Feelings of Fear Read online

  Eventually, he climbed out of bed, put on his warm maroon bathrobe, and went outside into the corridor. Jack had the largest bedroom, on the other side of the galleried landing. A Secret Service agent sat outside, reading a magazine. Bobby went round to Jack’s door and pointed at it. “Is the President asleep yet?”

  “I shouldn’t think so, Mr Kennedy, sir.”

  Bobby paused. There was something in the agent’s tone of voice that aroused his suspicion. “Are you trying to tell me that the President isn’t alone?”

  “Well, sir, it isn’t for me to—”

  “Who’s he got in there?”

  “Sir, I couldn’t—”

  Bobby came right up to him and seized hold of his necktie. “Who – has – he – got – in – there?”

  He burst open the double doors and stepped into the bedroom. Behind him, the agent said, “Jesus Christ.”

  The far side of the room was dominated by a huge, louring four-poster bed, more like a ceremonial barge than a place to sleep. All its blankets had been stripped off and heaped on to the floor. On the bed itself, naked, hunched up like a wolf, Jack was kneeling in the sliced-open body of Janie Schweizer – kneeling in it, so that he was thigh-deep in bloody intestines. He had cut her apart from the breastbone downward, and all her internal organs were strewn across the bed.

  Quivering, he slowly turned around and stared at Bobby with suspicious, animal eyes.

  Bobby didn’t say anything. He was too shocked to think of anything to say. He backed away, one step at a time, and then he closed the doors behind him.

  “He’s killed her, for Christ’s sake,” gasped the Secret Service agent. His face was the color of wet newspaper. “He’s cut her to pieces.”

  “Don’t do anything,” said Bobby. “Just stay by the door and make sure that nobody else goes in there.”

  “What if he comes out? What if he tries to do the same to me?”

  “What do you think? Run like hell.”

  “I don’t see any other way,” said George, tiredly. “We’ve been over it time and time again, and it’s the only way out.”

  “What if he misses?” asked Harold.

  “He won’t miss, not at that range.”

  “What if he gets caught?”

  “He won’t be. We’ll have three other guys there to help him get clear.”

  “How about this Oswald character?” Bobby wanted to know.

  “He’ll get caught, don’t you worry about that.”

  “And there is absolutely no way that Oswald can be connected with us?”

  “Absolutely none. He thinks he’s being paid by something called the Communist Freedom League, and that they’re going to give him political asylum in Russia.”

  “Supposing he manages to hit the target, too?”

  “Pretty unlikely. But if he does – well, the more the merrier, if you know what I mean.”

  After Bobby had left, George said, “When it’s all over, there’ll be one or two loose ends that will need to be tied up. You know, such as that Secret Service agent, and Dr Christophe. Especially Dr Christophe. We don’t want him bringing the President back to life a second time, do we?”

  Harold lit a Winston, and nodded through the smoke.

  On November 22, 1963, the Kennedy motorcade approached the triple underpass leading to Stemmons Freeway in Dallas, Texas. The sun was shining and crowds were cheering on both sides of the street.

  Under the shade of a tree, discreetly shielded by three other men, ex-Marine sharpshooter Martin D. Bowman took a high-powered rifle out of a camoflaged fabric case, lifted it, and aimed it. As the Presidential limousine passed the grassy knoll on which he was standing, he fired three shots in quick succession.

  It seemed to five or six of the eyewitnesses that “the President’s head seemed to explode.” But there was more than a spray of blood and brains in the air. For a fleeting second, a dark shadow flickered over the limousine – a shadow which one eyewitness described as “nothing but a cloud of smoke”, but which another said was “more like a cloak, blowing in the wind, or maybe some dark kind of creature.”

  A third witness was even more graphic. “It came twisting up out of the car dark as a torn-off sheet of tarpaper blowing in the wind, except that I could swear it’s face was all stretched out in agony with hollow eyes. I thought to myself, I’m seeing a man’s soul leaving his body. But if it was his soul, it was a black, black soul, and more frightening than anything I ever saw.”

  The shadow appears on two frames of amateur movie stock that was shot at the time, but it was dismissed by photographic experts as a fault caused by hurried development. But 2,000 miles away, in Sausalito, California, a feathered rattle that was hanging on a study wall began to shake, all on its own. Dr Christophe raised his eyes from the book he was reading, and took off his spectacles.

  “You’re back then, master?” he said. “They took away your host?”

  He stood up. He knew, with regret, that it was time for him to pack up and leave. They would be coming for him soon. “They want everything, don’t they, Baron, even life itself; but they’re never prepared to pay the price.”

  He went to the window and looked out over the garden. He wondered what Brazil would be like, this time of year.

  Anaïs

  He was talking to his wife on his mobile phone when he first saw Anaïs. He stopped in mid-sentence and stared at her. Even though she had her head half-turned away from him, he felt as if the paving-stones of the Pointe-à-Callière had dropped beneath his feet like an express elevator.

  “Yes – you told them what?” asked his wife.

  “What?” said George.

  “You were telling me about the city planning department.” Her voice was tiny and far away.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “The planning department. What a collection of clowns.” But he couldn’t take his eyes off Anaïs. She was wearing a long black trenchcoat with the collar turned up, and she was sitting right on the very end of a cast-iron bench on the opposite side of the redbrick square, her head slightly lowered. The square had eleven black lamps and eleven trees. She had a small sketch-pad on her knee and she was drawing them – occasionally stopping to feed cracker-crumbs to the scruffy little brown birds that pecked around her feet. Her hair was cut in a long dark bob that swung and shone as she moved her head, and she had the profile of an angel – dreamy, heavy-lidded eyes, the straightest of noses, and teeth that were poised on her full lower lip in the faintest suggestion of underbite.

  “George … can you speak up? I can’t hear you very well.”

  “Sure, yes, sorry. Maybe I’d better call you later, from the hotel.”

  “You won’t make it too late? I have to be up early tomorrow for a faculty meeting.”

  “No, no. I promise you. I won’t make it later than nine.”

  Without even saying goodbye, he pushed down the aerial and dropped the phone into his raincoat pocket. He waited for a moment, licking his lips with indecision, but then he stood up and walked across the square and stood close beside her – closer than a stranger normally would. The little brown birds all flustered into the air, and perched in the branches of the nearest tree.

  Anaïs turned and looked up at him, one hand raised to shield her eyes from the bright grayness of the afternoon sky. Her eyes were green, as green as laurel-leaves frozen in ice.

  “Sorry to scare off your birds,” he told her. She didn’t say anything, but continued to stare up at him, her hand across her forehead. God, she was beautiful. Even though she was wearing a trenchcoat he could tell that she had a good figure by the way that it was so tightly cinched in at the waist. All he could see of her legs were her ankles, in sheer black nylon. She wore shiny black patent shoes with unusually high heels.

  “I was, ah, looking for the Rue de la Commune,” he said. “Somebody told me there was some kind of monument there – some kind of obelisk or something.”

  Anaïs said nothing. She stared up at him for o
ne moment longer, then she turned and pointed to the other side of the square.

  “That way?” he asked her. Why didn’t she speak? He was desperate to know what her voice sounded like, whether she was Québecois or American. But she continued to point, and she twitched her index finger a little to indicate that oui, or yes, that was the way to go. Her fingernails were very long and polished in dark maroon.

  “Well, thanks very much,” he said. “Merci beaucoup. I have to say that I’m really enjoying your city. First day I’ve had enough time to take a walk.”

  Anaïs turned away and tossed another handful of Saltine crumbs on to the ground. The first two or three birds began to twitter back down from the branches. George stood where he was until it was obvious that she wasn’t going to turn back again.

  “I – ah – it’s kind of chilly, isn’t it?” he said. “Maybe you’d like to join me in a cup of coffee. You know, just for the company.”

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t even shake her head. George waited for a moment longer and then gave an exaggerated shrug. “Please yourself.” He started to walk slowly toward the Rue de la Commune. Just once he stopped and looked back. She was still sitting there, among the eleven black lamps and the eleven trees, her head lowered over her sketchpad. George covered his mouth with his hand and felt that he could scarcely breathe.

  He went to the Rue de la Commune although he didn’t know why. He hadn’t wanted to go there at all. He crossed it and found himself in a well-manicured, grassy square. The sky was still gray and overcast, but the grass was the same strong laurel-leaf color as Anaïs’ eyes. On the right stood the obelisk honoring the first inhabitants of Montreal. In front of him stood an old customs house, its windows blind and its walls still streaked with damp from this morning’s rain.

  George felt that he had walked out of the world he knew into a new and different world altogether. He felt deeply changed. He had never realized that just seeing a woman could have that effect on him. But Anaïs was the girl that he had always wanted, if only he had known it. The girl he couldn’t bear to be without.

  It started to rain again, and so he turned up the collar of his coat and walked back to his hotel.

  Two hours went by. George stood by the window in his hotel suite, drinking a Molson from the mini-bar and watching the rain ceaselessly dredging across the piers and cranes and grain-elevators of Montreal harbor.

  The dark-tinted glass made his reflection look even more haggard than he really was. He was a tall, skinny, loose-limbed man of thirty five with brown brushed-back hair and a slightly gone-to-seed face, like a recently retired tennis-player.

  He had been in Montreal seven weeks now, but up until today, he had been too busy to think about anything else except concrete and steel and structural analyses. He was an architect, the youngest and brightest partner in Novaks Safdie & Rain, and he was here to finalize his daring design for a new forty-two-story hotel on Sherbrooke Street West, a challenging competitor to Le Westin Mount-Royal and the Ritz-Carlton Kempinski. It would have over one hundred more rooms than either, more restaurants, a huge conference center and a state-of-the-art leisure facility.

  The pièce de résistance would be a ten-story atrium, with bridges to symbolize the city’s position on Montreal island, and three waterfalls to symbolize the confluence of the Ottawa and the St Lawrence rivers.

  He walked over to the drawing-board that was set up in the middle of his living-room, and switched on his angle lamp. He hesitated for a moment, then he lifted aside his sketches for the hotel’s elevator doors, and flipped back the cover of a white cartridge drawing block. Choosing a soft black pencil, he began to draw.

  He had never been particularly good at likenesses. For instance, he had never attempted any portraits of Helen or Charlie, but his first portrait of Anaïs flowed from his pencil as if she were drawing herself. He sketched her head and shoulders, the way her hair swung along her jawline, her slightly pouting lips. She came to life from the page and stared at him in the same way that she had stared at him in the Pointe-à-Callière, aloof, disinterested, but with a very subtle hint of slyness in her eyes.

  This was when he named her Anaïs. It was after the French erotic authoress, Anaïs Nin, but it was also a reminder of the perfume that his last girlfriend had worn, the girlfriend who had left him just before he met and married Helen. Anaïs Anaïs, a sweet flowery fragrance that always reminded him of being in love, and of being hurt.

  Under the sketch, he wrote, “Today, in the Pointe-à-Callière, I met Anaïs as arranged. She was sitting on one of the six benches, feeding the little birds. Immediately she saw me she stood up, came toward me and put her arms around me. She knew that she couldn’t ask me where I had been, but her green eyes filled with tears, and she said, ‘George … you don’t know how much I suffer when you leave me. I miss you so much that my heart feels as if it is being crushed in a terrible fist.’

  “I kissed her forehead and whispered to her not to make a scene in public. Then I told her to open her raincoat. She was about to protest. The square was busy that afternoon in spite of the rain. But then, with lowered eyes, she unbuckled her tight belt, and unbuttoned her coat. She stood with her arms by her sides, her eyes still lowered, because she knew that I would be angry if she tried to look challenging.

  “I reached out with one hand and opened up the coat a little way. Underneath she was completely nude except for a black lace garter belt and black silk stockings with lace tops. Her full white breasts were veined with blue, and in the chilly afternoon air her wide nipples crinkled and tightened. In her belly-button I noticed with satisfaction the gold ring that I had given her the last time we met. She had shaved her dark pubic hair into a shape like a flame, or a serpent’s tail.

  “I ran my middle finger down between her breasts, and then further still, pausing for a moment to tug at the ring. Then I told her that she could fasten her coat. She was to meet me at nine o’clock at my hotel. She begged to know why she couldn’t come with me immediately. I like it when she’s so distressed. I lifted her chin and kissed her on the lips and told her that it wasn’t possible. She would have to wait until I was ready for her.”

  He tore off the page, and on the next sheet he drew a full-length portrait of Anaïs standing in the square with her raincoat open, exposing her naked body. He gave her a crushed, vulnerable expression; a look of entreaty. He made her breasts much bigger than they probably were, but this was only a fantasy, right?

  He sat back and finished his can of beer. Anaïs looked back at him. He wrote the date and the time of their meeting on the bottom of the drawing, and signed it. That evening, restless, he went for another walk. A south-west wind had picked up and the rain had been blown away north-eastward. The sidewalks along St Laurent, The Main, were rapidly drying. The city glittered with lights and echoed with taxi-horns.

  He passed the Montreal Pool Room, where a fat cook in a white apron stared mournfully out of the window while an array of hamburgers broiled in front of him; and the Brasserie Alouette, where old men with berets and crumpled faces sat drinking Molson and smoking Gauloises. He turned right at Maisonneuve and made his way toward the Rue St Denis, where he found himself shuffling along a crowded sidewalk past cafés and bars and bistros, art galleries and L’Axe Disco Sex Club, avec Couples Érotiques.

  At last he reached the Rue Notre Dame, where St Denis became Rue Bonsecours. The brightness and the brashness was left behind. He descended a steep cobbled incline and found himself confronted by the Notre-Dame-de-Bonsecours Chapel. He stood still for a moment, breathing in the wind, breathing in the atmosphere. Then he continued, and he knew where he was going, back to the Pointe-à-Callière, in case by some impossible chance she was still sitting there.

  He walked across the square, and of course the bench was empty. He reached down and touched the place where she had been sitting with the tips of his fingers. Then he circled around two or three times. He had to be realistic. He would never see her again in
his life. He had never felt so bereaved.

  “I opened the door and there she stood, her raincoat collar turned up. I stood back and let her walk into the room. Even before I closed the door I ordered her to drop her raincoat, which she did, so that she stood there in nothing but her garter-belt and her stockings and her six-inch heels. One of the housekeepers walked past and saw her, and looked at me, but said nothing. It was my privilege to show her naked to anybody I wanted, and she knew that.

  “I closed the door and then told her to get down on her knees, which she did. I circled around her while she knelt silent and obedient, her head slightly lowered, her hands clasped together in front of her. I told her to keep her hands by her sides, I didn’t want her to hide anything, and she mutely obeyed. I asked her if she had been touched by any other men since I had last seen her. Had any other man held her hand? Had any other man kissed her? Had any other man made love to her?

  “Each time she shook her head, but I didn’t know whether to believe her or not. I took hold of her hair and lifted her head so that she was looking me directly in the eye. ‘Just remember,’ I told her. ‘You belong to me now. Completely.’

  “I ordered her bring me a whiskey, which she did. ‘Now, undress me,’ I said, and I stood with the glass in my hand while she loosened my necktie, unbuttoned my shirt and unfastened my belt. When I was undressed, I climbed on to the bed and lay back, and she climbed on top of me like a beautiful animal, her big breasts swaying. She kissed me and bit my neck, and dug her fingernails into my shoulders. She whispered how much she adored me and how she would serve me for the rest of her life. She said that I could do anything with her, body and soul.

  “She rode up and down on top of me, delirious, her dark hair swirling from side to side. Her eyes were closed, her lips were parted, sweat ran down her cleavage. She begged me to push it in deeper and harder. She begged me to hurt her, to punish her for being so jealous.