The Third Bullet (34 page)

“I do.”

“To them, you are simply a problem they do not care to deal with. Imagination is not their strong suit. Career-wise for them—and there is no other concern—it’s best you go away fast and forever and not upset or reroute the Kostikov Express to a dacha.”

“Yes sir.”

“But I’m in a different department. When news reaches me of the crazy American who says he took a shot at General Walker, I’m not annoyed, I’m fascinated. I have to learn more. My department has use for people like the crazy American; we’re charged with actually accomplishing something, not merely maintaining a security perimeter.”

Alek nodded.

“We occasionally do what’s called ‘wet work.’ Can you guess the meaning of ‘wet’?”

“Underwater,” the idiot said.

I sighed. “Try again, Alek.”

“Oh. Blood. You kill people.”

“Rarely. Sometimes. It’s always a tricky decision. It’s not like there’s a double-oh license or anything and we can go about blasting people with burp guns. But yes, sometimes, when necessary, say a defector, a murderer of one of our people, a particularly loathsome political opponent, then we may kill people.”

We reached his neighborhood. I pulled up a few doors down from his roominghouse, because I had no way of knowing if people there knew him and might remember him getting out of a car driven by a stranger.

“Alek,” I said, “I have a present for you. It’s in the glove compartment. Please reach in and get it.”

He opened the glove box and took out a white box of Western Cartridge co. 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition. He held it in his hand, jostled it, felt its considerable weight. His eyes lit up.

“Bullets,” he said. “For my gun.”

“You know Kostikov and Yatskov thought you were making up your story. So did everyone in the apparatus. Except me. I thought: Perhaps
this man, who lies about so much and has not finished one thing in his life, nor impressed one person, perhaps he is telling the truth about the shooting. That’s why I had to know you, Alek, I had to look into you. That’s why the travel, the investigation, all the interviews. But not till now, this second, have I confirmed for myself that yes, you are the rare man who believes in the cause so much that he will do the wet work for it. It’s easy to hand out flyers and go to meetings with homos and Negroes and federal agents. It’s easy to defect if you get to marry the sexiest Russian babe and begin fucking her right away. It’s easy to tell people that you’re a red, that you believe in the workingman, and that changes must be made, because you like the attention it gets and the ruckus it causes. The campuses and beatnik cafés are full of such worthless scum. But rare, truly rare, is the man for whom the revolution is worth dying for and worth killing for. He would be the man of action, an ideal. I believe you are such. Now get out, go home, go to bed, and prepare for another day of glory boxing books on the sixth floor. I will contact you again after these matters settle in that tiny little rathole you call a mind.”

“But I—”

“GO!” I commanded, and out he scooted.

A
week passed before Swagger dropped in on Richard again, this time intercepting him at a pharmacy where he was picking up prescriptions. “Damn!” said Richard, jumping visibly when his old pal Jack Brophy showed up from nowhere. “You are tricky,” he declared.

“I’m paranoid as hell,” Swagger said. “I’ve done some work and have made some progress. Don’t want any of those other boys knocking me off.”

“You might be better off to relax and let me introduce you to some people who might be able to help you.”

“Too shaky for that, Richard. You mean well, but I’ve got spiders in my mind telling me every-goddamned-body is spying on me.”

“I got it, I got it. Well, how about this—I think I could help you, no one else involved.”

“How’s that?”

Richard laid out his plan. He knew someone in the Dallas Association of Nursing Homes, which put out a weekly bulletin. His idea was to run an ad requesting that anyone who had worked in the Dal-Tex Building in ’63 and wanted to share memories with a researcher contact Richard. Then Richard, with Jack along, would interview. That way they could at least get a sense of how likely it was that a brazen penetration like the one Jack envisioned had happened.

Swagger thanked him, thought it over, watched him surreptitiously for a number of days, then okayed the idea.

The next week they visited three homes and talked to three old gadflies, two of whom said it was possible, one who said it wasn’t.

“The building was particularly deserted that day,” Mrs. Kolodny recalled. “We all rushed down at noon to get good spots to see the president. And afterward, who wanted to go back to work? I didn’t go back to work until Monday. It was so sad.”

Mr. O’Farrell disagreed, primarily because, it turned out, he was an amateur assassinologist.

“If you look, you’ll see that the Houston Street side of the building had a fire escape. And there was a bunch of people sitting there watching the president. Now, if someone fired a rifle shot, they’d be the closest, they’d be the ones who’d hear it and testify that a shot came from just forty or fifty feet above them. Yet there’s no testimony to that effect, goddammit. So how could it be?”

Swagger said, “Possibly they used a silencer.”

“Silencer, shmilencer,” said the old guy. “Hollywood crap! That’s what you get from TV and the goddamn movies! No silencer really silences. You can’t make a sound that loud and sharp go away. It might be lowered somewhat, but if he was shooting out the window, they’d feel the shock wave and they’d hear something damn suspicious. The only thing any of those folks heard was what everyone else heard, which was three loud cracks from the rifle of no one other than Mr. Lee Harvey Oswald.”

Swagger knew this not to be the case absolutely, as the sound itself could be modulated by a variety of techniques, primarily the efficacy of the suppressor and its location in an otherwise sealed room. A savvy shooter would place himself well back from the narrowly opened window, containing much of the sound and much of the shock wave. Unless the people beneath were listening for it and had experience with the vibratory patterns of suppressed weapons, it was unlikely that any lower-floor fire-escape sitters noticed a thing, what with so much else going on simultaneously.

Swagger ambushed Richard at the Palm over his weekly steak and martini.

“Mind if I join you?” Swagger said, appearing from nowhere just as Richard had finished his meat and put in an order for coffee and Key lime pie.

“Man,” said Richard, “you were in the spy business. I know you were. You move too silently, you follow too well.”

“Ain’t true a bit,” said Swagger. “I picked up my skills by being worried about Communist guerrillas in the mountains of Ecuador. Had a run-in with the same mob, different race, in Malaysia. Those were men who wanted us exploiters of the wonderful peasants dead. I developed a sixth sense for danger, and I learned how to disappear in plain sight. I was once three feet away from two guerrillas with AK-47s and went so still, they looked right past me, and here I am to tell the tale.”

“You could have fooled me.”

“Anyway, I wanted to tell you about something I discovered on the Net that’s interesting to me. A lot of it is shit, but this gal seems to know a thing or two.”

Swagger went on for a few minutes about the discovery. Some researcher had noted that when the FBI expert Robert Frazier had talked about the relative zero of the Hollywood scope on the Oswald rifle, it was clear that Frazier, a distinguished high-power marksman, was unfamiliar with scopes and unaware that if a scope is miszeroed, it will shoot groups in the same spot on the target relative to its miscalculated aiming point, altered only by the geometric progression of the range. If it’s an inch low and an inch to the right at fifty yards, it will be two inches low and two inches to the right at a hundred yards, and three inches low and three inches to the right at 150 yards, out until the distance where gravity and falling velocity have a larger influence than the scope misadjustment.

“The point is,” said Bob, “how can this guy say the rifle is accurate if he doesn’t know the most fundamental thing about the physics of the scope? How can he say a scoped rifle is easy to shoot? He doesn’t know enough to make either of those judgments, but those are key
factors in the commission’s conclusion that Oswald was capable of making the third, longest shot at the smallest and most quickly moving target.”

“It’s not really my thing,” said Richard. “I guess I get it, but it would be helpful if you could show me some of this stuff.”

“I will, I will,” said Swagger. “When I’ve got it all put together, I want to fly you out to Boise and take you to my range. You’ll see it. In the meantime, please be thinking of ways I could package this or someone I could write it up with.”

“Oh, all this on the rifles,” Richard said, as if a new thought had kicked its way into his head. “It reminds me. I’ve been meaning to mention this to you. Ever hear of a guy named Adams? In the gun world, I mean.”

“Nah,” said Swagger. “Can’t say—Oh, wait, there’s a guy named Marion Adams, a writer. Does these big fancy picture books on, say, Ruger or Winchester, like corporate histories or historical collections. That the guy?”

Richard handed him a card. “Marion F. Adams,” it said. “Firearms Historian and Appraisal Expert.” It had a cell number, an e-mail address, and a little picture of a seven-and-a-half-inch Colt Peace-maker.

Richard said, “He came by a couple of weeks ago. He told me some story about his theory of the case—I hear a lot of those, you know. But his was very gun-centric. It was sort of like yours, I thought, having to do with some Winchester gun firing bullets meant for the Carcano at a much faster speed.”

“Shit,” Swagger said. “Goddammit, that’s my theory. It’s my intellectual property. You’re telling me another guy who—”

“No, no, wait a sec. Here’s the deal. He said he was way behind the curve on what did or did not happen in the event, and he could never catch up. The websites gave him a headache. He’s not a Net guy. He wanted to shortcut the process. Did I know an investigator
who was conversant with the facts of the assassination, the state of the art of assassination research and theory, and firearms. Does that sound like somebody we know?”

Swagger didn’t say a thing. His face darkened as if his mood were tanking fast. His eyes narrowed. Finally, he barked, “It took me years to get where I am. I sure don’t want to give it away to some fellow with fancy friends who writes the words nobody reads in picture books. It’s my intellectual property. It’d be like giving away a piece of land with a mineral claim on it.”

“Jack,” said Richard, “I see your point. Don’t let it upset you. I didn’t get the impression he was too organized or anything.”

“Did you tell him about me?”

“Not by name. I told him I had a guy in mind who would fit the bill perfectly. And I’ll get back to him and tell him you’re not—”

“Hold off on that. If he’s published, it means he knows publishers, I mean, real New York publishers, like Simon and Schuster and Knopf and Random House, the big guys whose books get noticed by everybody. I had an idea that if I got it together somehow, I’d take it to them, even if they’d probably steal more than the little guys.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Oh,” said Swagger, going a little over the top on the angry-proprietor thing, “hold off a bit. Let me look into this guy. I’m not a writer, I’m an engineer. Maybe he could help me, I could help him. But goddammit, don’t tell him no more about me!”

Memphis got Agent Neal working again, and the results came back quickly enough. He summed them up for Swagger a few days later, in their weekly coffee-shop meet at a randomly selected Seattle’s Best in the suburbs.

“Okay, once again, we get a clean read,” he said. “Marion Adams, fifty-nine. Born into gun aristocracy. His father was CEO of a now-defunct Connecticut gun valley company that mainly produced .22
target pistols of very high quality. When target shooting got small in the late sixties, the company folded. But Marty, as he is called, knew everybody, he was, er, connected, and he was able to forge a career as a writer and consultant. He’s published nineteen books, many on the big-ticket manufacturers. His connections get him in the doors, he writes whitewashed company histories, he knows everybody, and he produces what many people consider technically beautiful volumes.”