11/22/63 полностью

It was only three miles, but that seemed like a very long drive. We didn’t talk. I turned into her driveway and cut the motor. She had stopped crying, but she still didn’t say anything. Neither did I. Some silences can be comfortable. This one felt deadly.

She took her Winstons out of her handbag, looked at them, and put them back. The snick of the catch was very loud. She looked at me. Her hair was a dark cloud surrounding the white oval of her face. “Is there anything you want to tell me, George?”

What I wanted to tell her more than anything was that my name wasn’t George. I had come to dislike that name. Almost to hate it.

“Two things. The first is that I love you. The second is that I’m not doing anything I’m ashamed of. Oh, and two-A: nothing you’d be ashamed of.”

“Good. That’s good. And I love you, George. But I’m going to tell you something, if you’ll listen.”

“I’ll always listen.” But she was scaring me.

“Everything can stay the same… for now. While I’m still married to John Clayton, even if it’s just on paper and was never properly consummated in the first place, there are things I don’t feel I have the right to ask you… or of you.”

“Sadie—”

She put her fingers to my lips. “For now. But I won’t ever allow another man to put a broom in the bed. Do you understand me?”

She put a quick kiss where her fingers had been, then dashed up the walk to her door, fumbling for her key.

That was how 1962 started for the man who called himself George Amberson.

New Year’s Day dawned cold and clear, with the forecaster on the Morning Farm Report threatening freezing mist in the lowlands. I had stowed the two bugged lamps in my garage. I put one of them in my car and drove to Fort Worth. I thought if there was ever a day when the raggedy-ass carnival on Mercedes Street would be shut down, it was this one. I was right. It was as silent as… well, as silent as the Tracker mausoleum, when I’d dragged Frank Dunning’s body into it. Overturned trikes and a few toys lay in balding front yards. Some party-boy had left a larger toy — a monstrous old Mercury — parked beside his porch. The car doors were still open. There were a few sad, leftover crepe streamers on the unpaved hardpan of the street, and a lot of beer cans — mostly Lone Star — in the gutters.

I glanced across at 2706 and saw no one looking out the large front window, but Ivy had been right: anyone standing there would have a perfect line of sight into the living room of 2703.

I parked on the concrete strips that passed for a driveway as if I had every right to be at the former home of the unlucky Templeton family. I got my lamp and a brand-new toolbox and went to the front door. I had a bad moment when the key refused to work, but it was just new. When I wetted it with some saliva and jiggled it a little, it turned and I went in.

There were four rooms if you counted the bathroom, visible through a door that hung open on one working hinge. The biggest was a combined living room and kitchen. The other two were bedrooms. In the larger one, there was no mattress on the bed. I remembered Ivy saying Be like takin your dog on vacation, won’t it? In the smaller one, Rosette had drawn Crayola girls on walls where the plaster was decaying and the lathing showed through. They were all wearing green jumpers and big black shoes. They had out-of-proportion pigtails as long as their legs, and many were kicking soccer balls. One had a Miss America tiara perched on her hair and a big old red-lipstick smile. The house still smelled faintly of whatever fried meat Ivy had cooked for their final meal before going back to Mozelle to live with her mama, her little hellion, and her brokeback husband.

This was where Lee and Marina would begin the American phase of their marriage. They’d make love in the bigger of the two bedrooms, and he would beat her there. It was where Lee would lie awake after long days putting together storm doors and wondering why the hell he wasn’t famous. Hadn’t he tried? Hadn’t he tried hard?

And in the living room, with its hilly up-and-down floor and its threadbare bile-green carpet, Lee would first meet the man I wasn’t supposed to trust, the one that accounted for most if not all of the doubts Al had held onto about Oswald’s role as the lone gunman. That man’s name was George de Mohrenschildt, and I wanted very much to hear what he and Oswald had to say to each other.

There was an old bureau on the side of the main room that was closest to the kitchen. The drawers were a jumble of mismatched silverware and crappy cooking utensils. I pulled the bureau away from the wall and saw an electrical socket. Excellent. I put the lamp on top of the bureau and plugged it in. I knew someone might live here awhile before the Oswalds moved in, but I didn’t think anyone would be apt to take the Leaning Lamp of Pisa when they decamped. If they did, I had a backup unit in my garage.