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. Terminate with extreme prejudice. Parmenter was handling the actual production of the memo on a suitable typewriter and stationery.
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."