‘Not anymore.’
‘Once a preacher, always a preacher. You bastards are supposed to look after the dying.’
‘Not to the extent of mercy killing.’
‘What the hell did you come here for then?’
Jonathan who rarely smiled, smiled. ‘To hear you beg,’ he said.
The satin pants on the central figure – the dead man – in George’s painting of the Revolution were the same pale cream color Jonathan had remembered. The man’s eyes were shut, face in calm repose. This is not death. This is Disneyland, a soft, plastic event suited to Bugs Bunny and a traveling salesman’s inflatable doll. George was real. His pants were serge; the thick ferret-like testicles were half alive inside the cloth of the leg that darkened now with urine. ‘If begging’s what you want, then I’ll beg,’ George sobbed, ‘if that’s what it takes—’
He maneuvered his massive posterior to the edge of the chair he sat in and then fell to his knees so hard that the glasses on the table slopped their contents. He let out an agonized groan at the shock.
‘Get up, George,’ Jonathan said, standing so abruptly himself that he knocked over the chair he’d been sitting in. ‘Get up!’
George crawled on his knees, a clumsy, leaden crawl, toward my grandfather, who backed away but found himself trapped between George and the fallen chair. ‘Please, Johnny. Please, please. You’re my only hope, only hope I got left. I seen guys die of this – this—’
‘I have no purpose here. Get up.’
‘You ain’t fighting fair. You always were a shit – I’m begging you, Johnny. Can’t you see? I’m begging—’
Jonathan looked at him in a rage of triumph and disgust. ‘Aren’t you going to wink at me, George?’ he whispered.
George reached out and grabbed hold of Jonathan’s frock coat – oh, frock coat! – ‘How the fuck can I wink at you?’ George wept. ‘You ain’t said a fucking thing a man can get his hands on.’
4
Jonathan was hardly aware of the gun in his hand: George’s head seemed to blossom into that shapeless red mass all of its own accord. My grandfather thought of the grapes Sarah used to hang in a muslin pouch above the sink; the jelly that came from them was a deep red, and the dregs when she spread them on a tart were the color of what remained of George’s face. The ceiling fan creak-creaked slowly round and round overhead, as helpless against the heat as ever; a grandfather clock tock-ticked off to one side. It was only when the weather broke that Jonathan moved, startled out of his trance by raindrops thudding down on the roof as locusts had thudded down on the roof of the Stokes’ wooden house all those years ago. He walked out of the senator’s mansion, leaving the door open behind him.
The assassination of Senator George Stoke is one of the great unsolved crimes of the century. Everybody knows this. Everybody has a theory. There were a number of arrests at the time. One of the suspects died in circumstances never explained and so came to the center of the stage; many were satisfied, but by no means all. I remember the precise position of my hand on the page when I read the last paragraphs of my computer-translated edition of Jonathan’s diaries. So this is why he’d coded them. From the moment he purchased a leather-bound ledger from Benbow Wikin way back before the turn of the century he’d been planning to kill George, do what he’d failed to do as a boy, give his life the meaning it lost when he lost God and gained back George all in one fell swoop. There I sat sixty years and six thousand miles away from the murder, and watched my grandfather whom I’d feared as a child for his implacable justice and the rigidity of his adherence to moral precepts: I watched this man become the most famous murderer of his age.