Three Days Before the Shooting ... (41 page)

My God
, I thought. McMillen’s story had led me to think that Jessie Rock-more’s indignant eyes had dulled while looking through the empty space where the mysterious stranger had disappeared—when in fact he might have been looking straight through time and space into the Senate chamber where the shots were soon to send the Senator reeling, the gunman crashing bodily to the chamber floor, and shatter the nation’s peace. And instead of dying of a stroke or heart attack upon seeing an uninvited visitor in his house, it was this vision which had killed Jessie Rockmore.

I hurried on, trembling, incoherent, and distrustful of my thoughts, but determined to have a look at the man who had brought all the random chaos which seemed to be bursting steadily from the springtime air into such confounding bloom.

Standing in the cool of the morgue, I watched the attendant roll out the sheet-covered form on a smooth, soundless swivelling of wheels, positioning it beneath a low-hanging metal-shaded light. He gave me a quizzical glance as he swept the cover aside—and I was looking down upon a fully clothed human form.

“You’ve been through this enough to know not to touch anything,” he said. “Just call when you’ve finished. I’m expecting a call.”

He started away before I could ask why the clothing was still intact, and I could hear the closing of the door as I studied the gunman’s intriguing face.

In the stillness of death it bore an expression eloquent of an eerie peace-fulness combined with an inner violence externalized now and spent. It appeared quite young, but for all its unlined youthfulness there was something prematurely aged about it; a face which seemed either to have seen and felt more than most people or to have lived through more in its self-terminated span than most managed to live. I asked myself if this was the effect of what he had done, or whether he had looked essentially like this before the murder, assassination, had ever crossed his mind. What cross had he borne to have pushed him across the boundary he had crossed? And the ambiguous look of aging—could it be that what he had done, his action, had blasted him into his present appearance within the split instant when intention had blossomed into act? How old could he have been? Twenty-nine? Thirty-nine? Looking down, I really couldn’t determine.

And what was his motive? How long had he nurtured his will to kill? And
why the Senator? Who was he? Where was he from? What had the authorities learned? Was there actually a plot?

With such questions flashing through my mind, I noted the light brown hair waved back from its high forehead, the recently barbered cheeks with a small razor nick showing at the corner of the full-lipped mouth; the left cheek displaying a violence of red and blue flesh which marked, I suspected, a crushed misalignment of the bone. A trickle of blood had flown from the right ear onto his collar, leaving a dry, flaky line.

But despite all evidence of the impact of his fall, I couldn’t shake off the impression that I was watching a young man napping after having participated in a wild party which, unfortunately, had ended in a brawl.
If only this were true
, I thought,
if only he had!

Jotting down notes for my story now, I observed that he had dressed himself carefully, even gravely, for the shattering occasion, and an air of an expensive and refined taste clung to his rumpled clothing—as though he had worn his best in order to do his worst. Or had he in fact considered this last act his best, his most meaningful assertion of self? But if so, why had he sought to render himself anonymous—or was this posture of anonymity a challenge by which he sought to more thoroughly establish an identity?

A fine silk handkerchief blossomed sadly in the breast pocket of his jacket, a black tie with an almost imperceptible pattern of red was knotted Duke of Windsor style beneath the widespread collar of his light blue shirt, and beneath the French cuff held by square gold links a thin platinum watch was strapped to the inner side of his right wrist. The crystal of this had been shattered, making it impossible to read the exact time of impact, and I was fighting off an impulse to lift the wrist to inspect it when I became aware of a lush, cloying scent, incongruous in such a place, pressing upon me as my eyes were drawn to the crumpled gardenia in his lapel. There, thin rustlike lines were spreading in the places where the fleshy ivory-toned petals had been broken, a sign of organic life still lingering while the human life had fled. Yes, but soon a timeless shadow of beard would bloom up on the dead, still-dying, no-longer-human face, and I was held by the feeling of a mystery deeper than that of his personal identity.

Such things shouldn’t happen
, my mind went on.
Society should be so ordered. But how, by lighting the shadows? This one struck, stepped out of sunlight…
.

Who am I? The
face before me seemed to ask, and I had no answers. It might have been the face of one of our Air Force generals, who for all the responsibilities undertaken at such an early age manage to appear eternally boyish, eternally romantic; striding ever to the air of some devil-may-care Mexican military marching song beneath pennants that snap ever in a breeze stirred by the soaring of golden eagles’ wings.
Pancho Villa’s men marched to death singing of a cockroach
, my mind went on.
What songs sang within this man’s reckless head?

I could feel the strain of weariness in the calves of my legs as I was taken by a fantasy in which I watched him posing before a full-length mirror of a fashionable apartment or hotel suite, girding himself for his twin acts of destruction. A soundless, dream-like scene. With sunlight streaming through a tall window and with the gunman gazing at his own image with remote and critical eye. A part of the wavy hair, a precise two inches of cuff showing below his expensive jacket sleeve. While in the background near an arched doorway a dark valet waited with hat, gloves, and fresh gardenia for his finely wrought lapel…. Did he wear a hat, I wondered, and when had he armed himself? It must have been in private, for surely he had the weapon with him when he left for the Hill. Yes, but what had he told himself as he made his way to the visitors’ gallery to stand so calmly firing down? What could have kept him so cool, icy in all the confusion; calm even with Hickman’s voice booming out beneath the dome?…

Hickman
, I thought,
HICKMAN!
bending forward and seeing my shadow sweep across the face, sliding away as I bent forward, suddenly taken by the disturbing feeling that I had seen the face somewhere before. Yes, and at a much more intimate distance than when, immediately after the shooting, I had looked through the doorway to see it lying like a broken puppet upon the Senate floor. But where? Where? It was eerie. I wanted to leave, but the face was speaking to me now, and in some disturbing accent which prickled the hair on the back of my neck. I peered at the texture of the bruised skin with its mass of red and blue ruptured blood vessels, the dim highlights and transparent shadows thrown against the skin of the forehead by the high-hanging incandescent bulbs, asking myself what secret knowledge was frozen there.

For even in death he seemed utterly aware of himself. Perhaps he had trained his face to keep itself under scrutiny; like a famous movie star once observed walking along a crowded street with his eyes riveted maniacally to his own moving image as it came and went in shop windows, stopping to stare, grinning, frowning, looking sinister, joyful, sad, in swift succession—utterly oblivious to the attention of fascinated pedestrians, himself his own best rubberneck. Yes, but here was a face long-trained to guard and direct its expression at all times. A face without spontaneity on a mission of no return. Could it be? It was like those faces once seen in the experimental silent-movie close-ups which owe their expressiveness not so much to the actor’s skill as to hard work performed in the editing room; images wherein each lift of eyelids, each movement of mouth, are calculated in advance and in which each of the complex movements necessary to achieve even the most casual expression of humanity are the results of the splicing together in skillful montage a series of carefully selected isolated exposures that are then projected and accelerated, controlled shadows against conspiratorial screen, into a flickering semblance of life.

All this, I realized, was quite far-fetched, a product of my imagination beginning to run away with itself. Yet it held me even though I realized that I was undergoing a kind of slow, snowballing panic in which I was projecting upon the dead man my own ideas of the kind of person
I
would have had to have been in order to do what he had done. For certainly I would have had to die myself even before the deed, and even from the moment it was conceived. For I would have been so frightened by the idea that the expressiveness of my face would have reduced to slow motion or frozen of itself. Otherwise, I couldn’t have brought it off. I fought away this drift of thought, for beneath it I sensed the stirring of some even more unpleasant idea, some knowledge too threatening to be willingly brought to the surface. But in vain; I had to know who he was. It was my duty.

I became so worked up that now it was as though the dead man was questioning me as to my own identity. If he was an assassin, what, then, was I who had witnessed his action?

I suppose it was then that I became committed to learning who he was and what he was—even though I had to throw myself bodily into every bit of the wild confusion which had exploded around me. If only I had known what this would entail, where it would lead!

As I turned away, the face continued to speak to me mutely, trying to tell me something which I could not, or would not, comprehend, even though the feeling that I had seen it somewhere before was growing even stronger. It was then, in reaching for my notebook, that I touched Vannec’s letter and had a sense of bad luck, an illogical feeling that by reading it, it had helped bring on the disaster. What would Vannec with his hero-of-the-intellect mind, his search for the significant gesture, make of the gunman? And the very suggestion that he might see implications and foreshadowings which I had neither the will nor the imagination to see made me suddenly nauseous. Turning abruptly, I hurried out of the building into the hot night street as though I’d heard the ticking of a time bomb.

I moved so fast that I was several yards away before it caught up with me, before I realized what it was that had put me to flight. And now as one caught in a sudden fog while fishing in a skiff looks up to see a ship bearing noiselessly down, I realized that the haunting face lying there in the cool behind me might well be that of the young man whom I’d accompanied to his rendezvous with Vannec during that dark night of war so long ago.

Then I was running, at first away, past the line of parked cars, then back toward the morgue. It was as though something was drawing me back against my will. I told myself that I was overwrought from the excitement and fatigue. So much had happened in so short a time, so many things had clashed together that I was losing my objectivity. But then I was there, and despite the annoyance of the attendant I went back once more to stare down at the face.

It lay as before, the eyes closed, the bruised flesh appearing colder, bluer, more translucent, but despite a strong sense of familiarity, I was tortuously unsure. It might be him, I thought, but that was so long ago. And even the fact that I thought of Severen was a coincidence. If I hadn’t touched the letter, I wouldn’t have thought of Vannec. And if I hadn’t thought of Vannec, I wouldn’t have thought of Severen. But I
had!
Out of all the many names, people, who might have arisen, it was his name which my mind wanted to fit to the face. It was a mystery. Yes, but what if my suspicions were correct? If so, then I had the responsibility of telling the police. I looked at the dark roll of the eyelashes, the sweep of the hairline and asked myself,
What if you’re wrong? If so, you’d never live it down. And after the fool you made of yourself by striking Hickman, you can’t even risk telling Tolliver of your suspicions. Yes, but what if you’re right? What if you managed even to question Hickman about Severen? Dammit
, why didn’t the authorities make the old Negro explain his relations to the whole affair! Why, by what tortuous connection was the wounded Senator allowed to give him sanctuary?

I moved now, noticing my shadow falling across the silent face.
What will you do now? It
seemed to say. I hurried out, thanking the attendant as I made for the street.

The hospital was still quiet when I returned, and in approaching the admissions desk I had the presence of mind to inquire if LeeWillie Minifees was still being detained. He was, but the nurse refused to give me any further information. She had her orders, and I couldn’t persuade her to break them. If I was to see him, it would be through other, less responsible channels. But what and how? Hospitals such as this are so efficient and strict in their procedures, so in their structure of security and responsibility.
^*

When I reached the corridor Hickman was still sleeping in his chair. It was disgusting. Where had he acquired his self-composure? I wondered. How was it that under all the tension, with the security authorities suspecting him of complicity in a plot, could he sleep so soundly? Was it through his religion or through a racial habit of escaping turmoil? Perhaps here was proof of McGowan’s assertion that Hickman’s people rested between every fifth tick of the clock—even when involved in the most intense and grueling activity.

“They aren’t on our time, McIntyre,” he had said. “They have their own
nigra
time. You watch those athletic-type nigras, the way they move around all loose-jointed and falling apart. Hell, one minute they running like they been caught stealing chickens and the Man’s after them with a shotgun, and the next thing you know, they’re creeping along like molasses on a cold morning in January and flopping around like they got no bones. That’s because they’re resting in between, man. Time is money and nigras are
expert
at stealing time,
and
they’re the most expert boondogglers in the civilized world!”