“What room are you in?” asked Harry.
“Not here. Not this hotel. Come on, get your things.” Walter saw that Harry was a very neat person. His bathroom had been set up as if he’d moved in. The toothpaste, toothbrush and a small bottle of mouthwash were stacked next to a drinking glass. His razor, shaving cream, aftershave lotion and extra blades had been carefully lined up on the side of the sink opposite the toothbrush. On a marble shelf next to the shower, Harry had arranged his deodorant, hairbrush and comb. The towels at first appeared undisturbed, still hanging, nicely folded. Walter’s experienced eye saw one of them had been used. It was refolded and had been put back in its original location, but he noticed the small change in the crease on one side. Very neat, he thought. He expected what came next. Harry’s clothes were hung in the closet and arranged in drawers-underwear and socks in the top drawer, a few shirts in the second and a sweater, sitting alone in the bottom drawer. “Look, Harry,” he said. “Just toss everything in your bag and let’s get out of here. Before they get here.”
“They can’t be that close-whoever they are-can they?”
“They could be getting off the elevator at the end of the hall, right now.”
“What? Come on now…”
“You’d be better off assuming that than assuming they’re not. I’m here, aren’t I?” Walter reached into the closet, grabbed the hanging pants, a jacket and the shirts and threw them into Harry’s open bag sitting on the bed. Harry looked upset, but he did the same with the rest of his belongings. Then he reached under the bed and retrieved a bulky attache case.
“That it?” asked Walter.
“Yes,” said Harry, “I hid it in London. I got it before I came here, to Holland.”
“That’s what I figured,” Walter said. “Call the desk. Check out.”
Harry called down and told the front desk to prepare his bill. Doing just as Walter instructed him, he said, “Put the charges on my credit card and mail the receipt to me.”
In a minute they were down the stairs, past the kitchen, out of there through a back door.
PART TWO
It may be the devil or it may be the Lord but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.
- Bob Dylan-
The day Anna Rothstein ran away from Memphis and married a kid named Eddie O’Malley, her father, Saul, worried about his wife’s sanity. Doris Rothstein was crying in the kitchen. Her sister Irene was on her way over but hadn’t arrived yet. They were always there for each other at a time of crisis. That’s certainly what this was, Saul said to himself. The word helpless ran through his mind. It was a very uncomfortable word. Saul Rothstein was not the kind of man who was used to feeling helpless. Despite his wife’s emotional meltdown, he saw this… thing, this set of fucking outrageous circumstances.. . as a challenge to the central rule guiding the Rothstein family’s life- I, Saul Rothstein, make the rules! The phone call from Anna pissed him off. Saul couldn’t believe she actually put this Eddie guy on the line. What can you say to a nineteen-year-old auto mechanic who’s just run off with your daughter?
That morning, Anna left for school before seven, saying she needed to be there early. A friend was picking her up, she told her parents. Saul Rothstein now realized the friend had been the little Irish shithead now calling himself Anna’s husband. Saul hung up the phone and muttered, “Fuck me? I don’t think so, you little Mick sonofabitch!”
The newlyweds returned home, to Memphis, by car from the small town in Mississippi where they had been married, a place called Langston, so small Saul had never heard of it, somewhere in the southwest part of the state not far from Louisiana. This Eddie O’Malley apparently lived in an apartment somewhere near the Memphis airport. Anna mentioned something about two other roommates who had gone off to let them have some privacy. Mr. and Mrs. O’Malley were holed up inside. This bullshit needed fixing.
What kind of assholes live in Mississippi? Rothstein pondered that question as he waited in the outside office of his old friend, the Honorable Milton Fryer, Memphis’s only Jewish judge. “How is it they allow children to get married over there?” he asked the judge. Anna was only sixteen. He thought she said the O’Malley guy was nineteen. Saul wasn’t sure, but he was certain he’d had enough of this already. He beseeched Judge Fryer to help and, in less time than it took cement to harden, the judge annulled whatever nonsense Mississippi had been stupid enough to sanction. Anna Rothstein-now never legally O’Malley-went home, to her parents’ house. Her mother, Doris, didn’t stop crying for weeks. Even Irene was no help. Saul wanted no part of that either.
Anna Rothstein was a nice looking girl, tall, five-eight, maybe more, hazel eyes and light brown hair-almost blonde. At fourteen she was full breasted and by sixteen, with a little makeup and a nice dress, she was able to look twenty if she wanted. She was a bright girl, clearly the favorite of her dad, also smarter than her older brother. She took after her father. Everyone always said that and it pleased Saul tremendously. But not now. Although she had gone home, Anna reacted harshly to the annulment. She said she was going to retain counsel and challenge the Judge’s ruling. She already knew the law much better than her father did. Saul’s friend Milton Fryer wasn’t there to help. He capitulated.
“Do you love this… Eddie O’Malley?” her father asked.
“That is not what we are talking about,” said Anna. “What’s at issue here is the legality of your bogus annulment. You and Milton Fryer have a relationship, the sort of which any judge, other than ‘Uncle Milty,’ would easily see as a conflict of interest for him. You know, Dad, the legal system of the state of Tennessee was not created for your personal use. I wasn’t even married in this state-they wouldn’t let me. My Mississippi marriage cannot be tossed out by some Tennessee judge, sitting in the company of my father, absent either myself or my husband or any representation either of us might wish to have. Do you see what I mean?” Saul couldn’t help himself. He was proud of his daughter.
“What is it you want, Anna? And remember, you’re driving your mother nuts here.”
So it was that a sixteen-year-old Jewish girl from Memphis, Tennessee, in the year 1953, granted her parents’ wish to annul her Mississippi nuptials in return for being allowed to keep the name O’ Malley. She didn’t think that was asking too much, and she was right. Her grandmother would get used to it, she said.
Two years later, when she left Memphis to attend the University of Tennessee, Anna O’Malley dropped the Anna for Abby. She liked the sound of it. She spent four highly entertaining, successful years in Knoxville, studying Political Science-and did it- “Thank you God!” her father had prayed – without getting married again. Eddie O’Malley was long gone, not missed and hardly remembered. In the autumn of 1959, Abby O’Malley enrolled at the University of Chicago Law School. She was the first woman to be Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review and graduated first in the class of 1962. She loved living in Chicago and, after graduation, accepted a position there with Farmers Mutual Insurance Company. She specifically asked to work in major fraud investigation. She liked the challenge and rose to meet it. She had a talent for taking disparate events and scattered pieces of evidence and putting them together, gleaning a method, a motive, a conspiracy. In 1963 she left the private sector for government work. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy hired her to work on his organized crime unit, The Jimmy Hoffa Squad, as it was called. Abby had a nose for fraud, and fraud was the way the mob ran its whole national operation. Bobby Kennedy was pleased to have her. She moved to Washington, D.C. where she was a perfect fit. She was young, attractive, ambitious and smart. Then the President was murdered and everything at the Justice Department changed.
Bobby Kennedy had only one thing on his mind-who killed his brother? He recruited a small team of talented Justice Department lawyers to work only on that. Abby O’Malley was among them. Less than a year later, while only twenty-seven years old, Robert Kennedy handpicked her to take his investigation private. At first he put her in the Justic
e Department’s Boston office. This gave her easy access to his family’s resources and kept anyone in Washington from learning what the Special Assistant to the Attorney General really did. Shortly thereafter, Abby resigned from her government job and was hired by the legal department of a private investment firm, controlled by the Kennedys. Her position there served as cover for her real job-for which the family had allocated an unlimited budget-finding the person or persons responsible for the death of President John F. Kennedy. That mystery was finally solved and the investigation concluded in 1968. Less than a month later Bobby Kennedy was murdered.
Following his death, Abby O’Malley’s duties changed. Once Bobby Kennedy was confronted with the existence of Lacey’s confession, and its contents, once he was assured it was real, and that it was hidden away to protect Lacey, Abby’s job was to get it. Get it and destroy it. No cost was too much. That Bobby too was soon gone made no difference. From then on, while she appeared to be a high-level lawyer for an investment-banking firm, she devoted her efforts to a single mission-preserving the Kennedy mystique.
Rose had become depressed after Bobby’s death. In her melancholy, she said things to Abby, cried to her as only a mother could. To Abby O’Malley she said that which she could never have uttered in the earshot of her priest, her bishop or Cardinal Cushing. She was a good Catholic, but she was human. To keep the flame of Camelot burning brightly was to keep her boys alive and close. A woman of boundless energy and infectious enthusiasm had become despondent.
“Isn’t it enough he took my boys?” she wept in private to Abby. Was it God she spoke of, or Frederick Lacey? “Must he now destroy all they stood for?”
“No one can ever do that, Rose,” comforted Abby, still unsure. Could the wrath of God be directed through Lacey? Was Rose Kennedy in fear of each? Of both together?
“Oh, yes they can. They’ll ruin Jack now. With Bobby gone…” Rose paused for a moment and Abby could hear the upheaval in the old woman’s chest. The pain this woman felt at the death of the son who had always been her favorite stood exposed like fresh-butchered meat-raw, red and dripping blood. Abby expected her to cry out, Bobby! Bobby! Bobby! But she didn’t. Rose Kennedy wiped her eyes and nose with a nearby tissue, cleared her throat and said, “Without Bobby, there’s nobody to protect Jack. They’ll savage him.”
“No,” said Abby. “We will not allow that.”
“The women, Abby! The women alone will do it for them. I told Jack, but he didn’t listen. I told him ‘You’re the President of the United States, act like it!’ He never listened to me, and his father-he was no help. You watch, Abby. The business with the Monroe girl. The others too. Jackie will be of no help either. She’s done with us and if it weren’t for her children, I would…” She stopped herself just in time.
Abby O’Malley said, “Rose, I never believed all that would stay hidden, not forever. The President’s health also. People will find out and there will be those who will publicize it. It doesn’t matter. There might even be more. There may be things we don’t know, especially about his friends-deals they made, favors they called in-who knows what. Still, it won’t matter. I promise you. The American people love President Kennedy without reservation, for one reason and one reason only.” She looked at Rose, wanting to make sure the senior Kennedy was focused and completely lucid. “They love him because he was assassinated. And the same for Bobby. They love them both for the tragedy that took their lives, took them from us before their time. Nothing that is revealed will ever change that, unless the circumstances of their deaths, at the hands of Frederick Lacey, become known.”
“But, Abby…,” said Rose, her voice rising above its normal high-pitched near scream.
“No buts.” Abby held up both hands. “The vast majority of Americans-the vast majority of people all over the world-believe the President was assassinated by a conspiracy. You know that. I know you know that.” Rose nodded silently, in acquiescence. “For as long as that notion of conspiracy is not confirmed, not proven-for as long as people feel they do not know who killed President Kennedy-his legend is safe. Camelot is safe. What you have struggled so long to build, is safe. Only Lacey can change that.”
“Oh, my God.” Rose Kennedy began crying again.
“Leave him to me,” said Abby. “I’ll take care of it.”
To do that she had to get her hands on Lacey’s document. Lacey himself was untouchable, but the document was another matter. Abby was single-minded and determined. She answered only to Rose Kennedy. The matriarch of the Kennedy family knew the awful truth, but Abby never told another living soul about Frederick Lacey’s confession. Except for Louis Devereaux. It was well known within the Kennedy compound that Abby did something very important and her authority was not to be questioned. Nothing about her task changed when Rose Kennedy followed her children into the arms of Jesus, albeit more peacefully than they had.
Abby met Louis Devereaux in Chicago, in 1971. He was twenty. She’d been invited back to her law school as part of a two-day seminar covering a wide range of legal topics. On the second morning, she sat on a panel discussing the Fourth Amendment. The then Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review, a young man from Louisiana named Louis Devereaux, delivered a paper in which he argued that the strictures of the Fourth Amendment did not apply to the President of the United States. Under certain circumstances, he maintained, the President’s power to investigate was basically without limit. Abby wasn’t sure he was serious, but she was fascinated with the skill of his presentation and the structure of his argument. She did, of course, pass off as a joke Devereaux’s idea that the President-any President-could break into someone’s house or office, secretly and without a warrant and, if caught, claim constitutional immunity. She did not fail to notice the subtle support for Devereaux’s claim expressed by some members of the panel after the young man’s paper. Louis was a force. He had a way about him. If he hadn’t convinced them, he sure scared them with the possibility. Later, when she stopped Devereaux in the hallway, she was even more impressed to realize he wasn’t at all committed to the ideas he’d just proposed. The thrill of the argument gave him a buzz. She admired that, her sense of the absurdity of others, very much a part of her character too. Abby liked to have fun. She recognized a kindred spirit and gave him her card. “Stay in touch,” she said. She meant it and he knew it. She was not the type to glad-hand people and he was certainly not the type to be glad-handed. They both saw something special in each other. Abby O’Malley fit exactly into Devereaux’s experience with his mother and sisters-older, strong, accomplished women. She was precisely the kind of person for whom he reserved his respect and admiration. The two of them shared a commonality of world-view-not a nitpicking uniformity on policy, but a grander agreement on the ultimate scheme of the universe. As well, they shared ambition and recognition of each other as someone they would surely meet at the top of the mountain. They were determined to greet one another at the summit as allies. They would never lose touch with each other.
Had either of them known that John Ehrlichman would read Devereaux’s Law Review article, expanding his Fourth Amendment idea, and then arrogantly spout the thesis of Presidential exception to the Senate Watergate Committee, they would have had a good laugh. Years later, when Devereaux listened to Nixon’s tapes, he was disappointed Ehrlichman failed to credit him. “That’s a great idea, John!” Nixon could be heard saying. “Where did you get it from?” Ehrlichman calmly claimed it as his own.
In 1975 Abby met and married David Lowenthal, a shy, gentle, sometimes mystical Fine Arts professor at Harvard. He was also a well-known sculptor. Their relationship would be intensely private. He was so absorbed with his pursuit of art and beauty that he never really learned the details of his wife’s job. She did not care much. She did not encourage his curiosity, not in that area. She wasn’t the type to come home telling stories of her day at work. He adored her and she him. That was all either needed. At more than one Boston party, David Lowenthal was heard to
explain what his wife did by saying she had “something to do with investments.”
Abby O’Malley was a patient woman. She gave no ground as Frederick Lacey wilted slowly, living longer, much longer than anyone had a right to. The day he finally died, her decades of planning were over. Within minutes events were in motion.
The Heerensgracht was frozen over. All the canals were. The smell of ice was in the air. Biting winds swept in off the North Sea. The usual canal traffic-the small outboards, the long, low tourist boats and the water taxis that ferried people from the Leidseplein to the Van Gogh Museum and on to the Flower Market-were all on hold until spring. It was damn cold in Amsterdam. Walter brought the wrong jacket. He’d forgotten how unpleasant the Dutch winter could be. The city was beautiful, as it always was, but he was freezing in his windbreaker, even with a sweater underneath. Fortunately, the apartment at 310 Heerensgracht was a short cab ride from Amsterdam Central Station.
The train from Bergen op Zoom got them to Amsterdam late in the afternoon. Walter had been in Central Station often enough to feel familiar there. He could never get the picture out of his mind, the sight of German trains loaded with Nazi soldiers pulling in on the same tracks his own train now rode on. He’d seen it in documentaries and newsreels. Why it didn’t bother the Dutch more was a mystery to him. Perhaps, one needed to be a European to understand. Europe was more the same than different, now. But how could all-or nearly all-be forgiven, he wondered. It never occurred to Walter that he himself was an occupier. St. John was hardly one of the thirteen colonies and May 4, 1734, meant nothing to him. For many on St. John, the ritual suicide of that day marked it indelibly as the saddest day ever.
The apartment Aat arranged for them was on the first floor of a narrow, three-story building that probably had been there since the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Like most of the old buildings in Amsterdam, the first floor was actually well above ground level, up a steep, stone stairway. He told Walter there would be a key under the mat. It was there. Upon entering the house, their place was immediately on the left. To get into the apartment, they had to open a massive, black, solid wood door that looked to Walter to be all of ten feet high. There was only a single lock, a simple tumbler. Once inside, Walter and Harry were somewhat surprised to find the place furnished in an ultra modern style neither one of them found very attractive. Cold, straight lines seemed to be the theme of the day, minimalism carried to its extreme. The ceilings, like those in most first-floor flats along the canals, were twelve to fourteen feet high. The walls had been sprayed with a bright, white paint, punctuated in a few spots, apparently selected at random, by the sort of art Walter never cared for. For a moment he was reminded of the two very large canvases, filled with big, colorful, abstract shapes, that had hung opposite each other on Isobel Gitlin’s living room walls on West End Avenue in New York.
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