We shall see.
The events of the morning of July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho… Only Ernest Hemingway knew the truth of those few moments, but the results seemed obvious enough.
According to the testimony of his fourth wife and many friends, Hemingway had made several clumsy efforts at suicide in the months before and after his second series of electroshock treatments in May and June. Once, as he was returning to the Mayo Clinic, he had tried to walk into the spinning propeller of a small plane warming up on the tarmac. Another time, a friend had to wrestle a loaded shotgun away from Hemingway at his home.
Despite all this, Mary Hemingway had locked the writer’s guns in the basement storage room but had left the keys to the room in plain view on the kitchen windowsill because “no one had a right to deny a man access to his possessions.” I thought about this for years. They—Miss Mary and friends—had felt that they had the right to authorize a series of electroshock treatments which all but destroyed Ernest Hemingway’s brain and personality, but she decided that she could not keep his guns locked away from him when he was depressed to the point of suicide.
That Sunday morning of July 2, 1961, Hemingway awoke early, as he always did. This morning was beautiful, sunny and cloudless. Miss Mary was the only other occupant of the Ketchum house, sleeping in a separate bedroom. She did not awaken as Hemingway tiptoed down the carpeted stairs, took the keys from the windowsill, went down to the storage room, and chose—I believe—his faithful Boss twelve-gauge. Then he went back upstairs, crossed the living room to the tiled foyer at the foot of the stairs, loaded both barrels, set the butt of the shotgun on the tiled floor, set the muzzles of both barrels against his forehead, I think—not in his mouth—and tripped both triggers.
I emphasize the details because I think it is important that he did not simply load the gun in the storage room and do the deed there, in the basement, where even the sound might have been swallowed by the intervening doors and carpeted floors and cinder-block walls. He carried the gun to the foyer, to the base of the stairs, to the one place in the house where it was guaranteed that Miss Mary could not get to the phone or the front door without stepping over his body and the pool of blood, splintered skull, and blasted brain tissue that had been the source for all those novels, all those stories, all the lies he once tried to convince me were truer than truth.
Some months earlier, Hemingway had been asked to write a simple sentence or two for a book commemorating JFK’s inauguration. After hours of futile effort, Hemingway had broken down and sobbed in front of his doctor: the great writer could not complete a simple sentence.
But he could still communicate, and I think that the place and manner of his death were a last message. It was addressed to Miss Mary, of course, but also to J. Edgar Hoover, to the FBI, to the OSS… or the CIA, as it was now called… to the memories of those who were there that year between late April and mid-September 1942 when the writer played spy and became entangled with Nazi agents, FBI snoops, British spooks, Cuban politicians and policemen. Spanish priests and noblemen, ten-year-old secret agents and German U-boats. I do not flatter myself that Hemingway was thinking of me that last morning, but if his message was what I think it was—a last, violent move to declare stalemate to a decades-old game rather than suffer checkmate at the hands of a patient but relentless enemy—then perhaps I was woven into the tapestry of his thoughts that morning, a minor figure in a baroque pattern.
I hope that on the morning of my forty-ninth birthday, in Hemingway’s last moments, he might have been thinking, if his sorrow and depression allowed him such a luxury as coherent thought, not only of his final, decisive, twelve-gauge gesture of ultimate defiance but also of any victories he had won in his long-running war against invisible enemies.
I wonder if he was thinking of the Crook Factory.
2
MR. HOOVER SUMMONED ME to Washington in late April 1942. The cable caught up to me in Mexico City and ordered me to report to the director “by the fastest possible means.” This gave me pause for a moment, since everyone in the Bureau knew how penny-pinching Mr. Hoover could be. Normally, a summons back to Washington, even from Mexico City or Bogotá, would entail travel by burro, car, boat, and train, while requiring a careful eye on the expense account.
On the morning of my appointment with Mr. Hoover, after hops through Texas, Missouri, and Ohio, I landed at Washington’s National Airport. I looked out the window of my silver DC-3 with some interest. Not only was it a beautiful spring morning with the dome of the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument gleaming cleanly in the rich April light, but the airport itself was new. In previous flights into Washington I had landed at the city’s old airport, Hoover Field, across the Potomac River in Virginia, near Arlington National Cemetery. I had been out of the country since the previous summer, but I had heard about how—even before Pearl Harbor and without presidential authorization—the army had started work on a huge, new, five-sided headquarters where the old airport had been.
As we circled once before landing, I could see that the new National Airport was much more conveniently located near the downtown. It was obvious that the modern airport was not yet finished: the brand-new terminal still had construction equipment and workers swarming around it like ants. I also caught a glimpse of the new army headquarters going up. The press had already started calling it “the Pentagon,” and the name seemed appropriate from my vantage point three thousand feet up, for although only about half of the monstrosity had been completed, the foundation and rising walls clearly showed the five-sided shape. The parking lots alone covered all of what had been Hoover Field and its next-door amusement park, and I could see lines of army trucks rolling in toward the completed part of the building, presumably delivering all the desks and typewriters and other bureaucratic detritus of the new, expanded army.
I sat back as the drone of the two engines changed pitch for landing. I had liked old Hoover Field, although it had been nothing more than a grass strip between an amusement park on one side and a dump on the other. A county highway, Military Road, had run across the landing strip—not parallel to it, but across it—and I had read a few years earlier that the airport manager had been arrested and convicted for trying to put up a stoplight there to halt traffic while commercial aircraft landed. The county highway department had torn the illegal stoplight out. It had not seemed to matter; the times I had flown in, the pilots seemed adept enough at gauging their landings between the crossing cars and trucks. I recalled that there had been no control tower as such and that the windsock had flown from the highest point on the roller coaster next to the field.
We landed, taxied, and I was the third person out, rearranging the .38 on my belt as I moved quickly down the stairway to the warm tarmac. I carried a bag with a change of underwear, a clean shirt, and my other dark suit, but I did not know if I would have time to find a hotel, check in, shower, shave, and change before my meeting with Mr. Hoover. The thought worried me. Mr. Hoover had no patience with special agents who showed up in less than their Sunday best, even if those agents had spent a day and a night catching planes across Mexico and the United States.
Passing through the new terminal that still smelled of paint and fresh plaster, I paused to look at the papers on the newsstand. One headline of The Washington Daily News read ENOUGH VD CASES IN D.C. TO OVERFLOW THE STADIUM. I tried to remember how many people could fit into old Griffith Stadium. Thirty thousand, at least. Glancing around at the mobs of crisp new uniforms—Army, Navy, MP’s, SP’s, Marines, Coast Guard, most of them kissing at least one girl goodbye—I was surprised that the VD problem since the beginning of the war was that small.
Passing through the new terminal, I headed for the telephone booths near the exit doors. My one chance to get a shower and a change of clothes would be to get in touch with Tom Dillon, a friend who had gone through Quantico with me and shared a bit of Camp X training before he had been transferred to Washington and me to the SIS. Tom was still
a bachelor—or had been when I had talked to him ten months earlier—and his apartment was not far from the Justice Department. I plugged in my nickel, asked the operator to connect me with his home number, hoping that this was his day off, knowing that as a field agent Tom was probably not in the office if this was a workday for him. I listened to the phone ring. Dispirited, I was fumbling for another nickel when a hairy hand came over my shoulder, took the receiver out of my hand, and hung it up.
I spun around, ready to deck the soldier or sailor who had made the mistake of fooling with me, only to be confronted by Tom Dillon’s smiling face a few inches from my own.
“I heard you ask for my number, Joe,” said Dillon. “I’m not home.”
“You never were,” I said with a grin. We shook hands. “What are you doing here, Tom?” I did not believe in coincidence.
“Mr. Ladd sent me. He said that you had an appointment at the Department at eleven-thirty and that I should give you a ride. Give you time to clean up at my place if you want.”
“Great,” I said. Mr. Ladd was D. M. Ladd—“Mickey” to his friends in the Bureau—one of the director’s assistants and now head of the Domestic Intelligence Division, in which Tom worked. Dillon had not said that I had an appointment with the director and probably did not know that bit of information. It was not my place to tell him.
“Your plane was early,” said Tom as if in apology for not meeting me at the gate.
“Didn’t have to wait for traffic to cross the landing strip,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Tom grabbed my bag and led the way out through the crowds to where his Ford coupe was parked at the curb just beyond the main doors. The Ford’s top was down, and Tom tossed my bag into the back seat and jogged around to the driver’s side with the same boyish energy I remembered from Quantico. I settled back into the thick cushions as we left the airport and drove toward downtown. The air here was warm and humid, but much less warm and humid than I had been used to for the past few years in Colombia and Mexico. It was too late in the season to see Washington’s famous Japanese cherry trees in full bloom, but the scent of their remaining blossoms still filled the broad avenues, mixing with the rich perfume from the magnolia trees that gave the city its familiar Southern feel.
I say familiar, but in actuality this might have been a completely different city from the Washington I had lived in for part of ’38 and ’39 and visited briefly the previous summer. That Washington had been a sleepy Southern town, its broad avenues never crowded with traffic, its demeanor more relaxed than many South American villages I had spent time in since then. Now everything was changed.
The “tempos” I had heard about were everywhere: ugly, drab buildings of gray asbestos board, each about half a block long with five wings extending from one side, each thrown up in a week to house the invading hordes of war workers and bureaucrats for the duration of the war. Tempos ran along both sides of the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, blocking the view of the pool itself, the ugly structures connected by rickety-looking covered bridges crossing and recrossing the water. More tempos filled the area along Constitution Avenue, obliterating a pleasant park where I had often grabbed a hasty lunch, and a pack of aggressive tempos circled the Washington Monument like so many gray, scabrous scavengers closing in for the kill.
The avenues were as wide as I remembered, but now they were packed with cars and trucks, including more convoys of olive-green Army trucks, in the backs of which I could see the desks and chairs and typewriters and filing cabinets which I had only imagined from my airplane window. America was going to war. In triplicate. The sidewalks were crowded, and while there were still many uniforms visible, the majority of people were dressed in the civil uniform of the day—gray and black suits, the women’s skirts shorter than I remembered, shoulders emphasized on male and female alike. Everyone appeared young and healthy and seemed to be hurrying to important meetings. Briefcases were ubiquitous; even some of the women carried them.
Trolley cars were still evident despite the heavy automobile traffic, but I noticed that the trolleys seemed older somehow. It took me a minute to realize that they were older—that the city must have brought old cars out of retirement to meet the demand of all this added population. I watched as a quaint, double-ended, wooden relic from the 1800s screeched by, glass windows along the roofline, its running boards crowded with men hanging on to brass bars and leather straps. Most of the men were Negroes.
“Yeah,” said Tom Dillon, looking over to catch my gaze. “Even more niggers in town now than before the war.”
I nodded. Someone looking at us from one of those trolley cars might think that we were brothers, perhaps even fraternal twins. Tom was thirty-one and I was only twenty-nine, but his skin was smoother and he still had a hint of freckles along the brim of his nose. And his nose had never been broken, unlike mine. We were both wearing the dark suits required by Mr. Hoover, with white shirts—admittedly, Tom’s was crisper than mine at the moment—and nearly identical snap-brim hats. We each had our hair cut the regulation two inches above our collars, and if our hats had blown off, a viewer would have noticed how carefully we combed our hair on the top to avoid the “pointy-headed look” that Mr. Hoover disliked. Each of us carried the Bureau-required white handkerchief in our right front trouser pocket so that we could wipe our hands before a handshake if we were nervous or had been exercising strenuously. Mr. Hoover hated encountering “damp palms” and did not want that stigma attached to any of his special agents. Both Tom and I carried matching Police Positive .38-caliber revolvers in black holsters on our belts, shifted to the right side so that they would not bulge too noticeably against our suit jackets. Unless Tom had gotten a raise, we each earned $65 a week: a solid sum in 1942 but not impressive for the college and law school graduates who met the minimum Bureau requirements for employment. Both of us had been born in Texas into Catholic families, had gone to second-rate Southern colleges, and had attended law school.
But there the similarities ended. Tom Dillon still spoke in a slow, West Texas drawl. My family had moved to California when I was three, then to Florida when I was six, and as far as I could tell, I had no discernible accent. Tom had gone to college on his family’s money. I had squeaked by on a football scholarship, supplemented by a part-time job. Tom had graduated from law school before being recruited, thus meeting Mr. Hoover’s requirements, but I had been an exception, recruited at the beginning of my second year of law school, just as I was about to drop out because of lack of funds and motivation. The reasons for the exception were simple: I spoke Spanish fluently and Mr. Hoover had needed Spanish-speaking special agents for the Special Intelligence Service he had been planning—counterintelligence agents who could blend into the crowd, talk to informants, and say “Thank you” in Spanish-speaking Latin America without pronouncing the word as “Grassyass.” I qualified. My father had been Mexican, my mother Irish. Which led to another difference between Tom Dillon and me.
When Dillon had said “even more niggers in town now than before the war” I had stifled the impulse to reach across, grab the back of the other agent’s head with both hands, and smash his face against the steering wheel. I didn’t give a damn about him insulting Negroes—I hadn’t worked with any blacks or known any well enough personally to avoid the bias we all had against these fourth-class American citizens—but when Tom Dillon said “nigger,” I heard “beaner” or “spic” or “wetback.”
My father had been Mexican. My skin was light enough, and I had inherited enough of my Irish mother’s bone structure and features to pass for a typical Anglo-Protestant American, but I had grown up being ashamed of my father’s Mexican heritage and fighting anyone and everyone who referred to me as “Mexican.” And because my father had died when I was six years old and my mother less than a year later, I felt even more deeply ashamed of my shame—of having never told my father that I forgave him for being non-pure-white American and having never begged forgive
ness of my mother for hating her for marrying a Mexican.
It was strange. As I grew older, I wished more and more that I had known my father better. I had been not quite five when he went off to the Great War, and I had turned six before we learned he died over there—of the flu, three months after the war ended. How could I miss someone so much whom I had never really known?
There were other differences between Tom Dillon and Joe Lucas. Tom’s work in the Domestic Intelligence Division entailed what the vast majority of FBI agents did—investigation. The Bureau, as Mr. Hoover repeatedly had to point out to eager congressmen and senators, was not in the business of police enforcement. It was an investigative agency. Tom spent most of his time doing interviews, making reports, cross-checking leads with other leads, and occasionally following people. He had some experience in carrying out black bag jobs, planting bugs, and other illegal surveillance techniques, but for the most part, that was left to the experts. I was one of those experts.
And Tom had never killed anyone.
“So,” said Tom as we drove past the White House. “You still with SIS?”
“Uh-huh,” I said. Noticed that they had put up some sort of security post at the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance to the White House. The gates were still open, but it looked as if the policeman at the gate might check your credentials if you tried to walk onto the White House grounds. When I had visited the city the previous summer, anyone could still stroll through the grounds without being challenged, although a Marine guard might ask your business if you walked into the executive mansion itself. When I had first come to the city in the mid-’30s, there had been no gates to the White House and entire sections of the grounds had no fence. I remembered playing baseball on the South Lawn that first summer.