Libra

15 July

The woman knew some ways to disappear. You could be alone in a room with her and forget she was there. She fell into stillness, faded into things around her. T-Jay liked to imagine this was a skill she'd been refining for years.

He stood at the window eating grapes from a paper bag torn open down the side. Norfolk was a foreign city. It was where trainees from the Farm came to practice the dark arts. Break-ins, dead drops, surveillance exercises, audio penetrations. Newport News and Richmond were also designated foreign. Baltimore was foreign off and on. But T-Jay wasn't here to supervise a break-in and grade the fellows on technique.

She sat on the bed dealing two hands of five-card draw and playing both hands. She was Formosan, she said, and looked young enough to be a war orphan in a public service ad. This was his third visit to the narrow room. She wore a T-shirt stenciled USS Dickson, which he hadn't noticed her putting on. Her nakedness was un-striking, so natural it seemed involuntary. He could easily believe she lived that way.

He watched her crash a magazine against the wall, trying to bat a horsefly. Seconds later he forgot her again.

The thing that hovers over every secret is betrayal. Sooner or later someone reaches the point where he wants to tell what he knows. Mackey didn't trust Parmenter. There were a thousand career officers like Parmenter. Their strongest conviction is lunch. He didn't trust Frank Vasquez. Frank had spied on fellow exiles at Mackey's direction in the months before the invasion. Frank was hard to figure. He had the heart of a chivato, a bleating little goat-face spy, but he was also quietly determined once he had an object in mind. Mackey didn't trust David Ferrie. Ferrie knew that weapons for the operation were being supplied by Guy Banister. He probably also knew that Banister had offered to channel cash from the New Orleans rackets to maintain the team of shooters. The larger the secret, the less safe it was with someone like Ferrie. There were others who would have to be recruited. Eventually one of them would reach the point. He knew how they thought, these men who float through plots devised by others. They want to give themselves away, in whispers, to someone standing in the shadows.

He drew a chair up to the bed and played one of the poker hands. Why did he have the feeling he was spoiling her fun? She had short chopped hair and narrow hips and a casual, almost dismissive manner, a kind of body slang that T-Jay took to be her free adaptation of the local style. She walked like a girl shooting a cart down a supermarket aisle.

"I ought to teach you gin rummy. It's a better game for two to play."

"Why, you coming back?"

"I might."

"You might not."

"I might not."

"So why do I learn?" she said.

He liked the idea that whores were profound. He was respectful of whores. They were quick in their perceptions-it was a quick business-and he sometimes had the feeling they could tell him things about himself that he'd missed completely. They had access to the starker facts. This made him wary and respectful.

She took his right hand and placed it against hers, palms touching. He didn't get the point at first. Then he realized she was comparing the size of their hands. The difference made her laugh.

"What's funny?"

She told him his hand was funny.

"Why mine? Why not yours?" he said. "If the difference is great, maybe you're the funny one, not me."

"You're the funny one," Lu Wan said.

She matched left hands now and fell sideways to the bed laughing. Maybe she thought they were two different species. One of them was exotic and it wasn't her.

The beer was warm now. He shook the bottle and looked at her.

"Stores close," she said.

It was Everett who'd made the leap. Everett took the once-bold idea of assassinating Castro and turned it over in his mind, finding it unworkable and crude. He struck a countermeasure that made better sense on every level. It was original, spare and clean. The man we really want is JFK. Mackey gave him every credit. Everett was a complex and passionate man who could think economically. All over Langley and Miami they were still formulating plans to hit Fidel. It was an industry like wood pulp or shoes. Everett had seen the logic in staying home. The idea had power and second sight. Of course Everett did not plan to shoot Kennedy in the strict sense. Only to lay down fire in the street. He wanted a surgical miss.

The second leap was Mackey's. He made it after hearing Everett's plan, driving alone toward the Louisiana border, his sunglasses on the dash in the softfall of evening light, two years to the day after Pigs. They had to take it one more step. Everett's obsession was scattered in technique. The plan grew too twisty and deep. Everett wanted mazes that extended to infinity. The plan was anxious, self-absorbed. It lacked the full heat of feeling. They had to take it all the way. It was a revelation to him that in the moment he saw what had to be done, feeling the crash of air on the hood of the car, he felt the oddest goddamn sympathy for President Jack.

There was fruit juice in the refrigerator. He drank some and handed her the bottle. She wiped her mouth with her hand, then drank and wiped her mouth again. A ship's horn sounded on the river. He took the bottle and put it down and she slipped out of the T-shirt. He put a knee to the edge of the bed, watching her pass imperceptibly into a second skin. All trace of personality was gone. He'd never known a woman who phased so completely into her body. She had a body that could reshape itself, roll itself into a straw ball, make sex a little mystery of sun-glint and shadow. He had a hand on the bedpost. They were screwing on top of a magazine and the pages stuck to her, rattling hard.

In stages, through a marriage, a career of sorts as a roving paramilitary, a fall from official grace, he had become a man with no fixed address. To a certain way of thinking, this was the stuff of paramount despair. He was getting on to forty, loose in the world, nothing to show for the time and risk. Yet here he was, starting up his car for the long drive south and feeling a curious edge of contentment, feeling charged with advantage. He had Jack Kennedy's picture stuck in his mind and nobody even knew he was out here, a man they used to pay to teach other men the fundamentals of deadly force.

Win Everett was in his daughter's room listening to her read from a book of stories with pop-up figures. Mary Frances left these story sessions to him. She was impatient with Suzanne's actressy moods and thought the child ought to be learning to read, not deliver lines. Win followed every word. His face changed as the girl's did, shifting through emotions and roles.

It was uncanny how these tales affected him, gave him a sense of what it was like to be a child again. He found he could lose himself in the sound of her voice. He searched her face, believing he could see what she saw, line by line, in the grave and fateful progress of a tale. His eyes went bright. He felt a joy so strong it might be measured in the language of angelic orders, of powers and dominations. They were alone in a room that was itself alone, a room that hung above the world.

Later he sat downstairs turning the pages of a magazine. He knew he'd become remote from the cutting edge of the operation. He used Parmenter to talk to Mackey. They both used Mackey to find out what was going on at 544 Camp Street. He was wary of Oswald. He only wanted to know selective things. He was putting too much distance between himself and the others. Did he expect his themes to develop in the field through otherworldly means? He was making the same mistakes the Senior Study Effort had made before the Cuban invasion. He didn't know if he could pull himself out. He half wanted to lose control. He wanted a way out of fear and premonition.

Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death. He believed that the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot. A narrative plot no less than a conspiracy of armed men. The tighter the plot of a story, the more likely it will come to death. A plot in fiction, he believed, is the way we localize the force of the death outside the book, play it off, contain it. The ancients staged mock battles to parallel the tempests in nature and reduce their fear of gods who warred across the sky. He worried about the deathward logic of his plot. He'd already made it clear that he wanted the shooters to hit a Secret Service man, wound him superficially. But it wasn't a misdirected round, an accidental killing, that made him afraid. There was something more insidious. He had a foreboding that the plot would move to a limit, develop a logical end.

Lancer is going to Miami.

Mary Frances moved past the doorway. Then she ran water in the kitchen. He heard her looking for something on the back stairway. He heard the kitchen radio. He waited for her to pass by the porch window with the watering can. It was an old metal can, gray and dented, and he waited to hear her walk across the porch. He listened carefully. She was still in the kitchen. That was all right.

As long as he knew where she was. She had to be close and he had to know where she was. Those were the two inner rules.

He heard an old familiar voice on the kitchen radio, some voice from the old days of radio, couldn't quite recall the man's name, but famous and familiar, with laughter in the background, and he sat very still as if to draw out the moment, struck by the complex emotion carried on a voice from another era, tender and shattering, a three-line joke that brings back everything.

He turned another page.

There was no date set for the President's trip. But it is definitely going to happen, said Parmenter. He wants to go to Florida because the state voted Republican in 1960 and because the whole South is pissing blood over his civil-rights program. Cape Canaveral, Tampa, Miami. There'll be a motorcade in Miami.

Mary Frances was in the doorway wearing rubber gloves, a scrub brush in her hand.

"Something odd lately? I don't know."

"What?" he said.

"Suzanne? Although it's probably nothing."

"It's not like you."

"Worry over nothing."

"She's all right. She's fine. She's a healthy child."

"With a morbid streak."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know. Lately she seems."

"What?"

"She's always going off with Missy Tyler. They practically hide from me at times. I don't know, it's just, I think she's so preoccupied lately, so inner, and I wonder if there's something unhealthy there."

"Missy's the skinny little redhead,"

"Adopted. They hide in corners and whisper solemnly. There's a kind of mood that descends whenever Missy's here. Very sort of haunted-house. Awestruck. Something walks the halls. I get the feeling it's me. I'm a very suspicious presence in this house. The girls hush up when they hear rne coming."

"They have their own world. She's dreamy," he said.

"She listens to a Dallas disc jockey named the Weird Beard."

"What does he play?"

"It's not what he plays. He plays top forty. It's what he says between records."

"Example."

"Impossible to duplicate. He just like, here I am, on and on. It's a completely other language. But she is fixed to the radio."

"Inka dinka dink."

"I know. It's not like me. Most of my worrying makes sense."

"She read to me for forty minutes nonstop and it was remarkable, remarkable."

" 'Please, Daddy, I want to read some more.''

"Are you handling plutonium with those gloves?"

"'Daddy, Daddy, please.'"

He went upstairs, moving slowly in his light and silent way. Miami has an impact, a resonance. City of exiles, unhealed wounds. The President wants a motorcade because the polls show he is losing popularity by the minute. Appear among the multitudes in his long blue Lincoln, men on motorcycles to trim the crowds, men in sunglasses dangling from the sides of the follow-up car. Lancer stands to wave. It is necessary to wing a bystander or Secret Service man in order to validate our credentials. This is how we show them it is real. Plots. The ancients shared in nature by echoing the violence of a windstorm or thunder squall. To share in nature is the oldest human trick. A thought for bedtime.

The watering can was gritty metal with an ugly snub spout.

He found Suzanne awake when he looked inside. There was a cloth-and-vinyl toy at the end of the bed, a football player they'd named Willie Wonder, with padded shoulders and polished chino pants. Win turned the key at Willie's back and sent him on a broken-field run the length of the bed. He broadcast the run in an urgent voice, described missed tackles and downfield blocks, added the roar of the crowd, became the official who signaled touchdown when the toy spun backwards into a pillow. Suzanne showed a pleasure that seemed to start at her feet and creep up her body and into her eyes, making them large and bright. If he could only keep surprising her, she would have a reason to love him forever.

Mackey drove across a drawbridge over the Miami River. The tires wailed on the iron grid. A white sloop moved upriver in the dark, a little mystery of grace and stealth. Two blocks south of the bridge he saw the first Volveremos bumper sticker. Empty streets. His hands sticking to the wheel.

He parked on a sidestreet and walked around the comer to a vast car lot. It took him ten minutes to find Wayne Elko stupidly sprawled in the back seat of a red Impala. The top was down and Wayne was gazing into the night.

"How did I get in here so easy?"

"T-Jay."

"You're the watchman, I hear."

"Where'd you come from?"

"I drove nearly a thousand miles just to see you, Wayne."

"I about gave you up."

Mackey leaned against the car and looked off toward the street as if the sight of the bedraggled Wayne Elko, in bare feet, with clothes and other possessions strewn about, was a little too bleak to take in right now.

"I saw Raymo and what's-his-name. I spent time with them training in the Glades, man. There is Alpha 66 people infesting the Glades. We trained with them a little bit. I never turned my back except to pee."

"Alpha won't bother us. I have long-time contacts in Alpha."

"Are you Agency, T-Jay, or what?"

"Not no more, Bubba. Sold my peewee trailer for small change and here I am. What do they call us, retirees?"

"We train with real shit weapons."

"Weapons are coming."

"The stars are fucking fantastic. I love the Glades for the clear nights. It's a whole other world out there. See those hawks zoom.

I wouldn't mind going out again. My back's messed up from sleeping in the car."

"We have a friendly source of funds will come through for you soon."

"When I was with Interpen, we had hotel and casino money."

"We have a fellow in New Orleans."

Mackey didn't trust Guy Banister. Guy was past it now, a once able man who'd grown fierce and unsteady in his hatreds. He was delivering money and weapons but would not support the operation blindly. Mackey would have to tell him who the target was or else invent a target. Either way he risked betrayal. Guy was deep in causes and affiliations. He had influence in a dozen directions. It was not reasonable to expect a man like that to sit and watch the event unfold. He'd want to take an active hand. He'd set loose forces that would threaten the self-contained system Mackey wanted to create.

He didn't trust Wayne Elko. Not that Wayne would knowingly turn. It was a question of temperament, unpredictability. Wayne had a gift for the celebrated fuck-up. He also had a nature that went violent in a flash. There was something a little viperish about him. He drawled and rambled and looked sleepy-eyed, stroking his lean jaw, then suddenly took offense. He was a man who took offense in a serious way. Scraggly and lank. Those ripe eyes bulging. An idea of himself as born to the warrior class. Mackey was sure he could get Wayne to do just about anything he wanted, just so long as it challenged his sense of limits.

"We did a certain amount of small arms in the Glades," he said to T-Jay now. "They had me using a pistol on a stationary target. I'm making the mental leap this is what you told them you want."

Wayne's assignment wouldn't take him anywhere near President Jack. He would be working strictly short-range. It was a matter of fitting the man to the nature of the task. He was the intimate killer type.

In Fort Worth

She wore shorts like any housewife in America. She thought she was in a dream at first, walking on the street in bare legs, with her hair cut short, looking in shopwindows. She saw things you could not buy in Russia if you had unlimited wealth, if you had money spilling out of your closets. She knew she hadn't lived in the world long enough to make comparisons, and Russia suffered terribly in the war, but it was impossible to see all this furniture, these racks and racks of clothing without being struck by amazement

They had very little money, practically no money. But Marina was happy just to walk the aisles of the Safeway near Robert's house. The packages of frozen food. The colors and abundance.

Lee got angry one night, coming back from a day of looking for work. He told her she was becoming an American in record-breaking time.

They were like people anywhere, people starting life a second time. If they quarreled it was only because he had a different nature in America and that was the only way he could love.

Neon was a revelation, those gay lights in windows and over movie marquees.

One evening they walked past a department store, just out strolling, and Marina looked at a television set in the window and saw the most remarkable thing, something so strange she had to stop and stare, grab hard at Lee. It was the world gone inside out. There they were gaping back at themselves from the TV screen. She was on television. Lee was on television, standing next to her, holding Junie in his arms. Marina looked at them in life, then looked at the screen. She saw Lee hoist the baby on his shoulder, with people passing in the background. She turned and looked at the people, checking to see if they were the same as the ones in the window. They had to be the same but she was compelled to look. She didn't know anything like this could ever happen. She walked out of the picture and then came back. She looked at Lee and June in the window, then turned to see them on the sidewalk. She kept looking from the window to the sidewalk. She kept walking out of the picture and coming back. She was amazed every time she saw herself return.

Lee stood in front of Robert's house and watched his mother approach. She looked shorter, rounder, her hair gone gray and worn in a bun. She was working as a practical nurse and showed up in uniform, all white, with dark-rimmed glasses and the little bent hat that nurses wear. It was the official uniform of motherhood and she looked like the angel of terror and memory sweeping down from the sky.

She embraced him crying. She held his face in her hands and looked into his eyes. She searched for her lost son in the tapered jaw and thinning hair. All this love and pain confused him. This blood depth of feeling. He felt a struggling pity and regret.

She was writing a book, she said, about his defection.

One day they were living with Robert, the next day with his mother. He didn't know how it happened. She took an apartment large enough for all of them, although she had to sleep in the living room. It was like growing up with her all over again, the bed in the living room, and one night they stayed up late, mother and son, after Marina and the baby were asleep.

"She doesn't look somehow Russian to me."

"She is Russian, Mother."

"Well I think she is beautiful."

"She admires you. She says the place is so clean and neat. She likes your soft hair, she says. But no book, Mother."

"I went to see President Kennedy. I have done my research. I had a lot of extenuating circumstances because of your defection."

"Mother, you are not going to write a book."

"It is my life as I was forced to live it because of not knowing if you were alive or dead. I can write what's mine, Lee."

"She has relatives there that would be jeopardized."

"Jeopardized. But you have given a public stenographer ten dollars to type pages for your own book."

"That is a different book."

"It is Russia and the evils of that system."

"It is a different book. The {Collective.' It deals with living conditions and working conditions. I will change people's names to protect them. Don't think we don't appreciate that you have bought clothes for the baby and that you're cooking and feeding us, so forth."

"It was the ten dollars I gave you that you gave that woman for the typing."

"It is a book of observations, Mother. I owe money to the State Department for getting me home. Robert paid our airfare from New York. I am only looking for ways to pay back my debts."

"I have a right to my book," she said. "The President was not available at that time but I spoke to figures in the government during a snowstorm who made promises that they would look into the matter."

"It is only an article, not a book. I am having notes typed for an article. It is so many pages."

"How many pages did she type?"

"Ten pages. That's all I had money for."

"A dollar a page I call a rooking."

"I smuggled those notes next to my skin right out of Russia."

"Marina watched a daytime movie with Gregory Peck with me sitting right here and she knew Gregory Peck."

"So what, he is well known everywhere."

"We have to use the dictionary to talk."

"Little by little she'll get the hang."

"I think she knows more than she's letting on," his mother said.

He found a job as a sheet-metal worker, drudge and grime and long hours and low pay. They left his mother's and moved to their own place, one-half of a matchstick bungalow, furnished, across the street from a truck lot and loading docks. This was the shipping and receiving entrance of a huge Montgomery Ward operation. Marina went to the retail store. She walked the aisles. She told Lee about the cool smooth musical interior.

All the homes on their street were bungalows. Everybody called it Mercedes Street. The lease for the apartment said Mercedes Street. Lee's map of Fort Worth said Mercedes Street. But the sign on a pole at the corner said Mercedes Avenue.

He sat on the concrete steps out front, next to a baby yucca, reading Russian magazines.

His mother came with a high chair. She came with dishes. Lee told her he didn't want anyone's charity. She came with a parakeet in a cage. It was the same bird in the same cage he had given her in New Orleans when he worked as a messenger.

It is the shadow of his prior life that keeps appearing.

"No more," he told Marina. "You keep the door closed."

"How can I do that to your mother? She is kind to us."

"Keep the door closed. Or she'll move in on us. Absolutely keep her out. She comes with a camera to take pictures of our baby."

"She Is the grandmother."

"It is the first phase to moving in."

"It is a picture, Alek."

"This is how she insinuates. This is conniving her way into our house."

"You don't want her coming around but at the same time you try to take advantage of her at every chance."

"That's what mothers are for."

"This is a cruel thing."

"I'm only kidding and don't call me Alek anymore. This is not Alek country. June is not Junka. People will think you don't know your own family by their right names."

"It doesn't sound like kidding when you raise your voice to her."

"You have to learn American kidding. It's how we talk to each other."

"All your life she worked very hard."

"She told you with the dictionary. You and Mamochka."

"I know this. It's very obvious to me."

"Very obvious is only half the story."

"What's the other half?"

He hit her in the face. An open-hand smash that sent her walking backwards to the stove. She stood there with her head tucked against her left shoulder, one hand raised in blank surprise.

A man spoke to him from the other side of the screen door. Lee looked at his bloated face peering in above the set of credentials he held under his chin. Freitag, Donald. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Dark eyes and five o'clock shadow. They agreed to talk in his car.

There was another man in the car, an Agent Mooney. Agent Freitag sat in the front seat with Mooney. Lee sat in back, leaving the rear door open. He thought of a word, Feebees, for FBI. It was dinnertime and sweltering.

"What this is, we want to know about your period of time in the Soviet Union," Agent Freitag said. "And being back here, who has contacted you at any time that we should know about."

"So if I have something sensitive I know about, they would want to hear it."

"That's correct."

"I assemble ventilators. This is not a sensitive industry."

"You would be surprised how many people link the name Oswald to turncoat and traitor."

"Let me state I was never approached or volunteered to Soviet officials any information about my experiences while a member of the armed forces."

"Why did you travel to the Soviet Union?"

"I don't wish to relive the past. I just went."

"That's a long way to just go."

"I don't have to explain."

"Are you a member of the Communist Party of the United States?"

"No."

Agent Mooney took notes.

"Are you willing to talk to us hooked up to a polygraph?"

"No. Who told you where to find me?"

"It wasn't hard."

"But who told you?"

"We talked to your brother."

"He told you where I live."

"That's correct," Freitag said with some satisfaction. There was a line of beady glisten above his lip.

"Am I being put under surveillance?"

"Would I tell you if you were?"

"Because I was watched in Russia."

"I thought everyone was watched in Russia."

Agent Mooney laughed quietly, his head bobbing.

"My wife is holding dinner," Lee said.

"How is it you were able to get your wife out? They don't let people out just by asking."

"I made no arrangements with them to do anything."

They covered several subjects. Then Freitag made a faint gesture to his partner, who put away his pen and notebook. There was a pause, a clear change in mood.

"What we are mainly concerned, if there are suspicious circumstances to inform us immediately of any contact."

"You're saying let you know."

"We are asking cooperation if individuals along the lines of Marxist or communist."

"I want to know if I'm being recruited as an informer."

"We are asking cooperation."

"So if someone contacts me."

"That's right."

"I will inform the Bureau."

"That's correct."

Lee said he would think about the matter. He got out of the car and closed the door. He glanced at the license plate as he walked behind the car on his way across the street and into the house. He wrote the license-plate number in his notebook along with Agent Freitag's name. Then he looked up the Fort Worth FBI office in the phone directory and wrote that number in his book beneath the agent's name and the license plate, just to have for the record, to build up the record.

Marina called him in to dinner.

He sat in a corner of the large room and watched them talk and eat. Their conversation had a munching sound. They milled and dodged, Russians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Georgians, Armenians. It was an evening with the emigre colony, some of the twenty or thirty families in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, English-speaking, Russian-speaking, French-speaking, constantly comparing backgrounds and education. Baby June was in his lap.

Marina always looked her prettiest on these evenings. People gathered round, prodding her for news. She was recently arrived, of course, and some of them had come here decades ago, thirty years, forty years some of them. Her pure Russian impressed the old guard. She was small and frail. They pictured Soviet women as hammer-throwers, brawny six-footers who work in brick factories. She stood smoking, sipping wine. She wore the clothes they gave her. They gave her dresses and stockings, comfortable shoes. He had his book he could not afford to get typed sitting in a closet in a Carrollton Clasp envelope, notes on scraps of paper, brown bag paper, and they are giving her dental work and stockings. Everything is measured in money. They spend their lives collecting material things and call it politics.

He watched them shake hands and embrace. They complained to Marina that he did not give them a human hello. They thought he was a Soviet spy. Anyone back from Russia who did not share their beliefs was a spy for the Soviet. Their beliefs were Cadillacs and air conditioners.

They gave him shirts which he returned.

A few of them came to his house now and then to take Marina to the dentist or supermarket. Show her how to shop. Here is the baby food. Here is the Swiss cheese. He kept his library books on a small table near the door where they would have to notice as they entered and left. There were books on Lenin and Trotsky plus the Militant and the Worker. Show them who he is. They didn't want to hear what he had to say about Russia unless it was bad. They closed in on the bad.

George came and sat next to him. The only one he could talk to was George de Mohrenschildt. A tall man, warm-spirited and assured, with a relish for conversation and a voice that surrounds you like a calm day.

"You know, Lee, you have told me practically nothing about Minsk."

"It's not an interesting place."

"It's interesting to me, you know, because I lived there as a child. My father was a marshal of nobility of Minsk Province in the czarist days. Not that I cling to this nonsense. But I am Baltic nobility, which some of my wives adored."

"Minsk, we had to get on line sometimes to buy vegetables."

"You prefer Texas?"

"I don't prefer Texas. Marina prefers Texas."

"Do you want me to tell you what Dallas is? It's the city that proves that God is really dead. Look at these people, wonderful people actually, most of them, but they come by choice to this bleak empty right-wing milieu. It's the local politics they find so congenial. Anticommunist this, anticommunist that. All right they have suffered, some of them, in one way or another, sometimes horribly. You know how I feel about Marxism. I will tell you frankly the word Marxism is very boring to me. It is very hard for me to find a word or subject more boring than this. But you and I know the Soviet Union is a going concern. We accept this and accept the realities. To the old guard there is no such place. It doesn't exist. A blank on the map."

George was in his fifties, still dark-haired, broad across the chest, an oil geologist or engineer, something like that. Lee liked to switch from English to Russian and back again, talking to George. He could take the older man's kidding and teasing and even his advice. George gave advice without making you feel he wanted a week of thank-yous.

"Marina says you have written some notes or something about Minsk. Something, I don't know what she said, impressions of the city."

"Everything I learned at the radio plant plus the whole structure of how they work and live."

A woman picked up June and made the same noises that Marina's relatives used to make, shaking the baby and gabbling at her.

George said, "You know, I am sitting and looking at this wonderful child and I am saying to myself, I can't help it but she looks just like Khrushchev. She is a baby Khrushchev with a big round head, a bald head, little narrow eyes."

"Kennedy would be better, for looks."

"I admire Kennedy. I think this man is very good for the country."

"Jacqueline, for looks."

"And his wife. And Jacqueline too. I knew her on Long Island when she was a girl. Very lovely child. Although he is quite a libertine with the women, this particular President, I understand. Not that I consider this a flaw. I am the last to say. But I'll tell you about some women. They will love you for your weaknesses. They will love you precisely for your flaws. This means trouble, my friend."

Lee found the child back in his arms. He said, "What Kennedy is doing for civil rights is the most important thing. He started off badly with the Bay of Pigs disaster. But I think he learned."

"He changed."

"I saw American Negro athletes get the greatest glory for their country and then they went back home."

"It's a humiliation to me," George said, "that I am sitting in a room with not a single Negro here."

"To face blind hatred and discrimination."

"Kennedy is trying to make the shift. Painfully slow but he's doing it. It's humiliating to me that I can't befriend a Negro without consequences among my friends or in my profession. I live in University Park. We are incorporated, a township. If a Negro family tries to move in, the township buys the house at two or three times its value. The family disappears, goodbye, like magic."

"Look at the anti-Kennedy feeling here."

"Poisonous. Young Dallas matrons tell the most vicious jokes. Their eyes light up in the strangest way. It's clear to me they want him dead."

George went across the room to embrace an elderly man and woman. Lee found himself smiling at the scene. He watched people steer through the room, holding plates of food before them. A man offered Marina a cigarette from a black-and-white case. Lee had his collection. He'd written to an obscure press in New York for a twenty-five-cent booklet called The Teachings of Leon Trotsky. Back comes a letter saying it's out of print. At least they sent a letter. He saved their letters. The point is they are out there and willing to reply. He was starting a collection of documents.

She would never refuse a cigarette.

He planned to write to the Socialist Workers Party for information about their aims and policies. Trotsky is the pure form. It was satisfying to send away and get this obscure stuff in the mail. It was a channel to sympathetic souls, a secret and a power. It gave him a breadth and reach beyond the life of the bungalow and the welding company.

She is the type that doesn't refuse. It is thrilling to her to be given things. She will take your cigarettes, money, paper clips, postage stamps, whatever you want to give her. There is a certain woman that glows at the smallest gift.

Trotsky's name was Bronstein.

Half a bungalow on an unpaved street. He slept next to his Junie, fanning her with a magazine in the middle of the night.

When George came back he did a curious thing. He moved his chair around and sat facing Lee, with his back to the room. He had a hanky folded to a point in his breast pocket. His tie was brown.

"Now, what I am talking about is having you show me these notes of yours, whatever condition they are in, because it is Minsk and I am interested."

"It is also the system. The whole sense of historic ideas being corrupted by the system."

"Good, wonderful, you must let me see."

"It isn't all typed yet," Lee said.

"Typed. I will have it typed. Please, this is the least of your worries."

"It's called The Kollective.' I did serious research. I read journals and analyzed the whole economy."

"Is there anything else? Because I would like to see anything at all from that period. Observations of the most innocent type. What people wear. Show me everything."

"Why?"

"Okay I will tell you why. It is really very simple. In recent years I have been approached a number of times about my travels abroad. It is strictly routine. In other words you went to such-and-such, Mr. de Mohrenschildt, and we'd like to know what did you see, who did you meet, what is the layout of the factory you toured and so on. It is routine intelligence that thousands of travelers every year say okay this is what I saw. It is called the Domestic Contacts Division and there is a man who asked me to talk to you strictly low-key, friendly, of the CIA, and this is what I am doing. He is a good fellow, reasonable fellow, so on. I am always traveling, I am always coming back, and when I come back there is Mr. Collings on my doorstep and we have a chat, low-key, with drinks. I have written things on my trips which I give him willingly and I have given things to the State Department because this is my philosophy, Lee, that I must take on the coloration, let us say, of the place where I am living and earning my income at the particular time. A country is like a business to me. I move from one to another as opportunity dictates. I will learn Croatian in Yugoslavia. I will learn the French patois as the Haitians speak it. This is how I survive as someone who has come through a revolution and a world war and so on. I am always willing to cooperate. I take on the coloration. It is my message to them that I am not the enemy. A necessary gesture. I am not in the market to be persecuted. In other words here is my itinerary, here are my notes, here are my impressions. Let's have a drink and be friends."

"It isn't all typed."

"Please, I have my consulting firm, you know, with paper, pencils and a girl who types. I will give you a copy, of course, plus the original notes."

"You will also give a copy to Mr. Collings."

"This is understood. They collect and analyze. It can be helpful to someone in your position if you cooperate. Let's face it, you are in a cramped position. If I am a Mr. Collings and I see cooperation from an individual who can use and appreciate a better-paying job, then I am inclined to make a call. This happens all the time."

Lee bounced the child on his knee to quiet her down.

"Also, George, I would like to publish 'The Kollective.' "

"I would advise you no. I would say no, this is not right for you at this time. Let us look at the work. Then we discuss publication. You will be compensated one way or another, I guarantee this. These people have a thousand ways. They reach across the world. It's amazing. How do you think you re-entered this country? When a person defects, his name is put on the FBI's watch list. There is a lookout card that is prepared in such cases. But they returned your passport. They let Marina in. They gave you a loan and let you in."

"They were keeping an eye all that time."

"They're still keeping an eye. You're an interesting individual. I'm sure they would very much like to learn about your contacts in the Soviet Union. We'll have a nice talk, you and I, in private somewhere, without the baby listening in."

George laughed. They both laughed.

First Freitag and his partner, now this man Collings. They were swarming all over him like ants on a melon rind.

He looked at Marina. She was standing slightly curled, listening carefully to someone. Even in the heat and smoke she looked wind-scrubbed and fresh. Never love me for my weaknesses, he wanted to say. Never take the blame for me. Never think it is your fault when I am the one. I am always the one.

He slapped her on the side of the head and she took half a swing at him. He sat down and opened a magazine. She could tell he was turning the pages without really looking. She wanted something to throw. She grabbed a sheet of paper and crumpled it up and threw it at him. It bounced off his arm but he didn't react. She went to the table and ate some of her dinner, looking at him. She stared hard. She wanted to make him uncomfortable, make it hard for him to read. She felt stupid, throwing a piece of paper.

"No cigarettes," he said. "I do not want you smoking. That is period, forever."

"If I want to smoke once in a while."

"No good for baby. Very, very bad. You could not fill my bathtub? It is too much to come home, for me to expect a warm bath is ready, after a day of noise and sweat."

"I don't smoke too much. It is reasonable, what I smoke."

"Lazy, lazy girl."

"I make dinner. I scrub on my knees."

"I scrub on my knees," he said.

He flung the magazine sidearm, whipped it hard against the wall. The baby started in to cry. He got up and walked over to Marina.

"I scrub on my knees," he said.

He hit her in the face. She sat in the chair, with leftover food in her plate.

"I scrub on my knees."

She covered up. He hit her again. Then he went back to his chair and picked up a book. She took the plate of leftovers to the sink and left it there without scraping the food into the little pail. She, left it there for him to clean. He would do it too. There was always something lying around after a fight that he would carefully clean.

"You tell those Russians how we live our lives, about our sex, our private lives."

"This is how friends communicate," she said.

"Everything is public for you."

"I trust friends, that they understand how things are. Who else do I talk to? I need these friends."

"You don't need to tell our private life. I don't want them coming here. Keep them out."

"I must keep your mother out. I must keep my friends out."

"My own brother told the FBI."

"It's no secret where we live. What did he tell? People know where we live. We can't hide where we live."

He read the book. She turned on the tap and watched water swirl into the drain. The baby was crying.

"You like your wine," he said, not really talking to her.

"Teach me English."

"You wait for them to refill your wine."

"1 never loved you. I took pity on a foreigner."

"Meanwhile cigarettes."

"I tell my friends how you hit me. He doesn't hit so hard. It's just that I have soft skin. That's why they see the marks."

She was standing at the sink with her back to the room. She heard him get up and come toward her. She picked up a sponge and began cleaning the edges of the sink. He hit her in the side of the face. He stood there a moment, deciding whether one was enough. Then he went and sat down and she wet the sponge and worked a stain out of the countertop.

They were unloading across the street. She heard truck engines, men's voices. She had another bite of leftovers and cleaned the windowsill behind the sink.

"I tell them he is careful of my well-being. He hits very lightly. It's only my fair skin that makes it look so bad."

He came over and started pummeling her on both arms. She turned off the tap. He hit her high on the arms, using open hands.

"I tell them it isn't his fault if I bruise so easily."

She put her hands to the sides of her head for protection. He kept hitting her on the upper arms like some kid's game of slap-the-arm. He hit in rhythm, hitting with the right hand, then the left. He worked quietly behind her, one and a-two, breathing through his nose. She could feel the labor of his concentration.

She lay in the dark and thought of the paper she'd crumpled and thrown. It was lesson number seven. An elderly man in the Russian colony sent her pages in the mail to improve her English. At the top of the first page he wrote in large, large letters, in Russian, My name is Marina. She was supposed to write the English words below. Lesson number two, / live in Fort Worth. Lesson number three, We buy groceries on Tuesday. Each lesson had its own page. She mailed him the finished pages and he corrected them and mailed them back, with new lessons for her to work on. Now lesson seven was crumpled and he would wonder how it happened.

Lee came out of the bathroom and got into bed, She felt how he carefully eased into bed so he wouldn't disturb her if she was asleep. She was facing away from him, of course.

She thought of Holland again. This was a recent thing, out of nowhere, thinking of Holland, of their train journey across Europe and her surprise at seeing Dutch villages and hearing church bells ring. It is the cleanest country in the world, unbelievably clean, with cozy houses and spotless streets and fences in the meadows that are perfectly straight.

She didn't want her baby sucking nervous milk.

She thought they would have a life that was not unusual in any way. Simple moments adding up. They had matching scars on the arm, which meant they were marked by fate to meet and fall in love.

She thought of walking the aisles of Montgomery Ward. She went in out of the heat to piped-in music and little ringing bells. The floors were polished. The aisles were immensely long, bordered with cosmetics in display cases and counters full of shiny handbags, with dresses spreading into other rooms. Fragrances drifting everywhere.

He wanted to go to college at night and take courses in politics and economics. But there was the need to make a living which interfered.

She saw him from a distance even when he was hitting her. He was never fully there.

Mamochka bought her modest shorts, pleated, with deep pockets. This was a difference of opinion.

She knew he was trying to sense if she was awake. He was on the verge of saying something or leaning over to touch. He would probably touch, rise on an elbow and touch her on the hip with his hand curled soft. She felt his desire like an airstream in the dark. It was absolutely there. He was wait'ng, thinking if this was the time. His own wife and he had to think.

She thought of Holland again.

She thought of landing in New York. One night in a hotel in the middle of cascading neon. Rivers and lakes of neon.

He is someone you see from a distance,

Fragrances. The floors remarkably clean. She stood in an area with TVs stacked everywhere. She watched TV half the morning, five different programs side by side. She walked the aisles. It was cool and peaceful. Nobody talked to you unless you asked a question or made a purchase and she didn't have the means of doing either.

He went out to find food and she was alone with the baby in New York, an old hotel, and she took a washcloth and cleaned the grime off the Venetian blinds.

She sensed he was going to touch, he was making up his mind to touch, after the beating, after everything they'd said.

They were brought together by fate but she wasn't sure who he really was. Sharing the bathroom she wasn't sure. Making love she didn't know who he was.

When she learned English he would be less distant. It was absolutely true.

We buy groceries on Tuesday.

They made love, when they did, in a tender way, full of honest forgiving.

There is a broadsheet plastered crookedly to a wall near their bungalow.

THE VATICAN IS THE WHORE OF REVELATION.

Lee translates for Marina.

Marguerite was calm. She stood at the ironing board running the iron over her uniform blouse. She faced the living room, which had a sofa with a mound of bright pillows, two comfortable chairs, a writing desk and TV set and a decorative stand with ivy twisting out of a long pot. She ironed the uniform every chance, keeping it crisp and fresh. She worked in other people's homes, by word of mouth, some of the best homes in Fort Worth, taking care of babies of the rich.

And I mentioned to the woman that it is two weeks to Lee's birthday and he doesn't have work clothes, so she said, "Mrs. Oswald, what build is he?" And I told her. And he was about the same build as her husband. And she got out the work clothes her husband didn't want, some worn-out pairs of pants, she wanted me to pay, for ten dollars. Here is a woman, she knows I make a hard living, she knows they are a young couple starting a home in a new country. This is being rich in Fort Worth, asking payment from a nurse for used clothing. I am calm about it today, your honor, but this to me is very strong in my mind, that here is another instance of a troubled situation. Because from the very first day I looked in his face and saw a different boy. And I was like, What have they done to my boy over there? Because his skin was not fair and smooth as previous. Because his face was drawn, a tint of sand to a tint of ash gray. Because his hair was kinky out of nowhere. Because his hair was coming out, which he says himself, from a full head of hair to badly thinning in front that you could practically see his scalp. We had him bend his head down, Robert and I, to where we could actually look at the top of his head in a bright light. Judge, this is a family where the men have always displayed full heads of hair and he is still a boy. He said it is the cold of Russia. I thought to myself it is shock treatments. This is my conclusion, his being an agent of our government and lost for a year. There are many ways this figures out, remembering the incident where we sat watching the television in my apartment on West Seventh Street after she came home with a cancan petticoat and some hose that Lee bought with a few dollars from Robert and me, and we sat watching the television and she said to me, "Mama, it is Gregory Peck," and I looked at the movie and it was Gregory Peck sitting on a horse. Now, about my suspicions does a foreign girl know movie stars? I think it is frankly something to examine. I know I have not traveled abroad but when I think of Minsk and the frozen cold, where are the movie magazines in this city? Where are the theaters that show our American West? I am a person who plunges straight into things and this is an incident that shows the character of what I am trying to bring out. Who is this girl and what is she doing here? Is this girl trained to know more than she lets on? I try to talk to Lee about is he happy, does she run a proper household, because there are a lot of Russian friends who are established, with cars and homes, that have publicly interfered. They could not see this Russian girl do without. She pictured America in her mind and these people seem to think she should not be disappointed. I am calm about it today but I am the one who bought her a little longer shorts. The Lord would know me for a liar if I said I stopped bringing things after he told me to stop, but it was only the shorts and the parakeet, and the parakeet was just to give a touch of color because it was bright green, to color up a home in a new country.

He freed the parakeet. He opened the cage and let it go. The boy who adored animals, judge.

But about the shorts it is, "No, Mama, I no like." And I said, "Marina, you are a married woman and it is proper for you to have a little longer shorts than the younger girls." But it is, "No, Mama, this no good." And I am strongly saying that this girl was not home. And this man was working. And I saw myself that this man came home and didn't have any supper in front of him. This couple does not have a maid to give this workingman his supper. We are a family that has struggled to stay together. His daddy collected insurance premiums right up to the moment he went down on the lawn, mowing the lawn in a raging heat. It is Marguerite and Lee ever since.

A family expects you to be one thing when you're another. They twist you out of shape. You have a brother with a good job and a nice wife and nice kids and they want you to be a person they will recognize. And a mother in a white uniform who grips your arms and weeps. You are trapped in their minds. They shape and hammer you. Going away is what you do to see yourself plain.

It was a Sunday and he stood in the empty lobby of the Republic National Bank Building in Dallas. Tan marble everywhere. He was waiting for George de Mohrenschildt. This was the second time he was meeting George. He wore a clean white shirt and the ready-made trousers of rough material he'd bought at the state-run store in Minsk.

George had a handful of keys. He jiggled them in greeting and walked to the elevators. They rode to sixteen and went down deserted corridors. The air was heavy and dense, with a carpet smell, a closeness. George was in tennis shorts and a shirt with an alligator emblem. He had a nice-size office with diplomas on the wall.

"You've been reading about this nut-case general."

"I know about him since Russia," Lee said.

"He's getting involved in Cuba now. Sit down. I have your papers."

"He's only reflecting the feelings of what most people think. What Walker says and does, this is white America."

"There are missiles poised to demolish us all and we have to open the newspaper and see this man."

"It is Mississippi, it is Cuba, it is wherever he sees the opportunity."

"He is making a switch to Cuba. He will jump into the Cuba thing. Wait and see."

"They are asking questions about my mail," Lee said.

"What do you mean?"

"A postal inspector talked to my landlord about the type mail I get."

"What type mail?"

"What some people would say subversive."

"Why do you read this material? It is totally boring material. I know this material without reading a word. It is the definition of boring."

"They are coming at me from a number of angles," Lee said, breathing a little laugh through his nose.

George gave him a copy of the material that had been typed since their last talk. He returned the original handwritten pages, page fragments, random notes, autobiographical notes, notes for speeches.

"I'm not disappointed, Lee. This is solid work, the main essay in particular. I think it is definitely a prospect that you move here to Dallas with a new job, something more suited. You'll come to my house. You'll be nearby, for easy visits. I'll tell you the most interesting thing about the house where I live. It is less than two miles from the house of General Walker."

George stuck out his index finger and raised his thumb.

The door opened and a tall man with cropped gray hair walked in. He was very tan and wore a tan suit with a blue shirt and he had to be Marion Collings. George introduced them. Collings had the spare build, the leanness and fitness of an older man who wants you to know he is determined to outlive you.

George left.

"This essay you've written," Collings said. "Very impressive, very thorough. I appreciate the fact you've allowed us to see it. -You picked up things only a trained observer ordinarily spots. Many interesting facts about the radio plant and the workers. Well organized, a nice grasp of social interplay. I would say a good beginning. We have something solid to start us out."

"I told George just about everything I remember that I didn't put in 'The {Collective.' '

"Yes, George and I have had our sit-down. I would say the major omission is glaring enough."

"Which is?"

"Lee, if I may, it is not even remotely conceivable that you spent over two and a half years as a defector in the Soviet Union and remained free of contact with the KGB."

"I had an interview with Internal Affairs, MVD, as final clearance for my departure."

"Who cleared your entry? You applied for a visa in Helsinki and had it in two days. Normally a week is what it takes. We happen to know the Soviet consul in Helsinki at that time was a KGB officer."

"You may know it but I didn't. They're all over the place. That doesn't mean I was doing any business. I went there to seek a better life."

"Lee, if I may, once we saw that you wanted out of there, we helped smooth the way. You're an interesting fellow. You've lived in the heart of the USSR for a long period. We want to have a relationship. We're very pragmatic people. We don't care what sort of affair you carried on with the Second Chief Directorate. You had a romance, you broke up. Fine. Happens all the time. Supply some details is all we're looking for. We're not the FBI. We don't pursue with a vengeance, or apprehend and prosecute. We want a relationship. A give-and-take, okay?"

"Is the FBI watching me?"

"I wouldn't know," Collings said. "How would I know a thing like that?"

It was as if he'd been asked the melting point of titanium.

"Look, it's simple. We want to know how you were handled. Who you saw, where you saw them, what they said. We don't have to get into it right this minute. We purposely waited some weeks to debrief you. We want to be careful not to crowd you. We understand defection, disillusionment, mental pressures. This piece of writing you've done shows that you know exactly what kind of material is worth recording. Understand, we're not asking for confessions or apologies. That's not our agenda."

He sat on the edge of George's desk.

"A fact is innocent until someone wants it. Then it becomes intelligence. We're sitting in a forty-story building that has an exterior of lightweight embossed aluminum. So what? Well, these dullish facts can mean a lot to certain individuals at certain times. An old man eating a peach is intelligence if it's August and the place is the Ukraine and you're a tourist with a camera. I can get you a Minox incidentally, any time. There's still a place for human intelligence. George, for example. George gives us material that we promptly analyze and disseminate to other agencies."

Lee said nothing.

"May I call you Lee?"

"All right."

"Lee, you have no high-school diploma, only a so-called equivalency. You have no college degree. You have an undesirable discharge. You have almost three years in the USSR, which is either a gap in your employment record or it is three years in the USSR. Take your pick. Now, all I have to do is make a call and you'll have a job with a firm here in Dallas that does very interesting work, classified work, where you'll start low but have a chance to learn a serious trade."

Marion Ceilings stood by the desk, well tanned, sincerely and correctly tanned, so trim and fit he could snap his fingers and knock a picture off the wall.

"It's a job I guarantee you are suited for and you'll be working there in a matter of days. Okay. Just tell me what to do."

Minox is the world-famous spy camera. Hidell has seen the name in books.

He walked through empty downtown Dallas, empty Sunday in the heat and light. He felt the loneliness he always hated to admit to, a vaster isolation than Russia, stranger dreams, a dead white glare burning down. He wanted to carry himself with a clear sense of role, make a move one time that was not disappointed. He walked in the shadows of insurance towers and bank buildings. He thought the only end to isolation was to reach the point where he was no longer separated from the true struggles that went on around him. The name we give this point is history.

12 August

Brenda Jean Sensibaugh, known professionally as Baby LeGrand, sat at the vanity in the dressing room of the Carousel Club, putting flesh-tone ointment on a pimple near her mouth. The narrow table was crowded with hairbrushes, coffee cups, thermos bottles, makeup kits, eight-by-ten glossies, sprays and foams, boxes of Kleenex, and it extended the length of the room, supporting four unframed mirrors. Brenda wore a bathrobe belonging to her sister.

Life Line was on KRLD, a patriotic show where they hiss at federal spending.

To get the ointment on right, Brenda had to stick her tongue against the side of her mouth, bulging the face, and this made it hard to talk. She was talking to the girl at the next mirror, Lynette Batistone, who looked barely out of high school.

"He might let you have an advance," Brenda said. "Only make sure he's in a good mood when you ask."

"I heard about his advances," Lynette said.

"This is just Jack. It's not, he doesn't expect results in other words. Who all'd you talk to, honey?"

"Molly Bright was saying."

"Never mind Molly. The thing of Jack is, he gets personal with words. This is the windbag of the world talking. But it's not like you have to fight your way out of the club."

"From what I hear. But this is strictly, you know."

"What?"

"He threatens his girls with, 'Dumb cunt,' like, Til throw you down the fucking stairs.' '

"Honey, all right, this is not a bookkeeping firm. What's a little language?"

"He gets screaming fits all the time," Lynette said.

"He will not put a hand on your body."

"Molly Bright offered she would fill in for Blaze and what happens, there's this pandemonium."

"You want to quote Molly. Let me say about Molly. If bullshit was music, she'd be a brass band. You need the money bad, go tell Jack. Just be sure to mention groceries. He reacts to anything concerning food."

Lynette was in costume, a cowgirl outfit with a riding crop and long-barreled pistol. Brenda thought the girl had talent but not an ounce of taste. What she did was not even striptease. She was doing the dirty dog basically, with added little struts and touches.

"They told me in New Orleans this Jack is up and coming."

"He owns another club."

"He owns another club. I heard that."

"The Vegas," Brenda said. "But I don't know about up and coming. I have to think on that a little."

"What are these dogs I keep seeing?"

"He has dogs he calls his family. They live at the club except for one he takes home."

"This is in case of protection."

"I don't know what he's got to protect here but just us strippers."

"I gotta go wee," Lynette said.

"The other thing of Jack is, he'll ask you if he's queer, 'Do you think I'm queer, Lynette?' 'Do I look like I'm queer to you?'

'Serious, tell me, do I strike you as queer from your experience?' I guarantee he will ask these questions. 'How surprised would you be if someone told you I'm a queer?' 'Do I talk the way a queer might talk if he's trying to hide it, or what?' "

"What am I supposed to tell him?" Lynette said.

"Doesn't make the slightest little difference. This is just Jack."

Jack Ruby came in off Commerce Street, paunchy, balding, bearish in the chest and shoulders, fifty-two years old, carrying three thousand dollars in cash, a loaded revolver, a vial of Preludins and a summons from small-claims court for passing a bad check in a department store.

He walked into the dressing room.

"Quiet," he told Brenda. "I want to hear this."

They listened to Life Line on the radio. It was a commentary on heroism and how it has fallen into disuse.

Jack sat at the second mirror, his head lowered for maximum listening.

The announcer said, "In America, not so long ago, thirty-five bright young university students in a history class were asked to identify Guadalcanal. Less than one-third of them had ever heard of it. Three thousand years of military history tell no story more splendid than the blazing heroism on Guadalcanal, every bit of it American, as truly American as the log-cabin frontier and the open range. But nobody hears it now. United Nations Day gets a hundred times the publicity."

Jack was wearing a dark suit, white shirt and white silk tie, and he carried the snap-brim fedora that put him into focus, gave him sharpness and direction, like a detective on assignment.

"I love this stuff," he said. "I get welled up something tremendous when they talk about our country. You should have seen me when FDR died, when they announced on the radio, I was in uniform crying like a baby. Where is this Randi Ryder of mine?"

"Taking a pee."

"I also have to say. Now that I'm started. You're always off somewhere in your mind. Carrying on your own conversation. You don't listen to people."

"You don't know how deep they're digging me."

"That's why there is all this yelling all night long in this place."

"I have my dogs and I."

"Which you're very welcome."

"You should know my early life, Brenda, which I'm still obsessed. My mother, this is the God-honest truth, I swear to God, she spent thirty years of her life claiming there was a fishbone stuck in her throat. We listened to her constantly. Doctors, clinics, they searched for years with instruments. Finally she had an operation. There was nothing caught in her throat, absolutely, guaranteed. She comes home from the hospital. The fishbone is there."

"Well this is just a woman and a mother."

"So help me, thirty years, my brothers and sisters, never mind. And that's the least of it. I'm just showing you some idea. My father was the drunk of all time. But I don't care anymore what they did to each other or to me. I'm not a person who maintains a malice. I feel only love and respect for those people because they suffered in this world. So forget it, I don't care, go away."

"You never married, Jack, but how come."

"I'm a sloven in my heart."

"Personal-appearance-wise, you dress and groom."

"In my heart, Brenda. There's a chaos that's enormous."

They heard the MC telling jokes out on the stage. Jack leaned toward the radio and listened some more.

"I love the patriotic feeling I get, hearing this stuff. I am one hundred percent in my feeling for this country. What else do I trust? My own voice goes creepy at times. I can't control the inner voice. There are pressures unbelievable."

"Everybody gets pressure. We get pressure. You work us seven days a week."

"I'm about halfway out of it in common terms."

"Why don't you marry your Randi Ryder? She'll straighten out your life."

"She's a famous lay in New Orleans but she won't do anything unnatural."

Somebody shouted around the corner. Visitor for Jack. He touched Brenda on the shoulder and went out of the room. It was six paces to his office, where Jack Karlinsky was sitting on the sofa with one of the dogs.

"This is my dachshund Sheba," Jack Ruby said. "Get down, baby."

Jack Karlinsky was in his sixties, an investment counselor who had no office, no business phone, no employees and no clients. At his twenty-room house outside Dallas, a Coast Guard fog light played over the grounds all night long.

"I want to know did you hear."

"Be calm, Jack. That's why I'm here. To discuss terms."

"There are people who'll speak for me out of long association. I talk to Tony Astorina on the phone."

"I know you have connections," Karlinsky said. "But this is not the same as so-and-so is connected."

"What is Cuba, nothing?"

"I understand full well you took some trips for people."

"This is when Cuba was popular in the press."

"You did some things for the Bureau too," Karlinsky said.

"Where is this? Is this something I'm just hearing?"

"Please. You volunteered your services to the FBI in March 1959. They opened a file."

"Jack, you know as well as I."

"Potential criminal informant. You informed a little bit here, a little bit there."

"This is for my own protection in case something is held against me, so I can say look."

"Jack, it means nothing to me personally. I appreciate you are known in New Orleans, you are known in Dallas, You are a constant face in Dallas."

"I have associations going back to the old Chicago days which I am prouder of than anything in my life, Newberry Street, Morgan Street, the pushcarts, the gangs."

"We all love the old Chicago stories. What do you think I was born here? Nobody is born in Dallas. We all carry the old Chicago thing, and the street life, and the scrappy days. But we are speaking here about a very sizable loan and the boys are naturally picky who gets the use of their capital."

Jack went through his desk drawers.

"Look, I can show you notices of tax liens, rejections of compromise offers. They're all over me about excise taxes. I am getting killed, Jack. They have history sheets on me this thick. I keep running in to pay cash in trickles. Two hundred dollars, two hundred and fifty dollars. In other words to show them some concern. But it's like a kid on an errand. I am in for over forty-four thousand dollars to the IRS alone and on top of that there is this union that wants me to ease up on the hours of the girls, there is this competition next door that is killing me with amateur nights and there is this girl from New Orleans that's gonna close me down for popping her G-string."

Jack Karlinsky had an invisible laugh. You heard it down in his throat but didn't see anything in his face that resembled mirth. He wore a sport coat over a turtleneck shirt and smoked a panatela. Jack checked out the shoes and haircut. He admitted left and right he was still learning how to live.

"I am telling my lawyer to settle eight cents on the dollar."

"Jack, they will tell you."

"I know."

"This is not a proposal they are drooling to accept."

"So I have to resolve in my own mind."

"You have to resolve in your own mind who you want to owe this money to. It is not found money. I have structured a deal here that I am not looking to pull in five points a week like the neighborhood loanshark. We are talking about a forty-thousand-dollar loan. We are speaking in a range of one thousand dollars a week vigorish."

"Which is ninety-two thousand total after one year."

"Or you keep paying the vig."

"Till my balls drop off."

"This is correct, Jack."

"Just to say. What if I can't pay one week?"

"One week, they will let it ride. They don't want to pop you on the head, Jack. They let it ride."

"Two, three weeks."

"The procedure you would do here is take out a second loan. This is not a good idea because you would pay the vig on one amount while they are actually giving you a lesser amount. Frankly, do you want my advice?"

"What?"

"Frankly, don't take the loan. You can't make a vig like that with your kind of operation that you're running here. You will fall deep into the pit."

"It's my pit, Jack."

"It's your pit but it's not your money."

"What happens, just saying, if I miss five weeks, six weeks?"

"If you are bled totally dry and white, they will simply stop the clock. Which is, pay the principal, forget the interest. In other words this fellow is known to us and we will settle for a piece of his business plus the original sum. They don't want to blow up the building."

"But they will grab my business."

"This is the ballfield you're playing on."

"What if I can't pay the principal?"

"Jack, this is what I'm telling you. I'm saying explore other avenues."

"A bank would make a credit check. They won't give me ten cents."

"Think of friends, relatives. Take a partner into the business."

"I can't work with other people. I already have backers. My sister manages the Vegas for me. We fight all the time."

"You strike me a little unreasonable. You have to grasp a major point. You are not outfit, Jack. Understand connected."

The drums were going out front.

"All right. Say this. I am willing to go for five hundred a week interest over one year when the convention business will pick up by then."

"I structured a serious deal here."

"Jack, take it to them and tell them. Mention I talk to Tony Push all the time. He has the reputation he's very close to Carmine Latta."

"Carmine is not in loanshark in a big way."

"I am only saying make a statement that I am known to Tony Astorina."

Karlinsky looked at him. A silent countdown. Then he said he would do whatever Jack asked. He had a deep, smooth and reasonable voice, gone hollow now, and a house with a giant searchlight, and a perfect turquoise pool, and four daughters and a son, and Jack Ruby wondered if this is what it takes to look invincible.

They shook hands in the doorway and then the older man stepped back into the office, briefly, as if he had a happy secret to reveal.

"The jacket is mohair. Look."

Then they walked to the head of the narrow stairway that led down to the street. They shook hands again. The saxophone was blatting. Jack took a Preludin with a glass of water at the bar for a favorable future outlook. Then he walked among the tables to mingle with the crowd. What is the point of running a club if you can't do that?

Dinner at home was a quiet affair with harpsichord concertos on the stereo and conversation coming in small runs. Beryl watched her husband raise the wineglass to his lips. Larry didn't drink his wine. He chewed it. To savor the tonality-the dryness, or the wetness. This is how we build a civilization, he liked to say. We chew our wine.

"You don't look happy," she said. "You haven't looked happy in a while. I want you to feel good again. Say something funny."

"You're the funny one."

"I am always the funny one, the strange one, the tiny one. I want you to assume one of these thankless roles."

They ate in silence for some moments.

"Remember the missile flap?" he said. "It's about ten months now since U-2 planes photographed offensive missiles in Cuba. Guess what? They've come up with something new."

"Do I want to know what it is?"

"A Soviet surveying team has found a major oil field. And it's precisely the area where I'd arranged drilling contracts. I saw the photos last week and they were so detailed I could recognize the terrain. I was there. I stood right there. I visited the fields. We did mineral surveys. There was serious money behind us."

"Your oil. Your field."

"Ours. And better ours than the goddamn Russians. You know what they'll do to that island. Drain the living blood out of it."

"I don't doubt it. But it's hard sometimes to live with a man who never, never, never lets go."

"This is damn right I don't let go."

They let it drop for a while. She got up and turned over the record. It was raining hard and she caught a glimpse of someone running in the street.

"Let me explain about obsessions," he said.

"Oh yes please."

"I take a sweeping view of the subject."

"God yes."

"It's the job of an intelligence service to resolve a nation's obsessions. Cuba is a fixed idea. It is prickly in a way Russia is not. More unresolved. More damaging to the psyche. And this is our job, to remove the psychic threat, to learn so much about Castro, decipher his intentions, undermine his institutions to such a degree that he loses the power to shape the way we think, to shape the way we sleep at night."

"Maybe what I don't understand is why Cuba. Do I know the first thing about this island? Is it West Indian, is it Spanish, is it white, is it black, is it mulatto, is it Latin American, is it Creole, is it Chinese? Why do we think it belongs to us?"

"It's not a question of belongs to us. It's a question of something working beautifully, of private investment being given the chance to help a country rise in the world, and Cuba was rising in distribution, manufacturing, literacy, social services, and any high-school student can make a solid case that the flaws and excesses of the Batista regime could have been contained without a revolution and certainly without a march into the communist camp."

They fell silent again. The power of his feelings made her want to pause. There weren't many things he believed in strongly. She felt a shrinking in herself, the old pathetic readiness to give in quietly. But what was there to fight about? She didn't know the subject. She saw the world in news clippings and picture captions, the world becoming bizarre, the world it is best to see in one-column strips that you send to friends. Refuge only in irony. If her aim was to go unnoticed, then why fight?

"Things are looking better in some areas," he said. "There are things I'm not unhappy about at all. I am making something of a professional comeback. There is, talk of moving me to the Office of Finance. There is a field unit in Buenos Aires. This is not to be discussed, of course. I'll work in money markets, making sure we have foreign currencies on hand for certain operations."

"Is this a plum, Buenos Aires?"

"I don't know where it stands in the fruit-and-vegetable kingdom. It is just goddamn good of them to give me this chance. The Agency understands. It's amazing really how deeply they understand. This is why some of us see the Agency in a way that has nothing to do with jobs or institutions or governments. We are goddamn grateful for their understanding and trust. The Agency is always willing to consider a man in a new light. This is the nature of the business. There are shadows, there are new lights. The deeper the ambiguity, the more we believe, the more we trust, the more we band together."

It was remarkable how often he talked to her about these things. The Agency was the one subject in his life that could never be exhausted. Central Intelligence. Beryl saw it as the best organized church in the Christian world, a mission to collect and store everything that everyone has ever said and then reduce it to a microdot and call it God. She needed to live in small dusty rooms, layered safely in, out of the reach of dizzying things, of heat and light and strange spaces, and Larry needed the great sheltering nave of the Agency. He believed that nothing can be finally known that involves human motive and need. There is always another level, another secret, a way in which the heart breeds a deception so mysterious and complex it can only be taken for a deeper kind of truth.

There were anemones in a bud vase on the table. The phone rang and Beryl went to her desk in the living room to answer. It was a man named Thomas Stainback. She knew from the tone of voice that it was a call Larry would take upstairs. She simply stood in the doorway. When he saw her, he got up from the table. She waited for him to climb the stairs to the guest room and pick up the phone and then she put the receiver down softly and went in to drink her coffee.

Parmenter said, "I'm here," and waited for Everett to ask the first question on the list.

"What do we know about schedule?"

"It looks like mid-November."

"That gives us time. I'm anxious to hear what Mackey is doing."

"He knows we've got Miami. I haven't told him when."

"Tell him right away."

"I can't find him," Parmenter said.

A pause on the other end.

"Is he reassigned?"

"I did some very delicate checking. He's not at the Farm or anywhere else he might logically be. There is no trace. It's beginning to look like he just submerged for a time."

"It's a reassignment," Everett said,

"I looked into it, Win. I was extremely goddamn thorough.

He is not in a cover situation. He is supposed to be training JOTs and he isn't."

"Does it mean he's out? We can't operate without Mackey."

"He's setting up. That's all. He'll get in touch."

"He can't just walk away."

"He'll get in touch. You know the man is solid."

"I've had a foreboding," Everett said.

"He's setting up. I'll get in my car one morning and find him sitting there. He wants this to happen as much as we do."

"I've had a feeling these past weeks that something isn't right."

"Everything is right. The city, the time, the preparations. The man is absolutely solid."

"I believe in the power of premonitions."

Larry put down the phone. Downstairs he found Beryl at the table with the newspaper, her coffee and a pair of scissors. Pages were spread over the wineglasses and dinner plates.

He'd stopped commenting on this oddness of hers. She said the news clippings she sent to friends were a perfectly reasonable way to correspond. There were a thousand things to clip and they all said something about the way she felt. He watched her read and cut. She wore half-glasses and worked the scissors grimly. She believed these were personal forms of expression. She believed no message she could send a friend was more intimate and telling than a story in the paper about a violent act, a crazed man, a bombed Negro home, a Buddhist monk who sets himself on fire. Because these are the things that tell us how we live.

Baby LeGrand stood at the end of the runway, knees bent, hands locked behind her neck, the drummer going boom to the jolt of her pelvis, and she scanned the club meantime, making out shapes beneath the tinted lights, whole lives that she could diagram in seconds, oh sailors and college boys, just the usual, plus a waitress taking setups to the hard drinkers, a kid in a skimpy outfit that makes her titties bulge. She ran a sash between her legs and waved it slow-motion through the baby spot. She eyed the table of off-duty cops drinking their cut-rate beer. She saw the odd-job boy taking Pola-roids of the customers which Jack will present as gifts. These are men in suit and tie, on business in the city, and men who come with dates to do the twist between sets. Brenda knows the twist crowd. She likes the younger cops if they are blue-eyed. She knows the smallest tomato stain on the narrowest tie because the only food is pizza from up the street, which somebody sticks in the warmer. Meantime the drummer's picking up the beat and a sailor says go go go. She drags the sash through the smoke and dust, scans the bar for the lowlife types that Jack drags in off the street, sad sacks and drifters he feels sorry for. And there is the gambling element or whatever they are, the vending-machine and Sicilian element, men of sharp practices, standing frozen at the back of the club. It's the whole Carousel in a five-second glimpse, plus the tourists from Topeka. They are saying go go go. They are crying for a garment. They want the piece of silk that passed between her legs. They are here to bathe in the flesh of the sleepwalking girl, the girl who wakes up naked in a throbbing crowd. This is how it always seems to Baby L. She is having a private fit in the middle of the night, like she is demonized, and wakes up naked in a different dream, where strange men are clutching at her body. Does anybody here know the stupid truth? She wants to be a real-estate agent who drives people around in a station wagon that is painted like wood. An award-winning realtor in a fern-green suit. But she is humping a spotlight in front of a crowd, flinging sweat from her belly and thighs, and the tassels on her pasties are swishing to the beat.

She did her trademark twirl of the breasts, one breast spinning clockwise, the other counter, and quickly disappeared.

Then she showered and wrapped herself in a towel and sat in the dressing room, smoking. This was the time when a cigarette was the purest pleasure known.

Lynette was in street clothes sitting at the next mirror. She had her head in a copy of Look.

"If I had the slightest sense," Brenda told her, "I'd get what I'm owed and just scram. I have a seven-year old and a four-year old and I am half the time too tired to say hello."

Lynette turned a page. She said, "I will tell you this Bobby Kennedy is right up my alley. Bobby is the one who could make me crazy. He has got this little hard gleam. Ten minutes with Bobby, I am out of my head."

"He doesn't do a thing for me."

"He could drive me into wah wah land."

"Where is that, Lynette?"

"He has got this little meanness in the eye but he doesn't really know it like?"

"I think he knows it," Brenda said. "Give me his brother any day. Jack would be better in bed. I like a lover with some shoulder to him. I stay away from these rabbity types."

"Bobby's an athalete."

"The President is mature to handle a woman like us. Not that I'm ready to settle down with the man."

"You need one of those bouffant hairdos like Jackie."

"I need more than that."

"You got the knockers, Brenda."

"Tit tit tit. This is my Achilles heel you're pointing out. Too much talent up front. It means a bunch of trouble."

"What's he do anyway, the Attorney General?"

"Are you kidding? He's the top cop."

"Top cop or top cock?"

"Same difference," Brenda said.

There was some kind of commotion out front. They could hear a few voices and a glass or bottle breaking. Lynette turned a page.

"Do you believe what they say about tell a person exactly when you were born, to the hour and the minute, and they can figure out everything about you?"

"I smell a fish, to quote a maxim," Brenda said.

The disturbance, whatever it was, grew louder. You feel these things in the walls. Brenda put on her robe and went to the end of the hall and looked out. Between the bar and the entranceway there was a flurry of bodies and arms, maybe four guys including Jack who were physically propelling a man who looked like he combed his hair with firecrackers. It now developed that Jack wanted to throw the man down the stairs. The others were trying to prevent this as extreme. Brenda waited until the odd-job boy lost his place in the moving knot of people and came off to the side, shaking a hand that may have been bitten.

"What is it?" Brenda said.

"This guy like grab-assed one of the waitresses. You know, felt her going by."

"Do we kill people for this?"

"You know Jack when it comes to abusing the girls. He about flipped sky-high."

Jack wrestled the man away from the others and the two of them went quick-walking down the narrow stairs, actually out of control, banging off the handrail, almost pitching forward to the street.

The bar crowd went after, hurrying down single-file and loud. Brenda took a deep drag on the cigarette and went back to finish her talk.

Out on the street Jack knocked the guy down. He went after him with his feet, kicking in a fastidious way as if trying to shake dog matter off his shoe. The guy skittered away and ran down the street, breaking through a line of people in front of the club next door, where an amateur strip night was going on. Jack went after him, followed by five or six others from the Carousel. The man was much faster but turned halfway down the block and was ready to fight. It made no sense to anyone and only got Jack madder. Jack charged into him swinging. The sheer bulk and force of the attack knocked the guy down. Jack kicked at him twice and the guy grabbed Jack's ankle and twisted him down to the pavement in slow motion. Then he started crawling toward a parking sign. Jack was on his knees and grabbed the guy's leg to keep him from reaching the signpost. Someone from the bar crowd tried to break Jack's grip, speaking soothingly to Jack. The guy kept struggling toward the sign. This was the clear meaning of what was going on. If he could only reach the sign. Two men from the bar crowd broke the fighters apart but Jack got in two kicks at the guy's ribs. The guy stood up, eyes averted. His pants were somehow unbuckled. Jack punched him hard in the head over the shoulders of the men between them and the guy walked out in the middle of the street and stood there, making the cars go around him. He fixed his clothes. He stood out there in traffic. He would not look at the men on the sidewalk, their chests pumping from the run and scuffle.

Jack went back down the street. When he reached the line of people outside the other club, he started shaking hands and giving out cards with the Carousel name and hours. Then he got into his white Olds and drove off to clear his head.

Jack's car was a movable slum. His dogs had chewed up the seat covers and mats. They'd eaten the stuffing inside the rear seat, exposing the springs. There were paw marks on the windows. There were eight empty liquor cartons tilted and wedged across the rear seat. He had jars of diet food rolling across the floor when he stopped or turned. He had a couple of hundred dollars on top of the dashboard, folded in butcher wrap stained with lamb-chop blood. There were extra Preludins in the glove compartment plus a bathing cap, a number of unpaid tickets, a number of address books, some loose condoms, a set of brass knuckles and a TV Guide.

He tuned in KLIF, looking for a disc jockey called the Weird Beard. He needed a familiar voice to calm him down.

He drove around downtown Dallas. It happens a few times where I have to pummel one of these guys who causes trouble in the club. Once they get you cowered to that extent, you are physically doomed. He felt his jacket for the. 38, which was tucked into a Merchants State Bank moneybag along with three thousand dollars in recent receipts tightly rolled in pink rubber bands.

It was the talk with Jack Karlinsky that probably got him inflamed with the guy who put his hand on what's-her-name. He had to get the money. He had no other source. There were debts and harassments in every direction. Even with forty thousand dollars in his hands tomorrow, the problems were not solved. He had to get the business built up. He had this union thing with the girls. He had an extortionist of long standing on the West Coast who'd already turned down his request for a loan and now Karlinsky was leaning the same way.

So the jacket is mohair. You should have bought two. One to shit on; one to cover it up.

He had a deal going where you put a token in a machine and it washes your car. His brother Sam sold one of his two washaterias and was looking with interest at this machine. It would never happen but it could. He'd tried different things with different brothers, from selling salt and pepper shakers to nice-looking busts of FDR. He sold costume jewelry, sewing machine attachments and cures for arthritis from Chicago to San Francisco.

Thirty years with a fishbone in her throat.

Weird Beard said, "I know what you think. You think I'm making it up. I'm not making it up. If it gets from me to you, it's true. We are for real, kids. And this is the question I want to leave with you tonight. Who is for real and who is sent to take notes? You're out there in the depths of the night, listening in secret, and the reason you're listening in secret is because you don't know who to trust except me. We're the only ones who aren't them. This narrow little radio band is a route to the troot. I'm not making it up. There are only two things in the world. Things that are true. And things that are truer than true. We need this little private alley where we can meet. Because this is Big D, which stands for Don't be Dissimilar. Am I coming in all right? Is my signal clear? We're the sneaky little secret they're trying to uncover. Do you think I'm making it up? I'm not making it up. Weird Beard says, Eat your cereal with a fork. Do your homework in the dark. And trust your radio before you trust your mother."

Jack had no idea what the guy was saying. He squeezed a

Preludin down his throat. It takes away your procrastination about what you want to do next.

He drove to the Ritz Delicatessen and parked outside. He opened the trunk and threw in the moneybag with the gun and heavy cash so he wouldn't forget to do it later. The trunk was a little overflowing with barbells, weights, a summer suit, a can of paint, a roll of toilet paper, dog toys and dog biscuits, a holster for his gun, a golf shoe with a dollar bill in it and about a hundred glossies of Randi Ryder that he'd brought back from New Orleans. You might as well call it my life because it's not any neater at home.

He walked into the Ritz and ordered everything with extra mustard and extra mayonnaise, a dozen sandwiches. Roast beef, corned beef, sliced turkey, tongue, dill pickles, cole slaw, relish, potato salad, black-cherry soda, ginger ale, etc. He told the man to give these sandwiches special handling because they were going to police headquarters.

He got back in the car. These cops of ours deserve the best because they put their lives on the line every time they walk out the door. This is a homicidal town. Bam. He had to remember to go back to the club later to get his dachshund Sheba and clear the register and grab his hat. He didn't like being without his hat because the balding head is here for all to see. He took scalp treatments that he felt were doing some good although he doubted it.

He drove to the Police and Courts Building, feeling a sharp sting in his left knee and hiking up his pants leg as he drove. A nice ripe gash. A street fight takes up your attention to the point where you don't know you're bleeding for an hour. He drove with his left pants leg raised above the knee. No responsible party would finance him because he gave away drinks to nobodies and brought in people and dogs off the street. He got out of the car, lowered his pants leg and went into the old part of the building, walking between the tall columns.

He took the elevator to three, holding the carton with the food and drinks, thinking that if he doesn't do something soon he will be running a business out of his pants pockets forever, if they let him run it at all, if they don't turn him into a nothing person completely. He got off the elevator and went down the corridor to the juvenile bureau. He felt blood seeping into his shoe. But just seeing these men in uniform, clean shaven, he wanted to say it is the proudest feeling of my life being a friend of the police in the most pro-American city anywhere in the world.

His rabbi told him many times, "Don't be so emotional."

In Dallas

Lee Oswald sat in Sleight's Speed Wash at midnight, waiting for his clothes to dry and reading H. G. Wells. One other customer was in the place, an obese and scary-looking man who wore slippers cut open near the front to give his swollen feet some room. The air had a sour reek. Lee was slumped over volume one of The Outline of History, biting the skin of his thumb, the book spread open in his lap.

He was living apart, off and on, from Marina and Baby June.

The night attendant came around, a lanky Negro saying in a kind of singsong, "Closing time, closing time, y'all go home." He carried somebody's sheets in a red mesh basket.

The other customer got up and went to a dryer to collect his things. Lee sat reading, folded over the book, chewing a knuckle now. The customer hobbled out.

About three minutes passed. The dryer with Lee's clothes stopped running. He sat with his head in the book. He knew the attendant was shooting him a very level look from fifteen feet. He turned a page and read toward the end of the chapter, which was at the bottom of the facing page. He read slowly, concentrating hard to get the meaning, the small raw truth inside those syllables.

"Hey, Jim. You are wearing me thin, okay."

The Greeks and the Persians. He looked up. The attendant had a droopy lower lip, a rust-tone complexion with a spatter of freckles across the cheekbones, those dangling hands, and Lee thought Japan before he was able to supply a name or set of circumstances. In an instant he knew. This was Bobby Dupard, his cellmate in the brig in Atsugi.

It took him a while to get Dupard to remember who he was. Bobby stared hard, taking in Oswald's hair, receding on the left side, where the part was; taking in the haggard look, the three-day stubble, the shirt with a popped seam near the collar; taking in a lot actually, four years plus of manhood and exile and hard times. Ozzie the Rabbit. Remembrance entered Dupard's face in a complicated way.

"What it is, I don't look real close at whites no more. So it takes me a while to pin down the individual I'm basically talking to."

They didn't talk about Japan. They talked about West Dallas, where Bobby lived with his sister and her three small kids in a project of hundreds of buildings stretched in barracks formation between the Trinity River and Singleton Boulevard. They called it a housing park. Fenced in, isolated from the city, with ripped-out plumbing set on the mud lawns. Bobby worked at the speed wash from seven to midnight six days a week. Twice a week he took a course in mechanical drawing at Crozier Technical High School downtown. Sometimes he worked a noon-to-four shift as a mixer in a bakery, a fill-in for the sick and the missing. He went home in clothes dusted white. His mother was dead now. His father lived in another part of the project. Bobby wasn't sure where. From the 52 bus he saw his old man all the time sitting in front of an auto-wrecker service sipping malt liquor from a can. Big Cat brand. Bobby knew his father would not recognize him if he walked over and said hello. His father would talk to him the same way he talked to everyone, explaining his conversations with the Lord.

That was West Dallas. Smoke from the lead smelter. Staccato lives.

Bobby had a trace of wispy chin hair now. His eyes had lost their quicksilver fear. He looked at Lee from an angle, cool and fixed, with a slow nod of the head to measure remarks.

Lee explained that he was living underground. He'd left his last job without a word. He'd disappeared from his last address. He had a post-office box. His brother didn't know what part of Dallas he was in. His mother thought he was still in Fort Worth. His wife was living with friends of hers due to misunderstandings. He was working for a graphic-arts firm. He didn't explain the occasional classified nature of the work. He said nothing about Marion Col-lings. Collings, through George de Mohrenschildt, was pressing him for details of his contacts with the security apparatus in the USSR. He was avoiding Collings. He was avoiding the postal authorities. He was hiding from the Feebees. He was using false addresses on every form he filled out. He was making posters after hours on the job and sending them to the Socialist Workers Party. He had a spy camera stashed in a seabag at the bottom of his closet.

He didn't explain about Marina and how much he missed her and needed her and how it made him angry, knowing this, trying to fight this off, another sneaking awareness he could not fight off.

Forget Japan. Bobby talked about the South, about the police dogs and fire-bombings, the integration of Ole Miss. It was a daily event just about, the TV footage of segregationist rage, crowds of Negro marchers bending to the charge of riot police, toppled in sudden clusters. Demonstrators smashed in the face, hit with rocks. Someone falls, those white boys move in kicking. Cops gripping those billy clubs, one hand at each end, twisting hard. Look at their eyes. Look at those firemen come jumping off the trucks. They turn on those hoses and it's like a wrath from out of hell that sends everybody spinning.

All over the project there were makeshift barbecue pits, fifty-five-gallon oil drums cut in half horizontally and set belly-down on metal legs-smoke rising, hoses shooting water on TV. The clothes tumbled in a dozen Loadstar dryers.

Bobby said, "I believe the whole system works to make the black man humble down. Follow the penny hustle, drink the cheap wine. This is what they got planned out for us. I'll tell you where I'm at, Ozzie. When I read crime news in the paper, I look at the names to figure out was the perpetrator black or white. Some names just black. I check them over close. I say, Go brother. Say, Do it to them. Because what edge do we have asides hating?"

He said, "I'm not looking to wear the white man out with my ability to suffer."

He said, "I'm trying to learn a trade to keep me sane."

They stayed in the speed wash talking until 2:00 a.m. Two nights later they talked again while Bobby loaded machines and folded clothes for the drop-off customers. The next day Lee punched out a little early and met Bobby downtown outside his drafting class and they took a bus to the Oak Cliff section, where the speed wash was located and where Lee was living in an area of rooming houses and rusted car hulks sitting in long weeds. They shared a box of donuts and talked some more. Later that night Lee walked six blocks to the speed wash from his flat on Elsbeth Street and they talked until closing time, talked politics and race and Cuba while the machines turned and the night stragglers threw fistfuls of clothes into the churning soap.

Next day they had an idea. Let's put a bullet in General Walker's head.

Marina stood arm-rocking little June. He'd cleaned the place for her return. He was happy to see her. He took the baby and spoke his fake Japanese, wagging his head. It made them all laugh.

He began to study bus schedules. The Preston Hollow bus, the 36, stopped a block and a half from the general's house. He walked past the house, which was set back from the street and very near to Turtle Creek, a lushness of cottonwoods and elms, a deep quiet. Just walking down the street made him feel untouchable. He memorized the license-plate number of a car at the head of the driveway and wrote it in his notebook. He kept a notebook of travel times, distances and other observations.

She asked him if he would teach her English now.

He sent $29.95 to Seaport Traders for a 38-caliber revolver with a shortened barrel. It was made by Smith amp; Wesson and known as the two-inch Commando. He used the name A. J. Hidell on the order form and entered his address as Box 2915, Dallas, Texas.

The next day he went to typing class. It was his first day there and he sat in the last row, talked to no one, studied the keyboard on his machine. It was like Chinese. He inserted paper, placed his fingers on the keys, trying to understand why the letters were positioned the way they were. It was a picture of his humiliation. Nine dollars to enroll. George had told him if he could type he'd get a better job someday.

It was the very end of January in '63.

He stood in the darkroom with another trainee, Dale Fitzke, a cripple. Dale wore a high shoe. He walked in a kind of tick-tock motion and had a soft clean face, incredibly smooth, that made him look about twelve years old.

They stood shoulder to shoulder by the developing trays. People moved in and out, squeezing behind them. There were dim red lights that made the room look radioactive.

"What kind of person are you?" Dale said. "I am sort of weird in my family. They have finally stopped expecting great things."

"What do they expect?"

"They are holding their breath, sexually. What do you like best about the darkroom? It's the way my room used to look when I had a fever. Childhood fevers were the best times. I had tremendous high fevers. What kind of feeling do you get about this company?"

"I like it here. The work is interesting by comparison to some."

"Because I get the feeling these various and sundry tasks are not the only things going on around here. For example. Do you want to hear an example?"

"Like what?" Lee said.

"They told me to stay away from the worktables in the typesetting area. Not allowed. No lookee."

"You can look. No one will stop you. I look all the time."

"So do I," Dale said with a jump in his voice. "I'll tell you what I see if you tell me what you see."

"They have lists of names for the Army Map Service."

"What kinds of names?"

"Place names."

"That's what I see too. They set the names in type on three-inch strips of paper."

"Some of the names are in Cyrillic letters. Which I know in Russian. For maps of Soviet targets."

They were both whispering.

"I'll tell you what I overheard," Dale said, "if you promise not to tell anyone. The maps are made from photographs. The photographs are the really secret things. They come from U-2s."

The light was an eerie neon rouge.

"Isn't that a neat thing to know? I love being in a position where I can exchange fascinating stuff with someone. Like you tell me, I tell you. U-2s. When I first heard this stuff, around Eisenhower, I thought they were saying you-toos, like there's me-too and you-too."

It was a Saturday and they were getting time and a half. Lee put in for Saturdays whenever possible because he knew this job was doomed the minute Marion Collings gave the word.

"Do you like the people here?" Dale said. "I saw you with that Russian magazine you were reading. There's been a little comment. The people here are friendly up to a point. Not that it matters to me, what anyone reads. Do you remember what it was like, being under the blankets, sweating, as a kid? A fever is a secret thing. It's like falling down a hole where no one can follow but there's no terror or pain because you don't even feel like yourself. I love huddling in sweat."

"I had an ear operation when I was little. I still remember the dreams after they put on the mask."

"I had four operations! I loved going under!"

Dale was gesturing in the glow, with fluid dripping off his hands into the tray.

"What kind of mind do you have, Lee? One day I heard my mother say, 'He'll never be brilliant, Tom.' She was talking to Tom, my brother. I have used that sentence at dinner a hundred thousand times."

The mysterious U-2. It followed him from Japan to Russia and now it was here in Dallas. He remembered how it came to earth, sweet-falling, almost feathery, dependent on winds, sailing on winds. That was how it seemed. And the pilot's voice coming down to them in fragments, with the growl and fuzz of a blown speaker. He heard that voice sometimes on the edge of a shaky sleep.

Dale Fitzke said, "I'll listen for things, you listen for things. Then we'll meet here and talk some more."

His typing class was at Crozier, the same school where Dupard was taking a course, and they met in an empty classroom whenever they could work out the timing. They talked strategy and philosophy, waiting for the gun to arrive in the mail.

Bobby said, "You think it's some coincidence this Walker come to live in Dallas? Get off, man. He is here because the fury and the hate is here. This is the city he made up in his mind."

"Did you see today's paper? He's going out of town on a speaking tour. Twenty-nine cities. He won't be back till April."

"What's he doing, the kill-a-nigger tour?"

"Operation Midnight Ride. The dangers of communism here and abroad. It's going to be pure Cuba. He loves to hit at Cuba. If we have to wait till April, let's make it worthwhile. We get him on the seventeenth. The second anniversary of the Bay of Pigs."

"Who is the shooter?"

"I am," Oswald said.

"You sure about that."

"I am the one that does it."

"If it's the seventeenth, I have to see if there's class."

"What do you mean?"

"It's a question do I want to cut class."

"I will need an accomplice, Bobby. This is not just walk in and shoot him. The house is located in such a way. There's an alley. We may need a car."

"I can get a car. I can always borrow a car. I don't know about dependable running. Just so we put him on the ground. That man got to taste some blood."

"They have a phrase they use in Russian for assassinations that involve blood being spilled. Mokrie dela. Which is wet affairs. Like the ice pick they used on Trotsky."

"Just so we do it to him," Bobby said.

They moved to Neely Street, nearby, another furnished apartment, two rooms in a frame house with a concrete porch and a balcony with sagging posts. They could put out flowerpots and pretend it's Minsk. There was a small additional room, the size of a walk-in closet, where Lee could work on his notebook and keep his correspondence and other writings.

They moved their belongings in Junie's stroller. They made six or seven trips, dishes, baby things, letters from Russia. Lee made the last trip alone, pushing the stroller west on Neely wearing most of the clothes he owned, to save another trip.

The little room could be entered from the living room and from the staircase outside their flat. Both doors could be locked from inside. It was like an airtight compartment, part of the building but also separate from it. He called the room his study. He squeezed a lamp table and chair in there and set to work on his notes for the death of the general.

He began taking photographs of Walker's house. He had a box camera he carried in a paper bag on the bus back and forth. He photographed the lattice fence behind the house, the alleyway that extended from the parking lot of the Mormon church to Avondale Street. He took some pictures of the railroad tracks where he could hide the gun if necessary.

There is a world inside the world.

He made detailed notes on the location of windows at the rear of the house. He studied maps of Dallas. He put the finishing touches on the false documents he'd made after hours at work. When the Hidell gun arrived at the post office, he'd have Hidell identification to claim the package. He did the typing for the documents on his machine at school.

He felt good about having Dupard behind him. Downtrodden. Dupard was the force of history, the show of a solid front against the far-right surge.

He used Hidell again, March 12, sending a money order for $21.45 to Klein's Sporting Goods in Chicago for a 6.5-millimeter Italian military rifle, the Mannlicher-Carcano, equipped with a four-power scope.

The rain fell on empty streets.

What a sense of destiny he had, locked in the miniature room, creating a design, a network of connections. It was a second existence, the private world floating out to three dimensions.

He went to a gun shop and bought an ammunition clip that would fit the Mannlicher, so he could fire up to seven rounds before reloading.

Rain-slick streets. He walked to the speed wash and talked excitedly with Dupard about the logic of a long-range shot, given the layout of the house and grounds. Then he let himself back into the study and no one even knew he'd been gone.

He stood barefoot in the living room in his pajamas, working the bolt. He jerked the handle, brought the bolt rearward, then drove it forward, jerking the handle down. He turned up the handle, drew the bolt back, drove it forward, jerking the handle down. He turned toward the mirror over the sofa. He jerked the bolt handle, drew the bolt back, then drove it forward, jerking the handle down. Marina was out at the store. Junie sat in the high chair near the window, rolling a marble back and forth across the tray.

There was a yard behind the house, a small dirt enclosure with a couple of forsythia shrubs. A clothesline ran parallel to the back fence and Marina stood there hanging diapers. The ground-floor tenants were away.

Ten minutes passed. Lee came down the exterior wooden steps. He carried the rifle in one hand, a couple of magazines in the other. He wore a black pullover shirt, short-sleeve, and a pair of dark chinos. The revolver was snug on his hip.

Marina watched him set the rifle against the stairway and climb back up. He returned seconds later with his box camera, an Imperial Reflex he'd bought cheap in Japan.

"Why do you want to do this?" she said. "If we are seen by a neighbor."

"It's for Junie, to remember me by."

"Does she want her father in a picture with guns? I don't know how to take a picture."

"You hold the camera at your waist."

"I've never taken a picture in my life."

"No matter what. I want you to keep a print for my little girl."

"Dressed all black. It's foolish, Lee. Who are you hunting with that gun? The forces of evil? I want to laugh. It's stupid. It impresses no one. It's pure and simple show."

He posed in a corner of the yard, the rifle in his right hand, muzzle up, butt end pressing on his waist, just inches from the bolstered. 38. The magazines, the Militant and the Worker, were in his left hand, fanned like playing cards.

She snapped the shutter,

He posed one more time, the rifle in his left hand now, the magazines held under his chin with the word Militant visible above the fold, his shadow trailing to the wooden gate and his thin smile carried forward by light and time into the frame of official memory.

Lee stood in a corner of the Gulf station on North Beckley, eight-thirty sharp, the stink of gasoline hanging low in the night. It was ninety-nine degrees. It was record-breaking heat for this date. He had a military slicker draped over his left shoulder and held a half-finished Coke in his right hand, drawn from the machine nearby, just as a reason to be here.

He kept his eye on a tan Ford turning slowly into the station and coming to a stop near the service area. It looked like a 1950 model, thereabouts. He watched Dupard get out and stand by the open door, peering. Bobby wore light-blue coveralls and a little round cap, with the words American Bakery embroidered across his shirtfront and a heavy dusting of flour on his face and clothes, whiting his eyebrows and the backs of his hands.

Lee walked toward the car, his left arm stiff beneath the slicker, the rifle held parallel to his body with the butt wedged in his armpit. They did not speak until the car was on the street, headed north, the rifle on the floor behind the seat.

"But how come, Bobby?"

"What?"

"You're in work clothes."

"I had a chance to make some overtime, which I'm forced to accept it if I'm not doing no laundry tonight."

"Am I keeping you from the laundry? Is that what this is all about?"

"I'm just saying. The chance came up. I squeezed in four extra hours."

"You can be identified. This is not a night you want to stand out."

"Nobody sees shit. We go in quick and dark. Where's the handgun?"

Lee took the. 38 out of his belt and put it on the seat between them.

"Did you get the bullets?" he said.

"Totally," Dupard said. "I got fifteen bullets I bought right off the street from some school kid. They're like two different-make bullets but they're.38 specials, so I don't foresee no problem."

"I don't foresee using them. It's just in case."

At the first red light Bobby swung out the cylinder of the gun and took six cartridges from the breast pocket of his uniform. He inserted them in the chambers.

"I'll tell you a good sign," Lee said. "I order the handgun in January, I order the rifle in March. Both guns arrive the same day. My wife would say it's fate."

"What did you tell her about tonight?"

"She thinks I'm at typing class. I dropped out of typing class two weeks ago. I got fired from my job last Saturday was my last day."

"I dread getting fired, man."

"They said my work wasn't exact. It had to happen. Just like tonight has to happen. They'll know about this in Havana. Before midnight the news will reach Fidel."

They crossed the Trinity River on the Commerce Street viaduct.

"What I seen, that rifle looks like war surplus. How do you know it shoots?"

"I wrapped it in my raincoat and took it on the Love Field bus. Then I went down to the river bottom out west of the freeway where there's an area that people test-fire their guns. It's like a war in ordinary daylight."

"That sling, that strap, like it comes off a tenor sax."

"It fits all right. Everything works. Everything fits. I planned this thing with care. I had to go to six gun shops before I found ammo for this type carbine."

"It's bearing on my mind that the general has to die."

"I hit him the first shot," Lee said softly.

"I need to stop feeling bad all the time."

"It's a clear shot to every window."

"I want him on the ground."

"Less than forty yards," Lee said.

"For Mississippi, for John Birch, for the KKK, for every fucking thing."

Bobby looked a little smoky-eyed. They were quiet for a while. The heat came washing through the windows. They headed up Stemmons to Oak Lawn Avenue.

Lee said, "We turn left off Avondale into an alley that runs about two hundred and fifty feet to a church parking lot. We go slow. I get out near the end of the alley. You keep going and turn right into the church driveway. There'll be a service in progress. You're like a latecoming Mormon. You stop and wait. Cut your lights. I aim the rifle through the lattice fence at the back of Walker's house. I have a clear line of fire. You sit and wait. I see a picture of him now. He likes a well-lighted house. He sits in his study at night."

He had a thirty-nine-week subscription to Time. He imagined the backyard photograph in Time. The Castro partisan with his guns and subversive journals. He imagined the cover of Time, a picture seen across the socialist world. The man who shot the fascist general. A friend of the revolution.

"They'll appreciate in Havana that we did it April seventeen," Lee said. "Two years to the day. The invasion was the thing that produced a General Walker, more than any other event."

They turned onto Avondale. He realized Bobby was staring, eyebrows white with flour.

"Seventeen. What seventeen?" Dupard said.

"It's Wednesday, isn't it?"

"This here is April ten."

Ted Walker was at the desk in his office, a fifty-three-year-old bachelor who looks like anybody's next-door neighbor, tallish, with jutting brows, flesh going a little slack in the jaw and neck, body slightly stooped, the neighbor who is stern with children, doing his taxes now.

It is the biggest joke in America. General Walker does his taxes.

He was used to talking about himself in the third person. He talked to the press about the Walker case, the attempts to silence Walker. It is only natural, his sense of a public self, when you consider the close and pulsating attention he received in the local press where he ran neck and neck last October with the Cuban missile crisis. It was President Jack who said about the Morning News, "I'm sure the people of Dallas are glad when afternoon rolls around."

The aging ladies love their Ted. They are the last true believers. He mutters the poem of their missing lives.

A cigarette burned in the ashtray. He sat with his back to the window, totaling figures on a scratch pad, taxes, doing his taxes, like any fool and dupe of the Real Control Apparatus. Letters from the true believers were stacked in a basket to his right. The Christian Crusade women, the John Birch men, the semiretired, the wrathful, the betrayed, the ones who keep coming up empty. They had intimate knowledge of the Control Apparatus. It wasn't just politics from afar. It wasn't just the deals of the sellout specialists and soft-liners, the weak sisters, the no-win policymakers. The Apparatus paralyzed not only our armed forces but our individual lives, frustrating every normal American ambition, infiltrating our minds and bodies with fluoridation, with the creeping fever of trade unions and the left-wing press and the income tax, every modern sickness that saps the nation's will to resist the enemy advance.

The Red Chinese are massing below the California border. There are confirmed reports.

This is the man, ladies and gentlemen, who climbed the base of the Confederate monument in Oxford, Miss., to rally thousands against the integration of the university. The man who SO-called led an insurrection, wearing his proud gray Stetson. Oh it was something. Four hundred federal marshals, five hundred state and local police, helicopters, jeeps, fire engines, three thousand National Guardsmen, tear gas blowing through the streets, burning cars, rocks flying everywhere, and birdshot, and sniper fire, two men dead, countless wounded, a couple of hundred arrested, military trucks full of regular army, sixteen thousand combat troops massed against a few thousand students and country boys and patriots of the South, and here is the object and source and cause of the whole thing, one gloomy nigger with a hanky in his face to keep the tear gas from making him cry.

Bring your flag, your tent and your skillet.

That's the main thing Ted actually said. Like a Boy Scout saga, a couple of days in the wholesome outdoors.

To his left was another basket, this one filled with news stories clipped by an aide. Here is Ted filing for election in the Democratic race for governor, a primary in which the Control Apparatus will see to it that he finishes sixth out of six candidates, which is dead last by any reckoning. Here he is with dear mother Charlotte outside a hearing room in Oxford with the leaves rustling down from the sweet gums and maples. This is when they tried to justify putting him in a mental ward with a bunch of gap-tooth idiots. The Apparatus in its grimmest stage, right out of the communist handbook, trying to put a decorated vet in the rubber room. This is what the general is up against, ladies and gentlemen, fellow patriots, loyal Birchers, members of the White Citizens Council, Boy Scouts, Christians, Mother dear.

In the Old Senate Caucus Room they asked him to name the members of the Real Control Apparatus. This is like naming particles in the air, naming molecules or cells. The Apparatus is precisely what we can't see or name. We can't measure it, gentlemen, or take its photograph. It is the mystery we can't get hold of, the plot we can't uncover. This doesn't mean there are no plotters. They are elected officials of our government, Cabinet members, philanthropists, men who know each other by secret signs, who work in the shadows to control our lives.

But he didn't say these things. He mumbled and groaned in the crowded room, then punched a reporter in the face.

I sometimes am confused. We are dealing with tragedies of speech, tragedies of the human body. There are forces we can't comprehend.

He put out one cigarette, lit another. He got tired early now. It was a lingering effect of Operation Midnight Ride, the series of one-night stands in Louisville, Nashville, Amarillo, his journey to arouse the heartland, to get them to listen, St. Louis, Indianapolis, etc., and he was still recovering. Beatniks came to picket, the most godawful bunch of Castro look-alikes anybody ever saw.

It is time to go down and liquidate the scourge which has descended on the island of Cuba.

It tired him and got to him, plain wore him out. Those deadly hotel rooms where he was never more totally alone and bare of comfort. I sometimes am confused and lost, ready to give in to lonely despair, tired of shuffling and dodging what I know and feel. Think of those uncombed boys in baggy jeans, sign-carriers, who shout dirty words into the night. They are soft beneath the drifting Cuban hair. Hotels. This is where the switch takes place, where he is a stranger who mind-wanders into the midst of the other side, only following what he's always felt.

Some people think a nigra is a sunburnt white.

He had a better time when he was running in the Texas primary. The crowds were rollicking. They were chanting and singing crowds, hopeful people, not the worn souls of Midnight Ride. He scratched out numbers, added up tax dollars, but what he thought about were flags waving in halls across the whole damn state, the draped bunting, the clear American voices calling out a song.

Put on your Pro Blue bonnet

With the Lone Star upon it

And we'll put Ted Walker on the way

Was that a firecracker? He turned to the window, standing in the same motion, but slowly, giving the matter some thought. Kids throwing firecrackers around? Did we put the screen back in? The screen was in, he saw, and the window was shut. All the windows were shut because the air conditioner was on. He moved out of the light and something caught his eye. There was a hole in the wall about the size of a half-dollar. He was trying to get it straight. He looked at the window again and the glass had radial streaks in it near the crosspiece of the wooden frame. He moved farther out of the light. His cigarette burning in the ashtray. He went upstairs and got his revolver. He came down quickly. He went out the back door and stood in the dimness with the gun, stood looking, dead still, feeling the heat like a wall of air. Then he went back inside and called the police. That's when he noticed bits of glass and wood in the hair on his right forearm, just below the rolled-up sleeve, and there were grainy fragments mixed in, bright as sand, a residue he believed were slivers of the copper jacket of a high-velocity bullet.

He was not half surprised. They have been plotting for a long time, every element in the Control Apparatus, planning and scheming carefully to keep Walker quiet. This is what shooting people does.

He got a pair of tweezers, sat in his easy chair and began picking metal out of his arm while he waited for the police to arrive.

Marina was worried about Lee. In the morning he told her he'd lost his job. He blamed it on the FBI. He said they'd probably come around the shop and asked questions about him. Now he was late coming home. Coming home from what? He said he had typing class but the class ended at a quarter past seven, three hours ago, and besides it was a Wednesday and there was no class on Wednesday.

He wanted her to go back to the USSR. He could not support a wife and child in America. He made her write to the Soviet embassy in Washington. Would they pay for the return of a Russian citizen and her baby girl?

She was pregnant again, which is the way destiny sometimes intervenes.

At least they had a balcony where June could crawl around in the fresh air. When they separated, after Fort Worth, she stayed with half a dozen different families, some nights with this one, then over to that one. It was beating on her nerves, all that moving around. One night Lee stayed with her in one of the Russian homes. There was a full refrigerator and an electric can opener. Two telephones. They made love with the TV on.

He told the landlady on Elsbeth Street she was a Czech.

He hit her once in front of people because the zipper on the side of her skirt was partly open. In front of people.

Holland was unbelievably clean. It was her dream country, with trim houses and spotless little children.

There were bargain stores in Oak Cliff. She went in out of the heat and walked the aisles. She went to shoe stores and stores called army-navy. She bought this, rejected that, mentally, walking the narrow aisles.

Maybe they would all go back to Russia, although she didn't want to. Maybe they would move to New Orleans. He was talking about New Orleans, his hometown, a port city like Archangel, where she grew up.

He did most of the housework and gave her breakfast in bed on Sunday. She was shameless when it came to sleeping late. People gave her things and he insulted them.

He took the bus to a place called the Field of Love, where he practiced shooting his rifle. They argued about this. He hit her and she threw something at him and he hit her again with a closed hand, making her bleed from the nose.

We buy groceries on Tuesday.

It was one more misfortune on her head, this lost job of his. But the pattern of a life can't be seen in fleeting days or weeks. Maybe it was their destiny to live in a port city, to feel the sea breeze and glimpse the tender promise ahead.

He'd never been so late. Something told her to look in his study. She found a note in Russian on the small table he used as a desk. There were eleven points listed by number, with certain words underlined.

She read quickly, in a blur.

He told her not to worry about the rent. He'd paid the rent on the second. He'd paid the water and gas. He told her to send newspaper clippings (if there was anything about him in the papers) to the Soviet embassy. He said the embassy would come to her aid once they knew everything. He said the Red Cross would help her. He told her money was due from work. Go to the bank and cash the check. He asked her to hold on to his personal papers. But throw out his clothes or give them away.

Number eleven was, If I am alive and taken prisoner, the city jail is located at the end of the bridge we always cross when we go downtown.

She stood a moment in the small room. Then she moved softly to the kitchen, where she folded the note and hid it in a Russian volume called The Book of Useful Advice.

Lee was back at the Gulf station drinking another Coke, his shirt sticking to him. He edged closer to the office, where a radio was playing. He figured it wouldn't take long before a report came in. Every time a song ended and someone on the radio started to speak, he moved a little closer to the office door, listening for urgent words, for shot, dead, dying, that excitement riding high in the chest when there is news of important violence. Both weapons were in the car, with the green slicker, about three miles away by now, somewhere in the West Dallas ghetto. He'd get them in a day or two, or when it was safe.

He took a deep swallow, then let the bottle dangle between his index and middle fingers. Things were slow. Two men in grease suits talked inside the office. The room was brightly lit, with stacked cans of motor oil, a sexy wall calendar. Lee moved closer. He tried to look like an idler on some weedy edge of town.

Late. The cars stopped coming. There was nothing on the radio but rock 'n' roll. He finished the Coke, put the bottle in the case of empties and walked home in the head-splitting heat.

George de Mohrenschildt listened to the car radio, changing stations often. He was trying to get some fresh news on the Walker affair. The attempt fascinated him. Evidently it was the nearest of misses. The bullet changed course when it nicked the window frame. The police weren't saying much else. It was frustrating. He was hungry for developments. He didn't want the episode to slip into oblivion.

He drove the Galaxie convertible into Oak Cliff. Next to him on the seat was a big pink rabbit for Baby June.

He hadn't seen Lee for some time. Lee undoubtedly felt used and badly handled and abandoned. All the sad words in the beggar's dictionary. But it was his own fault. All he had to do was talk to Collings, man to man. George half admired his resistance. There was a purity of sorts. But it was boring too.

There was a new abandonment in the works. George was going to Haiti and he knew Lee would feel that the one man who took an interest in him was scramming out the door. George wanted to open up the country of Haiti. He knew the number-one banker there, which meant many things were possible. Oil surveying, resorts, holding companies. There was also a weapons shipment in the works, deep deep in the dark. Front companies were rising out of desk drawers. There were numbered bank accounts, untraceable ship charters. A fellow at the Pentagon wanted George to help provide cover for an anti-Castro operation centered in Haiti.

He found Neely Street. He thought about people spending their lives in a place like this. Lee sat in this hole reading obscure economics, mumbo-jumbo theory of the left. It was sad, interesting, boring, stupid. It was also infuriating. It hadn't occurred to George that seeing where Lee and Marina lived would make him angry. There was something serious and unsettling about this kind of squalor. Everything was rickety, makeshift, slanting. Everything slanted. It was repellent, not much better than a slum in Port-au-Prince, and George realized he could never again be amused by Lee, by the boy with the odd past and the out-of-place manner.

Marina and Lee came to the door. George said to Lee in his biggest voice, "So my friend. How come you missed that son of a bitch?"

He waited for the sure laugh. But they retreated to the living room. There was a shrinking in the air. Obviously the joke was not so funny in this household.

He handed over the Easter bunny and told them he was going to Haiti, long-term business, let's keep in touch.

He watched Lee's face change. He felt bad about that. He was leaving the boy without someone to go to with his ideas and his troubles. Marina went to the kitchen to make tea and George talked in her general direction about his vision of Haiti. Hotels, casinos, hydroelectric plants, food-processing plants. Lee sat on the sofa. His peculiar smile appeared, the little smirk that made George think of a comedian in a silent film with the screen going dark around his head.

"So someone finally smiles. It's a very delayed reaction. I walk in the door with a joke, no one makes a sound. I think I'm in the valley of lost souls. Now I see a smile peeping out. What is so amusing? Please. Inform me."

"I sent you a picture," Lee said.

"What picture?"

"It's the kind of picture a person looks at and maybe he understands something he didn't understand before."

"Sounds mysterious," George said.

"Maybe he sees the truth about someone."

Driving home George thought about the heavy schedule of appointments he had in New York and Washington, preparing the way for various aspects of the Haitian venture. He had the Bureau of Mines, Lehman Trading, Chase Manhattan, Manufacturers Hanover Trust, the Pentagon, the ICA, the CIA. The last in fact was strictly social, lunch with an old Agency friend, Larry Par-menter, a Bay of Pigs character but otherwise decent and amusing, a chap who knew his wines.

He sat at his desk opening and reading three days of mail. He came to the envelope addressed by Lee Oswald. Just a snapshot inside. It showed Lee dressed in black, holding a rifle in one hand, some newspapers in the other. Am I interested or bored, thought George. He looked at the reverse side. It was inscribed To my friend George from Lee Oswald.

George checked the postmark on the envelope. April 9. One day before the attempt on General Walker.

He looked at the second inscription. This was in Russian, clearly in Marina's handwriting and evidently written without Lee's knowledge, sneaked in before he sealed and mailed the envelope- a private message from the wife of the poseur to the sophisticated older friend.

Hunter of fascists-ha ha hall!

6 September

Wayne Elko sat at the window of a shotgun shack in the bayous west of New Orleans. There was no glass in the windows, just dusty plastic stripping, and he looked at three blurry men taking target practice in a mixed stand of cypress and willow.

There were other shacks in the area, here and there, used by weekenders who came out frogging and crawfishing.

Early mist. The gunfire sounded small and distant, little popgun compressions in the heavy air.

David Ferrie, a magnetic presence, a humorous master of games, was shooting at tin cans with a.22.

The swag-belly Cuban, Raymo, had a modified Winchester he liked to break down and reassemble, running a patch through the bore, sandpapering the stock.

The third man, named Leon, worked the bolt on an ancient carbine; sighted, fired, worked the bolt.

This was a new and hastily assembled camp, Ferrie explained, which is why the lack of creature comforts. The regular setup was at Lacombe, nearer New Orleans, where a number of anti-Castro factions had trained in guerrilla tactics until federal agents raided, grabbing a huge store of dynamite and bomb casings. This project would be kept small and restricted. Speak to no one. Respect the environment. Wait for the moment.

Wayne thought these were rules that verged on mystical.

He knew they weren't here just to fire weapons. T-Jay wanted them sequestered. Raymo and Wayne especially. The business was sorting itself out and he wanted his shooters wrapped tight, where he could find them.

Wayne stood outside wearing Levis, his bare chest pale and veined. He was growing his hair down over his neck, a rat's tail he painstakingly braided. He went barefoot over the moist ground. There was a storm hanging close, a stillness and metallic light, pressure building. The bird noise was fretful and spooked.

Frank Vasquez was back in the Everglades spying on Alpha 66.

The others stood talking by a fallen tree. Wayne wore a hunting knife in a leather sheath clipped to his belt, just for the general look of it. Ferrie smiled at the sight of his bare feet.

"Here is a man who has no fear."

"I never understand about people and snakes," Wayne said. "Like what harm do they intend? They never touch me. I've had incidents with snakes where they never touch me."

"It's not they touch you," Raymo said. "It's stepping on them. Not seeing where you step."

"Copperhead," Leon said.

"I have the primitive fear," Ferrie said. "All my fears are primitive. It's the limbic system of the brain. I've got a million years of terror stored up in there."

He wore a crushed sun hat, the expressive brows like clown paint over his eyes. He handed Wayne the rifle. They watched him walk to the lopsided dock and climb into the skiff. His car was parked on a dirt road about half a mile downstream and the skiff was the only way in and out.

They took turns firing at a silhouette target that was the onetime property of the FBI. Then they went up to the long shack for something to eat.

The first drops of rain hit the sheeting, well spaced and heavy. They sat around the table and talked about jobs, odd jobs, seasonal jobs. Wayne told them about his pool-skimming days in California. Leon described a radio plant somewhere, lathes and grinding machines, floor awash in oil, the workers' hands stained black. Raymo talked about the hands of cane-cutters, seamed with cuts, sticky and black from the juice.

This was the first time Wayne had heard Leon say more than two words. He didn't know where Leon fit in, except it was obvious he was some kind of special component with his own little twist or spin. He came and he went, carrying the Italian carbine. The others seemed to leave some space around him, like he was holy or diseased.

They talked about prisons they'd been in.

"I used to believe the great thing of Castro was the time he spent in prison," Raymo said. "He went to prison in Cuba and Mexico both. I used to say this is the man's honor and strength. He comes out of prison with authority if he is sent there for his beliefs. It is completely different in Castro's own prisons. We came out of La Cabana with anger and disgust. We were the worms of the CIA."

"They sent me to prison in the military," Leon said.

"What for?"

"Politics. Just like Fidel. I spent a night in jail in New Orleans a month ago. Politics."

"I sat in a lockup for three days," Wayne said. "Our launch was intercepted about ten minutes out of the Keys. Violating the neutrality act. It was T-Jay that got us out. He fixed it somehow. The charges were dropped nicey-nicey."

Raymo said, "Castro spent fourteen months in an isolation cell. He read Karl Marx. He read every Russian. He told us he read twelve hours a day. He read in the dark. Always studying, always analyzing. Years later I saw the executions of men who fought by his side in the mountains."

"It's clear in history," Leon said, "that a man has to go to prison for his beliefs. It's a necessary stage in the evolution of any movement that cuts against the system. Eventually he merges his beliefs in the actual struggle."

"I thought about it a lot," Raymo said, "and I'll tell you my beliefs. I believed in the United States of America. The country that could do no wrong. It was bigger than anything, bigger than God. With the great U.S. behind us, how could we lose? They told us, they told us, they promise, they repeat and repeat. We have the full backing of the military. We went to the beaches thinking they would support us with air, with navy. Impossible we could lose. We are backed by the great U.S. What happens? We find ourselves in the swamps, lost and hungry, we are eating tree bark by this time, and the radio is saying, 'Attention, brigade, the owl is hooting in the barn.' "

He looked from one face to the other, laughing.

' 'Tomorrow, my brothers, the crippled child climbs the hill.''

They were all laughing.

"They disarmed us and fastened our hands in one big looping chain and put us in troop trucks to go to the nearest militia camp and there's a plane passing right overhead and I call out, I tell our men, 'Don't shoot, boys, it's one of ours.' '

His eyes were fierce and happy. He looked from Leon to Wayne and back, laughing cockeyed, hitting the table hard. The tin plates jumped. When they were quiet again he looked at his home fries and eggs for two full minutes. He brushed his mustache with an index finger, then began to eat.

"We are actually eating tree bark," he said again, without the wild-eyed glee this time, chewing his food slowly.

Later they saw T-Jay coming through the downpour, a wavy windblown rain. Behind him the trees were leaning. He had a duffel bag on his right shoulder and another under his left arm. Inside he worked the bags open. There were two leather cases in one bag, a single case in the other. Each case was lined in billiard cloth and fitted with a pair of high-powered rifles. The men hefted the guns, mumbling, and passed them hand to hand. The window sheeting billowed and snapped.

"Scopes are in the car," T-Jay said.

They sat and talked about the guns. Wayne believed there was friendship in guns. This might or might not be a paradox. His experience in life and in the movies told him that peace can wear away the bonds of friendship. This was the lesson of the samurai. Action is truth, and truth falters when combat ends and the villagers are free to go back to their planting. Again we survive, again we lose, says a character in Seven Samurai.

T-Jay had water still running down his face. He sat in a puddle. He had his right elbow on the table, arm up, and kept clenching and unclenching his fist. He was more talkative than Wayne had ever known him. Raymo was talkative. The guns were a language and a memory. Wayne happened to catch some sideline dialogue between T-Jay and Leon. To the effect that Leon would not be using one of the new rifles. To the effect that he would be using the Mannlicher he'd come into camp with. It was clear this was mutually agreed.

The wind was battering the shack. They talked for hours, telling funny and bloody stories. Wayne felt sweet and light as Jesus on a moonbeam.

Frank Vasquez was on the road in Mississippi driving Raymo's Bel Air decrepito. Driving was not natural to him. He was literal-minded about speed limits and grew tense when road signs appeared, not always understanding the symbols and fearing he would enter upon misfortune. He'd had car trouble twice since Miami. He'd taken wrong roads twice. He spent a night in a motel where a fight broke out in the parking lot among four or five men, their feet crunching on the gravel, breath coming heavy, a woman crying in a white convertible, somewhere near Pensacola.

He was not used to being out here in the U.S., away from Spanish-speaking people, without Raymo by his side.

He had news for T-Jay. Alpha was planning a major operation. Miami, November. At first he could not guess the nature of the mission but it had to be unique if it involved an American city and not some Cuban port or refinery.

Frank had spent two and a half weeks in Alpha's camp off Highway 41 along with men from other groups and factions, running obstacle courses through the slash pines. One day he was approached by Alpha's secretary-general. This man wanted Mackey to take part in an operation that would go a long way toward paying back the failure of Playa Giron. Mackey was held in highest esteem. The mission leaders believed he should have a hand in this action.

No place or date was mentioned. Frank gleaned these things from the general run of talk. The fellowship oppressed him. He hated the drilling and shooting. The leaders of Alpha wore sunglasses, combat boots, berets, half-serious beards. If these men were so violently anti-Castro, why did they want to look like Che Guevara?

He remembered what Raymo had told him, that after a battle in the Sierra here comes Che on a mud-spattered mule to talk to the captured troops. What is the first thing they do? They ask for his autograph. This is when everyone knew Batista was finished.

Frank thought of the mountains, the dense green cover, smoke rolling down from the heights, vanishing at a certain altitude, rolling down. The rain was total. They lived in camouflaged barracks and sometimes in mud and he thought about the idea he was fighting for. Full dignity for the people of Cuba. Justice for the hungry and forgotten. He knew from the first day he would not remain. He was not a rebel in body or spirit. He had an ordinary nature.

His mother, the author of his days, welcomed him back with a sad laugh.

Frank taught grades one to six, often at the same time, in a school at the edge of the company town. The company was United

Fruit and he had two brothers who were foremen in the cane fields and lived with their wives and kids, each family in a ten-by-ten room in a row often rooms built back to back with ten other rooms,, all set in one long building constructed on five-foot stilts. The cane-cutters and their families lived under the building in squat hovels made of cardboard and sacking.

One could not help noticing that the American executives of La United lived in well-staffed and graceful homes on streets lined with coconut palms. Frank blamed the government, not the company. He expected his brothers to get out of the fields and become skilled workers in the vast mill. La United was not blind to the notion of ambition. From mill workers they could advance to office staff or engineering. They could get two rooms each in a house on a street that was lighted at night. Americans respected those who worked efficiently, who got things done. A man could conceivably get ahead.

Then the rebels came, his former comrades, to burn the cane fields. This was consistent with Cuban history. Whoever rises in revolt, the first thing they do is burn the sugar cane. It is a statement about economic dependence and foreign control. Frank watched the fields burn and knew there were communists behind it. He'd feared this all along. There's more to it, there's something we don't know about. The fires cut and jumped through the canebrakes. The private police of La United were long gone.

In Havana he stood in line with hundreds of others at the curbside outside the U.S. embassy, waiting to apply for a visa. And now he was on the road near the Louisiana border, driving into thunderheads.

On his fourth day with Castro he shot a government scout, aiming through a telescopic sight. It was uncanny. You press a button and a man drops dead a hundred meters away. It seemed hollow and remote, falsifying everything. It was a trick of the lenses. The man is an accurate picture. Then he is upside down. Then he is right side up. You shoot at a series of images conveyed to you through a metal tube. The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you've killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it's ordinary murder.

Frank knew what Alpha was planning to do. He thought and he thought and it had to be that. Once he learned the President was going to Miami, there was nothing else to believe.

His brothers also fled Castro, later, dangerously, floating to Key West on an oil-drum raft. They went back in boats as well, one killed in the fighting on the beaches, one captured and taken to the fortress prison, where he was allowed to die quietly of starvation, his form of public prayer, a demonstration against the beatings and executions.

Fervent men, exiles, fighters against communism took off from the Keys in Cessnas and Piper Comanches to drop incendiary devices on the sugar cane of Cuba. The fields were burning again.

Here on the road in the Deep South he saw something that showed how strangely and completely a hatred for this President reached into certain parts of the culture, into daily lives. During the first long day of driving he'd wandered into Georgia by mistake and passed a drive-in theater where they were showing a movie about young Kennedy the war hero. It was called PT 109 and under the title on the signboard there was a special incentive: See how the Japs almost got Kennedy.

It scared him all right, the signs he saw on the road in the U.S. Here was Louisiana in heavy rain. He would tell T-Jay everything he'd seen and heard with Alpha 66 in the Glades. The conclusion wasn't hard to draw, that Kennedy was the object of the mission.

Something in his heart longed for this murder, even though he knew it was a sin.

The Curator sends autopsy photos of Oswald. Nicholas Branch feels obliged to study them, although he doesn't know what he can possibly learn here. There are the open eyes, the large wound in the left side, the two ridges of heavy stitching that meet beneath the clavicle and descend in one line to the genital area, forming the letter Y. The left eye is swiveled toward the camera, watching.

The Curator sends the results of ballistics tests carried out on human skulls and goat carcasses, on blocks of gelatin mixed with horsemeat. There are photographs of skulls with the right cranial portion blown away. There are bullet-shattered goat heads in close-up. Branch studies a picture of a gelatin-tissue model "dressed" like the President. It is pure modernist sculpture, a block of gelatin layered in suit and shirt material with a strip of undershirt showing, bullet-smoked. There are documents concerning exit velocities. There is a picture of a human skull filled with gelatin and covered with goatskin to simulate a scalp.

The Curator sends FBI memos concerning the President's brain, which has been missing from the National Archives for over twenty years.

He sends an actual warped bullet that has been fired for test purposes through the wrist of a seated cadaver. We are on another level here, Branch thinks. Beyond documents now. They want me to touch and smell.

He doesn't know why they are sending him this particular grisly material after all these years. Shattered bone and horror. That's all it means to him. There is nothing to understand, no insights to be had from these pictures and statistics, from this melancholy bullet with its nose leveled and spread like a penny left on trolley tracks. (How old he is.) The bloody goat heads seem to mock him. He begins to think this is the point. They are rubbing his face in the blood and gunk. They are mocking him. They are saying in effect, "Here, look, these are the true images. This is your history. Here is a blown-out skull for you to ponder. Here is lead penetrating bone."

They are saying, "Look, touch, this is the true nature of the event. Not your beautiful ambiguities, your lives of the major players, your compassions and sadnesses. Not your roomful of theories, your museum of contradictory facts. There are no contradictions here. Your history is simple. See, the man on the slab. The open eye staring. The goat head oozing rudimentary matter."

They are saying, "This is what it looks like to get shot."

How can Branch forget the contradictions and discrepancies? These are the soul of the wayward tale. One of the first documents he examined was the medical report on Pfc. Oswald's self-inflicted gunshot wound. In one sentence the weapon is described as 45-caliber. In the next sentence it is 22-caliber. Facts are lonely things. Branch has seen how a pathos comes to cling to the firmest fact.

Oswald's eyes are gray, they are blue, they are brown. He is five feet nine, five feet ten, five feet eleven. He is right-handed, he is left-handed. He drives a car, he does not. He is a crack shot and a dud. Branch has support for all these propositions in eyewitness testimony and commission exhibits.

Oswald even looks like different people from one photograph to the next. He is solid, frail, thin-lipped, broad-featured, extroverted, shy and bank-clerkish, all, with the columned neck of a fullback. He looks like everybody. In two photos taken in the military he is a grim killer and a baby-face hero. In another photo he sits in profile with a group of fellow Marines on a rattan mat under palm trees. Four or five men face the camera. They all look like Oswald. Branch thinks they look more like Oswald than the figure in profile, officially identified as him.

The Oswald shadings, the multiple images, the split perceptions-eye color, weapons caliber-these seem a foreboding of what is to come. The endless fact-rubble of the investigations. How many shots, how many gunmen, how many directions? Powerful events breed their own network of inconsistencies. The simple facts elude authentication. How many wounds on the President's body? What is the size and shape of the wounds? The multiple Oswald reappears. Isn't that him in a photograph of a crowd of people on the front steps of the Book Depository just as the shooting begins? A startling likeness, Branch concedes. He concedes everything. He questions everything, including the basic suppositions we make about our world of light and shadow, solid objects and ordinary sounds, and our ability to measure such things, to determine weight, mass and direction, to see things as they are, recall them clearly, be able to say what happened.

He takes refuge in his notes. The notes are becoming an end in themselves. Branch has decided it is premature to make a serious effort to turn these notes into coherent history. Maybe it will always be premature. Because the data keeps coming. Because new lives enter the record all the time. The past is changing as he writes.

Every name takes him on a map tour of the Dallas labyrinth.

Jack Ruby was born Jacob Rubenstein. He adopted the middle name Leon to honor the memory of a friend, Leon Cooke, shot to death in a labor dispute.

There are several versions of George de Mohrenschildt's name. He sometimes used the alias Philip Harbin.

Carmine Latta was born Carmelo Rosario Lattanzi.

Walter Everett used the cover name Thomas R. Stainback during his years in clandestine work.

Lee Oswald used about a dozen names including the backward-running O. H. Lee and the peculiar D. F. Drictal. He employed the latter in the blank space for Witness when he filled out an order form for the revolver he purchased through the mail. Branch has toiled over the inner structure of D. F. Drictal for many an hour. He feels like a child with alphabet blocks, trying to make a pretty word, and he has managed to find fragments of the names Fidel, Castro, Oswald and Dupard. It may be that D. F. Drictal is the strained merging of written and living characters, of words and politics, a witness to the decision to assassinate General Walker. Branch wonders whether Oswald registered the fact that the general's first name and middle initial match those of Edwin A. Ekdahl, young Lee's stepfather for a time and the man Marguerite Oswald never stopped blaming.

The Dallas disc jockey known as Weird Beard was Russell Lee Moore, who also used the name Russ Knight.

The man calling himself Aleksei Kirilenko, a KGB cover name, was in fact Sergei Broda, according to records supplied by the Curator.

After repeated requests, Branch has learned from the Curator T that Theodore J. Mackey, known as T-Jay, was born Joseph Michael Horniak and was last seen in Norfolk, Virginia, January 1964, in the company of a suspected prostitute, possibly of Asian extraction, name unknown.

Mackey sat in the car listening to Frank Vazquez. Frank was excited and tired. He said everything three times and quoted Alpha leaders completely, precisely and with gestures. The two men were surrounded by swamp night, the car sitting downstream from the shack, lights off, the banjo frogs getting up a racket.

Frank's judgment was that Alpha planned to kill the President. He seemed to think Mackey would have trouble believing this. But it was easy to believe. Mackey believed everything these days including how simple it was for Frank to walk into Alpha's camp and out again, carrying every kind of rumor and news.

Alpha was not known for shyness or tight security. They held press conferences to announce their raids on Cuban installations and Soviet freighters. Once they invited a Life photographer on a raid, ten men in two boats. A storm ruined the mission and the pictures but Life did a story anyway. Brave boys of Alpha. South Florida was full of Alpha members, uncounted, devout, screaming in their teeth.

"And this is what you also planned, all this time, T-Jay, to get Kennedy?"

"It's just his time has come."

"I don't think we kill an American president so easy. Miami, they'll have extra protection. This is not like walking into some little capital city, walking into the palace, buying off some bodyguards with a few dollars."

"The barrier is down, Frank. When Jack sent out word to get Castro, he put himself in a world of blood and pain. Nobody told him he had to live there. He made the choice with his brother Bobby. So it's Jack's own idea we're guided by. And once an idea hits."

"Not that I don't wish to see it happen."

"Oh I think it will."

"Someone has to pay for Cuba."

"You and I demand it, Frank."

"And it will point to Castro. They will say here is the source. He sent the men."

"This is what we're looking for. But even so, if all the gears don't mesh, at least we have our man. Someone has to die. It is very much a part of our thinking that Jack is the one."

"This is like Alpha. Someone has to die, they say."

"They can't contain it anymore."

"Do we go in with them?"

"I say why not, Frank."

"Do you trust them to run it?"

"They cross the water to blow up Russian shipping. What the hell. This is a man in an open car."

Frank needed to get some sleep.

"Who's in the camp?" he said.

"Raymo and Wayne and a visitor. You don't say too much to him. Smile nice, shake hands."

Oswald wanted his path to be tracked and his name to be known. He had private designs, a hero's safe haven in Cuba. He wanted to use the rifle that could be traced to him through the transparent Hidell. Mackey was cautious. The kid had a dizzying history and he was playing some kind of mirror game with Ferrie in New Orleans. Left is right and right is left. But he continued to fit the outline that Everett had devised six months earlier. There were the homemade documents, the socialist literature, the weapons and false names. He was one element of the original plan that still made sense.

Mackey trained the headlights on the skiff. Frank climbed in and switched on the deer lamp and the boat moved quietly through the duckweed and past the sunken trees.

Mackey sat in the dark again.

Some of Alpha's boldest operations were run by elements hidden in the Agency. Alpha had CIA mentors. These were men Mackey wasn't even close to knowing. They weren't necessarily known to the leaders of Alpha. A case officer would show up to provide money and to advise on sabotage missions. He would limit his contacts to one or two men in Alpha. They would not know his real name or his position in the Agency. There's always something they aren't letting you know. Alpha was run like a dream clinic. The Agency worked up a vision, then got Alpha to make it come true.

Too many people, too many levels of plotting. Mackey had to safeguard the attempt not only from Alpha but from Everett and Parmenter. They might decide to expose the plan now that he'd removed himself from contact, leaving them to their hieroglyphics. Then Banister and Ferrie and the men dealing out the cash. He had to protect the attempt, make it safe from betrayal.

He waved a hand at the persistent hum that jumped around his ear. A mosquito is a vector of disease. He got out of the car and listened. Something felt strange. Then he heard a vast rustling in the trees, coming louder with the wind. It took him some time to realize it was only water tapping on the leaves, rainwater stirred by the wind and falling leaf to leaf, everywhere around him.

His own car was parked next to Raymo's. It was a three-hour drive to New Orleans, where he would talk to Banister about Alpha 66. Let everyone know. Let everyone tell everyone.

Mackey would put every effort into Miami. He would put men and weapons into Miami. Agree to a joint operation with Alpha. Do the groundwork. Get people and money moving. Eighteen November in Miami. He would build a Miami fagade.

In New Orleans

The first thing he did was take a bus to the end of the Lakeview line to see his father's grave. The keeper helped him find the stone. He stood there in the heat and light, searching for a way to feel. He pictured a man in a gray suit, a collector for Metropolitan Life. Then his mind wandered through a hundred local scenes. Oh bike-riding in City Park. Seafood dinners at Aunt Lillian's every Friday when he was eleven, after he took the train alone from Texas. He hid in the back room reading funnybooks while his cousins fought and played.

A man in a gray suit who tips his hat to women.

In Exchange Alley there was a Negro hunkered on the curb looking in the side mirror of a parked car as he shaved, his mug and his brush on the pavement next to him.

Lee looked up Oswald in the phone book, tracking lost relations.

Lee looked for work. He lied on all his job applications. He lied needlessly and to a purpose. He made up past addresses, made up references and past employment, invented job qualifications, wrote down names of companies that didn't exist and companies that did, although he'd never worked for them.

An interviewer noted on a card: Suit. Tie. Polite.

Marina sat in a chair on the screened-in side porch. She held Lee's half-finished glass of Dr Pepper. It was nearly midnight and still wet and hot and awful. This was their home now, three rooms in a frame house with a little bit of gingerbread up top and some weedy vegetation at the front and side.

Lee was out there somewhere with the garbage. They couldn't afford a garbage can so he slipped out three nights a week to stuff their garbage in other people's containers. He went out wearing basketball shorts from his childhood or the childhood of one of his brothers, no top, and sneaked along the 4900 block of Magazine Street looking for a can to stuff the trash.

She watched him come back now, walking up the neighbor's driveway, which was how you reached the entrance to their part of the house. He came onto the porch and took the glass from her hand. TV voices traveled across the backyards and driveways.

"I am sitting here thinking he doesn't love me anymore."

"Papa loves his wife and child."

"He thinks I am binding him like a rope or chain. His attitude is I bind him. He has the high-flying world of his ideas. If only he didn't have a wife to hold him back, how perfect everything would be."

"We're here to start over," he said.

"I am thinking he wants me to go back to Russia. This is what he means by starting over."

"Russia is one idea. I've also been working on the idea I could hijack a plane, take a plane and go to Cuba and then you'll come with June to live there."

"First you shoot at a man."

"We may not be finished with him."

"I am finished with him."

"There's a travel ban to Cuba."

"And you are finished with him. Leaving me a note."

"Little Cuba needs trained soldiers and advisers."

"Scaring me to death. Now you want to steal an airplane. Who will fly it?"

"Stupid. The pilot. I kidnap it, I hijack it. It's a Hight to Miami and I take my revolver and go in the flight cabin. It's called the flight cabin."

"Who is stupid? Which one of us?"

"My snub-nose revolver. My two-inch Commando."

She had to laugh at that.

"I stick up the plane and tell them to drop me in Havana."

They both laughed. They took turns drinking the warm soda pop. Then he went around with the spray can squirting roaches. Marina stood in the doorway watching. They had roaches in large numbers, really extraordinary numbers. She told him he would never kill a roach with the cheap spray he bought. She followed him into the kitchen, telling him that roaches drink these cheaper sprays and have babies. She watched him spray the baseboards carefully, with strict precision, so he wouldn't waste a drop.

The next evening he took her to the French Quarter and they rode the streetcar home. Tourists glanced at the Russian-speaking couple. Exotic New Orleans.

They made love on the small bed in the closed room. He had the feeling she wanted more, more of something, more of body, money, things, excitement, and he knew it in the technicalities of the act, in the breathing minutes, mysteriously.

He was paid a dollar fifty an hour to grease coffee machines. The maintenance man complained that he couldn't read Lee's notations in the greasing log. He complained that he couldn't find Lee, that he had to go through the building top to bottom looking for him. Lee stuck out his index finger and raised his thumb, holding the pose for a moment. Then he dropped the thumb and went "Pow."

The main library at Lee Circle was gone. He had to ask people where the new one was located. He walked north and then east and when he found the building he took a placard out of a manila envelope and unfolded it. The placard had a hole at either end with a string going through. He stood in front of the library with the placard strung around his neck and started handing out pamphlets he'd been receiving in the mail from the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

He wore a short-sleeve white shirt and dark tie. He'd written in crayon on the placard: Viva Fidel.

About a minute and a half later the Feebees pounced. A man came sauntering up showing the grin of a long-lost pal. His name was Agent Bateman.

"Seriously. I'm not here to arrest or harass you. Let's find a place to sit and talk."

They went to a sorry-looking diner near the Trailways station. It was late afternoon, a Saturday, and nobody was in the place. They sat at the counter and spent some time reading the bill of fare on the wall. Agent Bateman was probably younger than he looked at first glance, a man with a longish head, balding, like a high-school coach and science teacher in a TV series.

The only thing slick about him was his shoes, which were shined into the fourth dimension.

"We have you in our files at the field office here. I'm the fellow who keeps an eye."

"You handle my file."

"Ever since your defection. Queries come in, due to you were born here."

"I like the high old ceilings and the live oaks."

"Is that why you're back?"

"They talked to me once before. An Agent Freitag."

"That was Fort Worth. I am New Orleans."

"My Russian period is over. That was long ago. Why can't I just live my life without someone coming around, coming around?"

"I have the theory, Hey, there's nothing in the world that's harder to do than live a straightforward life. I go so far to say there's no such thing."

"What do you want?" Lee said.

"Right now? A grilled-cheese sandwich with crisp bacon, which is impossible to get because they grill everything together and the cheese gets done before the bacon. It's a law of physics. So you get pale bubbly bacon. I know about your correspondence with Fair Play for Cuba in New York and the Socialist Workers Party and so on. Routine mail intercepts. I could spend about four hours a day making your life miserable. Visit your place of work. Put out lead sheets to have you and your wife and your relatives interviewed and reinterviewed to the end of recorded time."

Lee still had the placard around his neck.

"Or I could sit you down and talk to you about our mutual interests. Like you want to carry on your political activities without being pestered on a daily basis."

"And you want."

"There is a crackdown in progress. This anti-Castro business has gotten out of hand. There's a group called Alpha 66 that makes hit-and-run attacks on Soviet ships in Cuban ports. People in Washington are very unhappy. It's an embarrassment to the administration, and they're determined to stop it, and the Bureau has orders to gather intelligence against these groups that are shipping arms and making raids."

It occurred to Lee that this man thought he'd performed some function for Agent Freitag in Fort Worth. He must be in the files as a cooperating Marxist, ha ha, or part-time political informer.

"There's a detective agency here in town," Bateman said. "It operates as a nerve center for the anti-Castro movement in the area. A man named Guy Banister runs the office. He is ex-FBI. Normally speaking we are on the same side. We trade information with Banister all the time. But sometimes there is the necessity of, we turn around, we turn about. I want to get inside Guy Banister Associates. I need a little opening, a crack in the wall. By the way I want to ask. Were you with the Office of Naval Intelligence, going into Russia? Because I know a communication was sent from our Fort Worth desk to ONI."

"They had a false defector program."

"Inserting people. This I'm aware of."

"There are gray areas in ONI. I'm one of those areas."

Bateman seemed to appreciate the remark. He said, "That's only fitting because in this city at this particular time, black is white is black. In other words people are playing havoc with the categories. "

There was a trace of enthusiasm in his voice.

"Banister recruits students. He has students go into campus situations to monitor leftist activity. You're student-age. You're familiar with the language of left and right. You know your Cuba."

"I approach Banister for an assignment but I'm actually an informer for the Bureau."

"We use the word informant. It's not sleazy and ratty terminology. What would you say to being developed along those lines? You'd be surprised at the status of some of our informants. Off the top of my head I'd say we could stock the alumni association of a fair-size college."

They sat over their lunch plates for a moment, thinking it all out. There was a Merry Xmas sign going gray on the wall.

"Now tell me, do I keep going? Because this business implies trust. It is tricky to bring off. It requires a certain kind of individual. There is risk and chance in these things. But there's also solid trust. There is complete backing. I give that to an informant."

Lee ate his food, showing nothing.

"How it might operate goes something like this. You walk into Banister's office. It is convenient to your place of work, right around the corner. You tell them you're an ex-Marine and you mention contacts with the Bureau in the state of Texas. Make it clear you're a Castro hater. Tell them you want to pose as a leftist, to infiltrate local organizations."

"I could tell them I'm starting an organization."

"This is a thought."

"A local office, like, Fair Play for Cuba."

"This has possibilities."

"I could get pamphlets from New York in large quantities, plus application forms."

"This is promising," Bateman said. "You tell Banister you will start a chapter right here in town. This will draw pro-Castro people to your door. You'll gather names and addresses. Banister loves a good list."

"It goes round and round."

"You seem to pretend."

"But I'm not pretending."

"But you are pretending."

They ate their lunch. Bateman explained that if Guy Banister wanted to check Oswald's background, he would naturally contact the local FBI office, specifically Bateman, who would provide highly selective information. He also explained that he wasn't allowed to drink coffee. The Director had placed a ban, making the Bureau free of addictive stimulants.

"I think Banister will be interested. But don't expect funds. This would be a tiny sideline for him. I'll arrange an informant's fee of two hundred dollars a month. Out of this, you run your project. And of course you tell me what they're doing at 544 Camp Street. Because they're doing something all the time."

"I want to study politics and economics."

"You're an interesting fellow. Every agency from here to the Himalayas has something in the files on Oswald, Lee. One thing I have to be sure about. No one else shares your services. This is Bureau policy. I can't do business with an informant who has a relationship with another agency. Are we okay on that?"

"We're okay," Lee told him.

"You can carry on your politics in the open. That's the charm of the thing. And you're right around the corner from those people. Location-wise, it's perfect."

Lee took a bus down to Camp Street, the placard back in the envelope, and walked around the building several times. Streets in deep shade. No one around but winos in Lafayette Square and a woman in a long coat and heavy white socks who seemed upset that he was walking behind her. She stopped to let him pass, muttering urgently, her hand making a motion like hurry up.

Trotsky is the pure form.

The rear seat of an automobile lay in the middle of the sidewalk. A man coated in dirt and vomit was spread out there, one arm dangling, and he looked so sick or hurt or crazy it was not possible to enjoy the picture of a car seat without a car, plunked down on a sidewalk.

Trotsky brushing roaches off the page, reading economic theory in a hovel in eastern Siberia, exiled with his wife and baby girl.

On Monday, during his ten-minute break from work, he went to 544 and got an application from a secretary. The building had two entrances, two addresses. One for who you are, one for who you say you are.

He bought a Warrior-brand rubber stamping kit for ninety-eight cents. He wrote to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, asking for a charter, and before getting a reply he went to a printer, said his name was Osborne and got a thousand handbills printed. Hands Off Cuba! He stamped some with his own name, some with Hidell. Then he rented a post-office box, went to another printer, ordered application forms and membership cards. He got Marina to forge the signature A. J. Hidell in the space for chapter president and sent two honorary memberships to officials of the Central Committee, Communist Party U.S.A.

He went out in his gold shorts and thong sandals at midnight, dumping garbage in other people's cans, sometimes ranging three or four blocks before he found a can with room to spare for one more bag of bones and slop.

When he took the filled-out application back to Guy Banister Associates he saw a man at the building entrance who looked familiar. It was Captain Ferrie, the Civil Air Patrol instructor, the man who kept mice in a cage in his hotel room back about seven years ago, Lee recalled, when he and his friend Robert were tracking down a.22 for sale. Lee drew closer and saw there was something very different about the man. He seemed to have tufts of fur glued to his head, like handfuls of animal hair just pasted on. His eyebrows were high and shiny.

Ferrie seemed to be expecting him.

"You were in the office yesterday or day before. Am I right?"

"I was applying for a job part-time."

"Undercover work. I heard your voice. I said to myself I know that voice. Another lost cadet come back to Cap'n Dave."

They laughed, standing in the entranceway. A car stopped suddenly and pigeons fired up from the square across the street.

"Isn't life fantastic?" Ferrie said.

The Fair Play Committee discouraged him from opening a branch office. But they were nice and polite and made spelling mistakes and anyway the important thing was the correspondence itself. He would keep everything. These were his papers. When the time came he would be able to present Cuban officials with documentary proof that he was a friend of the revolution.

Besides he didn't need New York's backing to open an office. He had his rubber stamping kit. All he had to do was stamp the committee's initials on a handbill or piece of literature. Stamp some numbers and letters. This makes it true.

David Ferrie took him to the Habana Bar, a gloom palace near the waterfront. Open round the clock, Latin rhythms on the juke box, people with a look about them of chronic absenteeism, some failure to cohere-exiles, cargo handlers, seamen without papers, half a dozen amorphous others, mainly solitary men sitting well spaced at the long bar.

Ferrie and Oswald took a table.

"The man who runs this place is involved with the Cuban Revolutionary Council."

"Which side are they?" Lee said.

"Don't you want to take a guess?"

"The look of this place."

"Sadder than shit."

"Anti-Castro."

"The Feebees come in here to talk to him about who's who in the movement. They don't know what they're doing otherwise. They see a Mex kid with a butch haircut and think he's a Cuban warrior."

"Where did you get that word?"

"Feebees? That's my word. A long-time word of mine."

"I thought it was my word."

"You must have heard it from me," Ferrie said. "This happens all the time. People think they invent things they actually heard from me. I have a way of creeping into people's minds. I get inside people's minds."

A nasal voice, sinuously trailing the question of whether it ought to be believed.

"We have definite ESP, you and I. It probably covers years and continents. Have you ever lived outside the U.S.?"

Lee nodded.

"We probably had each other in range all that time. I want to experiment with remote hypnotism. Hypnotism over the phone or on TV. A fantastic political weapon. Some woman is after me for so-called hypnotizing her son so I could orally stimulate his geniials. I give flying lessons to boys at Lakefront,"

Ferrie took him to visit a man who lived in a restored carriage house on Dauphine Street, behind a high white wall with a red door in the middle of it. His name was Clay Shaw and he was tall and middle-aged, with a sculptured head and striking white hair. He stood in the middle of the large room that occupied the entire main floor. Silk curtains, bronzework, cork floors covered with Oriental rugs. Two young men were seated, alert and bright as weathercocks.

"When is your birthday?" Shaw said first thing.

"October eighteen," Lee said.

"Libra. A Libran."

"The Scales," Ferrie said.

"The Balance," Shaw said.

It seemed to tell them everything they had to know.

Clay Shaw wore well-made casual clothes and had the easy manner of someone clearly educated to all the right things. When he smiled, a vein seemed to flash from the corner of his right eye to his hairline.

He said, "We have the positive Libran who has achieved self-mastery. He is well balanced, levelheaded, a sensible fellow respected by all. We have the negative Libran who is, let's say, somewhat unsteady and impulsive. Easily, easily, easily influenced. Poised to make the dangerous leap. Either way, balance is the key."

"I brought him here," Ferrie said, "to see your collection of whips and chains."

Everyone laughed.

"Clay has whips and chains, black hoods, black capes."

"For Mardi Gras," one of the young men said, and everyone laughed again.

Lee felt his smile floating in the air about six inches from his face. They stayed fifteen minutes and went out into the twilight.

"Do you believe in astrology?" Lee said.

"I believe in everything," Ferrie told him.

He took Lee to his apartment, dark rooms with broken furniture and religious objects. The bookshelves were covered in wood-grain Con-Tact paper and bowed under the weight of many hundreds of medical books, law books, encyclopedias, stacks of autopsy records, books on cancer, forensic pathology, firearms.

Barbells on the floor. A framed document on the wall, a Ph.D. in psychology from Phoenix University-Bari, Italy.

Lee used the bathroom. Amber vials of pills and capsules filled the glass trays. There were loose capsules all over the floor and in the tub. Layers of sticky filament coated the washbasin and the wall next to it-whatever kind of glue he used to attach his mohair wig.

In the living room Ferrie began speaking about his condition even before Oswald emerged from the toilet.

"It's called alopecia universalis. Of mysterious etiology and without known cure. Instead of hiding it, I adorn it, I dress it up. God made me a clown, so I clown it up. When my hair started coming out, I thought it meant imminent apocalypse, the Bomb falling on Louisiana. The Bomb would seal my authenticity, make me a saint. Fallout shelters were called family rooms of tomorrow. I was ready to live in the meanest hole. The missile crisis came. This was the purest existential moment in the history of mankind. I was completely hairless by then. Let me tell you I was ready. Push the button, Jack. The only way I could forgive Kennedy for being Kennedy was if he rained destruction down on Cuba. I bought ten cartons of canned food and let my mice go free."

Ferrie looked out the window. On the wall next to him was a picture of Jesus with eyes that track the person passing by. Feme's voice coming in a whisper now.

"Then there's the theory about high altitudes. Hair falling out so suddenly and completely. Exposure to high altitudes. Pilots have been afflicted, men who spent too much time at ultra-high altitudes, like U-2 pilots."

"Did you ever fly a U-2?"

"I can't tell you that. It's the deepest secret in the government, the names of men who fly those planes. But let me ask you a question, speaking of secrets. Why do you want a job doing undercover work for the anti-Castro movement when it's clear to me that you're a Castro partisan, a soldier for Fidel?"

He turned away from the window and looked directly at Lee, who found the only way to answer was his funny little smile.

That was how it started. Lee sat many nights on the screened porch cleaning the Mannlicher, working the bolt on the Mann-licher, after midnight, formulating plans.

He'd learned from the Militant that he could get a visa to Cuba in Mexico City, evading the travel ban. He could work for the revolution as a military adviser. An old and deep ambition. They would be happy to have an ex-Marine with progressive ideas.

He collected correspondence and put it in the spare room with all his other papers, with Castro speeches and booklets on socialist theory.

He handed out leaflets on the Dumaine Street wharf and talked to a dozen sailors about Fair Play for Cuba. A port policeman came and ordered him off.

Ferrie let him play both sides. Banister gave him a small office at 544 to store material. He hardly talked to Banister. Banister gave the impression of being hard to talk to. Lee stamped the Camp Street address on some of his material. They let him come and go.

A crazy summer. Storms shaking the city almost every afternoon. Heat lightning at night. Clouds of mosquitoes blowing in from the salt marshes. As weeks passed he sensed a change around him. People at 544 began to regard him differently-the Cubans who came and went, the young men who posed as Tulane students to collect information on left-wingers and integrationists. Lee was becoming less a curiosity or puzzle. He felt he walked in a special light. They were looking at him carefully now.

Banister's secretary thought his first name was Leon. Ferrie started calling him Leon, after Trotsky. Mistakes have this way of finding a sweet meaning.

The First Lady was pregnant, just like Marina. He read somewhere that the President liked James Bond novels. He went to the branch library on Napoleon Avenue, a little one-story brick building, and took out some Bond novels. He read that the President had acquainted himself with works by Mao Tse-tung and Che Guevara. He went to the library and got a biography of Mao. He got a biography of the President which said that Kennedy had read The White Nile. He went to the library to get The White Nile but it was out. He took The Blue Nile instead.

John F. Kennedy was a sometime poor speller with miserable handwriting.

He sat on the porch in his basketball shorts reading science fiction recommended by Ferrie. He dry-fired the Mannlicher. He still had the textbook from his typing class in Dallas and he sat some nights with the book open to a diagram of a typewriter keyboard. He practiced fingering the letters in alphabetical order-a with the left pinky, b with the left index finger, tapping the page repeatedly without looking down, as he'd been taught in class.

Marina said, "Papa, there is garbage."

He hung out at the Crescent City garage, which was next door to the coffee company where he worked. He came in wearing his electrician's belt with grease gun, screwdriver, pliers, friction tape, etc. He stretched his ten-minute breaks to half an hour, sitting in the office reading gun magazines and talking to the guy who ran the place. There were beer mugs sitting in the window, maps on the wall. He could kill ten minutes looking at a map.

The Crescent City garage had a contract with the U.S. government to keep and maintain a certain number of vehicles for use by local agencies.

Sundays the street was empty and the garage was closed and looked like an abandoned Spanish church inside the lowered grille, with light falling through the high dusty windows. This was where he met Agent Bateman, who had a key to the office. They went through the office and sat in one of the cars set aside for the Secret Service and FBI. He told Bateman what he'd learned at 544 Camp, which wasn't a hell of a lot. He wanted to use the Minox but Bateman said no, no, no, no. He gave Lee a white envelope containing a number of well-wrinkled bills, like money saved by children.

Lee insisted on knowing the informant number he'd been assigned and Bateman told him it was S-l 72. Then Lee said he wanted to apply for a passport and wondered if there might be a problem, due to his record as a defector. Bateman said he'd look into it.

Mosquitoes in swarms. He saw himself typing a paper on political theory, basing it on experience no fellow student could match, a half-eaten apple at his elbow.

When Lee has a certain look on his face, eyes kind of amused, mouth small and tight, he finds himself thinking of his father. He associates the look with his father. He believes it is a look his father may have used. It feels like his father. A curious sensation, the look coming upon him, taking hold in an unmistakable way, and then his old man is here, eerie and forceful and whole, a meeting across worlds.

"There's something I know about you, Leon, that I find fascinating. It's something almost no one else knows. Very few people know. You're the night-rider who took a shot at General Ted Walker two and a half months ago in Dallas."

Lee's mind went blank.

"I can't tell you how I know," Ferrie said. "But there are men who are interested in you. At first I only played a hunch. I thought Leon and I, we have a psychic bond. I took your application to Banister. I had an argument all set. I would say to Guy, 'Here is a man who wants to spy on our operations. He wants to use us but we will end up using him. Not through manipulation or political conversion. He believes in his heart that he's a dedicated leftist. But he is also a Libran. He is capable of seeing the other side. He is a man who harbors contradictions.' I was ready to say to Guy, 'Here's a Marine recruit who reads Karl Marx.' I was ready to say, 'This boy is sitting on the scales, ready to be tilted either way.''

Lee finished off his beer.

"But I didn't have to present an argument at all. All I had to do was say your name. Banister was eager to grab you and hold on. Turns out he'd been making inquiries about you on behalf of an old buddy of his. A fellow named Mackey. You were lost. Nobody knew where you went after Dallas. Guy cracked his meanest smile when I told him you were greasing coffee machines right around the corner and wanted to join our staff. He picked up the telephone. 'Look what I found.'"

Ferrie ordered two more beers and said, "You are the object of some intense scrutiny. Banister doesn't know the exact nature of the role being planned for you. But it's only a matter of time before he finds out."

Three, four, half a dozen Cubans sat around the Habana tonight in camo T-shirts and pants, boots stained with dry white mud.

"Are you afraid you'll get caught for Walker? You never mentioned Dallas to'me."

"I never mention it to anyone."

"You think they'll know. All you have to do is say the word Dallas and everyone will know. Prison is terrifying. The first thing they do when they arrest a man is look up his ass."

"I found that out in the Marines."

"They look up your ass before they know your name. It's like some Pygmy ritual in the Congo."

Lee could not drink more than a single beer without feeling funny.

"Do you practice a religion? Do you go to church?"

"I'm an atheist."

"That's dumb," Ferrie told him. "How could you be so stupid?"

"Religion just holds us back. It's an arm of the state."

"Dumb. Shortsighted. You have to understand there are things that run deeper than politics. Our political skin is just the thinnest outer crust. I was brought up a Catholic in Cleveland." Feme's eyes went comically wide as if the remark had taken him by surprise. "Penance was the major sacrament of my adolescence. I used to haunt the confession boxes. I went from one to the other. It felt more like a sin than a way of absolving sin. There was a real sneaky pleasure there. I told my sins, I made up sins, I said my act of contrition, I went to the altar rail and said my penance and then I got back in line again. On Saturday afternoon four confessionals were going full-blast. I made the circuit. Kneeling in the dark and whispering my sins to a man in skirts. I went to seminaries, twice, to learn the trade. Even started my own church. Only a fool rejects the need to see beyond the screen."

Lee went to the men's room and stood there with a static around him, like space is crisscrossed with gray lines. He stood for two minutes in the middle of the room. When he got back to the table, Ferrie started right in.

"Didn't Kennedy know how big Cuba is? Didn't anyone tell him you can't invade an island that size with fifteen hundred men?"

"Cuba is little."

"Cuba is big. Why did he consent to an invasion if he didn't mean to follow through? Why did he promise us a military victory and then back off? Because he lost his nerve. He muted everything. He soft-pedaled it. He wanted an invasion that was subtle. It's a wonder Castro realized he was under attack."

"Cuba is little."

"I'll tell you what rankles," Ferrie said, "and this is something I hear every day from Guy. Guy feels strongly about this. He thinks Kennedy and Castro are talking to each other. They're writing secret letters, they're sending emissaries back and forth. Friendly overtures. There's something they aren't telling us. Something we don't know about. There's more to it. There's always more to it. This is what history consists of. It's the sum total of all the things they aren't telling us."

Lee got in a shoving match out on the street with some Latin type who had pockmarks and a dangling silver cross. He didn't know how it started. Even gripping the man's biceps and talking into his face, he couldn't remember how the thing got started. A few people stood around mainly for lack of other amusement. Then he was home in bed.

He read gun magazines in the garage office. One of the coffee heads would appear in the door and tell him he'd better get back. Back to the motors and blowers, the hoppers, grinders, conveyor belts.

His passport arrived the day after he applied.

He walked into the spare room at home and thought some things had been moved. It couldn't be Marina, who had orders to stay out. He inspected his papers, checked the closet where he kept his guns. Something was different, an invisible whispery difference, like when you know a thing deeply in a dream without knowing how or why.

A woman who looks Seminole somehow, squat-headed, whatever they look like, he doesn't really know, comes walking out of a crowd in the French market nearly scaring him with the strange flat eyes of some burning saint.

He remained the only member of the Fair Play for Cuba chapter in New Orleans. Didn't mean a thing. Summer was building toward a vision, a history. He felt he was being swept up, swept along, done with being a pitiful individual, done with isolation.

Marina pushed the stroller along their street. She tried to read the street names set into the sidewalk in light-blue tile.

Would he try to send his wife and baby to Russia or would they all go to little Cuba, where there was a purer socialism and a true joy among the people?

Last night she got up for a glass of water at 2:00 A.M. and found him sitting on the porch in his underwear with the rifle across his lap.

He had nosebleeds in the night. Once she watched his body shake for half an hour.,

She made him translate magazine stories about the Kennedys. He didn't mind doing it and sometimes added details not in the stories.

In pictures taken near the sea, with the wind ruffling his hair, the President looked like her old boyfriend Anatoly, who had unruly hair and kissed her in a way that made her dizzy.

Lee didn't wash for days at a time. He wore the same clothes and told her not to mend his socks or patch the elbows of threadbare sweaters. This was a complete turnabout. Here I am, he seemed to say. Look at what the system stamps out.

She knew, she was absolutely certain that Mrs. Kennedy would give birth to a boy. It was sure to be a boy, she told Lee, and then they would have a boy themselves, soon after.

She was ashamed to confess she was a woman of moods.

She was pregnant like Mrs. Kennedy but had not been examined by a doctor yet. Lee took her to Charity Hospital, a massive gray building that looked like a place you entered only once, never to emerge. In the marble lobby were enormous portraits of doctors in robes, doctors with the sky behind them, men with more important things on their mind than the gall bladder and kidneys. The trouble started at the information booth. A woman told Lee this was a state hospital and people could be treated free only if they'd been Louisiana residents for a certain period. Marina had not been living here long enough.

All that marble. It made her feel like a refugee. Lee followed a doctor down the corridor, almost begging. He picked up another doctor coming back this way, pleading and arguing at the same time, his face twisted and pale.

They were turned away.

Lee prowled the lobby, talking to people who walked in unaware, telling them the story. It's just another business. They make a business out of pain and suffering. No one knew what to say to him and finally he just paced the floor in silence, walking off his anger.

It was an anger that Marina did not try to soothe or wish away because she believed in her heart it was correct.

She pushed the stroller past some shops with large signs out front. She sounded the words in her mind. Washateria. One-hour Martinizing. She saw fewer people as they strayed a little north, a little east.

She wondered how many women had visions and dreams of the President. What must it be like to know you are the object of a thousand longings? It's as though he floats over the landscape at night, entering dreams and fantasies, entering the act of love between husbands and wives. He floats through television screens into bedrooms at night. He floats from the radio into Marina's bed. There were times when she waited for him, actually listened late at night for a few words of a speech or a news conference recorded earlier in the day, waited for the voice of the President, the radio on a table near the bed.

They had matching scars on the arm, Marina and Lee.

This was the basic question that didn't leave her day or night. Would he force her to go back to Russia?

She said to him, "A gloomy spirit rules the house." "I am not receiving happiness," she said.

He talked to June about little Cuba. Do you love little Cuba? Do you have sympathy for Uncle Fidel? There was a photograph of Castro on the wall that he'd clipped from a Soviet magazine. What do you think of Uncle Fidel? Do you love and support little Cuba?

She thought of the President sometimes, in pictures taken near the sea, while Lee was making love to her.

He kept after her to write to the Soviet embassy in Washington, teary-eyed letters, requesting visas, requesting travel expenses. She knew he was confused about the future.

She was a blind kitten who always returned to the person who caressed her, no matter if he also treated her cruelly.

She took Junie out of the stroller now and let her walk alongside. Junie didn't like to walk holding anyone's hand. She walked along on her own, endless joy and endless toil.

Sitting on the porch at 2:00 a.m. with the rifle across his lap.

They walked down many quiet streets. The houses were old and silent and some had cast-iron galleries and white columns.

There was no one else around. The afternoon was heavy and still. She stood on a corner and saw cars going through an intersection about seven blocks away but nothing moved nearby and she wondered if this might be an area closed to normal activity during certain times of day. One-hour Martinizing. They passed homes with carved entrances, with magnolias out front and straight-standing palms. She tried to take Junie's hand. The heat became oppressive. They passed a house with double galleries and she could see frescoes through the living-room window. She put June back in the stroller, forced her in, stuffed her back in. Then she turned in the direction she thought led home, walking quickly now, no longer looking at the graceful, old and silent homes.

She thought carefully in English, Where are all the people?

Bateman told him about a group called the Cuban Student Directorate. It was run out of a clothing store a few doors down from the Habana Bar. Confidential Source S-172 walked in one day and talked to a guy named Carlos, about thirty years old, shiny-haired, wearing dark glasses.

He brought along his old Marine Corps training manual to sort of indicate who he was and where he stood. Inside of a minute they were talking about bridges, blowing up bridges, laying powder charges, making homemade explosives, homemade guns.

Carlos, however, did not seem eager to tell him how he might enter the anti-Castro struggle. He wouldn't accept Lee's offer to join the organization, wouldn't even accept a cash contribution. He was wary of infiltrators. He said it straight out. This was a sensitive time.

They had a nice talk anyway. Lee left his training manual behind as a gesture of good will and said he'd come back soon. They shook hands at the door.

What happens? Four days later Lee is on Canal Street wearing his Viva Fidel sign and handing out pro-Castro leaflets. Along comes Carlos with two friends, Lee watches Carlos do a double-take from out of the archives.

He approached in an attitude of menace, taking off his glasses. Lee crossed his arms on his chest and smiled. He didn't want to fight with Carlos. He liked him. Carlos had that Latin quality of being easy to like.

"Okay, Carlos, if you want to hit me, hit me."

He stood there with his arms crossed, smiling nicely. A small crowd collected, backing Lee toward the entrance of a Walgreen's. One of the men with Carlos grabbed some handbills out of Lee's fist and threw them in the air. This caused some scuffling on the fringe. Then a police car rolled up and then another one and soon they were all walking across the sandy parking lot of the first-district station house on North Rampart.

Lee demanded to see Agent Bateman of the FBI.

Half an hour later Bateman walked into the interview room, hands held out, palms showing, a certain rigid set to his features.

Lee said, "They want to know how many members in my Fair Play chapter."

"What did you tell them?"

"Thirty-five."

"Fine. But why bring me into it?"

"Because what are they liable to do if I don't show I'm linked to law enforcement?"

"It is only disturbing the peace. So-called creating a scene."

"Well get me out."

"I can't get you out."

"This wasn't the deal. Getting me arrested."

"You got yourself arrested. And if I get you out, it exposes everything. Giving them my name is bad enough. Did they ask why you wanted to see me?"

"They asked about Karl Marx. I told them the real Karl Marx was a socialist, not a communist."

"I am deeply disappointed, Lee."

"Well I couldn't just let them bury me. I have a wife and baby."

"One night is all you'll lose."

"I had to show there's someone who knows who I am. A figure of authority."

"It is only disturbing the peace. Tell them as little as possible. Let them think you're just a hometown boy with political ideals."

"I told them I'm a Lutheran."

"First-rate," Bateman said, nice and nasty.

They photographed him front, profile and full figure and then took prints of his fingers and palms. They told him to drop his pants and bend over. Later he sat in a holding cell seeing himself as he would appear in the mug shots, dignified and balding. He listened to the drunks and hysterics. They brought more men in as the night progressed. A howler and a dancer. They brought in a Negro with an aluminum-foil hat, a little religious cap made of Reynolds Wrap, with trinkets dangling from the sides.

Trotsky took his name from a jailer in Odessa and carried it into the pages of a thousand books.

It was Lee who told Marina that Mrs. Kennedy's baby had died during the night. A boy, born prematurely, with respiratory problems. Marina stood by the window crying. It hit her with the force of something she'd feared all along without letting it surface. Thirty-nine hours of life for the President's son. She cried for the Kennedys and also for herself and for Lee. How could she grieve for Mrs. Kennedy's baby and not think about the child she carried in her own womb? This was the future and it was marked.

Lee went to court. The first thing he noticed was that the room was separated into white and colored. He sat square in the middle of the colored section, waiting for his case to be called. Then he pleaded guilty and paid a ten-dollar fine. He shook hands with Carlos and walked out the door.

You see, none of this really mattered. What mattered was collecting the experiences, documenting the experienes, saving it all for the eyes of Cuban officials. What is it called, dossier?

There was a camera crew from WDSU waiting outside the courtroom and they shot some footage of Lee H. Oswald for the evening news.

Four days later he was back on the street handing out leaflets in front of the International Trade Mart.

The day after that he went on the radio to talk about Cuba and the world.

Bill Stuckey, the host of Latin Listening Post, was expecting a folk-singer type with a beard and sooty fingernails. Oswald was neat and clean, in a white shirt and a tie, and carried a looseleaf notebook under his arm.

They sat in the studio, with an engineer to record the interview, and Stuckey began right away, introducing Oswald as the secretary of the New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

Lee said, "Yes, as secretary, I am responsible for the keeping of the records and the protection of the members' names so that undue publicity or attention will not be drawn to them, as they do not desire it."

He said, "Certainly it is obvious to me, having been educated in New Orleans and having been instilled with the ideals of democracy and objectiveness, that Cuba and the right of Cubans to self-determination is more or less self-evident."

He said, "You know, when our forefathers drew up the Constitution, they considered that democracy was creating an atmosphere of freedom of discussion, of argument, of finding the truth. The right, the classic right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And that is my definition of democracy, the right to be in a minority and not to be suppressed."

Stuckey listened to him talk about the United Fruit Company, the CIA, collectivization, the feudal dictatorship of Nicaragua, movements of national liberation. Thirty-seven minutes in all, which Stuckey was compelled to reduce to four and a half for his five-minute show, and this was a shame because Oswald's presentation was intelligent and clear and his way of leaping out of difficult corners extremely deft.

Stuckey invited Secretary Oswald out for a beer when the interview was over. Then he sent a copy of the tape to the FBI.

That's how it went, that's the kind of summer it was. One day he was going after roaches with a pancake flipper, mashing them flat-one of those soft plastic flippers that are always on sale. He'd lost his job. They fired him because he didn't do the work, which seemed reasonable enough. Storms shaking the city. They shot Medgar Evers dead in Jackson, Miss., a field secretary of the NAACP. Later they would dynamite the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, four Negro girls killed, twenty-three injured. One day he was hunting down roaches in his kitchen, unshaved, wearing clothes he hadn't changed in a week. The next day found him in a gawky Russian suit and narrow tie, with his looseleaf notebook at his side, engaged in radio debate on Conversation Carte Blanche, another public-affairs show on WDSU. This time they'd checked up beforehand and had questions ready about Russia and his defection, catching him by surprise. Working the bolt on the Mann-licher. Cleaning the Mannlicher. They had plans for him, whoever they were. Heat lightning at night. It was easy to believe they'd been watching him for years, working things around him, knowing the time would come.

A man, a madman, whatever he was, shadow-boxed outside the toilets at the Habana.

Ferrie didn't seem to know sometimes whether a story was funny'or sad. He told Lee about the time he tried to perfect a tiny flare device equipped with a timer. He wanted to make thousands of these devices and attach them to the bodies of mice. He wanted to parachute the mice into Cuban cane fields. He was driven by the image of fifty thousand mice scattering through the sugar cane as the timers ignited the flares. He wanted to be the Hannibal of the mouse world, he said, and seemed dejected by the failure of the plan.

"During the revolution," Lee said, "Castro made it a point to burn his own family's cane fields."

"Listen to me. This Walker business is strictly in the past. You ought to forget him. A dead General Walker means nothing to Fidel. He is old hat. He is day-old shit. No one listens to Walker anymore. Your missed bullet finished him more surely than a clean hit. It left him hanging in the twilight. He is an embarrassment. He carries the stigma of having been shot at and missed."

"How do you know I want to try again?"

"Leon, do we actually have to speak the words? Don't we know when a death is passing in the air? They're beginning to crowd you. Banister says they're serious men. They've been in your apartment."

"I know. I had a feeling."

"You sensed it. See? Nobody has to say anything. The scales will simply tip and then we'll know."

"What were they looking for?"

"Signs that you exist. Evidence that Lee Oswald matches the cardboard cutout they've been shaping all along. You're a quirk of history. You're a coincidence. They devise a plan, you fit it perfectly. They lose you, here you are. There's a pattern in things. Something in us has an effect on independent events. We make things happen. The conscious mind gives one side only. We're deeper than that. We extend into time. Some of us can almost predict the time and place and nature of our own death. We know it on some deeper plane. It's almost a romance, a flirtation. I look for it, Leon. I chase it discreetly."

The shadow-boxer was on another level now, making the slowest of moves, working out the mathematics. He stood in place, head down, and dragged his arms across his upper body, finding resistance, a retarding force, like someone gesturing in space.

"Your man Kennedy has a little romance of his own with the idea of death. Men preoccupied with courage have their dark dreams. Jack's a little death-haunted all right, but not pathologically, not creepy-crawly like me. Poetic. That's your Jack."

"He's not my Jack," Lee said.

"He knows the course. He's been close to dying several times. A brother killed in action. A sister killed in a plane crash. A baby dead. A Catholic. A Catholic gets it early. Incense, organ music, ashes on the forehead, wafer on the tongue. The best things shimmer with fear. Skelly Bone Pete. We used to stay out of certain alleyways, certain dark streets. That's where he was waiting with his wino breath and stinky underwear. Specialized in kids."

One of the bar girls stood by the juke box swaying, a West Texas woman who looked sandblasted, with bleached-out hair and skin, little gold lashes. Ferrie waved her over. He took a black bow tie out of his pocket and gave it to her. She clipped it to Lee's shirt collar. They thought that was pretty cute. Her name was Linda Frenchette and she held her hands up to her face and flexed her thumbs, snapping Lee's picture.

"He doesn't like to smoke or drink," Ferrie said. "He never says dirty words. We want to be nice to him."

"Nice for a price," she said.

"You get the front end. I get the back end. Like bumper cars," Ferrie said.

They thought that was cute too.

They all got into Ferrie's Rambler and drove up Magazine. The theme of the ride was "Taking Lee Home." Linda Frenchette sat in the back seat. She had tequila in a wineglass and clapped a hand over the top of the glass every time the car stopped short. She found a TV lunchbox on the seat with cartoon figures painted on the surface and some hand-rolled cigarettes inside. Ferrie took one and lighted it while Lee steered from the passenger seat. Hashish, said Cap'n Dave. They rolled up the windows and let the heavy scent collect, strong and rooted. Ferrie passed the stick around. A pudgy little thing tapered at both ends. They were taking Lee home.

They parked in front of a nice-looking house with a two-story porch, a couple of doors up from Lee. He'd used their garbage can several times. Linda lighted up another stick. They passed it round and round. It was 3:00 a.m. and with the windows up and the smoke collecting, there was very little world out there. They gave Lee instructions on smoking the dope. They argued about it, fiercely. He was smoking just to smoke. Then Ferrie recited the history of hashish, lighting up another stick, which took forever. Everything moved through time. The heat in the car was getting hard to take and the smoke seared Lee's throat. Linda dipped her tongue in tequila and softly licked his ear. They were in a place where a heartbeat took time.

"This is one of those times I don't know if I'm doing it or remembering it," she said.

"Doing what?" Ferrie said.

"In other words am I home in bed thinking about this or is the whole thing happening right now?"

"What whole thing?" Ferrie said.

His voice was far away. He rolled down his window to let the smoke out. Lee looked straight ahead. Bright ashes tumbled down his shirtfront. He realized Linda was reaching over the seat back. She groped, is the only word, at his belt buckle and fly.

"I'm hoping dear Jesus I'm at home. Because the idea that I have to get there yet is too much razzle to imagine."

Lee let Ferrie open his pants. Then Linda had his cock jumping in her fist and was hanging way over the seat back with her mouth open wide, sounding a comic growl.

Lee looked straight ahead. He heard Linda breathing through her nose. She changed her position, hitting her head on the jutting ashtray. He tried to recall the name of a girl he wanted to date once, plaid-skirted, when he was dating age.

Then Ferrie's voice began to reach him in weighted time, moving slowly, one word, another, deeply shaped, like ads for epic movies, those 3-D letters stretched across a bible desert.

"They've been watching you a long time, Leon. Think about them. Who are they? What do they want? I'm with them but I'm also with you. There are things they aren't telling us. This is always the case. There's always more to it. Something we don't know about. Truth isn't what we know or feel. It's the thing that waits just beyond. We share a consciousness, like tonight. The hashish makes us Turks. We share a homeland and a spirit. What Linda says is true. You're at home, in bed now, remembering."

Then he reached across the dangling woman to straighten Lee's bow tie.

Marina had a standing invitation to stay with her friend Ruth Paine in Dallas. Ruth Paine would be a big help when the new baby came. She knew some of the Dallas emigres and wanted to improve her Russian, which gave Marina a chance to return the favor.

It looked like New Orleans was over. In a way it had never begun. Lee wanted her back in Russia to free himself of responsibility. She thought he would settle for Dallas, at least for now.

Ruth Paine was passing through New Orleans from the East or the Midwest and she could take Marina back to Dallas with her. This is what Marina discussed with Lee. He would go to Mexico City to get his Cuban visa and Marina and June would go to Dallas with Ruth Paine, a Quaker and good friend.

Then they would see what came next.

They stood firing their weapons in the misty light. He was detached from the action, empty, squeezing off a round, a round, another. Strictly pouring lead. The other men had little to say to him and kept a calculated distance. This was all right with him. It was a summer of things taking shape at the edges.

David Ferrie wore earmuffs, firing at cans of tomato paste, unopened. Mass-market gore spritzed in the morning air. He didn't use the hearing protectors they wear on gun ranges. Ordinary dime-store earmuffs, but he could shoot. The Cuban could shoot. The rangy guy, Wayne, with the long wandering face, and kind of stoop-backed, fired only a couple of rounds, then drifted off.

Ferrie had to get back to New Orleans to speak to the Junior Chamber of Commerce. He said he'd be back next day to take Lee home.

The leader, T-Jay, seemed half amused by Lee. Strong-looking, a slight paunch, a tattoo bird flying out of his fist. Marlboro man, thought Lee.

T-Jay was aware of his desire to go to Cuba. Had Ferrie told him? Had Lee told Ferrie? Did Agent Bateman know? Had he told Bateman why he wanted a passport? These questions passed quickly through Lee's mind. Didn't mean a thing. Summer was building toward a vision.

T-Jay told him to train with the Mannlicher, not one of the new rifles. This was his intention all along. It was Lee who'd asked to come out to the camp. He'd insisted to Ferrie. He needed target work, serious time with his weapon.

Except that he was out of ammunition. Ammo for this type carbine was hard to find. He'd hit every gun shop in New Orleans. T-Jay seemed amused, all-knowing. He said he had an ample supply, obtained directly from the Western Cartridge Company on the basis of past dealings. See? Everything is taken care of. It's falling into place.

He curled into a sleeping bag on the floor of the long shack.

He has a lot to show the Cubans. There is correspondence from the Fair Play Committee and the Worker. He has handbills and membership cards.

He knows one thing sure. He is going to study politics and economics.

Take ' em to Missouri, Matt.

There is still this mix-up over his discharge, which they refuse to change to honorable.

Marina thinks he is in another parish looking for work in the aerospace industry,

The President reads James Bond novels.

He has proof of his subscriptions to left-wing journals. He has the court summons describing the incident that led to his arrest.

The revolution must be a school of unfettered thought.

Rain-slick streets.

Aerospace is the coming thing, with courses at night in economic theory.

He is working on a new project in his steno notebook. He has headings like Marxist, Organizer, Street Agitation, Radio Speaker and Lecturer. Under these he is writing concise descriptions of his activities, with attachments. He has the news story of his court appearance with his name spelled correctly. He has tax returns he took from the offices of the graphic-arts firm where he worked in Dallas, just to save, just to have in case of something like this, to take and keep. This would qualify as intelligence.

I am experienced in street agitation.

I have a far mean streak of independence brought on by neglect.

Aerospace.

It wasn't until they hit the gleaming traffic, the raw flash on the edges of New Orleans, that Ferrie brought up the subject.

"President Jack has been working overtime. Did you know this? To put Castro in the ground. The deepest of cover operations. Ask me how I know. I do legal research for Carmine Latta. Carmine has knowledge of this thing. The Agency has worked with crime figures to put the hit on Fidel."

The bright crush around them. Faces in side windows.

"Listen. They can't do it without Kennedy's knowledge. He has some dirty business, who does he consult? CIA is the President's toilet."

Children carried past, squinting in the hard light.

"Carmine has talked to people from Chicago, from Florida. This is amazing material, Leon, for you to think about. Think about it. On one level the government is seeking conciliation with Cuba. On another level it is sending out assassins."

The next day-it was September 9-Lee picked up the Times-Picayune and read that Castro was charging the U.S. with plotting assassinations.

"United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders," he said, "they themselves will not be safe."

Lee read the story several times. It was as if they had control of the news, Ferrie, Banister, all of them, all-knowing. Of course it was only coincidence that Ferrie mentioned the thing one day and it appeared in the paper the next. But maybe that was even stranger than total control.

Coincidence. He learned in the bayous, from Raymo, that Castro's guerrilla name was Alex, derived from his middle name, Alejandro. Lee used to be known as Alek.

Coincidence. Banister was trying to find him, not knowing what city or state or country he was in, and he walked in the door at 544 and asked for an undercover job.

Coincidence. He ordered the revolver and the carbine six weeks apart. They arrived the same day.

Coincidence. Lee was always reading two or three books, like Kennedy. Did military service in the Pacific, like Kennedy. Poor handwriting, terrible speller, like Kennedy. Wives pregnant at the same time. Brothers named Robert.

His nosebleeds started again the second night he was home. There was blood on the pillowcase. Marina told him he'd been shaking in his sleep.

They knew all about him, even where to get cartridges for his rifle. Plus the Feebees were reading his mail. Plus Marina was almost eight months pregnant, complaining about the way they lived, sarcastic about his principles as a fighter for progress. He missed two meetings with Bateman. He didn't care about the money. They could keep their money. They didn't own or control him. He lost weight. He could feel the difference in his clothes and see it in his face in the mirror. He took a careful stance on the screened porch and aimed the rifle at a man crossing the street, holding right where the head and neck join, saying the word windage to himself. He decided to study Spanish again.

He got his tourist card from the Mexican consulate. He got his documents and clippings in order. It was all for little Cuba, so the Cubans could see who he was.

He could get his visa and have them stamp it with a future date. He could go back to Dallas and shoot the fascist Walker. Then return to Mexico City, knowing his visa was already set, a solid fact, guaranteed travel to Havana. They would welcome him there as a hero.

He'd studied Spanish once before, or twice before. It would come easy this time.

Ferrie called his rifle the Man-Licker.

He fastened the playpen and stroller to the top of Ruth Paine's station wagon, a green Chevy, a '55, with rust spots and soft tires. He jammed suitcases and boxes inside, everything they owned. It was Ruth Paine's now. He sneaked the rifle in, disassembled in an old blanket wrapped tight with kitchen string. He tied a granny knot.

He told Ruth Paine he might go to Houston to look for work, or maybe Philadelphia.

Marina's eyes were wet with worry and love. He ran his fingertips along her high white neck. He fought off the tears. He thought his face might crumple like a child's, washed in sorrow.

That night he streaked through a heavy rain with bag after bag of leftover junk, pushing old newspapers into a neighbor's garbage can, letting pop bottles crash. Was anyone watching? Did a sleepless old lady keep track of these midnight sprints? He went back to the house at a shambling trot and was out again a moment later, quick-walking down the driveway with more junk pressed to his chest, the boy who spoke to no one on the street.

The next evening he stood on the porch waiting for the bus to pull up at the stop directly across Magazine. When it did, he hurried across the street carrying two canvas bags and owing fifteen days' rent.

At the Trailways terminal he headed for the window to buy a ticket to Houston, which was the first stage of the journey to Mexico City. David Ferrie was standing by the window. He wore a rumpled plaid sport jacket with a newspaper sticking out of one pocket. He looked like a horseplayer with two days to live.

"Where to, Mexico? To pick up a visa for little Cuba?"

"That's right," Lee said.

"Without a word to Cap'n Dave? I don't like this, Leon."

"You won't tell me what it is they want me to do. I have to make my plans best I can."

"They knew you were going. They've been watching extra close. I am personally put out about this. Cuba now, Leon? We haven't done our work yet."

"I'm planning I might come back."

"You'll come back all right. You know why? They don't give visas to Americans so easy. Plus you want to come back. You want to finish our work."

"What do they want me to do?"

"We both know the answer to that by now."

"You know. I don't."

"You've known almost all along. I think you knew before I did. You came to the swamps to shoot your Man-Licker. You know what side we're on. You know we're not about to choose a target suited to your tastes. But you wanted to come. I think you picked it out of the air. I honestly believe you beat me to it."

A Negro in hip boots wandered through the terminal selling yo-yos that lit up in the dark.

Ferrie talked Lee into having a meal together. Raymo would drive him to Houston tomorrow if that's what he wanted. Save the bus fare. Enjoy the comfort of the family car.

They ate scrambled eggs in Ferrie's apartment. There were explosives stored under the kitchen table. Ferrie kept his jacket on, wagged the fork as he spoke.

"I've seen the Fair Play material you keep at 544," he said. "I've noticed something you haven't noticed. Librans never notice references to themselves. The official symbol of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee is a man's hand holding aloft a pair of scales. Two weighing pans hanging from a rigid beam. Everywhere you go. It's all around you. Which way will Leon tilt?"

"I don't know what they want me to do."

"Of course you know."

"Tell me where it happens."

"Miami."

"That means nothing to me."

"You've known for weeks."

"What happens in Miami?"

Ferrie took a while to finish chewing his food.

"Think of two parallel lines," he said. "One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It's not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It's a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny."

25 September

Lee woke up on the sofa some time after midnight. He was wide awake almost at once. The TV was on a bookshelf, picture flipping, no sound. He heard Ferrie gargling in the bathroom. The smell of hashish stuck to everything, to Lee's hair and clothes, the fabric on the sofa.

He watched Ferrie walk into the room naked. His eyebrows and toupee were gone. He was sad and pasty, decolored, moving out of the background glow into the stutter light of TV. He resembled someone in the land of nudo, a shaved nude in a booth in Tokyo, a nude monk you pay to photograph, some endless variation on the factual nude, a satire for tourists. He looked unclear, half erased. Could he tell Lee's eyes were open?

He stood a moment among the books and pole lamps as if he'd forgotten something. What could he forget, naked? Lee shifted around so that his back was to the room. He shifted like someone asleep, just rolling over. He closed his eyes. He groaned like someone deep in sleep.

Ferrie sat on the edge of the sofa, reaching around to put a hand on Lee's belly over the shirt, a hand on Hidell, leaning closer now, his breath sharp with mouthwash.

"People have to be nice to each other."

He moved his hand around. Wandering hands, Lee thought. An old term, an old thing they said in junior high, what a girl said about a boy. He's got wandering hands.

"People be nice," whispered Cap'n Dave.

He seemed to be easing his body lengthwise onto the sofa, arranging himself behind Lee, the hand circling a central area, moving slowly over Lee's pants. Lee wouldn't let him undo the belt. They actually grappled for a moment. They fought over the belt buckle without changing positions on the sofa. Lee kept his eyes closed. They hand-fought and slapped at each other. Ferrie was strong. He was using one hand, gripping Lee's wrist hard. It's called an Indian burn when you put your hands around someone's wrist and twist in opposite directions. Another old term, a thing from grade school maybe.

"People be nice, be nice, be nice."

He seemed to be pressing with his body now. The hand sort of quieting down. Lee put his legs tight together. His eyes were still closed. He felt the rough fabric of the sofa on his face. Ferrie was breathing all over him, covering his head and neck with heavy breath.

Hide the L in Lee.

No one will see.

Then he felt it on his pants, seeping in. He tried not to take it personally. They separated themselves and Ferrie got a towel for him and then put on a robe. This was achieved mostly in the dark.

"When you get back to Dallas, there are some places you ought to know about."

"I'm going to Mexico City."

"But when you get back. There's a place called Gene's Music Bar. You ought to drop in some night. Or the Century Room, which I hear just opened."

"What for?"

"Meet people."

"What kind of people?"

"People you want to meet. I don't know Dallas bars myself. I'm passing on the word. Stay away from the Holiday. That's rough trade. Not for you, Leon."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Of course you do. Gene's Music Bar is number one on your list. You definitely want to catch the action. Tell me what it's like."

Out came the hashish.

David Ferrie said, "Hashish. Interesting, interesting word. Arabic. It's the source of the word assassin."

Jack Ruby liked his juice fresh-squeezed in the morning. He bought eight grapefruits at a clip, grabbing them out of the bin with a steely look, like this is the only thing that can save me. There were grapefruits wedged in every part of the fridge. He liked to slap the surface of a good grapefruit. Dependable. He liked to heft the thing in his hand. The whole business of juice was allied in his mind with swimming laps in a pool or working out with weights. He was a physical-culture nut when he had time.

When he stepped out of the kitchen, that's when the bachelor chaos began to flow. The place resembled a lost-and-found. To Jack it was okay. He hated and feared a hotel look. All he had to do was recall the time ten years ago when he became depressed over business failures, when money problems were climbing up his back and pressing on his skull. It got so bad he took a room in a cheap walk-up hotel and isolated himself for eight weeks with the shades drawn, eating only enough to stay alive. He was a nothing person. He had no desire to live. It was the one time in his life he was guilty of despair, which is the deepest misery of the spirit, the hardest to overcome.

Maybe this is why Jack had a roommate. To avoid the scariness of being alone. Or was it just his habit of taking in strays, people of untremendous means? George Senator was fifty, a postcard salesman, divorced through the mail, with an eighth-grade education. He'd been in and out of jobs for years, a short-order cook, a novelty man, a salesman of women's apparel whose territory had been reduced from the entire state of Texas to the jackrabbit wastes. He helped out at the club and cooked Jack a meal now and then, although he didn't broil things right and could never learn the organics of another person, the little niceties of diet that mean so much.

Coming out of the kitchen with the juice glass in his hand, Jack barely glanced at George, who sat bloated on the sofa in a beat-up robe, coughing into his cupped hands.

"I'm expecting a huge phone call. Stay away from the phone. Like into next week I'm referring."

"Who do I ever call?" George said.

"I don't know. The weather."

"I don't follow the weather. I don't go anywheres near it."

Jack barely heard. He had the ability to share an apartment with a roommate and just barge and rush around as if the guy wasn't there. His mind raced too fast for a guy like shapeless George to catch a ride. He didn't even know what the spare room looked like since George moved in. Maybe he painted it orange. Not that he didn't like having George around. It's a matter of once you're used to a human presence, growing up like I did with seven brothers and sisters plus two dead in infancy, you feel there's something missing in a household.

Living alone is a pressure situation. The roommates agreed on that.

Jack took a Preludin with his grapefruit juice. He walked around the living room, trying to say in his mind what he was thinking. Six weeks and no word. They were letting him dance in midair. He went into the kitchen and made more juice. He needed a scalp treatment. He was falling behind in every area of personal care.

"Who is the call?" George said.

"A guy from New Orleans I used to know."

"This is the money."

"He told me he'd be in Dallas today. Okay. I'm waiting."

"What about the other guy?" George said.

"Karlinsky? The man is purist-minded from the start. I expected no action and that's what I got."

"So you 'said, what, let me contact New Orleans."

"I went right through Karlinsky. I went ten feet over his head."

"This other guy leaves an opening?"

"We wait and see."

"What, you asked him straight out you needed a loan?"

"He already knew my situation. He knew from last June when we bumped into each other in the street. I was in New Orleans looking at Randi Ryder for the club."

"I never been," George said.

"It's a city where the money's not so tight and clean."

He put on his jacket and hat, got his moneybag and revolver, picked up Sheba from her chair and went down to the car. He dropped the dog on the front seat, opened the trunk and tossed the moneybag in. He drove to Commerce Street and bought a couple of newspapers at a corner stand. Back at the car he spotted his dirty laundry in the rear seat, where he'd left it six, seven, eight days ago, tied together with a pajama leg. He looked around for a glass of water. Nervous in the service. Then he drove half a block in reverse to the Carousel, checking the spelling of the girls' names on the marquee. Some tourists from Topeka were looking at the glossies on the wall out front. Jack introduced himself, shook hands, gave them his card, got the dog from the front seat and went on up the narrow stairway.

Walking into the empty club made him feel how inspirational it was to grow up quitting school in Chicago, nickname Sparky, scalping tickets outside fight arenas, selling carnations in dance halls, and now he is a club owner, a known face, with ads in the paper, as only America can turn out.

He went to his office and called the local IRS and told them he had to postpone the meeting they'd scheduled because he was unable to get his records properly compiled. A phrase his attorney had suggested. They made a new appointment and he promised to bring thirteen hundred cash to ease the matter of delinquency. Another phrase.

He went to the bar, poured a glass of water and swallowed another Preludin. To speed the day along and help him think positive. The phone rang in his office. He hurried in and picked up. It was George at the apartment. The call had come. The man was in town. Tony Astorina. Carousel at noon.

The dogs in the back room were barking to be let out. Jack went down to the car and drove a block and a half to the Ritz Delicatessen. He bought half a dozen sandwiches and beverages and drove right back.

His brother Sam called. He had some new production ideas for those plastic spinners, those twirly things that spin on high wires in front of service stations and car lots for a festive appearance.

The Times Herald called.

A stripper named Double DeLite called.

KLIF called.

Detective Russell Shively called.

His brother Earl called. He tried to talk Jack out of the twist-board idea. Jack wanted to manufacture an exercise device consisting of two fiberboards with some kind of ball-bearing disks between them and you stand on the boards and twist and shimmy, for fun and body tone both.

Tony Astorina walked in, doing a friendly little boxer's bob and weave. It looked like all the motion he was capable of. He had that expression of where's the coffee. Jack had coffee right here. They talked a little preliminaries. Tony was about forty but dressed young. His eyes were getting slirty inside the looming flesh. He said there was a place he had to be in forty-five minutes. He made it sound important. Jack did not want to hear this kind of remark. He wanted to believe Tony was involved in this conversation, not just passing by, passing time.

The barking in the back room was feeble and hoarse, like dogs in some Chinese village.

Then Tony said, "Loanshark is not our thing, Jack. There are people I can refer you. But I wouldn't be truthful if I said it could happen. These clubs, I don't know, they're shaky propositions."

"The boys know me in four cities, five cities."

"Your reputation is Jack Ruby is one tough Jew. To put it plain. He goes back to the unions."

"Scrap Iron and Junk Handlers."

"He did a lot of things you can give him credit."

"I brawl too much. It's this temperament where I lash out. I follow the theory you take the play away. You barrel in hard and fast before they even know they're in a dispute. Ten seconds later I'm a baby."

"But I'm making the point. The point isn't temperamental. It's a question of where's the money coming from to pay back."

"From business. From the clubs. Plus some ventures I'm planning in other vicinities. I'm saying you are close to Carmine."

"Carmine. I can't go to Carmine with something like this. Carmine has enormous, don't even get me started-things going on you can't believe. You think he does business all day long? He has an organization to do the business. The man is in conference. He has meets all the time. He's running a country, Jack."

"I'm saying you put a word in his ear. You plant an idea."

"There's so much stuff they put in front of him. Things from out of nowhere, I never heard of. Like I just found out about Kennedy and that woman. It went on two years. Mo talked to Carmine all the time."

"What woman?"

"You know Mo?"

"Giancana."

"Sam."

"Giancana."

"For two years Kennedy is ramming this woman that's Sam's mistress. I don't know the first thing. They do it in New York. They do it in L.A. They find like twenty minutes in Chicago, bing bang, when he's there for a fund-raising."

Jack was trying to draw himself a picture.

"And Carmine gets reports. She saw him here, she saw him there. He said this, he said that. Two years, Jack. They did it in the White House."

Jack could not conceive of a situation whereby the President of the United States would be fucking the girlfriend of Momo Gian-cana. There had to be a mistake somewhere. This is a guy from the Patch in Chicago, from Dago Town, four or five blocks from where Jack grew up. Jack used to be personal friends with two of Mo's enforcers. He'd been hearing Giancana's name for decades. Since the days he was called Mooney. A wheelman for the 42 Gang. Fifty or sixty arrests. Time in Joliet. Time in Leavenworth. A powerful figure today. Chicago, Las Vegas, etc. But sharing a woman with the President? Jack knew it was going to be hard to swing the conversation back to a loan for a failing business.

Tony was still in his chair but only technically. There was an air of departure, a small restlessness that Jack could trace to his hands, like a smoker who quits.

"Jack, I come by here for old time."

"We used to swim on the Capri roof."

"I'm saying. I didn't come by for the coffee."

"Tony. I appreciate."

"I come by because we go back together."

"We got laid in adjoining rooms."

"Havana, madonn'."

"Tony, I have plans I'm painting the club. A whole new scheme. I want to feature a silky type red, like an old-timey red. The convention business picks up soon. If Carmine could see his way clear to just think about this for a couple of minutes, riding in the car someday."

"I wish I could leave you some ray of light."

"I appreciate."

"I only drive the man around. In fact I'll tell you the most important thing I do for Carmine. Every morning I put him in his vest. I tie him in nice."

"What vest?"

"His vest. His body armor. He's running a fucking country."

They shook hands at the top of the stairs. Then Tony embraced Jack, who felt the emotion of the moment.

"There's something I want to do. I want to send you a twist-board. I have this twistboard I want you to try. Test model. Tony. We used to swim."

Jack called George Senator at the apartment.

He called his sister Eva.

He called Rabbi Hillel Silverman.

He called Lynette Batistone, Randi Ryder, to tell her she couldn't have the night off after all. Double DeLite was sick to her stomach in Grand Prairie.

Jack opened the door to the back room and the dogs shot out madcap and scrambling. There is a thing about the trust of a dog that makes up for a lot of heartache we take in this life. He plucked Sheba from the tumble of fur and went down to the car. He drove one block to the bank. He drove to the Sheraton and went into the coffee shop to tell the girl at the register a joke he knew would knock her to the floor. He drove to some stores looking for a certain food supplement for dieters. He heard police sirens and thought about following, just for a little adrenaline, but felt uninterested all of a sudden, down in the dumps.

This kind of gloom made him feel anonymous. Who was he? Why should anyone care about him?

He drove around a while, then stopped at a bakery and bought a cheesecake. He took it to the Police and Courts Building and rode the elevator to three. He stuck his head in a few offices and took the cake to the press room. Four or five clerks and detectives came in. Jack took a Preludin with a mouthful of cold coffee that was sitting in a paper cup. Somebody noticed the stub where Jack's index finger used to be. A little accident in the nature of an old-time dispute. He told two jokes that went over well. Then he went down the hall to Homicide and looked in on Russell Shively, who was at his desk reading Field and Stream, a lanky type with a sunburnt face who always made Jack feel here is my corny idea of a Texas lawman.

"Russell, how long we known each other?"

"Hell, I don't know."

"Have I ever mentioned suicide to you?"

"I don't believe so, Jack."

"Russell, if I ever mention suicide or the phrase kill myself or do away with myself, I am telling you right now it is not an empty threat to get attention. If you ever pick up the phone and hear a voice that says I'm killing myself and you think it's my voice, Jack Ruby, then I'm telling you right now I'm not bluffing."

These remarks came out of nowhere, of course, so Russell Shively just looked carefully into Jack's eyes and nodded, with no idea what to say.

Jack put his snap-brim fedora back on his head and walked out of the room. He went down to the car and drove off toward the Carousel. He thought of some calls he had to make. Bottles and jars rolled across the floor of the car. He thought of the fight that led to the stub finger. A dozen years ago he had a fight of a total animal nature with a guitar player at the Silver Spur, which Jack was running at the time. The guitarist bit off part of his left index finger. It was a single, sustained and determined head-wagging bite in the course of a stretch of wrestling and it left the top part of the finger hanging, beyond repair. This was harmful to Jack's public image because he wanted to join the Masons, the Freemasons, whatever they're called, for the business contacts and the fellowship. But the Masons would not accept a man who was missing part of his anatomy. This was an ancient bylaw that they kept in the books.

He called his attorney.

He called the Morning News about an ad for the club.

He called a stripper named Janet Alvord.

"Do I look swishy to you, Janet? What about my voice? People tell me there's a lisp. Is this the way a queer sounds to a neutral person? Do you think I'm latent or what? Could I go either way?

Don't pee on my legs, Janet. I want the total truth."

The bartender was here. Jack complained that the bar glasses were not clean enough to suit him. He spotted the new waitress, who walked in wearing a low-cut ruffled blouse. He took her into a corner and told her a joke. She had a rumbling laugh. He told another quick one and walked off fast, looking back at her laughing in the corner.

He liked a woman with a freckled cleavage.

He went down to the car and drove home for an early dinner. Because what is it like to be a Jew in a place, in a state like Texas? You feel to yourself don't ever speak out, don't ever stand out. But he loved this city. It made him a living in his own way. He didn't have to hide what he was. He didn't have to listen to Jewish jokes from the MC at the club. The MC knew one Jewish joke could land him in Emergency. No complaints. It's just the little feeling you get sometimes there's some secret thing they're shielding. He grew up in the neighborhoods, the crosstown wars. What was Dallas next to that? He used to come home with blood on his clothes for sticking up for the Jewish race. He met his sisters at the streetcar stop in Dago Town to make sure nobody catcalled Jew-girl at them, or walked close behind smacking their lips, or put a hand on them. No complaints. It's just the impression of you're off to the side. But he had friends on the force. He liked to give a loan to a young cop with a new baby. Plainclothes officers came to the club. How many cities could he name where a Jew can walk into police headquarters and he hears, Hello, how are you, it's Jack. I owe my life to this town.

George said they were having spaghetti tonight.

"I thought tonight was a broiled haddock."

"Where?"

"Didn't I come home with haddock-when was it?"

"I don't know," George said.

Jack took a Preludin with some leftover juice.

"Ask me I'm unhappy."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning with reference to what he said."

"No loan."

"They're getting ready to padlock my clubs."

"You take too many of those things, Jack."

"They're medically an obesity drug."

"Nobody's that fat."

"I need the stimuli," Jack said.

He took the newspapers he'd bought that morning and went into the toilet. All Jack's reading took place in the toilet. It was the best part of his day. He read the nightlife, the ads for the clubs, the local tidbits, the entertainment column. There were the shows around town. He checked the competition. His mind settled down when he was crapping. There was a restfulness and calm.

Later he stood in the kitchen talking to George.

He didn't want to reach the point again where he had to sleep at the club. There was a time not long ago when he didn't have a place to live. He was between apartments with not a lot of ready cash to maneuver. He slept at the club. He lived there, ate there, slept in a foldout bed in a back room next to the room with the dogs. His whole life conducted under one roof. A stink of beer and cigarettes and dog and what-have-you. That was the second-worst period after the Cotton Bowl Hotel, where he sat in the dark for eight weeks. He refused to go down to that level again. Of no place to live. Of totally outside the norm.

George said you can tell when the spaghetti's cooked by picking a strand out of the boiling water and flinging it against the wall. If it sticks, it's done.

Jack ate quickly and set out for the club in his bouncing Olds-mobile.

Guy Banister sat in his ottice after dark, the old lion head sunk in thought. Some bum was urinating in the street, drilling the wall of the building. The desk lamp was on. Guy picked up his file on the Red Chinese. It was the file he saved for quiet times of day, the final nightmare file, to be brooded over slowly. Red Chinese troops are being dropped into the Baja by the fucking tens of thousands. Mobilizing, massing, growing. Little red stars on their caps.

In fact there was nothing new in the file. The same old rumors and suspicions. They are down there in the pale sands in their padded jackets, gathered in one great silent sweep, waiting for the word. It didn't need elaboration or update. There was something classic in the massing of the Chinese.

He wanted to believe it was true. He did believe it was true. But he also knew it wasn't. Ferrie told him it didn't matter, true or not. The thing that mattered was the rapture of the fear of believing. It confirmed everything. It justified everything. Every violence and lie, every time he'd cheated on his wife. It allowed him to collapse inside, to melt toward awe and dread. That's what Ferrie said. It explained his dreams. The Chinese caused his dreams. Every terror and queerness of sleep, every unspeakability-it is painted in China white.

Men floating down in white silk. He liked to think of an unmechanized mass, silent men gathering their chutes, concealed in the pale sands. This was not the missiles or the satellites, all that cocksure technology. The Chinese file contained the human swarm, in padded jackets, massing near the border. A fear to savor slowly.

The door opened and Ferrie walked in, breaking the reverie. He leaned against a wall eating french fries from a carton.

"I came to give a report. Not that you want to hear it."

"Where's Oswald?"

"Houston by now. I had Frank and Raymo take him. He'll get on a bus for Mexico City."

"Mackey says he can fix it so the Cubans won't take him. He's got Agency connections in Mexico City. Agency's bound to have someone inside the Cuban embassy. We're counting on Leon going back to Texas. We know that station wagon parked outside his house had Texas plates. His wife and kid left in that car."

"I'm pretty sure his rifle went with them."

"Is he leaning our way?" Banister said.

"This is the part you don't want to hear."

"He says no."

"That's right. But there's time."

"Does he know who we want?"

"He knows."

"Not interested."

"It needs time. He's been carrying on a struggle inside."

"He's your project, Dave."

"We had a talk this morning. To the extent that he talks. He hasn't made the leap."

"You keep saying you'll get inside his mind."

"I'm in his mind. I'm there. Like a fucking car wash."

"He shot at Walker."

"That's the point. Walker was politics. But Leon can't get worked up over Kennedy. He figures the man has made amends for past errors. He's a little dazzled by the Kennedy magic."

Banister wanted to crush something.

"Leon's a type he is willing to relinquish control at some point down the line," Ferrie said. "It just hasn't happened yet. Where's Mackey?"

"Miami. He's got two houses set up. One for Alpha people. One for his own team."

"If Leon is in?"

"If Leon is in," Banister said, "you fly him to Miami the night before."

"Then what?"

"We have to work it out."

"Once it's done I want him out of there," Ferrie said. "I don't want him abandoned or killed. He leaves his rifle behind and he gets out like the rest of them."

"That's always a possibility," Banister said.

Ferrie tossed the empty carton toward a basket.

"Do you trust Alpha 66?" he said.

"What the hell. They've been running a high fever ever since Pigs. That's two and a half years with a thermometer up their ass. They're ready. Nobody doubts their readiness."

"Do you trust Mackey?"

"I trust him completely," Banister said. "He wants a wall of shooters. Maybe eight men elevated on both sides of the street. As many as ten men. A shooting gallery."

"I thought Mackey liked a hand-knit operation."

"That's what he likes. This is what he gets. Alpha is in whether we want them or not. Best to join forces. He'll make the most of it. Once the motorcade route is public, he'll scout the area and set up positions. The hero comes riding into town. Tra-la, tra-la. We get him first crack out of the box."

They went down the stairs and paused outside the building entrance.

Banister said, "We have one more thing working. We want to leave an imprint of Oswald's activities starting today and ending when the operation is complete. A series of incidents. We want to establish Oswald as a man that people will later remember. Someone involved in suspicious business."

"What if Oswald doesn't cooperate?"

"We create our own Oswald. A second, a third, a fourth. This plan goes into effect no matter what he does after Mexico City. Mackey wants Oswalds all over Texas. He wants Alpha to supply the people. I talked to Carmine Latta about money for this thing."

"I'm the one who talks to Carmine."

"Not this time."

"I'm the contact."

"Shut up so I can tell you."

"Carmine and I have a rapport."

"There's an Alpha chapter in Dallas with headquarters in some rundown house. Carmine sent his bodyguard to Dallas earlier today. Pockets hot with cash."

In Mexico City

Postcard #6. Mexico City. Ancient and modern. Sprawling yet intimate. A city of contrasts. Leon stands in his room at the Hotel del Comercio, counting out his pesos. He has a street map with the day's destinations clearly marked. He has his documents and clippings. He has his thirty-five-cent Spanish-English dictionary with the kangaroo emblem. (New, concise. Nuevo, conciso.) He enjoys foreign travel, just like the President.

He walks two miles from his hotel to the Cuban embassy. He tells the woman he is going to Russia and wants to stop off in Cuba for a while. It is easier to get a transit visa because of the Cuban wariness of Americans. And anyone on his way to Russia gets the benefit of the doubt.

The woman examines his old Soviet work permit, his proof of marriage to a Soviet citizen, his proof of leadership in the Fair Play for Cuba movement, the news story of his arrest and a number of other documents.

She does not say si. She does not say no.

She sends him off to get photographs for the visa application.

He stops in at the Soviet embassy, a couple of blocks away. The nearness is reassuring. The embassy is a large gray villa with a columned entrance and fancy dormers. There are armed sentries and a tall iron fence with a spiky top. It occurs to Leon that a concealed camera is probably taking his picture as he enters.

An official looks at his papers. It might be nice, he says, if Leon could come back with his Cuban transit visa in hand.

All right. He gets his picture taken and goes back to the Cuban embassy. The woman says he must get his Soviet entry visa before he can get his Cuban transit visa.

All right. He goes back to the villa. The man tells him a Soviet visa will take four months to arrange if he can get it at all. Leon says that when he was in Finland he got a visa in two days. The man says, "But this is Mexico City," and Leon expects him to add, "Hotbed of intrigue."

He eats the soup of the day, rice and meat. It costs forty-two cents. He checks the menu against the dictionary, then takes a bite of food, then checks again.

The next day at the Cuban embassy he demands to see the consul. He stands there shouting at the man. They have a loud and bitter exchange. He knows his rights. He is a friend of the revolution.

Then he goes to the Soviets and tells the man to check with the embassy in Washington. There are letters on file. His wife is Russian. They were married the day Castro won the Lenin Peace Prize.

It occurs to Leon that this man is KGB. So he mentions Kirilenko. Is this a good idea or not? At least it's a name, it's a link. It also occurs to Leon that he is being photographed not only by hidden Soviet cameras but probably by CIA cameras concealed in the building across the street or in a parked car or dangling, for all he knows, from a satellite in the sky.

His room number is eighteen. It is almost October and he was born on the eighteenth. David Ferrie was born on March 18. They have sat and discussed this. The year of Feme's birth is 1918.

On Sunday he goes to the movies in the afternoon and again in the evening.

The next day he visits the Cuban embassy, talks to the Soviet embassy on the phone and then visits the Soviet embassy. It occurs to him that the CIA probably taps the Soviet telephones.

Cuba and Russia. Russia is not totally out of the question. He could actually go back to Russia if Marina's visa comes through. He could visit or actually stay. They could be a family again.

Leon asks the Soviet official if there is any reply to the telegram sent to Washington. He tells the man he has information to offer in return for travel expenses to the USSR. He mentions Kirilenko again.

In the afternoon he consults his copy of Esta Semana, which he picked up in the hotel lobby. Events and locations in English and Spanish. Everything here happens in twos and his eyes constantly dart from one language to the other.

The next day they tell him at both embassies that there are no new developments. Once again he shows his documents, his correspondence. Documents are supposed to provide substance for a claim or a wish. A man with papers is substantial.

But this is the bureaucratic trap, in two languages, three languages, and nothing has effect. He is turned down, frozen out. It's hard to believe the representatives of the new Cuba are treating him this way. It's a deep disappointment. He feels he is living at the center of an emptiness. He wants to sense a structure that includes him, a definition clear enough to specify where he belongs. But the system floats right through him, through everything, even the revolution. He is a zero in the system.

For the third or fourth time he eats dinner in the small restaurant next to his hotel. It occurs to him that communications are flowing between agencies in the U.S. based on these wiretaps and the pictures taken by these hidden cameras.

Up to now he has been the only North American in the hotel and in the restaurant. But he realizes someone is looking at him, a man at a table near the kitchen, and Leon is fairly certain it is not a Mexican. He thinks he had a glimpse of the man coming in.

But he doesn't want to look that way and see who it is. He senses something about the man that he doesn't want to know. There is music playing on a radio that sits on a shelf, maybe a fandango. He shifts in his chair, turning his back completely to the corner of the room where the man is sitting. Because the curious thing, the odd and strange and singular thing is that Leon believes the man is T. J. Mackey. He sips his water carefully. He feels the blood sort of surge up his back. He knows the man is not Latin, from the glimpse. He knows he's broad-shouldered, hair cut close. He takes the dictionary out of his pocket just for something to do, a busyness, flipping through the pages. It was just a glimpse, a blur. He drinks his water slowly, almost formally, aware of himself, holding himself in a correct and serious way, as anyone does who knows he is being watched.

Walking across the square he hears someone call, "Leon," but the name is pronounced more Spanish than English and he decides it is not meant for him.

The next day he gets on a bus at eight-thirty in the morning and sits in seat number twelve, which he has reserved in the name H. O. Lee. It is not until they approach the International Bridge, seventeen hours later, that Leon realizes he has forgotten to visit Trotsky's house, the fortified house in Mexico City where Trotsky spent his last years in exile. The sense of regret makes him feel breathless, physically weak, but he shifts out of it quickly, saying so what.

He carries two bananas in a paper bag and he takes them out and gulps them down before the bus reaches customs. He figures fruit is not allowed across the border and the last thing he wants now is another tussle with authority.

4 October

Mary Frances pushed the vacuum cleaner across the living-room floor. She was feeling bloated and hormonal. It was an effort just to exist, to put one heavy foot ahead of the other. Friday, after school, and she had to vacuum around Suzanne, who knelt on the floor watching cartoon rabbits on TV. She vacuumed over the bump between the living room and dining room. She vacuumed around the table and under the oak sideboard. There was so much drag on her body today, so many resisting forces.

Win walked past the doorway with a knife in his hand.

She pushed the vacuum cleaner back into the living room. It was a five-year-old Hoover with a receptacle unit shaped like a space satellite. Funny, she thought, how she could vacuum back and forth in front of Suzanne and the girl never complained. The girl looked right through her. The girl heard the cartoon voices through the noise of the Hoover.

After dinner Win went down to the basement to investigate a noise. He watched himself come down the plank stairs, head tilted slightly, fingers of the right hand extended. Houses make noises, Mary Frances said. He smelled turpentine and understood how you could become hooked on the smell of turpentine, give yourself up to it, volatile, sticky, piney, your whole life centered on spirits of turpentine. Mary Frances told him that houses shift and settle all the time.

Thanks. But there is sometimes more to it.

He went back up to the living room and sat with her, listening to the radio. She liked the revivalist preachers, men of a certain creepy eloquence.

"Don't you feel well?" he said.

"I'm all right."

"I want you to be well."

"I'm all right."

"Because it would be devastating if you weren't well. That mustn't happen, understand? I actually couldn't bear it."

She had a Sears catalogue on her lap. She'd used catalogues to shop when they were posted to remote areas. isolation tropic. He wondered what the hell had happened to Mackey.

"Don't be so solemn," she said.

"Don't you like being fussed after?"

"Not the way you do it."

"The housewife who never has time for herself. Doesn't she relish a little attention?"

"Not the way you do it. Looking so stricken. It chills my blood."

He laughed. They heard Suzanne walk through the kitchen singing a rhyme popular with local kids. Mackey had eluded all attempts by Parmenter to trace him. What did it mean? Larry said he probably just walked off. Doesn't want to do it. Wants to change careers. It's over. We tried.

"Beans, beans, the musical fruit The more you eat, the more you toot."

Parmenter himself was in Buenos Aires getting a preview of his new job. This is the future of the Agency, he said to Everett. Keeping track of world currencies. Moving and hiding money. Building reserves of money. Financing vast operations with complex networks of money.

Lancer is coming to Texas.

"Did you notice the casual tone?" Mary Frances said.

"It's a kids' jingle. What sort of tone?"

"No but the way she sort of rehearsed the casualness. So we wouldn't know we were supposed to hear."

"It was casual because it was casual."

"Where's the steak knife you were using to scrape paint? We keep losing knives."

Premonition. The story about the President's trip was in the Record-Chronicle a week ago. A brief tour of Texas in November, after his swing through Florida. Stops at Houston, San Antonio, Fort Worth and Dallas. Buried inside the paper. Three or four lines that only a person with a compelling interest in the President's whereabouts might take note of. Win thought it was eerie that President Jack would be headed in this general direction. The plot coming to the plotter. Assuming he made it past Miami. Because Parmenter might be wrong. Something might still be in force, some movement, a driving logic.

"I can't find the paint scraper," he said.

"Just leave the knives alone."

"There's something about a paint scraper. You know it's there. You're looking right at it. But you can't quite pick it out of the background. Let's face it, the background is vast and confusing."

He wanted a way out of guilt and fear. He was not strong enough to survive the damage this operation might cause if it developed a second life. He half yearned to be found out. It would be a deliverance in a way to be confronted, polygraphed, forced to tell the truth. He believed in the truth. He feared and welcomed the chance to be polygraphed. The Office of Security had models designed to fit in suitcases. You could be fluttered in your home. They would arrive with a two-suit Samsonite case. Unpack the machine, mix some control questions in with the serious stuff. His body would do the rest, yield up its unprotected data. The machine intervenes between a man and his secrets. There is something intimate about the polygraph. It measures skin conduction and hears you sweat. It allows you to give yourself away. Lies quicken the breath. They make the blood pound. It was such an old-fashioned idea, dated and quaint, but he'd seen himself how well it worked. Failed one test. Broke down at the start of another. Polygraph. A nice technical sound to it, a specialist's sound, but still traditional, decipherable, from the Greek.

"Where is she?" He called out, "Where's my little girl?"

"In her room," Mary Frances said.

He called out, "But we want her down here. We need some serious cheering up."

"Once she's in her room, the subject's closed. The day is definitely over."

"I had to share a room," he said.

"I had my own, thank God."

"I think you'll find that the great figures of history rarely had their own rooms."

"I loved my room," she said.

"Are you saying nothing ever again has been quite so nice?" He called out, "Come down and talk to us or we'll be very unhaaaap- py."

He went out to the porch to investigate a noise. He stood there smoking. He could hear the radio faintly. An old voice, a radio voice from another era can bring back everything. This was a house that nurtured memories. The curved porch. The oak posts furled in trumpet vines.

He knew all the techniques ever devised to beat the machine but he also knew he would be helpless to bring them into play. He believed in the polygraph. He wanted to cooperate, show everyone the machine was working well. Devices make us pliant. We want to please them. The machine was his only hope of deliverance after what he'd done, what he'd loosed into the crowd. A way out of death. Because in time a pity would fall across their faces. They would all see he only wanted what was right for his country. He loved his country. He loved Cuba, knew the language and the literature. He would go beyond yes and no. Tell them about the deathward-tending logic of a plot. T-Jay is out there somewhere, chewing gum and squinting in the light. They would nod and understand. A forgiveness would come to their eyes. Because they are not, after all, unmerciful men. Say what you will about the Agency. The Agency forgives.

God is alive and well in Texas.

He went inside and turned off the radio. The day wasn't half done and it was time to go to bed again. He checked the front door and turned off the porch light. He walked down the hall for the millionth time, checked the back door, checked to see that the oven was off. The last thing downstairs was the oven, except for the kitchen light. He turned off the kitchen light and began to climb the stairs.

He slipped near the top of the stairway, an ordinary misstep, no harm, no deeper meaning, but Mary Frances was out of the bedroom in a silent burst to take him by the elbow and lead him inside.

He sat at the edge of the bed taking off his shoes. She watched him, reading his face for signs.

"Just a little slip," he said.

"It sounded."

"Just an ordinary fool missing a step."

"You have a seminar tomorrow. Arts and Sciences Building. Ten a.m."

"I want you to be well," he said. "You have to be absolutely well. We can't have a situation where you're not completely yourself. I couldn't even begin to carry on if you somehow weren't well. I count on you for everything that matters."

The Agency forgives. There wasn't a man in the upper ranks of the four directorates who didn't understand the perils of clandestine work. They would be pleased by his willingness to cooperate. What's more, they would admire the complexity of his plan, incomplete as it was. It had art and memory. It had a sense of responsibility, of moral force. And it was a picture in the world of their own guilty wishes. He was never more surely an Agency man than in the first breathless days of dreaming up this plot.

He stood at the side of the bed in his pajamas. He'd forgotten to register the fact that the oven was off. He would have to go back downstairs to check the oven. Mary Frances lay in the dark, already sleep-breathing, deep and even. He has to see that the oven is off and he has to register the fact. This means they are safe for another night.

Mackey stood by the refrigerator drinking water from a pitcher. He wore a sweatsuit and baseball cap. He'd taken to running at night to keep his weight down.

He took off the cap and blew into it. Then he sat at the kitchen table and peeled an orange. The house was at the end of an unfinished street about half a mile from the heart of Little Havana.

Raymo walked in. He said, "When did you get back?"

"This afternoon."

"Did you hear there's word going around? Somebody in Chicago's planning the same thing."

"Banister called. He got a look at an FBI teletype. An attempt on the life."

"Four-man team. At least one of them might be Cuban. JFK's supposed to be in Chicago like November second."

"We have to wait our turn."

"If word leaks out there, same thing could happen to us."

"I'm counting on it," T-Jay said. "In fact I'm taking steps to make it happen. It's the only way we'll succeed. We're going in quick and tight. You keep it quiet. You don't tell Frank or Wayne."

"Forget Miami."

"That's right."

"Then we don't bring Leon here."

"That's right."

"Where is he?"

"He took a Transportes del Norte bus to Laredo. I'm betting he took a Greyhound from there to Dallas. Main thing is the Cubans didn't take him. No visa for Leon. It's beginning to take shape. Small, spur-of-the-moment, that's what we want. An everyday Texas homicide."

"JFK."

"Goes to Dallas next month. The man's a serious traveler. And wherever he goes, somebody wants a piece of him. Deep sweats of desire and rage. I don't know what it is. Maybe he's just too pretty to live."

He detached a couple of wedges from the orange and handed them to Raymo.

"Somebody keeps an eye on Leon."

"I think Leon will be hiding from us," T-Jay said. "He knows what we're up to and he doesn't necessarily approve. For the time being, we have our own model Oswald. Alpha is running people up and down the state. Eventually we'll have to pinpoint the original."

"When we took him to Houston he doesn't say ten words to me. He only talked to Frank."

"What did he say to Frank?"

"He got after Frank right away. He wanted some Spanish lessons. "

Suzanne sat up in bed in the dark. She knew they were asleep. Once the radio hum withdrew from the wall by her ear, all she had to do was count to a hundred. Both sound asleep. If she was going to move the Little Figures, now was the time. She needed a safer hiding place. The closet had so much junk they would clean it any day and the Little Figures were hidden in one of the pockets on the shoe bag that hung inside the door. Once they found the Little Figures, that was the end of Suzanne, She would have no protection left in the world.

Lucky she had a good new place to keep them safe.

She got out of bed and raised the shade halfway, letting in light from the streetlamp. Then she moved softly in her nightgown that touched the floor, She took the Little Figures out of the shoe bag and sat them down on the narrow ledge behind the old bureau that used to belong to Grandma. The ledge stuck out about an inch near the bottom of the bureau. Hers was the only hand that could fit between the bureau and the wall. That was the perfect place because the Figures were already seated so they balanced just right. They were a clay man and a clay woman that her best friend, Missy, had given her as a birthday present. They were Indians who dwelt in pueblos and their hair and their clothes were painted black, with little black dots for the eyes and mouth.

She got back into bed and pulled the covers up.

The Little Figures were not toys. She never played with them. The whole reason for the Figures was to hide them until the time when she might need them. She had to keep them near and safe in case the people who called themselves her mother and father were really somebody else.

In Dallas

Four women sat around the table in Mrs. Ed Roberts's kitchen, drinking coffee and passing the time of day. A basket of folded laundry rested on the counter. Ruth Paine gestured again, calling for a pause. They all waited. Then she spoke softly in her halting Russian to Marina Oswald, who listened and smiled, a finger curled through the handle of her cup. The talk was kids, husbands, doctors, the usual yakkety-yak, but Ruth found it interesting. A chance to speak Russian. Mrs. Bill Randle, sitting next to her, nodded periodically as she translated. And Dorothy Roberts studied Marina's face to see that she was getting it. They wanted her to feel she was part of things.

The kids made a racket in the next room. Ruth Paine told her two neighbors that Marina's husband was having no luck finding work. He was living in a rooming house in Oak Cliff until he could find a job and an apartment for his family. Marina was due any day, of course.

Dorothy Roberts mentioned Manor Bakeries. They had a home-delivery service. Then there was Texas Gypsum, where somebody said they were hiring.

Ruth Paine said Marina's husband didn't drive, so that cut down the prospects.

Mrs. Bill Randle, Linnie Mae, said maybe she would have a piece of that coffee cake after all. It looked real good.

Dorothy Roberts said, "Is it warm for October or is it just me?"

A van door slammed across the street.

Then Linnie Mae Randle mentioned her brother. How he was saying the other day he thought they needed another fellow at the book warehouse where he worked, on the edge of downtown Dallas.

Ruth translated for Marina.

One of the little girls came in, wetting her finger to pick crumbs off the tabletop.

Dorothy opened the door to the carport.

"Out on Elm Street," Linnie Mae said. "Near Stemmons Freeway."

Five minutes later Ruth and Marina and June Lee and Ruth's small children, Sylvia and Chris, cut across the lawn to the Paine residence next door, a modest ranch house with an attached garage. Ruth turned at the door and watched Marina coming along slowly, vast, wide, ferrying one more soul across the darkness and into the world, or into suburban Dallas. The Oswald family was catching up to the Paines. Not that Ruth minded. She didn't even mind having Lee come out to visit once a week. She was separated from her husband and it was nice, actually, having a man to do certain jobs around the house.

Inside, Marina asked Ruth if she would telephone. Ruth looked in the phone directory for Texas School Book Depository. She talked to a man named Roy Truly about a job for a young veteran of the armed forces whose wife is expecting a child, and they already have a little girl, and he has been out of work for a while, and is desirous of employment, and is willing to work part-time or full-time, and is there a possibility of an opening?

Marina stood nearby, waiting for Ruth to translate.

It was a seven-story brick building with a Hertz sign on the roof. Lee was an order-filler. He picked up orders from the chute on the first floor and fixed them to his clipboard. Then he went up to six, usually, to find the books. Most of the order-fillers were Negroes. They had elevator races in the afternoon. Gates slamming, voices echoing down the shaft, laughter, name-calling. He took the books down to the girls on one, to the wrapping bench, where the merchandise was checked and shipped.

All these books. Books stacked ten cartons high. Cartons stamped Books. Stamped Ten Rolling Readers. Stacked higher than the tall windows. The cartons are a size you have to wrestle. When you open a fresh carton you get the fragrance of paper, of book pages and binding. It floods you with memories of school.

He liked carrying a clipboard. The clipboard made him feel this was a half-decent way to earn a dollar. He didn't have to listen to crazy-ass machines. There was no dirt or grease on the job. Just dust rising when the men ran to the elevators in the afternoon, three or four men pounding across the old wood floors to begin the race down-sunny dust forming among the books.

Lee sat in the dining room at the Paine house, wondering where the women had sneaked off to. Then Marina and Ruth walked in carrying a cake and singing "Happy Birthday." He was taken by surprise. It was a shock. He laughed and cried. Twenty-four.

He stayed over that night, a Friday, and the next evening he sat on the floor watching a double feature on TV, with Marina curled up next to him, her head in his lap.

The first movie was Suddenly. Frank Sinatra is a combat veteran who comes to a small town and takes over a house that overlooks the railroad depot. He is here to assassinate the President. Lee felt a stillness around him. He had an eerie sense he was being watched for his reaction. The President is scheduled to arrive by train later in the day. He is going fishing in a river in the mountains. Lee could tell the movie was made in the fifties from the cars and hairstyles, which meant the President was Eisenhower, although no one said his name. He felt connected to the events on the screen. It was like secret instructions entering the network of signals and broadcast bands, the whole busy air of transmission. Marina was asleep. They were running a message through the night into his skin. Frank Sinatra sets up a high-powered rifle in the window and waits for the train to arrive. Lee knew he would fail. It was, in the end, a movie. They had to fix it so he failed and died.

Then he watched We Were Strangers. John Garfield is an American revolutionary in Cuba in the 1930s. He plots to assassinate the dictator and blow up his entire Cabinet. Lee knew this was the period of the iron rule of Machado, known as the President of a Thousand Murders. The streets were dark. The house was dark except for the flickering screen. An old scratchy film that carried his dreams. Perfection of rage, perfection of control, the fantasy of night. John Garfield and his recruits dig a tunnel under a cemetery. Lee felt he was in the middle of his own movie. They were running this thing just for him. He didn't have to make the picture come and go. It happened on its own in the shaky light, with a strand of hair trembling in a corner of the frame. John Garfield dies a hero. He has to die. This is what feeds a revolution.

Lee sat there after the movie ended, with loud late-night commercials coming one after another, fast-talking men demonstrating blenders, demonstrating miracle shampoo, and Marina next to him, asleep, softly breathing.

It wasn't only the movies that made him feel a strangeness in the air. It was the time of year. October was his birthday. It was the month he enlisted in the Marines. He shot himself in the arm, in Japan, in October. October and November were times of decision and grave event. He arrived in Russia in October. It was the month he tried to kill himself. He'd last seen his mother one year ago October. October was the missile crisis. Marina left him and returned last November. November was the month he'd decided with Dupard to take a shot at General Walker. He'd last seen his brother Robert in November.

Brothers named Robert.

He got Marina settled in bed, then sat next to her and murmured serious baby talk to help her fall asleep again. He felt the power of her stillness, a woman's ardor and trust, and of the child she carried. He would start saving right away for a washing machine and car. They'd get an apartment with a balcony, their own furniture for a change, modern pieces, sleek and clean. These are standard ways to stop being lonely.

The landlady let him keep a jar of preserves and some milk in a corner of the fridge. He sat with the other roomers about half an hour a week, watching TV was all. He never spoke to them or raised his eyes to see them clearly. They were gray figures in old chairs, total nobodies. He was registered as O. H. Lee.

The rooming house was in an area of Oak Cliff that he knew well. The Gulf station where he'd rendezvoused with Dupard was across the street. The speed wash, now called Reno's, was half a block away. He went into the speed wash but Bobby didn't work there anymore. The place in daylight was home turf to half a dozen women and their scruffy kids. The children ate and played. The Coke machines sent bottles clunking into the slot.

His room was eight by twelve. Bed, dresser, clothes closet. He spent hours there reading the Militant and the Worker. One night he took the 22 bus back downtown. He walked the streets, looking into bars. He walked all the way down South Akard and stood outside Gene's Music Bar. Two men brushed past him, entering, and he followed them in. He stood near the door. The place was crowded. There were hard benches along the walls, rough-hewn benches. He could easily clear the room with an AR-15, which is what they use to guard the President, firing full auto. The idea was to stand here as long as he could without being noticed, just to watch, to see how queers work out their arrangements.

Somebody said, "It's none of my business but."

He tried to pick out a person he might want to talk to, an understanding type. He drew some glances, then straight-out looks. It was either go to the bar and order something or walk out the door. He decided this was a visit just to see. He could come back with a surer sense of things, not feeling so watchful and odd. Hidell means don't tell. He went out into the cool air, where he realized he was sweating. When he got to the rooming house he read every word of the week-old Militant. He also read between the lines. You can tell when they want you to do something on behalf of the struggle. They run a message buried in the text.

Three days after Rachel was born he went to a rally at Memorial Auditorium. The main speaker was Edwin A. Walker. Lee stood at the rear of the hall, watching people come in. The secret he carried with him made him feel untouchable. He was the one, the man who'd fired the shot that barely missed. It was a secret and a power. And he was standing right here, among them, among the Birchers and States Righters, wearing his.38 under a zipper jacket.

Crowd of about a thousand. Walker stood up there in his tall Stetson and moaned and groaned about the United Nations. Clap clap. The UN was an active element in the worldwide communist conspiracy. Clap clap. Lee slipped into a seat about midway down the aisle. He felt the smallness and rancor of these people. They needed to knock someone to the ground and stomp him for fifteen minutes. Feel better now? Walker went on about something called the Real Control Apparatus. He spoke in a clumsy way that engaged nothing, compelled nothing. There was a Lone Star standard on one side of him, a Confederate flag on the other. Lee moved farther down the aisle, stooped over so he wouldn't block anyone's view, and found a seat near the stage. Walker was a tired man. His face was like some actor's made up to show fatigue and aging. Lee saw a picture of a bright-red splotch on Walker's shirtfront just below the heart.

Outside the hall people crowded around the general, trying to touch him, show him their faces. He moved slowly to a waiting car. Lee pushed through the crowd. People thrust their faces into Walker's line of sight. They called to him and reached across bodies.

Lee caught the general's eye and smiled as if to say, Bet you don't know who I am. Untouchable. He had his hand inside the jacket, gripping the stock of the. 38, just to do it, to get this close and show how simple, how strangely easy it is to make your existence felt. He saw a picture of the crowd breaking apart, crying out as they scattered, No, no, no, and Walker on the pavement, hatless now, a front-page photo in the Morning News.

He took the bus to his rooming house. He sat on the bed, holding the revolver. Shooting Walker was a dead-end now. He had no means to get to Cuba. They probably wouldn't take him even if he shot the man and managed to escape. History was closed to Edwin Walker. He put the gun in a dresser drawer. He went to the kitchen and drank some milk, standing in the dark.

What would he have to give Fidel before they let him live happily in little Cuba?

He sat at the wheel of Ruth Paine's station wagon. Dust blew across the gravel surface of the huge parking lot. It was Sunday and the lot was empty.

Ruth Paine was tall and slender, a long-jawed woman in her thirties with wavy doll's hair and librarian's glasses. She turned in her seat, looking straight back.

"Slow, slow, slow," she said. "Take it very slow."

He went in reverse for thirty yards, then hit the brake too hard, jolting them both. They sat looking out at the windswept lot.

"Did you tell him where I live?"

"I don't know where you live," she said. "It wasn't until he asked that I realized I didn't know. Even Marina doesn't know. Put it in forward and we'll do some turns."

"Did he say how he found you? How he knew Marina is staying with you?"

"He seemed a very reasonable man. I don't think he'll cause you any trouble at work. He said he wouldn't do that and I believe him."

"He knows where I work?"

"I told him. I didn't see what else I could do. They're the government, Lee."

He stared through the windshield.

"Put it in forward. Drive toward that litter basket. Then make a left around it."

He remembered now. He'd left a forwarding address at the post office in New Orleans before he went to Mexico City. Ruth Paine's address. But why are they looking for him? Because they know he visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies. They have him on film. They have recordings of his voice. What is it called, electronic eavesdropping?

"Ease up on the accelerator," Ruth said.

A broadsheet was fastened around the litter basket. the vatican is the whore of revelation. He made the turn nicely and straightened out.

"He wanted to know about anyone visiting or calling. I told him your social contact at the Paine house consisted mainly of dialing the number that says what time it is. He thought that was fairly funny."

If the Feebees could find him, so could Guy Banister. Whatever the Feebees knew, Banister could find out. A whole Sunday paper scattered in the wind, pages skipping past. He brought the car to a stop and stared through the windshield.

Ruth Paine said softly, "Let's try it in reverse one more time."

He saw something in the Morning News about JFK coming to Dallas. A noon luncheon. November 21 or 22. He barely scanned the story. He barely ran his eyes over the surface of the words. It was a bright cool day. He saw a shopping cart roll slowly out of an alley.

Marina slipped out of the house during the FBI man's second visit there. She walked around and around his car, trying to figure out what make it was. She couldn't read the raised metal lettering but she did memorize the license number, as Lee had ordered, and wrote it on a slip of paper when she got back to the house, getting one digit wrong.

Lee wrote a letter to the Soviet embassy in Washington, using Ruth Paine's typewriter. He had to type the letter several times and had trouble with the envelope as well, getting the address and return address mixed up and leaving out numbers and whole words. But it was worthwhile to see the sentences emerge so clear and solid with the authority his handwriting could not convey. He complained about the notorious FBI. He tried to tell the embassy between the lines that he was known to the KGB. He asked about Soviet entry visas and announced the birth of his daughter. He blamed Mexico City on the Cubans.

Then he wrote a note to the FBI man and took it on his lunch hour to the local office of the Bureau, where he handed it to a receptionist and walked out. He understood the agent's name to be Hardy and this is the single word he wrote on the envelope. He did not sign or date the note. The note said he was tired of the FBI bothering his wife and if they didn't stop he would take action. It also said he was affiliated with the New Orleans FBI, including being assigned an official code number, and that could be verified.

He practiced parking on the weekend with Ruth.

The nosebleeds started again.

He played with little Rachel, who had dimples just like Papa. It was David Ferrie who'd told him months before that dimples were a mark of the Libran.

Nicholas Branch has a sound tape made in Miami nine days before the President was due to appear in that city. The conversation on the tape was secretly recorded by one William Somersett, a police informer. The man talking to Somersett is Joseph A. Milteer, a member of the Congress of Freedom and the White Citizens Council of Atlanta.

somersett I think Kennedy's coming here on the eighteenth, something like that, to make some kind of speech.

milteer You can bet your bottom dollars he's going to have a lot to say about the Cubans. There's so many of them here.

somersett Yeah, well, he'll have a thousand bodyguards. Doo't worry about that.

milteer The more bodyguards he has, the easier it is to get him.

SOMERSETT Well how in the hell do you figure would be the best way to get him?

milteer From an office building with a high-powered rifle. He knows he's a marked man.

somersett They're really going to try to kill him?

milteer Oh, yeah, it's in the working. There ain't any countdown on it. We've just got to be sitting on go. Countdown, they can move in on you, and on go they can't. Countdown is all right for a slow prepared operation. But in an emergency operation, you've got to be sitting on go.

somersett Boy, if that Kennedy gets shot, we've got to know where we're at. Because you know that'll be a real shake if they do that.

milteer They wouldn't leave any stone unturned. No way. They will pick somebody up within hours afterwards if anything like that would happen. Just to throw the public off.

When the Secret Service heard the tape, they prevailed upon the President's men to cancel the motorcade scheduled for Miami. Kennedy traveled by helicopter from the airport to a downtown hotel, where he spoke to a group of journalists.

Branch has two theories about this incident.

One, T. J. Mackey leaked news of the plot either directly to Milteer or to people in his circle. It's a fact that Mackey had connections in the intelligence unit of the Miami police and it's possible that he knew Milteer was being monitored. Milteer, a sixty-two-year-old Georgian, was known to be involved in violent resistance to integration.

Two, it was Guy Banister who told Milteer about the Miami plot and unwittingly ruined the operation.

(The Secret Service did not forward details of the taped conversation to agents responsible for the President's safety in Dallas. The FBI questioned Milteer superficially after the assassination.)

Branch also has a theory about the Oswald doubles who were active for almost two months, mainly in and around Dallas but also in other Texas cities. He thinks Mackey devised the scheme principally to occupy Alpha 66, to get them so deeply entrenched in rigid arrangements and setups that they wouldn't be able to adjust when the Miami fagade folded over in the first breeze. Joseph Milteer had spoken of the difference between countdown and go. Mackey wanted to be sure that Alpha was stuck in countdown. He would be sitting on go.

The operation was crude. Someone looking like Oswald walks into an auto showroom, says his name is Lee Oswald, says he will soon be coming into money, test-drives a Comet at high speeds and makes a remark about going back to Russia. Someone who says his name is Oswald goes to a gunsmith and has a telescopic sight mounted on his rifle. Someone looking like Oswald goes to a rifle range half a dozen times in a thirteen-day period and makes a point of shooting at other people's targets.

All of these incidents took place at times when the real Oswald was known to be elsewhere.

To Nicholas Branch, more frequently of late, "Lee H. Oswald" seems a technical diagram, part of some exercise in the secret manipulation of history. A photograph taken by hidden CIA cameras of a man walking past the Soviet embassy in Mexico City bears the identifying tag "Lee H. Oswald." Oswald was in Mexico City at the time but the man in the picture is someone else-broad-chested, with a full face and cropped hair, in his late thirties or early forties. Another form of double. It's not surprising that Branch thinks of the day and month of the assassination in strictly numerical terms- 11/22.

But there's something even more curious than the misidentification. The man in the photograph matches the written physical descriptions Branch has seen of T. J. Mackey.

(The Curator has never been able to provide a photograph of Mackey labeled as such.)

Branch sits in his glove-leather chair looking at the paper hills around him. Paper is beginning to slide out of the room and across the doorway to the house proper. The floor is covered.with books and papers. The closet is stuffed with material he has yet to read. He has to wedge new books into the shelves, force them in, insert them sideways, squeeze everything, keep everything. There is nothing in the room he can discard as irrelevant or out-of-date. It all matters on one level or another. This is the room of lonely facts. The stuff keeps coming.

The Curator sends thirty more volumes from CIA's one-hundred-and-forty-four- volume file on Oswald. He sends cartons of investigative reports and trial transcripts concerning people only remotely connected to the events of November 22. He sends coroners' reports on the dead.

Salvatore (Sam) Giancana, the syndicate boss who grew up near Jack Ruby in Chicago, is found dead in June 1975 in his finished basement, shot once in the back of the head, six times in a stitching pattern around the mouth. He was scheduled to testify five days later before a Senate committee looking into plots against Castro. The murder weapon is found and traced to Miami. No arrests in the case.

Walter Everett Jr., the man who conceived the plot, is found dead in May 1965 in a motel room outside Alpine, Texas, where he was assistant to the president of Sul Ross State College. Ruled a heart attack. He was registered as Thomas Stainback.

Wayne Wesley Elko, the ex-paratrooper and part-time mercenary, is found dead in January 1966 in a motel room outside Hibbing, Minnesota. Ruled acute morphine poisoning. In his pickup, police find tools and copper wiring stolen from an iron mine nearby, and a two-year-old boy asleep in a toddler's car seat.

Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot, gets a job with KNBC in Los Angeles, flying a helicopter and reporting on traffic and brush fires until one day in August 1977 when the Bell Jet Ranger evidently runs out of fuel and comes yawing down in a field where boys are playing softball, killing Powers instantly.

The crash occurs just three miles from the Skunk Works, a building with blacked-out windows at Lockheed Aircraft where the first U-2 was developed twenty-two years earlier.

Branch has become wary of these cases of cheap coincidence. He's beginning to think someone is trying to sway him toward superstition. He wants a thing to be what it is. Can't a man die without the ensuing ritual of a search for patterns and links?

The Curator sends a four-hundred-page study of the similarities between Kennedy's death and Lincoln's.

Wayne shared the back seat with Raymo's ancient shepherd dog. The idea was travel light. They'd moved out of Miami real quick, grabbing essential things, so it was hard to see the need for an animal coming along, big and sick as it was, gasping for last air.

They rode through the night.

Raymo drove and Frank sat next to him. They spoke Spanish most of the time, which Wayne didn't try to decode. His mind was still on fire with the knowledge of what they were going to do. They were going to go over the line. It was like science fiction. It carried you past the ordinary portals.

Frank drove for a while and Wayne sat up front. At least they weren't using the Bel Air. This was a '58 Merc with a pockmarked body and an engine out of the speed shop, easy-breathing, the pounce of a slingshot dragster. Wayne turned the radio full-blast. The wind shot through. They'd left all the new weapons with Alpha except for one rifle Mackey was transporting. Rock 'n' roll screamed in Wayne's face. Middle of the night near Tallahassee.

Wayne's old man used to say, "God made big people. And God made little people. But Colt made the.45 to even things up."

But this wasn't a mission to locate the social mean. They were making a crash journey over the edge. Wayne kept shaking his head to settle all the pieces. Making these shiver motions that drew a look from driver Frank. Wayne was amazed that an idea like this could even exist in America. And here he was in the middle of it, wind streaming through the car.

They stood pissing in a field in a light rain.

Wayne took the wheel with the first ruddled light breaking behind them. Radio off and windows shut now. Frank asleep in the rear seat and moaning through his crowded teeth.

"I'm still absorbing this thing," Wayne said, looking across at Raymo. "You read science fiction?"

"Fucking crazy, Wayne?"

"There's a quality I used to feel before a night jump. Like is this actually happening?"

"We're talking this is real."

"I know it's real."

"First they cancel Chicago right out. Then they do Miami without the motorcade. They know it's real."

Wayne kept studying Raymo, occasionally darting a look at the road. The car was tight and quiet, beautifully behaved.

"Like we're racing across the night," he said, mock-hysterical.

"They're paying some nice money. Think of you're doing a day's work."

"Like we're hand-picked men on the biggest mission of our lives."

They passed a convoy of military vehicles. After a while Raymo gestured toward the back seat and said, "There's something cross my mind."

"What?"

"I'm thinking I ought to put him down."

"What? Your dog?"

"He lost all coordination. He tries to get up, he can't keep his paws from sliding out."

"When the nervous system goes."

"I hate to take him to the box. They gas them in a box."

"You don't want gas."

"I hate the idea they use gas."

"Some things you know what has to be done."

"I had this dog since before Gir6n."

"But you don't have the heart."

"You hate to be the one."

"I'm stopping first chance," Wayne said.

He studied Raymo's face, which showed nothing, and five miles farther on he took an exit for a regional airport.

He had his hunting knife wrapped in a couple of sweaters in his khaki poke.

He stopped on the grassy border of a long straight road that ran alongside a chain-link fence with barbed wire canted at the top. He got out and waited while Raymo eased the big dog onto the grass. Silhouettes of hangars and small planes. Raymo got in the car and drove fifty yards and stopped. The dog stood by the side of the road. Wayne approached from the rear, standing over the animal, straddling it. Stars still out. He grabbed the dog's scruff and lifted hard. The front paws paddled air and Wayne moved his knife-hand under the dog's jaw. He growled, cutting the animal's throat. Then he let go with the left hand. The dog fell flat and hard, lying between Wayne's feet, blood running. He growled at it again and walked to the car, holding the bloody knife high. He wanted Raymo to see it, just as a sign, a gesture that had no meaning you could put into words.

He was able to sleep now. They all slept for a brief time in the late morning. Hours later in the dark they picked up the first pulse of Dallas on the radio, a scratch and rustle at the edge of the band, and they listened to an eerie voice ride across the long night.

"Tell you something, dear hearts, Big D is ner-vus tonight. Getting real close to the time. Notice how people saying scaaaary things. Feel night come rushing down. Don't y'all sense it around you? Danger in the air. You can see it in the streets. Billboards. Bumper stickers. Handbills. They're saying awful things about Our leaders. I'm walking down the street this morning and there's a

zigzag thing painted on a storewindow and it hits me all at once like it's a swastika. Do you think I'm making it up? I'm not making it up. Let me pass a thought through the ozone just to get your clock unwound. How do we know it's really him that's coming to town? Don't you know the rumors he travels with a dozen look-alikes when he goes into no man's land? Just to disorient the enemy. So maybe we're getting Jack Seven or Jack Ten. Or all of them at once in different locales. I can understand the need, myself. Or might be I'm just receptive to other people's fantasies. Some things are true. Some are truer than true. Oh the air is swollen. Did you ever feel a tension like right now? You know what Dallas is like, don't you, in the universal scheme? We're like everywhere. Or we're like everywhere wants to be. Dress alike, talk alike, think alike. We're a model for the country. I'm not making it up. But the little itchy thing is seeping out. Don't you feel it oozing to the surface? People say he's riding Caroline's tricycle into town. Not tough enough to lead us to Armageddon. All the ancient terrors of the night. We're looking right at it. We know it's here. We feel it's here. It has to happen. Something strange and dark and dreamsome. Weird Beard says, Night is rushing down over Big D."

Raymo, Wayne and Frank had never been to Dallas and they wondered what this creep could mean.

Wednesday. Lee walked out of the rooming house and went up the street to a diner where he had breakfast most mornings. He checked the license plates on cars parked along North Beckley, looking for Agent Hardy's number.

They'd get their own furniture, modern pieces, and a washing machine for Marina.

He had eggs over light. He ate with a folded-up newspaper under his left elbow. The noise and talk fell around him. He kept his head close to the page, reading the fourth or fifth story in the last week about a Yale professor of political science arrested in the Soviet Union as a spy. Arrested outside the Metropole Hotel, one of the places Lee had stayed. Arrested and then released. The story was really about him. Everything he heard and saw and read these days was really about him. They were running messages into his skin.

He walked to the bus stop, checking license plates along the way. A coppertone Mercury eased alongside and moved at Lee's pace down the street. It had those smoked-over windows. He was prepared to give his name as O. H. Lee and tell them nothing else. He knew his rights. He had his guaranteed rights. He would not stand for harassment.

The window slid down and David Ferrie rested an elbow on the door, then turned to look at him.

Lee said, "I can't be late for work."

They drove to the Book Depository. Lee interrupted the talk several times to give directions, concerned that they'd miss a turn.

"Been reading the papers?" Ferrie said. "I understand they've had a story every couple of days. First he's coming. Then he's having lunch at the Trade Mart. Then there's a motorcade looping through the downtown area. Then yesterday's papers, both papers, which I saw myself. A street-by-street outline of the motorcade route. Har-wood to Main. Main to Houston. Houston to Elm. Down Elm to Stemmons Freeway. I thought to myself, Old Leon's looking at this. What's he feeling right now? What were you feeling, Leon? It must have been an incredible moment. Like a vision in the sky. Must have froze your blood."

"I'm only aware five cities, two days. He'll be here a couple of hours."

"They know where you live and they know where you work."

"I didn't see yesterday's paper as a matter of fact."

"Of course you saw it. It said the President's passing under your fucking window. The fucking building faces Elm Street, doesn't it? You spend most of the day on the sixth floor, don't you? His car is coming along Houston right straight at you. Then dipping away down Elm. Moving slowly and grandly past, The one place in the world where Lee Oswald works. The one time of day when he sits alone in a window and eats his lunch. There's no such thing as coincidence. We don't know what to call it, so we say coincidence. It happens because you make it happen."

Ferrie was pink-faced, nearly shouting. Lee gave a direction to turn left. Ferrie gripped the steering wheel hard.

"You see what this means. How it shows what you've got to do. We didn't arrange your job in that building or set up the motorcade route. We don't have that kind of reach or power. There's something else that's generating this event. A pattern outside experience. Something that jerks you out of the spin of history. I think you've had it backwards all this time. You wanted to enter history. Wrong approach, Leon. What you really want is out. Get out. Jump out. Find your place and your name on another level."

Lee directed him to Houston Street, where they parked in front of the Old Court House, facing south, their backs to the Book Depository, which was a block and a half away. Ferrie wiped spit from the corners of his mouth. He seemed out of breath. Lee sat calmly looking out the window.

"It's been waiting to happen, Leon."

"I have to be at work at eight."

"That building's been sitting there waiting for Kennedy and Oswald to converge on it."

"Just o"* of curiosity. How did you find out where I live? The Feebees don't know. They know where I work."

"They know where you work. That's how we know. We followed you from work last night. We're more interested in you than they are. Listen. I sat in the car outside your rooming house half the night. I was afraid to come see you. Now that it's going to happen, I'm scared half to death. I've got fear running through my system. Look at what we're doing. The chaos? The fucking anguish we'll cause? We'll give everybody cancer. I sat in the car. I was afraid to face you. I thought, What are we doing to poor Leon? I thought, Poor Leon's seen that item in the paper. Harwood to Main. Main to Houston. Houston to Elm. Like a scary nursery rhyme. He's going to kneel in that window and do it. And I'm one of the ones. I'm the agitator. I'm the fool that's responsible." Lee took a stick of gum out of his pocket and broke it in half. He offered a piece to Ferrie, who slapped it out of his hand. "Where's the rifle?"

"In a garage in a suburb, where Marina's staying." "They drive you to Galveston when it's done. I meet you there. This way we're one city removed from the scene. There's a plane all set in Galveston. We fly to Yucatan. A place called Mdrida. They drive you across the peninsula. They put you on a boat to Havana. They want you in Havana. It suits their purposes just as it suits yours. The boat's all set. They'll give you a name and documents." Ferrie looked at him sadly. "Or there's more to it. Something we don't know about. Like they kill us both in Yucatan." Lee gave a little laugh, expelling air from his nose. Then he turned to look at the clock attached to the Hertz sign on the roof of the Book Depository. He got out of the car and walked down the street.

Just after lunch hour he went past Roy Truly's office on the first floor. Mr. Truly, the man who'd hired him, was talking to one of the textbook salesmen. Lee saw the salesman hand Mr. Truly a rifle. Two or three other men stood in the doorway commenting. Lee walked over. There were two rifles the salesman said he'd just bought. He had a.22 for his son for Christmas. And a deer rifle that Mr. Truly was inspecting. The fellows commented from the doorway. Lee watched the salesman box up the. 22 and then he walked over to the elevator and hit six. He wasn't surprised to see rifles in the building. How could he be surprised? It was all about him. Everything that happened was him.

Thursday. T. J. Mackey stood in front of the County Records Building. He crossed the street to the triangle lawn between Main and Elm. He looked toward the railroad tracks above the triple underpass. Then he jogged across Elm and Stood on the sloped lawn in front of the colonnade. He walked up toward the stockade fence that set off the parking lot. He stood facing Elm. He walked back toward the sign for Stemmons Freeway. Cars, everywhere, dashing. He looked at the sky and wiped his mouth.

Later he sat in a dark Ford on the downtown fringe, unwrapping a sandwich. This was an area of old packing houses with train tracks partly paved over and sides of buildings showing brick and mortar exposed by the demolition of adjacent structures. Every usable space was set aside for parking-alleyways, dusty lots, old loading zones. There was a clinging midday silence, a remoteness that Mackey found odd, a block and a half from the crowds and traffic.

He watched Oswald approach uncertainly.

He was sure Oswald wanted to be the lone gunman. This is how it is with solitaries, with men who plan eternally toward some total moment. Easy enough to make him believe it. But he would also have to make sure Oswald didn't fire until the limousine was moving away from him toward the triple underpass. T-Jay wanted a crossfire. If Oswald misses, his second shooter is in prime position; he has the car almost head-on. T-Jay did not trust Oswald to make the shot. This was the kid who missed General Walker at a hundred and twenty feet-a stationary man in a well-lighted room. And the Mannlicher is an old, crude and unreliable weapon. If he fires and misses while the car is still on Houston Street, coming at him, with no clear shot for the second gunman, then we all walk away with nothing. As a shooter, Oswald was redundant, strictly backup. His role was to provide artifacts of historical interest, a traceable weapon, all the cuttings and hoardings of his Cuban career.

T-Jay saw him spot the car, tilting his chin slightly. He walked over and got in, carrying a sandwich and a half-pint carton of milk.

"How's the new baby?"

"Fine. Doing real well."

"He's going to be coming at you for one street length, swinging out of Main and coming at you down Houston," T-Jay said. "You don't take him then. This is not the time. It's an easy shot, the easiest we could possibly expect, but they'll be looking right at you. There's a pilot car, there's about fifteen cops on motorcycles, there's a Secret Service car with eight men, four of them hanging off the running boards. They're all clustered around the President's limousine and they're all looking your way. Once the shot is off, they'll know exactly where it came from. That building will be flooded with police. I strongly recommend. I can't be too emphatic. Wait. You wait for them to turn down Elm and head toward the underpass and the freeway. It's not a hard shot. You aim at the mass, the center portion of his body or whatever part of his body is visible through the scope. Wait. You wait for him to veer away from you down Elm. Then you wait for him to clear the oak tree. He has to clear that tree. I estimate the first shot at less than two hundred feet. After that, depends on how fast the driver reacts. I figure the sound will ricochet toward the underpass. They won't be certain of the source. You're behind them now, which makes it harder for them to pick you out of the landscape. You gain extra seconds. Maybe ten extra seconds to get downstairs. It could make the difference. Wait. Be sure to wait. Don't even show yourself in that window until the car reaches the oak tree. Then wait for it to clear the tree."

The plan had one thing going for it that Win Everett's levels and refinements could not have supplied. Luck. T-Jay watched Oswald peel the lettuce off the bread and eat it separately.

"Once you're on the street, get out of the area fast. Jefferson Boulevard, not far from your rooming house. Go to West Jefferson, north side of the street, number 231. It's a movie house with a Spanish-type facade. It'll be open. They open the doors at twelve-forty-five. You go in, take a seat, watch the movie. We'll have you in Galveston by nightfall and out of the country by dawn."

Mackey crumpled the sandwich paper and threw it out the window. He took four cartridges out of his pocket. He jiggled them in his fist and let them drop into Oswald's lunch bag.

"I don't see any way you'll need more than four rounds."

"There won't be time."

"Trust your hands."

"I've worked the bolt a thousand times."

"What's the baby's name?"

"My wife named her Audrey, after Audrey Hepburn in War and Peace. Tolstoy. But her middle name is Rachel. We call her Rachel."

"You're going to love this operation," T-Jay said.

He watched Oswald walk out of the alleyway onto Griffin Street and then head southwest, back to work.

The main thing is Kennedy dead.

The next thing is Oswald dead.

Once Oswald's leftist sympathies are exposed, the authorities will conclude, will want to conclude, that Castro agents recruited him, used him, killed him.

Guy Banister would alert the FBI to the Hidell alias.

David Ferrie would spend a lonely night in Galveston.

Marina and Lee were in the backyard of the Paine house, pushing kids on the swings in turn, Sylvia and Chris and Junie and a neighbor's little girl and boy. It was dark but the kids didn't want to go inside. Two swings, two parents to push them.

"But you still haven't said what you're doing here on a Thursday."

"I miss my girls," he said.

"Without even calling."

"If you come to Dallas to live."

"No."

"Then I won't have to call. Everything will change. I can't live in that room too much longer."

"The children are better off here."

"Do you know the size of that room?"

"Ruth is still happy to have us stay."

"Papa thinks you don't love him."

They took two kids off the swings, put two more on. Marina was still angry at Lee for not telling her that he was using a false name. She found out when Ruth called the rooming house and asked for Lee Oswald. She wanted this foolish business to end. All these comedies. First one thing, then another.

The kids screamed, "Higher."

"I'll buy you a washing machine," he said.

"We might be better with a car."

"I'm saving the best I can. First we need to get an apartment."

"No."

"If you come to Dallas to live."

"No."

"The girls want to be with their daddy."

"Who will I talk to all day? Here I can talk to Ruth. Ruth is a big help to me."

"A balcony like Minsk," he said.

At dinner Ruth asked that the three of them hold hands around the table. She explained this was how Quakers say grace. Each person is supposed to recite a silent prayer, although it was clear to Marina that Lee's silence was not the prayerful kind.

When Marina was cleaning up in the kitchen, Ruth came in and said in a slightly puzzled way that someone had left the light on in the garage. They said it was probably Lee looking for a sweater among his belongings. Most of the things they owned were in boxes in Ruth's garage.

In the bedroom Marina took off her clothes. Lee sat in a chair, dressed except for his shoes and socks. Getting ready for bed, the same as anyone, here in this American place.

"Everything will change."

"No."

"But first we have to live together."

"I don't see any reason to hurry."

"If you come to Dallas to live."

"The children play outside here. Ruth is here."

"I have a little saved."

"I don't want my baby sucking nervous milk."

"Our own furniture for a change."

She stood naked on the far side of the bed. She reached around to the chair for her nightdress. He was watching her. She thought he was going to say something. She put the nightdress over her head and rolled back the bedcovers. Ordinary in every way, simple moments adding up, with rain falling on the lawn.

In the morning, early, he was gone. She found money in little bunches on top of the bureau and she counted it up, amazed. One hundred and seventy dollars. She was sure it was everything he had.

Three times he'd asked her to live with him in Dallas. Three times she'd said no. She stood by the bureau thinking. It was a well-known pattern, things that happen in threes. There was a certain dark power to the number three. She'd noticed all her life how it meant bad luck.

22 November

At the airport they were standing on baggage carts and clinging to light posts. They were draped over the chain-link fence, people in raincoats, waving flags, hanging off the sign for Gate 28. Skies were clear now and the 707 swung massively to a stop on the tarmac. They came running from their cars. They stood at the edge of the crowd, jumping up and down. Children rode the shoulders of gangly men. There was a mood rising from the packed bodies, an eager spirit of assent. Members of the welcoming party edged into place at the foot of the ramp, fussing with their clothes and hair. The aft door opened and the First Lady appeared in a glow of rosebud pink, suit and hat to match, followed by the President. A sound, an awe worked through the crowd, a recognition, ringing in the air. People called out together, faces caught in some stage of surprise resembling dazzled pain. "Here" or "Jack" or "Look." The President fingered his lapel, gave a little jacket-adjusting shrug and walked down the ramp. The sound was a small roar now, a wonder. They shook the fence. They came running from the terminal building, handbags arc! cameras bouncing. There were cameras everywhere, held aloft, a rustling of bladed shutters, with homemade signs poking through the mass.

Welcome Jack and Jackie to Big D.

After the handshakes and salutes, Jack Kennedy walked away from his security, sidestepping puddles, and went to the fence. He reached a hand into the ranks and they surged forward, looking at each other to match reactions. He moved along the fence, handsome and tanned, smiling famously into the wall of open mouths. He looked like himself, like photographs, a helmsman squinting in the sea-glare, white teeth shining. There was only a trace of the cortisone bloat that sometimes affected his face-cortisone for his Addison's disease, a back brace for his degenerating discs. They came over the fence, surrounding him, so many people and hands. The white smile brightened. He wanted everyone to know he was not afraid.

The Lincoln was deep blue, an iridescent peacock gleam, with an American flag and a presidential standard attached to the front fenders. Two Secret Service men in front, Governor Connally and his wife in the jumpseats, the Kennedys in the rear. The Lincoln moved out behind an unmarked pilot car and five motorcycles manned by white-helmeted city cops showing traditional blank faces. Stretching half a mile behind came the miscellaneous train of rented convertibles, station wagons, touring sedans, Secret Service follow-up cars, communications cars, buses, motorcycles, spare Chevys, Lyndon, Lady Bird, congressmen, aides, wives, men with Nikons, Rolliflexes, newsreel cameras, radiophones, automatic rifles, shotguns, service revolvers and the codes for launching a nuclear strike.

The Lincoln seemed to glow. Sunlight flashed from the fenders and hood, made the upholstery shine. The Governor waved his tan Stetson and the flags snapped and the First Lady held roses in the crook of her arm. The burnished surface of the car mirrored scenes along the road. Not that there was much to collect in the landscape at hand. Airport isolation. Horizontal buildings with graveled rooftops. Billboards showing sizzling steaks. Random spectators, brave-looking, waving, in these mournful spaces. And a man standing alone at the side of the road holding up a copy of the Morning News opened to the page that had everybody talking. Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas. An ad placed by a group called the American Fact-Finding Committee. Grievances, accusations, jingo fantasia- not so remarkable, really, even in a major newspaper, except that the text was bordered in black. Nicely ominous. Jack Kennedy had seen the ad earlier and now, with towered downtown Dallas in the visible distance, he turned and said softly to Jacqueline, "We're heading into nut country now."

Still, it was important to be seen in an open car without a bubbletop, without agents on the running boards. Here he was among them in a time of deep division, the country pulled two ways, each army raging and Jack having hold of both. Were there forebodings? For weeks he'd carried a scrap of paper with scribbled lines of some bloody Shakespearean ruin. They whirl asunder and dismember me. Still, it was important for the car to move very slowly, give the crowds a chance to see him. Maximum exposure as the admen say, and who wants a president with a pigeon's heart?

And there were friendly crowds ahead. The strays on the outskirts, stick figures, gave way to larger groups, to gatherings. They appeared at intersections. They stood on bumpers in stalled traffic and cried, "Jack-eeee." Signs, flags, surging numbers, people fifteen deep, crowds growing out over the curbstone, craning for a look at the brilliant limousine. The cops astride their Harleys trimmed the ragged edges. There were people backed against building walls who could not see the limousine but only figures gliding by, spirits of the bright air, dreamlike and serene. The crush was massive down near Harwood. It was a multitude, a storm force. The motorcycles rumbled constantly, an excitement in the sound, a power, and the President waved and smiled and whispered, "Thank you."

Advise keep crowds behind barricades. They are getting in the street here.

Street by street the crowd began to understand why it was here. The message jumped the open space from one press of bodies to the next. A contagion had brought them here, some mystery of common impulse, hundreds of thousands come from so many histories and systems of being, come from some experience of the night before, a convergence of dreams, to stand together shouting as the Lincoln passed. They were here to be an event, a consciousness, to astonish the old creedbound fears, the stark and wary faith of the city of get-rich-quick. Big D rising out of caution and suspicion to produce the roar of a sand column twisting. They were here to surround the brittle body of one man and claim his smile, receive some token of the bounty of his soul.

Advise approaching Main go real slow speed.

Into the noontide fires. Twelve city blocks down Main Street, some embers of the melodrama of small towns, of Hallmark and Walgreen and Thorn McAn, scattered among the bank towers. The motorcycles came, a steady throttling growl, a tension that bit into the edge of every awareness. The sight of the Lincoln sent a thrill along the street. One roar devoured another. There were bodies jutting from windows, daredevil kids bolting into the open. They're here. It's them. They're real. It wasn't only Jack and Jackie who were riding in a fire of excitement. The crowd brought itself into heat and light. A knowledge charged the air, a self-awareness. Here was a new city, an idea that traveled at the speed of sound, pounding over the old hushed heart, a city of voices roaring. Loud and hot and throbbing. The crowd kept pushing past the ropes and barricades. Motorcycles drove a wedge and agents dropped off the running boards of the follow-up car to jog alongside the Lincoln. Was it frightening to sit in the midst of all this? Did Jack think this fervor was close to a violence? They were so damn close, nearly upon him. He looked at them and whispered, "Thank you."

The men in dark glasses were back on the running boards as the motorcade began its swing into Houston Street and the last little dip before the freeway.

They ran to the birdcage elevators, four young men in the lunch-hour race, horse laughs, jostling at the gates. Lee heard them call to each other all the way down. Dust. Faded white paint on the old brick walls. Stacks of cartons everywhere. Old sprinkler pipes and scarred columns. A layer of dust hovered at a height of three feet. Loose books on the floor. His clipboard already hidden, jammed between cartons near the west wall. Stillness on six.

He stood at the southeast window inside a barrier of cartons. The larger ones formed a wall about five feet high and carried a memory with them, a sense of a kid's snug hideout, making him feel apart and secure. Inside the barrier were four more cartons- one set lengthwise on the floor, two stacked, one small carton resting on the brick windowsill. A bench, a support, a gun rest. The wrapping paper he'd used to conceal the rifle was on the floor near his feet. Dust. Broken spider webs hanging from the ceiling. He saw a dime on the floor. He picked it up and put it in his pocket.

He looked down Houston Street as the motorcade approached, slow and vivid in the sun. There were people scattered on the lawns of Dealey Plaza, maybe a hundred and fifty, many with cameras. He held the rifle at port arms, more or less, and stood in plain view in the tall window. Everything looked so painfully clear.,

The President had chestnut hair and the First Lady was radiant in a pink suit and small round hat. Lee was glad she looked so good. For her own sake. For the cameras. For the pictures that would enter the permanent record.

He spotted Governor John Connally in one of the jump seats, a Stetson in his lap. He liked Connally's face, a rugged Texas face. This was the kind of man who would take a liking to Lee if he ever got to know him. Cartons stamped Books. Ten Rolling Readers. Everyone was grateful for the weather.

The white pilot car turned, the motorcycles turned. The Lincoln passed beneath him, easing left, making the deep turn left, seeming almost to rotate on an axis. Everything was slow and clear. He got down on one knee, placed his left elbow on the stacked cartons and rested the gun barrel on the edge of the carton on the sill. He sighted on the back of the President's head. The Lincoln moved into the cover of the live oak, going about ten miles an hour. Ready on the left, ready on the right. Through the scope he saw the car metal shine.

He fired through an opening in the leaf cover.

When the car was in the clear again, the President began to react.

Lee turned up the handle, drew the bolt back.

The President reacted, arms coming up, elbows high and wide.

There were pigeons, suddenly, everywhere, cracking down from the eaves and beating west.

The report sounded over the plaza, flat and clear.

The President's fists were clenched near his throat, arms bowed out.

Lee drove the bolt forward, jerking the handle down.

The Lincoln was moving slower now. It was almost dead still. It was sitting naked in the street eighty yards from the underpass.

Ready on the firing line.

Raymo got out of the supercharged Merc in the parking lot above the grassy embankment a little more than halfway down Elm. A wooden stockade fence enclosed the parking area, with trees and shrubs set alongside. The rear bumper of the car nudged the fence. There were ten or twelve cars parked nearby, many more in the spaces to the north and west.

Raymo stood a moment, rolling his shoulders. He gave a firm hoist to his balls, three quick jogs with the left hand. The fence was about five feet high, too high for him to brace his left arm comfortably. He went to the rear of the car and stood on the bumper. He looked out over the fence and across a stretch of lawn. The pilot car approached the Elm Street turn.

Frank Vasquez got out of the car on the driver's side. He carried a Weatherby Mark V, scope-mounted, loaded with soft-point bullets that explode on impact. He stood by the rear fender until Raymo extended a hand. Frank gave him the weapon.

He went back to the driver's seat. The car bounced when he got in and Raymo glanced back sharply.

The crowd noise from Main Street was still in the air, faintly, a rustle somewhere overhead, and Frank, with his back to the action, sat at the wheel listening. His view was past the railyards to the northwest. Water towers painted white. Power pylons trailing into a flat grim distance. All light and sky. He felt like he could see to the end of Texas.

Raymo stood just west of the point where the two sections of fence form a near-right angle. From the deep shade of the trees he looked out on a sun-dazzled scene. Small groups collecting on the grass on both sides of Elm," families, cameras, like the start of a picnic. The limousine came swinging into the street. People on the north side of Elm, their backs to Raymo, shaded their eyes from the sun. Other people waving, Kennedy waving, applause, sunlight, sharp glare on the hood of the limousine. A girl ran across the grass. The dangling men. Four men dangling from the sides of the follow-up car, only a few feet behind the blue Lincoln.

Dallas One. Repeat. I didn't get all of it.

Leon fired too soon, with the car passing under the tree. The report sounded like a short charge, a little weak, a defect, not enough powder.

Kennedy reacted late, without surprise at first, his arms coming up slowly like a man on a rowing machine.

The driver slowed to half-speed. The driver sat there. The other agent sat there. They were waiting for a voice to explain it.

Pigeons flared past.

Raymo eased the gun barrel out over the fence. He set his feet firmly on the bumper. His left forearm, bracing the weapon, was wedged between the tops of two pickets. He tilted his head to the stock. He waited, sighting through the scope.

On the grass a woman saw the limousine emerge from behind a freeway sign with the President clutching at his throat. She heard a sharp noise, like a backfiring car, and realized it was the second noise she'd heard. She thought she saw a man throw a boy to the grass and fall on top of him. She didn't really hear the first noise until she heard the second. A girl ran waving toward the limousine.

The noise cracked and flattened, washing across the plaza. This wasn't making sense at all.

There was so much clarity Lee could watch himself in the huge room of stacked cartons, scattered books, old brick walls, bare light bulbs, a small figure in a corner, partly hidden. He fired off a second shot.

He saw the Governor, who was turned right, begin to look the other way, then double up suddenly. A startle reaction. He knew this was called a startle reaction, from gun magazines.

He turned up the handle, drew the bolt back, then drove it forward.

Stand by a moment please.

Okay, he fired early the first time, hitting the President below the head, near the neck area somewhere. It was a foolishness he could dismiss on a certain level. Okay, he missed the President with the second shot and hit Connally. But the car was still sitting there, barely moving. He saw the First Lady lean toward the President, who was slumped down now. A man stood applauding at the edge of the telescopic frame.

Lee jerked the handle down and aimed. He heard the second spent shell roll across the floor.

There were roses on the seat between Jack and Jackie. The car's interior was a nice light blue. The man was so close he could have spoken to them. He stood at curbside applauding. A woman called out to the car, "Hey we want to take your picture." The President looked extremely puzzled, head leaning left. The man stood applauding, already deep in chaos, looking at crumpled bodies, a sense of guns coming out.

Put me on, Bill. Put me on.

Bobby W. Hargis, riding escort, left rear, knew he was hearing gunfire. There was a woman taking a picture and another woman about twenty feet behind her taking the same picture, only with the first woman in it. He couldn't tell where the shots were coming from, two shots, but knew someone was hit in the car. A man threw his kid to the ground and fell on him. That's a vet, Hargis had time to think, with the Governor, Connally, kind of sliding down in the jump seat and his wife taking him in, gathering the man in. Hargis turned right just after noticing a girl in a pretty coat running across the lawn toward the President's car. He turned his body right, keeping the motorcycle headed west on Elm, and then the blood and matter, the unforgettable thing, the sleet of bone and blood and tissue struck him in the face. He thought he'd been shot. The stuff hit him like a spray of buckshot and he heard it ping and spatter on his helmet. People were down on the grass. He kept his mouth closed tight so the fluid would not ooze in.

In the jump seat John was crumpled up. Nellie Connally pulled him over into her arms. She put her head down over his head. She was pretending she was him. They were both alive or both dead. They could not be one and one. Then the third shot sent stuff just everywhere. Tissue, bone fragments, tissue in pale wads, watery mess, tissue, blood, brain matter all over them.

She heard Jackie say, "They've killed my husband."

It could have been Nellie's own voice, someone speaking for her. She thought John was dead. Then he moved just slightly and she thought at the same time that Jackie was out of the car, gone off the end of the car, but now was somehow back. John moved in her arms. They were one heart pumping.

We are hit. Lancer is hit. Get us to Parkland fast.

The car picked up speed and everything went rushing past. Nellie thought how terrible this must be, what a terrible sight for people watching, to see the car speeding past with these shot-up men; what a horror, what a sight.

She heard Jackie say, "I have his brains in my hand."

Everything rushing past.

The man in the white sweater, applauding, saw the stuff just erupt from the President's head. The motorcycles went by. There were guns coming out, a man in the second car with an automatic rifle. The second car went by. A motorcycle went fishtailing up the grassy slope near the concrete structure, the colonnade. Someone with a movie camera stood on an abutment over there, aiming this way, and the man in the white sweater, hands suspended now at belt level, was thinking he ought to go to the ground, he ought to fall right now. A misty light around the President's head. Two pink-white jets of tissue rising from the mist. The movie camera running.

Lee was about to squeeze off the third round, he was in the act, he was actually pressing the trigger.

The light was so clear it was heartbreaking.

There was a white burst in the middle of the frame. A terrible splash, a burst. Something came blazing off the President's head. He was slammed back, surrounded all in dust and haze. Then suddenly clear again, down and still in the seat. Oh he's dead he's dead.

Lee raised his head from the scope, looking right. There was a white concrete wall extending from the columned structure, then a wooden fence behind it. A man on the wall with a camera. The fence deep in shadow. Freight cars sitting on the tracks above the underpass.

He got to his feet, moving away from the window. He knew he'd missed with the third shot. Went wild. Missed everything. Maggie's drawers. He turned up the bolt handle.

Put me on. Put me on. Put me on.

He was already talking to someone about this. He had a picture, he saw himself telling the whole story to someone, a man with a rugged Texas face, but friendly, but understanding. Pointing out the contradictions. Telling how he was tricked into the plot. What is it called, a patsy? He saw a picture of an office with a tasseled flag, dignitaries in photos on the wall.

He drew the bolt back, then drove it forward, jerking the handle down. He walked diagonally across the floor to the northwest end, where the staircase was located. Books stacked ten cartons high. That fragrance of paper and binding.

The fender sirens opened up, the guns started coming out.

The girl stopped running toward the car. She stood and looked without expression.

A woman with a camera turned and saw that she was being photographed. A woman in a dark coat was aiming a Polaroid right at her. It was only then she realized she'd just seen someone shot in her own viewfinder. There was bloodspray on her face and arms. She thought, how strange, that the woman in the coat was her and she was the person who was shot. She felt so dazed and strange, with pale spray all over her. She sat down carefully on the grass. Just let herself down and sat there. The woman with the Polaroid didn't move. The first woman sat on the grass, put her own camera down, looked at the colorless stuff on her arms. Pigeons spinning at the treetops. If she was shot, she thought, she ought to be sitting down.

Agent Hill was off the left running board and moving fast. There was another shot. He mounted the Lincoln from the bumper step, extending his left hand to the metal grip. It was a double sound. Either two shots or a shot and the solid impact, the bullet hitting something hard. He wanted to get to the President, get close, shield the body. He saw Mrs. Kennedy coming at him. She was climbing out of the car. She was on the rear deck crawling, both hands flat, her right knee on top of the rear seat. He thought she was chasing something and he realized he'd seen something fly by, a flash somewhere, something flying off the end of the limousine. He pushed her back toward the seat. The car surged forward, nearly knocking him off. They were in the underpass, in the shadows, and when they hit the light he saw Connally washed in blood. Spectators, kids, waving. He held tight to the handgrip. They were going damn fast. All four passengers were drenched in blood, crowded down together. He lay across the rear deck. He had this thought, this recognition. She was trying to retrieve part of her husband's skull. He held on tight. He could see right into the President's head. They were dcing eighty now.

FLASH SSSSSSSSSS

BLOOD STAINEZAAC, KENNEDY SERIOSTY WOUNDED SSSSSSSSSS

MAKE THAT PERHAPS PERHAPS SERIOUSLY WOUNDED

Raymo's view was briefly obscured. He had to wait for the right side of the limousine to clear the concrete abutment. He knew Connally was hit. He had time to think, Leon's picking them off one by one. He had a sense of people ducking and scattering even though they weren't in the frame. Now the car moved clear, quartering slowly in. He held on Kennedy's head. The man was leaning left, tight-eyed in pain. A hundred and thirty feet. A hundred and twenty feet. He got off the shot. The man's hair stood up. It just rippled and flew. Raymo stepped off the bumper and got in the back seat. Frank had the car moving. He drove between rows of parked cars behind the Depository. He headed straight for three freight cars marked Hutchinson Northern. Raymo leaned forward. Watch it, man. But he didn't say a word.

See if the President will be able to appear out here. We have all these people that are waiting. I need to know whether to feed them or what to announce out here.

Frank found a lane to the street. He went one block east on Pacific Avenue. He made a left onto Record Street. Warehouses and parking lots. He felt there was someone sitting inside his body making these moves and turns. He tried not to think past the moment. Elevated highway straight ahead. He had a pestering fear about what would happen when they were past the moment of turns and traffic signs. He didn't know how he'd feel when he was back in his body again.

The guns were coming out.

Cops left their Harleys to run up the slope with pistols drawn. In the motorcade the Secret Service men had automatic weapons cocked, sidearms coming out.

Pigeons reversing flight, beating eastward now.

Mackey watched from the south colonnade, across Elm, across Main, across Commerce. There was no one on the lawns or under the trees here. It was the matching half of the plaza, less than a hundred yards from the scene but totally remote, hot and empty in the glare. He stood against a column, arms folded. He let his sunglasses dangle from his right hand.

The sirens opened up. Outside the Book Depository, policemen stood with rifles and shotguns pointing up. Men pointing. People looking up.

GET OFF NXR

BULLETIN

SSSSSSSSSS ZA SNIPER SERIOUSLY

WOUNDED

OFF ALL OF YOU STAY

OFF AND

KEEP OFF GET OFF

A small girl stood with a hand over each ear. The motorcade was in collapse, vehicles stopped, others rushing past. Ordinary traffic moved into Elm. Many people running up the steps between the stockade fence and the colonnade. A goddamn mob of people. Figures prone on the grass. A man pounding his fist on the hood of a car. Mackey saw a man get out of another car and fall down. Ragged cries and shouts. People on their knees. Others sitting, with cameras, out of breath and unbelieving.

He saw a fire truck come down Main. It was the dumbest thing he'd seen in twenty years.

SPEAKING AT THE TT

WILL U U PLEASE STAY OFF THIS

WIRE

ssssssssss

STAY OFF STAY OFF

SSSSSSSSSS

ZA SNIPER SERIOUSLY WOUNDED PRESIDENT KENNEDY DOWN TOWN DAL LAS TO DAY PERHAPS FAAATALLY

From this distance Mackey wasn't sure whether the people going up the embankment steps looked like a lynch mob or men and women in raw shock, in flight, running with others. He was thirsty and depressed. Strange harsh cries kept sounding from the lawns, from the echoing underpass, a thickness of voice, all desperate effort, like speech of the deaf and dumb.

Lee hid the rifle on the floor between rows of cartons near the sign for the stairway. They'd find it easy enough. But he still had to hide it, just to do the expected thing, make them believe he didn't want to be identified. It was the same with the clipboard, already hidden, and the unfilled orders that were fixed to it. He wanted to give them something to uncover, a layer to strip away.

He liked the idea of a job that required a clipboard.

He was down the stairs fast and headed for the Coke machine on the second floor. A Coke in his hand would make him feel secure. It was a prop, a thing to carry around by way of saying he was okay. He thought he might need a prop to get him out of the building.

He heard a voice behind him like, "Come here." It was a cop with a drawn gun rushing into the lunchroom. He had one of those plastic covers on his hat for rainy days. Lee turned and walked slowly at him. He showed a face you'd see on any public transport, anonymous and dreamy. He made it a point not to notice the pistol aimed at his chest.

Roy Truly came in then and the cop said, "Does this man work here?" And Mr. Truly said yes and they both headed out'to the stairway. Lee got his Coke and wandered down one flight and out the front entrance, a hole in the elbow of his shirt.

Agent Grant stood under the canopy at the Trade Mart entrance, just off Stemmons Freeway. He was explaining to two local business leaders how to present themselves to the Kennedys. He heard sirens getting louder. He saw the pilot car, the motorcycles, the Lincoln doing maybe eighty, with somebody spread-eagle on the rear deck. Other vehicles following, high speed, the craziest damn scene, a press bus blowing past. He asked one of the businessmen what time he had. Then they all checked their watches, placing the event in a framework they could agree upon.

HE LAAAAAAAAAA

There was a man holding Mary's arm and she was crying. He had hold of her camera trying to take it with him. He said he was Featherstone of the Times Herald. Mary's friend Jean was saying, "I thought that was a dog on the seat between them. I was saying I could see Liz Taylor or the Gabors traveling with a dog but I can't see the Kennedys on tour with dogs." Mary was not listening to this. She was crying and fighting to keep her camera. This man from the paper would not let go her arm. He was dragging her away toward Houston Street. Jean wasn't able to get to her feet. She sat on the grass trying to finish her train of thought about seeing a dog in the car. She wanted to say to Mary, she did actually say, "I realized finally that little fuzzy thing. It was roses on the seat between them."

Flying down that freeway with those dying men in our arms and going to no telling where. Everything flashing by. A billboard reading, Roller Skating Time.

Lee got off the bus in stalled traffic and walked to the Greyhound terminal to catch a taxi. The traffic was stalled for pretty obvious reasons, so maybe the bus was not a good idea. He walked south on Lamar, the sirens going all around him, and spotted an empty cab. They were a little removed here from the major congestion.

He got in next to the driver and here is a nice old lady sticking her head in the window looking for a taxi. Lee started getting out. He offered the cab to the lady. But the driver rolled away and Lee gave him an address a few blocks from his rooming house. It was a five- or six-minute ride, going out over the old viaduct. The driver said something about all the squad cars running a code three- lights spinning, sirens going. He wondered what was up.

Lee got out and walked north on Beckley, hearing a jangling in the air, feeling the first nervousness.

What do I look like?

To anybody seeing me, where do I look like I'm coming from?

He checked the numbers on the license plates of parked cars.

Do I look like someone leaving the scene?

His stomach was empty and he had that feeling in the mouth where there's a rusty taste, something oozing from the gums.

That old patchy sadness of this part of Oak Cliff, the room-to-let signs and the trees going bare, the clotheslines, the bare-looking house fronts.

He was wishing he'd taken that Coke along.

The housekeeper was watching TV and it was all over the air waves. She said something but he went right by. In the toilet he pissed and pissed. It just kept coming.

Jangling in the air.

He went to his room and opened the dresser drawer for the. 38. It was only common sense. He couldn't go out there without a gun. This was the day of all days when he needed protection.

They'd find the Hidell rifle. He had Hidell documents in Ruth Paine's garage. His wallet was full of Hidell. So it was only common sense to take the Hidell handgun. A dozen layers to strip away. It was everything, together, Hidell.

He scooped the loose cartridges out of the drawer. Bought off the street by Dupard. Would they even go bang?

He'd left his blue jacket at work. He took his gray one. Wherever he'd be spending the night, and the rest of his life, he might need a jacket. Plus it covered up the gun.

The room. The iron bed.

To anybody watching, what do I look like with the bulge at my hip under the jacket?

Unknown white male. Slender build.

He went out the door and down the walk. He was having a little trouble figuring what to do. All the clarity was gone. There was a nervous static in the air.

What do I look like?

Do I stand out in the street, walking?

He went down Beckley figuring there was no choice but to go to the movie house where they were supposed to pick him up. He knew he couldn't trust them but there was nowhere else to go. He had fourteen dollars and a bus transfer. They had him cold. He could be walking right into it. The lurking thought, the idea of others making the choice now. He wanted to believe it was out of his hands.

He saw a police car up ahead, coming this way, and he made a left onto Davis, knowing he'd turned too quick. The streets were nearly empty. He actually saw the cop watching him move down Davis, squeezed eyes peering, although the car was out of sight now.

Okay, he shot him once. But he didn't kill him. To the best of his knowledge he hit him in the upper back or somewhere in the neck area, nonfatally. Then he missed and hit the Governor. Then he missed completely. There are circumstances they don't know about. Are they sure it was him in that window? It could be different than they think. A setup.

Slender white male. Five feet ten.

The car came into view again, down Patton, and he walked halfway along the next block. Then he did an about-face and went back to Patton and walked south. To fake out the car. He figured if he went to where he'd seen the car, it would be somewhere else.

Do I look like a suspect fleeing?

Have they figured out who's missing from the Book Depository?

What is my name if I am asked?

He went down Patton to Ninth Street. Nobody around this time of day. The idea was to make a quick move back to Beckley, across Beckley, down to Jefferson. A dozen old hair-drying machines stood along the curbside. A mattress on a lawn.

He wanted to write short stories about contemporary American life.

At Tenth and Patton he expected to see the car, if at all, moving away from him. But it was cruising east, to his right, coming at him. He crossed the street and began walking east and by this time the car was right behind him, tagging along, going ten to twelve miles an hour, the motorcade speed, teasing.

From the corner of his eye he could see the number on the door. A number ten. The car was marked number ten and this was Tenth Street.

He wasn't sure if he stopped first or the car stopped. It was like they both had the same idea. He went over to the window on the passenger side.

They spoke at the same time. Lee said, "What's the problem, officer?" And the cop, strong-featured, looking maybe one-eighth Indian, said something about "You live around here, buddy?"

Lee stuck his head right in the window, smelling stale cigarettes, and said, "Any reason to want to talk to me?"

"You look to me like you're taking evasive tactics."

"I'm walking in broad daylight."

"To me, you're doing every possible thing to evade being spotted."

There was a voice squawking on the radio.

"I'm just a citizen on foot."

"Then maybe you'd like to tell me where you're going to."

"I don't think I'm required to tell you that. I live in this area, which I'm telling you more than required by law."

He took the position, the attitude, that he was being singled out for harassment. Even if they had a description, from witnesses looking up at the window, how specific could it be?

"I'm saying for your own good."

"I'm only walking on the street."

One other person in sight, a woman approaching the intersection of Tenth and Patton.

"You carrying ID or not?"

"I'm a resident here."

"I'm saying for the last time."

He did not like the way cops, had never liked it when cops sat in their car and you had to approach them with documents, bending all the time, leaning toward their windows.

"I'm only asking what's the reason."

"Better show me some paper real soon."

"I hear you."

"Then do it."

"I'm a citizen on foot."

"I'm saying one last time."

They spoke at the same time again. The cop sat in his Ford getting a little testy. A voice on the radio said, Disheveled hair.

We're on Tenth Street and the car is number ten, All the factors are converging.

"Look. If I have to get out of this vehicle."

"Harass."

"I want to see your hands."

"This is how we have misunderstandings."

"Hands on the fucking hood."

"I hear you."

"Then fucking do it, pencil-neck."

The cop reached for the door handle on his side, not taking his eyes off Oswald. They were going to another level now.

"I'm only asking what for."

"Hands, hands-where I can see them."

"I have a right I'm on the street without harassment."

He began easing out the door. He said something else about "Go real slow," and Lee said, "A man taking a walk in his own city."

Talking at the same time.

The cop was on the other side of the car. A little traffic down the street. Lee pulled the. 38 out of his belt and fired four times across the hood, blinking and muttering. Poor dumb cop. Opened his mouth and slid down the fender. Lee saw a woman ninety feet away and their eyes definitely met. She dropped some stuff she was carrying and put her hands in front of her face. He moved in a jog step to Patton and turned south, ejecting empty cartridges from the cylinder and reloading as he went.

Helen took her hands away from her eyes. She was all alone screaming in the street. The policeman's cap was a little ways out from the body. He was on his side and gushing blood. She picked up her purse and work shoes and went toward him, calling for help and screaming. She walked bent over, actually screaming at the body.

Then there were some people in the street and a man climbing out of a pickup. Helen approached the body screaming. The man was in the police car saying, "Hello hello hello." Helen saw the blood take oval shape in the street. She moved around the body and put her shoes on the hood of the car. She stood bent over, seeing wounds in the chest and head. She just could not believe the volume of blood.

The Mexican said into the dashboard, "Hello hello hello." Later there was an ambulance and many police cars with red lights and sirens, cars on the sidewalks and lawns and men taking pictures of the stains in the street. Helen stood in front of a frame house halfway down the block, where she'd somehow ended up, trying to tell a detective what she'd seen. She said she waitressed at the Eat Well downtown and was on her way to the bus stop to go to work. Three or four shots, real rapid fire.

Back at the scene there were two small white canvas shoes on the hood of Patrolman Tippit's car. The men from Homicide stood around wondering. They discussed what these objects could possibly mean.

Wayne Elko sat in the last row of the Texas Theater, center section, watching a black-and-white movie called Cry of Battle with Van Heflin and a bunch of people he'd never seen before. It was about an hour into the movie and Van Heflin has just shot Atong, a Filipino bandit. This is taking place a little after Pearl Harbor and Wayne was pretty sure the Japanese were getting ready to pull a night raid on the Filipino guerrillas and their American friends. Under his jacket he carried a target pistol with the barrel tooled down to a nub and an eight-inch length of baffled tubing attached to it. There were seven other men scattered in the theater. The shot will sound like someone coughing.

There's a female guerrilla in skintight jeans. Wayne was thinking how Hollywood invents these women just for afternoons like this, exposed and white, men at loose ends hiding in the dark. That's when Leon appeared at the head of the aisle. He stood there a moment to accustom his eyes. His hair was messed up and his shirt was outside his pants and he looked scared and he looked wild. He took a seat three rows from the back. He was two rows in front of Wayne and four seats to the left.

Be cool, Wayne. Do not rush into this.

Wayne watched the silver faces show fear and desire. He was waiting for the noise on-screen to increase, for the Japs to swarm over the guerrilla camp with machine guns and grenades. He planned to ease out of the row, step in behind Leon, whisper a small adios, then mash the grooved trigger, already walking backwards to the lobby.

But he would wait for the noise and cries.

He would let the tension build.

Because that's the way they do it in the movies.

It didn't get that far. Four or five minutes after Leon came in, an exit door opened near the stage, showing silhouetted figures. Then men appeared at the rear and there were voices in the lobby. Someone turned up the house lights and Wayne saw police sort of combing the aisles. Two cops on the stage, thumbing their gun butts and peering out.

The picture died away with a swoony sound.

They searched two men in the rows up front. They came up the aisles. Some more of them pushed through another exit. Sirens repeating in the street. A cop jumped down off the stage. Another drew his gun. Cool head, Wayne. There was a pie-face cop who approached Oswald. Leon got to his feet and said something. When the cop moved into the row, Leon took a swing at him. He hit him hard in the face. The hat spun around on the cop's head. He punched Leon, who twisted away, grinning and hurt, then showed a pistol in his hand.

They fell all over him. Cops grunting, banging their knees on the seats. The first cop and Leon were in the seats struggling for the gun. Officers cursing. Wayne heard a click and thought the hammer snapped on someone's hand. They were on Leon from the row behind him, grabbing his neck and hair. He almost ripped the nameplate off one man's shirt. It was general grappling that went on and on, awkward and intense.

They worked the gun out of his hand and were trying to get the cuffs on. The rows were bursting with police. They gave him a little roughing up.

When they had him in handcuffs they moved him into the aisle. There were cops still banging their knees on the edges of seats, picking up their caps and flashlights. They took him out to the lobby, quick-time, pressing around him.

Wayne heard Leon's voice going out the door, "Police, police brutality."

There was a moment when the patrons didn't know what to do. Then the ones who were standing returned to their seats. Somebody called, up front, "Lights." Another guy tilted his head sideways and up, saying, "Lights, lights." They all waited in their seats, hearing the sirens go into the distance. They tried clapping hands. Then Wayne spoke up, "Lights, lights." And in fifteen seconds the house lights went down and the picture shot onto the screen.

The men settled down contentedly. Wayne felt the mood close around them, the satisfied air of resumption. It wasn't just this picture to see to the end. There was a second feature coming up, called War Is Hell.

The prisoner stood inside the jail elevator, which was sealed to ordinary traffic. Four detectives edged in tight, rangy men in dark suits and ties, high-crowned Western hats, their faces closed to interpretation.

The media crowds collected and rocked in the corridors. They were waiting for the prisoner to come down to the interrogation room here on the third floor of the Police and Courts Building. TV cameras sat on dollies and there were cables slung over windowsills, trailing through the offices of deputy chiefs. Nobody checked credentials. Reporters took over the phones and pushed into toilets after police officials. Total unknowns walked the halls, defendants from other parts of the building, witnesses to other crimes, tourists, muttering men, drunks in torn shirts. It was a roughhouse, a con-foundment. Every rumor flew. Disk jockeys arrived to fill in, blinking, flinching, wary. A reporter wrote notes on a pad he balanced on the back of the chief of police.

They set up a chant. "Let us see him, bring him down. Let us see him, bring him down."

Hours going by. Blank faces arrayed against corridor walls. Men crouched near the elevators waiting. They sensed the incompleteness out there, gaps, spaces, vacant seats, lobbies emptied out, disconnections, dark cities, stopped lives. People were lonely for news. Only news could make them whole again, restore sensation. Three hundred reporters in a compact space, all pushing to extract a word. A word is a magic wish. A word from anyone. With a word they could begin to grid the world, make an instant surface that people can see and touch together. Ringing phones, near-brawls, smoke in their eyes, a deathliness, a hanging woe. Is Connally alive? Is Johnson safe? Has SAC gone to full alert? They began to feel isolated inside this old municipal lump of Texas gray granite. They were hearing their own reports on the radios and portable TVs. But what did they really know? The news was somewhere else, at Parkland Hospital or on Air Force One, in the mind of the prisoner on the fifth floor.

Someone said he's coming. A kind of clustered stirring, like riled bees. Then formal jostling across the floor, a grab for position. When he appeared in the elevator door, a slight man in handcuffs, with a puffed eye and stubble, they went a little crazy. Stooped photographers moving backwards, hand mikes shooting out of the crowd, everybody shouting, reaching toward him. A howl, a passion washing through the corridor. Newsreel cameras floated over the heads of the men escorting him. They had to throw some elbows, working him toward the door of the interrogation room. One eye puffed, a cut over the other, his shirt hanging loose. He resembled a guy who comes out of a doorway to bum a smoke. But a protective defiance, an unyielding in his face. The flash units fired. TV floodlights cooked the nearest heads. The reporters stared and wailed. It was hard to breathe in the ruck around the prisoner. They looked at him. They all cried out.

"Why did you kill the President?"

"Why did you kill the President?"

He said he was being denied the right to take a shower. Denied his basic hygienic rights. The escorts worked him to the office door.

Questioned, arraigned, displayed in lineups. He felt the heat of the corridor mobs every time he got off the elevator, the actual roil of moist air. Assassin, assassin.

In his cell he thought about the ways he could play it. He could play it either way. It all depended on what they knew.

He had the middle cell in the maximum-security block in the jail area. They kept the cells on either side of him empty. There were two guards on constant watch in the locked corridor.

Every time they brought him back to the cell, they made him take off his clothes. He sat in the cell in his underwear. They were afraid he'd use his clothes to harm himself.

A bunk bed, a chipped sink, a sloped hole in the floor. No flush toilet. He had to use a hole.

They stared up his ass. They came and shaved some hair from his genitals, two men from the FBI, placing the samples carefully in plastic baggies.

The revolution must be a school of unfettered thought.

In the interrogation room there were Dallas police, Secret Service, FBI, Texas Rangers, county sheriffs, postal inspectors, a U.S. marshal. No tape recorder or stenographer.

No, he didn't own a rifle.

No, he hadn't shot anyone.

He was not the man in the photograph they'd found in Ruth Paine's garage-the man with a rifle, a pistol and left-wing journals. The photograph was obviously doctored. They'd taken his head and superimposed it on someone else's body. He told them he'd worked for a graphic-arts firm and had personal knowledge of these techniques. The only thing in the picture that belonged to him was the face and they'd gotten it somewhere else.

He denied knowing an A. J. Hidell.

No, he'd never been to Mexico City.

No, he wouldn't take a polygraph.

They asked him if he believed in a deity. He told them he was a Marxist. But not a Marxist-Leninist.

It was pretty clear they didn't get the distinction. Whenever they took him down, he heard his name on the radios and TVs. Lee Harvey Oswald. It sounded extremely strange. He didn't recognize himself in the full intonation of the name. The only time he used his middle name was to write it on a form that had a space for that purpose. No one called him by that name. Now it was everywhere. He heard it coming from the walls. Reporters called it out. Lee Harvey Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald. It sounded odd and dumb and made up. They were talking about somebody else.

The men in Stetsons took him back through the crowds to the jail elevator. He held his cuffed hands high, making a fist. Flashbulbs and hoarse cries. They kept shouting questions, shouting right over his answers. The elevator climbed to the cell block.

In the clink. Back in stir. Up the river. In the big house. Lights flicker when they pull the switch. So long, Ma.

Rain-slick streets.

Courses at night in economic theory.

He sat in the cell and waited for the next event. He knew it was late. He pictured Ruth Paine's street, the lawns and sycamores. Was Marina in bed, scared, sorry, thinking she might have shown him more respect, seen the seriousness of his ideas? He wanted to call her. He pictured her reaching for the phone, a drowsy arm warm from the sheets, and the trustful mumbled hello, her eyes still closed.

Never think it is your fault when I am the one. I am always the one.

Now they were coming to take him down again. He believed they would release him once he settled on the right story to tell them. The way the Russians released Francis Gary Powers. The way they released the Yale professor they arrested for spying. Trumped-up charges. Screw is slang for prison guard.

They took him to the assembly room in the basement. This was the fourth time today they'd brought the prisoner down. Three times for lineups. Now it was midnight and they wanted him to meet the press in a formal and controlled exchange.

Hell and bedlam. Crowds jammed clear back out to the hall. Reporters still trying to press in, just arrived from the East Coast and Europe, faces leaking sweat, ties undone. The prisoner stood on the stage in front of the one-way screen used for lineups. His hands were cuffed behind him. Photographers closed in, crab-walking beneath him. Reporters shouting out to him. A moan of obscure sounds that resembled charismatic speech. The chief of police could not get into the room. He tried to edge his way, prying people apart with his hands. He was concerned for the safety of his prisoner.

A burly man moved through the crowd introducing out-of-town reporters to Dallas cops. He handed out a brand-new card he'd printed for his club. Who could it be but Jack Ruby? It was a card he was proud of, with a line drawing of a champagne glass and a bare-ass girl in black stockings. It was a come-on to the average patron, but with class. Nobody challenged Jack's presence in the assembly room. He had the ability to carry a domineering look into a building. He was looking for a radio reporter named Joe Long because he had a dozen corned-beef sandwiches out in the car which he planned to take to the crew at KLIF working into the night to report this frantic tale to the unbelieving city. Instead he spotted Russ Knight, the Weird Beard, and even arranged an interview, clearing the way for Russ so he could tape the District Attorney for local radio. Jack was playing newsman and tipster tonight. He was in complete charge of mentally reacting. He had a pencil and pad at the ready, just in case he caught a remark he could give to NBC.

That's it, boys, take the little rat's picture.

It mulled over him that he might go to the Times Herald later and see how things were going in the composing room. He had a sample twistboard in the car and he thought he might treat the people to a demonstration, just for the frolic of the moment. It was always a popular sight, Jack doing a rolling rumba to show off the board.

7

The horror of the day swept over him. He began to sob, talking to a newsman by the back wall.

Ask the weasel why he did it, boys.

The reporters wouldn't stop shouting. The prisoner tried to answer a question or make a statement but no one could hear him. It was a riot in a police station. Too crowded here, a danger, and the detectives moved in to end the session before it even started.

They took him back to the cell. He stripped to his underwear and sat on the bunk, thinking, feeling the noise of the assembly room still resonating in his body. A cell is the basic state, the crude truth of the world.

He could play it either way, depending on what they could prove or couldn't prove. He wasn't on the sixth floor at all. He was in the lunchroom eating lunch. The victim of a total frame. They'd been rigging the thing for years, watching him, using him, creating a chain of evidence with the innocent facts of his life. Or he could say he was only partly guilty, set up to take the blame for the real conspirators. Okay, he fired some shots from the window. But he didn't kill anyone. He never meant to fire a fatal shot. It was never his intention to cause an actual fatality. He was only trying to make a political point. Other people were responsible for the actual killing. They fixed it so he would seem the lone gunman. They superimposed his head on someone else's body. Forged his name on documents. Made him a dupe of history.

He would name every name if he had to.

In Dallas

Dealey Plaza is symmetrical. A matching pair of colonnades, stockade fences, triangle lawns and reflecting pools-split down the middle by Main Street, which shoots straight out of the triple underpass into downtown Dallas. To one side of Main, Elm Street curves out of the underpass and proceeds at a gradual elevation past the Texas School Book Depository, where Lee Oswald stood in the sixth-floor window with a rifle in his hands. To the other side of Main, Commerce Street carries incoming traffic eastward past the Carousel Club, six blocks into the downtown core, where Jack Ruby sits in his office at 4:00 A. M. cursing the smirky bastard who killed our President.

He was alone and vomiting. He vomited the meals of the last three weeks. Crying for five minutes, vomiting for five minutes. He couldn't bear to hear the name Oswald one more time. Even off in his own rnind the name was waiting at the end of every shrunken thought.

Some of the clubs stayed open Friday night. Jack closed the Carousel and Vegas. He was committed to closing for the weekend in honor of the President being shot. He vomited into a polyethylene bag he had somebody manufacture for his twistboards. Then he picked up the phone and called his roommate, George Senator.

"What are you doing?" he said.

"What am I doing? I'm sleeping."

"Schmuckhead. They killed our President."

"Jack, that was yesterday."

"We're going out to take pictures. Where's the Polaroid?"

"At the club."

"You know those Impeach signs? There's one around here someplace. I'm coming to pick you up."

"I want you to know. There's this constant interference of the time that I wake up and the time that you go to bed. Which don't match."

"Get dressed fast," Jack told him.

He found the camera and drove out to his apartment building. It was located over a freeway and looked like a motel that changed its mind. The whole scene was removable. George was sitting on the iron stairway in baggy clothes and slippers. They headed back downtown.

Jack explained the nature of the assignment.

First there was the ad in the Morning News. It said, Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas. A series of lies and smears. Not that Jack fully absorbed the points in the ad. It was the nasty tone he noticed most. And of course the black border. And of course the fact that the ad was signed by someone Bernard Weissman. A Jew or someone posing as a Jew to blacken the name of the Jews. Then it just happened that he drove past a billboard with three towering words on it. Impeach Earl Warren. The ad had a post-office box number. So did the billboard. Thinking about it in his mind, as he went over both incidents, Jack believed the number was the same.

"So I am trying to put the two together."

"You think the same person."

"Whereby the same person or group is behind both incidents. And since it is against the President, I am trying to take a crime reporter's frame of mind."

They drove all over the downtown fringe trying to find the Earl Warren billboard and check out the box number. Jack was sure there was conspiracy here. The John Birch Society or the Communist Party were the suspects uppermost. He had his pad and pencil to take down particulars.

That clean but lonely feeling when there are no other cars. The traffic lights changing just for you.

He started vomiting again on the Central Expressway. The way he did it was to open the door, right hand clamped on the steering wheel, and drop his head down to vomit on the road. He could tell where they were going by his view of the white line, which was only inches away. George was screaming at him to stop the car or give up the steering to him. Jack straightened up. He said don't worry, he'd done this as a kid growing up in the toughest streets of Chicago. It was part of how you survived. Then he leaned way over to vomit some more. He vomited half his life out the car door, due to these assaults on his emotions.

They found the billboard on Hall Street. George got out of the car and took three pictures with the flash. To Jack Ruby this was hunting down a major clue and acquiring physical evidence. Now they had to find a copy of the ad so they could compare the box numbers. Jack didn't know where he'd left his newspaper. They drove to the coffee shop at the Southland Hotel just to take a break from these excitements. The place was either just closing or just opening. An old bent Negro working a mop. They sat at the counter and there's a copy of the Morning News lying right there waiting. They looked at each other. Jack ripped through the pages and found the ad. George took out the Polaroids.

The numbers didn't match.

Jack looked around for someone to get some coffee. He didn't even comment on the numbers. He had a twelve-inch stare, a dullish flat-eyed gaze. How a complete nothing, a zero person in a T-shirt, could decide out of nowhere to shoot our President.

They drove past the Carousel to take a look at the sign Jack had put up, one word only, saying closed.

Then they went home. Jack got a few hours' sleep, woke up, took a Preludin with his grapefruit juice and watched a famous New York rabbi on TV.

The man spoke in a gorgeous baritone. He went ahead and eulogized that here was an American who fought in every battle, went to every country, and he had to return to the U.S. to get shot in the back.

This, with the rabbi's beautiful phraseology, caused a roar of sorrow in Jack's head. He turned off the set and picked up the phone.

He called four people to tell them he'd closed his clubs for the weekend.

He called his sister Eileen in Chicago and sobbed.

He called KLIF and asked for the Weird Beard.

"Tell you the truth," Jack said, "I never know what you're talking about on the air but I listen in whenever. Your voice has a little quality of being reassuring in it."

"Personality radio. It's the coming thing, Jack."

"Plus when do I see a beard in Dallas?"

"I'm the only one."

"Russ, you're a good guy so I called with a question I want to ask."

"Sure, Jack."

"Who's this Earl Warren?"

"Earl Warren. Are we talking this is blues or rock 'n' roll? There was an Earlene (Big Sister) Warren sang on the West Coast for a while."

"No, Earl Warren, from the Impeachment signs. The red, white and blue signboards."

"Impeach Earl Warren."

"That's the one."

"He's the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Jack. Of the United States."

"The events have got me bollixed up."

"Who can blame you?"

"It's the worst thing ever in our city."

"One little man comes along and turns everything upside down. And we'll get the blame for him."

"Don't say his name," Jack said. "It has an effect of making me worse in my mind. Like I'm watching a dog playing in the dirt with my liver."

Saturday afternoon. Lee Oswald sat in a small glass enclosure with a phone on a shelf to his right. The door across the room opened. Here she came moving toward him, bandy-legged, dry-eyed, jowly, hair pure white now, long and white and shining. She sat on the other side of the partition. She looked at him carefully, taking him in, absorbing. They picked up the phones.

"Did they hurt you, honey?" she said.

She went on to tell him how she heard the news on the car radio and turned around and went home and called the Star-Telegram and asked them to take her to Dallas in a press car. Then she was interviewed by two FBI men, both named Brown. She told them for the security of the country she wanted it kept perfectly quiet that her son Lee Harvey Oswald returned to the United States from Russia with money furnished by the State Department. This was news to the Browns and they were pop-eyed.

"They're taping this, Mother."

"I know. We'll be careful what we say. I told them I haven't seen my son in a year. 'But you are the mother, Mrs. Oswald.' I told them I've been doing live-ins as a nurse and they didn't tell me where they'd moved to. 'But you are the mother, you are the mother.' I told them I didn't even know about the new grandchild. I had to endure a year of silence and now there is family news every minute on the radio."

These men, Brown, were looking for suspects in every direction. Magazine people were keeping the family in a room at the Adolphus Hotel. It was kept extremely hush hush. They were whisked from place to place with precautions. All of them. The accused mother, the brother, the Russian wife, the two little babies. Accompanied by approximately eighteen to twenty men who were suspicious of them and of each other. These were FBI, Secret Service and Life magazine. There was a man continually taking pictures. And Marguerite rolled her stockings down and he took that picture too, of the mother rolling her hose after a day that made history.

"Things were done without my consent," she told Lee. "But I'm checking every quote I make to them and if there are mistakes coming out, I'll know it is all stacked up against us, going back to Russia."

The babies had diarrhea in their hotel surroundings and there were diapers strung across the room from wall to wall. A president had to die before she could learn she was a grandmother again.

When Marina went into the room to talk to Lee she didn't know the police had found prints of the photographs she'd taken in the backyard on Neely Street. They were with Lee's belongings in Ruth Paine's garage. Marina had found two prints herself, overlooked by the police, in little June's baby book. The pictures with the fateful rifle. The gun in one hand, then the other.

She had both pictures folded inside her shoe.

"There's nothing to worry about," he said into the phone. "You have friends to help you."

It was painful seeing him in this state. Not just the bruises and scratches. This was a man who appears in a dream, a distorted figure in some darkness outside ordinary night.

She thought of the mild face of the boy she'd married, the unexpected American who asked her to dance. The face was almost plump then, rosy with cold, and the hair neatly parted, the clothes pressed. He was even cleaner than she was, very clean coming to bed, clean in every habit.

Then the worker in Texas and Louisiana, sometimes grease-spattered, losing weight, losing hair, dog-weary, suffering nosebleeds in his sleep, refusing to change his clothes.

Now this vision, this man with a beak nose and dark eyes, one brow swollen, clothes too big for him. This specter with gray skin. She looked at the lumpy Adam's apple, the prominent nose. His cheeks were sunk under the bones, leaving this nose, this bird beak.

He had to be guilty, she thought, to look so bad.

He told her not to cry. His voice was gentle and sad. He told her they were taping every word.

So she could not tell him about the pictures in her shoe. Or about the other thing she'd discovered after the police had left last night. This was his wedding ring in a demitasse cup on the bedroom bureau. He'd left it behind with the money, early Friday morning.

The money, the photographs, the wedding ring.

Three times he'd asked her to live with him in Dallas. She said no, no, no.

He told her now to buy shoes for June. Don't worry, he said. And kiss the babies for me.

The guards got him out of the chair and he walked backwards to the door, watching her until he was gone.

Home, Aunt Valya would be putting up sauerkraut, polishing copper, busy with the usual things, going with Uncle Ilya to visit the Andrianovs, a life without sudden turns and interruptions, and waiting for the first heavy snows.

She didn't even know about the policeman. She didn't know about Governor Connally. No one told her until later in the day that Lee was accused of wounding one of them and cold-bloodedly killing the other.

They led him back to the cell. He took off his clothes and gave them to the guard. He ate a lunch of beans, boiled potatoes and some kind of meat.

Nothing about this place bewildered him or set him to wondering what would happen next. The reporters did not surprise him, uproar in the halls. The lawmen asked the obvious questions and even when he failed to anticipate what they'd ask, it was still everyday obvious stuff. The cell was the same room he'd known all his life. Sitting in his underwear on a wooden bunk. A sink with a dripping tap. Nothing new here. He was ready to take it day by day, growing into the role as it developed. He didn't fear a thing. There was strength for him here. Everything about this place and situation was set up to make him stronger.

Even his appetite was back. This was the first meal he could really dig into. There was coffee in a mug. He drank it slowly. He thought. He listened to the guards talk softly in the narrow hall.

There was a third way he could play it. He could tell them he was the lone gunman. He did it on his own, the only one. It was the culmination of a life of struggle. He did it to protest the anti-Castro aims of the government, to advance the Marxist cause into the heart of the American empire. He had no help. It was his plan, his weapon. Three shots. All struck home. He was an expert shot with a rifle.

Saturday night. David Ferrie was driving in circles through the city of Galveston, Texas. His monkey fur was askew on his head. His mind had reached the stage of hysteroid extremes.

When the President was shot he was in a federal courtroom in New Orleans, where Carmine Latta's tax evasion case was being decided in the old man's favor.

When Leon was picked up by the police he was in his apartment packing for the trip to Galveston. He had his old Eastern captain's hat, gold-braided, that he was putting in an overnight bag. He heard the capture on the radio.

This was cause for panic. He gave in to it at once. Ferrie believed panic was an animal action of the body to ensure that the species survives. It was far older than logic. He kept on packing, only faster, and hurried down to his car.

He drove in circles around New Orleans for hours, listening to news reports. Then he filled the tank and headed west through a black storm, one of those sky bursts full of slanting coastal fury, and seven hours later he was in Houston.

He drove in circles around Houston. At 4:30 A.M. he checked into a place called the Alamorel. He was in no mood for patriotic puns. He spoke Spanish to the desk clerk, went to his room and made a series of calls to people in New Orleans, friends, lovers, clergy. He sought comfort in these calls and spoke Spanish even to those who didn't know a word.

He was afraid Leon would give the police his name.

He was afraid Leon would be killed.

He was afraid Leon, alive or dead, had his library card in his wallet. He seemed to recall letting Leon use his card once.

In the morning he bought newspapers and coffee and sat in the car listening to the radio. He felt his life trembling on the edge of the news reporter's tongue. He drove to a skating rink and made more calls. Banister wouldn't talk to him. Larta was at a sit-down. He called teenage boys he'd taught to fly. The skating-rink organ produced a sound that made him think of total death. He went out to the car.

Something about the time of year depressed him deeply. Overcast skies and cutting wind, leaves falling, dusk falling, dark too soon, night flying down before you're ready. It's a terror. It's a bareness of the soul. He hears the rustle of nuns. Here comes winter in the bone. We've set it loose on the land. There must be some song or poem, some folk magic we can use to ease this fear. Skelly Bone Pete. Here it is in the landscape and sky. We've set it loose. We've opened up the ground and here it is. He took Interstate 45 south. He didn't want them to kill Leon. He felt a saturating sense of death, a dread in the soft filling of his bones, the suckable part, approaching Galveston now.

He drove in circles around Galveston. The plane was probably still at the airport. He thought he might fly it out of here, a Piper Aztec, and make the escape to Mexico without the assassin. It didn't seem the least bit crazy. It seemed a ritual suited to the event.

The event was total death. Only a ritual could save him from succumbing.

He checked into a place called the Driftwood Motel. He spoke Spanish on the phone.

What was he doing in Galveston? Wasn't he here to fly the plane? The idea of flight had drawn him. He was a flyer, a master of the element of air. He was prepared to submit to death if it came at the end of a flight across the shining gulf, on some scoured brown flat in Mexico, remote, in fierce heat, with mountains trembling in the haze. These were the rules he insisted on. Mexico is a place where they understand the dignity of rules for dying.

He reached Banister on the phone. Guy told him something was in the works, a chancy plan, a long shot. David Ferrie decided to get a good night's sleep and head back to New Orleans in the morning.

There were wreaths and flower clusters arrayed on the lawns of Dealey Plaza, marks of sadness and farewell, and Jack Ruby drove through the streets at midnight, soaking up atmosphere and emotion. He looped through the plaza half a dozen times. He drove past seven or eight clubs to see who was open. It made him angry in that patriotic way of clenching your jaw tight when you see your fellow citizens profiteering from the heartbreak of others, conniving to be the only ones open on a weekend of national pain. All day he'd watched TV at various points in his circuit of downtown Dallas. This death was everywhere. Pictures of the grieving family. Re-enactments at the scene of the murder. This was an event that had the possibility of being bigger in history than Jesus, he thought. So much impact and reaction. It was almost as though they were re-enacting the crucifixion of Jesus. God help the Jews. Empty soda bottles rolled around his feet.

He drove home and started pulling things out of the refrigerator to eat. He felt a compulsion to stuff the body against despair. He wanted to handle food, to cook it and smell it, watch animal blood spurting in the pan. Take back muscle and blood. Take back gristle. He needed chewy meat and seltzer water fizzing in his teeth. It adds a little reserve to my strength of will.

He spent ten minutes making a sandwich but didn't have the heart to eat it. He went into the living room and picked up a newspaper to make sure his ads looked okay-the notices that his clubs were closed. George was hulked on the sofa in Jack's old robe, a beer can sweating in his hand.

Jack called his brother Earl in Detroit.

He called his sister Eva here in Dallas to talk for the third or fourth time about what happened. Eva began to weep. She was totally broken up. He handed the phone to George because he wanted his roommate to hear his sister weep. It was a broken hacking sob. Authentic. Jack and Eva wept and George stood with the phone planted on the left side of his head, looking impressed.

Jack went to bed. He stared at the ceiling in the dark. Every time a truck passed on Thornton Freeway it made a noise like paper ripping. The phone rang and he went into the living room and picked it up. He listened about twenty seconds. Then he put on his clothes and drove to the Carousel.

He went up the narrow stairs and turned on the lights. The dogs started barking in the back room. He sat in his office running his hand through his hair. He needed a scalp treatment fast.

He heard the footsteps. Then Jack Karlinsky walked into the office. He looked a little tired. He wore an open-collar shirt and his neck was stretched and ridged. He looked old at this hour, unprepared. He brushed some dog hair off the sofa and sat down.

"It's terrible, what's happening to this city, Jack. Every hour brings new words of grief abroad and wonderment how this could happen. Already the Europeans are talking this is conspiracy. What do we expect? They have their centuries of daggers in the back, frame-ups and poisons. This is adverse thinking. It builds up a pressure which is bad for the city, bad for us all."

"When I think of my father coming out of some Polish village."

"Polish village, exactly."

"To the carpenters' union in Chicago."

"To raise a boy who grows up owning a business, Jack. This is what we want to defend. What is the first thing people say about this tragedy? What does my mother say, eighty-eight years old, in a nursing home? She calls me on the phone. Do I have to tell you what she says? Thank God this Oswald isn't a Jew.' '

"Thank God."

"Am I right? How many people are saying the exact same thing these last two days? Thank God this Oswald isn't a Jew.' '

' 'Whatever he is, at least we know he's not a Jew.

"Am I right? These are the things people say."

"When I think of my father," Jack Ruby said.

"Of course. This is what I say."

"Always drinking, drinking. Out of work for years. My mother talked Yiddish to the day she died. She couldn't write her name in English."

"This is exactly the situation we find ourselves today. I'm saying there are things that need protection."

"I'm a great believer in you have to stand up for your natural values."

"Don't hide who you are."

"Don't hide. Don't run."

"This is a subject I talked to Carmine only today. I've been talking to Carmine direct. He made reference to he was anxious about Oswald. It makes the whole country look bad, all this talk on a level of conspiracy. I'll tell you what people want. They want this Oswald to vanish. That's how you close the book on loose talk. People want him off the map, Jack. He's a nuisance to behold."

"It's a tide of emotion where anything can happen."

"It's a wave. You feel it in the streets. It carries everyone along. We're involved one way or another whether we like it or not. Look at the ad that ran in the paper with a thick black border. Signed with a Jewish name. People notice things like that. They file it away. There's a lot of extreme feelings that attach themselves to Jews."

"I personally feel I've been dropped in a pool of shit."

Jack Karlinsky nodded.

"Let me tell you something right straight out. The man who gets Oswald, people will say that's the bravest man in America. And it's just a matter of time before somebody clips him. They're saying reports of mob action any time. The people want a blank space where he's standing. This act, they'll build a monument, whoever does it. It's the shortest road to hero I ever saw."

"You talk to Carmine."

"Carmine mentioned your name. From Tony Push. They know about you, Jack, in New Orleans."

"I did some things in the Cuba days."

"In other words this Oswald is an aggravation. He knows some little iffy things. He has some names he's playing around in his mind. Carmine wants to clear the air."

"I was over at headquarters, dropping in this afternoon. There's talk they're moving him to the county jail."

"I was about to say. It's a procedure they have to follow in a felony case. This city, it's screwy, the way certain affairs are handled in the legal arena. Commit a violent crime and there's a good chance you'll walk. This is a feature of the local climate. You know as well as I. Murder is easier to get exonerated than breaking and entering, Jack."

"It's considered how people behave."

"Am I right? It's considered settling things Old West-style. They have it ingrained in the way they think. You get a shvartzer kills another shvartzer in a gunfight, the case won't even go to trial."

"Nobody cares enough to try a case like that."

"This is what I say. I'm saying. Popping a guy like Oswald, this is the same approach. Can you project a heavy sentence to take this guy out?"

"People want to lose him."

"You'll see total rejoice. As things now stand, Jack, what are you worth to the city of Dallas? You're a Chicago guy to them. You're an operator from the North. Worse, a Jew. You're a Jew in the heart of the gentile machine. Who are we kidding here? You're a strip-joint owner. Asses and tits. That's what you mean to Dallas."

"Who are we kidding?"

"Who are we kidding here?"

"When I think of my mother."

"Exactly what I'm saying."

"My mother went crazy in a big way. I can't describe the horror. I used to look in her eyes and there was nothing there that you could call a person. She screamed and raged. That was her life. My father hit her. He hit us. She hit us. She thought we were all shtupping each other. Brothers and sisters having constant sex. I never went to school. I fought. I delivered envelopes for Al Capone."

"I'm saying. This is my point. It builds up a pressure that's bad for us all."

There was a short heavy silence.

' Thank God he's not a Jew.

' Thank God whatever he is, at least he's not a Jew.' '

"Jack, I'm sure you hear the same thing in the street I've been hearing for almost two days. The man who kills that communist bastard is saving the city of Dallas from world shame. This is what they're saying in the streets."

"What is Carmine saying?"

"Good point. Because here you have an ally. Here you have protection and support. Carmine himself brought up the subject of the loan. I think you'll be delighted with the terms."

"And for this?"

"For this you undertake to rid the city."

"In other words."

"Jack, you're a floater all your life. This is a chance you put your fist around something solid. You want to end your life selling potato peelers in Piano, Texas? Build something. Make a name."

"So what you're saying, Jack."

"Take him off the calendar."

"Clip him."

"Turn him into a crowd," Karlinsky said sadly.

He unwrapped a cigar but didn't light it. He looked old and drawn. He sat like a patient in a waiting room, preoccupied and tense, hunched forward on the sofa.

"Carmine is offering that we completely forgive the loan. We make the loan, then we cancel the debt forever. Forty thousand dollars. Deliverable at the first convenience. It's just a question how soon. We expect very soon. We don't expect a major delay here."

"What about my clubs?"

"We look after them in the meantime. I have every confidence you'll see a rebirth. Think of the people who'll want to say they paid a visit to the Carousel. Jack Ruby's club, who took out Oswald."

"To see what kind of atmosphere."

"Out-of-towners in total droves. You own a gun, Jack?"

"What do you think?"

"Carmine is getting full cooperation from the boys in Dallas. They have people they render assistance in the police. The police are going to move Oswald out of the building via the basement. It is for some time after ten A. M. There are two ramps to the street."

"Main Street and Commerce."

"I'm saying, Jack. The ramps will be heavily guarded. The building entrances closed off. The accordion gate between the two parts of the building will be locked. The power will be off in the elevators except for the jail elevator, which they'll use to bring Oswald down."

"I can probably walk right down a ramp."

"Wait. I'm saying."

"I'm a known face in the building."

"Not tomorrow you can't walk down a ramp. They are letting in reporters with press cards and that's it. A limited number, mainly picture-taking. This transfer is very delicate. They have extra men coming in. They're determined it goes off without a hitch."

"Then how do I get in?"

"I'm saying, Jack. There's an alley that runs along the east side of the building. You're inconspicuous here. Halfway down there's a door to the new part of the building, the municipal annex. This door is always locked except tomorrow we arrange it's open. There is no guard on the door. You go in the building. Once you're inside you see elevators and stairs. You take the stairs down. They're fire stairs. This is how you get in the basement."

"How do they bring him out?"

"Handcuffed to a detective. Another detective on the other side. What kind of gun do you have?"

"Snub-nose.38. Fits in a pants pocket."

"You'll have the heaviest hard-on in America."

Karlinsky laughed bleakly, a growl down in the throat. Jack sat behind the desk, looking blank. The conversation ended here.

Jack was alone for an hour figuring out how to meet recent wages and bills without the weekend receipts. This kind of petty arithmetic tightened his skull.

He looked in his address book for a number. Then he called Russell Shively, his detective friend, at home. It was after 3:00 a.m. Jack listened to the lonely phone ringing.

"Yes. Who's this?"

"Hello Russell."

"Who the hell is this?"

Jack paused.

"They are going to kill that bastard Oswald in the police basement tomorrow during the transfer to the county jail."

He paused again, then put down the phone.

Lee Harvey Oswald was awake in his cell. It was beginning to occur to him that he'd found his life's work. After the crime comes the reconstruction. He will have motives to analyze, the whole rich question of truth and guilt. Time to reflect, time to turn this thing in his mind. Here is a crime that clearly yields material for deep interpretation. He will be able to bend the light of that heightened moment, shadows fixed on the lawn, the limousine shimmering and still. Time to grow in self-knowledge, to explore the meaning of what he's done. He will vary the act a hundred ways, speed it up and slow it down, shift emphasis, find shadings, see his whole life change.

This was the true beginning.

They will give him writing paper and books. He will fill his cell with books about the case. He will have time to educate himself in criminal law, ballistics, acoustics, photography. Whatever pertains to the case he will examine and consume. People will come to see him, the lawyers first, then psychologists, historians, biographers. His life had a single clear subject now, called Lee Harvey Oswald.

He and Kennedy were partners. The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live.

The more time he spent in a cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now. This charged him with strength. There was clearly a better time beginning, a time of deep reading in the case, of self-analysis and reconstruction. He no longer saw confinement as a lifetime curse. He'd found the truth about a room. He could easily live in a cell half this size.

Sunday morning. Jack did the normal shuffling, getting the day going. It took him a certain time to beam in on things. He drank some grapefruit juice and paced the living room. George was on the sofa reading a newspaper and Jack kept going by with that stare of his that reached only a foot into the world.

"Jack, for me to express a facial nature, you know it's hard with words, but I don't think you look so good."

Jack turned on TV. He washed and shaved, using a Wilkinson sword blade for the name appeal and smacking on aftershave so it hurt. He made scrambled eggs and coffee and looked at the first section of the Times Herald, still in his shorts, while he ate. There was an open letter to Caroline Kennedy that was so emotional it choked off his ability to swallow. In his mind he rehashed the tragedy of the President and his lovely family.

The telephone rang. It was Brenda Jean Sensibaugh, Baby LeGrand, calling from her apartment in Fort Worth.

"Jack, the rent is due. There is nothing to eat in the house for me and the kids."

"I barely pick up the phone."

"I'm coming to the point so we don't waste time. Last night was supposed to be pay night."

"You know damn well why we closed."

"I'm not stating it was wrong to close. Just tell me how I get from one week to the next without a pay night."

"You already drew some on your salary."

"Don't be hateful or short with me, Jack. I'm asking a small advance so my children will have a meal before the day is over. I am one of your dependables and you know it. I'm only asking what I need to get through the day food-wise and place a little sum in my landlord's fist to keep him quiet."

"How much, bitch?"

"Twenty-five dollars. I can't get all the way to Dallas but if you could telegraph a money order or however they do it, I can go downtown and pick it up."

Jack realized there was a Western Union only half a block from the Police and Courts Building. Lucky for her. If he hurried he could wire twenty-five dollars to Brenda and then go shoot that bastard Oswald.

He took a Preludin with his coffee dregs and got dressed. Dark suit, gray fedora, Windsor knot in his silk tie. He picked up Sheba and told George he was going to the club. Downstairs he dropped the dog in the front seat and started up the car.

He was running late. If I don't get there in time, it's decreed I wasn't meant to do it. He drove through Dealey Plaza, slightly out of the way, to look at the wreaths again. He talked to Sheba about was she hungry, did she want her Alpo. He parked in a lot across the street from the Western Union office. He opened the trunk, got out the dog food and a can opener and fixed the dog her meal, which he left on the front seat. He took two thousand dollars out of the moneybag and stuffed it in his pockets because this is how a club owner walks into a room. He put the gun in his right hip pocket. His name was stamped in gold inside his hat.

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

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

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

"Here he comes."

"Here he comes."

"Here he comes."

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

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

Here he comes.

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

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

A shot.

There's a shot. Oswald has been shot. Oswald has been shot. A shot rang out. Mass confusion here. All the doors have been locked. Holy mackerel.

A shot rang out as he was led to the car. A shot.

Mass confusion here. Rolling and fighting. • As he was being led out. Now he's being led back. Oswald shot.

The police have the entire area blocked off. Everybody stay back is the yell, is the yell. A stocky man with a hat on. Oswald doubled over. One of the wildest scenes. Screaming red lights. A man in a gray hat. Somehow he got in. The police protection and the police cordons.

People. Policemen.

Here is young Oswald now.

He is being hustled out.

He is lying flat.

There is a gunshot wound in his lower abdomen.

He is white.

Oswald white.

Lying in the ambulance.

His head is back.

He is unconscious.

Dangling.

His hand is dangling over the edge of the stretcher.

And now the ambulance is moving out.

Flashing red lights.

Young Oswald rushed out.

He is white, white.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aerospace.

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

If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act. But maybe not. Nicholas Branch thinks he knows better. He has learned enough about the days and months preceding November 22, and enough about the twenty-second itself, to reach a determination that the conspiracy against the President was a rambling affair that succeeded in the short term due mainly to chance. Deft men and fools, ambivalence and fixed will and what the weather was like. Branch not only has material resulting from the Agency's internal investigations-Everett and Parmenter cooperated to varying degrees-but he also has key information about the last stages of the plot derived from sources inside Alpha 66.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He begins to hear voices. He hears one of his brothers screaming as people set him on fire outside the county jail.

He believes all his brothers and sisters will be killed because of what he did.

He believes people are distorting his words even as he speaks them. There is a process that takes place between the saying of a word and when they pretend to hear it correctly but actually change it to mean what they want.

He believes the Jews of America are being put in kill machines and slaughtered in enormous numbers.

He is miscast, or cast as someone else, as Oswald. They are part of the same crime now. They are in it together and forever and together.

The lawyers leave, the doctors come waltzing in. The cancer is spreading. He can smell it on the hands of his examiners. Jack Ruby reads his telegrams.

Does anyone understand the full measure of his despair, the long slow torment of a life in chaos, going back to Fanny Rubenstein toothless on Roosevelt Road, screaming in the night, going back in time to the earliest incomprehension he can remember, a truant, a ward of the state, living in foster homes, going back to the first blow, the shock of what it means to be nothing, to know you are nothing, to be fed the message of your nothingness every day for all your days, down and down the years?

You have lost me, Chief Justice Warren.

He begins to merge with Oswald. He can't tell the difference between them. All he knows for sure is that there is a missing element here, a word that they have canceled completely. Jack Ruby has stopped being the man who killed the President's assassin. He is the man who killed the President.

This is why Jews are being stuffed in machines. It is all because of him. It is the power and momentum of mass feelings.

Oswald is inside him now. How can he fight the knowledge of what he is? The truth of the world is exhausting. He lowers his head and runs into the concrete wall.

And Nicholas Branch studies the psychiatric reports. He reads into the night. He sleeps in the armchair. There are times when he thinks he can't go on. He feels disheartened, almost immobilized by his sense of the dead. The dead are in the room. And photographs of the dead work a mournful power on his mind. An old man's mind. But he persists, he works on, he jots his notes. He knows he can't get out. The case will haunt him to the end. Of course they've known it all along. That's why they built this room for him, the room of growing old, the room of history and dreams.

Sunday night. Beryl Parmenter sat watching TV in her little house in Georgetown. They were showing reruns of the shooting.

Over and over. The screen is full of broad-shouldered men in hats, all around Oswald, who is bare-headed, his features whited out by glare except for his left eye, shining darkly. Jack Ruby comes into the frame, bulky and hunched. His hand is bright static around the gun. The picture jumps. The surprise and pain in Oswald's face remove him from the company around him. He is alone, already far away, the only one not wondering what has happened. A cold moment of stillness after the shot. Then everything flies apart.

She didn't want these people in her house.

The camera doesn't catch all of it. There seem to be missing frames, lost levels of information. Brief and simple as the shooting is, it is too much to take in, too mingled in jumped-up energies. Each new showing reveals a detail. This time she sees that Ruby carries dark-rimmed glasses folded in his breast pocket. Oswald dies unchanged.

Why do they keep running it, over and over? Will it make Oswald go away forever if they show it a thousand times? She knew exactly what Ruby was thinking. He wanted to erase that little man. He wanted him out of here. He didn't want to see him or hear him or think about him. Just like the rest of us, Jack. We want him out of here too. And now he's gone but it isn't helping at all.

Beryl had admired President Kennedy. She'd even felt a small personal involvement in his rise, a sort of landed interest, inasmuch as the Kennedys had lived for a time in a brick house on N Street, practically around the corner, when Jack was a senator. She wanted to feel a satisfaction in the death of Oswald, some measure of recompense. But this footage only deepened and prolonged the horror. It was horror on horror.

She didn't want these people here. But she felt morally bound to watch. They kept on showing it and she kept watching. She had the sound turned down because the voices of reporters made her cry.

She'd been crying all weekend, crying and watching. She couldn't shake the feeling she'd been found out. These men were in her house with their hats and guns. Pictures from the other world. They'd located her, forced her to look, and it was not at all like the news items she clipped and mailed to friends. She felt this violence spilling in, over and over, men in dark hats, in gray hats with dark bands, in tan Stetsons, in white caps with shiny visors and badges pinned to the crowns. The little hatless man said "Oh" or "No."

After some hours the horror became mechanical. They kept racking film, running shadows through the machine. It was a process that drained life from the men in the picture, sealed them in the frame. They began to seem timeless to her, identically dead.

Larry was in the cellar cataloguing wines.

She began to cry again. She wanted to crawl out of the room. But something held her there. It was probably Oswald. There was something in Oswald's face, a glance at the camera before he was shot, that put him here in the audience, among the rest of us, sleepless in our homes-a glance, a way of telling us that he knows who we are and how we feel, that he has brought our perceptions and interpretations into his sense of the crime. Something in the look, some sly intelligence, exceedingly brief but far-reaching, a connection all but bleached away by glare, tells us that he is outside the moment, watching with the rest of us. This is what kept Beryl in the room, this and the feeling that it was cowardly to hide.

He is commenting on the documentary footage even as it is being shot. Then he himself is shot, and shot, and shot, and the look becomes another kind of knowledge. But he has made us part of his dying.

They replayed the sequence into early morning. Beryl stayed in the room and watched. The telephone rang for the twentieth time. She didn't move. The pain entered Oswald's face. She wasn't taking any calls this particular wintry weekend.

25 November

The road curved uphill through the burial ground, past jack oaks and Chinese elms, above grassy swales tracked with grave markers, and two dusty police cars moved slowly along, unaccompanied, an incongruous stately pace. At the top of the rise they stopped outside a pretty sandstone chapel to release the mourners to their organized grief. But it seemed at once that something was wrong. The family climbed out of the cars and there were Secret Service men and cemetery staff gathered in the archway, showing the grim pride that low officials take in a despised duty. The wind began to sing in the east, sweeping out of the reaches of industrial prairie between Dallas and Fort Worth, and Marguerite Oswald stood outside the chapel in a black dress and black-rimmed glasses, holding the new baby in her arms, the granddaughter whose birth they had kept from her, and her face wore a look of helpless pain. Because somebody canceled the service. Somebody ordered the body removed from the chapel. Because the chapel was empty. The body was not there.

They called many ministers, Lutheran men of God, but no one wanted to pray over Lee Harvey Oswald. This is the reason, your honor, they were in the utmost sheepish hurry to put my boy in the earth. Robert was crying bitterly, trying to get them to return Lee's body to the chapel for a brief service, an appearance in a holy place. So then I intervened and said, "Well if Lee is a lost sheep and that is why you don't want him in church, it escapes the purpose of a church. The good people do not need to go to church. Let's say he is called a murderer. It is the murderers who need a church. Isn't this what Jesus teaches?" They were in such a hurry to bury Lee Harvey Oswald they forgot to notify the men who carry the coffin to the graveside, so news reporters teamed up to move the body. I have many stories, your honor. I have stories I am sure you do not know. I am the mother in the case.

Hurrying clouds now. The wooden coffin rested on a bier above the open grave, with a massive concrete vault below, vandal-proof, a thousand years of peace. The family sat in dented metal folding chairs under a faded canopy. Robert Oswald was between the widow and the mother, each woman holding one of the little girls. Reporters were restricted to the far fringes. No friends or well-wishers allowed, not that any were clamoring to attend. Secret Service men and uniformed police stood around the canopy, many with hands folded in front of them, dipping their knees in turn, and there were armed guards stationed along the cemetery fence. The joke among reporters was that Fort Worth was taking better care of Oswald dead than Dallas did when he was alive. Robert was trying not to break down again. He was a man of earnest bearing, dark-browed, with neatly trimmed hair, a sales coordinator, a hard worker, looking older and more responsible than any twenty-nine-year-old from here to Texarkana, as if young Lee's truancy, the defection, the undesirable discharge, the lost jobs, all of it, had planted him in a stiff shirt for life.

Your honor, I cannot state the truth of this case with simple yes and no. I have to tell a story. This is a boy the other children teased. It was torn, torn shirts and a bloody nose. Listen to me. I will write books about the life of Lee Harvey Oswald. I have information pertinent to the case. I am all over the world. I have struggled to raise my boys on mingy sums of money and today I am everywhere, newsreel and foreign press, but where are the funds for a decent burial? There are stories inside stories, judge. Lee collected stamps in a book and practiced chess alone at the kitchen table and they sent him to Russia to infiltrate. I will wear a camera and make a photographic record of Lee's life, getting houses and rooms on the record. I will tell how I worked at many jobs to raise my boys, leading up to practical nurse. I know what sickness looks like. I know low pay. I have worked for nine dollars a day, live-in, twenty-four hours' duty. I wore my nurse's uniform three days, sneaking from hotels with the secret police of different branches, with Life magazine running alongside, and a translator, and a photographer, and the Russian daughter-in-law, and the two sick babies. Marina stands and smokes a cigarette plain as day. I am in my uniform and they bring clothes for her. There are diapers hanging everywhere. TV gave the cue and Lee was shot. They kept it from us, being women, and then in the car to the next hotel something came over the radio and the agent said, "Do not repeat, do not repeat." And I said, "Is that my son?" And he didn't answer. So then I said, "My son is shot, isn't he?" And he said into the mike, "Do not repeat, do not repeat." So then I said, "Answer me, I want to know." "Do not repeat, do not repeat." So then they showed it on television in the room but Marina and I were not shown the sequence. They made us sit behind the television and the agents all crowded around in front and watched. And the back of the television was to us. And fifteen to eighteen men crowded in to watch on the other side. They gave us coffee and they watched.

I am going through a death and it is hard.

I intend to research this case and present my findings. But I cannot pin it down to a simple statement. I came home to find red welts on his legs at the age of two, where Mrs. Roach whipped him on Pauline Street, and then I placed him in a home and he slept with his brothers in a big long dormitory, one hundred little boys in rows and rows of cots. He attended six schools by the age often.

They will search out the environmental factors, that we moved from home to home. Judge, I have lived in many places but never filthy dirty, never not neat, never without the personal loving touch, the decorator item. We have moved to be a family. This is the theme of my research.

I arn smiling, judge, as the accused mother who must read the falsehoods they are writing about my boy. Lee was a happy baby. Lee had a dog. This is the boy who spent only one month in attendance at Arlington Heights High School before he entered the Marines when we were living on Collinwood Avenue and there are three pictures of this boy in the school yearbook. Now, why do you pick out this one boy who is in school so briefly, of all the boys and girls there, and make him the subject of three photographs? People say, "Mrs. Oswald, I don't get the point." You don't get the point? The point is how it goes on and on and on and on. That's the point. The point is how far back have they been using him? He used to climb the tops of roofs with binoculars, looking at the stars, and they sent him to Russia on a mission. Lee Harvey Oswald is more than meets the eye. Already there are documents stolen from rne. There are newspaper clippings stolen from my home by one of the branches of secret police. I am all over the world and they are rifling my files.

A minister showed up, willing to say a few words at the grave. He was an executive of the Council of Churches and hadn't conducted a service in eight years. But he wanted to help, although he'd left his Bible in the car. The undertaker opened the coffin and Marina Oswald approached and kissed her husband and placed two rings on his fingers. She wore a dark dress and pale cloth coat and she was sobbing now, and the babies were crying, and the security men dipped their knees and gazed vaguely skyward. Marina found herself thinking, how odd, that when Khrushchev visited Minsk while she was living there with Lee, there were strong rumors of an assassination attempt. If that had been Lee, if Lee had been picked up for that, they would have taken better care of him. At least say this for Russians; they can guard a suspect. These grudging minutes at the grave completed her abandonment, except for dreams. Her dreams would be incomplete for years, deprived of Alek in his early sweetness, the way he loved to play with June Lee, could sit and look at her for hours. The minister said, "O God of the open sky and of the infinite universe." She was alone with two small children under these blowing clouds, an outcast, bent in grief and loss, living in a motel with a dozen armed men. She tried to understand how this could happen.

Now, about Marina as Russian or French. It is amazing how her English improved right after Lee is killed. It is amazing how she suddenly has a cigarette in her hand, which I never witnessed when Lee was alive. I will research the picture of Marina to learn if it is true. I have a sixth sense, judge. People have remarked on my ESP. If Lee Harvey Oswald shot the President, why didn't I know it at the time? It is a prevalent feeling every mother has when the phone rings and she knows it is her son. Why didn't I sense he was in a window with a gun when the shots rang out? Even being his gun doesn't mean he did the shooting. I will wear a camera. I will time his movements on the fatal day. I am ready to go round and round on this because there are stories inside stories, that the press is unaware. Marina knows English, Marina knows French. This foreign girl is trained. They brought clothes for Marina. They showed me a story in the paper where a woman has offered her a home. They want Marina to admit to his guilt and they will find her a home. Robert sides constantly with the secret police. Our dispositions do not jell. This is the heartbreak of blood relations. I am forgetting many things, your honor. Lee had a bicycle. Lee had a dog. This boy was shot handcuffed to an officer of the law. Somebody paid to have him shot on cue. TV gave directions and down he went. We have a moral issue all through this that I am fighting for. My mail is opened. There are three letters missing from my desk. Lee wrote to me from Russia, "I am lonesome to read." In this letter he is thanking me for sending books. He is saying please. He asks for news of his homeland. This is a letter that is missing. Our government has been watching him for years.

Did Lee even know he was being used? This is a question I will research. Listen to me. I have to tell a story. I have to work into this, living in the French part of town. He knew Robert's manual by heart. He liked histories and maps. The recruiting officer said, "Mrs. Oswald, there is less delinquency in Japan and those places than we have here." He sold a bill. He was willing to sneak Lee in at age sixteen, before the legal limit. They were preparing him. They were using him already. Three photos in the yearbook and he was only there a month. People say, "Mrs. Oswald, what is the point?" The point is how far back did it go? When did they start watching him? Did he belong to them for life? The point is what about the boy in the casket? Lee in a suit and nice tie looking completely different from the scarecrow son in the newspapers and TV, a sturdy boy, broad-faced, like a Russian. Is the person they buried the same as the person they killed? Did they really kill him? Is the person who came back from Russia the same as the person who went? I have a right to ask these questions. How tall is Lee? What are his scars? I will bring these questions out in books and appearances.

I wrote to Mr. Khrushchev July 19, 1960, when my boy was lost in Russia. I received no reply. I went to Washington January 21, 1961, to petition President Kennedy to find my boy and bring him home. So-wait now, this is good-they write I am neglectful. I left my boys to shift for themselves. I drove all the way to New York in that old junky Dodge. I pulled up stakes in our Western slang too many times. When the truth is that the mother is neglected. If you research the life of Jesus, you see that Mary mother of Jesus disappears from the record once he is crucified and risen. Where is the mother who raised the boy? When the boy is dead, do they build a box around the mother? I played piano by ear. I was a popular child. I can't give facts point-blank. It takes stories to fill out a life. Only think of Mr. Ekdahl, who cheated me out of a decent divorce and abandoned me to a life of scaring up dimes. Mr. Ekdahl is a story. Marina is a story where the details are lax. I strictly believe in my suspicions. Her statements, her way of life, she smokes, she does not nurse her baby. Marina has a manager. She has offers coming in and where is the mother? I am pictured in Life magazine in my uniform with hose rolled down. I have suffered like my son. We have the same construction.

It was near dusk now, stormlight forming at the edges of low-sailing clouds, dark and mobbed, and there was urgency, a wildness in the sky, everything electric. The minister finished reciting a psalm and the funeral director prepared to lower the coffin. Policemen adjusted their gun belts shyly. The family stood and watched. Robert and Marina had similar looks, soft, lost, pleading. Make it different, make it not happen, give him another chance, another life. Marguerite, holding little Rachel across her folded arms, showed a desolation so total it could be taken as the only thing left, all she had and was, all she'd given returned to her in a suit in a box, all fall arid smash, a soul struck by ruin. She passed the baby to the minister and put her hands to her face, not touching but enclosing only, keeping the moment safe from every woe outside her own.

They lowered her youngest son to the red clay of Texas, burying him for security reasons under another name, the last alias of Lee Harvey Oswald. It was William Bobo.

Now Marina came forward and picked up a handful of dirt. She made the sign of the cross, then extended her arm over the grave, letting the dirt fall. Marguerite and Robert had never seen anything like this. The beauty of the gesture was compelling. It was strange and eloquent and somehow correct. They'd agreed on nothing since Robert was a boy but now they leaned together to the mound of earth and took some dirt and blessed themselves, then held their fists upright over the grave and let the dirt spill out, running through their hands like sand hurrying in an hourglass, lightly falling on the pinewood box.

I stand here on this brokenhearted earth and I look at the stones of the dead, a rolling field of dead, and the chapel on the hill, and the cedar trees leaning in the wind, and I know a funeral is supposed to console the family with the quality of the ceremony and the setting. But I am not consoled.

And this is from oldentimes, that the men will kill each other and the women will be left to stand at the grave. But I am not content to stand, your honor.

I will time his movements on the fatal day. I will interview every witness. I am not speaking just to be speaking. I know as the accused mother I must have facts. Listen to me. Do you know I took Russian classes at the library? I went and studied once a week on my one day off, hoping in my heart that Lee would contact me someday, that I could talk to Marina in a normal way. Listen to me. Listen. I cannot live on donation dribs and drabs. Marina has a contract and a ghostwriter. She refused to wear the shorts I bought. And this boy on a Sunday in Fort Worth was not packed to go anywhere and the next day was gone with his wife and baby to a job in Dallas, overnight, without notice to his former employer or his mother. A job in photography where the details are not known. You have to wonder. Who arranged the life of Lee Harvey Oswald? It goes on and on and on. Lee had a stamp collection. Lee swam at the Y. I used to see him on Ewing Street with his hair all wet. Hurry home dear heart or you will catch your death. I am not letter-perfect but I have managed, judge. I have worked in many homes for fine families. I have seen a gentleman strike a wife in front of me. There is killing in fine homes on occasion. This boy and his Russian wife did not have a telephone or television in America. So that is another myth cut down. Listen to me. I cannot enumerate cold. I have to tell a story. He came home with a birdcage that had 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. This boy bought gifts for his mother. He was lonesome to read.

My only education is my heart. I have to work into this in my own way, starting with the day I took him home from the Old French Hospital in New Orleans. I am reciting a life and I need time.

Her hair was bright and strange in the painted glare. The first drops fell. For these final moments at the grave she was still a family. But she knew the minute they moved toward the cars, the Secret Service would separate her from the others. Think of the emptiness of going home alone. Think of not ever seeing the babies again. She was certain there was a campaign of permanent isolation. The funeral director took her arm and murmured something. She shook him off. The family clustered under umbrellas held by their protectors, moving to the cars now, slowly. Marguerite stayed with the diggers. They wanted to fill the hole before the rain got heavy and they worked in earnest, three men pitching dirt methodically. A couple of local policemen came near. The Secret Service came near with those faces made of slate. Still she did not leave. The mistake she'd made was handing over the baby. As long as she held the baby, she was still a family. They'd taken her youngest son and now they were taking the daughter-in-law and the two little girls. Marguerite felt a weakness in her legs. The wind made the canopy snap. She felt hollow in her body and heart. But even as they led her from the grave she heard the name Lee Harvey Oswald spoken by two boys standing fifty feet away, here to grab some clods of souvenir earth. Lee Harvey Oswald. Saying it like a secret they'd keep forever. She saw the first dusty car drive off, just silhouetted heads in windows. She walked with the policemen up to the second car, where the funeral director stood under a black umbrella, holding open the door. Lee Harvey Oswald. No matter what happened, how hard they schemed against her, this was the one thing they could not take away-the true and lasting power of his name. It belonged to her now, and to history.