His mind worked tidily, sorting out the evidence he would need to illustrate the truth. Christopher hadn’t yet discovered the details-how the money was handled or whether money was necessary, how they found the assassin and perfected his will to kill. They could not have told him their reasons, or who they were. It must have been easy to convince him that nothing was left to luck, that they had the power to rescue him. Christopher understood what had happened and why it had been inevitable. Putting faces to his theory was a matter of professional routine. He knew where to go, which men to contact. He thought he might very well be killed.
Christopher and Molly had been together in Siena for three days. Molly had chosen the hoteclass="underline" the Palazzo Ravizza, built by some nobleman in the seventeenth century and now restored for romantic tourists. Molly loved the cold floors, the whitewashed walls, the carved black furniture, the curtained bed. She would not let him use the electricity; she bought candles in the town and they went to sleep with tongues of light all around them.
There was a dead garden behind the hotel; they ate breakfast there, wearing heavy sweaters under their coats. At night Molly’s breath was scented with the white truffles she’d had for supper. They dined at a restaurant where the waiter brought a shallow basket heaped with truffles to their table: he would hold them under Molly’s nose one after the other until she selected the one she wanted. They ate pasta with truffles, truffled chicken, truffle soup. “The taste penetrates the brain,” Molly said. “Even you are beginning to taste like a truffle, Paul.”
The night before, as they walked across the brown dish of the Piazza del Campo, Molly began to sing in the dark. “Come le Rose”: this had been her favorite song ever since she had heard a street musician sing it at the table of an American couple at a sidewalk restaurant in Rome; the wife, gray-haired and wrinkled, wearing clothes that looked ridiculous in Italy, had wept with happiness, though she could not understand the words.
When Molly began to sing, Christopher let go of her hand and stopped where he stood. She walked onward a few steps, then turned and ceased singing in the middle of a phrase. She smiled and lifted a hand in apology. “Am I making too much racket?” she asked.
“No,” Christopher said. “I just realized that I love you.”
Molly stood absolutely still, the smile still on her lips, her hand still raised, the sleeve of her coat pulled away from the bare skin of her wrist.
“Paul,” she said, whispering as though she thought a whisper might make him understand her better. “Paul, it’s all right to be happy.”
In the morning, at the open window, Christopher remembered the look and sound of her and he realized, with a thrill of surprise, that he wanted his own life to continue.
2
They had lost a week in Rome before going to Siena. When he reached his apartment on the day after Kennedy’s assassination, after the long taxi ride from the airport, he found his telephone ringing. It was Tom Webster; he made no effort to deceive the recording devices that monitored international calls out of France.
“I don’t know what you can do about this in Rome,” Webster said. “But there’s total priority on this problem. This Oswald was a defector to the Soviet Union. He was in Russia from 1959 until June, 1962. The Russians are going crazy. They expect SAC over Moscow any minute. They keep telling everyone they didn’t do it.”
“I believe them,” Christopher said. “Why would they?”
“I know. But it’s a possibility that has to be considered. Headquarters wants maximum information from every point in the world. Who do you know down there, or anywhere, who might know something about this rotten bastard?”
“You want me to tell you over the phone?”
“Yes. Fuck it.”
“You know all the names. There’s no one in this town, except a couple of people who’d just be guessing.”
“What about that journalist?”
“He’d just repeat the line, whatever it is. I can’t believe they’d do it, Tom. Not with a man like Oswald. If I were the Russians, I’d think it was an attempt to put the blame on them. It might be.”
“Let them worry about that,” Webster said. “Our job is to tap in wherever we can and find out what we can. Anything. Every detail. Try the journalist-you never know.”
Christopher met Piero Cremona in the Galleria Colonna. The brass band was playing waltzes as usual, and the music made Cremona angry.
“Italians!” he said. “There should be no music today.”
Christopher was exhausted. He had not changed the clothes he wore on the flight from Léopoldville, and his shirt smelled of the sweat he had shed in the Congo. There was a newspaper on every table in the café, and a photograph of the dead President on every front page.
“How do you feel, my friend?” Cremona asked.
“I don’t know, Piero.”
“You Americans kill whole countries and it doesn’t bother you,” Cremona said. “But for America to be wounded-ah!”
“You enjoy the spectacle?”
Cremona tapped his coffee cup with a spoon. “No, I detest it,” he said. “Politics is politics. Life is life. I hate Washington since the war-they don’t understand misery. They don’t know how to look into the mind of most of mankind, they think suffering-real suffering, which is at the center of everyone’s history but America’s-does not matter. But Americans are different, individual Americans. I saw them come into Italy in 1943, into an enemy country. They were alive, those soldiers, and they wanted everyone else to be alive, too. They handed out food, they screwed the girls, they got drunk. I’ve never forgotten how they were. There is a goodness in your people, Paul. I’m very sad for them today. Maybe even I think there should be one country in the world where suffering is not permitted to exist.”
“I expected you to tell me that this assassination is a small thing, compared to Hiroshima.”
“No,” Cremona said. “This is no small thing. Nothing is so terrible as to kill a symbol. The Japanese were Japanese; when a hundred thousand of them were vaporized by the atomic bomb, very few considered that anything important had happened to the human race. They were yellow creatures. The death of a hundred thousand Englishmen, maybe even a hundred thousand Italians, would have been different.”
“Only the death of white men matters?” Christopher said.
“To Christians, yes. Do you think the whole Northern Hemisphere would be in a spasm of mourning if some brown president had been shot through the brain? This murdered man is an American. If a madman can kill an American president, then what is certain? ‘Ah,’ the miserable of the world will say, ‘it’s not possible, after all, to bribe history.’ Everyone thought America could do it.”
“You think Oswald is a madman?”
“Of course.”
“It seems he’s a Communist,” Christopher said.
“Oh, Paul-you? You know what a Communist is. This man is a sick romantic. They didn’t want him in the Soviet Union, they didn’t want him anywhere.”
“Have you found anyone who knows anything about him?”
“Everyone knows all about him. He occurs everywhere, sometimes he acts.”
“What do the Russians say?”
“They’d kill him if they could,” Cremona said. “I had a drink with Klimenko, the Tass man, last night. They’re very angry.”
“And very scared.”
“Yes-and who can blame them?” Cremona drew a mushroom cloud in the air with a quick movement of his hands.