by Greg Ahlgren
Lewis Ginter stepped into the phone booth and closed the louvered door. He dumped his pile of change onto the shelf, lifted the receiver, inserted a dime, and dialed zero. When the machine returned his coin, Lewis added it to the pile.
It had been over a month since he had left Paul and Amanda in Manchester and he had yet to contact them. It should be about 8:00 a.m. in New York, and if they were at the Waldorf, contact should be easy. If they weren’t there...
Lewis almost held his breath as he asked the desk clerk to connect him to Paul deVere’s room. The pause at the other end was maddening but Lewis sighed in relief when the phone began ringing. At least he’s registered there, he thought.
After eight rings, the desk clerk came back on and asked if he wished to leave a message.
He hesitated before asking, “Could you connect me to Amanda Hutch’s room please?”
After a pause the phone began ringing again. He was about to hang up when he heard her voice at the other end.
“Hello?” she said.
He sucked in his breath. “Amanda?”
“Lewis?” Her voice was crackly.
“It’s me. Where’s Paul?” he asked.
“He’s out getting the papers. We read them every morning. Lewis, where the hell have you been? Are you O.K.? Is Pamela with you?”
“I’m fine. Pamela is fine.”
“Where are you?” she asked.
He hesitated. He wished he had reached Paul. “Down south,” he said. “Near Dallas.”
“Texas?” she asked.
“Yeah, Dallas, Texas.”
“Is Pamela still with you?” she asked.
“In a way,” he answered.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“Hey, you’re the history professor,” Ginter countered. “I’m staying in a colored motel. And I don’t mean the wall decor. Pamela is staying in one for white people a few miles away. We communicate by telephone and my motel doesn’t have a phone in the room, just cockroaches.”
There was a long pause. “I’m sorry,” Amanda said. She sounded genuinely apologetic. “Be careful.”
“Don’t worry, I have been.”
Lewis looked through the booth’s windows at the surrounding parking lot and scanned the cars coming and going. Nothing suspicious.
“Have you seen our friends?” Ginter asked, annoyed at how stilted this conversation was sounding.
“Friends?”
“Collinson or Pomeroy? Anyone seem not right at the hotel? Anyone following you? Anything not feeling right?”
“Neither one of us has seen anything that seems out of the ordinary, whatever that means,” Amanda said. “But you know, Lewis, neither one of us would know if someone was tailing us, we don’t have that kind of training. How about you?”
For a moment Lewis questioned his decision in leaving Paul and Amanda on their own. Maybe he should have risked circling back for them. If someone else were back here, they were sitting ducks. But whoever came back apparently didn’t want to harm them, at least not yet.
“I haven’t seen any sign of anyone, or anything suspicious.”
He told her about his efforts in New Orleans to discover whether Collinson or Pomeroy had been in contact with the anti-Castro faction.
“Anti-Castro?” Amanda asked. “What does that have to do with anything? I don’t remember them amounting to anything after the Bay of Pigs. And why were you in New Orleans?”
“Just a hunch,” he lied. “The anti-Castro thing is the biggest Cuban angle happening right now. And that’s in Louisiana. There was some sort of paramilitary camp for anti-Castro Cubans right outside of New Orleans that the feds raided a few weeks ago.”
Amanda seemed uninterested. “Lewis, even we weren’t planning on coming back here in 1963 so why would someone else have done that?”
The same thought had been bothering him. It all made no sense. He tried to change the subject, more from embarrassment than anything else.
“So, what are you working on?”
Amanda talked about their unsuccessful approach to Harrison Salisbury and their letter writing campaign.
“I really can’t blame him, can you?” Ginter asked. “I mean, what would you have said a year ago if someone had come up to you with this story?”
“We have another plan,” Amanda said. Ginter could sense the hesitation in her voice.
“Which is?” he demanded.
“We’re going to try to get in to see the President.”
“How?” he asked. “Even back then, I mean back now, security isn’t going to let you do that.”
“Paul and I are going to get Senator Thurmond to get us in to see the President.”
“Why would he do that?” Ginter asked.
Amanda explained the plan to get them into the Oval Office.
“Do you know how risky that is?” Ginter asked in amazement. “You might get arrested. If you do get in to see Kennedy why would he believe you any more than Salisbury did?”
“We’re thinking we can tell Kennedy about his girlfriend as proof we’re time travelers,” she said simply, but even from thousands of miles away Ginter could sense her own doubt.
“Unless you have something better?” she demanded.
He considered a moment. What difference did it make? he asked himself. Why the secrecy? No one seemed to be making any progress anyway.
“Maybe,” he said.
He cleared his throat. “I’ve been working on a plan involving a defector from Russia,” he said. “I’ve still got some stuff to do. It may work out O.K. I’m going down to Mexico. If it all works out I may be able to change some part of history. Then if it really works out I might get the guy to come back up to Dallas and I’ve got a plan involving Kennedy, maybe something that will convince him to change his mind on Cuba.”
Ginter paused. He suspected that Amanda thought that he sounded vague.
“O.K.,” was all she said. “Is Pamela involved in this? What is she doing?”
“I can’t involve her much,” he said. “I can’t even be seen with her without running the risk of getting rousted by the cops. I, I never really knew...” Ginter’s voice trailed off.
“I understand, Lewis,” Amanda said sympathetically. “So, she’s not going to Mexico with you?”
“She can’t. She’s got no identification to get back in the country. She’s O.K. checking into motels but not crossing borders.”
“When we will hear from you again?” Amanda asked.
“When I get back. Stay at the Waldorf,” he instructed her.
“Lewis,” she asked, “did you end up with Kennedy’s itinerary?”
“I have it,” he answered.
He heard a sigh of relief from the other end. “I was afraid it had gotten lost,” she said. “Can you make another copy?”
“I will,” he promised. “I’ll send it to you at the Waldorf.” She gave him the address.
“And make sure to say ‘hi’ to Paul for me, will you?” Ginter asked before hanging up.
In New York Amanda rolled over on her bed and replaced the receiver. “Say ‘hi’ to Paul for me,” Lewis had said.
Funny, if things had worked differently, she’d have heard that said hundreds of times over the last 28 years, whenever a friend of theirs called.
Instead, 28 years ago she had left him at the Ithaca bus station, or rather, he had left her, late as he had been to get back to teach a class.
“Are you sure you’re O.K.?” he had asked her in the bus station. “You look like you don’t feel so well.”
“I’m fine, how are you doing?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I’m sick about this, Amanda. I’m just sick. This morning I thought I was going to throw up. I wolfed about five antacid tablets.”
“But you didn’t get sick,” she laughed. “You’re just projecting your own feelings on to me.”
Paul nodded glumly and looked back over his shoulder toward the clock on the far wall.
>
“You think they’re following me?” Amanda teased. “You think I’m that big a radical they’d have an agent tail me around, make sure I go to Leipzig?”
Paul flushed and looked down. “No,” he said, his face reddening as he stared at the floor. “No, I don’t think that, it’s just…”
Amanda nodded and touched his shoulder.
“I know,” she whispered. “I know. These are sucky times. The whole world has turned upside down and it’s like you and I have fallen off. Some crackpots blow things up and everyone is afraid, so damn afraid.”
Paul looked up and Amanda panicked that she had said too much. But then he nodded, and she relaxed. She took his arm and guided him across the room.
“How many antacids did you have this morning?” she teased.
“Five,” he said. “I’m really sick about this, Amanda, about you going just because the bastards are making you.”
She patted his arm.
“You’ll be fine. Hey, I’m not sick over it. Even if I didn’t have to, I might have chosen to study abroad. It gives one a new perspective.”
They walked to the candy counter, arm in arm, and bought two Snickers, their favorites. Paul peeled back the wrapping while Amanda dropped hers in her purse.
“For the trip,” she said.
“You sure you’ll make the connection in Boston O.K.?”
She nodded. “Plenty of time. I’ll be in Munich in the morning.”
She looked at her watch. She knew she had to at some point.
“Oh my goodness, Paul, you’ve got to get back to campus. You have an eleven o’clock. I’ll be fine.”
She let his obvious relief pass without comment.
They hugged tightly, and kissed deeply, but she knew. They said all the right things, but she still knew. At her urging, he turned and walked to his car. She stood in the concourse for a full minute before making her way to the ladies room. She entered the first available stall, collapsed on the tile floor, and vomited into the bowl. She wished she too had antacids.
Chapter 22
Lewis Ginter lay staring at the wobbling ceiling fan in his third floor room in Mexico City’s Hotel d’Estes. It wasn’t helping. He was soaked in sweat.
He had been in Mexico City for a week, and the late September temperature had not dropped below 90 degrees. His hotel room, on the south side of the building under tarpaper eaves, did little for his comfort.
Lewis had never liked Mexico, and the Hotel d’Estes was, even by 1963 standards, a dump. He wondered if the temperature was usual for the city in late September. He would have asked someone-a casual inquiry of a desk clerk perhaps-but he remained wary of unnecessary contact with “63ers” as he had come to think of them. Knowledge of the climatic conditions of a Mexican city was of no benefit to him. He just knew it was hot.
Ginter had driven down from Laredo knowing he had to be in Mexico City at the end of September. He recalled that it was on a weekend that his efforts would be needed, but was unsure of the specific dates.
As he did several times a day, Ginter mentally checked his body. He began by checking his skin, his muscle reflexes and his joints, and ended with a memory test by asking himself questions about his past. In the seven weeks since the four of them had traversed, Lewis Ginter had discovered no physical ill effects.
Yet mentally, he felt different. Was it the wormhole? He reflected back on the run-up to his departure from Cambridge, and chastised himself for lack of preparation. This mission had gone terribly wrong. Last summer-was it last summer or a future summer?-he should have studied more. Maybe he was too old and his military training had faded. Maybe he had relied too much on Hutch’s expertise. The image of them scrambling around the lab with Pamela, Hutch hurriedly gathering up scattered papers, and tumbling into the Accelechron, Plan A already a shambles, sickened him. How could he have allowed the development of such a complex mission without an alternate plan?
But that didn’t matter now. He was in 1963, separated from Hutch and deVere, trying to formulate Plan B on the fly. It was impossible to convince the President not to pull out of Southeast Asia. Check that. It was impossible in 1963 for a black man to do it.
But he was not without options. He couldn’t change Southeast Asian military history, but he could change what would happen in South America, to stop Ché Guevara. Heck, the guerrilla would have been stopped long before his run north if not for that American turncoat.
Lewis knew the Soviet version. “Hero O.H. Lee used his American Marine training to encircle the reactionary forces with liberation fighters.”
But Ginter also knew the truth. Oswald, or Lee, as he called himself when he defected to Cuba, had screwed up, taken the wrong road, and arrived after Guevara’s force had already been attacked, but in perfect time to counter-attack. The trap had failed, and Guevara, who should have been killed, escaped. Without the charismatic Ché Guevara, Cuban agitation in South America might have petered out. And without the Communist threat in South America, the U.S. could have focused on stopping them elsewhere. And without Lee Harvey Oswald, Ché Guevara would have been killed in that Bolivian jungle.
So now, he had to stop Oswald however he could. He should have shot him in the head in broad daylight in New Orleans, and Rhodes be damned. But then he had seen the pathetic, gaunt loser, passing out leaflets. Plan B had hatched. “The perfect patsy,” Ginter had said to himself.
And so Ginter had spent the last sweat-soaked week in the Hotel d’Estes, staring at his ceiling fan. He only left the room, his fist full of coins, to call every other cheap hotel to see if Señor Oswald had checked in.
“Non, Señor,” was the constant reply.
Until this morning. Friday, September 27, 1963. Hotel del Comercio. Another third-rater just four blocks from the bus station.
“Si, Señor,” the desk clerk had answered.
“Oh, good,” Ginter had said, nonchalantly. “Oh, no need to leave a message. I will meet him later.”
He hoped that the del Comercio’s desk clerk would not mention the call to the American guest. Oswald didn’t speak Spanish, at least not yet, so the odds were good.
Ginter rose from the bed and checked his new Timex. Eleven twenty-three a.m. He dressed quickly and, as always, quietly. Despite the humidity, he slipped a sport coat over his starched white shirt. It clung a little in the damp, but was cut full enough to hide the .45.
The walk to the Cuban Embassy took only a few minutes and Ginter arrived shortly after noon. He passed the embassy on the opposite side of the street without glancing over. At the corner he turned and strolled past a row of apartment houses.
He surveyed the Cuban Embassy every day. The stone facade building, located in a generally residential neighborhood, was difficult to keep under surveillance. There were no good places to read a newspaper while standing, and no public park in which to innocently loiter. All surveillance had to be moving, and eventually someone might notice anyone who kept circling the neighborhood.
But surveying was not really necessary for the plan. Ginter knew what Oswald would do, and what the Embassy would do. He had two days to change it.
On Saturday, Lewis Ginter spotted Oswald leaving the Cuban Embassy from across the street. The 23 year-old had stormed out the front door, scowling. Ginter turned sideways as his target turned left and trudged back toward the del Comercio.