The Fourth K (52 page)

The car directly behind Francis Kennedy held more Secret Service men armed with heavy automatic weapons, and other Secret Service men on foot ran alongside it. The next limousine carried Christian Klee, Oddblood Gray, Arthur Wix and Eugene Dazzy. The limousines were barely moving, Pennsylvania Avenue was becoming awash with the crowd, stopping the advance of the cavalcade. Majestically, large flakes of snow descended and formed a white mantle over the crowd.

The car carrying the presidential staff came to a complete
stop, and Oddblood Gray looked out the window. “Oh shit, the President is getting out and walking,” he said.

“If
he’s
walking we have to walk with him,” Eugene Dazzy said.

Gray looked at Christian Klee, and said, “Look—Helen’s getting out of her car, too. This is dangerous. Chris, you have to stop him. Use that veto of yours.”

“I haven’t got it anymore,” Klee said.

Arthur Wix said, “I think you’d better call a whole lot more Secret Service men down here.”

They all got out of the car and formed a wall to march behind their President.

The large snowflakes were still swirling in the air, but they felt no more substantial on the body of Francis Kennedy than the Communion wafer had felt on his tongue when he was a child. For the first time he wanted to touch physically the people who loved him. He walked up the avenue and shook the hands of those people who pierced the police-manned barriers and then the ring of Secret Service men assembled around him. Every so often a tiny wave of spectators managed to wash through, pushed on by the mass of a million spectators behind them. They crested over the Secret Service men who had tried to form a wider circle around their President. Francis Kennedy shook the hands of these men and women and kept his pace. He could feel his hair getting wet from the snow, but the cold air exhilarated him, as did the adulation of the crowd. He was not conscious of any tiredness, or discomfort, though there was an alarming numbness in his right arm and his right hand was swollen from being gripped so often and so harshly; Secret Service men were literally tearing the devoted supporters away from their President. A pretty young woman in a creamy wind-breaker
had tried to keep holding his hand and he had had to wrench it back to safety.

David Jatney pushed out a space in the crowd that would shelter himself and Irene, who held Campbell in her arms because he would have been trampled otherwise—the crowd kept shifting in waves like an ocean.

They were no more than four hundred yards from the viewing stands when the presidential limousine came into their line of sight. It was followed by official cars holding dignitaries. Behind them was the endless crowd that would pass before the viewing stand in the inaugural parade. David estimated that the presidential limousine was a little more than the length of a football field away from his vantage point. Then he noticed that parts of the crowd lining the avenue had surged out into the avenue itself and forced the cavalcade to halt.

Irene screamed, “He’s getting out. He’s walking. Oh, my God, I have to touch him.” She slung Campbell into Jatney’s arms and tried to duck under the barrier, but one of the long line of uniformed police stopped her. She ran along the curb and made it through the initial picket line of policemen only to be stopped by the inner barrier of Secret Service men. Jatney watched her, thinking, If only Irene were smarter, she would have kept Campbell in her arms. The Secret Service men would have recognized that she was not a threat and she might have slipped through while they were thrusting back the others. He could see her being swept back to the curb, and then another wave of people swept her up again and she was one of the few people who managed to slip through and shake the President’s hand and then was kissing the President on the cheek before she was roughly pulled away.

David could see that Irene would never make it back to
him and Campbell. She was just a tiny dot in the mass of people that was now threatening to engulf the broad expanse of the avenue. More and more people were pressing against the outer security rim of uniformed police; more and more were hitting against the inner rim of Secret Service men. Both rims were showing cracks. Campbell was beginning to cry, so Jatney reached into the pocket of his windbreaker for one of the candy bars he usually carried for the boy.

And then David Jatney felt a suffusion of warmth through his body. He thought of the past days in Washington, the sight of the many buildings erected to establish the authority of the state: the marble columns of the Supreme Court and the memorials, the stately splendor of the facades—indestructible, irremovable. He thought of Hock’s office in its splendor, guarded by his secretaries, he thought of the Mormon Church in Utah with its temples blessed by special and particularly discovered angels. All these to designate certain men as superior to their fellows. To keep ordinary men like himself in their place. And to direct all love on to themselves. Presidents, gurus, Mormon elders built their intimidating edifices to wall themselves away from the rest of humanity, and knowing well the envy of the world, guarded themselves against hate. Jatney remembered his glorious victory in the “hunts” of the university; he had been a hero then, that one time in his life. Now he patted Campbell soothingly to make him stop crying. In his pocket, underneath the cold steel of the .22, his hand found the candy bar and gave it to Campbell. Then, still holding the boy in his arms, he stepped from the curb and ducked under the barriers.

David Jatney was filled with wonder and then a fierce elation. It would be easy. More of the crowd were overflowing the outer rim of uniformed police; more of those were piercing
the inner rim of Secret Service agents and getting to shake the President’s hand. Those two barriers were crumbling, the invaders marching alongside Kennedy and waving their arms to show their devotion. Jatney ran toward the oncoming President, a wave of spectators piercing the wooden barriers carrying him along. Now he was just outside the ring of Secret Service men who were trying to keep everyone away from the President. But there no longer were enough of them. And with a sort of glee he saw that they had discounted him. Cradling Campbell in his left arm, he put his right hand in the windbreaker and felt the leather glove; his fingers moved onto the trigger. At that moment the ring of Secret Service men crumbled, and he was inside the magic circle. Just ten feet away he saw Francis Kennedy shaking hands with a wild-looking ecstatic teenager. Kennedy seemed very slim, very tall, and older than he appeared on television. Still holding Campbell in his arms, Jatney took a step toward Kennedy.

At that moment a very handsome black man blocked him off. His hand was extended. For a frantic moment Jatney thought he had seen the gun in his pocket and was demanding it. Then he realized that the man looked familiar and that he was just offering a handshake. They stared at each other for a long moment; Jatney looked down at the extended black hand, the black face smiling above it. And then he saw the man’s eyes gleam with suspicion, the hand suddenly withdrawn. Jatney with a convulsive wrenching of all his bodily muscles threw Campbell at the black man and drew his gun from the windbreaker.

Oddblood Gray knew, in that moment when Jatney stared into his face, that something terrible was going to happen. He let the boy fall to the ground, and then with a quick shift
of his feet put his body in front of the slowly advancing Francis Kennedy. He saw the gun.

Christian Klee, walking to the right and a little behind Francis Kennedy, was using the cellular phone to call for more Secret Service men to help clear the crowd out of the President’s path. He saw the man holding the child approach the phalanx guarding Kennedy. And then for just one second he saw the man’s face clearly.

It was some vague nightmare coming through—the reality did not sink in. The face he had called up on his computer screen these past nine months, the life he had monitored with computer and surveillance teams had suddenly sprung out of that shadowy mythology into the real world.

He saw the face not in the repose of surveillance photos but in the throes of exalted emotion. And he was struck by how the handsome face had become so ugly, as if seen through some distorted glass.

Klee was already moving quickly toward Jatney, still not believing the image, trying to certify his nightmare, when he saw Gray stretch out his hand. And Christian felt a tremendous feeling of relief. The man could not be Jatney, he was just a guy holding his kid and trying to touch a piece of history.

But then he saw the child in his red windbreaker and little woolen hat being hurled through the air. He saw the gun in Jatney’s hand. And he saw Gray fall.

Suddenly Christian Klee, in the sheer terror of his crime, ran toward Jatney and took the second bullet in the face. The bullet traveled through his palate, making him choke on the blood, then there was a blinding pain in his left eye. He was still conscious when he fell. He tried to cry out, but his mouth was full of shattered teeth and crumbled flesh. And
he felt a great sense of loss and helplessness. In his shattered brain, his last neurons flashed with thoughts of Francis Kennedy, he wanted to warn him of death, to ask his forgiveness. Christian’s brain then flicked out, and his head with its empty eye socket came to rest in a light powdery pillow of snow.

In that same moment Francis Kennedy turned full toward David Jatney. He saw Oddblood fall. Then Christian. And in that moment, all his nightmares, all his memories of other deaths, all his terrors of a malign fate crystallized into paralyzed astonishment and resignation. And in that moment he heard a tremendous vibration in the world, felt for a tiny fraction of a second only the explosion of steel in his brain. He fell.

David Jatney could not believe it had all happened. The black man lay where he had fallen. The white man alongside. The President of the United States was crumpling before his eyes, legs bent outward, arms flying up into the air as his knees finally hit the ground. David Jatney kept firing. Hands were tearing at his gun, at his body. He tried to run, and as he turned he saw the multitude rise and swarm like a great wave toward him and countless hands reach out to him. His face covered with blood, he felt his ear being ripped off the side of his head and saw it in one of the hands. Suddenly something happened to his eyes and he could not see. His body was racked with pain for one single moment and then he felt nothing.

The TV cameraman, his all-seeing eye on his shoulder, had recorded everything for the people of the world. When the gun flashed into sight, he had backed away just enough steps so that everyone would be included in the frame. He caught David Jatney raising the gun, he caught Oddblood Gray making his amazing jump in front of the President and
go down, and then Klee receiving a bullet in his face and going down. He caught Francis Kennedy making his turn to face the killer and the killer firing, the bullet twisting Kennedy’s head as if he were in a hammerlock. He caught Jatney’s look of stern determination as Francis Kennedy fell and the Secret Service men frozen in that terrible moment, all their training for immediate response wiped out in shock. And then he saw Jatney trying to run and being overwhelmed by the multitude. But the cameraman did not get the final shot, which he would regret for the rest of his life. The crowd tearing David Jatney to pieces.

Over the city, washing through the marble buildings and the monuments of power, rose the great wail of millions of worshipers who had lost their dreams.

President Helen Du Pray held the Oracle’s one-hundredth birthday party in the White House on Palm Sunday, three months after the death of Francis Kennedy.

Dressed to understate her beauty, she stood in the Rose Garden and surveyed her guests. Among them were the former staff members of the Kennedy administration. Eugene Dazzy was chatting with Elizabeth Stone and Sal Troyca.

Eugene Dazzy had already been told his dismissal was to take effect the next month. Helen Du Pray had never really liked the man. And it had nothing to do with the fact that Dazzy had young mistresses and was indeed already being excessively charming to Elizabeth Stone.

President Du Pray had appointed Elizabeth Stone to her staff; Sal Troyca came with the package. But Elizabeth was exactly what she needed. A woman with extraordinary energy,
a brilliant administrator, and a feminist who understood political realities. And Sal Troyca was not so bad; indeed he was a fortifying element with his knowledge of the trickeries of the Congress and his low brand of cunning, which could sometimes be so valuable to more sophisticated intelligences, such as Elizabeth Stone’s and indeed, thought Du Pray, her own.

After Du Pray assumed the presidency she had been briefed by Kennedy’s staff and other insiders of the administration. She had studied all the proposed legislation that the new Congress would consider. She had ordered that all the secret memos be assembled for her, all the detailed plans, including the now infamous Alaska work camps.

After a month of study it became horrifyingly clear to her that Francis Kennedy, with the purest of motives, to better the lot of the people of the United States, would have become the first dictator in American history.

From where she stood in the Rose Garden, the trees not yet in full leaf, President Du Pray could see the faraway Lincoln Memorial and the arching white of the Washington Monument, noble symbols of the city that was the capital of America. Here in the garden were all the representatives of America, at her special invitation. She had made peace with the enemies of the Kennedy administration.

Present were Louis Inch, a man she despised, but whose help she would need. And George Greenwell, Martin Mutford, Bert Audick and Lawrence Salentine. The infamous Socrates Club. She would have to come to terms with all of them, which was why she had invited them to the White House for the Oracle’s birthday party. She would at least give them the option of helping build a new America, as Kennedy had not.

But Helen Du Pray knew that America could not be
rebuilt without accommodations on all sides. Also, she knew that in a few years there would be a more conservative Congress elected. She could not hope to persuade the nation as Kennedy, with his charisma and personal romantic history, had done.