American Savior (40 page)

“Yeah?”

“I’ve always wondered, you know. I mean, the story we did about Dukey Junior falling and everything. I mean, that was a long way to fall.” He was watching me intently. I kept on. “I’m glad he’s all right, of course. Great kid. But I’ve always wondered, was that really the way it played out, with Jesus coming by and touching him, and so on?”

Dukey stared at me, the celebratory smile fading from his face. Five seconds. Ten seconds. Arms held out away from his body, short rust-colored hair standing up straight, eyebrows pinched down, ears and nose red from the cold, whiff of marijuana about him. “Wow,” he said at last, and it was as if he had hit me in the jaw. “After everything you seen, man, everything we done … you ask a question like that?”

“I didn’t mean anything by it. Just curious, you know, it’s hard to—”

“What good does it do to be smart, man, if you have to ask a question like that?”

“No good,” I said, just to get away from him then, to get away from myself. “I’d be better off being stupid.”

“Right.”

I remember turning away and walking back around the corner of the hotel, in the dark, trying not to worry about what I had done. An innocent question, I told myself. The skepticism of a born journalist. But such a surge of shame was filling me then that it was all I could do not to run the rest of the way to the front door and sprint up the eleven flights of steps. I wanted to look into Jesus’s face at that moment. I wanted to see something better than me.

I was at the back of the hotel by then, out of sight of Dukey and the press corps. My cell phone rang. I took it out of my pocket, saw Zelda’s name on the caller ID, and flipped it open. “Hi, beautiful,” I said into the phone.

“He’s on his way down,” she said. “I was calling to see if you’re ready.”

The fact is, when Zelda spoke those words, I felt a presence behind me. I whirled around, thinking it might be a Secret Service agent, or Dukey come to give me a hard time, or a crazy person trying to sneak into the hotel, but no one was there in the darkness.

“And to say I love you,” Zelda added.

“See you in a second. Love you, too.”

As soon as I closed the phone I heard sirens—not exactly a startling and unusual sound in the West Zenith of those days, but it cut into me like a blade between the ribs, and I started to run like a crazy man. I sprinted down the cold grass strip that separated the wall of the hotel from the parking lot, turned the corner, and saw, at the front of the building, a crowd of supporters there, the press, and others who had sneaked past the barricades. I felt a momentary wash of relief … and then the first ambulance and the first police car came screeching up in the circular drive, and then it was as if a signal had been given to the crowd, some word had been spoken that raced from body to body. I felt sudden, aimless panic. It wasn’t like the time in Seattle when Alton Smith had taken his two shots. Then there had been something real, the sounds, the bullets, the blood. This was only news, only words, but what monumental words they were. “Jesus has been shot,” people were saying. “He’s been shot.”

I pushed hard through the crowd, toward the door, and then I was inside the lobby, and the sirens were piling one on top of the other outside, and people were shoving and yelling and wild rumors were flying around beneath the chandelier. There was a period of pure confusion, ambulance attendants and police trying to push through to the elevator. I remember some of the police hurrying toward the stairwell, and I remember that I felt paralyzed, as if in a nightmare, unable to get through the crowd, and then, when I turned and tried for the stairs, unable to move at all. After what seemed like many minutes, the door of one elevator opened. Four men hurried out and tried to run through the crowded lobby. They were moving awkwardly, and I realized they were holding a stretcher between them. One of the men was Richard Diamond. I called to him, but of course he could not hear me. Over the tops of the heads in front of me, I could see the expression on his face; it was not something you would ever want to see on the face of a human being, a contorted combination of agony and failed duty; he knew he was holding history in his hands, and history was bleeding to death. He was screaming for people to move out of the way, but those in front of me were doing the opposite: pushing toward the stretcher, yelling, “It’s Jesus! It’s Jesus!”

I could not get any closer, I saw the stretcher go out the door, I caught a glimpse of dark hair. The bodies were pressed so tight around me that I could not get my hand into my pocket to take out my phone. I was still trying as hard as I could to move past the people in front of me. With my left hand, I was raising my photo ID above my head in the direction of the policemen, who were forming a line in front of us and trying to herd us to one side of the lobby. No one paid the slightest attention to it. The same elevator opened again. Another stretcher. Four more men carrying it, a woman running with them. This time I was close enough to recognize the face of the person on the stretcher—my father. There was a wide patch of blood on his shirt, near his right shoulder, and the woman, an EMT maybe, was pressing a towel or a balled-up shirt against it. I pushed as if I were trying to push down the whole building, and took four steps forward and then popped through the last person between me and the policeman. I waved my ID frantically and made it past the policeman to the side of the stretcher.

“Pa!”

He turned his head an inch. His eyes were open, the muscles around them squeezed tight in pain.

“Pa!”

“Shot him,” was the only thing he said. His voice was small, and then the stretcher was hurried past me and I tried to follow close behind it, got through the front door, tried to force my way into the ambulance with him. “That’s my father!” I was screaming. “I’m on the staff! I’m on Jesus’s staff! I’m Russ Thomas! It’s my dad!”

But it was no go. The ambulance doors closed. It pushed out through the crowd, slowly at first, and then sped off toward Springfield Hospital, the siren blending with a dozen other sirens. The scene in front of the hotel was a madhouse of ambulances and squad cars and faces and policemen running this way and that way and people screaming and crying. I remember one image from out of that chaos: a woman about my mother’s age was sitting in the cold grit at the edge of the driveway with her knees spread out wide and her face in her hands.

I felt somebody grab the collar of my leather jacket from behind. I spun around, thinking it was a cop trying to get me out of there. It was.

Bastatutta did not say a word. He was practically dragging me beside him, holding the collar of my jacket with one hand and shoving people aside with the other. He pushed his way up to the nearest police car and shoved me against the passenger door. “Get him to the hospital,” he barked at the officer standing nearest the car. “GO! NOW!”

Thirty seconds of nudging the front fenders through the crowd, and then we were screaming at seventy miles an hour through the heart of the city. The radio was squawking, the sergeant listening intently and saying, over and over, “I don’t know no more than you know.” My cell phone rang. I had forgotten it. I yanked it out of my pocket and flipped it open and heard Zelda weeping, and in one sentence asking me where I was, if I was hurt, who was hurt and how badly, telling me she was still up in the room, she’d stayed behind to call me and to get something she thought Jesus had forgotten. As she was heading out the door and into the corridor, she was met by Secret Service agents. They pushed her back in. My father and mother and Stab and the others had gone with Jesus, and Stab, where was Stab? They wouldn’t let her out of the room! There were conflicting stories on the TV. “Your mother is here, but where is Stab!”

“I don’t know! I’m in a police car,” I shouted three times before she stopped yelling long enough to listen. “Going to the hospital. Jesus is shot. I saw them carry him out. Pa is shot. He was talking, he’s alive. I’ll have Bastatutta send someone to get you. All of you. Are you there? Zel! Zelda!”

The line had gone quiet as death. I tried calling her again, twice more, and got only a no-service message, and then we were at the hospital, and the policeman was calling Bastatutta on his radio, and I was sprinting toward the emergency room doors through an army of blue uniforms. I remember the fluorescent lights of the waiting area, and one fist-sized splash of blood on the linoleum. I made it past one or two officers who tried to stop me and as far as the door of the treatment rooms, where a stocky young orderly with a beard blocked the way.

“I’m on Jesus’s staff,” I said very loudly and with as much authority as I could manage. I was waving my ID. I was spraying words at him. I was trying to push past him and he was holding me tight by the shoulders. “My father’s in there. I’m on the staff! Let me by!”

“I know who you are. No one goes by.”

“My dad was shot.”

“No one goes in.”

“Chief Bastatutta said—”

“The chief is not in charge here.”

He turned me roughly and pointed toward a side treatment room, and I argued with him for another few minutes and then gave up and went through the door he had pointed to. In that sterile room, instead of sitting, I got on my knees. I was breathing as if I had just sprinted a lap around the city. I didn’t care who saw me—the doctor, the policeman, the nurses—I got on my knees. I could hear them working on Jesus, or my father, I couldn’t tell who, a few yards away, through a doorway, behind a curtain, a female doctor barking orders for this and that to be done. The sound of her voice, the tone of it, the professional calm over a layer of suppressed terror—it was like listening to the one thing you would never in your life want to listen to. I squeezed my eyes shut and squeezed my hands together in front of my chest and whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” without thinking about what I was sorry for. A kind of communal guilt had wrapped itself around me, guilt by association with the human race. Guilt by association with my thoughts. After a while, I heard Zelda’s voice, and then my mother’s voice, and then Stab’s, and I stood up and went to them, and we held each other in a circular embrace. I told them I had no news, about anybody, about anything. I told them we should pray, which, in the days before Jesus, would not have been like me at all.

FORTY-TWO

Almost everyone in the world knows the historical details of what happened that night, but I have some personal information that was never in the newspapers and on TV. As Jesus stepped out of the hotel suite, his mother, my dad, Wales, Ezzie, Stab, and Enrica were beside him, a cadre of Secret Service agents in front and behind. Ada Montpelier and my mom had stayed in the suite to watch the children. Zelda had started out of the room with Jesus, and then decided she should go back for a notebook in which were written names of people he might want to thank. On her way back into the suite she decided to call me and give me a heads-up. “Hold the elevator for me,” she yelled over her shoulder. Mom changed her mind and waited to go downstairs with Zelda.

It would come to light that, simmering in his jealousy, Randy Zillins had used his investigative skills and local connections to find out certain security details having to do with the hotel: that one elevator had been programmed to prevent it from going above the tenth floor, that the other was broken, that only workmen with passes could get to the thirteenth floor, where the machinery was. There are conspiracy theorists who believe more than one person was involved, that the elevator malfunction itself was part of the killer’s plan, but none of the evidence unearthed by the Leahy Commission supports that, and I believe it would be giving Randy Zillins too much credit. He was not much different from the overweight middle-aged man I’d imagined when talking to Wales on the beach. He was a thirty-eight-year-old reporter with an insecurity
complex the size of Jupiter. He was a little man, not so much physically as psychologically, and he was tormented, in a society obsessed with celebrity, by his own stunted ambitions.

While we had been on the road with the campaign, Zillins had written a series of articles about Jesus, all of them soaked in cynicism. I read through them, much later, when I was able to bear it. They had titles like, “False Gods, False Witnesses,” and “The True Sinner.”

In any case, near midnight, when Jesus and his entourage came down the hallway, the one working elevator had not yet been reprogrammed to go up to the twelfth floor. (Conspiracy theorists see this as part of the plan, too, but I know better: I simply forgot to call the manager when I should have, and then in the confusion the manager simply forgot to give the order when she should have.) When it did not appear on the twelfth floor after a minute and a half, the Secret Service people became suspicious and steered Jesus toward the nearest stairway. They cleared the stairwell, of course, but by luck, fate, local connections, or some hidden criminal genius, Randy Zillins had secured a workman’s pass, and was hiding one floor above. He heard the door open, heard voices, guessed the moment that Jesus would be moving from the corridor below onto the landing. He moved out from his hiding place, descended two steps, and fired two quick shots down between the flights. It was a fluke that he hit his target. He had made, it would turn out, only a few dozen visits to the shooting range in East Zenith; he was no expert. He would have had a clear look at Jesus for only a fraction of a second, and even then, a clear look at only a piece of his torso. I believe now that some divine plan was at work, though that is something I do not say to many people. The first bullet missed and went zinging around the concrete stairwell. The second pierced Jesus’s body at a sharp downward angle, entering two inches above his right lung, exiting through his lower back. My father, combat veteran that he was, reacted instantly and sprinted up the stairs toward the assailant. Richard Diamond’s second in command, a man named Elliot Welner, was half a step behind him. Zillins fired a wild shot as he turned and tried to run, and that bullet tore through my father’s right shoulder. Welner then fired three shots, one of which hit
Zillins directly behind his heart, killing him instantly. After that there was a frantic race to stanch the bleeding of the two victims, find out why the elevator was stalled, and carry Jesus and my dad down to the ambulances.