The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9

by Maxim Jakubowski

  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 bumper, and I remember how hot the sun felt. The underpass 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 shirt 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 …”

  “Hell. 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 hell does like Texas?”

  “I’m from Texas … my whole goddamned 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 assume 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 assuage what you feel?

  Do such words exist?

  Even I can see the moment now, the moment we approached the overpass, 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 space. The Secret Service undertook two courses a year in outdoor shooting at the National Arboretum, a wide-open space 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 snatched 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, Godfrey—”

  “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 shield. 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 God …”, 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 button to alert Kellerman and Greer. That siren started up like a tornado, right there on Halfback’s bumper.

  SS 100 X slowed down.

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

  And then Jackie was screaming, and even now I can recall exactly the words that came from her mouth: “My God, what are they doing? My God, they’ve killed Jack, they’ve killed my husband … Jack, Jack!”

  I could see her sprawled across the back of the car, and for some reason I had the idea she was trying to gather my head together, gather it all together and put it back where it came from … and I could feel myself smiling, and the feeling I had was one of peace, peace and quiet, because somehow I knew I would never have to sit up late into the night worrying about what was happening with the world, and what the Russians might be doing in Cuba, and whether Connally and Yarborough would bury the hatchet so we could take Texas with something more than an eyelash margin in the fall … all these things …

  Police Chief Curry’s Ford couldn’t keep up with SS 100 X and Halfback. I could see him shouting at a motorcyclist.

  “Anybody hurt?” he asked, and the motorcyclist shouted, “Yes”, and then Curry radioed his HQ dispatcher and told them to call Parkland Hospital and have them stand by. The dispatcher’s microphone button was stuck, and it was three minutes before Parkland was notified. Three minutes before they got the message “601 coming in on Code 3, stand by”. Then the motorcade arrived at 12.36, and they weren’t ready. The Chief Surgeon was in Houston, the Senior Nurse at a conference fifteen miles away …

  I was dead by the time we got there. Jackie was holding on to my body, and though Dr Burkley was there, there was nothing he or anyone else could have done. Six minutes it had taken to get to Parkland, and I had been dead for all of those six. Clint was there, Ralph Yarborough and Dave Powers. They had to get John Connally out in order to reach me, and – once they had him – Clint tried to tell Jackie to let me go, but she wouldn’t. She held on to me for dear life, and when he asked again she said, “I’m not going to let him go, Mr Hill,” and then Clint said “We’ve got to take him in, Mrs Kennedy”, and she said, “No, Mr Hill. You know he’s dead. Let me alone.” Clint took his coat off then, and he handed it to Jackie, and she wrapped it around my head. She didn’t want the world to see me like that. And then they took my body out and laid it on the stretcher, and Jackie was moving alongside it and holding the coat together so the world wouldn’t see what had become of me.

  I remember the corridor inside, the tan-coloured tiling, and red-brown linoleum on the floor, and we were travelling down this corridor past O. B., Triage, Gynaecology, X-Ray, Admittance. Someone said that Connally was in Trauma Two, and I figured maybe he was dead too, and the first thought that came to mind was how this really was the end of the feud between him and Ralph Yarborough. Yarborough was the first one the reporters got to, and he said something which I will never forget. He said, “Gentlemen, this has been a deed of horror. Excalibur has sunk beneath the waves …”

  24740, Gunshot Wounds. That’s who I was at Parkland, and then at 2 p.m. I was pronounced dead by Kemp Clark, and apparently there were already seventy-five million Americans aware of what had happened, but not until five minutes later did Bobby find out, and it wasn’t until 2.14 that Lyndon knew. He left Parkland twelve minutes later, and half an hour after that he called three Dallas lawyers in an attempt to locate a copy of the Oath of Office. He knew the thing had been done. He knew he was President, and it scared the living Jesus out of him.

  McNamara summoned a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Washington’s phone system broke down, and then at 3.20 Katzenbach dictated the Oath of Office to the crew aboard AF1. Eighteen minutes later Lyndon was sworn in as the thirty-sixth President of the United States of America. They took off for Andrews Field, and then at eight in the evening they started my autopsy.

  The country kind of fell to pieces for a while, you know? November twenty-third they questioned this Oswald guy for less than three hours, and then on Sunday Jack Ruby shot him on NBC, and by the time Sunday evening rolled around there were 200,000 people around the Capitol. The following day, Monday, was the funeral. Jackie lit the Eternal Flame. Broken Taps were played.

  But you know, the hardest thing of all, the thing that cuts me up even now, is that Monday was John Junior’s birthday party. You imagine that? Three days after his dad is killed little John Junior has his birthday party, his third birthday party. Jackie did that. Jackie went ahead and did that, despite everything. And it was in that moment I realized how much I loved that woman, how much I cherished everything she did, everything she’d done to help me get where I was, and it was then, maybe for the first time, that I understood how much I had hurt her with the other women …

  And now you’re gonna ask me whether I know who it was who killed me.

  I’m sorry, I cannot put you out of your misery on that one. We know, we all know, that it could never have been this Oswald character. Impossible feat – two shots, perhaps even three, from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository? I understand that the FBI and the Army have tried this numerous times with a succession of brilliant marksmen, and none have accomplished it. They won’t ever accomplish it, because it can’t be done. The Warren Report was what it was: a whitewash. No one will ever really know, because the people who know are very likely dead themselves, and anyone who might be left will take it to their graves. But hell, they won’t get an Eternal Flame like I did.

  Always has to be a fall guy … always has to be someone who takes the rap for these things, and more often than not they’re no more guilty than Oswald.

  * * *

  “We do this, it’ll set a precedent.”

  “There’s a pun there somewhere.”

  “There’s always a pun with you.”

  “So once we have this one taken care of we’ll talk about Bobby.”

  “We’ll talk about Bobby if he campaigns.”

  “He will, believe me. I know the kid as well as anyone.”

  “Then we’ll nominate you for that project.”

  “Well, this’ll shut him up for a little while, that’s for sure.”

  “This will shut everyone up for a little while.”

  “It’ll change everything—”

  “That’s what it’s supposed to do.”

  * * *

  And you know something? Perhaps it would have been so much worse had it not been for Bobby. Bobby was always there, always back and to the left of me. I knew he was right behind me, knew he would just pick up the torch and keep carrying it.

  He would make it.

  I knew that in my hea
rt.

  That’s what Dad would have wanted.

  That one of us – just one of us – would make it all the way.

  * * *

  “So we’re done then.”

  “Seems that way. It’ll roll forward just the way we’ve discussed. We’ll have that bastard Jack Kennedy out of the White House, the whole world blindsided by some bullshit Communist plot, and the country back in safe hands.”

  “Couldn’t agree more. Here’s to Texas in the fall.”

  “Sure as damn it, my friend … Texas in the fall.”

  THE FEATHER

  Kate Ellis

  * * *

  THE PIANO IN the corner of the parlour hadn’t been used for over three years … not since Jack first left for France. Nobody had had the heart to lift the lid since we received the dreadful news because the very sight of those black and white keys brought back memories of how he used to sit there and play.

  Jack had known all the latest tunes and I can see him now, turning his head round and telling us to join in. “Come on,” he’d say. “I’m not singing a solo.” And when he sang, unlike me, he’d always be in perfect tune. Our Aunty Vi used to say he should be on the stage.

  I stood in the parlour doorway and stared into the room with its big dark fireplace and its heavy oak furniture. It looked as it always had done, polished and spotless. The best room that we only used on Sundays. Sometimes I wondered what was the use of having a room you only used one day a week, but that was the way things were done in all the houses round here. Except when Jack had played the piano and sent a ray of sunshine into the solemn, polish-scented gloom.

  “Ivy, what are you doing?”

  My mother’s voice made me jump and I swung round, feeling guilty. I’d been daydreaming again and in our house daydreaming was regarded as a major sin.

  “I was just on my way to the washhouse.”

  “Well, go on then. Don’t leave your sister to do all the work while you stand around thinking of higher things.”