Feelings of Fear (13 page)

It was then, for the briefest of moments, that he saw the dark shadow of a man walking away across the playing fields. The man looked as if he were wearing a thick khaki overcoat, and a helmet on his head.

Jack lifted his hand to his forehead to keep the falling snow out of his eyes.

“Great-uncle Bertie?” he whispered.

“What?” said Thomson. “What are you talking about?”

Jack began to run. The figure turned, and stopped. Jack stopped, too, less than ten metres away. There was a moment's silence between them.

Then the figure sang, “O little town of Bethlehem,” in the softest and deepest of voices.

Jack hesitated, and sang back, “How still we see thee lie.”

“Above thy deep and dreamless sleep,” sang great-uncle Bertie.

Jack swallowed. Tears were running down his cheeks, unstoppable, and he could hardly manage to sing the last line, “The silent stars go by.”

Great-uncle Bertie stood and smiled at him, his face so kind and sad, and white as a memory. Then he turned and walked off into the snow, and it wasn't long before it swallowed him up altogether.

Jack walked back to the pitch where his grandfather was waiting for him. His grandfather squeezed his hand and said, “Come on. Let's have some tea, shall we? You must be frozen.”

There was a light smattering of applause as they walked back to the changing rooms. Jack turned and looked back, just once,
but there was nothing to be seen but the snow and the gathering darkness.

At the school carol service, however, when they sang “O Little Town Of Bethlehem.” Jack sang only the alternate lines, and listened, and listened, for somebody else to sing the lines in between.

S
he called him on his private number at three seventeen in the morning, and she was hysterical. “It's Jack! I can't wake him up!”

“Hey, ssh, calm down, will you? What do you mean, you can't wake him up?”

“He's just lying there … I shook him and I shook him but nothing happened.”

“Listen, calm down. Is he still breathing?”

“I don't know. I couldn't wake him, that's all.”

“How about a pulse? Is his heart still beating?”

“I don't know. I didn't try.”

“Well, go try. I'll wait while you do it. And for Christ's sake get a grip on yourself.”

There was a lengthy silence. Next to him, Ethel turned over and said drowsily, “Who is it? Couldn't they wait till the morning?”

He reached out and squeezed her hand. “It's OK. Something came up, that's all.”

After more than a minute she came back to the phone. “He's not breathing and I can't find a pulse. I lifted up his eyelid and his eye was all stary.”

“OK, then. Where are you?”

“The Madison, the Presidential Suite.”

“What security do you have?”

“Two men in the hall outside. Bobby – what am I going to
do
?” Her voice rose almost to a squeal.

“Don't do anything. Don't touch him anymore. Get your clothes
on and leave as quickly as you can. Don't say anything to the agents, nothing at all. Just smile and try to act normal.”

“But what about a doctor?”

“Leave the doctor to me. Just get dressed and get out of there.”

Ethel turned over again. “Bobby? What's all this about a doctor?”

“Henry Kissinger,” he said. He put down the phone, and switched on his bedside lamp. “Listen, honey, I have to go out for a while. I'll give you a call later.”

“Is it really so urgent?”

Bobby was already unbuttoning his pale yellow pajamas. He gave her a quick, ambiguous nod, which was all that he could manage. Urgent wasn't the word for it. This was the end of the world as everybody knew it. He went into the dressing room and found a pair of gray pants, a shirt and a blue golfing sweater. When he was dressed, he leaned across the bed and gave Ethel a quick kiss. She said, “Look at you. You look so pale. Are you sure that you're feeling all right?”

“I'm fine. I'm really fine.” And that was when he realized that he had told her three lies already.

From his car, he called just three people: Jack's private doctor, Toussaint Christophe; Harold Easterlake, from the State Department; and his own closest confidant from the Attorney General's office, George Macready. He didn't tell them what had happened, but he asked them all to meet him at the Madison as soon as they could. “And for Christ's sake be discreet,” he said.

He thought of calling Ted Sorensen, Jack's closest counsel, but he decided against it, just for now. If Jack were really dead, he would want his own people around him not Jack's. And he didn't want to be out-maneuvered by LBJ.

He went up in the elevator directly to the penthouse floor. His reflection in the elevator mirror looked unshaven and strained, and his hair stuck out at the back. He tried to smooth it down but it kept springing up again. Outside the Presidential Suite the two Secret Service agents were sitting on folding chairs. One was staring at the ceiling and the other was reading
To Kill A Mockingbird.
They jumped to their feet as soon as they saw him coming.

“Good morning, Mr Kennedy. Something we can help you with?”

“I have to see the President right now,” he said.

“He specially asked not to be disturbed, sir.”

“That's all right. Just let me in and I'll wake him myself. Has his – uh, friend left already?”

The agent's eyes scarcely flickered. “About fifteen minutes ago, sir.”

He unlocked the doors and let Bobby into the suite. The large sitting-room was lit with a single lamp. A room-service trolley was still parked in one corner, with the remains of two lobsters on it, and an empty bottle of Perrier Jouët rosé. A damp white bathrobe lay on the couch as if somebody had shed it like a pelt.

Bobby walked quickly across to the bedroom and opened the door. The ceiling light was on, which made the scene look even more sordid than it really was, a badly lit B-picture. The sheets of the king-size bed were twisted, and on the far side lay Jack, face-down, one arm crooked behind him and the other arm dangling. There were bright red smudges on the sheets which Bobby thought were blood; but as he came closer he could see that they were lipstick.

Jack. My brother. Oh God.

Bobby went around the bed, knelt down, and laid his hand on his brother's tanned, freckled back. He was still warm, but his muscles felt oddly flaccid. “Jack? It's Bobby! Jack, what's wrong?”

Jack's eyelids slowly opened and for one wonderful terrible instant Bobby thought that he was still alive. But Jack wasn't looking at him at all. He was staring at his bedside alarm-clock with an expression of total disinterest, and Bobby didn't need to feel his pulse to know that he was dead. Jesus. He stood up, his knees quaking, and took deep, slow breaths to steady himself. He felt as if his larynx were crammed with broken glass, and his eyes filled up with tears. He had always believed that they would live for ever, he and Jack, as gilded and youthful as they always were.

He let out a howl that sounded barely human, frightening himself; and he had to wedge his hand between his teeth to stop himself from doing it again.

After the first surge of grief, however, came overwhelming panic. What the hell were they going to do now? How were they going to explain what the President was doing in the Madison Hotel? And how
long was it going to take before some bellboy leaked the information that he hadn't gone there alone? Even more catastrophic than that, they were supposed to be confronting the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko tomorrow morning, for further talks on Cuba. They were facing the most stressful test of their entire administration, and now Jack was lying dead in a lipstick-stained bed.

Harold Easterlake arrived first, quickly followed by Dr Christophe. “Have you touched anything?” asked Dr Christophe, trying to be matter-of-fact, although he was clearly very shaken. Harold Easterlake, pale and puffy-eyed, stood in the far corner and smoked furiously, and silently cried.

Dr Christophe gave Jack a quick examination. He was neat-bearded, lean, dark and handsome, in a French-Caribbean way, with liquid black eyes and a long curved nose. Jack had brought him to Washington seven months ago to help to deal with his twenty-three-year-old back pain. “If the regular doctors can't help me, I don't mind trying somebody irregular.” And Dr Christophe was highly irregular. He had founded the Saturday Clinic in Sausalito, California, which promoted “spiritual solutions for every ill,” including his controversial trance therapy, an out-of-body rest cure, and whole-skeleton manipulation that was supposed to disperse all of the bad spirits that clung to your joints and gradually paralyzed you.

It was the whole-skeleton manipulation that had particularly appealed to Jack; and Dr Christophe had kept him active and free from pain, even when he was highly stressed. He hadn't found it necessary to wear his back-brace for almost three months.

“Any idea what he died of?” asked Harold. “I mean, shit, he's only forty-five.”

Dr Christophe picked up the small brown-glass bottle on the nightstand. “Did the President have heart problems?”

“You're his doctor. You should know that.”

“Mr Kennedy, sir, I was the doctor only for his soul, not his body.”

“Well, he didn't have any heart problems. None that he told me about. Apart from his back, he was the fittest man I ever knew. The first thing he did when he moved into the White House was to tell his staff to lose five pounds apiece.”

Dr Christophe handed him the bottle. “Mr Kennedy, sir, this is amyl nitrite. It is a vasodilator, usually used in the treatment of angina pectoris.”

“But Jack didn't have angina. I'm sure of it. You don't think that—”

“No, Mr Kennedy, sir. I don't think that his companion had angina, either. Apart from the treatment of heart disease, amyl nitrite is commonly used as a sexual stimulant. It dilates the
corpus spongiosum,
the spongy tissues of the penis, so that it can accommodate more blood, and thence become stiffer and larger. Unfortunately, there are associated risks, one of which is heart seizure.”

Bobby pressed his hand over his mouth. He simply couldn't speak. Harold lifted his hand in resignation. “Oh, fuck,” he said. “Oh, fuck.” He repeated himself over eleven times before Bobby turned and stared at him, and he stopped.

At that moment George Macready arrived, looking as haggard as the rest of them. He was big and paunchy with a shock of white hair and a face that looked like a prizewinning Idaho potato. They didn't need to tell him what had happened. He took one look at Jack's body lying on the bed and he turned to Bobby with such pain in his eyes that it was hard for Bobby not to start crying again.

“We'll have to get him out of here,” said Harold, lighting another Winston. “We'll have to put him in a laundry basket or something and get him back to the White House.”

“I guess that Jackie doesn't know about this,” said George.

Bobby shook his head. “As far as she's aware, he's working late on the Cuba crisis, and he's sleeping alone so that he doesn't disturb her.”

“Maybe we can prop him up between us and make it look like he's walking,” Harold suggested. “I saw that in a movie once.”

“Are you crazy?” George hissed at him. “This is the President of the United States and he's dead, and naked, in a hotel suite where he's not supposed to be, after having sexual congress with somebody he wasn't supposed to be having sexual congress with.” He turned to Bobby. “Was it—?”

Bobby said nothing. He didn't really need to. “God almighty,” said George. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

“What the hell are we going to do?” said Harold. “If Jack isn't there tomorrow, Khruschev will wipe the floor with us. This is eyeball-to-eyeball.”

“Maybe it'll save the situation,” George suggested. “If we announce that Jack's dead, the Russkies can hardly keep up all this aggression, can they? It'll make them look like A-l shits.”

But Bobby shook his head. “If we announce that Jack's dead, then Lyndon will have to be sworn in as President, and he's going to go after Khruschev like a beagle with a firecracker up its ass. Jack was playing this cool and calm. Lyndon could screw it up completely.” He looked down at the bottle of amyl nitrite. “Jesus. Talk about a heartbeat away.”

“Well, then,” said George, “what are the options?”

Bobby had another try at patting down his hair. “Either we try to get his body back to the White House and announce his death in the morning; or else we leave him here and cover up the evidence that anybody else was here – which will still leave us with the awkward question of why he came over to the Madison to sleep, when he has a whole selection of perfectly good beds in the White House.”

“We could play for time,” said Harold. “We could say that he's gone down with the grippe or something.”

“Yes, but then his regular doctors will want to see him.”

They all stared at each other. There didn't seem to be any alternative but to bite the bullet and call for the coroner, and announce that the President had died of heart failure. Maybe, with luck, they could keep his companion out of the news.

“There is one more alternative,” said Dr Christophe, quietly. “It is a desperate measure, but then perhaps this is what you might call a desperate situation.”

“Well, what? Anything.”

“Apart from developing my trance therapy and my out-of-body experiences, I worked for many years with the drugs that they use in Haiti for bringing the dead back to life.”

George said, “Am I hearing this right? Are you talking about zombies?”

“You can call them what you like,” said Dr Christophe. “But there is nothing supernatural about what they are or how they are resurrected.
In many cases, people are deliberately given the drug tetrodotoxin, which comes from the puffer fish. Tetrodotoxin has an anesthetic effect 160,000 times stronger than cocaine, so somebody who has ingested some may appear to be dead. In Japan they call the puffer fish the
fugu
and eat it as a delicacy, and there have been many reported cases of tetrodotoxin victims being certified as dead, and then reviving after three or four days – in one case, in 1880, a gambler came back to life after a week in the mortuary.”