snapped his fingers as he thought of someone else. For muscle, you can have Licio the Elephant. He's tough as they come. And he's got this special skill that might come in useful. He used to be a memory man, counting cards in Atlantic City before the casinos figured it would be cheaper to give him a job looking out for scams. He was a pit boss at the Capri in Havana before the revolution. Since then, he's been kicking his heels.' Rosselli lit another cigarette. What else?'
Money. Cash. People talk easier when they're seeing green. Transport. A driver. A cook. Make sure she doesn't speak English. A coffee machine. Groceries. Toiletries. An AP wire. Stationery.'
No problem.'
I'll give the feds some story about Jefferson being a communist. Nothing too grand or they'll start to get nosey. Just enough so we can trace his car. Assuming he's still driving it.'
Rosselli had taken out a pad and was writing now. Anything else?'
More money. I'll need to bribe some people. Cops. Feds. Secret Service guys. Make it small bills, tens and twenties. Those kind of people don't trust anything larger than a fifty in case they're being set up by Internal Affairs.'
Okay. What else?'
Tomorrow I'll call the Police Department and tell them I need to take some leave, or something. Not that anyone will give a shit. Those bastards think I'm just hanging on for my pension,' Nimmo grinned as if he was enjoying himself. If only they knew, huh?'
Sunday afternoons in Miami were quiet, almost as quiet as Sunday mornings. That is, anywhere except the beach, or the resort hotel swimming pools. Government offices were closed of course, so there was little Nimmo could do except report Jefferson's car stolen, and then move a bag of things over to the house on Riviera Drive that was now the headquarters of the search for Jack Kennedy's potential assassin. With anyone but Johnny Rosselli it might have taken days to arrange extra telephone lines, an AP wire, and a cook at an hour's notice. That was the advantage of having the Teamsters' Union in your pocket, not to mention the Laborers' Union, the Hotel and Restaurant Employees' Union, and the Longshoreman's Union. Having the Bad Four' major unions meant there wasn't much that couldn't be fixed at a time when most families were collecting their children from Sunday School.
When Nimmo arrived in Coral Gables he found a telephone engineer already at work. And twenty minutes later a woman turned up in a van from the Fontainebleu Hotel with a coffee machine and several bags full of groceries. Nimmo spoke a little Spanish and was able to comprehend that her name was Tintina, and that SeA+-or Rosselli had told her to come. Having made several storeys of sandwiches, filled the refrigerator, and set up the coffee machine, Tintina, who looked as though she never ate anything herself, told Nimmo she would return at seven o'clock in the morning to make breakfast.
It was six thirty in the evening when the engineer finally left, by which time Nimmo was becoming better acquainted with Lansky's large and airy house. It was a little too Miami-modern for his taste and for Lansky's too, he supposed - all high ceilings with fans, plantation shutters, wooden floors, rattan furniture, and enough big plants to hide a small army of Japanese die-hards. It was difficult to imagine that Meyer Lansky had ever lived here. But as safe houses went it was a pleasant one, and Nimmo thought he and the two wiseguys Rosselli was delivering with the morning milk would probably be very comfortable in it. There were several large bedrooms, each with an en- suite bathroom, and a sizeable meeting room with a long table - now with several phones and a wire - where Nimmo had decided to base their activities.
After a bath, he collected a plate of sandwiches, and the photograph of Jefferson provided by Johnny Rosselli, and settled down on one of the big sofas to watch Ed Sullivan on TV. Seeing Jerry Lewis, Sophie Tucker, and Connie Francis guest on the show it was hard to credit the possibility that they were living in an America where a professional killer was already stalking the forty-three-year-old President-elect, whose victory at the polls was still only eleven days old. A young Senator with a beautiful wife, two lovely children, and a baby on the way. What kind of America was it that could have produced such a situation?
Nimmo looked forward to collecting his money, but the stakes were more important now. He hadn't voted for Kennedy himself, didn't even like him much, but he wasn't about to see the man get shot and killed. Jack Kennedy certainly didn't deserve to die for anything he had done in the bedroom. The very idea of preventing an assassination made Nimmo feel quite public-spirited again - loyal and true to his country and its institutions, the way a decent citizen was supposed to feel. He hadn't encountered that kind of feeling in himself since the war.
Now and then, Nimmo looked away from the TV and searched the face of the man in the photograph, like General Montgomery studying the picture of Field Marshal Rommel, as if some clue to the man's psychology and his probable next move might be found in those quiet, dark eyes. Jefferson didn't look much like a killer, but then not every gunman was as obviously a murderer as Jacob Gurrah' Shapiro, or Albert The Mad Hatter' Anastasia. Nimmo didn't have much faith in physiognomy, but he still believed that, in time, he might get to read a face just as a good poker player could spot whether another guy had a tell or not. It was going to take a while, but he was going to learn everything he could about Tom Jefferson -the way Jefferson had, in all likelihood, already learned everything he could about Jack Kennedy. Nimmo's resolve was sharpened by the certainty that if he failed, the unremarkable face in the photograph on his lap might turn out to be one of the most infamous faces in history.
Chapter 12
The Iceman Cometh
Tom did not linger in Tampa. In other circumstances he'd have tested himself on the Palma Ceiba Golf Club. But the city was the centre of all Mafia activity in Florida and controlled by the Trafficante family, which had put up a good part of the money for the hit on Castro. So the day after meeting LA3pez Ameijeiras, Tom sold the Chevy Bel Air and boarded a train for Jacksonville, ignoring the temptation to go and visit his mother who lived near Orlando, in Intercession City. There seemed little point in making a detour since her mind was gone and she could no more have recognised her son than she could have told him Eisenhower's nickname.
From Jacksonville, he flew to New York and was back in his Riverside Drive apartment in time to catch the six o'clock news on NBC, which reported Kennedy meeting Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell from the CIA, at the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach that same morning. Kennedy's press secretary, Don Wilson, said that Dulles and Bissell had brought two large folders of maps and charts and had discussed the uprisings against the pro-American governments of Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Which meant that Ameijeiras was probably right. An invasion of Cuba was definitely in the wind, with or without a Castro assassination.
Tom spent the remainder of the evening studying Kennedy's forthcoming schedule and watching television - from Jim Backus at seven o'clock, right through to the end of Mr Adam and Eve at eleven, when he went to bed.
The next morning he rose early. He had breakfast at Rosenbloom's Kosher Deli on Broadway, near 100th Street, and read the Times, which headlined with Kennedy considering his brother, Bobby, for Attorney-General. It was beginning to look as if the Kennedy brothers would be every bit as clannish as the Castros.
After breakfast Tom walked across Central Park. The city was cool after Miami, although mild by the standards of a New York November, with the temperature in the mid-fifties. A westerly wind was blowing leaves from the trees, which always left Tom feeling blue. He crossed to the Upper East Side, to survey the Kennedy family's Park Avenue addresses. He had already looked at the family estate at Palm Beach on the drive up from Miami, and by lunchtime he had rejected two of the four possible locations where he considered an assassination might feasibly be staged.
After lunch at Liborio, a Spanish restaurant on 53rd, he bought some books at Rizzoli, his favourite New York bookstore, on 5th, and then visited the De Witt Wallace Periodical Room on the first floor of the New York Public Library, where he consulted some back issues of the Congressional Record, the New York Post, the Saturday Evening Post, McCalls, the Boston Globe, and the Boston Herald. Then he went bowling at the City Hall Bowling Center on Park Row, opposite the Woolworth Building. In lieu of golf, Tom often went bowling when he needed to think. Apart from the weather, that was the only major disadvantage about living in Manhattan: the limited golfing opportunities.
Once again he spent the evening alone, studying the books he had bought and watching more TV. Gunsmoke was pretty good, as always, but The Iceman Cometh, with Jason Robards, was not, as billed in the Times, the finest play ever seen on TV', just depressing - all those alcoholics only reminded Tom of his own father - and Tom soon found himself heading to bed, to listen to a Schumann piano concerto on radio. It was the kind of music Mary had liked a lot.
