peaceful night’s sleep rather than engaged in the agony of childbirth. One of the women who styles herself Naz’s
Naz smiles wider. If she is pushing, it doesn’t show on her face. “I know he’s coming. Just like the storm.”
A gust of wind shakes the whole house and a ceramic pitcher smashes on the floor. A thread of water snakes across the floor toward Louie’s feet, but he doesn’t notice. His eyes are glued to Naz’s face. For a single moment her brows knit together, more in concentration than pain, as if she is willing her child into existence. The next minute the midwife is calling,
Despite his yearlong gestation, the baby is normal-sized, even a bit small. But his limbs are strangely articulate and fine—not thin but lean, as if he has already started to tone his muscles and burn off his baby fat. He is as calm as his mother. His eyes are open, and he doesn’t cry as the midwife wipes him clean, wraps him in a blanket, and carries him across the room. He looks not at his mother or the woman holding him but directly at Louie, and when the midwife offers him the baby, Naz’s guard hesitates, looks at the mother.
“Do you want to hold him first?”
Naz shakes her head. The wind whips her hair around, a dark halo at the center of the riot of color on the pillowcase. Her dark eyes stare at nothing—nothing in the room anyway—and her smile grows even wider.
“Take the boy to him. I’ve already told him everything he needs to know.”
“To—the father?” Louie still hasn’t accepted the baby from the midwife, who seems eager to have it out of her arms.
“To Melchior,” Naz says, smiling radiantly. “I want him to see the face of the man who will kill him one day.”3
Arlington National Cemetery
November 22, 1965
Beneath its hollow cross the tombstone reads only:
FRANK
WISDOM
JUNE 23, 1909
OCTOBER 29, 1965
The grave is almost a month old, but for some reason the sods haven’t taken yet. Though the rest of the cemetery is uniformly, immaculately green, the grass over the Wiz’s grave is brown and friable—so dry that the man carrying a bouquet of forget-me-nots imagines it would crunch beneath his shoes if he dared to step on it. “Happens sometimes,” a passing groundskeeper tells him. “Don’t worry, sir, it’s already scheduled for resodding.”
The man with the flowers nods. He doesn’t bother to point out that the brown strands extend well beyond the rectangle of cut sods laid atop the grave itself—that its tentacles spiral out a good six inches in every direction like a negating kaleidoscope sucking the color from everything it touches. As soon as the groundskeeper is gone, the man pulls a bullet-shaped lead from his pocket. The lead is attached to a long coil of wire and the man drops it in the center of the brown patch, then glances at what looks like a watch on his wrist to confirm what the grass has already told him. He reels the lead up, drops it in his pocket, and turns away; almost as an afterthought, he tosses the flowers behind him.
Something about the gesture stops him in his tracks. A memory shakes him like a muscle spasm. A hot spring day in New Orleans in 1942, a marble toss he made without looking. The day it all started. He knew it even then, even if the Wiz didn’t, or Caspar.
He turns, and when he steps on the grave to lean the flowers against the headstone, the grass does indeed break beneath his shoes. There’s not enough radiation to worry about—not for a few seconds anyway—but even so, he takes care not to touch the ground or the stone or the rotten flowers that already adorn the site, and then he turns and makes his way to the pay phones outside the chapel.
Only someone watching would notice that he doesn’t put any money in the machine or place a collect call, just punches several long strings of numbers. It takes nearly two minutes for the connection to be made. Finally a click, a hollow
“It’s leaking,” Melchior says, and hangs up.4
Dallas, TX
January 3, 1967
“Credentials?”
The police officer guarding the hospital door is soft but solid and has a no-nonsense air about him. He peers at the badge the man in the white coat shows him, then scrutinizes the face that goes with it.
“I ain’t seen you before.”
In answer the man pulls his coat open, revealing a Star of David hanging from a chain around his neck.
“Oh. Go on in, Mister, uh”—the man glances at the badge—“Rabbi Gaminsky.”
BC slips past the guard. Once in the room he pulls a plastic-bottomed steel wedge from his pocket and slides it beneath the door, just in case the room’s occupant makes a fuss. But the person on the bed doesn’t wake up, so BC pulls out a needle and, ignoring the IV line, slides it directly into an arm. Epinephrine, aka adrenaline. The same stuff Melchior had used to save his life just over three years ago.
Jack Ruby’s eyelids flutter apart, barely, his lips part the tiniest sliver as though a knife has sliced them open.
“Who …” His voice breaks. He swallows and tries again. “Who are you?”
“You haven’t got much time left, Mr. Ruby. I’ve come to give you the chance to make things right.”
Ruby stares at him a moment and then, as if it takes all his strength, turns away. His body is so desiccated that when he turns, strands of hair break from his head and fall to the pillow. The thin lines wavering on the white background remind BC of staff paper for some reason, the blank pages of an unfinished symphony that he has been desperately trying to complete for the past three years.
