The Third Bullet - Страница 64

I positioned myself at the window, immediately adjacent to the opening. Craning to the left, I could see the Houston-Elm intersection as I heard the roar rolling toward us like a wave. I saw a Dallas police sedan and then. . nothing. I guessed he was some sort of advance car a half mile or so out. It seemed a minute passed, and then a white sedan came down the street, leading the parade. Three motorcycles followed, then five more in some kind of formation, then another white sedan, and finally, the large black Lincoln, with its cargo of imminent tragedy open to the crowd. It was flanked by motorcycle policemen, and we watched as it pulled wholly into view. It looked more like a black lifeboat than a car, a huge thing, with a driver and guard in the front seat, then behind them, though considerably lower, as if squatting, a male-female couple I took to be Governor and Mrs. Connally, and then Jack Kennedy himself, and next to him, in a pink pillbox hat, his wife.

His reddish hair glinted in the sunlight. Even from almost eighty yards and without binoculars, I could make out the ruddiness of his skin and could tell that all the lines of his face were pulling his mouth up into a smile, and at that moment it incongruously struck me that he was quite a handsome man. He was waving with one hand but only intermittently, and if I read his body posture in that split second, it was one of relaxation. The man was campaigning and happy.

The limo reached the hard left turn onto Elm from Houston just below me. At that point, it was out of sight to Lon, but I leaned forward and pressed my forehead against the pane. I watched as the car slowed almost to a halt and began its slow, majestic pivot toward its new direction. I could not breathe. This was Alek’s shot, his moment to enter history and send us all home absolved of any guilt.

Nothing happened.

I don’t know what the idiot was doing up there, but it wasn’t shooting. Silence. Obviously, some kind of failure, as per all anticipation. That put us right back on the fulcrum of events, the little creep with his cowardice, his incompetence, his stupidity. Agh!

The great car turned slowly left and began its descent down Elm, sliding down the slight undulation that led to the triple overpass, which moved it left in Lon’s sights, but gently, not radically. The public feet away on either side, all madly waving and cheering, you could see the excitement, the sparkle or glitter of crowd passion that you see at key moments of big ball games. The car was fully oriented toward Elm but just feet beyond the axis of the turn when Alek managed to fire his first shot.

We heard the crack! In my peripheral, I saw Lon react, not a jerk or a spasm but a tight, controlled lurch. He kept his discipline, though, and didn’t lose his hold on the rifle, which was still. He seemed calm. I knew he would fire at a specific point, in seconds, waiting for the target to climb into his crosshairs, and would make final mini-corrections before coordinating his shot with Kennedy’s arrival at the point of impact designator.

I locked my eyes on Kennedy and the car. Nothing stirred, no reaction, no sudden dive for cover, nothing. Had they noticed? I thought: Maybe it’s not Alek, maybe it’s a backfire or firecracker.

Then a second crack! rang out, and though the car had traveled a good twenty-five yards or so in the interval between shots, I could make out no reaction this time either. Possibly some movement, but nothing radical or reflexive as a bullet impact might have unleashed.

The fool missed twice. Of course! Idiot! Idiot! A burst of rage knifed through me. The little moron! God, what a fool he was; never did anything right in his life. He was struggling to catch up from the blown easy shot, was rushing, shooting poorly.

“He missed. Lon-” I said.

Again I pivoted instinctively, enough to see the fluid grace with which Lon raised the rifle, right elbow locked up for maximum support, canting the living part of his body slightly against the dead part, his head utterly still and locked on the opening in the telescopic sight. He was a portrait of stillness in motion, a discipline acquired over a hundred thousand rifle shots, the ball of his finger exquisitely balanced against the blade of the trigger. The next two, three seconds seemed to hang in eternity, although possibly that’s a conceit I impose from memory, for dramatic purposes, to make the tale more compelling, even if the only soul I’ve ever told it to is myself.

Feu.

The rifle leaped, but only slightly, in his hand, while his head stayed immobile to the scope and his trigger finger followed through to pin that lever to the back of the guard. It produced an oddly attenuated report, something like a book being dropped on a wood floor with weird tones of vibration, maybe a poke and a buzz to the inner ear but nothing sharp and percussive like a gunshot. You would expect more, would you not? It was a phenomenon of vibration, this key moment in history, a thrum or cello note extended by a master bowman. Yet in the instantaneous aftermath, I thought I heard Alek’s third shot. Could they have been simultaneous? No, because then I wouldn’t have heard both. It was as if Alek had fired a few hundredths of a second after Lon. We didn’t realize then, but it was the biggest break we were going to get that day.

Jimmy, unperturbed, was in charge in another second. “All right, fellows,” he crooned, “out you go now, while I tidy up here.”

Lon, stone-faced, handed the rifle to Jimmy as I knelt and raised the two brakes. It took another second for Jimmy to single-handedly ease Lon’s chair from the swatch books and pull the coat off, and then I had him turned around and was beelining to the door.

“Don’t rush, sir,” called Jimmy. “You’ve nothing to hide, remember.”

I took a quick peek back and saw that Jimmy already had the rifle half disassembled and was working on the third screw. Then the door closed, and I was in the outer office. I sped to that door, and it locked behind me with a click and we were in the hallway. I pushed down it, trying to control my breathing. Finally, I had to ask. “Good hit?”

“Don’t ask me what I saw through the scope, Hugh. Ever.”

We reached the elevator, I punched the down button and waited an eternity for it to arrive and the doors to open. I shoved Lon in, hit 1, and listened as the doors closed behind me.

When the elevator doors opened and I pushed Lon into the lobby of the Dal-Tex Building, it was as if we’d entered a new America. I say that knowing how trite it sounds, and then I worry again that my memory is playing tricks on me and has added a drama that wasn’t there.

Maybe. I still say it was like a massive change in the weather. I’ll argue till death that the color had been drained from the day and the atmosphere had turned sepia. I’ll claim that all the human specimens we observed were in a state of stunned shock, mouths and faces slack, posture discipline unhinged, a tone of disbelief bleeding toward numbness and shutdown everywhere. It was only about ninety seconds after Lon’s shot, and no one had processed what happened yet, although all knew, almost instantaneously, that something, something horrible, had transpired.

Then, as we watched, it transformed instantly into panic, buzz, dread, gibbering, stupidity. People couldn’t shut up. An insistent yammer began, a mutter with high notes, inflections, voices piping or breaking or losing steam in a flood of phlegm. The lobby was not crowded, but everyone began yapping at each other, along the lines of “He was shot?”

“In the head?”

“Oh my God, is he dead?”

“Who the hell could have done it?”

“Was it the Russians? Did the Commies get JFK?”

“Where did the shots come from?”

“The Book Depository? Are you kidding? The Book Depository!”

“Who would do such a terrible thing?”

Nobody paid the two of us any attention, and I pushed Lon to the door, rotated 180 degrees to back out and pull him through, got that done, and emerged into sunlight, heat, panic, incredible motion, pandemonium everywhere, random, brain-dead movement, and people talking insanely among themselves.

I saw only one man moving with purpose, a Dallas policeman who raced to the building, almost knocking me down getting by, and bulled his way inside. He was quick, that man, and I don’t know if it was by official directive or his own decision, but he’d understood that if the Book Depository was the probable origin point for the shooting, other buildings with access to Elm Street should be sealed for investigation.

He’d missed us, or perhaps scanned us from afar and dismissed us because of Lon’s disability. As for Jimmy, still inside, I felt confident that he could outthink and outmaneuver a Dallas policeman any day of his life.

I gingerly pushed Lon to the edge of the steps and began the ordeal of easing him down into the roiling crowd, which, drawn to tragedy exactly as had been the thousands who’d lined up to see the bullet-riddled corpses of Bonnie and Clyde, surged toward the plaza to see, to know, to feel, to bear witness, to be a part of what all felt was a calamitous day for our country.

I was trying to figure which way to go, as fighting the crowd with Lon wouldn’t be easy. I’d pretty much decided to get across Elm, divert to Houston, hit Main, and head up until the crowds had thinned, then cut to Commerce to get us back to the hotel.

Then the left wheelchair tire caught on something on the middle step. I bent awkwardly to see what it was (a chunk of loosened cement that had worked out of the joinery between the stone slabs) and was readjusting the chair by pulling it back a couple of inches when, in my peripheral vision, I saw Alek.