Libra (51 page)

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 façade 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 misidenti fication. 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 mer cenary, 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 Girón.”

“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. Harwood 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.”