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Frame 232

Page 19

by Wil Mara


  Sheila glanced briefly at the photo of herself, shook her head, then went back to the text messages. Hammond switched to CNN, where another newsreader was replaying the phoned-in report by David Weldon from the previous day.

  “. . . said that he was following a lead stemming from a new piece of evidence, one that has never been seen before. And from it, he has learned of a new person who was likely involved in the assassination. During his investigation on these leads, he twice encountered an individual who not only tried to kill him and his female companion but also shot and killed Dr. Benjamin Burdick. Hammond said that this alone lends tremendous credence not only to the possibility that he may be getting closer to the heart of what really happened on that dark day in American history but that some of the people involved might still be alive and well—and quite worried.”

  And on Fox News there was an unsteady helicopter view of the New Hampshire estate with the camera trained on the main house. As soon as Hammond saw it, he began to feel nauseous.

  “. . . and neither Hammond nor his family’s longtime assistant, Noah Gwynn, has responded to repeated phone calls from Fox. We do know that Gwynn is here at the family compound, and it is believed Hammond and his sidekick, gym owner Sheila Baker, are still somewhere in the Dallas area. . . .”

  Hammond switched back to CNN—more to remove the image of his home than anything else—and thumbed down the volume.

  “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to hold them off,” Noah said through the tiny speaker. “The phone is ringing around the clock, and there are about ten news vans parked at the gate. Can you believe Fox has a helicopter out here?”

  “I’m getting all kinds of text messages and voice mails,” Sheila said and began massaging her temples. “Everyone wants to know what’s going on. I’m hearing from people who haven’t contacted me in years. And I’ve got urgent business questions from Vicki to answer, but I’m afraid to send any replies because they might pick up the signal and find us.”

  “Jason, you can’t stay there,” Noah said.

  Hammond, his attention still possessed by CNN, nodded. “I know.”

  “There are reporters swarming the Dallas area too,” Noah said.

  “I figured as much,” Hammond replied.

  “Then what’s your plan?”

  Hammond switched to one of the local stations and found a reporter on the sidewalk randomly interviewing people. “How do you feel about the possibility of the assassination of President Kennedy finally being solved?” One was a black girl who appeared to be about college age. Another was a thirtysomething woman carrying an infant. The third was a well-groomed older man in a gray business suit. All three shared the sentiment that it was long past time to close the case and bring those responsible to justice.

  “We’ll go early tomorrow morning,” he said finally, “while it’s still dark.”

  “Oh?” Noah said. “And where will you go?”

  “Back east.”

  “You mean here? Home?”

  “No, to the CIA library in Washington.”

  A few seconds passed without a word from his audience. “You’re kidding me,” Noah said finally.

  “No.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m very serious.” He glanced at Sheila, who was staring with both eyebrows raised. “It has to be done, Noah. Sheila and I have explored just about every conceivable sector of the Internet and come up with nothing on Clemente. You said you went through every book and paper we’ve got in the home library and couldn’t find anything either. This guy’s been invisible since the day of the assassination, and I’m sure that’s because a lot of people want it that way. But there’s one place where we know there’s information, and that’s this one building in D.C. And since we can’t exactly make a formal request for it, we’ve got to go there in person.”

  “Okay, it sounds good in principle. But what do you do at the library once you get there?”

  “I’ve got some ideas.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “What if we’re seen, Jason?” Sheila asked, resignedly powering down her phone and putting it in her pocket. “There’s a pretty good chance of it.”

  “We’ll just have to reduce that chance.”

  “You have ideas about that, too?”

  “I do,” he said.

  They waited until after midnight for the trip to the drugstore. Hammond stayed in the car while Sheila went inside with the list he’d made in his careful print. She kept her head down and avoided security cameras. When they returned to the hotel, she used her key card to open a door facing the back lot. The hallway was deathly silent.

  Hammond dumped the contents of the two bags onto the bed—lipstick, rouge, skin toner, eye shadow, grease pencils, a variety of powders and hair dyes, a do-it-yourself haircutting kit, two pairs of low-magnification reading glasses, and two baseball caps.

  “You really think this is all it’s going to take?” Sheila asked. “Some makeup, glasses, and hats?”

  “Oh no,” Hammond said, ripping things out of their packaging. “It’s just the starting point. I’ll show you the rest.”

  “You know about this stuff?”

  “I did some acting at Harvard. Freshman theater program, American Repertory, like that. Stage presentation was required learning. The art of changing one’s appearance has been around for centuries. Did you know that actors in ancient Greece and Rome covered their faces with flour and wine? They also used animal fur to make beards.”

  “I recommend we not try that.”

  “No, I think we’ll stick with what we’ve got here.” He lined up the hair dyes in a neat row. “Pick one you can live with, at least for a while.”

  She studied her choices and settled on a light blonde. “This should be sufficiently different, yes?”

  Hammond inspected her natural color, which was a deep brown. “Yeah, that’ll be okay. Much lighter, but not so much that it’ll attract attention. Or worse, look fake.”

  She raked her fingers through it. Each little piece flopped right back into place. “Too short to cut, right?”

  “Yeah, no cutting. You’ll look like Mr. Clean. Or Mr. Clean’s wife.”

  She sniffed out a little laugh, her first in a while, noting that Hammond seemed pleased by this. “What about you? What’ll be your new color of choice?”

  “I don’t know.” He stroked his chin and appraised the boxes. “I’ve got this wicked midnight black now.”

  “With some light touches of gray, I see.”

  “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that. Umm . . . okay, how about this one?” He picked up a medium chestnut, which bore the more marketable name of “ash brown.”

  “That should work. Are you going to cut it too?”

  “A little bit. Maybe lose the sweepback that makes me look like a college boy and go for something more modern. Frankly I like the Julius Caesar thing you’ve got going on.”

  “Oh, thank you.”

  “I’ll be a regular George Clooney.”

  “Right, that’s what you’ll be.”

  “I’ll meet you back here after the metamorphosis is complete.”

  It took about an hour, and Hammond looked anything but pleased with the results.

  Sheila said, “You don’t like it?”

  “Not particularly. My head looks like it got caught in a blender.”

  “Well, you didn’t cut it very straight.”

  “I don’t do this every day.”

  “Here, give me those.”

  She took the scissors, led him into the bathroom, and patiently fixed it. Hammond, wearing fresh clothes and covered with a bath towel around his neck and torso, frowned like a disgruntled schoolboy being primped for a class picture.

  After they cleaned up both bathrooms, they returned to his suite.

  “Okay,” he said, “now for step two—the basics of acting.”

  He began by explaining that every person already had a method of his or
her own—that is, normal, everyday mannerisms. The key to true acting was to learn how to alter those mannerisms in order to adopt the manifestations of someone else. “We communicate more information with our body language and our appearance than we do with our words,” he said. “People get about 90 percent of their impression of you long before you open your mouth. The way you walk, the way you sit, the way you dress, whether you make eye contact or not, what you do with your hands, your general posture . . . everything. People who move with good posture, keep their head up, and look straight ahead as they’re walking, for example, project confidence. Those who shuffle along hunched forward with their head down, on the other hand, display—and thus inspire—very little confidence. What you therefore need to do is decide on a subtle persona that won’t be too difficult for you to emulate, then learn the little traits that project it.”

  Hammond demonstrated a few examples—an old man, a street punk, a wino, a narcissistic game-show host.

  After an hour of practice plus the application of some basic makeup, Sheila saw a stranger in the mirror over the dresser.

  “I look like I’m sixty!” she said with mild horror. The rectangular-framed glasses gave her a measure of affluent dignity, but the delicately applied age lines added a decade or two.

  “I certainly hope so,” Hammond said, sitting with his arms crossed on the bed. “We don’t want anyone going, ‘Hey, isn’t that the girl we’ve been seeing on CNN?’”

  “No, definitely not.” She moved closer to the glass and touched her face lightly. “I wonder if this is how I’ll really look someday.”

  “As long as you get to that age in the first place,” Hammond said. “That’s my main concern at the moment.”

  The comment didn’t register with her at first, but when it did, it opened a floodgate of affection that, she realized, had been culturing for a while. She turned her mirrored gaze in his direction—he was cleaning up the room now—and smiled.

  Her initial caution toward the man had melted completely away. She had tried at several moments to fit him with her stereotype of the rich—arrogant, aloof, etc. But it just never worked. Hammond exhibited the natural tendencies of one who had lived in splendor all his life, one who simply did not know any other way. And the detachment was not aloofness but shyness. He only made eye contact when speaking to her; the rest of the time his eyes were kept respectfully away. Further, he never made even the faintest implication that she owed him anything. She had wrestled—sometimes literally—with men who expected quite a bit for something as simple as dinner and a movie. Hammond had not demonstrated so much as a hint of this mentality. Furthermore, he had been concerned with her welfare from the moment they met. He had done so at great expense to himself and with no regard for his own safety. The fact is, he’s one of the most genuinely decent people I’ve ever met—and I was right to trust him.

  A short time later, she drifted off to sleep.

  23

  HAMMOND SLID UP onto his elbows, his chest heaving and slicked with sweat. His eyes, wide and wild, darted about the room, taking in the shadows and the scattered moonlight that danced along one wall courtesy of a muscular north wind blowing through the ornamental trees outside the window. It was just after two thirty.

  Throwing the covers back, he got into a sitting position and yanked open the nightstand drawer. There was nothing inside except a small, maroon-covered Bible. Stamped in gold foil along the bottom edge was the legend Placed by the Gideons. He took it out and flipped until he found Matthew 5:4:

  Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

  Then he located John 6:39-40:

  And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life.

  He mumbled the passages to himself as images from the dream began to reinvade his conscious thoughts. He closed his eyes tight and shook his head like a wet dog. He murmured both passages again, chanting them like incantations. “I shall lose none of all that he has given me. . . . Everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him . . . they will be comforted. . . . They will be comforted.”

  But the dream images would not abate, and soon more began to slip through.

  “No!” he screeched with naked rage. “No! How could you let this happen?”

  In one fluid motion he got to his feet, took the book in hand, and readied to throw it against the wall. He stopped himself when he realized Sheila was standing in the doorway that separated their rooms—and had likely been there for some time.

  They engaged in a silent staring match for a long time. Hammond’s chest was still heaving, and crystal beads ran down the sides of his face. Sheila knew she must look every bit as petrified as she truly was.

  “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I woke you up again.” He looked down at the Bible that was still in his hand, regarding it with a distinctly skeptical expression before tossing it onto the little writing desk against the wall. “I guess I had another bad dream.”

  “I guess so.”

  He smiled and looked away. “Well, nevertheless, we should try to get back to sleep. It’s going to be a long—”

  “You have them all the time, don’t you.” This wasn’t really a question.

  “What?”

  “The nightmares. They come all the time.” She moved closer.

  “No, not really.”

  “Yes, they do.”

  “No. I mean, I don’t want them at all, of course. But hey, what can I do, right?”

  “They’re about your family, aren’t they? About what happened to them?”

  All expression fell from his face.

  “I read something about it on the Internet when you were on your way to my mom’s house. The plane crash in the Caribbean. It was awful, Jason. Just awful.” She was very close now. “That’s what the nightmares are about, right? I heard you talking when you had them. Screaming.”

  His breathing was becoming labored again. “Sometimes. Not always.” He swallowed hard and willed himself back to reality. “It’s not a big deal, really. Please, go back to bed so you can—”

  “And that long period of depression afterward. All those years. You never really got out of it, did you?”

  “No, that’s all behind me now. Well behi—”

  “Jason.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine. You need to talk to someone. You need help.”

  “No.”

  “You need to get this out of your system before it eats up everything inside.”

  “It only comes once in a while, and I can control it when it does.”

  “You’re only telling yourself that.” She set a hand gently on his back. “You’re not controlling it. It’s controlling you.”

  He appeared to consider this for a moment—she saw a flash of resigned acknowledgment there—then began to turn away. She moved to follow him, however, to maintain eye contact. “Jason, look at me. Jason? Hey, look at me.”

  At first he wouldn’t give in, turning farther and farther away. Then he relented. Sheila was momentarily stunned by his expression—that of a frightened child rather than a grown man.

  “It’s okay,” she said with exquisite delicacy.

  Hammond nodded after a brief pause, again with the countenance of a little boy.

  “Jason,” she said firmly, just to get his attention. Then, mouthing the words without sound, she repeated herself. “It’s okay.”

  They remained in a benign stare for what felt like an age. Then Hammond came unglued all at once. It was as if his resolve had been supported by a machine whose plug had suddenly been pulled. He collapsed against the side of the bed, weeping more powerfully than anyone Sheila had ever seen.

  When she knelt down and pulled him to her, he did not resist.

  24

  IT WAS a very old photograph, black-and-white and cr
eased and edgeworn. Nevertheless, Clemente, sitting on a cot inside the canvas tent he had called home for so long, held it with the utmost reverence, suspended like a plank between his thumb and forefinger. A hurricane lamp burned on a small table nearby.

  The picture showed a happy family standing alongside a 1950s Chevy Bel Air convertible. They were resplendent in their Sunday outfits, the father looking every inch the respectable businessman, the mother as beautiful as ever. The two boys, one in his early teens and the other approaching fast, had the first flickers of mischief in their eyes.

  Clemente remembered that the photo had not, in fact, been taken on a Sunday but rather a Monday, at the start of a weeklong vacation to their uncle Hugo and aunt Mariela’s coastal home in San Cristóbal. He always thought of the trip as a significant historical marker along the timeline of his life—the last of the Good Days. A week of swimming in the warm Caribbean while the women drank sweet garapa on the porch and the men smoked cigars, played chess and checkers, and drank rum that they said tasted like liquid gold and ushered them into a stone-dead sleep, often on the patio furniture in the backyard and still fully dressed. During the day, when they were free of alcoholic influences, they discussed plans to combine their businesses. The boys were too young to understand the details, but they could grasp the elementary concept that their father had lost much in the last few years and was growing increasingly worried. Forming a partnership with Uncle Hugo was a survival tactic.

  The plan never got off the ground. Four days after the family returned from San Cristóbal, Batista’s guerrillas came in the middle of the night and hauled the Clemente parents away. Olivero tried to fight them off and ended up bleeding and unconscious in the kitchen. Galeno fared a little better, breaking one man’s arm and another’s nose. Ultimately, though, he had to flee through the back door to narrowly avoid what the gunfighters of America’s Old West called “a sudden case of lead poisoning.”

 

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