The Great American Joke: An American finally makes it to Heaven - all those before him went straight to Hell you see, just for being American.

And God looks at him and says: "Okay, come on. Who really shot Kennedy?"

  They say that everyone who was alive at the time remembers where they were when John Kennedy was shot, and I was no exception. Our memories attach themselves to emotional experiences, which is why we recall some events in great detail and many not at all, and whatever his shortcomings, we all liked this man. Someone we really cared for was murdered, coldly, ruthlessly, unfairly, and right before our very eyes. The shared memory was the shared emotion.
    Perhaps appropriately, I was in the butcher’s shop where my mother had sent me to obtain half a pound of mince steak and some bones for the next of a series of short-lived dogs, for it would be a long time before Spot would really be replaced. It proved more difficult than I expected because both butchers ignored me completely. That was very unusual, since like most butchers, these were smiling chatty chaps whom, I always thought, spoke cheerily to everyone to try and distract the customers from the thought that they were being served by a man with blood splattered all over his apron. And the customers were always friendly in return, as anyone might sensibly be when discussing business matters with men who possessed very large knives and used them with such breathtaking skill.
    That day the butcher’s knives were sheathed and so were the smiles and they were listening anxiously to the radio which was placed on the shelf beneath the mirror that occupied the full length of the back wall of the shop. There, the customers could admire themselves—another distraction from the slaughter. I had to make a noise to cause them to know I was in the shop, but they only glanced up, the shine gone from their cheery cheeks, the smiles nowhere to be seen, and the older one said, “They shot him.”
“Shot who?” I asked.
“Kennedy,” they chorused in despair.

“But I thought, I hoped—you know yourself we anarchists are poor people.”
“And that is why we make you so cheap a rate. Ten thousand dollars is not too much for the killing of the chief of police of a great city. Believe me, it barely pays expenses. Private persons are charged much more, and merely for private persons at that. Were you a millionaire, instead of a poor struggling group, I should charge you fifty thousand dollars at least for McDuffy. Besides, I am not entirely in this for my health.”
 “Heavens! What would you charge for a king!”
 “That depends. A king, say of England,

would cost half a million. Little second and third rate kings come anywhere between seventy-five and a hundred thousand dollars.”
 “I had no idea they came so high.”
 “That is why so few of them are killed...”
   Jack London died before he could finish The Assassination Bureau, Ltd although he left comprehensive notes of his intentions. Others have fallen to the temptation and finished it for him, but that was never the problem. It was that the material London had written was plainly an early draft and would need fleshing out once he had completed the draft. The idea remains far better than the story. It concerns an organisation who will assassinate anyone for the right price, and what happens when a young woman offers its creator a huge sum of money to have the founder and leader of the organisation make himself the target. Thus the organisation is turned against itself. You can bet London would even have dropped the `Ltd’ from the title, had he been around to do so.