“This was all at the same time you were getting the FBI off my back?”
“It was all around the same time, yes.”
The man contemplated the situation.
“So,” he recapitulated, “you got a visit from Sam Brenckmann’s attorney?”
“Yes, a man called Vincent Meredith. He wanted me to spill the dirt on Johnny.”
“You did, right?”
“Yes. But I haven’t had anything to do with the little shit since that night at Haight Street. After that night I wouldn’t be surprised if Uncle Harvey or the San Francisco PD put the screws on him to leave me alone. I couldn’t really help, Vincent Meredith. He was very polite but I got the impression he’d do whatever he had to do to get Sam off the hook. Even if it meant dragging me and my family into this thing.”
Miranda felt better for having said it, unfortunately that did not to mitigate the likely consequences of the ensuing scandal. If this thing got nasty she could wave goodbye to her job on the Governor’s staff and her post-war new start would be over. Her parents would probably never speak to her again.
“I’d be angrier,” she admitted, “if it wasn’t all my fault. I almost got Sam killed and he went through Hell last winter because of me!”
Chapter 35
“You ain’t going to give me any of that religious crap you laid on me the last time we met?” The shorter, much younger man checked as he joined the craggy, granite-jawed cowboy in the alcove at the back of the diner off Commerce Street. The joint was filling up with mid-day business and outside, despite the season, the Sun beat down and dust hung in the air. Fort Worth and the nearby big city, Dallas, had not been as hard hit by the post-war recession as a lot of places and the diner’s clients were of the well-fed, complacent sort that tended to irritate the twenty-four year old former Marine.
What did these people think they had to be so goddammed proud of?
Galen Cheney seemed to be reading his thoughts.
“Their time will come, son,” he murmured sagely, careful to conceal his misgivings about the decision he had taken a fortnight ago to engage such an unworthy man in his crusade. However, God had spoken to him; even the least worthy of turncoats might be of service to the Lord in times such as these. These were indeed the strangest of times; who could doubt that the end of days would soon be upon Mankind?
Nowadays, a more prosaic consideration was that so many of his brethren in the Brotherhood of Liberty had fallen in the Battle of Washington, or since been hunted down by the monstrous forces of the ungodly charlatans who still ruled in this corrupt land, that if the Lord’s work was to be continued then sometimes unworthy men like the man before him might be given the opportunity to excel in the sight of the Lord. No matter how distasteful that was to a righteous man, such was the price the Lord demanded of his servants in times such as these when good men so easily despaired of their eternal souls.
Great vengeance had been wrought; Galen Cheney had exacted it on the evil doers who had failed their fellow men on seventeen occasions in the month of December before, reluctantly, covering his tracks and going underground again. The Brotherhood must be rebuilt, renewed and it was now clear that many — if not most — of the brethren from before the uprising would have to be abandoned to their fate. While he had personally opposed the uprising in Washington — it was too early and the ranks of the guilty had hardly been thinned around the edges — others eager for the ‘final confrontation’, Armageddon, had shouted him down. A man of less faith would have walked his own path but he was not the man to stand between a godly brother and his yearning for revelation. The rebellion had failed. So be it; that was the Lord’s doing. The struggle went on and the struggle was now Galen Cheney’s life’s work.
“I ain’t about to start going to church,” the small man said, uneasy under the relentless scrutiny.
“No,” the older man agreed. “I want you to keep away from my people.”
“Oh,” the other man had half-expected an argument. “Then why are we meeting here,” he waved around, “where everybody can see us?”
“Nobody ever remembers seeing anybody at a place like this, son.” Galen Cheney’s tone reflected his frustration to be having to work with such unpromising material. It vexed him also that he knew so little about Lee Harvey Oswald and that there was no time to fill in the gaps in his history or the questions that those gaps prompted.
“Why do I have to go on working at that fucking book warehouse on Dealey Plaza?” The younger man followed up this complaint with another. “Have you any idea how fucking boring it is filing books all fucking day long?”
The older man’s expression remained impassive.
Oswald was like so many of the people who had come to the Brotherhood via criminal or anarchistic routes, recommended by third parties who invariably melted away into the amorphous milieu of American society like snakes into the long grass. Oswald was angry, disaffected, a man who could not be trusted to know any of the Brotherhood’s secrets.
“Why did you lie to me about coming from New York?” Galen Cheney asked lowly. The kid had been born in New Orleans, his father had died two months before his birth and this event had doomed Oswald to what sociologists called a ‘broken childhood’. Cheney had no time for psychologists or other behavioural ‘experts’. Bad parent equalled bad child; poor exemplars bred failure in their offspring and in any sensible society bad parents would be punished for their lack of rectitude and their crimes against the wider communion. His people in New York had ferreted around about the two adolescent years Oswald had spent in the Bronx before his mother returned to Louisiana in 1954.
A school psychiatrist had described 13 year old Oswald as living a ‘vivid fantasy life, turning around the topics of omnipotence and power through which he tries to compensate for his present shortcomings and frustrations’. The diagnosis was unambiguous; a ‘personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies’ requiring ongoing treatment. But shortly afterwards Oswald had been taken to New Orleans by his mother because of the threat of his being removed from her care, ostensibly to enable him to finish his schooling. In 1956 mother and son had come to Fort Worth where Oswald had quit school — Arlington Heights High School — at the age of seventeen to join the Marines. By any standards this was an unlikely decision for a kid who had claimed to be a Marxist when he was fifteen, and a year later written to the Socialist Party of America claiming to have been studying ‘socialist principles’.
The thing Galen Cheney mistrusted the most about Oswald was that he was the kind of man to whom trouble naturally gravitated like iron filings to a magnet. Trouble and therefore attention. Unprepossessing to look at — five feet eight inches tall and sparsely built — the Marine Corps had trained him as a radar operator and posted him to Tokyo. Initially qualified as a sharpshooter, he had later been downgraded to a marksman just before he left the Marines on a hardship discharge claiming he needed to care for his mother. Although described as ‘competent’ while in the Marines he was court-martialed for inadvertently shooting himself in the elbow with an unauthorized hand gun — which was the sort of thing that told one a lot about what kind of soldier he had been — and a second time for picking a fight with the NCO whom he blamed for his original court-martial. Demoted from private first class to private he had served a brief period of stockade time.