Libra

  In Fort Worth

  Even coming back he was a military man. His father was a veteran. His brothers were in the service. My own brother was a navy man. We were a serviceman family. He sent me a regular allotment every month out of his pay and when he heard about my injury, which I said in a letter, he put in for a hardship discharge as I was disabled from work and trying for six months to collect on my claim. He was stationed in California then and they let him go early in order to help his mother. This is the injury of a candy jar falling off a shelf that four doctors have taken x-rays of my nose and face and there is travel time and carfare and the store is still holding tight to their cash. I am a disabled woman who can’t collect. It is like the days of Mr. Ekdahl, a ten-thousand-dollar-a-year man with an expense account who fixed it so my welfare was ignored.

  I am leaving out Lee had a beautiful voice and sang beautifully at age six in Covington, Louisiana. He sang a solo in the Lutheran church, “Silent Night,” and that can be verified.

  Now this boy comes home from the service and says he will work on a cargo ship and send money home to me. That was our only conversation over three days where he slept on a col in the kitchen, which was the only place I had for him, plus he told me that he passed his high-school-level tests, Mother, which I don’t know why you need this to lift crates on a boat. He was here only parts of three days before packing a bag and leaving. Then I received a letter postmarked New Orleans that he has booked passage on a ship to Europe. It is painful to accept, your honor. There is nothing in the letter that says cargo. There is nothing about he will work his way for a certain time until I have found a larger place for us to live. It is, “I have booked passage.” It is, “My values are very different from Robert’s or yours.” It is, “I did not tell you about my plans because you could hardly be expected to understand.”

  It is the struggle hanging over my life that made him go away.

  Postcard #3. Aboard the freighter SS Marion Lykes bound for Le Havre. The oddball loner has little to say to the three other passengers on the sixteen-day crossing. Gray seas, high swells, missed meals. He tells them he is going to school in Switzerland but doesn’t mention the name of the institution or the course of study he plans to follow. He avoids a passenger’s friendly attempts to take his picture. She is a nice enough lady whose husband is a lieutenant colonel, U.S. Army, retired. You’d think in the middle of the ocean he’d be able to sit on deck without answering questions from some clear-eyed military type. He talks least of all to the fourth passenger, his cabin mate, a boy just out of high school and on his way to France to study French. He is a Texas boy and just close enough to Lee outwardly to be the world’s preferred version of the type.

  It is like the shadow of his own life keeps falling across his path.

  He watches them at dinner in the officers’ mess and he thinks he knows why they look so satisfied with themselves. They have begun to feel the bond of being American. They almost glow with self-awareness, headed for foreign shores, surrounded and attended by a partly foreign and mainly dark-skinned crew, delighting in their own straightforward and affirmative ways, their democratic values, their moral strength, the way they hold their knife and fork, smiling over the glitter, and this is why he will not eat with them or share their conversation.

  The spiral rind of a tangerine sits in a white saucer in front of him. He thinks of the nine months he spent at the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro in California, after Japan. He continued his Russian studies, learned some Spanish (it was the time of Fidel Castro) and developed a neat little deception for the venture he was now engaged in.

  At the base library he found a catalogue listing the names of colleges abroad. He scanned the list for obscure schools in certain locations, then wrote away for an application. Albert Schweitzer College. Churwalden, Switzerland. He needed to invent a reason to travel abroad because a Marine has two years in the reserve after active duty.

  On the application form he listed under special interests: Philosophy, Psychology, Ideology, Football, baseball, tennis, Stamp collecting.

  Vocational interest (if decided upon): To be a short story writer on contemporary American life.

  In certain light the sea goes green, a slow dullish tumble he watches from the deck. When he goes below again he lies on his bunk, aware of the great slow creaking of the ship, like a mind stirring around him. Hawsers are ropes for mooring.

  On the Albert Schweitzer application he made it a point to mention that after the term was completed he planned to attend the summer session of the University of Turku—Turku, Finland.

  Hidell creeps closer to the East.

  19 June

  Mary Frances parked under an oak tree on the circular drive outside the College of Education Building, or Old Main. It pleased her that Win’s office was in the oldest building on campus. The building pleased her with its arched entranceways and two-story columns. Denton had its hidden streets, its sense of languorous history, an old American stillness, wistful and unchanged, and these older traces too, older ideas and values scored in limestone and marble, in scroll ornaments atop a column or in the banknote details of a frieze. The Old Main, the county courthouse, the broad-fronted homes, the homes with deep shady porches, the trees, the streets named for trees—all this pleased her, made her think that happiness lived minute by minute in the things she saw and heard. Being happy was a small awareness, the sum of small awarenesses, day by day, minute by minute, and you knew it now, in the hair and skin as much’ as in the heart.

  Suzanne sat next to her mother, arms at her sides, slim white legs pointed straight out, a show’ of mock obedience. They were not talking to each other.

  You could be happy now. It did not have to be experienced in retrospect, as Win believed, as he liked to explain in his mild way, with the face he called a failed professor’s tipped slightly right. It was not a slow-working glow or meditation. You could feel it now, collect it in the names of things around you, in chinaberry, oak and slippery elm. It pleased her to live here, after Miami, Havana, Mexico City, Guatemala City, temporary housing in southeast Virginia (ISOLATION), dusty tracts of identical homes near the Carolina coast (ISOLATION TROPIC).

  They would go to the Steak House on South Locust for jumbo shrimp with salad, french fries and hot rolls and then Win would suggest an ice cream at Lane’s.

  Bright hot skies.

  Silence in the car, on the burning lawns.

  Suzanne was holding her breath.

  In his basement office in the Old Main, Win Everett was on the phone with Parmenter.

  “How does Mackey know all this if he hasn’t made contact?”

  “Whatever T-Jay knows comes out of Banister’s office. Oswald confides in one of Banister’s people.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “In January he orders a snub-nose .38 from a firm in Los Angeles. In March he sends away to Chicago for an Italian carbine with a sniper’s scope.”

  “Armed and dangerous,” Win said softly.

  “Plus. Are you ready? He’s handing out pro-Castro leaflets on the street. He was on the docks two or three days ago pushing leaflets at sailors off an aircraft carrier.”

  Everett looked into space.

  “How does this fit in with the fact that he has the use of an office in the same building as Banister’s detective agency, right above Banister’s office, which is the damn pivot point of the anti-Castro crusade in Louisiana?”

  “It doesn’t fit in,” Parmenter said.

  “I’m glad you said that. I thought I might be missing something.”

  “All I know is what T-Jay tells me. As follows. The subject walks into Banister’s office looking for an undercover job. Banister installs him in a broom closet upstairs. This little-bitty room becomes the New Orleans headquarters of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. And the subject hits the streets in a white shirt and tie, handing out leaflets.”

  They talked about Oswald as the subject in the same way they referred to the Presid
ent as Lancer, which was his Secret Service code name. Habit. One wants the least possible surface to which pain and regret might cling—anyone’s, everyone’s pain. A thought for late afternoon.

  “Let me understand the sequence,” Win said. “The subject leaves Dallas. He is gone, out of our lives, a promising part of our operation lost forever.”

  “Then he turns up in the one place we would never expect to find him.”

  “He turns up, out of nowhere, in New Orleans, in Guy Banister’s office, looking for an undercover assignment. The same fellow who defected to the bloody Soviet Union, who used his mail-order rifle to take a shot at General Walker. Strolls right into the middle of the enemy camp.”

  “Mackey was supposed to ask Guy Banister to find a substitute for our boy. What happens? The original walks in off the street.”

  Everett searched his pockets for a cigarette.

  “You’ve got to get close to the subject,” he said.

  “Oh no.”

  “Look, Larry.”

  “I don’t want personal contact any more than you do, my friend. Give him to Mackey.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Still at the Farm as far as I know.”

  “All right. Look. Get me a sample of the kid’s handwriting.”

  “I’ll talk to T-Jay right away.”

  The hallway was empty. Win climbed the stairs to the main floor. Nobody at the desk. He went outside. School year ended, slow-moving figures in the distance, summer students, maintenance men, and a lawn sprinkler sending out spray in overlapping. arcs, all the lazy brightness of cobwebbed grass.

  Before the murder attempt comes the provocation.

  He’d devised a top-secret memo from the Deputy Director Plans to selected members of the Senior Study Effort, dated May 1961. It concerned the assassination of foreign leaders from a philosophical point of view. It also included a fragment from the psalm-book, not known to the outside world. Terminate with extreme prejudice. Parmenter was handling the actual production of the memo on a suitable typewriter and stationery.

  Two. Through his contacts in Little Havana, Everett had planted a cryptic news item in an exile magazine published in New Jersey. The story,- from an unnamed source, concerned an operation run in July 1961 by the Office of Naval Intelligence out ofGuantánamo, the U. S. base near the eastern end of Cuba. The story was fabricated but the plan itself was real, involving the assassination of Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl. This news item would be found among the subject’s effects after the failed attempt on the life of the President.

  Three. He was working on a scheme involving telephone notes on pages of stationery used by the Technical Services Division. Doodles, phone numbers, abbreviations of the names of advanced poisons produced by a special unit of the division, known entertainingly as the Health Alteration Committee. A person following the sequence of phone numbers would be led along a serendipitous path with a number of ordinary stops (florist, supermarket) as well as the home of an exile leader in Miami, a motel in Key Biscayne known to be mob-run, a yacht moored at a Miami marina—living quarters of the CIA’s chief of station.

  He headed toward the car.

  Local color, background, connections for investigators to ponder. He had other schemes, other documents, authentic, relating to attempts on Castro’s life—attempts he’d personally been involved in at the planning stage. It would be up to Parmenter to get this reading matter, circuitously, into the hands of journalists, subcommittee members and anyone else who might bring them to light. Once people saw the attempt on the President as a Cuban response to repeated efforts of U.S. intelligence to murder Castro, we were all halfway home to getting the island back.

  He saw them sitting in the car. He began to smile, shielding his eyes from the sun. He approached the front door on the passenger side. The wet grass looked spangled in the heat and glare. He tiptoed closer, smiling broadly, waiting for Suzanne to spot him.

  Guy Banister sat alone in the Katz & Jammer Bar. He had his private spot at the near end, where the bar curves into the wall. He liked to sit with his back against the wall, looking out to the street, to the neon heads bobbing past the Falstaff sign in the high window.

  His doctor told him don’t drink. He drank. Don’t smoke. He smoked. Give up the detective agency. He worked longer hours, compiled longer lists, shipped arms, stored munitions, ran a network of clean-cut boys who spied on local universities.

  Dave Ferrie had this routine about a tumor growing on his brain. But it was Banister who had blackouts and dizzy spells, who sat at his desk and watched his hand start trembling, way out there, as if it belonged to someone else.

  He was sixty-three years old, twenty years in the Bureau, a decorated agent drinking alone in a bar.

  He carried a blue-steel Colt under his jacket, chambered for the .357 magnum cartridge. Guy sincerely believed the old reliable .38 special with standard police loads was simply not enough gun for the type of situation a man of his standing might run into any time of day or night. Amen. Beautiful auburn glitter at the bottom of the glass. He knocked back the last of the bourbon and watched the man come forward.

  “We got him coming out of the Biograph in Chicago, July of ’34, shot him dead in an alleyway three doors down from the theater.”

  “This is who are we talking about now,” says the jug-eared barman.

  “Mr. John Dillinger. This is who. Fill the fucking glass.”

  “Rocks or not?”

  “Famous finish. Old Dillinger buffs could tell you what was playing at the movie house when we gunned him down.”

  “All right I’ll bite.”

  “Manhattan Melodrama with Clark Gable.”

  The barman poured the drink, oblivious.

  “Whenever there’s a famous finish in the vicinity of a movie house, it behoovès you to know what’s playing.”

  “I don’t doubt it, Mr. Banister.”

  “This is history with a fucking flourish.”

  He’d shipped munitions to the Keys for the bombing of refineries, for the Bay of Pigs. There was so much ordnance stored in his office he had to get Ferrie to take some home. Ferrie had land mines stacked in his kitchen. With dozens of factions angling for a second invasion, something had to happen soon. The government knew it. Raids and seizures were commonplace now. Things were turning upside down.

  He saw the kid Oswald walk past the window on his way home from work at the William Reily Coffee Company. Another bobbing head in the great New Orleans current.

  The hand starts trembling way out there. -It has nothing to do with him.

  He worked longer hours, compiled longer lists. He had researchers coming up with names all the time. He wanted lists of subversives, leftist professors, congressmen with dubious voting records. He wanted lists of niggers, nigger lovers, armed niggers, pregnant niggers, light-skinned niggers, niggers married to whites. You couldn’t photograph a nigger. He’d never seen a picture of a nigger where you could make out the features. It’s just a fact-of nature they don’t emit light.

  The Times-Picayune was full of stories about the civil-rights program of JFK. You could photograph a Kennedy all right. That’s what a Kennedy was for. The man with the secrets gives off the glow.

  We gave away Eastern Europe. We gave away China. We gave away Cuba, just ninety miles off our coast. We’re getting ready to give away Southeast Asia. We’ll give away white America next. We’ll give it to the Nee-groes. One thing Guy couldn’t stand about these sit-ins and marches. When the goddamn whites get to singing. The whole occasion falls apart. It makes everyone feel bad.

  He called the barman over.

  “You know this Kennedy goes around with ten or fifteen people who look just like him. You know about that?”

  “ No. ”

  “You never heard about that?”

  “I never heard he had anybody.”

  “He has got them,” Banister said.

  “That look like him.”

  “He has got
about fifteen. Whenever he goes anyplace, they go too. They’re on constant fucking standby. You know why? Diversionary. Because he knows he’s made a lot of people mad,”

  He was as old as the century, twenty years in the Bureau, a dignitary in the local police until he fired his gun into the ceiling of some tourist bar.

  He finished his drink and got up to leave.

  Public enemy number one. Sweltering night in July. We got him in an alley near the Biograph.

  His office was next door to the bar but he did not use the Camp Street entrance, which was where they’d be waiting to blast him if and when the time came, now or later, day or night. He used the side entrance, on Lafayette, and trudged up the stairs to the second floor.

  Delphine was at the desk in the outer office. She gave him a little prissy look that meant she knew he’d been drinking. With a mistress like this, he didn’t need a wife.

  “There’s something I think you definitely ought to know,” she said.

  “Chances are I do know.”

  “Not this you don’t.”

  He sat on the vinyl sofa that Ferrie said carried cancer agents and took his time shaking a cigarette out of the pack and lighting it. He had à Zippo he’d caffied.through the war that still worked perfect, with a whoosh and flare.

  “It’s about this Leon upstairs, whatever his name is, working in the vacant room.”

  “Oswald.”

  “I was up there after lunch trying to track down some files that just got up and walked off. There was no one in the office. Just small piles of handbills on a table. What do they say? Hands off Cuba. Fair Play for Cuba. This is pro-Castro material sitting on a table right over our heads.”

  Guy Banister gave a little twirl of the hand that held the cigarette.

  “Go ahead, what else,” he said, an amused light in his eye.

  “This is no joke, Guy. There is inflammatory reading matter in that little office.”