residents of this dormitory?'
No.' Goldman stopped and looked at the staircase beneath his feet, as if some physical trace of their poetic presence might still remain. You know, I always did like Thoreau. And now that I've seen where he lived at Harvard, I can understand why he wanted to go and live by himself in a log cabin at Walden Pond. I wouldn't much like the idea of sharing a room with you, Paladin. Or anyone else for that matter.'
Outside Hollis Hall, they walked across the quadrangle to the steps of University Hall where, next to the statue of John Harvard, they mounted the steps and turned to face the building whence they had come. For a minute or two both men stood in silence, their eyes fixed on the lights that shone from room fifteen, unhindered by tree branch or lamp-post. Finally, Goldman glanced up at Tom and said, So what do you think of their room, Paladin?'
Tom's nod was full of shrewd deliberation. Perfect,' he said. You couldn't get a more perfect position for a shot than that. Not if you were Alfred Hitchcock himself.'
Chapter 19
Manhattan Walks
After the word went out about Pavlick's Model TNT, Palm Beach was wrapped as tight as Lariat, Texas. The Secret Service doubled the detail on La Guerida and almost everywhere else Senator Kennedy was likely to go - at least those places he was supposed to go. Agents who had never seen the inside of a Catholic church overcame three centuries' worth of conservative American protestantism and learned that the Scarlet Woman played no part in a mass, not even one attended by Mattress Jack. The golf course at the country club never saw so many good walks spoiled by so many men in sober suits. And not one, but three coastguard cutters went sharkspotting off La Guerida's private beach. Despite getting himself arrested for loitering close to 1095 North Ocean Boulevard, first thing on Monday morning, no one was more relieved to see this general improvement in Senator Kennedy's security than Mothballs. It meant that Nimmo could take Mothballs and Sunshine out of commission, and let them get back to more obviously felonious activities.
Friday, 16 December, the day Pavlick was finally picked up - he told newsmen he wanted to take Mr Kennedy's life because of the underhanded way he was elected. Kennedy money bought the White House and the presidency. I had the crazy idea I wanted to stop Kennedy from being President' - Jimmy Nimmo flew to New York, with a few crazy ideas of his own. Friday, 16 December 1960 was not a good day to fly into New York, however. Two inbound planes - a United Air Lines DC-8 from Chicago and a Trans World Super Constellation out of Columbus, Ohio - collided over New York City harbour, killing 127 passengers and crewmen. The DC-8 jet crash-landed in Brooklyn, killing five people on the ground; the Super Constellation crashed on Staten Island, eleven miles to the southwest. It was only the next day, when Nimmo saw the report in the New York Times, that he realised his own plane had been airborne over New York at around the same time.
Despite the accident, and the cold, and the early snow that lay thick on the streets of Manhattan, and the certainty that he would probably have to spend Christmas alone, he gave thanks that he was back in New York. Instead of a beach with neighbourhoods, he was in a real city. It was the biggest city in the world, a great ship of living stone, but Nimmo, whose positive thinking owed nothing to the best-selling book by the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, was confident - nay, he had faith, not in the God of Abraham and Isaac and Oral Roberts, but in himself - that if he could find Tom Jefferson anywhere it would be in little old New York. According to his schedule, Kennedy would leave Palm Beach on 2 January, and fly to New York where, apart from brief trips to Washington and Boston, he would spend the first two weeks of January. The inauguration of John F. Kennedy as thirty-fifth President of the United States was now just thirty-four days away. Time was not just running out, it was hitching a ride in a fast car.
New York is all the cities. The opinion city. The style city. The financial city. The radio city. The TV city. The cultural city. The immigrant's city. If, post-Copernicus, the goocentrist view could persist anywhere in the enlightened face of heliocentrism, it would be in cynosural New York, the dog's tail containing the North Star that is Manhattan Island. The wonder is that New York had to fight hard to persuade the United Nations to make its headquarters there. Paris may be more beautiful, but it lacks impact. London may be larger, but it fails to overwhelm. Rome may be eternal, but it does not thrill. But New York is its own model, the supreme expression of all that is good and bad in contemporary civilisation, whatever that is. The city is an extraordinary achievement, and although there is nothing pedestrian about New York, in the pejorative sense of that word, nevertheless the pedestrian is king. One need not be mounted on Pegasus, either to appreciate its architectural treasures, or to travel down its magnificent avenues or across its ornamented streets. All sorts of native Gothamites go walking in New York: bankers, lawyers, publishers, librarians, store assistants, waiters.
And cops. No one knows more about walking the streets of New York City than a cop. Five years before, as the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's New York office, on 3rd Avenue at 69th Street, Jimmy Nimmo had walked a lot in Manhattan. He reckoned he knew the Upper East Side as well as he knew the guy he saw every morning in his shaving mirror. And, even in winter, with side streets banked high with dirty levees of gritty grey snow, Nimmo knew that the best way to find someone in a city as large as New York was to get on his dogs. Only first he needed to be dressed for something colder than a box of Florida fruit preserves.
He went to Macy's overcoat sale in Herald Square and walked out of the place street smart for only eighty dollars: a British woollen overcoat for sixty bucks, a pair of Hahn Ripple shoes for thirteen bucks, and pigskin gloves with stretch sidewalls for seven. And of course he wore his hat. In New York, going without a hat in winter was like the joke people used to tell about Harry Truman: Would you like a Truman beer? You know, the one with no head.' To err was Truman, but not wearing a hat during a New York winter was plain stupid.
Nimmo stayed at the Shelburne, on Lexington, because he had stayed there before, and because it was close to the New York Public Library, where he would frequently begin or, sometimes, end his daily search of Tom Jefferson's alleged haunts. Indeed sometimes he thought that it was a little like looking for the ghost of a man who had never existed, when you didn't even believe in ghosts. The hotel was not particularly luxurious, although quite comfortable for Nimmo's bachelor needs, being an above-average mid-town choice of interim lodging for newly relocated executives. Despite its proximity to the United Nations, however, the Shelburne did seem an unusual choice of lodging, interim or otherwise, for UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold to have made for the Cuban delegation back in September. Soon after he arrived, Nimmo made a joke about Fidel Castro to Mr Spatz, the hotel manager, who said that the hotel would burn in flames before he ever took another Cuban guest again, whatever his politics.
Prometheus bringing fire to man was the story contained in just one of the many murals that were to be found on the ceiling and walls of the New York Public Library. Built of marble in the beaux arts style, and around two inner courts with an immense reading room occupying a half-acre of floor space, the library opened from Tuesday to Saturday, and from ten or eleven o'clock until six or seven thirty. Thomas Jefferson's own handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence was among the treasures that could be seen in the library, although Nimmo thought it unlikely that Jefferson's homicidal namesake would be influenced to go there by something as cute as that. Colt Maurensig's asseveration that Jefferson went to the NYPL to research the backgrounds and probable praxis of his more important targets looked a much safer bet.
Nimmo himself had once been a frequent visitor to the library, especially in summers when a walk of twenty- seven blocks had seemed less of an effort than it did now. The FBI HQ on 3rd had a library, of sorts, but nothing to compare with the resources that were to be found in John Jacob Astor's building. Hoover, it was said, was impervious to all kinds of culture, and his favourite reading matter was Reader's Digest. But Nimmo appreciated libraries, and this one, with its atmosphere of scholarly calm in the huge, high-ceilinged reading room, above all others. He thought it just the place that a man like Tom Jefferson would use as his intellectual base of operations, since by now he had formed a better idea of the man's character. For as well as Rosselli and Sorges, Nimmo had spoken to Orlando Bosch, Irving Davidson, and Moe Dalitz. He had even spoken to another contract killer named Lucien Sarti with whom Tom Jefferson had performed a contract in Houston, the previous year.
In 1959, 1,094 people were murdered in Texas, twice as many as New York, which has seven million more people, with Houston narrowly outstripping Dallas as the state murder capital. Whichever way you look at it, Texas is not a state to have someone bear you a grudge, or even displeasure, as the much-spat-upon Mr and Mrs Lyndon B. Johnson could no doubt testify. Local gun law being what it is, and lenient Texan juries (unless, of course, you are coloured) being what they are, Texans are mostly inclined to shoot you themselves. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, runs the single entry in Webster's Familiar Texan Quotations. But on this particular occasion, Houston's second-largest oil shipper wanted Houston's largest oil shipper permanently out of the port and, as is the
