He’s left his Bible open to the Gospel of John—Lennon.

This is who I am, Mark thought as he looked at his room for the final time. This is who I was.

After a walk through Central Park, Mark returns to the Dakota. He opens his copy of The Catcher in the Rye and is looking down into the pages when the doorman calls to him.

“Did you see him?” the man asks. “John Lennon just stepped out of a cab and went inside the building.”

The news doesn’t bother him. The timing, he feels, isn’t right.

A short time later, a little boy appears in the archway of the Dakota.

The boy is Sean Lennon. He’s heading out for a morning walk with his nanny.

Mark approaches the boy and gets down on one knee, feels the gun tucked in his jacket pocket bump against his leg. He slides his hand inside his pocket to make sure the revolver doesn’t fall out.

“I came all the way across the ocean from Hawaii, and I’m honored to meet you,” Mark says, shaking Sean’s tiny hand.

Sean’s brow furrows, confused. He runs his sleeve across his nose.

“You’d better take care of that runny nose,” Mark says. “You wouldn’t want to get sick and miss Christmas.”

Mark looks up at Sean’s governess.

“He’s a beautiful boy,” he tells her. “He’s such a beautiful boy.”

Chapter 52

Chapter 52

A splendid time is guaranteed for all.

—“Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”

Christmas carols have never sounded as sweet as they do this season, when Sean is a newborn. They should, coming from voices beloved worldwide. The singers are Paul and Linda McCartney, who are making a surprise visit to the Dakota to meet the baby.

It has taken a long while for the chilliness between the two old friends to thaw. While Paul has made occasional friendly overtures over the years, John has always held his former bandmate at arm’s length. “You’re all pizza and fairy tales,” John sneered at Paul once when he phoned the Bank Street apartment.

“He’d become sort of Americanized by then, so the best insult I could think of was to say, “Oh, fuck off, Kojak,” and slam the phone down,” Paul recalls. At the same time, though, he mused over the turn of phrase. “‘Pizza and fairy tales’—I almost made that an album title.”

Now John’s friend Elliot Mintz is among the holiday guests mingling and eating take-out pizza in the Dakota, watching the winter sun descend over the Hudson River and “paying close attention to John and Paul and the way they looked at each other.” Mintz says that “during this Christmas sunset, it was obvious to me that the two of them had run out of things to say.”