmistakable sensation of rising upwards, and then it was as if I was floating above the car, and my body was down there, and though the confusion centered around my body, for some strange reason I felt that none of it had anything to do with me.

Strange how the mind plays tricks.

Everything went in slow-motion, and it was quiet but for the sound of the wind and the birds. I saw Hickey waving the barrel of his AR-15 aimlessly around. He didn't know what to do but wanted to look like he was doing something. I saw a man throw his son to the ground and lie over him like a s.h.i.+eld. Ken O'Donnell and Dave Powers were in the jump seats. O'Donnell crossed himself, and I could hear Powers whispering, "Jesus, Mary, mother of G.o.d ...", and I knew no one else could hear him, and it made me think of my father, and because of my father I thought of Roosevelt, and the Eleanor hates war. James hates war ... Presidential Address he gave in August of 1936, and how my father used to tell me what he thought of FDR, how he had finally capitulated and led us into the Second World War.

And then Sam Kinney stamped on the siren b.u.t.ton to alert Kellerman and Greer. That siren started up like a tornado, right there on Halfback's b.u.mper.

SS 100 X slowed down.

I could see Jackie spattered with blood, and I remembered thinking, Blood? Whose blood? Where the h.e.l.l has all this blood come from?