Libra (24 page)

Still, he would recommend that surveillance be maintained, indefinitely, wherever the boy was sent.

 

 

Lee was not sure if this official was one of the men he’d seen before. There’d been so many, in the same dark suit.

The official told him he was not yet being considered for Soviet citizenship. Instead he was given Identity Document for Stateless Persons Number 311479. It was, anyway, a nice-looking piece of paper.

The official told him he was being sent to the city of Minsk. The official pronounced the name with a devastating clarity, as if moved by a painful ringing in his teeth.

Oswald cracked a little joke. “Is that in Siberia?”

The official laughed, shook the American’s hand, then clapped him hard between the shoulder blades and sent him out into the snow.

 

 

The next day the Red Cross gave him five thousand rubles, which just about knocked him flat.

One day later Lee H. Oswald, with a just-shaved look, set out by train for this place Minsk. Seven hours out of Moscow he caught twenty minutes’ sleep on a wooden bunk with a rented mattress and pillow. Then he ate meat pie and drank tea and could not recall a meal that tasted better. The land was forested here, silent and white in the Russian dusk.

David Ferrie drove the Rambler south past chemical plants where waste gas flared yellow and red. Farther on he saw oystermen’s shacks in the windy distances, set on stilts above the marsh grass. He reached a place called Wading Point, the country retreat of Carmine Latta. He went past the Dead End sign, past the No Trespassing sign, waved to three men conferring on a lawn, then turned onto a dirt road. Men were always conferring at Wading Point. He’d see them clustered at the door of one of the outbuildings or seated in a car on a rutted lane, four large men crowded into some nephew’s VW, absorbed in serious talk.

The hunched bearing, the repetitive gestures, the set jaws and fixed regard, the economy of the group, the formal air of exclusion, bodies leaning inward toward a center.

Ferrie understood the
gestalt
of serious talks. He’d studied psychology through the mail with Italian masters. This was long before Eastern Airlines fired him for moral turpitude and for making false claims about a medical background. As if a degree could solve the riddle of Comrade Cancer. They took away his uniform for good.

He drove to an old lodge in the swampy bottoms where Carmine liked to relax with the boys. Four of the boys were roasting a goat on a spit outside the lodge, which was weathered past the point of rustic charm, with swallows’ nests mud-stuck to the eaves. Ferrie parked in the shade and went inside. The white-haired man, bright-eyed, veined, ancient, was sitting on a sofa, drink in hand. He was frail and spotted, with the drawn and thievish look of a figure in a ducal portrait. There were times, entering his presence, when Ferrie experienced a deferential awe so complete that he found himself becoming part of the other man’s consciousness, seeing the world, the room, the dynamics of power as Carmine Latta saw them.

Carmine ran the slots. Carmine had prostitutes from here to Bossier City, a place where you could get a social disease leaning on a lamppost. There were casinos, betting parlors, drug traffic. Carmine had a third of the Cuban dope before Castro. Now he had a shrimp fleet making deliveries from Central America. There was a billion dollars a year in total business. Carmine had motels, banks, juke boxes, vending machines, shipbuilding, oil leasing, sightseeing buses. There were state officials drinking bourbon sours in his box at the racetrack. The story was he funneled half a million cash to the Nixon campaign in September 1960. What the boys call a tremendous envelope.

“My friend David W. Ferrie. What’s the W. for?”

“Wet my whistle,” Ferrie said.

Carmine laughed and pointed at the liquor cabinet. The third man in the room was Tony Astorina, driver and bodyguard, occasional courier, known as Tony Push for obscure reasons. He and Carmine were reminiscing grimly about the Attorney General. Robert Kennedy was an obsessive topic of conversation wherever Carmine settled for ten minutes. Carmine had grudges. Ferrie could see the Bobby Kennedy grudge come to life in his eyes, a determined rage, but fine and precise, carefully formed, as if the lean old face held a delicate secret within it, one last and solemn calculation.

“So what I’m saying,” Astorina said, “the whole thing goes back to Cuba. You look at everything today, the Justice Department, the pressure they’re putting. If the boys took out Castro when they were supposed to, we wouldn’t have a situation like this here.”

“That’s half true,” Carmine said. “We would have leeway, with Cuba back in the firm. The value of Cuba, you use it to relieve pressure on the mainland. But the fact is nobody ever gave the Castro matter their full attention. We weren’t very sincere.”

They all laughed at that.

“Removing Castro was strictly a CIA daydream. The boys in Florida just strung them along. They were looking to keep the prosecutors off their back. They could always claim they were serving their country. And it worked. The CIA backed them up constantly.”

“I still say everything goes back to Cuba.”

“All right. But we’re realistic people. We don’t do tricks with mirrors and false bottoms. The styles don’t match.”

Ferrie wasn’t surprised to hear them talking about delicate subjects in his presence. He did research on legal matters for Carmine and knew a great deal about his holdings and operations. He also knew the answers to some touchy questions.

Why did Carmine hate Bobby Kennedy in such a personal way, right down to the sound of his crackling Boston voice?

In early 1961 Carmine walks out of his modest house outside New Orleans and sees he is being followed by FBI. They tail his car, eat lunch at an adjoining table, photograph his movements to and from his office, above a movie theater in Gretna. It is the beginning of a campaign of total relentless surveillance carried out at the direction of the Attorney General. In March they go to Las Vegas with him, take his picture in hotels and casinos, come back with him, camp outside his house, photograph his family, the neighbors, the mailman, the boy who delivers groceries. In April they go to church with his wife and his niece, play with his great-granddaughter in a supermarket and shoot movies of his sister’s funeral. It is Carmine’s personal Bay of Pigs, coinciding in time with the better-publicized one. Although there is public ruckus here as well. Sightseers come to the street where he lives to watch the FBI watching Carmine. There are traffic jams, skirmishes with the boys. It goes on for close to a year. These men are in his face day and night. It is the systematic humiliation of a senior citizen in front of his family, his neighbors and his business associates. And that little Bobby son of a bitch is calling every shot.

Carmine said, “The CIA comes up with exotic poisons one after another. They all end up in the toilets of South Florida.”

“But if we want to clip this Castro,” Tony said.

“The word is feasible or not feasible. We don’t go on fools’ errands.” He stared at the glass in his hand. “Then there’s the other theory why Castro’s still alive. One of our people in Florida made a deal with him.”

Tony Astorina stood against the wall across the room. Ferrie saw in him the ruins of a certain kind of grace. He was one of those nervy sharp-dressing kids who wake up at age forty, ruefully handsome, with a wife, three babies and a liver condition, the adolescent luck and charm lost in mounting body fat. He’d worked his way from the floor of the gaming room at the Riviera in Havana. Ferrie thought he’d probably built some corpses in order to be standing where he was now.

Tony said, “Speaking of Cuba, a couple of weeks ago I dream I’m swimming on the Capri roof with Jack Ruby. The next day I’m on Bourbon Street, who do I fucking see? You talk about coincidence. ”

“We don’t know what to call it, so we say coincidence. It goes deeper,” Ferrie said. “You’re a gambler. You get a feeling about a horse, a poker hand. There’s a hidden principle. Every process contains its own outcome. Sometimes we tap in. We see it, we know. I used to run into Jack Ruby now and then. What was he doing in New Orleans?”

“Shopping for dancers. There’s a girl at the Sho-Bar he’s salivating. ”

“I was making leaflet runs in a light plane out of the Keys. A little while after Castro came in. I saw Ruby in Miami once or twice. ”

“Stop-offs,” Tony said.

“He was running cash or arms or something.”

“He was buying people out of Cuban jails.”

Ferrie was drinking scotch and soda, same as Carmine. He was watching Carmine. They shook their glasses simultaneously, rattling the cubes. The old man’s hands were long and thin. His ears were tufted with snowy hair. Ferrie smelled the roasting goat.

Tony Push said, “I remember I seen a picture six, seven months ago in a magazine. Anti-aircraft guns outside the Riviera. Dug in right in the street. Which comes a long way from what we had there. A whole city to pluck like a fruit.”

“A whole country,” Carmine said.

“It was fucking paradise, Havana, then. The casino was gold-leaf walls. I mean beautiful. We had beautiful chandeliers, women in diamonds and mink stoles. The dealers wore tuxedos. We had greeters at the door in tuxedos. Twenty-five thousand for a casino license, which is the steal of all time, plus twenty percent of the profits. Batista gets his envelope, everybody’s happy. We let the Cubans turn the wheel. We did the blackjack and craps. What’s it called, brocade, the fucking drapes. I like to see a room where the dealers wear a tux. Plus there’s action all over town. Your cockfights, your jai alai. At the track you play roulette between races. I mean tell me where it went.”

“Kennedy should have blown it up when he had the chance,” Ferrie said.

“You blow up Cuba, you get the Russians.”

“I’ve got my rubber bedsheets all ready. An eternity of canned food. I like the idea of living in shelters. You go in the woods and dig your personal latrine. The sewer system is a form of welfare state. It’s a government funnel to the sea. I like to think of people being independent, digging latrines in the woods, in a million backyards. Each person is responsible for his own shit.”

Carmine rocked on the sofa. The ice cubes rattled. Ferrie knew he could make Carmine laugh just about any time he wanted. He always knew the moment, always sensed the approach to take. This was because he shared the man’s perceptions.

“One thing, I have to say it,” Tony said. “I don’t bear no feeling against the President one way or the other. It’s this rat fink Bobby that’s pushing too hard. I say all right. They have their job, we have ours. But he’s making it like some personal program. He crosses the line.”

“They both cross the line,” Carmine said. “The President crossed the line when he put out the word he wanted Castro dead. Let me tell you something.”

“What?”

“I want to tell you a little thing you should always remember. If somebody’s giving you trouble, again, again, again, again, somebody with ambitions, somebody with a greed for territory, the first thing you consider is go right to the top.”

“In other words you take action at the highest level.”

“That’s where they’re letting it get out of hand.”

“In other words you bypass.”

“You clean out the number one position.”

“In other words you arrange it so there’s a new man at the top who gets the message and makes a change in the policy.”

“You cut off the head, the tail doesn’t wag.”

David Ferrie loved a proverb. He loved the feeling of being swept into another man’s aura. A power aura like Carmine’s was a special state of awakening. The man was like a fairy-tale pope, able to look at you and change your life, say a word and change your life. Ferrie had devised a theology based on militant anticommu nism. He was a sometime master of hypnotism. He studied languages, studied political theory, knew diseases intimately, had official records of his skill as a pilot. All this paled in the presence of a man like Carmine Latta.

Carmine had a battle column of lawyers with millions ready to spend against repeated government attacks. He had men working on conspiracy to defraud, obstruction of justice, perjury, a thousand pain-in-the-ass details. Carmine had Ferrie doing research on tax liens. He had state officials and bank presidents making personal pleas on his behalf. Carmine and the boys were the state’s biggest industry. Carmine had finance companies, gas stations, truck dealerships, taxi fleets, bars, restaurants, housing subdivisions. Carmine had a man who washed his pocket money in Ivory liquid to keep it germ-free.

Now Ferrie followed Tony Astorina down a hall flanked by simple bedrooms. On the floor of the last room stood a tall canvas bag laced at the top. Ferrie could see the square bulges the stacks of money made. A gift from Carmine to the cause. Guy Banister saw to it that exile leaders knew who was providing cash for arms and ammunition. It was Latta’s bid for gambling concessions after Castro fell.

Back in the living room Ferrie said, “I’ll take it straight to Camp Street, Carmine. They’ll be very happy, very grateful. All through the movement.”

“We all look forward to the day,” Carmine said softly. “We only want what’s ours.”

Ferrie believed there was a genius in the man. Carmine was born in the mid 1880s to an Italian father and Persian mother, at sea, under the sign of Taurus. This was a powerful blend of elements. Ferrie admired Taureans. They were generous people, steadfast and tolerant, with a gift for empire.

He carried the duffel bag to the car. He waved to the boys and drove out to the main road. Astrology is the language of the night sky, of starry aspect and position, the truth at the edge of human affairs.

 

 

Raymo furled the blue bandanna and tied it around the neck of his German shepherd. Stinking hot today. He had a room in a little stucco house bristling with TV antennas. It was not far from the stone house on Northwest Seventh Street where Castro had lived when he was in Miami, raising money, finding men for the revolution. Raymo stroked the animal’s head, muttered into the silky ear. Then he put on the leash and followed the dog down the stairs.