"Libra" - читать интересную книгу автора (DeLillo Don)19 JuneMary Frances parked under an oak tree on the circular drive outside the College of Education Building, or Old Main. It pleased her that Win's office was in the oldest building on campus. The building pleased her with its arched entranceways and two-story columns. Den ton had its hidden streets, its sense of languorous history, an old American stillness, wistful and unchanged, and these older traces too, older ideas and values scored in limestone and marble, in scroll ornaments atop a column or in the banknote details of a frieze. The Old Main, the county courthouse, the broad-fronted homes, the homes with deep shady porches, the trees, the streets named for trees-all this pleased her, made her think that happiness lived minute by minute in the things she saw and heard. Being happy was a small awareness, the sum of small awarenesses, day by day, minute by minute, and you knew it now, in the hair and skin as much as in the heart. Suzanne sat next to her mother, arms at her sides, slim white legs pointed straight out, a show'of mock obedience. They were not talking to each other. You could be happy now. It did not have to be experienced in retrospect, as Win believed, as he liked to explain in his mild way, with the face he called a failed professor's tipped slightly right. It was not a slow-working glow or meditation. You could feel it now, collect it in the names of things around you, in chinaberry, oak and slippery elm. It pleased her to live here, after Miami, Havana, Mexico City, Guatemala City, temporary housing in southeast Virginia (isolation), dusty tracts of identical homes near the Carolina coast (isolation tropic). They would go to the Steak House on South Locust for jumbo shrimp with salad, french fries and hot rolls and then Win would suggest an ice cream at Lane's. Bright hot skies. Silence in the car, on the burning lawns. Suzanne was holding her breath. In his basement office in the Old Main, Win Everett was on the phone with Parmenter. "How does Mackey know all this if he hasn't made contact?" "Whatever T-Jay knows comes out of Banister's office. Oswald confides in one of Banister's people." "Go ahead." "In January he orders a snub-nose.38 from a firm in Los Angeles. In March he sends away to Chicago for an Italian carbine with a sniper's scope." "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. 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 of Guantanamo, 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 Raul. 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 amp; 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." The barman poured the drink, oblivious. "Whenever there's a famous finish in the vicinity of a movie house, it behooves 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 a Zippo he'd carried 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 "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, 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?" Del-phine 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 amp;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. He was asleep ten minutes on the bench when a cop bounced his nightstick off Wayne's raised knee. It made a sound like he was built of hollow wood. Welcome to the Rockies. He got up, took his things, crossed the street and went immediately to sleep on the concrete loading-platform of a warehouse. This time it was trucks that got him up. He wandered an area of refrigerated warehouses with old dual-gauge tracks intersecting on the cobbled streets. At Twentieth and Blake he saw a man swabbing a garbage truck. They had a hundred wrecked cars behind barbed wire and a thousand specks of broken glass every square foot. It was the broken-glass district of Denver. At Twentieth and Larimer he saw some men with a stagger in their gait. Early-rising winos out for a stroll. Baptist Mission. Money to Loan. A guy with a Crazy Guggenheim hat came pitching down the street; might be Indian, Mexican, mix-blood or who knows what, muttering curses in some invented tongue. Made Wayne think of the faces in the Everglades and on No Name Key during his training with the Interpen brigade. All those guys who'd fought for Castro and then crossed over. Dark rage in every face. Fidel betrays the revolution. He'd lived with a shifting population of rogue commandos in a boardinghouse on Southwest Fourth Street in Miami. They spent weeks at a time training in the mangrove swamps and went on forays along the Cuban coast in a thirty-five-foot launch, mainly to land agents and shoot at silhouettes. Otherwise they stayed close to the clapboard house, cleaning submachine guns in the backyard. Judo instructors, tugboat captains, homeless Cubans, ex-paratroopers like Wayne, mercenaries from wars nobody heard of, in West Africa or Malay. They were like guys straight out of Wayne's favorite movie, JFK had made his deal with the Soviets to leave Castro alone. Incredible. The same man Wayne would have voted for if he'd gotten around to registering. He believed in country, loyalty, mountains and streams. They were all tied together. He found a telephone and made a collect call to the New Orleans number T. J. Mackey had given him about a year earlier. He told the woman at the other end he wished to speak to a Mr. Guy Banister. "This is Wayne Elko calling. It seems like I have washed up in Denver, Colorado, tell T-Jay, and I am looking for a chance at some employment." Win Everett was in his basement at home, hunched over the worktable. His tools and materials were set before him, mainly household things, small and cheap-cutting instruments, acetate overlays, glues and pastes, a soft eraser, a travel iron. He felt marvelously alert, sure of himself, putting together a man with scissors and tape. His gunman would emerge and vanish in a maze of false names. Investigators would find an application for a post-office box; a certificate of service, U.S. Marine Corps; a Social Security card; a passport application; a driver's license; a stolen credit card and half a dozen other documents-in two or three different names, each leading to a trail that would end at the Cuban Intelligence Directorate. He worked on a Diners Club card, removing the ink on the raised letters with a Q-tip doused in polyester resin. A radio on a shelf played soothing music. He pressed the card against the warm iron, heating it slowly to flatten the letters. Then he used a razor blade to level the remaining bumps and juts. He would eventually reheat the card and stamp a new name and number on its face with an addressograph plate. He'd picked up a certain amount of sleazy tradecraft in his early years as an operations officer. Before that he'd taught in a series of small liberal-arts colleges in the Midwest, places like Franklin, in Indiana, where a perceptive colleague, affiliated somehow or other with CIA, recruited him for covert training. The idea seemed immediately right, a possible answer to the restlessness he'd felt working through his system, a sense that he needed to risk something important, challenge his moral complacencies, before he could see himself complete. Soon he was taking handy instruction in Flaps amp; Seals, or how to read other people's mail without letting them know about it, and remembering now and then those sleepy afternoons at little Franklin College. After some years in Havana and Central America, including duty as chief of station in Guatemala City, he was one of several men assigned to coordinate the training of a Cuban exile brigade. He was in a constant hurry after that. Underwater demolition in Puerto Rico and North Carolina, paratroop maneuvers outside Phoenix, teams to organize in Nicaragua, Miami, Key West. He felt sharp now, better than he'd felt in some time, on top of things, alert. The young man's address book would be next. A major project. Once he had a handwriting sample, Win would scratch onto those miniature pages enough trails, false trails, swarming life, lingering mystery, enough real and fabricated people to occupy investigators for months to come. He unscrewed the top of the Elmer's Glue-All. He used his X-Acto knife to cut a new signature strip from a sheet of opaque paper. He checked the length and width of the strip against the bare space on the back of the credit card. Then he dribbled an even stream of glue over the paper and pressed it lightly on the card. He listened to the radio while the glue dried. He was in a constant hurry then. Fort Gulick in the Canal Zone. Trax Base in Guatemala. Things were quieter now. He had time to turn the pages of all the books he'd been meaning to read. After the address book came the false names. He looked forward to coming up with names. He removed excess glue from the back of the card with one of Suzanne's school erasers. Then he turned off the radio, turned off the light, climbed the old plank stairs. His gunman would appear behind a strip of scenic gauze. You have to leave them with coincidence, lingering mystery. This is what makes it real. He checked the front door. The days came and went. Bedtime again. Always bedtime now. He went around turning off lights, checked the back door, checked to see that the oven was off. This meant all was well. Someday this operation would be studied at the highest levels of intelligence in Langley and the Pentagon. He turned off the kitchen light. He began to climb the stairs, felt compelled to double-check the oven, although he was certain it was off. Astonish them. Create coincidence so bizarre they have to believe it. Create a loneliness that beats with violent desire. This kind of man. An arrest, a false name, a stolen credit card. Stalking a victim can be a way of organizing one's loneliness, making a network out of it, a fabric of connections. Desperate men give their solitude a purpose and a destiny. The oven was off. He made an effort to register this fact. Then he went upstairs, hearing soft music on the bedroom radio. This kind of man. A self-watcher, a man who lives in random space. If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail. Lancer is going to Honolulu. At one level he operated well. He felt alert, marvelously sharp, very much on top of things. The address book was next. We want a spectacular miss. A voice on KDNT said that an eight-nation committee of the Organization of American States has charged Cuba with promoting Marxist subversion in our hemisphere. The island is a training center for agents. The government has begun a new phase of encouraging violence and unrest in Latin America. He didn't need these reminders. He didn't need announcers telling him what Cuba had become. This was a silent struggle. He carried a silent rage and determination. He didn't want company. The more people who believed as he did, the less pure his anger. The country was noisy with fools who demeaned his anger. He put on his pajamas. He seemed to be in pajamas all the time now. The day wasn't half done and it was time to go to bed again. Mary Frances was asleep. He switched off the radio, switched off the lamp. He spoke inwardly to whatever force was out there, whatever power ruled the sky, the endless hydrogen spirals, the region of all night, all souls. He said simply, Please let me sleep but not dream. Dreams sent terrors you could not explain. |
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