November, 1963, the week before Thanksgiving. Twelve-year-old Jeff Greenaway, recently exiled from Manhattan to Ponsonby Hall, a New Hampshire prep school "for boys who behaved badly," wins big in a clandestine poker game. The next day, President John F. Kennedy is murdered in Dallas. The Ponsonby boys are sent home early by train for the holiday - and the president's funeral.
Back at home with his parents on East 79th Street, and restless over the tragic events playing out on TV, Jeff ventures out into the city on his own, an explorer in the underbelly of Times Square and its colorful denizens. He falls hard for the teenage ingenue Kathy Kaine, star of the Broadway hit The Wayward Family Singers, who lives unsupervised in the historic Bomoseen Hotel uptown. It's a first romance for him, but not for her.
Unable to swallow the official story about JFK's assassination, he stakes out the Russian Mission to the United Nations on 68th Street and Park Avenue, taunting the KBG goons who guard the entrance until Ambassador Zorin himself takes Jeff for a mind-bending ride into Central Park to explain how the world really works.
