It may be the devil or it may be the Lord but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.
The day Anna Rothstein ran away from Memphis and married a kid named Eddie O’Malley, her father, Saul, worried about his wife’s sanity. Doris Rothstein was crying in the kitchen. Her sister Irene was on her way over but hadn’t arrived yet. They were always there for each other at a time of crisis. That’s certainly what this was, Saul said to himself. The word helpless ran through his mind. It was a very uncomfortable word. Saul Rothstein was not the kind of man who was used to feeling helpless. Despite his wife’s emotional meltdown, he saw this… thing, this set of fucking outrageous circumstances.. . as a challenge to the central rule guiding the Rothstein family’s life- I, Saul Rothstein, make the rules! The phone call from Anna pissed him off. Saul couldn’t believe she actually put this Eddie guy on the line. What can you say to a nineteen-year-old auto mechanic who’s just run off with your daughter?
That morning, Anna left for school before seven, saying she needed to be there early. A friend was picking her up, she told her parents. Saul Rothstein now realized the friend had been the little Irish shithead now calling himself Anna’s husband. Saul hung up the phone and muttered, “Fuck me? I don’t think so, you little Mick sonofabitch!”
The newlyweds returned home, to Memphis, by car from the small town in Mississippi where they had been married, a place called Langston, so small Saul had never heard of it, somewhere in the southwest part of the state not far from Louisiana. This Eddie O’Malley apparently lived in an apartment somewhere near the Memphis airport. Anna mentioned something about two other roommates who had gone off to let them have some privacy. Mr. and Mrs. O’Malley were holed up inside. This bullshit needed fixing.
What kind of assholes live in Mississippi? Rothstein pondered that question as he waited in the outside office of his old friend, the Honorable Milton Fryer, Memphis’s only Jewish judge. “How is it they allow children to get married over there?” he asked the judge. Anna was only sixteen. He thought she said the O’Malley guy was nineteen. Saul wasn’t sure, but he was certain he’d had enough of this already. He beseeched Judge Fryer to help and, in less time than it took cement to harden, the judge annulled whatever nonsense Mississippi had been stupid enough to sanction. Anna Rothstein-now never legally O’Malley-went home, to her parents’ house. Her mother, Doris, didn’t stop crying for weeks. Even Irene was no help. Saul wanted no part of that either.
Anna Rothstein was a nice looking girl, tall, five-eight, maybe more, hazel eyes and light brown hair-almost blonde. At fourteen she was full breasted and by sixteen, with a little makeup and a nice dress, she was able to look twenty if she wanted. She was a bright girl, clearly the favorite of her dad, also smarter than her older brother. She took after her father. Everyone always said that and it pleased Saul tremendously. But not now. Although she had gone home, Anna reacted harshly to the annulment. She said she was going to retain counsel and challenge the Judge’s ruling. She already knew the law much better than her father did. Saul’s friend Milton Fryer wasn’t there to help. He capitulated.
“Do you love this… Eddie O’Malley?” her father asked.
“That is not what we are talking about,” said Anna. “What’s at issue here is the legality of your bogus annulment. You and Milton Fryer have a relationship, the sort of which any judge, other than ‘Uncle Milty,’ would easily see as a conflict of interest for him. You know, Dad, the legal system of the state of Tennessee was not created for your personal use. I wasn’t even married in this state-they wouldn’t let me. My Mississippi marriage cannot be tossed out by some Tennessee judge, sitting in the company of my father, absent either myself or my husband or any representation either of us might wish to have. Do you see what I mean?” Saul couldn’t help himself. He was proud of his daughter.
“What is it you want, Anna? And remember, you’re driving your mother nuts here.”
So it was that a sixteen-year-old Jewish girl from Memphis, Tennessee, in the year 1953, granted her parents’ wish to annul her Mississippi nuptials in return for being allowed to keep the name O’ Malley. She didn’t think that was asking too much, and she was right. Her grandmother would get used to it, she said.
Two years later, when she left Memphis to attend the University of Tennessee, Anna O’Malley dropped the Anna for Abby. She liked the sound of it. She spent four highly entertaining, successful years in Knoxville, studying Political Science-and did it- “Thank you God!” her father had prayed – without getting married again. Eddie O’Malley was long gone, not missed and hardly remembered. In the autumn of 1959, Abby O’Malley enrolled at the University of Chicago Law School. She was the first woman to be Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review and graduated first in the class of 1962. She loved living in Chicago and, after graduation, accepted a position there with Farmers Mutual Insurance Company. She specifically asked to work in major fraud investigation. She liked the challenge and rose to meet it. She had a talent for taking disparate events and scattered pieces of evidence and putting them together, gleaning a method, a motive, a conspiracy. In 1963 she left the private sector for government work. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy hired her to work on his organized crime unit, The Jimmy Hoffa Squad, as it was called. Abby had a nose for fraud, and fraud was the way the mob ran its whole national operation. Bobby Kennedy was pleased to have her. She moved to Washington, D.C. where she was a perfect fit. She was young, attractive, ambitious and smart. Then the President was murdered and everything at the Justice Department changed.
Bobby Kennedy had only one thing on his mind-who killed his brother? He recruited a small team of talented Justice Department lawyers to work only on that. Abby O’Malley was among them. Less than a year later, while only twenty-seven years old, Robert Kennedy handpicked her to take his investigation private. At first he put her in the Justice Department’s Boston office. This gave her easy access to his family’s resources and kept anyone in Washington from learning what the Special Assistant to the Attorney General really did. Shortly thereafter, Abby resigned from her government job and was hired by the legal department of a private investment firm, controlled by the Kennedys. Her position there served as cover for her real job-for which the family had allocated an unlimited budget-finding the person or persons responsible for the death of President John F. Kennedy. That mystery was finally solved and the investigation concluded in 1968. Less than a month later Bobby Kennedy was murdered.
Following his death, Abby O’Malley’s duties changed. Once Bobby Kennedy was confronted with the existence of Lacey’s confession, and its contents, once he was assured it was real, and that it was hidden away to protect Lacey, Abby’s job was to get it. Get it and destroy it. No cost was too much. That Bobby too was soon gone made no difference. From then on, while she appeared to be a high-level lawyer for an investment-banking firm, she devoted her efforts to a single mission-preserving the Kennedy mystique.
Rose had become depressed after Bobby’s death. In her melancholy, she said things to Abby, cried to her as only a mother could. To Abby O’Malley she said that which she could never have uttered in the earshot of her priest, her bishop or Cardinal Cushing. She was a good Catholic, but she was human. To keep the flame of Camelot burning brightly was to keep her boys alive and close. A woman of boundless energy and infectious enthusiasm had become despondent.
“Isn’t it enough he took my boys?” she wept in private to Abby. Was it God she spoke of, or Frederick Lacey? “Must he now destroy all they stood for?”
“No one can ever do that, Rose,” comforted Abby, still unsure. Could the wrath of God be directed through Lacey? Was Rose Kennedy in fear of each? Of both together?
“Oh, yes they can. They’ll ruin Jack now. With Bobby gone…” Rose paused for a moment and Abby could hear the upheaval in the old woman’s chest. The pain this woman felt at the death of the son who had always been her favorite stood exposed like fresh-butchered meat-raw, red and dripping blood. Abby expected her to cry out, Bobby! Bobby! Bobby! But she didn’t. Rose Kennedy wiped her eyes and nose with a nearby tissue, cleared her throat and said, “Without Bobby, there’s nobody to protect Jack. They’ll savage him.”
“No,” said Abby. “We will not allow that.”
“The women, Abby! The women alone will do it for them. I told Jack, but he didn’t listen. I told him ‘You’re the President of the United States, act like it!’ He never listened to me, and his father-he was no help. You watch, Abby. The business with the Monroe girl. The others too. Jackie will be of no help either. She’s done with us and if it weren’t for her children, I would…” She stopped herself just in time.
Abby O’Malley said, “Rose, I never believed all that would stay hidden, not forever. The President’s health also. People will find out and there will be those who will publicize it. It doesn’t matter. There might even be more. There may be things we don’t know, especially about his friends-deals they made, favors they called in-who knows what. Still, it won’t matter. I promise you. The American people love President Kennedy without reservation, for one reason and one reason only.” She looked at Rose, wanting to make sure the senior Kennedy was focused and completely lucid. “They love him because he was assassinated. And the same for Bobby. They love them both for the tragedy that took their lives, took them from us before their time. Nothing that is revealed will ever change that, unless the circumstances of their deaths, at the hands of Frederick Lacey, become known.”
“But, Abby…,” said Rose, her voice rising above its normal high-pitched near scream.
“No buts.” Abby held up both hands. “The vast majority of Americans-the vast majority of people all over the world-believe the President was assassinated by a conspiracy. You know that. I know you know that.” Rose nodded silently, in acquiescence. “For as long as that notion of conspiracy is not confirmed, not proven-for as long as people feel they do not know who killed President Kennedy-his legend is safe. Camelot is safe. What you have struggled so long to build, is safe. Only Lacey can change that.”
“Oh, my God.” Rose Kennedy began crying again.
“Leave him to me,” said Abby. “I’ll take care of it.”
To do that she had to get her hands on Lacey’s document. Lacey himself was untouchable, but the document was another matter. Abby was single-minded and determined. She answered only to Rose Kennedy. The matriarch of the Kennedy family knew the awful truth, but Abby never told another living soul about Frederick Lacey’s confession. Except for Louis Devereaux. It was well known within the Kennedy compound that Abby did something very important and her authority was not to be questioned. Nothing about her task changed when Rose Kennedy followed her children into the arms of Jesus, albeit more peacefully than they had.
Abby met Louis Devereaux in Chicago, in 1971. He was twenty. She’d been invited back to her law school as part of a two-day seminar covering a wide range of legal topics. On the second morning, she sat on a panel discussing the Fourth Amendment. The then Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review, a young man from Louisiana named Louis Devereaux, delivered a paper in which he argued that the strictures of the Fourth Amendment did not apply to the President of the United States. Under certain circumstances, he maintained, the President’s power to investigate was basically without limit. Abby wasn’t sure he was serious, but she was fascinated with the skill of his presentation and the structure of his argument. She did, of course, pass off as a joke Devereaux’s idea that the President-any President-could break into someone’s house or office, secretly and without a warrant and, if caught, claim constitutional immunity. She did not fail to notice the subtle support for Devereaux’s claim expressed by some members of the panel after the young man’s paper. Louis was a force. He had a way about him. If he hadn’t convinced them, he sure scared them with the possibility. Later, when she stopped Devereaux in the hallway, she was even more impressed to realize he wasn’t at all committed to the ideas he’d just proposed. The thrill of the argument gave him a buzz. She admired that, her sense of the absurdity of others, very much a part of her character too. Abby liked to have fun. She recognized a kindred spirit and gave him her card. “Stay in touch,” she said. She meant it and he knew it. She was not the type to glad-hand people and he was certainly not the type to be glad-handed. They both saw something special in each other. Abby O’Malley fit exactly into Devereaux’s experience with his mother and sisters-older, strong, accomplished women. She was precisely the kind of person for whom he reserved his respect and admiration. The two of them shared a commonality of world-view-not a nitpicking uniformity on policy, but a grander agreement on the ultimate scheme of the universe. As well, they shared ambition and recognition of each other as someone they would surely meet at the top of the mountain. They were determined to greet one another at the summit as allies. They would never lose touch with each other.
Had either of them known that John Ehrlichman would read Devereaux’s Law Review article, expanding his Fourth Amendment idea, and then arrogantly spout the thesis of Presidential exception to the Senate Watergate Committee, they would have had a good laugh. Years later, when Devereaux listened to Nixon’s tapes, he was disappointed Ehrlichman failed to credit him. “That’s a great idea, John!” Nixon could be heard saying. “Where did you get it from?” Ehrlichman calmly claimed it as his own.
In 1975 Abby met and married David Lowenthal, a shy, gentle, sometimes mystical Fine Arts professor at Harvard. He was also a well-known sculptor. Their relationship would be intensely private. He was so absorbed with his pursuit of art and beauty that he never really learned the details of his wife’s job. She did not care much. She did not encourage his curiosity, not in that area. She wasn’t the type to come home telling stories of her day at work. He adored her and she him. That was all either needed. At more than one Boston party, David Lowenthal was heard to explain what his wife did by saying she had “something to do with investments.”
Abby O’Malley was a patient woman. She gave no ground as Frederick Lacey wilted slowly, living longer, much longer than anyone had a right to. The day he finally died, her decades of planning were over. Within minutes events were in motion.
The Heerensgracht was frozen over. All the canals were. The smell of ice was in the air. Biting winds swept in off the North Sea. The usual canal traffic-the small outboards, the long, low tourist boats and the water taxis that ferried people from the Leidseplein to the Van Gogh Museum and on to the Flower Market-were all on hold until spring. It was damn cold in Amsterdam. Walter brought the wrong jacket. He’d forgotten how unpleasant the Dutch winter could be. The city was beautiful, as it always was, but he was freezing in his windbreaker, even with a sweater underneath. Fortunately, the apartment at 310 Heerensgracht was a short cab ride from Amsterdam Central Station.
The train from Bergen op Zoom got them to Amsterdam late in the afternoon. Walter had been in Central Station often enough to feel familiar there. He could never get the picture out of his mind, the sight of German trains loaded with Nazi soldiers pulling in on the same tracks his own train now rode on. He’d seen it in documentaries and newsreels. Why it didn’t bother the Dutch more was a mystery to him. Perhaps, one needed to be a European to understand. Europe was more the same than different, now. But how could all-or nearly all-be forgiven, he wondered. It never occurred to Walter that he himself was an occupier. St. John was hardly one of the thirteen colonies and May 4, 1734, meant nothing to him. For many on St. John, the ritual suicide of that day marked it indelibly as the saddest day ever.
The apartment Aat arranged for them was on the first floor of a narrow, three-story building that probably had been there since the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Like most of the old buildings in Amsterdam, the first floor was actually well above ground level, up a steep, stone stairway. He told Walter there would be a key under the mat. It was there. Upon entering the house, their place was immediately on the left. To get into the apartment, they had to open a massive, black, solid wood door that looked to Walter to be all of ten feet high. There was only a single lock, a simple tumbler. Once inside, Walter and Harry were somewhat surprised to find the place furnished in an ultra modern style neither one of them found very attractive. Cold, straight lines seemed to be the theme of the day, minimalism carried to its extreme. The ceilings, like those in most first-floor flats along the canals, were twelve to fourteen feet high. The walls had been sprayed with a bright, white paint, punctuated in a few spots, apparently selected at random, by the sort of art Walter never cared for. For a moment he was reminded of the two very large canvases, filled with big, colorful, abstract shapes, that had hung opposite each other on Isobel Gitlin’s living room walls on West End Avenue in New York.
A tiny kitchen nestled in a corner at the far end of the room, exposed except for a table-high countertop. Two very strange, tall barstools, that Walter thought looked like somebody’s idea of skinny, black metal flamingos, were tucked up against it. Down the hall, past the kitchen on the right, was a small toilet and shower and, at the hallway’s end, a door opened to the apartment’s only bedroom. One bed was in the room, a platform affair, little more than a thin mattress without benefit of a box spring, apparently laid on nothing more than a slab of wood. Simple, thought Walter. Probably cost a fortune. The bedroom, like the rest of the apartment, was done in stark contrast, black or white. For a while it appeared that neither Walter nor Harry wanted to take that bed for themselves. Then Walter spoke.
“Make yourself at home,” he said, taking off his jacket and tossing it on one of the ugly barstools. “Take the bedroom,” he added.
“Where are you going to sleep?”
“Out here.” Walter pointed to the living room couch.
“It looks like something you might find in a prison,” said Harry, examining the couch.
“An expensive prison,” mumbled Walter. “Anyway, wash up and we’ll eat.” They had taken the time to stop, in Central Station, at a shop selling broodjes. “It means sandwiches,” Walter told Harry as he pointed toward the sign. They bought more than they needed because Walter said they couldn’t be sure when they could go out for more food.
“If we don’t eat them, we can throw them out,” Harry said.
“We’ll eat them. Don’t worry about that. Grab a couple of drinks while you’re at it.”
They don’t sell Diet Coke in the Netherlands. What they do offer is something they call Coca Cola Light. They replace the artificial sweetener used in America with corn syrup or some other natural sweetening agent. It still has basically no calories, but it’s a little sweeter. They don’t use the word diet on foods or drinks because something about it offends Dutch sensibilities. They are a very fit people who, unlike Americans, do not live in constant fear of fat. You’d have a hard time finding a Dutchman who ever heard of the Atkins diet. So, Walter threw a few cans of Coca Cola Light into the bag, together with a container of milk Harry handed him.
Darkness fell soon after they arrived. It was evening in the heart of winter and the sun sets early in Holland. Amsterdam is a lively city-many would say the liveliest in Europe-but there’s no nightlife, no restaurants, bars or coffee shops on the Heerensgracht. The Gentleman’s Canal was called such for good reason. Walter was not surprised when Aat told him that was where they would stay. Harry went to use the toilet and when he emerged he saw Walter standing next to the first of the two huge, nearly floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the canal. He separated the sheer curtains that fell lightly from a window treatment at the top all the way to the floor, and he stood there for a long time looking down the street in both directions and straight across to the other side of the iced-over waterway. Then he did the same thing at the other window. After that he opened their front door, pretended like he was coming into the building and counted the steps, to and beyond their apartment door, all the way to the stairway leading up to the second and third floors. All the while Harry stared at him. He was sure Walter was doing something important. Thus far, Harry had not seen anything about Walter to indicate that he ever did anything without a purpose to it. But, watching this little bit of theater, Harry had no clue what Walter was up to. Finally, Walter told Harry to open the front door of the building, twice. He had him close it carefully behind him the first time, allowing it to shut almost by itself, lending just a hand at the last instant to keep it from slamming. The second time Harry was instructed to let it close on its own, unimpeded.
“Just let it slam shut,” said Walter.
As Harry did this, Walter went back inside, sat down on the living room couch and, with the apartment door closed, he listened. When Harry was done he came back inside. Walter said, “Let’s eat.”
Aat van de Steen knocked on their door at eight, sharp. “Hoe gaat het met de oude jongen?” he said, wrapping his arms around Walter in a bear hug. “I am so glad to see you again. So glad.”
“Me too,” said Walter. “Look at you. You look great.”
“Ah, ha! Like you, Walter Sherman, I too am een oude waas,”
“A what?”
“An old fool, my friend. An old fool.”
Aat van de Steen was tall and thin. He had the kind of good looks more appreciated in Europe than in America where broad features, wide shoulders and a little extra weight around the middle was expected from a successful man in his sixties. He wore an overcoat and scarf, both of which he immediately took off and hung carefully on a coat hook near the door. He was well dressed in a gray suit, light blue shirt and maroon striped tie. His hair, like his suit, was gray and perfectly cut. He ran his fingers through it twice and it fell into place. He looked like a man who was comfortable with luxury, yet he wore only a simple watch and no other jewelry. In Holland, gratuitous display of wealth is a serious faux pas. In the social democracy of the Netherlands there were, of course, many rich people, but they dutifully observed the social contract not to flaunt their material excesses in their everyday life. You would never hear a discussion of investments, real estate values or how much you paid for your car at a dinner party in Holland. No matter what your social standing, no Dutchman would be so crude as to ask how much you earned or speculate on the salary of others. Unlike the United States, people in Holland kept their finances to themselves. Walter knew, but Harry surely didn’t, that Aat van de Steen had more money than he could ever count.
“No one’s looking for you here,” said van de Steen. “Not on the Heerensgracht.”
“Heerensgracht,” Harry said somewhat absently.
“Very good,” Aat smiled. “Your Dutch will be better than Walter’s in no time.”
“I’m thinking that’s what we have,” chimed in Walter. “No time.”
“The Heerensgracht,” said Aat directly to Harry. “You would say, the Gentleman’s Canal. So, you are in the right place. I apologize for the bedroom-only one, that is.”
“Already a settled matter,” Walter replied. Harry nodded agreement.
“Before I forget, Walter,” he said, striding over to where his coat hung. “Let me give you this. You never can tell when you might need it.” He reached into the pocket of his overcoat and withdrew a. 9mm pistol, one that had a dull, silver finish. It was not a small gun. Then he reached into the other coat pocket and took out two extra clips. He put them all down on the delicate, modern glass table in front of the couch.
“Een achteloze mens kan een dode mens zijn,” he said.
Walter had heard his Dutch friend say that very thing before, the first time many years ago in the jungles of Laos. He knew he was right. In English, it meant, “A careless man can be a dead man.”
“Holy shit!” said Harry, actually jumping backward. “How did you get a gun in Holland?”
Aat van de Steen looked at Harry like he was crazy, looked at Walter in disbelief, then broke into uproarious laughter. Walter couldn’t resist. Soon he too was laughing. Poor Harry stood there wondering what was so funny.
Tucker Poesy landed at Schiphol long before Walter’s plane got in from Frankfurt. Before she left London, she read his file, the one she picked up from the Indian. The material faxed to The Standard by Devereaux included a recent photo of Walter Sherman, taken outside a restaurant in Atlanta called Il Localino. He was attractive, she thought, for an old man. She had Walter’s flight information and a dozen pages with the details of one of the more interesting lives she had read about. The pages about Vietnam contained things that might have frightened some people. It intrigued her. As she often did when studying someone else’s exploits, she imagined herself in the same circumstances and wondered what she would have done. Some of what she read about Walter Sherman had happened many years ago. He was near sixty now and not quite so imposing. Yet, something about him stirred fear in Ms. Poesy’s belly. One thing was certain. Walter Sherman was not a man to be taken lightly. That was a mistake she would not make.
As she waited for Walter’s flight to land, she thought about her earlier fuck-up with Harry Levine. She was angry with herself. Her frustration was more than a little out of control. What a mess she had made in London. Quite rightly, she took the blame for it when she called Devereaux. But now, with ample time for self-protective rationalization, her pride was winning the battle against her sense of responsibility.
“Fuck you,” she told herself she should have said to Devereaux. “I’m not a goddamn babysitter.” Her job was killing people and most of the people she’d killed she’d never even spoken to-not a word. Now, she was being told to pick this guy up and hold on to him until she could get her hands on some document, a document Devereaux wanted so badly. “Bullshit!” she told herself. “Not my fucking job!”
She followed Walter Sherman downstairs in Schiphol, to the trains. She joined him on the train to Rotterdam, sitting two seats behind him. She changed trains, as he did, and traveled on with him to Bergen op Zoom. In Rotterdam, before getting on the train to Bergen op Zoom, she went to the restroom, removed her dark blue jacket, turned it inside out and it became a red one. She piled her hair on top of her head and pushed it under a small cap. She quickly rubbed off all her face makeup. Then she boarded the train and again sat two seats behind Walter Sherman.
She watched him walk into the Mercure de Draak. She waited across the square on which the hotel fronted. Ten minutes later she spotted him again, this time with her old friend Harry Levine. The two of them approached the front of the hotel coming from around the corner. They must have gone out through the back, she thought. When they took a cab, so did she. At the train station, she stood far enough back from them that she could be unseen. The two men bought tickets and started toward the tracks. Tucker Poesy ran up to the ticket window just after Walter and Harry walked away.
“Oh!” she said, trying very hard to make the ticket agent think she was catching her breath. “I missed them! My uncle and my cousin-they just left your window. They probably think I’m not coming. Please,” she said with her best helpless young girl smile, “give me a ticket too, just like theirs.” With her ticket in hand, she saw they were headed for Amsterdam Central Station, end of the line. She didn’t even have to ride in the same car. Not this time. They were all headed for the last stop. Not only that, she could actually close her eyes and get some sleep. When they arrived in Amsterdam, she didn’t need the sort of sweet technique she used buying her ticket in Bergen op Zoom. She trailed Harry Levine and Walter Sherman to a small food shop inside the station, watched as they bought some sandwiches and drinks and followed them outside to the cab line. When they took off, she jumped in a taxi and calmly told the driver, “Follow that cab.” The cabbie, a young man who looked distinctly Middle Eastern, glanced backward with some suspicion, but as soon as he caught the look in Tucker Poesy’s eyes, he quickly faced forward again. He never again looked in his rearview mirror after that. She frightened him.
“Keep going,” she said when they stopped behind the cab in front of them, the one letting Walter and Harry out at 310 Heerensgracht. “Go around to the other side of the canal. Now! Hurry!” They made a quick left and crossed the bridge at the next corner, turned back in the direction they had just come, and finally rolled to a stop directly across from the building Walter and Harry had gone into. She got out of the cab and sternly told the driver, “Go to the next corner and wait for me. You’ll be well taken care of.” As the cab pulled away, she stood on the narrow cobblestone street, just inside the bike lane, looking across the icy canal. She recognized Walter Sherman standing in the window. That was all she needed, for now. She walked to the corner, got back in the cab and told the driver to take her to the Hotel Estherea on the Single.
The sound woke Walter, a sound he knew he’d heard before. It was the sound of a door opening, the door at the front of the building. Someone from upstairs, he thought. Second or third floor. Coming home late. After all, it is Amsterdam. Must be alone because he heard no voices. Two or more people, they’d be talking, wouldn’t they? Laughing, maybe giggling, urging each other not to wake the neighbors. The door had opened. He waited for the sound of it closing. It never came. Someone must have grabbed the heavy wooden door just before it thundered shut and then silently slipped it into place. An act of consideration at-he glanced over at the small clock he always traveled with-2:53 am? Perhaps. He listened for footsteps. One, two, three, and they stopped. It was seven steps to the stairway leading to the upper floors. It was three to the door of their apartment. Someone was standing just outside, on the other side of the door. Someone was right there, an inch or two away. Walter lay on the couch, in the darkness. Reaching down to the floor beneath him, using only his left hand, he found the pistol Aat had given him earlier that evening. He held it aimed at the middle of the door just left of the latch. If it opened, whoever came in would walk directly into his sights. Then he sat up, moving his body slowly, trying to keep the couch from making noise while he shifted his weight. When both feet were firmly on the floor, he stood in one quick move. The. 9mm held its aim throughout, now leveled at what he figured to be chest height. Gliding on the balls of his bare feet, Walter reached the door in two long steps, flipped the latch, turned the doorknob and threw it open. Instantly, the barrel of his weapon was jammed against the forehead of the man standing in the hallway.
“Not a sound,” Walter said. “Just follow my lead.” With that he pushed the gun forcefully against the man’s head to the left as he stepped to the right. This placed the man inside the apartment with his back to the couch, the one Walter had been sleeping on. Now, closing the door, he pushed him harder, into the apartment. As he did so, he flipped the light switch. “Put your hands on top of your head,” he said, very quietly, very calmly, almost reassuringly. “Get down on your knees and lay flat on the floor, face forward.” The man did as he was told. “If you make any movement or gesture,” Walter went on, “anything at all that disturbs me, I’ll shoot you. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” the man said in a voice muffled by the fact that his face was flat on the floor and he was unable to raise his neck with his hands on the back of his head as they were.
“Good,” said Walter. “I’m going to search you and then ask you to remove your coat. Don’t be alarmed. I will not hurt you, unless you make me. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” said the man.
With the gun pushed against the back of the man’s head at the base of his skull, Walter ran his free hand down and across the man’s body, his arms and legs, looking for a weapon, including any small ordnance that might be hidden in his socks or hitched on his ankle, around his waist and belt, under his armpits and into his groin. He was unarmed. Walter removed the man’s wallet from the left breast jacket pocket, opened it and dropped it on the floor next to the man’s head.
“I’m going to ask you to do something, Sean,” he said. “When I do, do exactly as I say. Take as much time as you need. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” said the man.
“Good. Roll over on your back. Take your hands from your head and unbutton your coat. Then remove the coat, one arm at a time, without getting off the floor. Do it now.” Walter stepped back a pace and watched the man turn over and begin unbuttoning his long overcoat. “If you make a move other than with your buttons, I’ll shoot you. You understand me?”
“Yes,” said the man.
“Good,” said Walter.
When his overcoat was unbuttoned and the man lay on top of it, Walter reached with his right foot and kicked the coat from under him, away in the direction of the ugly barstools near the kitchen. It slid on the hardwood floor nearly the length of the room. “Now take your pants off.”
“What?”
“Don’t speak. Just remove your pants and your underwear.” The man hesitated. This was not the first time Walter had engaged in this particular piece of melodrama. He was not surprised by the man’s reluctance. He knew that any man who did not instinctively recoil from such an order was a very dangerous man indeed. Any man who could maintain his concentration and keep his cool while his balls were set free to flap on the floor was already working on a plan of escape. Such a man, Walter knew, would be devising a way to kill him. This one was not such a man.
He managed his pants without incident, but again stopped before taking his underwear off. “Do it,” said Walter, this time with an edge to his voice. The man was clearly frightened and that pleased Walter. When he lay there, his genitals fully exposed, Walter said, “Pull your shirt up over your eyes. Let it cover your head.”
“Hey, wait a…” He was stopped by the sound of Walter’s gun clicking into a ready position. “Okay, okay,” the man said and did as he had been told. Finally, he lay there, on the floor, naked below the neck, his face covered and his hands at his side.
“Hands on head,” said Walter. The man complied immediately. At that point Walter brought the gun down and moved the hammer to rest. If that sound made the man feel better, Walter couldn’t tell because the man’s face was covered by his shirt. It made Walter feel safer. He certainly did not want to shoot someone, in the middle of the night, on the quiet and reserved Heerensgracht. How much attention would that bring? And there was Harry. He didn’t want to wake him.
Walter asked, “Where are you from, Sean Dooley?” The man on the floor mumbled something through his shirt. “Speak up,” said Walter.
“Waterford.”
“Waterford?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Where’s that?”
“Ireland.”
“Right on the River Suir,” came a voice from the hallway at the end of the room. It was Harry Levine. “Waterford, you know, the glass people. Nice town. Very pretty really.”
“I didn’t want to wake you,” Walter said.
“Well, I’m up and look what I find. Somebody, naked, face up on the living room floor. And you’re holding that gun on him.”
“At least you’re in a good mood,” said Walter, then turning his attention back to the naked man on the floor, he asked, “Who are you working for?” Dooley said nothing. “Look Dooley,” Walter said with a sigh, “When I ask a question, you have to answer me. Those are the rules. Otherwise I’ll shoot you. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“How old are you, Sean?”
“Thirty-one.”
“If you’d like to be thirty-two, you need to know that any inclination you might have to tell me less than what I want to know or to give me information which is less than truthful, could lead to me killing you. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” and this time he added, “sir.”
“Then tell me what you are doing here and who sent you.”
Harry found himself much more accepting of the situation than he ever dreamed he would be. Of course, he never dreamed anything like this at all. It was like fishing, he thought. You drop your line and hope for a catch. Only thing was, he wasn’t wading in cool water somewhere along the Chattahoochee River, flicking his rod, tossing his lure way out from shore. He was a world away from a warm spring morning in the north Georgia mountains. To be sure, he was the fish. And it looked like Walter Sherman just caught the fisherman.
Fear gripped Sean Dooley as surely as if he had come face to face with the Devil himself and Beelzebub had thrown him, naked, into Hell’s firestorm. The flames nipped at his dick. Satan’s spear surely awaited him. The anticipation of jagged pain made his stomach churn and he convulsed involuntarily, right there on the floor. Walter had pegged him right. Now he was afraid the Irish pussy might throw up. This Sean Dooley was no more than a regular guy, not a trained operative. Too often, Walter knew, when you use loud aggressive threats with civilians, instead of cooperating they tighten up, harden their resistance as a reaction to the violence they sense is about to come their way. They can’t help it. They instinctually react in a manner inconsistent with their own self-interest. With them, the calm and quiet assertion of authority, coupled with the prospect of impending bodily harm or even death, works much better. Be reasonable, he told himself. They respond to reason. On the other hand, Walter found over the years, pros fell into two groups. The first were people who would die before talking. It was a waste of time to question them. The second bunch often needed a specific sign of what was to come before giving in. They could manage the abstract threat of violence, but not a taste of the real thing. A kick in the groin, a gun barrel shoved up their ass. Something to get their attention. Why they didn’t believe, at the start, in the certainty of their own misfortune was a mystery. One thing was for sure, you could never tell what impulse would make a man willingly give his life rather than surrender information. It was irrational, but what could you do? Sean Dooley talked, and Walter was well enough convinced, after a while, that the Irishman told the truth. How many men had Walter interrogated over the years? More than he could remember. He knew how to ask the same question, in different ways, in unconnected context, to test the truth of the initial answer. Mostly these were simple questions, the kind a regular person, a truthful person, had no time to figure out.
“When did you get to Amsterdam?” Walter asked. Dooley told him he’d just arrived. “You came here straight from the airport?”
“Yes,” he told Walter, “straight from the airport.” A few minutes later, Walter asked, “What time was it when you got off the plane?” The question demanded an immediate answer and he got one. He knew that someone like Sean Dooley would look at his watch as he walked off the plane, leaving the jetway and entering the terminal area. People in a hurry, on a schedule, always do. Dooley gave Walter the right answer. He really had come straight from the airport. How the hell did he know where to go? Walter motioned to Harry pointing at the overcoat on the floor near one of the flamingos. Harry snatched it up. “Check the pockets,” Walter told him. Dooley’s plane ticket was there, one-way from London to Amsterdam. He’d been in Holland less than an hour. Harry pulled something else out too, unfolded it and gasped.
“What is it?” Walter asked.
“My picture,” said Harry.
It was indeed. There, on the page, was a photograph of Harry Levine and underneath it, written in hand- Harry Levine, 310 Heerensgracht, first floor. Amsterdam.
At the top of the page was a fax-generated telephone number-the sender’s number-an American number with an area code Walter didn’t recognize. He looked at Harry.
“Area code 617,” he said. “You know where that is?”
“Boston.”
Walter looked down at the man lying on the floor. “Sean, are you with me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Who do you know in Boston?”
“I dunno.”
“Young man,” said Walter, now sounding every bit the genial family doctor. “Tell me who sent you a fax of Harry Levine’s picture or I will step on your balls and crush them into the floor. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir. Please don’t… It was Miss O’Malley. She sent it for me.”
“Who is she?” asked Walter looking over at Harry who shrugged. He had no idea who this Miss O’Malley might be.
“She’s a woman I done some jobs for before. American, but that’s all I know of her. I don’t ask questions.”
“What sort of jobs?”
“You know, just jobs, all kinds of stuff here and there.”
“Tell me about this job.”
“There’s this thing, she called it a document. She said that Harry Levine has it. She wants it.”
“And your job?”
“Get it.”
Sean Dooley was not the brightest light shining from the Emerald Isle. It went on this way-Walter asking a question and Sean giving a short, simple answer-for what seemed to Harry to be a half-hour. Actually it was only a few minutes. Finally, Walter said, “Pull your shirt down.” The Irishman did and for the first time Harry saw his face. Sean Dooley may have been only thirty-one, but he looked like fifty. His Irish mug was both puffy and deeply lined at the same time. Probably the result of a lot of time spent outside, Harry concluded, and a lot of beer drinking when he was indoors.
“Put your pants on. Go ahead, it’s all right.” Dooley pulled his pants up from around his ankles, tucked his shirt halfway in and buckled his belt. He was breathing easier now. Walter thought the vision of his balls ground into the hardwood floor was still very much in Sean Dooley’s mind. “I want you to do two things for me, Sean, okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. First, I want you to give Miss O’Malley this number.” He handed the Irishman a small slip of paper. On it was written a telephone number. “You won’t lose it, right?”
“Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir. I won’t lose it.”
“And second-and Sean, listen very carefully because your life depends on this-I want you to leave Holland, right now, and never come back. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Leave right now. When you walk out of here go straight to the airport. Sleep at Schiphol, if you have to wait before you can get a flight back home.”
“Yes, sir,” said Dooley.
“Here’s the part where you have to listen carefully.” Dooley looked up at Walter from the floor and nodded in a manner that showed Walter he wanted to comply completely and he was eager for Walter to know it. Walter said, “If I ever see you again, I will kill you. Tell Miss O’Malley that if I see anyone else she sends, I will kill them and then, Sean, I’ll come back and kill you too. Even if you’ve done everything I’ve said, I’ll come back for you. Miss O’Malley sent you. If she sends anyone else, you’ll pay too. You have good reason, a powerful incentive to convince Miss O’Malley of my bad intentions.” He waved Dooley’s driver’s license in his face and then tossed it over to Harry. The rest of the wallet he gave back. “I won’t have any trouble finding you, you know that don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good,” said Walter. “Get the fuck out of here.”
“Pack,” said Walter as Harry poured himself a glass of milk.
“What? I beg your pardon. What do you mean?”
“We have to leave. It’s too dangerous here.”
“But you let him go. You threw him out.”
“It’s not him I’m concerned about. Our boy Sean hasn’t been killing anybody. Sir Anthony Wells, and your Ambassador Brown, they were killed by pros, mean ones at that. They were beaten for information. Can you imagine a hundred-year-old man taking that sort of abuse?” Walter stopped for a moment and shook his head. He didn’t have to ask what kind of man would do such a thing. He knew. “We need to get out of here,” he said, looking at the little clock next to the couch. It said 3:20 am.
Ten minutes later, after Walter made two phone calls, a taxi pulled to a halt in front of the building. Walter and Harry walked quickly down the stone steps and into the waiting cab. As they drove off, Walter looked in all directions. He saw no one. He gave the driver specific instructions-“turn here… turn there”-taking them through the empty residential neighborhoods in the Jordan section and then, quickly and unexpectedly, in the opposite direction toward the newly developed part of Amsterdam where clusters of gleaming glass skyscrapers surrounded the Heineken Music Hall. The streets were empty. Nobody followed them. Finally, no longer visibly on edge, Walter leaned forward and said to the cab driver, “Rotterdam.”
Louis Devereaux was angry. Tucker Poesy was pissed. He was talking mostly to himself, but she held the phone to her ear anyway.
“Twice? Jesus fucking Christ! Twice?”
“I…”
“You lost him, again? First you lost him when he was in your apartment?-in your apartment! And now you lose him-again!”
“Look,” she said.
“No! You look…”
“I am not a fucking babysitter!” She was shouting at him. “Do you hear me? I don’t find people. I kill people. You tell me where to go, I go. You tell me who to shoot, I shoot. All the rest of this is bullshit! Now if you have nothing more to say, I’ve got better things to do than chase around Europe after Harry Levine and some psycho named Walter Sherman.”
“They’re not in Europe anymore,” said Devereaux, his boil having quickly receded to little more than a simmer. The total transformation from furious to… calm took Tucker Poesy by surprise.
“What?”
“When I know exactly where he is, I’ll call you.” With that Devereaux hung up.
Years ago, while getting his doctorate in European History at Yale, Devereaux took a Greek History course with an offbeat professor named Yataka Andrews. He remembered him now, after hanging up on Tucker Poesy. Yataka Andrews was a flamboyant character on the New Haven campus. He seemed so old at the time, so grown-up, but he was probably no more than forty, if that. Tall and thin, smooth skinned and handsome, his straight black hair flew about as he shook his head this way and that, all hands and arms, gesturing wildly while he paced about the classroom in jeans and a turtleneck sweater. His mother was Japanese; his father English, rumored to be a Duke or Earl or something like that. Dr. Andrews spoke with a distinct, clipped upper-class British accent. Close your eyes and you heard a Shakespearean actor, English, Irish or Welsh. Open them and you saw a towering Asian. Devereaux recalled a spirited discussion, one afternoon. It centered on Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War .
The thirty-year truce, agreed upon at the conclusion of the conquest of Euboea, was broken in less than half that time when the Thebans invaded Plataea. They massed their forces at the gates to the city, approaching in secret, in the dark of night. The assault was an inside job, facilitated by a Plataean traitor named Naucleides who, thinking he would gain a political advantage after a Theban victory, quite stupidly opened the gate and practically invited them in. Professor Andrews posed the question: “What do you do when the wolf is at your door?” Obviously, this had implications well beyond the Greeks. The discussion was wide-ranging, covering wars, and threats of wars, from ancient Greece to Vietnam. Agreement within the class was hard to come by. Plataea was pushed to the background, forgotten in the heat of the moment by some. Finally, one student said, “When the wolf is at your door, it’s best to have a big gun.” A funny comment, of course, since, as Dr. Andrews was quick to point out, neither the Thebans nor the Plataeans had explosives of any kind. But the point was made. In the face of a threat, mighty force was the best defense. “No,” said Yataka Andrews, dashing up the aisle of sitting students, jumping, standing like a colossus on an empty desk in the back row. They all turned to see him. “That is not the answer,” he said. “Nor is it the meaning of the lesson. It was not for the Greeks to answer this question. Hardly. It was-” He paused momentarily for effect, then nearly leaped to the front of the class, turned to look at his students and announced, “It was Joseph Stalin who said, ‘When the wolf is at your door, you need a better place to hide.’ ”
Breaking through his anger with The Bambino, decades later, Devereaux heard it all again, the sonorous tones of Yataka Andrews reciting the words of the Soviet tyrant. It rang in his ears- “a better place to hide.” Of course. That’s where Walter Sherman was headed, to a better place to hide. Devereaux smiled. He couldn’t help but also remember that the Plataeans, despite the surprise advantage of their attackers, had routed the Thebans in their pre-dawn battle. They fought furiously with wild abandon, men, women and children. Even the slaves fought against the invaders. Better the master you know than the one you don’t.
Devereaux knew what lay ahead for Harry Levine, for the Lacey Confession, for The Locator. He just didn’t know the fine details. No matter, he was sure of the outcome. He poured himself a cup of tea, tore off a chunk of the French bread that lay on the kitchen tile next to the stove, and picked up the phone again. This time he called his old friend Abby O’Malley. After a minimum of small talk-they were truly glad to hear each other’s voice-Devereaux said, “I’m on it, Abby. I was close, and missed, but I’ll have it soon.”
“You mean… Lacey?”
“Lacey. I’ve got a man working it as we speak. Actually, he doesn’t exactly work for me, but he works for me, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh, I do,” said Abby. “I certainly do, Louis.”
“His name is Sherman, Walter Sherman. I’m positive he’s got Levine-and the document. I thought we had him in Holland, but he’s out now. We’ll find him again.”
“Walter Sherman?” she said, quite openly amused. “I thought we had him in Holland, too. But it’s okay, Louis. Really it is.” Abby O’Malley was laughing now, a gentle laugh meant for an old friend, with no hint of mean spirit.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“I have his cell phone number,” she said. “He left it for me.” And now they both laughed.
They slept most of the way to Juarez. The last road sign Harry saw said Torreon. He never heard of it and had no idea where he was. The sign next to it had an arrow pointing right. Monterrey, 382 km. Well, at least he’d heard of Monterrey. What was 382 kilometers? About 250 miles? Something like that. Harry thought back to when Walter first said they were taking a bus. Why? He knew it was easily a thousand miles from Mexico City to Ciudad Juarez, a thousand miles to Texas. In Harry’s mind, he was certain a Mexican bus meant a rickety, old half-truck, sputtering its way along dirt roads, luggage loaded on the roof. He pictured old men, Indians no doubt, chewing something vile, spitting on the floor, and behind them, sullen-faced fat women surrounded by chickens. He remembered Turkey and especially Egypt. Could Mexico match what went for public transportation on the outskirts south of Cairo? Of course, he was wrong about Mexico. This bus turned out to be an ultra-modern vehicle, air conditioned, complete with comfortable tilt-back seats equipped with headphones offering a selection of music channels, clean restrooms, even a cold drink machine, and easy-on-the-eye recessed lighting. You could sleep or you could eat or you could read without invading the privacy of the person next to you.
Harry had no idea what lay at the end of their journey or where that might be. Walter told him things one step at a time. By now, Harry could hardly remember what day it was. Just because it was sunny didn’t mean it was daytime. Not for his body clock. In Rotterdam-when was that, yesterday? Or the day before?-they took a train to Brussels. They had breakfast there, in the train station, Harry remembered. Walter had even made a joke, a bad joke about Belgian waffles. Then they cabbed to the airport where, just before eight o’clock, they took an Iberia flight to Madrid. After Rotterdam, everything was waiting for them. Arrangements had been made. Probably the Dutchman, Aat van de Steen, Harry thought. They stopped only to pick up tickets. Walter knew just where to go and what to ask for when he got there. In Madrid they made their way to The Palace Hotel, ornate, elegant, the domed lobby perhaps the most beautiful he’d ever seen. Harry tagged along as Walter walked up to the desk and announced himself. It was not yet eleven in the morning. Their rooms, Harry figured, would not be available for hours. Then it struck him-arrangements had been made. The desk clerk handed Walter a key and minutes later they were shown to a suite overlooking the plaza. As the bellhop swung open the high, double-door windows, Harry saw the Ritz facing them across the busy plaza below. When they were finally alone, Walter pointed toward a bedroom down the hall.
“You take that one,” he said. “I’ll take the one over here. Get some sleep. We won’t be here long.”
Harry was awakened at three that afternoon. Walter nudged him gently. Nevertheless, he jumped out of bed-scared, or ready for the fight? Who knew? Walter was pleased. In circumstances like these, it was better to travel with someone on edge. He was sure of that. But he didn’t want to pursue the thought for fear it might be fear, not readiness that put the spring in his companion’s step. He had enough to worry about without that.
“Take a shower,” he told Harry. “Might be awhile before you get another one. It’ll help wake you up too.”
Refreshed, and with a change of clothes, Harry saw that Walter had ordered lunch. The tray sat on the low coffee table in the living room. Salads and pasta with some grilled shrimp, water with ice. No coffee or tea. Through the open windows off the terrace, cool air blew in from the plaza. They ate, then left the hotel.
At six o’clock Harry and Walter buckled themselves in, in seats A and B in the second row of First Class on AeroMexico flight #4, nonstop from Madrid to Mexico City. “Drink as much water as you can,” Walter told Harry. “It’ll help.” Favorable winds got them in forty-five minutes early. Still, it was a twelve-hour trip. Harry had difficulty sleeping on airplanes and even in First Class, twelve hours was enough to drive him nuts. Time was starting to really get away from him. It was early in the evening in Mexico City, around eleven, when they arrived, but for Harry and Walter it was already past breakfast time the next day. Walter seemed untroubled. Harry was trying desperately to accommodate. That was when Walter told him not to get comfortable. “We’re going straight to the bus station,” he told him. Seeing the bewilderment in Harry’s face, Walter said, “Ciudad Juarez.” With a light clap of his hands, like a magician freeing a white dove and, with what he hoped was a comforting smile, he added, “We’re bound for Texas.”
Like the flight from Madrid, the bus to Juarez was nonstop. A second driver slept in a sort of cubbyhole of a seat directly behind the driver at the wheel. A heavy curtain enclosed him. Whoever was in there was already hidden away when Harry and Walter boarded. At some point in the trip, he would emerge, take the wheel and allow the first driver to get some sleep himself. Harry wondered how many turns they took for a thousand-mile trip. The bus would stop only for gas and, while doing that, to let the passengers stretch their legs. “Why are we taking a bus?” Harry had asked as they left the airport. “Isn’t it a long trip? A thousand miles or so?” It was, Walter told him. “Eleven hundred and three miles,” he said. “I need the time to think. Nobody’s looking for us on a bus in Mexico. We’re safe here and I need the time.” Harry asked no more questions.
Rolling along the Mexican highway, Harry tried to put it all together. What day was it? It all began on Saturday-Sir Anthony-McHenry Brown-The President of the United States and some guy named Louis Devereaux-Tucker Poesy. Christ, where was she now?-Sean Dooley. How many days had gone by? What’s next? Who’s next? And, of course, Frederick Lacey. My God! Harry closed his eyes, hoping to fall into a dreamless sleep.
They crossed the border into El Paso on foot. It was some ungodly hour, early in the morning, still dark. Walter bought a newspaper from a street corner box. It didn’t seem to bother him that it was yesterday’s. Harry watched him turn quickly to the pages advertising car dealers. After looking for just a minute or so, he tossed the paper into a trashcan and began searching for a cab. Harry followed. Walter asked the taxi driver something Harry couldn’t hear. He spoke in Spanish. They hopped in and the cab drove for a while before pulling into a La Quinta Inn.
“Is this one okay?” the driver asked.
“Yes, this is fine,” said Walter.
Inside, Walter registered for both of them, paid cash and handed Harry a key.
“Get some sleep,” he said. “Meet me here, in front, at noon.”
Four or five hour’s sleep and a hot shower gave Harry a whole new attitude. He was getting his bearings at last. Holland, Spain, Mexico and now Texas. Tia Chita said to trust this guy. What choice did he have? The girl at the front desk called them a taxi. At a used-car lot, with a large sign reading Texas Monster Motors, he told the driver to let them out. “Let’s go,” he said to Harry.
“What do you have in a four-wheel drive?” Walter asked the kid who came bounding out of the tiny, one-room mobile office building, sprinting to meet them.
“Lonnie P. Meecham,” the kid said with a smile meant to charm a snake. He wore electric blue pants and a red golf shirt with a Monster Motors logo on the front. Naturally, he had on the obligatory cowboy boots. He stuck out his hand toward Walter.
“Four-wheel drive,” said Walter without shaking hands.
“And you are?” asked Lonnie P. Meecham, still grinning from ear to ear.
“Four-wheel drive.”
“Absolutely. Why yes, absolutely.” Walter, with Harry trailing just behind, followed as the used-car salesman showed them to a section of the lot filled with SUVs. They walked down the line, stopped a couple of times and Harry observed as Walter gave a once-over, to first one vehicle then another. Walter paid no attention at all to whatever Lonnie P. Meecham was saying about the cars. The young Mr. Meecham, who talked endlessly, took no notice of Walter’s disinterest.
“That one,” Walter said, pointing at a 2002 black Isuzu Rodeo. “You have a key?” A few minutes later, after a quick spin around the block to see if the car actually ran, Walter said, “I’ll take it.”
“That’s great,” said Lonnie. “That’s great. Y’all made a great selection.”
“How much?”
“Well now, this particular one here is priced at seventeen, seven-fifty, but I…”
“I’ll take it,” said Walter.
“Seventeen, seven-fifty?”
“Look Lonnie-can I call you Lonnie?”
“Why sure, you sure can, Mister…?”
“I’m in a real big hurry, Lonnie.”
“Un huh.”
“And I just don’t have the time to take care of all the paperwork I know you have to do on a transaction like this.”
“Un huh.”
“So here’s what I’d like to do, if it’s okay with you. I’d like to take this Isuzu, right now, and drive it out of here, and let you do all the paperwork without me.”
“But…”
“No, no,” Walter interrupted him. “I’m aware of how much trouble this puts you to. Believe me, I know. Why, you don’t even know my name, do you? So, I’m going to pay you the seventeen, seven-fifty and I’m going to throw in another two thousand two hundred and fifty just for you.”
“Two thousand two hundred and fifty?” Lonnie P. Meecham was flabbergasted.
“Twenty thousand altogether,” said Walter. “Cash.”
“Twenty thousand?” The kid could hardly swallow properly.
“Give me the keys, Lonnie.”
It’s a straight shot on I-25, about 325 miles, less than five hours, from El Paso to Santa Fe. They would stay there overnight and in the morning, as Walter planned, they would drive the last hundred miles or so, to a small cabin in the middle of nowhere, near the tiny town of Albert, New Mexico.
The fire provided all the heat they needed. The twigs Walter placed under the four heavy logs in the fireplace burst into flame as soon as he touched the match to them. The wood crackled as it burned, hot splinters spitting and bouncing off the screen in front. A large stack of firewood was piled high behind the cabin. Walter knew it had been there for years. The small cabin was pushed into the side of a hill. It overlooked a dirt road winding and bending a full quarter mile from the main road. The cabin was well built and someone had gone to a lot of trouble, once, to make sure it was comfortable in winter. The windows and doors had been carefully insulated sometime after they were installed. The three small space heaters Walter and Harry bought before leaving Santa Fe were plugged in but not turned on. Everything in the place worked. The water, the toilet, the stove, even the small refrigerator under the counter in the kitchen. The cabin had been empty for a long time and it was dirty, dusty. They cleaned it once the fire was going.
Walter remembered the one time he’d been here before. How could he forget? Michael DelGrazo had greeted him. Michael DelGrazo, The Cowboy . It was of course, Leonard Martin, pretending to be the slow-witted Michael. “Can I use your restroom?” Walter had asked him. That always worked, always got him inside. After Michael DelGrazo let him in, he walked back to the small bathroom, opened its window and peered out, looking for something, anything, a sign to tell him Leonard Martin had been there. All the while, he was right there, sitting on the couch in the living room near the front door. He flushed the toilet even though he hadn’t used it and on his way back to the front room, Walter took a good look into the cabin’s only bedroom. He saw nothing remarkable except for the fact there was no bed, only a bedroll stacked against the far wall. No bed, just a closet and a small, three-drawer dresser. Back in the living room, Michael talked about “Mr. Marteenez.” His boss, he said he was. Marteenez. Shit! It was Leonard Martin all along. It still pissed Walter off. He had missed him, missed him completely. He spent more time looking at the cabin than at the man. He’d been made the fool. He stood in front of the warm fire with Harry Levine, thinking, unable to drive the past from his mind. “Now look at me,” he said, half out loud. The cat had become the mouse.
“What?” asked Harry.
“Nothing. Nothing.”
This was the perfect place to put Harry. No doubt about it. Leonard Martin had hidden here for two years. The whole country-Jesus, the whole world-searched for him. Walter was the only one who had found him. And when he did, he didn’t know it. He fell for the Michael DelGrazo act and drove off that day thinking he had not yet seen Leonard Martin. Now, he struggled to keep his attention on the matter at hand. He knew it was a personal risk coming here. He’d replay it all. He was afraid of that. But this was the best place he had ever seen to hide out. This was the place where Harry Levine would be safe. Walter was sure nobody would discover him here.
It wasn’t just Leonard, of course. He couldn’t think of him and not think of Isobel. Isobel was part of it then and part of it now too. He checked before leaving for Europe. Through her organization, The Center for Consumer Concerns, she had handled all the expenses since Leonard left. She paid the taxes, the electricity, the water, everything, and why had she done that? Was it sentimentality? He didn’t know. Somewhere in the back of his mind, behind those heavy metal doors, he wondered if Isobel thought someday Leonard might need to come back. Was that possible? Was he only dreaming? He didn’t know. And what would Leonard say if he could see Walter now, if he could see he had come here, again, this time not to find, but to hide? Where was Leonard Martin? Alive, or dead? Did Isobel know? What Walter didn’t know-couldn’t know-was that Leonard’s last instructions for Isobel told her to pay the bills, keep the place. She did not know why and Leonard didn’t say. What Walter did know, however, was that Leonard Martin had never returned to New Mexico. Not after the day Walter drove up and drove off. Walk on the other side, Conchita Crystal had asked him. What side was more other than Leonard Martin’s?
After dinner Walter and Harry sat outside on the front porch. It was freezing, but they wore the heavy, down-lined jackets they bought back in Santa Fe and they were bundled up against the night air. The cold wind on their faces was compromised by the hot tea they held in their gloved hands. The steam warmed their cheeks. Neither man had seen a sky like this one before. Pitch-black, deep and wide beyond measure, tipping their sense of perspective, forcing them to look upward. With no nearby lights illuminating the horizon, nothing masked the stars. In the distance, only the abrupt absence of a million sparkling lights indicated the demarcation line separating land and sky, planet and space. All those bright shining spots in the highest regions of the night sky-the sheer number of stars they could plainly see-was enough to make both men gawk like teenage boys at the sight of their very first naked girl.
“Harry, I need you to do something while you’re here.”
“You don’t get to see this, do you?-not in a city anyway.”
“The stars?” said Walter. “No. You’re right.”
“Can you just imagine life before electricity? Everyone, everywhere on the Earth saw-this-every day, every time the sun set. It’s no wonder we’re a spiritual species.”
“I need for you to read the document you have, carefully. And I need for you to figure out who would kill to keep it secret. I don’t mean, who wants to keep it quiet. That’s not enough. I mean who would kill for it. That’s a decision you’ll have to make. Maybe it’s a list. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just one.”
“The Kennedys?”
“No,” said Walter. “Not the Kennedys. They sent Sean Dooley. I’m not making a judgment about how much the Kennedy family might want to keep this confession from ever reaching the public. I suppose they have a strong desire. But they sent Dooley and he’s no killer.”
“That’s why you let him go?”
“He wanted the document, and he might have pushed somebody around if he needed to. But he was unarmed and not skilled or experienced enough to beat anyone to death.”
“You know that? How?”
“His hands. Did you see them? No marks. No scars. His fingers were never broken. Same for his face. He’s no fighter. Bust and grab, break and enter maybe. But no fighter.”
“Still, the Kennedys…”
“No, Harry. Sending Sean Dooley, when they were absolutely sure the document would be there, makes no sense, no sense that is if they killed Sir Anthony and McHenry Brown trying to find it. You don’t send a killer to find something and a civilian to get it. Forget the Kennedys. Find me somebody else.”
“Well, so far anyway, I haven’t read about any other world leader Frederick Lacey assassinated.”
“Don’t be a smart ass, Harry.”
“How did Dooley know where we were staying?”
“I don’t know, yet. I have a few ideas. Your list might help me. Harry, let me ask you a question.”
“Shoot.”
“Why didn’t you go to Scotland Yard or the Police? Why didn’t you just walk into the American Embassy and give yourself up? You could have. You hadn’t committed a crime of any kind. Screw Lacey’s confession. Hand it over. Wash your hands of the whole mess. Why not?”
“I did what Devereaux told me to do.”
“And you never thought about what I just asked? Never occurred to you?”
“I suppose not. The President of the United States told me to listen to Devereaux. I suppose I never thought of doing anything different. Should I have?”
“Not for me to say,” Walter said. “Not for anyone to say, except you. Anyway, we should look ahead of us, not behind.”
“What about you?” Harry asked. “What are you going to do while I try to make a definitive list of the people who want to kill me?”
“Kill us, you mean.”
“Us? Why us?”
“Recall what happened to McHenry Brown’s companion?”
“Oh, I forgot. Sorry about that. You’re right. I really am sorry. I know you’re in danger just being around me. However, I’ll ask you again, Walter, what do we do next?”
“I don’t know yet,” Walter answered. “You’re safe here and,” he added, “for now that’s good enough. I can’t stay here with you. You know that?”
“I guessed as much.”
“I have work to do, Harry. People to see and places to go. But you’re safe here.”
Walter’s cell phone rang at seven-fifteen the next morning. It woke him from his hard, wooden sleep, but whoever was calling would have had a hard time figuring that out from his voice. Decades of such calls had fine-tuned his senses. He sounded like the middle of the afternoon.
“Hello,” he said.
“Abby O’Malley. How are you doing?”
“Fine. Just fine. And yourself, Ms. O’Malley?”
“I like a man who’s up early, Mr. Sherman. Especially a man who sounds like it.”
“So you woke me,” he said, surprised she caught it. “It’s okay. And please call me Walter.”
“Very well, Walter. Where do we begin?”
“I’ll be home in the next day or two. What day is it today?”
“Thursday. I know, it gets a little confusing when you fly halfway around the world, doesn’t it?”
“Come see me Sunday. You know where I live?”
“I do. St. John.”
“Good. Get off the ferry, walk across the square to a place called Billy’s. Look for an old black man sitting at a table closest to the front. He’ll tell you where to go. See you Sunday?”
“See you Sunday.”
“Dress comfortably,” he said before cutting the connection.
Harry had been given very specific instructions. Walter wanted everything understood. No screwups. He was to use the prepaid, use-and-lose cell phone to call Walter every day. “I have to assume someone is bugging my phone. You call me with that prepaid phone and there’s no way to trace it back here. Just remember not to ever say anything about where you are. Not a word. Call me at eight o’clock in the morning on the first day,” Walter told him. Then he was to add an hour for each day thereafter. “So, four days from now you’ll call me at noon. And, on the fifth day-at one o’clock. Got it?” Harry assured him he knew how to tell time. “Don’t call at any other time, unless it’s an emergency.”
“An emergency?”
“Someone shows up. And if that happens you know what to do?”
“You think I can get away with it?”
“It’s been done before,” said Walter. “Remember Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man? Just act like him and say your name is Michael DelGrazo.”
A layer of gray winter clouds obscured the ground from Boston to the Carolinas. After that, it was clear skies, bright blue and sunny all the way to St. Thomas. Flight time was nearly four hours, and Abby had been awake since before five o’clock. The American Airlines plane lifted off from Logan at 7:40 am. After a pretty decent breakfast, she considered taking a short nap, but Devereaux had sent her too much material to sleep. Instead, she opened the large envelope and removed a single, full file folder. It was unmarked. His brief cover note was signed with a simple LD. Very much in the Kennedy style, she thought, and wondered if he signed all his papers that way or if he did it only for her. Louis had a sly side, a dry sense of humor meant as much to entertain himself as for anyone else’s benefit. Maybe this was his way of telling her he knew.
Early on she learned the Kennedys communicated, in writing among themselves, with initials- RFK being the first ones she saw. Later she had the President’s personal memos Bobby gave her to read. They were each initialed JFK. Whenever Abby received something from Rose Kennedy, all there was to show Rose had sent it was a little RK at the bottom. Like a good soldier, she assumed the position, took the Kennedys as Romans, and began signing her memos, letters and longer papers AO. The current generation of Kennedys, even those bearing the names of their Kennedy sons-in-law’s fathers, were never entirely sure what Abby O’Malley did. She had little to do with them, but when they were called upon, they were attentive and responsive, deferential. Abby O’Malley was a force to be reckoned with within the family. Among those younger Kennedys, she was referred to as AK, not meaning Abby Kennedy, as Abby first thought, but rather “Almost Kennedy.” Abby never minded. She decided early on that they used it, if not as a true compliment, certainly as a sign of respect. Going over Devereaux’s gift package, she recalled her conversation with him a few days earlier.
“Are you taking your bathing suit?” he asked.
“I’m sixty-eight, Louis.” Boston was freezing, but she was, of course, aware that summer never vacated the Virgin Islands.
“I didn’t know there was an age limit, Abby. I hear the beaches on St. John are among the world’s best.”
“You haven’t said ‘you’re still a beautiful woman, Abby O’Malley.’”
“Self-evident,” said Devereaux. “What are you going to offer him?”
“Money,” she said. “I find that usually works quite well.”
“Usually,” he replied. “But not always. Sherman’s as close to unbuyable as I’ve ever seen-for a sane man, that is-and Harry Levine. ..?” He left the question hanging there. “There will be other buyers, you know that. Not to mention those who might see no reason to pay for something they can just take. You’re not the only player on this field.”
“We know that. I’m fully cognizant of the damage already done. I can’t worry about that. I need Lacey’s confession. Until I have it I can’t be concerned about protecting it, or him. There is nothing I can do to help Walter Sherman, except take it off his hands as soon as possible.”
“Sunday?”
“I hope so.”
“I hope so too. But it doesn’t seem likely, does it?”
“He’ll be ready, I believe. He thinks it was us-me-who ordered the killings in England-Sir Anthony Wells and McHenry Brown. That will help. It always does when you think you’re dealing with someone serious. Do I need to convince him we…”
“He already knows Abby.”
“Knows? Knows what, Louis?”
“That you are not responsible for the killings.”
“Not responsible? Why do you say that?”
“From what you told me about the way he handled your man in Amsterdam, I’d say he believes you’re harmless. I’m also just as sure Sherman also knows that somebody out there isn’t.”
Abby had been worried about that. Since this began, since Frederick Lacey’s death, she was well aware she wasn’t the only one waiting for Lacey’s diary, his personal journal. Whoever it was who really killed Sir Anthony Wells and the American Ambassador, she couldn’t be sure how much, if anything, they knew about the Kennedys. If others wanted Lacey’s document, for their own reasons, reasons unknown and perhaps unknowable to Abby O’Malley, and if they got it, they would learn the secret of the Kennedys. What sort of blackmail might ensue? She couldn’t let that happen.
“Do you think he knows who is doing the killing?” she asked Devereaux.
“ Doing, not done?” he responded. “You expect more? No, I don’t think Sherman knows that, not yet. Give him enough time and he will. He’s that good, better even. If I told you what this guy has done.. .”
“I hear it in your voice, Louis. You’re an admirer of Mr. Sherman.”
“I met him, you know.”
“I declare-you’re star struck, Mr. Devereaux.”
“Had dinner with him. He can be shaken, but not easily. Once he reads it, he’ll figure out who it is.”
“Do you know?”
“Do I know? Of course not. How can I know without reading whatever it is Lacey’s written? I suspect there’s something in his confession-perhaps unrelated to the Kennedy family-something important to someone. Someone we don’t know. And there’s always the possibility that whoever that someone might be, they might kill to get the document, only to discover that whatever it is they’re looking for is not there.”
“No guarantees?”
“Guarantees? There is no guarantee Sherman even has the document with him. I’d say the odds were against you there. You can’t get it if he doesn’t have it, can you? Worse yet, Abby, it could just as well be that there is something in Lacey’s journal-forget what he did to the Kennedys-something that’s not just embarrassing, something instead that’s valuable.”
“Killing Joe Jr., John and Robert Kennedy is not just embarrassing , Louis. It’s historical treachery, an obscenity of mammoth proportions.”
“I meant no offense, really.”
“None taken.”
Tucker Poesy was enjoying the day. The beach at the Caneel Bay resort was crowded, and she liked it that way. The sun was hot and the water was surprisingly warm. She hated long trips and she was only now getting her land legs back. The quickest way to St. John was to fly nonstop from London to New York, stay over a night and catch the early morning flight to St. Thomas. No one told her there would be a ferry. How else could you go from St. Thomas to St. John? She would find it herself. By the time she arrived on the smaller of the two islands, it was Friday afternoon. Devereaux told her to look for Sherman on Monday. She was determined to get a suntan and catch up on her sleep over the weekend.
Devereaux called her two days ago. Walter Sherman was going to show up at home, on St. John, he told her. Harry Levine would not be with him. He was unsure if Sherman would bring the document with him to St. John. Devereaux figured Sherman’s plan was to flush out the competitors, setting up shop for bids. He did not tell The Bambino about Abby O’Malley. He did say potential buyers would appear within days.
“Get there,” he ordered her.
“Do you want him dead?” she asked.
“No, no,” he chuckled. “Don’t even try. I don’t want you dead either.”
“Yeah,” she said, “I read that stuff from Vietnam. Used to be a bit of a nutcase, don’t you think? I doubt he’s still the same man. Not at his age.”
“Hardly,” said Devereaux, a man with the keenest sense of the evil one man can do to another. “Had it been you, you would have done the same. And, watch out. He’s not that old.”
Ike saw her first. She strolled leisurely and unaccompanied across the square on her way to Billy’s. She had not gotten off the ferry. That’s for sure, thought Ike. That boat was still at sea, on its way from St. Thomas. He knew immediately she was no ordinary bushwhacker. She had the look of money-big money. He couldn’t say exactly how he knew it, what it was he got a glimpse of, but he knew it when he saw it. There was well off and there was wealthy. There was no mistaking her. Such women, he thought, particularly ones like her in her later middle age, did not travel alone. But she was.
Ike knew a few things. He was confident he hadn’t lost much. Not up here, he told himself, tapping his noggin. “Old is in the body,” he said, more than once. As far as he was concerned, he was as clear headed and sharp as ever. Hell, it could have been 1940 as far as his mind was concerned. Ike was primed to judge this woman, coming his way, without any more information. If Walter could do it, why couldn’t he? Walter was the kind of guy, Ike always figured, to make judgments about strangers right off the bat. Ike had watched him do that, more than once. No reason why he couldn’t do it too. She’s coming my way, he thought, with no idea in the world why. The old man was proud and certain. It thrilled him when she approached, stopped at his table and smiled.
“How do you do, sir,” she said, then quickly added, as she watched Ike struggling to stand, “Please, do not get up, not on my account.”
“Ike’s the name and it’s my pleasure to meet you Miss…?”
“Abby,” she said, reaching out to shake the old man’s hand. He smiled at her in a way she knew he’d been doing for a million years. All yellow teeth and friendly manner. For just an instant she pictured him, fifty or sixty years ago, offering the same toothy grin to a lovely island girl. Undoubtedly, he had more hair then. “I understand you can direct me to Walter Sherman.”
“If I had to guess,” Ike said, “in an instant, you know, not with any thought behind it-if I had to guess who you came to see, other than myself, of course, I’d have said Walter. Sure thing, I would have. He’s right over there.” Ike didn’t point, motion with his head, move his upper body in some way, or shift his eyes at all. It was understood he meant somewhere inside the bar. “And I’ll bet he’s expecting you too, even if he don’t know you’re coming. If you know what I mean.” With that, Ike kissed her hand and reached deep inside his pocket for a fresh cigarette. “Over there, at the end…”
“I know,” she said.
Ike was right, and he was wrong. Walter was expecting her. But he also knew she was coming. He spotted her making her way up the bar, toward him. The day was warm, yet she showed no signs of perspiration. Her hair was in place. She had no tan to speak of, not even a fresh redness, the sort of lobster look commonly seen on new arrivals. Most revealing was her style of dress. She was indeed comfortably dressed, but unlike every other woman in Billy’s, Abby O’Malley did not wear shorts or jeans and she did not have on flip-flops or Nikes. Instead she wore a light blue summer dress, subtly festooned with small yellow flowers. She walked in heels, low ones, but heels nonetheless. Not work clothes, but still city clothes. She was there for business. When Abby was still ten or fifteen feet away, she smiled at Walter. Introductions were politely called for but he already knew they were unnecessary. Walter rose from his seat.
“Miss O’Malley. Good to meet you.” He held out his hand. She took it. Her hand was soft and smooth. Rich hands. Her handshake was firm, not too quick, yet she did not let it linger. Without further invitation, she sat on the barstool next to Walter.
“It’s my pleasure to meet you, Mr. Sherman,” she said. “May I call you Walter? Do you mind?”
“No, not at all.”
“And please call me Abby.”
“All right, Abby. I’m glad you called.”
“Thank you for leaving your number with…”
“Sean?”
“Yes, with Sean. I hope he didn’t give you any trouble. I apologize for that.”
“I understand,” said Walter. Abby then proceeded to make a little small talk. She asked about the bar, about Ike, and wondered how long Walter had lived on St. John. He thought she might have been just a tad nervous to start with, but she seemed to loosen up just fine after a while. Walter told her about Billy’s, even the story about how it used to be Frogman’s, and he gave her the big picture on Ike, his storied history. He said nothing about his stay on St. John.
“Tell me,” Walter finally said, “how long have you known?”
“Known? Known about Lacey?”
“Yes. About his confession.” He watched for signs of stress in her manner, in her eyes, in the lines around her mouth, a change in her respiration. Nothing.
“Since 1968,” she said.
Walter shook his head, nodded to indicate-what? she wondered. Was he surprised? Was he impressed with such a revelation? She couldn’t tell. Almost forty years. He hadn’t expected that. Billy approached. Abby watched the two men as their eyes met. The look on Billy’s face asked if the lady was going to eat. This part of the place, the far end of the bar nearest the kitchen, appeared to be Walter’s private domain.
“Hungry?” Walter asked. “What do you like to eat?”
“Fish?” she answered, with a question of her own.
“Fish,” said Billy. “Fish is the specialty of the house. Red snapper in my own tangy mustard sauce? Seared tuna with capers on a bed of Yukon mashed potatoes? Grilled mahi-mahi served with pineapple rice and coconut shrimp? Or maybe something a little more casual, for the time of day. Grouper fingers-fish and chips?”
“That’s it,” she said. “Fish and chips and a bottle of beer.”
“Where you from?” Billy asked. It was clear to her he had only a professional’s interest in the information.
“Boston.”
“Sam Adams,” said Billy. “Good enough?”
“Perfect,” she said. Billy looked to Walter. Years of silent signals between them told the bartender to bring his friend another Diet Coke and put the lady’s order on his tab. Abby could not help but notice.
“That’s a long time,” Walter said after Billy left. “How did you find out?”
She started with Chicago. She told Walter about graduating from law school there, about her one-year tenure at Farmers Mutual Insurance Company. She came to the notice of the Attorney General, she said. That’s how she got to Washington. She put in a year on the Jimmy Hoffa Squad and then it happened-November 22, 1963. After that, all Robert Kennedy cared about was finding the one, or the ones, responsible for murdering his brother. Abby told Walter everything, unvarnished. It was really quite a treat talking to him. Walter Sherman was one person she could be sure-absolutely sure-would never breathe a word spoken between them. His own identity was so well shrouded, so carefully obscured, his history of discretion so solid. Many people, she thought, have told Walter Sherman things they would never want anyone to know. Famous and powerful people have actually told him the truth and benefited from the telling. She never considered doing otherwise.
She filled him in on her assignment to the Boston office of the Justice Department and later, when Bobby resigned from Johnson’s cabinet, her job placement as an investment banking attorney. “I had only one client,” she said. “And I never handled any investments. My job was to find out who killed President Kennedy. To help Bobby.” She stopped there. Billy brought out her fish and chips, asked if they wanted any more to drink, smiled and left.
Walter asked, “What did you discover?”
“Frederick Lacey,” she said. “A private matter.”
“Got a little out of hand, wouldn’t you say?” She didn’t. Instead, she was silent. And while she didn’t speak, Walter could see there was a lot she might have said. He saw movement in her eyes, a slight tightening in her temples, a blush in her cheeks. “Harry told me,” Walter assured her. “He told me why. He told me about Audrey Lacey.”
Abby reminded herself again, Walter Sherman was a free ride. For more than forty years she held it in, held it tight. She told no one, except Bobby. She never talked about her work, not with a single soul, not even her husband. Now, here she was, sitting in a bar in a dumpy little town on a tiny speck of an island in the American Virgin Islands. Here she was with a man who would not only listen but understand. In her life, Abby O’Malley, nee Anna Rothstein, had been nothing if not precise, specific, skilled in detail while also knowing how much was enough. For as long as she could remember, there had been few if any disparate facts she couldn’t make sense of. When she had it all together, especially in the early days with Bobby, her analysis was either conclusive or illuminating in a manner that held promise for the future. With Bobby, she loved the give and take, the teamwork, the endless gaming. Back then, she was sure she worked best working with him. And when she had, when she knew it was Lacey, it had been Bobby who told his mother. Abby couldn’t do it. He realized that and, besides, it was his job. No one else could tell her. She had lost two sons to the man. Only the third could tell a mother such a horror. Only Bobby. And soon, she would lose him too. Had she known that, she would have done anything-anything.
Then, with the Kennedy legend entrusted to Abby and Rose, both women agreed, Ted Kennedy should not know. When Rose died, the Kennedy flame was left to the care of a Jewish girl from Memphis. She was certain only four people ever learned the truth-she did, Bobby, Rose and Louis Devereaux-and a fifth, of course, if you included the killer himself, Frederick Lacey. When Bobby confronted him in London, Lacey said, quite clearly, that he had told no one. He had written it all down-his confession, his protection-but he never took anybody into his confidence. Neither Robert Kennedy nor Abby O’Malley doubted him.
And that was it, she told Walter. Since the death of Rose Kennedy, Abby and Devereaux were the only ones who knew the identity of the man who killed Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., President John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. It never occurred to Abby that Devereaux would share that information with anyone, with another woman, no matter how close he was to her.
As soon as the chunky man in the dark suit with his back to the camera shot Lee Harvey Oswald, Abby took the lead in investigating him. Every good investigator knows to start with the most obvious evidence. It’s basic. If something stares you in the face, follow it. When you have a killing, and you have a live suspect, start with him. If, as was the case with the Kennedy assassination, the suspect too is murdered, start then with his murderer. The assignment was hers before anyone heard the name Jack Ruby-before Oswald stopped breathing-almost before he hit the ground. They all saw it. Like the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, in his Washington, D.C., home, and millions of Americans across the nation, Robert Kennedy’s special Organized Crime investigative team, including Abby O’Malley, watched it happen on television. She leaped from her seat, grabbed her coffee-which was old and cold, she recalled-and shouted, “I’ve got him!”
It didn’t take much to connect Ruby with the mob, she told Walter. He was tied in half a dozen ways. The biggest, of course, was his business. The nightclub in Dallas owed a lot of money to the Chicago family headed by Johnny Rosselli. Jack was behind in his payments. Not a good thing, for him. He was in over his head and to make matters worse, he had cancer. Anthony Rocco, a capo in the Chicago gang, known to his associates as T Rock, approached Jack Ruby. The deal he offered would wipe out Ruby’s debt and net him fifty thousand dollars on top of it. Abby reminded Walter that fifty thousand dollars in 1963 was like a half million today, maybe more. Jack Ruby had a short time to live and this was a way he could take care of his own. When he was told what was expected of him, he never hesitated. Everyone concerned figured Ruby to be a dead man over this. After all, he was supposed to kill someone in police custody. He would be going into Police Headquarters in Dallas, guns blazing. The necessary arrangements would be made to give Ruby access to his target-more than a few Dallas cops got paid for that one-but no one could protect him afterward. The cops would shoot back, wouldn’t they? Part of the deal even? He didn’t mind. The cancer was taking him out anyway. As soon as Oswald was captured, Jack Ruby got a call telling him where to be and when to be there. He was on time. He shot Oswald as planned and, fortunately or not, he was not killed in a hail of bullets from the Dallas Police. He was captured and he kept his end of the bargain until the end. Tracking Ruby’s movements were easy, Abby said, and the key was the timing. “You see,” she told Walter, “ T Rock met with Ruby the day before the assassination.”
Walter listened. He asked no questions, but his interest was evident, his attention riveted. Abby continued. She knew the mob had not ordered the hit on the President because they would never use a patsy like Oswald or a cutout like Jack Ruby to clean up at the end. That’s not the way they worked and Abby knew it. Had it been them, they would have left no loose ends, no errant strings to pull, and no civilians in their wake. Someone else had killed JFK, and somehow managed to get the Chicago organized crime family to eliminate the fall guy. Abby traced Anthony Rocco to a meeting, a full week before November 22, with a man named Angelo Francese. The aged Francese was well known to be capo de capo, answering only to the Don whose family ruled in Naples, Italy. The meeting in New York had been arranged, as a gesture, by the Costello family. Once she had the meeting confirmed, Abby told Robert Kennedy. Why, she wanted to know, would T Rock from the Chicago mafia meet with someone from Italy, someone from the old country, someone so high up? And why would they meet in New York?
Bobby leaned on his father’s contacts on the East coast, Abby told Walter. A face-to-face was arranged for RFK. He went to a beach house on Long Island where he met with one of the Costello lieutenants. It was just the two of them. “This meeting never happened,” the young Costello soldier told the nation’s highest-ranking law enforcement officer. That’s what Abby told Walter Bobby had told her. Costello’s man, who insisted he be called only Dante, explained that an important family in the old country asked New York for a special favor. They wanted to contract with the Chicago people for a hit. Dante said they were never told who the target was or where or when this would occur. “We couldn’t refuse,” he told Kennedy. Their service was only that of an intermediary, an act of respect and kindness. “Never, never in a million years did we think this thing would involve your brother, the President.” That’s what Dante told Kennedy.
“He was telling the truth,” Abby said to Walter. “When I realized that Costello had misunderstood everything, that he thought the Rosselli crowd had killed the President, I knew Costello really knew nothing. And I knew the mob was in the clear. They did Jack Ruby all right, but they had no clue why, not when they agreed to do it. Of course, by the time Ruby shot Oswald, they had to know it had something to do with President Kennedy. Costello, and his capos, felt betrayed, used. These people are very patriotic, in their own way. Killing the President was out of bounds, like killing your mother. Killing Oswald, on the other hand, was just business. And, by then it was a matter of honor.”
With the mob no longer a suspect, out of the picture, for five years Abby chased other leads. She told Walter she couldn’t remember how many people she went after. “Everything,” she said. “We rejected nothing out of hand.” Who knew who, or what, or why? Who knew someone else who knew something-something that seemed important? Every theory was checked and then checked again. Assassination conspiracies ran amok in the press, in the media, in books and periodicals, not only here, but worldwide. The CIA killed Kennedy because he was about to abandon Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs did it. No, it was J. Edgar Hoover. Or the Cubans. Maybe the Russians. Abby covered every one. She looked at homegrown racist crackpots in the South, white supremacists out West. Abby went after everyone ever mentioned as having even the slimmest motive. She chased FBI agents, CIA case officers, even a few Dallas cops themselves. Every lead was treated as a good one. At one point she spent three months digging into a tiny cult of radical Catholics in Rhode Island. This bunch thought a Catholic in the White House would bring the Pope to power in the United States. They were beside themselves when it didn’t turn out that way and they despised Jack Kennedy for it. She investigated them all, even Lyndon Johnson and his motley crew of Texas associates. “God, Bobby hated that man,” Abby told Walter. Each time she found a string, she pulled it. And every time that string led to another, she pulled it too. Sooner or later, every string came to an end. None revealed the killer.
On a winter afternoon in early 1968, Abby O’Malley and Robert Kennedy sat in a small den in a house in Hyannisport. A fire from four big logs warmed them against the New England snowstorm raging outside. They were alone. A few months earlier, before the leaves changed and the temperatures plummeted, she asked him for a list of individuals, private citizens with no government or political affiliations, a list she told Bobby might contain the name that eluded them, the name of the assassin. Where else could they look?
“We’ve gone through everyone else,” she said to him. “We should look at it as if it might have been a private matter. It might have been.” The list was a short one.
Jack Kennedy was a man. Like most men, he had made enemies along the way. But, also like most men, none of his personal enemies seemed to be people who would actually try to kill him. Besides, who could kill the President of the United States? Who could manage it? With two exceptions, the men on what Abby came to call the Private List were all contemporaries of JFK. One of the two who were not was an old man, a long-ago business partner of Kennedy’s father. Bobby said this man indeed hated Jack, hated him since his brother was a young man-since he was at Harvard. Remembering it, Robert Kennedy laughed, as did Abby as she told the story to Walter Sherman. Apparently Bobby’s older brother Jack had been sleeping with this man’s wife. They were never caught in the act, in flagrante delicto so to speak, but one day in the midst of a bitter argument with her husband, the wife threw it in his face. Jack was still in college, said Bobby. The angry woman then went and told a few of her friends. Her husband was a laughing stock. He threatened Jack Kennedy’s life a number of times, in front of quite a few witnesses. Surely, all assumed, the man was all bluster. JFK himself knew nothing of these revelations, or the animosity and hostility they provoked, or the threats. His father shielded him. Bobby only learned of it when his brother became President. As Attorney General, he ordered a complete review of all the President’s perceived enemies. He made a list then, too, he told Abby.
“He gave me a copy of that list,” Abby told Walter. “I remember, it was dated February 1960. It must have been the first thing Bobby did when Jack took office.”
By 1963, this vengeful husband was divorced, eighty-one years old, and in the care of a nurse twenty-four hours a day. He had difficulty urinating. He could hardly remember the names of his children. It was doubtful he even knew who the President of the United States was. Abby scratched his name off. What surprised her about Bobby’s second list, the 1968 list, was another name, a name that had not appeared on the list he made in 1960. Frederick Lacey-Lord Frederick Lacey.
“Who is Frederick Lacey?” she asked JFK’s brother.
Finally, he told her.
By the spring of 1968, Bobby Kennedy was disheartened. Abby O’Malley told Walter she was worried about him. The murder of Martin Luther King Jr. affected him deeply. It seemed he was no closer to finding his brother’s killer than he was five years before. He viewed the list of private individuals he gave to Abby as a desperate move, an indication all hope was lost. While his run for the Democratic nomination did raise Kennedy’s enthusiasm noticeably, Abby could see the despair roiling his gut.
It was on a campaign bus in Indiana, rolling through the foothills in the southern part of the state, with a steady rain more dripping than falling, that Abby first told him it was Frederick Lacey who killed President Kennedy. “He looked at me in disbelief,” she told Walter. “I gave it to him-the whole thing, as I saw it, from start to finish-and he never said a word.” As Abby detailed a sequence of events leading to the assassination, Walter marveled at her concentration, her focus, her ability to relate apparently unrelated facts. Of course, he knew just how accurate her analysis was. He knew what Lacey had written. Abby did not. She knew nothing more than that Lacey had left something in writing, an admission, a confession.
Once she presented her conclusion to Bobby Kennedy, she asked him how he could have left Lacey’s name off the original list of the President’s enemies, the list he prepared immediately following the inauguration. His explanation was weak and tentative. It was almost as if he was making it up as he spoke. That was not like him, Abby said. Without Walter asking, she revealed that the real reason for Bobby’s oversight in 1960 was embarrassment. Robert Kennedy did not want his dead brother’s affair with Audrey Lacey coming to light then, just as he entered the White House, or later, after his death in 1963. In 1968, Abby could see his continuing determination that it never would. Bobby did not see the connections between Lacey’s masterminding of the murder and the evidence trails that, over five years, led them into the FBI and the CIA and others. Abby explained it by showing him that Lacey had contacts within all the suspect groups, all the different organizations. Sure the CIA was involved. And the FBI. Lacey was able to get information from each vital to the success of his plan. His reach extended even into the supposedly unreachable Secret Service. The strings she had been pulling, for five years, had been attached only to the coverup. The assassination itself remained a mystery. Like the mob, which was only hired for Ruby’s cleanup work on Oswald, the intelligence agencies also did not know what Lacey intended to do before he did it. Once the act had been accomplished, it was too late for all of them. In their rush to cover up their unwitting roles, they made many mistakes. There were dozens of sleuths chasing down the facts: newspaper reporters, magazine journalists and freelance writers, Kennedy conspiracy enthusiasts-nuts, if you will-of all sorts. Plus, everyone at CIA and FBI knew Bobby had a crack team working around the clock. Abby’s problem was simple, her delay perfectly understandable. She never heard of Frederick Lacey until