suggests it was preceded by a “down” and the gentleman hadn’t dared lay his precious body on a mattress with such an obvious history. He’d spent the night in a chair wrapped in a blanket he’d brought with him watching the minutes crawl by on his luminous watch face. His personal assistant was a Chinese-American called Ethel Chin who could trace her Chinese-American ancestry back four generations, long enough to have lost the Chinese language entirely. She’d ordered room service for the senator but he’d taken one look at it and decided he’d make do with a cup of coffee and a cookie. He had work to do. By seven he was out in the forecourt of the Friendship overseeing the digging of a pit deep enough to bury the Sikorsky tailplane. They were inside the safety zone but the senator stood well back from the hole. They lowered the wreckage into it and sprinkled a thin layer of dirt on top. And there, Ethel Chin and Rhyme from Time took several pictures of the senator on his knees unearthing the wreckage.
