I could not get any closer, I saw the stretcher go out the door, I caught a glimpse of dark hair. The bodies were pressed so tight around me that I could not get my hand into my pocket to take out my phone. I was still trying as hard as I could to move past the people in front of me. With my left hand, I was raising my photo ID above my head in the direction of the policemen, who were forming a line in front of us and trying to herd us to one side of the lobby. No one paid the slightest attention to it. The same elevator opened again. Another stretcher. Four more men carrying it, a woman running with them. This time I was close enough to recognize the face of the person on the stretcher—my father. There was a wide patch of blood on his shirt, near his right shoulder, and the woman, an EMT maybe, was pressing a towel or a balled-up shirt against it. I pushed as if I were trying to push down the whole building, and took four steps forward and then popped through the last person between me and the policeman. I waved my ID frantically and made it past the policeman to the side of the stretcher.
“Pa!”
He turned his head an inch. His eyes were open, the muscles around them squeezed tight in pain.
“Pa!”
“Shot him,” was the only thing he said. His voice was small, and then the stretcher was hurried past me and I tried to follow close behind it, got through the front door, tried to force my way into the ambulance with him. “That’s my father!” I was screaming. “I’m on the staff! I’m on Jesus’s staff! I’m Russ Thomas! It’s my dad!”
But it was no go. The ambulance doors closed. It pushed out through the crowd, slowly at first, and then sped off toward Springfield Hospital, the siren blending with a dozen other sirens. The scene in front of the hotel was a madhouse of ambulances and squad cars and faces and policemen running this way and that way and people screaming and crying. I remember one image from out of that chaos: a woman about my mother’s age was sitting in the cold grit at the edge of the driveway with her knees spread out wide and her face in her hands.
I felt somebody grab the collar of my leather jacket from behind. I spun around, thinking it was a cop trying to get me out of there. It was.
Bastatutta did not say a word. He was practically dragging me beside him, holding the collar of my jacket with one hand and shoving people aside with the other. He pushed his way up to the nearest police car and shoved me against the passenger door. “Get him to the hospital,” he barked at the officer standing nearest the car. “GO! NOW!”
Thirty seconds of nudging the front fenders through the crowd, and then we were screaming at seventy miles an hour through the heart of the city. The radio was squawking, the sergeant listening intently and saying, over and over, “I don’t know no more than you know.” My cell phone rang. I had forgotten it. I yanked it out of my pocket and flipped it open and heard Zelda weeping, and in one sentence asking me where I was, if I was hurt, who was hurt and how badly, telling me she was still up in the room, she’d stayed behind to call me and to get something she thought Jesus had forgotten. As she was heading out the door and into the corridor, she was met by Secret Service agents. They pushed her back in. My father and mother and Stab and the others had gone with Jesus, and Stab, where was Stab? They wouldn’t let her out of the room! There were conflicting stories on the TV. “Your mother is here, but where is Stab!”
“I don’t know! I’m in a police car,” I shouted three times before she stopped yelling long enough to listen. “Going to the hospital. Jesus is shot. I saw them carry him out. Pa is shot. He was talking, he’s alive. I’ll have Bastatutta send someone to get you. All of you. Are you there? Zel! Zelda!”
The line had gone quiet as death. I tried calling her again, twice more, and got only a no-service message, and then we were at the hospital, and the policeman was calling Bastatutta on his radio, and I was sprinting toward the emergency room doors through an army of blue uniforms. I remember the fluorescent lights of the waiting area, and one fist-sized splash of blood on the linoleum. I made it past one or two officers who tried to stop me and as far as the door of the treatment rooms, where a stocky young orderly with a beard blocked the way.
“I’m on Jesus’s staff,” I said very loudly and with as much authority as I could manage. I was waving my ID. I was spraying words at him. I was trying to push past him and he was holding me tight by the shoulders. “My father’s in there. I’m on the staff! Let me by!”
“I know who you are. No one goes by.”
“My dad was shot.”
“No one goes in.”
“Chief Bastatutta said—”
“The chief is not in charge here.”
He turned me roughly and pointed toward a side treatment room, and I argued with him for another few minutes and then gave up and went through the door he had pointed to. In that sterile room, instead of sitting, I got on my knees. I was breathing as if I had just sprinted a lap around the city. I didn’t care who saw me—the doctor, the policeman, the nurses—I got on my knees. I could hear them working on Jesus, or my father, I couldn’t tell who, a few yards away, through a doorway, behind a curtain, a female doctor barking orders for this and that to be done. The sound of her voice, the tone of it, the professional calm over a layer of suppressed terror—it was like listening to the one thing you would never in your life want to listen to. I squeezed my eyes shut and squeezed my hands together in front of my chest and whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” without thinking about what I was sorry for. A kind of communal guilt had wrapped itself around me, guilt by association with the human race. Guilt by association with my thoughts. After a while, I heard Zelda’s voice, and then my mother’s voice, and then Stab’s, and I stood up and went to them, and we held each other in a circular embrace. I told them I had no news, about anybody, about anything. I told them we should pray, which, in the days before Jesus, would not have been like me at all.
FORTY-TWO
Almost everyone in the world knows the historical details of what happened that night, but I have some personal information that was never in the newspapers and on TV. As Jesus stepped out of the hotel suite, his mother, my dad, Wales, Ezzie, Stab, and Enrica were beside him, a cadre of Secret Service agents in front and behind. Ada Montpelier and my mom had stayed in the suite to watch the children. Zelda had started out of the room with Jesus, and then decided she should go back for a notebook in which were written names of people he might want to thank. On her way back into the suite she decided to call me and give me a heads-up. “Hold the elevator for me,” she yelled over her shoulder. Mom changed her mind and waited to go downstairs with Zelda.
It would come to light that, simmering in his jealousy, Randy Zillins had used his investigative skills and local connections to find out certain security details having to do with the hotel: that one elevator had been programmed to prevent it from going above the tenth floor, that the other was broken, that only workmen with passes could get to the thirteenth floor, where the machinery was. There are conspiracy theorists who believe more than one person was involved, that the elevator malfunction itself was part of the killer’s plan, but none of the evidence unearthed by the Leahy Commission supports that, and I believe it would be giving Randy Zillins too much credit. He was not much different from the overweight middle-aged man I’d imagined when talking to Wales on the beach. He was a thirty-eight-year-old reporter with an insecurity complex the size of Jupiter. He was a little man, not so much physically as psychologically, and he was tormented, in a society obsessed with celebrity, by his own stunted ambitions.
While we had been on the road with the campaign, Zillins had written a series of articles about Jesus, all of them soaked in cynicism. I read through them, much later, when I was able to bear it. They had titles like, “False Gods, False Witnesses,” and “The True Sinner.”
In any case, near midnight, when Jesus and his entourage came down the hallway, the one working elevator had not yet been reprogrammed to go up to the twelfth floor. (Conspiracy theorists see this as part of th
e plan, too, but I know better: I simply forgot to call the manager when I should have, and then in the confusion the manager simply forgot to give the order when she should have.) When it did not appear on the twelfth floor after a minute and a half, the Secret Service people became suspicious and steered Jesus toward the nearest stairway. They cleared the stairwell, of course, but by luck, fate, local connections, or some hidden criminal genius, Randy Zillins had secured a workman’s pass, and was hiding one floor above. He heard the door open, heard voices, guessed the moment that Jesus would be moving from the corridor below onto the landing. He moved out from his hiding place, descended two steps, and fired two quick shots down between the flights. It was a fluke that he hit his target. He had made, it would turn out, only a few dozen visits to the shooting range in East Zenith; he was no expert. He would have had a clear look at Jesus for only a fraction of a second, and even then, a clear look at only a piece of his torso. I believe now that some divine plan was at work, though that is something I do not say to many people. The first bullet missed and went zinging around the concrete stairwell. The second pierced Jesus’s body at a sharp downward angle, entering two inches above his right lung, exiting through his lower back. My father, combat veteran that he was, reacted instantly and sprinted up the stairs toward the assailant. Richard Diamond’s second in command, a man named Elliot Welner, was half a step behind him. Zillins fired a wild shot as he turned and tried to run, and that bullet tore through my father’s right shoulder. Welner then fired three shots, one of which hit Zillins directly behind his heart, killing him instantly. After that there was a frantic race to stanch the bleeding of the two victims, find out why the elevator was stalled, and carry Jesus and my dad down to the ambulances.
They managed to get Jesus to the hospital while he was still alive, but he’d lost so much blood that it was impossible to save him. For forty minutes the doctors tried. And for that time we waited in a nearby room, praying and crying. Word came to us quickly that my father’s wounds were not life-threatening; it was the one comfort of that hideous night.
It was strange, the way our vigil ended. This part, of course, was never reported in the press: about a minute before we received word that the doctors could not save Jesus, my brother Stab suddenly stopped sobbing—which he had been doing nonstop—and looked at me. I had looked into Stab’s face several million times in the years I’d known him. There had always been a sort of covering across his close-spaced, droopy eyes and rounded mouth, a dimness—that’s the only way I can describe it—as if his brain were cloaked in fog. But, for that minute or so, a change came across him. He sat there with a look of surprise on his face. I believe that, for better or worse, he was seeing the world around him as the rest of us do. And shortly after that, Dr. Wendy Weston, the head surgeon at Springfield Hospital, came into the waiting room and told us Jesus was gone.
Our grief then was beyond personal, as my guilt had been. It was a universal grieving—for the loss of Jesus, but also for us, our country, humankind. Zelda told me later she thought it was grief that grew out of the fact that we live in a world where evil can triumph so easily over good.
I stayed there a long time. My father had lost a lot of blood and would eventually require two shoulder surgeries, and would never regain full use of his right arm, but his life was not in danger. We were allowed in to see him, though he was still sedated and spoke to us only later in the night.
Before that, dividing us into two groups, the doctors let us into the room where Jesus’s body lay. Zelda and I and Wales and Ezzie and Anna Songsparrow were in the first group. From the shoulders down Jesus was covered in a sheet. His face was unnaturally pale, the eyes closed, the hair tousled and wet. It was as if no light was in that room, no air.
“Rise,” I said beneath my breath, in a trembling voice that no one could hear. I felt emptied out and bitter, and I could not stop looking at him. “If you’re going to rise, rise now. Don’t wait. Don’t make us wait. Please. Rise.”
He did not stir. Zelda was squeezing my hand and weeping loudly. We moved half a step back so that Anna Songsparrow could go up close and have a private moment. I watched her lean down and press her forehead against her son’s forehead, and I heard her mumbling words—a prayer or incantation in a language I did not understand. She went on for a long time, and after a while her body started to shake, and Zelda and Ezzie went up and held her, and Wales and I moved closer, too, though we did not look at each other and could not speak.
FORTY-THREE
In the small hours of that morning, after Zelda had stood up in front of the press corps and told them everything she knew, and after my mother and Stab had insisted on staying the night in my father’s hospital room (even though he was awake by then and telling them not to), and after Dukey and Enrica and I had accompanied the body down to the morgue, I called Chief Bastatutta and asked him to post a second special detail (in addition to the disgraced Secret Service cadre) to make sure no one tampered with the body, and after Anna Songsparrow and Wales and Ezzie and the Simmeltons had gone back to the hotel to pray or to drink or to field the endless phone calls, I wandered away again. I cannot explain why. When she was done with the press, Zel asked me to take her back to her apartment, which I did. And then she asked me to stay with her, which I did not do, not right away at least. “I’ll come back,” I said.
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know. Walking. I just need … I don’t know what I need. I won’t go far. I’ll come back. I need an hour.”
After the trauma of that day, a lot of other women would have made a fuss and insisted I stay. And a lot of other men would not have left. But Zel and I are both different in that respect, and it is a difference that has persisted in our married life, and we both see it as a strength, a way of letting the other person move in his or her own orbit, while holding on to the gravitational attachment we feel for each other.
In any case, I went out walking. It was past three a.m. by that point, the darkest part of a dark night. I did not set out with any conscious destination in mind, just turned right on the sidewalk in front of the building and kept going, past the row of redone Victorians, and then across the bridge and into Fultonville. Maybe I was subconsciously heading for the scene of the first miracle, I don’t know. I walked in a cold daze. I remember that a few lights were on in the windows of the buildings I passed, a few cars and cabs in the street. Under ordinary circumstances, at that hour of the night, I wouldn’t have been caught dead strolling through Fultonville without a police escort, or at least the accompaniment of a camera crew. But you had the sense that even the muggers and dealers and gang bangers were taking a break (in fact, as statistics would later show, there was a seventy percent drop in violent crime, nationwide, in the twenty-four hours after Jesus’s death).
Still, it was an eerie place, a neighborhood haunted by the memories of awful news stories, and it was almost as if those stories lived on in the brick faces of the buildings, in the littered vacant lots and school playgrounds, in the molecules of the fire hydrants, telephone poles, and rusting chain-link fences.
After a while, tired and cold, I came to a place called Liberty Park, a nasty three or four hundred square yards of urban foliage and trash, a place frequented by street people who could find no safer spot to lay down their cardboard boxes. I had done a dozen stories from Liberty Park, none of them happy. It was only blocks from the place where Dukey Junior had been brought back to life. I was very cold by then. I should have turned around and headed back to Zelda’s apartment, but I was in a peculiar mood, a mood that went beyond sadness. It was more than missing Jesus, more than sorrow that he would never inhabit the White House, more than anger at the violent fool who had shot him. I had sunk into a spiritual depression, you could call it. A feeling that, in this realm at least, good would never triumph, hope was nothing more than a waste of energy, and my own personal demons would always haunt me.
I sat on one of the wooden slat benches in
the half darkness, and I looked out across the empty park.
And now I come to another part of the story you won’t find in the history books. I will tell it the way it happened, which is what I was asked to do.
I was sitting on the bench in Liberty Park when I saw a shadowy figure come walking through the same entrance I had used. I felt a stirring of fear, of course—in that neighborhood, at that hour. And yet, I was in such a strange mood that I almost didn’t care, one way or the other, if somebody tried to hurt me. I could see that it was a man. On the tall side, dressed in dark clothes. He was shuffling along in a street person’s gait, moving vaguely in my direction. When he passed beneath the dim streetlight I caught a glimpse of his face. I stood up. He shuffled over to me. I made a move to get down on my knees, but he took hold of my right arm and held me upright. “I do not want that from you,” he said. “Let’s sit.”
We sat side-by-side, but I turned so I could look at him. The clothes were dirty and old and there was mud on his shoes, but it was the same face, eyes shining in the darkness, a hint of impatience around the mouth. There was no evidence of blood anywhere; he did not seem to be in pain; he had a human consistency, if that’s the right word, and was nothing like a walking ghost. I could feel my body trembling, the smallest of vibrations, as if grief were strumming a funeral song in my cells.
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