Libra (11 page)

Banister paused until Mackey’s eyes shifted to meet his.

“I believe deeply there are forces in the air that compel men to act. Call it history or necessity or anything you like. What, do you sense in the air? That’s all I’m saying, T-Jay. Is there something riding in the air that you feel on your body, prickling your skin like warm sweat? Drink up, drink up. We’ll have one more.”

What passes in a glance.

 

 

That night Mackey sat in a small room across the street from a surgical-supply firm and two or three house trailers. Odds against a cool breeze about a thousand to one. The trailers were set in enclosures heaped with debris and guarded by bad-tempered dogs.

He sat by the window, in the dark, applying a pale lotion to the mosquito bites scattered across his ankles and the backs of his hands. It was going to be tough trying to sleep in this heat, without a fan, these little buzzing mothers closing in.

The rooming house was in an area where homes and junkyards seemed to spawn each other. A rooster crowed every morning, amazing, only blocks from major thoroughfares.

Every room has a music of its own. He found himself listening intently at times, in strange rooms, after the traffic died, for some disturbance of tone, a nuance or flaw in the texture.

Getting weapons from Banister was less risky in the long run and a hell of a lot easier, short-term, than stealing them from the Farm. This was the covert training site the CIA operated in south-eastern Virginia, five hundred wooded acres known to the outside world as a military base called Camp Peary. Mackey instructed trainees in light weapons there, college grads eager for careers in clandestine work. This was the Agency’s way of letting him know where he stood for refusing to sign a letter of reprimand. He lived about ten miles off-post but during periods of special exercises he shared quarters with another instructor in an old wooden barracks partitioned into double rooms. They wore army fatigues and played brooding games of gin rummy, listening to dull rumbles from the sabotage site.

He poured the lotion on his fingers, then rubbed his fingers lightly over the bites. The bites continued to sting.

Everywhere he went, mosquitoes. He’d trained rebels in Sumatra and the commando units of CIA client armies in a number of piss-hole places. But he was not Agency for life. He could wait for them to drop him or beat them to it. He’d seen too many evasions and betrayals, fighting men encouraged and then abandoned for political reasons. They didn’t call it the Company for nothing. It was set up to obscure the deeper responsibilities, the calls of blood trust that have to be answered. This was the only war story he knew, the only one there was or could be, and it always ended the same way, men stranded in the smoke of remote meditations.

He felt the heat beating in, midnight vibrations, the sirens down Canal, the growl of some solo drunk. A mosquito is a vector of disease. He clenched his right fist. The tattoo bird was an eagle, circa 1958, etched in a dark shop on one of Havana’s esquinas
del pecado
, sin comers, where he was providing security in an Agency endeavor to supply funds to the movement of the rebel Fidel Castro, three years before the invasion.

Every room has a music that tells you things if you know how to listen.

Good men died because the administration delayed, pondering options to the end. To Mackey, aboard the CIA’s lead ship, an old landing-craft carrier situated fifteen miles from Blue Beach, the operation began to resemble something surreal. As information became available, with data flowing across the radar screens and over the radios, with signals bounced off the clouds by a destroyer’s twenty-four-inch lights, it seemed to him that something was running out of control. There was strange and flawed material out there, a deep distance full of illusions, deceptions, eerie perspectives.

The same ship used two different names.

Radio Swan, located on a tiny guano island, was broadcasting meaningless codes to pressure the Fidelist armed forces into mass defections. “The boy is in the yellow house.” “The one-eyed fish are biting.” All night the lonely babble sounded.

The seaweed in reconnaissance photos turned out to be coral reef that interfered with the landings.

Planes flew with insignia painted out and when pilots were finally allowed to reconnoiter inland they had to use Esso road maps to find their way.

Navy jets meant to link up with B-26s from Nicaragua arrived too early, or too late, because somebody mixed up the time zones.

Two ammunition ships appeared on radar, heading full-speed in the wrong direction, ignoring radio messages to return.

The DCI, Allen Dulles, was spending the weekend in Puerto Rico, delivering a speech to a civic group on the subject “The Communist Businessman Abroad.”

There was a ten-minute mutiny on Mackey’s ship.

“The sky is swollen with dark clouds.” “The hawk swoops at dawn.”

The second air strike, finally, was canceled.

He knew Everett believed the failure was more complex than one scrubbed mission. A general misery of ideas and means. But Mackey insisted on a clear and simple reading. You can’t surrender your rage and shame to these endless complications.

He had a wife somewhere. This was a complication to think back on. Two years of study, postwar, mining and metallurgy, with a wife to encourage him. He could barely picture her face. Paled and ballooned by drink. She was a paramilitary wife by then. She liked the movies. She liked to sit with her ass dipped down into the opening between the seat and the backrest, her feet up on the raised edge of the seat front, balanced like a serious toy, as the bullets flew. She had pretty hair, he seemed to recall, and drank in a methodical way, as if to forestall any complaint that she was out of control.

The scouting party came ashore before midnight. Mackey was the only American in the rubber raft and he wasn’t supposed to be there. The raft skidded up the beach and one man vaulted into the water and ran alongside, scooping dense sand with both hands and muttering a prayer. They began marking the beach with landing lights for the troops waiting beyond the breakers in ancient pitching LCIs and born-again freighters. The place wasn’t exactly deserted. Some people sat outside a bodega above the beach, old men talking. One of the scouts, wearing black trunks and a black sweatshirt, face smeared with galley soot, walked over to chat with them, carrying an automatic rifle. T-Jay wasn’t armed. He couldn’t be sure whether this was his way of letting the men know his role here was limited or whether he was feeling indestructible tonight. The sea tang was bracing. He saw an old Chevy near the bodega and got his chief scout Raymo to request the keys from one of the patrons as a gesture of welcome from those about to be liberated. He wanted to find out if the local militia camp was where the intelligence briefers said it was. The car was a ’49 model with a picture pasted to the dashboard of a Cuban ballplayer in a Brooklyn Dodgers cap and shirt. They were an eighth of a mile down the stony road when a jeep appeared in the high beams, two heads bobbing in silhouette. T-Jay eased the car diagonally across the road. Raymo was out the door, saying something into the bursts from his submachine gun. Every other round was a tracer. Heat and light. When the magazine was empty, two dead militiamen sat in the vehicle, mouths open, the upholstery smoking. Raymo stood looking, his squat body immensely still. He was barefoot, in ridiculous checkered shorts, like a vacationing Minnesotan, a cartridge belt slung below his belly. They heard pistol fire from the beach and drove to the bodega in reverse. Someone said a scout had shot one of the old men over a careless remark. Near the body a cluster of people stood arguing. T-Jay walked down to the beach. Frogmen were in, helping rig the marker lights. He had his radioman tell the lead ship to send the brigade commanders ashore, send the troops ashore, get the goddamn thing going. Back near the road he saw a woman standing outside a straw hut, swatting the air around her. They were very near Zapata swamp, famous for mosquitoes.

He read the sign across the street. Discount on Lab Coats. There were voices around the corner, the particular ragged laughter of people leaving a bar. At daybreak the rooster would crow, the dogs would bark, like some tin-shack village in the Caribbean.

The memory was a series of still images, a film broken down to components. He couldn’t quite make it continuous. He saw Raymo heaving open the car door, a stutter motion, each segment leaving a blur behind. The bursts from the surplus Thompson were the first shots fired at the Bay of Pigs. This made Raymo a figure of respect among his fellow prisoners during the twenty months they would spend in the fortress of La Cabana listening to rifle reports from the moat, where the executions took place, each crisp volley followed by a precise echo, an afterclap, as the prisoners thought about the dog that lived in the moat, lapping up blood.

Finally the taxi stopped outside.

He went into the bathroom and ran cold water over his hands, trying to ease the sting where the lotion had failed. He’d contracted malaria during his Indonesian stint and felt the effects now and then, a sense that his body was a swamp. He went to the door and waited.

His wife cut him once, swinging a knife across the kitchen table and catching the left side of his jaw, after a night of who knows what. He never thought of her by name. He thought of her being somewhere very vague, in a room with curtains, never moving from the chair. This is what happens to loved ones who go away. We make them sit in a room forever.

The woman came in, wearing a hard tan, her skin smoked and cracked. She said she was Rhonda. She had heavy dark makeup that made him think of nights at the shore and gonorrhea.

“Casal said be nice to you.”

“What do you think he meant by that?”

She smiled and unzipped her skirt. Casal was the bartender at the Habana, a waterfront dive that catered to merchant seamen, Cubans with a grudge and other floating bodies on the tide.

All night it sounded across the water. “Listen, my brothers, to the roar of the white typhoon.” It was the grimmest, most godawfu! thing, to be ashamed of your country.

 

 

Win Everett was in pajamas looking at a two-day-old copy of the Daily Lass-O, the student newspaper at TWU. There were contests for yell leaders and twirlers. A nationwide search was under way for a typical coed. He sat in an armchair in a comer of the bedroom. He learned from the paper that the school’s original name was the Texas Industrial Institute and College for the Education of White Girls of the State of Texas in the Arts and Sciences. He skipped the piece on JFK.

The phone rang downstairs. He heard Mary Frances walk into the kitchen and pick up the receiver. She came to the foot of the stairs and he dropped the newspaper, waiting to hear her call his name.

She watched him come down the stairs, looking nearly weightless in his pajamas, that softness of step he’d developed only lately, as if to show someone watching that he’d taken the path of self-effacement. They touched lightly as he moved past and she knew it meant they would make love on the fresh sheets with the window open and the smell of rain and dripping leaves still in the air.

Parmenter calling from a public booth. Win could hear traffic noises, excited air. He watched Mary Frances start upstairs, her hand leaving the carved newel and slipping along the handrail, barely touching.

“How do we proceed?”

“The phone is, secure. They’re not interested in me anymore. Besides, I’ve cleaned it.”

A brief laugh. “You know how to do that?”

“I tinker in the basement,” Win said.

“Do you know a man named George de Mohrenschildt?”

“No.”

“Does odd jobs for Domestic Contacts. I find out he’s also hooked to Army Intelligence. Cuba via Haiti. He’s on the way to Haiti. It probably involves an arms deal. George comes across pro-Castro. I believe this is a genuine attachment. He thinks we’ve behaved rather badly. But the fact is, if my information is correct, he’s working against Castro interests, or will be as soon as he gets to Haiti. In any case George doesn’t concern us directly. He has a young friend, a kid he debriefed on behalf of the Agency. A defector who repented, more or less, after two years plus in the USSR. I got George to tell me his name and I’ve done some checking. There’s a 201 file on the kid dating to December 1960.”

“Did SR Division insert him?”

“The way we fake our own files, who knows for sure? There’s no clear sign we put him into Russia. That’s all I can tell you except for this. He spent some of his service time at a closed base in Japan. Atsugi. He was a radarman. Had access to data concerning U-2 flights. A nice house-present to give the Soviets when he went over. He married a Russian girl. Decided he wanted to come home. The young marrieds settled in Dallas, met George, spent evenings with the local émigrés, reminiscing. One night about two and a half weeks ago, according to George, our young man fired a shot into the night, aimed at the infamous head of Major General Edwin A. Walker, U.S. Army, resigned.”

A silence. Win listened to the dense rush of air in the earpiece, a city alive, horns blowing, cars streaming across the Potomac bridges.

“Could be a nice find, Larry.”

“Don’t make it sound like a three-room apartment. We could put him together. A far-left type. Work him in. Tie him to Cuban intelligence. Possibly even place him at the scene. If he thinks he’s operating on the left, pro-Castro, pro-Soviet, whatever his special interest, we’ll help him select a fantasy. There’s never a dearth of reasons to shoot at the President.”

“Tell Mackey. Give T-Jay the details. T-Jay will bring him in,”

He always seemed to be going to bed. It was always bedtime. The day came and went and it was time to go to bed again.

He went around turning off lights, checking the front and back doors. He’d seen a U-2 once on a salt flat in Nevada. It looked like a child’s idea of advanced reconnaissance. Freakish wingspan, basic body that looked unfinished, wingtips that folded over. But it had a jet engine under a glider frame and could climb at an angle steeper than forty-five degrees, soar to eighty-five thousand feet, its camera sweeping a path over a hundred miles wide. Dark lady of espionage, the Soviets called it. He checked to see that the oven was off. The last thing downstairs was the oven.