Alek sat in the swooping chair.
A number of dangers cling to the slim figure of this Lee H. Oswald, an innocent who wanders into the outer rings of the Center, leaving thoughtful men to speculate. Are the Americans monitoring his progress? Would they let him fall into our arms if they thought he knew important things? Atsugi is a key base. There are reports from Hanna Braunfels, dredged from the files of the Seventh Department (Japan, India, etc.) of the First Chief Directorate. In a sense we have already gone too far with the boy, exposed too many of our methods. Despite all the tests and interviews, we may know less about him than he knows about us. In some office in the Pentagon, they are waiting to pick his brains.
Alek was paid to drive himself crazy.
One thing the tests confirmed. This was not agent material. You want self-command and mettle, a steadiness of will. This boy played Ping-Pong in his head. But Alek liked him and would arrange something decent. Has to be far from Moscow. A place where there are no foreign journalists, no chance to use him for propaganda. Give him a nice apartment, a well-paying job, a sweet subsidy in the name of the Red Cross-incentives to remain in this country. Alek had every reason to believe that Lee H. Oswald would eventually be given Soviet citizenship, become a genuine Marxist and contented worker, go to lectures and mass gymnastics, fit in, find his place in history, or geography, or whatever he was looking for. A true-blue Oswaldovich.
Still, he would recommend that surveillance be maintained, indefinitely, wherever the boy was sent.
Lee was not sure if this official was one of the men he'd seen before. There'd been so many, in the same dark suit.
The official told him he was not yet being considered for Soviet citizenship. Instead he was given Identity Document for Stateless Persons Number 311479. It was, anyway, a nice-looking piece of paper.
The official told him he was being sent to the city of Minsk.
LIBRA • W7
The official pronounced the name with a devastating clarity, as if moved by a painful ringing in his teeth.
Oswald cracked a little joke. "Is that in Siberia?"
The official laughed, shook the American's hand, then clapped him hard between the shoulder blades and sent him out into the snow.
The next day the Red Cross gave him five thousand rubles, which just about knocked him flat.
One day later Lee H. Oswald, with a just-shaved look, set out by train for this place Minsk. Seven hours out of Moscow he caught twenty minutes' sleep on a wooden bunk with a rented mattress and pillow. Then he ate meat pie and drank tea and could not recall a meal that tasted better. The land was forested here, silent and white in the Russian dusk.
2 July
David Ferrie drove the Rambler south past chemical plants where waste gas flared yellow and red. Farther on he saw oystermen's shacks in the windy distances, set on stilts above the marsh grass. He reached a place called Wading Point, the country retreat of Carmine Latta. He went past the Dead End sign, past the No Trespassing sign, waved to three men conferring on a lawn, then turned onto a dirt road. Men were always conferring at Wading Point. He'd see them clustered at the door of one of the outbuildings or seated in a car on a rutted lane, four large men crowded into some nephew's VW, absorbed in serious talk.
The hunched bearing, the repetitive gestures, the set jaws and fixed regard, the economy of the group, the formal air of exclusion, bodies leaning inward toward a center.
Ferrie understood the gestalt of serious talks. He'd studied psychology through the mail with Italian masters. This was long before Eastern Airlines fired him for moral turpitude and for making false claims about a medical background. As if a degree could solve the riddle of Comrade Cancer. They took away his uniform for good.
He drove to an old lodge in the swampy bottoms where Carmine liked to relax with the boys. Four of the boys were roasting a goat on a spit outside the lodge, which was weathered past the point of rustic charm, with swallows' nests mud-stuck to the eaves. Ferrie parked in the shade and went inside. The white-haired man, bright-eyed, veined, ancient, was sitting on a sofa, drink in hand. He was frail and spotted, with the drawn and thievish look of a figure in a ducal portrait. There were times, entering his presence, when Ferrie experienced a deferential awe so complete that he found himself becoming part of the other man's consciousness, seeing the world, the room, the dynamics of power as Carmine Latta saw them.
Carmine ran the slots. Carmine had prostitutes from here to Bossier City, a place where you could get a social disease leaning on a lamppost. There were casinos, betting parlors, drug traffic. Carmine had a third of the Cuban dope before Castro. Now he had a shrimp fleet making deliveries from Central America. There was. a billion dollars a year in total business. Carmine had motels, banks, juke boxes, vending machines, shipbuilding, oil leasing, sightseeing buses. There were state officials drinking bourbon sours in his box at the racetrack. The story was he funneled half a million cash to the Nixon campaign in September 1960. What the boys call a tremendous envelope.
"My friend David W. Ferrie. What's the W. for?"
"Wet my whistle," Ferrie said.
Carmine laughed and pointed at the liquor cabinet. The third man in the room was Tony Astorina, driver and bodyguard, occasional courier, known as Tony Push for obscure reasons. He and Carmine were reminiscing grimly about the Attorney General. Robert Kennedy was an obsessive topic of conversation wherever Carmine settled for ten minutes. Carmine had grudges. Ferrie could see the Bobby Kennedy grudge come to life in his eyes, a determined rage, but fine and precise, carefully formed, as if the lean old face held a delicate secret within it, one last and solemn calculation.
"So what I'm saying," Astorina said, "the whole thing goes back to Cuba. You look at everything today, the Justice Department, the pressure they're putting. If the boys took out Castro when they were supposed to, we wouldn't have a situation like this here."
"That's half true," Carmine said. "We would have leeway, with Cuba back in the firm. The value of Cuba, you use it to relieve pressure on the mainland. But the fact is nobody ever gave the Castro matter their full attention. We weren't very sincere."
They all laughed at that.
"Removing Castro was strictly a CIA daydream. The boys in Florida just strung them along. They were looking to keep the prosecutors off their back. They could always claim they were serving their country. And it worked. The CIA backed them up constantly."
"I still say everything goes back to Cuba."
"All right. But we're realistic people. We don't do tricks with mirrors and false bottoms. The styles don't match."
Ferrie wasn't surprised to hear them talking about delicate subjects in his presence. He did research on legal matters for Carmine and knew a great deal about his holdings and operations. He also knew the answers to some touchy questions.
Why did Carmine hate Bobby Kennedy in such a personal way, right down to the sound of his crackling Boston voice?
In early 1961 Carmine walks out of his modest house outside New Orleans and sees he is being followed by FBI. They tail his car,.eat lunch at an adjoining table, photograph his movements to and from his office, above a movie theater in Gretna. It is the beginning of a campaign of total relentless surveillance carried out at the direction of the Attorney General. In March they go to Las Vegas with him, take his picture in hotels and casinos, come back with him, camp outside his house, photograph his family, the neighbors, the mailman, the boy who delivers groceries. In April they go to church with his wife and his niece, play with his great-granddaughter in a supermarket and shoot movies of his sister's funeral. It is Carmine's personal Bay of Pigs, coinciding in time with the better-publicized one. Although there is public ruckus here as well. Sightseers come to the street where he lives to watch the FBI watching Carmine. There are traffic jams, skirmishes with the boys. It goes on for close to a year. These men are in his face day and night. It is the systematic humiliation of a senior citizen in front of his family, his neighbors and his business associates. And that little Bobby son of a bitch is calling every shot.