someone ripped off a shipment. Kennedy always figured it was Longy. Only it was some other guy. Anyway, Longy committed suicide last year, because he was facing a subpoena from that Senate Rackets Committee the Kennedy boys were on. Grudge work for their old man. That's what I mean about no honour. Maronna mia, I'd kill them myself, cut their fucking throats like chickens, if I thought I could get away with it. You hear me, Nimmo?'
E calma, Dio cane,' the wiseguy's partner had said to him. And then, with an apologetic shrug, to Nimmo, I'm sorry. No disrespect to Momo, you know. But Timo's not in the best of moods, right now. Christmas always gets him this way.'
Nimmo walked away thinking Kennedy was a dead man if his life depended on the likes of Antimo Gelli. But at the same time there was something in what Gelli had said: if the Kennedys were going to use the mob to deliver votes, to raise money, to get Castro, whatever, they were going to have to play by the mob's rules. Only somehow he didn't see that happening.
Chapter 20
A Liberal Education
On Saturday, 17 December, Chub Farrell took the Red Line train to Boston's South Station, where he caught the nine a.m. express to New York. The journey lasts about four hours and, even in unreserved seats, it provides a comfortable view of the New England countryside which, in winter, is especially beautiful. Like most young men of his age, Chub had never been much interested in countryside and, after reading all about the Brooklyn air crash in the newspaper, was intending to make a start on Baudelaire.
Chub was a polite, courteous young man and he tried hard to respect the privacy of the woman who was seated next to him, a dark, auburn-haired beauty in her mid-thirties, who reminded him of Sophia Loren (August, Playboy) and was just about the most stunning woman he had ever seen. He tried not to look at her fabulous, sibilantly stockinged legs which she would keep crossing, nor to notice when she scratched at one of her large breasts. He tried hard to ignore her seductive perfume, and her beautifully manicured fingernails, and her perfect smile, which was surely just her being pleasant, because women of her age and beauty and obvious sophistication were not supposed to be attracted to young men like Chub Farrell. That kind of thing only ever happened in books and movies. But when she looked at him with her fantastic violet-coloured eyes and smiled her smile of smiles, he felt his young heart skip a beat, and his brain empty of all thoughts that were not fuelled by pure testosterone. To his delighted surprise the woman, whose name was Edith, seemed keen to talk, first about Baudelaire and then about anything at all, and by the time the express reached Mystic, Connecticut, which was about halfway to Grand Central Station, Chub thought he himself was probably halfway to paradise.
Edith told Chub she was Venezuelan, from Dutch CuraASSao, that she was the wife of an American oil executive, and that since he was away in the British North Sea, exploring for new oil deposits, this was to be her first Christmas in New York, alone. Edith approached her task with some pleasure. She enjoyed sex, a lot, especially with young men, and since no harm was likely to befall Chub - or Torbert, when the time came for her confederate, Anne, to become involved - she felt, like Alex, that she was doing Chub a favour, giving him the kind of education she thought would matter more than Economics and French.
Having finished her own schooling in Switzerland, French was just one of several languages that she spoke fluently, and, as the train journey progressed to its conclusion, she suggested that she might give Chub French conversation at her Riverside Drive apartment over the Christmas holidays. Chub, who had been expecting and dreading a quiet and thoroughly studious vacation with his parents, accepted with alacrity. He thought French conversation was really all that could and would happen - and, after all, French was his weakest subject - but, even as she extended her invitation, a small part of Chub started to enjoy a lubricious fantasy in which Edith would add some much-needed love lessons to their Christmas curriculum.
In this harmless fantasy, Chub was not disappointed. It took him only a few days to fall hopelessly in love with Edith. A small part of her knew she would break his heart, but since there were, she knew, worse things for a nineteen-year-old boy to suffer, she gave the matter little or no thought. A broken heart is its own education. The first time Edith went to bed with Chub, which was two or three days before Christmas, they had sex several times, after which the young man slept the smug, self-satisfied sleep that is the inevitable corollary of male virginity's loss. While Chub dozed contentedly, Edith borrowed Chub's keys, and gave them to Tom, who was waiting patiently, and without any apparent jealousy, in the next room for her to execute this part of their plan. Tom's lack of feeling was a disappointment to her for, in her own way, and despite knowing almost nothing about who and what he was, Edith was falling in love with him, although she knew he did not love her. But a display of some feeling would have been nice.
From Riverside Drive, Tom took the keys to All Over, a twenty-four-hour locksmith on Lexington, near 80th Street, and had three sets of copies made, returning the originals to Edith in time for her to replace the keys in Chub's pocket, before he left the apartment at around eleven thirty, in time to be home before midnight, as his parents had dictated.
The following day, Goldman, Tom, and Edith met in the Riverside Drive apartment where they admired the short-wave radio Tom had bought to listen in to Secret Service radio traffic when they were in Boston. After that, Goldman flew to Mexico City, to collect some final orders from his KGB controllers before returning to Miami, on Christmas Eve, having supposedly recovered from the bout of cholera that had apparently kept him south of the border.
Edith and Tom spent Christmas Day together, before he too left New York for Cambridge. They exchanged small gifts, enjoyed a delicious Christmas lunch that Edith cooked, went for a walk by the river, watched TV, and then made love. Neither of them mentioned John Kennedy, although, like that nagging Bobby Vee song about a rubber ball, he was always on their minds.
Chapter 21
Blowback
The CIA had its offices in some twenty-five buildings all over Washington, with most of the departments housed in a sprawl of wartime-built wooden structures on the Foggy Bottom bank of the Potomac, near the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The agency headquarters was the old OSS complex at 2430 E Street, which comprises four brick buildings with Watt Ionic columns, located between the State Department and a roller-skating rink. A little further along E Street was an abandoned gasworks and a brewery, that gave the already damp air a strong malt flavour and a smell like a bad hangover. It would be another ten months before the first CIA employees would move into the new CIA campus' across the Potomac, at Langley - a project that was CIA director Allen Dulles's all-consuming interest.
On a cold, blustery morning a couple of days before Christmas, Colonel Sheffield Edwards and Jim O'Connell left the old and rundown naval barracks on Ohio Avenue known as Quarters Eye, where the JMARC war room' was headquartered, and walked across the Polo Grounds towards the Reflecting Pool. A stiff westerly breeze, off the tidal basin to their right, bent the cherry trees and Edwards nearly lost his hat. Outside the dingy hut that was simply known as K' they collected a dark-blue 1956 Pontiac Start Chief four-door sedan and headed north on to 23rd Street, across Virginia Avenue and Washington Circle. On L Street they made a right, and parked close to Duke Zeibert's Restaurant where, after the meeting in the DD/P, they planned to have lunch.
Richard Bissell's office was on the corner of the building, overlooking L Street, an unadorned, slightly shabby room, with felt-covered pinboard walls, peeling linoleum, a threadbare Aubusson rug, and, around a refectory-style table, a junk-shop of wobbly chairs. On one wall was a large framed photograph of a yacht - a fifty-seven-foot yawl named The Sea Witch - which was Bissell's pride and joy, while on an overstuffed set of bookshelves were piles of paper weighted down with an assortment of auto parts.
The owner of the office and his deputy were what was known as P Source' - P' meaning someone who had been a professor, or who had attended an Ivy League university. Richard Bissell was both. A Yale man, he had spent the war running the Shipping Adjustment Board, planning the comings and goings of American merchant shipping. After that, he had taught for a while at MIT, before being recruited by Averell Harriman to help set up and run the Marshall Plan in 1947. It was 1953 before Bissell finally joined the CIA, since when his rise had been spectacular. A technocrat, rather than a professional spy, Bissell had developed the U-2 programme before being appointed to the DD/P to succeed Frank Wisner as head of the CIA's clandestine service. Tall, about fifty years old, wearing a double-breasted English worsted suit, a Yale tie, large heavy-framed glasses that did not quite seem to fit over his ears, and with a large truffle of a nose, Bissell looked and sounded like a slimmed-down version of Sydney Greenstreet.
Tracy Barnes had gone to the same school - Groton - and university as his boss. They were the same age,
