“Fuck.”
A line of live oaks blocked his view of this end of Houston Street, as well as the beginning of Elm. He’d seen the trees dozens of times before, of course, but never really noticed just how much they shaded the street in front of the depository—it wasn’t the kind of thing you would notice unless you were planning to shoot someone from an upper-story window. He would have to wait until the motorcade turned on Elm and was directly below the building and moving away from him—and he would have to lean halfway out the window to get a clear shot to boot. Someone in Dealey Plaza would almost certainly see him and shout, warning the president’s guards.
Not that he would do it. But Melchior had said he had to play it straight. Right to the end.
There were dozens of people in the park already. Caspar put his eye to the scope of his rifle and moved it from face to face.
Where the hell was Melchior?
Traffic had thickened in the past hour, and the lunchtime rush was backed up for blocks around the motorcade route. Melchior was coming in from the north, so he missed most of the tie-up, but still it slowed him down, and it was after noon when he finally reached Dealey Plaza. He abandoned BC’s Rambler behind the depository and made his way around the west side of the building, figuring that if Chandler was already at the scene he’d most likely take cover in the park itself—probably in the line of trees that skirted the park’s eastern edge. It had turned into a warm, humid day, and, what with the wig Song had packed for him, he was sweating buckets. It was almost like being back in Cuba. Fucking Cuba, where this had all started. It seemed like years ago, but it had only been a month. Four fucking weeks.
But four weeks, four months, four years, four centuries, it didn’t matter, it could all come to an end in the next four minutes if he didn’t figure out what he was going to do now. Why in the hell had BC shown up at the house without Chandler? And how had the detective gotten the drop on Melchior, forcing him to use the tranq meant for Orpheus—who, presumably, had followed what was otherwise a pretty obvious trail of bread crumbs leading straight to the Book Depository. All Melchior had now was a vial of acid and the Thorazine-phenmetrazine combo that protected his brain from Chandler’s when the latter’s was souped up. Oh, and the dart-shooting umbrella Ivelitsch’s techies had cooked up for him. He had that, too. He was going to have to wing it.
As he came around the side of the depository he saw that a substantial crowd had gathered in Dealey Plaza. Spectators sat on a grassy ridge this side of Elm, and more stood along both curbs. At least a hundred people were in Dealey Plaza itself. Dozens of them had cameras out, and Melchior saw one man with an eight-millimeter movie camera aimed at the gap between the two courthouses at the top of the park. That’s what he should have had Ivelitsch rig up. Not a ridiculous umbrella that managed to shoot a single dart at a time, but a bullet-shooting camera. Something that would give you a chance to fight your way out, if it came to that. Oh well. Next time.
He slipped a beret from his pocket and pulled it low on his forehead, added a pair of glasses with thick black rims, then eased himself into the crowd. He was conscious of the Book Depository on his left, row upon row of open windows looking straight down on him. For the next several minutes he was wide open. It was all up to Caspar. Either he was loyal to Melchior, and he would wait for the president to show, or someone had supplanted him in Caspar’s esteem—Scheider, the Wiz, Giancana, who knows, maybe even Ivelitsch himself—in which case Melchior was dead to rights. Here’s hoping Caspar’s marksmanship hadn’t improved in the last few years.
“All right, Chandler,” he said under his breath. “Show yourself.”
Chandler wasn’t sure how long the void had been there before he felt it. Two minutes? Ten? It crept up on him like white noise until suddenly it was all he could hear.
Melchior.
But where was he? It was hard to pinpoint a silence, especially in the midst of so much commotion. He barely had any juice left and didn’t want to waste it. He did his best to ignore his brain, searched the crowd with his eyes instead. The feeling came from the north, toward the depository, and he began to make his way in that direction as stealthily as he could.
It was hard to see people’s faces because everyone was turned toward the eastern edge of the park, waiting for the first sign of the president’s motorcade. (Funny word, motorcade, he thought as he walked past a young black man sitting on the grass eating a sandwich. Probably supposed to be a combination of motor and parade, but it sounded more like a combination of motor and arcade—a shooting gallery—which didn’t make any sense when you thought about it.) He searched the sides of people’s faces, their physical profiles, anyone big enough to be Melchior. He found himself staring at a lot of plump women with beehives—what more unexpected disguise could there be for a man as aggressively masculine as Melchior? But unless he’d found a way to alter the shape of his face, none of the women was him.
Suddenly it came to him. Cavalcade. That’s where the cade in motorcade came from.
Jesus Christ, Chandler, he said to himself. That’s really not important right now. Focus.
He made his way closer to Elm. On the far side of the street, on the edge of a grassy embankment, a large man carrying a closed umbrella15 caught his attention. The man was staring right at him, holding his umbrella in the middle so that it pointed out from his abdomen, and Chandler mistook it for a gun at first. He started to look away, then glanced back at the man’s face. A black beret was pulled down over a dense cap of stiff, straight black hair, and the rims of the man’s glasses were nearly as thick as a raccoon’s mask. Chandler had been looking for an elaborate disguise, but now he saw that the simplest could be just as effective: he wasn’t 100 percent positive it was Melchior until the rogue spy smiled at him.
Chandler kept his eyes on Melchior’s hands as he crossed the street, but the big man merely stood there with that smile on his face. He heard motorcycles a few blocks away, a sputtering rumble punctuated by frequent backfires pulsing out of the canyon of Main Street. People strained to see the president and First Lady. Their thoughts flitted through Chandler’s head like whispers from a hidden PA system. Almost here, he heard, and I wonder if she’s as pretty in real life, and He may be a Yankee and a papist, but he’s still the president, and then, louder than all these other thoughts, more desperate:
Where are you, Tommy?
The cry was so urgent that Chandler looked up at the School Book Depository. The anguish was like a beacon drawing his eyes to the sixth floor. The southeast corner. The window. He saw an outline low above the sill, as if someone was kneeling just behind it. He couldn’t see the face, though, because it was concealed behind a—
He heard the pfft and tried to jump to the left, but it was too late. Something punched his abdomen just below the ribs, hard enough to knock the wind from him. Spots danced in front of his eyes and he braced himself for the numbing effect. Instead the spots danced faster, gained size, intensity, color, and he realized Melchior hadn’t shot him with a tranq. He’d shot him with LSD—a lot of LSD. Chandler fought to get control of the trip, but the world got brighter and brighter and louder and louder. Jesus, he thought. Melchior must have injected him with thousands of hits. He’d never felt anything like this before.
He felt a hand on his shoulder, looked up in confusion to find Melchior beside him.