11/22/63: A Novel (98 page)

I hung up before she could say anything else. Then I took off my shoes (getting free of the left one was a slow and painful process), lay down on the bed, and put my arm over my eyes. I saw Sadie dancing the Madison. I saw Sadie telling me to come in, kind sir, did I like poundcake? I saw her in my arms, her bright dying eyes turned up to my face.

I thought about the rabbit-hole, and how every time you used it there was a complete reset.

At last I slept.

Hosty’s knock came promptly at nine. I opened up and he ambled in. He carried a briefcase in one hand (but not
my
briefcase, so that was still all right). In the other was a bottle of champagne, the good stuff, Moët et Chandon, with a red, white, and blue bow tied around the neck. He looked very tired.

“Amberson,” he said.

“Hosty,” I responded.

He closed the door, then pointed to the phone. I took the bug from my pocket and displayed it. He nodded.

“There are no others?” I asked.

“No. That bug is DPD’s, and this is now our case. Orders straight from Hoover. If anyone asks about the phone bug, you found it yourself.”

“Okay.”

He held up the champagne. “Compliments of the management. They insisted I bring it up. Would you care to toast the President of the United States?”

Considering that my beautiful Sadie now lay on a slab in the county morgue, I had no interest in toasting anything. I had succeeded, and success tasted like ashes in my mouth.

“No.”

“Me, either, but I’m glad as hell he’s alive. Want to know a secret?”

“Sure.”

“I voted for him. I may be the only agent in the whole Bureau who did.”

I said nothing.

Hosty seated himself in one of the room’s two armchairs and gave a long sigh of relief. He set his briefcase between his feet, then turned the bottle so he could read the label. “Nineteen fifty-eight. Wine fanciers would probably know if that was a good year, but I’m more of a beer man, myself.”

“So am I.”

“Then you might enjoy the Lone Star they’re holding for you downstairs. There’s a case of the stuff, and a framed letter promising you a case a month for the rest of your life. More champagne, too. I saw at least a dozen bottles. Everyone from the Dallas Chamber of Commerce to the City Board of Tourism sent them. You have a Zenith color television still in the carton, a solid gold signet ring with a picture of the president in it from Calloway’s Fine Jewelry, a certificate for three new suits from Dallas Menswear, and all kinds of other stuff, including a key to the city. The management has set aside a room on the first floor for your swag, and I’m guessing that by dawn tomorrow they’ll have to set aside another. And the food! People are bringing cakes, pies, casseroles, roasts of beef, barbecue chicken, and enough Mexican to give you the runs for five years. We’re turning them away, and they hate to go, let me tell you. There are women out there in front of the hotel that . . . well, let’s just say Jack Kennedy himself would be envious, and he’s a legendary
cocksman. If you knew what the director has in his files on that man’s sex life, you wouldn’t believe it.”

“My capacity for belief might surprise you.”

“Dallas loves you, Amberson. Hell, the whole country loves you.” He laughed. The laugh turned into a cough. When it passed, he lit a cigarette. Then he looked at his watch. “As of nine-oh-seven Central Standard Time on the evening of November twenty-second, 1963, you are America’s fair-haired boy.”

“What about you, Hosty? Do you love me? Does Director Hoover?”

He set his cigarette aside in the ashtray after a single drag, then leaned forward and pinned me with his eyes. They were deep-set in folds of flesh, and they were tired, but they were nonetheless very bright and aware.

“Look at me, Amberson. Dead in the eyes. Then tell me if you were or weren’t in on it with Oswald. And make it the truth, because I’ll know a lie.”

Given his egregious mishandling of Oswald, I didn’t believe that, but I believed that
he
believed it. So I locked onto his gaze and said: “I was not.”

For a moment he said nothing. Then he sighed, settled back, and picked up his cigarette. “No. You weren’t.” He jetted smoke from his nostrils. “Who do you work for, then? The CIA? The Russians, maybe? I don’t see it myself, but the director believes the Russians would gladly burn a deep-cover asset in order to stop an assassination that would spark an international incident. Maybe even World War III. Especially when folks find out about Oswald’s time in Russia.” He said it
Roosha,
the way the televangelist Hargis did on his broadcasts. Maybe it was Hosty’s idea of a jest.

I said, “I work for no one. I’m just a guy, Hosty.”

He pointed his cigarette at me. “Hold that thought.” He unstrapped his briefcase and took out a file even thinner than the one on Oswald I’d spied in Curry’s office. This file would be mine, and it would thicken . . . but not as quickly as it would have done in the computer-driven twenty-first century.

“Before Dallas, you were in Florida. The town of Sunset Point.”

“Yes.”

“You substitute-taught in the Sarasota school system.”

“Correct.”

“Before that, we believe you spent some time in . . . was it Derren? Derren, Maine?”

“Derry.”

“Where you did exactly what?”

“Where I started my book.”

“Uh-huh, and before that?”

“Here and there, all around the square.”

“How much do you know about my dealings with Oswald, Amberson?”

I kept silent.

“Don’t play it so cozy. It’s just us girls.”

“Enough to cause trouble for you and your director.”

“Unless?”

“Let me put it this way. The amount of trouble I cause you will be directly proportional to the amount of trouble you cause me.”

“Would it be fair to say that when it came to making trouble, you’d make up what you didn’t absolutely know . . . and to our detriment?”

I said nothing.

He said, as if speaking to himself, “It doesn’t surprise me that you were writing a book. You should have carried on with it, Amberson. It probably would have been a bestseller. Because you’re bloody good at making things up, I’ll give you that. You were pretty plausible this afternoon. And you know things you have no business knowing, which is what makes us believe you’re far from a private citizen. Come on, who wound you up? Was it Angleton at the Firm? It was, wasn’t it? Sly rose-growing bastard that he is.”

“I’m just me,” I said, “and I probably don’t know as much as you think. But yes, I know enough to make the Bureau look bad. How Lee told me he came right out and told
you
that he was going to shoot Kennedy, for instance.”

Hosty stubbed out his cigarette hard enough to send up a fountain of sparks. Some landed on the back of his hand, but he didn’t seem to feel them. “That’s a fucking lie!”

“I know,” I said. “And I’ll tell it with a straight face. If you force me to. Has the idea of getting rid of me come up yet, Hosty?”

“Spare me the comic-book stuff. We don’t kill people.”

“Tell it to the Diem brothers over in Vietnam.”

He was looking at me the way a man might look at a seemingly inoffensive mouse that had suddenly bitten. And with big teeth. “How do you know America had
anything
to do with the Diem brothers? According to what I read in the papers, our hands are clean.”

“Let’s not get off the subject. The thing is, right now I’m too popular to kill. Or am I wrong?”

“No one wants to kill you, Amberson. And no one wants to poke holes in your story.” He barked an unamused laugh. “If we started doing that, the whole thing would unravel. That’s how thin it is.”

“‘Romance at short notice was her specialty
,
’” I said.

“Huh?”

“H. H. Munro. Also known as Saki. The story is called ‘The Open Window.’ Look it up. When it comes to the art of creating bullshit on the spur of the moment, it’s very instructive.”

He scanned me, his shrewd little eyes worried. “I don’t understand you at all. That concerns me.” In the west, out toward Midland where the oil wells thump without surcease and the gas flares dim the stars, more thunder rumbled.

“What do you want from me?” I asked.

“I think that when we trace you back a little farther from Derren or Derry or whatever it is, we’re going to find . . . nothing. As if you stepped right out of thin air.”

This was so close to the truth it nearly took my breath away.

“What we want is for you to go back to the nowhere you came from. The scandal-press will gin up the usual nasty speculations and conspiracy theories, but we can guarantee you that you’ll come
out of this looking pretty good. If you even care about such things, that is. Marina Oswald will support your story right down the line.”

“You’ve already spoken to her, I take it.”

“You take it right. She knows she’ll be deported if she doesn’t play ball. The gentlemen of the press haven’t had a very good look at you; the photos that show up in tomorrow’s papers are going to be little more than blurs.”

I knew he was right. I had been exposed to the cameras only on that one quick walk down the hall to Chief Curry’s office, and Fritz and Hosty, both big men, had had me under the arms, blocking the best photo sightlines. Also, I’d had my head down because the lights were so bright. There were plenty of pictures of me in Jodie—even a portrait shot in the yearbook from the year I’d taught there full-time—but in this era before JPEGs or even faxes, it would be Tuesday or Wednesday of next week before they could be found and published.

“Here’s a story for you,” Hosty said. “You like stories, don’t you? Things like this ‘Open Window’?”

“I’m an English teacher. I love stories.”

“This fellow, George Amberson, is so stunned with grief over the loss of his girlfriend—”

“Fiancée.”

“Fiancée, right, even better. He’s so grief-stricken that he ditches the whole works and simply disappears. Wants nothing to do with publicity, free champagne, medals from the president, or ticker-tape parades. He just wants to get away and mourn his loss in privacy. That’s the kind of story Americans like. They see it on TV all the time. Instead of ‘The Open Window,’ it’s called ‘The Modest Hero.’ And there’s this FBI agent who’s willing to back up every word, and even read a statement that you left behind. How does that sound?”

It sounded like manna from heaven, but I held onto my poker face. “You must be awfully sure I can disappear.”

“We are.”

“And you really mean it when you tell me I won’t be disappearing
to the bottom of the Trinity River, as per the director’s orders?”

“Nothing like that.” He smiled. It was meant to be reassuring, but it made me think of an old line from my teenage years:
Don’t worry, you won’t get pregnant, I had the mumps when I was fourteen.

“Because I might have left a little insurance, Agent Hosty.”

One eyelid twitched. It was the only sign the idea distressed him. “We think you can disappear because we believe . . . let’s just say you could call on assistance, once you were clear of Dallas.”

“No press conference?”

“That’s the last thing we want.”

He opened his briefcase again. From it he took a yellow legal pad. He passed it over to me, along with a pen from his breast pocket. “Write me a letter, Amberson. It’ll be Fritz and me who’ll find it tomorrow morning when we come to pick you up, but you can head it ‘To Whom It May Concern.’ Make it good. Make it
genius.
You can do that, can’t you?”

“Sure,” I said. “Romance at short notice is my specialty.”

He grinned without humor and picked up the champagne bottle. “Maybe I’ll try a little of this while you’re romancing. None for you, after all. You’re going to have a busy night. Miles to go before you sleep, and all that.”

I wrote carefully, but it didn’t take long. In a case like this (not that there had ever in the whole history of the world been a case exactly like this), I thought shorter was better. I kept Hosty’s Modest Hero idea foremost in my mind. I was very glad that I’d had a chance to sleep for a few hours. Such rest as I’d managed had been shot through with baleful dreams, but my head was relatively clear.

By the time I finished, Hosty was on his third glass of bubbly.
He had taken a number of items from his briefcase and placed them on the coffee table. I handed him the pad and he began reading over what I’d written. Outside the thunder rumbled again, and lightning briefly lit the night sky, but I thought the storm was still distant.

While he read, I examined the stuff on the coffee table. There was my Timex, the one item that for some reason hadn’t been returned with the rest of my personal effects when we left the cop-shop. There was a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles. I picked them up and tried them on. The lenses were plain glass. There was a key with a hollow barrel instead of notches. An envelope containing what looked like about a thousand bucks in used twenties and fifties. A hairnet. And a white uniform in two pieces—pants and tunic. The cotton cloth looked as thin as Hosty had claimed my story to be.

“This letter’s good,” Hosty said, putting the pad down. “You come across kind of sad, like Richard Kimball on
The Fugitive.
You watch that one?”

I’d seen the movie version with Tommy Lee Jones, but this hardly seemed the time to bring it up. “No.”

“You’ll be a fugitive, all right, but only from the press and an American public that’s going to want to know all about you, from what kind of juice you drink in the morning to the waist size of your skivvies. You’re a human interest story, Amberson, but you’re not police business. You didn’t shoot your girlfriend; you didn’t even shoot Oswald.”

“I tried. If I hadn’t missed, she’d still be alive.”

“I wouldn’t blame yourself too much on that score. That’s a big room up there, and a .38 doesn’t have much accuracy from a distance.”

True. You had to get within fifteen yards. So I had been told, and more than once. But I didn’t say so. I thought my brief acquaintanship with Special Agent James Hosty was almost over. Basically I couldn’t wait.