Libra (43 page)

“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 genitals. 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 comer 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. Ferrie’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 Mannlicher, 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-172. 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.” Ferrie’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.