The Shot - Softcover

Kerr, Philip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 067104141X ISBN 13: 9780671041410

Publisher: Pocket, 2001

Synopsis

When a mob hitman slated to take out Fidel Castro disappears, the underground rumor mill begins to circulate word that the missing assassin is now gunning for JFK himself. Reprint.

About this title

About the Author

Philip Kerr is the author of eleven wildly imaginative and acclaimed novels. Named one of Granta's "Best Young British Novelists," his works include Esau, which has been optioned for a major motion picture by Disney; A Five-Year Plan, which was bought for a major motion picture by Tom Cruise; and The Second Angel. Mr. Kerr lives in London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One: In the Kingdom of the White Caesars

Helmut Gregor feared the sound of his real name as another man might have feared the name of his worst enemy. But thanks to the generous support of his family and the agricultural business that continued to thrive in Günzberg, Bavaria, he managed to live very comfortably in Buenos Aires. An old but attractive capital -- it is a well-named city of good airs -- Buenos Aires has many fine boulevards and an excellent opera house, and on a cool July afternoon in 1960, the middle-aged German doctor could still think himself in his beloved Vienna, before the war -- before the defeat of Germany had necessitated such a protracted period of exile. For almost ten years he had resided in a quiet country house in the predominantly English suburb of Temperley. At least he had until now. After what had happened to Adolf Eichmann, Helmut Gregor considered it safer to move into the city center. And until he could find a suitable apartment in the microcentro, he was currently staying at the elegant and modern City Hotel.

Other old comrades, alarmed by the audacity of the kidnapping -- Eichmann had been snatched from his own house in San Fernando by Israeli intelligence agents and spirited away to Jerusalem -- had fled across the Río de la Plata to Uruguay and the city of Montevideo. The cooler Helmut Gregor, noting the world's condemnation of Israel's violation of international law and the possibility that the Israeli embassy in Argentina might be forced to close down -- not to mention the rather satisfying wave of anti-Semitic violence that had recently occurred in Buenos Aires as a result of the illegal Israeli action -- had reasoned that in all probability Buenos Aires was now the safest city in all of South America. For him and others like him, at any rate. There seemed little chance of the same thing happening to Helmut Gregor as had happened to Eichmann. Especially now that sympathetic friends in the right-wing Argentinian government had arranged for him to have twenty-four-hour police protection. It was Gregor's opinion that by living in the middle of nowhere and lacking the kind of money that would have bought some protection, Adolf Eichmann had made it easy for his Israeli enemies. Even so, he had to admit that the Jews had carried off the operation with considerable flair. But he did not think they would, or could, snatch him from the biggest hotel in Buenos Aires.

Not that he stayed skulking indoors all day. Far from it. Like Vienna, Buenos Aires is a city made for walking; and like the ancient capital of Austria, it boasts some excellent coffee houses. So every afternoon at around three o'clock, and accompanied by the melancholic, swarthy-featured policeman who was his afternoon bodyguard -- but for the man's piercing blue eyes, Gregor would have said he looked more Gypsy than Spanish -- the German doctor would take a brisk walk to the Confiteria Ideal.

With its elaborate brass fittings, marble columns, and, in the late afternoons, an organist who played a medley of waltzes and tangos, the Ideal café, just off Corrientes, seemed a perfect evocation of old Austrian Gemütlichkeit. After drinking his usual cortado doble and eating a slice of delicious chocolate cake, and having closed the cold dark eyes that had seen his own hands inflict a whole Malabolgia of horrors, it was quite possible for the doctor to imagine himself back in Vienna's Central Café on Herrengasse, anticipating a night at the Staatsoper or the Burgtheater. For a while anyway, until it was time to go. As he and his bodyguard collected their coats and left the Ideal at the usual time of a quarter to five, it would have been quite impossible for Helmut Gregor to have imagined himself in any way worse off than Adolf Eichmann. And yet he was. It would be another twenty-three months before Eichmann would meet the hangman in Ramleh Prison. But judgment was rather closer at hand for the doctor. Even as he was leaving the Ideal, one of the waiters, himself a Jew -- of whom there are a great many in Buenos Aires -- had ignored the doctor's generous tip and was calling the Continental Hotel.

"Sylvia? It's me. Moloch is on his way."

Sylvia replaced the hotel room's telephone receiver and nodded at the tall American who was lying on the big bed. He threw aside the new Ian Fleming he had been reading, stubbed out his cigarette, and, having climbed up on top of the large mahogany wardrobe, adopted a prone position. Sylvia did not think this behavior eccentric. Rather she admired him for the efficient professional way he approached his task. Admired him but feared him, too.

The Continental Hotel, on Roque Saenz Pena, was a classic Italian-style building, but it reminded the American of the Flatiron building in New York. The room was on the fifth-floor corner and through the open, double-height window, he could see right up the street to the corner of Suipacha -- a distance of over one hundred and fifty yards. The wardrobe creaked a little as he leaned toward the Winchester rifle that was already carefully positioned there between a couple of pillows. He always disliked poking a rifle out of an open window, preferring the comparative anonymity of a makeshift marksman's platform constructed inside the shooting position. Moving the wardrobe away from the wall by six or seven feet had created the perfect urban hide, rendering him virtually undetectable from the street or the office building opposite. Now all he had to worry about was the unsuppressed noise of the .30 caliber rifle when he squeezed the trigger. But even that, he hoped, had been taken care of: Sylvia was already signaling to a car parked on the other side of the street. The black De Soto, a popular car in Buenos Aires, was old and battered, with a tendency to backfire and, seconds later, there came a report, as loud as any rifle shot, that scattered the seagulls and pigeons like a handful of giant-sized confetti from off the ledge outside the window.

Not much of a ruse, thought the American, but it was better than nothing. And anyway, B.A. wasn't like his hometown of Miami where the locals weren't much used to the sound of firecrackers, or gunfire. Here there were plenty of public holidays, always celebrated at maximum volume, with cherry bombs and starting pistols, not to mention the odd revolution. It was only five years since the Argentinian air force had strafed the main square of the city during the military coup that had overthrown PerÓn. Loud bangs and explosions were a way of life in Buenos Aires. And sometimes death.

Sylvia collected a pair of field binoculars and stood with her back against the wardrobe, immediately underneath the barrel of the rifle. More powerful than the 8X Unertl scope mounted on the American's rifle, the binoculars were to help her ensure that among the many pedestrians who passed along the length of Roque Saenz Pena, the target was properly spotted and a kill detected. Sylvia glanced at her watch as, in the street outside, the De Soto backfired once again.

Even with some cotton wool in her ears to stop her being deafened when the American finally pulled the trigger, the echo chamber effect of the backfire between the tall buildings of Cangallo and Roque sounded more like a bomb going off.

Having achieved a solid body position, the American took hold of the rifle butt with his nonshooting hand and pressed it firmly against his shoulder. Next, he clasped the grip, slid his forefinger through the trigger guard, and positioned his cheek against the smooth wooden stock. Only then did he check the eye relief through the scope. The sight was already zeroed, following an uncomfortable 350-mile round-trip the previous weekend, to the valley of the Azul River, where the American had shot several wild goats. But even with a correctly bore-sighted rifle, this promised to be a much more difficult target to hit than a goat. There was a considerable amount of traffic along Roque Saenz Pena and across Cangallo, to say nothing of the confusing effect of the ancient seaport's many cross winds. As if to confirm the difficulty of sniping in an urban environment, a colectivo -- one of the red Mercedes buses that served the city -- obscured his practice view through the scope just as he had been positioning the cross hairs of the reticle on an old porteño's wide-brimmed hat.

"Moloch should be coming into view any second now," Sylvia said loudly, because, like her, the American was also wearing ear protection.

The American said nothing, already concentrating on his breathing cycle: before making a shot he had been trained to exhale normally, and then hold his breath for just a fraction of a second before squeezing the trigger. He had no doubt that Sylvia would correctly identify the target when he hove into view. Like the rest of the local Shin Bet team in Buenos Aires, she knew Moloch's face almost as well as she had come to know Eichmann's. And if the American did have a concern about her it was that he was relying on someone who had never before seen someone shot dead in cold blood to confirm that he had hit, or missed, his target. Any rifle's recoil prevented the shooter from seeing if he had hit his man. Especially when the target was standing more than a hundred yards away and in a crowd of people. At that kind of distance a shooter needed a spotter like a pitcher needs an umpire behind home plate, to call balls and strikes on the batter. The least amount of squeamish hesitation on her part and they risked losing the opportunity for a second shot. Observing bullet impacts was easy. Detecting a miss -- even the best marksman could miss -- and describing where the bullet went was the hard part.

The American held no opinion of his professional skills except to say that he was able to command a high fee for his services. It wasn't the kind of business where you could claim to be the best. Or indeed where others could legitimately claim that distinction for you. Moreover, he disliked that kind of reputation as much as he eschewed inflated claims of his own excellence. For him, discretion and reliability were the two defining features of his way of life and the fewer people there were who knew about what he did and how well he did it, the better. The most important part of the job was getting away with it, and that necessitated the kind of quiet, unassuming, unsigned behavior that was characteristic of only the most self-effacing of people. In none of this, however, did he consider himself to be at all atypical of anyone in that particular line of work. He knew there were other marksmen out there -- Sarti, Nicoli, David, Nicoletti, to name but a few -- but other than their names he knew very little about them, which told him that they aimed to be as anonymous as he was himself. His name was Tom Jefferson.

There was one thing he knew was quite unusual about his own situation, however, and this was that he was married, and to a girl who knew exactly what he did for a living. Who knew what he did and approved of it.

Mary accompanied Tom on the trip to Lake Tahoe to pick up the contract. That had been the plan anyway: things happened a little differently when they finally arrived in Lake Tahoe.

They flew Bonanza Air from Miami to Reno, and from there they drove to the Cal-Neva Lodge on the North Shore's Crystal Bay, at the invitation of a man named Irving Davidson. Mary, a second-generation Chinese, had never been to Tahoe, but she had seen the Cal-Neva's advertisements in the magazines -- "Heaven in the High Sierras" -- and she had read about how the resort was part-owned by Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford, and how Marilyn Monroe was a frequent visitor there, as were members of the Kennedy family. Mary, as interested in the Kennedys as she was a fan of Monroe's, was keen to stay in such a glamorous spot.

And she took to the place as soon as she saw it. Or rather as soon as she saw Joe DiMaggio and Jimmy Durante having a drink in the Indian Room. But there was something about the Cal-Neva Tom didn't like. An atmosphere. Something indefinably corrupt. Perhaps it was because the operating philosophy of the place seemed to be that money could buy you everything. Or perhaps it was because the resort had been built by a wealthy San Francisco businessman with the express purpose of circumventing California law. Located on the state line dividing California and Nevada, the resort comprised a central rustic lodge with an enormous fireplace, a cluster of luxury chalets, and a casino that, because of the laws banning gambling in California, was located on the Nevada side of the border. The state line ran right through the middle of the swimming pool, enabling bathers to swim from one state to another. Tom was glad that, as things turned out, he only had to spend one night in the place.

Soon after their arrival it became clear that their host and potential client would be unable to join them. Tele-phoning the discreet chalet where Tom and Mary were relaxing together in the large hot tub, Irving Davidson explained the situation.

"Tom? May I call you Tom? I'm afraid that some business is going to detain me here in Las Vegas for a while. Look, I'm very sorry about this, but I'm not going to be able to come up there and join you. That being the case, for which once again you have my apologies Tom, I was wondering if I could prevail upon your time and patience a little further. I was wondering if you would mind driving down here to meet me and my associates here in Vegas. It's about four hundred and fifty miles down Highway 95. You could leave just after breakfast and be here late afternoon. It's a nice drive. Especially if you're in a nice car. Living in Miami, I bet you drive a convertible, Tom. Am I right?"

"Chevy Bel Air," confirmed Tom.

"That's a nice car," said Davidson. "Well, there's a Dual Ghia at your disposal while you're in Nevada, Tom. That's a really beautiful car. But here's the kick. It belongs to Frank Sinatra. How does that sound? And when you arrive in Vegas you can stay in the suite Frank has here at the Sands. Everything is fixed. What do you say, Tom?"

Tom, who had never much cared for Sinatra's music, was silent for a moment. He sensed that the suite was for him alone. "What about my wife?" he asked.

"Let her enjoy herself where she is. Listen, she's got everything she needs right there. A drive through the desert with the hood down, she doesn't need. Her hair doesn't need it. Her complexion doesn't need it. There's a pretty good beauty salon in the lodge. I've booked her a whole morning in there. And I've arranged for her to have five hundred dollars' worth of chips to play with in the casino. She needs anything else, all she's got to do is pick up the phone and Skinny'll fix it for her. That's Skinny D'Amato. The general manager? He knows all about how you and Mary are my special guests. I believe that some celebrity guests are coming in tomorrow. Eddie Fisher and Dean Martin. I can have Skinny introduce her if she wants. So what do you say, Tom?"

"Okay, Mr. Davidson. It's your party."

Early the next morning, Tom left Mary very excited about the possibility of meeting Dean Martin and...

About this edition

• Publisher: Pocket
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 067104141X
• ISBN 13: 9780671041410
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480