The Third Bullet (46 page)

“You’re right. I guess we ought to go ahead.”

“Besides,” I said, “we can’t find any cabs. This isn’t Manhattan, you know.”

At Elm and Houston, we got a good look at the celebration. More and more people seemed to be gathering and spreading across the grass of the plaza as if it were some racecourse infield or county fair. The sun was bright, and I could see hats, cameras, and sunglasses and feel those positive feelings in the air. From pop music: “good vibrations.” It felt more like a circus or ball game than a political event, but I suppose that had to do with the unique identities of Jack and Jackie, who were more like movie stars than politicians.

When the light changed, I pushed Lon across Elm, then we turned up the street, to the entrance of the Dal-Tex Building. I checked my watch. It was 12:07 and felt a little early. But it wasn’t easy going up Elm, with the crowd continuing to rush down to get a good place to view the Kennedys, and a few times I had to pull back or turn sharply to avoid colliding with anybody.

When I got to the three broad steps that led to the entrance of the Dal-Tex Building, it was 12:15. I turned Lon outward and pulled him up the steps, then, evading this fellow and that, pivoted him and steered him to the main entrance. Luckily there were no revolving doors, a royal ordeal for anyone in a wheelchair. Someone held the door for us, and I slid into the dark lobby. To the right, behind a thick window and illuminated from within by fluorescent lighting, full of bustle, was an office of the sheriff of Dallas County. I could see a few uniformed deputies inside, but mainly, it was women at desks with typewriters, talking on phones or filling
out official documents. There was a receiving counter, and a few people stood in line to be waited on by a sergeant. No one in there showed the slightest awareness that in a few minutes, the president of the United States would come by in a Lincoln limo, waving happily to the folks, breathing the sweet air, and enjoying the lush sunshine one last time.

I got to the elevators, punched up, and waited till a door opened. A few late stragglers were there, and I pulled Lon to the side to let them out, as they straightened hats or pulled ties tighter or shrugged into jackets against the slight chill in the air. When the car was empty, I backed Lon in, and the doors were just about shut when a woman ducked in. She smiled, punched—ah—three, and turned and asked me for a floor. “Six,” I said, because lying was natural to my state of being. Again: overcaution, a sign of paranoia, fear, lack of confidence.

The three of us rose in silence, and she got out at three, smiling, turning to say politely (as usual), “Good afternoon,” and I think we both muttered something. Then I quickly hit seven to make sure the elevator continued its ascent after the stop on six.

At seven, I pushed Lon out. The hall was darkish, empty, with no sign of human buzz or hum anywhere. Most people had gone to the plaza to see President Kennedy.

I pushed Lon down the hall, watching the signs on or at the doorways slide by, watching the numbers climb, until at last we came to an intersection and turned to the left, down another, better-lit corridor (the offices to the right, behind opaque glass, had exterior windows).

FUNTASTIC FASHIONS

MARY JANE JUNIORS

712

I pushed the door and stepped into the two-room office suite that was the headquarters of Funtastic Fashions, apparently, from the idealized pictures on the wall, some kind of line for naive young women whom you might find in the farm belt, all wholesome gingham and
flower-patterned jumpers and dresses in heavy patterns, as worn, in the artist’s sketches, by pictograms representing the perfect, happy, well-adjusted junior miss. Odd how some details stick in mind: in one, Our Heroine was running with a dog, and the dog reminded me of a neighbor’s dog from some distant past. I could remember the dog, though not the neighbor or the city or the year. But the dog rang a bell.

I pulled the door softly shut, hearing it click locked, and pushed Lon across wood flooring beyond the secretary’s desk. The name on the door to the boss’s office was simple: Mr. Goldberg. It meant nothing to me; nor did the pictures on the wall of a middle-aged fellow who looked to be Jewish, with a wife and three children, all five beaming at the success Mr. Goldberg had made in Dallas, Texas. I slid Lon into the boss’s office, a square, high-ceilinged wood-floored room full of light, with an overhead fan rotating sluggishly with a slight hum. It was dominated by two large windows, and immediately across the way, I could see the upper floor of the Texas Book Depository. I pushed Lon to the window, and as we approached, the angles widened and revealed, in all its detail and seething mass of witnesses along both curbs, the spectacle of Elm Street trending left as it descended the gentlest of inclines, shielded at our end by the canopy of a few oak trees, yielding to the broadness of the plaza, green in bright sun, dotted with last-minute scurriers trying to get into at least the third rank along the curb for maximum proximity to the glamour couple. From our vantage, we could not see the grassy knoll, we could not see the amphitheater, the pillars, the marble benches, all the flourishes of Athens on a good day in 300
B.C
., that the Texan city fathers had constructed there. But we could see every square inch of Elm Street once it emerged from the trees.

Jimmy had assembled the rifle, raised the window a few inches, and laid out a few large swatch books on Mr. Goldberg’s desk for Lon’s lap. I glanced at my watch. It was 12:24.

When I pushed Lon to the place where he’d determined to shoot from, we had our inevitable crisis. What do they say—no plan survives contact with the enemy?

The issue was height. In order to assure that minimum noise would escape from the room, Lon told us we had to be as far back from the window as possible, even with the German suppressor jerry-rigged to the muzzle. If it extended beyond the window, it would admit the report to the outer atmosphere and might attract attention, or at least curious eyes. The point was to contain as much of the attenuated report as possible within the confines of the room, where it would be deadened by the noise-absorption qualities of the walls and furnishings and by the buzz of the ceiling fan swishing away overhead. Lon would shoot from his chair but as far back from the window as possible while still having vantage on the target. The problem: at no place in the room would Lon be high enough to get the necessary angle over the sill!

We stood stupidly. Brilliant Hugh had fouled up again! It never occurred to me, nor had it occurred to Jimmy, why the fifth floor was preferable. It was too late to get down a floor or two, where the angles would have been more welcoming.

“Can we get you standing, Lon?” I asked.

“Not without my knee braces, which are in Roanoke.”

“We have to raise him,” I concluded.

It was Jimmy who remembered the swatch books originally destined for Lon’s lap. At least three inches deep, they contained fabric samples. He brought four of them over. “We can lift him up on these,” he said.

He set two down, and we labored to lift the wheelchair’s right tire, not an easy task, though Lon helped by shifting his weight accordingly. Then the other one. Lon plus chair was really heavy, and this lift was no picnic. I could feel my veins bulging with blood as I gave it all my strength, but it was probably Jimmy who did the bulk of the work. Lon was up high enough.

“Yeah,” he said, “good angle. But it’s crooked. The left one is higher than the right one. I can compensate, but—”

“I got it,” said Jimmy.

Quickly, he peeled off his nice new overcoat, folded it into quarters, and bent to the wheel. I did my part, again using all of my muscles, and
Jimmy got the coat wedged between the rubber and the book. I saw that the tire had left a black mark where it pressed into the gabardine.

“Dry cleaning’s on me!” I said.

“Much better,” Lon said. It brought him to the level where he had the angle above the sill but beneath the bottom of the window. “Lock the brakes.”

As I bent to do so, we heard a rise in sound; it seemed that the motorcade had hit lower Main a block away, and when the magic Lincoln passed, it unleashed a roar of inchoate human energy, cheers and yells, yes, but also the collective sighs and deep breaths of the enchanted. Their prince had come. I knew that Kennedy was but a minute or so away.

“Here,” said Jimmy, handing Lon the rifle. It was a long, sleek thing, not like Alek’s piece of battered military junk, not like the dangerous army guns, the carbines and BARs and tommy guns I’d seen in Vietnam, not like the red burp guns, with their ugly, ventilated cooling housings and their Mob-style drums featured in every statue in Russia. I had to say that the rifle had an aristocratic grace, and in some odd way, it seemed appropriate to the young prince’s demise. Lon had told me it was a Winchester Model 70, and I knew that he and his late father had enjoyed a long and mutually satisfying relationship with the company. At one point, Lon’s father had been presented with a rifle called the Tenth Black King, in some awesome caliber, called that because the American walnut of the stock was so bloodred that it looked black in certain lights, and when Winchester wanted to give “Presentation Guns” to some who were prominent in the gun world, they had their custom shop build an edition of ten, all called Black Kings. Both Lon’s father and Lon used that rifle—which turned out to have unusual powers of accuracy—to win or place highly in national rifle competitions.

This one was not customized, at least not by Winchester. Lon had done some work on it, lightening the trigger, “bedding” the action, which I understand to be coating the interior, where the metal of the action sits in the inlay of the stock, with a kind of fiberglass or epoxy so that the contact between the surfaces is 100 percent even, and no odd stress
from irregularities is transferred to the rifle, affecting the accuracy. On the whole, the thing was beautiful, a graceful orchestration of tubes supported in a slice of burnished wood, with a slight streamline that seemed to have it leaning forward, like a thoroughbred at full extension, muscles cut and the entire beast captured in a kind of forward bound.

A long tube, black and shiny, was secured to the action above the bolt by two stout metal rings, and at a point on the scope’s length between the rings lay an administrative housing, the site of a vertical and a horizontal turret by which the scope could be tuned for maximum accuracy. I was close; I happened to note the white lettering above the horizontal turret, and it read simply J. UNERTL. What distinguished this rifle from any other I’d seen was the German suppressor, the
Schalldaempfer
Type 3, as Lon called it. It too was tubular, and locked over the muzzle by means of a pivoting lever cranked to the closed position. The genius of German engineering! It was surprisingly stubby, under a foot long, looking like a steel water bottle screwed to the muzzle, and much discolored and tarnished from military use.

Lon handled the gun with extraordinary ease, I must say. His face deadpan, he accepted it and mounted it to his shoulder, one hand at the comb, the index finger suspended on the stock above the trigger, not touching the trigger. His other flew to the the end of the stock, which he acquired and used as leverage, thrusting the rifle back hard to shoulder, now supported by two elbows. This was the holding position. Because we’d used the swatch books to elevate him, they were not available for lap duty. He’d have to shoot offhand. I thought, For want of a nail, the shoe is lost, for want of a shoe, the horse is lost, for want of a horse, the battle is lost, and imagined the chain of catastrophe that could undo us.

Nevertheless, he was an elegant construction, slightly canted, the rifle and man solid, immutable, bent forward a bit under muscular tension as if in sprinter’s blocks, the slight vibration of his slow and easy breaths the only sign of life. The rifle was locked in his arms, which were resting on his elbows on his dead legs.

I positioned myself at the window, immediately adjacent to the opening. Craning to the left, I could see the Houston-Elm intersection as I heard the roar rolling toward us like a wave. I saw a Dallas police sedan and then . . . nothing. I guessed he was some sort of advance car a half mile or so out. It seemed a minute passed, and then a white sedan came down the street, leading the parade. Three motorcycles followed, then five more in some kind of formation, then another white sedan, and finally, the large black Lincoln, with its cargo of imminent tragedy open to the crowd. It was flanked by motorcycle policemen, and we watched as it pulled wholly into view. It looked more like a black lifeboat than a car, a huge thing, with a driver and guard in the front seat, then behind them, though considerably lower, as if squatting, a male-female couple I took to be Governor and Mrs. Connally, and then Jack Kennedy himself, and next to him, in a pink pillbox hat, his wife.

His reddish hair glinted in the sunlight. Even from almost eighty yards and without binoculars, I could make out the ruddiness of his skin and could tell that all the lines of his face were pulling his mouth up into a smile, and at that moment it incongruously struck me that he was quite a handsome man. He was waving with one hand but only intermittently, and if I read his body posture in that split second, it was one of relaxation. The man was campaigning and happy.

The limo reached the hard left turn onto Elm from Houston just below me. At that point, it was out of sight to Lon, but I leaned forward and pressed my forehead against the pane. I watched as the car slowed almost to a halt and began its slow, majestic pivot toward its new direction. I could not breathe. This was Alek’s shot, his moment to enter history and send us all home absolved of any guilt.

Nothing happened.

I don’t know what the idiot was doing up there, but it wasn’t shooting. Silence. Obviously, some kind of failure, as per all anticipation. That put us right back on the fulcrum of events, the little creep with his cowardice, his incompetence, his stupidity. Agh!

The great car turned slowly left and began its descent down Elm, sliding down the slight undulation that led to the triple overpass, which moved it left in Lon’s sights, but gently, not radically. The public feet away on either side, all madly waving and cheering, you could see the excitement, the sparkle or glitter of crowd passion that you see at key moments of big ball games. The car was fully oriented toward Elm but just feet beyond the axis of the turn when Alek managed to fire his first shot.