Libra (8 page)

“If we can find the .22 and wrap it up,” Lee said, “I should probably be getting back.”

“It’ll be Carnival soon,” David Ferrie told him. “Farewell, flesh.”

 

 

He shouts for his meals. He hollers. I will be downstairs visiting with Myrtle Evans and we will hear him calling for his mother and I will jump right up and get upstairs to cook him his meal, like any boy.

 

 

Nobody knew what he knew. The whirl of time, the true life inside him. This was his leverage, his only control. He watched his mother browning flour, her hands rising sticky-white from the heavy-bottomed pan. He ran messages to steamship lines. He lay near sleep, falling into reverie, the powerful world of Oswald-hero, guns flashing in the dark. The reverie of control, perfection of rage, perfection of desire, the fantasy of night, rain-slick streets, the heightened shadows of men in dark coats, like men on movie posters. The dark had a power. The rain fell on empty streets. Always the men appeared, their long shadows bent behind them, then the rifle in his hands, the clip-fed Marlin, the idea of shooting for the gut, to draw out the dying.

There is a world inside the world. Stalin’s party name was Koba. He would devise a secret name, find a cell in the buildings near the docks. He memorized a license number, the color and make of car. He checked out a book that contained police pictures of revolutionaries. Police picture, Trotsky, age nineteen. Police picture, Lenin, full face and profile. Richard Carlson as Herb Philbrick, ordinary citizen, member of the Communist Party, undercover agent for the FBI. She tapped her fingers on the palm of her hand. Rise and shine.

He saw a guy sitting backwards on a motorcycle, smoking a cigarette and looking into space, with tattoos running down one arm to the back of his hand.

The reverie of the girl in the plaid skirt. She lies back across the bed, her feet touching the floor. Brown-and-white saddle shoes, white socks, white blouse, the plaid skirt arranged four inches above the knees. The reverie of stillness, perfection of desire, perfection of control, her pale legs slightly parted, arms at her sides, eyes closed. He makes the picture come and go. It is what he knows about her, how he controls her, alone at night, watching her motionless on the bed, above the rain-slick streets. She is just the right height, thin-lipped, shy, stupid. He watches but is not there.

A dozen movies say the gut-shot man takes a long time dying.

Her hands rising sticky-white. She browned the flour in some fat until it was dark and muddy, the color she wanted her gravy to be. She added meat juices, onions, spices. They ate at the kitchen table. The sound of her mouth chewing the food. The noises in the street. She was always there, watching him, measuring their destiny in her mind. He had two existences, his own and the one she maintained for him. He couldn’t get the .22 to fire. He showed it to a car mechanic, who kept it five weeks without looking at it. They had words over that. He was not afraid to stand up for his rights. In the end he sold the gun for ten dollars to Robert Oswald, who’d been mustered out of the Marines and who was always ready to do a favor, with or without acknowledgment, for his kid brother Lee.

Marguerite sat on the sofa watching TV.

It griped him to move to New York, which we traveled all the way in that 1948 Dodge, but that’s where John Edward was stationed with his wife and baby and we are a family that has never been able to stay together. There are some women in this position who ignore history. But Lee has traveled with me and Mr., Ekdahl and he has traveled alone on a train from Fort Worth to New Orleans when he was eleven years old to visit my sister, a distance of some five hundred and twenty-five miles. Now, about does he live a healthy American life? I would answer as such, your honor, that there are many fine and well-to-do citizens living all around us but that the French Quarter has its vagrants and others. There are certain type bars, including we live over a pool hall, and there is business and gambling on the street. I would also state prostitutes by the galore. But in defense of a mother’s position, he missed only nine days in his last term at Beauregard when I was working at Kreeger’s, 800 and something Canal Street. His future and his dream is the United States Marines, which we bickered back and forth because he used a false affidavit to join but failed at this time. It is only a question of getting to age seventeen, although he has already left school, which he says is for good. This is a boy who grins while they are beating him up and waits for national news on TV. As far as his mother’s place in his heart, he has worked as a messenger and office boy and bought me a thirty-five-dollar coat with his first pay and who gives over money to his mother for room and board and bought me a parakeet in a cage that came with a stand with a planter. It had ivy in the planter, it had the cage, it had the parakeet, it had a complete set of food for the parakeet. It is a question of adjusting, your honor, and he will make the effort every time. I cannot say enough how hard it is to raise boys without a father. I was sitting pretty in our American slang, managing Princess Hosiery, when Mr. Ekdahl proposed in the car. I made him wait a year and he was a Harvard man. I have always seemed to make a home against the odds. I have often been complimented on my appearance and my little bright touches here and there and now I am thinking we will go to Texas again to be with his brother Robert, to be a family again, in Fort Worth, so this boy can be with his brother. And I don’t want to hear how I call the movers all the time. The point of our century is people move. I am a mother of three who sold needles and thread and yarn in her own shop in the front room of the house on Bartholomew Street, a frame house with a backyard, when Lee was a baby in a crib. I was a popular child, your honor. I was raised by a father with five other children to be happy and patriotic. I have made my best effort to raise my boy in this manner, regardless. Whatever is said by them, and they are at it all the time, he knows who has been his main support from the moment I took him home from the Old French Hospital on Orleans Avenue. I am not the looming mother of a boy’s bad dreams.

George Gobel appeared on the screen, stubby, crewcut, with a wholesome smirk, right hand raised to the middle of his forehead in some kind of antic fraternal small-town salute.

Lee was in his room reading about the conversion of surplus value into capital, following the text with his index finger, word by word by word.

Pocket litter. Win Everett was at work devising a general shape, a life. He would script a gunman out of ordinary dog-eared paper, the contents of a wallet. Parmenter would contrive to get document blanks from the Records Branch. Mackey would, find a model for the character Everett was in the process of creating. They wanted a name, a face, a bodily frame they might use to extend their fiction into the world. Everett had decided he wanted one figure to be slightly more visible than the others, a man the investigation might center on, someone who would be trailed and possibly apprehended. Three or four shooters would vanish completely, leaving scant traces of their affiliation. Spanish-speaking men, Mexican, Panamanian, trained specifically for this mission in Cuba. Then one other figure, one slightly clearer image, perhaps abandoned in his sniper’s perch to find his own way out, to be trailed, found, possibly killed by the Secret Service, FBI or local police. Whatever protocol demands. This kind of man, a marksman, near anonymous, with minimal known history, the kind of man who surfaces in murky places, disappears, is arrested for some violent act, is released to drift again, to surface, to disappear. Mackey would find this man for Everett. They needed fingerprints, a handwriting sample, a photograph. Mackey would find the other shooters as well. We don’t hit the President. We miss him. We want a spectacular miss.

Win sat alone on the porch. There was a glass of lemonade on a wicker table. Plants stood in tubs and window boxes, in terracotta pots on the steps. The brick walk was bordered in monkey grass. He waited for Mary Frances.

Of all the cities where the attempt might be made, Miami was the clear choice. Hundreds of exile factions lived there, conspired and squabbled, waited for another chance—
movimientos, juntas, uniones.
Win imagined how word would flash through the area, through all his old exile haunts, La Moderne Hotel, the offices of the Frente leadership. Miami had a resonance, an ardor. It was a city of open wounds, of explosive politics and feelings. This very inflammability, this Cuban heat and light, made him determined to keep the plan a secret from anti-Castro leaders.

Kennedy had been in Miami four months earlier to accept the brigade flag from survivors of the invasion, many just ransomed from Cuban prisons. This was the necessary cleansing of emotions. The failure was now openly acknowledged, commemorated before forty thousand people in a football stadium, all the repressed material sent in reconverted waves into Televisionland, where Everett had sat watching. He respected the President for going to Miami. He was surprised and touched when the President’s wife spoke Spanish to brigade members. But the ceremony had not renewed the cause, the forceful devotion to a free Havana. He saw it now as pure public relations, the kind of gleaming imagery that marked every move the administration made.

The car pulled up and he went down the steps to help Mary Frances take the groceries inside. He gripped the heavy bags. A wind sprang from the east, an idea of rain, sudden, pervading the air. He saw himself go inside, a fellow on a quiet street doing ordinary things, unafraid of being watched.

He stood in the pantry and she handed things in to him. The bulb had blown and he stood in the dimness putting objects on shelves. The faintly musty smell, the coolness of the small room, the familiar labels on jars and cans made him feel like an ancient and tired child, someone allowed to relive the simplest, the deepest times, moments that left a scar on the heart—not an evidence of some detailed pain but only of time itself, systemic, heavy with loss. He tried to register the idea of the burnt-out bulb so he wouldn’t forget to replace it. He heard a shaking in the sky and thought of thunderstorms when he was a boy growing up in the country, the boy who tried not to seem smarter than his older brothers, seeing the light change, the landscape become serious, solemn. Everything ran with fear. It leapt out of the air into things and into children. Those smoky storms approaching. He used to stand in the pantry counting to fifty because that’s when the thunder would stop.

“I have to pick up Suzanne.”

“I’ll finish this, he said.

“Don’t you have a class?”

“Canceled.”

“I want to stop at Penney’s for a couple of things.”

“We should all stop at Penney’s.”

“No but just some things I’ve been meaning to get. We won’t be long.”

“Penney’s is home to us all.”

“The light bulbs are stacked in the back stairway.”

“She reads my mind. She remembers for me.”

“I won’t be long,” she said.

Parmenter would tell him in advance if there were plans for JFK to return to Miami. Sooner or later the President would venture out with his train of attendants, protectors, handshakers and hacks, a city, a street where he’d be vulnerable. Everett was willing to wait a year for Miami. The message would be clearest there, a long-range attempt, high-angled, telescopic, without the pointless human mess some madman would create, walking out of a crowd with the family handgun.

He followed Mary Frances to the door.

He would not consider the plan a success if the uncovering of its successive layers did not reveal the CIA’s schemes, his own schemes in some cases, to assassinate Fidel Castro. This was the little surprise he was keeping for the end. It was his personal contribution to an informed public. Let them see what goes on in the committee rooms and corner offices. The pocket litter, the gunman’s effects, the sidetrackings and back alleys must allow investigators to learn that Kennedy wanted Castro dead, that plots were devised, approved at high levels, put into motion, and that Fidel or his senior aides decided to retaliate. This was the major subtext and moral lesson of Win Everett’s plan.

 

 

The two men who shared a table in the Occidental Restaurant had certain physical similarities. Both were over six feet tall, expensively dressed, robust and athletic, men clearly at ease here, in the theater of the Kennedys, the capital city that measured itself to a certain kind of manliness, a confidence and promise, the grace to take the maximum dare.

Laurence Parmenter, perhaps five years the younger of the two, spoke in the slight whine of the educated Easterner, a way of drawing out syllables to express ironic self-regard.

The other man, George de Mohrenschildt, who lived in Dallas now, spoke English with a courtly foreign accent. He was not averse to being seen as the complete continental. This is what he was. A charming and worldly man able to converse fluently in Russian, English, French, Spanish, probably Togo as well, or whatever they spoke in Togoland. (Parmenter knew he had been there in 1958, posing as a stamp collector.) Larry liked the man. He’d known him for some years and was aware that George had been debriefed by the Agency after several trips abroad. But even though their business interests had overlapped once or twice, he wasn’t sure quite what George’s racket was.