his Secret Service detail had already departed for mass, waved off by his equally oblivious family.
It was another ten minutes before Nimmo was able to restart his car. He drove quickly south to St Edwards, but of Pavlick's car there was no sign. But he still sat outside long enough to see Kennedy come out of the church, shriven and absolved, and get back into his limo. Nimmo followed the unwitting Senator safely back to La Guerida, and then drove back to Mothballs' place, thanking the Almighty God he no longer believed in for having delivered them both - himself and Jack Kennedy - from a violent death.
After all he had gone through, it seemed incredible to Nimmo that Mothballs was still so soundly asleep in his Cellini bedroom suite. It was as if, during some ramble in the Kaatskill Mountains, the gangster had met some strange people dressed in the old Flemish style playing at ninepins, and taken a draught of their Hollands.
Nimmo placed another long-distance call to Washington and, speaking once again to Murray Weintraub, told him what had happened. Weintraub swore that Nimmo's information had been passed on to the PRS - the Service's Protective Research Section - but was at a complete loss to explain why that information had not been acted on. An hour or so later Weintraub telephoned Nimmo to confirm that a search for Pavlick was now properly underway and that he would soon be in custody. But his private account of what had happened in Palm Beach upon receipt of the original red alert signal would have appalled the Chief of the Secret Service, one Mr U.E. Baughman.
You're not going to believe this,' said Weintraub. It seems as if Jack Kennedy himself overruled the detail chief. Kennedy said it was just another crank threat and that there was really no need to overreact to what was really a common enough situation for the President of the United States. The fact was, he knew that a PRS red alert would have grounded him last night. And that was the last thing he wanted. You see, after Jackie went to bed, Jack slipped out the back way for a midnight swim in his next-door neighbour's pool. Florence Smith. Well, what can you say, Jimmy? You are dealing with a young, horny guy who is not yet ready to behave like old FDR, Harry Truman, or Dwight Eisenhower. In short, a security fucking nightmare. What can you do when the future President of the United States tells you to ignore signals from the White House Communications Agency? You remember what I said? That politics and protection don't mix? Change that. It's not politics, it's promiscuity. Promiscuity and protection don't mix. JFK carries on like this, he's going to find himself in trouble.'
Nimmo heard Weintraub out and agreed that the Secret Service had a difficult job on its hands. But four days later, when he was in New York, he decided that it was not all Kennedy's fault. Four days. That was how long it took before Richard Pavlick was finally apprehended. And not by Secret Service agents, either. Still driving his car around Palm Beach as if it was nothing more lethal than an ice-cream van, Pavlick was arrested by a Palm Beach patrolman, for driving over a white line.
Chapter 18
Harvard Yard
On Monday, 12 December 1960, New England had its heaviest snow in years: thirteen inches fell, and for a while the whole region slipped and skidded to a halt. In Cambridge, Massachusetts - Boston's intellectual younger brother, although the two cities are so close that they are more usually thought of as twins - freshmen students emerged from the dormitories of Harvard Yard, and an unusually vigorous snowball fight ensued.
Snow fights were always a serious affair in Massachusetts. The Boston Massacre of 1764 had started thus when inexperienced British soldiers found themselves pelted with snow and ice, and returned fire not with snowballs but with musket-balls. On a cold December morning two hundred years later, there was but one symbol of authority to be found in all of Harvard Yard. Within Johnson Gate, the elderly gatekeeper charged with offering advice to visitors, directing vehicles, and generally keeping an eye on things for the Harvard University Police Force, wisely stayed inside his tiny beige-coloured guard-house, which was more like a sentry box, and poured himself a cup of hot coffee from a thermos flask.
Harvard Yard is almost always open to the public. On any day you can see several groups of tourists pausing in front of the statue of John Harvard, and hearing the same old nonsense about his not having founded the university at all. On that particular morning there was but one visitor to the Yard's western quadrangle, recently arrived from New York, and he soon found himself involved in an icy battle that was probably as much action as the Yard had seen since George Washington stationed some of his troops there. Good-humouredly, the visitor gave as good as he got, although he was more than twice the age of the mostly male students - two or three hundred of them -who fought a running, laughing, yelling battle between the leafless American elm trees and the handsome eighteenth-century buildings.
Anyone watching the snowball fight from the comparative safety of an open window might have noticed the older man's keener eye and more accurate aim, for nearly every missile he hurled left a fresh young face stung or bruised with snow and, likely, even fresher than before. Few would have paid attention to the visitor's expensive- looking thirty-five-millimetre Nikon camera, which had an Auto Nikkor telephoto zoom lens, nor to the Telectro portable tape-recorder that he had been carrying over one shoulder, although there could have been very few tourists that came to Harvard who exhibited a desire to particularise and describe the university's architectural treasures in such close detail.
Only minutes before joining in the fight, which had obliged him to place his camera and tape-recorder behind the statue of the much-maligned John Harvard, close to the steps of University Hall, which had been his vantage point, the stranger's interest had been focused on those dormitories that constituted the western side of Harvard Yard's first quadrangle, these being Matthews, Massachusetts Hall, Harvard Hall, Hollis, and Stoughton. Indeed, there was really but one of these buildings that interested him, enjoying, as it did, a view of the University Hall steps that was almost uninterrupted by the branches of the elm trees, and that was Hollis Hall.
There was nothing remarkable about Hollis, in the sense that it was nearly a facsimile of Stoughton and Holsworthy, the dormitory that constituted the northern side of the first quad. The Harvard Book will tell you that Hollis is one hundred and three feet long, forty-three feet broad, and thirty-two feet high. On both facades, the line of the four-storey building's roof is broken by an ornamental pediment, in the centre of which is a common window, with a circular window on each side of it. But it was the four tall rectangular-shaped windows on the top storey's southern side that the solitary visitor had been most concerned to photograph. And not just the windows, but the occupants of the rooms that lay behind them. A supply of snowballs had been carried up to the fourth floor of Hollis to be hurled out of the open windows, and the visitor had obtained several good photographs of the two pairs of students occupying these rooms. It was more than he could have hoped for on his first visit to Harvard.
Finally quitting the frozen fray, the visitor collected his expensive belongings and, wet but laughing, returned to his car, a Rambler Station Wagon he had bought in Norwood, and, thankful that he had enjoyed the presence of mind to spend an extra sixty-five dollars on snow tyres, drove back to the three-room apartment he had recently rented on nearby Center Street, at a cost of one hundred and fifty dollars a month.
Once inside the door of the centrally heated hallway, he pulled off his boots and his wet outer clothes and placed them in the bathroom, close to the hot-water tank, before going into the laundry room he had turned into a darkroom, to develop his black and white film and make some enlargements. When these prints were dry, he spread them on the kitchen table so that he and Alex Goldman could examine them in detail.
Tom Jefferson lit a cigarette and said, These are all taken from the steps of University Hall, where Kennedy will leave the building after the meeting of the Harvard Board of Overseers. That's Grays to the left of the quadrangle, which is too far for our purposes. Then we have this rather more Gothic-looking building, which is Matthews. We have plenty of good windows to choose from there, but I'm not happy about all these trees. Those branches could easily spoil a good shot. Then we have Massachusetts Hall, which also has some nice windows, but it is where the Harvard president has his office, so there are likely to be a few Secret Service agents, cops, what have you, coming in and out of the place. Besides, I don't like the proximity of the balcony you see above the arched windows on Harvard Hall, opposite. Or that little cupolaed bell-tower on Harvard Hall's roof. I figure those are two places you can expect to see some Secret Service agents, and they might very well see a gunman who was positioned in a window of Massachusetts.'
Agreed,' said Goldman. They're bound to position a man with binoculars in that bell-tower.'
Coming out of Harvard Yard for a second, on the other side of the Johnson Gate, we've got the First Unitarian Church.' Tom paused. What the fuck kind of church is a Unitarian one, anyway?'
It's a numbers thing. I don't think they like the Holy Trinity, or some shit like that. How the fuck should I know? I'm a Jew.'
Well, whatever the fuck it is, it's possible we could get into that spire, take out some window panes. But it doesn't look too comfortable. In these kinds of temperatures, I'd like to suggest we forget all about using this building.'
