hollow cell at the center of all the football crowd noise.
At 10:35 Jimmie Horn?s press secretary went over to the mayor. He performed a ritual that often went on with Horn before big speeches.
He knelt so that his face was down even with Horn?s. ?It?s twenty-five minutes to eleven now,? he whispered.
Jimmie Horn only nodded.
At 10:45 the press secretary repeated the procedure, giving Horn the new time.
Jimmie Horn nodded, spoke the man?s name, and stood up.
Now the twenty-odd people in the room began to talk. Laughter started up. ?All right. All right. All right now.? Santo Massimino began to pace and clap his hands.
After a few minutes, Massimino walked up to Jimmie Horn and asked him what he was thinking about.
Horn smiled at him. ?You really need to know?? he said.
?Yeah,? Massimino said. ?I need to know.?
?Well ? I was in a rowboat, fishing out on Lake Walden,? Horn said. ?It was a pleasantly cool day; I kept dipping my arms in the lakewater ? I caught some catfish, and some nice bass, Santo. Sometimes, though, the fishing isn?t so good out there.?
When Jimmie Horn appeared in the dark eye of a concrete tunnel entrance to the field, Joe Cubbah ran ahead and joined the six or seven city policemen who crossed over to meet the mayor.
Jimmie Horn was tall, stately, but Cubbah thought he looked a little nervous.
Cowboys, two roadhouse bouncers outfitted in chambray shirts, came riding by firing blanks. Cubbah was so startled he wheeled and nearly shot one of them off his horse.
Each little detail seemed both extremely important, and extremely unimportant, to Thomas Berryman.
He took out a thick, black, garrison belt. The belt was about three inches in width. He looped it around his rib cage, then pulled it as tight as he could stand it. The pressure made him burp on his breakfast.
A risk should be taken now, he was thinking. Some of his calmness at breakfast was gone; some of the shaking from the night before had returned.
He picked up the hotel room?s desk chair. Stood it up on the bed. Flush against Versailles garden in the wallpaper.
He removed velveteen couch cushions and carefully stacked them on end across the desk chair.
Finally, he fluffed all three bed pillows and punched them in tight, punched them in front of the couch cushions. The back of the chair was up level with his face now. At chin level.
Berryman measured the distance across the room to the door.
He unlatched it. Looked up and down the halls where black chambermaids were up to their morning cleaning business. There was some sisterly chattering and some vacuuming, but it was fairly quiet and orderly in the hotel corridor. It smelled slightly of the dust being raised. Perfumed dust.
Standing in the open doorway, Berryman raised the .44 magnum revolver with its silencer. He braced the handle tightly against the garrison belt.
Occasionally checking the cleaning women with glances, he rehearsed the fast motion of raising and lowering the gun to belt level.
He fired off two shots with the gun pressed against his ribs. The distance from the doorway to the chair was about sixteen feet.
The gunshots destroyed the bed pillows, blowing dust and feathers all over the room.
The nearest maid was two doorways away. She was draping white towels over her arm. Scooping a handful of soap bars. Humming. The two muffled
had gone unnoticed in the hall.
Berryman shut the door. He sat down and took off the belt. The recoils had left a slight, livery bruise on his ribs. His stomach was quivering.
The hunting pistol was unwieldy and overly nasty, but it would work for the job. He hoped that his central nervous system would function half as well.
Husky, bowlegged farmers sauntered along Nashville?s sidewalks with their thumbs in their belt loops.
Their wives held pinwheels or Nashville pennants or rabbit balloons; they used the toys to point out the monuments of President Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay.
Their children seemed more impressed with what the parade horses had left in the streets.
That fact of life amused the farmers almost as much as city life did.
Thomas Berryman sat at a stoplight on West End Avenue. The light changed and he straddled the tracks of a peppy Volkswagen. Five hippie girls in the bug.
He took the Dart over two quiet single-block streets?one west, one south?and when he turned onto a wider avenue, he tested the car up to fifty-five. Another little precaution.
Black people began to appear down another quiet street.
A crazy-looking old woman was boiling clothes in a washpot.
Three teenagers bopped along in black shirts and porkpie hats, looking like fugitives from the law.
