Libra (20 page)

“Armed and dangerous,” Win said softly.

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

Everett looked into space.

“How does this fit in with the fact that he has the use of an office in the same building as Banister’s detective agency, right above Banister’s office, which is the damn pivot point of the anti-Castro crusade in Louisiana?”

“It doesn’t fit in,” Parmenter said.

“I’m glad you said that. I thought I might be missing something.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everett searched his pockets for a cigarette.

“You’ve got to get close to the subject,” he said.

“Oh no.”

“Look, Larry.”

“I don’t want personal contact any more than you do, my friend. Give him to Mackey.”

“Where is he?”

“Still at the Farm as far as I know.”

“All right. Look. Get me a sample of the kid’s handwriting.”

“I’ll talk to T-Jay right away.”

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

Before the murder attempt comes the provocation.

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

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

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

He headed toward the car.

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mr. John Dillinger. This is who. Fill the fucking glass.”

“Rocks or not?”

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

“All right I’ll bite.”

“Manhattan Melodrama
with Clark Gable.”

The barman poured the drink, oblivious.

“Whenever there’s a famous finish in the vicinity of a movie house, it behoovès you to know what’s playing.”

“I don’t doubt it, Mr. Banister.”

“This is history with a fucking flourish.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

He called the barman over.

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

“ No. ”

“You never heard about that?”

“I never heard he had anybody.”

“He has got them,” Banister said.

“That look like him.”

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

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

He finished his drink and got up to leave.

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

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

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

“There’s something I think you definitely ought to know,” she said.

“Chances are I do know.”

“Not this you don’t.”

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

“It’s about this Leon upstairs, whatever his name is, working in the vacant room.”

“Oswald.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Then you know about it.”

“We’ll just see how it all works out.”

“Well what do you know about
him?”

“Not a hell of a lot, personally. He’s working mainly with Ferrie. Ferrie recommended him. He’s a David Ferrie project:”

“I wonder what that means,” Delphine said.

Banister smiled and got up. He put his cigarette in the ashtray on the desk. Then he stood behind Delphine’s chair and massaged her shoulders and neck. On the desk was a recent issue of On Target, the newsletter of the Minutemen. A line in italics caught his eye.
Even now the crosshairs are centered on the back of your neck.
Something in the air. There were forces in the air that men sense at the same point in history. You can feel it on your skin, in the tips of your fingers.

“What about the fellow who called early this morning?” Delphine said. “He sounded far away in more ways than one.”

“Did you wire him fifty dollars?”

“Just like you said.”

“One of Mackey’s people. New to me. I told him how to contact T-Jay.”

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

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

He reached across her shoulder for his cigarette.

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

“What do I put in the file?”

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

 

 

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

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

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

He was a long-chance man. This was a term from the real frontier a hundred years ago. For twenty dollars he’d roll your odometer back twenty thousand miles. Took about fifteen minutes. For a hundred dollars he’d set a charge of plastique and blow the car into car heaven if your insurance needs were such. Except he’d probably do it free. Just for the science involved.

Early light collected at the tall arched windows. The benches were thirty feet long, with high backs, curved backs, nicely polished. Giant chandeliers hung above him. The waiting room was empty except for two or three station familiars, the two or three shadowy men he saw at every stop, living in the walls like lizards. The silence, the arched windows, the wooden benches and chandeliers made him think of church, a church you travel to on trains, coming out of the noise and steam to this high empty place where you could think your quietest thoughts.