Ken Grimwood - Replay

President John F. Kennedy

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington, D.C.

President Kennedy:

It is you who have alienated Premier Fidel Castro and the liberated peoples of Cuba.

You are the oppressor, the enemy of free men throughout Latin America and the world.

If you come to Dallas I will kill you. I will shoot you in the head with a high-powered rifle, and in your spilled blood will be written JUSTICE for the freedom fighters of the Western hemisphere.

This is not an idle threat. I am well armed, and prepared to die myself if need be.

I will murder you.

VENCEREMOS!!

Lee Harvey Oswald

Jeff added Oswald’s home address, drove back across town, and put the letter in a mailbox two blocks from the nondescript frame house. An hour later, and forty miles southeast of Dallas, the gloves were getting sweaty. The tightening leather numbed his hands as he pitched the typewriter off a bridge into a large lake in the middle of nowhere. It felt good to finally pull the damned gloves off, to toss them out the car window near some godforsaken town named, of all things, Gun Barrel. His hands felt freer, cleaner.

For the next four days he stayed in his room at the Holiday Inn, speaking to no one but room service and emerging only to buy the local papers. On Tuesday, the nineteenth, the Dallas Herald had the item he’d been waiting for, on page five: Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested by the Secret Service for threatening the life of the president, and would be held without bail until Kennedy had completed his one-day trip to Texas at the end of the week.

Jeff got very drunk on the plane back to New York that night, but the alcohol had nothing to do with the triumph he felt, the exultant thoughts that crowded his brain: images of a world in which negotiation took the place of war in Vietnam, in which the hungry were fed, racial equality attained without bloodshed … a world in which John Kennedy and the hopeful spirit of humanity would not die, but would blossom and prosper upon the earth.

As his plane landed, the lights of Manhattan seemed a brilliant portent of the glorious future Jeff had just created.

At ten minutes past one on Friday afternoon, his secretary opened the door to his office without knocking. She stood there with tears streaming down her face, unable to speak. Jeff didn’t have to ask what was wrong. He felt as if he had been struck in the gut by an invisible, heavy object.

Frank came in behind her, quietly told the young woman there’d be no more business conducted today; she and everyone else should go home. He took Jeff in tow, and they left the building together. People milled about Park Avenue in a general stupor. A few wept openly; some were gathered around car or transistor radios. Most just stared blankly ahead, putting one foot absentmindedly before the other in a slow, distracted gait wholly uncharacteristic of New Yorkers. It was as if an earthquake had loosened the solid concrete of Manhattan and no one was sure of stable footing. No one knew whether the streets would tremble and buckle again, or even split apart to swallow up the world. The future had arrived, in one jolting instant.

Frank and Jeff found a table at a hushed bar off Madison. On the television screen, Air Force One was leaving Dallas, the body of the president on board. In his mind’s eye, Jeff saw the photograph of LBJ taking his oath of office, with a dazed Jacqueline Kennedy beside him. The bloodstained dress, the roses.

"What happens now?" Frank asked.

Jeff tore himself from his macabre reverie. "What do you mean?"

"What’s next for the world? Where do we all go from here?"

Jeff shrugged. "I guess a lot depends on Johnson. What kind of president he’ll make. What do you think?"

Frank shook his head. "You don’t guess anything, Jeff. I’ve never seen you make a guess. You know things."

Jeff looked around for a waiter; they were all watching the television, listening to a young Dan Rather recapitulate the afternoon’s momentous events for the twentieth time. "I don’t know what you’re talking about."

"Neither do I, not exactly. But there’s something that’s … not right with you. Something odd. And I don’t like it."

His partner’s hands were trembling, Jeff saw; he must be in bad need of a drink.

"Frank, it’s a terrible, strange day. We’re all kind of in shock right now."

"You’re not. Not the way I am, and everybody else. Nobody in the office even told you what had happened; it was like they didn’t have to, like you knew what was coming."

"Don’t be absurd." A burly police official was being interviewed on TV, describing the statewide manhunt now underway in Texas.

"What were you doing in Dallas last week?"

Jeff eyed Frank wearily. "What’d you do, check with the travel agency?"

"Yeah. What were you doing there?"

"Looking into some property for us. It’s a growth market, despite what’s happened there today."

"Maybe that’ll change."

"I don’t think so."

"You don’t, huh? Why not?"

"Just a feeling I have."

"We’ve come a long way on these feelings of yours."

"And we can go further still."

Frank sighed, ran his hand through his prematurely thinning hair. "No. Not me. I’ve had it. I want out."

"Jesus Christ, we’ve hardly even started!"

"I’m sure you’ll do spectacularly well. But it’s gotten too weird for me, Jeff. I don’t feel comfortable working with you anymore."

"For God’s sake, you don’t think I had anything to do with—"

Frank held up his hand, cut him off. "I haven’t said that. I don’t want to know. I just want … out. You can hang on to the bulk of my share for working capital, pay me back out of profits over the next few years, or however long it takes. I’d recommend you turn my end of the operations over to Jim Spencer; he’s a good man, knows what he’s doing. And he’ll follow your instructions to the letter."

"Damn it, we were in this together! All the way back to the Derby, to Emory—"

"So we were, and it’s been a hell of a streak. But I’m cashing in my chips, old partner. Walking away from the table."

"To do what?"

"Finish law school, I suppose. Make some nice, conservative investments of my own; I’ve got enough to keep me set for life."

"Don’t do this, Frank. You’d be missing out on the opportunity of a lifetime."

"Of that I have no doubt. Maybe someday I’ll regret it, but right now it’s what I have to do. For my own peace of mind." He stood up, extended his hand. "Good luck, and thanks for everything. It was some fun while it lasted."

They shook hands, Jeff wondering what he could have done to prevent this. Maybe nothing. Maybe it had to happen.

"I’ll talk to Spencer on Monday," Frank said. "Assuming the world’s still at peace and the country’s functioning by then."

Jeff gave him a long, sober look. "It will be."

"Good to know. Take care, partner."

When Frank had left, Jeff moved to a stool at the bar, finally got a drink. He was on his third when CBS broke the bulletin:

"… arrested a suspect in connection with the assassination of President Kennedy.

I repeat, Dallas police have arrested a suspect in connection with the assassination of President Kennedy. The man is said to be a drifter and sometime left-wing activist named Nelson Bennett. Authorities say a telephone number found in Bennett’s pocket has been traced to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. We’ll have more on this late-breaking story as soon as…"

The patio of the East Side town house was bleak in the late-November chill; it was a place designed for summer, in a world where summer had been banished. The glass-topped table, the polished chrome struts of the lounge chairs, somehow made this sunless day more barren still.