The Third Bullet - Страница 70

“Maybe they don’t know. Maybe whoever’s pulling the string is lying to them, telling them it’s some other kind of scam; maybe they’re expendable to this guy, who, after all, is fighting for his life, his legacy, his family name, if he’s who you think he is and has done what you think he’s done.”

“But how can I not go? If I’m who I say I am, I have to go, or the whole deception falls apart and we’re left with nothing and I have to sit around and wait for Hugh to find me.”

“You tell me what to do.”

“I have no suggestions. Pray for luck, how’s that?”

“Okay, then I’ll make a suggestion. You set up your appointment. On that day, I’ll have a team from New York in the parking lot. No big deal, plainclothes, but with enough signs of serious operators on-site. Overcoats concealing long guns, vests under the coats, snail-cord earpieces, tactical shades, bloused boots, that sort of thing. If Hugh has people, the last thing he’ll want is a gunfight in the parking lot. They’ll take a powder fast, and there won’t be any action.”

“Okay,” said Bob. “It sounds good. You can pay for that?”

“It’s under the James Aptapton investigation and the Sergei Bodonski investigation. Capping Bodonski wasn’t enough; we have to find out who let the contract. It’s legit law enforcement initiative.”

“Great,” said Swagger. “I’m appreciative.”

“If we can take down the contract taker and he’s someone big, maybe even a once-dead Hugh Meachum, then we don’t have to go to JFK up front. And once we bag him, we can work for proof, and eventually, it gets out.”

“Not bad,” said Swagger. “There would be your career finisher. Your-what do they call it? Your capstone.”

“Just,” said Nick, “so it’s not your-what do they call it? Oh, yeah. Your tombstone.”

Like many Americans, I’m not sure if I saw Alek get his in real time, live on the network, or if I saw it a few minutes later, when the other networks ran the tape. I suppose it doesn’t matter.

I’d missed his brief encounter with the press Friday night, since I’d been ingloriously passed out. But I’d seen it on tape, as they had to fill the time when nothing was happening, and what I’d seen had seemed classical Alek. He was scruffy, as usual, hair a mess, and the shiner from the punch in the eye he’d taken earlier that day from a Dallas cop hadn’t subsided. He was surly, squint-eyed, radiating animus. The cops shoved him up on a riser, and immediately, a surge of newspeople surrounded him, shoving mikes in his face, yelling questions. Bulbs flashed; he winced and got to speak only a few words before the cops hauled him up to Homicide.

“I didn’t kill anybody,” he said, or words to that effect, and I suppose to him, it made perfect sense. He had to know he hadn’t fired the fatal shot. It would be a while before I worked out what had happened to him up there, but he must have seen the president’s head take its hit, and he knew in his feral way that there was a game going on, that he’d been played for a sucker and was now somebody’s prey, and off he went.

That’s why his cry of “I didn’t kill anybody” as he was taken away haunted me. What you heard in that plaintive tone was self-belief. He knew he hadn’t murdered anybody-it follows that if he was a setup, he had concluded that his shooting of the Dallas police officer was pure self-defense-and you hear it in that yell.

The next morning, after an alcohol-free, somewhat redemptive sleep, I returned to the television. It seemed all the TV people were grouchy too; they’d been working long hours without sleep, chasing witnesses and rumors, dealing with bureaucratic recalcitrance and ass-covering, shoved this way and that by defiantly unempathetic Dallas cops, being screamed at for being slow by network headquarters and screamed at louder for getting things wrong. What a life. I wouldn’t give it to a dog.

As I fought for clarity with my first cup of room-service coffee, I could sense the irritation everywhere. We were now in the basement of the police station, to witness Alek’s transfer from the supposedly vulnerable jail to one that offered more protection. To that order, an armored car had been arranged, so that only a bazooka rocketeer could kill Alek, and not even in Texas were bazookas legal.

But the transfer had fallen behind schedule. Things almost always do, don’t they? The reporters had been milling around listlessly for about an hour, and when anyone “reported,” it was time-filling banality, updates on the timing of the transfer or explanations on why it was late. Occasionally, they’d cut to Washington, where again, nothing was happening. They might run some old tape, to remind us what this was all about, not that we’d ever forget. Nobody did or could distinguish themselves under those circumstances, and I stayed with it only because it occupied all the channels. I’d decided to take a shower, get up, go for a walk, find a nice restaurant, head back, maybe watch some football-the NFL had decided, amid much controversy, not to cancel its slate of games. Tomorrow I’d fly back to somewhere under my fake identity, then to Washington under my real one, and rejoin the human race and my family.

Suddenly, on the television, it was as if a wave of energy had crackled through the black-and-white image of lolling, sullen reporters. Our correspondent-I have no idea who it was-informed us that Lee Harvey Oswald, indicted for the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit and the only suspect in the murder of John F. Kennedy, was on his way.

Why do I relive this incident? Surely any who read these pages will have seen it for himself. There’s no suspense; it turns out the same each time the tape is run, and as movie special effects have gotten almost too realistic, so the almost chaste, bloodless death by gunshot of this appalling man is of little consequence to anybody. That is the view from a comfortable perch in our present. Then it was all different: nobody knew what the next big twist in our giant American narrative would be. Nobody could have predicted it, not even I, who had made the unpredictable happen two days earlier. Nobody had any idea that Mr. Deus Ex Machina was about to introduce himself.

I saw the surly Alek emerge from a door at the rear of the crowded room. He was shackled to a cartoon figure out of the old west, some sort of gigantic cowpoke in a smallish Stetson-it was like mine, though light where mine was gray-and what had to be called a westerner’s suit, apparently khaki. It was Captain Fritz of the Dallas Homicide Squad, but he looked to our uneducated eyes like a foursquare avatar of Texas Ranger justice. He stood out in a sea of dark suits and snap-brim hats, as if intent on representing the best of Texas to a shocked world. Next to him, Alek jauntily, perhaps even smugly, set the pace. He’d been allowed to clean up and change clothes and wore a black sweater over some kind of sport shirt. He grasped his hands at his waist and, for some reason, projected a “Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up” sense of self-possession.

I have to say that the quality of the broadcast was exceedingly fine. Every detail stood out, almost as if iridescent; the lines were bold and sharp; the depth of the image was startling. I don’t think I ever saw anything so clearly in my life.

Alek never knew what hit him. Deus ex machina hit him. Fate hit him. Retribution hit him. The fellow Ruby stepped from nowhere and jammed the pistol-a gangster’s snub-nose, so appropriate to a strip club owner-into his side. I don’t think there was a flash, but the report was enough to carry the news.

The famous photo almost does the scene a disservice. It freezes and therefore distorts. You can see Captain Fritz bending backward in surprise, Ruby hunched like a boxer who’s delivered a solid gut hit, and Alek, mouth open in pain, eyes wincing. In reality, it was so damned fast, like a man slipping under the waves in the grasp of an undertow; he’s there and then he’s gone in the flashing of a nerve synapse.

Then chaos, disbelief, the whirls of spinning figures, as people fled the shot, Alek pulled Captain Fritz down with him, and various officers leaped on Ruby and shoved him to the ground. If the famous cry “Jack, you son of a bitch” was uttered, I missed it in my disbelief. I sat back and watched the melancholy play end. Alek, uncuffed, slid onto a stretcher and wheeled out, fast. Ruby pulled away. The reporters tried to make sense of it, interviewing each other to make certain the gigantic plot twist they’d just seen had actually happened.

I got a glimpse of Alek’s colorless, expressionless, perhaps breathless face as they wheeled him out and knew he was a goner. You don’t come back from that one, for I’d gotten a good fix on the bullet’s diagonal trajectory through innards, and I knew the violence it would do to the sweetbread of mysterious but crucial organs that the middle of the body conceals.

Perhaps you’ll think better of me for it, but my first thought was sadness at his death. Another man dead of violence in America, as if I hadn’t been the one who killed the last man dead of violence in America. It seemed like a contagion. You sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind, and I had to wonder when my whirlwind would come.

I’d known him and loathed him, as all did, while at the same time understanding that he was nevertheless human, like the rest of us. Did he “deserve” it? I suppose so; Jack Ruby thought so, and a few days later, I’d hear my oldest son say, “I’m glad they got him.”

Alek was a jerk, he was a fool, he was utterly incapable of doing a single thing right, but he was human and died as all too many humans do, alone, in pain, abruptly.