Libra

  “Then my wife calls us from Miami,” Frank said. “We drive up here right away.”

  Drive through Georgia and the Carolinas to hear what news T-Jay has for them. It could only be a Cuban operation. Nothing else would make him get in touch with them and nothing else would bring them here.

  Vásquez sat on the bunk bed. He had a thin sad face and would have seemed at ease in a cobbler’s smock in some dark narrow shop on a fringe street of Little Havana. There were two rows of teeth in his lower jaw, or maybe one row haphazardly aligned, with zigzag patterns, teeth set at angles to each other. It made him look like a saint of the poor. A brother and a cousin lost at Red Beach, another brother allowed to die in a hunger strike at La Cabana prison. Frank had been a schoolteacher in Cuba. Now, between jobs, he and Raymo drove to a training camp in the Everglades with the one weapon they owned between them, a so-called Cuban Winchester, put together from elements of three other rifles with handmade parts added on. They drilled with one of the groups out there, living in open huts made of eucalyptus logs and assorted vines. Raymo fired the rifle, swung from ropes, pissed in the tall grass. Frank did some target work but otherwise just hung around, the longtime silent buddy, dressed the way he always dressed, in oversized trousers and a sleeveless sepia shirt worn outside his pants.

  Both men had been with Castro, originally, in the mountains.

  “The wife and children, Frank? They’re well?”

  “Doing okay.”

  “Three kids, right? What about Raymo? The right woman doesn’t show up?”

  These were the only men Mackey could talk to like this, in extended ceremonial hellos, little arcs of family news and other details of being. It was the necessary foreground. He knew it was expected and he’d come to look forward to it. They had to say something to each other. There was only one subject among them and it did not adapt to easy chat.

  All right. Mackey gave them some background on the operation. Extremely dedicated men were behind it. The idea was to galvanize the nation into full awareness of the danger of a communist Cuba. Dirección General de Inteligencia would be exposed as a criminal organization willing to take extreme action against important figures who opposed Castro.

  He told them a shooting was in the works, designed to implicate the DGI. He wanted Frank and Raymo to be part of it and he supplied some operational details. High-powered rifles, elevated perches, a trail of planted evidence, someone to take the fall. There would be five hundred dollars a month for each of them, commencing now, and a nice payday when the job was done. The men behind the plan, he said, were respected Agency veterans, deep believers in a free Havana.

  He did not mention Everett and Parmenter by name. He did not tell them who their target was or where the shooting would take place. He would let details drop, here and there, in time, as need dictated. The other thing he did not say was that they were supposed to miss.

  The Parmenters lived in a stunted frame house at the edge of a brick sidewalk in Georgetown. The sidewalk bulged and rippled and the once-quaint house was slightly shabby now, a mousy relic no one noticed.

  It was Beryl who’d wanted to live here. The corporate suburbs were not for them, she said. Guarded shoptalk over drinks and dinner with colleagues and their anxious wives. She wanted to live in town. Fanlights, wrought iron, leaded glass. The security of a small and darkish place with old familiar things lying about, with books, rugs, dust, a wine cellar for Larry, a tininess, an unnoticeability (if such a word exists). There was something about a long and low and open-space house with a lawn and a carport that made her feel spiritually afraid.

  Larry paced the small rooms now, drink in hand, wearing an enormous striped robe. Beryl was at her writing desk clipping news items to send to friends. This was a passion she’d discovered recently like someone in middle life who finds she was born to show pedigreed dogs. Nothing that happened before has any meaning compared to this. A week’s worth of newspapers sat on the desk. She sent clippings to everyone. There was suddenly so much to clip.

  “Look at this, now. Am I angry or amused?”

  She turned around to find her husband.

  “Look at this, Larry. A folk singer named Bob Dylan is told by CBS he can’t sing one of his songs on The Ed Sullivan Show. Too controversial.”

  “What’s controversial about it?”

  “It’s called ‘Tatkin’ John Birch Society Blues.’ ”

  “Is he white or Negro? Because white boys shouldn’t mess with the blues.”

  “But imagine forbidding him airtime.”

  “I’ll try to get worked up about it. Give me ten minutes.”

  “I know the signs, old boy.”

  “What signs?”

  “When you sweep through the house guzzling gin. I know exactly what it means. Nostalgic for Guatemala.”

  Some people thought Beryl had money. It was one of the false impressions that collected around her. What she actually had was a small picture-framing shop on Wisconsin Avenue, strictly a marginal income—lithographs, photographs, framing. Other people thought she was creative. One of the softer arts, quilt-making, water colors. She had a look and manner people took to be unconventional in a certain way, a kind of reclusiveness in a crowd. She wore soft clothes. She draped herself in casual layers, a smallish woman half buried in pastels. There was always the idea she was in quiet retirement from some fear or pain. She bought factory-outlet moccasins, never wore jewelry, kept snapshots of her mother in favorite books. People thought she was a canned-soup heiress who painted seascapes with birds. She ate soft food, spoke softly, with a slight huskiness, a sexiness. She was very sexy, at forty-seven. There was still that smoky little thing about her. The sexy swaying walk, the dark voice. She had a dry way of delivering friendly insults directly into people’s chests. She walked softly swaying into a room and you could sense anticipation in the group. They began preparing their laughter before she said a word.

  It was seen as a mark of the Parmenters’ sophistication that she raked the Agency in mixed company while Larry looked on grinning.

  Not that she didn’t mean what she said.

  “No. I am not making fun. I admire what you did in Guatemala. If not politically, then in other ways. It was practically bloodless. I certainly admire that.”

  “It was a textbook operation.”

  “Of course there would have been no need for an operation if the Guatemalans hadn’t taken back all that land belonging to United Fruit. ”

  “Is that what happened? Oh.”

  “I love the way you say textbook operation.”

  Yes. It was also the peak experience of Larry’s career, centering on a radio station supposedly run by rebels from a jungle outpost in Guatemala. The broadcasts actually originated in a barn in Honduras and the messages were designed to put pressure on the leftist government and arouse anxiety in the people. Rumors, false battle reports, meaningless codes, inflammatory speeches, orders to non-existent rebels. It was like a class project in the structure of reality. Parmenter wrote some of the broadcasts himself, going for vivid imagery, fields of rotting bodies, fighter pilots defecting with their planes. A real pilot tossed dynamite sticks out the window of his Cessna. A real bomb fell on a parade ground, sending up smoke in an ominous column. The government fell nine days after an invasion force of five thousand troops was said to be advancing on the capital. The force materialized then, several trucks and a crowded station wagon, about a hundred and fifty ragged recruits.

  That was nine years ago. Larry became involved in proprietaries for a time, legally incorporated businesses actually financed and controlled by CIA. When the Agency wanted to do something interesting in Kurdistan or Yemen, it filed for incorporation in Delaware. It was during this period that he came into contact with a number of Agency assets who had important holdings in sensitive parts of the hemisphere. A man from United Fruit, a man from the Cuban-Venezuelan Oil Trust (it was George de Mohrenschildt as a matter of fact). Merchant banks, sugar companies, arm
s dealers. A curious convergence of motives and holdings. Hotel interests here, gambling interests there. Men with vivid histories, sometimes including prison. He saw there was a natural kinship between business and intelligence work. And he realized that the companies he was helping set up as cover for Agency operations held potential for legitimate profits—and beyond that, for enormous personal gain.

  Contact with wealthy and influential men was a bracing experience for someone who’d been brought up to believe in the American genius for making leaps to new levels of privilege. Being rich, he saw, was something you grew into. The Agency had huge collections of intelligence on banana republics and their leaders. Larry traded secrets for pieces of promising action. He spent time in Cuba, setting up transactions between the Batista government and interests in the U.S. He helped arrange mineral surveys, land-development deals, drilling contracts, casino franchises. He traveled to Oriente Province to learn the extent of the rebel threat to cane fields controlled by U.S. firms. The extent was considerable. When the American executives left their palm-shaded streets and large white houses, when the cooks and gardeners looked for new situations, when the company guards fled, when the local army post was overrun, Laurence Parmenter’s fortune was still in the ground of the unexplored oil properties of Cuba.

  “I admire that robe, Larry. You look like Orson Welles in deep focus.”

  He stood in the doorway smiling absently at the familiar flatness in her voice, not quite hearing what she said.

  “On second thought I’ll tell you what you look like. You look like one of those corrupt barons in Ivan the Terrible, got up deliciously in animal skins. Make me a drink so I can keep you company. We ought to keep each other company.”

  After the revolution came the plan to invade. He helped set up the Double-Chek Corporation, a front for the recruitment of pilot instructors. Gibraltar Steamship came next, a company whose nominal head was a former State Department officer and ex-president of United Fruit. Parmenter himself could not always tell where the Agency left off and the corporations began. There were men related by blood and by marriage; there were company directors who were former high-ranking intelligence officers; there were govemment advisers who were once company directors. It was a society he recognized as a better-working version of the larger world, where things have an almost dreamy sense of connection to each other. Here the plan was tighter. These were men who believed history was in their care.

  Gibraltar Steamship provided cover for propaganda operations against Cuba. The device was Radio Swan, a transmitter stored in an oversized trailer on a remote island in the western Caribbean. Great Swan Island was the product of hundreds of years of bird droppings. There were three coconut palms, twenty-eight people. Lovely numbers, everyone agreed, pointing toward barrenness and isolation, the soul-testing elements of the trade. For the invasion Parmenter used the same broadcast techniques that had worked in Guatemala. Cryptic messages from spy movies of the forties. “Attention, Eduardo, the moon is red.” Romantic imagery employing the names of local wildlife. “The barracuda sleeps at sundown.” “The shark leaves a golden trail.” Mackey would later tell Parmenter that in his LCI lying to off Blue Beach, this gibberish had the sound of a mind unraveling. It diminished the whole operation, made comic fucking opera of troops in combat.

  When the messages were broadcast, Larry was in Washington at the Agency’s invasion headquarters, a tempo building near the Lincoln Memorial. He was eating a soggy meal off a paper plate when news hit the control room that JFK would not approve air cover for the landings. The men did not accept it at first. Too unbelievably stupid and cruel. A colonel in golf togs walked through. The men shouted at superiors, damn near grew violent. Someone vomited lazily in a wastebasket, leaning over with his hands on his knees. Win Everett arrived from Miami, wrote out a letter of resignation, tore it up, flew back to Miami to be with exile leaders who were confined in a barracks at Opa-Locka so they would not leak word of the landings. It was the first major death watch in South Florida that week.

  No one used the term textbook operation. Three days later Radio Swan was still on the air, promising the abandoned troops in Zapata swamp that help was on the way. Larry slept on a cot in grubby clothes but made it a point to shave every day. Shaving had an impact on his morale and he needed all the help he could get. Several weeks earlier he’d borrowed heavily to buy stock in Francisco Sugar at depressed prices. Sugar was the word going round. There were stunning profits to be made, insiders said, once the plantations were back in U.S. control.

  “People think we’re the strangest marriage,” Beryl said.

  “Why should they? Who? What’s strange about us?”

  “Only everything.”

  “People think we’re interesting. That’s my impression.”

  “They think we’re strange. We have nothing in common. We have no practical reason for being. We never even talk about practical things.”

  “We have no children. We’re not parents. Parents talk about practical things. They have reasons to be practical.”

  “With or without children. Believe me. We’re considered strange.”

  “I don’t think we’re strange. I think we’re interesting.”

  “We’re interesting in a way. But we’re also strange. I’m the one they focus on. I’m the stranger of the two.”

  “I don’t like conversations like this. I don’t know how to have these conversations.”

  “They’re probably not a good idea.”

  “So let’s change the subject,” he said.

  “Although the fact of the matter is you’re far stranger, love, than I could ever think of being.”

  “Strange how? I’m not strange. I don’t like this at all.”

  “Strange like a man. Strange like someone I could never know the heart of, the truth of.”

  “This is thankfully outside my range.”

  “I don’t think I could ever begin to imagine in years and years of living intimately with a man what it is like to be him.”

  “Funny. I thought women were the secret.”

  “No no no no no,” she said softly, as if correcting a touchy child. “That’s the wisdom handed down from man to boy, through the ages, a hundred generations of knowledge and experience. But it is just another Agency lie.”

  From the moment the CIA monitored a rebel broadcast on January 1, 1959, announcing that the tyrant Batista had fled the country at 2:00 A.M. and that Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz was the supreme leader of the Cuban revolution, from that moment to this, four and a half years later, as he stood in his striped robe mixing a drink for his wife, Larry Parmenter had been involved in one or another plot to get Cuba back. Soldiering on, Beryl said. She liked to remind him that he was not vindictive, had no strong political convictions, did not hate Castro or wish to see physical harm come to him. Larry was famous in fact for going to a costume party as Fidel Castro, with beard, cigar, khaki fatigues, about a month before the invasion. Seemed funny at the time.

  One thing Larry didn’t like at all. This was the kind of fellow he’d occasionally had to deal with in joint efforts to recover investments in Cuba. The gambling interests, the casinos and hotels, the men who bought off officials routinely, who sent a steady traffic of couriers with hefty satchels moving through the Bahamas to the International Credit Bank in Geneva—men who thought longingly of the millions they’d once skimmed from the gaming tables in Havana. He wanted nothing to do with those roly-poly wops.

  Earlier that day a young man walked into the outer office at Guy Banister Associates in New Orleans. Delphine Roberts was at her desk typing a revised list of civil-rights organizations for Banister’s files. The young man stood patiently waiting, in jeans with rolled cuffs, two days’ stubble on his chin. Delphine stopped typing long enough to pat her teased hair, a nervous habit she was determined to overcome. Then she resumed her work, aware that the young man was studying a calendar on the wall in order to kid himself into thinking he was not being made to
wait. She knew all the styles. She could type a complicated text and scrutinize a visitor at the same time. This visitor had a little smile that seemed to say, Here I am—just the fellow you’ve been waiting for.

  “I would like to fill out an application for a position with the firm. ”

  Delphine kept on typing.

  “You have people who do undercover work, I believe, like mingle with students or go to political meetings. I am referring to collecting information. I want to apply to become an undercover agent. I have a verified alias. I have served in the armed forces. And I have lived abroad in a situation that gave me special depth into the communist mentality.”

  Delphine was not surprised. They had some thought-provoking individuals walking in unannounced at 544 Camp. This address tended to draw people from a colorful range of backgrounds.

  She stopped typing long enough to give the young man an application. He said he had to get back to work at the coffee company around the comer but he would fill out the form and return it in the morning. Then he was gone.

  David Ferrie came out of the small back room and said in his routine disbelieving’ whisper, “Who on earth was that?”

  “He has a verified alias.”

  “Do we have forms for undercover agents?”

  “No. It’s just a normal form.”

  “Like height and weight.”

  “Whatever it says. I don’t know.”

  “Like insanity in the family. Or give us the history of your disease. ”

  “It says whatever you want it to say, Dave. I’m very, very busy. ”

  “How can a person explain his disease on a printed form?”

  David Ferrie went into Guy Banister’s office, which was empty, and looked out the street-side window, trying to catch a glimpse of the young man whose voice he’d just been listening to. Had he caught something familiar in the tone? Would he be able to match a body to the voice? He looked at the swarm of people moving down the street. Dark folks aplenty, he thought. But no sign of the sweet-voiced boy who wants to be a spy.