Feelings of Fear (15 page)

On the far side of the hollow, a driftwood fire was crackling and spitting. In the middle of the hollow, there were three bodies, all cut wide open, their entrails and their stomachs dragged out of them, and all piled together. There was gristle and blood-red connective tissue and frills of fat, and yellowish heaps of glistening intestine.

Hunkered over this grisly array was Jack, wearing nothing but
his green swimming shorts, his body spattered and smeared with blood. He was tossing ashes on to the bodies, and chanting, in the same distinctive voice with which he had said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” But the words he was saying tonight were not the words of a political speechwriter. They were the words of a religious supplicant. “I offer you these bodies, Baron. I offer you their lives and their agony. You gave me life. You gave me strength. Take these lives in return, as my homage.”

Bobby stood staring for almost half a minute, numbed with shock and terrible fascination. He watched Jack loping and crawling from carcass to carcass, cutting off legs and ribs, and gouging out eyes. His sacrificial victims were three sheep, but it was no less horrifying because of that. The shadows from the fire danced across the hollow, and made the scene look even more lurid.

He retreated down the sand dune before Jack could see him. He walked stiffly to the ocean's edge, his stomach churning. He stood in the surf and vomited, and the warm, thick vomit was washed around his ankles.

He called Dr Christophe in Washington; and discovered that he had left his house in Georgetown more than three months ago and returned to Sausalito. It took two and a half hours before he found him at a supper party in Mill Valley. The line was crackly, and there was a hubbub of guests in the background.

“It's Jack. He killed three sheep today, cut them right open.”

“They were a sacrifice, Mr Kennedy. Nobody gets anything for nothing. The President has to repay his debt to Baron Samedi – not just once, or twice, but a thousand times over. Baron Samedi is a very demanding creditor, particularly when it comes to human life.”

“Why the hell didn't you warn me?”

“I beg your pardon, Mr Kennedy. I did warn you. But you wanted the President back to life at any cost.”

“Shit,” said Bobby. “If anybody finds out about this—”

“That is the least of your worries,” said Dr Christophe. “Now you must watch for even greater sacrifices. Not just sheep, but children, and women … Baron Samedi always wants more and more, and it is
very hard to say no. If you don't make the sacrifice, you lose whatever he gave you. In your brother's case, your very life.”

“But most of the time he seems so normal. In fact, he's very much
better
than normal.”

“That was Baron Samedi's gift, Mr Kennedy. But one never gets anything for nothing; and a gift can always be taken away.”

“So what do I do?”

“You have to make a decision, Mr Kennedy. That is what you have to do. I thought that was what politicians were especially good at.”

“What decision? What in God's name are you talking about?”

“You have to decide whether to continue to protect your brother, or whether you might have to take steps to protect those who might innocently cross your brother's path.”

Bobby said nothing for a long time. Then he hung up.

During the fall, Jack made a number of trips around the country. Next year was election year and he wanted to rouse up as much support as he could. He visited Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Nevada; then Wisconsin, North Dakota, Montana, California, Oregon, and Washington.

He seemed to have endless reserves of energy, and his back trouble had left him completely. He was always smiling and handshaking and he was full of optimism for 1964 – even in Washington, which hadn't supported him in 1960.

Bobby flew out to Seattle to join him. It was late October, and it was raining hard when he stepped off the plane. He had brought Harold with him and a new junior assistant, a pretty young Harvard law graduate, Janie Schweizer. Jack and his entourage were staying with a wealthy Seattle Democrat, Willard Bryce, at his huge Gothic-style townhouse overlooking Washington Park.

Willard appeared in the porch as Bobby's limousine came curving up the driveway. He was portly and affable, like W.C. Fields without the vitriol. “Welcome to the Emerald City. Or should I say the Soaking City. Don't worry. The forecast says it should clear by May.”

They went inside, and found Jack in the drawing-room, holding an informal conference with twenty or thirty local Democrats. He was leaning back in a rocking-chair, dressed in his shirt-sleeves, and he
looked unexpectedly tired and strained. All the same, he made the introductions and cracked a joke about Seattle voters. “They never get it right. I came here asking for a landslide and they gave me a downpour.”

When he saw Janie Schweizer, however, his smile completely changed, and he lifted his head back in that way that Bobby had so often seen before. Janie was a tall girl, with blonde hair bobbed in the style that Jackie had made almost obligatory, and a strong, Nordic-looking face. She was wearing a dark, discreet business suit, with a knee-length skirt, but it didn't conceal the fact that she had a very well-proportioned figure.

“This is Janie,” said Bobby. “Just joined us from law school. I thought the experience would do her good.”

Janie flushed. This was the first time that she had met the President. “Honored to meet you, Mr President.”

“How come you get all the lookers, Bobby? Most of my staff look like the wicked witch of the west.”

And all through the morning's discussions, in the gloom of Willard's drawing-room, with the rain trickling down the windows and the cigarette-smoke fiddling to the ceiling, Jack hardly ever took his eyes away from Janie Schweizer, and once Bobby caught him licking his lips.

That night, Willard held a formal fundraising dinner for one hundred local supporters. It was a glittering white-tie affair with a string quintet and the cutlery glittered like shoals of fish. Jack gave a speech about the future of world democracy, and his hopes for an end to the arms race. They didn't manage to get to bed until three a.m., and there was still laughter and talking in the house until well past four.

Bobby found that he couldn't sleep. He lay on his bed staring at the elaborately plastered ceiling, listening to the rain as it trickled along the gutters. He hadn't liked the way that Jack had been looking at Janie today; although he guessed that he couldn't blame him. She was younger and prettier than Marilyn, and she had a law degree. He would have been interested in her himself if the timing had been different.

An hour passed and still he couldn't sleep. He switched on the
bedside lamp and tried to read another chapter of
Specimen Days in America,
by Walt Whitman. “I had a sort of dream-trance the other day, in which I saw my favorite trees step out and promenade up, down and around, very curiously, with a whisper from one: ‘We do all this on the present occasion, exceptionally, just for you.'”

Eventually, he climbed out of bed, put on his warm maroon bathrobe, and went outside into the corridor. Jack had the largest bedroom, on the other side of the galleried landing. A Secret Service agent sat outside, reading a magazine. Bobby went round to Jack's door and pointed at it. “Is the President asleep yet?”

“I shouldn't think so, Mr Kennedy, sir.”

Bobby paused. There was something in the agent's tone of voice that aroused his suspicion. “Are you trying to tell me that the President isn't alone?”

“Well, sir, it isn't for me to—”

“Who's he got in there?”

“Sir, I couldn't—”

Bobby came right up to him and seized hold of his necktie. “
Who – has – he – got – in – there?”

He burst open the double doors and stepped into the bedroom. Behind him, the agent said, “Jesus Christ.”

The far side of the room was dominated by a huge, louring four-poster bed, more like a ceremonial barge than a place to sleep. All its blankets had been stripped off and heaped on to the floor. On the bed itself, naked, hunched up like a wolf, Jack was kneeling in the sliced-open body of Janie Schweizer –
kneeling
in it, so that he was thigh-deep in bloody intestines. He had cut her apart from the breastbone downward, and all her internal organs were strewn across the bed.

Quivering, he slowly turned around and stared at Bobby with suspicious, animal eyes.

Bobby didn't say anything. He was too shocked to think of anything to say. He backed away, one step at a time, and then he closed the doors behind him.

“He's killed her, for Christ's sake,” gasped the Secret Service agent. His face was the color of wet newspaper. “He's cut her to pieces.”

“Don't do anything,” said Bobby. “Just stay by the door and make sure that nobody else goes in there.”

“What if he comes out? What if he tries to do the same to me?”

“What do you think? Run like hell.”

“I don't see any other way,” said George, tiredly. “We've been over it time and time again, and it's the only way out.”

“What if he misses?” asked Harold.

“He won't miss, not at that range.”

“What if he gets caught?”

“He won't be. We'll have three other guys there to help him get clear.”

“How about this Oswald character?” Bobby wanted to know.

“He'll
get caught, don't you worry about that.”

“And there is absolutely no way that Oswald can be connected with us?”

“Absolutely none. He thinks he's being paid by something called the Communist Freedom League, and that they're going to give him political asylum in Russia.”

“Supposing
he
manages to hit the target, too?”

“Pretty unlikely. But if he does – well, the more the merrier, if you know what I mean.”

After Bobby had left, George said, “When it's all over, there'll be one or two loose ends that will need to be tied up. You know, such as that Secret Service agent, and Dr Christophe. Especially Dr Christophe. We don't want him bringing the President back to life a second time, do we?”

Harold lit a Winston, and nodded through the smoke.

On November 22, 1963, the Kennedy motorcade approached the triple underpass leading to Stemmons Freeway in Dallas, Texas. The sun was shining and crowds were cheering on both sides of the street.

Under the shade of a tree, discreetly shielded by three other men, ex-Marine sharpshooter Martin D. Bowman took a high-powered rifle out of a camoflaged fabric case, lifted it, and aimed it. As the Presidential limousine passed the grassy knoll on which he was standing, he fired three shots in quick succession.

It seemed to five or six of the eyewitnesses that “the President's head seemed to explode.” But there was more than a spray of blood and brains in the air. For a fleeting second, a dark shadow flickered over the limousine – a shadow which one eyewitness described as “nothing but a cloud of smoke”, but which another said was “more like a cloak, blowing in the wind, or maybe some dark kind of creature.”

A third witness was even more graphic. “It came twisting up out of the car dark as a torn-off sheet of tarpaper blowing in the wind, except that I could swear it's face was all stretched out in agony with hollow eyes. I thought to myself, I'm seeing a man's soul leaving his body. But if it was his soul, it was a black, black soul, and more frightening than anything I ever saw.”

The shadow appears on two frames of amateur movie stock that was shot at the time, but it was dismissed by photographic experts as a fault caused by hurried development. But 2,000 miles away, in Sausalito, California, a feathered rattle that was hanging on a study wall began to shake, all on its own. Dr Christophe raised his eyes from the book he was reading, and took off his spectacles.

“You're back then, master?” he said. “They took away your host?”

He stood up. He knew, with regret, that it was time for him to pack up and leave. They would be coming for him soon. “They want everything, don't they, Baron, even life itself; but they're never prepared to pay the price.”

He went to the window and looked out over the garden. He wondered what Brazil would be like, this time of year.

H
e was talking to his wife on his mobile phone when he first saw Anaïs. He stopped in mid-sentence and stared at her. Even though she had her head half-turned away from him, he felt as if the paving-stones of the Pointe-à-Callière had dropped beneath his feet like an express elevator.

“Yes – you told them what?” asked his wife.

“What?” said George.

“You were telling me about the city planning department.” Her voice was tiny and far away.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “The planning department. What a collection of clowns.” But he couldn't take his eyes off Anaïs. She was wearing a long black trenchcoat with the collar turned up, and she was sitting right on the very end of a cast-iron bench on the opposite side of the redbrick square, her head slightly lowered. The square had eleven black lamps and eleven trees. She had a small sketch-pad on her knee and she was drawing them – occasionally stopping to feed cracker-crumbs to the scruffy little brown birds that pecked around her feet. Her hair was cut in a long dark bob that swung and shone as she moved her head, and she had the profile of an angel – dreamy, heavy-lidded eyes, the straightest of noses, and teeth that were poised on her full lower lip in the faintest suggestion of underbite.

“George … can you speak up? I can't hear you very well.”

“Sure, yes, sorry. Maybe I'd better call you later, from the hotel.”

“You won't make it
too
late? I have to be up early tomorrow for a faculty meeting.”