Libra

  Mackey sat in the dark again.

  Some of Alpha’s boldest operations were run by elements hidden in the Agency. Alpha had CIA mentors. These were men Mackey wasn’t even close to knowing. They weren’t necessarily known to the leaders of Alpha. A case officer would show up to provide money and to advise on sabotage missions. He would limit his contacts to one or two men in Alpha. They would not know his real name or his position in the Agency. There’s always something they aren’t letting you know. Alpha was run like a dream clinic. The Agency worked up a vision, then got Alpha to make it come true.

  Too many people, too many levels of plotting. Mackey had to safeguard the attempt not only from Alpha but from Everett and Parmenter. They might decide to expose the plan now that he’d removed himself from contact, leaving them to their hieroglyphics. Then Banister and Ferrie and the men dealing out the cash. He had to protect the attempt, make it safe from betrayal.

  He waved a hand at the persistent hum that jumped around his ear. A mosquito is a vector of disease. He got out of the car and listened. Something felt strange. Then he heard a vast rustling in the trees, coming louder with the wind. It took him some time to realize it was only water tapping on the leaves, rainwater stirred by the wind and falling leaf to leaf, everywhere around him.

  His own car was parked next to Raymo’s. It was a three-hour drive to New Orleans, where he would talk to Banister about Alpha 66. Let everyone know. Let everyone tell everyone.

  Mackey would put every effort into Miami. He would put men and weapons into Miami. Agree to a joint operation with Alpha. Do the groundwork. Get people and money moving. Eighteen November in Miami. He would build a Miami façade.

  In New Orleans

  The first thing he did was take a bus to the end of the Lakeview line to see his father’s grave. The keeper helped him find the stone. He stood there in the heat and light, searching for a way to feel. He pictured a man in a gray suit, a collector for Metropolitan Life. Then his mind wandered through a hundred local scenes. Oh bike-riding in City Park. Seafood dinners at Aunt Lillian’s every Friday when he was eleven, after he took the train alone from Texas. He hid in the back room reading funnybooks while his cousins fought and played.

  A man in a gray suit who tips his hat to women.

  In Exchange Alley there was a Negro hunkered on the curb looking in the side mirror of a parked car as he shaved, his mug and his brush on the pavement next to him.

  Lee looked up Oswald in the phone book, tracking lost relations.

  Lee looked for work. He lied on all his job applications. He lied needlessly and to a purpose. He made up past addresses, made up references and past employment, invented job qualifications, wrote down names of companies that didn’t exist and companies that did, although he’d never worked for them.

  An interviewer noted on a card: Suit. Tie. Polite.

  Marina sat in a chair on the screened-in side porch. She held Lee’s half-finished glass of Dr Pepper. It was nearly midnight and still wet and hot and awful. This was their home now, three rooms in a frame house with a little bit of gingerbread up top and some weedy vegetation at the front and side.

  Lee was out there somewhere with the garbage. They couldn’t afford a garbage can so he slipped out three nights a week to stuff their garbage in other people’s containers. He went out wearing basketball shorts from his childhood or the childhood of one of his brothers, no top, and sneaked along the 4900 block of Magazine Street looking for a can to stuff the trash.

  She watched him come back now, walking up the neighbor’s driveway, which was how you reached the entrance to their part of the house. He came onto the porch and took the glass from her hand. TV voices traveled across the backyards and drive-ways.

  “I am sitting here thinking he doesn’t love me anymore.”

  “Papa loves his wife and child.”

  “He thinks I am binding him like a rope or chain. His attitude is I bind him. He has the high-flying world of his ideas. If only he didn’t have a wife to hold him back, how perfect everything would be. ”

  “We’re here to start over,” he said.

  “I am thinking he wants me to go back to Russia. This is what he means by starting over.”

  “Russia is one idea. I’ve also been working on the idea I could hijack a plane, take a plane and go to Cuba and then you’ll come with June to live there.”

  “First you shoot at a man.”

  “We may not be finished with him.”

  “I am finished with him.”

  “There’s a travel ban to Cuba.”

  “And you are finished with him. Leaving me a note.”

  “Little Cuba needs trained soldiers and advisers.”

  “Scaring me to death. Now you want to steal an airplane. Who will fly it?”

  “Stupid. The pilot. I kidnap it, I hijack it. It’s a flight to Miami and I take my revolver and go in the flight cabin. It’s called the flight cabin. ”

  “Who is stupid? Which one of us?”

  “My snub-nose revolver. My two-inch Commando.”

  She had to laugh at that.

  “I stick up the plane and tell them to drop me in Havana.”

  They both laughed. They took turns drinking the warm soda pop. Then he went around with the spray can squirting roaches. Marina stood in the doorway watching. They had roaches in large numbers, really extraordinary numbers. She told him he would never kill a roach with the cheap spray he bought. She followed him into the kitchen, telling him that roaches drink these cheaper sprays and have babies. She watched him spray the baseboards carefully, with strict precision, so he wouldn’t waste a drop.

  The next evening he took her to the French Quarter and they rode the streetcar home. Tourists glanced at the Russian-speaking couple. Exotic New Orleans.

  They made love on the small bed in the closed room. He had the feeling she wanted more, more of something, more of body, money, things, excitement, and he knew it in the technicalities of the act, in the breathing minutes, mysteriously.

  He was paid a dollar fifty an hour to grease coffee machines. The maintenance man complained that he couldn’t read Lee’s notations in the greasing log. He complained that he couldn’t find Lee, that he had to go through the building top to bottom looking for him. Lee stuck out his index finger and raised his thumb, holding the pose for a moment. Then he dropped the thumb and went “Pow.”

  The main library at Lee Circle was gone. He had to ask people where the new one was located. He walked north and then east and when he found the building he took a placard out of a manila envelope and unfolded it. The placard had a hole at either end with a string going through. He stood in front of the library with the placard strung around his neck and started handing out pamphlets he’d been receiving in the mail from the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

  He wore a short-sleeve white shirt and dark tie. He’d written in crayon on the placard: Viva Fidel.

  About a minute and a half later the Feebees pounced. A man came sauntering up showing the grin of a long-lost pal. His name was Agent Bateman.

  “Seriously. I’m not here to arrest or harass you. Let’s find a place to sit and talk.”

  They went to a sorry-looking diner near the Trailways station. It was late afternoon, a Saturday, and nobody was in the place. They sat at the counter and spent some time reading the bill of fare on the wall. Agent Bateman was probably younger than he looked at first glance, a man with a longish head, balding, like a high-school coach and science teacher in a TV series.

  The only thing slick about him was his shoes, which were shined into the fourth dimension.

  “We have you in our files at the field office here. I’m the fellow who keeps an eye.”

  “You handle my file.”

  “Ever since your defection. Queries come in, due to you were born here. ”

  “I like the high old ceilings and the live oaks.”

  “Is that why you’re back?”

  “They talked to me once before.
An Agent Freitag.”

  “That was Fort Worth. I am New Orleans.”

  “My Russian period is over. That was long ago. Why can’t I just live my life without someone coming around, coming around?”

  “I have the theory, Hey, there’s nothing in the world that’s harder to do than live a straightforward life. I go so far to say there’s no such thing.”

  “What do you want?” Lee said.

  “Right now? A grilled-cheese sandwich with crisp bacon, which is impossible to get because they grill everything together and the cheese gets done before the bacon. It’s a law of physics. So you get pale bubbly bacon. I know about your correspondence with Fair Play for Cuba in New York and the Socialist Workers Party and so on. Routine mail intercepts. I could spend about four hours a day making your life miserable. Visit your place of work. Put out lead sheets to have you and your wife and your relatives interviewed and reinterviewed to the end of recorded time. ”

  Lee still had the placard around his neck.

  “Or I could sit you down and talk to you about our mutual interests. Like you want to carry on your political activities without being pestered on a daily basis.”

  “And you want.”

  “There is a crackdown in progress. This anti-Castro business has gotten out of hand. There’s a group called Alpha 66 that makes hit-and-run attacks on Soviet ships in Cuban ports. People in Washington are very unhappy. It’s an embarrassment to the administration, and they’re determined to stop it, and the Bureau has orders to gather intelligence against these groups that are shipping arms and making raids.”

  It occurred to Lee that this man thought he’d performed some function for Agent Freitag in Fort Worth. He must be in the files as a cooperating Marxist, ha ha, or part-time political informer.

  “There’s a detective agency here in town,” Bateman said. “It operates as a nerve center for the anti-Castro movement in the area. A man named Guy Banister runs the office. He is ex-FBI. Normally speaking we are on the same side. We trade information with Banister all the time. But sometimes there is the necessity of, we turn around, we turn about. I want to get inside Guy Banister Associates. I need a little opening, a crack in the wall. By the way I want to ask. Were you with the Office of Naval Intelligence, going into Russia? Because I know a communication was sent from our Fort Worth desk to ONI.”

  “They had a false defector program.”

  “Inserting people. This I’m aware of.”

  “There are gray areas in ONI. I’m one of those areas.”

  Bateman seemed to appreciate the remark. He said, “That’s only fitting because in this city at this particular time, black is white is black. In other words people are playing havoc with the categories. ”

  There was a trace of enthusiasm in his voice.

  “Banister recruits students. He has students go into campus situations to monitor leftist activity. You’re student-age. You’re familiar with the language of left and right. You know your Cuba.”

  “I approach Banister for an assignment but I’m actually an informer for the Bureau.”

  “We use the word informant. It’s not sleazy and ratty terminology. What would you say to being developed along those lines? You’d be surprised at the status of some of our informants. Off the top of my head I’d say we could stock the alumni association of a fair-size college.”

  They sat over their lunch plates for a moment, thinking it all out. There was a Merry Xmas sign going gray on the wall.

  “Now tell me, do I keep going? Because this business implies trust. It is tricky to bring off. It requires a certain kind of individual. There is risk and chance in these things. But there’s also solid trust. There is complete backing. I give that to an informant.”

  Lee ate his food, showing nothing.

  “How it might operate goes something like this. You walk into Banister’s office. It is convenient to your place of work, right around the comer. You tell them you’re an ex-Marine and you mention contacts with the Bureau in the state of Texas. Make it clear you’re a Castro hater. Tell them you want to pose as a leftist, to infiltrate local organizations.”

  “I could tell them I’m starting an organization.”

  “This is a thought.”

  “A local office, like, Fair Play for Cuba.”

  “This has possibilities.”

  “I could get pamphlets from New York in large quantities, plus application forms.”

  “This is promising,” Bateman said. “You tell Banister you will start a chapter right here in town. This will draw pro-Castro people to your door. You’ll gather names and addresses. Banister loves a good list.”

  “It goes round and round.”

  “You seem to pretend.”

  “But I’m not pretending.”

  “But you are pretending.”

  They ate their lunch. Bateman explained that if Guy Banister wanted to check Oswald’s background, he would naturally contact the local FBI office, specifically Bateman, who would provide highly selective information. He also explained that he wasn’t allowed to drink coffee. The Director had placed a ban, making the Bureau free of addictive stimulants.

  “I think Banister will be interested. But don’t expect funds. This would be a tiny sideline for him. I’ll arrange an informant’s fee of two hundred dollars a month. Out of this, you run your project. And of course you tell me what they’re doing at 544 Camp Street. Because they’re doing something all the time.”

  “I want to study politics and economics.”

  “You’re an interesting fellow. Every agency from here to the Himalayas has something in the files on Oswald, Lee. One thing I have to be sure about. No one else shares your services. This is Bureau policy. I can’t do business with an informant who has a relationship with another agency. Are we okay on that?”

  “We’re okay,” Lee told him.

  “You can carry on your politics in the open. That’s the charm of the thing. And you’re right around the corner from those people. Location-wise, it’s perfect.”

  Lee took a bus down to Camp Street, the placard back in the envelope, and walked around the building several times. Streets in deep shade. No one around but winos in Lafayette Square and a woman in a long coat and heavy white socks who seemed upset that he was walking behind her. She stopped to let him pass, muttering urgently, her hand making a motion like hurry up.

  Trotsky is the pure form.

  The rear seat of an automobile lay in the middle of the sidewalk. A man coated in dirt and vomit was spread out there, one arm dangling, and he looked so sick or hurt or crazy it was not possible to enjoy the picture of a car seat without a car, plunked down on a sidewalk.

  Trotsky brushing roaches off the page, reading economic theory in a hovel in eastern Siberia, exiled with his wife and baby girl.

  On Monday, during his ten-minute break from work,, he went to 544 and got an application from a secretary. The building had two entrances, two addresses. One for who you are, one for who you say you are.

  He bought a Warrior-brand rubber stamping kit for ninety-eight cents. He wrote to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, asking for a charter, and before getting a reply he went to a printer, said his name was Osborne and got a thousand handbills printed. Hands Off Cuba! He stamped some with his own name, some with Hidell. Then he rented a post-office box, went to another printer, ordered application forms and membership cards. He got Marina to forge the signature A. J. Hidell in the space for chapter president and sent two honorary memberships to officials of the Central Committee, Communist Party U.S.A.

  He went out in his gold shorts and thong sandals at midnight, dumping garbage in other people’s cans, sometimes ranging three or four blocks before he found a can with room to spare for one more bag of bones and slop.

  When he took the filled-out application back to Guy Banister Associates he saw a man at the building entrance who looked familiar. It was Captain Ferrie, the Civil Air Patrol instructor, the man who kept mice in a cage in hi
s hotel room back about seven years ago, Lee recalled, when he and his friend Robert were tracking down a .22 for sale. Lee drew closer and saw there was something very different about the man. He seemed to have tufts of fur glued to his head, like handfuls of animal hair just pasted on. His eyebrows were high and shiny.

  Ferrie seemed to be expecting him.

  “You were in the office yesterday or day before. Am I right?”

  “I was applying for a job part-time.”

  “Undercover work. I heard your voice. I said to myself I know that voice. Another lost cadet come back to Cap’n Dave.”

  They laughed, standing in the entranceway. A car stopped suddenly and pigeons fired up from the square across the street.

  “Isn’t life fantastic?” Ferrie said.

  The Fair Play Committee discouraged him from opening a branch office. But they were nice and polite and made spelling mistakes and anyway the important thing was the correspondence itself. He would keep everything. These were his papers. When the time came he would be able to present Cuban officials with documentary proof that he was a friend of the revolution.

  Besides he didn’t need New York’s backing to open an office. He had his rubber stamping kit. All he had to do was stamp the committee’s initials on a handbill or piece of literature. Stamp some numbers and letters. This makes it true.

  David Ferrie took him to the Habana Bar, a gloom palace near the waterfront. Open round the clock, Latin rhythms on the juke box, people with a look about them of chronic absenteeism, some failure to cohere—exiles, cargo handlers, seamen without papers, half a dozen amorphous others, mainly solitary men sitting well spaced at the long bar.

  Ferrie and Oswald took a table.

  “The man who runs this place is involved with the Cuban Revolutionary Council.”

  “Which side are they?” Lee said.

  “Don’t you want to take a guess?”

  “The look of this place.”