Libra

  “I know you have connections,” Karlinsky said. “But this is not the same as so-and-so is connected.”

  “What is Cuba, nothing?”

  “I understand full well you took some trips for people.”

  “This is when Cuba was popular in the press.”

  “You did some things for the Bureau too,” Karlinsky said.

  “Where is this? Is this something I’m just hearing?”

  “Please. You volunteered your services to the FBI in March 1959. They opened a file.”

  “Jack, you know as well as I.”

  “Potential criminal informant. You informed a little bit here, a little bit there.”

  “This is for my own protection in case something is held against me, so I can say look.”

  “Jack, it means nothing to me personally. I appreciate you are known in New Orleans, you are known in Dallas. You are a constant face in Dallas.”

  “I have associations going back to the old Chicago days which I am prouder of than anything in my life, Newberry Street, Morgan Street, the pushcarts, the gangs.”

  “We all love the old Chicago stories. What do you think I was born here? Nobody is born in Dallas. We all carry the old Chicago thing, and the street life, and the scrappy days. But we are speaking here about a very sizable loan and the boys are naturally picky who gets the use of their capital.”

  Jack went through his desk drawers.

  “Look, I can show you notices of tax liens, rejections of compromise offers. They’re all over me about excise taxes. I am getting killed, Jack. They have history sheets on me this thick. I keep running in to pay cash in trickles. Two hundred dollars, two hundred and fifty dollars. In other words to show them some concern. But it’s like a kid on an errand. I am in for over forty-four thousand dollars to the IRS alone and on top of that there is this union that wants me to ease up on the hours of the girls, there is this competition next door that is killing me with amateur nights and there is this girl from New Orleans that’s gonna close me down for popping her G-string.”

  Jack Karlinsky had an invisible laugh. You heard it down in his throat but didn’t see anything in his face that resembled mirth. He wore a sport coat over a turtleneck shirt and smoked a panatela. Jack checked out the shoes and haircut. He admitted left and right he was still learning how to live.

  “I am telling my lawyer to settle eight cents on the dollar.”

  “Jack, they will tell you.”

  “I know. ”

  “This is not a proposal they are drooling to accept.”

  “So I have to resolve in my own mind.”

  “You have to resolve in your own mind who you want to owe this money to. It is not found money. I have structured a deal here that I am not looking to pull in five points a week like the neighborhood loanshark. We are talking about a forty-thousand-dollar loan. We are speaking in a range of one thousand dollars a week vigorish.”

  “Which is ninety-two thousand total after one year.”

  “Or you keep paying the vig.”

  “Till my balls drop off.”

  “This is correct, Jack.”

  “Just to say. What if I can’t pay one week?”

  “One week, they will let it ride. They don’t want to pop you on the head, Jack. They let it ride.”

  “Two, three weeks.”

  “The procedure you would do here is take out a second loan. This is not a good idea because you would pay the vig on one amount while they are actually giving you a lesser amount. Frankly, do you want my advice?”

  “What?”

  “Frankly, don’t take the loan. You can’t make a vig like that with your kind of operation that you’re running here. You will fall deep into the pit.”

  “It’s my pit, Jack.”

  “It’s your pit but it’s not your money.”

  “What happens, just saying, if I miss five weeks, six weeks?”

  “If you are bled totally dry and white, they will simply stop the clock. Which is, pay the principal, forget the interest. In other words this fellow is known to us and we will settle for a piece of his business plus the original sum. They don’t want to blow up the building.”

  “But they will grab my business.”

  “This is the ballfield you’re playing on.”

  “What if I can’t pay the principal?”

  “Jack, this is what I’m telling you. I’m saying explore other avenues.”

  “A bank would make a credit check. They won’t give me ten cents.”

  “Think of friends, relatives. Take a partner into the business.”

  “I can’t work with other people. I already have backers. My sister manages the Vegas for me. We fight all the time.”

  “You strike me a little unreasonable. You have to grasp a major point. You are not outfit, Jack. Understand connected.”

  The drums were going out front.

  “All right. Say this. I am willing to go for five hundred a week interest over one year when the convention business will pick up by then.”

  “I structured a serious deal here.”

  “Jack, take it to them and tell them. Mention I talk to Tony Push all the time. He has the reputation he’s very close to Carmine Latta. ”

  “Carmine is not in loanshark in a big way.”

  “I am only saying make a statement that I am known to Tony Astorina. ”

  Karlinsky looked at him. A silent countdown. Then he said he would do whatever Jack asked. He had a deep, smooth and reasonable voice, gone hollow now, and a house with a giant searchlight, and a perfect turquoise pool, and four daughters and a son, and Jack Ruby wondered if this is what it takes to look invincible.

  They shook hands in the doorway and then the older man stepped back into the office, briefly, as if he had a happy secret to reveal.

  “The jacket is mohair. Look.”

  Then they walked to the head of the narrow stairway that led down to the street. They shook hands again. The saxophone was blatting. Jack took a Preludin with a glass of water at the bar for a favorable future outlook. Then he walked among the tables to mingle with the crowd. What is the point of running a club if you can’t do that?

  Dinner at home was a quiet affair with harpsichord concertos on the stereo and conversation coming in small runs. Beryl watched her husband raise the wineglass to his lips. Larry didn’t drink his wine. He chewed it. To savor the tonality—the dryness, or the wetness. This is how we build a civilization, he liked to say. We chew our wine.

  “You don’t look happy,” she said. “You haven’t looked happy in a while. I want you to feel good again. Say something funny.”

  “You’re the funny one.”

  “I am always the funny one, the strange one, the tiny one. I want you to assume one of these thankless roles.”

  They ate in silence for some moments.

  “Remember the missile flap?” he said. “It’s about ten months now since U-2 planes photographed offensive missiles in Cuba. Guess what? They’ve come up with something new. ”,

  “Do I want to know what it is?”

  “A Soviet surveying team has found a major oil field. And it’s precisely the area where I’d arranged drilling contracts. I saw the photos last week and they were so detailed I could recognize the terrain. I was there. I stood right there. I visited the fields. We did mineral surveys. There was serious money behind us.”

  “Your oil. Your field.”

  “Ours. And better ours than the goddamn Russians. You know what they’ll do to that island. Drain the living blood out of it.”

  “I don’t doubt it. But it’s hard sometimes to live with a man who never, never, never lets go.”

  “This is damn right I don’t let go.”

  They let it drop for a while. She got up and turned over the record. It was raining hard and she caught a glimpse of someone running in the street.

  “Let me explain about obsessions,” he said.

  “Oh yes please.”

  “I take a s
weeping view of the subject.”

  “God yes.”

  “It’s the job of an intelligence service to resolve a nation’s obsessions. Cuba is a fixed idea. It is prickly in a way Russia is not. More unresolved. More damaging to the psyche. And this is our job, to remove the psychic threat, to learn so much about Castro, decipher his intentions, undermine his institutions to such a degree that he loses the power to shape the way we think, to shape the way we sleep at night.”

  “Maybe what I don’t understand is why Cuba. Do I know the first thing about this island? Is it West Indian, is it Spanish, is it white, is it black, is it mulatto, is it Latin American, is it Creole, is it Chinese? Why do we think it belongs to us?”

  “It’s not a question of belongs to us. It’s a question of something working beautifully, of private investment being given the chance to help a country rise in the world, and Cuba was rising in distribution, manufacturing, literacy, social services, and any high-school student can make a solid case that the flaws and excesses of the Batista regime could have been contained without a revolution and certainly without a march into the communist camp.”

  They fell silent again. The power of his feelings made her want to pause. There weren’t many things he believed in strongly. She felt a shrinking in herself, the old pathetic readiness to give in quietly. But what was there to fight about? She didn’t know the subject. She saw the world in news clippings and picture captions, the world becoming bizarre, the world it is best to see in one-column strips that you send to friends. Refuge only in irony. If her aim was to go unnoticed, then why fight?

  “Things are looking better in some areas,” he said. “There are things I’m not unhappy about at all. I am making something of a professional comeback. There is talk of moving me to the Office of Finance. There is a field unit in Buenos Aires. This is not to be discussed, of course. I’ll work in money markets, making sure we have foreign currencies on hand for certain operations.”

  “Is this a plum, Buenos Aires?”

  “I don’t know where it stands in the fruit-and-vegetable kingdom. It is just goddamn good of them to give me this chance. The Agency understands. It’s amazing really how deeply they understand. This is why some of us see the Agency in a way that has nothing to do with jobs or institutions or governments. We are goddamn grateful for their understanding and trust. The Agency is always willing to consider a man in a new light. This is the nature of the business. There are shadows, there are new lights. The deeper the ambiguity, the more we believe, the more we trust, the more we band together.”

  It was remarkable how often he talked to her about these things. The Agency was the one subject in his life that could never be exhausted. Central Intelligence. Beryl saw it as the best organized church in the Christian world, a mission to collect and store everything that everyone has ever said and then reduce it to a microdot and call it God. She needed to live in small dusty rooms, layered safely in, out of the reach of dizzying things, of heat and light and strange spaces, and Larry needed the great sheltering nave of the Agency. He believed that nothing can be finally known that involves human motive and need. There is always another level, another secret, a way in which the heart breeds a deception so mysterious and complex it can only be taken for a deeper kind of truth.

  There were anemones in a bud vase on the table. The phone rang and Beryl went to her desk in the living room to answer. It was a man named Thomas Stainback. She knew from the tone of voice that it was a call Larry would take upstairs. She simply stood in the doorway. When he saw her, he got up from the table. She waited for him to climb the stairs to the guest room and pick up the phone and then she put the receiver down softly and went in to drink her coffee.

  Parmenter said, “I’m here,” and waited for Everett to ask the first question on the list.

  “What do we know about schedule?”

  “It looks like mid-November.”

  “That gives us time. I’m anxious to hear what Mackey is doing.”

  “He knows we’ve got Miami. I haven’t told him when.”

  “Tell him right away.”

  “I can’t find him,” Parmenter said.

  A pause on the other end.

  “Is he reassigned?”

  “I did some very delicate checking. He’s not at the Farm or anywhere else he might logically be. There is no trace. It’s beginning to look like he just submerged for a time.”

  “It’s a reassignment,” Everett said.

  “I looked into it, Win. I was extremely goddamn thorough. He is not in a cover situation. He is supposed to be training JOTs and he isn’t.”

  “Does it mean he’s out? We can’t operate without Mackey.”

  “He’s setting up. That’s all. He’ll get in touch.”

  “He can’t just walk away.” ,

  “He’ll get in touch. You know the man is solid.”

  “I’ve had a foreboding,” Everett said.

  “He’s setting up. I’ll get in my car one morning and find him sitting there. He wants this to happen as much as we do.”

  “I’ve had a feeling these past weeks that something isn’t right.”

  “Everything is right. The city, the time, the preparations. The man is absolutely solid.”

  “I believe in the power of premonitions.”

  Larry put down the phone. Downstairs he found Beryl at the table with the newspaper, her coffee and a pair of scissors. Pages were spread over the wineglasses and dinner plates.

  He’d stopped commenting on this oddness of hers. She said the news clippings she sent to friends were a perfectly reasonable way to correspond. There were a thousand things to clip and they all said something about the way she felt. He watched her read and cut. She wore half-glasses and worked the scissors grimly. She believed these were personal forms of expression. She believed no message she could send a friend was more intimate and telling than a story in the paper about a violent act, a crazed man, a bombed Negro home, a Buddhist monk who sets himself on fire. Because these are the things that tell us how we live.

  Baby LeGrand stood at the end of the runway, knees bent, hands locked behind her neck, the drummer going boom to the jolt of her pelvis, and she scanned the club meantime, making out shapes beneath the tinted lights, whole lives that she could diagram in seconds, oh sailors and college boys, just the usual, plus a waitress taking setups to the hard drinkers, a kid in a skimpy outfit that makes her titties bulge. She ran a sash between her legs and waved it slow-motion through the baby spot. She eyed the table of off-duty cops drinking their cut-rate beer. She saw the odd-job boy taking Polaroids of the customers which Jack will present as gifts. These are men in suit and tie, on business in the city, and men who come with dates to do the twist between sets. Brenda knows the twist crowd. She likes the younger cops if they are blue-eyed. She knows the smallest tomato stain on the narrowest tie because the only food is pizza from up the street, which somebody sticks in the warmer. Meantime the drummer’s picking up the beat and a sailor says go go go. She drags the sash through the smoke and dust, scans the bar for the lowlife types that Jack drags in off the street, sad sacks and drifters he feels sorry for. And there is the gambling element or whatever they are, the vending-machine and Sicilian element, men of sharp practices, standing frozen at the back of the club. It’s the whole Carousel in a five-second glimpse, plus the tourists from Topeka. They are saying go go go. They are crying for a garment. They want the piece of silk that passed between her legs. They are here to bathe in the flesh of the sleepwalking girl, the girl who wakes up naked in a throbbing crowd. This is how it always seems to Baby L. She is having a private fit in the middle of the night, like she is demonized, and wakes up naked in a different dream, where strange men are clutching at her body. Does anybody here know the stupid truth? She wants to be a real-estate agent who drives people around in a station wagon that is painted like wood. An award-winning realtor in a fern-green suit. But she is humping a spotlight in front of a crowd, flinging sweat
from her belly and thighs, and the tassels on her pasties are swishing to the beat.

  She did her trademark twirl of the breasts, one breast spinning clockwise, the other counter, and quickly disappeared.

  Then she showered and wrapped herself in a towel and sat in the dressing room, smoking. This was the time when a cigarette was the purest pleasure known.

  Lynette was in street clothes sitting at the next mirror. She had her head in a copy of Look.

  “If I had the slightest sense,” Brenda told her, “I’d get what I’m owed and just scram. I have a seven-year old and a four-year old and I am half the time too tired to say hello.”

  Lynette turned a page. She said, “I will tell you this Bobby Kennedy is right up my alley. Bobby is the one who could make me crazy. He has got this little hard gleam. Ten minutes with Bobby, I am out of my head.”

  “He doesn’t do a thing for me.”

  “He could drive me into wah wah land.”

  “Where is that, Lynette?”

  “He has got this little meanness in the eye but he doesn’t really know it like?”

  “I think he knows it,” Brenda said. “Give me his brother any day. Jack would be better in bed. I like a lover with some shoulder to him. I stay away from these rabbity types.”

  “Bobby’s an athalete.”

  “The President is mature to handle a woman like us. Not that I’m ready to settle down with the man.”

  “You need one of those bouffant hairdos like Jackie.”

  “I need more than that.”

  “You got the knockers, Brenda.”

  “Tit tit tit. This is my Achilles heel you’re pointing out. Too much talent up front. It means a bunch of trouble.”

  “What’s he do anyway, the Attorney General?”

  “Are you kidding? He’s the top cop.”

  “Top cop or top cock?”

  “Same difference,” Brenda said.

  There was some kind of commotion out front. They could hear a few voices and a glass or bottle breaking. Lynette turned a page.

  “Do you believe what they say about tell a person exactly when you were born, to the hour and the minute, and they can figure out everything about you?”