Maria Summers was watching on TV, in the White House press office, as Air Force One touched down in brilliant sunshine at the Dallas airport called Love Field.
A ramp was maneuvered into place at the rear door. Vice President Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, took up their positions at the foot of the ramp, waiting to greet the president. A chain-link fence kept back a crowd of two thousand.
The aircraft door opened. There was a suspenseful pause, then Jackie Kennedy emerged, wearing a Chanel suit and a matching pillbox hat. Right behind her was her husband, Maria’s lover, President John F. Kennedy. Secretly, Maria thought of him as Johnny, the name his brothers occasionally used.
The television commentator, a local man, said: “I can see his suntan all the way from here!” He was a novice, Maria guessed: although the television picture was monochrome he failed to tell his audience the colors of things. Every woman watching would have been interested to know that Jackie’s outfit was pink.
Maria asked herself whether she would change places with Jackie, given the chance. In her heart Maria yearned to own him, to tell people she loved him, to point to him and say: “That’s my husband.” But there would be sadness as well as pleasure in the marriage. President Kennedy betrayed his wife constantly, and not just with Maria. Although he never admitted it, Maria had gradually realized that she was only one of a number of girlfriends, maybe dozens. It was hard enough to be his mistress and share him: how much more painful it must be to be his wife, knowing that he was intimate with other women, that he kissed them and touched their private parts and put his cock in their mouths every chance he got. Maria had to be content: she got what a mistress was entitled to. But Jackie did not have what a wife was entitled to. Maria did not know which was worse.
The presidential couple descended the ramp and began to shake hands with the Texas bigwigs waiting for them. Maria wondered how many of the people who were so pleased to be seen with Kennedy today would support him in next year’s election—and how many were already planning, behind their smiles, to betray him.
The Texas press was hostile. The Dallas Morning News, owned by a rabid conservative, had in the past two years called Kennedy a crook, a Communist sympathizer, a thief, and “fifty times a fool.” This morning it was struggling to find something negative to say about the triumphant tour by Jack and Jackie. It had settled for the feeble STORM OF POLITICAL CONTROVERSY SWIRLS AROUND KENNEDY ON VISIT. Inside, however, there was a pugnacious full-page advertisement paid for by “the American Fact-Finding Committee” with a list of sinister questions addressed to the president, such as: “Why has Gus Hall, head of the U.S. Communist Party, praised almost every one of your policies?” The political ideas were about as stupid as could be, Maria thought. Anyone who believed that President Kennedy was a secret Communist had to be certifiably insane, in her opinion. But the tone was deeply nasty, and she shivered.
A press officer interrupted her thoughts. “Maria, if you’re not busy . . .”
She was not, evidently, since she was watching television. “What can I do for you?” she said.
“I want you to run down to the archives.” The National Archives building was less than a mile from the White House. “Here’s what I need.” He handed her a sheet of paper.
Maria often wrote press releases, or at least drafted them, but she had not been promoted to press officer: no woman ever had. She was still a researcher after more than two years. She would have moved on long ago, were it not for her love affair. She looked at the list and said: “I’ll get on it right away.”
“Thanks.”
She took a last glance at the television. The president moved away from the official party and went to the crowd, reaching over the fence to shake hands, Jackie behind him in her pillbox hat. The people roared with excitement at the prospect of actually touching the golden couple. Maria could see the Secret Service men she knew well trying to stay close to the president, hard eyes scanning the throng, alert for trouble.
In her mind she said: Please take good care of my Johnny.
Then she left.
• • •
That morning George Jakes drove his Mercedes convertible out to McLean, Virginia, eight miles from the White House. Bobby Kennedy lived there with his large family in a thirteen-bedroom white-painted brick house called Hickory Hill. The attorney general had scheduled a lunch meeting there to discuss organized crime. This subject was outside George’s area of expertise, but he was getting invited to a wider range of meetings as he became closer to Bobby.
George stood in the living room with his rival Dennis Wilson, watching the TV coverage from Dallas. The president and Jackie were doing what George and everyone else in the administration wanted them to do, charming the socks off the Texans, chatting with them and touching them, Jackie giving her famous irresistible smile and extending a gloved hand to shake.
George glimpsed his friend Skip Dickerson in the background, close to Vice President Johnson.
At last the Kennedys retreated to their limousine. It was a stretched Lincoln Continental four-door convertible, and the top was down. The people were going to see their president in the flesh, without even a window intervening. Texas governor John Connally stood at the open door wearing a white ten-gallon hat. The president and Jackie got into the rear seat. Kennedy rested his right elbow on the edge, looking relaxed and happy. The car pulled away slowly, and the motorcade followed. Three buses of reporters brought up the rear.
The convoy drove out of the airport and onto the road, and the television coverage came to an end. George switched off the set.
It was a fine day in Washington, too, and Bobby had decided to have the meeting outside, so they all trooped through the back door and across the lawn to the pool patio, where chairs and tables had been set out ready. Looking back toward the house, George saw that a new wing had been built. It was not finished, for some workmen were painting it, and they had a transistor radio playing, its sound a mere susurration at this distance.
George admired what Bobby had done about organized crime. He had different government departments working together to target individual heads of crime families. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics had been gingered up. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had been enlisted. Bobby had ordered the Internal Revenue Service to investigate mobsters’ tax returns. He had got the Immigration and Naturalization Service to deport those who were not citizens. It all amounted to the most effective attack ever on American crime.
Only the FBI let him down. The man who should have been the attorney general’s staunchest ally in the fight, J. Edgar Hoover, stood aloof, claiming there was no such thing as the Mafia, perhaps—George now knew—because the Mob was blackmailing him over his homosexuality.
Bobby’s crusade, like so much that the Kennedy administration did, was disdained in Texas. Illegal gambling, prostitution, and drug use were popular among many leading citizens. The Dallas Morning News had attacked Bobby for making the federal government too powerful, and argued that crime should remain the responsibility of local law enforcement authorities—who were mostly incompetent or corrupt, as everyone knew.
The meeting was interrupted when Bobby’s wife, Ethel, brought out lunch: tuna sandwiches and chowder. George looked at her with admiration. She was a slim, attractive woman of thirty-five, and it was hard to believe that four months ago she had given birth to their eighth child. She was dressed with the understated chic that George now recognized as the trademark of the Kennedy women.
A phone beside the pool rang and Ethel picked it up. “Yes,” she said, and she carried the phone on its long lead to Bobby. “It’s J. Edgar Hoover,” she said.
George was startled. Was it possible that Hoover knew they were discussing organized crime without him, and was calling to reprimand them? Could he have bugged Bobby’s patio?
Bobby took the phone from Ethel. “Hello?”
Across the grass, George noticed one of the house painters behaving oddly. He picked up his portable radio, spun around, and started running toward Bobby and the group on the patio.
George looked again at the attorney general. A look of horror came over Bobby’s face, and suddenly George felt scared. Bobby turned away from the group and clasped his hand over his mouth. George thought, What is that bastard Hoover saying to him?
Then Bobby turned back to the group eating lunch and cried: “Jack’s been shot! It might be fatal!”
George’s thoughts moved with underwater slowness. Jack. That means the president. He’s been shot. Shot in Dallas, it must be. It might be fatal. He might be dead.
The president might be dead.
Ethel ran to Bobby. All the men jumped to their feet. The painter arrived at the poolside, holding up his radio, unable to speak.
Then everyone began talking at the same time.
George still felt submerged. He thought of the important people in his life. Verena was in Atlanta, and she would hear the news on the radio. His mother was at work, in the University Women’s Club; she would hear in minutes. Congress was in session, and Greg would be there. Maria—
Maria Summers. Her secret lover had been shot. She would be grief-stricken—and she would have no one to comfort her.
George had to go to her.
He ran across the lawn and through the house to the parking lot in front, jumped into his open Mercedes, and drove off at top speed.
• • •
It was just before two in the afternoon in Washington, one in Dallas, and eleven in the morning in San Francisco, where Cam Dewar was in a math class, studying differential equations and finding them hard to understand—a new experience for him, for until now all schoolwork had been easy.
His year in a London school had done him no harm. In fact the English kids were a little ahead, because they started school younger. Only his ego had been damaged, by Evie Williams’s scornful rejection.
Cameron had little respect for the hip young math teacher, Mark “Fabian” Fanshore, with his crew cut and his knitted ties. He wanted to be the pupils’ friend. Cameron thought a teacher should be authoritative.
The principal, Dr. Douglas, stepped into the room. Cameron liked him better. The school’s leader was a dry, aloof academic, who did not care whether people liked him or not as long as they did what he told them.
“Fabian” looked up in surprise: Dr. Douglas was not often seen in classrooms. Douglas said something to him in a low voice. It must have been shocking, for Fabian’s handsome face paled beneath his tan. They talked for a minute, then Fabian nodded and Douglas walked out.
The bell rang for the midmorning break, but Fabian said firmly: “Stay in your seats, please, and listen to me in silence, all right?” He had the odd speech habit of muttering “All right?” and “Okay?” with unnecessary frequency. “I’ve got some bad news for you,” he went on. “Terribly bad news, in fact, okay? There has been a dreadful event in Dallas, Texas.”
Cameron said: “The president is in Dallas today.”
“Correct, but don’t interrupt me, okay? The very shocking news is that our president has been shot. We don’t yet know if he’s dead, all right?”
Someone said: “Fuck!” out loud but, astonishingly, Fabian ignored it.
“Now I want you to keep calm. Some of the girls in the school may be very upset.” There were no girls in the math class. “The younger children will need reassurance. I expect you to behave like the young men you are and help others who may be more vulnerable, okay? Take your break now as usual, and look out for alterations in the school timetable later. Off you go.”
Cameron picked up his books and walked out into the corridor, where all hope of quiet and order evaporated in seconds. The voices of children and adolescents pouring out of classrooms rose to a roar. Some kids were running, some standing dumbstruck, some crying, most shouting.
Everyone was asking whether the president was dead.
Cam did not like Jack Kennedy’s liberal politics, but suddenly that did not matter. If Cam had been old enough, he would have voted for Nixon, but all the same he felt personally outraged. Kennedy was the American president, elected by the American people, and an attack on him was an attack on them.
Who shot my president? he thought. Was it the Russians? Fidel Castro? The Mafia? The Ku Klux Klan?
He spotted his younger sister, Beep. She yelled: “Is the president dead?”
“Nobody knows,” Cam said. “Who’s got a radio?”
She thought for a moment. “Dr. Duggie has one.”
That was true, there was an old-fashioned mahogany wireless set in the head’s study. “I’m going to see him,” Cam said.
He made his way through the corridors to the head’s room and knocked on the door. Dr. Douglas’s voice called: “Come!” Cameron went in. The head was there with three other teachers, listening to the radio. “What do you want, Dewar?” said Douglas in his customary irritated tone.
“Sir, everyone in the school would like to listen to the radio.”
“Well, we can’t get them all in here, boy.”
“I thought you might put the radio in the school hall and turn up the volume.”
“Oh, did you, now?” Douglas looked about to issue a scornful dismissal.
But his deputy, Mrs. Elcot, murmured: “Not a bad idea.”
Douglas hesitated a moment, then nodded. “All right, Dewar. Good thinking. Go to the hall and I’ll bring the radio.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Cameron.
• • •
Jasper Murray was invited to the opening night of A Woman’s Trial at the King’s Theatre in London’s West End. Student journalists did not normally get such invitations, but Evie Williams was in the cast, and she had made sure he was on the list.
Jasper’s newspaper, The Real Thing, was going well, so well that he had dropped out of classes to run it for a year. The first issue had sold out after Lord Jane attacked it, in an uncharacteristically incontinent outburst during Freshers’ Week, for smearing members of the governing body. Jasper was delighted to have enraged Lord Jane, who was a pillar of the British establishment that disfavored people such as Jasper and his father. The second issue, containing further revelations about college bigwigs and their dubious investments, had broken even financially, and the third had made a profit. Jasper had been obliged to conceal the extent of his success from Daisy Williams, who might have wanted her loan repaid.
The fourth issue would go to the printer tomorrow. He was not so happy with this one: there was no big controversy.
He put that out of his mind for the moment and settled in his seat. Evie’s career had overtaken her education: there was no point in going to drama school when you were already getting film parts and West End roles. The girl who had once had an adolescent crush on Jasper was now a confident adult, still discovering her powers but in no doubt about where she was going.
Her distinguished boyfriend sat next to Jasper. Hank Remington was the same age as Jasper. Although Hank was a millionaire and world famous, he did not look down on a mere student. In fact, having left school at the age of fifteen, he was inclined to defer to people he thought were educated. This pleased Jasper, who did not say what he knew to be true, that Hank’s raw genius counted for a lot more than school exams.
Evie’s parents were in the same row, as was her grandmother Eth Leckwith. The major absence was her brother, Dave, whose group had a gig.
The curtain went up. The play was a legal drama. Jasper had heard Evie learning her lines, and he knew that the third act took place in a courtroom; but the action started in the prosecuting barrister’s chambers. Evie, playing his daughter, came in halfway through the first act and had an argument with her father.
Jasper was awestruck by Evie’s confidence and the authority of her performance. He had to keep reminding himself that this was the kid who lived in the same house as he. He found himself resenting the father’s smug condescension and sharing the daughter’s indignation and frustration. Evie’s anger grew and, as the end of the act drew near, she began an impassioned plea for mercy that had the audience silently mesmerized.
People began to mutter.
At first the actors onstage did not notice. Jasper looked around, wondering whether someone had fainted or thrown up, but he could see nothing to explain the talking. On the other side of the auditorium two people left their seats and walked out with a third man who appeared to have come to summon them. Hank, sitting beside Jasper, hissed: “Why don’t these bastards keep quiet?”
After a minute Evie’s magisterial performance faltered, and Jasper knew that she had become aware of something going on. She tried to win back the attention of the audience by becoming more histrionic: she spoke louder, her voice cracked with emotion, and she strode about the stage making large gestures. It was a brave effort, and Jasper’s admiration rose even higher; but it did not work. The murmur of conversation rose to a buzz, then to a roar.
Hank stood up, turned around, and said to the people behind him: “Will you lot just bloody well shut up?”
Onstage, Evie stumbled. “Think of what that woman . . .” She hesitated. “Think of how that woman has lived—has suffered—has been through . . .” She fell silent.
The veteran actor playing her barrister father got up from behind his desk, saying, “There, there, dear,” a line that might or might not have been in the script. He came downstage to where Evie was standing and put his arm around her shoulder. Then he turned, squinting into the spotlights, and spoke directly to the audience.
“If you please, ladies and gentlemen,” he said in the fruity baritone for which he was famous, “will someone kindly tell us what on earth has happened?”
• • •
Rebecca Held was in a hurry. She came home from work with Bernd, made supper for them both, and got ready to go to a meeting while Bernd cleared away. She had recently been elected to the parliament that governed the Hamburg city-state—one of a growing number of female members. “Are you sure you don’t mind me rushing out?” she said to Bernd.
He spun his wheelchair around to face her. “Never give anything up for me,” he said. “Never sacrifice anything. Never say you can’t go somewhere or do something because you have to take care of your crippled husband. I want you to have a full life that gives you everything you ever hoped for. That way you’ll be happy, you’ll stay with me, and you’ll go on loving me.”
Rebecca’s question had been little more than a courtesy, but clearly Bernd had been thinking about this. His speech moved her. “You’re so good,” she said. “You’re like Werner, my father. You’re strong. And you must be right, because I do love you, now more than ever.”
“Speaking of Werner,” he said, “what do you make of Carla’s letter?”
All post in East Germany was liable to be read by the secret police. The sender could be jailed for saying the wrong thing, especially in letters to the West. Any mention of hardship, shortages, unemployment, or the secret police themselves would get you in trouble. So Carla wrote in hints. “She says that Karolin is now living with her and Werner,” Rebecca said. “So I think we have to infer that the poor girl was thrown out by her parents—probably under pressure from the Stasi, maybe from Hans himself.”
“Is there no end to that man’s vengefulness?” said Bernd.
“Anyway, Karolin has been befriended by Lili, who is almost fifteen, just the right age to be fascinated by a pregnancy. And the mother-to-be will get plenty of good advice from Grandma Maud. That house will be a safe haven for Karolin, the way it was for me when my parents were killed.”
Bernd nodded. “Are you not tempted to get back in touch with your roots?” he asked. “You never talk about being Jewish.”
She shook her head. “My parents were secular. I know that Walter and Maud used to go to church, but Carla got out of the habit, and religion has never meant anything to me. And race is best forgotten. I want to honor my parents’ memory by working for democracy and freedom throughout Germany, East and West.” She smiled wryly. “Sorry to make a speech. I should save it for the parliament.” She picked up her briefcase with the papers for the meeting.
Bernd looked at his watch. “Check the news before you go, in case there’s something you need to know about.”
Rebecca turned on the TV. The bulletin was just beginning. The newsreader said: “The American president, John F. Kennedy, was shot and killed today in Dallas, Texas.”
“No!” Rebecca’s exclamation was almost a scream.
“The young president and his wife, Jackie, were driving through the city in an open car when a gunman fired several shots, hitting the president, who was pronounced dead minutes later at a local hospital.”
“His poor wife!” said Rebecca. “His children!”
“Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was in the motorcade, is believed to be on his way back to Washington to take over as the new president.”
“Kennedy was the defender of West Berlin,” said Rebecca, distraught. “He said: ‘I am a Berliner.’ He was our champion.”
“He was,” said Bernd.
“What will happen to us now?”
• • •
“I made a terrible mistake,” said Karolin to Lili, sitting in the kitchen of the town house in Berlin-Mitte. “I should have gone with Walli. Would you fill a hottie for me? I’ve got a backache again.”
Lili took a rubber bottle from the cupboard and filled it at the hot tap. She felt Karolin was too hard on herself. She said: “You did what you thought was best for your baby.”
“I was timid,” Karolin said.
Lili arranged the bottle behind Karolin. “Would you like some warm milk?”
“Yes, please.”
Lili poured milk into a pan and put it on to heat.
“I acted from fear,” Karolin went on. “I thought Walli was too young to be trustworthy. I thought my parents could be relied upon. It was the reverse of the truth.”
Karolin’s father had thrown her out after the Stasi threatened to get him fired from his job as a bus station supervisor. Lili had been shocked. She had not known there were parents who would do such things. “I can’t imagine my parents turning on me,” Lili said.
“They never would,” Karolin said. “And when I turned up on their doorstep, homeless and penniless and six months pregnant, they took me in without a moment’s hesitation.” She winced at another pang.
Lili poured warm milk into a cup and gave it to Karolin.
Karolin took a sip and said: “I’m so grateful to you and your family. But the truth is I’ll never trust anyone again. The only person you can rely upon in this life is yourself. That’s what I’ve learned.” She frowned, then she said: “Oh, God!”
“What?”
“I’ve wet myself.” A damp patch spread across the front of her skirt.
“Your waters have broken,” Lili said. “That means the baby is coming.”
“I’ve got to clean myself up.” Karolin stood up, then groaned. “I don’t think I can make it to the bathroom,” she said.
Lili heard the front door open, then shut. “Mother’s home,” she said. “Thank God!” A moment later Carla came into the kitchen. She took in the scene at a glance and said: “How often are the pains coming?”
“Every minute or two,” Karolin replied.
“Goodness, we don’t have much time,” said Carla. “I’m not even going to try to get you upstairs.” Briskly, she started putting towels on the floor. “Lie down right here,” she said. “I gave birth to Walli on this floor,” she added brightly, “so I expect it will do for you.” Karolin lay down, and Carla pulled off the soaked underwear.
Lili was frightened, even though her competent mother was now here. Lili could not imagine how a whole baby could emerge through such a tiny opening. Her fear grew worse, not better, a few minutes later when she saw the opening begin to enlarge.
“This is nice and quick,” said Carla calmly. “Lucky you.”
Karolin’s groans of agony seemed restrained: Lili felt she would have been screaming her head off.
Carla said to Lili: “Put your hand here, and hold the head when it comes out.” Lili hesitated, and Carla said: “Go on, it will be all right.”
The kitchen door opened, and Lili’s father appeared. “Have you heard the news?” he said.
“This is no place for men,” Carla said without looking at him. “Go to the bedroom, open the bottom drawer of the chest, and bring me the light-blue cashmere shawl.”
“All right,” Werner said. “But someone shot President Kennedy. He’s dead.”
“Tell me later,” said Carla. “Bring me that shawl.”
Werner disappeared.
“What did he say about Kennedy?” Carla asked a minute later.
“I think the baby’s coming out,” Lili said fearfully.
Karolin gave a huge wail of pain and effort, and the baby’s head squeezed out. Lili supported it with one hand. It was wet and slimy and warm. “It’s alive!” she said. She found herself overflowing with an emotion of love and protectiveness for the tiny scrap of new life.
And she was no longer frightened.
• • •
Jasper’s newspaper was produced in a tiny office in the student union building. The room contained one desk, two phones, and three chairs. Jasper met Pete Donegan there half an hour after leaving the theater.
“There are five thousand students in this college and another twenty thousand or more at other London colleges, and a lot are American,” Jasper said as soon as Pete walked in. “We need to call all our writers and get them working straightaway. They must talk to every American student they can think of, preferably tonight, tomorrow morning at the latest. If we do this right we can make a huge profit.”
“What’s the splash?”
“Probably HEARTBREAK OF U.S. STUDENTS. Get a mug shot of anyone who gives a good quote. I’ll do the American teachers: Heslop in English, Rawlings in engineering . . . Cooper in philosophy will say something outrageous, he always does.”
“We ought to have a biography of Kennedy as a sidebar,” said Donegan. “And maybe a page of pictures of his life—Harvard, the navy, his wedding to Jackie—”
“Wait a minute,” said Jasper. “Didn’t he study in London at one point? His father was American ambassador here—a right-wing Hitler-supporting bastard, apparently—but I seem to recall that the son went to the London School of Economics.”
“That’s right, it comes back to me now,” said Donegan. “But his studies were cut short, after only a few weeks.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Jasper excitedly. “Someone there must have met him. It makes no difference if they spoke to him for less than five minutes. We just need one quote, I don’t care if it’s only: ‘He was quite tall.’ Our splash is THE STUDENT JFK I KNEW, BY LSE PROF.”
“I’ll get on it right away,” said Donegan.
• • •
When George Jakes was a mile from the White House, traffic slowed to a stop for no apparent reason. He banged on his steering wheel in frustration. He pictured Maria weeping alone somewhere.
People started to blare their horns. Several cars ahead, a driver got out and spoke to someone on the sidewalk. At the corner, half a dozen people were gathered around a parked car with its windows open, listening, presumably to the car radio. George saw a well-dressed woman clap her hand to her mouth in horror.
In front of George’s Mercedes was a new white Chevrolet Impala. The door opened and the driver got out. He was wearing a suit and hat, and might have been a salesman making calls. He looked around, saw George in his open-top car, and said: “Is it true?”
“Yes,” George said. “The president has been shot.”
“Is he dead?”
“I don’t know.” There was no radio in George’s car.
The salesman approached the open window of a Buick. “Is the president dead?”
George did not hear the reply.
The traffic was not moving.
George turned off his engine, jumped out of the car, and started to run.
He was dismayed to realize that he had got out of shape. He always seemed too busy to work out. He tried to think when was the last time he had done some vigorous exercise, and he could not remember. He found himself perspiring and breathing hard. Despite his impatience, he had to alternate jogging with fast walking.
His shirt was soaked with sweat when he reached the White House. Maria was not in the press office. “She went to the National Archives Building to do some research,” said Nelly Fordham, whose face was wet with tears. “She probably hasn’t even heard the news yet.”
“Do we know whether the president is dead?”
“Yes, he is,” said Nelly, and she sobbed afresh.
“I don’t want Maria to hear it from a stranger,” George said, and he left the building and ran along Pennsylvania Avenue toward the National Archives.
• • •
Dimka had been married to Nina for a year, and their child, Grigor, was six months old, when he finally admitted to himself that he was in love with Natalya.
She and her friends frequently went for a drink at the Riverside Bar after work, and Dimka got into the habit of joining the group when Khrushchev did not keep him late. Sometimes it was more than one drink, and often Dimka and Natalya were the last two left.
He found he was able to make her laugh. He was not generally considered a comedian, but he relished the many ironies of Soviet life, and so did she. “A worker showed how a bicycle factory could make mudguards more quickly by molding one long strip of tin, then cutting it, instead of cutting it first, then bending the pieces one by one. He was reprimanded and disciplined for endangering the five-year plan.”
Natalya laughed, opening her wide mouth and showing her teeth. The way she laughed suggested a potential for reckless abandon that made Dimka’s heart beat faster. He imagined her throwing her head back like that while they were making love. Then he imagined seeing her laugh like that every day for the next fifty years, and he realized that was the life he wanted.
He did not tell her, though. She had a husband, and seemed to be happy with him; at least, she said nothing bad about him, although she was never in a hurry to go home to him. More importantly, Dimka had a wife and a child, and he owed them his loyalty.
He wanted to say: I love you. I’m going to leave my family. Will you leave your husband, live with me, and be my friend and lover for the rest of our lives?
Instead he said: “It’s late, I’d better go.”
“Let me drive you,” she said. “It’s too cold for your motorcycle.”
She pulled up at the corner near Government House. He leaned across to kiss her good night. She let him kiss her lips, briefly, then pulled back. He got out of the car and went into the building.
On the way up in the elevator he thought about the excuse he would make to Nina for being late. There was a genuine crisis at the Kremlin: this year’s grain harvest had been a catastrophe, and the Soviet government was desperately trying to buy foreign wheat to feed its people.
When he entered the apartment, Grigor was asleep and Nina was watching TV. He kissed her forehead and said: “I was kept late at the office, sorry. We had to finish a report on the bad harvest.”
“You shit-faced liar,” said Nina. “Your office has been calling here every ten minutes, trying to find you, to tell you that President Kennedy has been killed.”
• • •
Maria’s tummy rumbled. She looked at her watch and realized she had forgotten to have lunch. The work she was doing had absorbed her, and for two or three hours no one had come into this area to disturb her. But she was almost done, so she decided to finish off, then get a sandwich.
She bent her head over the old-fashioned ledger she was reading, then looked up again when she heard a noise. She was astonished to see George Jakes come in, panting, his suit jacket wet with perspiration, his eyes a little wild. “George!” she said. “What the heck . . . ?” She stood up.
“Maria,” he said, “I’m so sorry.” He came around the table and put his hands on her shoulders, a gesture that was a little too intimate for their strictly platonic friendship.
“Why are you sorry?” she said. “What have you done?”
“Nothing.” She tried to pull back, but he tightened his grip. “They shot him,” he said.
Maria saw that George was close to tears. She stopped resisting him and stepped closer. “Who was shot?” she said.
“In Dallas,” he said.
Then she began to understand, and a terrible dread rose inside her. “No,” she said.
George nodded. In a quiet voice he said: “The president is dead. I’m so sorry.”
“Dead,” Maria said. “He can’t be dead.” Her legs felt weak, and she sank to her knees. George knelt with her and folded her in his arms. “Not my Johnny,” she said, and a huge sob erupted from inside her. “Johnny, my Johnny,” she moaned. “Don’t leave me, please. Please, Johnny. Please don’t leave.” She saw the world turn gray, she slumped helplessly, then her eyes closed and she lost consciousness.
• • •
Onstage at the Jump Club in London, Plum Nellie performed a storming version of “Dizzy, Miss Lizzy” and came off to shouts of: “More!”
Backstage, Lenny said: “That was great, lads, best we’ve ever played!”
Dave looked at Walli and they both grinned. The group was getting better fast, and every gig was the best ever.
Dave was surprised to find his sister waiting in the dressing room. “How did the play go?” he said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there.”
“It stopped in the first act,” she said. “President Kennedy has been shot dead.”
“The president!” said Dave. “When did this happen?”
“A couple of hours ago.”
Dave thought of their American mother. “Is Mam upset?”
“Terribly.”
“Who shot him?”
“No one knows. He was in Texas, in a place called Dallas.”
“Never heard of it.”
Buzz, the bass player, said: “What shall we do for an encore?”
Lenny said: “We can’t do an encore, it would be disrespectful. President Kennedy has been assassinated. We have to do a minute’s silence, or something.”
Walli said: “Or a sad song.”
Evie said: “Dave, you know what we should do.”
“Do I?” He thought for a second, then said: “Oh, yeah.”
“Come on, then.”
Dave went onstage with Evie and plugged in his guitar. They stood at the microphone together. The rest of the group watched from the wings.
Dave spoke into the microphone. “My sister and I are half British, half American, but we feel very American tonight.” He paused. “Most of you probably know by now that President Kennedy has been shot dead.”
He heard several gasps from the audience, indicating that some had not heard, and the room went quiet. “We would like to play a special song now, a song for all of us, but especially for Americans.”
He played a G chord.
Evie sang:
O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming,
The room was dead silent.
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watch’d were so gallantly streaming?
Evie’s voice rose thrillingly.
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there,
Several people in the audience were crying openly now, Dave saw.
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
“Thank you for listening,” said Dave. “And God bless America.”