"Yes, behind the garage."
"There"s a blue notebook in the briefcase. Put it in the incinerator and burn it. Will you do that for me?" And for Sadie. We"re both depending on you.
"Yes. I will. Jake, I"m so sorry for your loss."
"And I"m sorry for yours. Yours and Miz Ellie"s."
"It"s not a fair trade!" he burst out. "I don"t care if he is the president, it"s not a fair trade!"
"No," I said. "It"s not. But Deke . . . it wasn"t just about the president. It"s about all the bad stuff that would have happened if he had died."
"I guess I have to take your word for that. But it"s hard."
"I know."
Would they have a memorial a.s.sembly for Sadie at the high school, as they had for Miz Mimi? Of course they would. The networks would send camera crews, and there wouldn"t be a dry eye in America. But when the show was over, Sadie would still be dead.
Unless I changed it. It would mean going through everything again, but for Sadie I"d do that. Even if she took one look at me at the party where I"d met her and decided I was too old for her (although I would do my best to change her mind about that). There was even an upside: now that I knew Lee really had been the lone gunman, I wouldn"t have to wait so long to dispatch his sorry a.s.s.
"Jake? Are you still there?"
"Yes. And remember to call me George when you talk about me, okay?"
"No fear there. I may be old, but my brains still work pretty well. Am I going to see you again?"
Not if Agent Hosty tells me what I want to hear, I thought.
"If you don"t, it"s because things are working out for the best."
"All right. Jake . . . George . . . did she . . . did she say anything at the end?"
I wasn"t going to tell him what her final words had been, that was private, but I could give him something. He would pa.s.s it on to Ellie, and Ellie would pa.s.s it on to all Sadie"s friends in Jodie. She"d had many.
"She asked if the president was safe. When I told her he was, she closed her eyes and slipped away."
Deke began to cry again. My face was throbbing. Tears would have been a relief, but my eyes were as dry as stones.
"Goodbye," I said. "Goodbye, old friend."
I hung up gently and sat still for quite some time, watching the light of a Dallas sunset fall red through the window. Red sky at night, sailor"s delight, the old saying has it . . . but I heard another rumble of thunder. Five minutes later, when I had myself under control, I picked up my debugged phone and once again dialed 0. I told Marie I was going to lie down, and asked for an eight-o"clock wake-up call. I also asked her to put a do-not-disturb on the phone until then.
"Oh, that"s already taken care of," she said excitedly. "No incoming calls to your room, orders from the police chief." Her voice dropped a register. "Was he crazy, Mr. Amberson? I mean, he must have been, but did he look it?"
I remembered the cheated eyes and daemonic snarl. "Oh, yes," I said. "He certainly did. Eight o"clock, Marie. Nothing until then."
I hung up before she could say anything else. Then I took off my shoes (getting free of the left one was a slow and painful process), lay down on the bed, and put my arm over my eyes. I saw Sadie dancing the Madison. I saw Sadie telling me to come in, kind sir, did I like poundcake? I saw her in my arms, her bright dying eyes turned up to my face.
I thought about the rabbit-hole, and how every time you used it there was a complete reset.
At last I slept.
9.
Hosty"s knock came promptly at nine. I opened up and he ambled in. He carried a briefcase in one hand (but not my briefcase, so that was still all right). In the other was a bottle of champagne, the good stuff, Moet et Chandon, with a red, white, and blue bow tied around the neck. He looked very tired.
"Amberson," he said.
"Hosty," I responded.
He closed the door, then pointed to the phone. I took the bug from my pocket and displayed it. He nodded.
"There are no others?" I asked.
"No. That bug is DPD"s, and this is now our case. Orders straight from Hoover. If anyone asks about the phone bug, you found it yourself."
"Okay."
He held up the champagne. "Compliments of the management. They insisted I bring it up. Would you care to toast the President of the United States?"
Considering that my beautiful Sadie now lay on a slab in the county morgue, I had no interest in toasting anything. I had succeeded, and success tasted like ashes in my mouth.
"No."
"Me, either, but I"m glad as h.e.l.l he"s alive. Want to know a secret?"
"Sure."
"I voted for him. I may be the only agent in the whole Bureau who did."
I said nothing.
Hosty seated himself in one of the room"s two armchairs and gave a long sigh of relief. He set his briefcase between his feet, then turned the bottle so he could read the label. "Nineteen fifty-eight. Wine fanciers would probably know if that was a good year, but I"m more of a beer man, myself."
"So am I."
"Then you might enjoy the Lone Star they"re holding for you downstairs. There"s a case of the stuff, and a framed letter promising you a case a month for the rest of your life. More champagne, too. I saw at least a dozen bottles. Everyone from the Dallas Chamber of Commerce to the City Board of Tourism sent them. You have a Zenith color television still in the carton, a solid gold signet ring with a picture of the president in it from Calloway"s Fine Jewelry, a certificate for three new suits from Dallas Menswear, and all kinds of other stuff, including a key to the city. The management has set aside a room on the first floor for your swag, and I"m guessing that by dawn tomorrow they"ll have to set aside another. And the food! People are bringing cakes, pies, ca.s.seroles, roasts of beef, barbecue chicken, and enough Mexican to give you the runs for five years. We"re turning them away, and they hate to go, let me tell you. There are women out there in front of the hotel that . . . well, let"s just say Jack Kennedy himself would be envious, and he"s a legendary c.o.c.ksman. If you knew what the director has in his files on that man"s s.e.x life, you wouldn"t believe it."
"My capacity for belief might surprise you."
"Dallas loves you, Amberson. h.e.l.l, the whole country loves you." He laughed. The laugh turned into a cough. When it pa.s.sed, he lit a cigarette. Then he looked at his watch. "As of nine-oh-seven Central Standard Time on the evening of November twenty-second, 1963, you are America"s fair-haired boy."
"What about you, Hosty? Do you love me? Does Director Hoover?"
He set his cigarette aside in the ashtray after a single drag, then leaned forward and pinned me with his eyes. They were deep-set in folds of flesh, and they were tired, but they were nonetheless very bright and aware.
"Look at me, Amberson. Dead in the eyes. Then tell me if you were or weren"t in on it with Oswald. And make it the truth, because I"ll know a lie."
Given his egregious mishandling of Oswald, I didn"t believe that, but I believed that he believed it. So I locked onto his gaze and said: "I was not."
For a moment he said nothing. Then he sighed, settled back, and picked up his cigarette. "No. You weren"t." He jetted smoke from his nostrils. "Who do you work for, then? The CIA? The Russians, maybe? I don"t see it myself, but the director believes the Russians would gladly burn a deep-cover a.s.set in order to stop an a.s.sa.s.sination that would spark an international incident. Maybe even World War III. Especially when folks find out about Oswald"s time in Russia." He said it Roosha, the way the televangelist Hargis did on his broadcasts. Maybe it was Hosty"s idea of a jest.
I said, "I work for no one. I"m just a guy, Hosty."
He pointed his cigarette at me. "Hold that thought." He unstrapped his briefcase and took out a file even thinner than the one on Oswald I"d spied in Curry"s office. This file would be mine, and it would thicken . . . but not as quickly as it would have done in the computer-driven twenty-first century.
"Before Dallas, you were in Florida. The town of Sunset Point."
"Yes."
"You subst.i.tute-taught in the Sarasota school system."
"Correct."
"Before that, we believe you spent some time in . . . was it Derren? Derren, Maine?"
"Derry."
"Where you did exactly what?"
"Where I started my book."
"Uh-huh, and before that?"
"Here and there, all around the square."
"How much do you know about my dealings with Oswald, Amberson?"
I kept silent.
"Don"t play it so cozy. It"s just us girls."
"Enough to cause trouble for you and your director."
"Unless?"
"Let me put it this way. The amount of trouble I cause you will be directly proportional to the amount of trouble you cause me."
"Would it be fair to say that when it came to making trouble, you"d make up what you didn"t absolutely know . . . and to our detriment?"
I said nothing.
He said, as if speaking to himself, "It doesn"t surprise me that you were writing a book. You should have carried on with it, Amberson. It probably would have been a bestseller. Because you"re b.l.o.o.d.y good at making things up, I"ll give you that. You were pretty plausible this afternoon. And you know things you have no business knowing, which is what makes us believe you"re far from a private citizen. Come on, who wound you up? Was it Angleton at the Firm? It was, wasn"t it? Sly rose-growing b.a.s.t.a.r.d that he is."
"I"m just me," I said, "and I probably don"t know as much as you think. But yes, I know enough to make the Bureau look bad. How Lee told me he came right out and told you that he was going to shoot Kennedy, for instance."
Hosty stubbed out his cigarette hard enough to send up a fountain of sparks. Some landed on the back of his hand, but he didn"t seem to feel them. "That"s a f.u.c.king lie!"
"I know," I said. "And I"ll tell it with a straight face. If you force me to. Has the idea of getting rid of me come up yet, Hosty?"
"Spare me the comic-book stuff. We don"t kill people."
"Tell it to the Diem brothers over in Vietnam."
He was looking at me the way a man might look at a seemingly inoffensive mouse that had suddenly bitten. And with big teeth. "How do you know America had anything to do with the Diem brothers? According to what I read in the papers, our hands are clean."
"Let"s not get off the subject. The thing is, right now I"m too popular to kill. Or am I wrong?"
"No one wants to kill you, Amberson. And no one wants to poke holes in your story." He barked an unamused laugh. "If we started doing that, the whole thing would unravel. That"s how thin it is."
""Romance at short notice was her specialty,"" I said.
"Huh?"
"H. H. Munro. Also known as Saki. The story is called "The Open Window." Look it up. When it comes to the art of creating bulls.h.i.t on the spur of the moment, it"s very instructive."
He scanned me, his shrewd little eyes worried. "I don"t understand you at all. That concerns me." In the west, out toward Midland where the oil wells thump without surcease and the gas flares dim the stars, more thunder rumbled.
"What do you want from me?" I asked.
"I think that when we trace you back a little farther from Derren or Derry or whatever it is, we"re going to find . . . nothing. As if you stepped right out of thin air."
This was so close to the truth it nearly took my breath away.
"What we want is for you to go back to the nowhere you came from. The scandal-press will gin up the usual nasty speculations and conspiracy theories, but we can guarantee you that you"ll come out of this looking pretty good. If you even care about such things, that is. Marina Oswald will support your story right down the line."
"You"ve already spoken to her, I take it."
"You take it right. She knows she"ll be deported if she doesn"t play ball. The gentlemen of the press haven"t had a very good look at you; the photos that show up in tomorrow"s papers are going to be little more than blurs."
I knew he was right. I had been exposed to the cameras only on that one quick walk down the hall to Chief Curry"s office, and Fritz and Hosty, both big men, had had me under the arms, blocking the best photo sightlines. Also, I"d had my head down because the lights were so bright. There were plenty of pictures of me in Jodie-even a portrait shot in the yearbook from the year I"d taught there full-time-but in this era before JPEGs or even faxes, it would be Tuesday or Wednesday of next week before they could be found and published.
"Here"s a story for you," Hosty said. "You like stories, don"t you? Things like this "Open Window"?"
"I"m an English teacher. I love stories."
"This fellow, George Amberson, is so stunned with grief over the loss of his girlfriend-"
"Fiancee."
"Fiancee, right, even better. He"s so grief-stricken that he ditches the whole works and simply disappears. Wants nothing to do with publicity, free champagne, medals from the president, or ticker-tape parades. He just wants to get away and mourn his loss in privacy. That"s the kind of story Americans like. They see it on TV all the time. Instead of "The Open Window," it"s called "The Modest Hero." And there"s this FBI agent who"s willing to back up every word, and even read a statement that you left behind. How does that sound?"