The Remembering

earlier. We ordered a late dinner from room service and discussed our options. Cardinal made the critical decision to not pass our information on to the Secret Service. He knew they would doubt its veracity and he feared they might want to know more about where he obtained the information than its content. And they would definitely want to know more about Sailor and me, which we could not allow.

Early on Thursday, November 21, Jack rented a car and we spent the day driving back and forth along the route the motorcade would be taking. We were looking for vulnerable locations that a sniper might find attractive. There were too many to count, but one stood out above the others. It was the area around Dealey Plaza, where the motorcade would have to slow down considerably in order to make a series of turns before exiting onto Elm Street. We decided that was the area where we would patrol and keep vigil the next day. Sailor said he felt somewhat like the Basque shepherd, alone in a vast wilderness, watching for wolves.

That night I had several strange, convoluted dreams, each of which woke me with a start and a gasp. In the morning I remembered none of them, but I felt exhausted, as if I’d been running or swimming all night long.

Around ten o’clock we separated and took our positions of observation. Sailor wandered among the gathering crowd at the entrance to Dealey Plaza. Cardinal stood near the steps of the Texas School Book Depository, where the route turned onto Elm Street. Jack was across the street next to the John Neely Bryan concrete pergola. I was a few hundred feet to the south on the triple underpass, a railroad bridge that crossed over Elm Street. It was a clear day with very little wind, and the sun was already high in the sky. We watched and we waited.

By noon the crowd had doubled. Many people carried cameras, but the majority simply lined the road hoping for a glimpse of the President and the First Lady. I didn’t see anything or anyone out of the ordinary. The minutes ticked by. At 12:30 a man standing near me turned and asked if I had “cut school” to come and see Kennedy. Before I could answer I felt a sudden chill and prickly sensation on the skin of my arms and neck. Then the man said, “Here they come.” I looked north on Elm Street and the motorcade was entering Dealey Plaza. The crowd shouted and waved as the President’s limousine turned onto Elm and passed the Book Depository. Then a gunshot rang out, and then another. The President grabbed his throat. Then came the third and fatal shot, but there was something extremely unusual about it that only I could hear. Because of my “ability,” I was able to pinpoint the source of the gunshots immediately — a window on the sixth floor of the Book Depository. However, the third shot had actually been two shots at once, fired simultaneously so that they sounded like one shot. The other gun was fired from somewhere in the shade on a grassy knoll to my left. In an instant I looked that way to see a man leap behind a fence and vanish in a split second. His movements were as quick and graceful as Geaxi, and I was probably the only one who saw him. I had seen him before in a film clip. He was short. He wore a fishing cap with an elongated bill and he was carrying what looked to be a cane, only now I knew the cane was actually a unique and deadly sniper rifle. He was the Beekeeper, and he had just assassinated the President of the United States.

There is no way to adequately describe the shock, madness, and sadness that followed in the next few days. It is well known and documented that the events changed something in America and Americans forever. Perhaps it was the hard truth and unwanted knowledge that all dreams are assailable and anyone can be murdered.

As for us, Sailor and I made a brief visit to St. Louis with Jack. Then the three of us flew back to Paris via New York. Cardinal was devastated and horrified by what happened in Dallas. For days he kept repeating, “Why? Why?” None of us had the answer or any other concerning “Cowboy,” the Beekeeper, and Valery. We came upon them too late and with too little. Now nothing could change it, and they had disappeared once again. Cardinal flew from Dallas to Washington, D.C., where he said he was going to stay. “I am too old for this,” he said. “I’ll send you anything that comes my way, but I’ll be staying home.” We understood and wished him well.

On the long flight to Paris, neither Sailor nor I could sleep, so we talked at length about all things Meq, including the Gogorati, the Remembering. What was it? Would it be a beginning, an end, or some kind of transition? Would we find out why we are the way we are? Would we learn the truth? I asked Sailor what he expected to happen. He laughed and said, “The unexpected.”

“But what if we can’t find the sphere?”

“Be patient, Zianno. It may take years, but we shall find this sphere and you shall read it.”

“That is what Opari told me.”

“She is correct, and she is your Ameq, Zianno. Believe her for your own sake.”

Sailor was right, of course. Once we landed and made our way across the city to the Canal St. Martin and the Giselle, and I looked into Opari’s eyes, those black and beautiful eyes, I didn’t care how long it took to find the sphere. I, she, we … would wait.

But it is odd how things sometimes play out and turn around. Just under five months later, on April 16, Cardinal sent us a message. A sport-fishing yacht, a sixty-four-foot Bertram, was found drifting in the Gulf of Mexico, four miles off the coast of Matagorda Island in South Texas. On board, the Coast Guard discovered the bodies of two men who had been dead for several days. They had each been shot once in the back of the head, execution style, and their throats had been slashed ear to ear. No money, jewelry, or valuables of any kind were missing. The name of the yacht itself was Cowboy’s Dream, and the name of one of the men, the owner of the yacht, was Blaine Harrington, Captain U.S. Army, retired.

Ten days later, on his birthday, April 26, Jack received a small package in the mail. The package had no return address, but was postmarked West Berlin. Jack tore open the brown paper wrapping to find a book titled The Gashouse Gang: The St. Louis Cardinals of the 1930s by Cappy Briant. That was Jack’s favorite period of St. Louis Cardinals history. Whoever sent the package knew a great deal about Jack, intimate knowledge that he shared with very few others, which would imply that whoever it was also knew everything about Jack’s family, including where they lived and what they did every day. It was a subtle message, yet it was there and meant to be noticed.

Stuck between the pages of the book was a handwritten note. It read:

Dear Jack,

Happy Birthday, Comrade. I hope you enjoy the book. I did. The American game of baseball is perhaps your best export. It has been a long time since Manchuria, has it not? You are an admirable adversary, Jack Flowers. You play a good game. On the back of this note are the instructions for the one called Zianno Zezen. I pray you follow them.

V.

The instructions were brief and simple. They told me to come alone to a certain intersection in West Berlin on a certain day at a certain time. The certain day happened to be May 4, my birthday, which sent another message that Valery knew much more than we suspected. But why had Valery surfaced now? And why me? Was it some sort of sacrifice, or trap, or exchange? Jack advised me not to go alone. However, that was the price and there was only one way to get the answers to my questions.

I waited the eight days, then boarded a plane in Paris and flew to Berlin, telling the stewardess and the woman sitting next to me I was on my way to spend the summer with my grandparents. After landing and clearing customs, I took a taxi to the designated intersection, only a block from the Anhalter Bahnhof train station. I was forty minutes early. It was a warm and sunny day, so I rolled up my shirtsleeves and leaned against the street sign, waiting. In exactly forty minutes, a blue Volkswagen pulled up to the curb and the passenger side door opened. The driver, a man about seventy or seventy-five years old, waved me inside. I got in and without ever saying a word to me the man drove across West Berlin to a checkpoint into East Berlin. The border guard waved us through, never looking at me and barely glancing at the man, as if he knew him well. We drove on to the outskirts of East Berlin, where the man stopped in a parking lot and pointed toward a pickup truck parked twenty yards away. The driver of the pickup was a woman at least as old as the man with the Volkswagen. “Danke,” I said and walked over and got in the pickup. From there we drove northwest for about thirty miles. The woman spoke to me occasionally, but it was with a thick accent and I didn’t understand a word. Finally, we turned off the highway onto a winding asphalt road that took us into a stretch of hills running along the east bank of the Elbe River. The hills were dotted with small farms and a few larger, older farms with landscaped terraces overlooking the river.