Mackey would put every effort into Miami. He would put men and weapons into Miami. Agree to a joint operation with Alpha. Do the groundwork. Get people and money moving. Eighteen November in Miami. He would build a Miami fagade.
In New Orleans
The first thing he did was take a bus to the end of the Lakeview line to see his father's grave. The keeper helped him find the stone. He stood there in the heat and light, searching for a way to feel. He pictured a man in a gray suit, a collector for Metropolitan Life. Then his mind wandered through a hundred local scenes. Oh bike-riding in City Park. Seafood dinners at Aunt Lillian's every Friday when he was eleven, after he took the train alone from Texas. He hid in the back room reading funnybooks while his cousins fought and played.
A man in a gray suit who tips his hat to women.
In Exchange Alley there was a Negro hunkered on the curb looking in the side mirror of a parked car as he shaved, his mug and his brush on the pavement next to him.
Lee looked up Oswald in the phone book, tracking lost relations.
Lee looked for work. He lied on all his job applications. He lied needlessly and to a purpose. He made up past addresses, made up references and past employment, invented job qualifications, wrote down names of companies that didn't exist and companies that did, although he'd never worked for them.
An interviewer noted on a card: Suit. Tie. Polite.
Marina sat in a chair on the screened-in side porch. She held Lee's half-finished glass of Dr Pepper. It was nearly midnight and still wet and hot and awful. This was their home now, three rooms in a frame house with a little bit of gingerbread up top and some weedy vegetation at the front and side.
Lee was out there somewhere with the garbage. They couldn't afford a garbage can so he slipped out three nights a week to stuff their garbage in other people's containers. He went out wearing basketball shorts from his childhood or the childhood of one of his brothers, no top, and sneaked along the 4900 block of Magazine Street looking for a can to stuff the trash.
She watched him come back now, walking up the neighbor's driveway, which was how you reached the entrance to their part of the house. He came onto the porch and took the glass from her hand. TV voices traveled across the backyards and driveways.
"I am sitting here thinking he doesn't love me anymore."
"Papa loves his wife and child."
"He thinks I am binding him like a rope or chain. His attitude is I bind him. He has the high-flying world of his ideas. If only he didn't have a wife to hold him back, how perfect everything would be."
"We're here to start over," he said.
"I am thinking he wants me to go back to Russia. This is what he means by starting over."
"Russia is one idea. I've also been working on the idea I could hijack a plane, take a plane and go to Cuba and then you'll come with June to live there."
"First you shoot at a man."
"We may not be finished with him."
"I am finished with him."
"There's a travel ban to Cuba."
"And you are finished with him. Leaving me a note."
"Little Cuba needs trained soldiers and advisers."
"Scaring me to death. Now you want to steal an airplane. Who will fly it?"
"Stupid. The pilot. I kidnap it, I hijack it. It's a Hight to Miami and I take my revolver and go in the flight cabin. It's called the flight cabin."
"Who is stupid? Which one of us?"
"My snub-nose revolver. My two-inch Commando."
She had to laugh at that.
"I stick up the plane and tell them to drop me in Havana."
They both laughed. They took turns drinking the warm soda pop. Then he went around with the spray can squirting roaches. Marina stood in the doorway watching. They had roaches in large numbers, really extraordinary numbers. She told him he would never kill a roach with the cheap spray he bought. She followed him into the kitchen, telling him that roaches drink these cheaper sprays and have babies. She watched him spray the baseboards carefully, with strict precision, so he wouldn't waste a drop.
The next evening he took her to the French Quarter and they rode the streetcar home. Tourists glanced at the Russian-speaking couple. Exotic New Orleans.
They made love on the small bed in the closed room. He had the feeling she wanted more, more of something, more of body, money, things, excitement, and he knew it in the technicalities of the act, in the breathing minutes, mysteriously.
He was paid a dollar fifty an hour to grease coffee machines. The maintenance man complained that he couldn't read Lee's notations in the greasing log. He complained that he couldn't find Lee, that he had to go through the building top to bottom looking for him. Lee stuck out his index finger and raised his thumb, holding the pose for a moment. Then he dropped the thumb and went "Pow."
The main library at Lee Circle was gone. He had to ask people where the new one was located. He walked north and then east and when he found the building he took a placard out of a manila envelope and unfolded it. The placard had a hole at either end with a string going through. He stood in front of the library with the placard strung around his neck and started handing out pamphlets he'd been receiving in the mail from the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
He wore a short-sleeve white shirt and dark tie. He'd written in crayon on the placard: Viva Fidel.
About a minute and a half later the Feebees pounced. A man came sauntering up showing the grin of a long-lost pal. His name was Agent Bateman.
"Seriously. I'm not here to arrest or harass you. Let's find a place to sit and talk."
They went to a sorry-looking diner near the Trailways station. It was late afternoon, a Saturday, and nobody was in the place. They sat at the counter and spent some time reading the bill of fare on the wall. Agent Bateman was probably younger than he looked at first glance, a man with a longish head, balding, like a high-school coach and science teacher in a TV series.
The only thing slick about him was his shoes, which were shined into the fourth dimension.
"We have you in our files at the field office here. I'm the fellow who keeps an eye."
"You handle my file."
"Ever since your defection. Queries come in, due to you were born here."
"I like the high old ceilings and the live oaks."
"Is that why you're back?"
"They talked to me once before. An Agent Freitag."
"That was Fort Worth. I am New Orleans."
"My Russian period is over. That was long ago. Why can't I just live my life without someone coming around, coming around?"
"I have the theory, Hey, there's nothing in the world that's harder to do than live a straightforward life. I go so far to say there's no such thing."
"What do you want?" Lee said.
"Right now? A grilled-cheese sandwich with crisp bacon, which is impossible to get because they grill everything together and the cheese gets done before the bacon. It's a law of physics. So you get pale bubbly bacon. I know about your correspondence with Fair Play for Cuba in New York and the Socialist Workers Party and so on. Routine mail intercepts. I could spend about four hours a day making your life miserable. Visit your place of work. Put out lead sheets to have you and your wife and your relatives interviewed and reinterviewed to the end of recorded time."
Lee still had the placard around his neck.
"Or I could sit you down and talk to you about our mutual interests. Like you want to carry on your political activities without being pestered on a daily basis."
"And you want."
"There is a crackdown in progress. This anti-Castro business has gotten out of hand. There's a group called Alpha 66 that makes hit-and-run attacks on Soviet ships in Cuban ports. People in Washington are very unhappy. It's an embarrassment to the administration, and they're determined to stop it, and the Bureau has orders to gather intelligence against these groups that are shipping arms and making raids."