"What did you tell them?"
"Thirty-five."
"Fine. But why bring me into it?"
"Because what are they liable to do if I don't show I'm linked to law enforcement?"
"It is only disturbing the peace. So-called creating a scene."
"Well get me out."
"I can't get you out."
"This wasn't the deal. Getting me arrested."
"You got yourself arrested. And if I get you out, it exposes everything. Giving them my name is bad enough. Did they ask why you wanted to see me?"
"They asked about Karl Marx. I told them the real Karl Marx was a socialist, not a communist."
"I am deeply disappointed, Lee."
"Well I couldn't just let them bury me. I have a wife and baby."
"One night is all you'll lose."
"I had to show there's someone who knows who I am. A figure of authority."
"It is only disturbing the peace. Tell them as little as possible. Let them think you're just a hometown boy with political ideals."
"I told them I'm a Lutheran."
"First-rate," Bateman said, nice and nasty.
They photographed him front, profile and full figure and then took prints of his fingers and palms. They told him to drop his pants and bend over. Later he sat in a holding cell seeing himself as he would appear in the mug shots, dignified and balding. He listened to the drunks and hysterics. They brought more men in as the night progressed. A howler and a dancer. They brought in a Negro with an aluminum-foil hat, a little religious cap made of Reynolds Wrap, with trinkets dangling from the sides.
Trotsky took his name from a jailer in Odessa and carried it into the pages of a thousand books.
It was Lee who told Marina that Mrs. Kennedy's baby had died during the night. A boy, born prematurely, with respiratory problems. Marina stood by the window crying. It hit her with the force of something she'd feared all along without letting it surface. Thirty-nine hours of life for the President's son. She cried for the Kennedys and also for herself and for Lee. How could she grieve for Mrs. Kennedy's baby and not think about the child she carried in her own womb? This was the future and it was marked.
Lee went to court. The first thing he noticed was that the room was separated into white and colored. He sat square in the middle of the colored section, waiting for his case to be called. Then he pleaded guilty and paid a ten-dollar fine. He shook hands with Carlos and walked out the door.
You see, none of this really mattered. What mattered was collecting the experiences, documenting the experienes, saving it all for the eyes of Cuban officials. What is it called, dossier?
There was a camera crew from WDSU waiting outside the courtroom and they shot some footage of Lee H. Oswald for the evening news.
Four days later he was back on the street handing out leaflets in front of the International Trade Mart.
The day after that he went on the radio to talk about Cuba and the world.
Bill Stuckey, the host of Latin Listening Post, was expecting a folk-singer type with a beard and sooty fingernails. Oswald was neat and clean, in a white shirt and a tie, and carried a looseleaf notebook under his arm.
They sat in the studio, with an engineer to record the interview, and Stuckey began right away, introducing Oswald as the secretary of the New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
Lee said, "Yes, as secretary, I am responsible for the keeping of the records and the protection of the members' names so that undue publicity or attention will not be drawn to them, as they do not desire it."
He said, "Certainly it is obvious to me, having been educated in New Orleans and having been instilled with the ideals of democracy and objectiveness, that Cuba and the right of Cubans to self-determination is more or less self-evident."
He said, "You know, when our forefathers drew up the Constitution, they considered that democracy was creating an atmosphere of freedom of discussion, of argument, of finding the truth. The right, the classic right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And that is my definition of democracy, the right to be in a minority and not to be suppressed."
Stuckey listened to him talk about the United Fruit Company, the CIA, collectivization, the feudal dictatorship of Nicaragua, movements of national liberation. Thirty-seven minutes in all, which Stuckey was compelled to reduce to four and a half for his five-minute show, and this was a shame because Oswald's presentation was intelligent and clear and his way of leaping out of difficult corners extremely deft.
Stuckey invited Secretary Oswald out for a beer when the interview was over. Then he sent a copy of the tape to the FBI.
That's how it went, that's the kind of summer it was. One day he was going after roaches with a pancake flipper, mashing them flat-one of those soft plastic flippers that are always on sale. He'd lost his job. They fired him because he didn't do the work, which seemed reasonable enough. Storms shaking the city. They shot Medgar Evers dead in Jackson, Miss., a field secretary of the NAACP. Later they would dynamite the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, four Negro girls killed, twenty-three injured. One day he was hunting down roaches in his kitchen, unshaved, wearing clothes he hadn't changed in a week. The next day found him in a gawky Russian suit and narrow tie, with his looseleaf notebook at his side, engaged in radio debate on Conversation Carte Blanche, another public-affairs show on WDSU. This time they'd checked up beforehand and had questions ready about Russia and his defection, catching him by surprise. Working the bolt on the Mann-licher. Cleaning the Mannlicher. They had plans for him, whoever they were. Heat lightning at night. It was easy to believe they'd been watching him for years, working things around him, knowing the time would come.
A man, a madman, whatever he was, shadow-boxed outside the toilets at the Habana.
Ferrie didn't seem to know sometimes whether a story was funny'or sad. He told Lee about the time he tried to perfect a tiny flare device equipped with a timer. He wanted to make thousands of these devices and attach them to the bodies of mice. He wanted to parachute the mice into Cuban cane fields. He was driven by the image of fifty thousand mice scattering through the sugar cane as the timers ignited the flares. He wanted to be the Hannibal of the mouse world, he said, and seemed dejected by the failure of the plan.
"During the revolution," Lee said, "Castro made it a point to burn his own family's cane fields."
"Listen to me. This Walker business is strictly in the past. You ought to forget him. A dead General Walker means nothing to Fidel. He is old hat. He is day-old shit. No one listens to Walker anymore. Your missed bullet finished him more surely than a clean hit. It left him hanging in the twilight. He is an embarrassment. He carries the stigma of having been shot at and missed."
"How do you know I want to try again?"
"Leon, do we actually have to speak the words? Don't we know when a death is passing in the air? They're beginning to crowd you. Banister says they're serious men. They've been in your apartment."
"I know. I had a feeling."
"You sensed it. See? Nobody has to say anything. The scales will simply tip and then we'll know."
"What were they looking for?"
"Signs that you exist. Evidence that Lee Oswald matches the cardboard cutout they've been shaping all along. You're a quirk of history. You're a coincidence. They devise a plan, you fit it perfectly. They lose you, here you are. There's a pattern in things. Something in us has an effect on independent events. We make things happen. The conscious mind gives one side only. We're deeper than that. We extend into time. Some of us can almost predict the time and place and nature of our own death. We know it on some deeper plane. It's almost a romance, a flirtation. I look for it, Leon. I chase it discreetly."