Philip Kerr - The Shot

As Kennedy got out of the car, an enormous cheer went up, and to his momentary alarm a man caught him by the elbow and then shook him by the hand, saying he was an Irishman, and that his name was Patrick Shea, and that he was a retired Cambridge policeman. ‘And this,’ he said proudly, ‘is my daughter, sir.’

‘Delighted to meet you,’ grinned Kennedy, and mounted the steps to the rear of University Hall to greet the Harvard president, Nathan Pusey, and Devereaux Josephs. Meanwhile, the sizeable crowd had started to chant, ‘Speech! Speech! We want a speech!’

Kennedy turned and raised his hands for quiet. Then he said, ‘I am here to go over your grades with Doctor Pusey, and I’ll protect your interests.’ But his words were whipped away in the bitterly cold wind and only those who were standing nearest the steps caught his words, and laughed. Still smiling, Kennedy turned his back on the crowd, shook hands with Pusey and Josephs, waved again, and then went into University Hall.

In Hollis Fifteen, Tom Jefferson and Alex Goldman heard the cheers through the open window and saw the crowds of students streaming out of the west quad, and pressing around the corner of University Hall, where Kennedy was making his entrance. There were hundreds, perhaps even as many as a thousand students, and their numbers were growing all the time. As soon as Kennedy was inside University Hall, they began to congregate in the west quad in front of the building. They were not just from Harvard. There were quite a few Radcliffe girls, easily identified by their striking red and yellow sweaters, and many others who carried Welcome Jack signs from Boston University and MIT. Next to University Hall, at Weld, the rather Gothic-looking hall where the President-elect had once roomed, a banner was hung from a third-floor window. It read: ‘Jack — Weld is a Depressed Area’.

‘What have they got to be depressed about?’ demanded Tom. ‘Poor little rich kids.’

‘Shit, I’d be depressed myself if I had to room in there,’ declared Goldman. ‘Place looks more like a penitentiary than a freshman dormitory.’

‘This isn’t exactly the Plaza in here,’ remarked Tom.

With the window wide open now, the room was freezing, and Goldman blew on his hands in a vain attempt to keep them warm. Unlike Tom, he had not thought to wear gloves. Since he was not handling the actual rifle, there had seemed little need for them, but he was regretting it now. Swathed in a blanket off Chub’s bed, he sat beside the short-wave radio listening in to the Secret Service signals traffic. There were two presidential wavelengths: Baker Channel, emanating from a signals control car in the motorcade, which kept Kennedy in touch with Washington; and Charlie Channel, the radio link between the presidential car and the Secret Service agents who were inside University Hall. It was with the Charlie frequency that Goldman concerned himself.

Tom rolled off the desk he had placed by the window, on which he had been lying in the prone firing position, but without the rifle, and sat down on the floor beside Alex Goldman. Collecting the rifle off the floor, and nervously inspecting the blue sky through the telescopic sights, he said, ‘So, are we gonna do this?’

‘Sure we’re going to do it,’ said Goldman.

‘I just wanted to hear you say it. Because now that we’re here. Well, you know.’ Tom shrugged.

‘I know what you’re driving at, Paladin.’

‘I figured you would.’

‘And you’re crazy. Orders are orders. You know that.’

Tom worked the rifle bolt and sighted a pigeon high in the branches of an elm tree. He pulled the trigger on an empty chamber and nodded. ‘Whatever you say, Alex. I’m just the guy who pulls the trigger, you know?’

‘That’s not what you sound like.’

Tom shrugged innocently. ‘Now that we’re here. That’s all I said.’

‘You want to know what your trouble is, Tom?’

‘What’s that?’

‘You think too much.’ Goldman shook his head.

Tom worked the bolt and fired the empty chamber again. Even unloaded, it still added a slight smell of gun oil and cordite to the room’s cold fresh air, as if an invisible bullet had been fired.

‘And stop playing with that fucking rifle. You make me nervous.’

‘Take it easy,’ said Tom, and lit a cigarette. With the window wide open he was no longer worried that any other students on the top floor of Hollis South would smell his tobacco. Besides, all was silent down the hall. Everyone was now out in the Yard.

‘Take it easy?’ Goldman repeated scornfully. ‘Maybe you didn’t see all those fucking cops down there?’

‘I saw them. Not so many as I thought. Not so many as they need, if you ask me. I know crowds. I study them. I work with them. I use them. Crowds are my cover. When you’ve done as many jobs as me, you get to know what a crowd will do when they see someone famous, or hear a shot. And I’m telling you, there aren’t nearly enough cops for all the kids there are out there. Must be getting on for two thousand. So forget about them. When the time comes they’ll have their work cut out just looking out for Kennedy’s ass to pay any attention to us.’

Goldman grinned. ‘Okay. You’re right.’

‘Sure I’m right. You just keep your ear on that Charlie Channel,’ said Tom. ‘As soon as he comes out of that front door, I want to be ready for him. Okay?’

‘Don’t you worry about me,’ insisted Goldman. He listened carefully to the voices in his ear for a moment, and then said, ‘I wonder what’s going on in that room, right now.’

‘It’s a closed meeting. Proceedings are in secret. No press.’

‘I know, I was just wondering what they would be talking about.’

‘If you ask me, they’re pissed at him, that’s what’s going on. He’s been stealing Harvard’s best brains to fill his lousy cabinet. Dave Bell, McGeorge Bundy, and Archibald Cox. They’ll probably have to resign from the university.’

‘I thought these guys could take a year off. A sabbatical?’

‘Uh-uh. Kennedy’s asked them all to stay on for four years. Harvard only grants its faculty members a one-year leave of absence. I’ve been reading about it. I’m telling you, Alex. They’ll be chewing his balls.’

The January meeting of the Harvard Board of Overseers was held in the faculty room on the second floor of University Hall. There were thirty overseers in all, with five men elected each year to serve a six-year term. John Kennedy, a member of the Harvard class of 1940, was the youngest member of a board that included alumni from all walks of life — everyone from a mountaineer to a bishop. On a raised dais, six inches above the main body of the overseers, which included Kennedy, at a massive round table cut from a huge slab of Philippine nara wood, and scrutinised by the portraits of previous Harvard alumni such as Charles Eliot and Henry Longfellow, five ex officio members of the board sat facing the rest. These five included Nathan Pusey, Paul Cabot, David Bailey, James Reynolds, and Devereaux Josephs who, as president of the board, brought the meeting to order with a simple, ‘Shall we begin?’

The Harvard University president, Nathan Pusey, then rose to deliver his annual report on the condition of the university. Pusey told the board that the time had come in the nation’s history when government and universities should work more closely together.

‘We must take thought together how the relationship is to be made as fruitful as possible, and be careful at every stage of the way to provide adequate safeguards for autonomous interests which rightfully exist within the relationship, and must be maintained.’

In his prepared text, Pusey made only one reference to the President-elect when he referred to the constant turnover in Harvard’s officers of instruction. ‘This natural process,’ he said, ‘has perhaps recently had a bit more assistance from Washington than we might selfishly like.’