The Second Assassin

by The Second Assassin (retail) (epub)

  It would also be impossible to escape after the deed was done. According to Bone’s information there would be fourteen thousand soldiers guarding the station and the parade route, twice that many Washington, D.C. policemen and Virginia State Troopers, not to mention several thousand Secret Service agents brought in from all over the country, the presidential detail, the White House police and several hundred State Department investigators. The same security difficulties were presented by the British Embassy; not only would a shot be difficult but escape would be impossible.

  Initially the available lie from the Hay-Adams Hotel seemed promising. The range was slightly less than three hundred yards and immediate escape, while not simple, was at least possible, although he knew there would be very little time between the moment he took the shot and the time any egress from the city was blocked by the massive security forces on hand. He did come up with a possible escape plan that would take him down to the river and a hidden boat but in the end he abandoned the hotel. The terrain of the White House grounds was so heavily treed it afforded him only the briefest moment for the attempt, catching the president and the royal couple in the few seconds during which they stepped down from their vehicles or climbed into them.

  Bone, unlike the majority of the American public, had been informed of the extent of President Roosevelt’s physical infirmity and knew that time would be taken up getting him into his wheelchair and up the temporary ramps installed under the White House portico, but even so it was unlikely that he would have more than a ten- or fifteen-second window of opportunity when his view wasn’t blocked by trees. Beyond that, the Hay-Adams, the Willard and the Mayflower – any hotel within reasonable range of the White House – would be watched carefully, perhaps constantly during the visit.

  The king, queen and President Roosevelt were scheduled to use the presidential yacht Potomac to travel down to Mount Vernon to visit George Washington’s estate but on close inspection Bone quickly abandoned it. The estate itself was too isolated to offer an escape route and taking a shot from the shore to the yacht would be extremely difficult, the distance from the far shore to the wharf at the foot of the Mount Vernon estate more than a thousand yards with virtually no cover on Bone’s side of the Potomac. To further complicate matters it was being rumoured that the highways on both sides of the river would be closed on the day of the Mount Vernon trip to avoid congestion and accidents caused by rubbernecking sightseers. In the end Bone was left with what he knew almost from the beginning was the most logical place to make his attempt – the grounds of the New York World’s Fair.

  * * *

  The New York World’s Fair 1939 Incorporated was formed in October 1935 by a group of one hundred wealthy New York businessmen led by Grover A. Whalen, a man of independent means who had been a public official in New York for decades, filling roles as diverse as being an acting New York police commissioner to heading FDR’s New Recovery Administration.

  Whalen, his business friends and Mayor La Guardia were all acutely aware of Chicago’s great success with their Century of Progress Exposition of 1933–1934 and wanted to reproduce the same kind of relative prosperity and prestige. It was also a way to rid the city of a 1,216.5-acre combination bog and garbage dump delicately named Flushing Meadows but popularly known as the Corona Dumps.

  In the distant past Flushing Meadows had actually been a salt marsh fed by a tidal river leading to Flushing Bay. Once home to a peaceful agrarian band of Indians known as the Matinecocks, progress and expansion of the city saw the stagnation of the river and the extinction of the Matinecocks. With rail lines leading farther and farther out from the city, Flushing Meadows, with its Mount Corona, named for the hundred-foot-high pile of ashes, quickly became a grotesque wasteland, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Valley of Ash.’

  Whalen, sometimes allied with and sometimes at odds with Robert Moses, La Guardia’s power-hungry parks commissioner, quickly moved to level the mountain, fill in the swamps with six million cubic yards of ashes and spread hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of top soil over everything.

  On the surface the site looked attractive enough, especially after the Flushing River was rerouted and several artificial lagoons and lakes controlled by a massive dam and tide gate were created, but one of the city architects working on the fair was heard to comment that it was a good thing the buildings only had to last for two years because they certainly wouldn’t remain standing for a third. Regardless of doom-filled predictions, design and construction continued at a breakneck pace, including construction of the nine-million-pound Perisphere, a two-hundred-foot-diameter aluminium ball resting on eight steel columns rammed into the subsoil atop six hundred timber piles, and its seven-hundred-foot-tall triangular companion, the Trylon, both of which were created as both the futuristic centrepiece and gigantic visual trademark of the fair.

  Three years and 170 million dollars later the New York World’s Fair opened. In all, Grover Whalen had convinced sixty countries, thirty-eight states, Puerto Rico, the League of Nations, the federal government of the United States and every major corporation in the nation to build exhibits and pavilions on what had once been an evil-smelling swatch of swampland and which would now become a killing ground for a king.

  Dressed in a suit and tie like every other adult male around him and with a camera on a strap around his neck, Bone’s first impression after paying his seventy-five cents at the western entrance to the fair had been a surprising and overwhelming sense of gaudiness on a stupefying scale. From what he could see, the design theme had consisted of three words: Simple, Big and Colourful. Entering the fair was like stepping into a child’s nursery, the floor covered with a scattering of brightly coloured building blocks in every shape and size – an Art Deco–Bauhaus symphony.

  Walking down a broad, overscaled concrete ramp with several hundred other visitors he was confronted by an enormous empty plaza with an iridescent gushing fountain at its centre. On the left was the huge gold-toned curvilinear Home Building Center, visibly shaped like a massive, jutting, erect male organ, even from the ramp’s low vantage point.

  To the right, rising like a pair of hundred-foot-tall pale green bobby pins were the double arches of the Hall of Special Events, while directly ahead, bright gold and spread like a wedge-shaped fan, was the Home Furnishings Building.

  Looking down at what he later discovered was Rainbow Avenue, it seemed that each of the cheek-by-jowl pavilions had been painted a different colour, from lurid green to blood red, from a childish sea blue to banana yellow and back again in every possible shade, accent and combination.

  Here and there along the broad processional avenues and asphalt plazas there were wedges and rectangles of grass and trees but much of the site not covered by large, colourful buildings was taken up by architecturally created vistas designed to sweep the visitors’ eyes in one direction or the other but almost inevitably drawing their view to the monumental, dead white shapes of the Trylon and Perisphere located in the centre of the fair. Taken all together it was comparable to looking at the oversized models of a set design for a film like Things to Come, which Bone had seen in London several years before.

  Ignoring the two giant structures, he purchased an official guidebook for twenty-five cents from a young, blue-uniformed girl in a pith helmet. Following the map printed inside, he went down Rainbow Avenue past the redwood plank façade of the Contemporary Arts Building, turned left between the Electrified Farm and the deeply louvred slab of the Brazilian pavilion, then crossed a low, arched bridge over the artificial river that burbled along a hundred yards or so to the spurting fountains of the Lagoon of Nations.

  Just to the right on the far side of the bridge was the British pavilion, a modern though ordinary building that by choice or by chance was done in pale pink concrete of almost the exact same hue as Queen Elizabeth’s favourite Betty Prior roses.

  Bone lifted the Leica on its strap and began playing the visiting tourist, taking snapshots. The royal couple were s
cheduled to spend a little more than four hours at the fair but this was the one place Bone could be certain they’d come. Trying not to appear overly serious about it he quickly took a dozen exposures, raking from left to right, beginning with the gold-roofed cupola of the long horticultural exhibit surrounding Gardens on Parade on three sides, then across the lawn that stood in front of the British pavilion’s blushing pink wall – three gold Lions Rampant bolted to it in a staggered row – and finally the bridge at the second-storey level connecting the British pavilion to the Australia and New Zealand building next door.

  Turning around, Bone took another twelve shots facing away from the pavilion, looking across the sixty-foot-wide river to the opposite shore. Left to right were the dozen or more fountains of the Lagoon of Nations, the glass-walled bulk of the French pavilion with its elegant tiered restaurant overlooking the water, the Brazilian pavilion, the Electrified Farm again, and past that the compound of full-sized houses that marked the Town of Tomorrow.

  Pictures taken, Bone moved on, skirting the lagoon then turning north down the long rectangle of parkland leading to the austere U.S. Government Building at the far end. Squatting like a pale yellow twin-towered Egyptian temple, it closed off the long mall that began almost a mile away at the Trylon and Perisphere. He bought a hot dog and a Coca-Cola from a pushcart vendor then found a bench in the sparse shade offered by a young tree, where he sat down to eat his lunch and look over the guidebook.

  According to the map, as he’d already noted, the fair was divided into a dozen major zones, those fanning out from the theme centre of the Trylon and Perisphere, colour coded in shades of yellow, red and blue. The fair was effectively bisected north to south by Constitution Mall, which ran from the theme centre to the so-called Court of Peace where he was now sitting. Most but not all of the foreign pavilions were located on the north side of the concrete-lined re-creation of the Flushing River.

  To the west was the Administration Zone, the Communications Zone and the gates for the jointly operated IRT/BMT subway line and the Long Island Railroad station where he’d entered the fair. Due south of the Perisphere were the two main gates at Corona Avenue and to the east, on the far side of World’s Fair Boulevard, was the Amusement Area, not officially a zone but clearly an integral part of the fair with its own gate and IND subway station. There was an artificial lake as well as freak shows, carny games and girlie shows, not to mention Billy Rose’s Aquacade starring Johnny Weissmuller, who played Tarzan in the movies, and a nightly fireworks display.

  Bone counted eight official entrances into the fair and three or four unofficial exits, like the pathway leading around the U.S. Government Building to the semi-permanent Boy Scout Camp on the open field behind it. The whole north-eastern flank of the fair faced the Flushing neighbourhoods along Lawrence and Rodman Streets and Bone had no doubt that an hour or two spent watching the tall chain-link fences would provide him with everything he needed to know about slipping onto the grounds without paying the twenty-five-cent children’s admission price.

  Bone swallowed the last bite of his hot dog, wiped his lips with a paper napkin and drank his Coca-Cola slowly through a straw, remaining on the bench, watching the passing parade of visitors to the fair as it moved steadily back and forth around him. The extra-wide asphalt walkways and the complete lack of motor cars, with the exception of a few maintenance vehicles, meant that there was no sense of overcrowding but a sample count for a minute or two proved the fact that at any given time the fair was playing host to an enormous number of people. This backed up a recent article he’d read in Time stating that the fair was admitting between seventy-five and a hundred thousand people each day.

  According to Bone’s information the fair would not close while the king and queen were in attendance. Presumably there would be more than the usual number of people there to see them. Based on previous experience, particularly the chaos resulting from the affair in Marseilles five years before, Bone knew that he had no better ally to ensure his escape than a panicked crowd after the first shots were fired.

  He’d seen the pandemonium brought on by the queen’s unscheduled contact with the veterans around the war memorial in Ottawa, where he’d estimated the throng in Confederation Square at no more than three or four thousand. Here, like the fair itself, the scale of the effect would be astronomical by comparison. A crush of a hundred thousand frightened fair-goers to melt into, a dozen or more exits to choose from and beyond that the anonymous safety of a city of eight million people.

  Bone returned his empty bottle to the pushcart vendor, dropped his crumpled napkin into a nearby wastebasket and moved on again. For the rest of the day he wandered over the grounds, taking three more rolls of photographs to document the approaches to the various exit points and the exits themselves.

  He left the fair at dusk and just before heading across the overpass leading to the IRT he heard the strong, mournful wail of a hunting horn nearby, loud enough to rise above the noises of the crowd and the constant rushing patter of the fountains. It was strange enough to touch what was left of the Irish in him, raising the short hairs on his neck. The eerie sound ended abruptly, breaking on an unblown note. Because he’d read the guidebook Bone knew what he was hearing. It was the Hejnal, blown from the top of the Polish pavilion’s golden tower each night, commemorating the death of a Cracow watchman who, centuries before, had saved the city from invaders with his call, the unfinished warning ending on a broken, jarring note as the watchman fell dead, an arrow in his throat.

  In the ten days between May 25 and June 3, John Bone paid four more visits to the New York World’s Fair. On the second occasion it was to gather more detailed information, on the third it was to refine his plan and on the fourth it was to check his original findings. He knew that the fifth and final visit was an indulgence but he was a careful man and more than anything else he believed in his own continued existence. Even so, returning to the Gramercy Park Hotel after his final trip to the fair he knew without a doubt that he’d found the perfect lie and that his escape was assured as well as it could be. All that he needed now was the proper weapon. He had just the thing in mind. To celebrate the completion of his research he went into the Gramercy bar, located just to the left of the brass revolving doors, where he had a double shot of Jameson Irish Whiskey, neat, in a water glass. Finishing the drink he made enquiries to the bartender about the availability of women in the neighbourhood. Bone placed two ten-dollar bills on the oak surface in front of him and the bartender said he would take care of it, asking for nothing more than his room number and the required time the woman should be made available.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Sunday, June 4, 1939

  New York City

  ‘I’ve been in this goddamn room for a month now. I’m getting sick of it.’

  ‘A month at the Plaza,’ said Dan Hennessy, perched at the end of the bed. ‘Most of us wouldn’t be complaining.’

  Jane Todd shifted against the pillows behind her, trying to get comfortable. The plaster cast that ran from her left wrist up to her shoulder was itching terribly, the fresh scar under her right eye was burning and she still had pain in the badly fractured baby finger of her right hand. The worst of it was the god-awful pale pink quilted bedjacket Hennessy had picked up for her. After a month her other, less serious wounds had healed, most of them cuts and burns caused by the explosion.

  ‘This isn’t the Plaza,’ Jane grumbled. ‘It’s a prison cell.’ Pelay the bellman had put Jane in one of the almost unrentable turret rooms in what amounted to the attic above the eighteenth floor. It was small, dusty, only a few yards from the groaning cable reels of the elevator machinery and from all appearances the plumbing hadn’t been upgraded since the venerable hotel’s construction more than thirty years before.

  Hennessy lit a cigarette, adding to the haze. ‘Quit carping,’ he said. ‘It’s better than being dead.’

  Jane reached out with her bandaged right hand and tapped the folded new
spaper on the bedside table. ‘According to Buschy’s creative little obit in the News that’s exactly what I am.’

  ‘Busch thought it was a good idea and so did I.’ Hennessy shrugged. ‘You know what they say about discretion, Jane.’ He paused, tapping his cigarette into the big crystal ashtray in his lap. ‘Someone tried to kill you. Better they think they succeeded.’ The detective shook his head. ‘Just be glad you got friends in all sorts of low places.’

  Somehow Jane had managed to crawl halfway to the elevator after the explosion. Even so she came very close to being consumed by the fire that raged outward into the hallway from her office. The firemen called an ambulance and had Jane transported to the nearest hospital, which happened to be Bellevue, a stroke of luck since it was easy to get lost in the massive twelve-square-block facility even at the best of times.

  Hennessy’s card was in the burned remains of the shoulder bag she’d managed to hang on to and he was the first person notified following Jane’s admission. After finding out from the firemen exactly what had happened at Jane’s office, Hennessy cautioned the attending physician about discussing Jane’s case with anyone, then had her file sent down to a lady friend of his in the medical examiner’s office in the Pathology Building where, at Hennessy’s request, she promptly lost it. With twenty thousand bodies a year passing through the morgue, almost half of which were never claimed, Hennessy knew that the chance of anyone finding out that Jane wasn’t actually dead was slim.

  With the help of another friend, this one in the mortuary trade, Jane was taken to the rear of the Plaza in a funeral home meat wagon. With Pelay’s help, as well as that of Bill Hartery, the Plaza house dick, she was whisked up one of the service elevators to the turret room with none the wiser. Hennessy then quietly put out the word and the small news stories that appeared documenting the explosion and fire all said that Jane had died as a result of the incident, the fault presumably stemming from her darkroom chemicals.