Ken Grimwood (8 page)

" … through this reception area here—just wait'll you see the knockout who'll be sitting at
that
desk a couple of weeks from now—and … here … we … are!"

The office was expansive yet somehow cozy, impressive without being intimidating. A black Barcelona chair awaited its owner behind the large oval oak desk, which faced a well-stocked bar and a handsomely cabineted TV-stereo console. Floor-to-ceiling windows on two walls offered views of the Hudson River on one side and the towers of midtown Manhattan on the other. The several flourishing plants gave a lush feeling to every corner of the room, and the framed Pollocks offered testament to the worth of human creativity. Amusingly, and with perfect appropriateness, one block of wall space was devoted to a photographic blowup of a horse bedecked with flowers: Chateaugay, in the winner's circle after the Kentucky Derby.

"All yours, buddy," Frank said, smiling.

Jeff was touched by what his friend had done. "Frank, it's fantastic!"

" 'Course, anything you don't like, we can change right away. Designer understands it's all preliminary—you have to approve it. After all, you're the one's gotta work in here."

"Everything's great just as it is. I'm astounded. And you can't tell me some designer came up with the idea of that picture of Chateaugay."

"No," Frank admitted, "that was my suggestion. Thought you might get a kick out of it."

"It'll give me inspiration."

"That's what I'm counting on." Frank laughed. "Jesus, when I think how fast all this has happened, how—Well, you know what I mean." The moment of boyish glee was retracted as quickly as it had appeared. This whole experience was aging Frank: the unspoken and unanswerable questions, the shockingly sudden and inexplicable success … It was all more than he could readily deal with.

"Anyway," Frank said, looking away toward the empty reception area, "I've got a whole pile of stuff to take care of today. Ordered a bunch of the new office calculators from Monroe; they should have been here two days ago. So if you want to just settle in here a bit, get a feel for the place … "

"It's all right, Frank; you go ahead. I'd very much like to sit here and think for a while. And thanks again. You're doing a terrific job—partner."

They shook hands, clapped each other on the shoulder in a self-conscious gesture of camaraderie.

Frank strode away toward the near-empty offices, and Jeff eased himself into the enfolding comfort of the Barcelona chair behind the massive desk.

It had all been so easy, easier even than he'd imagined. The races, the inning-by-inning replays of the World Series games … and with the huge amount of capital accumulated from those sure-thing bets, there was no limit to what he could do now, with equal or greater ease.

He'd already begun studying stock prices, reviewing what he knew of the world to come and applying that knowledge to an extrapolation of the current market situation. He couldn't remember every dip and rise of the economy for all those years, but he was certain he had enough general insight to make consideration of minor recessions and setbacks irrelevant.

Some investments were obvious: IBM, Xerox, Polaroid. Others took a bit more thought, connecting in his mind social changes already underway or soon to come with the companies that would benefit from those changes. The rest of the decade, Jeff knew, would be a time of general prosperity, with Americans traveling widely for business or amusement; Future, Inc. should invest heavily in hotel and airline stocks.

Similarly, Boeing Aircraft had to be in for a long upswing, even though the much-vaunted SST program would soon be canceled; the 727 and 747, neither announced yet, would become the primary commercial planes of the next twenty-five years. Other aerospace companies would have their own successes and failures, and Jeff felt sure some careful research would help jog his memory as to which had been awarded the most lucrative contracts for the
Apollo
program, and, ultimately, to build the space-shuttle fleet.

He gazed down at the Hudson, thick with commerce. The Japanese auto invasion would be a long time coming, as he'd noticed on that first day, and America was near the peak of its love affair with big cars; it couldn't hurt to put a million or so into Chrysler, GM, and Ford. RCA would probably be a good short-term choice, too, since color television was about to become the standard, and it would be many years before Sony made its devastating inroads into that market.

Jeff closed his eyes, giddy from the potential of it all. The monthly financial crises he had once endured, the lifelong frustration of jobs with too much responsibility and too little pay, were now concerns not only of the past, but of a future that would never be. Who cared how this had come to pass? He was young, he was wealthy, and he would soon be immeasurably richer still. He had no wish to change any of that or even question it, much less go back to that other reality he had lived or perhaps imagined. Now he could have everything he'd ever wanted, and the time and energy to enjoy it all.

" … whether the Republican nominee is Goldwater or Rockefeller. The Baker scandal is unlikely to have any serious effect on the president's reelection bid, although a 'dump Johnson' movement within the White House inner circle is a possibility if the investigation escalates much further. Of more immediate concern to the Kennedy staff will be—"

"Can't we watch something else?" Sharla pouted. "I don't know why you care so much about all this political stuff anyway. It's a whole year before the next election."

Jeff gave her an appeasing half-smile but didn't answer.

" … tax cut and civil-rights bills. Unless they are enacted before Congress adjourns on December twentieth, the proposals will face an even tougher uphill battle in the spring sessions of the House and Senate, and Kennedy would be forced to begin the campaign in the shadow of continued congressional battle rather than in his hoped-for aura of dual victory."

Sharla uncurled herself from the sofa in a silent huff, walked toward the stairs that led to the upper levels of the East Seventy-third Street town house. "I'll be waiting for you in bed," she called over her shoulder, bare in the peach-colored filmy nightgown. "That is, if you're still interested."

" … despite ongoing criticism of the Bay of Pigs disaster, despite bitter problems with such disparate entities as the AFL-CIO and the steel industry, the image and the man remain inseparable for the majority of the public. His windswept youthfulness, his charming wife and devoted children, the tragedies and triumphs his family has survived, the easy grace and ready sense of humor, all—"

Jeff ran back the tape on the prototype Sony VTR that had cost him over eleven thousand dollars and was doomed to failure, a product a decade ahead of its time. The black-and-white file-footage clips of John Kennedy lit the screen a second time, so familiar and yet still heart-rending: grinning in his famous rocking-chair, scooping John-John and Caroline into his arms on an airport runway, romping with his brothers on the beach at Hyannisport. So many times Jeff had seen these brief public segments of the man's life; and always, for a quarter of a century, they had been followed by the open limousine in Dallas, the frenzied horror, the blood on Jackie's clothes and the roses in her arms. But no such images existed now. Tonight, on this tape of a news show broadcast not two hours before, there would be no photograph of Lyndon Johnson assuming the mantle of power, no funeral cortege through Washington, no Eternal Flame at the fade-out. Tonight the man of whom they spoke was alive, vital, full of plans for his own future and that of the nation.

" … grace and ready sense of humor, all lend at least superficial weight to the notions of a New Frontier, a fresh beginning … the advent, as some would have it, of a modern-day Camelot. It is this enormously positive image, rather than any solid record of first-term accomplishments, that the newly appointed Kennedy reelection team will have to work with. Sorensen, O'Donnell, Salinger, O'Brien, and Bobby Kennedy are all well aware of their candidate's strengths and weaknesses, and of the power of instant myths. You may be sure they know where to concentrate their attention in the upcoming campaign."

The newscast switched to a shot of Charles de Gaulle visiting the Shah of Iran amid much pomp and circumstance, and Jeff turned off the machine. Kennedy alive, he thought, as he had thought so often in the past few weeks. Kennedy leading the nation toward who knew what—continued prosperity, racial harmony, an early disengagement from Vietnam?

John F. Kennedy alive. Until three weeks from now.

Unless, unless … what? The fantasy was irresistible, outlandish and even clichéd though it might be.

But this was no television drama, no science-fiction plot; Jeff was here, in this as-yet-unshattered world of 1963, with the greatest tragedy of the era about to unfold before his too-knowing eyes. Was it possible that he might intervene, and would it be proper? He had already begun to wreak major changes in the economic realities of the time, merely by establishing the existence of Future, Inc., and the space-time continuum had not yet shown any signs of unbearable strain.

Surely, Jeff thought, there must be something he could do about the imminent assassination, short of actually confronting the killer himself in that sixth-floor room of the Texas School Book Depository on November twenty-second. A phone call to the FBI, a letter to the Secret Service? But of course no one in authority would take his warnings seriously, and even if someone did, he'd probably be arrested as a suspected conspirator.

He poured himself a drink from the wet bar by the patio entrance and considered the problem.

Anyone he spoke to about it would dismiss him as a lunatic; until, that is, after the president's motorcade had passed through Dealey Plaza, had entered and so tragically departed the killing ground. Then there'd be hell to pay, and too late to do the world a bit of good.

So what should he do, just sit back and watch the murder happen? Let history brutally repeat itself because he was afraid of appearing foolish?

Jeff looked around the tastefully appointed town house, so far superior to any residence he or Linda had ever hoped to occupy. It had taken him only six months to acquire all this, with almost no effort at all.

Now he could spend a lifetime limitlessly expanding his comfort and his wealth because of what he knew; but those achievements would stick in his craw forever if he failed to act on what
else
he knew.

Something, somehow, must be done.

He flew to Dallas on the fifteenth, and stopped at the first phone booth he came to in the airport. He thumbed through the O's and there it was, a listing like any other, though to his eyes the letters stood out from the page as if they had been inscribed in flames:

Oswald, Lee H … 1026 N. Beckley … 555-4821

Jeff wrote down the address, then rented a plain blue Plymouth from Avis. The girl at the counter told him how to find the part of town he was looking for.

He drove past the white frame house in Oak Cliff six times. He pictured himself walking to the door, ringing the bell, speaking to the soft-voiced young Russian woman, Marina, who would answer. What would he say to her? "Your husband is going to kill the president; you have to stop him"? What if the assassin himself came to the door? What would he do then?

Jeff drove slowly past the ordinary little house once more, thinking of the man who dwelt within it, who waited and plotted to shatter the world's complacency.

He left the neighborhood without stopping. At a K-Mart in Fort Worth he bought a cheap portable typewriter, some typing paper, and a pair of gloves. Back in his anonymous Holiday Inn room off the East Airport Expressway he put on the gloves, opened the sheaf of paper, and began composing a letter that it sickened him to write:

President John F. Kennedy

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington, D.C.

President Kennedy:

It is you who have alienated Premier Fidel Castro and the liberated peoples of Cuba.

You are the oppressor, the enemy of free men throughout Latin America and the world.

If you come to Dallas I will kill you. I will shoot you in the head with a high-powered rifle, and in your spilled blood will be written JUSTICE for the freedom fighters of the Western hemisphere.

This is not an idle threat. I am well armed, and prepared to die myself if need be.

I will murder you.

VENCEREMOS!!

Lee Harvey Oswald

Jeff added Oswald's home address, drove back across town, and put the letter in a mailbox two blocks from the nondescript frame house. An hour later, and forty miles southeast of Dallas, the gloves were getting sweaty. The tightening leather numbed his hands as he pitched the typewriter off a bridge into a large lake in the middle of nowhere. It felt good to finally pull the damned gloves off, to toss them out the car window near some godforsaken town named, of all things, Gun Barrel. His hands felt freer, cleaner.

For the next four days he stayed in his room at the Holiday Inn, speaking to no one but room service and emerging only to buy the local papers. On Tuesday, the nineteenth, the
Dallas Herald
had the item he'd been waiting for, on page five: Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested by the Secret Service for threatening the life of the president, and would be held without bail until Kennedy had completed his one-day trip to Texas at the end of the week.

Jeff got very drunk on the plane back to New York that night, but the alcohol had nothing to do with the triumph he felt, the exultant thoughts that crowded his brain: images of a world in which negotiation took the place of war in Vietnam, in which the hungry were fed, racial equality attained without bloodshed … a world in which John Kennedy and the hopeful spirit of humanity would not die, but would blossom and prosper upon the earth.

As his plane landed, the lights of Manhattan seemed a brilliant portent of the glorious future Jeff had just created.

At ten minutes past one on Friday afternoon, his secretary opened the door to his office without knocking. She stood there with tears streaming down her face, unable to speak. Jeff didn't have to ask what was wrong. He felt as if he had been struck in the gut by an invisible, heavy object.