Libra

In the Bronx

This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track. He liked to stand at the front of the first car, hands flat against the glass. The train smashed through the dark. People stood on local platforms staring nowhere, a look they'd been practicing for years. He kind of wondered, speeding past, who they really were. His body fluttered in the fastest stretches. They went so fast sometimes he thought they were on the edge of no-control. The noise was pitched to a level of pain he absorbed as a personal test. Another crazy-ass curve. There was so much iron in the sound of those curves he could almost taste it, like a toy you put in your mouth when you are little.

Workmen carried lanterns along adjacent tracks. He kept a watch for sewer rats. A tenth of a second was all it took to see a thing complete. Then the express stations, the creaky brakes, people bunched like refugees. They came wagging through the doors, banged against the rubber edges, inched their way in, were quickly pinned, looking out past the nearest heads into that practiced oblivion.

It had nothing to do with him. He was riding just to ride.

One forty-ninth, the Puerto Ricans. One twenty-fifth, the Negroes. At Forty-second Street, after a curve that held a scream right out to the edge, came the heaviest push of all, briefcases, shopping bags, school bags, blind people, pickpockets, drunks. It did not seem odd to him that the subway held more compelling things than the famous city above. There was nothing important out there, in the broad afternoon, that he could not find in purer form in these tunnels beneath the streets.

They watched TV, mother and son, in the basement room. She'd bought a tinted filter for their Motorola. The top third of the screen was permanently blue, the middle third was pink, the band across the bottom was a wavy green. He told her he'd played hooky again, ridden the trains out to Brooklyn, where a man wore a coat with a missing arm. Playing the hook, they called it here. Marguerite believed it was not so awful, missing a day now and then. The other kids ragged him all the time and he had problems keeping up, a turbulence running through him, the accepted fact of a fatherless boy. Like the time he waved a penknife at John Edward's bride. Not that Marguerite thought her daughter-in-law was worth getting into a famous feud about. She was not a person of high caliber and it was just an argument over whittling wood, over scraps of wood he'd whittled onto the floor of her apartment, where they were trying to be a family again. So there it was. They were not wanted anymore and they moved to the basement room in the Bronx, the kitchen and the bedroom and everything together, where blue heads spoke to them from the TV screen.

When it got cold they banged the pipes to let the super know. They had a right to decent heat.

She sat and listened to the boy's complaints. She couldn't fry him a platter of chops any time he wanted but she wasn't tight with the lunch money and even gave him extra for a funnybook or subway ride. All her life she'd had to deal with the injustice of these complaints. Edward walked out on her when she was pregnant with John Edward because he didn't want to support a child. Robert dropped dead on her one steamy summer day on Alvar Street, in New Orleans, when she was carrying Lee, which meant she had to find work. Then there was grinning Mr. Ekdahl, the best, the only hope, an older man who earned nearly a thousand dollars a month, an engineer. But he committed cunning adulteries, which she finally caught him out at, recruiting a boy to deliver a fake telegram and then opening the door on a woman in a negligee. This didn't stop him from scheming a divorce that cheated her out of a decent settlement. Her life became a dwindling history of moving to cheaper places.

Lee saw a picture in the Daily News of Greeks diving off a pier for some sacred cross, downtown. Their priests have beards.

"Think I don't know what I'm supposed to be around here."

"I've been all day on my feet," she said.

"I'm the one you drag along."

"I never said any such."

"Think I like making my own dinner."

"I work. I work. Don't I work?"

"Barely finding food."

"I'm not a type that sits around boo-hoo."

Thursday nights he watched the crime shows. Racket Squad, Dragnet, etc. Beyond the barred window, snow driving slantwise through the streetlight. Northern cold and damp. She came home and told him they were moving again. She'd found three rooms on one hundred and something street, near the Bronx Zoo, which might be nice for a growing boy with an interest in animals.

"Natures spelled backwards," the TV said.

It was a railroad flat in a red-brick tenement, five stories, in a street of grim exhibits. A retarded boy about Lee's age walked around in a hippity-hop limp, carrying a live crab he'd stolen from the Italian market and pushing it in the faces of smaller kids. This was a routine sight. Rock fights were routine. Guys with zip guns they'd made in shop class were becoming routine. From his window one night he watched two boys put the grocery store cat in a burlap sack and swing the sack against a lamppost. He tried to time his movements against the rhythm of the street. Stay off the street from noon to one, three to five. Learn the alleys, use the dark. He rode the subways. He spent serious time at the zoo.

There were older men who did not sit on the stoop out front until they spread their handkerchiefs carefully on the gray stone.

His mother was short and slender, going gray now just a little. She liked to call herself petite in a joke she really meant. They watched each other eat. He taught himself to play chess, from a book, at the kitchen table. Nobody knew how hard it was for him to read. She bought figurines and knickknacks and talked on the subject of her life. He heard her footsteps, heard her key in the lock.

"Here is another notice," Marguerite said, "where they threaten a hearing. Have you been hiding these? They want a truancy hearing, which it says is the final notice. It states you haven't gone to school at all since we moved. Not one day. I don't know why it is I have to learn these things through the U.S. mails. It's a blow, it's a shock to my system."

"Why should I go to school? They don't want me there and I don't want to be there. It works out just right."

"They are going to crack down. It is not like home. They are going to bring us into court."

"I don't need help going into court. You just go to work like any other day."

"I'd have given the world to stay home and raise my children and you know it. This is a sore spot with me. Don't you forget, I'm the child of one parent myself. I know the meanness of the situation. I worked in shops back home where I was manager."

Here it comes. She would forget he was here. She would talk for two hours in the high piping tone of someone reading to a child. He watched the DuMont test pattern.

"I love my United States but I don't look forward to a courtroom situation, which is what happened with Mr. Ekdahl, accusing me

of uncontrollable rages. They will point out that they have cautioned us officially. I will tell them I'm a person with no formal education who holds her own in good company and keeps a neat house. We are a military family. This is my defense."

The zoo was three blocks away. There were traces of ice along the fringes of the wildfowl pond. He walked down to the lion house, hands deep in his jacket pockets. No one there. The smell hit him full-on, a warmth and a force, the great carnivore reek of raw beef and animal fur and smoky piss.

When he heard the heavy doors open, the loud voices, he knew what to expect. Two kids from P.S. 44. A chunky kid named Scalzo in a pea coat and clacking shoes with a smaller, runny-nose comedian Lee knew only by his street name, which was Nicky Black. Here to pester the animals, create the routine disturbances that made up their days. He could almost feel their small joy as they spotted him, a little jump of muscle in the throat.

Scalzo's voice banged through the high chamber.

"They call your name every day in class. But what kind of name is Lee? That's a girl's name or what?"

"His name is Tex," Nicky Black said.

"He's a cowpoke," Scalzo said.

"You know what cowpokes do, don't you? Tell him, Tex."

"They poke the cows," Scalzo said.

Lee went out the north door, a faint smile on his face. He walked down the steps and around to the ornate cages of the birds of prey. He didn't mind fighting. He was willing to fight. He'd fought with the kid who threw rocks at his dog, fought and won, beat him good, whipped him, bloodied his nose. That was on Vermont Street, in Covington, when he had a dog. But this baiting was a torment. They would get on him, lose interest, circle back fitfully, picking away, scab-picking, digging down.

Scalzo drifted toward a group of older boys and girls huddled smoking around a bench. Lee heard someone say, "A two-tone

Rocket Olds with wire wheels."

The king vulture sat on its perch, naked head and neck. There is a vulture that breaks ostrich eggs by hurling stones with its beak. Nicky Black was standing next to him. The name was always used in full, never just Nicky or Black.

"Playing the hook is one thing. I say all right. But you don't show your face in a month."

It sounded like a compliment.

"You shoot pool, Tex? What do you do, you're home all day. Pocket pool, right? Think fast."

He faked a punch to Lee's groin, drew back.

"But how come you live in the North? My brother was stationed in Fort Benning, Georgia. He says they have to put a pebble in their hand down south so they know left face from right face. This is true or what?"

He mock-sparred, wagging his head, breathing rapidly through his nose.

"My brother's in the Coast Guard," Lee told him. "That's why we're here. He's stationed in Ellis Island. Port security it's called."

"My brother's in Korea now."

"My other brother's in the Marines. They might send him to Korea. That's what I'm worried about."

"It's not the Koreans you have to worry about," Nicky Black said. "It's the fucking Chinese."

There was reverence in his voice, a small note of woe. He wore torn Keds and a field jacket about as skimpy as Lee's wind-breaker. He was runty and snuffling and the left half of his face had a permanent grimace.

"I know where to get some sweet mickeys off the truck. We go roast them in the lot near Belmont. They have sweet mickeys in the South down there? I know where to get these books where you spin the pages fast, you see people screwing. The kid knows these th'ings. The kid quits school the minute he's sixteen. I mean look out."

He blew a grain of tobacco from the tip of his tongue.

"The kid gets a job in construction. First thing, he buys ten shirts with Mr. B collars. He saves his money, before you know it he owns a car. He simonizes the car once a month. The car gets him laid. Who's better than the kid?"

Scalzo was the type that sauntered over, shoulders swinging. The taps on his shoes scraped lightly on the rough asphalt.

"But how come you never talk to me, Tex?"

"Let's hear you drawl," Nicky Black said.

"I say all right."

"Talk to Richie. He's talking nice."

"But let's hear you drawl. No shit. I been looking forward."

Lee smiled, started walking past the group hunched over the park bench, lighting cigarettes in the wind, the fifteen-year-old girls with bright lipstick, the guys in pegged pants with saddle stitching and pistol pockets. He walked up to the main court and took the path that led to the gate nearest his street.

Scalzo and Nicky Black were ten yards behind.

"Hey fruit."

"He sucks Clorets."

"Bad-breath kissing sweet in seconds."

"One and a two."

"I say all right."

"One two cha cha cha."

"He don't know dick."

"I mean look out."

"But how come he won't talk to me?"

"But what do we have to do?"

"Smoke a Fag-a-teeeer."

"Ex-treeeem-ly mild."

"I say all right."

"But talk to us."

"We're talking bad or what?"

"But say something."

"Think fast, Tex."

"I say all right,"

At the gate a man in a lumber jacket and necktie asked him his name. Lee said he didn't talk to Yankees. The man pointed to a spot on the pavement, meaning that's where you stand until we get this straight. Then he walked over to the other two boys, talked to them for a moment, gesturing toward Lee. Nicky Black said nothing. Scalzo shrugged. The man identified himself as a truant officer. Scalzo tugged at his crotch, looking the man right in the eye. Like so what, mister. Nicky Black did a little cold-day dance, hands in pockets, giving a buck-tooth grin.

Out on the street the man escorted Lee to a green-and-white squad car. Lee was impressed. There was a cop behind the wheel. He drove with one hand, keeping the hand that cupped a cigarette down between his knees.

Marguerite stayed up late watching the test pattern.

Lee purely loves animals so the zoo was a blessing but they sent him downtown to a building where the nut doctors pick at him twenty-four hours a day. Youth House. Puerto Ricans by the galore. He has to take showers in that jabber. John Edward tried to get him to talk to the nut doctor but Lee won't talk to John Edward ever since he opened the pocketknife on John Edward's bride. They have got him in an intake dormitory. They talk to him about is he a nail-biter. Does he have religious affiliation and whatnot? Is he disruptive in class? He doesn't know the slang, your honor. The place is full of New York-type boys. They see my son in Levis, with an accent. Well many boys wear Levis. What is strange about Levis? But they get on him about does he think he's Billy the Kid. This is a boy who played Monopoly with his brothers and had a normal report card when we lived with Mr. Ekdahl, on Eighth Avenue, in Fort Worth. It is a question of adjusting, judge. It was only a whittling knife and he did not actually cut her and now they don't talk, brothers. This is a boy who studies the lives of animals, the eating and sleeping habits of animals, animals in their burrows and caves.

What is it called, lairs? He is advanced, your honor. I have said

from early childhood he liked histories and maps. He knows uncanny things without the normal schooling. This boy slept in my bed out of lack of space until he was nearly eleven and we have lived the two of us in the meanest of small rooms when his brothers were in the orphans' home or the military academy or the Marines and the Coast Guard. Most boys think their daddy hung the moon. But the poor man just crashed to the lawn and that was the end of the only happy part of my adult life. It is Marguerite and Lee ever since. We are a mother and son. It has never been a question of neglect. They say he is truanting is the way they state it. They state to me he stays home all day to watch TV. They are talking about a court clinic. They are talking about the Protestant Big Brothers for working with. He already has big brothers. What does he need more brothers for? There is the Salvation Army that is mentioned. They take the wrappers off the candy bars I bring my son. They turn my pocketbook all out. This treatment is downgrading. It is not my fault if he dresses below the level. What is the fuss about? A boy playing hooky in Texas is not a criminal who is put away for study. They have made my boy a matter on the calendar. They expect me to ask their permission to go back home. We are not the common drifters they paint us out to be. How on God's earth, and I am a Christian, does a neglectful mother make such a decent home, which I am willing to show as evidence, with bright touches and not a thing out of place. I am not afraid to make food last. This is no disgrace, to cook up beans and cornbread and make it last. The tightfisted one was Mr. Ekdahl, on Granbury Road, in Benbrook, when the adulteries started. But I am the one accused of excesses and rages. I took back my name, your honor. Marguerite Claverie Oswald. We moved to Willing Street then, by the railroad tracks.

He did Human Figure Drawings, which were judged impoverished.

The psychologist found him to be in the upper range of Bright Normal Intelligence.

The social worker wrote, "Questioning elicited the information that he feels almost as if there is a veil between him and other people through which they cannot reach him, but he prefers this veil to remain intact."

The schoolteacher reported that he sailed paper planes around the room.

He returned to the seventh grade until classes ended. In summer dusk the girls lingered near the benches on Bronx Park South. Jewish girls, Italian girls in tight skirts, girls with ankle bracelets, their voices murmurous with the sound of boys' names, with song lyrics, little remarks he didn't always understand. They talked to him when he walked by, making him smile in his secret way.

Oh a woman with beer on her breath, on the bus coming home from the beach. He feels the tired salty sting in his eyes of a day in the sun and water.

"The trouble leaving you with my sister," Marguerite said, "she had too many children of her own. Plus the normal disputes of family. That meant I had to employ Mrs. Roach, on Pauline Street, when you were two. But I came home one day and saw she whipped you, raising welts on your legs, and we moved to Sherwood Forest Drive."

Heat entered the flat through the walls and windows, seeped down from the tar roof. Men on Sundays carried pastry in white boxes. An Italian was murdered in a candy store, shot five times, his brains dashing the wall near the comic-book rack. Kids trooped to the store from all around to see the traces of grayish spatter. His mother sold stockings in Manhattan.

A woman on the street, completely ordinary, maybe fifty years old, wearing glasses and a dark dress, handed him a leaflet at the foot of the El steps. Save the Rosenbergs, it said. He tried to give it back, thinking he would have to pay for it, but she'd already turned away. He walked home, hearing a lazy radio voice doing a ballgame. Plenty of room, folks. Come on out for the rest of this game and all of the second. It was a Sunday, Mother's Day, and he folded the leaflet neatly and put it in his pocket to save for later.

There is a world inside the world.

He rode the subway up to Inwood, out to Sheepshead Bay. There were serious men down there, rocking in the copper light. He saw chinamen, beggars, men who talked to God, men who lived on the trains, day and night, bruised, with matted hair, asleep in patient bundles on the wicker seats. He jumped the turnstiles once. He rode between cars, gripping the heavy chain. He felt the friction of the ride in his teeth. They went so fast sometimes. He liked the feeling they were on the edge. How do we know the motorman's not insane? It gave him a funny thrill. The wheels touched off showers of blue-white sparks, tremendous hissing bursts, on the edge of no-control. People crowded in, every shape face in the book of faces. They pushed through the doors, they hung from the porcelain straps. He was riding just to ride. The noise had a power and a human force. The dark had a power. He stood at the front of the first car, hands flat against the glass. The view down the tracks was a form of power. It was a secret and a power. The beams picked out secret things. The noise was pitched to a fury he located in the mind, a satisfying wave of rage and pain.

Never again in his short life, never in the world, would he feel this inner power, rising to a shriek, this secret force of the soul in the tunnels under New York.

17 April

Nicholas Branch sits in the book-filled room, the room of documents, the room of theories and dreams. He is in the fifteenth year of his labor and sometimes wonders if he is becoming bodiless. He knows he is getting old. There are times when he can't concentrate on the facts at hand and has to come back again and again to the page, the line, the fine-grained detail of a particular afternoon. He wanders in and out of these afternoons, the bright hot skies that give tone and depth to narrow data. He falls asleep sometimes, slumped in the chair, a hand curled on the broadloom rug. This is the room of growing old, the fireproof room, paper everywhere.

But he knows where everything is. From a stack of folders that reaches halfway up a wall, he smartly plucks the one he wants. The stacks are everywhere. The legal pads and cassette tapes are everywhere. The books fill tall shelves along three walls and cover the desk, a table and much of the floor. There is a massive file cabinet stuffed with documents so old and densely packed they may be ready to ignite spontaneously. Heat and light. There is no formal system to help him track the material in the room. He uses hand and eye, color and shape and memory, the configuration of suggestive things that link an object to its contents. He wakes up suddenly, wondering where he is.

Sometimes he looks around him, horrified by the weight of it all, the career of paper. He sits in the data-spew of hundreds of lives. There's no end in sight. When he needs something, a report or transcript, anything, any level of difficulty, he simply has to ask. The Curator is quick to respond, firm in his insistence on forwarding precisely the right document in an area of research marked by ambiguity and error, by political bias, systematic fantasy. But not just the right document, not just an obscure footnote from an open source. The Curator sends him material not seen by anyone outside the headquarters complex at Langley, material that includes the results of internal investigations, confidential files from the Agency's own Office of Security. Branch hasn't met the current Curator and doubts if he ever will. They talk on the telephone, terse as snowbirds but unfailingly polite, fellow bookmen after all.

Nicholas Branch in his glove-leather armchair is a retired senior analyst of the Central Intelligence Agency, hired on contract to write the secret history of the assassination of President Kennedy. Six point nine seconds of heat and light. Let's call a meeting to analyze the blur. Let's devote our lives to understanding this moment, separating the elements of each crowded second. We will build theories that gleam like jade idols, intriguing systems of assumption, four-faced, graceful. We will follow the bullet trajectories backwards to the lives that occupy the shadows, actual men who moan in their dreams. Elm Street. A woman wonders why she is sitting on the grass, bloodspray all around. Tenth Street. A witness leaves her shoes on the hood of a bleeding policeman's car. A strangeness, Branch feels, that is almost holy. There is much here that is holy, an aberration in the heartland of the real. Let's regain our grip on things.

He enters a date on the home computer the Agency has provided for the sake of convenient tracking. April 17, 1963. The names appear at once, with backgrounds, connections, locations. The bright hot skies. The shady street of handsome old homes framed in native oak.

American kitchens. This one has a breakfast nook, where a man named Walter Everett Jr. was sitting, thinking-Win, as he was called-lost to the morning noises collecting around him, a stir of the all-familiar, the heartbeat mosaic of every happy home, toast springing up, radio voices with their intimate and busy timbre, an optimistic buzz living in the ear. The Record-Chronicle was at his elbow, still fresh in its newsboy fold. Images wavered in the sunlit trim of appliances, something always moving, a brightness flying, so much to know in the world. He stirred the coffee, thought, stirred, sat in the wide light, spoon dangling now, a gentle and tentative man, it would be fair to say, based solely on appearance.

He was thinking about secrets. Why do we need them and what do they mean? His wife was reaching for the sugar.

He had important thoughts at breakfast. He had thoughts at lunch in his office in the Old Main Building. In the evening he sat on the porch, thinking. He believed it was a natural law that men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted-a respite from the other life, from the eerie realness of living with people who do not keep secrets as a profession or duty, or a business fixed to one's existence.

Mary Frances watched him butter the toast. He held the edges of the slice in his left hand, moved the knife in systematic strokes, over and over. Was he trying to distribute the butter evenly? Or were there other, deeper requirements? It was sad to see him lost in small business, eternally buttering, turning routine into empty compulsion, without meaning or need.

She knew how to worry reasonably. She knew how to use the sound of her own voice to bring him back to what was safe and plain, among the breakfast dishes, on the tenth straight sunny day.

"One of the nicest things to watch? And I've never really noticed till we moved here? People coming out of church. Just gathering near the steps and talking. Isn't it one of the best things to watch?"

"You thought you'd find outlaws down here."

"I like it here. You're the one."

"Men swaggering into saloons. Thirsty from cattle drives."

"I mean churches anywhere. I just never paid attention before."

"I like to watch people come out of motels."

"No but I'm serious. There's something lovely about a church lawn or church steps with the service just ended and people slowly coming out and forming little groups. They look so nice."

"That's what I didn't like about Sundays when I was growing up. All the frumpy people in their starchy clothes. Depressed the hell out of me."

"What's wrong with frumpy? I like being a middle-aged frump."

"I didn't mean you."

He reached across the table and touched her arm as he always did when he thought he might have said something wrong or cut her off. Don't listen to what I say. Trust my hands, my touch.

"It's so comfortable," she said.

We tend to draw together to seek mutual solace for our disease. This is what he thought at the breakfast table in the sweet old house, turn-of-the-century, with the curved porch, the oak posts furled in trumpet vines. He had time to think, time to become an old man in aspic, in sculptured soap, quaint and white. It was not unusual for men in the clandestine service to retire at age fifty-one. A pension plan had been approved by some committee and a statement had been issued about the onerous and dangerous lives led by such people; the family problems; the transient nature of assignments. But Win Everett's retirement wasn't exactly voluntary. There was the business in Coral Gables. There were visits to the polygraph machine. And from three levels of specialists he heard the term "motivational exhaustion." Two were CIA psychiatrists, the other a cleared contact in the outside world, the place he found so eerie and real.

They called it semiretirement. A semantic kindness. They set him up in a teaching post here and paid him a retainer to recruit likely students as junior officer trainees. In a college for women, this was a broad comic thrust even Win could appreciate in a bitter and self-punishing way, as if he were still on their side, watching himself from a distance.

This is what we end up doing, he thought. Spying on ourselves. We are at the mercy of our own detachment. A thought for breakfast.

He folded the lightly toasted slice, ready at last to eat. In his ordinary body she saw the power of conviction. A lean and easy frame. A mild face, clear eyes, high and sad and mottled forehead. There was a burning faith in this man, a sense of cause. Mary Frances saw this more clearly than ever now that he'd been sent away from the councils and planning groups, the task forces, the secret training sites. Deprived of real duties, of contact with the men and events that informed his zeal, he was becoming all principle, all zeal. She was afraid he would turn into one of those men who make a saintliness of their resentment, shining through the years with a pure and tortured light. The radio said high seventies. God is alive and well in Texas.

Suzanne came in, hungry all over again, their six-year-old. She stood with her head piopped against her daddy's arm, feet crossed in a certain way, half sullen, a routine bid for attention. She had her mother's matter-of-fact blondness, hair thick and wiry, her face paler than Mary Frances's, without the wind-roughened texture. Because they'd wanted a child but had given up hope, she was a sign of something unselfish in the world, some great-hearted force that could turn their smallness to admiring awe. Win gathered her in, allowing her to collapse dramatically. He fed her the rest of his toast and made slobbering sounds while she chewed, his gray eyes excited. Mary Frances listened to Life Line on KDNT, a commentary on the need for parents to be more vigilant in checking what their children read and watch and listen to.

"Danger everywhere," said the grim voice.

Win tapped his breast pocket for a cigarette. Suzanne hurried out, hearing the school bus. A silence fell, the first of the day's pauses, the first small exhaustion. Then Mary Frances in her Viyella robe began to remove things from the table, a series of light clear sounds hanging in the air, discreet as hand bells.

The two men sat in Win Everett's temporary office in the basement of the Old Main, under a weak and twitchy fluorescent light. Win was in shirtsleeves, smoking, eager to talk, surprised and a little dismayed at the high anticipation he felt, sharing news with a former colleague face to face.

Carpenters worked in the hallway, men with close-cropped hair and poky drawls, calling to each other under the steam ducts.

Laurence Parmenter leaned forward in his chair, a tall broad man in a blue oxford shirt and dark suit. He showed a vigor even in repose, his blond hair touched with silver at the sideburns, and he had the air of a man who wishes to conduct business, affably, over jokes and drinks. Win thought he was an impressive sort of fellow, self-assured, well connected, one of the men behind the crisp and scintillating coup in Guatemala in 1954, a collector of vintage wines, friend and fellow veteran of the Bay of Pigs.

"My God, they buried you."

"Texas Woman's University. Savor the name."

"What do you teach?"

"History and economics. Somebody in the DDP asked me to check out promising students for them. Foreign girls in particular. If there's a future prime minister here, the idea is we recruit her now, while she's still a virgin."

"Christamighty."

"First they hand me over to the psychiatrists," Win said. "Then they send me into exile. What country is this anyway?"

They both laughed.

"I say the name to myself all the time. I let it flow over me. I linger in its aura."

"Texas Woman's University," Parmenter whispered almost reverently.

Win sat nodding. He and Larry Parmenter had belonged to a group called SE Detailed, six military analysts and intelligence men. The group was one element in a four-stage committee set up to confront the problem of Castro's Cuba. The first stage, the Senior Study Effort, consisted of fourteen high officials, including presidential advisers, ranking military men, special assistants, undersecretaries, heads of intelligence. They met for an hour and a half. Then eleven men left the room, six men entered. The resulting group, called SE Augmented, met for two hours. Then seven men left, four men entered, including Everett and Parmenter. This was SE Detailed, a group that developed specific covert operations and then decided which members of SE Augmented ought to know about these plans. Those members in turn wondered whether the Senior Study Effort wanted to know what was going on in stage three. Chances are they didn't. When the meeting in stage three was over, five men left the room and three paramilitary officers entered to form Leader 4. Win Everett was the only man present at both the third and fourth stages.

"Could actually be worse," Parmenter said. "At least you're still in."

"I'd love to be out, completely, once and for all."

"And do what?"

"Start my own firm. Consult."

"On what, secret invasions?"

"That's one problem. I'm something of a tainted commodity. The other difficulty is I have precious little instinct for business ventures. I know how to teach. CIA has a picture of my prelapsarian soul in their files. They looked at it and sent me here."

"They kept you on. That's the point. They understand more deeply than you think they do."

"I'd love to be out forever. As long as I'm here, I still work for them, even though it's all a poor sick joke."

"They'll bring you back, Win."

"Do I want to be brought back? I don't like the kind of double-minded feeling I have about this thing. Despise them on the one hand; crave their love and understanding on the other."

Knowledge was a danger, ignorance a cherished asset. In many cases the DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence, was not to know important things. The less he knew, the more decisively he could function. It would impair his ability to tell the truth at an inquiry or a hearing, or in an Oval Office chat with the President, if he knew what they were doing in Leader 4. or even what they were talking about, or muttering in their sleep. The Joint Chiefs were not to know. The operational horrors were not for their ears. Details were a form of contamination. The Secretaries were to be insulated from knowing. They were happier not knowing, or knowing too late. The Deputy Secretaries were interested in drifts and tendencies. They expected to be misled. They counted on it. The Attorney General wasn't to know the queasy details. Just get results. Each level of the committee was designed to protect a higher level. There were complexities of speech. A man needed special experience and insight to work true meanings out of certain murky remarks. There were pauses and blank looks. Brilliant riddles floated up and down the echelons, to be pondered, solved, ignored. It had to be this way, Win admitted to himself. The men at his level were spawning secrets that quivered like reptile eggs. They were planning to poison Castro's cigars. They were designing cigars equipped with micro-explosives. They had a poison pen in the works. They were conspiring with organized-crime figures to send assassins to Havana, poisoners, snipers, saboteurs. They were testing a botulin toxin on monkeys. Fidel would be seized by cramps, vomiting and fits of coughing, just like the long-tailed primates, and horribly die. Have you ever seen a monkey coughing uncontrollably? Gruesome. They wanted to put fungus spores in his scuba suit. They were devising a sea shell that would explode when he went swimming.

The members of the committee would allow only generalities to carry upward. It was the President, of course, who was the final object of their protective instincts. They all knew that JFK wanted Castro cooling on a slab but they weren't allowed to let on to him that his guilty yearning was the business they'd charged themselves to carry out. The White House was to be the summit of unknowing. It was as if an unsullied leader redeemed some ancient truth which the others were forced to admire only in the abstract, owing to their mission in the convoluted world.

But there were even deeper shadows, strange and grave silences surrounding plans to invade the island. The President knew about this, of course-knew the broad contours, had a sense of the promised outcome. But the system still operated as an insulating muse. Let him see the softer tones. Shield him from responsibility. Secrets build their own networks, Win believed. The system would perpetuate itself in all its curious and obsessive webbings, its equivocations and patient riddles and levels of delusional thought, at least until the men were on the beach.

After the Bay of Pigs, nothing was the same. Win spent the spring of'61 traveling between Miami, Washington and Guatemala City to close out different segments of the operation, get drunk with station chiefs and advisers, try to explain to exile leaders what went wrong. It was the unraveling of the plot, the first weeks of a wreckage whose life span he seemed determined to prolong at the risk of his own well-being, as if he wanted to compensate for the half-measures that had brought about defeat. A new committee replaced the old, structured less cleverly, although many of the same men, to no one's shocked surprise, took chairs in the paneled room. The death of Fidel Castro was the small talk once more. But SE Detailed and Leader 4 would not take part. The groups were disbanded, their members marked not as failed plotters and operatives but as the Americans in the invasion array who had the deepest personal involvement in the exiles' cause. It was precisely the true believers who must be removed. Their contact with the exile leaders, their work in assembling and training the assault brigade, had made these men overresponsive to policy shifts, light-sensitive, unpredictable. All this was unspoken, of course. The groups simply disappeared and the members were given scattered duties unrelated to Castro's

Cuba, the moonlit fixation in the emerald sea.

Interestingly, some of the men continued to meet.

"Will he find us?"

"I have a feeling he's already here," Win said.

"My plane leaves at five-twenty-five."

"He'll find us."

They sat at the lunch counter in Shraders Pharmacy on the courthouse square. Win stirred his coffee, thought, sat, stirred. Larry kept ducking in his seat to get a better look at the Denton County courthouse, a limestone building of mixed and vigorous character, with turrets, pediments, marble columns, pointed domes, roof balustrades, Second Empire pavilions.

"I look at these ornate old buildings in bustling town squares and I find them full of a hopefulness I think I cherish. Look at the thing. It's so imposing. Imagine a man at the turn of the century coming to a small Southwestern town and seeing a building like this. What stability and civic pride. It's an optimistic architecture. It expects the future to make as much sense as the past."

Win said nothing.

"I'm talking about the American past," Larry said, "as we naively think of it, which is the one kind of innocence I endorse."

The subject ostensibly was Cuba. They'd met several times in an apartment in Coral Gables, a place Parmenter had used to brief Cuban pilots on their way to Nicaragua. They talked about maintaining contacts in the exile community, setting up a network in the Castro government. They were five men who could not let go of Cuba. But they were also an outlawed group. This gave their meetings a self-referring character. Things turned inward. There was only one secret that mattered now and that was the group itself.

"Only be a minute," Win said.

They walked under a canopy and went into the long dark interior of the hardware store, a place of lost and reproachful beauty, with displays of frontier tools and ancient weighing machines, where Win often came to walk the two aisles like a tourist in waist-high ruins, expanded and sad. He had to remind himself it was only hardware. He bought a paint scraper and when they got back to

Larry's rented car, parked off the square, they saw a figure in the front seat, passenger side, a broad-shouldered man in a loud sport shirt. This was T. J. Mackey, a cowboy type to Win's mind but probably the most adept of the men in Leader 4, a veteran field officer who'd trained exiles in assault weapons and supervised early phases of the landings.

Parmenter got behind the wheel, humming something that amused him. Win sat in the middle of the rear seat, giving directions. With Mackey here, the day took on purpose. T-Jay did not bring news of hirings and firings, the births of babies. He was one of the men the Cubans would follow without question. He was also the only man who'd refused to sign a letter of reprimand when the secret meetings in Coral Gables were monitored by the Office of Security. If a monumental canvas existed of the five grouped conspirators, a painting that showed them with knit brows and twisted torsos, darkly scheming men being confronted by crewcut security agents in khaki suits with natural shoulders, it might be titled "Light Entering the Cave of the Ungodly." Parmenter and two others signed letters of reprimand that were placed in their personnel files. Win signed a letter and also agreed to a technical interview, or polygraph exam. He signed a quit claim, stating that he was taking the test voluntarily. He signed a secrecy agreement, stating that he would talk to no one about the test. When he failed the polygraph, security men sealed his office, a small room with a blue door on the fourth floor of the Agency's new headquarters at Langley. In the office they found telephone notes and documents that seemed to indicate, amid the usual ambiguities, that Win Everett was putting people of his own into Zenith Technical Enterprises, the burgeoning Miami firm that provided cover for the CIA's new wave of operations against Cuba. It was a little too much. First he heads a group that ignores orders to disband. Then he runs a private operation inside the Agency's own vast and layered industry of anti-Castro activities. When Win took a second polygraph he sat at the desk apparatus sobbing, after three questions, the electrodes planted in his palm, the cuff around his bicep, the rubber tube traversing his chest. It was such an effort not to lie.

They drove south out of Denton into deep-green country. There were pastures abandoned to mesquite and juniper, places of sudden starkness, a burning glare, a single squat tree, burled and grim. The sky towered unbearably here.

Mackey sat with his right arm out the window, hanging down along the door. He showed no interest in the scenic details of the ride. They passed a Baptist church set on cinder blocks. He responded to remarks with a faint tilt of the head, a raised jaw, to show agreement or amusement.

Parmenter said, "There must be people in these old graveyards who came out on wagon trains. Circuit riders, Indian fighters. It's pretty country, Win. What the hell. Why not settle in, raise your little girl, sign up for the concert and drama series. The school's bound to have one. No, I mean it."

Eyes in the rearview mirror.

The psychiatrists were not unkind. But they'd made him aware of illness and disease. They carried disease with them. They were ill themselves. There were areas of their faces they'd neglected to shave carefully. He didn't have the heart to tell them. They were nice men but incomplete, or too complete. He saw the microscopic hairs so clearly. Motivational fatigue. The Agency was tolerant of such problems. The Agency understood. The truth was he hadn't placed agents in Zenith Technical Enterprises. His old team was already there, working with new case officers, prepared to run sea raids from secret bases in the Keys. But the evidence, thin, sketchy, incidental, was too far-reaching in principle to be convincingly denied by a man in his condition. It was easier to believe than to deny. They'd deciphered his notes, read his typewriter ribbons. Could he tell them he loved Cuba, knew the language and the literature? They had the contents of his burn bags. How could he make them see there was nothing to his scheme but the marginal notes of a diehard and fool?

He took off his jacket, folded it lengthwise and then top to bottom and dropped it on the seat next to him. He tapped his shirt pocket for a cigarette.

They went along a farm-to-market road and crossed the Old Alton Bridge, over Hickory Creek. Win indicated a right turn. They went down a red dirt road that ran a quarter of a mile under a thick canopy of post oaks and hickories. Woods on one side, pasture on the other. Larry eased the car to a stop alongside the rail fence. Win lit a cigarette, leaning forward from the middle of the seat. The two men up front sat with their heads tilted slightly toward him, although neither turned at any time to look back.

"When my daughter tells me a secret," Win said, "her hands get very busy. She takes my arm, grabs me by the shirt collar, pulls me close, pulls me into her life. She knows how intimate secrets are. She likes to tell me things before she goes to sleep..Secrets are an exalted state, almost a dream state. They're a way of arresting motion, stopping the world so we can see ourselves in it. This is why you're here. All I had to do was provide a place and time. You came without asking why. You didn't consider the risks to your careers, associating with Walter Everett Jr. after what's happened. You're here because there's something vitalizing in a secret. My little girl is generous with secrets. I wish she weren't, frankly. Don't secrets sustain her, keep her separate, make her self-aware? How can she know who she is if she gives away her secrets?"

The two men waited.

"The invasion failed because high officials didn't examine the basic assumptions. They got caught up in a spirit of compelling action. They were eager to accept other men's perceptions. There was safety in this. The plan was never clear. No one was ever responsible. Some of them knew a disaster was in the works. They let it ride. They put themselves out of reach. They wanted it over and done. T'here was pressure to get all those armed exiles out of Florida and into goddamn Cuba. I'm not sure anybody thought about what happens to them after we drop them off at the beach. That's where we came in. We were on the airfields or the ships or we were locked in barracks with the exile leaders. They had brothers and sons among the dead and there were armed American soldiers keeping them from leaving the barracks at Opa-Locka. What could I tell those men? I felt like a messenger of plague and death. Then the long slow fall. I wanted to sanctify the failure, make it everlasting. If we couldn't have success, let's make the most of our failure. That's what we were doing at the end when we tried to keep things going. Just an empty exercise."

They waited. They were patient and attentive.

"The movement needs to be brought back to life. These operations the Agency is running out of the Keys are strictly pinpricks. We need an electrifying event. JFK is moving toward a settling of differences with Castro. On the one hand he believes the revolution is a disease that could spread through Latin America. On the other hand he's denouncing guerrilla raids and trying to get brigade members to join the U.S. Army, where someone can keep an eye on them. If we want a second invasion, a full-bore attempt this time, without restrictions or conditions, we have to do something soon. We have to move the Cuban matter past the edge of all these sweet maneuverings. We need an event that will excite and shock the exile community, the whole country. We know Cuban intelligence has people in Miami. We want to set up an event that will make it appear they have struck at the heart of our government. This is a time for high risks. I'm saying be done with half-measures, be done with evasion and delay."

A pickup came down the road and they rolled up their windows to keep the dust out. The driver gave a half-wave without taking his hand off the wheel. They waited for the dust to settle, then rolled down the windows. Win paused a moment before beginning to speak again.

"Some things we wait for all our lives without knowing it. Then it happens and we recognize at once who we are and how we are meant to proceed. This is the idea I've always wanted. I believe you'll sense it is right. It's the high risk we need. We need an electrifying event. You've been waiting for this every bit as much as I have. I believe that or I wouldn't have asked you to come here. We want to set up an attempt on the life of the President. We plan every step, design every incident leading up to the event. We put together a team, leave a dim trail. The evidence is ambiguous. But it points to the Cuban Intelligence Directorate. Inherent in the plan is a second set of clues, even more unclear, more intriguing. These point to the Agency's attempts to assassinate Castro. I am designing a plan that includes elements of both the American provocation and the Cuban reply. We do the whole thing with paper. Passports, drivers' licenses, address books. Our team of shooters disappears but the police find a trail. Mail-order forms, change-of-address cards, photographs. We script a person or persons out of ordinary pocket litter. Shots ring out, the country is shocked, aroused. The paper trail leads to paid agents who have disappeared in Venezuela, in Mexico. I am convinced this is what we have to do to get Cuba back. This plan has levels and variations I've only begun to explore but it is already, essentially, right. I feel its Tightness. I know what scientists mean when they talk about elegant solutions. This plan speaks to something deep inside me. It has a powerful logic. I've felt it unfolding for weeks, like a dream whose meaning slowly becomes apparent. This is the condition we've always wanted to reach. It's the life-insight, the life-secret, and we have to extend it, guard it carefully, right up to the time we have shooters stationed on a rooftop or railroad bridge."

There was a silence. Then Parmenter said dryly, "We couldn't hit Castro. So let's hit Kennedy. I wonder if that's the hidden motive here."

"But we don't hit Kennedy. We miss him," Win said.

Mackey fed quarters into the public phone in the Esso station about a hundred miles from the Louisiana border. He was trying to reach a man named Guy Banister, a former FBI agent who ran a detective agency in New Orleans. Banister was a channel for CIA money supplied to the anti-Castro effort in the area. Mackey knew him in the period before the invasion, when Banister was shipping weapons and explosives to the exile forces. It was time to get in touch again.

The voice at the other end was not Banister's or his secretary's. It took Mackey a moment to place it correctly. David Ferrie. The investigator, bag man and spiritual adviser. Mackey put down the phone and walked across the windy plaza to his car.

David Ferrie made a face when he heard the click in his left ear. He had a tendency to wince. He winced all the time in front of mirrors when he pasted on his homemade eyebrows and mohair toupee. Ferrie suffered from a rare and horrific condition that had no cure. His body was one hundred percent bald. It looked like something pulled from the earth, a tuberous stem or fungus esteemed by gourmets. But he wasn't about to give in, grow despondent, sit in a dark room drinking Tastee Shakes and jerking off. He had some lively interests. A cure for cancer was one interest, almost a lifelong interest. He'd done research and written papers on the subject. He was interested in hypnotism and could put people into trances. Flying was a deep and abiding interest. Ferrie had been a senior pilot for Eastern Airlines before his disease made him bald and before his sexual sport with boys became a widely known fact that Eastern officials found disconcerting. He was interested in the communistic menace. Cuba was an interest.

Moments after he put down the phone, Ferrie was in the small room behind Guy Banister's office, making faces in the mirror as he adjusted the semicircular eyebrows. He was on his way to a shopping center in Jeff Parish where a model fallout shelter was on display. He wanted to check the dimensions, see what kind of supplies they had and how they were stored. He already had rubber bedsheets and a battery radio with CONELRAD frequencies clearly marked. He knew about a munitions bunker to the southwest that might be converted to an effective shelter, deep in the ground, isolated, with food and water for many months. It was heart-lifting in a way to think about the Bomb. How satisfying, he thought, to live alone in a hole. Not because he resembled a mutant form of life but just to eke out extra time while all hell thundered on the surface. He'd earned a reward for his unlucky life.

Laurence Parmenter drove toward Love Field in his rented Dodge Dart. He preferred to avoid thinking about Everett's plan for the time being. He listened to the radio, to an evangelist talking about retail prayer and wholesome prayer. Pray for yourself, pray for the world. Win was a bright man, dedicated, loyal to the cause, bright, very bright, but he'd suffered some kind of nervous collapse. Happens all the time. He seemed well now, alert, in full control, but an idea needs time to reveal its facets, its shifting lights and fires. Not that Larry meant to let the matter drag. He wanted Cuba back and the sooner the better. He had interests there. He had rights, claims, hidden financial involvement in a leasing company that had been working toward a huge land deal to facilitate oil drilling. This was before the plucky rebels came out of the hills.

He would begin to think about Everett's plan on the flight back to Washington. Sip a Beefeater martini, nibble salted nuts, pray for himself, pray for the world. A line from an old drinking song popped into his head. But where from? From Cairo, 1944, morale operations, Office of Strategic Services. Larry was part of the Groton-Yale-OSS network of so-called gentlemen spies, many of them now in important Agency positions. He was not old money, not quite elect, but still a member, ready to accede to the will of the leadership. They were the pure line, a natural extension of schoolboy societies, secret oaths and initiations, the body of assumptions common to young men of a certain discernible dash. He sang aloud, "Oh we are the jolly coverts, we lie and we spy till it hurts." He was trying to recall the next line when the first of the airport signs appeared.

On the radio a news announcer said that police were still keeping watch over Major General Edwin A. Walker's home and grounds following a gunman's attempt to kill the controversial right-wing figure one week earlier. There were no new leads in the case.

After dark the stillness falls, the hour of withdrawal, houses in shadow, the street a private place, a set of mysteries. Whatever we know about our neighbors is hushed and lulled by the deep repose. It becomes a form of intimacy, jasmine-scented, that deceives us into trustfulness.

Win was in the living room turning the pages of a book. This is what he did, according to his wife, instead of reading. Turned pages until there were no more. He wondered whether the two men realized he'd called them here specifically for April 17, the second anniversary of the Bay of Pigs. A thought for bedtime. He turned another page.

Upstairs Mary Frances was in bed. She worried about the worn-out rug, thought about breakfast, thought about lunch, tried not to be too foolishly proud of the renovated kitchen, large, handsome, efficient, with its frostless freezer and color-matched appliances, on the quiet street of oak and pecan trees, forty miles north of Dallas.

In New Orleans

A classmate, Robert Sproul, watched him cross the street. He carried his books over his shoulder, tied together in a green web belt with brass buckle. U.S. Marines. His shirt was torn along a seam. There was smeared blood at the corner of his mouth, a grassy bruise on his cheek. He came through the traffic and walked right past Robert, who hurried alongside, looking steadily at Lee to draw a comment.

They walked along North Rampart, on the edge of the Quarter, where a few iron-balconied homes still stood among the sheet-metal works and parking lots.

"Aren't you going to tell me what happened?"

"I don't know. What happened?"

"You're bleeding from the mouth is all."

"They didn't hurt me."

"Oh defiance. You're my hero, Lee."

"Keep walking."

"They made you bleed. It looks like they rubbed your face in it all right."

"They think I talk funny."

"They roughed you up because you talk funny? What's funny about the way you talk?"

"They think I talk like a Yankee."

He seemed to be grinning. It was just like Lee to grin when it made no sense, assuming it was a grin and not some squint-eyed tic or something. You couldn't always tell with him.

"We'll go to my house," Robert said. "We have eleven kinds of antiseptics."

Robert Sproul at fifteen resembled a miniature college sophomore. White bucks, chinos, a button-down shirt open at the collar. This was the second time he'd encountered Lee in the streets after he'd been knocked around by someone. Some boys had given him a pounding down by the ferry terminal after he'd ridden in the back of a bus with the Negroes. Whether out of ignorance or principle, Lee refused to say. This was also like him, to be a misplaced martyr and let you think he was just a fool, or exactly the reverse, as long as he knew the truth and you didn't.

It occurred to Robert that there was, as a matter of fact, a trace of Northern squawk in Lee's speech, although you could hardly blame him for it, knowing what you knew of his mixed history.

He spent serious time at the library. First he used the branch across the street from Warren Easton High School. It was a two-story building with a library for the blind downstairs, the regular room above. He sat cross-legged on the floor scanning titles for hours. He wanted books more advanced than the school texts, books that put him at a distance from his classmates, closed the world around him. They had their civics and home economics. He wanted subjects and ideas of historic scope, ideas that touched his life, his true life, the whirl of time inside him. He'd read pamphlets, he'd seen photographs in Life. Men in caps and worn jackets. Thick-bodied women with scarves on their heads. People of Russia, the other world, the secret that covers one-sixth of the land surface of the earth.

The branch was small and he began to use the main library at Lee Circle. Corinthian columns, tall arched windows, a rank of four librarians at the desk on the right as you enter. He sat in the semicircular reading room. All kinds of people here, different classes and manners and ways of reading. Old men with their faces in the page, half asleep, here to escape whatever is out there. Old men crossing the room, men with bread crumbs in their pockets, foreigners, hobbling.

He found names in the catalogue that made him pause with a strange contained excitement. Names that were like whispers he'd been hearing for years, men of history and revolution. He found the books they wrote and the books written about them. Books wearing away at the edges. Books whose titles had disappeared from the spines, faded into time. Here was Das Kapital, three volumes with buckled spines and discolored pages, with underlinings, weird notes in an obsessive hand. He found mathematical formulas, sweeping theories of capital and labor. He found The Communist Manifesto. It was here in German and in English. Marx and Engels. The workers, the class struggle, the exploitation of wage labor. Here were biographies and thick histories. He learned that Trotsky had once lived, in exile, in a working-class area of the Bronx not far from the places Lee had lived with his mother.

Trotsky in the Bronx. But Trotsky was not his real name. Lenin's name was not really Lenin. Stalin's name was Dzhugashvili. Historic names, pen names, names of war, party names, revolutionary names. These were men who lived in isolation for long periods, lived close to death through long winters in exile or prison, feeling history in the room, waiting for the moment when it would surge through the walls, taking them with it. History was a force to these men, a presence in the room. They felt it and waited.

The books were struggles. He had to fight to make some elementary sense of what he read. But the books had come out of struggle. They had been struggles to write, struggles to live. It seemed fitting to Lee that the texts were often masses of dense theory, unyielding. The tougher the books, the more firmly he fixed a distance between himself and others.

He found enough that he could understand. He could see the capitalists, he could see the masses. They were right here, all around him, every day.

Marguerite browned flour in a heavy-bottomed pan. They watched each other eat. She was always right there, hands busy, eyes bright behind the dark-rimmed glasses. He could see the strain and aging in her face, the flesh going taut at the hairline, and he felt something between pity and contempt. They watched TV in the next room. Miniature willow baskets hung on the wall. Her skull was showing through.

"Lillian says I spoil you to a T. You think you own me, she says."

"I'm your son. You have to do what I want."

"I admit this, which I shouldn't say a word, but your brothers were a burden on my back. They demanded attention which it was not humanly possible to give. This is where the human element comes in. When I think of all the tragedies. Your daddy felt a pain in his arm, out mowing. The next thing I know."

"They're in the service to get away from you."

"When I think of being a grandparent who is denied affection. We ate red beans and rice on Mondays. I took you to Godchaux's in a stroller."

Ever since he could remember, they'd shared cramped spaces. It was the basic Oswald memory. He could smell the air she moved through, could smell her clothes hanging behind a door, a tropical mist of corsets and toilet water. He entered bathrooms in the full aura of her stink. He heard her mutter in her sleep, grinding the death's-head teeth. He knew what she would say, saw the gestures before she made them.

"I am entitled to better."

"So am I. I'm the one. I have rights," he said.

He helped her hang half-moon wall shelves. He would find a communist cell and become a member. This was a city with a hundred kinds of foreigners and ideas and influences. There were people who ran ads in the paper to seek favors of a patron saint. There were people who wore berets, who did not speak ten words of English. Down at the docks he saw oppressed workers unloading ninety-pound banana stems from Honduras. He would find a cell, be given tasks to prove himself.

"Lillian expects endless thanks. She lives off thank-yous and you're-welcomes."

"She thinks we're one jump up from handouts in the street."

"She thinks we're beholden," Marguerite said. "I was a popular child. I am willing to stand on the facts."

They'd lived with her sister Lillian on French Street. They took an apartment on St. Mary Street, eventually moving to a cheaper apartment in the same building. Then they moved to the Quarter.

He is a quiet and studious boy who demands his meals, like any boy.

"The Claveries were poor but not unhappy. We ate red beans and rice on Mondays. Just because she let us stay a few weeks, I know what she says behind my back. They talk and make up stories, which I am not surprised. They have hidden reasons they aren't telling for how they feel. They say I fly off too quick on the handle. I just can't get along, so-called. They never say it could be they're the ones at fault. They're the ones you can't reason with. She says I take one little word and make a difference out of it, which stands between us until we see each other on the street when it's 'Oh hello, how are you, come see us real soon.' '

"She thinks because she gives me money to rent a bike."

They lived in a three-story building in an alley that opened onto Canal Street, the dodging bodies and shopwindows glaring hot. The building had arched entranceways with decorative crests. That's what Marguerite liked most. It was otherwise a sad show. Lee had the bedroom, she took the studio couch.

In St. Louis Cemetery Number One he sees an old Negro snoring in his stocking feet, body propped against one of the oven vaults, the sun beating down on smashed amber glass.

They watched each other eat. He practiced chess moves at the kitchen table. She described houses and yards and furniture way back to the early decades of the century, in New Orleans, where she was raised, a happy child. He knew these things were important. He did not deny the value of what she said or the power of the images she carried with her. These were important things, family, money, the past, but they did not touch his real life, the inward-spinning self, and he let her voice fall through a hole in the air.

He sees a tough-looking Mexican or whatever he is suddenly strike a female pose outside a bar, getting a laugh from his friends.

He had his one-volume encyclopedia of the world, which his aunt Lillian said he read like a boy's novel of the sea. Kinetic energy. Grand Coulee Dam. He would join a communist cell. They would talk theory into the night. They would give him tasks to perform, night missions that required intelligence and stealth. He would wear dark clothes, cross rooftops in the rain.

How many people know a killdeer is a bird?

He got a letter from his brother Robert, his full brother, who was still in the Marines. He took a page out of his spiral notebook and replied at once, mainly answering questions. He liked his brother but was certain Robert didn't know who he was. It was the age-old family mystery. You don't know who I am. Robert was named for their father, Robert E. Lee Oswald. That's where his own name came from, Lee. His father was at the end of the Lakeview line, turning to chalk.

"I took you to Godchaux's to see the flag, the two of us. The war was on and we lived on Pauline Street and they hung a seven-story flag right down the front of Godchaux's, where I bought my light-gray suit which I am wearing in the photo with Mr. Ekdahl, which is shortly after our marriage. A seven-story American flag. This is when you caused a flurry with Mrs. Roach, throwing an iron toy."

He wanted to write a story about one of the people at the library for the blind. That was the only way to imagine their world.

Marguerite had blue eyes and dark lashes. She was a sales clerk and cashier, working near the hosiery shop she'd managed, about a dozen years earlier, on Canal Street, before they fired her. She could not add or subtract was the stated reason. Marguerite knew better, felt the vibrations, heard the whispers of nasty attitude, of grudge against the world, which wasn't as bad as the time she was fired from Lerner's in New York because they said she did not use deodorant. This was not true because she used a roll-on every day and if it didn't work the way it said on TV, why should she be singled out as a social misfit? New York was not behind the times in strange smells.

He did his homework at the kitchen table, questions only morons would want to answer. She woke him up for school by clapping her hands in the doorway, insistently, the fingers of one hand tapping the palm of the other. Something in him turned to murder at the sight of her, sometimes, in the street, coming toward him unexpectedly. He heard her footsteps, heard her key in the lock. The voice called out from the kitchen, the toilet flushed. He knew the inflections and the pauses, knew what she would say, word for word, before she spoke. She tapped her hands in the doorway. Rise and shine.

"It is evident," he read, "that the definition of capital-value invested in labor-power as circulating capital is a secondary one, obliterating its specific difference in the process of production."

He tried to talk politics with Robert Sproul's sister, mainly to say something. They played chess on a closed porch at the Sproul house. Robert sat nearby doing a term paper on the history of air power.

She was a year older than Lee, soft-skinned, blond, with a serious mouth. He had a feeling she tried not to look too pretty. There were girls like that, hiding behind a surface of neatness and reserve.

"Eisenhower gets off too easy," Lee was saying, "and I can give you a good example."

"I don't think you can but go ahead."

"It was Eisenhower and Nixon who killed the Rosenbergs. Guaranteed. They're the ones responsible."

"Well that's just you're daydreaming."

"Well no I'm not."

"There was a trial unless I'm sadly mistaken," she said.

"Ike is a well-known boob. He could have stopped the execution."

"Like a movie, I suppose?"

"Do you know who the Rosenbergs are, even?"

"I just said there was a trial."

"But the hidden factors, the things that don't get out."

She gave him a tight look. She was just the right height. Not too tall. He liked her air of restraint, the way she moved the pieces on the board, almost bashfully, giving no hint of the winning or losing involved. It made him feel animated and rash, a chess genius with dirty fingernails. There was a mother or father moving around inside the house.

"I read all about the Rosenbergs when I was in New York," he said. "They were railroaded to the chair. The idea was to make all communists look like traitors. Ike could have done something."

"He did do something. He played golf," Robert said.

"Now Senator Eastland's coming to New Orleans. You know why, don't you?"

"He's looking for you," Robert said. "He can't figure out how a boy in the Civil Air Patrol."

"He's looking for reds under the beds," Lee said.

"He's wondering how a clean-cut boy."

"The main thing is in communism that workers don't produce profits for the system."

"He's looking at your cute smile and he's just real upset. A teenage communist in the CAP."

Lee half enjoyed the ribbing. He looked at Robert's sister to get her reaction but her eyes were on the board. Well brought up. He saw her at the library. She was on the pep squad at school, the girl at the far end who went more or less unnoticed.

"What if they did spy? It's only because they believed communism is the best system. It's the system that doesn't exploit, so then you're strapped in the chair."

Lee was aware that the parent, whichever one it was, had moved to the edge of the open doorway. The parent was standing there, on the other side of the wall, listening.

"If you look at the name Trotsky in Russian, it looks totally different," he said to Robert Sproul's sister. "Plus here's something nobody knows. Stalin's name was Dzhugashvili. Stalin means man of iron."

"Man of steel," Robert said.

"Same thing."

"Dumb bunny."

"The whole thing is they lie to us about Russia. Russia is not what they say. In New York the communists don't hide. They're out on the street."

"Quick, Henry, the Flit," Robert said.

"First you produce profits for the system that exploits you."

"Kill it before it spreads."

"Then they're always trying to sell you something. Everything is based on forcing people to buy. If you can't buy what they're selling, you're a zero in the system."

"Well that's neither here nor there," the sister said.

"Where is it?" he asked her.

It was the father who appeared in the doorway, a tall man with a plaid blanket folded over one arm. He seemed to be looking for a horse. He spoke of homework and errands, he mumbled obscurely about family matters. The sister's relief was easy to see. It could be felt and measured. She slipped past her father and melted serenely into the dim interior.

The father walked with Lee to the front door and opened it as wide as it would go. They did not speak to each other. Lee walked home through the Quarter past hundreds of tourists and conventioneers who thronged in the light rain like people in a newsreel.

He kept the Marxist books in his room, took them to the library for renewal, carried them back home. He let classmates read the titles if they were curious, just to see their silly faces crinkle up, but he didn't show the books to his mother. The books were private, like something you find and hide, some lucky piece that contains the secret of who you are. The books themselves were secret. Forbidden and hard to read. They altered the room, charged it with meaning. The drabness of his surroundings, his own shabby clothes were explained and transformed by these books. He saw himself as part of something vast and sweeping. He was the product of a sweeping history, he and his mother, locked into a process, a system of money and property that diminished their human worth every day, as if by scientific law. The books made him part of something. Something led up to his presence in this room, in this particular skin, and something would follow. Men in small rooms. Men reading and waiting, struggling with secret and feverish ideas. Trotsky's name was Bronstein. He would need a secret name. He would join a cell located in the old buildings near the docks. They would talk theory into the night. But they would act as well. Organize and agitate. He would move through the city in the rain, wearing dark clothes. It was just a question of finding a cell. There was no question they were here. Senator Eastland made it clear on TV. Underground reds in N'yorlenz.

In the meantime he read his brother's Marine Corps manual, to prepare for the day when he'd enlist.

There were two kids at school, in particular, before he quit, who called him Yankee all the time. Trailing him down the halls, calling across the lunchroom. He smiled and was ready to fight but they never made a realistic move.

The names on the order blanks excited him. Lisbon, Manila, Hong Kong. But soon the routine took hold and he realized the ships and cargoes and destinations had nothing to do with him. He was a runner. He carried paper to other forwarding companies and steamship lines or across the street to the U.S. Custom House, which looked like a temple of money, massive and gray, with tall granite columns. He was supposed to look eager and bright. People seemed to depend on his cheerfulness. The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile. He disappeared for hours at the movies. Or he sat in an unused office in a far corner of the third floor, where he spent serious time reading the Marine Corps manual.

He memorized the use of deadly force. He studied principles of close order drill and the use of ribbons and badges. He made unauthorized phone calls to Robert Sproul to read hair-raising passages about bayonet fighting. The whirl, the slash, the butt stroke. There was no end of things to quote from the manual. The book had been written just for him. He read deeply in the rules, impressed by the strictness and precision, by the stream of awesome details, weird, niggling, perfect.

Robert Sproul knew about a gun for sale, a bolt-action.22, a varmint gun, or we'll plink tin cans, and they went on Lee's lunch hour to a cheap hotel above the business district, among muffler shops and discount furniture, in the January chill. The lobby was like a passageway to a toilet. The rooms were on the second floor, above a boarded-up store with a sign reading Formal Rentals. Robert had the seller's room number but not his name. Supposedly he was an acquaintance of David Ferrie, an airline pilot and instructor in the Civil Air Patrol. Ferrie had commanded the unit Robert and Lee were enrolled in that summer, although Lee had attended only three sessions, just long enough to get the uniform.

The boys were surprised when Captain Ferrie himself opened the door. A man in his late thirties, sad-faced, friendly, standing in the doorway in a bathrobe and a pair of argyle socks reaching to his knees. He waved them into the room, looking carefully at Lee. The shades were drawn. There were clothes everywhere, Chinese food spilling out of white cartons, some bills and coins on the floor. The room stood in a kind of stupor, a time zone of its own.

"Boys, how nice. I was told to expect visitors. Alfredo is selling his gun, I understand. He claims he killed a man with that gun. Some gringo millionaire. Every Latin has killed a gringo in his daydreams. These are temporary quarters, you understand. Your flying ace is between assignments."

Ferrie sat in an armchair amid strewn clothing. Robert looked quickly at Lee. A strangulated grimace.

"Now let's see," Ferrie said. "Robert I know from our classes in the Eastern hangar at Lakefront. It seems a hundred years ago. But who's the shy one with the neat part in his hair?"

"I went a few times," Lee said, "but then I stopped."

"But you were there. I thought so. I was sure of it. In your uniform. A uniform makes all the difference. I know my boys. I never forget a cadet. Do you know Dennis Rumsey? Dennis is a cadet. He comes here after school. Do you know Warren Van Zandt, the fat boy? Warren's daddy has lung cancer bad."

"What about the rifle?" Robert said.

"It's around here somewhere. A Marlin bolt-action.22. It's clip-fed and you can have it real cheap because the firing pin's broken. Easy to fix. Take it to a welder, bang bang bang."

"Nobody mentioned broken," Robert said.

"They never do."

"Well I don't know, sir."

"Neither do I."

"If the rifle can't be fired as is."

"He'll weld an extension, bang bang."

"But this would mean an inconvenience."

"The pleasure may be worth it. Do you know guns? Guns are an interest of mine."

Robert shot a glance like let's get out of here. Something in the far corner seemed to be alive. Lee took a few steps in that direction. He was aware that some kind of well-intentioned look was pasted to his face, a smile not connected to things. There was a cage on the dresser with white mice running around inside.

He turned to Ferrie and said, "Mice."

"Isn't life fantastic?"

"What are they for?"

"Research. Here we are it's eleven years after the war, a new era, an age of hope, and we're no closer to ending the cancer plague than a thousand years ago. I've studied diseases all my life. Even as a boy I allotted my time. I knew what cancer was long before I heard the word. What's your name?"

"Lee."

"Allot your time, Lee."

Robert Sproul edged toward the door.

"Captain Ferrie, I think actually, sir."

"What?"

"I have to get going. I guess I'll take a rain check on the gun purchase."

"I've studied patterns of coincidence," Ferrie said to Lee. "Coincidence is a science waiting to be discovered. How patterns emerge outside the bounds of cause and effect. I studied geopolitics at Baldwin-Wallace before it was called geopolitics."

"Lee, are you coming?"

Lee wanted to leave but found himself just standing there grinning stupidly at Robert, who made a dumb face back at him and walked out, sort of tiptoed out. Maybe Lee thought it wasn't nice to leave abruptly. But in that case Robert was the one who should have stayed. He was the honor student, well brought up, who lived in a house with a closed porch amid azaleas, oaks and palms.

"Tell me about yourself," Ferrie said. "First, ignore the mess. The mess belongs mainly to Alfonso, Alfredo, whatever he's called. Anywhere he settles, even for a minute, you sense an air of criminal intent. Works on a tug out of Port Sulphur. A job that wouldn't interest a boy with intelligent eyes like yours. Tell me about your eyes."

Ferrie was deep in the armchair. At this angle, in the uncertain light, he resembled an eighty-year-old man, wide-eyed with fear.

He was totally remote. Lee's sense of things was that he was one step ahead for having stayed, that Robert had bailed out too soon, that this business was too rich to be missed, and for the rest of his time here he experienced what was happening and at the same moment, although slightly apart, recounted it all for Robert. He had a little vision of himself. He saw himself narrating the story to Robert Sproul, relishing his own broad manner of description even as the moment was unfolding in the present, in the larger scheme, arms going like crazy, an animated cartoon, and he felt slightly superior in the telling. He'd stayed for the whole thing. What could be more squeamish and chicken-hearted than leaving too soon, thinking safety-first, home to your perfect family and plaid blanket, and then the thing turns out okay.

"If you allot your time, you can accomplish fantastic things. I learned Latin when I was your age. I stayed indoors and learned a dead language, for fear of being noticed out there, made to pay for being who I was."

He forgets I'm here.

"Cleveland," he said, making it sound like a lost civilization. "My father was a cop. I'm constantly haunted by the thought of cops, government cops, Feebees-the FBI. They're on you like the plague. Once you're in the files, they never leave you alone. They stick to you like cancer. Eternal."

This man is strange even to himself.

"What about the rifle?" Lee said. "Maybe I'll buy it. How much does he want for it?"

"He wants twenty-five dollars. But you give me fifteen. Because it's you, fifteen. You're one of my cadets. I look out for my boys. You wear a uniform, it makes all the difference. Look at me. I put on my captain's jacket, all this bleary shit just falls away. I become a captain for Eastern. I talk like a captain. I instill confidence in anxious travelers. I actually fly the goddamn plane."

He knows he's strange but can't help it.

"If I decide I'll buy it, how do I get it home?"

"How do you get it home is easy. You take it and wrap it in a blanket. You use that blanket right there. The hotel won't mind."

Added to everything else was the fact that he'd actually have the rifle. He'd emerge with the rifle. He'd be able to say he'd transported a rifle in a stolen blanket through the city of New Orleans. Ferrie watched the mice in the cage, made whistling sounds. All this built seamlessly into Lee's narration to Robert Sproul, the future inside the present, the little cartoon at the heart of events.

"The question is can you cure the disease before it kills you? Once you set out consciously to cure the disease, as I did even before I knew the word cancer, you run the risk of catching it. Comprende? Whatever you set your mind to, your personal total obsession, this is what kills you. Poetry kills you if you're a poet, and so on. People choose their death whether they know it or not."

"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 Phil-brick, 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.

26 April

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."

'Til 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.

"Then in May I go to Haiti," de Mohrenschildt said.

"Do I dare ask?"

"Ask, by all means. I'm going there to find oil for the Haitians. They're giving me a sisal plantation as a concession."

"Do they need help finding sisal?"

"I believe it grows aboveground."

They held their laughter.

"You turn up in interesting places, George."

Now they laughed, remembering the same thing, the time Parmenter walked into a dental clinic in a remote town near the CIA air base in southwest Guatemala where the Bay of Pigs was being rehearsed by Cuban pilots and American advisers. Sitting in the shabby waiting room, in an alligator shirt and madras shorts, was George de Mohrenschildt, also known as Jerzy Sergius von Mohrenschildt. He was on a walking tour of Central America, he said.

"That whole thing ended horribly," George said, "if I can actually say it has ended."

"I think you can say that."

"This administration still bullies Castro. It's ridiculous and unnecessary. I'll go even further. This whole administration revolves around the floating cinder of little communist Cuba. It's something of a joke, Larry, and I say this knowing which side of the Cuban fence you are on. Of course this is your job and I respect it."

"This was my job. I'm doing strictly support work now."

"I would like to believe the administration has no more designs on Cuba."

"Believe it, George. The missile crisis was resolved with the understanding that we wouldn't invade Cuba. Kennedy had the chance to get rid of Castro and he ends up guaranteeing the man's job. There is widespread lack of interest right now. Commitment to this issue is absolutely nil. The administration went from passionate and total dedication to an attitude of complete aloofness and indifference and they did it in goddamn record time."

"It's the American disease," George said with a warm smile.

De Mohrenschildt was a petroleum engineer by profession but didn't seem to spend much time at it. He was on his fourth wife, Larry knew, and they tended to be women from wealthy families.

But his marriages didn't explain his apparent association with Nazis in World War II, his apparent ties to Polish and French intelligence, his expulsion from Mexico, his apparent communist leanings when he was at the University of Texas, his Soviet contacts in Venezuela, the discrepancies in his stated history, his travels in West Africa, Central America, Yugoslavia and Cuba.

George had a tendency to be detained or shot at for sketching coastal installations in strategic areas.

But he knew Jackie Kennedy or her parents or someone in the family, and he spent time at the Racquet Club when he was in New York, and he was technically entitled to call himself a baron. It was part of George's attractiveness that he continually emerged from a different past.

"When do you leave Washington?"

"I go to New York tomorrow, then back to Dallas."

"I thought Dallas was Walker country," Larry said. "Who's taking potshots at the general?"

"He's a complete fascist degenerate, this man Walker. A very dangerous man with his racism, his anti-Castro crusades. This is what I mean about Cuba. Cuba stirs up the worst kind of American obsession. Here is a general who is relieved of his command for preaching right-wing politics, who leads a racist campaign in Mississippi, who is put in the loony bin, who settles down in Dallas where we see him in the papers every day with his John Birch Society nonsense and his Cuban tirades. Raw hate, Larry. Two men died in Mississippi because of Walker's provocations. He's a little Hitler plain and simple."

"You sound as though you'd like to take a crack at him yourself."

"I'm telling you, I wouldn't mind. As a matter of fact, I think I know who tried to kill him."

A waiter plunged after a dropped spoon.

"A boy I know in Dallas," George said. "I call him a boy. Maybe he's twenty-two, twenty-three. Now that I'm past fifty, they all look like boys and girls. But as long as the boys don't look like girls and vice versa."

"What got him interested in Walker?"

"The easy answer is politics. In 1959, an ex-Marine, what does he do? He defects to the Soviet Union. They send him to a factory in Minsk. Disillusionment sets in, of course, and back he comes. Naturally the Agency is interested. Domestic Contacts asks me to talk to the boy."

"A friendly debriefing."

"Exactly. I'm to take the fatherly approach. Find out what he saw, heard, smelled and tasted. It wasn't long before we started to like each other. In fact I think my own feelings about General Walker may have influenced Lee to take a shot at him."

"But you're not absolutely sure."

"Not absolutely."

"He hasn't said he did it."

"He hasn't said anything. But there were indications, certain signs, an atmosphere, you know? Plus a curious photograph he sent me. I'm frankly sorry he missed."

They returned to their food, their lunch. The voices and noise around them became apparent once more, a tide of excited news, a civilized clamor. George said something perfectly right about the wine, swirling it in the high-stemmed tulip glass. An attractive woman hurried toward a table, showing the happy exasperation that describes a journey through traffic snarls and personal dramas to some island of prosperous calm. There were times when Larry thought lunch in a superior restaurant was the highlight of Western man.

"You mentioned politics," he said. "How far left is this young friend of yours?"

"There is politics, there is emotion, there is psychology. I know him quite well but I wouldn't be completely honest if I said I could pin him down, pin him right to the spot. He may be a pure Marxist, the purest of believers. Or he may be an actor in real life. What I know with absolute certainty is that he's poor, he's dreadfully, grind-ingly poor. What's the expression I want?"

"Piss-poor."

"Exactly. He's married to a lovely, lovely girl. Really, Larry, one of those flawed Russian beauties. Innocent and frail. She speaks a lovely true Russian. Not Sovietized, you know? Her uncle is a colonel in the MVD."

Larry couldn't help laughing. It was all so curiously funny. It was rich, that's what it was. Everyone was a spook or dupe or asset, a double, courier, cutout or defector, or was related to one. We were all linked in a vast and rhythmic coincidence, a daisy chain of rumor, suspicion and secret wish. George was laughing too. A wonderful woodwind rumble. They looked at each other and laughed. They laughed in appreciation of the richness of life, the fabulous and appalling nature of human affairs, the good food and drink, the superior service, the wrecked careers, the whole teeming abscess of folly and regret. Larry felt flush and well fed, a little tipsy, all the right things. The Honduran ambassador said hello. A man from Pemex stopped to tell a richly filthy joke. It was a lovely lunch. It was great, rich, lovely and perfectly right.

Parmenter took the Agency shuttle bus back to Langley. Then he wrote a memo to the Office of Security requesting an expedite check on George de Mohrenschildt.

Somewhere in his room of theories, in some notebook or folder, Nicholas Branch has a roster of the dead. A printout of the names of witnesses, informers, investigators, people linked to Lee H. Oswald, people linked to Jack Ruby, all conveniently and suggestively dead. In 1979 a House select committee determined there was nothing statistically abnormal about the death rate among those who were connected in some way to the events of November 22. Branch accepts this as an actuarial fact. He is writing a history, not a study of the ways in which people succumb to paranoia. There is endless suggestiveness. Branch concedes this. There is the language of the manner of death. Shot in back of head. Died of cut throat. Shot in police station. Shot in motel. Shot by husband after one month marriage. Found hanging by toreador pants in jail cell. Killed by karate chop. It is the neon epic of Saturday night. And Branch wants to believe that's all it is. There is enough mystery in the facts as we know them, enough of conspiracy, coincidence, loose ends, dead ends, multiple interpretations. There is no need, he thinks, to invent the grand and masterful scheme, the plot that reaches flawlessly in a dozen directions.

Still, the cases do resonate, don't they? Mostly anonymous dead. Exotic dancers, taxi drivers, cigarette girls, lawyers of the shopworn sort with dandruff on their lapels. But through the years the violence has reached others as well, and with each new series of misadventures Branch sees again how the assassination sheds a powerful and lasting light, exposing patterns and links, revealing this man to have known that one, this death to have occurred in curious juxtaposition to that.

George de Mohrenschildt, the multinational man, a study in divided loyalties or in the irrelevance of loyalty, the man who befriended Oswald, dies in March 1977, in Palm Beach, of a blast through the mouth with a 20-gauge shotgun. Ruled a suicide.

One week later, in Miami Beach, police find the body of Carlos Prfo Socarras, former President of Cuba, millionaire gunrunner, linked by an informer to Jack Ruby. The body sits in a chair, a pistol nearby. Ruled a suicide.

David William Ferrie, the professional pilot, amateur researcher in cancer, anti-Castro militant, is found dead in his apartment in New Orleans in February 1967, five days after his name is linked in the press to the assassination of the President. Natural causes, says the coroner, but some people wonder how Ferrie had time to type a farewell note to a friend in the middle of a brain hemorrhage. ("Thus I die alone and unloved.") Among his possessions are three blank passports, a one-hundred-pound bomb, a number of rifles, bayonets and flare guns and a complete library of books and other materials, as of that date, on the Kennedy assassination.

Eladio del Valle, a friend of David Ferrie and head of the Free

Cuba Committee, is found dead the same day, in a car in Miami, shot several times in the chest at point-blank range, his head split open by an ax. No arrests in the case.

The documents are stacked everywhere. Branch has homicide reports and autopsy diagrams. He has the results of spectographic tests on bullet fragments. He has reports by acoustical consultants and experts in blur analysis. He studies blurs himself, stooped over photos taken in Dealey Plaza by people who thought they were there to see the head of state come riding nicely by. He has a magnifier. He has detailed maps of photographers' lines of sight.

The Curator sends transcripts of closed committee hearings. He sends documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, other documents withheld from ordinary investigators or heavily censored. He sends new books all the time, each with a gleaming theory, supportable, assured. This is the room of theories, the room of growing old. Branch wonders if he ought to despair of ever getting to the end.

The FBI's papers on the assassination are here, one hundred and twenty-five thousand pages, no end of dread and woe. The Curator sends new material on Oswald's stay in Russia, gathered from a KGB defector (not the first such defector to offer a version of events). There is new material on Everett and Parmenter, on Ramon Benitez, Frank Vasquez. Data trickling down the years. Water dripping into his brain pan. There is 544 Camp Street in New Orleans, the most notorious address in the chronicles of the assassination. The building is long gone and the site is an urban renewal plaza now. The Curator sends recent photos and Branch understands that he must study them, although they do not pertain to the case. There are granite benches, brick paving, a piece of sculpture with a subsidized look about it, called "Out of There."

Branch must study everything. He is in too deep to be selective.

He sits under a lap robe and worries. The truth is he hasn't written all that much. He has extensive and overlapping notes- notes in three-foot drifts, all these years of notes. But of actual finished prose, there is precious little. It is impossible to stop assembling data. The stuff keeps coming. There are theories to evaluate, lives to ponder and mourn. No one at CIA has asked to see the work in progress. Not a chapter, a page, a word of it. Branch is on his second Curator, his sixth DCI. Since 1973, when he first set to work, he has seen Schlesinger, Colby, Bush, Turner, Casey and Webster occupy the Director's chair. Branch doesn't know whether these men were told that someone is writing a secret history of the assassination. Maybe no one knows except the Curator and two or three others in the Historical Intelligence Collection at CIA. Maybe it is the history no one will read.

T. J. Mackey stood across the street from the shabby three-story building where Guy Banister's detective agency was located. His light-brown hair was cut close and he wore a sport shirt and sunglasses, the shirt tight across his upper body. He had a way of clenching and unclenching his right fist. There was a bird tattooed there, in the webbing between'thumb and index finger, and when he opened his fist the bird spread its blue wings.

He was watching someone on Camp Street, a rattled old woman, an outcast in a long coat and white ankle socks, one of the lost bodies of New Orleans this uneasy spring of 1963, already too hot, too heavy and wet. He was interested in the way she kept adjusting her pace as she walked down the street. She slowed down to let others get ahead of her. In a wary crouch she moved along the wall at number 544, swinging an arm out to wave people on. She wanted everybody up ahead, where she could see them all.

Mackey enjoyed this. He'd been in the city over a week now and had seen many a jumpy drunk but no one with this kind of paranoid wit.

Around were old warehouses and coffee-roasting plants, fifty-cent-a-night hotels. Over the original entranceway at 544, bricked up now, he could make out an inscription: Stevedores and Long-shoremens Building. He crossed the street and went in. The offices of Guy Banister Associates were on the second floor. Banister was at his desk, a tough and somber man in his sixties. Twenty years in the FBI, deputy superintendent of the New Orleans police, a member of the John Birch Society and the Minutemen. He opened a bottom drawer when Mackey walked in. Invitation to a drink. T-Jay waved it off and took a chair.

"You don't drink with me. You don't tell me where the hell you're staying."

"I leave tomorrow."

"Where to?"

"The Farm."

"Must be a great life, showing kids from Swarthmore how to break a chinaman's neck."

"It's an assignment."

"It's a fucking shame, that's what it is, T-Jay, a man like you, who risked his life. This Kennedy, he has things to answer for. First he launches an invasion without adequate air support, then he makes the movement pay for it. He's got people raiding our guerrilla bases, seizing arms shipments all over."

"What am I here for? You've had time, Guy."

"It's not that simple."

"You've got more guns than the Mexican army."

"There's priorities," Banister said. "It's looking like a busy summer we got coming."

"I'll need to see some money. Upkeep, monthly payments, a healthy severance."

"How many men?"

"Let's say several. Plus I may need a pilot."

"He'll walk in the door in ten minutes."

"Goddamn."

"Calm down."

"Not him."

"Never mind appearances or what he says for effect. Feme's a capable son of a bitch. He can fly a plane backwards. He has first-rate contacts. He does work for Carmine Latta's lawyer. He goes out to Latta's house and comes back with money in fucking duffel bags. It's all for the cause. He can lease a small plane, no questions asked, no records kept. Right now I've got him looking for a C-47 which I want to use to ship explosives out of here."

Banister opened the desk drawer again, took out a fifth of Early

Times and reached back to snatch two coffee mugs from a shelf. "I'm sending select items to one of our staging areas in the Keys," he said. "Rifle grenades, land mines, dynamite, antitank guns, mortar shells. Listen to this: canisters of napalm."

Mackey noted the look in that silvery eye. Banister's rage toward the administration was partly a reaction to public life itself, to men who glow in the lens barrel of a camera. Kennedy magic, Kennedy charisma. His hatred had a size to it, a physical force. It was the thing that kept him going after career disappointments, bad health, a forced retirement. Mackey briefly met his eye. So many meanings crowded in, memories, sadnesses, convictions, lost Cuba, Cuba to come-a moment so humanly dense, rich in associations, such deep readings, the power of things unsaid, that T-Jay looked away. They were entertaining too many of the same thoughts.

"Where did you get the hardware?"

"A bunker in the woods. We put the key in the lock and there it was."

"Who arranged that?" Mackey said.

"It's a CIA weapons cache. Stuff never used at the Bay of Pigs. Which I assume you know."

"I don't know much these days."

"We have recruits coming in all the time. They want another crack at Fidel. We train them at a camp not far from here. We've had no problems up to now, knock fucking wood, which is something I personally see to, working it out with the feds. But this Kennedy, he's making all kinds of moves against us. Did you know he's got exile leaders restricted to Dade County? They can't travel out of the county. He's normalizing with Castro. He's dealing with the Soviets. They got a deal cooking. Cuba is guaranteed communist. From which Jack gets a second term unmolested by Moscow. He is interested in his own protection and security, which I believe he is correct in wishing to increase."

He poured the bourbon.

"What about the thing in Dallas," he said, "a couple of weeks ago?"

"The Walker shooting."

"Did they catch the nigger that did it?"

Mackey caught the sly tone of the older man's voice. Walker had been consuming news space like a movie star in a fever of insecurity. Being shot at over a backyard fence by a sniper on tiptoes, and missed, was just about the perfect payoff Mackey could imagine for a certain kind of fame. It reduced the man to the status of casual target for some gun-toting Mr. Magoo.

"Now, assuming I can come up with the rifles."

"Plus scopes."

"What do I do with them?"

"Hold them," Mackey said.

"Who are we talking about here?"

"Keep them absolutely secure and ready."

"What is the subject of this meeting? Because I have to know there's complete trust between us."

"You do know. Take my word. Or I wouldn't be here."

"Don't make me feel I'm getting too old for certain operations. This is my trade. There's only one subject for people like us."

Paint flakes on the desktop and floor, steel cabinets covered in dust. Inside the cabinets were Banister's intelligence records. He kept files on people who volunteered for the anti-Castro groups in the area. He kept microfilmed records of left-wing activity in Louisiana. He had the names of known communists. He had material supplied by the FBI on Castro agents and sympathizers. Mackey had seen handbooks on guerrilla tactics, back issues of a racist magazine Guy published. There were files on other organizations renting space at 544 Camp, past and present, including the Cuban Revolutionary Council, an alliance of anti-Castro groups put together by the CIA with Banister's help.

"People like us," he said to Mackey, "we have this dilemma we have to face. Serious men deprived of an outlet. Once we're pushed out, how do we retire to a chair on the lawn? Everyday lawful pursuits don't meet our special requirements." He laughed happily. "For twenty-some-odd years in the Bureau I lived in a special society that pretty much satisfied the most serious things in my nature. Secrets to trade and keep, certain dangers, an opportunity to function in tight spots, wave a gun in people's faces. That's a charmed society. If you've got criminal tendencies, and I'm not saying this is true of you or me, one of the places to make your mark is law enforcement." A short happy laugh. "How much of my manhood is watery puke? That's what I want to know. I was involved in the Dillinger case, earliest days of my career. Public enemy number one. Famous finish, got him coming out of a movie house in Chicago, sweltering night, the Biograph. I was with the Office of Naval Intelligence in the war, just like young Jack Kennedy. " He took a swallow. "Spy work, undercover work, we invent a society where it's always wartime. The law has a little give."

He set the mug of bourbon to one side and ran his hand over the newspapers and files to find his cigarettes.

"In John Birch," he said, "we have a hundred thousand members. Way out of hand. Then there's General Ted Walker going on tour with the Reverend Billy James Hargis, coast to coast, in ten-gallon hats. The Minutemen are leaner, move close to the ground. But there's a fervor I don't trust. They're waiting for the Day. They've got their ammo clips hidden in the garage and they know the Day is fast approaching. They get their politics all mixed up with the second coming of Christ. I respect your methods, T-Jay. You want a unit that's small, tight and mobile. None of these bullshit mailing lists. You don't want theory and debate. Just impact. Two or three men to do serious things."

David Ferrie walked in wearing an undersized panama hat and a turtleneck shirt with a drooping collar. To Mackey, who'd met him once before, he had a look of sad apology, like a man who'd betrayed a public trust. (Banister claimed he was a defrocked priest.) He moved in a languid glide, loafers slapping.

He said to Banister, "Shouldn't be drinking this time of day."

"What do we have in the storeroom?"

Ferrie glanced at T-Jay.

"Some old, old Springfields. Thirty-aught-six. I mean old. We have M-ls, a whole raft of Yugoslav Mausers with markings stamped in Russian if that impresses you. We have some M-4s out by La-combe. I burnt off a magazine only yesterday. "

"Where do we keep our scopes?" Banister said.

"Most of the scopes and mounts are out at the camp. We have some extra-long target scopes stored here. Of course it depends on what you want to shoot. Hairy big game like Fidel, you want a wide field of view because he's always in motion. The fact is I used to admire Dr. Castro, secretly. A brief moment only. I wanted to fight by his side."

His voice was whispered, incredulous; something about the curious paths of his own life caused him endless surprise. The face itself was disbelieving, the stark pasted brows looped high over his pale eyes. Nothing he said could be separated from the eerie facts of his appearance, least of all, apparently, by Ferrie himself.

"Where would you park a light plane below the border?" Mackey said. "Figure you're leaving home in a hurry."

"I'd point her right on down to Matamoros. Below Brownsville. There's a field there. You want to go deeper into Mexico, you can play hopscotch on dry lakes. Avoid populated areas entirely."

"No offense. How old are you?"

"Forty-five. Perfect astronaut age. I'm the dark scary side of John Glenn. Great health except for the cancer eating at my brain."

"You'll die violently," Banister said.

"I want to believe it."

"A nacho stuck in your throat."

"I speak Spanish," Ferrie said, amazed to hear it.

He went into the small room behind the office, where Delphine Roberts was compiling one of the lists that someone in the firm was always gathering material for. Delphine was Banister's secretary and research aide, a nailed-down American, middle-aged, with airy spraywork hair.

"These are supposed to be runless stockings," she said.

"Everything is supposed to be something. But it never is. That's the nature of existence."

"I know. You studied philosophy where was it."

"Did you eat lunch?"

"I'm back on Metrecal." "But you're a wisp, Delphine."

He turned on the little TV.

"Why do you think a Negro would want to be a communist?" she said, running a finger down the list. "Isn't it enough for them being colored? Why would they want a communistic tinge added on?"

"Are you saying why be greedy?"

"I'm saying don't they have enough trouble. Besides, if you're colored, you can't be anything else."

She worked at a Formica desk by the window. A cardboard shirt support was taped over a hole in the screen.

"I priced a bomb shelter last week," Ferrie told her.

"It's not the bombs coming out of the sky I worry about. The missile crisis came and went. It's the troops that will just appear one quiet morning, armies landing on the beaches, paratroops dropping through the clouds. Guy received a report that the Red Chinese are massing troops in Baja California."

"I have private torments, Delphine. They require something larger than an army."

They were watching As the World Turns. Ferrie sat in a folding chair with his legs crossed. He took off his hat and placed it on his right kneecap.

"I say to myself, I wonder why Delphine comes to this rat-trap office every day. A woman like her. With a background and so forth. A real pretty house on Coliseum Street. Social niceties, let's say. The DAR."

"This is the real work of the nation. What could I accomplish in the City Council or some ladies' group? Guy Banister is the vanguard of what is going on in this country, so far as actually making an impact. Recruiting, training, collecting information. I feel like this is a contribution I can make that I couldn't do in the normal ways, through committee work and so forth."

She glanced at Ferrie's faded red toupee, an object that resembled some windblown piece of street debris. She looked at the sloped forehead, the somewhat Roman profile, eagle-beaked, oddly impressive despite the man's overgrown ears, the clownish aspects of his appearance. In fact she'd seen the profile before she ever met Ferrie. There was a mug shot in Banister's files. It commemorated two arrests in 1961, in Jefferson Parish, for what were officially described as crimes against nature.

They watched TV.

"Dave, what do you believe in?"

"Everything. My own death most of all."

"Do you wish for it?"

"I feel it. I'm a walking sandwich board for cancer."

"But you talk about it so readily."

"What choice do I have?" he said.

On the screen two women commenced a dialogue in slow and measured movements, over coffee, with solemn pauses for hurt and angry looks. Delphine went back to her work, trying to listen past the TV set to the voices in the next room, the remote and private drone that fixed the limits of her afternoons.

"Why are homosexuals addicted to soap opera?" Ferrie said absently. "Because our lives are a vivid situation."

Delphine fell forward in bawdy laughter. Her upper body shot toward the desk, hands gripping the edges to steady her. She sat there rocking, a great and spacious amusement. David Ferrie was surprised. He didn't know he'd said something funny. He thought the remark was melancholy, sadly philosophical, a throwaway line for an aimless afternoon. Not that this was the first time Delphine had reacted so broadly to something he said. She considered his mildest comic remarks automatically outrageous. She had two kinds of laughter. Lewd and bawdy and abandoned, the required worldly response to Ferrie's sexual status, her sense of a kind of anal lore that informed the sources of his humor. Softer laughter for Banister, throaty, knowing, wanting to be led, rustling with complicities, little whispery places in her voice, a laughter you could not hear without knowing they were lovers.

"It's not just Kennedy himself," Banister was saying on the other side of the door. "It's what people see in him. It's the glowing picture we keep getting. He actually glows in most of his photographs. We're supposed to believe he's the hero of the age. Did you ever see a man in such a hurry to be great? He thinks he can make us a different kind of society. He's trying to engineer a shift. We're not smart enough for him. We're not mature, energetic, Harvard, world traveler, rich, handsome, lucky, witty. Perfect white teeth. It fucking grates on me just to look at him. Do you know what charisma means to me? It means he holds the secrets. The dangerous secrets used to be held outside the government. Plots, conspiracies, secrets of revolution, secrets of the end of the social order. Now it's the government that has a lock on the secrets that matter. All the danger is in the White House, from nuclear weapons on down. What's he plotting with Castro? What kind of back channel does he have working with the Soviets? He touches a phone and worlds shake. There's not the slightest doubt in my mind but that a movement exists in the executive branch of the government which is totally devoted to furthering the communist cause. Strip the man of his powerful secrets. Take his secrets and he's nothing."

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 southeastern 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 corners, 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-}ay 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 Min-nesotan, 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 corner 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 Emigre's, 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.

Mary Frances was in bed, waiting. A soft light glowed by the armchair. He felt the air on his body as he undressed. The night was full of new things, earth musk and wet bark and night jasmine, a scented freshness, a turning of the earth after rain. He pressed down slowly. The wind-burnt face and whitish brows. The perfumed tincture of her breasts. He would love her into death, into the secret sleep. Her head rolled on the pillow, eyes shut tight. He hid his face in the curve of her neck. The night was full of water moving, faint wet sounds, rainwater dripping through trees, water falling from eaves, running in downspouts, wet sounds of tires on asphalt, tires on a wet street. He raised up slightly, locked his hands in hers, fingers extended. Each pushed hard against the other. A charged fragrance. Hollow thunder in the distance. Water silent in grassy pools, running down leaf stems, collecting in the webbed centers of leaves, droplets, trembling drams, water on the leaves of the blackjack oak set near the house, a light spatter on the screen when the wind shifts. She was blond and white and pink, rough-textured, broader than he was and stronger-minded now, the stronger by far, and all she wanted for him was something safe and plain. He smelled light sweat, felt spittle reaching to his chin. Their hands pushed against each other, fingers tensed and shaking. He felt a rustling response in the sheets, her ass wagging, moisture in the white down at the sides of her mouth. He said her name and watched her eyes come open to that deep wondering of hers, that trust she placed in the ordinary mysteries. She was in the world as he could never be. She meant the world. He freed a hand and wiped away the spit. She said his name quickly, many times, like some cheerleader's sideline riff, and that was that was that.

Side by side, listening to the radio.

"I wonder," she said. "What do other people say to each other?"

"When?"

"Now. I want to know what people say. Maybe there are things we haven't thought of." Laughing at herself. "Things we ought to be saying."

"While having sex or afterward?"

"While having sex is not interesting. Moany-groany love talk. No, afterward, now."

"Do you think we've been saying the wrong things all these years?"

"Wouldn't you like to overhear? I don't want to watch other people. I want to listen."

"They talk about wanting a cigarette."

"Who was that on the phone?"

" 'Where are my cigarettes?' That's what they say."

"He wouldn't tell me his name."

"Larry Parmenter. You remember him. Somebody's house in Miami."

"Kind of just barely."

"Maybe three years ago."

"What did he want to talk about?"

"Curious lady."

"Some nights I need to be held. Tonight I'm a listener. So nice to lie in rumpled sheets and listen. Cover me with words. We're two gossipy bodies alone in the night. Tell me what you talked about."

"Very sexy stuff."

"Oh sure really."

"U-2 planes. The planes that spotted the missiles the Soviets were putting into Cuba. We used to call the photos pornography. The photo interpreters would gather to interpret. 'Let's see what kind of pornography we pulled in today.' Kennedy looked at the pictures in his bedroom as a matter of fact."

"Talk," she said.

"Spy planes, drone aircraft, satellites with cameras that can see from three hundred miles what you can see from a hundred feet. They see and they hear. Like ancient monks, you know, who recorded knowledge, wrote it painstakingly down. These systems collect and process. All the secret knowledge of the world."

"Isn't it one of the best things there is, feeling the air on your body on a night like this?"

"I'll tell you what it means, these orbiting sensors that can hear us in our beds. It means the end of loyalty. The more complex the systems, the less conviction in people. Conviction will be drained out of us. Devices will drain us, make us vague and pliant."

Years together, years of transience, cover operations, plausible denials, dead silences had given Mary Frances no reason to believe she would ever know exactly what kind of secrets Win was keeping at a given time, which meant there was something welcome in these moments of wordiness, in the shape and range of his meanders. She encouraged him to tell her whatever he could about subjects and developments close to his work, or simply things on his mind- encouraged him tacitly, creating receptive fields around him, still-nesses. A wifely labor as natural to her as choosing curtains. By now she was adept at discharging an air of shy curiosity and although there was no longer any real work for him to do, she still wanted to know, wanted badly to hear. But tonight it happened that she fell asleep, drifting lightly off, twisted in a bedsheet, one arm swept across his chest. He listened to the radio, a man preaching the gospel in a bright clear voice, a thrilling voice, youthful, assured. Yes yes yes yes. God is alive and well in Texas.

He would put someone together, build an identity, a skein of persuasion and habit, ever so subtle. He wanted a man with believable quirks. He would create a shadowed room, the gunman's room, which investigators would eventually find, exposing each fact to relentless scrutiny, following each friend, relative, casual acquaintance into his own roomful of shadows. We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in plots, without the compression and numinous sheen. Our lives, examined carefully in all their affinities and links, abound with suggestive meaning, with themes and involute turnings we have not allowed ourselves to see completely. He would show the secret symmetries in a nondescript life.

An address book with ambiguous leads. Photographs expertly altered (or crudely altered). Letters, travel documents, counterfeit signatures, a history of false names. It would all require a massive decipherment, a conversion to plain text. He envisioned teams of linguists, photo analysts, fingerprint experts, handwriting experts, experts in hairs and fibers, smudges and blurs. Investigators building up chronologies. He would give them the makings of deep chronos, lead them to basement rooms in windy industrial slums, to lost towns in the Tropics.

He turned off the radio and slipped out from under her arm. He wanted a cigarette. He put on his pajamas and found two bent Winstons in his shirt pocket, on the armchair. He sat smoking, trying to read. The storm moved west in blue-white rattling streaks. T-Jay will bring him in. Win knew that the name Mackey was a pseudonym assigned by the Records Branch. Theodore}. mackey. Win had also used a false name through the years, standard practice for officers engaged in covert work. Mackey's name became enveloped in a certain favorable light, a legendary light, when exile leaders found out he had gone ashore with the scouts at Blue Beach. Once it was clear the invasion would fail, Mackey returned in a whaleboat and cruised the inlets with a megaphone, calling for and finding survivors. Win didn't know his real name.

He read the Daily Lass-O. He read that the school chucked its original name in 1905 to call itself the College of Industrial Arts, or CIA. He was too tired to appreciate the irony, or coincidence, or whatever it was. There were too many ironies and coincidences. A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn't already, and make a million. Yes yes yes yes. He looked around for an ashtray. He hadn't felt well for a long time now. Ever since whenever it was. He felt tired and forgetful. He had to talk to himself, inwardly, when he was driving the car, give simple commands, scold, to keep his concentration. He fumbled change at drug counters, buying kiddie soap in an aerosol can for his little girl. There were times when he could not bear to be alone in the house. The house was a terrible place when his wife and child were not there, when they were late coming home in the car. He imagined accidents all the time. A stunned wreck at the side of the road. The house grew dark around him.

It was all part of the long fall, the general sense that he was dying.

In Atsugi

The dark plane drifted down, sweeping out an arc of hazy sky to the east of the runway. It had a balsa-wood lightness, a wobbliness, uncommonly long-winged, and it came in over the power pylons that stretched through the rice fields and up into the hills and out of sight. A strange high sound whistled through the air, bringing people out of houses outside the base, men taking bowlegged stances to follow the line of descent-a sound like a gull-shriek endlessly prolonged, caroming through the deep caves set around the base, the kamikaze nests of the second war. Men appeared in barracks windows to catch a glimpse of the landing. A man stood outside the radar bubble watching with folded arms. Two men in utility caps paused outside the mess as the plane glided finally in over the fields and the barbed-wire fences, touching down lightly, its lop-eared wingtips sparking when they scraped the runway, cartoonishly, in the chalk blaze of noon.

"The son of a bitch climbs unbelievable."

"I know. I heard," Heindel said.

"But fast. It's gone before you know it. Never mind how high."

"I know how high."

"I was in the bubble," Reitmeyer said.

"Eighty thousand feet."

"The son of a bitch requests winds at eighty thousand feet."

"Which isn't supposed to be possible," Heindel said.

"I was plotting intercepts. I heard. The mystery man speaks."

The first marine, Donald Reitmeyer, had a large squared-off frame and a lazy amble that made him seem to be sinking into the ground. He watched the tractor approach to tow the plane to its remote hangar. The plane would be escorted, the hangar surrounded, by men with automatic weapons. Reitmeyer took off his cap and waved it at someone heading toward them across the fuming tarmac, a slightish man who walked with his head tilted and one shoulder drooping, the Marine who'd been watching from the radar hut when the plane came in.

"It's Ozzie. Looking like his usual self."

Heindel shouted, "Oswald, move it."

"More skosh," Reitmeyer called, using a familiar pidgin phrase.

"Show some life."

"Show some interest."

The three men walked toward the barracks.

"We know how high it goes, so the next question," Reitmeyer said, "is how far it goes and what does it do when it gets there."

"Deep into China," Oswald said.

"How do you know?"

"It's logic and common sense. Plus the Soviet Union."

"It's called a utility plane," Heindel said.

"It's a spy plane. It's called a U-2."

"How do you know?"

"Common knowledge, pretty much," Oswald said. "You hear things, and the things you don't hear you can find out easy enough. You know those buildings way past the hangars at the east end.

That's called the Joint Technical Advisory Group. Which is a phony name where the spies hide out."

"You're so fucking sure," Reitmeyer said.

"What do you think's there, dormitories for the wrestling team?"

"Well just shut up about it."

"I go to the briefings. I know what to shut up about."

"You see the armed guards, don't you?"

"That's my point, Reitmeyer. Nobody gets near this base without clearance."

"Well just try shutting up."

"Imagine flying over China," Heindel said. "The vastness of China."

"China's not so vast," Oswald said. "What about the Soviet Union, for vast?"

"How vast is it?"

"Someday I want to travel the length and breadth of it by train. Talk to everybody I meet. It's the idea of Russia that impresses me more than the physical size."

"What idea?" Reitmeyer said.

"Read a book."

"You always say read a book, like that's the answer to everything."

"Maybe it is."

"Maybe it isn't."

"Then how come I'm smarter than you are."

"You're also dumber," Reitmeyer said.

"He's not as dumb as an officer," Heindel said.

"Nobody's that dumb," Oswald said.

They called him Ozzie the Rabbit for his pursed lips and dimples and for his swiftness afoot, as they saw it, when there was a scuffle in the barracks or one of the bars off-base. He was five feet nine, blue-eyed, weighed a hundred and thirty-five, would soon be eighteen years old, had conduct and proficiency ratings that climbed for a while, then fell, then climbed and fell again, and his scores on the rifle range were inconsistent.

Heindel was known as Hidell, for no special reason.

He went to the movies and the library. Nobody knew the tough time he had reading simple English sentences. He could not always get a fixed picture of the word in front of him. Writing was even tougher. When he was tired it was all he could do to spell five straight words right, to spell a single small word without mixing up the letters.

It was a secret he'd never tell.

He had a liberty card, a gaudy Hawaiian shirt that made him feel like an intruder in his own skin, and a window seat on the train to Tokyo.

It was Reitmeyer who'd arranged the date, explaining to Lee that all he had to do was show up at the right time and place and flash his heartwarming American smile. A thousand forbidden pleasures would be his.

Welcome to JP-land of sliding doors and slant-eyed whores.

He walked invisibly through layers of chaos, twilight Tokyo. He walked for an hour, watching neon lights pinch through the traffic haze, with English words jumping out at him, terrific terrific, under the streetcar cables, past the noodle shops and bars. He saw Japanese girls walking hand in hand with U.S. servicemen, six doggie bakers and cooks by the look of them, all wearing jackets embroidered with dragons. It was 1957 but to Lee these men had the style of swaggering warriors, combat vets taking whatever drifted into meathook reach.

He walked through mazes of narrow streets mobbed with shoppers. He was remarkably calm. There was something about being off-base, away from his countrymen, out of America, that took the edge off his wariness, eased his rankled skin.

He checked the piece of paper with her name on it.

Lamps were lit along the alleyways. He saw a legless man with an accordion, his torso set on weird metal supports, like a Singer sewing machine-an ideogram sign flapping on his chest.

He found Mitsuko all right, a baby-face girl, sort of formless, wearing a skirt and white blouse and a handkerchief on her head, waiting by a sign that read soldiers access, the rendezvous point as devised by Reitmeyer, on a street of cheap arcades.

She took him to a pachinko parlor, a long narrow room full of people pressed against upright machines. They were trying to maneuver a steel ball into a little hole. The machines made a factory din, like a stamping plant maybe. When she found a free machine, she pressed a lever that released the ball. This was the signal for nirvana or whatever they call the absolute state. She stared into the gray circle, watching the ball go round and round. People pushed through the room, students, old women in kimonos, men who looked educated, with high-paying jobs, all waiting for machines. They were three-deep in some places, patient in the noise and hanging smoke as if nothing hit upon the skin but the racing gray ball.

He checked the paper with her name.

Two hours later they were in a room with sliding panels and straw mats. Something told him the place wasn't hers. It looked imitation Japanese. A silk roll hung from the wall, except it probably wasn't silk. He caught a glimpse of a pinup calendar above a dressing table, some bars of Lifebuoy soap. She took off her open-toed shoes. It was a little hard to believe he was on the legendary verge of getting laid. The subject of a million words, noises, laughs and shouts in the sandlots and barracks of his experience. He felt a stillness, looking at his first naked girl, grown-up, outside a magazine. There was something serious about a woman nude. He felt different, serious, still. He was part of something streaming through the world. Then her hand was in his pants, matter-of-fact, like she was turning on a tap. He took off his clothes, folded the shirt with the windswept palms. The moment had been waiting to happen. The room had been here since the day he was born, waiting for him, just like this, to walk in the door. It was just a question of walking in the door, entering the stream of things.

Was he supposed to give her money? Reitmeyer hadn't said. He saw himself having sex with her, He was partly outside the scene. He had sex with her and monitored the scene, waiting for the pleasure to grip him, blow over him like surf, bend the trees. He thought about what was happening rather than saw it, although he saw it too.

He had a duty weekend coming up but was back in Tokyo the first possible chance. It turned out she took his money only to play pachinko. She was a pachinko fool, a total addict of the form, standing for hours in a raincoat that wasn't hers. He'd go out, come back, go out again, checking the strip joints and cowboy bars. He'd stand near the entrance and watch her play. People pressed into the room. Now and then somebody won a prize, a packet of leaf-shaped sweets. He watched her raise her right foot behind her, absently scratch the other ankle.

Strange days in the fabulous East.

This time she took him to a room in a large apartment block set near factories and oil-storage tanks. The air smelled of sulfur and tidal scum. He could see a river from the window but didn't know what it was called. She told him she was thirty-four years old. Strange days and nights. Some time after they were dressed again, a man came in, moving through the shadows, young, lean, familiar with the room, seeming to take Lee for granted, acting as if he knew everything Lee had ever said and done. He was looking for his raincoat.

Lee never understood the man's connection to Mitsuko. A brother, cousin, lover, a handler or protector of some kind, although not a pimp (if she didn't take money). Lee saw him several times over the next couple of weeks. He was an interesting guy, last name Konno, with wavy hair and dark glasses. He chain-smoked Lucky Strikes, knew American jazz, names that Lee was at a loss to identify. They talked politics. They drank beer and gin, which Lee brought to the room but only sipped to be polite. Konno's English was okay, better than rudimentary. He wore shabby clothes and shoes and a black silk scarf, always, outdoors and in.

The autumn damp took hold. Lamplight shimmered in networks of alleys crowded with wooden houses and shops. They'd taken away his American space. Not that it mattered. His space had been nothing but wandering, a lie that concealed small rooms, TV, his mother's voice never-ending. Louisiana, Texas were lies. They were aimless places that swirled around the cramped rooms where he always ended up. Here the smallness had meaning. The paper windows and box rooms, these were clear-minded states, forms of well-being.

Mitsuko took him into the land of nudo. Billboards, photographs, leaflets, lamppost signs, nudes in booths and theaters, neon and paper nudes, models to be photographed, nudes arrayed in colored lights, strangely pale beneath the fake rose glow. Rain-slick streets like the streets in his reveries, movie shadows and dark-coated men, Mitsuko's little pouting mouth, her language of sighs and hints, reverie of stillness, perfection of desire, her legs slightly parted, arms at her sides.

She did none of the things Reitmeyer had said she'd do, and Ozzie didn't ask.

In the bubble he worked in a hot glow, marking intercept paths, checking the oscilloscope for traces of electron motion that represented air traffic within a given sector.

Through the all-night watches he engaged officers in conversation, asked them questions about world affairs. It turned out he knew more than they did. They didn't know the basic things. Names of leaders, types of political systems. The younger officers were the worst informed, Joe College types, which served to justify some old suspicion of his about the way things work.

A crackling voice requesting winds aloft at eighty thousand feet, a voice outside the dome of night, beyond the known limits.

There were bars and bar girls near the base but he preferred going to Tokyo, alone, where he visited Konno in the huge development near the factories. The coppery smog was so thick it obscured the setting sun. Konno smoked Luckies and talked about the struggle to exist. He worked only part-time, an elevator operator, because the country was awash in college graduates. Sometimes Mitsuko showed up and she and Ozzie made love to Thelonious Monk records, weird plinking and bonging blues, sort of Japanese come to think of it. Other times Konno took him to the Queen Bee, a nightclub with elaborate floor shows and gorgeous women drifting through the smoke like one hundred slit-skirt versions of a Howard Johnson's hostess. It occurred to Lee that he ought to wonder what an elevator man and a pfc. were doing in a place like this.

Konno would slouch in, taking off his raincoat and dragging it along the floor as they were led to a table in a platformed area above the tourists, the Japanese businessmen, American officers, contract pilots (recognizable by their drab short-sleeve shirts and fancy sunglasses, whatever the weather). Konno pocketed checks without seeming to pay and one night introduced Lee to a hostess named Tammy, a woman in a silver dress and shiny face paint.

Konno believed in riots.

Konno believed the U.S. had used germ warfare in Korea and was experimenting with a substance called lysergic acid here in Japan.

Life is hostile, he believed. The struggle is to merge your life with the greater tide of history.

To have true socialism, he said, we first establish capitalism, totally and heartlessly, and then destroy it by degrees, bury it in the sea.

He was a member of the Japanese-Soviet Friendship Society, the Japanese Peace Council, the Japan-China Cultural Exchange Association.

Foreign capital, foreign troops dominate modern Japan, he said.

All foreign troops are U.S. troops. Every Westerner is an American. Every American serves the cause of monopolistic capital.

Tammy took Lee to a Buddhist shrine.

One night at the Queen Bee, Konno announced that MACS-1, Lee's unit, would soon leave for the Philippines. This was news to the young Marine, He was beginning to like Japan. He liked coming to Tokyo. He counted on these discussions with Konno, who was able to argue Lee's own positions from a historic rather than a purely personal viewpoint, from the ashes, the rebuilt waste of a blasted landscape and economy.

Why were they shipping him out, now, of all times, when things were going well for a change, when he had things to look forward to, a woman, now and then, to crawl into bed with, people to talk to who did not see him as a figure in the shadows?

They went to the flat near the river. Konno paced the room, tugging at the ends of his silk scarf. He hinted there were others who knew about Pfc. Oswald and admired his political maturity. He said there were things that could be accomplished by people with similar ideas on world affairs, people situated in certain places, within easy reach of each other. He gave Lee a pistol, small and silver-plated, a derringer, a gift, modest, two-shot, and asked him to pick up some Luckies back at the base.

Reitmeyer tried to pick him up and turn him upside down, grabbing from behind, at the crotch and the shirt collar, basic aimless ballbreaking fun, but he messed it all up, ending with one hand gripping Ozzie's side pocket and the other in an armpit, with the victim more or less parallel to the ground, flailing for a door jamb. At first Ozzie reacted with good-natured yelping surprise, out for a midair swim; then, as Reitmeyer manhandled and yanked, refusing to see it wouldn't work, trying to cartwheel him halfway around, he complained in fierce whispers, with ultimatums and unfinished threats; then struggled hard to free himself, close to bursting into frustrated tears, a snared and wriggling kid, pink with rage; then, finally, and this brought forth a certain lurking satisfaction, familiar, falsehearted, awful, he went completely limp.

One night he wandered into a Tokyo bar that was either a queer hangout or some kind of kabuki show or maybe a little of both. The customers were all male and the hosts or hostesses-they looked increasingly like men as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark-wore bright kimonos and high swirling wigs, their mouths precisely painted, faces layered in chalk. Educational. Someone rustled nearby, a costumed man waiting to lead him to a table, but Ozzie walked quietly to the door, feeling watched, odd, peculiar, quaint. When he opened the door he saw a familiar figure in the street. It was a Marine from his unit, Heindel, just walking on by. Ozzie had a moment of small panic. He didn't want to be seen coming out of a place like this. They'd mop the barracks with him if word got out. They'd have a hog-wallow of gruesome fun. The oddball loner caught sneaking out of a swishy bar. He moved back into the dimness and ordered a beer, keeping an eye to the street. Hidell in a dark jacket with a pouncing tiger on the back. Ozzie drank his beer and got his bearings. The darkness was creepy. Whining music came from the walls.

He found a taxi and headed out to Konno's district. Chemical smoke pouring off the shipyards and factories. Skinhead kids on bikes shooting out of alleys, coming at a racing slant over the pot-holed streets.

Hidell means don't tell.

No one was home. He walked for miles, lost, before he found another cab. He went to the Queen Bee, greeted by a hostess whose sole duty was to bow to entering guests. Konno was alone at a table near the rear. They talked a long time. Girls in swimsuits passed across the stage, each throwing a hip toward the audience of businessmen and U.S. brass. It was a vast place, a noisy crowd. Konno was tired and hoarse, coming down with something. A silence at the table. Then Lee let it be known that he'd seen something interesting in Atsugi one day, a plane called a U-2.

He paused, measuring how he felt. Inside the bouncy music and applause, he occupied a pocket of calm. He was not connected to anything here and not quite connected to himself and he spoke less to Konno than to the person Konno would report to, someone out there, in the floating world, a collector of loose talk, a specialist who lived in the dark like the men with bright lips and spun-silk wigs.

He pointed out that the plane climbed right off the radarscopes.

He said it reached an altitude almost five miles above the known record. He suggested it was armed with amazing cameras and headed for hostile soil.

He barely noticed himself talking. That was the interesting part. The more he spoke, the more he felt he was softly split in two. It was all so remote he didn't think it mattered what he said. He never even looked at his companion. He sat in a white calm and let the sentences float. Konno studied him, listened, jittery, needing a shave, sniffing the nicotine on his fingers, a habit of his that seemed to imply there was never enough-enough of what you craved. Lee talked softly on. Ten thousand years of happiness, or whatever it means when they say banzai.

He let it be known that he'd figured out the U-2's rate of climb. He didn't say what it was but went into detail on other, minor matters, testing Konno's knowledge of technical things, lecturing a little, pointing out flaws in the base's security.

A man in a white tuxedo introduced the bathing beauties by name. Sincere applause. The two men went into the chill night. It was late and quiet and Lee pulled his windbreaker tight around him. Konno stood smoking, hunched away from the wind, knees bent, looking down an empty neon street.

Take the double-e from Lee.

Hide the double-/ in Hidell.

Hidell means hide the L.

Don't tell.

White ideograms. Roman letters ticking in the dark. Konno said they were waiting for one of the hostesses, Tammy, and he looked a little dejected about it, maybe because he needed sleep. She came out a side exit wrapped in plastic rainwear including a hat and floppy booties, and seemed ready for some hard-earned relaxation. She thought she knew a pachinko parlor that might still be open. She wanted to play pachinko.

A radarman named Bushnell was climbing the exterior stairs of his barracks when he heard a sharp noise, a single hard rap, like a ruler striking a desk. On second thought, no, that wasn't it. More like a little popping sound, a two-inch firecracker maybe. Except that wasn't it either. That wasn't even close. Maybe just a slamming door actually.

He went inside and saw Ozzie sitting on a footlocker, alone in the squadbay, showing his funny smile. He had a little bitty pistol in his hand and there was a streak of blood across his left arm, above the elbow.

"I believe I shot myself," he said.

Bushnell studied the perfect little scene. He thought Ozzie's remark sounded historical and charming, right out of a movie or TV play.

"Where did you get the gun is what I'm thinking if I'm the duty officer and just happen to come around."

"Meanwhile would you do something?"

"What do you want me to do?"

"Get a corpsman would be fine with me."

"What's it doing? Is it bleeding? Looks like a shaving cut to me."

"There's a hole in my arm."

"You shave yet, Ozzie? I hear your mother shaves but you don't. What happens when they see the gun?"

"It was an accident."

"Bullshit. You should have used your.45."

"And blow my arm off."

"It's government issue, shitbird. What are you supposed to tell them, I found the gun on a sidewalk at high noon?"

"I did find it."

"Christ, Ozzie, you make me sick. You're sitting here all alone. What if I don't come in? You just sit and wait? If there's anything I don't respect, it's bad planning."

"Meanwhile I am shot."

"Well big fucking deal."

"I am bleeding, Bushnell."

"You deserve to bleed. You deserve to go white and fucking die. This is a stunt. It is just the oldest stunt in the world. How do you expect them to walk in here and say all right you're shot, Oswald, so you stay here and the rest of them have to ship their asses out to sea."

"Because I am shot. That's how I expect them to say it."

"Completely ignoring the fact you hit only flesh, which it looks like it to me. It's a court-martial offense, I guarantee, the minute they see a weapon that's not authorized."

"I took the gun out of the footlocker to turn it in when it went off."

"Tell us how small and cute it is."

"I am bleeding."

"You'll be hit with wrongful conduct, regardless. Same as if you had a riot gun."

"It went off when I dropped it. I picked it up off the floor, which at the time I felt dizzy and thought to myself I'm in a state of shock so I closed the footlocker in an attempt to sit down, which is how you found me."

"Don't tell me. Tell them, shitbird."

"Just get me a corpsman, Bushnell. Somebody has to treat me. I'm a wounded Marine."

DIAGNOSIS: WOUND, MISSILE, UPPER LEFT ARM GUNSHOT, NO A OR N INVOLVEMENT #8255

Within command-work.

Patient dropped 45 caliber automatic, pistol discharged when it struck the floor, and missile struck patient in left arm causing the injury.

NARRATIVE SUMMARY:

This 18 year male accidentally shot himself in the left arm with a sidearm, reportedly of 22 caliber. Examination revealed the wound of entrance in the medial portion of the left upper arm, just above the elbow. There was no evidence of neurologic circulatory, or bony injury. The wound of entrance was allowed to heal and the missile was then excised through a separate incision two inches above the wound of entry. The missile appeared to be a 22 slug. The wound healed well, and the patient was discharged to duty.

SURG: 10-5-57: FOREIGN BODY, REMOVAL OF, FROM EXTREMITIES, LEFT UPPER ARM #926

Postcard #1. Aboard the USS Terrell County in the South China Sea. Ozzie sits on the afterdeck with Reitmeyer, counting the days of ghost maneuvers in the drenching heat, wondering if he'll ever see land again.

"What do you say I teach you to play chess?"

"Fuck you."

"It's for your own stupid good, Reitmeyer. Plus we have to pass the time somehow."

"Take a flying fuck at the moon."

"The best players in the world are generally Russian."

"Fuck them, in spades."

Men sit dazed in the streaming light.

Postcard #2. Corregidor, among the war ruins. John Wayne comes to visit the homesick leathernecks of MACS-1, interrupting work on a movie being shot somewhere in the Pacific. Ozzie has mess duty, he has mess duty all the time now, but he sneaks a look at the famous man eating lunch with a group of officers-roast beef and gravy that he has helped prepare. He wants to get close to John Wayne, say something authentic. He watches John Wayne talk and laugh. It's remarkable and startling to see the screen laugh repeated in life. It makes him feel good. The man is doubly real. He does not cheat or disappoint. When John Wayne laughs, Ozzie smiles, he lights up, he practically disappears in his own glow. Someone takes a photograph of John Wayne and the officers, and Ozzie wonders if he will show up in the background, in the passageway, grinning. It's time to get back to the galley but he watches John Wayne a moment longer, thinking of the cattle drive in Red River, the great expectant moment when it starts. Stillness, nervous steers, horsemen in dawn light, the rim of hills, the deep sure voice of aging John Wayne, the voice with so many shades of feeling and reassurance, John Wayne resolutely to his adopted son: "Take ' em to Missouri, Matt." Then rearing mounts, trail hands yahooing, the music and rousing song, the honest stubbled faces (men he feels he knows), all the glory and dust of the great drive north. He reads Walt Whitman in hospital ruins.

One thing about Konno. He never talked to Lee in a personal way. He seemed to be reciting, talking into a Dictaphone. There was no flexibility in his manner. He didn't see the individual.

One other thing. He was in over his head, technically speaking. He didn't know the terminology, all the phrases and labels in aviation electronics, high-altitude reconnaissance. An elevator operator. Ha ha.

Lee didn't let on that he'd wounded himself with the derringer Konno had supplied. First because the strategy had failed to keep him in Japan. Then, too, he didn't want Konno to know he'd been under his influence.

No talking.

You stand at attention until assigned.

You do not step on white paint at any time. Segments of the floor are painted white. Do not touch white. There are white lines running down passageways. Do not touch or cross these lines. Every urinal is situated behind a white line. You need permission to piss.

You take your beatings in the area between the chest and groin, so bruises won't show. This is tradition. Or a guard will put a bucket on your head and whack it with a truncheon.

If you are assigned a cell, your guard will hose out the cell while you are inside it.

There are special punishment facilities called the hole, the box, the cage-names with a vivid history familiar from the movies.

You never walk where there is room to run. You run to and from your storage box. You stop at every white line and wait for permission to cross. You run in the compound, your grub hoe held at port arms.

You are processed naked, holding your seabag above your head at arm's length, shouting aye aye sir and no sir at the slightest sound. You are permitted to lower the seabag to the back of your neck only when you bend over to allow them to check your anal cavity for printed matter, narcotics, alcoholic beverages, digging tools, TV sets, implements of self-destruction.

This was the brig in Atsugi, a large frame building with cement floors, a number of storerooms, offices and compartments, a turnkey's area and a large chicken-wire enclosure that contained twenty-one bunks. The enclosure was filled to capacity. New prisoners were lodged in six concrete cells located along a passageway marked with white lines. The cells were designed for single occupancy but summer was the season of misfits, runaways, violent drinkers, born losers, petty thieves, desperadoes, men of every manner of delicate temperament, and Oswald had a cellmate named Bobby Dupard, a slim sad-eyed Negro with a copper cast to his hair and skin.

Oswald, first in, got the stationary bunk. Dupard got a swayback cot and a mattress that was aglimmer with flat-bodied biting things- things you could crack between your fingernails and they'd break into two and become four and then eight, swarming back into their cottony nests to breed some more, so what was the point of even trying, according to Dupard.

They whispered to each other in the night.

"Are you saying when you kill them, they multiply?"

"I'm saying you can't kill them. Some things too small."

"Sleep on top of the blanket," Oswald told him.

"They get on through. They bore through."

"That's termites, that bore."

"Hey, Jim, I live with these things for years."

"Put the blanket on the floor. Sleep on the floor."

"Half the floor is white lines, like they foreseen. Which anyway the lice jump down on top of me."

A nearly bare place, simple objects, basic needs. Oswald's senses were fearfully keyed. He tasted iron on his tongue. He heard the voices from the chicken wire, guards grumbling like heavy dogs. When they hosed down the floor of the cell block he smelled the earth embedded in concrete-pebbles, gravel, slag and broken stone, all distantly mixed with ammonia, like contempt blended in.

Dupard was from Texas.

"Leads the nation in homicides," Oswald said.

"That's the place."

"Whereabouts?"

"Dallas."

"I'm from Fort Worth, off and on, myself."

"Neighbors. Ain't that something. How old is a kid like yourself?"

"Eighteen," Oswald told him.

"You a baby. They throw a baby into prison. How much time you bring with you?"

"Twenty-eight days."

"What's the charge?"

"First I accidentally shot myself in the arm, which they court-martialed me for, but suspended the sentence."

"If it's accidentally, what's their point?"

"They said I used an unregistered weapon. I had a private weapon."

"Which they never handed out."

"Which I found. But that doesn't matter in their eyes as long as the weapon is not registered."

"But they suspend the sentence, so then what?"

"Then there was a second court-martial."

"Sound like somebody push his luck."

"Based on an incident. That's all it was." "I believe it."

"There's a sergeant, Rodriguez, that's been giving me mess duty all the time. Doesn't like me, which I guarantee it's mutual. So we had words more than once. I let him know how I felt about being singled out. He told me it's the court-martial that's keeping me out of the radar hut, plus general standards, which he's saying I don't dress or behave up to standards. I saw him at a local bar and went right over. I told him. I said get me off these menial jobs. We were standing jaw to jaw. He thought I'd say my piece and back off. But I stood right there. There were people pressing close. My mind was already working. Potential witnesses. I told him what I thought. That's all. I didn't wise off. I was simple and clear. I said I wanted fair treatment. I told him. I didn't bait him. He said I was baiting him. He said I wouldn't get him to fight. More trouble than it was worth. Lose him a stripe or something. Some guys egged us on. They told Rodriguez whip him good. But I wasn't trying to get him to fight. I was stating my case in the matter. He called me maricon. He whispered to me, maricon, with a little sweet smile. I told him I know what that means. I heard Puerto Ricans use those words. I know those words. He said he was no Puerto Rican. I told him don't use Puerto Rican words. It was heated then. They were all around us. Somebody shoved me and I spilled my beer all over Rodriguez. Accidentally spilled. I said you saw I was pushed. I told him. I didn't apologize or make an excuse. It wasn't my fault. There was shoving all around. I was only standing up for my military rights."

"Regulate the voice," Bobby whispered.

"So that was the second court-martial. But I defended myself this time. I questioned Rodriguez on the stand. I was proved not guilty of throwing my drink on him, which is technically an assault charge."

"How come here we are, having this talk?"

"They said I was guilty of a lesser charge. Wrongful use of provoking words to a staff noncommissioned officer. Article one seventeen. Bang."

"Slam the gate," Bobby said.

He wore faded utilities that still carried the imprint of long-gone sergeant stripes and he worked in the fields, clearing stones and burning trash. The guard wore a.45 and kept his gun side turned away from the prisoners. There was no talking or rest. They worked in the rain. There were great billowing rains that first week, rain in broad expanses, slow and lilting. Smoke drifted over the men, smelling of wet garbage, half burnt. Their useless work trailed them through the day. He thought there was a good chance he would go to OCS. He'd passed the qualifying exam for corporal before shipping out. He'd be in good shape if it wasn't for the shooting incident and the spilled-drink incident. He could still be in good shape. He was smart enough to make officer. That wasn't the issue. The issue was would they let him. He cut brush and cleared fields of heavy stones. The issue was would they rig the thing against him.

"I landed here like a dream," Dupard whispered that night. "I figure I'm already dead. It's just a question they shovel the dirt in my face."

"What did they charge you with?"

"There was a fire to my rack, which they accused me. But in my own mind I could like verbalize it either way. In other way of saying it, the evidence was weak."

"But you did it."

"It's not that easy to say. I could go either way and be convinced in my own mind."

"You're not sure you really wanted to do it. You were just thinking about doing it."

"I was like, Should I drop this cigarette?"

"It just seemed to happen while you were thinking it."

"Like it happened on its own."

"Did the rack go up?"

"Scorch some linen was all. Like you fall asleep a tenth of a second, smoking."

"Why did you want to start a fire?"

"It's a question of working it out in my own mind, the exact why I did it. Because the psychology is definitely there."

"Then what?"

"Mainly one thing. I deserted."

"Why?"

"Because I want to book on out of here," Bobby said. "I am not a Marine. Simple. They ought to see that and just call a halt. Because the longer it goes on, there's no chance I deal with this shit."

In the prison literature he'd read, Oswald was always coming across an artful old con who would advise the younger man, give him practical tips, talk in sweeping philosophical ways about the larger questions. Prison invited larger questions. It made you wish for an experienced perspective, for the knowledge of some grizzled figure with kind and tired eyes, a counselor, wise to the game. He wasn't sure what he had here in Bobby R. Dupard.

The next day he came back from a work detail and found two guards in the cell pummeling Dupard. They took their time. It looked like something else at first, an epileptic fit, a heart attack, but then he understood it was a beating. Bobby was on the deck trying to cover up and the two men took turns hitting him in the kidneys and ribs. One guard sat on Oswald's bunk, leaning way over to throw short lefts like a man trying to start an outboard. The other guard was down on one knee, biting his lip, pausing to aim his shots so they wouldn't catch Bobby's crossed arms. Bobby had a look on his face like this is bound to end someday. He was working hard to keep them unfulfilled.

They called him Brillo Head. He showed a little smile, as if only the spoken word might perk his interest. They went back to pounding.

Oswald stopped at the white line outside the cell. He thought if he stood absolutely still, looking vaguely right or vaguely left, waiting patiently for them to finish what they were doing so he could request permission to cross the line, they might be inclined to let him enter without a beating.

He hated the guards, secretly sided with them against some of the prisoners, thought they deserved what they got, the prisoners who were stupid and cruel. He felt his rancor constantly shift, felt secret satisfactions, hated the brig routine, despised the men who could not master it, although he knew it was contrived to defeat them all.

When a man was returned to his unit from the chicken-wire enclosure, a man from the cells took his place.

When a man in the chicken wire fouled up, he got a cell of his own, C-rats to eat, close and horrendous attention.

When a man from the cells fouled up, he was thrown in the hole, a junior-size cell with a dirt floor and a cat hole to crap in.

Because of the overcrowding, there was constant shifting of prisoners, many ceremonial occasions at white lines, inspections, friskings, shakedowns, foul-ups.

The night of the beating, Dupard had nothing to say, although Ozzie knew he was not asleep.

He tried to feel history in the cell. This was history out of George Orwell, the territory of no-choice. He could see how he'd been headed here since the day he was born. The brig was invented just for him. It was just another name for the stunted rooms where he'd spent his life.

He'd once told Reitmeyer that communism was the one true religion. He was speaking seriously but also for effect. He could enrage Reitmeyer by calling himself an atheist. Reitmeyer thought you had to be forty years old before you could claim that distinction. It was a position you had to earn through years of experience, like winning seniority in the Teamsters.

Maybe the brig was a kind of religion too. All prison. Something you carried with you all your life, a counterforce to politics and lies. This went deeper than anything they could tell you from the pulpit. It carried a truth no one could contradict. He'd been headed here from the start. Inevitable.

Trotsky in the Bronx, only blocks away.

Maybe what has to happen is that the individual must allow himself to be swept along, must find himself in the stream of no-choice, the single direction. This is what makes things inevitable. You use the restrictions and penalties they invent to make yourself stronger. History means to merge. The purpose of history is to climb out of your own skin. He knew what Trotsky had written, that revolution leads us out of the dark night of the isolated self. We live forever in history, outside ego and id. He wasn't sure he knew exactly what the id was but he knew it lay hidden in Hidell.

A naked bulb burning in the passageway. He watched Dupard in the shadows, sitting on the infested cot, showing an empty stare. His bony wrists dangled out of the faded shirt. He had a gangliness that made him seem sixteen, rompish and clumsy, but he moved well running-running in the compound, running to the head, eyeing those white lines. A long face, hangdog, sad-sack, and dusty hair, reddish brown. Eyes suspicious and hurt, quick to look away. Oswald lay still, aware of a drone in the block, a heaving breath, grimness, massive sleep. Dupard undressed, got under the blanket and began to masturbate, turned toward the wall. Oswald watched his top shoulder twitch. Then he turned to his own wall, closed his eyes, tried to will himself to sleep.

Hidell means don't tell.

The id is hell.

Jerkle and Hide in their little cell.

Oswald stood at the white line in front of the urinal. A guard moved alongside, peering in that inquisitive way, like what do we have here to pass the time.

Oswald requested permission to cross the line.

"I'm looking at your hairline, shitbird. What is supposed to be the length of the hair in the area of the nape of the neck?"

"Zero length."

"What do I see?"

"I don't know."

The guard pushed him stumbling across the line. When he turned to recross he looked directly in the man's face. A long-headed type, half intelligent, small bright eyes.

Oswald turned to face the urinal, requested permission to cross.

"I'm looking at your sideburns. What am I looking at?"

"My sideburns."

"The hair on your sideburns will not exceed what length when fully extended."

"One-eighth inch."

The guard extended the hair between his thumb and index finger, twisting for effect. Oswald let his head lean that way, not so much to ease the pain, which was mild, as to show he would not accept pain stoically in these circumstances. The guard released and then popped him in the head with the heel of his hand.

Oswald requested permission to cross the line.

"The length of the hair at the top of the head will not exceed how many inches maximum."

"Maximum three inches."

He waited for the guard to grab a handful.

"The fly of the trousers shall hang in what kind of line and shall not do what when they are what."

"The fly of the trousers shall hang in a vertical line and shall not gap when they are unzipped."

The guard reached around and grabbed him by the nuts.

"I know the type."

"Aye aye sir."

"I spot the type a mile away."

"Aye aye sir."

"The type that can't stand pain."

"Aye aye sir."

"The sniveling phony Marine."

A prisoner approached the second white line, requested permission to cross. The guard looked over, slowly. He let go of Oswald's crotch. It was raining again. He detached the billy club from his belt and approached the second prisoner.

"What's your name?"

"Nineteen."

"Don't you know the code, Nineteen?"

"I requested permission to cross the line."

"You didn't request permission to talk." The guard jabbed him lightly in the ribs. "Prisoners are silent. We observe the international rules of warfare in this head. This is my head. Nobody talks without my say-so."

He jabbed the prisoner with the billy club.

"Prisoners run silent. They fall to the deck silent when struck. Do you know how to fall, Nineteen?"

The guard jabbed twice, then three more times, harder, before Nineteen realized he was supposed to fall down, which he did, crumpling slowly, in careful stages. His right shoulder touched the white line. The guard kicked him back over.

"We observe the principles of night movement in this head. What is the first principle of night movement, Nineteen?"

"Run at night only in an emergency."

The guard swung the club without bothering to lean toward the prisoner, using a casual backhand stroke, grazing the man's elbow. The guard did not look at the man as he swung. This was one of the features of the local style.

The guard looked at Oswald.

"Why did I hit him?"

"He recited principle number two."

The guard swung the club, hitting the man in the shoulder.

"In this head we know our manual word for word," the guard told the crumpled man, standing with his back to him. "We say nothing in this head that does not come from the manual. We kill silent and with surprise."

Oswald needed desperately to piss.

"In the final assualt," said the guard, "it is the individual Marine, with his rifle and his what, who closes with the enemy and destroys him."

"Bayonet," the prisoner said.

"A vigorous bayonet assault, executed by Marines eager to drive home cold steel, can do what, what, what."

Silence from the man on the deck. He tightened his fetal knot a second before the guard stepped back half a stride and swung the club in a wide arc, striking the knee this time. Oswald was eager to be called.

The guard looked at Oswald, who said at once, "A vigorous bayonet assault, executed by Marines eager to drive home cold steel, can strike terror in the ranks of the enemy."

The guard swung the club backwards once more, striking Nineteen on the arm. Oswald felt a slight satisfaction. The guard made a point of gazing into the distance as he struck his blows.

Oswald sensed the guard's interest shift his way. He was ready for the question.

"Principle number one."

"Get the blade into the enemy."

"Principle number two."

"Be ruthless, vicious and fast in your attack."

The guard took half a step, switched the billy to his left hand and swun'g it hard, striking Oswald's collarbone. He was genuinely surprised. He thought they'd reached an understanding. The blow knocked him back three steps and forced him to one knee. He'd thought he was through getting hit for the day.

"There are no right answers," the guard advised, looking into the distance.

Oswald got to his feet, approached the white line, stood staring at the urinal. He requested permission to cross.

"To execute the slash, do what."

"One, assume the guard position."

"Then what."

"Two, step forward fifteen inches with the left foot, keeping the right foot in place."

The guard swung the club, hitting him in the arm. He was sweaty with the need to piss, his upper body moist and chill.

"There are no right answers in this head. It is the stupidest arrogance to give an answer that you think is right."

The guard jabbed him in the ribs with the butt end of the stick. The other man, Nineteen, was still crumpled on the deck.

The guard swung the club, smashing Oswald on the upper back. The idea seemed to be why bother with questions. Oswald made a decision to let the piss come flowing out. It was an anger and a compensation. He felt it flow down his leg, knowing deep relief, deliverance, good health everywhere, long life to all.

The guard swung the club, hitting the side of Oswald's neck.

He put his hands over the back of his head, covering up. The last blow put the guard strangely on edge. He stood looking into the distance but was different from before, mouth hanging open, a dead spot in his eye, and Oswald knew they were all one word away from a private carnage of the type you hear about from time to time, nameless and undetailed.

He watched the puddle take shape on the floor, his arms crossed at the back of his head. He needed a moment to think.

He sighed deeply, stepping up to the white line. He looked straight ahead and lowered his hands slowly to his sides. It was his sense of things that if he moved slowly and openly and did not show terror, the guard would stand off. The guard's mental condition had to be taken into account. They were all here to see to it that the guard came through. Oswald believed that the man crumpled on the deck knew this as well as he did. He sensed the man's awareness of the moment. They had to let the moment cohere, build itself back to something they all recognized as a rainy Wednesday in Japan.

He stood at the white line and waited.

Dupard whispered in the dark.

"I definitely get the idea they want to send me home in a box.

LIBRA • JOS

The first minute I put on the green service coat, I look like I'm dead. It's a coffin suit for a fool. I seen it on the spot."

"I liked the uniform," Ozzie told him. "It was great how it looked. I was surprised how great I felt. I kept it cleaned and mothproofed. I kept heavy objects out of the pockets. I looked in the mirror and said it's me."

"Nice joke. They told my mother. Get him in the service, Mrs. Dupard. The streets of America getting crazy by the day. Your boy is safe with us."

"That's what they told my mother."

"They sent me to JP to save me from West Dallas niggers. Believe this booshit? They put me behind bars so nobody slips off with my wallet and shoes."

"It's the whole huge system. We're a zero in the system."

"They give me their special attention. Better believe."

"They watch us all the time. It's like Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-four. This isn't a book about the future. This is us, here and now."

"I used to read the Bible," Bobby said.

"I used to read the manual. I never looked at my schoolbooks but I read the Marine Corps manual."

"Make you a man."

"Then I found out what it's really all about. How to be a tool of the system. A workable part. It's the perfect capitalist handbook."

"Be a Marine."

"Orwell means the military mind. The police state is not Russia. It's wherever we have the mind that can think up manuals full of rules for killing."

"Where's this Stalin, dead?"

"Dead."

"I thought I heard that."

"But Eisenhower's not. Ike is our own Big Brother. Our commander in chief."

They lay in the dark, thinking.

Because of what they did to us. The way she had to work and quit and take care of me and get fired and work and quit and pick up and leave. Let's pick up and leave. Scraping up pennies for the next move somewhere. Daily humiliations all her life. This is known as ground down by the system. Except she never questions that. It is only the local conditions. It is Mr. Ekdahl and his puny divorce settlement. It is the whispering behind her back. It is the neighbors with their Hotpoint washers and Ford Fairlane cars, which she competes against the only way she can.

"My boy Lee loves to read."

His mother never-ending.

Three days running, for no special reason, every meal was rabbit chow-lettuce, carrots, water.

Oswald ran past the chicken wire, turned into the cell block, stopped at the white line. Dupard was in the cell wearing skivvies and sitting on Oswald's rack. Dupard's mattress was smoldering. Oswald watched the pale smoke collect in the air. His cellmate just sat there, hangdog, thoughtful, picking at his feet.

"Bobby, how come?"

"You want your rack?"

"Stay there."

"We're not supposed to talk."

"You're only making things worse."

"I'm evicting lice, that's all. They're boring into my skin. Time to rid the premise, man."

"Did you ask for a new mattress?"

"I axed. They punch my face."

He was calm, a little sullen, mainly thoughtful and resigned.

"They'll only extend your time."

"In my own mind this is nothing to excite themselves. I don't feel like there's any guilt to be handed out whereby I'm punished. I'm fumigating these lice on out of here. In other way of saying it, it's like I'm doing their job for them."

"This is your second fire."

"Regulate the voice."

"Well I don't see the point of mattress fires, frankly."

"Stop talking, Ozzie. They kill your ass."

Two guards came down the passageway, brushed past Oswald and entered the cell. The fire was so insignificant they were able to delay getting water until after they'd spent five grim minutes pounding Dupard.

Oswald stood at the white line, looking away.

They moved him out to the chicken wire. Not only guards but fellow inmates, all those bodies to avoid, those eyes and inner melodies-terror, gloom, psycho violence. The trick inside the wire was to stay within your own zone, avoid eye contact, accidental touch, gestures of certain types, anything that might hint at a personality behind the drone unit. The only safety was in facelessness.

He developed a voice that guided him through the days. Forever, endless, identical. The brig was so unthinking it eventually drove out fear. He ran in the passageways, he ran in place. He scrubbed the brightwork in the head, squared away his area, made up his rack. The point of the brig was to clean the brig. He drew his bucket from the storeroom, stood at the white line. They'd built the brig just to keep it clean. It was where they put their white lines. Everything depended on the lines. The brig was the place where all the lines that were painted in the military mind were made bright and clean forever. Once he understood that, he knew he had their number.

He sat in the TV room watching reruns of Dick Clark's American Bandstand. Reitmeyer came in to shake his hand. Haifa dozen other guys dropped by to ask about the brig. He wore his Hawaiian shirt, smirking a little, telling them he'd breezed right through. Great training for life in the U.S. Gives you that competitive edge. That's Ozzie for you, said his barracks-mates. That's the Rabbit, that's Bugs, and they drifted out one by one, leaving him to stare at the high-school boys and girls shuffling drowsily on a dance floor in Philadelphia.

Two weeks later he followed directions to a house in the Sanya district of Tokyo. He made his way through a ragpickers' village built with material scavenged from other parts of the city. Old women jogged through the alleys carrying empty bottles, broken chair legs, pieces of indefinable junk. Houses were shoulder-high, made of old packing crates and strips of sheet metal, the walls stuffed with cardboard and rags. There were lines of people selling blood at mobile units, people who seemed hollow-bodied, so small, in such collapse. It would never bottom out. No matter how far down you went into the world, there were distances still to go, worse things to see and experience. He made it a point not to hurry through the area. He wanted to see what was here.

He entered a tenement and looked in an open door to a flat where a young man was trying to fix a mimeograph machine. Konno had told him to go to the fourth floor but hadn't supplied an apartment number. The hallway was dark and rank. A child was wailing on one of the upper stories.

Hidell climbs the ancient creaking stairs.

On four, two more doors were open. Students milled inside the apartments, moved from one to the other. A young man looked at Ozzie, who was standing in the hallway, smiling, in his T-shirt and dusty jeans. The man smiled back and pointed to a door at the end of the hall. Oswald knocked and was told to enter. He saw a tatami mat and low table. A woman moved across the room. She was about fifty years old, with a moon face and pixie hairdo, wearing a light cotton kimono. She said her name was Dr. Braunfels. She taught German and Russian on a private basis to students at Tokyo University. She understood he was interested in learning Russian. He said he was, and waited. She sat cross-legged on the mat at the far side of the table. She asked him to take off his shoes. These were the nice little gestures that went with the setting.

She wore eye makeup that matched the pale-blue shade of the kimono. He hadn't expected a European. It was encouraging, it was all to the good, it made his decision seem timely, fixed to favorable circumstances. She was probably important, an adviser to radical students and a recruiting officer or handler of agents. She gestured for him to sit facing her on the mat. She watched him assume the awkward position. They ate rice cakes wrapped in seaweed.

"And you are Oswald, Lee," she said finally, as if correcting an imbalance, adding the last stately note to some diplomatic exchange.

There were bamboo shades behind her, a screen to one side. The ceiling was low, a dark-toned wood. Small polished objects here and there. You were supposed to appreciate the near-bareness, the placement of things. Twigs in a vase on the lacquer table.

He told her he wanted to defect.

"I've been thinking this is the step to take, that I'll never be able to live in the U.S. I want a life like these students, political, working in the struggle. I'm not an innocent youth who thinks Russia is the land of his dreams. I look at this coldly in the light of right and wrong. I do think there is something unique about the Soviet Union that I wish to find out for myself. It's the great theory come to life. Before I was fifteen I began indoctrinating myself in the New Orleans library. I studied Marxist ideology. I could lift my head from a book and see the impoverishment of the masses right there in front of me, including my own mother in her struggle to raise three children against the odds. These socialist writings showed me the key to my environment. The material was correct in its thesis. Capitalism is beginning to die. It is taking desperate measures. There is hysteria in the air, like hating Negroes and communists. In the military I'm learning the full force of the system. There is something in the system that builds up hate. How would I live in America? I would have a choice of being a worker in a system I despise or going unemployed. Nobody knows how I feel about this.

I'm sincere in my ideal that this is what I want to do. This is not something intangible. I'm ready to go through pain and hardship to leave my country forever."

That evening he sat alone at the Queen Bee, thinking he'd approached the main business too quickly. She did not seem happy to hear the news and she countered it with news of her own. His unit was shipping out for the latest hot spot, Formosa, in a couple of weeks. What she wanted him to do, for now, was put aside any thought of defecting and concentrate on getting access to classified documents and photographs. She spent some time discussing this. She talked about his job, not his life. She wanted tactical call signs, authentication codes, radio frequencies. She wanted spotter photos of U-2s.

There would be money for this, although she realized money was not his motive. She talked about a second meeting in Yamato, near the base, and gave him detailed directions. She spoke in a practiced way about procedures and craft, about the need for discipline, possibly referring to his rumpled street clothes and day-old stubble. She said she admired the Japanese because a man might spend a lifetime getting one thing right.

She had a full mouth and pudgy hands. There was a mock girlishness about her, several levels of something tricky and derisive. He told her he was serious about learning Russian.

At the Queen Bee he waited for Tammy to finish work and he spent the night with her in the flat she shared with two of her sisters. They had sex, more or less furtively, as the sisters watched TV. Curled in a corner of the room, unable to sleep, his head in the crook of his lover's arm, he thought of a number of things Dr. Braunfels didn't know. She didn't know he'd been on mess duty since the first court-martial. Mess duty, guard duty, a series of shit details-everything but gazing into radarscopes. She didn't know he'd lost his security clearance after the second court-martial. She didn't know there was a second court-martial, or a first for that matter, and she didn't know about the incidents that brought them about. One last thing she didn't know, and that was how far out on a limb he would have to go to snatch documents from a restricted area without clearance.

Seeing her smooth round face, doing her accented voice, he said to himself in the dark, What kind of foul-up do we have here, Oswald Lee?

Back in Atsugi he went on a movie binge. He saw every movie twice, kept to himself, spent serious time at the base library, learning Russian verbs.

Ozzie thought, What if she's only interested in twisting me dry?

He met her in a flat above a bicycle shop. There was an open umbrella drying in the hall. She wore Western clothes, a raincoat over her shoulders. They shook hands like hospital roommates. She had that cropped uneven hair that was way too young and made him think she was undependable, a person who could not survive without double meanings, or saying one thing to mean the opposite.

"You are much greater value," she said, "going on with your duties, reporting to me at regular times. Go where they send you. Why not? We wish you to get ahead. You get ahead here, not in Moscow or Leningrad."

"What if I'm determined to go?"

"This is not the time for you."

"Couldn't they train me there, then send me back?"

"You are already back."

A little joke. He told her he had no documents. Documents would come, possibly, in the near future. It all depended. In the meantime he showed his good will by reporting the number and type of aircraft in his squadron and the squawk codes for aircraft entering and exiting the identification zone. He did not tell her everything he knew about the U-2. He told her a few technical things, studying her reaction to the terms. He told her there was talk around the base that the plane's cameras scanned through multiple apertures.

How wide a track?

He hated to say he didn't know. She asked the names of U-2 pilots. She wanted technical manuals, instruction sheets. He gave the impression that further information would be available in the normal course of things, depending.

He definitely wanted instruction in Russian. He'd brought along an English-Russian dictionary. The sight of it made Dr. Braunfels sink deeply into her raincoat. She told him never to do that again. She would bring whatever books were needed.

They sat at the table in dim light going over pronunciations. She seemed impressed by his efforts. If he was willing to keep studying on his own, without attracting attention, she would give him as much help as she could. She talked about the language for some time, seemingly against her better judgment, drawn by his earnest desire to learn.

Working with her, making the new sounds, watching her lips, repeating words and syllables, hearing his own flat voice take on texture and dimension, he could almost believe he was being remade on the spot, given an opening to some larger and deeper version of himself. The language had a size to it, a deep-reaching honesty. He thought she was a good teacher, firm and serious, and he felt a small true joy pass between them.

He said to her, "A thousand years from now, people will look in the history books and read where the lines were drawn and who made the right choice and who didn't. The dynamics of history favor the Soviet Union. This is totally obvious to someone coming of age in America with an open mind. Not that I ignore the values and traditions there. The fact is there's the potential of being attracted to the values. Everyone wants to love America. But how can an honest man forget what he sees in the daily give-and-take that's like a million little wars?"

Reitmeyer listened to the greetings, which were followed by a halting dialogue, with hand gestures, between his off-and-on buddy Oswald and a corporal named Yaroslavsky. He thought it was curious that a pair of U.S. Marines would turn up at muster every day chatting in Russian. It annoyed Reitmeyer. It definitely rubbed him the wrong way, the private joke they made of it all, laughing over certain phrases, calling each other comrade. They seemed to think this was hilarious. Seven, eight, nine days running. This half-ass foreign gibberish. Only in America, as the saying goes. Except this is Japan, he reminded himself, and every day is a strange day in the fabulous East.

He watched Tammy apply eyebrow pencil to her lips, a fad among teen-age girls in JP that year. She was younger than Mitsuko but not that young. Mitsuko had vanished into the floating world and it was possible Tammy would follow any time. She posed for him now in a fluffy blouse and toreador pants. It no longer made Ozzie feel self-conscious to be seen by other Marines with a woman who was put together so well. The guys in MACS-1 couldn't figure it out.

She took him to a place called the Loneliness Bar, where the hostesses wore swimsuits treated with a chemical substance. The idea was to strike a match on a girl's backside as she walked by your table. Four Negro GIs went apeshit striking matches on sleek bottoms. There were matches jutting from the knuckles of every hand. They hooted and laughed, could not contain their amazement. They were young Southern Negroes, awkward and spindly, with a likable slapstick manner, and they made him wonder what had happened to Bobby Dupard. It put a kind of doom on the evening. He sat drinking beer in the stink of all those blistered match-heads, explaining his past to Tammy in simple phrases. A night in the life of the Loneliness Bar.

Three days later he felt a stinging heat when he pissed. It burned inside. Two days after that he couldn't help noticing a thick discharge from the selfsame organ. He went to the head in the middle of the night to study the fluid, a dreadful yellowish drip. At the lab they took a series of smears and cultures, gave him nine hundred thousand units of penicillin, intramuscular, over a three-day period, and returned him to light duty. Ozzie had the clap.

The pilot arrives in an ambulance, with armed guards. He wears a white helmet that is sealed to his airtight suit and he strides to the unmarked plane without delay. The ground crew and guards back off as the engine emits the high-pitched signal that always brings a few men slouching out of the radar shack to watch the black-bandit jet streak down the runway. It's over almost at once, the shrill sound rising, the strut-and-wheel devices keeping the long wings level until flying speed is reached. Then the plane is up, the pogos drop off, the men try to keep track of the fast steep climb, the brilliant leap into another skin. They scrunch up their faces, peering into the haze. But the object is already gone, part of the high quiet, the flat and seamless sky out there, leaving behind a string of soft drawled curses and murmurs of disbelief.

The pilot, sooner or later, whoever he is, whatever his base or his mission, thinks about the items stored in his seat pack. Water, field rations, flares, a first-aid kit; a hunting knife and pistol; a needle tipped with lethal shellfish toxin and concealed in a fake silver dollar. ("We'd just as soon they didn't get a chance to interrogate you guys, not that we think you'd breathe a word.") There is also the delicate charge of cyclonite that will pulverize the camera and electronic equipment an undetermined number of seconds after the pilot activates the timer and gets his feet into the stirrups of the ejection seat, should the remote possibility arise that any such maneuver is necessary. ("Now, you people understand the ejection seat can cause amputation of the limbs if things don't work just perfect, so maybe you ought to figure on slipping quietly over the side, like you don't want to wake the kids.") He can't help thinking, sooner or later, about the worst that could happen. A stall at extreme altitudes. Or an SA-2 missile just happens to detonate nearby, knocking out a stabilizer. ("Not that the bastards have the know-how to go that high.") Next thing he knows he is out in the stratosphere, sky-hiking with a pack on his back, and he tries to convince a somewhat dreamy hand to jerk the pull-ring. At fifteen thousand feet it happens automatically, swat, the orange plume streaming out of his shoulder blades. It becomes a matter of dignified descent. He comes floating down out of the endless pale, struck simultaneously by the beauty of the earth and a need to ask forgiveness. He is a stranger, in a mask, falling. People come into view, farm hands, children racing toward the spot where the wind will set him down. Their rough caps are tilted back. He is near enough to hear them calling, the words bounced and steered and elongated by the contours of the land. The land smells fresh. He is coming down to springtime in the Urals and he finds that this privileged vision of the earth is an inducement to truth. He wants to tell the truth. He wants to live another kind of life, outside secrecy and guilt and the pull of grave events. This is what the pilot thinks, rocking softly down to the tawny fields of a landscape so gentle and welcoming it might almost be home.

20 May

Laurence Parmenter booked a seat on the daily flight to the Farm, the CIA's secret training base in Virginia. The flight was operated under military cover and used mainly by Agency people with short-term business at the base.

The Farm was known officially by the cryptonym isolation. The names of places and operations were a special language in the Agency. Parmentef was interested in the way this language constantly found a deeper level, a secret level where those outside the cadre could not gain access to it. It was possible to say that the closest brotherhood in the Agency was among those who kept the crypt lists, who devised the keys and digraphs and knew the true names of operations. Camp Peary was the Farm, and the Farm was isolation, and isolation probably had a deeper name somewhere, in a locked safe or some computer buried in the ground.

He showed his laminated badge to the MP at the gate. The badge was coded to reveal to the trained eye just how much clearance the owner had. After his letter of reprimand, Parmenter had been assigned to what was joshingly called the slave directorate, a support division of clandestine services, and he'd been issued a new badge with a diminished number of little red letters around the edges. His wife said, "How many letters do you have to lose before you disappear?"

T. J. Mackey was waiting at the gatehouse. He wore well-pressed fatigues and had the distant look of a doorman in a gold coat outside a new hotel. Basically he doesn't want his friends to see him.

He took Parrnenter to the JOT area, where junior officer trainees received instruction in everything from the paramilitary arts to counterintelligence. They sat alone in one of four sections of bleacher seats that formed an amphitheater over a pit area. Two young men were grappling in the dust. An instructor circled them in a busy way, speaking a language Larry did not recognize.

"Things broke our way early," he said to Mackey, "but we've reached a static period."

"I've been in touch with Guy Banister."

"Camp Street."

"That's the one. He talked to the Dallas field office of the FBI about this Oswald. They finally got him an answer. He left Dallas April twenty-four or twenty-five."

"There's a Russian wife."

"Left Dallas May ten with their baby."

"Nobody knows where."

"That's right."

"Which leaves us groping."

"I thought you had a line of communication."

"George de Mohrenschildt. But he's in Haiti. Besides I don't want him to know how interested we are in Oswald."

"How interested are we?"

"He sounds right, politically and otherwise. Win wants a shooter with credentials. He's an ex-Marine. I managed to get access to his M-l scorebook and other records."

"Can he shoot?"

"It's a little confusing. The more I study the records, the more I think we need an interpreter. He was generally rated poor. But it looks like he did his best work the day he fired for qualification. He got a two-twelve rating that day, which makes him a sharpshooter. Except they gave him a lower designation. So either the number is wrong or the designation is wrong."

"Or the kid cheated."

"There's something else we ought to discuss, although I told Win it seems way too soon. Accidental hits."

"You want a realistic-looking thing. That means multiple rounds flying from a number of directions."

"Win says hit the presidential limousine, hit the pavement, hit a Secret Service man. Just don't shoot anyone in the car."

"Hit a Secret Service man."

"Hit, don't kill."

"This isn't a controlled experiment," Mackey said.

"If at all possible, you try to wound one of the men in the follow-up car. The way these things work, there are two agents on each running board of the follow-up car. That's four dangling men. And the car is going about twelve miles an hour. And it's only five feet behind the presidential car, which makes it perfectly plausible, an agent taking a bullet meant for the President."

"Where do we do it?"

"Miami."

"Good enough."

"If at all possible, that's where Win says we do it."

"It ought to be Miami."

"Definitely."

"Agreed."

"Sooner or later the President will take a swing through Florida. All the political signs point that way."

Two more young men entered the pit. Mackey said they were South Vietnamese being trained for the secret police. Foreigners attending sessions at the Farm were known as black trainees. A few of them, on sensitive assignments, had been brought to the U.S. under conditions so secure, according to Mackey, that the men did not necessarily know what country they were in. Larry thought this was farfetched. Look at the damn trees, you know you're in Virginia. But he was careful to say nothing to T-Jay. T-Jay was not to be disputed on subjects central to his interests.

He told Parmenter he would stay in close touch with Guy Banister. Banister's detective agency was the Grand Central Station of the Cuban adventure. Every type renegade passed through. Guy would help them locate a substitute for this kid who'd disappeared. Someone rated expert with a rifle and scope. A shooter who could blast a finger off a dangling man.

When Parmenter was gone, T-Jay sat in the bleachers watching the Vietnamese bounce each other around. The hot new station was Saigon. It was the talk around the base. They were putting Cuba in a box, which was okay with him. Let them forget. Let them find a new excitement. It would make the moment in Miami all the more powerful.

Some hours later Mackey was in his trailer in the woods outside Williamsburg. Light beams floated through the trees and then he heard the ghetto clank of Raymo's '57 Bel Air. He opened the trailer door and watched them get out, two men showing the stiff weighted movements of long-distance drivers.

Mackey said, "Just in time for dinner except there isn't any."

The words sounded abrupt and clean in the empty night.

"Maybe just a swallow. Un buchito," Raymo said. "We ate on the road."

The other man, Frank Vasquez, was occupied getting blankets and clothes out of the re'ar seat and then he backed out and stood erect and half turned, his hands occupied, and gave the door a rough shove with his hip and followed with a sweet kick, knocking it shut. Raymo, approaching the trailer, gave a little head-shake at the other man's treatment of the once-gorgeous car.

"Plenty of coffee," Mackey said. "Good to see you. How are things?"

"Good to see you. Long time. How are things?"

"Hello, T-Jay."

"Hello, Frank. I thought you were getting your teeth fixed."

"He never does it," Raymo said.

They embraced, pounding each other on the back, abrazos, absent-minded collisions.

"How are things?"

"Long time."

"Too long, my friend."

Standing by the trailer door exchanging nods, looks, half-sentences, everything so clearly shaped, their words sounding well made in the fine light air.

Mackey made room for their things in the trailer. Then they sat drinking coffee. Raymo was at the fold-out table, a thickset man with a wide mustache. He wore a black cowboy hat, black T-shirt, fatigue pants, combat boots. His lounging outfit. Mackey definitely wanted Raymo in on this. Raymo could not light a match, walk his dog, scratch his head without infusing the act with the single-minded energy of his rage. It was a consciousness they shared un-spokenly, Bahia de Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs, the Battle of Giron- whatever you wanted to call it. Even his stockiness, all that dense flesh, seemed a form of energy and purpose. A flamingo was etched on his T-shirt. He was the one man T-Jay trusted completely.

"We spent part of April with the harvest."

"Picking oranges in central Florida," Frank said.

"We fill ten-box tubs. How many pounds you think that is?"

"He fell off the ladder," Frank said.

"I'm telling you, man, it's hard labor."

"Then what, we go to Live Oak- near the Georgia border."

"We stack these huge bales of tobacco," Raymo said. "Like in huge sheets they're called. They work our ass, T-Jay."

Mackey knew they were working every job they could, night work, spare time, odd job, to save enough money to start a business, maybe a service station or small construction firm.

"Then my wife calls us from Miami," Frank said. "We drive up here right away."

Drive through Georgia and the Carolinas to hear what news T-Jay has for them. It could only be a Cuban operation. Nothing else would make him get in touch with them and nothing else would bring them here.

Vasquez sat on the bunk bed. He had a thin sad face and would have seemed at ease in a cobbler's smock in some dark narrow shop on a fringe street of Little Havana. There were two rows of teeth in his lower jaw, or maybe one row haphazardly aligned, with zigzag patterns, teeth set at angles to each other. It made him look like a saint of the poor. A brother and a cousin lost at Red Beach, another brother allowed to die in a hunger strike at La Cabana prison. Frank had been a schoolteacher in Cuba. Now, between jobs, he and Raymo drove to a training camp in the Everglades with the one weapon they owned between them, a so-called Cuban Winchester, put together from elements of three other rifles with handmade parts added on. They drilled with one of the groups out there, living in open huts made of eucalyptus logs and assorted vines. Raymo fired the rifle, swung from ropes, pissed in the tall grass. Frank did some target work but otherwise just hung around, the longtime silent buddy, dressed the way he always dressed, in oversized trousers and a sleeveless sepia shirt worn outside his pants.

Both men had been with Castro, originally, in the mountains.

"The wife and children, Frank? They're well?"

"Doing okay."

"Three kids, right? What about Raymo? The right woman doesn't show up?"

These were the only men Mackey could talk to like this, in extended ceremonial hellos, little arcs of family news and other details of being. It was the necessary foreground. He knew it was expected and he'd come to look forward to it. They had to say something to each other. There was only one subject among them and it did not adapt to easy chat.

All right. Mackey gave them some background on the operation. Extremely dedicated men were behind it. The idea was to galvanize the nation into full awareness of the danger of a communist Cuba. Direction General de Inteligencia would be exposed as a criminal organization willing to take extreme action against important figures who opposed Castro.

He told them a shooting was in the works, designed to implicate the DGI. He wanted Frank and Ray mo to be part of it and he supplied some operational details. High-powered rifles, elevated perches, a trail of planted evidence, someone to take the fall. There would be five hundred dollars a month for each of them, commencing now, and a nice payday when the job was done. The men behind the plan, he said, were respected Agency veterans, deep believers in a free Havana.

He did not mention Everett and Parmenter by name. He did not tell them who their target was or where the shooting would take place. He would let details drop, here and there, in time, as need dictated. The other thing he did not say was that they were supposed to miss.

The Parmenters lived in a stunted frame house at the edge of a brick sidewalk in Georgetown. The sidewalk bulged and rippled and the once-quaint house was slightly shabby now, a mousy relic no one noticed.

It was Beryl who'd wanted to live here. The corporate suburbs were not for them, she said. Guarded shoptalk over drinks and dinner with colleagues and their anxious wives. She wanted to live in town. Fanlights, wrought iron, leaded glass. The security of a small and darkish place with old familiar things lying about, with books, rugs, dust, a wine cellar for Larry, a tininess, an unnoticeability (if such a word exists). There was something about a long and low and open-space house with a lawn and a carport that made her feel spiritually afraid.,

Larry paced the small rooms now, drink in hand, wearing an enormous striped robe. Beryl was at her writing desk clipping news items to send to friends. This was a passion she'd discovered recently like someone in middle life who finds she was born to show pedigreed dogs. Nothing that happened before has any meaning compared to this. A week's worth of newspapers sat on the desk. She sent clippings to everyone. There was suddenly so much to clip.

"Look at this, now. Am I angry or amused?"

She turned around to find her husband.

"Look at this, Larry. A folk singer named Bob Dylan is told by CBS he can't sing one of his songs on The Ed Sullivan Show. Too controversial."

"What's controversial about it?"

"It's called Talkin' John Birch Society Blues.' "

"Is he white or Negro? Because white boys shouldn't mess with the blues."

"But imagine forbidding him airtime."

"I'll try to get worked up about it. Give me ten minutes."

"I know the signs, old boy."

"What signs?"

"When you sweep through the house guzzling gin. I know exactly what it means. Nostalgic for Guatemala."

Some people thought Beryl had money. It was one of the false impressions that collected around her. What she actually had was a small picture-framing shop on Wisconsin Avenue, strictly a marginal income-lithographs, photographs, framing. Other people thought she was creative. One of the softer arts, quilt-making, water colors. She had a look and manner people took to be unconventional in a certain way, a kind of reclusiveness in a crowd. She wore soft clothes. She draped herself in casual layers, a smallish woman half buried in pastels. There was always the idea she was in quiet retirement from some fear or pain. She bought factory-outlet moccasins, never wore jewelry, kept snapshots of her mother in favorite books. People thought she was a canned-soup heiress who painted seascapes with birds. She ate soft food, spoke softly, with.a slight huskiness, a sexiness. She was very sexy, at forty-seven. There was still that smoky little thing about her. The sexy swaying walk, the dark voice. She had a dry way of delivering friendly insults directly into people's chests. She walked softly swaying into a room and you could sense anticipation in the group. They began preparing their laughter before she said a word.

It was seen as a mark of the Parmenters' sophistication that she raked the Agency in mixed company while Larry looked on grinning.

Not that she didn't mean what she said.

"No. I am not making fun. I admire what you did in Guatemala. If not politically, then in other ways. It was practically bloodless. I certainly admire that."

"It was a textbook operation."

"Of course there would have been no need for an operation if the Guatemalans hadn't taken back all that land belonging to United Fruit."

"Is that what happened? Oh."

"I love the way you say textbook operation."

Yes. It was also the peak experience of Larry's career, centering on a radio station supposedly run by rebels from a jungle outpost in Guatemala. The broadcasts actually originated in a barn in Honduras and the messages were designed to put pressure on the leftist government and arouse anxiety in the people. Rumors, false battle reports, meaningless codes, inflammatory speeches, orders to nonexistent rebels. It was like a class project in the structure of reality. Parmenter wrote some of the broadcasts himself, going for vivid imagery, fields of rotting bodies, fighter pilots defecting with their planes. A real pilot tossed dynamite sticks out the window of his Cessna. A real bomb fell on a parade ground, sending up smoke in an ominous column. The government fell nine days after an invasion force of five thousand troops was said to be advancing on the capital. The force materialized then, several trucks and a crowded station wagon, about a hundred and fifty ragged recruits.

That was nine years ago. Larry became involved in proprietaries for a time, legally incorporated businesses actually financed and controlled by CIA. When the Agency wanted to do something interesting in Kurdistan or Yemen, it filed for incorporation in Delaware. It was during this period that he came into contact with a number of Agency assets who had important holdings in sensitive parts of the hemisphere. A man from United Fruit, a man from the Cuban-Venezuelan Oil Trust (it was George de Mohrenschildt as a matter of fact). Merchant banks, sugar companies, arms dealers.

A curious convergence of motives and holdings. Hotel interests here, gambling interests there. Men with vivid histories, sometimes including prison. He saw there was a natural kinship between business and intelligence work. And he realized that the companies he was helping set up as cover for Agency operations held potential for legitimate profits-and beyond that, for enormous personal gain.

Contact with wealthy and influential men was a bracing experience for someone who'd been brought up to believe in the American genius for making leaps to new levels of privilege. Being rich, he saw, was something you grew into. The Agency had huge collections of intelligence on banana republics and their leaders. Larry traded secrets for pieces of promising action. He spent time in Cuba, setting up transactions between the Batista government and interests in the U.S. He helped arrange mineral surveys, land-development deals, drilling contracts, casino franchises. He traveled to Oriente Province to learn the extent of the rebel threat to cane fields controlled by U.S. firms. The extent was considerable. When the American executives left their palm-shaded streets and large white houses, when the cooks and gardeners looked for new situations, when the company guards fled, when the local army post was overrun, Laurence Parmenter's fortune was still in the ground of the unexplored oil properties of Cuba.

"I admire that robe, Larry. You look like Orson Welles in deep focus."

He stood in the doorway smiling absently at the familiar flatness in her voice, not quite hearing what she said.

"On second thought I'll tell you what you look like. You look like one of those corrupt barons in Ivan the Terrible, got up deli-ciously in animal skins. Make me a drink so I can keep you company. We ought to keep each other company."

After the revolution came the plan to invade. He helped set up the Double-Chek Corporation, a front for the recruitment of pilot instructors. Gibraltar Steamship came next, a company whose nominal head was a former State Department officer and ex-president of United Fruit. Parmenter himself could not always tell where the Agency left off and the corporations began. There were men related by blood and by marriage; there were company directors who were former high-ranking intelligence officers; there were government advisers who were once company directors. It was a society he recognized as a better-working version of the larger world, where things have an almost dreamy sense of connection to each other. Here the plan was tighter. These were men who believed history was in their care.

Gibraltar Steamship provided cover for propaganda operations against Cuba. The device was Radio Swan, a transmitter stored in an oversized trailer on a remote island in the western Caribbean. Great Swan Island was the product of hundreds of years of bird droppings. There were three coconut palms, twenty-eight people. Lovely numbers, everyone agreed, pointing toward barrenness and isolation, the soul-testing elements of the trade. For the invasion Parmenter used the same broadcast techniques that had worked in Guatemala. Cryptic messages from spy movies of the forties. "Attention, Eduardo, the moon is red." Romantic imagery employing the names of local wildlife. "The barracuda sleeps at sundown." "The shark leaves a golden trail." Mackey would later tell Parmenter that in his LCI lying to off Blue Beach, this gibberish had the sound of a mind unraveling. It diminished the whole operation, made comic fucking opera of troops in combat.

When the messages were broadcast, Larry was in Washington at the Agency's invasion headquarters, a tempo building near the Lincoln Memorial. He was eating a soggy meal off a paper plate when news hit the control room that JFK would not approve air cover for the landings. The men did not accept it at first. Too unbelievably stupid and cruel. A colonel in golf togs walked through. The men shouted at superiors, damn near grew violent. Someone vomited lazily in a wastebasket, leaning over with his hands on his knees. Win Everett arrived from Miami, wrote out a letter of resignation, tore it up, flew back to Miami to be with exile leaders who were confined in a barracks at Opa-Locka so they would not leak word of the landings. It was the first major death watch in South Florida that week.

No one used the term textbook operation. Three days later Radio Swan was still on the air, promising the abandoned troops in Zapata swamp that help was on the way. Larry slept on a cot in grubby clothes but made it a point to shave every day. Shaving had an impact on his morale and he needed all the help he could get. Several weeks earlier he'd borrowed heavily to buy stock in Francisco Sugar at depressed prices. Sugar was the word going round. There were stunning profits to be made, insiders said, once the plantations were back in U.S. control.

"People think we're the strangest marriage," Beryl said.

"Why should they? Who? What's strange about us?"

"Only everything."

"People think we're interesting. That's my impression."

"They think we're strange. We have nothing in common. We have no practical reason for being. We never even talk about practical things."

"We have no children. We're not parents. Parents talk about practical things. They have reasons to be practical."

"With or without children. Believe me. We're considered strange."

"I don't think we're strange. I think we're interesting."

"We're interesting in a way. But we're also strange. I'm the one they focus on. I'm the stranger of the two."

"I don't like conversations like this. I don't know how to have these conversations."

"They're probably not a good idea."

"So let's change the subject," he said.

"Although the fact of the matter is you're far stranger, love, than I could ever think of being,"

"Strange how? I'm not strange. I don't like this at all."

"Strange like a man. Strange like someone I could never know the heart of, the truth of."

"This is thankfully outside my range."

"I don't think I could ever begin to imagine in years and years of living intimately with a man what it is like to be him."

"Funny. I thought women were the secret."

"No no no no no," she said softly, as if correcting a touchy child. "That's the wisdom handed down from man to boy, through the ages, a hundred generations of knowledge and experience. But it is just another Agency lie."

From the moment the CIA monitored a rebel broadcast on January 1, 1959, announcing that the tyrant Batista had fled the country at 2:00 a.m. and that Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz was the supreme leader of the Cuban revolution, from that moment to this, four and a half years later, as he stood in his striped robe mixing a drink for his wife, Larry Parmenter had been involved in one or another plot to get Cuba back. Soldiering on, Beryl said. She liked to remind him that he was not vindictive, had no strong political convictions, did not hate Castro or wish to see physical harm come to him. Larry was famous in fact for going to a costume party as Fidel Castro, with beard, cigar, khaki fatigues, about a month before the invasion. Seemed funny at the time.

One thing Larry didn't like at all. This was the kind of fellow he'd occasionally had to deal with in joint efforts to recover investments in Cuba. The gambling interests, the casinos and hotels, the men who bought off officials routinely, who sent a steady traffic of couriers with hefty satchels moving through the Bahamas to the International Credit Bank in Geneva-men who thought longingly of the millions they'd once skimmed from the gaming tables in Havana. He wanted nothing to do with those roly-poly wops.

Earlier that day a young man walked into the outer office at Guy Banister Associates in New Orleans. Delphine Roberts was at her desk typing a revised list of civil-rights organizations for Banister's files. The young man stood patiently waiting, in jeans with rolled cuffs, two days' stubble on his chin. Delphine stopped typing long enough to pat her teased hair, a nervous habit she was determined to overcome. Then she resumed her work, aware that the young man was studying a calendar on the wall in order to kid himself into thinking he was not being made to wait. She knew all the styles. She could type a complicated text and scrutinize a visitor at the same time. This visitor had a little smile that seemed to say, Here I am-just the fellow you've been waiting for.

"I would like to fill out an application for a position with the firm."

Delphine kept on typing.

"You have people who do undercover work, I believe, like mingle with students or go to political meetings. I am referring to collecting information. I want to apply to become an undercover agent. I have a verified alias. I have served in the armed forces. And I have lived abroad in a situation that gave me special depth into the communist mentality."

Delphine was not surprised. They had some thought-provoking individuals walking in unannounced at 544 Camp. This address tended to draw people from a colorful range of backgrounds.

She stopped typing long enough to give the young man an application. He said he had to get back to work at the coffee company around the corner but he would fill out the form and return it in the morning. Then he was gone.

David Ferrie came out of the small back room and said in his routine disbelieving whisper, "Who on earth was that?"

"He has a verified alias."

"Do we have forms for undercover agents?"

"No. It's just a normal form."

"Like height and weight."

"Whatever it says. I don't know."

"Like insanity in the family. Or give us the history of your disease."

"It says whatever you want it to say, Dave. I'm very, very busy."

"How can a person explain his disease on a printed form?"

David Ferrie went into Guy Banister's office, which was empty, and looked out the street-side window, trying to catch a glimpse of the young man whose voice he'd just been listening to. Had he caught something familiar in the tone? Would he be able to match a body to the voice? He looked at the swarm of people moving down the street. Dark folks aplenty, he thought. But no sign of the sweet-voiced boy who wants to be a spy.

In Fort Worth

Even coming back he was a military man. His father was a veteran. His brothers were in the service. My own brother was a navy man. We were a serviceman family. He sent me a regular allotment every month out of his pay and when he heard about my injury, which I said in a letter, he put in for a hardship discharge, as I was disabled from work and trying for six months to collect on my claim. He was stationed in California then and they let him go early in order to help his mother. This is the injury of a candy jar falling off a shelf that four doctors have taken x-rays of my nose and face and there is travel time and carfare and the store is still holding tight to their cash. I am a disabled woman who can't collect. It is like the days of Mr. Ekdahl, a ten-thousand-dollar-a-year man with an expense account who fixed it so my welfare was ignored.

I am leaving out Lee had a beautiful voice and sang beautifully at age six in Covington, Louisiana. He sang a solo in the Lutheran church, "Silent Night," and that can be verified.

Now this boy comes home from the service and says he will work on a cargo ship and send money home to me. That was our only conversation over three days where he slept on a cot in the kitchen, which was the only place I had for him, plus he told me that he passed his high-school-level tests, Mother, which I don't know why you need this to lift crates on a boat. He was here only parts of three days before packing a bag and leaving. Then I received a letter postmarked New Orleans that he has booked passage on a ship to Europe. It is painful to accept, your honor. There is nothing in the letter that says cargo. There is nothing about he will work his way for a certain time until I have found a larger place for us to live. It is, "I have booked passage." It is, "My values are very different from Robert's or yours." It is, "I did not tell you about my plans because you could hardly be expected to understand."

It is the struggle hanging over my life that made him go away.

Postcard #3. Aboard the freighter SS Marion Lykes bound for Le Havre. The oddball loner has little to say to the three other passengers on the sixteen-day crossing. Gray seas, high swells, missed meals. He tells them he is going to school in Switzerland but doesn't mention the name of the institution or the course of study he plans to follow. He avoids a passenger's friendly attempts to take his picture. She is a nice enough lady whose husband is a lieutenant colonel, U.S. Army, retired. You'd think in the middle of the ocean he'd be able to sit on deck without answering questions from some clear-eyed military type. He talks least of all to the fourth passenger, his cabin mate, a boy just out of high school and on his way to France to study French. He is a Texas boy and just close enough to Lee outwardly to be the world's preferred version of the type.

It is like the shadow of his own life keeps falling across his path.

He watches them at dinner in the officers' mess and he thinks he knows why they look so satisfied with themselves. They have begun to feel the bond of being American. They almost glow with self-awareness, headed for foreign shores, surrounded and attended by a partly foreign and mainly dark-skinned crew, delighting in their own straightforward and affirmative ways, their democratic values, their moral strength, the way they hold their knife and fork, smiling over the glitter, and this is why he will not eat with them or share their conversation.

The spiral rind of a tangerine sits in a white saucer in front of him. He thinks of the nine months he spent at the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro in California, after Japan. He continued his Russian studies, learned some Spanish (it was the time of Fidel Castro) and developed a neat little deception for the venture he was now engaged in.

At the base library he found a catalogue listing the names of colleges abroad. He scanned the list for obscure schools in certain locations, then wrote away for an application. Albert Schweitzer College. Churwalden, Switzerland. He needed to invent a reason to travel abroad because a Marine has two years in the reserve after active duty.

On the application form he listed under special interests: Philosophy, Psychology, Ideology, Football, baseball, tennis, Stamp collecting.

Vocational interest (if decided upon): To be a short story writer on contemporary American life.

In certain light the sea goes green, a slow dullish tumble he watches from the deck. When he goes below again he lies on his bunk, aware of the great slow creaking of the ship, like a mind stirring around him. Hawsers are ropes for mooring.

On the Albert Schweitzer application he made it a point to mention that after the term was completed he planned to attend the summer session of the University of Turku-Turku, Finland.

Hidell creeps closer to the East.

19 June

Mary Frances parked under an oak tree on the circular drive outside the College of Education Building, or Old Main. It pleased her that Win's office was in the oldest building on campus. The building pleased her with its arched entranceways and two-story columns. Den ton had its hidden streets, its sense of languorous history, an old American stillness, wistful and unchanged, and these older traces too, older ideas and values scored in limestone and marble, in scroll ornaments atop a column or in the banknote details of a frieze. The Old Main, the county courthouse, the broad-fronted homes, the homes with deep shady porches, the trees, the streets named for trees-all this pleased her, made her think that happiness lived minute by minute in the things she saw and heard. Being happy was a small awareness, the sum of small awarenesses, day by day, minute by minute, and you knew it now, in the hair and skin as much as in the heart.

Suzanne sat next to her mother, arms at her sides, slim white legs pointed straight out, a show'of mock obedience. They were not talking to each other.

You could be happy now. It did not have to be experienced in retrospect, as Win believed, as he liked to explain in his mild way, with the face he called a failed professor's tipped slightly right. It was not a slow-working glow or meditation. You could feel it now, collect it in the names of things around you, in chinaberry, oak and slippery elm. It pleased her to live here, after Miami, Havana, Mexico City, Guatemala City, temporary housing in southeast Virginia (isolation), dusty tracts of identical homes near the Carolina coast (isolation tropic).

They would go to the Steak House on South Locust for jumbo shrimp with salad, french fries and hot rolls and then Win would suggest an ice cream at Lane's.

Bright hot skies.

Silence in the car, on the burning lawns.

Suzanne was holding her breath.

In his basement office in the Old Main, Win Everett was on the phone with Parmenter.

"How does Mackey know all this if he hasn't made contact?"

"Whatever T-Jay knows comes out of Banister's office. Oswald confides in one of Banister's people."

"Go ahead."

"In January he orders a snub-nose.38 from a firm in Los Angeles. In March he sends away to Chicago for an Italian carbine with a sniper's scope."

"Armed and dangerous," Win said softly.

"Plus. Are you ready? He's handing out pro-Castro leaflets on the street. He was on the docks two or three days ago pushing leaflets at sailors off an aircraft carrier."

Everett looked into space.

"How does this fit in with the fact that he has the use of an office in the same building as Banister's detective agency, right above

Banister's office, which is the damn pivot point of the anti-Castro crusade in Louisiana?"

"It doesn't fit in," Parmenter said.

"I'm glad you said that. I thought I might be missing something. "

"All I know is what T-Jay tells me. As follows. The subject walks into Banister's office looking for an undercover job. Banister installs him in a broom closet upstairs. This little-bitty room becomes the New Orleans headquarters of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. And the subject hits the streets in a white shirt and tie, handing out leaflets."

They talked about Oswald as the subject in the same way they referred to the President as Lancer, which was his Secret Service code name. Habit. One wants the least possible surface to which pain and regret might cling-anyone's, everyone's pain. A thought for late afternoon.

"Let me understand the sequence," Win said. "The subject leaves Dallas. He is gone, out of our lives, a promising part of our operation lost forever."

"Then he turns up in the one place we would never expect to find him."

"He turns up, out of nowhere, in New Orleans, in Guy Banister's office, looking for an undercover assignment. The same fellow who defected to the bloody Soviet Union, who used his mail-order rifle to take a shot at General Walker. Strolls right into the middle of the enemy camp."

"Mackey was supposed to ask Guy Banister to find a substitute for our boy. What happens? The original walks in off the street."

Everett searched his pockets for a cigarette.

"You've got to get close to the subject," he said.

"Oh no."

"Look, Larry."

"I don't want personal contact any more than you do, my friend. Give him to Mackey."

"Where is he?"

"Still at the Farm as far as I know."

"All right. Look. Get me a sample of the kid's handwriting."

"I'll talk to T-Jay right away."

The hallway was empty. Win climbed the stairs to the main floor. Nobody at the desk. He went outside. School year ended, slow-moving figures in the distance, summer students, maintenance men, and a lawn sprinkler sending out spray in overlapping arcs, all the lazy brightness of cobwebbed grass.

Before the murder attempt comes the provocation.

He'd devised a top-secret memo from the Deputy Director Plans to selected members of the Senior Study Effort, dated May 1961. It concerned the assassination of foreign leaders from a philosophical point of view. It also included a fragment from the psalm-book, not known to the outside world. Terminate with extreme prejudice. Parmenter was handling the actual production of the memo on a suitable typewriter and stationery.

Two. Through his contacts in Little Havana, Everett had planted a cryptic news item in an exile magazine published in New Jersey. The story, from an unnamed source, concerned an operation run in July 1961 by the Office of Naval Intelligence out of Guantanamo, the U.S. base near the eastern end of Cuba. The story was fabricated but the plan itself was real, involving the assassination of Fidel Castro and his brother Raul. This news item would be found among the subject's effects after the failed attempt on the life of the President.

Three. He was working on a scheme involving telephone notes on pages of stationery used by the Technical Services Division. Doodles, phone numbers, abbreviations of the names of advanced poisons produced by a special unit of the division, known entertainingly as the Health Alteration Committee. A person following the sequence of phone numbers would be led along a serendipitous path with a number of ordinary stops (florist, supermarket) as well as the home of an exile leader in Miami, a motel in Key Biscayne known to be mob-run, a yacht moored at a Miami marina-living quarters of the CIA's chief of station.

He headed toward the car.

Local color, background, connections for investigators to ponder. He had other schemes, other documents, authentic, relating to attempts on Castro's life-attempts he'd personally been involved in at the planning stage. It would be up to Parmenter to get this reading matter, circuitously, into the hands of journalists, subcommittee members and anyone else who might bring them to light. Once people saw the attempt on the President as a Cuban response to repeated efforts of U.S. intelligence to murder Castro, we were all halfway home to getting the island back.

He saw them sitting in the car. He began to smile, shielding his eyes from the sun. He approached the front door on the passenger side. The wet grass looked spangled in the heat and glare. He tiptoed closer, smiling broadly, waiting for Suzanne to spot him.

Guy Banister sat alone in the Katz amp; Jammer Bar. He had his private spot at the near end, where the bar curves into the wall. He liked to sit with his back against the wall, looking out to the street, to the neon heads bobbing past the Falstaff sign in the high window.

His doctor told him don't drink. He drank. Don't smoke. He smoked. Give up the detective agency. He worked longer hours, compiled longer lists, shipped arms, stored munitions, ran a network of clean-cut boys who spied on local universities.

Dave Ferrie had this routine about a tumor growing on his brain. But it was Banister who had blackouts and dizzy spells, who sat at his desk and watched his hand start trembling, way out there, as if it belonged to someone else.

He was sixty-three years old, twenty years in the Bureau, a decorated agent drinking alone in a bar.

He carried a blue-steel Colt under his jacket, chambered for the.357 magnum cartridge. Guy sincerely believed the old reliable. 38 special with standard police loads was simply not enough gun for the type of situation a man of his standing might run into any time of day or night. Amen. Beautiful auburn glitter at the bottom of the glass. He knocked back the last of the bourbon and watched the man come forward.

"We got him coming out of the Biograph in Chicago, July of '34, shot him dead in an alleyway three doors down from the theater."

"This is who are we talking about now," says the jug-eared barman.

"Mr. John Dillinger. This is who. Fill the fucking glass."

"Rocks or not?"

"Famous finish. Old Dillinger buffs could tell you what was playing at the movie house when we gunned him down."

"All right I'll bite."

"Manhattan Melodrama with Clark Gable."

The barman poured the drink, oblivious.

"Whenever there's a famous finish in the vicinity of a movie house, it behooves you to know what's playing."

"I don't doubt it, Mr. Banister."

"This is history with a fucking flourish."

He'd shipped munitions to the Keys for the bombing of refineries, for the Bay of Pigs. There was so much ordnance stored in his office he had to get Ferrie to take some home. Ferrie had land mines stacked in his kitchen. With dozens of factions angling for a second invasion, something had to happen soon. The government knew it. Raids and seizures were commonplace now. Things were turning upside down.

He saw the kid Oswald walk past the window on his way home from work at the William Reily Coffee Company. Another bobbing head in the great New Orleans current.

The hand starts trembling way out there. It has nothing to do with him.

He worked longer hours, compiled longer lists. He had researchers coming up with names all the time. He wanted lists of subversives, leftist professors, congressmen with dubious voting records. He wanted lists of niggers, nigger lovers, armed niggers, pregnant niggers, light-skinned niggers, niggers married to whites. You couldn't photograph a nigger. He'd never seen a picture of a nigger where you could make out the features. It's just a fact of nature they don't emit light.

The Times-Picayune was full of stories about the civil-rights program of JFK. You could photograph a Kennedy all right. That's what a Kennedy was for. The man with the secrets gives off the glow.

We gave away Eastern Europe. We gave away China. We gave away Cuba, just ninety miles off our coast. We're getting ready to give away Southeast Asia. We'll give away white America next. We'll give it to the Nee-groes. One thing Guy couldn't stand about these sit-ins and marches. When the goddamn whites get to singing. The whole occasion falls apart. It makes everyone feel bad.

He called the barman over.

"You know this Kennedy goes around with ten or fifteen people who look just like him. You know about that?"

"No."

"You never heard about that?"

"I never heard he had anybody."

"He has got them," Banister said.

"That look like him."

"He has got about fifteen. Whenever he goes anyplace, they go too. They're on constant fucking standby. You know why? Diversionary. Because he knows he's made a lot of people mad."

He was as old as the century, twenty years in the Bureau, a dignitary in the local police until he fired his gun into the ceiling of some tourist bar.

He finished his drink and got up to leave.

Public enemy number one. Sweltering night in July. We got him in an alley near the Biograph.

His office was next door to the bar but he did not use the Camp Street entrance, which was where they'd be waiting to blast him if and when the time came, now or later, day or night. He used the side entrance, on Lafayette, and trudged up the stairs to the second floor.

Delphine was at the desk in the outer office. She gave him a little prissy look that meant she knew he'd been drinking. With a mistress like this, he didn't need a wife.

"There's something I think you definitely ought to know," she said.

"Chances are I do know."

"Not this you don't."

He sat on the vinyl sofa that Ferrie said carried cancer agents and took his time shaking a cigarette out of the pack and lighting it. He had a Zippo he'd carried through the war that still worked perfect, with a whoosh and flare.

"It's about this Leon upstairs, whatever his name is, working in the vacant room."

"Oswald."

"I was up there after lunch trying to track down some files that just got up and walked off. There was no one in the office. Just small piles of handbills on a table. What do they say? Hands off Cuba. Fair Play for Cuba. This is pro-Castro material sitting on a table right over our heads."

Guy Banister gave a little twirl of the hand that held the cigarette.

"Go ahead, what else," he said, an amused light in his eye.

"This is no joke, Guy. There is inflammatory reading matter in that little office."

"Just you make sure those circulars don't get up and walk off in this direction. I don't want them down here. He has his work, we have ours. It amounts to the same thing."

"Then you know about it."

"We'll just see how it all works out."

"Well what do you know about him?"

"Not a hell of a lot, personally. He's working mainly with Ferrie. Ferrie recommended him. He's a David Ferrie project:"

"I wonder what that means," Delphine said.

Banister smiled and got up. He put his cigarette in the ashtray on the desk… Then he stood behind Delphine's chair and massaged her shoulders and neck. On the desk was a recent issue of On Target,the newsletter of the Minutemen. A line in italics caught his eye,

Even now the crosshairs are centered on the back of your neck.

Something in the air. There were forces in the air that men sense at the same point in history. You can feel it on your skin, in the tips of your fingers.

"What about the fellow who called early this morning?" Del-phine said. "He sounded far away in more ways than one."

"Did you wire him fifty dollars?"

"Just like you said."

"One of Mackey's people. New to me. I told him how to contact T-Jay."

She put her hand to her hair, looking toward the smoked-glass panel on the office door.

"Do I get to see my G-man later tonight?"

He reached across her shoulder for his cigarette.

"I want you to start a file," he told her, "before you leave the office. Fair Play for Cuba. Give it a nice pink cover."

"What do I put in the file?"

"Once you start a file, Delphine, it's just a matter of time before the material comes pouring in. Notes, lists, photos, rumors. Every bit and piece and whisper in the world that doesn't have a life until someone comes along to collect it. It's all been waiting just for you."

Wayne Elko, an out-of-work pool cleaner, sat on a long bench in the waiting room at Union Station this chilly a.m. in Denver.

It occurred to Wayne that for some time now he was always arriving or departing. He was never anywhere you could actually call a place. He wasn't here and wasn't there. It was like a problem in philosophy.

Next to him on the bench was his khaki knapsack and an over-the-hill shopping bag from some A amp;P on the Coast. His life in material things he carried in these two weary pokes.

He was a long-chance man. This was a term from the real frontier a hundred years ago. For twenty dollars he'd roll your odometer back twenty thousand miles. Took about fifteen minutes.

For a hundred dollars he'd set a charge of plastique and blow the car into car heaven if your insurance needs were such. Except he'd probably do it free. Just for the science involved.

Early light collected at the tall arched windows. The benches were thirty feet long, with high backs, curved backs, nicely polished. Giant chandeliers hung above him. The waiting room was empty except for two or three station familiars, the two or three shadowy men he saw at every stop, living in the walls like lizards. The silence, the arched windows, the wooden benches and chandeliers made him think of church, a church you travel to on trains, coming out of the noise and steam to this high empty place where you could think your quietest thoughts.

He was asleep ten minutes on the bench when a cop bounced his nightstick off Wayne's raised knee. It made a sound like he was built of hollow wood. Welcome to the Rockies.

He got up, took his things, crossed the street and went immediately to sleep on the concrete loading-platform of a warehouse. This time it was trucks that got him up. He wandered an area of refrigerated warehouses with old dual-gauge tracks intersecting on the cobbled streets. At Twentieth and Blake he saw a man swabbing a garbage truck. They had a hundred wrecked cars behind barbed wire and a thousand specks of broken glass every square foot. It was the broken-glass district of Denver. At Twentieth and Larimer he saw some men with a stagger in their gait. Early-rising winos out for a stroll. Baptist Mission. Money to Loan. A guy with a Crazy Guggenheim hat came pitching down the street; might be Indian, Mexican, mix-blood or who knows what, muttering curses in some invented tongue. Made Wayne think of the faces in the Everglades and on No Name Key during his training with the Interpen brigade. All those guys who'd fought for Castro and then crossed over. Dark rage in every face. Fidel betrays the revolution.

He'd lived with a shifting population of rogue commandos in a boardinghouse on Southwest Fourth Street in Miami. They spent weeks at a time training in the mangrove swamps and went on forays along the Cuban coast in a thirty-five-foot launch, mainly to land agents and shoot at silhouettes. Otherwise they stayed close to the clapboard house, cleaning submachine guns in the backyard. Judo instructors, tugboat captains, homeless Cubans, ex-paratroopers like Wayne, mercenaries from wars nobody heard of, in West Africa or Malay. They were like guys straight out of Wayne's favorite movie, Seven Samurai, warriors without masters, willing to band together to save a village from marauders, to win back a country, only to see themselves betrayed in the end. First it was Navy jets making reconnaissance runs over No Name Key, snapping little pix of the muddy boys. Next it was five Interpen commandos picked up for vagrancy, courtesy of the Dade County sheriff. Then U.S. customs officers pounced, arresting a dozen men, including Wayne Elko in battle gear and a lampblacked face, just as they were setting out for Cuba in the twin-engine launch.

JFK had made his deal with the Soviets to leave Castro alone. Incredible. The same man Wayne would have voted for if he'd gotten around to registering. He believed in country, loyalty, mountains and streams. They were all tied together.

He found a telephone and made a collect call to the New Orleans number T. J. Mackey had given him about a year earlier. He told the woman at the other end he wished to speak to a Mr. Guy Banister.

"This is Wayne Elko calling. It seems like I have washed up in Denver, Colorado, tell T-Jay, and I am looking for a chance at some employment."

Win Everett was in his basement at home, hunched over the worktable. His tools and materials were set before him, mainly household things, small and cheap-cutting instruments, acetate overlays, glues and pastes, a soft eraser, a travel iron.

He felt marvelously alert, sure of himself, putting together a man with scissors and tape.

His gunman would emerge and vanish in a maze of false names. Investigators would find an application for a post-office box; a certificate of service, U.S. Marine Corps; a Social Security card; a passport application; a driver's license; a stolen credit card and half a dozen other documents-in two or three different names, each leading to a trail that would end at the Cuban Intelligence Directorate.

He worked on a Diners Club card, removing the ink on the raised letters with a Q-tip doused in polyester resin. A radio on a shelf played soothing music. He pressed the card against the warm iron, heating it slowly to flatten the letters. Then he used a razor blade to level the remaining bumps and juts. He would eventually reheat the card and stamp a new name and number on its face with an addressograph plate.

He'd picked up a certain amount of sleazy tradecraft in his early years as an operations officer. Before that he'd taught in a series of small liberal-arts colleges in the Midwest, places like Franklin, in Indiana, where a perceptive colleague, affiliated somehow or other with CIA, recruited him for covert training. The idea seemed immediately right, a possible answer to the restlessness he'd felt working through his system, a sense that he needed to risk something important, challenge his moral complacencies, before he could see himself complete. Soon he was taking handy instruction in Flaps amp; Seals, or how to read other people's mail without letting them know about it, and remembering now and then those sleepy afternoons at little Franklin College. After some years in Havana and Central America, including duty as chief of station in Guatemala City, he was one of several men assigned to coordinate the training of a Cuban exile brigade. He was in a constant hurry after that. Underwater demolition in Puerto Rico and North Carolina, paratroop maneuvers outside Phoenix, teams to organize in Nicaragua, Miami, Key West.

He felt sharp now, better than he'd felt in some time, on top of things, alert.

The young man's address book would be next. A major project.

Once he had a handwriting sample, Win would scratch onto those miniature pages enough trails, false trails, swarming life, lingering mystery, enough real and fabricated people to occupy investigators for months to come.

He unscrewed the top of the Elmer's Glue-All. He used his X-Acto knife to cut a new signature strip from a sheet of opaque paper. He checked the length and width of the strip against the bare space on the back of the credit card. Then he dribbled an even stream of glue over the paper and pressed it lightly on the card. He listened to the radio while the glue dried.

He was in a constant hurry then. Fort Gulick in the Canal Zone. Trax Base in Guatemala. Things were quieter now. He had time to turn the pages of all the books he'd been meaning to read.

After the address book came the false names. He looked forward to coming up with names. He removed excess glue from the back of the card with one of Suzanne's school erasers. Then he turned off the radio, turned off the light, climbed the old plank stairs.

His gunman would appear behind a strip of scenic gauze. You have to leave them with coincidence, lingering mystery. This is what makes it real.

He checked the front door. The days came and went. Bedtime again. Always bedtime now. He went around turning off lights, checked the back door, checked to see that the oven was off. This meant all was well.

Someday this operation would be studied at the highest levels of intelligence in Langley and the Pentagon.

He turned off the kitchen light. He began to climb the stairs, felt compelled to double-check the oven, although he was certain it was off. Astonish them. Create coincidence so bizarre they have to believe it. Create a loneliness that beats with violent desire. This kind of man. An arrest, a false name, a stolen credit card. Stalking a victim can be a way of organizing one's loneliness, making a network out of it, a fabric of connections. Desperate men give their solitude a purpose and a destiny.

The oven was off. He made an effort to register this fact. Then he went upstairs, hearing soft music on the bedroom radio.

This kind of man. A self-watcher, a man who lives in random space. If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail.

Lancer is going to Honolulu.

At one level he operated well. He felt alert, marvelously sharp, very much on top of things. The address book was next. We want a spectacular miss.

A voice on KDNT said that an eight-nation committee of the Organization of American States has charged Cuba with promoting Marxist subversion in our hemisphere. The island is a training center for agents. The government has begun a new phase of encouraging violence and unrest in Latin America.

He didn't need these reminders. He didn't need announcers telling him what Cuba had become. This was a silent struggle. He carried a silent rage and determination. He didn't want company. The more people who believed as he did, the less pure his anger. The country was noisy with fools who demeaned his anger.

He put on his pajamas. He seemed to be in pajamas all the time now. The day wasn't half done and it was time to go to bed again. Mary Frances was asleep. He switched off the radio, switched off the lamp. He spoke inwardly to whatever force was out there, whatever power ruled the sky, the endless hydrogen spirals, the region of all night, all souls. He said simply, Please let me sleep but not dream.

Dreams sent terrors you could not explain.

In Moscow

He opened his eyes to the large room. There were high walls, old plush chairs, a heavy rug with a stale odor hanging close. He got out of bed and walked to the window. Hurrying people, long lines for buses. He washed and shaved. He put on a white shirt, gray flannel trousers, the dark narrow tie, the tan cashmere sweater, and stood in his bare feet at the window once more. Muscovites, he thought. After a while he put on his socks and good shoes and the flannel suit coat. He looked in the gilt mirror. Then he sat in one of the old chairs in the lace-curtained room and crossed one leg carefully over the other. He was a man in history now.

Later he would print in his Historic Diary a summary of these days and of the weeks and months to follow. The lines, mainly in block letters, wander and slant across the page. The page is crowded with words, top to bottom, out to either edge, crossed-out words, smudged words, words that run together, attempted corrections and additions, lapses into script, a sense of breathlessness, with odd calm fragments.

He told his Intourist guide, a young woman named Rimma, that he wanted to apply for Soviet citizenship.

She is flabbergassed, but aggrees to help. Asks me about myself and my reasons for doing this. I explaine I am a communist, ect. She is politly sym. but uneasy now. She tries to be a friend to me. She feels sorry for me I am someth. new.

On his twentieth birthday, two days after his arrival, Rimma gave him a Dostoevsky novel, in Russian, and she wrote on a blank page: "Great congratulations! Let all your dreams come true!"

Things happened fast after that. He had no time to work out meanings, fall back on old attitudes and positions. The secret he'd carried through the Marine Corps for over a year, his plan to defect, was the most powerful knowledge in his life up to this point. Now, in the office of some bald-head official, he tried to explain what it meant to him to live in the Soviet Union, at the center of world struggle.

The man looked past Oswald to the closed door of his office.

"USSR is only great in literature," he said. "Go home, my friend, and take our good wishes with you."

He wasn't kidding either.

/ am stunned I reiterate, he says he shall check and let me know.

They let him know the same day. The visa of Lee H. Oswald would expire at 8:00 p.m. He had two hours to leave the country. The police official who called with this news did not seem to know Oswald had talked to a passport official earlier in the day. Lee tried to explain that the first official had not given a deadline, had held out hope that his visa might be extended. He could not recall the man's name or the department he belonged to in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He began to describe the man's office, his clothing. He felt a rush of desperation. The second official didn't know what he was talking about.

It was this blankness that caused his terror. No one could distinguish him from anyone else. There was some trick he hadn't mastered which might easily set things right. Other people knew what it was; he did not. Other people got along; he could not. He'd come so far on his own. Le Havre, Southampton, London, Helsinki-then by train across the Soviet border. He'd made plans, he'd engineered a new life, and now no one would take ten minutes to understand who he was. A zero in the system. He sat near the window looking at the open suitcase on the rack across the room, some of his things still unpacked.

I am shocked!! My dreams!

He was a foreigner here. There was no profit in discontent. He could not apply his bitterness. It was American-made and had no local standing. For the first time he realized what a dangerous thing he'd done, leaving his country. He struggled against this awareness. He hated knowing something he didn't want to know. He opened the door and looked into the hallway. The woman who handed out room keys sat at a small desk near the elevator. She turned to look at him. He went back inside.

7:00 p.m. I decide to end it. Soak rist in cold water to numb the pain.

He stood at the sink, left shirtsleeve rolled up. He stopped freezing his wrist long enough to prop a clean blade against the razor case. Warm water was running in the tub.

Hidell prepares to make his maker, ha ha.

Was there something funny about this? He didn't think so. They were always trying to get him to leave places he didn't want to leave. The cold water would numb the pain. That was step one. The warm water would make the blood flow easily. That was two. He would barely have to nick the skin. Gillette sponsors the World Series on TV-they use a talking parrot. He loosened his tie with his free hand.

My fondes dreams are shattered

He imagined Rimma coming at eight o'clock to find him dead. Hurried calls to officials at their homes. He watched the tub fill. Any reason why it had to be filled? He wasn't getting in, was he? Only plunging the cut wrist. Soviet officials call American officials. Always being the outsider, always having to adjust. He turned off the cold water, picked up the razor blade and sat on the floor next to the tub.

Then slash my left wrist.

But why was it funny? Why was he watching himself do it without a moan or cry? The first line of blood came seeping out, droplets running down in sequence from the careful slit. He wasn't here to escape personal pressures. He wasn't a guy with a problem marriage. He had solid convictions, practical experience in the world. He flopped his left arm over the rim of the tub.

somewhere, a violin plays, as I watch my life whirl away.

How do they measure cuts here, in centimeters? Hurried calls to Texas. It's me, Mother, lying in a pool of blood in the Hotel Berlin. He looked at the water going cloudy pink. I taught myself Berlitz. My Russian is still bad but I will work on it harder. I won't answer questions about my family but I will say this for publication. Emigration isn't easy. I don't recommend it to everyone. It means conning to a new country, always being the outsider, always having to adjust. I am not the total idealist. I have had a chance to watch the American military in action. If you've ever seen the naval base at Subic Bay, you know what I mean. Machines of war across the whole horizon. Foreign peoples exploited for profit. He closed his eyes after a while, rested his head on the rim of the tub. Go limp. Let them do what they want.

I think to myself, "How easy to die"

I would like to give my side of the story. I would like to give people in the United States something to think about. He knew where he was, could picture himself sitting on the tile floor, but felt a sense of distance from the scene.

and "A sweet death, (to violins)

Felt a sleepiness. A false calm. Something falsehearted. Felt like a child in the white tile world of cuts and Band-Aids and bathwater, a little dizzied by aromas and pungencies, fierce iodine biting in, Mr. Ekdahl's bay rum. There is a world inside the world. I've done all I can. Let others make the choices now. Felt time close down. Felt something mocking in the air as he slipped off the edge of the only known surface we can speak of, as ordinary men, bleeding, in warm water.

Ministry of Health of the USSR

EPICRISIS

Oct. 21 The patient was brought by ambulance into the Admission Ward of the Botkin Hospital and further referred to Bldg. No. 26. Incised wound of the first third of the left forearm with the intention to commit suicide. The wound is of linear character with sharp edges. Primary surgical treatment with 4 stitches and aseptic bandages. The patient arrived from the USA on Oct. 16 as a tourist. He graduated from a technical high school in radio technology and radio electronics. He has no parents. He insists that he does not want to return to the USA.

They put him in with the nut cases. Terrible food, soft eyes peering. Rimma kept him company and then helped get him transferred to the land of the normally ill. She took an unlabeled jar out of her coat and told him to sip the liquid slowly. Vodka with cucumber bits. To your health, she said.

After his discharge she took him to the visa-and-registration department. He talked to four officials about becoming a citizen. They'd never heard of him. They didn't know about his meetings with other officials. They told him it would be a while before they'd have an answer.

At his new hotel, the Metropole, he spent three days alone. This was the first of the silences Lee H. Oswald would enter during his two and a half years in the Soviet Union.

He walked the corridors past enormous paintings of Heroes of the Soviet. He took his key from the floor clerk, who wore her hair in braids. He smelled the varnish and tobacco.

In his room he sat in a fancy chair under a chandelier. He set his watch to the clock on the mantel. His watch, his ring, his money and his suitcase neatly packed had all been sent from the first hotel. Everything intact. Not a kopeck missing.

He sketched a rough street plan of Moscow in his notebook, Kremlin at the center.

His third day alone he ate only one meal. He stayed by the phone waiting for an official to call. He tried to read his Dostoevsky. He heard tourists go past his door talking about the sights, the beautiful subway stations, amazing bronze and marble sculpture. There was a statue at the end of the corridor. A nude, life-size. The language was hard. He thought he'd do better with his Dostoevsky.

Oct. 31. I catch a taxi, "American Embassy" I say.

The receptionist asked him to sign the tourist register. He told her he was here to dissolve his American citizenship. Oh. She led him into the consul's office. He selected an armchair to the left side of the desk. He crossed his legs, matter-of-fact.

"I am a Marxist," he began.

The consul adjusted his glasses.

"I know what you're going to say to me. Take some time to think it over.' 'Come back, we'll talk some more.' I'd like to say right now I'm ready to sign the legal papers giving up my citizenship."

The consul said the papers would take time to prepare. He had a look on his face like, Who are you?

"There are certain classified things I learned as a radar operator in the military, which I am saying as a Soviet citizen I would make known to them."

He believed he had the man's attention. He saw the whole scene in some future version. Three days alone. This convinced him he had to reach the point where there was no turning back. Stalin's name was Dzhugashvili. Kremlin means citadel.

J leave Embassy, elated at this showdown. I'm sure Russians will except me after this sign of my faith in them.

He stayed in his room, eating sparely, living on soup for a while, racked by dysentery, nearly two weeks alone, nearly broke, sitting in the plush chair, unshaven, in his button-down shirt and tie.

They moved him to another room, smaller, very plain, without a bath, and charged him only three dollars a day, as if they knew he could no longer afford the regular Intourist rate.

He wrote his name in Russian characters in his steno notebook.

Days of utter loneliness

The first snows fell. He spent eight hours a day studying Russian, serious time, using two self-teaching books. He took all meals in his room, owed money to the hotel, expected a visit from an assistant manager.

No one came.

He went to the visa-and-registration department. He told them about his visit to the U.S. embassy, his wish to become a citizen.

They didn't seem to know what to do with him.

Out on the street a small boy figured him for American, asked for a stick of gum. Subzero cold. Broad-backed women shoveling snow. He was struck for the first time by the immensity of the secret that swirled around him. He was in the midst of a vast secret. Another mind, an endless space of snow and cold.

Lenin and Stalin lay together in an orange glow at the bottom of a stone stairway. It was one of the few sights he'd seen.

He was down to twenty-eight dollars.

He wrote in Russian in his notebook. I have, he has, she has, you have, we have, they have.

Two men came to his room before seven the next morning. He stood barefoot in his flannel trousers and pajama tops, studying their moves. He didn't think it was Grandfather Frost and his head elf. The room was theirs now. He wasn't sure how they'd taken it over so fast but he knew he felt like an intruder, some kind of bungling tourist. It was his fault they had to get up so early.

They weren't dressed like the officials he'd met. They weren't Intourist people or collectors of overdue bills. One of them wore a black car-coat and dark glasses like a gangster on the Late Show. The other guy was older, in snow boots, going quietly bald.

It was this second man who gestured for Oswald to sit on the bed. He said his name was Kirilenko.

Oswald said, "Lee H. Oswald."

The man nodded, smiling faintly. Then he sat in the chair, in his coat, facing Oswald, his right hand dangling between his knees.

Lee volunteered the following.

"My passport is with the U.S. embassy. I surrendered it to them as a sample of no longer wanting to be a citizen. As I told them flatly."

The man nodded one more time, eyelids falling shut.

"Do you know what organization I represent?"

Oswald gave a half-smile.

"Committee for State Security. We believe you've been trying to contact us in your own way. Not fully knowing how perhaps. You understand we're wary of all attempts to contact us. A nervous habit. With luck we'll get over it someday."

Kirilenko had light blue eyes, silvery stubble, the beginning of a sag to his lower jaw. He was stocky and wheezed a little. There was a slyness about him that Oswald took to be an aspect of friendliness. He seemed to be talking to himself half the time the way a middle-aged man might drift lightly through a dialogue with a child, to amuse himself as much as the boy or girl.

"Tell me. How do you feel?"

"Some diarrhea for a while."

Nodding. "Are you happy to be here? Or it was all a mistake. You want to go home."

"I feel fine now. Very happy. It's all cleared up."

"And you want to stay if this is what I understand."

"To be a citizen of your country."

"You have friends here."

"No one."

"There is your family in America."

"Just a mother."

"Do you love her?"

"I don't wish to ever contact her again."

"Sisters and brothers."

"They don't understand the reasons for my actions. Two brothers."

"A wife. You are married."

"No marriages, no children."

The man leaned still closer.

"Girlfriends. A young woman, you lie in bed and think of her."

"I left nothing behind. I had no quarrels with anyone."

"Tell me. Why did you cut your wrist?"

"Because of disappointment. They wouldn't let me stay."

Nodding. "Did you feel, in all seriousness, you were dying? I'm rather curious to know, personally."

"I wanted to let someone else decide. It was out of my hands."

Nodding, eyelids falling shut. "You have funds, or they will send funds from home?"

"I am down to almost nothing."

"Good warm clothes. You have boots?"

"It's a question of being allowed to stay. I'm ready to work. I have special training."

Kirilenko seemed to let that pass.

"Where would you work? Who would give you work?"

"I was hoping the state. I am willing to do whatever necessary. Work and study. I would like to study."

"Do you believe, I wonder, in God?"

"No."

Smiling. "Not even a little? For my personal information."

"I consider it total superstition. People build their lives around this falsehood."

"On your passport, why do I have the impression you crossed out the name of your hometown?"

"It's completely behind me was the reason for doing that. Plus I didn't want them contacting relatives. Which the press did anyway. But I didn't take their phone calls or answer their telegrams."

"Why did you tell your embassy you would reveal military secrets?"

"I wanted to make it so they had to accept my renouncing my citizenship."

"Did they accept?"

"They said it's a Saturday and they close early."

"Your unlucky day."

"They said, 'Come back and we'll do what we can.' '

"I think I'm enjoying this talk."

"I didn't give them the satisfaction of reappearing. I wrote them my position instead."

"And these secrets, which you've carried all this way."

"I was in Atsugi."

Nodding.

"Which is a closed base in Japan."

"We'll talk further. I wonder, though, if these secrets become completely useless once you announce your intention to reveal them."

This last remark was delivered directly to the other KGB man, who leaned against the window frame smoking. Kirilenko made it sound like a scholarly aside. He leaned close to Oswald once more.

"Tell me: The scar is healing well?"

"Yes."

"You can stand the cold? The cold isn't too ridiculous?"

"I'm getting used to it."

"The food. You eat the food they serve here? Not so bad, is it?"

"It's only the hospital food that wasn't good. Like any hospital."

He looked down to see if his pajamas were sticking out of his trousers. He was wearing his pajama bottoms under his suit pants because he'd hurried to answer the knock at the door.

"What about the Russian people? I'm personally curious to hear what you think of us."

Lee cleared his throat to answer the question. The question made him happy. He'd anticipated being asked, sooner or later, and had an answer more or less prepared. Kirilenko waited patiently, appearing to enjoy himself, as if he knew exactly what Oswald was thinking.

Oswald was thinking, This is a man I can trust completely.

Factory smoke hung fixed in the distance, tall streamers absolutely still in the iced blue sky. He rode with Kirilenko in the rear seat of a black Volga. The city was stunned, dream-white. He tried to figure out the direction they were taking by keeping an eye out for landmarks but after he sported the main tower of Moscow University nothing looked familiar or recallable. He saw himself telling the story of this ride to someone who resembled Robert Sproul, his high-school friend in New Orleans.

It was Eisenhower and Nixon who killed the Rosenbergs.

The room was twelve by fifteen with an iron bed, an unpainted table and a chest of drawers in a curtained alcove. Down a dark hall was a washbasin and beyond that a toilet and small kitchen. Kirilenko said something to the other man, who left for a moment, returning with a squat chair, which he set by the table. They gave Oswald a questionnaire to fill out on his personal history, then another on his reasons for defecting, then another on his military service. He wrote all day, eagerly, going well beyond the scope of specific questions, scribbling in the margins and on the reverse side of every form. The chair was too low for the table and he wrote for extended periods standing up.

In the evening he had a short talk with Kirilenko. They talked about Hemingway. The older man was the one who sat on the bed this time, still in his bulky coat, remembering lines from Hemingway stories.

"Someday when I'm settled here and studying," Oswald said, "I want to write short stories on contemporary American life. I saw a lot. I kept silent and observed. What I saw in the U.S. plus my Marxist reading is what brought me here. I always thought of this country as my own."

"One day I would genuinely like to see Michigan. Purely because of Hemingway."

"The Michigan woods."

"When I read Hemingway I get hungry," Kirilenko said. "He doesn't have to write about food to make me hungry. It's the style that does it. I have a huge appetite when I read this man."

Oswald smiled at the idea.

"If he's a genius of anything, he's a genius of this. He writes about mud and death and he makes me hungry. You've never been to Michigan?"

"I went where I was told," Oswald said.

Kirilenko looked tired in the dim light. His boots were salt-stained. He stood up, pulling his muskrat cap out of his coat pocket and smacking it in the palm of the opposite hand.

"We have large subjects to cover," he said. "So: I would like you to call me Alek."

In the morning they talked about Atsugi. Oswald described a four-hour watch in the radar bubble. Alek wanted details, names of officers and enlisted men, the configuration of the room. He wanted procedures, terminology. Oswald explained how things worked. He talked about security measures, types of height-finder equipment. Alek took notes, looked out the window when his subject had trouble recalling something or seemed unsure of his facts.

Two men joined them to talk about the U-2. The weather plane, one of them called it, deadpan. They brought a stenographer with them. They wanted names of U-2 pilots, a description of the takeoff and landing. Not friendly types. The stenographer was an old man with a rosette in his lapel.

When Oswald didn't know the right answer he made one up or tried to vanish in excited syntax. Alek seemed to understand. They communicated outside the range of the other men, silently, without gestures or glances.

The name of a single pilot. The name of a mechanic or guard.

Deadpan fellows leaning toward him. He described times when the radar crew received requests for winds aloft at eighty thousand feet, ninety thousand feet. He described the voice from out there, dense, splintered, blown out, coming down to them like a sound separated into basic units, a lesson in physics or ghosts. They pressed him for facts, for names. Many more questions. Air speed, range, radar-jamming equipment. He hated to say he didn't know.

Alek said they would resume in the morning. Lee wanted a sign from him. How is it going? Will they let me stay, give me solid duties, allow me to study economics and political theory?

"I have a click in my knee when I bend," Kirilenko said. "What do you think, old age?"

There is time for everything, he seemed to mean. Time to recall the smallest moment, time to revise your story, time to change your mind. We are here to help you clarify the themes of your life.

They spent many days on Oswald's early experience in the military, many more days on the U-2 and Atsugi, dividing every compact topic into fractional details, then dividing these. They moved on finally to MACS-9, his radar unit in California.

Castro was exploding on the scene. Oswald had wanted to go to Cuba and train young recruits. He was a skilled technician and fighting man, sympathetic to Fidel.

He subscribed to a Russian-language newspaper and a socialist journal. He answered the guys in his quonset hut with da and nyet. It used to get them all worked up. They called him Oswaldovich.

He told Alek about the rumors he'd heard of a false defector program run by the Office of Naval Intelligence. They inserted agents into the Eastern Bloc, a select number of men posing as victims of the American system, lonely and impressionable, eager to adopt another kind of life.

This was precisely at the time he was taking steps to defect. The whole scheme was written with him in mind. He half expected to be approached by Naval Intelligence. It was easy to believe they knew about his pro-Soviet remarks and Russian-language newspaper. He would tell them he was trying to make contact in his own way. They'd train him intensively. He'd be a real defector posing as a false defector posing as a real defector. Ha ha.

Alek sat across the table shaking salted nuts in his fist. He said something about getting a TV set brought in. Oswald was surprised to hear that broadcasting started at six in the evening. It was one of the strangest things he'd heard since crossing the ocean.

The guard showed up. He showed up every evening before Alek left. Alek never introduced him, didn't seem to notice he was in the flat. The guard usually sat by the washbasin in the hall, his hat balanced on his knee.

There were things Oswald didn't tell Alek, like details of the MPS-16 radar system, just integrated into the network. He wanted to see how their friendship progressed. It occurred to him that the U.S. military might have to spend jillions to change the system anyhow, now that he'd crossed to the other side. How strangely easy to have a say over men and events.

The other thing he didn't tell Alek concerned the false defector program. When nobody contacted him, Ozzie decided to sign up for a foreign-language qualification test. Russian. Just to see if he'd get noticed.

His rating was P for poor throughout.

A doctor and nurse came to give him a physical. They listened to his heart, shined a light in his ears. They weighed and measured him and went away with samples of his urine and blood. Then three men arrived and took him to a concrete building about half an hour away. He walked into a modern apartment. They had him remove objects from his pockets. They sat him down in a chair that was attached to a console equipped with graph paper, pen recorders, dials, switches, etc. They told him to put his feet flat on the floor. Then they attached tubes and devices to the arms, chest and hands of Oswaldovich. One of the men sat facing him. Is your name such-and-such? Did you ever use another name or identity? Is your favorite color blue? Are you an agent of U.S. intelligence? Are you in secret contact with anyone in this country? Is your hair brown? Have you been sent here to assassinate some person or persons? Are you married? Are you homosexual? Do you smoke or drink?

Deadpan.

No sign of Alek. Oswald stood while they unplugged him from the console. He was lonely for his friend and had a sneaking suspicion he'd messed up the test something awful.

He told them Alek had promised TV.

Someone arrived with his belongings. He stayed in the new apartment for three days. They gave him intelligence tests, aptitude tests, personality profiles, tests in English and basic math, tests in the recognition of patterns and shapes.

He dreamed of walking into the house on Ewing Street, in Fort Worth, his hair sopping wet from a swim at the Y. Lenin and Stalin in an orange glow. Caspian Sea, largest inland sea in the world, on the boundary between Europe and Asia. Kremlin means citadel.

He is telling the story of his stay in a guarded apartment somewhere in Moscow to a man in a suit and tie. Maybe it is Richard Carlson as Herb Philbrick on TV. / Led Three Lives. Maybe it is the man at the U.S. embassy, the second secretary or consul, whatever he is called, adjusting his glasses, listening with interest to the story of an ex-Marine who has infiltrated -the Soviet intelligence apparatus as part of the U.S. Navy's false defector program.

Kirilenko stood on the parquet floor of his partitioned office in the First Section, Seventh Department, Second Chief Directorate at KGB headquarters, the Center, 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, a mass of elaborate stonework comprising an old main building, a postwar extension, a prison, Lubyanka, famous for exterminations, other, lesser buildings, and a courtyard visible through barred windows or screens of heavy-gauge mesh. He liked to think standing up.

The nice thing about the Center was the inexpensive caviar and salmon available in Building 12 across the square, and the J amp;B and Johnnie Walker at a dollar a bottle. The not-so-nice thing was the heavy sense of Stalinist terror. He also hated the chair they'd given him, a modern contour piece that looked ridiculous behind his old wooden desk.

All the more reason to stand. He kept his arms behind him, left hand clutching right forearm. He was thinking about the American boy, Lee H. Oswald. The lesson of Lee H. Oswald was that easy cases are never easy. It made him think of the classical axioms of his early training in geometry and arithmetic. Sad to learn that those self-evident truths, necessary truths, faltered so badly when subjected to rigorous examination. No plane surfaces here. We are living in curved space.

Alek liked the boy. Such naked aspiration in his eyes. He was trying to get a grip on the world. Facts, words, historic ideas. He struggled against his fate, yes, exactly, like someone in the social universe of Marx. He believed genuinely in high principles and aims even if he was not yet assured of a sense of perspective.

At twenty years old, all you know is that you're twenty. Everything else is a mist that swirls around this fact.

He slit his wrist to stay in Russia.

But idealists of course are unpredictable. They tend to be the ones who turn bitter overnight, deceived by lies they've told themselves. Men who defect for practical reasons are easier to manage and maintain. Money, sex, frustration, resentment, vanity. We understand and sympathize. We get close to the edge ourselves sometimes.

They'd been watching him since Helsinki, where he registered at the Torni Hotel, moved to the cheaper Klaus Kurki, applied for a visa at the Soviet consulate, told a clerk in passing that he was an ex-Marine highly qualified in radar and electronics.

A walk-in. But not so sure of himself. Not certain how to go about it.

They made it easy for him to get in, providing a visa in forty-eight hours.

In Moscow his Intourist guide, Rimma Shirokova, reported his choicest remarks to the Fourth Section of the Seventh Department, where they were passed on to Kirilenko. Alek waited, let the low officials mix things up, let the boy pace his room; had him moved to a cheaper room; waited, waited.

There were one hundred and thirty listening devices in the U.S. embassy. In his combination safe Alek had a transcript of Oswald's remarks about revealing military secrets. Through the efforts of a clerk in the consulate section he had a photograph of Oswald's passport as well as a copy of a confidential telegram sent from AmEmb Moscow to the Department of State concerning the young man's statement.

MAIN REASON "I AM MARXIST." ATTITUDE ARROGANT AGGRESSIVE.

An easy case that left Alek wondering about Oswald's procom-munist career in the military. Didn't U.S. intelligence pick this up? Wouldn't they want to use his political sympathies to find out what they could about the people he contacted, about KGB recruitment methods, agent training? They would turn him when it suited their purpose. That's when he would tell them everything he'd learned, just as he was telling us.

Does Mother Russia want this boy? He was useful as a radar specialist at a U.S. base. What do we do with him here? Is it conceivable we might send him to the building on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, where he would be trained, genuinely educated, in Marx and Lenin, microphotography and secret writing, Russian and English, rebuilt so to speak, given a new identity, sent back to the West as an illegal?

That's what they all want, isn't it, these people who live in corners inside themselves, in blinds and hidey-holes? A second and safer identity. Teach us how to live, they say, as someone else.

The test results were in and only his urine got a passing grade. He tended toward emotional instability. Tended toward erratic behavior. Had some form of dyslexia or word-blindness. Scored fairly well in physical sciences, low in most other categories. The polygraph was more or less chaotic but then it almost always is. Inconclusive owing to various factors. Maybe the boy was scared.

An easy case-send him home-except that Alek had a quota. There was pressure to handle a certain number of recruitments, turn up beautiful information (or make it up yourself). The vital take was the U-2 data, which Alek did not wholly trust. Eighty thousand feet? Ninety thousand feet? Nothing flies that high. Fly to ninety thousand feet, you see the souls of the dead in rings of white light. The men who'd debriefed Oswald on the weather plane were officers of the GRU, military intelligence, and they hadn't officially pronounced on the data they'd been given. What could they say? If the boy was word-blind, couldn't he be number-blind as well?

Alek sat in the swooping chair.

A number of dangers cling to the slim figure of this Lee H. Oswald, an innocent who wanders into the outer rings of the Center, leaving thoughtful men to speculate. Are the Americans monitoring his progress? Would they let him fall into our arms if they thought he knew important things? Atsugi is a key base. There are reports from Hanna Braunfels, dredged from the files of the Seventh Department (Japan, India, etc.) of the First Chief Directorate. In a sense we have already gone too far with the boy, exposed too many of our methods. Despite all the tests and interviews, we may know less about him than he knows about us. In some office in the Pentagon, they are waiting to pick his brains.

Alek was paid to drive himself crazy.

One thing the tests confirmed. This was not agent material. You want self-command and mettle, a steadiness of will. This boy played Ping-Pong in his head. But Alek liked him and would arrange something decent. Has to be far from Moscow. A place where there are no foreign journalists, no chance to use him for propaganda. Give him a nice apartment, a well-paying job, a sweet subsidy in the name of the Red Cross-incentives to remain in this country. Alek had every reason to believe that Lee H. Oswald would eventually be given Soviet citizenship, become a genuine Marxist and contented worker, go to lectures and mass gymnastics, fit in, find his place in history, or geography, or whatever he was looking for. A true-blue Oswaldovich.

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.

LIBRA • W7

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.

2 July

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.

He went south toward Calle Ocho, the main drag of Little Havana. Dogs ran up to fences to yap at Capitan. 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. Capitan 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, Ramon Benftez, 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 facade 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 Vasquez 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 Vasquez. 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 a 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, looking 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. richard rhoads and james WOODARD got drunk one night and woodard said that he and jack would run some guns to Cuba. james woodard had a shotgun, a rifle and possibly one hand gun. He said that jack had a lot more guns than he did. dolores stated that she did not see any guns in jack's possession. She stated that he had several boxes and trunks in his garage and isabel claimed they contained her furs, which had been ruined by mold, due to the high humidity in the area.

Photographs. Many are overexposed, light-blasted, with a faded quality beyond their age, suggesting things barely glimpsed despite the simple nature of the objects and the spare captions. Curtain rods found on shelf in garage of Ruth Paine. There they are. The picture shows no more or less. But Branch feels there is a loneliness, a strange desolation trapped here. Why do these photographs have a power to disturb him, make him sad? Flat, pale, washed in time, suspended outside the particularized gist of this or that era, arguing nothing, clarifying nothing, lonely. Can a photograph be lonely?

This sadness has him fixed to his chair, staring. He feels the souls of empty places, finds himself returning again and again to the pictures of the second-floor lunchroom in the Texas School Book Depository. Rooms, garages, streets were emptied out for the making of official pictures. Empty forever now, stuck in some picture limbo. He feels the souls of those who were there and left. He feels sadness in objects, in warehouse cartons and blood-soaked clothes. He breathes in loneliness. He feels the dead in his room.

W. Guy Banister, former special agent of the FBI, collector of anticommunist intelligence, is found dead in his home in New Orleans in June 1964, his monogrammed. 357 Magnum in a drawer by the bed. Ruled a heart attack.

Frank Vasquez, the former schoolteacher who fought for and against Castro, is found dead in front of El Mundo Bestway, a supermarket on West Flagler Street in Miami, August 1966, shot three times in the head. Reports of a factional dispute among anti-Castro groups in the area. Reports of an argument in a social club earlier in the evening. No arrests in the case.

Ten years later, to the day, also in Miami, police find the decomposing body of John Roselli, born Filippo Sacco, an underworld figure who'd recently testified before a Senate committee investigating CIA-Mafia efforts to assassinate Castro. The body is floating in an oil drum in Dumbfoundling Bay, legs sawed off. No arrests in the case.

Branch sits staring.

The Agency is paying him at the GS level he'd reached at retirement, with periodic cost-of-living increases. They paid for the room he has added to his house, this room, the room of documents, of faded photographs. They paid to fireproof the room. They paid for the desktop computer he uses to scan biographical data. Branch is ill at ease billing them for office supplies and often submits a figure lower than the amount he has spent.

He eats most of his meals in the room, clearing a space on the desk, reading as he eats. He falls asleep in the chair, wakes up startled, afraid for a moment to move. Paper everywhere.

They sat in wooden bleachers in the early evening watching the old men play Softball. The players wore short-sleeve white shirts, long white pants and dark bow ties, with baseball caps and white sneakers. It was the bow ties that made Raymo happy. He thought the ties were fantastic, a perfect yanqui touch.

Frank sat one row above him and slightly to the side, drinking an orangeade. He said, "I still think of the mountains."

"You still think of the mountains. Look at the first baseman. I bet anything he's seventy-five. He still does a dance around the bag."

But Raymo thought of the mountains too. He was with Castro in the movement of the 26th of July, the starved army of beards. Fidel was some kind of magical figure then. There was no doubt he carried a force, a myth. Tall, strong, long-haired, dripping filth; mixing theory and raw talk, appearing everywhere, explaining everything, asking questions of soldiers, peasants, even children. He made the revolution something people felt on their bodies. The ideas, the whistling words, they throbbed in all the senses. He was like Jesus in boots, preaching everywhere he went, withholding his identity from the campesinos until the time was dramatically right.

Frank said, "It was miserable because of the sickness and hunger, the rain. But also because I was never sure of my reasons. When I think of the mountains it's mainly my own confusion I recall. I was pulled in two directions. This made it hard for me."

It was true. Frank was always a bit of a gusano, with a sneaking admiration for Batista. Now they were all gusanos, anti-Castro worms, in the language of the left. But Frank was always half a worm, half a batistiano, even fighting for Fidel.

Castro liked to recall the earliest days of the insurrection, before Frank and Raymo went into the Sierra Maestra. Twelve men with eleven rifles. Raymo knows today it was not the 26th of July alone that overthrew the regime. From the first minute, Castro was inventing a convenient history of the revolution to advance his grab for power, to become the Maximum Leader.

The third baseman went into a crouch and bowed his arms wide. The old guy at the plate sent the ball on a line to left center and his teammates watched, half rising from the bench. The sun was in the palms behind the right-field fence.

Frank said, "I think of the mountains more than ever now."

"Because you're stupid, man."

"But I don't think of the invasion at all."

"Who wants to think about either one? Besides you were shipwrecked."

"Run aground. But still our confidence was unshaken."

"Stupid to the end. From the beach I saw the stern begin to sink."

"We still had hope," Frank said seriously.

"No wonder you think of the mountains. In the mountains we won."

Frank handed him the orange drink with a couple of swigs left. They watched the old men make a double play, more serious and alert than boys, mechanically correct at seventy, in bow ties. They recalled how Fidel used baseball terms when he talked about operations. We'll get them in a rundown. We'll shut the bastards out. They went down the steps and walked to the car. Capitin was sprawled in the back seat like a stolen coat.

Raymo drove his buddy home. Sure, Frank thinks of the mountains all the time. He spent twenty-three days in the mountains. He moaned every day for twenty-three days and when he finished his rosary of complaints he went back to teaching school. Teaching the children of men who cut cane for the sugar bosses, children who cleaned and packed cane without pay.

The building where Raymo lived was between the Miami River and the Orange Bowl. He parked the car, took the dog to the hydrant, then went inside. Stinking hot. The first thing he heard was the groan of traffic over the suspension bridge at Northwest Twelfth Avenue. It was a sound raised slightly above the natural tone of the world, the sound of someone thinking, alone in a room.

The troops of the regime were afraid of the Cordillera. The mountains meant death to them. For Raymo there wasn't a chance in a million that he could die. He was untouchable in the Sierra, fat and rank, even during the last major offensive with repeated waves of napalm scorching the land and air. They were all untouchable in their minds. This was the point of being rebels.

He lay on the bed thinking.

The march to Havana took something like five days. They were greeted with the awe that heroes earn in books. Purify the country was the cry. Raymo watched a number of executions. These were the rapists and torture masters of the regime, drivers of nails into skulls. They were kindly asked to stand at the edge of a knee-deep ditch. They all ended differently, fell sideways, fell backwards, an arm flung wide, an arm tucked in, but all taken unawares, dying deeply surprised.

Then the communists appeared, entering the unions and rural committees. Castro gave them legal status. There were MiGs in crates waiting for Cuban pilots to learn how to fly them. Think in collective terms was the cry. The individual must disappear.

He talked about one revolution and gave us another. Certain areas were off-limits to Cubans. There were Russian and Czech technicians, Russian construction crews everywhere you looked. On highways, at night, students working against the new regime spotted flatbed trucks carrying long objects, canvas-shrouded, of a certain configuration. The joke was that palm trees were being sold on the black market. The cargo was the SA-2, the first of the Soviet missiles to reach Cuba. They were here to defend the heavens against high-altitude spy planes.

By this time Raymo was in La Cabana prison, a veteran of the Bay of Pigs. Yes, like that, the bearded hero is a worm. The yard was flanked by ancient storerooms and magazines, barrel-vaulted galleries now used as cells, and he shared one of these with former Castro guerrillas and Batista officers, with workers, radicals, union officials, student leaders, men who'd been tortured by the old regime and the new one, a perfect Cuban stew. The far end of his cell faced the moat, where executions took place. He waited for John F. Kennedy to get him out.

Some nights they'd hear ten executions. Once Raymo saw a slender man standing in the spotlight in front of the sandbags. He wore white shoes, a dark shirt and lariat tie, a nice-looking panama hat. They were in such a hurry to execute him they didn't even give him a set of prison grays, much less a hearing or trial. Raymo watched the hat go sailing off his head when they shot him. It went straight up in the air like a cartoon hat. The individual must disappear.

Another car hit the iron grillwork at the center of the bridge and that low groan went up.

He wanted to believe he was out of prison. A one-time fighter in the Sierra and Playa Giron, he was reduced to listening to endless arguments between Castro and Kennedy, arguments that determine where he lives, what he eats, who he talks to. In Oriente he was a skilled worker, a mechanic in a nickel-mining operation, American-owned, and this is where he learned about the movement of the 26th of July from students who spoke convincingly of wide injustice. Now he stands on ladders picking fruit and waiting for the maximum leaders to tell him where he goes next. They carry such a stain of greatness, both these men with their visions and heroic bearing. Each takes a turn as the other's shadow, his haunted dream. One buys what the other sells. Eleven hundred veterans of the assault brigade were released from prison after the U.S. paid fifty-three million dollars to the Castro government. Raymo stood on a sideline stripe in the Orange Bowl, three blocks from this stinking bed, and heard the renewed pledges, the second wave of emptiness. Six months had passed since then. He did not believe he'd been freed from anything. Training in the wild grass of the Everglades. This was the only time he felt free.

The thing he could not forget was the way the hat jumped from the slim man's head. The heavy thudding surprise, the sudden insult. Even after you think you've seen all the ways violence can surprise a man, along comes something you never imagined. How much force do bullets have to exert if they can hit a man in the chest and make his hat fly four feet in the air, straight up? It was a lesson in the laws of motion and a reminder to all men that nothing is assured.

In Minsk

The plant was an eight-minute walk from his flat. He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled. The plant covered twenty-five acres, employed five thousand people and turned out radios and TV sets.

On his first day he presented a handwritten autobiography to the plant director. "My parents are dead," he wrote. "I have no brothers or Sisters."

The director welcomed Citizen Oswald.

At eight sharp the duty orderly rang a bell. Grinding metal. Saws cutting through iron ingots. He hadn't realized such high-pitched fury went into the making of a radio.

Meetings all the time. A large picture of Lenin looked down on the workers. Fifteen meetings a month, all after work, plus compulsory daily gym.

He took girls to the opera and went sightseeing. There were a number of imposing structures in this industrial city, some of them a little funny, he thought. The trade-union building had a Greek temple facade but the figures carved into the frieze were a bricklayer, a surveyor, a woman shot-putter and a man in a double-breasted suit, with briefcase.

He ate fried cabbage in stand-up cafes.

Each autonomous republic is represented by eleven deputies in the Soviet of Nationalities of the Supreme Soviet. Soviet means council.

/ am learning Russian quickly

In his fourth-floor apartment he had his own kitchen and bath. He slept on a sofa bed. There was a private balcony that overlooked a wide bend in the river that runs through Minsk. The fifth day of every month he got his Red Cross check.

He read on the balcony, wrote in Russian in his steno notebook. Thank you, he wrote. Neuter nouns ending in o take a. He wrote the lyrics of a popular song.

Church spires in the distance.

He had money to spend. He was someone interesting, an American, a stranger with a story. America was a rumor down the street, a gleaming place people didn't quite believe in, and they wanted to hear what he had to say.

Then on May 1, May Day, in the skies over Sverdlovsk in the Ural Mountains, the heart-shaking event took place.

The prisoner stood in a metal cage inside the elevator. Light-proof, soundproof. This was a form of naked awareness he didn't need right now. Irregular heartbeat. Right leg stinging. An exhaustion settling in over the raw headache, the whistling in his ears.

They marched him down a corridor. Four men, two in uniform. He sensed their grim satisfaction, something meritorious in the air, some old grievance righted at last. He was due to land, just about now, along a fjord in Norway.

They led him into a small room. Time to strip again. All afternoon they'd been telling him to take off his pressure suit, flight suit, long Johns, stand still, bend over, give us a look, put on these pants, wear this shirt. Then they'd take him somewhere else and do it all over again.

He knew he was in Lubyanka now, right in downtown Moscow, the local political prison of the KGB. Maybe this was the last of the body searches.

They gave him another set of clothes, including a double-breasted suit three sizes too large, and took him to the interrogation room, where a dozen men sat waiting, three in uniform, two majors and a colonel. No tape recorder in sight. An interpreter sat next to the prisoner. A stenographer, who looked too old to record anything beyond name and nationality, sat at the end of the long table, a rosette in his lapel.

The prisoner nodded faintly at the array of somber faces. Men well established in state security. They seemed to regard him skeptically, although he hadn't said a word yet. Maybe they thought it was too good to be true, getting their hands on an American air pirate after four years of overflights in unmarked planes. The prisoner thought ahead to a lifetime of potatoes and cabbage soup. Maybe a short lifetime. They might shoot him in the courtyard, like a movie, to muffled drums.

Bright flash in the sky, the way the aircraft lurched forward like a car jolted in heavy traffic.

The long night of questions began. Name, nationality, type of aircraft, type of mission, altitude, altitude, altitude. The trouble with lies is trying to remember what you said so you can repeat it when they ask again. Mainly he told the truth. He wanted to tell the truth. He wanted these people to like him. A few shrewd lies in selected areas, if only he could be sure which areas were the ones he needed to protect. There had been no preparation for this. No one had told him what to say. He was only a pilot. This is what he tried to get across. He flew a certain route, flipped the mission switches. He was a civilian employee. He recorded instrument readings, drifted off course, corrected back. A boy from the Virginia hill country. Didn't smoke, drink or chew. Made a plane out of a cigar box for his fifth-grade teacher.

He told them he'd been flying at sixty-eight thousand feet.

Once they examined the wreckage, they would ask him about the destructor unit, which he hadn't activated because he thought it might detonate before he had time to leave the aircraft. Embarrassing. They would also ask him about the poison needle, which they'd confiscated in Sverdlovsk hours earlier. Yes, the prisoner felt a little sheepish. He was supposed to be dead. Some very important men would be mighty surprised when they learned he was still alive. They'd spent millions to make it convenient for him to die.

When the questions ended they gave him another set of clothes, took him to another room, signaled down with the pants, gave him an injection which he assumed would either help him sleep or make him tell the truth.

They marched him past the desk of the section supervisor into a two-tiered cell block. His cell was eight by fifteen with a solid oak door supported by steel bands. There was an iron bed, a small table and chair, a double-pane window reinforced with wire mesh. He was alone and could hear the Kremlin clock. Already word was beginning to spread of the missing U-2. Bod0, Incirlik, Peshawar, Wiesbaden, Langley, Washington, Camp David. This was exciting in a way. As he undressed for the fifth or sixth time this endless, weary and disconnected day, he noticed the peephole in the door.

The spin was upside down, nose of the aircraft pointing skyward, a little like a dream in which you're powerless to move.

The next day, instead of torturing him to get some answers they liked, they sent him on a tour of Moscow.

Aleksei Kirilenko was present for the second round of questions. A package of Laika filters sat on the table in front of him. There were ten men in the room. The questions rolled forth. The prisoner, called Francis Gary Powers, was sincerely telling the truth about half the time, just as sincerely lying the other half. So Alek estimated.

No, he had not flown over Soviet territory before.

No, the CIA had not given him a list of underground agents he could contact here.

No, he had never been stationed at Atsugi in Japan.

What about the plane?

Yes, the plane had once been based in Atsugi.

They'd given the prisoner a peasant haircut. It suited him well, Alek thought. He had a large square head, strong features, the worried look of a rustic crossing streets in the capital.

No, it did not occur to the prisoner that by violating Soviet frontiers he was endangering the upcoming summit conference.

The thinking in the Center was that Khrushchev would not reveal that Francis Gary Powers was alive and in custody until the American cover story was released in all its hopeful and pathetic variations. (An unarmed weather plane is missing somewhere near Lake Van in Turkey after the civilian pilot reported trouble with the oxygen system.) They would add or subtract details as need dictated. But they were counting on a dead man either way.

Then the Premier would mount the rostrum in the Great Hall, wearing a modest cluster of medals on the breast pocket of his business suit, and announce the interesting news, with photographs, with fitting gestures, his voice carrying in bursts over the delegates, Presidium members, diplomatic corps and international press.

Comrades, he would begin, I must let you in on a secret. The broad smile, the choppy gesturing hand. We have the pilot of the innocent weather plane you have all been hearing about. We have the wreckage of the plane. Shot down by our missiles two thousand kilometers inside Soviet territory. The shadow in the sky. Sent to photograph military and industrial sites. We have the camera and rolls of film. Waving the spy photos, making jokes about the air samples the plane had allegedly been sent to gather. Yes, yes, Francis Gary Powers is alive and kicking, safe and sound, despite the plane's destructor unit, despite the poison meant to end his life, and the pistol with silencer, and the long knife. Pausing to drink some water. Seven thousand rubles in Soviet currency. Did they send him all this way to exchange old rubles for new ones?

Laughter, applause.

Alek looked forward to the theater that Khrushchev would make of the U-2 affair. The summit was scheduled for Paris in two weeks. Eisenhower's moral leadership turns to shit.

But as the questions continued for hours, then days, he began to feel uneasy. The men in uniform, the GRU, kept coming back to the question of altitude. Didn't they know how high the plane was flying when they hit it? Had it been an accidental hit with a haywire missile? Had he taken the plane down to reignite the engine after a flameout? Is that how they hit it? There were rumors they hadn't hit it at all. Had the plane been sabotaged by the CIA to wreck the summit?

Francis Gary Powers repeatedly claimed he was at maximum altitude when he felt the impact and saw the flash. Sixty-eight thousand feet. It seemed the GRU thought he was lying. They believed U-2s went much higher and they knew Soviet missiles could not reach these altitudes.

Why would they believe the plane flew higher than the pilot contended?

Because Oswald told them? Surely they would have strong corroboration from other sources. In any case this affair tended to strengthen the boy's claim to authority. He'd evidently been right about the extreme altitude the plane could reach. He was also the one person in the USSR who had inside working knowledge of the U-2, who was American like Powers, who could measure his countryman's responses and telltale inflections, who could evaluate what he said about ground personnel, base security and so on.

Lee H. Oswald was taking shape in Kirilenko's mind as some kind of Chaplinesque figure, skating along the edges of vast and dangerous events.

Unknowing, partly knowing, knowing but not saying, the boy had a quality of trailing chaos behind him, causing disasters without seeing them happen, making riddles of his life and possibly fools of us all.

Alek had never been to the United States. Everything he'd learned about the country made him wary of its impulsiveness, its shallow self-assurance. It is a nursery school of a culture, startled, dribbling, forgetful, compared to what we have here, the massive treasure of a history that endures in the souls of the people.

Cigarettes made him patriotic. He was smoking again after six years of nibbling tiny things.

At least Oswald looked American. Francis Gary Powers would eventually stand in the dock in the chandeliered courtroom of the Hall of Columns in his doltish haircut and ridiculous oversized clothes, or undersized clothes, looking like some woodchopper from the Balkans.

Citizen Oswald came to town wearing his dark tie, cashmere sweater and gray flannel suit. It was nice to be back in Moscow.

They led him into the room some minutes after the interrogation had begun. He sat against the wall, fifteen feet behind the prisoner, with a security man in plainclothes. He had a notepad and pencil.

The news, of course, was everywhere, dominating the press and the air waves. The U-2 was the biggest thing in years. A tremendous clamor of righteous Soviet voices, historic American lies, damaged relations. He listened to Francis Gary Powers trying to handle the questions of Roman Rudenko, who had been one of the chief prosecutors of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. He thought a prosecutor of Nazis was a slightly dramatic touch for someone like Francis Gary Powers. The prisoner sounded like an ordinary guy. A coal miner's son from some hollow in the boondocks. Paid to fly a plane.

For three solid hours of questions and answers, Oswald stared at the back of the head of Francis Gary Powers.

Then he went to the Chess Pavilion in Gorky Park to see a display of the plane's battered fuselage and tail section. The wings were mounted in the center of the room. The pilot's survival gear, personal effects and signed confession were in glass cases. There were photographs of the pilot under a sign reading powers francis

GARY THE PILOT OF THE SHOT AMERICAN PLANE. The Crowd W3S in a holiday mood. Oswald wondered if Powers played chess. It would be a nice gesture if Alek let him into the cell to play a game of chess with Francis Gary Powers.

His plainclothes escort took him back to Lubyanka. Alek and a uniformed guard led him into the cell block. The floor was carpeted. Powers' cell was on the lower level. The guard slid the cover off the spyhole on the door. Oswald looked into the cell. The prisoner sat at a small table, drawing lines on a piece of paper. Oswald thought he might be making a calendar. Men in small rooms, in isolation. A cell is the basic state. They put you in a room and lock the door. So simple it's a form of genius. This is the final size of all the forces around you. Eight by fifteen.

There was something gentle about Powers. He was the type Oswald could get along with in the barracks. He raised his head a moment and looked directly at the spyhole as if he sensed someone watching. Paid to fly a plane and incidentally to kill himself if the mission failed. Well we don't always follow orders, do we? Some orders require thought, ha ha. He wanted to call to the prisoner through the door, You were right; good for you; disobey. The prisoner wore a checked shirt buttoned to the top. He waved at a fly and returned to his piece of paper. He seemed to toil at those lines he was drawing. What is the Russian for firing squad?

Alek led Oswald to the interrogation room, where they sat alone in the faint stink of ground-out cigarettes.

"Now you've seen him as close as we can get you. Tell me. Does he look familiar?"

"No."

"Do you know him from Atsugi?"

"They wear helmets and faceplates. There are armed guards around them all the time. I never got a good look at a pilot."

"From the bars perhaps. The nightclubs."

"I don't recall him at all."

"Did you know they had flights from Peshawar?"

"Where is that?"

"Pakistan. Where this flight originated."

"No."

"Powers is telling us many lies. What do you think?"

"He's confused. I think he's mainly truthful. He wants to survive."

"He says sixty-eight thousand feet, maximum altitude. You say eighty thousand, ninety thousand."

"I could be wrong."

"I don't think you're wrong."

"I could definitely be mistaken."

"You sounded very sure. You described the pilot's voice. There is reason to believe you were correct."

"Eighty is pretty damn high. Maybe I thought I heard eighty but it was sixty-eight. I think Powers is telling the truth, based on the type fellow he seems to be."

"What type is that?"

"Basically honest and sincere. Cooperating to the best of his ability. What will happen to him?"

"Too early to say."

"Will they put him on trial?"

"This is almost certain."

"Will they execute him?"

"I don't know."

"He'll get the firing squad, won't he?"

"This is not correct to assume."

"That's the way it's done, isn't it? They shoot them here."

Smiling. "Not so much anymore."

"Let me talk to him."

"Not a good idea."

"I could lecture him on the virtues of life in the Soviet Union. Making radios for the masses."

"The masses need radios so they won't be masses anymore."

"I have an idea I've been thinking." He paused to assemble the dramatic words. "I want to go to Patrice Lumumba Friendship University."

"A wonderful place no doubt. But it happens to be in Moscow and I don't think this is the right time for you to live here."

"Alek, how do I get ahead? I want to study. The plant is dull and regimented. Always go to meetings, always read the propaganda. Everything is the same. Everything tastes the same. The newspapers say the same things."

"All right, this much. We will think about further schooling for Lee H. Oswald."

"I will wait to hear from you. I depend on it."

"Tell me, personally, for my own enlightenment, is Francis Gary Powers a typical American?"

It occurred to Oswald that everyone called the prisoner by his full name. The Soviet press, local TV, the BBC, the Voice of America, the interrogators, etc. Once you did something notorious, they tagged you with an extra name, a middle name that was ordinarily never used. You were officially marked, a chapter in the imagination of the state. Francis Gary Powers. In just these few days the name had taken on a resonance, a sense of fateful event. It already sounded historic.

"I would say a hardworking, sincere, honest fellow has found himself in a position where he is being crushed by the pressure exerted from opposite directions. That makes him typical, I guess."

He spoke these words in Russian and saw that Alek was impressed.

From the Historic Diary.

The coming of Fall, my dread of a new Russian winter, are mellowed in splendid golds and reds of fall in Belorussia plums peaches appricots and cherrys abound for these last fall weeks I am a healthy brown color and stuffed with fresh fruit.

my list birthday see's Rosa, Pavil, Ella at a small party at my place Ella a very attractive Russian Jew I have been going walking with lately, works at the radio factory also.

Finds the approach of winter now. A growing lonliness overtakes me in spite of my conquest of Ennatachina a girl from Riga

New Years I spend at home of Ella Germain. I think I'm in love with her. She has refused my more dishonourable advanis

After a pleasent handin-hand walk to the local cinima we come home, standing on the doorstep I propose's She hesitates than refuses, my love is real but she has none for me. (I am too stunned too think!) 1 am misarable!

He talked to his friends about Cuba, surprised to find they weren't passionate on the subject. Cuba was a situation he could easily get heated about and it was steady news in the English-language Worker, on local radio and the BBC. Mikoyan signs a trade pact with Che Guevara. Russia sends heavy arms. Ike breaks diplomatic relations.

Chocolate was expensive. These people had a vicious sweet tooth. Always a crowd at the local confectionery. Life was small things. Chocolate, a record player, a meal at the automat.

His friends had trouble with his name. They didn't feel comfortable saying Lee. It sounded Chinese or just didn't fit right on the tongue.

He told them to call him Alek.

Postcard #4. Washington, D.C. It is January 21, 1961, the day after the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, and Marguerite Oswald is in Union Station looking for a telephone. She has just traveled three days and two nights on a train from Fort Worth, borrowing on an insurance policy to pay for the ticket, wiping out her bank account to buy a pair of shoes, traveling all this way sitting up-not enough cash for a roomette in the sleeping car. This is an angry, tired and frustrated woman. Letters to her congressman unanswered. Phone calls to the local office of the FBI unreturned. Telegrams to the State Department. Letters and calls to the International Rescue Committee. The State Department talks to the International Rescue Committee but nobody wants to talk to her. Is it really so strange that she uses the word conspiracy? She is only trying to analyze a whole condensed program of things that are not correct.

The White House switchboard tells her the President is in conference.

She throws another coin down the slot.

The State Department switchboard says Secretary Rusk is not available right now but anything they could do for her, etc. etc. The operator is a Negro woman and Marguerite used to live in a mixed neighborhood of Negroes and whites on Philip Street in New Orleans when she was growing up, and played with Negroes, and lived next door to a lovely Negro family, so she finally gets connected, after a lot of back and forth, to a man who seems to be talking from an office instead of a switchboard. There is a silence around him and he says he is an aide and asks her politely what the trouble is.

"I have come to town about a son of mine who is lost in Russia."

She tells the man she is not the sobbing-mother type but the fact is she is getting over a sickness and she doesn't know whether her son is living or dead. He is somewhere abroad working as an agent of our American government. He has the right to make his own decisions, she says, but there is a good chance he has become stranded by his government and cannot get out.

The man says the Weather has predicted a terrible snowstorm and they have orders to leave early.

Marguerite is wary of conspiracy.

She says into the phone, "I cannot survive in this world unless I know I have my American way of life and can start from the very beginning. I have to work into this, starting from the time he was determined at age sixteen about joining the Marines, which we bickered back and forth, living in the French part of town."

She says, "He read Robert's manual day and night. He knew Robert's manual by heart. And now he is unheard from in over a year, which I am convinced is not completely of his doing, however agents operate overseas. I am here to demand the substance of where he is."

The man at the State Department says they are all leaving the office due to this predicted storm. It is apparently bearing down. The Weather says it could hit any time.

Marina loved hearing English spoken. It was exciting, an adventure of a sort. She hadn't even known there was an American in Minsk. This was something fairly remarkable. The thing that people felt about America never went away.

She danced with Alek on the vast floor of the Palace of Culture. He was polite and neatly dressed, told her how pretty she was in her brocade dress and upswept hair. He spoke English to some of the other boys but only Russian to her, of course. She'd rarely heard English, didn't know a word except song lyrics, Tarzan, Spam.

Marina herself had arrived in Minsk like snow off the roof, her uncle Ilya said. She was illegitimate, she was an orphan, she was drawn to people who were different. Ilya told the American she had breezes in her brain.

She saw Alek often. They seemed to shine together at the center of things. They made things theirs. A certain bench in the park, near the chess players, ordinary things, not unusual in any way. They fell in love the way anyone does. They were from different worlds, totally different cultures, but they were brought together by fate, Marina believed. Her heart began to beat in a different way.

They flattered each other, made each other seem unique and marvelous. It is the lie everyone accepts about being nineteen, which was Marina's age when she met this unexpected man.

She threw over Anatoly, who looked like an actor in the movies, and she threw over Sasha, who was wonderful in every way and therefore not for her.

Alek had a small lovely flat and listened to Tchaikovsky on the phonograph. He took Marina boating on Youth Lake. They were the same as anyone, completely ordinary, saying what people say. Every fact about their lives was precious. Marina's weight at birth was a little over two pounds. Alek was in awe of this fact. It was a private charm, something about her to hold dear. He gestured with his hands, trying to find a shape for two pounds of precious life. Her eyes were blue. Her childhood name was Spichka, or Match-stick, for her spare frame and her tendency to flare up, to speak in abrupt excited phrases. These things they told each other were like stories in a book that changes every day, giving their love a quality of never ending.

He told her his mother was dead.

They talked about everything, the sun and the moon, a fly on a pane of glass. He hid in doorways when the cold wind blew. There was a killer wind that blew along the river.

They were marked by fate to be married and they went to the registry office, with spring coming on, only six weeks after they'd met. Alek brought her a cluster of early narcissus and she wore a short white gown with a grass-blade pattern. That night he thanked her sweetly for being a virgin.

She came home from work in the hospital pharmacy to find him doing the laundry or mopping the floor. He would not let her wash his work clothes. He was ashamed of the grime and sweat and did not like thinking of himself as a factory hand, a manual laborer, slotted to do a certain eternal task.

He tuned in the Voice of America every night at ten.

They had matching scars on their arms, his left arm, her right, both scars near the elbow, the same size and shape. A sense of destiny, or mirrored fate. He told her he'd been wounded in action, in Indonesia, in an operation against the communists. He would say nothing to her about the other scar, the one on his wrist.

He was an orphan like her, an outsider, which was all to the good, but beyond that she was not sure who Alek really was. She saw him from a slight distance, it seemed. He was never fully there, He was the other person, the one she lived with, the American who told her he was twenty-four years old but who turned out, on their wedding day, when she saw the marriage stamp in his residence permit, to be only twenty-one.

It was some weeks later that she learned his mother was not dead.

Some of the boys from the plant told Marina that he was a good enough fellow but always kept to himself, always the loner, not really part of things, not at all like a Russian in temperament and feeling-not straight from the heart, in other words.

The day they were married Castro won the Lenin Peace Prize. This was two weeks after the Bay of Pigs.

He wrote in Spanish in his notebook the numbers one to seventeen, leaving out five and six.

"The other girls I knew here, why did they want to go out with me, just like you?"

"I don't know," she said.

"Because I'm American. That's the funny thing. I left my country out of protest against the conditions there and now I'm the all-American boy to everyone. Except I'll tell you this. When I wanted to marry that girl from the factory, Ella, she turned me down flat for the same reason she went out with me in the first place. I'm an American. Sooner or later I'd be arrested as a spy, she said. Her family thinks I'm a spy. She probably thinks I'm a spy. It's the state of fear of ordinary life in Russia. I saw her the other day. Fat as a barrel now."

Interesting, Marina thought, how much writing he seems to do on those large new pads. What are those photographs he keeps on the top shelf of the closet, behind the suitcases? What is this pencil sketch that looks like a ground plan of the radio factory?

He told her he was writing his impressions of Russia.

And what is that thing on the wall, the little fixture near the sofa bed that seems to have no earthly use? Is someone listening to what we say?

Even now, after Stalin, she wasn't sure who to trust. Her own uncle Ilya was a colonel in the MVD. In his uniform he was like a painted hero of the Great Patriotic War. Alek wanted her to find out everything she could about Ilya's rank, his salary, his duties. She knew his position had something to do with the timber industry. A sensitive post but not at all related to spies or counterspies. He was Head of Timber or something similar. That was her impression.

Alek told her to find out more. It was for the sketches he was writing of Russia.

Sometimes Alek rented a boat alone and let it drift along the river past their building. He would shout her name, call repeatedly into the wind until she appeared on the balcony to wave. His return wave was like a child's, a deep and excited delight. He seemed in his little boat to say, "Look at us, a miracle, so true and sure."

Two years earlier, on a vacation trip to Minsk when she lived in Leningrad, Marina had noticed a handsome apartment house with balconies overlooking the river. One terrace was bright with flowers and she'd imagined how lovely it would be to live there. She was certain this was the balcony she stood on now, hers and Alek's, waving, as the boat moved slowly past.

Destiny is larger than facts or events. It is something to believe in outside the ordinary borders of the senses, with God so distant from our lives.

Some people don't believe in God but they color eggs at Easter just to change the pattern of their days.

Postcard #5. A foldout number. "Scenes of Minsk." Oswald is photographed at the Victory Monument, the Palace of Culture, Stalin Square. He is a cheerful enough subject, smiling squarely at the camera, but in fact there is little to be happy about right now.

His application to study at the Patrice Lumumba University of the Friendship of Nations has been turned down. He takes the news hard. It makes him feel small and worthless. The Chief of Student Welcoming writes that the school was created exclusively for youths of the underprivileged countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Lee wonders how they can think he is privileged. It is part of the general stupidity about life in the U.S.

What else? Well, he has written to the U.S. embassy in Moscow to ask for his passport back. He's a little nervous about this, considering he dumped the passport in their lap, practically forced them to take it, and then said some things he wishes he hadn't about military secrets. Would they want to prosecute him if he returned?

What else? There's this funny little device on the wall of his flat and it's not a socket, a light switch or a thing to hang a picture from. Not only that. He keeps seeing a car marked "Driving School" going up and down his street. Maybe his street is the site of the final exam, he thinks, except there is never a student in the car.

He believes they are watching him because they think he is a false defector sent by the Office of Naval Intelligence. He easily sees the possibility that ONI is waiting to get him out of here so he can tell them what he's learned.

He knows someone is intercepting his mail because right after he wrote to the U.S. embassy, his monthly payments from the so-called Red Cross suddenly disappeared, cutting his income in half. He took the money in the first place because he was hungry and broke and there was snow on the ground in Moscow. He didn't want to think about the true source of the funds. They were paying him for defecting, for answering questions about his military service. Now that he wants to go home, the money stops coming.

No sign of Alek. Not a word. Total silence.

Maybe this is all Alek. It is everything Alek. It is get the goods on him. It is pin him to the wall when all I want to do is study.

/ sfi'// haden't told my wife of my desire to return to US.

His friend Erich introduces him to some Cuban students and he likes talking to them, likes exchanging complaints about the dreariness of Minsk. The Cubans have a talent and a flair. There is an integrity in the Cuban cause, he believes. It is an underdog effort, Here, people use the party to get ahead. The party is an instrument of material gain.

He is photographed one more time, wearing dark glasses.

Near his building was a five-hundred-foot radio tower enclosed in barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards with the usual snarling dogs. Not far away were two smaller structures, just as well guarded. These were jamming towers, designed to interfere with high-frequency broadcasts _vfrom Munich and other Western cities.

He saw himself writing this story for Life or Look, the tale of an ex-Marine who has penetrated the heart of the Soviet Union, observing everyday life, seeing how fear rules the country. Chocolate is four times more expensive than in the U.S. No choice, however small, is left to the discretion of the individual.

He has taken photographs of the airport, the polytechnic institute and an army office building, just to have, to save for later.

"A strange sight indeed," he would write, "is the picture of the local party man delivering a political sermon to a group of robust simple working men who through some strange process have been turned to stone. Turned to stone all except the hard faced communists with roving eyes looking for any bonus-making catch of inattentiveness on the part of any worker."

He saw himself in the reception room at Life or Look, his manuscript in a leather folder in his lap. What is it called, morocco?

He got his friend Erich to give him lessons in German.

When Marina told him she was pregnant he thought his life made sense at last. A father took part. He had a place, an obligation. This woman was bringing him the kind of luck he never figured on. Marina Prusakova, herself born two months premature, weighing two pounds, from Archangel on the White Sea, halfway round the world from New Orleans. He took her face in his hands. Fair-haired wispy girl. Full mouth, high neck, blue-eyed flower girl, his slender pale narcissus. Let the child look like her, even that little sulky curl of the mouth, her eyes showing fire when she is angry.

He danced her around the room, promised to take better care of her than anyone ever had. She would be the baby until the real baby came.

He told her the stores in America were incredibly well stocked, full of amazing choices. Whatever a baby needed, all you had to do was find the nearest department store. Whole departments for babies. Whole stores, babies only. You've never seen such toys.

He was home first, washing the breakfast dishes. He heard her climb the last flight, getting slower every day. She had ice cream and halvah in a bag.

"They're getting ready to make Stalin disappear," she said. "I walked past the square and it's roped off."

"They'll have to use dynamite."

"They'll drag him down with chains."

She put the food away and sat at the kitchen table, behind him, lighting up a cigarette.

"It's way too big," he told her. "They'll have to blow it up."

"Too many Stalinists still around. I think they'll knock him down with chains and drag him off under cover of dark. So no one knows until it's too late."

"They already know. The square's roped off. Put out that cigarette please."

"I am doing much, much less these days."

"No good for baby. No, no, no," he said.

"I don't do so much, Alek."

"You hide them all around. I find cigarettes in every corner. Very bad for baby."

"I do less and less now. Two cigarettes today. What about the visas?"

"I went all over. The ministries, the departments, a total run-around. They are hopeless people, Marina. They read my mail, so I complain to my brother in my letters about their hopeless bureaucracy."

"You are writing to him and to them. Two letters for the price of one."

"We're saving a fortune," he said.

"Where is Texas actually?"

He washed the coffeepot in tepid water.

"It's where General Walker lives. The head of all the ultra-right hate groups in America. The Worker had a headline today. general walker bids for fuhrer role. He resigned his army command so he won't have any military restraints when he tries to lead a far-right takeover."

"Should I learn English now?"

"Later, when we get there."

These days and nights were a revelation to him. He was a domestic soul, happy in the home, a householder who did the dishes, chatted with his wife about the wallpaper. It was wonderful to discover this. He had a chance to avoid the sure ruin. It seemed so safe in these small rooms with Marina near him to talk to and touch, to make this Russia seem less vast and secret. So many angers waned as he sat under a lamp reading, reading politics and economics, his wife always near, in a loose dress, pregnant, with streetlights shining on the river.

That night they heard the rumble in their sleep. Two, three, four hollow booms, like some power in the sky, deep-rolling across the night. He lay still, eyes open now, waiting for her to speak, knowing what she would say, word for word.

"What is it, Alek, thunder?"

He heard the last slow rumble.

"They're blowing up the statue of your leader."

Tishkevich, the personnel chief, told Citizen Oswald that his performance as a regulator was unsatisfactory. He was not displaying initiative. He was reacting in an oversensitive manner to helpful remarks from the foreman. He was careless in his work.

He said he was writing a report. He would state all these things and would add that Citizen Oswald takes no part in the social life of the shop.

No trace of Alek. No word. Not a single sign he even knew Oswald was alive.

His mother found him. She wrote a letter telling him that the Marine Corps had given him a dishonorable discharge.

He wrote to his brother to ask whether the government might be planning to take action against him.

He wrote to the U.S. embassy to ask for a government loan so he and his family could travel to America.

He wrote to his mother to ask her to file an affidavit of support on Marina's behalf.

He wrote to Senator John Tower of Texas and to the International Rescue Committee.

The whole process of paperwork channels, endless twisting systems, documents in triplicate-an anxious labor for him to decipher these forms and fill them out.

He was writing to John B. Connally Jr. because he thought that Connally was Secretary of the Navy. He was actually the Governor of Texas.

Marina walked in, carrying the paperback Dr. Spock a friend of hers had sent from England. She sat next to him and he translated passages into Russian. She told him that giving birth is a woman's secret, like something that happens on the ocean floor, in dim light and silent water, the one mystery no one can solve even when we know the biology involved.

Dr. Spock wrote, "Don't be afraid of your baby. Your baby is born to be a reasonable, friendly human being."

Marina looked at him when he translated these lines. She seemed to be asking for the first time, What kind of place is America?

He went back to his letter. Could he tell the Secretary that he was a false defector? He wanted to repair the damage done to him and his family. He knew his rights. He wanted his honorable discharge reinstated. But could he tell the Secretary, the way his mail was constantly intercepted, that he'd been sent by Naval Intelligence to live in the USSR as an ordinary worker, observing the system, photographing areas of strategic value and making note of the details of everyday life?

He saw himself sitting next to a tasseled flag in the Secretary's office, talking to the Secretary, a square-jawed man with honest eyes, a friendly type Texan.

Dawn. Marina wakes me. Its her time.

The experience had a form, a sense of tradition and generation, like his own father standing in a dimly lit hallway waiting for word of a son. Word of Robert Oswald. The second son would not be born until the father was two months dead.

He wrote at once to Robert.

Well, I have a daughter, June Marina Oswald, 6 Ibs. 2 oz., born Feb. 15, 1962 at 10. am. How about that?!

But then you have a head start on me, although I'll try to catch up. Ha-Ha.

How are things at your end? I heard over the voice of america that they released Powers the U2 spy plane fellow. Thats big news where you are I suppose. He seemed to be a nice, bright american-type fellow, when I saw him in Moscow.

He put another coat of paint on the secondhand crib while Marina was in the hospital. He dusted and scrubbed the whole flat, did the laundry, ironed her blouses and skirts. In the end the bureaucrats insisted that the baby's middle name must be the same as the father's first. He moved the crib to his side of the bed and slept every night only inches from June Lee.

Stateless, word-blind, still a little desperate, he got up in the middle of a spring night and wrote the Historic Diary.

He wrote it in two sittings, breaking for coffee at 4:00 A. M. He wanted to explain himself to posterity. People would read these words someday and understand the fears and aspirations of a man who only wanted to see for myself what socialism was like.

It was his goodbye to Russia. It signified the official end of a major era in his life. It validated the experience, as the writing of any history brings a persuasion and form to events.

Even as he printed the words, he imagined people reading them, people moved by his loneliness and disappointment, even by his wretched spelling, the childish mess of composition. Let them see the struggle and humiliation, the effort he had to exert to write a simple sentence. The pages were crowded, smudged, urgent, a true picture of his state of mind, of his rage and frustration, knowing a thing but not able to record it properly.

He went back to the first day, fall of 1959, jumping right in, writing in a child's high fever in which half-waking dreams, dreams with runny colors, can seem a state of purer knowledge. He felt little charges of excitement when he set to work on his suicide attempt in the voice of Hidell, theatrical, self-mocking. It was the true voice of that episode. He'd heard it then, watching his own fishy blood mix into the bath water (somewhere, a violin plays) and he was quick to use it now, sweating in his pajamas at the kitchen table.

Always the pain, the chaos of composition. He could not find order in the field of little symbols. They were in the hazy distance. He could not clearly see the picture that is called a word. A word is also a picture of a word. He saw spaces, incomplete features, and tried to guess at the rest.

He made wild tries at phonetic spelling. But the language tricked him with its inconsistencies. He watched sentences deteriorate, powerless to make them right. The nature of things was to be elusive. Things slipped through his perceptions. He could not get a grip on the runaway world.

Limits everywhere. In every direction he came up against his own incompleteness. Cramped, fumbling, deficient. He knew things. It wasn't that he didn't know.

He stood on the balcony with his coffee. The breeze made his wet pajamas stick to his body. An N on its side becomes a Z.

Even in the rush of filling these pages, he was careful to leave out certain things that could be used in legal argument against his return to the U.S. Yes, the diary was self-serving to a degree but still the basic truth, he believed. The panic was real, the voice of disappointment and loss.

He knew there were discrepancies, messed-up dates. No one could expect him to get the dates right after all this time, no one cared about the dates, no one is reading this for names and dates and spellings.

Let them see the struggle.

He believed religiously that his life would turn in such a way that people would one day study the Historic Diary for clues to the heart and mind of the man who wrote it.

"It will be terrible, Alek, breathing the air of Russia for the last time."

"Your friends already envy you."

"I'll be unbearably sad at the train station. Our good friends standing on the platform. No one will believe I'm actually going. My uncle and aunt will be so unhappy. 'Marinochka, it's like a trip into space.' I can't bear to think about it."

"They'll weep with envy, I bet."

"I want them to throw flowers when our train pulls out. White narcissus petals floating down. The air must be full of flowers."

She imagined ahead. The train station, the border, the ship. But that was as far as she could go. There was nothing collecting in her mind that looked like a picture of a home.

Her husband sat at the kitchen table, writing.

He wrote "The Kollective," a painstaking essay of more than forty handwritten pages on life in Russia, life in Minsk, the hard-fisted discipline of the radio plant. He compiled statistics and asked Marina a hundred questions about food prices, customs, etc. He wanted to examine the subject of control, the Communist Party's domination of every aspect of Soviet life.

He wrote "The New Era," a brief account of the destruction of the Stalin monument in Minsk.

He made notes for an essay on "the murder of history"-the terrible march of Soviet communism. Deportations, mass exterminations, the prostitution of art and culture, "the purposeful curtailment of diet in the consumer slighted population of Russia."

Marina cried, leaving Minsk. A man at the train station stood watching, half hidden in the crowd. She saw him briefly through the window. Was it her former boyfriend Anatoly, with the unruly blond hair, who'd once proposed to her, whose kisses made her reel, or was it the KGB?

When their train approached the Polish border, Lee took his diary pages, his essay pages, all his notes, and began stuffing them in his pants and shirt. He had pages nestled ridiculously in his crotch. Two Soviet customs men came aboard and Marina drew their attention to the baby. The agents gave their luggage a quick look and wished them good fortune.

Aboard the SS Maasdam he kept on writing. Rotterdam to New York. He wrote speeches he might one day deliver as a man who'd lived for extended periods under the capitalist and communist systems.

He wrote a forward to "The Kollective."

He wrote a sketch titled "About the Author." The author is the son of an insurance man whose early death "left a far mean streak of indepence brought on by negleck."

The women on the ship were American and European, up-to-date, carefully tailored. Marina seemed a girl in their company, small, shabby-looking, lugging a baby swaddled Russian-style in bands of linen. She sat in their third-class stateroom. Except for mealtimes she was almost always there.

"Should I learn English now?" she said.

Early morning, June 13-June, his daughter's name-he stood on deck and watched the south rim of Manhattan appear at the edge of the sea, an arc of broad buildings crowded in the mist. He was seeing what Leon Trotsky saw near the end of his second foreign exile, 1917, the skyline of the New World. All the time he was in Russia he'd barely thought of Trotsky. But now he could feel the man's spirit. Trotsky was the seeker of asylum. Thrown out of Europe. Hounded by secret police. Crossing the ocean to Wall Street on a rusty Spanish steamer.

Lee was worried that the police would be waiting for him on the Hoboken docks. Here comes the defector with his beggar wife and beggar child. He had answers ready for them, two sets of answers he'd drafted and memorized in the ship's library. If he sensed he could get by as an innocent traveler, those were the answers he'd give, friendly and nonpolitical. But if the authorities were hostile, if they tried to put him on the defensive, if they had information about his activities in Moscow, he was prepared to be defiant and scornful. He would make an issue of his right to certain beliefs. Stand up to them, mock them, look right in their squeezed policemen's eyes and tell them who you are.

A tugboat moved through the harbor dawn, and bridges emerged, piers, highway lights along the Hudson.

If they could only make it to Texas, things would be all right.