"Oswald gave his rifle to Caballo?" asked Karp in disbelief.
"Of course not. Ah, a clarification. Caballo and Oswald had no contact, of course. Bishop kept them strictly apart at the guerrilla operations and during training. It was Turm and Bishop who acted as intermediaries throughout all of this. Turm got the rifle; he admired the weapon and said he wanted to have it checked out by a gunsmith. Oswald was ridiculously proud of that piece of junk. It also gave us the premise for the real assassination weapons."
"Real…?"
"Yes. Caballo procured four mint M1938 Mannlicher-Carcano rifles from the same series as Oswald's own. He cut the barrels down, tuned them up nearly to match standards, and fitted them with folding stocks and high-quality optics. The finished weapons were works of art, a little over twenty inches long and concealable under a jacket when they were folded."
"But the ballistics still wouldn't match Oswald's rifle," Karp objected. He realized he was treating Blaine like just another Kennedy nut with a theory.
Blaine seemed to realize this and gave him a long, humorous stare. "No, but they'd be close, perhaps close enough for government work, as the saying goes, and of course the ammunition was exactly the same as Oswald's. In any case, while this was going on, Oswald got the job in the book depository, in mid-October I think, and shortly after that, the White House added plans for a motorcade to the trip. Bishop, through his sources, was able to get preliminary plans for the route, and when we saw where they intended to go, everything fell into place. The other plans were immediately abandoned and we settled on a shooting from the book depository. Perhaps that was foolish, but I balanced the possibility of something going amiss in a more spontaneous plan against the overwhelming advantage of having the shooting done from Oswald's place of work.
"In the morning, Oswald dutifully brought his silly rifle in his homemade paper sack. The plan called for him to shoot from the second-floor window, from which he had an easier escape route. Just after he arrived, however, Carrera walked in and told him that the plan had been canceled, that the FBI had become suspicious of him, and that he was to hide his rifle on the sixth floor behind some cartons, lie low, and await orders."
"He bought that?"
"Oh, yes. He was already nervous from his earlier contretemps with Agent Hosty. It was plausible."
"Not to mention that he was basically a paranoid maniac to begin with," added Marlene.
"How true," said Blaine. "In any case he did as he was told. Carrera stayed on the second floor and went to the window."
"Nobody noticed him?" asked Karp.
"Another Latino man in work clothes in a book warehouse? This was not the Federal Reserve, Mr. Karp; people were coming in and out with deliveries all the time. Caballo came in about eleven and went to the sixth floor. He talked to no one, but several of Oswald's co-workers saw him and accepted him as Oswald. He removed Oswald's rifle from its bag and arranged the bag and rifle artistically in the places where they were to be found by the police. He placed three spent cartridges from Oswald's rifle, brass that he'd secured at the firing range, on the floor."
"Why three?" asked Karp.
Blaine shrugged. "I have no idea. He was improvising by then. Perhaps he and Carrera agreed that they would only need three shots. Now to the event: the motorcade arrived and made the turn onto Elm Street. Carrera fired first, striking Kennedy in the upper back. Kennedy moved in reaction to that shot, and that threw Caballo's aim off and he hit Governor Connally instead. A few seconds after that, he fired again and hit Kennedy in the back of the head. Carrera folded his weapon, stuck it under his jacket, and walked out the back. He went one street over, where Guel was waiting for him in a station wagon. Caballo picked up his own spent cases and walked down the stairs and out the back too, with the weapon under his jacket. Unfortunately he was seen doing it, which made for some confusion afterward, since Oswald was at that time having his famous Coke in the second-floor lunchroom. Of course, as soon as Oswald learned that the president-not Castro-had really been shot, he realized that something was desperately wrong. He simply left and went home, without even trying to take his rifle. Naturally, Bishop, who had excellent connections with the Dallas Police Force, was able to leak Oswald's description and address to them. Unfortunately, they dispatched Officer Tippet."
"Why unfortunately," Marlene asked.
"I mean unfortunately for Tippet. Tippet and Oswald knew each other. They were rather birds of a feather, in fact: tough-talking real men with guns. They used to meet at Jack Ruby's place. Oswald had armed himself and was wandering aimlessly. He now must have understood that all his delusions had come to nothing; he was simply being set up as a fall guy for the assassination. When Tippet approached him, Oswald panicked and killed him."
"So Tippet wasn't sent to assassinate Oswald?" asked Karp.
"Not by us, at any rate. No, we had Ruby set up to do that from the beginning. I thought an assassin assassin, so to speak, with organized-crime connections, was a nice touch. The last little item was that Turm went up to Parkland and dropped the magic bullet on a stretcher lying in the hallway. That was, of course, one of the errors; he should have used a banged-up slug; he had plenty, from his target practice with Oswald's rifle. The other error was the shot from the second floor. A proper autopsy would have recognized that this shot was angled upward and could not possibly have come from the sixth floor."
"What about the autopsy?" Karp asked. "Did you fiddle with that too?"
"No, in fact, we simply trusted to the incompetence and confusion of the federal government, a never-failing friend. The Secret Service, the FBI, and of course, our own CIA had all been very derelict, which helped prove my theory. Once a plausible patsy was presented to them, moreover, one who had all the kaleidoscopic qualities of Lee Harvey Oswald, every responsible party would join in the effort to enhance evidence pointing to Oswald and suppress any which did not or which pointed back at the agency in question. And so it proved; as you should know, it is proving so yet."
Blaine relaxed back onto his pillow and closed his eyes. He looked utterly spent. Karp and Marlene waited for him to resume, but instead a dark woman in a nurse's uniform strode out onto the terrace, nodded at the two of them, smiled at Blaine, and said, "It's time, Mr. Blaine." She knelt and released the brakes on the bed, and switched on a motor. Blaine said, "I'm sorry I am unable to continue for the moment. I have to get my oil changed. Perhaps this would be a good time for you to have lunch."
The mechanized bed rolled off, guided by the nurse. A Mexican in a white coat brought out a tray with an assortment of sandwiches and fruit and set it down on the little table.
They ate without much appetite, speaking little, as if the place were listening, as if Blaine were still there.
An hour passed. The nurse rolled Blaine back to the terrace. He asked how their lunch had been and whether they wanted anything. The treatment he had received seemed to have exhausted him even more. He was speaking very slowly now, with long pauses between thoughts.