Number eleven was, If I am alive and taken prisoner, the city jail is located at the end of the bridge we always cross when we go downtown.
She stood a moment in the small room. Then she moved softly to the kitchen, where she folded the note and hid it in a Russian volume called The Book of Useful Advice.
Lee was back at the Gulf station drinking another Coke, his shirt sticking to him. He edged closer to the office, where a radio was playing. He figured it wouldn't take long before a report came in. Every time a song ended and someone on the radio started to speak, he moved a little closer to the office door, listening for urgent words, for shot, dead, dying, that excitement riding high in the chest when there is news of important violence. Both weapons were in the car, with the green slicker, about three miles away by now, somewhere in the West Dallas ghetto. He'd get them in a day or two, or when it was safe.
He took a deep swallow, then let the bottle dangle between his index and middle fingers. Things were slow. Two men in grease suits talked inside the office. The room was brightly lit, with stacked cans of motor oil, a sexy wall calendar. Lee moved closer. He tried to look like an idler on some weedy edge of town.
Late. The cars stopped coming. There was nothing on the radio but rock 'n' roll. He finished the Coke, put the bottle in the case of empties and walked home in the head-splitting heat.
George de Mohrenschildt listened to the car radio, changing stations often. He was trying to get some fresh news on the Walker affair. The attempt fascinated him. Evidently it was the nearest of misses. The bullet changed course when it nicked the window frame. The police weren't saying much else. It was frustrating. He was hungry for developments. He didn't want the episode to slip into oblivion.
He drove the Galaxie convertible into Oak Cliff. Next to him on the seat was a big pink rabbit for Baby June.
He hadn't seen Lee for some time. Lee undoubtedly felt used and badly handled and abandoned. All the sad words in the beggar's dictionary. But it was his own fault. All he had to do was talk to Collings, man to man. George half admired his resistance. There was a purity of sorts. But it was boring too.
There was a new abandonment in the works. George was going to Haiti and he knew Lee would feel that the one man who took an interest in him was scramming out the door. George wanted to open up the country of Haiti. He knew the number-one banker there, which meant many things were possible. Oil surveying, resorts, holding companies. There was also a weapons shipment in the works, deep deep in the dark. Front companies were rising out of desk drawers. There were numbered bank accounts, untraceable ship charters. A fellow at the Pentagon wanted George to help provide cover for an anti-Castro operation centered in Haiti.
He found Neely Street. He thought about people spending their lives in a place like this. Lee sat in this hole reading obscure economics, mumbo-jumbo theory of the left. It was sad, interesting, boring, stupid. It was also infuriating. It hadn't occurred to George that seeing where Lee and Marina lived would make him angry. There was something serious and unsettling about this kind of squalor. Everything was rickety, makeshift, slanting. Everything slanted. It was repellent, not much better than a slum in Port-au-Prince, and George realized he could never again be amused by Lee, by the boy with the odd past and the out-of-place manner.
Marina and Lee came to the door. George said to Lee in his biggest voice, "So my friend. How come you missed that son of a bitch?"
He waited for the sure laugh. But they retreated to the living room. There was a shrinking in the air. Obviously the joke was not so funny in this household.
He handed over the Easter bunny and told them he was going to Haiti, long-term business, let's keep in touch.
He watched Lee's face change. He felt bad about that. He was leaving the boy without someone to go to with his ideas and his troubles. Marina went to the kitchen to make tea and George talked in her general direction about his vision of Haiti. Hotels, casinos, hydroelectric plants, food-processing plants. Lee sat on the sofa. His peculiar smile appeared, the little smirk that made George think of a comedian in a silent film with the screen going dark around his head.
"So someone finally smiles. It's a very delayed reaction. I walk in the door with a joke, no one makes a sound. I think I'm in the valley of lost souls. Now I see a smile peeping out. What is so amusing? Please. Inform me."
"I sent you a picture," Lee said.
"What picture?"
"It's the kind of picture a person looks at and maybe he understands something he didn't understand before."
"Sounds mysterious," George said.
"Maybe he sees the truth about someone."
Driving home George thought about the heavy schedule of appointments he had in New York and Washington, preparing the way for various aspects of the Haitian venture. He had the Bureau of Mines, Lehman Trading, Chase Manhattan, Manufacturers Hanover Trust, the Pentagon, the ICA, the CIA. The last in fact was strictly social, lunch with an old Agency friend, Larry Par-menter, a Bay of Pigs character but otherwise decent and amusing, a chap who knew his wines.
He sat at his desk opening and reading three days of mail. He came to the envelope addressed by Lee Oswald. Just a snapshot inside. It showed Lee dressed in black, holding a rifle in one hand, some newspapers in the other. Am I interested or bored, thought George. He looked at the reverse side. It was inscribed To my friend George from Lee Oswald.
George checked the postmark on the envelope. April 9. One day before the attempt on General Walker.
He looked at the second inscription. This was in Russian, clearly in Marina's handwriting and evidently written without Lee's knowledge, sneaked in before he sealed and mailed the envelope- a private message from the wife of the poseur to the sophisticated older friend.
Hunter of fascists-ha ha hall!
6 September
Wayne Elko sat at the window of a shotgun shack in the bayous west of New Orleans. There was no glass in the windows, just dusty plastic stripping, and he looked at three blurry men taking target practice in a mixed stand of cypress and willow.
There were other shacks in the area, here and there, used by weekenders who came out frogging and crawfishing.
Early mist. The gunfire sounded small and distant, little popgun compressions in the heavy air.
David Ferrie, a magnetic presence, a humorous master of games, was shooting at tin cans with a.22.
The swag-belly Cuban, Raymo, had a modified Winchester he liked to break down and reassemble, running a patch through the bore, sandpapering the stock.
The third man, named Leon, worked the bolt on an ancient carbine; sighted, fired, worked the bolt.
This was a new and hastily assembled camp, Ferrie explained, which is why the lack of creature comforts. The regular setup was at Lacombe, nearer New Orleans, where a number of anti-Castro factions had trained in guerrilla tactics until federal agents raided, grabbing a huge store of dynamite and bomb casings. This project would be kept small and restricted. Speak to no one. Respect the environment. Wait for the moment.
Wayne thought these were rules that verged on mystical.
He knew they weren't here just to fire weapons. T-Jay wanted them sequestered. Raymo and Wayne especially. The business was sorting itself out and he wanted his shooters wrapped tight, where he could find them.
Wayne stood outside wearing Levis, his bare chest pale and veined. He was growing his hair down over his neck, a rat's tail he painstakingly braided. He went barefoot over the moist ground. There was a storm hanging close, a stillness and metallic light, pressure building. The bird noise was fretful and spooked.
Frank Vasquez was back in the Everglades spying on Alpha 66.