Seeing no police, Ginter exited the Corvette and approached the youngster. He asked him for directions to Canal and St. Charles Streets. After getting them he retreated to the car.
Pamela had spent the last three days trying to talk Ginter out of shooting Lee. She had repeatedly emphasized that he would get caught. Driving the Corvette out of New Orleans would be impossible. The police wouldn’t arrest him; they’d just gun down the nigger who had shot the white guy. And even if he were arrested no defense would stop his eventual execution. And for what? Just so maybe Ché Guevara would get killed in Bolivia? Did Lewis want to throw his life away on a plan that might possibly thwart one small piece of the Communist initiative? Besides, Pamela argued in summary, what if someone else saved Ché anyway?
“You won’t get away with it,” she said. “And it probably won’t work. So why do it?”
But she had stuck with him. She hadn’t asked to leave the car at any of a number of way stops. Here in New Orleans, she was with him still.
When she emerged from the terminal with hotdogs and open soda bottles he checked his watch. If he had calculated it correctly, he would be there in plenty of time.
He hoped he had the date right. He was sure he remembered correctly. But what if the little weasel himself had been wrong? Or worse, had lied?
He checked his watch again, and then cursed himself for doing so. Was he coming apart? On the street, passers-by ignored him. A good sign.
He turned and got in the driver’s seat as Pamela circled around and got in on the passenger side.
“I’ll drive,” was all he said before gobbling the cool hot dog. He ignored the offered soda.
It took them eight minutes to reach the corner of Canal and St. Charles. He pulled into a parking space with a clear view of the street corner. He switched off the engine and used his left elbow to subtly check beneath his oversized brown cotton sport coat. He shook his head. Nerves, Lewis. He wondered when the last time was that he had checked for a sidearm. Greece, it was Greece.
No one was at the corner. Ginter’s heart sank. Had he arrived too late, or too early, or did the weasel have the wrong date after all?
I always knew Lee was an idiot, he thought. He considered that the incident might never have happened but had simply been manufactured for the memoirs. How am I going to track him then? Where can I pick him up?
And then, diagonally across the intersection, he saw him, dressed in a white short sleeve shirt, a placard hanging around his neck. He was approaching pedestrians, offering them small white pamphlets. He tried to read the placard when the man turned toward him, but he was too far away. “The Hero of Acapulco,” Ginter mumbled disgustedly. Got you.
For a moment he considered approaching the pamphleteer and making contact but decided against blowing his cover. He contemplated removing the loaded Colt from under his arm, dashing across the street, and blowing out the man’s brains—what there were of them.
Pamela stared at him apprehensively. He was sweating profusely and could feel the stickiness under his starched white collar.
“Damn, no air conditioning,” he joked, but she didn’t smile. She kept looking at him.
Pamela reached down to the floor and lifted her pocketbook up into her lap. Ginter looked at her quizzically.
“Well, she asked, “are we getting out or not?”
He turned back to the intersection. “No,” he said. “You’re right. That won’t do. I won’t kill him. At least, not here. I need a better plan.”
Pamela turned her gaze to the pamphleteer. Three Hispanic men approached him. The man seemed to recognize them as he smiled and extended his right hand. But one of the Hispanic men began yelling and calling the pamphleteer names. “You son of a bitch. Why, you are a Communist!”
Another shouted, “What are you doing?”
Ginter checked the men again. Only three. Not the ten to twelve as claimed in the memoirs.
Several pedestrians paused on the sidewalk as the confrontation continued. The three men were screaming, “Communist!” and “Liar!”
Others took up the shout and began jeering, telling the man to go back to Russia.
Ginter saw one of the Hispanic men remove his own eyeglasses and hand them to a companion. The pamphleteer lowered his own arms and yelled, “Hey Carlos, if you want to hit me, hit me.” Another of the three grabbed the pamphleteer and then grabbed the pamphlets and threw them into the air. They scattered in the light breeze.
The pamphleteer began yelling in the face of one of his tormenters. When a New Orleans patrol car approached the intersection Ginter slouched down in his seat.
A second cruiser pulled up and after a brief conversation all four men were handcuffed and shoved into the back of the second cruiser. Lights off, the two cruisers pulled away.
Well, Mr. Lee Harvey Oswald, not an auspicious beginning for the Hero of Acapulco, is it? Ginter mused.
“Still not there?” Amanda asked.
Paul deVere replaced the receiver on its cradle. “Still on vacation.”
“You think he really is?”
DeVere shrugged. “Hey, it’s mid-August. Didn’t all these New York people go out to the Hamptons or something every summer?”
It was Amanda’s turn to shrug. “I don’t know. They were never my crowd.”
She lay back on her bed at the New York Waldorf and gazed at Paul deVere who stood, looking down at the telephone as if expecting it to ring. The two weeks since they had tumbled unconscious in Manchester, New Hampshire, had passed in a blur. Their hurried train trip to New York through Boston had led to an extended stay at the Waldorf. They stuck to their rooms during the day, venturing out at night.
Amanda suggested that going out together was risky lest one of them slipped and made a conversational reference to their situation. Further, she urged they take separate rooms, decreasing the likelihood people might link them. Paul had not argued.
Other than Amanda’s quick trip to the beauty parlor for a more contemporary hairstyle, they worked on reformulating their plan. Calls to Harrison Salisbury at the New York Times were intercepted by a variety of secretaries who dutifully checked before informing them that he was still on vacation.
Frustrated, Amanda urged that they do something productive while waiting. They purchased two typewriters, reams of paper, and envelopes, and began an aggressive letter writing campaign to every newspaper they could find, warning of “The Coming Communist Menace.” Neither had illusions that the campaign would amount to a hill of beans, but it couldn’t hurt. They had time to fill while waiting for Salisbury’s vacation to end, or for Lewis to turn up. They took solace that calls to the Manchester Police Department, New Hampshire jails, and the New Hampshire State Hospital, revealed that neither Lewis Ginter nor Pamela Rhodes were in custody. Somehow, they had gotten away.
“If we get to see Salisbury, what will we say?” Paul asked.
“Tell him the truth?” Amanda suggested.
“Yeah, right,” Paul scoffed. “How are we now going to prove that we’re from 2026?”
“You have a better idea?” Amanda challenged testily.
“No,” he said apologetically. “I’m just wondering if there is something else we can do. We seem to be just sitting around waiting for him to come back from vacation.” He looked at the street below.
“I don’t know where they can be either,” Amanda said to his back.
He turned. “They should have called by now. I mean, if they could. He mentioned the Waldorf at my house. He should think of that.
“I think he was wrong that someone else came back,” deVere continued. “I think those cops were just checking for kids drinking. If someone wanted to kill us, they would have been waiting with guns when we arrived and blasted away. Why send cops to poke around? What could they have done? Arrested us for loitering?”