Libra (25 page)

He went south toward Calle Ocho, the main drag of Little Havana. Dogs ran up to fences to yap at Capitán. A lot of killer dogs, a lot of cars with hood ornaments that were the only things worth saving. Old cars sinking into the tar. Dogs skidding sideways along the fences barking in the brilliant heat. Capitán plodded on, old and remote.

Raymo turned left on Calle Ocho. He walked past the jewelry shops, every bakery window with a pink-and-white wedding cake. A hundred men were crowded into a little corner park, playing dominoes and cards. Still plenty of time. He bought some fruit, stopped to talk to someone every half-block. It was busy on the street. Men stood in clusters, women moved from shop to shop. How the hell could you know, in an all-Cuban place, who were the spies for Fidel?

Up on Flagler Street, Wayne Elko slouched past the stumpy palms. He wore jump boots stained white by salt water and thought about stopping for a
cerveza
Schlitz. Not smart, Wayne. He’d been wandering Florida for nearly two weeks trying to find T-Jay. Spent three days as roustabout and barker with the Jerry Lepke Ten-in-One Carnival. They had a sword box, a ladder of swords, a fire-eater, a two-headed baby show and a snake girl with braces on her teeth. Called a dozen people he knew from the movement. Finally in Miami he received a message at Elliot Bernstein Chevrolet, where the assistant sales manager was an anti-Castro guerrilla who let him sleep in a used Impala.

Be on time, Wayne. He walked down to Calle Ocho and saw the man he was looking for, Ramón Benitez, standing at the designated corner with a doddering beast. He knew Raymo slightly from the days long gone when exiles used to practice close-order drill on front lawns, watched by sleepy children.

They shook hands, etc.

Wayne said to himself, Some tough hombre. Raymo led him a block and a half south. The Cuban façade faded into a version of suburban America. Sunny little stucco homes with postcard lawns. They went into a one-story house. The radio played. in a back room. They came out a side entrance and sat at a wooden table in a small concrete enclosure with a statue of St. Barbara standing in the middle.

“This is Frank’s house,” Raymo said.

Hairy arms. One of those thick-bodied types you can’t reach with the usual persuasion. There are only two or three things in the world he ever thinks about and he’s made up his mind about each one. Wayne didn’t know who Frank was.

“So there’s still activity,” he said. “There’s this friend of mine who works in a Chevy dealership. He makes napalm in his basement with gasoline and baby soap. I sleep in a car in the lot. I’m the unofficial watchman.”

“What T-Jay wants is just, like you stick around a couple of days. ”

“I’ve been looking for him.”

“He’s a pretty busy guy,” Raymo said unconvincingly.

The dog lay throbbing in the shade.

Frank Vásquez showed up with a wife, two kids and some food. The wife and kids took a peek at the visitor. Wayne waited for someone to say, “Mi casa es
suya.”
He got a little charge from the Old World graces. But they slipped back inside, leaving his smile hanging like a rag on a stick.

The three men ate a meal in the humming midday heat. Wayne could find out nothing of substance from the two Cubans. The smaller the talk, the clearer it became that something serious was in the works. The meal was so entrenched in seriousness, in that grave Latin manner and tact, that Wayne was outright convinced this was no mission to harass the Cuban coast as he’d done so many times with the boardinghouse commandos.

He told Raymo and Frank about the operations he’d been involved in. Many fabulous snafus. Squalls, Cuban gunboats, pursuit by police launches. He described how T-Jay had appeared out of nowhere—they didn’t even know if he was Agency or not—to give them special training in weapons and night fighting. They needed every little extra they could get.

With Interpen, Wayne was still in the high-scream tempo of his paratroop days. He was rounding out his youth. The business at hand gave every sign of being very different. A dark and somber plan. Just look at Frank Vásquez. Sad-eyed, long-faced, earnest, with little to say outside of what his family had suffered, which he narrated tersely, like a documentary of a war a hundred years ago.

It hit Wayne Elko with a flash and roar that this was like
Seven Samurai.
In which free-lance warriors are selected one at a time to carry out a dangerous mission. In which men outside society are called on to save a helpless people from destruction. Swinging those two-handed swords.

 

 

Win Everett sat in his office on the empty campus of Texas Woman’s University. All that heat and light made him grateful for the gloom of the basement nook. Here he worked patiently on his bitterness, honing and refining. It was something he returned to periodically as if to some legend of his youth, a golden moment on a football field or frozen pond, some enterprise of such flawless proportions that he could forget it only at the risk of deep-reaching loss.

The office was a place to come to when Mary Frances and Suzanne were not at home. He didn’t mind being alone here. It was a place to sit and think, searching for a grim justice in the very recollection of what they’d done to him—a place to refine and purify, to hone his sense of the past. The fluorescent light buzzed and flickered. When the room grew warm he took off his jacket, folded it neatly lengthwise, then over double, and dropped it softly on a cabinet.

It was no longer possible to hide from the fact that Lee Oswald existed independent of the plot.

T-Jay had picked the lock at 4907 Magazine Street in New Orleans. This became necessary when he learned there was no sample of the subject’s handwriting at Guy Banister Associates. The files contained a single document, his job application, filled out in block letters and unsigned.

Lee H. Oswald was real all right. What Mackey learned about him in a brief tour of his apartment made Everett feel displaced. It produced a sensation of the eeriest panic, gave him a glimpse of the fiction he’d been devising, a fiction living prematurely in the world.

He already knew about the weapons. Mackey confirmed the weapons. A 38-caliber revolver. A bolt-action rifle with telescopic sight.

He knew about the leaflets. Oswald was handing out leaflets in the street. The headline was “Hands Off Cuba!”

There was Oswald’s correspondence with the national director of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

There was socialist literature strewn about. Speeches by Fidel Castro. A booklet with a Castro quotation on the cover: “The Revolution Must Be a School of Unfettered Thought.” Copies of the Militant and the Worker. A booklet,
The Coming American Revolution.
Another,
Ideology and Revolution,
by Jean-Paul Sartre. Books and pamphlets in Russian. Flash cards with Cyrillic characters. A stamp album. A twelve-page handwritten journal with the title “Historic Diary.”

There was correspondence with the Socialist Workers Party.

A novel,
The Idiot,
in Russian.

There was a pamphlet titled
The Crime Against Cuba.
On the inside back cover Mackey found a stamped address: 544 Camp St.

There was a draft card in the name Lee H. Oswald. There was a draft card in the name Alek James Hidell.

There was a passport issued to Lee H. Oswald. A vaccination certificate stamped Dr. A. J. Hideel. A certificate of service, U.S. Marines, for Alek James Hidell.

There were forms filled out in the names Osborne, Leslie Oswald, Aleksei Oswald.

There was a membership card, Fair Play for Cuba Committee, New Orleans chapter. Lee H. Oswald is the member. A. J. Hidell is the chapter president. The signatures, according to Mackey, were not in the same hand.

A magazine photo of Castro was fixed to a wall with Scotch tape.

There was the room itself. Mackey had found most of these materials in a kind of storeroom off the living room. Small, dark, shabby, a desperate place, the gunman’s perfect hutch, with roaches on display along the baseboards.

Everett had wanted only a handwriting sample, a photograph. With these he could begin to construct the illustrated history of his subject, starting with a false name. He’d looked forward to thinking up a name, just the right name, just the spoken texture of a drifter’s time on earth.

Oswald had names. He had his own names. He had variations of names. He had forged documents. Why was Everett playing in his basement with scissors and paste? Oswald had his own copying method, his own implements of forgery. Mackey said he’d used a camera, an opaque pigment, retouched negatives, a typewriter, a rubber stamping kit.

He called the work sloppy. But Everett was not inclined to fault the boy on technicalities (Hidell, Hideel). The question was a larger one, obviously. What was he doing with all that fabricated paper, with Minox camera buried at the back of a closet?

Everett flung both arms out briefly to free his shirt from his damp skin. He searched the room for cigarettes. It seemed there were more questions than actions these past days, and more bitterness than questions. The thing about bitterness is that you can work on it, purify the anguish and the rancor. It is an experience that holds out promise of perfection.

Lancer is back from Berlin.

It was coming back down to pure rancor, to this business of honing and refining. It was this business of how much they’d reduced his sense of worth. It was a question of measurement. It was a question of what they’d done to him. It was this business of sitting in his office in the Old Main and working on his rage.

The last thing Mackey saw, leaving the apartment, was a James Bond novel on a table by the door.

Nicholas Branch has unpublished state documents, polygraph reports, Dictabelt recordings from the police radio net on November 22. He has photo enhancements, floor plans, home movies, biographies, bibliographies, letters, rumors, mirages, dreams. This is the room of dreams, the room where it has taken him all these years to learn that his subject is not politics or violent crime but men in small rooms.

Is he one of them now? Frustrated, stuck, self-watching, looking for a means of connection, a way to break out. After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation. You apply for a credit card, buy a handgun, travel through cities, suburbs and shopping malls, anonymous, anonymous, look ing for a chance to take a shot at the first puffy empty famous face, just to let people know there is someone out there who reads the papers.

Branch is stuck all right. He has abandoned his life to understanding that moment in Dallas, the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century. He has his forensic pathology rundown, his neutron activation analysis. There is also the Warren Report, of course, with its twenty-six accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, its millions of words. Branch thinks this is the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.

Everything is here. Baptismal records, report cards, postcards, divorce petitions, canceled checks, daily timesheets, tax returns, property lists, postoperative x-rays, photos of knotted string, thousands of pages of testimony, of voices droning in hearing rooms in old courthouse buildings, an incredible haul of human utterance. It lies so flat on the page, hangs so still in the lazy air, lost to syntax and other arrangement, that it resembles a kind of mind-spatter, a poetry of lives muddied and dripping in language.

Documents. There is Jack Ruby’s mother’s dental chart, dated January 15, 1938. There is a microphotograph of three strands of Lee H. Oswald’s pubic hair. Elsewhere (everything in the Warren Report is elsewhere) there is a detailed description of this hair. It is smooth, not knobby. The scales are medium-size. The root area is rather clear of pigment.

Branch doesn’t know how to approach this kind of data. He wants to believe the hair belongs in the record. It is vital to his sense of responsible obsession that everything in his room warrants careful study. Everything belongs, everything adheres, the mutter of obscure witnesses, the photos of illegible documents and odd sad personal debris, things gathered up at a dying—old shoes, pajama tops, letters from Russia. It is all one thing, a ruined city of trivia where people feel real pain. This is the Joycean Book of America, remember—the novel in which nothing is left out.

Branch has long since forgiven the Warren Report for its failures. It is too valuable a document of human heartbreak and muddle to be scorned or dismissed. The twenty-six volumes haunt him. Men and women surface in FBI memos, are tracked for several pages, then disappear—waitresses, prostitutes, mind readers, motel managers, owners of rifle ranges. Their stories hang in time, spare, perfect in their way, unfinished.