The Shot

Whatever I can do, Murray. You only have to ask.'

I was telling you how I'm getting too old for this job. Forty-eight isn't old. But it's too old for this job. Only I can't afford to retire. Not only can I not afford to do it, I don't want to be sitting on a veranda, picking my feet, and reading the paper from one cover to the other. I'm still a young man. I could do something. Most guys get jobs in the Treasury. The lucky ones join Western Union, or some place where they pay good money. A few even go to big hotels. Head of security, something like that. I was thinking, you being in Miami, you must know a lot of people who own hotels.'

Nimmo nodded. Or maybe a casino. In Vegas.'

Vegas. Yeah. I hadn't thought of that. Vegas would be nice, too.'

Sure, I know lots of people who could use a man with your background and experience. Leave it to me, Murray. I'll speak to someone on your behalf, tonight.'

Thanks a lot, Jimmy. I really appreciate it.' They started to move again. Did you know that it isn't anything other than a straight murder felony to kill the President of the United States? In England, they call it high treason if you kill the head of state, Queen Elizabeth. But not here. Imagine if the President got shot on a trip to the Yukon? Shit, they'd have to try the killer's ass according to local state law, in Juneau, which, I'm sure you know, is the capital of Alaska.'

So what's wrong with that? They'd have to try the guy somewhere. Juneau'd be as good a place to do it as any place else, what with all the witnesses and all.'

Except that they don't have the death penalty in Alaska. They abolished it in fifty-seven. Some fucked-up Alaskan gold-miner shoots the President of the United States and all they do is put him in jail for the rest of his natural. Seems hardly just, now does it?'

They stopped outside 3307 N Street - Senator Kennedy's Georgetown home. It was a flat, red-brick building of three storeys, with a walled garden out back. To Jimmy Nimmo, it seemed a small sort of house for the President-elect to be living in. The lights were on, and no doubt Kennedy was inside choosing another member of his cabinet. It appeared unlikely that he'd be fucking some big-breasted actress with so many reporters and TV cameras parked outside his front door. But then maybe there was a back door, too. And maybe Kennedy was the type to get off on that kind of risk.

Standing there, watching the house, searching the windows for some sign of the President-elect, Nimmo began to understand how easy it would be to kill the man. He himself was carrying a six-shot .38 in a shoulder holster. It had taken just one shot, from a .44-calibre Derringer, to kill Abraham Lincoln. Ford's Theater - the scene of the assassination - wasn't more than three miles away. Killing the President was probably straightforward enough, provided you were willing to be executed for it - or be shot trying to escape, like John Wilkes Booth. But to be shot by a fucking actor. That was plain embarrassing. No wonder they had tried to prove that Booth had been part of some great Confederate conspiracy. Important people -gods - just weren't supposed to die that way.

Of course, the autopsy hadn't helped any. Fucking autopsy surgeons. Early confusion centred on the fact that Booth had approached President Lincoln from the right, but the bullet had entered his head from the left. This obfuscation persisted until the trial of the conspirators - despite the fact that Booth had indeed acted alone, the United States government still managed to hang several others for the crime - when one witness gave evidence to the effect that just before the fatal shot was fired, Lincoln, hearing a noise in the auditorium, had turned his head sharply to the left.

Nimmo turned his own head in one direction, and then the other. The buildings facing the Kennedy home belonged to other senators, or were owned by the federal government. It was hardly sniper's terrain. This would not be where Jefferson made his attempt, that much was clear to Nimmo. Shooting a man with a handgun and then getting caught was hardly the style of a professional marksman.

Weintraub took Nimmo by the arm and led him away. I'll see what I can do for you, Jimmy. I'll call you, in your hotel room, tomorrow morning.'

Nimmo breakfasted alone in his room, and waited for the phone to ring. He watched The Today Show with Dave Garroway, on TV. Then an old movie, just because Peter Lawford, Kennedy's brother-in-law, happened to be in it. Nimmo had heard the stories about Lawford. Rumour had it that Lawford, a boozer and a womaniser, was also a nasty piece of work. The movie was Picture of Dorian Gray and, for a while, Nimmo thought that Lawford would have made a more convincing Dorian than the actor who did play him. But, by the time the movie was over, Nimmo had come to the conclusion that Jack Kennedy would have made an even better fist of the role. Who better than Kennedy, with his handsome good looks and easy charm, to play the part of a destructive hedonist whose own attractive features hid a shocking story of moral degeneration and sexual depravity?

He was watching Morning Court when finally the phone rang. It was Murray Weintraub. He said, Okay, you first.'

I spoke to my friend,' reported Nimmo. Seems like they could use someone with your abilities at the Riviera Hotel and Casino, in Vegas.'

I always wanted to go to Vegas.'

The way you play your cards? I had you down for a regular, Murray.'

I think you'll be happy with what I have for you, too, Jimmy. Meet me for lunch at Duke Zeiberts, seventeen-thirty L Street. That's two doors west of Connecticut Avenue. Twelve o'clock.'

I'll be there.'

After spending most of the morning cooped up in his hotel room, Nimmo decided to walk the mile and a half to the restaurant. There had been a shower of rain but the sun was shining now. It was a typical late November day. Thanksgiving holidays were being planned. Pumpkins were piled in front of grocery stores. Shop windows were posted with Thursday opening hours. America looked a peaceful place to be living in, prosperous and responsibly governed. For all but one citizen abroad on the streets of Washington that 22 November morning, the murder of a President, especially one who had yet to take the oath of office, would have seemed a very unlikely scenario.

Chapter 14

Edith Quadros

Ever since he was a boy, Tom Jefferson had been fascinated by American presidents. When Tom was in New York he used the name Frank Pierce, after Franklin Pierce, the fourteenth President of the United States. If he was moving among the buxom, blithe, and barely bedecked cocktail waitress set - somewhere like Chez Joie, on Broadway - then he called himself Marty Van Buren, after the eighth President. But mostly he stayed at home in the apartment, especially when Edith turned up pretending, for the benefit of the doorman in Tom's building and his nosey neighbours, to be his half-sister.

Edith Quadros was Nicaraguan, estranged - since she was also a communist - from a very rich family who were close friends of Luis Somoza Debayle, the Nicaraguan President. Working alongside Tom was to be her last assignment for the Cuban Intelligence Service before returning to Managua and helping Carlos Fonseca to found a Nicaraguan revolutionary movement. She believed in the Soviet Union - which she had visited - in the Cuban revolution - which she had assisted - and in Fidel Castro - whom she had bedded - as much as she believed in the evil of Standard Fruit, the CIA, and the Somoza regime. And she believed in the expedience of what Tom and Ameijeiras were planning.

Tom liked Edith immediately, not least because she was as intelligent as she was beautiful, and they were quickly lovers, for theirs was the kind of secret work that promotes an easy intimacy. She knew something of the plan already from Colonel Ameijeiras, and although Tom described it again in greater detail, he could see that it made her nervous. He would have been surprised if it had not. So he tried not to discuss it too much with her, which was easy since there was little to do until the week before Christmas, except rent an apartment and buy a car in Boston.

And in the week up to Thanksgiving, he concentrated on showing her a good time in New York. He took her bowling at Pinewood Lanes on West 125th, and to dinner at Le Vouvray on East 55th. He even took her clothes shopping at Korvette's and Ohrbach's. Gradually, as he got to know her better, Tom realised that he had mistaken nerves for impatience to get on with the job, since Edith was quite resolved to go through with her part in the plan which, in its way, was almost as difficult as his own. And it became clear to him that she disliked Kennedy in the same way Tom did.

He's a playboy,' she said dismissively. I've known the type all my life. I can't stand playboys. Being the President is just like having another expensive toy his father has bought for him, and an opportunity to sleep with more women. I don't understand why America would elect such a man.'

The reason's simple,' said Tom. Richard Nixon. Nobody wanted a bum like him for President. He was the one candidate worse than Jack Kennedy.'

You're right,' she laughed. I never thought of it that way.'

One day, after they had returned from another shopping trip to Stern's on West 42nd Street, Edith lit a cigarette and coolly asked him what might happen if they got caught.

We won't get caught,' insisted Tom.

Please, Tom. I want to know. What method of capital punishment do they use in the state of Massachusetts?'

We're not going to get caught,' he insisted. Believe me.'

All the same,' she smiled, I should still like to know.'

Very well. Not that it matters much, since it just isn't going to happen that way.' Tom shrugged. They use the electric chair.'

Edith nodded. She had thought it was the electric chair, only she knew that there were some states still using the gallows, and a few now using gas. She grimaced and shook her head. The electric chair seemed so peculiarly American. She muttered, Yes, of course. I was forgetting Sacco and Vanzetti. They went to the electric chair in Boston, didn't they? Myself, I think I should prefer to be executed by a firing squad.'

Don't even think about it. It's not going to happen. Besides, even if they did catch you, which they won't, the most that would happen to you is that you might go to prison.'

Why do you think so?'

Because you're a woman.'

Edith laughed bitterly. Tell that to Ethel Rosenberg.'

Edith, that was during the Korean War. Things were a lot different then.'

It was only seven years ago.'

Look, this whole thing has been planned too carefully for any of us to get caught.' Even as he said it, Tom knew this simply was not true. Much remained still to be done. And there were considerable risks, but Edith's risk still seemed smaller than his own. Don't worry,' he insisted. I've thought of everything.'

Something always goes wrong. That's to be expected.'

It won't. So let's change the subject, shall we?'

Okay. Tell me about your wife.'

LA3pez told you about her, did he?'

And what happened to her.' Edith stubbed out her cigarette and smiled. Tell me about her. About how you met.'

We met in Tokyo, after my release from the Korean POW camp. It was Mary who showed me how capitalism needed to live up to its own principles of liberty and equality, and that socialism was the best way of achieving this. Neither of us was a communist. She said that it was an accident of history that being a socialist in America was as bad as being a communist. Which was why she had been helping the Russians, although not in any important way. Just passing on the odd bit of information that came her way. Soon after bringing her back to America as my wife, we both came to the conclusion that we might as well be hanged, or electrocuted, for a sheep as for a lamb. And I started to work for the KGB. This wasn't difficult. I never had a problem killing fascists. Still don't. But things became harder when Mary became more actively involved. Her sleeping with other men -important politicians, government officials - wasn't so easy to accommodate.'

Evidently.'

Of course, once the KGB has you, they have you for ever. There's no going back. The best we can hope for now is to help defeat the fascist counter-revolutionaries in Cuba. And that would seem to require something singular.'

Tom took Edith's hand and added, That's what really scares you, isn't it? It's not the electric chair. It's the idea that you'll end up like Mary.'

Will I?'

Believe me, Edith. I wouldn't ever let that happen.'

Chapter 15

The Other 0.1

We're in the wrong fucking place,' snarled Sam Giancana, his mouth a rictus of hoodlum distaste.

It was Wednesday morning, 23 November, and Nimmo was back in Miami, at the safe house on Riviera Drive. Seated around the boardroom table, examining the details of Jack Kennedy's pre-inauguration schedule, were Nimmo, Giancana, Rosselli, and Paul Ianucci. Licio Montini was away, on the trail of another contract killer who might once have worked with Tom Jefferson.

Look at this,' Sam Giancana continued, in a rough note of complaint. Kennedy flies to Palm Beach tomorrow. For the weekend, says the note. Then he flies back to Washington on Tuesday, for a meeting at Dean Acheson's house. Then, hey whaddya know? It's back to Palm Beach, Thursday, the first of December. I mean, this guy's supposed to be getting ready to run the fuckin' country, for Christ's sake. But most of the time he's sunning his ass by the pool, at his old man's hacienda. As far as I can see he's only in Washington for two nights a week.

Sunning his ass, some of the time, maybe,' objected Nimmo. But not all the time.'

Saturday third, tenth, seventeenth, he's playing golf at the Palm Beach Country Club.'

The Everglades Club is a better course,' reflected Rosselli. If it comes to that, it's a better club. I wonder why the Kennedys don't belong.'

They wouldn't have Joe because he was a fucking crook,' explained Giancana. Then the old bastard put out that he was joining the Palm Beach Country Club because he didn't like the Everglades' anti-Semitism. But everyone knew Joe was the biggest Hebe hater of the lot.'

Look,' said Nimmo. He doesn't have to be in Washington to do the job of President-elect. He can pick his cabinet anywhere. For example, he's meeting Dean Rusk in Palm Beach, on Monday the twelfth.'

Why are all these Washington types called Dean anyway?' grumbled Rosselli.

Because their Harvard daddies wanted them to grow up to be the head of something,' said Giancana. Only punks are called Johnny.'

Maybe so, but I heard of a President called Tom Jefferson.'

Being called Dean is like being called Dulles,' said Ianucci. It's the right kind of handle for being some crappy old politician. Everyone knows there's dull, there's duller, and there's Dulles.'

That's what a college education gets you,' said Rosselli. A smart mouth. You're going to make a great lawyer, kid.'

It looks to me,' said Giancana, that after his meeting with the British Ambassador in Washington, on the sixteenth - Sir Harold whatever his fucking name is - that Kennedy is in Palm Beach right through New Year. Seems I've spent an awful lot of money to put a fucking playboy in the White House.' Giancana counted his way down the list of appointments for the President-elect that Murray Weintraub had provided. And since he's there for thirty days out of the next forty, it leads me to suppose that Palm Beach is the more likely venue for a hit, given what you've said, Jimmy, about how hard it would be for a sniper to go after Kennedy, outside his Georgetown home. In which case, maybe we should be there, too.'

He flies to New York on January second,' said Rosselli. He's there until the night of Wednesday January fourth, when he flies to Washington. Thursday the fifth he's back in New York. Then on Sunday evening he's going to Boston to make some speech on the Monday at the Board of Overseers, then right on back to the Big Apple.'

Wouldn't Boston be a good place to try to take him down?' asked Ianucci.

Listen to him,' snorted Rosselli. Anyone would think he'd made his bones, instead of a promising career. Don't let your Uncle Santos hear you talking like that, kid.'

Overseers? In The Ten Commandments, an overseer was a guy with a whip and a naked broad at his feet,' laughed Giancana. Sounds like Jack's kind of party.'

I think it just means a kind of superintendent, or supervisor.'

I know what it means, kid.' Giancana grinned patiently. Besides, it's more of an opportunity for a handgun than a marksman, I'd have thought. But you're right, Pauli. A public speech is a target standing still. Maybe we should try to check the place over. See what opportunities it might present.'

But apart from that, Mrs Kennedy,' quipped Rosselli, how did you enjoy your husband's speech?'

Let's hope this sonofabitch Jefferson isn't moved by historical parallels,' said Giancana. What month was Lincoln shot?'

April fourteenth,' answered Ianucci, eighteen sixty-five.'

The State Legislature. Is that the building with the big golden dome on Boston Common?' asked Nimmo.

Rosselli, who knew Boston well, said it was. Pauli's right,' he said. This is a good place for a shot. What is more, as the state Senator for Massachusetts, Kennedy has had to maintain a voting address in Boston. According to our schedule his apartment is number thirty-six, at one twenty-two Bowdoin Street, which is right around the corner from the State House. And he'll be going there to make a last visit to his old apartment before moving into the White House. Chances are he'll walk to, or from, the State House.

That's something even Jack Kennedy can do for himself,' said Giancana. I'd better get it checked out. You can leave that to me, Jimmy. I'll call some people in Boston. Howard Winter.'

That fucking mick?' objected Rosselli. I wouldn't trust that cocksucker to send flowers to his own mother.'

It's a fucking mick town, ain't it? I'll have him send someone down to take a look and advise on that other f word you're always using for the CIA, Johnny.'

Feasibility.'

You ask me, it's a major fucking mistake for the President to walk anywhere,' commented Ianucci. I mean, it is kind of naive, isn't it? Look at what happened to Andy Jackson back in eighteen thirty-five. Poor sonofabitch walks out of the Capitol to light his fucking cigar and some limey fires two pistols at him. Lucky for him they misfired.' Seeing the way everyone was looking at him, Paul Ianucci shrugged defensively. What?'

Where does he learn language like this?' sighed Giancana.

No, I've been reading up about this kind of thing. Most American presidents get shot from a distance of less than six feet, and what is clear to me is that all the Secret Service agents in the world won't stop someone who is really determined to do it. Teddy Roosevelt got shot in Milwaukee, standing up to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd. He got it in the lung, but lucky for him the bullet velocity was spent, having passed through his coat, his spectacles case, and, thickest of all probably, a folded manuscript of his speech. Garfield wasn't so lucky. He got shot in a Washington railroad station, not by some obvious criminal, but by an attorney, Charles Guiteau.'

Attorneys?' said Giancana. They're the worst fucking assassins of the lot. When you're dead, you don't even feel it.'

As a matter of fact, Garfield was on his way back to Massachusetts when it happened. And he had lots of protection. So did McKinley. He was shot by a man who had concealed a thirty-two inside a handkerchief. Shot him at point-blank range. It's like I say. The Secret Service won't stop you from getting shot.'

The Secret Service saved Harry Truman's ass, as I recall,' said Rosselli. Remember those Puerto Ricans who tried to whack him in fifty-one? It was a long time before that dumb bastard could wear the pants of that white suit again, I can tell you.'

We're getting away from the point here,' said Giancana. Which is that Kennedy's going to be spending a fuck of a lot of time in Palm Beach.'

Sam's right,' said Nimmo. I oughta drive up there, and check it out.'

If you do.'

Ianucci began to search through some of the papers that were piled in front of him. Since arriving at the safe house the man who looked like Dean Martin's younger brother had spent hours on the telephone, dealing patiently with the most dauntingly Gordian knots of red tape that American bureaucracy had ready to confound the unsuspecting interlocutor. He was tired, but he was still full of an investigative zeal that Nimmo applauded.

If you do go, Mister Nimmo,' he repeated, finding the paper for which he had been looking, there is something else you might like to check out at the same time. I've got a friend, from when I was in the army, who is now attached to the Fourth Army hundred and twelfth Military Intelligence Group, at Fort Sam Houston in Dallas. On my behalf, he's made some enquiries about Tom Jefferson with the hundred and eleventh MIG here in Miami.' He shrugged apologetically. I didn't know anyone there, I'm afraid. That's why the long way around.'

No, you're doing good, kid,' said Nimmo.

Well, sir, it turns out that Jefferson's army file is classified. But I was able to glean the following information.' He glanced down the page and began to read the notes he had taken of his telephone conversation. Tom Jefferson, born St Petersburg, Florida, nineteen twenty. Father Roberto Casas, a Cuban-born baseball player, naturalised American, mother Mildred Jefferson. Status, illegitimate. Brought up by his mother and his aunt, in Miami. Attended Miami High School, graduating second in his class, National Honor Society President, blah-blah. A runner-up in the National Rifle Championships when he was just nineteen years old. Enlisted United States Marine Corps, nineteen forty-two. Training at Camp Pendleton, and Marine Corps Scout and Sniper School, Greens Farm, San Diego. Served Guadalcanal, Okinawa, decorated, blah-blah, ended war with rank of Gunnery Sergeant.

Now then, here's where it starts to become really interesting. The official story is that he was attached to the United Nations between forty-seven and forty-nine. But what he was really doing is classified. Well, how can that be? We do know that he was a member of US Armed Forces in Korea in June nineteen fifty, when North Korean troops crossed the thirty-eighth parallel. And we do know he was captured at Pork Chop Hill, in January nineteen fifty-three. Repatriated August, when he retired from the army, after which nothing about him is known officially. I'm still trying to locate his parents, but I have been able to trace one of Jefferson's old army buddies from Greens Farm and Korea. Someone else who trained to be a sniper, just like our boy. Name of Colt Maurensig. And guess what? He's now running a gun dealer's shop, in West Palm Beach.'

Good work, Paul,' said Nimmo.

What the hell is there to shoot in Palm Beach?' grumbled Rosselli.

Burglars, intruders,' grinned Nimmo. People like you and me. Anyone who's worth less than a million dollars.'

You speak for yourself.'

In Palm Beach, it's not just Jack Kennedy who needs a bodyguard.'

Jimmy's right,' agreed Giancana. A lot of nervous money lives there. The kind that needs a castle door and a gold inlaid forty-four Magnum in order to sleep at night.'

Sam?' said Nimmo. Who can you call in Palm Beach?'

You mean made guys?' Nimmo nodded. Nicky Mothballs. Bobby Sunshine. They're part of Louis Trafficante's family. Why?'

We're going to need someone in Palm Beach. To help us keep an eye on the Kennedy place. In case Jefferson shows up. So, I was thinking, I might as well meet them when I'm up there.'

No problem. When?'

This afternoon. Tell them to meet me at the Breakers. It's the only place in Palm Beach I know.'

A charmed life you lead,' muttered Rosselli. I'd better come too. Make the introduction. Pay the price of their fuckin' help. Buy whatever it is they'll want to sell. He shrugged at Nimmo, and by way of explanation, added, 'I've met these two characters before.

Okay. I'd enjoy the company.'

Rosselli laughed, as if to say he didn't feel like he was much company, and said, You drive.'

Suits me.'

Can I come too?' asked Paul Ianucci.

Your Uncle Santos would kill me if I got you involved in something,' said Giancana. Be a fuckin' lawyer, kid. That's the best way of not getting involved there is.

It was a sixty-five-mile drive north from Miami to Palm Beach, along US1. Jimmy Nimmo liked to drive with the hood down. America was at its most American seen from a convertible. Driving a car that way made him feel deracinated, rootless, floating, conditions which he thought were probably those that most defined what it was to be an American. Like John Wayne riding the range. These days you had to be in a car to be reminded of what a vast, lonely country America really was. The Impala's powder-blue bonnet was short, by the standard of a Cadillac, but for him it was an essential feature in the appreciation of his country's geography. Rosselli seemed more interested in the copy of Life magazine he had brought along for the journey, than female pedestrians, and the occasional blue riband view of the ocean.

What are you reading about?' asked Nimmo.

Adolf Eichmann. He says his job fascinated him.'

Be happy in your work. That's what I always say.'

I was in effect a travelling salesman for the Gestapo,' Rosselli quoted, just as I had once been a travelling salesman for an oil company in Austria.'

Excuse me, ma'am,' said Nimmo. I wonder if I might interest you in getting rid of your neighbours. For only five dollars a month, we'll arrest them, torture them, and then shoot them. We'll even dispose of their bodies, at no extra charge.'

Rosselli was shaking his head, not much amused. Don't talk to me about arrests,' he said darkly. Some of our anti-Castro people have been picked up by G2 in Cuba. Alonzo Gonzales. Genevieve Suarez. One of our guys, Luis Balbuena, escaped to Guantanamo base by the skin of his teeth. But the arrest of Genevieve is especially unfortunate. When they arrested her, they found two secret rooms underneath her swimming pool. In one room were some Castro government defectors, and in the other a large weapons cache we've been building up for a while.'

That's too bad. Will they shoot her?

Very possibly. Frank and Orlando are devastated. Genevieve was a good friend of theirs. Comes to that, she was a good friend of mine, too.'

What happened?'

Rosselli shrugged. How do these things always happen? Poor security. Big mouths. You know, back in the twenties, when I made my bones, I took an oath of silence. Omerta, we called it. That's a blood oath, and when Sicilians take a blood oath, to keep their mouths shut, they mean it. I'm not sure if some of these fuckin' Cubans understand what it means to keep silent. If it comes to that, I'm not sure the people I've met from the CIA understand that either. Thanks to assholes like McCarthy, Kefauver, and McLellan, people no longer have respect for silence. If you refuse to answer, you're guilty. Silence is now a very underrated quality in a person, Jimmy. But you should never forget how important it is. Capisce?

It irritated Jimmy a lot that Rosselli had said that. He thought of himself as a man who was as mindful of his tongue as Prometheus had been about his liver.

One thing I've always been good at, Johnny, and that's keeping my fuckin' mouth shut. I don't even know a dentist. I can't sing, and I never learned to whistle. I might even still have a wife, if I'd ever licked her pussy. But that's something else you can't do if you keep your tongue in check. So don't tell me about keeping my mouth shut. I'm breathing through my fucking nose for you people. Nimmo slammed the steering wheel hard with the heel of his hand. 'Don't ever tell me that. My name is Helen fucking Keller for you guys. Jesus Christ, I won't stand to be compared to some blabber-mouthed fucking Cubans. Me, I'm Burt Lancaster's dumb friend, Nick Cravat. You got that? Don't ever mistake me for a fucking rat, Johnny. I've never squealed on anyone.

The rest of the drive was completed in silence.

Palm Beach is a narrow sandspit, thirteen miles long, and three quarters of a mile wide, and separated from the mainland by Lake Worth. The lake is well named, for there is a gulf of financial difference between the inhabitants of Palm Beach, secure in accumulated wealth and accustomed privilege, and those of its more plebeian neighbour to the west. Palm Beach is quiet and contemptuous, with the kind of declarative housing - mostly bogus French chateaux, ersatz Florentine palazzos and phoney Spanish haciendas - which, in the twenties and early thirties when most of them were built, cost several Lindbergh ransoms - small fortunes, even judged by the more obviously prosperous, you've-never-had-it-so-fucking-good standards of the Eisenhower years. Created to serve its beautiful but snooty millionaire sister to the east, West Palm Beach is bustling and friendly, but with lots of shops, high-rise office buildings, small factories, even a dog track, this is one Cinderella too ugly to merit anything but a wrecker's ball. One hundred yards apart, these two Palm Beaches are two side-by-side worlds as different as Manchester and Monaco.

The Breakers, on County Road, was Palm Beach's oldest and grandest hotel, a palatial Italian Renaissance structure surrounded by expansive lawns that looked as if someone trimmed them with nail scissors. Nimmo parked the car in front of the main entrance where, in a marble fountain, a gang of ill-advised cupids were wrestling a whole shoe factory's supply of alligators. It looked an unequal struggle of the kind that only the ageing reptiles who lived on the island, behind high, rust-free iron fences, among carefully tended jungles of tropical growth, might have enjoyed.

Inside the hotel's cool lobby there was more marble than a Medici mausoleum, with some frescoes thrown in for those few guests whose eyes were still keen enough to see as far as the ceiling vaults. Nimmo, Rosselli, and, seated on a chintz sofa by a Chinese porcelain table lamp, Nicky Mothballs' Mazarini and Bobby 'Sunshine Solegiatto made an incongruously robust foursome among the decrepit denizens of the Breakers Hotel.

Hey, Johnny,' brayed Mothballs. How ya doin'?

Both the men from West Palm Beach wore dove-grey Cricketeer Shirtweight suits, with white shirts and black ties. Despite their well-pressed clothes, the two of them looked as pugnacious as a pair of battered boxing gloves. Neither man was particularly tall, but what each lacked in height he made up for in breadth and front, displaying more attitude than a regiment of cavalry officers.

Rosselli made the introductions, and then they sat down in a quiet corner and ordered some coffee. He told them that a renegade associate of San Giancana's and Meyer Lansky's had gone nuts and was threatening to kill the President-elect, and that Sam saw it as his patriotic duty to make sure that this did not happen. To which end, he wished to enlist the help of his friends in West Palm Beach, for which he would be forever in their debt.

Anything to help Sam and Meyer,' Mothballs said after an expletive declaration of vicarious outrage. We're glad you thought of us.'

Thanks a lot, boys. I appreciate it a lot. And you know, I was wondering, is there something we can do for you?'

Mothballs and Sunshine exchanged a vacillating look, as if there really was some doubt as to what kind of favour they were about to ask. Then Mothballs, who seemed to do all the talking, looked at Rosselli, and said, You know us, Johnny. Generally we stick to what we know. Vice, gambling, narcotics - what the fuck else is there to do in Palm Beach, right? But we got this new thing going. A real sweet thing that we figure is going to make some real dough. Only we'd like your help, and Sam's help to get the thing off the ground. Let me tell you, Johnny, this scam is the future of the scam. This thing is gonna be universal in its use. It's a miraculous piece of cardboard. Show him, Bobby.'

Bobby Sunshine held up a wallet and let fall a ladder of square plastic holders each one of which contained a Diners Club credit card.

February twenty-eighth, nineteen fifty,' said Mothballs proudly. It's the day they killed cash. We got someone on the inside of Diners Club head office in New York. He can get any number of these we want, in whatever fuckin' names we like.

Rosselli took one of the oblongs of cardboard from its plastic holder and scrutinised it carefully. I've been thinking of getting one of these,' he said thoughtfully. I'm told you can charge up to a thousand dollars' worth of merchandise to one card, is that right?'

That's right.'

And this John Doe's name and address, they're a fake?'

All you have to do is sign it. This is the future of fraud, Johnny. We're certain of it. Only Louis can't see that. All he understands is dollar cash money. In God We Trust, he says, like what we was proposing was some kind of fuckin' blasphemy. But you and Sam and the Little Man, you're always thinking about the future of business.

This is a great fuckin' idea, grinned Rosselli. 'Can I keep this one?

Keep 'em all, said Mothballs. 'Show them to Sam and Meyer. We got a box load. Like fuckin Christmas cards. We figure you can sell 'em out for a hundred bucks apiece. Maybe more.

What's our cut?'

Forty per cent.'

Fair enough.' Rosselli shook his head at the simplicity of their scheme. Sam's gonna love this.'

Great,' said Mothballs, rubbing his gnarled, murderous-looking hands together. Okay, let's go and take the ten-cent tour.'

They paid their bill, in cash, and then left in Sunshine's car, a copper-coloured 1959 Pontiac Bonneville Sports Coupe. In closer proximity to Mazarini, Nimmo easily understood how Mothballs had come by this nickname, for he smelled like a balloon-sized chunk of naphthalene. But his gloomy-looking associate's nickname was harder to understand as anything other than the crudest irony. So far he'd hardly spoken a word.

Nice car,' Nimmo told him.

Thanks,' grunted Sunshine.

Why do they call you Sunshine anyway? It wasn't for your disposition, was it?'

Solegiatto. That's my name. It's Italian for sunshine.'

They drove north, up County Road, with the ocean on their right, or at least what they could see of it between the ship-sized houses.

Then I guess you're in the right place, Sunshine,' said Nimmo. Just look at these fuckin' houses. This place looks like they own the patent on good weather, as well as everything else. How the other half lives, huh?

The other half?' Mothballs twisted around in the front passenger seat and laughed harshly. Sa matter, pal? Something wrong with your math. Jesus, there isn't more than nought point one per cent of the fuckin' country lives the way these people do. Heaven's gonna look mighty disappointing when they die.

Heaven?' snorted Nimmo. I don't think so. There's only one place for people as rich as this to go when they're dead. It's not hell. It's worse than hell. It's Canada.'

When we get to the Kennedy place,' said Mothballs, you'll see that there ain't much to see. Leastways not from the road, anyway. There's a better view from the ocean. But we'll take the land side first and then go pick up the boat.'

The Kennedy house, at 1095 North Ocean Boulevard, was as easy to spot as his home in Georgetown. A group of pink-faced tourists and a parboiled cop were grouped on the sidewalk, opposite the front of the house, although, as Mothballs had predicted, there was very little to see. Just an archway in a big white wall, with a heavy oak door and, beyond a courtyard, the glimpse of a white stucco corner, and a red-tile roof among a whole coconut plantation of wind-bent palm trees. The house looked as private as a camera-shy clam.

Sunshine pulled up a way short of the entrance and turned off the Pontiac's throbbing engine.

Whad I tell ya?' said Mothballs. Place is real private and, you might also say, modest by comparison with some of these other joints. I ain't ever been inside but I know people that have. Peter Lawford for one. He likes to score some weed off me when he's in town. Anyway, he told me that old Joe paid a hundred grand for the place back in the early thirties, and another twenty thousand bringing the place up to par. It was called La Guerida back then. But now it's just the Kennedy house. But some people have already started calling it the winter White House, for obvious reasons. Mind you, the weather's only part of the reason Jack comes down here so often, without Jackie. The other half is his next-door neighbour, Florence Smith. Her old man, Earl, used to be ambassador to Cuba. Jack's been fuckin' Flo since fifty-seven. You wait and see if Jack doesn't appoint Earl ambassador to somewhere else a lot further away than Cuba.

Nimmo smiled. Listening to Mothballs was like listening to a reporter for Confidential magazine. He said, This is better than any ten-cent tour I ever went on.'

We aim to please. Anyway, you can see for yourself that the boulevard's hardly the place for a sniper. A drive-by maybe. You know? Capone style. But not a marksman. But we'll stake it out for ya. Wait a minute. Who's this?'

A black, flat-top Cadillac drew up outside the entrance to the house. As a tall man got out of the car and moved towards the door, one of the tourists shouted, Where's Jackie?' The man smiled, and gesturing that he had no idea, he disappeared through the door.

Was that a Kennedy?' mused Nimmo.

Who the fuck knows?' commented Mothballs. There are so many of those mick fuckers. We've got Kennedys in Palm Beach like Sanibel's got fuckin' pelicans. Okay, let's go and get the boat.

Driving south to get on to Flagler Memorial Bridge and across Lake Worth, Mothballs pointed out an undistinguished church near the junction with Royal Poinciana Way. St Edward's,' he said. If you wanna shoot Jack Kennedy on a Sunday morning, before he confesses a whole Saturday night's worth of sins, then that's the place to go. Seven a.m. mass every time he's in town. And believe me, he's got a lot to confess. Mattress Jack is what the local girls used to call him. Man's been laid more times in this town than a fucking dinner table. Word is he even married some Palm Beach broad back in the forties. Durie Malcolm was her name. But old Joe got it annulled. Yes sir, Jack's a regular in confession. And somehow God always forgives Jack's sins. So I guess we'd better keep an eye on this place, too.'

Across the bridge, in West Palm Beach, they turned north on to Broadway. A few minutes' steady driving put them in Riviera Beach, and on Blue Heron Boulevard where they boarded a Tupperware sports fisher and headed out to sea, past Peanut Island and through the Lake Worth Inlet. Almost as soon as they were on the open blue mosaic of the Atlantic Ocean, Sunshine steered the boat south, along the Hesperidean coast of Palm Beach, affording his nefarious crew a clear and uninterrupted view of a plurality of plutocratic homes and gardens containing golden apples, ambrosia spurting fountains, and three-headed attack dogs. After only a few minutes he throttled back, and let the boat drift around in the eddy from its own screws.

There it is,' announced Mothballs, and handed a Nimmo a pair of binoculars that were as large as two Coke bottles. That's the Kennedy place. If it was me planning to whack the guy, this might be where I'd choose to do it from.'

Nimmo lifted the binoculars to his beetle-brow and quickly focused on the house. The main part of the house was a two-storey affair, about one hundred feet long, with a guest bungalow or pool-house immediately to the south. Bracketed by palm trees shaped into parentheses by the prevailing Atlantic breezes, and lush vegetation that evidenced a contempt for the cost of gardeners, the place was set atop a concrete dock that was twice the length of the house, and about fifteen feet high. Nimmo thought it an impressive-looking house although, by the more opulent standard of a Flagler, a Post, or a Widener, Addison Mizner's pseudo-Spanish design was quite plain -even a tad Boston conservative.

Nimmo enfiladed his way along the winter White House, taking in details like the two dozen windows, the white picket fence that nearly hid the swimming pool from the ocean, and, moored to the dockside, the coastguard's launch from which two blue-shirted men wearing life-jackets were staring back at him through equally powerful binoculars.

They say Jack's got a secret entrance, to let him get out on a pussy hunt with no one seeing. But don't ask me which one of those doors it is. If Kennedy was here now, those coastguards would be patrolling this area and moving nosey-parkers like us on our way, for sure. Not that Jack gives much of a fuck who sees him in his swimsuit. No sir. Sometimes he even swims in the ocean. There are sharks, but he doesn't seem to give a fuck. But then I guess Jack's the biggest shark of them all.'

You add those coastguards to the swell under this boat,' said Nimmo, and you've got a tough shot to make. How far do they come out from shore, Mothballs?'

Bout fifty, sixty yards, depending on the weather.'

Jefferson would probably have to put another hundred between himself and the coastguard. That's a minimum of a hundred and fifty yards to shore. Yes sir, that's quite a shot to make. He'd have to hope for a nice smooth sea. Not to mention the most important thing, which is getting a sight of Jack. The pool area's quite well hidden. Seems to me it's all just a little unpredictable.'

He's a professional,' said Rosselli. That's what you pay him for. If any schmuck could do it, you'd do it yourself. That's the way these things work. Maybe he'd do it at night. Some of those windows get lit up they'd make quite a target.'

You wanna shoot Jack Kennedy?' growled Sunshine.

Nimmo grinned. Not especially, no. I think you're missing the point, Sunshine. We're trying to prevent that from happening.'

Then you wanna do it on the fuckin' golf course.

Yes, there's a thought,' agreed Rosselli.

Man plays early Saturday morning,' Sunshine continued in his Buddhist chanter's bass monotone. At the Palm Beach Country Club. S'about half a mile from the house. Shooter waits in a bunker, or something. With his gun in a golf bag. Makin' like he's tryin to wedge his way out of the sand, right? Only he'd have to make it the nine out. Jack don't often complete the nine home.'

Sunshine's a real keen golfer,' confirmed Mothballs. Gotta handicap of six.'

Is that all?' Nimmo grinned.

I seen him play a few times,' continued Sunshine. Got a friend who's a member at the PBCC. It wasn't right him makin' those remarks about Ike playin golf all the time, specially when he likes to play himself. Mind you, Ike's better. May be an old man, but he's good. Good enough, you know? Kennedy'll hit some nice shots. But he's too stiff around the waist. And he ain't got the patience to get his game right.'

I'll remember that tip if I ever play him,' said Nimmo. Come on, let's get out of here. Before the coastguard asks us to open our bags.'

Where to now?' asked Mothballs.

Colt Maurensig's place, on Gun Club Road.'

It figures,' said Rosselli.

Colt Maurensig's Gun Shop, in West Palm Beach, was a pueblo-style building of pink concrete near a liquor store and a do-it-yourself centre. Maurensig had used his Christian name and the prefix and suffix of his surname to make an acrostic featuring three popular makes of gun: Colt, Mauser, and Sig. Parked on the near-empty car lot, in front of the shop, was a 1957 Chevrolet Stepside pick-up truck bearing the same design as the gun shop window.

The four men in the Pontiac Bonneville pulled up and sat in the shade of the pick-up, waiting to see if anyone went in or came out of Maurensig's store. Finally, when Nimmo decided there could be no customers in the shop, he said, No one says a fuckin' word except me. You all got that? Nods all round. 'Mothballs? You and me'll go in first. Johnny? You and Sunshine give us ten minutes, and then come in, and when I give you the nod, close the store up. Okay?

A bell rang as Nimmo and Mothballs went through the door of the gun shop. Behind a wide glass counter that was home to an extended family of automatics and revolvers stood a man the size of a gun safe, with red hair and a beard, and forearms that were the colour and shape of two rifle stocks. The man, who was on the telephone, looked part hillbilly, part baresark Viking. Mothballs hung back by the door, browsing some cartridge belts.

Nimmo went up to the counter and, as the man came off the call, flipped open his old FBI shield, the one he had told the Bureau he had lost. Sometimes it came in handy, and this was such a time. He didn't want to get into an argument with this guy about being out of his proper jurisdiction: it was fifty years since Palm Beach had been part of Dade County.

What can I do for the FBI?'

Is your name Colt Maurensig?'

Yes, it is.'

I'd like you to take a look at this picture, sir.' Nimmo showed him a photograph of Tom Jefferson, and said, We're checking gun dealers throughout the state to see if anyone recognises him as someone who might have come in and bought something.'

I keep good records here. If you've got a name for that face, I can look him up and check if he purchased a firearm.'

No, we don't have a name,' lied Nimmo. Not yet. If you could just look at the picture, sir. And tell me if you recognise him.'

Maurensig took the picture in his fingers and shook his head slowly. Nope. Can't say that I do. What's he done, this fellow?'

He's an assassin. A marksman. He uses a rifle with a scope to shoot a man in the back, like a dirty stinking coward.' Nimmo pointed at the rack of rifles behind Maurensig's broad back. Same as one of those rifles probably. Winchester. Springfield. He's not particular how he murders someone.'

I just sell 'em, mister. Where they point them is their own affair.

Take another look, sir. I'd appreciate it.'

Insolently, Maurensig looked at one side of the picture and then the other. Handing it back to Nimmo, he said, He could be the Sliphorn King of Polarou for all I know, mister. I've never seen him before in my life.'

Nimmo nodded wearily and pocketed the picture. Well, thanks a lot for your time, sir. I appreciate it.' He rubbed the back of his head and sighed. I didn't mean to be short with you. Only, so far, we're not getting very far with this inquiry. It's been one of those days. Thank God it's a holiday tomorrow.'

I'm working. Thanksgiving tends to be a busy day for us. Some folks like to go over to Okeechobee and shoot duck, hogs, or wild turkey.'

On Thanksgiving? Seems kind of late in the day to be shooting your turkey, doesn't it?' Maurensig shrugged like he didn't care if they shot the last passenger pigeon. Listen,' said Nimmo, you couldn't do me a favour, could you? I'd pay you, of course. You see, I carry a Military and Police Smith and Wesson nineteen oh-five Model thirty-eight-calibre revolver. Would you mind if I showed it to you?'

Be my guest. Always happy to help the John Laws.'

Nimmo took out his weapon and laid it on the counter. As you can see it's a five-inch barrel. Now my partner over there, he carries a thirty-eight Special. The shorter barrel makes it easier to draw. Lighter, too. I was wondering if you might be able to cut this down to a two-and-a-quarter-inch barrel for me, while I wait. I'd sure appreciate it.'

As you can see, I'm none too busy this afternoon. I guess I could do that for you. Just cut the barrel, right? Only, to turn this firearm into a thirty-eight Special, I'd have to rechamber it to accept thirty-eight Special ammunition. And that's a lot of effort, for not much result. 'Sides, you can't change the diameter of the cylinder.

Sawn off and smoothed up would be just fine,' said Nimmo.

Okay,' shrugged Maurensig, and took the gun into the smithing shop in the back.

I really appreciate it,' said Nimmo, following. Strictly speaking, agents aren't supposed to customise a weapon. Otherwise I'd have one of our own armourers doing it. But everybody does.'

Maurensig sat down in front of a bench, unloaded the revolver, and then fixed it into a vice. Wish I had a dollar for every one of these I've seen,' he said. Largest-selling quality revolver ever produced.'

Never let me down yet.'

Sniffing the Sweet's Solvent out of the air, Nimmo started to look around. The smithing shop was littered with all kinds of specialist equipment: reloaders, case-cleaners, case-media separators, eliminator scales, and rifle rests.

Thirty-eight Special ammo's smaller in diameter, but slightly longer than standard. Maybe a little more accurate over a distance, but less stopping power.'

Oh, I'll trade stopping power for accuracy any day of the week.'

Nimmo's keen eyes alighted on a single bullet that was lying at the back of another workbench. Careful not to be observed by Maurensig, he picked it up and examined the sharp end of what turned out to be a 30.06-calibre cartridge, closely. Until 1954, the 30.06 had been the official US military cartridge, which made it as ubiquitous as Fords. Only this particular cartridge had been modified, and by someone who knew what they were doing. Most likely Maurensig himself had removed the original bullet and fitted a small red plastic shoe, or sabot, in order to hold a smaller-calibre slug inside the larger shell casing. Using an accelerator was, Nimmo knew, an old sniper's method for achieving a vast increase in a bullet's velocity and striking power. From his coat pocket, he took out the 30.06 bullet he had found in Tom Jefferson's house. It had the same red plastic casing as the one from Maurensig's workbench.

The bell in the shop rang again. Nimmo knew it was Rosselli and Sunshine, but he let Maurensig get up from the bench and go back out front. It gave him time to reclaim his thirty-eight, and reload it. Having bolstered his weapon, he followed Maurensig into the shop.

What can I do for you, gentlemen?'

Nimmo caught Rosselli's eye and nodded. Rosselli turned the open/closed sign around in the door, saying, Here, let me do it for you. You're closed for the afternoon.'

Sensing trouble, Maurensig was already reaching for the weapon he kept handy under the counter. Nimmo saw him. The little flat slapper he carried inside his jacket, which was a leather-covered lead billy with a spring just above the handle, was, even now, swinging through the air. The first time on Maurensig's outstretched wrist. The second time against his elbow. And the third time, on the back of his thick neck. The gun dealer hit the floor like Terry Molloy diving for the short money and a one-way ticket to Palookaville. Even before he stopped moving, his hands were cuffed behind his back. Rosselli, Mothballs, and Sunshine were all made men, which is to say that they were men who had killed other men, but even they were impressed by the speed and dexterity with which Nimmo had handled the big man.

I'm glad he's not holding my rap sheet,' Mothballs told Johnny.

Come on,' said Nimmo. Let's take him in the back.'

In the smithing shop, they found some rifle straps, tied the unconscious man to his chair, and waited for him to come round.

So what happens now?' asked Sunshine.

Nimmo did not answer. He lit a cigarette and smoked it silently, thinking how he always hated this kind of thing, which was making someone tell you that which they didn't want to tell. It was not that he was a cruel man. He himself thought it was simply that he had little or no empathy for other people. It was as if something inside him had been switched off, disabled, in the same way that some people were colour-blind or tone-deaf. Of course, he had questioned men before. Many times. And often he had been brutal with them. More often than he cared to remember. Usually, the inflicting of pain was the result of a simple lack of time. Mostly you were in a hurry for information and that meant there was only one possible solution to your dilemma: pain. Lots of it, too. The way Nimmo saw it, for both parties' sakes it was best to go in hard, as soon as possible. That way they knew that you were not fucking around, and it wouldn't get any better from then until they convinced you they weren't holding anything back.

Maurensig groaned and, hearing this, Nimmo pulled his beard hard a couple of times to hurry him up to the surface. When Maurensig's Tabasco eyes finally opened, Nimmo lit another cigarette and placed it between the gun dealer's already well-chewed lips. He said, Okay, beard, listen up. Here's the I-know-you-know dialectic.

Now I know you know Tom Jefferson. I know you were in the army with him. For quite a while. And I know you're a friend of his, otherwise you wouldn't have told me that you'd never seen him before in your hitherto pain-free life. I know you made this bullet. Exhibit one.' He held up the sabot he had found on Maurensig's bench. Which is the identical Toni twin of this bullet I recovered from Tom Jefferson's house. Exhibit two.' Nimmo held that one up too. So, now you know that I know that you must have supplied it to him. Which means now I know you know things I don't know. Quite a fuckin' lot, I shouldn't wonder. And the way I see it is that with your ass at a position of extreme disadvantage, I shouldn't have to wonder at all. Not any more. Not with what you are about to receive for which the Lord won't make you truly thankful, amen. So I'm gonna make you a real friendly invitation to bring me up to speed on what you know. And please try to bear in your red-haired mind that this invitation is strictly RSVP. That's French for you respond or vous gets pain. Wherever pain hurts most.

Maurensig closed one eye against the smoke that was curling into his eye from his cigarette and said, What kind of a fuckin' fed are you anyway, mister?

The worst fucking kind there is. The venal kind. The vicious and degraded kind. The impatient kind. A drunkard, a liar, and an adulterer by an enforced obedience of planetary influence. Evil by a divine thrusting on. A villain and a bastard.' Nimmo paused and bent closer to Maurensig's face. Where, my hog-tied friend, is Tom Jefferson to be found?'

I don't know anyone by that name.'

Nimmo stood up and sighed. I'd forgotten. You were a soldier, were you not? You've got the will to heroism. But only because your body isn't in a panic yet. Or maybe it's that you think there's a creator, who's going to save your soul, even if he can't save your lardy ass.'

I don't know who the fuck you're talking about, mister.'

Nimmo shook his head. Watch out. That's two denials. You deny your friend a third time and we're gonna be looking around for a fuckin' rooster, Colt. Look what happened to St Peter. Cock-a-doodle-do spells big trouble. Old Peter, they crucified his ass. That's what the Bible says anyway, if you believe that shit. Those Christian martyrs could take the New Testament's amount of pain the Romans put them through because they had faith in an immortal soul. But you and I know different, Colt. If there's one thing the twentieth century has taught us, it's that this frail flesh is all there is. We know what happened during the war. And there ain't any such thing as the peace of heaven. So, I'm going to ask you one more time. Real friendly. Like we were outside the gates of Jerusalem, and I was one of those maids of old Caiaphas himself. Where the fuck is he?

How the hell should I know? I haven't seen him in a long-' Before Colt Maurensig could complete his third denial, Nimmo had snatched away his cigarette and had thrust his fingers into the other man's nostrils, twisting them hard like a farmer attempting to control a maddened bull. Maurensig opened his mouth and bellowed with pain. Coolly holding Maurensig's nose with one hand, Nimmo fed the cigarette between his own lips, quickly puffed it aglow, and then popped it into the other man's wide-open mouth, before pulling the gun dealer's lower jaw tight shut on the burning hot end. Maurensig's whole head turned magenta, and his body flexed as if he had been in the hot seat at Sing Sing and the New York State executioner had just thrown the switch to send him on his way with twenty amperes at 2,400 volts. From behind Nimmo's hand, clamped tight across his mouth, Maurensig screamed a long, muffled shriek of choking pain that sounded like a whole pitful of devils.

Come to where the flavour is,' breathed Mothballs. Jesus.'

Sunshine sneered a cruel laugh and lit one for himself. Experimentally he tapped the lighted end at a callus on his hand and, discovering that this hurt more than he had thought it would, he tried to imagine what it would be like to have a hot cigarette inside his own mouth. Since Maurensig was still screaming like a burning heretic, this was easy enough, even for an intellectual somnambulist like Bobby Solegiatto.

After ten or fifteen seconds, Nimmo removed his hand and let Maurensig spit, gag, and retch the still-burning cigarette end from his wretched mouth.

Colt?' Nimmo tried to get the weeping man's attention. Colt?' Now he took hold of the beard again. Listen to me, Colt. The next time, I'll make you swallow it,' said Nimmo. Like Portia, the wife of Brutus. And by the way, she didn't make it. So what's it to be, Colt? Some answers, or a last cigarette? Smoking'll kill you pal, and that's a fuckin' promise. Mothballs? Fetch hotlips here a glass of water so he can talk his way back into our affections.

Mothballs brought a glass of water and helped Maurensig to drink. Wincing with pain, he swallowed the water and then mumbled, with Quasimodo's care of diction, He's got. A safe house. In New York. I don't. Know where. But that's where. It is.'

When did you last see him?'

For a moment, holding cold water inside his branded mouth seemed to afford Maurensig some relief. Then he shook his head and swallowed uncomfortably.

Not in a while. But we spoke. On the phone.'

When?'

Mid-November some time. Maybe the eighteenth?'

What did he say?'

Maurensig looked as if he was suffering from the most excruciating toothache, and every answer was like cold ice-cream on a raw nerve.

Only that he was going. To New York.'

To do what?

That's where he. Does his research. When he's planning. A hit. Finds out about people. Targets. You want to find him. Try the New York Public Library. Maybe. You'll find him there.'

So why did he call you?'

Maurensig sucked some cool air into the auto-da-fe that was the inside of his mouth. He'd seen someone hold a cigarette inside his mouth when he was in the army. A party trick. It was a trick you obviously had to learn with an unlit cigarette. Maurensig found it hard to imagine that anyone would have risked feeling the kind of pain he was in to impress a few dumb broads in a bar.

He said he was going to be gone for a long while. And that his next job. Would probably. Be his last.'

Jesus Christ,' muttered Johnny Rosselli. Jesus fucking Christ's ass.'

He say who it was that he was planning to wing?'

Never tells me nuthin'. Not like that. I just supply ammo and guns, is all. Or a scope.

But not this time, right?'

No. Give me some more water. Please.'

Mothballs, still holding the glass of water, looked at Nimmo, who nodded back. Maurensig leaned toward the glass like he was dying of thirst.

And what did you say?' asked Nimmo. When he told you that this New York thing would be his last?'

Not what he said. Listen. New York's just safe for him. Plans the job there. Then he goes someplace else and does it. Miami. Dallas. Vegas. You name it.'

Palm Beach?'

Wherever the contract takes him.'

So what did you say? On the telephone.'

I asked if he was retiring. He just said that he had enough money. To live well for the rest of his days. To get out of the country. If he had to.' Maurensig shook the tears out of his eyes. Nimmo guessed that the smoke inside his mouth had done that. He said something about how the John Laws might make it difficult for him to stick around. That he'd have to get himself a new ID. Shit like that. Because lots of people were gonna come looking for him.'

Christ's ass and balls,' said Rosselli. Looks like you were right, Jimmy. I must say I had my doubts. But not any more. The crazy fucker's really planning to do it, isn't he?'

Yeah, but where?' said Nimmo.

Could be here. Could be New York. According to your schedule, our friend is supposed to fly to New York on January second. And stay there a coupla days.'

Tell me, Colt,' asked Nimmo. Could he shoot a man from boat to shore at a distance of, say, two or three hundred yards?'

Maurensig spat blood. In his pain he had bitten his tongue and cheek quite badly. He could shoot almost any damn thing, mister. Chappo Flat Range at Camp Pendleton. Jefferson fired two-three-six. Out of a possible two-fifty. Highest score of any enlisted man in the First Marines. Best man with a rifle I ever saw. Man, with his head in a bag he's still Davy fucking Crockett. Look, mister, that's all I know. Honest. You've got to believe me.'

That's for damn sure,' chuckled Mothballs. Less you want to take up smoking again.'

Look. I knew him, okay. But he wasn't a friend. His kind doesn't make friends. If I'm not telling you much, it's because I don't know much. Not since we left the army.'

Nimmo lit another cigarette which Maurensig regarded as Winston Smith might have regarded a rat in Room 101. The worst thing in the world. You said New York. Have you any idea where in New York?'

No, I honestly don't.'

Nimmo regarded the tiny fireball at the end of his cigarette with detachment. Are you sure about that?' Now he blew on the end with sadistic meaning.

Honest mister,' pleaded Maurensig.

Nimmo grabbed the man's nostrils once more, hauled them towards his tear-stained eyes, and then held the cigarette about an inch away from the exposed mollusc, grey with numerous livid red spots, that was Maurensig's branded tongue. I don't think that's true,' yelled Nimmo.

There's a piece of paper,' screamed Maurensig. Nimmo let him go. Maurensig shook his head and added, It's just some places, he recommended me to go, if ever I was in New York. Places he used to go himself. That's all.'

Where is this piece of-'

In the shop, under the counter, there's an American guide. It's in there.'

Nimmo went back into the shop and, under the counter, next to a twelve-gauge semi-automatic shotgun, was a whole pile of books. The American guide was sandwiched between Grant Moves South and A Stillness at Appomattox, both by Bruce Catton. In the New York City section, he found a folded sheet of paper with the names and addresses of some night-clubs and restaurants, most of which he knew himself. Chez Joie up on Broadway, west of High Bridge, was a late-night joint where the waitresses wore not very much and, if you paid them, even less when they took you home. A little further south, also on Broadway, the Prelude was a pre-prandial cocktail bar that was favoured by a better class of B-girl. Nimmo had not heard of La Barraca on West 51st, but he knew Basin Street East on 48th Street, and the Five Spot on Cooper Square, as good places for jazz. Liborio, on 8th, was the west side's smartest restaurant, the kind of place where you took a girl to satisfy your interest in the finer things in life, such as her silk underwear. Nimmo thought there was nothing much wrong with Tom Jefferson's taste, since it seemed to coincide pretty much with his own.

Back in the smithing shop, Nimmo grabbed Maurensig by the nose. This better be according to Hoyle, or I'll use your crotch as my ashtray. You understand me, fat boy?'

It's on the level,' insisted Maurensig. I swear.'

Sunshine? Keep an eye on him. Johnny? Mothballs?' Nimmo jerked his head toward the shop. We need to huddle.'

Back out front, he said, I don't know if we kill this guy, or not. Thing is, if we leave him alive, then maybe he'll warn Jefferson.'

He said he didn't know how to contact Jefferson,' offered Mothballs. And I believed him.'

A phone works two ways, Mothballs. Maybe Jefferson'll contact him again, and then he'll be warned. What I can't figure is if it's best that Jefferson knows we're after him, or not. If he does know it, then maybe he'll figure to call off the hit on Kennedy. On the other hand he may not stand down, just get more careful. Right now, the one thing we've got going for us is that he doesn't know we know what he's planning, and that we're on his trail. So if the outfit sends some people in New York to stake out the places on this list that Maurensig gave me, not to mention the New York Public Library, then maybe he'll show up. In which case they'll spot him.'

I don't know that they've ever seen the inside of the New York Public Library,' said Rosselli, thinking out loud. But the Gambino family can take care of things for us in New York.'

But if he's spooked,' said Nimmo, he'll stay away from these places like they were plague pits. Maybe even leave New York altogether. We might never catch up with him.'

I don't like it when someone takes me for an idiot,' said Rosselli. As I see it, getting Jefferson is paramount. Everything else comes after that. Nothing should jeopardise that. Putting him off doesn't do it for me, and I don't think it'll work for Momo. Tom Jefferson is a dead man breathing air.' He jerked his thumb in the direction of the smithing shop. And so is he, if he stands a chance of getting in the way of making that happen.'

Nimmo shrugged. Who's going to do it?'

This is my territory,' said Mothballs. Let me handle it. S'not a problem. 'Bout twenty minutes' drive west of here is Loxahatchee. It's a refuge, if you're the national wildlife, but it ain't much of a sanctuary if you drink beer and watch TV. Place is two hundred square miles of sawgrass marshland. Fuckin snakes and alligators everywhere. Not a good place to be without independent transportation. A man might never find his way out of there. Specially if an alligator found him first. Me and Sunshine'll stick him in the trunk and drive him out there after dark, pop one in his hat, and leave him for the critters. You won't have to worry about Colt Maurensig no more.'

Thanks a lot, Mothballs,' said Rosselli.

Not a problem. It's not just cash we kill, y'know?' Mothballs opened his William Bendix reject face and laughed uproariously at his own joke. Soon as the job's done we'll get to watching Kennedy's ass for you. From what Lawford's told me, it might make interesting viewing. Hell, I voted for that boy and I wouldn't like to see anything happen to him. Even if he is the biggest tail-chaser since Errol Flynn played Don Juan.'

So you voted for him. You are one of the nought point one per cent.'

Come again?'

I worked it out. Sixty-eight million Americans voted. Kennedy won by one hundred and twelve thousand. That's point one per cent of the vote.' Nimmo grinned. Nothing wrong with my fucking math pal.'

Chapter 16

A Man's Word

When Alex Goldman arrived at Tom's riverside apartment it was the first time the two men had seen each other since Mary Jefferson's death. Edith was out, having her hair done at the Beacon Beauty Salon on Broadway, for which Tom was glad. He and Goldman had a lot to talk about. Tom poured them both a Scotch and waited for Alex to speak first. Goldman looked around at the large and well-appointed apartment with its high ceilings and fine view of the river, and then toasted him silently.

Nice place.'

Tom nodded. Of course. It's the first time you've been here.'

Very classy. Rented?'

Of course.'

Very different from your place in Miami.'

Lots of things are different from Miami.'

Goldman sipped his drink silently, and fumbled awkwardly for his pipe.

Did you have to kill her, Alex?'

What did you think I was going to do?'

You said you would take care of her. I didn't figure that meant you were going to kill her.'

And you said they had a tape of her and Kennedy.' Goldman shrugged. I took no pleasure in it. But what choice did I have? She was compromised. You said so yourself. Close to being blown. And, therefore, so were you. We couldn't risk that. Not with what we're planning for Christmas.'

After. Monday, January the ninth, to be precise.'

Whenever.' Goldman found his pipe and began to fill it with tobacco. I'm sorry, Tom. Really I am. But there was no alternative.'

Was it your idea, Alex, or did the Russians tell you to do it?'

Tom, I did what I had to do. It wouldn't have made any difference if I'd asked them. The result would have been the same. You know that. I liked that little girl. I liked her a helluva lot.' Goldman gulped the rest of his drink down and got up to help himself to another. But I did what I had to do.'

Tom nodded sombrely and watched Goldman carry his refreshed drink over to the big window. The view from there of New Jersey was worth a look.

Just like I had to get rid of that guy down in Mexico. Shit, he was a friend of mine. But he'd fallen under suspicion, and when he found out what we had planned for Kennedy, that was it for him. He had to be killed.'

I thought you'd just get her out of the country or something,' persisted Tom. A new passport. Maybe even Russia. She always wanted to go to the Soviet Union.'

It was nothing personal, like I said.' Goldman frowned. Come on, Tom. What can I say that I haven't said?'

Tom shrugged and lit a cigarette.

She wouldn't have liked Russia at all. Nobody does. Not even the Russians.'

Tom just kept on smoking.

Look, Tom, are we okay? I don't see how we can do this job if you and I are not okay.' Alex held out his hand. What do you say?'

After a long moment, Tom stood up and grasped it.

Yeah,' he growled. We're okay.'

Good. By the way, where's the broad?'

Edith? At the beauty parlour.'

What's she like?'

Good. She'll be fine.'

Goldman nodded. LA3pez Ameijeiras speaks vA

We'll need another girl.'

Same deal?'

Tom nodded.

Want me to fix it?'

No, Edith is going to speak to Ameijeiras. She reckons she knows someone who fits the bill.' He took a deep draw on the cigarette and blew the smoke towards the Jersey coastline. She thinks you're going to kill her when this is done.'

Whoever gave her that idea?'

Not me. It was Ameijeiras told her about Mary.'

Goldman tutted loudly. Bastard. Why'd he want to do a thing like that?'

I imagine he has some very old-fashioned ideas about party discipline.'

Sounds like.'

Anyway, I told her that you had no intention of killing her.'

Good.'

And that's what she believes.'

Goldman nodded.

I am right, aren't I? You don't intend to kill her when this is all over?'

Of course not.'

Tom held out his hand.

Your word?'

Goldman grinned and took Tom's hand. Sure. Why not? I give you my word.'

Chapter 17

Giving Thanks

In 1621 Captain Miles Standish, the leader of a group of religious fanatics from England, who believed in the imminent arrival of Armageddon in Europe, invited a local tribe of Algonkian Indians, the Wampanoag, to join them for a dinner celebrating the good fortune that had seen their immigrant community established in New England. Since this had more to do with the charity of the Indians than the Christian God, or happy accident, it would have been churlish not to ask them. Especially since it was the Indians who supplied the food. Two years later, things looked even more secure for the New Englanders, and Mather the Elder's Thanksgiving sermon included a special thanks to Almighty God for the plague of smallpox that had destroyed the tribe of Wampanoag who had been their immediate benefactors.

For these Indians, Armageddon turned out to be rather closer to home, and Americans more or less forgot about the destruction of the world until 23 September 1949, which was the day when Joe 1, the first Soviet atomic bomb, was successfully detonated. Since then, and since 29 December 1955, when Bulganin announced that the USSR had developed a rocket that could carry the H-bomb four thousand miles, Thanksgiving has had perhaps as great a meaning for Americans as it has ever had in the three hundred and forty years since the Pilgrim Fathers sailed across the Atlantic Ocean.

Not that this holiday, traditionally the last Thursday in November, has ever lost its meaning. The importance of the holiday in the American calendar is evidenced by the fact that George Washington's 1789 Thanksgiving Proclamation was the first presidential proclamation ever issued in the United States. This proclamation, mislaid for 132 years and rediscovered in 1921, says nothing about those Wampanoag Indians, which is a pity. No more does it mention family food, or football, or the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade, sponsored by the Lionel Corporation and Ideal toys, and watched by Jimmy Nimmo, in colour, on NBC television, at his home in Keystone Islands.

He was alone. Reluctantly he had conceded that there was little of practical investigative use that could be achieved on a public holiday. Except perhaps one thing.

And so it was that, after watching the parade on his new television set, followed by the game - the Green Bay Packers versus the Detroit Lions - and a TV dinner, and then a nap in his favourite chair that took him through Edge of Night, and Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic in West Berlin, followed by a couple of beers and a sandwich during the Seven o'Clock News and Bat Masterson, he got into his car and drove back to Palm Beach.

It was after eleven by the time Nimmo got there but, according to Jack Kennedy's schedule, he was early. So he had a drink at the popular Bradley's Saloon on Royal Poinciana Way, near the intra-coastal waterway, before driving across Lake Worth to the airport in West Palm Beach. He was still early when he joined the crowd of reporters and well-wishers who were there to see Kennedy fly in from Washington National Airport. Nimmo wanted to see if the airport in West Palm Beach was the kind of place Tom Jefferson might choose to make an attempt on the life of the President-elect.

With no jet aircraft, and only turbo-prop planes, mostly private, flying in and out, it was not a large airport, so there was not much to see - just a landing strip and a building handling passengers and air traffic control. Looking around, Nimmo decided that the best place to position himself would be where Tom Jefferson would probably choose, and with all the people and cars around, he figured that would be somewhere higher up.

Getting out on the roof of the airport building proved easy enough, and he might have been more alarmed at the excellent potential it offered a marksman, had it not been for the two Secret Service agents who were up there already. The square jaws, right-angled haircuts, buttoned, lozenge-shaped coats and sensible black shoes gave their game away in less time than it would have taken them to show Treasury badges and Big Brother attitudes.

Who are you?' asked one of the agents. You're not supposed to be up here.' Both men walked quickly towards Nimmo as, somewhere in the deep purple sky, a plane began its final approach to the runway.

I thought I'd get a better view up here,' Nimmo explained. But what he really thought was that it might be awkward to be detained and questioned by these two bozos, who looked as if they had every intention of searching him. I'm sorry, I didn't mean any harm.' But meaning a great deal of harm was exactly what he intended as he flattened the first agent's nose with a rock-breaker of a punch. The second man went for his gun, which was fastened securely in a holster underneath the elastically controlled waistband of his Goldenaire pants. By the time the agent had his hand on the .38, Nimmo's sap was on his skull.

Leaving both men sprawled on the rooftop in the darkness, Nimmo returned to the inside of the building, his question about a shot from the highest point in the airport answered. And out on the tarmac, he mingled with the two hundred people who, even near midnight, were gathered to applaud the man of the moment, and to wave their banners: Welcome to Palm Beach' and, rather prematurely, We Love you Mister President'. Nimmo glanced at his watch and concluded that the four-engined plane taxiing noisily towards the building could hardly be John Kennedy's Convair. According to the schedule his private plane left Washington at eight thirty p.m., on a flight that took four hours. The two men standing right in front of Nimmo were real convention types - liquored legionnaires - who knew all the answers. This was not the first time they had welcomed Jack Kennedy into Palm Beach airport.

That's the press plane,' explained the fatter, more sober, uglier of these two Democrats, whose asinine, stupid, stubborn faces reminded Nimmo why a jackass was the party's symbol. It left Washington around the same time as JFK, but s'got four engines, see? That makes it faster than The Caroline. Which is what JFK calls the two-engined plane he owns. After his beautiful, two-year-old daughter. Just like her mother, too. Matter of fact, they're all beautiful. Don't you think? We love Jack Kennedy. I think everyone does, don't you? Even the folks who didn't vote for him.'

During this explanation, Nimmo recoiled from the Floridian's florid breath. This one was a real Cracker. His conversation smelled of fish, grits, and humbug.

I guess so,' agreed Nimmo, pretending to blow his nose.

The plane began to disgorge the fourth estate and its baggage, and started refuelling. Twenty-five minutes passed with the two Crackers discussing some of Kennedy's cabinet appointments, and how a new dawn was on the horizon for the people of the United States. Nimmo listened patiently, hardly worrying about the two agents he had left insensible on the rooftop. It had been dark, and besides, Secret Service agents were usually coy about their mistakes. He wondered what the two Crackers might have said if he'd told them only half of what he had learned from Mothballs about Mattress Jack. But at last a plane was heard and, at twelve thirty a.m., with the crowd cheering enthusiastically, a smaller plane landed.

It was the first time Nimmo had seen Kennedy in the cupreous flesh. The policeman's eyes saw a six-foot Caucasian male, weighing around 170 pounds, with code six eyes (blue), code four hair (reddish brown), and in his early forties. He wore a blue-grey two-button suit, a dark-blue tie, and a white shirt with narrow grey stripes. Not wearing a hat helped to make the young Senator look even younger -too young to be the President-elect of the United States. Too young, the old cop would have said, to be the President's press secretary. But for the private plane, the European cut of the suit, the Palm Beach tan, and the shit-eating grin, Nimmo would have marked Kennedy down as the kind of B-movie actor you would get to play the DA in some gritty courtroom melodrama: Dana Andrews harassed by Lee J. Cobb. Except that for once the grin was gone. And something was clearly wrong. Senator Kennedy walked rapidly from his plane into the airport building, hardly slowing to acknowledge the applause of the crowd or to shake any of the supplicant hands.

The hell's the matter with him?' complained one of the Crackers. On a goddamn holiday, too. Might have stopped to say hello. Wish us a happy Thanksgiving. Who the hell does he think put him in the White House in the first place?'

You can bet he would have stopped if there'd been niggers waiting in line,' suggested the other. Gettin' his picture taken, shakin hands with a nigger. Too good an opportunity to miss.'

Too dark,' laughed the first. Picture wouldn't ever come out. Just be him shakin' hands with two eyes and a happy smile. Sides, if that's all he wants he just has to go down to Montgomery and get on a goddamn bus. I just can't get over his behaviour. On a goddamn Thanksgiving holiday, too.'

Nimmo paid little attention to their disappointment. Instead he wondered if the Senator's concerned demeanour might have had anything to do with the incident on the airport building rooftop. Maybe the Secret Service had advised Kennedy to get his ass indoors as quickly as possible, in case some nut with a gun was out there.

Nimmo was just starting to think of going home when Kennedy came out of the building again, and marched quickly back to his own plane where he spoke to one of the pilots for a moment. Then he walked fifty or sixty yards to the press plane, and climbed aboard.

Maybe Cronkite's on board that plane,' speculated once of the Crackers. And he wants an interview.'

But a few minutes later the press plane finished refuelling and started up its four engines. By one a.m. the President-elect was airborne again, leaving some very puzzled people back on the warm ground in West Palm Beach.

Nimmo drove back to Miami, went to bed, and got up late to learn that not long after Kennedy had flown out from Washington, the pregnant Jackie had started haemorrhaging. She had been taken to Georgetown hospital where she was delivered of a son, by Caesarean section. Kennedy had simply taken the faster plane back to Washington to be at his wife's side.

One thing was now obvious to Nimmo. Jack Kennedy would be spending a lot less time in Palm Beach and a lot more time in Washington than anyone had thought.

The next two weeks passed without any action, or leads. It was a difficult time for Jimmy Nimmo and everyone who was associated with the investigation. An increasingly anxious Sam Giancana flew to New York to square things with Carlo Gambino. As a result, outfit men were sent to keep an eye on all the places on Colt Maurensig's list, and a few others besides, just in case Tom Jefferson decided to reconnoitre these locations, too: the Carlyle Hotel, on Madison Avenue, where Jack Kennedy owned a penthouse apartment and where, sometimes, he met Marilyn; Joe Kennedy's apartment at 277 Park Avenue; and the building the Kennedy family owned at 230 Park Avenue where, in suite 953, old Joe had offices that had been the Kennedy campaign headquarters during the election. There was nothing on the schedule that showed Kennedy was planning even to visit New York before the New Year, but Giancana did not want to leave any possibility untried.

Besides,' he said, it'll be next year before you know it. After January second he's there for the best part of two whole weeks. Seems to me that New York's as good a place as anywhere to hit Jack Kennedy.'

The only light relief to be had for the Chicago gangster was a telephone call from a plainly terrified Joe Kennedy who, having noticed the muscle that had started hanging around his Park Avenue addresses, now concluded that Frank Costello still bore him a lethal-sized grudge. Giancana, an old friend and admirer of Costello's, tried to reassure Bootlegger Joe that Costello was more or less retired after the Genovese family had shot him in the head, some four years earlier. But Bootlegger Joe was not persuaded, and shortly afterwards flew to Palm Beach for the rest of the month.

There was some good news from another area, however, and for which the Chicago boss gave a loud thanks in the shape of a party in New Jersey for a couple of dozen wiseguys.

In November 1957, right in the middle of the McLellan Committee hearings, the mob had held the largest sit down in Cosa Nostra history, at the one-hundred-and-fifty-acre estate of Joe Barbara in Apalachin, New York. The sit down had been raided by New York State police and US Treasury officials. Many of the leading figures in organised crime were arrested, although quite a few, including Sam Giancana, escaped. Those arrested were subpoenaed to give evidence to a Grand Jury on the purpose of the meeting. This had been a peaceful one - to avoid a war in the wake of the attempt on Costello's life, and the murder of Albert Anastasia - but no one was talking. As Johnny Rosselli had told Jimmy Nimmo, omerta was more than just a word to these men. As a result of their refusal to do anything but take the Fifth, Russell Bufalino and nineteen others were indicted and convicted of conspiring to obstruct justice. They were sentenced to prison terms of three to five years, and each was fined $10,000. On bail, they appealed, and on 28 November 1960 the judgement came down from the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, reversing the conspiracy conviction for want of sufficient evidence. Giancana was jubilant.

Meanwhile, the search for Tom Jefferson continued, slowly. Paul Ianucci and Nimmo found Tom Jefferson's Chevy Bel Air with Peter Rooney's Used Cars in Tampa, and then his mother at the Elderflower Home for Elder Citizens in Intercession City, near Orlando, in Osceola County. Mildred Jefferson was not yet seventy, but she did not know what month it was, or even who had won the election. Barbara Zioncheck, the nurse in receipt of Nimmo's ten dollars and who, on a promise of ten more, agreed to call if anyone came to visit the prematurely old woman, told him that no one had and no one would. But since the retirement home's bills were paid by Tom Jefferson's bank in Mexico City, it remained a possibility that had to be covered. Just like the bank itself, which was now watched round the clock by the same team of Cuban anti-Castro exiles whom Jefferson had met while he was there.

Barbara Zioncheck recalled her last coherent conversation with Mildred Jefferson, and thought she remembered having heard something about someone called Roberto, Tom Jefferson's father, who was now living permanently in Cuba. Nimmo came away from Intercession City almost certain that this particular avenue of inquiry was now terminated. Just like N Street, back in Georgetown, which the local police had now closed to the public - everyone, from those who wished mother and child well, to those who wished only harm to the father.

Nimmo had thought Kennedy would remain in Georgetown, next to his recuperating wife, for a long time, but he was soon proved wrong. One of Jack Kennedy's girlfriends, Judy Campbell, a Jackie look-alike from Los Angeles, was, through Frank Sinatra, also a girlfriend of Sam Giancana's. From Campbell, Giancana learned that Kennedy had invited her down to Palm Beach for the first weekend in December, staying at the Breakers Hotel, in a complimentary suite that Kennedy kept reserved for weeks at a time. After spending two or three nights sneaking out of La Guerida and into the back entrance of the Breakers - which kept Mothballs and Sunshine hugely amused - the President-elect returned to Washington for a meeting with President Eisenhower, on 6 December. Then it was back to Palm Beach again, only this time he was accompanied by Jackie and their two children, Caroline and John. Photographed on the runway at Palm Beach airport, they looked like any other happy family worth a hundred million dollars. Jackie, glamorous as always, seemed well rested, with no concerns other than the ones that afflict any new mother who has had a child delivered by Caesarean section.

It was ten o'clock on Saturday morning when Mothballs telephoned the safe house in Coral Gables. I'm not sure, but I think we could have a situation here,' he told Nimmo. There's some guy in a car with a New Hampshire licence plate who keeps coming back to park outside the Kennedy place. He's not John Laws, and he's not a Secret Service agent. And I'm pretty sure he's not Tom Jefferson, unless that was a very old photograph you gave me. No, this guy is old, about seventy years of age, and kind of rough-looking, too. Unshaven. Very not Palm Beach. The car's covered with dust, like he's been driving a way. And he does nothing but stare at the house, like he's waiting for something, or someone. And I got thinking, I know you didn't mention it, but it occurred to me that Jefferson might have some kind of accomplice. You know, a partner. For instance, you said he had a father, who might be around this guy's age. Either way, I've got a bad feeling about this fucking character. Maybe you should come and take a look for yourself.'

Nimmo thought for a moment. It did not sound like Tom Jefferson's MO, but could he afford to ignore the nose of an experienced criminal like Mothballs? He said, Where's Kennedy right now?'

On the golf course. Bobby Sunshine's keepin' an eye on him. After that, Sunshine'll be in the boat on the other side of the house.

Have you got the licence number of this guy's car?'

Mothballs gave it to him.

Sit tight. I'll be there as soon as I can.'

Nimmo telephoned police headquarters for a DMV check and any rap sheet on the driver, and then took off for Palm Beach. It was lunchtime when he arrived but, before driving up to the north of the island and the Kennedy house, he found a payphone and rang headquarters again. It turned out that the car was registered to a Richard Paul Pavlick, aged seventy-three, from Belmont, New Hampshire. Pavlick had no criminal record to speak of but, according to the Belknap County Sheriff's office, he had been treated at a local mental hospital. More disturbing was the news that Pavlick had written to a local attorney, Maurice P. Bois, threatening to kill Jack Kennedy. Bois had reported the threat to the police who had formed the conclusion that Pavlick, a retired postal clerk, was a harmless crank.

Mothballs was sitting in a grey Chrysler Imperial on North Ocean Boulevard, about forty yards north of the Kennedy house. Outside 1095 were the usual well-wishers, braving the heat in the hope of catching a glimpse of glamorous Jackie, and the usual cops shepherding them. The truth was that no one in Palm Beach wanted to see him as much as her. Nimmo parked beyond Mothballs' car and got into the Chrysler's passenger seat alongside him. The Palm Beach mobster looked hot and tired and smelt like he was badly in need of a bath. He pointed to a dirty-looking Ford parked about ten yards in front of him, on the opposite side of the baking boulevard.

That's him there,' he said, handing Nimmo his binoculars. Just sits there and watches, like a cigar store Indian. Gives me the spooks.'

Nimmo took a closer look. Pavlick seemed to be in no hurry to do anything now that he had driven all the way down from New Hampshire. He was round-shouldered, grey-haired, bespectacled. Having seen the guy for himself, Nimmo's first inclination was to agree with the New Hampshire police. The guy looked harmless enough.

Nimmo said, He's a loony. I had him checked out. Seems like he's spent some time in a mental institution.'

Only a loony would sit out here in this fuckin' heat, Mothballs said pointedly. 'So that figures.

On the other hand.'

Even as he spoke the dusty Ford started up its engine, and moved gently away, heading south, down the Boulevard.

I think maybe he heard you,' observed Nimmo. C'mon, let's follow him.'

What the fuck for?' objected Mothballs. He's a loony, ain't he?' But he started the car anyway and set off in slow pursuit of Pavlick's Ford.

I was thinking,' explained Nimmo. Maybe the New Hampshire cops got it wrong. I mean, it's over fifteen hundred miles between here and there. And that's a fuck of a drive for anyone, let alone a loony. And another thing. He's a smart enough loony to know that he'd be wasting his time sitting outside the Kennedy place in Hyannis Port. Massachusetts is a lot nearer Belmont, New Hampshire. Seems to me that if I was a loony, that's where I'd have headed. No, this guy knew Kennedy would be here in Palm Beach, because he reads the newspapers. And how loony is that?'

Depends which paper,' said Mothballs. Okay, you made your point. It was you that mentioned he was a loony in the first place. To me he looked like a guy trying to get up the nerve to do a drive-by. I know what that's like. I've sat in that car myself. Okay, you're thinking, I don't look old enough to have pulled that kind of Untouchables shit. But I started early in this business.'

They trailed Pavlick across Lake Worth to one of the many no-frills motels along Dixie Highway, close to the junction with Southern Boulevard. Between the cheap motels were stores selling sub-tropical plants, honey, citrus fruits, and kitsch souvenirs made of coconut shells, conch shells, and cypress knees. If they had driven further south on Dixie Highway the road would have been lined with signs advertising the merits of various jungle gardens, Indian villages, mineral springs, alligator farms, and lion ranches. It was a depressing area replete with half-assed schemes and disappointed dreams, and so many neon proclamations of Vacancy' that it was as if blank minds and absence of thought were the recommended orders of the day. Nimmo considered it an unlikely place to choose to stay in for anyone who was looking to give his mentally disturbed life some desperately needed meaning and significance. Substance and expression fled from the Dixie Highway like a breeze blowing through the bluish-green Australian pines, and out towards the empty ocean.

I do believe that the Secret Service agents guarding Mattress Jack are billeted in one of those flop-houses,' observed Mothballs.

Jesus, it's no fun being the Kennedy help, is it?'

Pavlick turned into the parking lot of a faceless, innominate motel and, watched by Nimmo and Mothballs from the other side of the highway, got stiffly out of his car, as if he had been sitting in it for quite a while.

Now what do we do?' asked Mothballs.

Observing that Pavlick had taken nothing with him from the car and into the motel, Nimmo said, One of us should take a look at that car. See if he's carrying a piece, or something.'

Mothballs turned off the engine and pulled on the parking brake. Like I keep saying, this is my territory, so let me handle it. If there's any trouble, I know all the cops around here. But you they don't know, and they don't owe. I reckon you of all people will understand what I mean by that. Besides, I used to jack cars when I was a kid. Grand Theft Auto was all I could spell until I looked up masturbation in the dictionary. Told you I started early.'

Nimmo shrugged as Mothballs pushed open the car door and got out. Okay. Whatever you say.'

Mothballs threw the door closed, then opened the back door, took out his jacket, and put it on. A unit like that heap of shit he's driving,' he said. S'not a fuckin' problem. Only, I always wear a jacket when I'm doing something of this order. You can get away with a lot if you look respectable in this town.

His arms and body hardly moved at all as he ran across the street, just his legs below the knee, so that with his bulk and in his black suit, he looked more like a bowling bowl, rolling slowly toward Pavlick's car, than anything that might be described as respectable. True to his word of his own expertise, though, he was inside the car in seconds, checking the glove box, and then the back seat, and last of all the trunk with the innocence of a travelling salesman from Honor, Michigan.

He was back in the Chrysler, alongside Nimmo, in just a few minutes, his broad, sweating face flushed with fear and excitement.

He's a fucking loony, all right. He's driving a bomb around, and I don't mean no fuckin' Edsel. The trunk of that car is filled with fucking dynamite, and several cans of gasoline. There are all sorts of wires going in and out of the driver's compartment, and a kind of switch thing under the dashboard that looks as though it might turn this whole street into Bikini fucking Atoll if you rocked it. I really think he means to do it, the crazy sonofabitch. To kill Kennedy.

Wired up, you say?'

Mothballs wiped his face with a handkerchief. Wired. There are blasting caps, detonators, wires, sticks of dynamite, everything except the cheap clock and the Jew accent.'

Did you touch it?'

Do I look like a fuckin' Jap general? I wanna kill myself I'll take an overdose of pussy, not go screwin around with a fuckin' bomb. Nervously, Mothballs lit a cigarette. 'What do we do now?

Call the Secret Service.'

What about the cops?'

They'll involve the FBI. Do you want to spend the rest of the weekend answering their questions?'

Not now you come to mention it.'

Besides, I owe someone a favour. Someone in Washington. I need to call long distance. Can we pick up my car and then go to your place?'

Mothballs gunned the engine. I'll be glad to get out of here.'

I don't get it,' said Nimmo, switching off the TV in the corner of Mothballs' living room. There was nothing at all about Pavlick or his bomb on the eleven o'clock news.'

Hey, forget about it,' yawned his host. They're probably still questioning the guy. And you know how they are with the newsboys. They don't want to tell 'em what fucking year it is. Come on. I'll show you to your room.

Mothballs' home in Lake Worth was a modest Cape Cod-style house with a kitchen, a living room, two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a carport, in a Levittown-like development of uniform, unidentifiable, pre-fabricated properties. Mothballs was perhaps the only unmarried man in the street.

The bed was comfortable, but Nimmo hardly slept. Every half hour he would start out of a light doze to recall the details of what he had told Murray Weintraub, worried that he had somehow failed to impress upon the Secret Service agent the full gravity of the threat posed to the young President-elect. The fourth or fifth time he woke up, Nimmo wondered if perhaps his insistence on not wanting any credit for the collar after all might have confused Weintraub, or even made him suspicious.

I don't get it,' Weintraub had said. I thought you said you wanted this collar. To get back in Hoover's good books.'

I changed my mind. I'd prefer to remain anonymous.'

Anonymous tips have to be verified before we can act on them, you know that, Jimmy.'

I already thought of that. You can call the cops in Belknap County, New Hampshire. And there's an attorney, name of Maurice P. Bois, who originally reported this character. He'll verify that Pavlick threatened Kennedy.'

Good enough.'

Just leave me out of it.'

Why so coy all of a sudden? This is on the level, isn't it?'

Like it was built by Frank Lloyd Wright, Murray. Look, let's just say that I was somewhere I shouldn't have been when I found out, okay?'

Same old Jimmy.'

If you're quick, you might just catch him in his motel room.'

Now Nimmo sat up in bed and looked at his watch. It was five fifty-five on Sunday morning, a whole fourteen hours since he had reported Pavlick and his car bomb. Surely they would have put out something to the press by now. He got out of bed, went into the living room, turned on the Pilot Soloist radio-phonograph and, as soon as the tubes had warmed up, searched the tuner for a six o'clock news broadcast. But to his irritation and discomfort, the news was still dominated by events in Algeria and Congo. As if anyone cared about shit like that. There was nothing about a plot to kill Jack Kennedy.

Nimmo was not a man to sit around and do nothing. He dressed quickly and, leaving Mothballs snoring like a lawnmower, he went out to his car.

From the house in Lake Worth, it was a straight drive north up Dixie Highway into West Palm Beach. Pavlick's car was gone from outside the motel but it was immediately clear to Nimmo that its absence had nothing to do with the Secret Service, or any other law enforcement agency. If Pavlick had been arrested the motel would likely have been closed while the bomb squad boys went over his room, just in case there were any other sticks of dynamite or booby traps inside a hollowed-out Gideon Bible. At the very least, the county sheriff would have posted a couple of men in the parking lot. Clearly something had gone very wrong.

Nimmo looked at his watch. It was now six thirty a.m. Jack Kennedy would be getting ready to go to seven a.m. mass at St Edwards. Suddenly Nimmo saw Pavlick's obvious course of action in all its simple lethality. Detonating a car bomb in front of La Guerida might only injure the President-elect. The Kennedy house looked substantial enough to withstand a decent-sized blast. The only certain way of killing the President-elect with such a device would be if Pavlick were to crash his car into the Kennedy limousine, and then to hit that switch underneath the dash. In just a few minutes Kennedy would be getting into the back of his car for the short drive to St Edwards Church. There was no time to lose thinking twice.

Nimmo stamped hard on the gas pedal and, with a strident caterwaul of hot rubber on warm blacktop, the Chevy Impala sprang forward, as if pursued by a whole pride of hungry lions. Driving like a man who is late for the Indianapolis 500, Nimmo careered east over Flagler Drive and on to the Royal Park Bridge, across Lake Worth. The car snaked from side to side as it held the left turn off Royal Palm Way on to South County Road. Touching sixty miles an hour, he sped past another church - Bethesda-by-the-Sea - cursing himself at the top of his voice for what he might have to do. How the hell did you stop one car from crashing into another except by crashing into that one car yourself? And not just any fucking car, but a car filled with dynamite. He would probably be lucky if they found enough bits of him to put in a lousy shoebox.

Rounding the Palm Beach Country Club on to North Ocean Boulevard, Nimmo slowed a little. It was six forty-five and a dark limousine was already parked outside La Guerida. As he passed the front doorway he had an excellent view of Jack Kennedy himself coming through the oak door and on to the Boulevard, followed closely by his daughter, Caroline, and Jackie, who was carrying their new baby, John. It was then that Jimmy Nimmo saw Pavlick's dust-covered Ford, parked about thirty or forty yards to the north of the house. The Ford was already creeping slowly forward, like a wild animal stalking its prey. There was no need to crash into it.

Nimmo accelerated again, spun the wheel to the right, and then hit the brakes, which was more than enough to cause the Impala's uncertain back end to sweep across the whole road like a pastel-coloured turnpike, blocking the path of Pavlick's explosive-filled car.

The dusty Ford jerked to a halt. Richard Pavlick looked as surprised as a jack rabbit to see Nimmo blocking the Boulevard in front of him. Any chance of driving into the Kennedy limousine was now gone. Surprise quickly turned to fear as Nimmo, gun in hand, leaped out of his car and lurched towards the bonnet of the Ford. Momentarily he lost his footing and went down on the blacktop, scraping his knees. Almost immediately, Pavlick began to reverse away from Nimmo, gaining speed all the time, and by the time the policeman had picked himself up from the ground, the Ford had all but disappeared. Nimmo got back into his own car and turned the key, intending to pursue the bomber, only to discover that the stalled V8 engine was also flooded.

With his own car now blocking North Ocean Boulevard, the only way for Pavlick to reach St Edwards would be to go all the way to the north of the island and then drive south down the western shore of Lake Worth on Lake Way. Meanwhile, thirty yards away to Nimmo's right, quite oblivious to what had just taken place, Jack Kennedy and his Secret Service detail had already departed for mass, waved off by his equally oblivious family.

It was another ten minutes before Nimmo was able to restart his car. He drove quickly south to St Edwards, but of Pavlick's car there was no sign. But he still sat outside long enough to see Kennedy come out of the church, shriven and absolved, and get back into his limo. Nimmo followed the unwitting Senator safely back to La Guerida, and then drove back to Mothballs' place, thanking the Almighty God he no longer believed in for having delivered them both - himself and Jack Kennedy - from a violent death.

After all he had gone through, it seemed incredible to Nimmo that Mothballs was still so soundly asleep in his Cellini bedroom suite. It was as if, during some ramble in the Kaatskill Mountains, the gangster had met some strange people dressed in the old Flemish style playing at ninepins, and taken a draught of their Hollands.

Nimmo placed another long-distance call to Washington and, speaking once again to Murray Weintraub, told him what had happened. Weintraub swore that Nimmo's information had been passed on to the PRS - the Service's Protective Research Section - but was at a complete loss to explain why that information had not been acted on. An hour or so later Weintraub telephoned Nimmo to confirm that a search for Pavlick was now properly underway and that he would soon be in custody. But his private account of what had happened in Palm Beach upon receipt of the original red alert signal would have appalled the Chief of the Secret Service, one Mr U.E. Baughman.

You're not going to believe this,' said Weintraub. It seems as if Jack Kennedy himself overruled the detail chief. Kennedy said it was just another crank threat and that there was really no need to overreact to what was really a common enough situation for the President of the United States. The fact was, he knew that a PRS red alert would have grounded him last night. And that was the last thing he wanted. You see, after Jackie went to bed, Jack slipped out the back way for a midnight swim in his next-door neighbour's pool. Florence Smith. Well, what can you say, Jimmy? You are dealing with a young, horny guy who is not yet ready to behave like old FDR, Harry Truman, or Dwight Eisenhower. In short, a security fucking nightmare. What can you do when the future President of the United States tells you to ignore signals from the White House Communications Agency? You remember what I said? That politics and protection don't mix? Change that. It's not politics, it's promiscuity. Promiscuity and protection don't mix. JFK carries on like this, he's going to find himself in trouble.'

Nimmo heard Weintraub out and agreed that the Secret Service had a difficult job on its hands. But four days later, when he was in New York, he decided that it was not all Kennedy's fault. Four days. That was how long it took before Richard Pavlick was finally apprehended. And not by Secret Service agents, either. Still driving his car around Palm Beach as if it was nothing more lethal than an ice-cream van, Pavlick was arrested by a Palm Beach patrolman, for driving over a white line.

Chapter 18

Harvard Yard

On Monday, 12 December 1960, New England had its heaviest snow in years: thirteen inches fell, and for a while the whole region slipped and skidded to a halt. In Cambridge, Massachusetts - Boston's intellectual younger brother, although the two cities are so close that they are more usually thought of as twins - freshmen students emerged from the dormitories of Harvard Yard, and an unusually vigorous snowball fight ensued.

Snow fights were always a serious affair in Massachusetts. The Boston Massacre of 1764 had started thus when inexperienced British soldiers found themselves pelted with snow and ice, and returned fire not with snowballs but with musket-balls. On a cold December morning two hundred years later, there was but one symbol of authority to be found in all of Harvard Yard. Within Johnson Gate, the elderly gatekeeper charged with offering advice to visitors, directing vehicles, and generally keeping an eye on things for the Harvard University Police Force, wisely stayed inside his tiny beige-coloured guard-house, which was more like a sentry box, and poured himself a cup of hot coffee from a thermos flask.

Harvard Yard is almost always open to the public. On any day you can see several groups of tourists pausing in front of the statue of John Harvard, and hearing the same old nonsense about his not having founded the university at all. On that particular morning there was but one visitor to the Yard's western quadrangle, recently arrived from New York, and he soon found himself involved in an icy battle that was probably as much action as the Yard had seen since George Washington stationed some of his troops there. Good-humouredly, the visitor gave as good as he got, although he was more than twice the age of the mostly male students - two or three hundred of them -who fought a running, laughing, yelling battle between the leafless American elm trees and the handsome eighteenth-century buildings.

Anyone watching the snowball fight from the comparative safety of an open window might have noticed the older man's keener eye and more accurate aim, for nearly every missile he hurled left a fresh young face stung or bruised with snow and, likely, even fresher than before. Few would have paid attention to the visitor's expensive-looking thirty-five-millimetre Nikon camera, which had an Auto Nikkor telephoto zoom lens, nor to the Telectro portable tape-recorder that he had been carrying over one shoulder, although there could have been very few tourists that came to Harvard who exhibited a desire to particularise and describe the university's architectural treasures in such close detail.

Only minutes before joining in the fight, which had obliged him to place his camera and tape-recorder behind the statue of the much-maligned John Harvard, close to the steps of University Hall, which had been his vantage point, the stranger's interest had been focused on those dormitories that constituted the western side of Harvard Yard's first quadrangle, these being Matthews, Massachusetts Hall, Harvard Hall, Hollis, and Stoughton. Indeed, there was really but one of these buildings that interested him, enjoying, as it did, a view of the University Hall steps that was almost uninterrupted by the branches of the elm trees, and that was Hollis Hall.

There was nothing remarkable about Hollis, in the sense that it was nearly a facsimile of Stoughton and Holsworthy, the dormitory that constituted the northern side of the first quad. The Harvard Book will tell you that Hollis is one hundred and three feet long, forty-three feet broad, and thirty-two feet high. On both facades, the line of the four-storey building's roof is broken by an ornamental pediment, in the centre of which is a common window, with a circular window on each side of it. But it was the four tall rectangular-shaped windows on the top storey's southern side that the solitary visitor had been most concerned to photograph. And not just the windows, but the occupants of the rooms that lay behind them. A supply of snowballs had been carried up to the fourth floor of Hollis to be hurled out of the open windows, and the visitor had obtained several good photographs of the two pairs of students occupying these rooms. It was more than he could have hoped for on his first visit to Harvard.

Finally quitting the frozen fray, the visitor collected his expensive belongings and, wet but laughing, returned to his car, a Rambler Station Wagon he had bought in Norwood, and, thankful that he had enjoyed the presence of mind to spend an extra sixty-five dollars on snow tyres, drove back to the three-room apartment he had recently rented on nearby Center Street, at a cost of one hundred and fifty dollars a month.

Once inside the door of the centrally heated hallway, he pulled off his boots and his wet outer clothes and placed them in the bathroom, close to the hot-water tank, before going into the laundry room he had turned into a darkroom, to develop his black and white film and make some enlargements. When these prints were dry, he spread them on the kitchen table so that he and Alex Goldman could examine them in detail.

Tom Jefferson lit a cigarette and said, These are all taken from the steps of University Hall, where Kennedy will leave the building after the meeting of the Harvard Board of Overseers. That's Grays to the left of the quadrangle, which is too far for our purposes. Then we have this rather more Gothic-looking building, which is Matthews. We have plenty of good windows to choose from there, but I'm not happy about all these trees. Those branches could easily spoil a good shot. Then we have Massachusetts Hall, which also has some nice windows, but it is where the Harvard president has his office, so there are likely to be a few Secret Service agents, cops, what have you, coming in and out of the place. Besides, I don't like the proximity of the balcony you see above the arched windows on Harvard Hall, opposite. Or that little cupolaed bell-tower on Harvard Hall's roof. I figure those are two places you can expect to see some Secret Service agents, and they might very well see a gunman who was positioned in a window of Massachusetts.'

Agreed,' said Goldman. They're bound to position a man with binoculars in that bell-tower.'

Coming out of Harvard Yard for a second, on the other side of the Johnson Gate, we've got the First Unitarian Church.' Tom paused. What the fuck kind of church is a Unitarian one, anyway?'

It's a numbers thing. I don't think they like the Holy Trinity, or some shit like that. How the fuck should I know? I'm a Jew.'

Well, whatever the fuck it is, it's possible we could get into that spire, take out some window panes. But it doesn't look too comfortable. In these kinds of temperatures, I'd like to suggest we forget all about using this building.'

I agree.'

I'd also recommend we forget all about Harvard Hall. One, it's used for lectures and tickets for Harvard sports events, so people will be coming and going at all times. And two, we both agree there will probably be an agent in the bell-tower. That leaves Hollis, which is this one, and Stoughton, between Hollis and Holsworthy. Holsworthy's too far, same as Grays. Stoughton's good, but Hollis gives us longer for a shot. Especially if we can gain access to one of these windows on the top floor, to the side. Thirty-two feet high, plus a hundred and fifty across the yard, to the steps of University Hall.'

Tom pointed to a photograph of a building whose grey granite was in contrast to the red brick of all the others.

Kennedy comes out of this door, on the steps here, to the left of the statue of John Harvard. Anyway, according to Pythagoras, that's a range of one hundred and fifty-three feet.' He pointed to the white balustrade atop University Hall's three-storey facade. Figure on a couple of Secret Service agents up here, on the roof of University Hall. They'll command quite a good view of the whole quad when looking down. But not such a good view of the top floor on the southern side of Hollis, when looking up. Which they'll have to do. Hollis is a whole storey higher than UH. Just as good is the fact that you cannot see any of these four windows from the bell-tower.'

Tom removed the photograph of University Hall and replaced it with some wider shots of the whole western quad.

By the way, we're lucky those aren't evergreen trees,' he said. If they were, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. If it was the other side of UH, in the eastern part of Harvard Yard, we'd almost be in as much trouble. There's a pine tree in front of the chapel, and a smaller one in front of Boylston Hall.' Tom puffed his cigarette and shrugged. So I hope the information from your Russian comrades is good. The car only drops him at the back door of UH, right? But he leaves from the front, on the western side, which is where we'll be.'

That's right. Ten thirty a.m., January ninth. He'd be out of the car for ten seconds at the most before going inside. Not much of a window. Not compared with the front door. He'll come out of there at midday, with the rest of the overseers, and then they'll stroll across the Yard, and then the Square, to Brattle Street. They're planning to have lunch at the new Loeb Drama Center. If he wants drama, we'll give him a drama.'

Tom nodded. Depending on the number of people in the Yard, I figure it will take him at least three or four minutes to walk between University Hall and Johnson Gate. For seventy-five per cent of that time we'll have a clear view of him from Hollis.'

Three or four minutes. That's more than enough time.'

All you have to do is figure out a way for us to get into one of those rooms in Hollis,' said Tom.

Alex Goldman grinned back at him. I'm in the FBI, aren't I? Shit, no one argues with the FBI, especially when it's some eighteen-year-old kid who's fresh out of school. You can relax and leave the talking to me, Paladin. After nearly five years working COINTELPRO ops, I eat bullshit for breakfast.'

The following Tuesday evening, at around five o'clock, and wearing dark suits and ties under their G-man type raincoats, Goldman and Tom drove along Massachusetts Avenue to Harvard, in the Rambler Station Wagon. They parked in Harvard Square, alongside the Old Burying Ground, where early settlers and revolutionary soldiers - not to mention Harvard University's first eight presidents - are interred, and walked across Peabody Street, through Johnson Gate, with Harvard Hall to their left. There, they turned on to a path now cleared of snow, and paused before the southern side of Hollis Hall for a brief moment.

Observing that there were lights in all the fourth-floor windows, they came around front and walked coolly through the first of two entranceways, called Hollis South. Immediately to their left was a staircase which, like the walls surrounding it, was painted white, so that the interior of Hollis looked almost as if some negligent student had left the front door open to the elements. And certainly it was none too warm inside, even with the door closed.

The two men proceeded up three flights of stairs, ignoring a couple of young men carrying green cloth bags, apparently full of books, who ignored them right back. There were five plain wooden doors on the top landing, four of them numbered, and one, at the back of the building, an unoccupied bathroom. Somewhere they could hear the sound of a record player - Elvis Presley singing Are You Lonesome Tonight?' Immediately at the top of the stairs, at the back left of Hollis, was room thirteen. Down the hall, on the front left, was room fifteen. Rooms fourteen and sixteen, having no side windows, were of little interest to Tom and Goldman, beyond the names of the two roommates posted on a piece of paper that was taped to each of the doors.

Okay,' said Goldman. In room thirteen we have John McMurry and Michael Salant. And in room fifteen we have Chub Farrell and Torbert Winthrop. Good Ivy League names, if ever I heard them. Okay. It's your call, Paladin. Which of these two pairs of roommates is going to receive the benefit of a real education in the university of life?'

Fifteen,' said Tom.

Fifteen,' repeated Alex. Tonight's winning number is fifteen.' He knocked softly on the door. They don't know how lucky they are.' Both men took out FBI identification - fakes from one of Alex's COINTELPRO ops, but indistinguishable from the real thing - and held them up to the scrutiny of the young man who threw open the door. FBI,' growled Goldman. I'm Special Agent Christopher. This is Agent Rutter.

The student's mouth opened and then shut again, several times, as if he had been thinking of spitting out some butter that would not melt in there. He was tall, red-haired, with large ears, and a face that looked as though it had fallen off the side of a church. Finally, he stammered,Wow.'

Goldman grinned. Can we come in for a minute, son?'

Sure,' said the young man, and stepped politely aside as if he had been standing in a ballroom full of debutantes. Please do, come in.'

Tom and Goldman advanced into a large but cosy room that was approximately thirty feet square. A fireplace with a roaring fire jutted out about two or three feet into the room, on either side of which was a single bed. Elsewhere in the room were two dressers, two closets, two desks, two desk-chairs, two sets of well-stuffed bookshelves, and two library chairs. A large, heavily stained Bokhara rug covered about half of the uneven hardwood floor.

Chub?' The tall, red-haired fellow closed the door and, springing nervously from one foot to the other like a dancing bear, attempted to get the attention of his roommate who, seated at his desk, had yet to look up from the book in which he appeared to be thoroughly absorbed. Hey, Chub. Get up. It's the FBI.'

The FBI. Sure it is,' muttered the boy at the desk, still not looking round. Jerk.'

I'm not kidding, man.'

Chub leaned back in his chair, glanced around wearily, and then did a Stan Laurel of a double-take as he saw Goldman and Tom, and the badges they were still flourishing. Jesus Christ, Torbert,' he exclaimed loudly, jumping up from his chair. What the hell did you do?'

We're sorry to disturb you two gentlemen,' Goldman said smoothly. No one's in trouble. No one's done anything. So there's absolutely nothing to get alarmed about. This is just a routine background security check we're making, in advance of Senator Kennedy's visit to Harvard, next month.'

Chub Farrell frowned. Jack Kennedy's coming to Harvard?'

Tom laughed wryly and walked over to the windows, of which there were four, each about three feet wide by six feet high, with wood-panelled window seats, and two pairs of matching shutters. There were no drapes. He stamped gently on the floorboards a couple of times, and spent the rest of his time staring out of the two windows that looked immediately on to Massachusetts Hall. These two windows remained his favoured place for a rifleman's position. From either one it was possible to cover the whole quadrangle, from the snow-covered steps that led down from University Hall to within only a few yards of Johnson Gate.

Chub's roommate, Torbert Winthrop, was remonstrating with him wearily. Don't you read the newspapers?' he demanded. Jack Kennedy's on the Harvard Board of Overseers. That's why he's coming. For the January meeting.'

That's right,' confirmed Goldman. January the ninth, to be precise.'

He is? What do they do?'

They talk about a whole lot of stuff. Committee report on things like the performance of the football team.'

Hell, that sure won't take long,' snorted Chub. The team's lousy. What else is there to say?' Chub was shorter than his lanky roommate, but better-looking, with longish fair hair and a pale complexion that seemed to indicate he needed to spend more time outside the Widener Library. Like Torbert, Chub wore a Harvard pullover, a cotton shirt, grey flannel trousers, and a pair of stiff English brown brogues. The team plays like it's in aspic.'

The university police,' continued Goldman, unperturbed by this interruption, are co-operating with the FBI and the Secret Service to make sure that next month's visit goes as smoothly as possible. I'm sure we all want that, don't we?'

Goldman glanced around the room in an attempt to make a quick appraisal of the two young characters with whom he was dealing. There was a pair of skis sticking out from under each boy's bed and, taped to the walls, were pictures of naked girls and sportscars. In the corner, resting on a Knickerbocker beer crate, was a Motorola television set, and there was even a small Christmas tree, atop of which shone a toy sheriff's badge. Torbert's desk was home to a copy of Atlantic Monthly, a flashlight, some family photographs, and a new briar pipe, while Chub's desk revealed interests as Catholic as Playboy magazine, Marx's Das Kapital, a Ben Hur souvenir movie programme, and a French edition of Charles Baudelaire's Intimate Journals. Goldman thought Chub and Torbert looked like what they were: a couple of polite young men in a hurry to be older ones. That was good. That was very much to his purpose. With what Tom had in mind for them, they were booked on a DC-8 bound for Manhood.

Sure, I guess everyone wants Kennedy's visit to be a success,' agreed Torbert. But how can we help you, sir?'

Yes, of course, anything,' said Chub.

I'm sure you understand that sometimes we have to check people out, just to make sure they're not the enemies of democracy.'

Goldman picked up the copy of Kapital and turned the pages with a show of disapproval. It was a long time since he had read it himself -at least twenty years. Things had seemed clearer back then, in the thirties, when he had decided that the best way of serving the cause of anti-fascism had been to work for the Soviet Union. For a long while after the war, when he had learned the true facts about Stalinist Russia, he had doubted the wisdom of that original choice: political conscience, instead of loyalty to country. But, more recently, his communist faith had been restored by the revolution in Cuba. And by a determination to prevent the forces of American fascism from destroying Castro and his popular revolution, by any means necessary. Those were his orders from his KGB controllers. And he intended to carry them out. Even when those orders sometimes involved carrying out an assassination. No matter who it was.

Silencing the two Nicaraguan girls, Edith and Anne, after this was all over, would be tough enough. A lot tougher than merely ordering Tom to kill an old friend who had been about to defect from the GRU in Mexico City. But hardest of all had been killing Mary Jefferson. Goldman had liked her, and even his degraded sensibilities had found the means of her murder quite abhorrent. By comparison with what had happened to Mary, planning John Kennedy's assassination looked like a picnic.

Chub Farrell was looking nervous at the amount of interest the FBI was showing in his choice of reading matter, and, flushing bright red, said, I was just reading that, sir.'

It's only a book,' said Goldman.

We both were, as a matter of fact,' added Chub. For Economics.'

But you bought it,' accused Torbert.

Thanks a lot, Tor.' Then, to Goldman, Economics is one of the subjects we're studying this year. That's the only reason I'm reading it. I'm not a communist. I don't even like Economics.'

Dismal science, huh?' Goldman tossed Marx aside and, collecting Playboy off Chub's desk, idly thumbed through its pages. What are the others?'

History, English, French. French is my worst.'

For a moment, Goldman's eyes lingered over a pictorial tribute to Marilyn. Then he smiled and said, What are you majoring in? Good-looking broads?'

Government, sir. With an emphasis on international relations.'

Goldman thought the better of making a remark about sexual relations being more likely in government, especially if Jack Kennedy was anyone to go by. Replacing the magazine, he took out a notebook and a pencil.

Where do you live, son? When you're not here and studying hard?'

New York, sir.'

Address?'

Chub gave an exclusive-sounding address on New York's Upper East Side.

What about you, son?' Goldman asked Torbert.

Torbert's address in Boston sounded equally patrician.

Now then. Can you each verify the other's good character?'

Oh yes sir. We were at school together. At Choate.'

Cho what?'

It's an Episcopalian school in Wallingford, Connecticut,' explained Torbert.

Where Jack Kennedy went to school,' murmured Tom.

That's right, sir.'

And now you're both Harvard men.' Goldman looked like he was impressed. It all sounds very promising. Who knows? Maybe, in twenty years or so, it'll be you who's coming to attend a meeting of the Harvard Board of Overseers. Now wouldn't that be something?'

It sure would, sir,' agreed Chub.

Okay. That's about it for now,' said Goldman. The Secret Service might be along sometime nearer the big day, to check over the immediate scene.'

That's the easy part,' said Tom.

They leave the background checks to us. It is possible your parents might get a visit over the holidays, just to find out if you are who you say you are. But, like I said before, it is nothing to be alarmed about. Just routine. By the way, when do you boys break up here for the holidays?'

Winter recess begins on Friday the sixteenth,' said Torbert. We're both back for the Winter Reading Period on January second.'

Tom got up from the window seat. What are you boys doing for Christmas?' he asked innocently.

Studying at home.'

Me too.'

We've got mid-year examinations starting on the sixteenth of January.'

We'd stay here and study, if we could, but you can't. It's not allowed. Winter recess is the one break when you have to leave the Harvard campus.'

And you can't come back in after you've left. The dorm is all closed up.'

Good luck with the exams,' said Goldman. And I want to thank you both for your time and your co-operation. Oh, there is one more thing, gentlemen. I'd be really grateful if you would refrain from discussing our visit with anyone. And I do mean anyone. Not just Thold and David in room fourteen, McMurry and Salant in thirteen, and Boyd and Costello in sixteen, but anyone at all. Girlfriends, teachers, even the university police. You see, in matters affecting the security of the President, or the President-elect, we usually find that it is best if our involvement is treated in a vacuum, as it were. Just in case a foreign power or enemy agency should discover how we handle these matters. Now I would be within my rights to ask you both to sign an executive order, binding you to confidentiality, which forbids the unauthorised disclosure of anything that might reasonably be expected to cause damage to the national security. Such as our investigative procedures in the FBI. But you being Harvard men, I'm only going to do what I've done with your friends along the hall there. All I'm going to do is ask you on your honour not to discuss this matter. Not even with each other. Okay?'

Exhibiting the kind of gravity normally reserved for the Grand Jury, or presidential inaugurations, the two Harvard students came to attention and gave their solemn oaths to Alex Goldman.

Good enough,' he said, shaking each by the hand. Good enough.'

Tom opened the door and walked silently into the cold white corridor. He had always wondered what it might be like to go to Harvard, and now he knew. It was high school with good shoes and a historic view. Goldman followed him along the hall, and down the stairs.

Seemed like a couple of polite young fellows,' he said.

Yes, they did.'

Bright, too.'

Bright, they always are. Did you know that Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were once residents of this dormitory?'

No.' Goldman stopped and looked at the staircase beneath his feet, as if some physical trace of their poetic presence might still remain. You know, I always did like Thoreau. And now that I've seen where he lived at Harvard, I can understand why he wanted to go and live by himself in a log cabin at Walden Pond. I wouldn't much like the idea of sharing a room with you, Paladin. Or anyone else for that matter.'

Outside Hollis Hall, they walked across the quadrangle to the steps of University Hall where, next to the statue of John Harvard, they mounted the steps and turned to face the building whence they had come. For a minute or two both men stood in silence, their eyes fixed on the lights that shone from room fifteen, unhindered by tree branch or lamp-post. Finally, Goldman glanced up at Tom and said, So what do you think of their room, Paladin?'

Tom's nod was full of shrewd deliberation. Perfect,' he said. You couldn't get a more perfect position for a shot than that. Not if you were Alfred Hitchcock himself.'

Chapter 19

Manhattan Walks

After the word went out about Pavlick's Model TNT, Palm Beach was wrapped as tight as Lariat, Texas. The Secret Service doubled the detail on La Guerida and almost everywhere else Senator Kennedy was likely to go - at least those places he was supposed to go. Agents who had never seen the inside of a Catholic church overcame three centuries' worth of conservative American protestantism and learned that the Scarlet Woman played no part in a mass, not even one attended by Mattress Jack. The golf course at the country club never saw so many good walks spoiled by so many men in sober suits. And not one, but three coastguard cutters went sharkspotting off La Guerida's private beach. Despite getting himself arrested for loitering close to 1095 North Ocean Boulevard, first thing on Monday morning, no one was more relieved to see this general improvement in Senator Kennedy's security than Mothballs. It meant that Nimmo could take Mothballs and Sunshine out of commission, and let them get back to more obviously felonious activities.

Friday, 16 December, the day Pavlick was finally picked up - he told newsmen he wanted to take Mr Kennedy's life because of the underhanded way he was elected. Kennedy money bought the White House and the presidency. I had the crazy idea I wanted to stop Kennedy from being President' - Jimmy Nimmo flew to New York, with a few crazy ideas of his own. Friday, 16 December 1960 was not a good day to fly into New York, however. Two inbound planes - a United Air Lines DC-8 from Chicago and a Trans World Super Constellation out of Columbus, Ohio - collided over New York City harbour, killing 127 passengers and crewmen. The DC-8 jet crash-landed in Brooklyn, killing five people on the ground; the Super Constellation crashed on Staten Island, eleven miles to the southwest. It was only the next day, when Nimmo saw the report in the New York Times, that he realised his own plane had been airborne over New York at around the same time.

Despite the accident, and the cold, and the early snow that lay thick on the streets of Manhattan, and the certainty that he would probably have to spend Christmas alone, he gave thanks that he was back in New York. Instead of a beach with neighbourhoods, he was in a real city. It was the biggest city in the world, a great ship of living stone, but Nimmo, whose positive thinking owed nothing to the best-selling book by the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, was confident - nay, he had faith, not in the God of Abraham and Isaac and Oral Roberts, but in himself - that if he could find Tom Jefferson anywhere it would be in little old New York. According to his schedule, Kennedy would leave Palm Beach on 2 January, and fly to New York where, apart from brief trips to Washington and Boston, he would spend the first two weeks of January. The inauguration of John F. Kennedy as thirty-fifth President of the United States was now just thirty-four days away. Time was not just running out, it was hitching a ride in a fast car.

New York is all the cities. The opinion city. The style city. The financial city. The radio city. The TV city. The cultural city. The immigrant's city. If, post-Copernicus, the goocentrist view could persist anywhere in the enlightened face of heliocentrism, it would be in cynosural New York, the dog's tail containing the North Star that is Manhattan Island. The wonder is that New York had to fight hard to persuade the United Nations to make its headquarters there. Paris may be more beautiful, but it lacks impact. London may be larger, but it fails to overwhelm. Rome may be eternal, but it does not thrill. But New York is its own model, the supreme expression of all that is good and bad in contemporary civilisation, whatever that is. The city is an extraordinary achievement, and although there is nothing pedestrian about New York, in the pejorative sense of that word, nevertheless the pedestrian is king. One need not be mounted on Pegasus, either to appreciate its architectural treasures, or to travel down its magnificent avenues or across its ornamented streets. All sorts of native Gothamites go walking in New York: bankers, lawyers, publishers, librarians, store assistants, waiters.

And cops. No one knows more about walking the streets of New York City than a cop. Five years before, as the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's New York office, on 3rd Avenue at 69th Street, Jimmy Nimmo had walked a lot in Manhattan. He reckoned he knew the Upper East Side as well as he knew the guy he saw every morning in his shaving mirror. And, even in winter, with side streets banked high with dirty levees of gritty grey snow, Nimmo knew that the best way to find someone in a city as large as New York was to get on his dogs. Only first he needed to be dressed for something colder than a box of Florida fruit preserves.

He went to Macy's overcoat sale in Herald Square and walked out of the place street smart for only eighty dollars: a British woollen overcoat for sixty bucks, a pair of Hahn Ripple shoes for thirteen bucks, and pigskin gloves with stretch sidewalls for seven. And of course he wore his hat. In New York, going without a hat in winter was like the joke people used to tell about Harry Truman: Would you like a Truman beer? You know, the one with no head.' To err was Truman, but not wearing a hat during a New York winter was plain stupid.

Nimmo stayed at the Shelburne, on Lexington, because he had stayed there before, and because it was close to the New York Public Library, where he would frequently begin or, sometimes, end his daily search of Tom Jefferson's alleged haunts. Indeed sometimes he thought that it was a little like looking for the ghost of a man who had never existed, when you didn't even believe in ghosts. The hotel was not particularly luxurious, although quite comfortable for Nimmo's bachelor needs, being an above-average mid-town choice of interim lodging for newly relocated executives. Despite its proximity to the United Nations, however, the Shelburne did seem an unusual choice of lodging, interim or otherwise, for UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold to have made for the Cuban delegation back in September. Soon after he arrived, Nimmo made a joke about Fidel Castro to Mr Spatz, the hotel manager, who said that the hotel would burn in flames before he ever took another Cuban guest again, whatever his politics.

Prometheus bringing fire to man was the story contained in just one of the many murals that were to be found on the ceiling and walls of the New York Public Library. Built of marble in the beaux arts style, and around two inner courts with an immense reading room occupying a half-acre of floor space, the library opened from Tuesday to Saturday, and from ten or eleven o'clock until six or seven thirty. Thomas Jefferson's own handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence was among the treasures that could be seen in the library, although Nimmo thought it unlikely that Jefferson's homicidal namesake would be influenced to go there by something as cute as that. Colt Maurensig's asseveration that Jefferson went to the NYPL to research the backgrounds and probable praxis of his more important targets looked a much safer bet.

Nimmo himself had once been a frequent visitor to the library, especially in summers when a walk of twenty-seven blocks had seemed less of an effort than it did now. The FBI HQ on 3rd had a library, of sorts, but nothing to compare with the resources that were to be found in John Jacob Astor's building. Hoover, it was said, was impervious to all kinds of culture, and his favourite reading matter was Reader's Digest. But Nimmo appreciated libraries, and this one, with its atmosphere of scholarly calm in the huge, high-ceilinged reading room, above all others. He thought it just the place that a man like Tom Jefferson would use as his intellectual base of operations, since by now he had formed a better idea of the man's character. For as well as Rosselli and Sorges, Nimmo had spoken to Orlando Bosch, Irving Davidson, and Moe Dalitz. He had even spoken to another contract killer named Lucien Sarti with whom Tom Jefferson had performed a contract in Houston, the previous year.

In 1959, 1,094 people were murdered in Texas, twice as many as New York, which has seven million more people, with Houston narrowly outstripping Dallas as the state murder capital. Whichever way you look at it, Texas is not a state to have someone bear you a grudge, or even displeasure, as the much-spat-upon Mr and Mrs Lyndon B. Johnson could no doubt testify. Local gun law being what it is, and lenient Texan juries (unless, of course, you are coloured) being what they are, Texans are mostly inclined to shoot you themselves. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, runs the single entry in Webster's Familiar Texan Quotations. But on this particular occasion, Houston's second-largest oil shipper wanted Houston's largest oil shipper permanently out of the port and, as is the way in this rich state, was prepared to pay handsomely for it.

This fellow was so determined, he paid double to have not one, but two sharpshooters, to make absolutely sure,' Sarti, a Corsican-born killer, had explained to Nimmo and Licio Montini. Jefferson, he planned how we do it. To catch our target in a crossfire, I would be on top of the Rice Hotel, while Jefferson, he is on top of the Gulf Building. Pffft. It was simple. We shot the guy right on Main Street, as they say in the cowboy films. I got him in the throat, and Jefferson hit him in the back of the head. We were in Houston for only a couple of days. Less than thirty-six hours. I would not say I got to know him very well, except to say that he is an excellent shot. The best I have seen. And that he is a quiet man. He liked to read, always reading, and to play golf, he said. He liked to play boules, also. The American boules, you know? One other thing. He was a late bird. Not sleeping very much. You might almost say nocturnal, like a bat.'

There were twenty-eight bowling alleys in Manhattan, and most of them were open twenty-four hours a day. Nimmo could see no point in visiting them all, so what he did was to try and construct a little probability theorem he hoped that in time he could prove. It worked like this: Chez Joie, the topless joint on Maurensig's list, was at 3740 Broadway, and the Prelude was at 3219. Close to these spots were three bowling alleys: Pinewood Lanes, on the corner of West 125th Street; Harlem Lanes, which was a little further along 125th near Seventh; and Lenox Lanes, which was up on 146th. Detective work! A dark, inscrutable workmanship that reconciles discordant elements, and makes them cling together in one society Imagination! Insight! Amplitude of mind! Reason in her most exalted mood! Gut Feel! Hunch!

In the two weeks up to New Year, Nimmo got into an investigative routine he was certain would yield a result. Perseverance was an essential quality in a detective, as were obstinacy and fixity of purpose. They were the very same characteristics that helped him to ignore Christmas and, as a corollary of that joyful season, his complete and utter loneliness. Not that he saw it that way at all. He knew the difference between solitude and separation, and convinced himself that he was armed with solitude's self-sufficing power. He was like Moses gone up into the mountain, Christ sent by himself into the wilderness, or Luther fasting to draw nearer to his God.

Which was why he avoided calling those few old friends he still had in the city, and stayed away from his former favourite bars and restaurants: PJ. Bernstein's Delicatessen on 3rd near 71st, the Cafe Hindenburg on East 86th, and the Red Hackle on 2nd near 88th. He even stayed away from the Luxor Baths on West 46th, figuring that the more he denied himself, the more focused he would be on tracking down Tom Jefferson, and the sooner he could get back to his normal life. That was what he told himself. And that was what he came to believe. He forgot that he had taken the job from Sam Giancana, not just because of the money, but to give his normal life some meaning. Walking the streets at night, looking for someone who may or may not have been there, passing the time, talking to himself, or to the four walls of his hotel room, alone with his thoughts, exchanging a few words here and there with total strangers - this was his life, and it was no more normal than the Flying Dutchman's.

Every day he would drop into the library and wander around the main reading room and the periodicals room. Sometimes he would sit there and read a book, or a newspaper, or a magazine, but, as in an art gallery, he was always more interested in the people around him, their studious, bookish faces themselves a whole Frick of portraits by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Titian, Holbein, Rembrandt, and El Greco. But a crowd is not company, and at noon Nimmo would head out of the library to one or other of the two lunchtime addresses on Maurensig's list. This was no great hardship. Liborio on 8th Avenue, between 52nd and 53rd, was an excellent Spanish restaurant. Le Vouvray, on East 55th, was an equally good French restaurant, but with the added attraction of a shapely proprietor, Yvette, who was soon welcoming Nimmo as if he had been one of her long-standing customers. After lunch, Nimmo would head back to the hotel for a short nap.

Around five o'clock he would return to the library for an hour, or less. At six o'clock he would walk up to West 51st and La Barraca, drink a couple of very dry Martinis, and listen to a pretty good Flamenco guitarist they had playing there, a guy by the name of Arnaldo Sevilla. Sometimes, he even stayed for dinner, but never if he had been to Liborio that day. You could have too much of a good thing when it was paella or arroz con polio. On Liborio days, he would leave La Barraca and walk down to Basin Street East on 48th, and have dinner there. The food was Chinese and not so good, but the jazz was first rate, and he saw Johnnie Ray, George Shearing, and Quincy Jones, but never Tom Jefferson. Nimmo's thoughts on leaving the Basin Street East were always the same: if Jefferson really was a jazz fan, then how could he miss hearing the Prince of Wails do Cry'? Maybe Johnnie Ray was a faggot and a junkie, but he could still sing the pants off anyone but Sinatra. Or the nigger covering Ray Charles and Count Basie? The blind limey he'd never heard of, but he was good, too.

Around ten to ten thirty he would catch a cab up Broadway, and try the Prelude, or Chez Joie. Naturally he preferred Chez Joie because there was more to look at, such as the half-dressed waitresses, especially the one with the forty-four-inch bust who looked like a Vargas drawing. The place was run by one Joie Dee, a snub-nosed, gap-toothed, lascivious blonde beauty of indeterminate age, who wore only a little more than the girls who worked for her, and who much appreciated the way Nimmo handled his money in her club, which was none too carefully. Upstairs in the Chez Joie was a Gay Nineties bar, where the girls wore next to nothing at all, and were not too bothered where or on whom they sat. You could only get upstairs with Joie's blessing, which the free-spending Nimmo soon had, and with holy oil. There was no minimum cover charge, but Nimmo always bought champagne for Joie and the girls, and never looked too closely at his check. He hoped that one night Joie would like him well enough to take a look at the picture of Tom Jefferson he carried in his wallet.

Chez Joie closed around one thirty a.m. A few times he took one of the B-girls bowling, or, if she was hungry, to La Luna restaurant, on the corner of 140th and Broadway, where you could eat a beef dinner until five a.m., or on to the Prelude, which was open until four, and did a pretty good burger plate for a dollar twenty-five. A couple of nights before Christmas he even persuaded one of the girls, a big, tall, kraut-looking blonde named Lisa, to spend the night with him, but the night ended none too satisfactorily when he caught her taking a twenty from his coat pocket, which was on top of the twenty he had given her already. Any other time he might have slapped her in the mouth and kicked her fabulous ass out on the street, but it was the season of goodwill to all men, and women - even Nazi-faced B-girls who dipped your pocket. So he let it go with just a slap in the mouth.

Lenox Lanes on West 146th, near Lenox Avenue, never closed. There were thirty-four lanes, all wood, with a bar and a luncheonette. It was fifty-five cents a line, and fifty cents for shoe rental. The house balls were the latest thing, being plastic instead of rubber, and the pins, also plastic, flew, but not normally into each other, and Nimmo had lots of tens. Some nights the floor was a mess, but he usually played after a league, and he knew the guy that ran the place, Quinton Hindrew, was trying. Nimmo figured that Jefferson would almost certainly prefer Lenox Lanes to Harlem Lanes, where there were papers in the settee area, old league standing-sheets, sticky tables, and dirty toilets; or Pinewood Lanes, where the pins were old and did not have much left on them, so that he only ever had a few light hits that carried.

Nimmo was not much of a bowler, but his ex-wife, Hannah, had been a real anchor. When they had still been living together in the Bronx, on Aqueduct Avenue, close to where she worked as a midwife at University Heights Hospital, they used to take a bus across the Harlem River and go bowling at a bowl on Dyckman Street. Hannah could bowl a straight line like the ball was on rails. The Christmas Eve he went to the Dyckman Bowlway was also the night he went to see his old neighbourhood and his old apartment building - a sentimental journey that left him feeling hollower than a dugout canoe in a dried-up riverbed.

Nimmo never saw Tom Jefferson at any of the places he visited. A couple of times he went to the Kennedy family addresses on Park and Madison, and spoke to the guys from the Gambino family crew who were watching the front doors from parked cars, reminding them that Jack Kennedy was due to arrive in New York on 2 January, and to keep on their toes. He told them the closer they got to January, the more likely Jefferson was to show up, but some of them didn't look convinced that their obviously tedious assignment was anything other than a waste of time. With Nimmo sitting in the back of their grey Oldsmobile convertible, the two watching the Carlyle on Madison made no secret of their opinion that Jack Kennedy was a minghia, which is Sicilian for a prick.

And not just him,' explained the older of the two men, whose white head, wrinkled brow, and crooked jaw put Nimmo in mind of Moby Dick. His name was Antimo Gelli, and he spoke in a rasping, barking, pungent way that sounded as if at any moment his larynx might throw up a cloud of volcanic ash. Him, his smartass brother, his cock-sucking father, the whole fucking family. They're all a bunch of Irish pricks. Buttiga devilo, I don't care if someone does shoot that sonofabitch. Te jura anima futa. He's no friend to us. Momo's wrong if he thinks you can make deals with these fuckers. You mark my words. These assholes don't play by the same rules as the rest of us. Momo isn't from New York. He didn't have to work with Joe Kennedy. That guy has no fucking honour. You could ask Longy Zwillman, if he was still alive. Longy was one of Kennedy's bootlegging partners in the twenties, until someone ripped off a shipment. Kennedy always figured it was Longy. Only it was some other guy. Anyway, Longy committed suicide last year, because he was facing a subpoena from that Senate Rackets Committee the Kennedy boys were on. Grudge work for their old man. That's what I mean about no honour. Maronna mia, I'd kill them myself, cut their fucking throats like chickens, if I thought I could get away with it. You hear me, Nimmo?'

E calma, Dio cane,' the wiseguy's partner had said to him. And then, with an apologetic shrug, to Nimmo, I'm sorry. No disrespect to Momo, you know. But Timo's not in the best of moods, right now. Christmas always gets him this way.'

Nimmo walked away thinking Kennedy was a dead man if his life depended on the likes of Antimo Gelli. But at the same time there was something in what Gelli had said: if the Kennedys were going to use the mob to deliver votes, to raise money, to get Castro, whatever, they were going to have to play by the mob's rules. Only somehow he didn't see that happening.

Chapter 20

A Liberal Education

On Saturday, 17 December, Chub Farrell took the Red Line train to Boston's South Station, where he caught the nine a.m. express to New York. The journey lasts about four hours and, even in unreserved seats, it provides a comfortable view of the New England countryside which, in winter, is especially beautiful. Like most young men of his age, Chub had never been much interested in countryside and, after reading all about the Brooklyn air crash in the newspaper, was intending to make a start on Baudelaire.

Chub was a polite, courteous young man and he tried hard to respect the privacy of the woman who was seated next to him, a dark, auburn-haired beauty in her mid-thirties, who reminded him of Sophia Loren (August, Playboy) and was just about the most stunning woman he had ever seen. He tried not to look at her fabulous, sibilantly stockinged legs which she would keep crossing, nor to notice when she scratched at one of her large breasts. He tried hard to ignore her seductive perfume, and her beautifully manicured fingernails, and her perfect smile, which was surely just her being pleasant, because women of her age and beauty and obvious sophistication were not supposed to be attracted to young men like Chub Farrell. That kind of thing only ever happened in books and movies. But when she looked at him with her fantastic violet-coloured eyes and smiled her smile of smiles, he felt his young heart skip a beat, and his brain empty of all thoughts that were not fuelled by pure testosterone. To his delighted surprise the woman, whose name was Edith, seemed keen to talk, first about Baudelaire and then about anything at all, and by the time the express reached Mystic, Connecticut, which was about halfway to Grand Central Station, Chub thought he himself was probably halfway to paradise.

Edith told Chub she was Venezuelan, from Dutch CuraASSao, that she was the wife of an American oil executive, and that since he was away in the British North Sea, exploring for new oil deposits, this was to be her first Christmas in New York, alone. Edith approached her task with some pleasure. She enjoyed sex, a lot, especially with young men, and since no harm was likely to befall Chub - or Torbert, when the time came for her confederate, Anne, to become involved - she felt, like Alex, that she was doing Chub a favour, giving him the kind of education she thought would matter more than Economics and French.

Having finished her own schooling in Switzerland, French was just one of several languages that she spoke fluently, and, as the train journey progressed to its conclusion, she suggested that she might give Chub French conversation at her Riverside Drive apartment over the Christmas holidays. Chub, who had been expecting and dreading a quiet and thoroughly studious vacation with his parents, accepted with alacrity. He thought French conversation was really all that could and would happen - and, after all, French was his weakest subject - but, even as she extended her invitation, a small part of Chub started to enjoy a lubricious fantasy in which Edith would add some much-needed love lessons to their Christmas curriculum.

In this harmless fantasy, Chub was not disappointed. It took him only a few days to fall hopelessly in love with Edith. A small part of her knew she would break his heart, but since there were, she knew, worse things for a nineteen-year-old boy to suffer, she gave the matter little or no thought. A broken heart is its own education. The first time Edith went to bed with Chub, which was two or three days before Christmas, they had sex several times, after which the young man slept the smug, self-satisfied sleep that is the inevitable corollary of male virginity's loss. While Chub dozed contentedly, Edith borrowed Chub's keys, and gave them to Tom, who was waiting patiently, and without any apparent jealousy, in the next room for her to execute this part of their plan. Tom's lack of feeling was a disappointment to her for, in her own way, and despite knowing almost nothing about who and what he was, Edith was falling in love with him, although she knew he did not love her. But a display of some feeling would have been nice.

From Riverside Drive, Tom took the keys to All Over, a twenty-four-hour locksmith on Lexington, near 80th Street, and had three sets of copies made, returning the originals to Edith in time for her to replace the keys in Chub's pocket, before he left the apartment at around eleven thirty, in time to be home before midnight, as his parents had dictated.

The following day, Goldman, Tom, and Edith met in the Riverside Drive apartment where they admired the short-wave radio Tom had bought to listen in to Secret Service radio traffic when they were in Boston. After that, Goldman flew to Mexico City, to collect some final orders from his KGB controllers before returning to Miami, on Christmas Eve, having supposedly recovered from the bout of cholera that had apparently kept him south of the border.

Edith and Tom spent Christmas Day together, before he too left New York for Cambridge. They exchanged small gifts, enjoyed a delicious Christmas lunch that Edith cooked, went for a walk by the river, watched TV, and then made love. Neither of them mentioned John Kennedy, although, like that nagging Bobby Vee song about a rubber ball, he was always on their minds.

Chapter 21

Blowback

The CIA had its offices in some twenty-five buildings all over Washington, with most of the departments housed in a sprawl of wartime-built wooden structures on the Foggy Bottom bank of the Potomac, near the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The agency headquarters was the old OSS complex at 2430 E Street, which comprises four brick buildings with Watt Ionic columns, located between the State Department and a roller-skating rink. A little further along E Street was an abandoned gasworks and a brewery, that gave the already damp air a strong malt flavour and a smell like a bad hangover. It would be another ten months before the first CIA employees would move into the new CIA campus' across the Potomac, at Langley - a project that was CIA director Allen Dulles's all-consuming interest.

On a cold, blustery morning a couple of days before Christmas, Colonel Sheffield Edwards and Jim O'Connell left the old and rundown naval barracks on Ohio Avenue known as Quarters Eye, where the JMARC war room' was headquartered, and walked across the Polo Grounds towards the Reflecting Pool. A stiff westerly breeze, off the tidal basin to their right, bent the cherry trees and Edwards nearly lost his hat. Outside the dingy hut that was simply known as K' they collected a dark-blue 1956 Pontiac Start Chief four-door sedan and headed north on to 23rd Street, across Virginia Avenue and Washington Circle. On L Street they made a right, and parked close to Duke Zeibert's Restaurant where, after the meeting in the DD/P, they planned to have lunch.

Richard Bissell's office was on the corner of the building, overlooking L Street, an unadorned, slightly shabby room, with felt-covered pinboard walls, peeling linoleum, a threadbare Aubusson rug, and, around a refectory-style table, a junk-shop of wobbly chairs. On one wall was a large framed photograph of a yacht - a fifty-seven-foot yawl named The Sea Witch - which was Bissell's pride and joy, while on an overstuffed set of bookshelves were piles of paper weighted down with an assortment of auto parts.

The owner of the office and his deputy were what was known as P Source' - P' meaning someone who had been a professor, or who had attended an Ivy League university. Richard Bissell was both. A Yale man, he had spent the war running the Shipping Adjustment Board, planning the comings and goings of American merchant shipping. After that, he had taught for a while at MIT, before being recruited by Averell Harriman to help set up and run the Marshall Plan in 1947. It was 1953 before Bissell finally joined the CIA, since when his rise had been spectacular. A technocrat, rather than a professional spy, Bissell had developed the U-2 programme before being appointed to the DD/P to succeed Frank Wisner as head of the CIA's clandestine service. Tall, about fifty years old, wearing a double-breasted English worsted suit, a Yale tie, large heavy-framed glasses that did not quite seem to fit over his ears, and with a large truffle of a nose, Bissell looked and sounded like a slimmed-down version of Sydney Greenstreet.

Tracy Barnes had gone to the same school - Groton - and university as his boss. They were the same age, but Barnes, noticeably more athletic, was the professional spy. During the war he had joined the OSS and been parachuted into enemy-occupied France, on a mission for which he had won a Silver Star. After practising law, the Korean War saw him back in the service and, following an unsatisfactory time spent with the Psychological Strategy Board, he found himself working for his old school-friend as ADD/PA. A handsome, noble-looking man, with Alpine cheekbones, an eagle nose, and wearing amber-framed spectacles and a Yale bow-tie, Barnes looked like the cleverest Indian on the reservation.

Bissell and Barnes were already seated side by side at the table when Bissell's secretary, Doris, ushered Edwards and O'Connell -about whom it was impossible to say more than that they looked like they had been pressed from the same military mould, like a rifle part, a helmet, or a mess-tin - through the door of the office. Edwards and O'Connell were closely followed by two younger men.

Sheff, Jim, sit down,' said Bissell, indicating a choice of seats. You remember Jim Flannery and John Bross, of course. From the last time?'

Edwards and O'Connell nodded quietly. Flannery, a combat veteran from World War Two, was Special Aide to Bissell, but bore more of a resemblance to Edwards. Bross, on the other hand, who was Bissell's old classmate from Groton and now the DD/P's Planning Officer, was very definitely P Source'. Barnes's own secretary, Alice, brought up the rear with a tray of coffee and, after a short exchange of lights for cigarettes, and Georgetown gossip, the meeting commenced in earnest.

Handling a small inhaler which from time to time he would thrust into his nostrils like a tiny rocket, to clear his problematic sinuses, Bissell's patrician, Connecticut tones brought the meeting to order.

Sheff?' he said. For the benefit of John and Jim, why don't you take us through the chain of causation that has caused us to be brought here on this cold and windy morning.'

Edwards nodded, and cleared his throat.

Yes sir, I will. Back in late October, the thirty-first, to be precise, in the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, a maid walks into a hotel suite and finds the room filled with a sophisticated array of sound equipment -tape-recorders, amplifiers, tuners, speakers, and boxes of Soundcraft tape. She starts to dust the furniture, and the tape-recorder, and, inadvertently, switches on the machine's play button. At least that was what she said. Anyway, she hears the sound of a man and a woman talking about how much they love each other. It seems like a very intimate conversation, except for the very obvious fact that it has been recorded by the gentleman whose suite she is cleaning, and whose name, according to the housekeeper's guest list, is Mr Arthur Balletti. The man on the tape's name is Dan. The woman is called Phyllis. Her suspicions aroused, the maid calls hotel security who, suspecting that someone might be trying to defraud the hotel casino in some sophisticated, highly technical way, call Sheriff Lamb's office, and Balletti, a private investigator from Miami, Florida, is subsequently arrested. The charges were a little vague, since wiring another man's room and telephone are not in violation of Nevada state law. But when that man is Dan Rowan, and the woman is Phyllis McGuire, then you can bet your sweet bippy that Sheriff Lamb can be forgiven for arresting Balletti first, and then looking around for some kind of crime with which to charge him.'

Dan Rowan was half of the popular Las Vegas comedy duo Rowan & Martin, and Phyllis McGuire was one third of the even more popular close-harmony trio The McGuire Sisters. In 1952 they successfully auditioned for television's Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts and a series of hit records soon followed. Sincerely', written by Harvey Fuqua and Alan Freed, was their first million seller, in 1955. That stayed at number one for ten weeks. But the song that everyone remembers them for was, of course, Sugartime', which had been a big, big hit for the McGuires in 1958.

Balletti calls Jimmy Cantillon, a Los Angeles attorney, who telephones Johnny Rosselli, who arranges for a local gambler, one T.W. Richardson, to turn up at the sheriff's office and post the thousand-dollar bail. By now, the sheriff has decided to use Balletti's place of origin and the 1934 Federal Communications Act as sufficient reason to dump the whole matter in the lap of the FBI. And that, more or less, is the official version of the Dan Rowan wiretapping affair. The truth is somewhat different.

Back in 1958, the girls were appearing on The Phil Silvers Show, Red Skelton's Show, and topping the bill at Las Vegas, which was where Phyllis found herself being introduced by Frank Sinatra to Sam Giancana. To quote a couple of McGuire hits, It May Sound Silly but Sam Giancana found his hard old heart going Ding Dong whenever he thought of Phyllis. And to do it a third and last time, that Lonesome Polecat began to lavish her with expensive gifts: jewellery, furs, cars, a ranch in Vegas, an apartment in Manhattan, a condo in Beverly Hills, extensive stock and bond investments, even picking up the tab for her gambling debts.

Sam was almost happy. Except for one thing. He was haunted by the suspicion that Phyllis was continuing to see her former lover, Dan Rowan, to whom she remained, in fact, secretly engaged. So Sam called our old friend Bob Maheu, who promised to fix things in Las Vegas, so that Sam Giancana would know for sure if Phyllis and Rowan were still together. He agreed to install some electronic eavesdropping equipment in Dan Rowan's room and to bring Sam the tapes.

Now this particular pair of star-crossed lovers were both playing the Riviera Hotel in Vegas, which is owned by the Chicago outfit. Nothing happened at the Riviera without the okay from Chicago. But fear of Chicago was just one of the reasons that stopped Maheu from handling the wiretap on Dan Rowan's hotel room himself. Maheu spoke to an ex-FBI man, Edward Dubois, who ran a private detective agency, not in Vegas, which would have made more sense, but in Miami. And for a fee of five thousand dollars, Dubois took the job and dispatched Balletti to Vegas to handle it. Dubois and Balletti were old hands at this kind of wire-work, and they frequently employed Bernie Spindel, who's been something of a pioneer in the field of electronic eavesdropping. During the war Spindel did a lot of work for the OSS. After the war he did a lot of work for Jimmy Hoffa, advising him on how to defend himself against eavesdroppers like the FBI and Bobby Kennedy. Our information was that at first it was just Bobby he was spying on. But then they started to set up fuck recordings involving Jack Kennedy, too.

Of course, by now, Bob Maheu was also involved with our plot to kill Castro.'

The notion of using the mob as a cutout to kill the Cuban Prime Minister had been Bissell's idea. He and his Assistant Deputy Director of Plans for Action, Tracy Barnes, had brought in Colonel Sheffield Edwards of the CIA's Office of Security to set up the contract. Edwards had contacted his Operations Chief, Jim O'Connell, an ex-FBI counter-intelligence expert, who had worked with Maheu. O'Connell had brought Maheu on board to develop the liaison between Rosselli and Colonel Edwards. These men had supported Nixon for the presidency, perceiving Kennedy as being too weak ever to get tough with Cuba. Moreover, plans to invade the island, codenamed JMARC, had been drawn up well in advance of the election, and Dulles and Bissell were of the opinion that the then Vice-president Nixon was best qualified to give the plan the presidential go-ahead after preparations were completed. But when Kennedy looked like winning the election, members of the JMARC group began to look for some insurance.

After Kennedy got the better of Nixon in the first of the television debates,' continued Edwards, the necessity for ensuring JMARC continuity started to look much more urgent. We saw Giancana's asking Maheu's help in establishing the loyalty of his girlfriend as an opportunity, not only to put pressure on Giancana finally to sanction Castro's assassination, but also to use the mob as a cutout in putting pressure on Kennedy himself.

On October thirty-first, it was not Riviera Hotel security that called the sheriff's office, but one of our people. And it was also one of ours who suggested to Sheriff Lamb that he use Balletti's Miami origins and the Federal Communications Act's ban against wiretapping to bring in the FBI, who were themselves already trying, illegally, to bug Giancana in Chicago. The squeeze was almost invisible. We told Giancana we could make anything disappear in the name of national security, even the FBI. It was the same thing we told Bernie Spindel. Help us to get a hand on some of those tapes you have made for your friends Hoffa and Giancana, and we will keep you out of this mess with Dan Rowan you've gotten yourself into. Spindel agreed, and ten days after the Halloween bust, he handed Security Office agents copies of some of the more sensational recordings he had made of Kennedy and a whole series of women.'

The Security Office existed within the CIA's Directorate of Administration which was the largest department, and when most people thought of the CIA - opposing other spy agencies, tapping telephones, organising security clearances for government personnel, handling defectors, and carrying out polygraphic tests - they were usually thinking of the Security Office.

It was two or three weeks before anyone in the Security Office got around to organising transcripts of the honeymooners' tapes,' explained Edwards. And it was another fortnight before we managed to read all the transcripts. Only then did we realise that we had an extra, Ralph-sized problem. I now draw your attention to the transcripts before you. To Kennedy's fuck with one girl in particular. Most girls just fucked the guy. But this little lady wanted to talk. More important, she had questions she wanted answered.'

Bissell took another loud snort from his inhaler and then used the kind of hyperbole that was typical of him.

All presidents are whores,' he declared. They change their policies like panties and sell themselves to whoever will vote for them. The purpose of this meeting, however, is not to determine how much whoring Jack Kennedy has done to get elected, but exactly who he has been whoring with, in his own free time, so to speak. If I may bowdlerise Dorothy Parker, you can lead a whore to the skipper, but she mustn't be a pink. So the question before us is just how much of a pinko the lady is, Colonel Edwards having drawn our attention to the fact that one of the President's ladies, with whom he has been recorded in flagrante delicto, evinces a much greater interest in the President-elect's foreign policy than in his very remarkable sexual prowess. In particular, Jack Kennedy's future policy vis A vis Fidel Castro and Cuba.

Now, if I may generalise for a moment, gentlemen, most people's post-coital small-talk is just a little more routine than that which lies before us. Call me old-fashioned, but I would not expect a B-girl I had just picked up in a Nevada hotel-casino, and who had just pleasured me orally, to sound like Walter Cronkite, viz. page eleven, line six, Do you think it likely that there will be a US invasion of Cuba within the next twelve months?; and page fifteen, line twelve, Why don't you just take Castro out? You know, have him assassinated?; and page sixteen, line nineteen, If the Russians marched into West Berlin, would you really press the button? Could you stand to have that on your conscience? '

Bissell threw the transcript down on the table in front of him and exclaimed, And if all that wasn't bad enough, the dumb sonofabitch goes ahead and answers her, too. Sweet Jesus, if only his suspicions were aroused as easily as his goddamned libido.' Bissell snorted loudly. Well, Sheff? What's the verdict? Who the hell is she, and is she a goddamned spy?'

Edwards answered Bissell quickly. There were some who thought Bissell a cold-blooded person, but Edwards was not one of them. He knew the DD/P to be a warm and courteous person, whose cool demeanour concealed a personal tragedy: one of Bissell's children, Will, was retarded and had been recently institutionalised. Edwards thought that must have been especially hard for someone as intellectually bright as Richard Bissell. If the DD/P did have some faults they were his impatience, and a tendency to high-handedness. Well, sir, her name is Mary Jefferson. Correction, was. Mary Jefferson was found dead just a few days after the election, and although the police were not initially inclined to treat her death as suspicious, it now seems she may actually have been murdered. Until her death, Mary Jefferson was a dedicated Democratic Party campaign worker in Miami, where she lived with her husband, Tom Jefferson. She was half-Chinese, half-coloured, from Jamaica, and, until nineteen fifty-three, she held a British passport. Her maiden name was Swithenbank, and she and Tom Jefferson met in Japan, after his release from a Korean POW camp. She had been working as a hostess in a Tokyo night-club, but prior to that she was doing the same in Hong Kong, and it's possible she was indeed a prostitute. I've checked with the British in Jamaica and Hong Kong, and it would seem that prior to her going to Hong Kong, Mary Swithenbank was quite active politically. She was a member of the Jamaican Labour Party and the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union, but there's no evidence that she was ever a communist. The British say they don't know anything about what she was doing while she was in Hong Kong, but our own station chief, John Horton, says that for a while she was the girlfriend of a guy by the name of Hugh Wilberforce, who worked as a secretary to the British Governor of Hong Kong. In fifty-two Wilberforce suddenly resigned from the foreign service, without any explanation. At least none that was made public, and Horton says that he often suspected that the British may have found something in Mary Swithenbank's background which led them to think that Wilberforce had been compromised. Anyway, it was after this that Mary Swithenbank left Hong Kong altogether and went to Tokyo.'

I'm beginning to smell a rat,' observed Barnes.

The smell gets worse, I'm afraid,' said Edwards. During the war, Tom Jefferson was a highly decorated US Marine sniper. After the war he did the odd job for the Pickle Factory.'

Sweet Jesus,' muttered Bissell. You mean he's one of ours?'

Not exactly. More of a freelance. In nineteen forty-seven he handled a wet job for General Gehlen's Org in Austria, at our recommendation. In forty-eight he did a job for us in Greece. In forty-nine he did another job for us as part of Operation BGFIEND in Albania. Then there was the Korean War, of course. He saw some pretty distinguished service before being captured. After Korea, we continued to use him. The French had him hit someone in Vietnam, I believe. Then, in nineteen fifty-four he carried out an assassination for us in Uruguay. I'm not exactly sure who that was. Some local commie. But in fifty-seven he assassinated Carlos Armas, the President of Guatemala. By then he was also doing work for the FBI's COINTELPRO programme. But mostly, he was working for the mob. There were a couple of hits in Cuba-'

Wait a minute, Sheff,' said Bissell, whose agile mind had already leapfrogged over the back of Edwards's exposition. You're not going to tell me that this Jefferson's the guy that Giancana and Rosselli put up to do the contract on Castro?'

I'm afraid he is, sir.'

Sweet Jesus, Sheff.'

Yes sir,' said Edwards, who had decided not to mention that his own Operations Chief, Jim O'Connell, had met and vetted Tom Jefferson at the Fontainebleu Hotel in Miami, with Maheu and Rosselli. At this particularly delicate stage of his explanation, that one detail seemed a little more than Bissell needed to know.

And this is the guy who's now quit the contract and disappeared, right Sheff?' asked Jim Flannery.

That's the way it looks,' Edwards admitted uncomfortably.

Do you think Tom Jefferson murdered his wife?' asked Bissell.

The Miami police don't seem to think she was murdered,' said Edwards. And that's the way the coroner judged it. He returned a verdict of accidental death. But our friends in TSS will no doubt tell us that there are ways of doing it that won't leave a trace. Jefferson's a professional. My guess is that it is certainly possible he was responsible, sir. But I don't know how. And Rosselli and friends aren't saying. In fact they're not saying anything at all. I think they're a little embarrassed at this turn of events. Rightly concerned about how this will look in our eyes. Just as importantly, I think they're worried how it makes them look in the eyes of their underworld colleagues. I mean, this guy took a hundred thousand dollars from them. That was the kill fee. A part of it, anyway.'

Let's say he did murder her,' suggested Bissell. Did he murder her because he heard the tape, and found out that another guy was screwing her? That other guy just happening to be Kennedy. Or, did he murder her because he heard that tape and maybe thought she was a Russian agent, the same as we did?'

Her background seems to hint as much,' said Bross. There can't be many women in trade unions who decide to become hookers. And then the British thing.'

More likely it was a combination of both those reasons,' said Barnes, who thought he knew women. He was jealous, sure, only I don't think that would be enough of a reason on its own. But if he thought she was a spy, as well.' He shrugged.

There is another possibility, sir,' said Edwards. Suppose Jefferson is a Russian agent himself. Maybe while he was in that Korean POW camp the commies got to work on the guy. And sheep-dipped him.'

Yeah, like in that book,' said Bross. The Manchurian Candidate.'

That's a damned good book,' said Bissell.

Made one of ours into one of theirs,' continued Edwards. He wouldn't be the first. Six months they had him. I checked with the one hundred and eleventh MIG in Miami. Apparently Jefferson was one of the very first prisoners to be released. Within just a few weeks of that he married Mary Swithenbank, and brought her back here to the United States. Maybe she was his controller. Maybe she was supposed to be a sleeper. To get herself deep into the political machine.'

You sure couldn't get deeper than what she was doing with the President of the United States,' remarked Barnes.

While she sleeps with the odd Democratic Party senator, picking up information, here and there,' said Edwards, Tom Jefferson resumes his old trade. He works for us, and for the FBI's anti-communist programme. That must have brought him some good intelligence. Could be that some of the people he killed for us and for the feds were actually people the Russians wanted out of the way themselves.'

I'll buy that,' said Bissell. Wasn't Carlos Armas, the guy we put in power in Guatemala, to replace the commie guy, Jacobo Arbenz?'

Yes sir,' explained O'Connell. The trouble was that Armas was a man of considerable probity. He wanted to get rid of the casinos in Guatemala, and place our man, Ted Lewin, in jail. So we agreed to let the mob kill Armas, and put up someone else to replace him. Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes.'

If I may continue sir,' said Edwards. Suppose that when the communists took over Cuba and we started planning Operation Pluto, Tom Jefferson's masters decide to use him as another dangle, to penetrate American-backed opposition to Castro. He wouldn't be the first one of those we've had, either. Now suppose that he hears the tape-'

But why would Rosselli be dumb enough to let him hear it?' demanded Bissell.

Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe Rosselli didn't actually think that it was Tom Jefferson's wife who was on the tape, but Marilyn Monroe. Could be that Rosselli had been bragging about how he had something that was going to give the mob a stranglehold on the White House. And the tapes got switched. Or the Marilyn tape wasn't available. It might be that Tom Jefferson heard that tape and realised that, sooner or later, someone in the Pickle Factory might get to hear that tape, and wonder why Mary Jefferson liked to talk politics instead of pussy. Imagine it. He'd know right away that she had been compromised. And that she had to be silenced before we caught up with her and started asking questions.'

Why not just take the tape?' asked Barnes.

Because he knew it was just a copy. Same as ours.'

There was a longish silence.

Sheff? You've got a whole gutful of supposition there,' said Bissell. I'm not saying I don't think there's anything to it. But have you got any evidence to support what you've been talking about?'

Well sir, I don't have any U-2 overflight reconnaissance photographs from seventy thousand feet above Miami, if that's what you mean,' he said pointedly.

TouchE,' chuckled Bissell. But?'

But I do believe I have some circumstantial evidence to support what I've been talking about.'

Sheffield Edwards paused to light a cigarette and savour the moment. It made a very pleasant change for the P Source to be on the back foot like this, and hanging on to his every word. He knew the kind of jokes they made about the Security Office at their Alibi Club cocktail parties - the how-no-one-in-the-Security-Office-could-read-a-report-without-moving-their-lips kind. Let them think that if they wanted, but so far he had not needed to read anything to get their attention. Maybe it was mostly conjecture, but that was the cornerstone of good intelligence.

Come on, Sheff,' Bissell said impatiently. What I want is facts.' He was quoting Charles Dickens now, not that he thought anyone would notice. Teach these boys nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.'

Very well sir. It's like this. Just a few days after collecting the AMTHUG contract from Giancana, Jefferson met several members of a WH/4 group in Miami. Cuban exiles who were part of the big Operation Pluto picture. One of them, a guy by the name of HA1/4ber Lanz, was murdered the very same day. He was found strangled with a length of wire, in a Miami Beach movie theatre. Now Lanz had worked for G2, until the Cubans worked out that he was on our side, and tried to arrest him. Lanz barely escaped with his life. My guess is that Jefferson recognised him and killed Lanz before he could remember Jefferson and inform the other members of the group. Since then, two other members of the group have been arrested in Cuba. No one knows who betrayed them to G2. One of them is dead, and the other, an American woman, Genevieve Suarez, was sentenced to ten years in prison just a few days ago. How am I doing?'

Bissell nodded. I think you're right, Sheff,' he acknowledged. We need to speak to this Tom Jefferson.'

The mob has someone co-ordinating their efforts to find him,' said Edwards. An ex-FBI Miami policeman named James Nimmo. I think they have high expectations of him.'

And if he finds Jefferson? What are his orders?'

The mob doesn't like to be crossed, sir,' said O'Connell. They'll kill him for sure.'

That would be a pity,' said Barnes. I'm sure Jefferson could tell us a lot.'

Any ideas, Sheff?'

Edwards looked meaningfully at O'Connell. He said, Big Jim?'

O'Connell shifted forward uncomfortably on his creaking chair. Bissell's departmental budget was rumoured to be in the region of a hundred million dollars. It seemed almost absurd that a few hundred dollars of it was not being spent on some new office furniture.

As you probably know, sir,' he said, the Office of Security has a lot of guys who used to work for Hoover.'

Or were fired by him,' snorted Barnes.

O'Connell smiled thinly. I was FBI myself for a quite a while. It so happens that the Miami COINTELPRO is run by an old friend of mine. A SAC by the name of Alex Goldman. Goldman has used Jefferson to do some wet work in the past. Now I'm more or less certain that neither the mob, nor this Jimmy Nimmo guy they've got trying to find Jefferson, know about COINTELPRO, or Goldman. So, I was thinking, maybe I could have a word with Goldman. See if he has any better idea than Nimmo about where we might catch up with Jefferson. Maybe even go after him for us himself. That would help to keep us at arm's length, and make any search for him that we initiate more or less legitimate.'

Have the feds do our dirty work for us?' Bissell nodded. It would certainly avoid any more blowback than we already have here now. I like the sound of that, Jim.'

Of course, I'll have to offer him something in return.'

A sedulous John Bross said to Bissell, Sir, we have some active lines of credit with the Teamsters' bank in Miami. The Miami National. We could use one of those to compensate him.'

Goldman operates right on the edge of his remit, sir. And he likes to be creative with his operations. Innovative. I was thinking more along the lines of having the Technical Services Staff give him something for Christmas, sir.'

A toy?' Bissell nodded. Good idea, Jim. But let him ask for it. Don't suggest anything. Maybe there's something electronic he wants from Santa Claus. If he's heard of it, then the chances are it's not the family silver.'

O'Connell nodded, and then leaned back in his chair, trying to second-guess what someone as well informed as Alex Goldman would ask for. He thought of some of the things that TSS came up with. Eavesdropping devices, poisoned cigars, handkerchiefs treated with deadly bacteria like the one they had sent to Colonel Mahdawi of Iraq, but which got lost in the mail. Now that using a gunman to kill Castro was more or less defunct, the chances are that it would be down to TSS to come up with a way of assassinating AMTHUG.

Barnes looked at his watch. Christmas,' he muttered. I haven't bought one damn thing.'

Me, I'm tired of it already,' said Bross.

You know it's finally Christmas when you see the Easter eggs in the stores,' laughed Barnes.

Bissell gave a loud snort, like the sound of a heavy table leg being dragged across a wooden floor. All storekeepers,' he declared sourly, should be hanged.'

A couple of days after Christmas, Jim O'Connell was collected from Miami Airport by Ted Shackley, the Miami station chief who was running the local JMARC programme. Bissell had telephoned Shackley from Washington and told him to put O'Connell in touch with Alex Goldman.

That's easy enough,' said Shackley, driving O'Connell to the FBI building on Biscayne Boulevard. Normally Goldman's a little more difficult to track down, but I believe he's been ill.'

You sound like you know him,' observed O'Connell.

Shackley shrugged. Enough to know that Goldman's behind most of the red baiting and subterfuge that goes on in this town. I think he must have invented the concept of the agent provocateur. That guy would use his own grandmother to screw the communists. If I can give you some advice? Watch your step with him. Guy's a real slim customer, you know? Anyway, he is expecting you. Be sure to let me know if there's anything else I can do for you while you're in Miami. I wouldn't want the Barons to think that we didn't know how to run things down here.'

The FBI building was just north of the Julia Turtle Causeway, and Goldman's office was on the fourth floor, overlooking a Biscayne Bay that was as blue as the blue on the CIA roundel. It was an otherwise unremarkable room with a desk that was handsomely set up for smoking: a leather pipe rack with a series of Kaywoodie matched-grain pipes lay between a miniature ship's binnacle made of heavy brass, which held cigarettes, and a removable lighter, and a crystal ashtray that was as big as a car hubcap. There were two books on the otherwise empty shelves - The Intellectuals by George B. de Huszar, and Harry and Bonara Overstreet's What We Must Know about Communism - and an eight-hundred-dollar Bolex Rex cine camera that O'Connell, a keen amateur movie-maker, greatly coveted. The Bolex had everything: auto-threading, tri-turret lens system with corresponding telescopic viewfinders, a built-in exposure meter can lap dissolve, and, best of all, a fantastic Pan Cinor zoom lens.

Goldman was thinner than O'Connell remembered, which also made him seem taller. And his normally robust New Orleans voice, which always made him sound like Burl Ives playing Big Daddy, had been reduced almost to a near whisper, as if it had been boiled off in a saucepan. He was recovering from a heavy cold, only the story he had given out at the FBI, in order to account for his several absences from the office, was rather less prosaic.

I've had cholera,' he explained, in response to O'Connell's polite enquiry after his health, and after they had exhausted the compliments of the season. Just a mild dose, but a mild dose is bad enough. Picked it up when I was down in Mexico City. The whole of Central America's lousy with it. Taken me over a month to recover. You ever had cholera, Big Jim?'

O'Connell recalled a dose of turista he had had in Guatemala which had seemed bad enough to warrant being called something more serious than plain diarrhoea, and said, I don't think so.'

Oh, you'd know if you had. It's the stomach cramps that really fuck with you. And the stink of yourself. Until you have cholera you never know what bad company you can be.'

So, how are you now?'

Not too bad, I guess. So what can I do for the CIA?'

Tom and Mary Jefferson. I was wondering if you could tell us anything about them.'

She's dead, I can tell you that right away.'

That much we know. We would very much like to speak to him, now. As a matter of some urgency.'

We're off the record here, right?'

Record?' O'Connell smirked. What the hell's that? What with Eisenhower's committee to keep the CIA under policy control, we're not much interested in paperwork at the Security Office.' O'Connell glanced over the empty bookshelves, and smiled wryly. I can see you have the same free-thinking attitude as we do.'

Goldman lit his pipe and said, Keep it all in your head, huh? Damn right. It's the only really secure place I know.' He puffed a nimbus cloud of smoke across the office and, with pipe clenched between his discoloured teeth, like Popeye, leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a moment. Then he said, Back in fifty-four, the FBI in Miami received an anonymous letter, most probably from one of Jefferson's neighbours, to the effect that Mrs Jefferson was half-Chinese, and might therefore be communist. I'm pretty sure this was around January of that year, and it was certainly before Joe McCarthy went and let Ed Murrow make an idiot of him on television. I guess maybe he was an idiot, but that's another story. It wasn't exactly the height of the red scare, but the witch hunt was still on, and there were some prominent people who had to be burned. I think it was another few months before Oppenheimer got stripped of his security clearance.

The letter received here was fairly standard Salem stuff. You know the kind of thing: Mary Jefferson was an atheist, she was a passionate Democrat, she was clever, she thought housing discrimination against coloureds ought to be outlawed, she thought there ought to be state-regulated house insurance, and she wore a lot of red. I guess maybe there'd been some coffee morning at which Mary Jefferson spoke her mind, and wore a red scarf. Seems strange, but even a few years ago, some of those things were enough to arouse the suspicions of ordinary citizens. And this office received hundreds of letters like the one about Mary Jefferson. I think Hoover probably wrote a lot of them himself.

At that time, it was my job to check out this kind of thing. So I went around to where the Jeffersons lived and met them both. She was a beautiful, clever woman, maybe a little liberal, but no more of a communist than Harry Truman, or Dean Acheson, or you, or me. I remember now. A couple of days after I was there visiting with them, we got another letter from the same source, this time saying that a suspicious character wearing a black hat had been at the Jefferson's house. The letter gave the licence plate of this Rooskie spy character's car, which turned out to be my own. A lot of people thought that was very funny, I can tell you.