The Third Bullet (51 page)

“But how can I
not
go? If I’m who I say I am, I have to go, or the whole deception falls apart and we’re left with nothing and I have to sit around and wait for Hugh to find me.”

“You tell me what to do.”

“I have no suggestions. Pray for luck, how’s that?”

“Okay, then I’ll make a suggestion. You set up your appointment. On that day, I’ll have a team from New York in the parking lot. No big deal, plainclothes, but with enough signs of serious operators on-site. Overcoats concealing long guns, vests under the coats, snail-cord earpieces, tactical shades, bloused boots, that sort of thing. If Hugh has people, the last thing he’ll want is a gunfight in the parking lot. They’ll take a powder fast, and there won’t be any action.”

“Okay,” said Bob. “It sounds good. You can pay for that?”

“It’s under the James Aptapton investigation and the Sergei Bodonski investigation. Capping Bodonski wasn’t enough; we have to find out who let the contract. It’s legit law enforcement initiative.”

“Great,” said Swagger. “I’m appreciative.”

“If we can take down the contract taker and he’s someone big, maybe even a once-dead Hugh Meachum, then we don’t have to go to JFK up front. And once we bag him, we can work for proof, and eventually, it gets out.”

“Not bad,” said Swagger. “There would be your career finisher. Your—what do they call it? Your capstone.”

“Just,” said Nick, “so it’s not your—what do they call it? Oh, yeah. Your tombstone.”

Like many Americans, I’m not sure if I saw Alek get his
in real time, live on the network, or if I saw it a few minutes later, when the other networks ran the tape. I suppose it doesn’t matter.

I’d missed his brief encounter with the press Friday night, since I’d been ingloriously passed out. But I’d seen it on tape, as they had to fill the time when nothing was happening, and what I’d seen had seemed classical Alek. He was scruffy, as usual, hair a mess, and the shiner from the punch in the eye he’d taken earlier that day from a Dallas cop hadn’t subsided. He was surly, squint-eyed, radiating animus. The cops shoved him up on a riser, and immediately, a surge of newspeople surrounded him, shoving mikes in his face, yelling questions. Bulbs flashed; he winced and got to speak only a few words before the cops hauled him up to Homicide.

“I didn’t kill anybody,” he said, or words to that effect, and I suppose to him, it made perfect sense. He had to know he hadn’t fired the fatal shot. It would be a while before I worked out what had happened to him up there, but he must have seen the president’s head take its hit, and he knew in his feral way that there was a game going on, that he’d been played for a sucker and was now somebody’s prey, and off he went.

That’s why his cry of “I didn’t kill anybody” as he was taken away haunted me. What you heard in that plaintive tone was self-belief. He
knew
he hadn’t murdered anybody—it follows that if he was a setup, he had concluded that his shooting of the Dallas police officer was pure self-defense—and you hear it in that yell.

The next morning, after an alcohol-free, somewhat redemptive sleep,
I returned to the television. It seemed all the TV people were grouchy too; they’d been working long hours without sleep, chasing witnesses and rumors, dealing with bureaucratic recalcitrance and ass-covering, shoved this way and that by defiantly unempathetic Dallas cops, being screamed at for being slow by network headquarters and screamed at louder for getting things wrong. What a life. I wouldn’t give it to a dog.

As I fought for clarity with my first cup of room-service coffee, I could sense the irritation everywhere. We were now in the basement of the police station, to witness Alek’s transfer from the supposedly vulnerable jail to one that offered more protection. To that order, an armored car had been arranged, so that only a bazooka rocketeer could kill Alek, and not even in Texas were bazookas legal.

But the transfer had fallen behind schedule. Things almost always do, don’t they? The reporters had been milling around listlessly for about an hour, and when anyone “reported,” it was time-filling banality, updates on the timing of the transfer or explanations on why it was late. Occasionally, they’d cut to Washington, where again, nothing was happening. They might run some old tape, to remind us what this was all about, not that we’d ever forget. Nobody did or could distinguish themselves under those circumstances, and I stayed with it only because it occupied all the channels. I’d decided to take a shower, get up, go for a walk, find a nice restaurant, head back, maybe watch some football—the NFL had decided, amid much controversy, not to cancel its slate of games. Tomorrow I’d fly back to somewhere under my fake identity, then to Washington under my real one, and rejoin the human race and my family.

Suddenly, on the television, it was as if a wave of energy had crackled through the black-and-white image of lolling, sullen reporters. Our correspondent—I have no idea who it was—informed us that Lee Harvey Oswald, indicted for the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit and the only suspect in the murder of John F. Kennedy, was on his way.

Why do I relive this incident? Surely any who read these pages will have seen it for himself. There’s no suspense; it turns out the same each
time the tape is run, and as movie special effects have gotten almost too realistic, so the almost chaste, bloodless death by gunshot of this appalling man is of little consequence to anybody. That is the view from a comfortable perch in our present. Then it was all different: nobody knew what the next big twist in our giant American narrative would be. Nobody could have predicted it, not even I, who had made the unpredictable happen two days earlier. Nobody had any idea that Mr. Deus Ex Machina was about to introduce himself.

I saw the surly Alek emerge from a door at the rear of the crowded room. He was shackled to a cartoon figure out of the old west, some sort of gigantic cowpoke in a smallish Stetson—it was like mine, though light where mine was gray—and what had to be called a westerner’s suit, apparently khaki. It was Captain Fritz of the Dallas Homicide Squad, but he looked to our uneducated eyes like a foursquare avatar of Texas Ranger justice. He stood out in a sea of dark suits and snap-brim hats, as if intent on representing the best of Texas to a shocked world. Next to him, Alek jauntily, perhaps even smugly, set the pace. He’d been allowed to clean up and change clothes and wore a black sweater over some kind of sport shirt. He grasped his hands at his waist and, for some reason, projected a “Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up” sense of self-possession.

I have to say that the quality of the broadcast was exceedingly fine. Every detail stood out, almost as if iridescent; the lines were bold and sharp; the depth of the image was startling. I don’t think I ever saw anything so clearly in my life.

Alek never knew what hit him. Deus ex machina hit him. Fate hit him. Retribution hit him. The fellow Ruby stepped from nowhere and jammed the pistol—a gangster’s snub-nose, so appropriate to a strip club owner—into his side. I don’t think there was a flash, but the report was enough to carry the news.

The famous photo almost does the scene a disservice. It freezes and therefore distorts. You can see Captain Fritz bending backward in surprise, Ruby hunched like a boxer who’s delivered a solid gut hit, and
Alek, mouth open in pain, eyes wincing. In reality, it was so damned fast, like a man slipping under the waves in the grasp of an undertow; he’s there and then he’s gone in the flashing of a nerve synapse.

Then chaos, disbelief, the whirls of spinning figures, as people fled the shot, Alek pulled Captain Fritz down with him, and various officers leaped on Ruby and shoved him to the ground. If the famous cry “Jack, you son of a bitch” was uttered, I missed it in my disbelief. I sat back and watched the melancholy play end. Alek, uncuffed, slid onto a stretcher and wheeled out, fast. Ruby pulled away. The reporters tried to make sense of it, interviewing each other to make certain the gigantic plot twist they’d just seen had actually happened.

I got a glimpse of Alek’s colorless, expressionless, perhaps breathless face as they wheeled him out and knew he was a goner. You don’t come back from that one, for I’d gotten a good fix on the bullet’s diagonal trajectory through innards, and I knew the violence it would do to the sweetbread of mysterious but crucial organs that the middle of the body conceals.

Perhaps you’ll think better of me for it, but my first thought was sadness at his death. Another man dead of violence in America, as if I hadn’t been the one who killed the last man dead of violence in America. It seemed like a contagion. You sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind, and I had to wonder when my whirlwind would come.

I’d known him and loathed him, as all did, while at the same time understanding that he was nevertheless human, like the rest of us. Did he “deserve” it? I suppose so; Jack Ruby thought so, and a few days later, I’d hear my oldest son say, “I’m glad they got him.”

Alek was a jerk, he was a fool, he was utterly incapable of doing a single thing right, but he was human and died as all too many humans do, alone, in pain, abruptly.

It wasn’t until that night that it occurred to me, amid the hysterical news reporting, that again we’d caught another gigantic break. Luck does favor the bold, no question of it. Now that Alek’s lips were forever closed, there’d be no crazed stories of manipulations by cynical
red spies who set him up and played him as a sucker. A myth wouldn’t spring forth—others did, of course, all patently incorrect—to tantalize the imaginative for decades to come. Books wouldn’t be written, not about the Red Master at least, nor movies made, nor TV series commissioned. All Alek’s secrets would be buried with him, and the narrative would shift its focus to this apparition out of
Chicago Confidential,
this fireplug-like gunman with his titillating connection to the demimonde and women with improbably large hair and breasts and arcs of eye shadow. I thought, You know what? I don’t have to learn a goddamn thing about Mr. Jack Ruby, and that’s okay with me.

I viewed the end of Alek in solitude, because Lon and
Jimmy had already left, both of them early on Sunday the twenty-fourth.

I saw Lon before he was gone. I gave him Jimmy’s report and delivered the rifle. I watched him put the parts in the gun case. He seemed dolorous and depressed; I got little out of him. Jimmy awakened and came by, and the two embraced. Then Lon was gone, and Jimmy was off to pack for his later flight, and I was enmeshed in the Oswald denouement.

Jimmy always got it more than Lon did, and he was too professional to let it affect him. I couldn’t have known then that within six months Jimmy would be dead. Another Clandestine Services colleague enlisted him to do a routine wiretap insertion on an East-bloc embassy in Canada. It was a low-level, routine thing. But somehow he was spotted—a first—and a Mountie, of all people, saw his shadow in the alley and drew. Jimmy knew he couldn’t surrender and testify; it would embarrass too many people. He turned, and the Mountie fired one shot and Jimmy fell dead on the streets of Ottowa, the death addressed as “mysterious,” as in “Why was an American businessman messing about in the alleys behind the Czechoslovakian embassy, and why did he flee the Mountie?”
Requiescat in pace
, good friend, loyal operative, hero.

As for Lon, I knew I wouldn’t hear from him for a long time, until he worked some things out. If you are thinking, Danger Man, he was the only one who knew, why didn’t you have him eliminated?, you’ve seen too many movies. The answer is, I don’t eliminate. I don’t even like the euphemism “eliminate” for “kill”; it sounds like cheap fiction. I am a
moral murderer. I can kill only for policy. I cannot kill for personal reasons, such as to deter threat or to earn money or for the pleasure of removing one of the world’s annoyances. What will come will come, and I will accept it. If Lon went mad with guilt and decided to confess, then I would accept that decision and ride the horse where it took me. But the world wasn’t worth living in if you didn’t trust the people you loved, so I let it go at that, and that is what happened; I didn’t see him again until 1993, when he had a different name and a different identity.

I stayed in the hotel until Monday the twenty-fifth, ironically, the day we’d planned the General Walker job. I stayed even though I was anxious to get home to Peg and the boys and help them through the emotional crisis that they couldn’t have suspected was my invention. But I couldn’t hurry, because I didn’t want anyone associating my coming and going with events in Dallas, the overcaution of an overcautious mind. I returned, took a day off, then went back to work in an effort to impose workaday normality on the inchoate grief that was everywhere.

Since this is memoir and not autobiography, allow me to skip details of the healing of the family, the stunned disbelief in Clandestine, the sorrow of even Cord Meyer, the lugubrious mourning of Washington, D.C., that seemed to last through winter and into spring. You’re familiar with the iconic images of the period, no doubt, the lasting one for me being the prancing of the riderless horse, Black Jack, with its single boot mounted backward in the stirrup. If I suggest, horribly, that I felt grief for the man I had murdered, it’s still the truth. Never did I feel joy except that one moment when Jimmy showed up and I knew we had done it, and that was a professional’s pride in craft, not a hunter’s exhortation of bloodlust after the kill.

I should not have been surprised, moreover, at the way in which Kennedy, a mild failure of a president who had shown a little promise and the barest possibility of intellectual growth, immediately became a symbol of greatness and his time in office christened “Camelot” and held up to the popular imagination as a bright and shining moment of moral excellence, star glamour, vivid beauty, and so forth. Yet I was not
sickened. It happens that way, and in my mid-thirties, I was barely mature enough to get it. Nothing makes the heart grow fonder than a nice bloody martyr’s death, real or imagined.

Dully, I soldiered on. I lost myself in the Agency and began working the terrible hours that I later became famous for. I wasn’t escaping guilt or voices in my head or the sad faces of my family upon my return or anything like that. I didn’t feel that I owed anything or that redemption was in order. It just seemed the way to go, and if I wasn’t already the section star, I shortly became one, and in time a legend. It’s amazing what a little hard work can do.