Libra (59 page)

He went across the street and filled out the form to send the money. The clerk time-stamped the receipt 11:17. Jack was even later than he thought. For the first time he put a little hurry in his day and in less than four minutes he stood in the dark garage below police headquarters.

If I get in this easy, it means they want me to do it.

He walked across the deserted parking area toward a pair of unmarked Fords waiting in the space between the ramps. He heard voices saying, “Here he comes, here he comes,” and at first he thought they meant him. He walked up a slight incline and stood at the edge of a group of reporters. Vault noises, voices, hollow bouncing sounds filled the areaway, car engines, clanking equipment. There were plainclothes cops and white-hatted brass everywhere. Detectives lined the walls leading from the jail office to the ramps. Russell was standing right there but Jack didn’t have time to catch his eye. Most of the newsmen and three TV cameras were clustered on the ramp to Jack’s right, leading to Main Street. An armored bank truck waited at the top of the other ramp.

“Here he comes.”

“Here he comes.”

“Here he comes.”

The timing was split-second, the location was pinpoint. Spotlights came on. Everything was black and white, highlights and heavy shadows. He saw a cluster of police come out of the jail office escorting the prisoner, who wore a dark sweater and looked like nobody from nowhere.

There was a movement of reporters. Then flashbulbs, shouts echoing off the walls, and it all seemed strange to Jack, already seen, and he stood in the artificial glare in the dank basement with the ramps stained by exhaust smoke and a charge of octane in the air.

Here he comes.

Jack came out of the crowd, seeing everything happen in advance. He took the revolver out of his pocket, bootlegging it, palming it on his hip. A path opened up. There was no one between him and Oswald. Jack showed the gun. He took a last long stride and fired once, a mid-body shot from inches away. Oswald’s arms crossed on his body and his eyes went tight. He made a sound, a deep grunt, heavy and desolate. He began his fall through the world of hurt.

A tumble of bodies over the gunman, all these men in Stetsons heavy-breathing, struggling for the weapon, someone’s knee emplaced in Jack’s gut. He was at a loss to understand their attitude. None of this was necessary if they knew him. He felt even worse, hearing Russell Shively’s voice pitch above a dozen other noises, saying, “Jack, Jack, you son of a bitch.”

Remember the ambulance in Atsugi, camouflage-green, wavering in the heat haze on the tarmac, and the pilot climbing out?

Lee didn’t feel real good. First they shot him, then they tried to give him artificial respiration. He learned in Marine training this is the last thing you do for a man with abdominal injuries.

He could see himself shot as the camera caught it. Through the pain he watched TV. The siren made that panicky sound of high speed in the streets, although he had no sense of movement. A man spoke close to him, saying if he had anything he wanted to say he was going to have to say it now. Through the pain, through the losing of sensation except where it hurt, Lee watched himself react to the augering heat of the bullet.

Remember how the pilot looked, a spaceman in a helmet and rubber suit?

Everything was leaving him, all sensation at the edges breaking up in space. He knew he was still in the ambulance but couldn’t hear the siren any longer or the voice of the man who wanted him to speak, a friendly type Texan by the sound of him. The only thing left was the mocking pain, the picture of the twisted face on TV. Die and hell in Hidell. He watched in a darkish room, someone’s TV den.

The falling away of things we carry around with us, twilight and chimney smoke. What is metal doing in his body?

He was in pain. He knew what it meant to be in pain. All you had to do was see TV. Arm over his chest, mouth in a knowing oh. The pain obliterated words, then thought. There was nothing left to him but the pathway of the bullet. Penetration of the spleen, stomach, aorta, kidney, liver and diaphragm. There was nothing left but the barest consciousness of bullet. Then the bullet itself, the copper, lead and antimony. They’d introduced metal into his body. This is what caused the pain.

But remember the men watching the jet take off? Could hardly believe how quick it lost itself in mist.

They logged him in at Parkland at 11:42. Chief complaint, gunshot wound.

The heart was seen to be flabby and not beating at all. No effective heartbeat could be instituted. The pupils were fixed and dilated. There was no retinal blood flow. There was no respiratory effort. No effective pulse could be maintained. Expired: 13:07. Two sponges missing when body closed.

Aerospace.

It is the white nightmare of noon, high in the sky over Russia. Me-too and you-too. He is a stranger, in a mask, falling.

 

 

If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It’s the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.

But maybe not. Nicholas Branch thinks he knows better. He has learned enough about the days and months preceding November 22, and enough about the twenty-second itself, to reach a determination that the conspiracy against the President was a rambling affair that succeeded in the short term due mainly to chance. Deft men and fools, ambivalence and fixed will and what the weather was like. Branch not only has material resulting from the Agency’s internal investigations—Everett and Parmenter cooperated to varying degrees—but he also has key information about the last stages of the plot derived from sources inside Alpha 66.

The stuff keeps coming. The Curator sends FBI surveillance logs. He sends a thirty-five-hour film chronology of unedited network footage shot during the weekend of November 22. He sends a computer-enhanced version of the Zapruder film, the 8mm home movie made by a dress manufacturer who stood on a concrete abutment above Elm Street as the shots were fired. Experts have scrutinized every murky nuance of the Zapruder film. It is the basic timing device of the assassination and a major emblem of uncertainty and chaos. There is the powerful moment of death, the surrounding blurs, patches and shadows.

(Branch’s analysis of the film and other evidence leads him to believe the first shot came much sooner than most theories would allow, probably at Zapruder frame 186. Governor Connally was hit two point six seconds later, at Zapruder 234. The shot that killed the President, crushingly, came four point three seconds after that. Even though he has reached firm conclusions in this area, Branch will study the computerized version of Zapruder. He is in too deep to stop now.)

The Curator sends a special FBI report that includes detailed descriptions of the
dreams
of eyewitnesses following the assassination of Kennedy and the murder of Oswald.

The Curator sends material on Bobby Dupard. Branch knows about Dupard only through the Curator. But how does the Curator know? Did Dupard tell someone about his role in the attempt on Walker? Did Oswald let his name slip to someone in New Orleans?

There are worrisome omissions, occasional gaps in the record: Of course Branch understands that the Agency is a closed system. He knows they will not reveal what they’ve learned to other agencies, much less the public. This is why the history he has contracted to write is a secret one, meant for CIA’s own closed collection. But why are they withholding material from him as well? There’s something they aren’t telling him. The Curator delays, lately, in filling certain requests for information, seems to ignore other requests completely. What are they holding back? How much more is there? Branch wonders if there is some limit inherent in the yielding of information gathered in secret. They can’t give it
all
away, even to one of their own, someone pledged to confidentiality. Before his retirement, Branch analyzed intelligence, sought patterns in random scads of data. He believed secrets were childish things. He was not generally impressed by the accomplishments of men in the clandestine service, the spy handlers, the covert-action staff. He thought they’d built a vast theology, a formal coded body of knowledge that was basically play material, secret-keeping, one of the keener pleasures and conflicts of childhood. Now he wonders if the Agency is protecting something very much like its identity—protecting its own truth, its theology of secrets.

The Curator begins to send fiction, twenty-five years of novels and plays about the assassination. He sends feature films and documentaries. He sends transcripts of panel discussions and radio debates. Branch has no choice but to study this material. There are important things he has yet to learn. There are lives he must examine. It is essential to master the data.

Ramón Benítez, the man on the grassy knoll, is seen in a photograph taken in April 1971 at the dedication of the eternal flame in Cuban Memorial Plaza on Southwest Eighth Street in Miami. An urn containing the flame rests on a twelve-foot column. Five plaques list the names of the fallen—
los mdrtires de la brigada de asalto.
The Curator forwards vague reports that Benitez, using another name, drove a taxi for some years in Union City, New Jersey. Otherwise, nothing.

Also present in the crowd that day, caught in photographs, is Antonio Veciana, the founder of Alpha 66. Eight and a half years later he will be shot and wounded in Miami. This will happen after publication of the House select committee’s report on assassinations—a report that includes Veciana’s allegation that Lee Oswald met with a member of U.S. intelligence in Dallas some time before November 22. No arrests in the case.

Brenda Jean Sensibaugh, the stripper to whom Jack Ruby wired money, is found hanging by her toreador pants in a holding cell in Oklahoma City, June 1965, after an arrest on charges of soliciting for the purpose of prostitution. Ruled a suicide.

Two days later, Bobby Renaldo Dupard is shot to death during a holdup at Ray’s Hardware in West Dallas, where he was employed as assistant manager. Branch immediately connects the name of the store with one of those useless clinging facts that keep him awake at night. This is where Jack Ruby, in 1960, bought the gun he used to kill Oswald.

Jack Leon Ruby dies of cancer in January 1967 while awaiting retrial for the murder of Oswald. In his time in prison he attempts suicide by ramming the cell wall with his head and by trying to jam his finger in a light socket while standing in a puddle of water.

He tells Chief Justice Earl Warren at the commission hearings that he has been used for a purpose, that he wants to tell the truth and then leave this world. But first they have to take him to Washington. He will tell the truth to President Johnson.

He lives in a cell in an isolated area of the county jail, a small square room with a toilet bowl and a mattress on the floor. A guard reads the Bible to him. Jack believes this man has a listening device in his clothes. They safely store away all his incriminating remarks and then erase all the remarks that prove his crime was unpremeditated, a spasm of personal conscience.

When he is feeling totally morose, a nothing person, he rereads the telegrams he received in the first days after the shooting. HOO-RAY FOR YOU JACK. YOU ARE A HERO MR. RUBY. WE LOVE YOUR GUTS AND COURAGE. YOU KILLED THE SNAKE. YOU DESERVE A MEDAL NOT A JAIL CELL. I KISS YOUR FEET BORN IN HUNGARY LOVE. Then he remembers the guilty verdict, the death penalty, the reversal on flimsy technicalities. He knows that Dallas wants him dead and gone just like Oswald. He knows that people regard all the shootings of that weekend as flashes of a single incandescent homicide and this is the crime they are saying Jack has committed. He is worried that he has been miscast. He runs across the room and butts his head.

He wears white jail coveralls and scribbles notes when his lawyers come to the interview room, where the walls are bugged. He insists on taking a lie-detector test because the sincerity and authenticity of the truth are precious qualities to Americans. “It seems as you get further into something,” he scribbles on a pad, “even though you know what you did, it operates against you somehow, brainwashes you, that you are weak in what you want to tell the truth about.” Authorities arrange a polygraph exam in July 1964. Results are inconclusive.