"All right I'll bite."
"Manhattan Melodrama with Clark Gable."
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 him?"
"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,
Even now the crosshairs are centered on the back of your neck.
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.