Frame 232 (32 page)

HAMMOND FOLLOWED
Clemente for over an hour. In spite of his earlier conviction that he had already covered every inch of Old Havana, he did not recognize any of the routes they traversed. At times he felt like a mouse in a maze, moving along cramped cobblestoned roads and turning down narrow alleyways. He wasn’t even certain they were still
in
Old Havana. One certainty that was unimpeachable, though, was that he should continue to exercise caution where his guide was concerned. Throughout the journey, he was careful to remain several paces behind him. Clemente, who had not uttered a single word since the park, did not seem worried.

They arrived at a soldierly line of low-rise apartment buildings, all of identically antiquated design and delineated only by color. Clemente went up the steps of the first, which was sky blue, and held the door open. “To the top,” he instructed. The fluorescent bulbs in the stairwell buzzed mutedly, and the air reeked of plaster dust and wood varnish. On the top floor
 
—the fifth
 
—Hammond stood back to let Clemente pass. Clemente opened the first door on the right and again invited his guest to enter before him.

There were multiple rooms, each weakly lit and sparsely furnished. Very Old World, Hammond thought, very European. It was also kept astringently neat, with an agreeably sweet odor. Olivero Clemente was nothing if not fastidious.

Clemente brushed past and gestured for Hammond to follow. The kitchen was small but serviceable, with painted cabinets, a gas stove, a ballooning Philco refrigerator that could’ve been taken from the set of
Leave It to Beaver
, and an equally nostalgic boomerang-laminate table bathed in the glow of an aluminum pendant lamp.

Clemente motioned for Hammond to sit. Then he laid his gun on the counter as unceremoniously as if he were setting down his keys and wallet at the end of the day. He filled an enamel kettle with water and placed it on the stove, igniting the gas flame with a wooden match.

“Do you like tea?”

“Uh, sure. That’d be fine. Thank you.”

Now that Hammond could study his host in a better light, he noticed that a subtle metamorphosis of sorts had taken place. Clemente no longer appeared to be the fierce warrior from the park but rather an ordinary man upon whom the specter of age was steadily gaining. His posture was slightly swaybacked, and there was a hint of gout in his knuckles, a few of which appeared to be swollen. His skin, while generally free of the manifold discolorations common to the geriatric set, sagged in places, as if it were about a half size too large for his modest frame.

What also struck Hammond as noteworthy was Clemente’s resemblance to the man who had been hiding in the Dealey Plaza storm drain. The broad nose and small, closely spaced eyes, in particular, left no room for doubt about the relationship between the two. Either unaware that
he was being evaluated or simply disinterested, Clemente took two saucered cups and a small box of tea bags from the cabinet. After that, and without any kind of preamble, he said, “How did you learn of my brother’s participation in the plot to assassinate your president?”

Hammond felt as though he’d been struck by a sledgehammer.
And there it is,
he thought,
just like that.
He wished he had a recorder going, and for a moment he thought about using his phone. He had a feeling, however, that Clemente was the sort of man who always knew what was going on behind his back.

“I saw a film of the assassination, and he was in it.”

“The film of the woman called the Babushka Lady?”

A second jolt
 
—
He knows about her?
Hammond was beginning to feel like he’d undergone one too many sessions of shock therapy.

“You’ve heard of
 
—?”

“Yes. So he was in the film?”

Hammond nodded. “In the storm drain on Elm Street.”

If Clemente felt any emotion toward this information, he kept it to himself. When the kettle began to whistle, he moved it to a dormant burner and killed the flame. Then he dropped a bag of tea in each cup and poured in the water.

The host set one cup in front of his guest, the other just across from it, and pulled out a chair for himself. Once seated, he paid no attention to Hammond for a time. And in spite of the tea still being well above comfortable drinking temperature, he took long sips with no apparent effect.

“I didn’t know who he was at first,” Hammond went on. “I had to see an assassination expert named Ben Burdick, a professor at Southern Methodist University in Texas. His book gave me a pretty good idea of the man’s identity. Incidentally, Ben was murdered for helping me.”

Clemente closed his eyes and shook his head as if Burdick had been an old friend.

“From there I went to the CIA library in Washington, D.C. That’s when I first saw your brother’s name officially recorded somewhere.”

Clemente took another sip of tea. “I thought those files were sealed for a hundred years.”

Here was another missile strike to Hammond’s sensibilities. This one, however, did not pack the punch of the previous two, for he was beginning to understand something
 
—
There are people in the world who know the whole story.
They were, by simple virtue of either having been on the inside of the conspiracy or very close to it, one crucial level above the thousands of enthusiasts who had spent thousands of hours agonizing over thousands of details. He imagined this to be a very tiny group, maybe only a handful now. And he wondered what they thought when they watched the assassination documentaries on television, listened to the so-called experts spew forth their manifold theories on countless talk shows, or read books like those written by Ben Burdick and others.

“Dr. Burdick found a page from one of those sealed files that had been mislaid. That’s where he first encountered your brother’s name. When I went to the CIA library to learn more, I couldn’t get past the security filters. But I did find
your
name in multiple places. That’s why I came to Cuba
 
—to see if I could locate you. And to find out if that really was your brother in that film.”

Hammond watched Clemente and waited. As he expected, there was no immediate reaction. The man drummed his fingers contemplatively on the table and stared into his cup.

Then he said, “My brother led a long and interesting life, to say the least.” He sighed. “A long and interesting life.”

Hammond felt something drop in his stomach. “You say ‘led’ as if it were over. Does that mean . . . he’s dead?”

The tiniest of smiles materialized on Clemente’s mouth, and his head rocked back as if he found this amusing. “Oh no, he’s not dead,” he said, his tone suggesting that the fact was a great burden to him. “He’s still very much alive.”

Hammond was unable to keep his own smile from forming. “Okay. . . . So is there any chance I could speak with him? Would you be willing to tell me where he is?”

He figured another long silence was coming, followed by a polite rejection of the request. He was barely able to believe his eyes, then, when Clemente pursed his lips and began nodding.

“I will tell you that, yes. It is no problem, Mr. Hammond. He is standing right behind you.”

Hammond’s expression shifted from ebullient to bewildered. His first thought was that Clemente spoke metaphorically, although the meaning wasn’t immediately clear. He also considered the idea that the man was joking. Olivero Clemente, however, didn’t strike him as the humorous type.

Then Hammond saw that Clemente was no longer looking directly at him but rather at a spot just over his shoulder. And when he turned, he found the man from Margaret Baker’s film
 
—older, but inarguably the same person
 
—standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. He was dressed in black jeans and a gray T-shirt, the latter matching both his mustache and the thick hair that covered his smallish head. The eyes still held the same fierce glimmer they had on that day in 1963. Hammond also noticed that Galeno Clemente had a silenced revolver in hand and was pointing it in his direction.

“Some things in this world are better left unrevealed, Mr. Hammond,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

IT WAS A LONG,
frozen moment. No one spoke; no one moved. Even with a gun pointed in his face, Hammond felt no fear. He kept his eyes locked on Galeno Clemente’s.

Then Clemente brought the weapon down and held it limp at his side. “The human desire to kill . . . it should be buried deep down and forgotten. Don’t you agree, Mr. Hammond?”

“As a matter of fact I do, yes.”

The weapon came up again, but only so Clemente could give it a cursory appraisal. “We have made it so easy, though. So very easy. We build the tools, then convince ourselves to use them. If we don’t have the reasons, we find them.” He shook his head. “We justify it.”

He came into the kitchen and put the gun down alongside Olivero’s, kind of dropping it there as if contemptuous of it. Then he pulled out the chair next to his brother’s, sat down, and massaged his face the way someone does when exhausted. What was particularly fascinating to Hammond was how
ordinary
this made him seem. At that moment, he was not a historical figure but a flesh-and-blood man.

“You did not come to Cuba to listen to my philosophies, though. Am I correct?”

“No,” Olivero cut in, “he did not. And I’m not interested in hearing them either.”

Hammond felt the insane urge to laugh. Another human moment
 
—typical sibling tension. He thought he caught a glimpse of their core personalities then
 
—Olivero, the commonsense one, grounded and calculating, somewhat machinelike in his black-and-white thinking. And Galeno, passionate and opinionated
 
—the philosopher
 
—given to outbursts from all points across the emotional spectrum. A touch melodramatic perhaps, but sincere. He probably kept a journal, wrote poetry. And yet . . .
A killer. A man willing to take the lives of other men, who was ready to shoot the American president. How does that resolve itself?

“I came here to learn the facts,” Hammond said firmly. “To solve this mystery once and for all. To bring the answers to the American people.”

Galeno was nodding. “Yes, I know of this, of your crusades to expose truth. Truth can be a dangerous thing, but in the end it is a good thing. The only thing. I have seen you on television, read about you in newspapers and on the Internet. And I can tell you the truth in this case, Mr. Hammond, for I was indeed there that day. That was me you saw in the woman’s film, sitting in the sewer like the rat that I was.”

“You
knew
!” Hammond said, incredulous. “You knew she captured you with her camera?”

“Yes. I saw the lens, like a black eyeball, aimed in my direction. I had a feeling.”

“Yet you didn’t consider killing her, too, just to eliminate the possibility of her film becoming public?”

“No. I could not have killed anyone at that point.”

Hammond’s eyebrows rose. “I’m sorry? I don’t underst
 
—”

“I know you don’t,” Galeno said. “I know that. But you will. If you are to know the full truth, then you must be told everything.”

“And why would you do that? Why tell
me
? And why now?”

“In part because of reasons you yourself have touched upon. But also for reasons of my own. Reasons that I will explain later. So are you ready to hear this?”

Hammond looked to Olivero, who had finished his tea and was staring at nothing in particular.
He’s heard it all before, probably many times, and is weary of it now.
It made Hammond remember the realization that had struck earlier
 
—
There are some people who have always known.

“Yes, I’m ready,” he replied.

“My brother and I were very happy when we were small boys,” Galeno Clemente began. “My father made a good living, and my mother took care of our home. We always had good food, wore nice clothes, went on trips. . . . It was a wonderful way for two children to grow up.”

“And then came Batista?”

“That is correct. He took everything my father had worked for. First his businesses, then his house and his land. Then he took our parents from
us
.” Clemente waved a finger between himself and his brother, his voice rising. “His men came one day and simply took them. We never saw them again.”

“I’m sorry,” Hammond said. “I can well imagine how difficult that must’ve been.”

“We had no place to go and no money. We knew nothing
of that kind of life. We lived in the streets and picked our food out of garbage cans. We begged, too. Some friends helped us, but most were afraid to. They were afraid of what would be done to them if they did. So we were left to fend for ourselves. The things we had to do . . . the things we saw out there . . . we lived this way for
years
. It changed both of us. Our innocence disappeared. We became hard men. Not boys, playing soccer with our friends like we should have been. Do you know what happens to vulnerable young boys? You do not, nor should you ever.
No
boy should ever have to know this.”

Olivero moved his hand up and down
 
—
Take it easy; take it easy.
Galeno leaned back, palms flat on the table, and took a deep breath. Then he came forward again.

“We didn’t know how long we could survive, but it probably would not have been much longer. Then Fidel Castro came, and he changed everything for us. He was an avowed enemy of Batista, so we supported him. We wanted to be part of his movement, join his army of revolutionaries. We were given training, new uniforms, food, and a place to live. You must understand, Mr. Hammond; to us, this was like winning one of your American lotteries.”

“I can imagine.”

“When Castro came to Havana in 1959 and drove Batista out, it was one of the greatest days of my life. We had won! We had beaten the man who had taken everything from us! I had become a very good soldier by this time. Practicing in the hills, and all the guerrilla warfare . . . I discovered I had natural skill with a gun. I could hit targets others could barely see. I never missed.” He sat up proudly upon making this announcement. Then, just as suddenly, he sagged again. “Yes, I never missed. That was when it all began to
go bad. After one term in the military, my brother got out. He went to school and became an engineer. But I stayed in. I was being treated like a prince for my talent. I was given extra rations, better quarters. Officers who were my superiors treated me with respect. Several of the medals I received were given to me by Castro himself. I felt like the world was in my hand. From living on the streets to receiving medals in just a few years. Do you know what this does to a young man, Mr. Hammond? It develops a sense of loyalty that goes beyond what is rational. I would’ve done anything for my leader. I would’ve walked off a cliff if he’d asked. If he had said it was for the good of the revolution, I would have done it like
tha
t
!” He snapped his fingers. “And Castro knew this. He was a master of human psychology. He knew exactly how to work a person like a puppet. It wasn’t long before he was sending me all over the world to do his killing for him. I thought it was romantic and exciting. It was all for the cause, you understand. The great and noble
cause
.”

He dropped his head and took several deep breaths. At first Hammond thought it was because he had become winded. Upon further reflection, he realized Clemente simply found the memories unbearable and needed to clear his mind temporarily.

“Then Castro began loaning my services out. I’ve killed for other politicians, for wealthy businessmen, even for his family and friends. As I said, I would’ve done anything for the man. I viewed him as my savior, remember.” Clemente leveled his gaze at Hammond. “And that’s how I became involved in the plot against your president.”

Hammond’s eyes popped wide in surprise. “Are you saying that Fidel
Castro
was responsible for
 
—?”

Clemente put a hand up. “No, no
 
—let me finish. It was
late October of 1963. I was told I would be part of a secret operation that was to take place in the United States. I had never been to the States before, and this was exciting to me. I would not receive any information about the operation until just before it began, but I was assured
 
—as I always was
 
—that my target was an enemy of the revolution. On November 20, I was flown to Dallas and put in a hotel room. I was told not to speak with anyone and not to leave until I received further instructions. The weapon
 
—a bolt-action European Mauser M59 with a side-mounted sight, if you are interested in such details
 
—was already in the room, along with a box of ammunition. The next day, a man came. He was young but very confident in himself.”

“Do you know who it was?”

“No, he did not give a name, and I never saw him again. He had two maps with him
 
—one showing Dealey Plaza and the route your president would be taking, and another showing the plaza’s sewer pipes. I was required to memorize these maps while he waited because he did not want to leave them behind. He showed me where I was to go and what I was to do. Then he told me who the target was. . . .” Clemente trailed off here, head cocked slightly and one eyebrow raised. “You should know, Mr. Hammond, that I would not have hesitated to fire if Lee Harvey Oswald had not. Your president had humiliated my leader during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He had imposed an embargo on my country that crushed our economy. He was Castro’s enemy, which meant he was my enemy.” Clemente shook his head sadly, ashamedly. “That was the state of my mind at the time.”

“So Oswald
was
the man who hit the president?”

“Oh yes, of that there is no doubt.” Clemente surprised Hammond with a chuckle here. “It is amazing to me that
there has been so much debate about this. I have heard arguments, for example, that he was a poor marksman who could not have possibly hit such a target from such a distance. Ridiculous. Mr. Oswald was a very good marksman, and with his weapon of choice
 
—a single-action Carcano M91
 
—he would have had no problem hitting his target from the sixth-floor window of the book depository. What
is
amazing is that he missed on the first try. With the element of surprise in his favor, that should have easily been the fatal strike.”

“Then how did he miss?”

“Nerves, I’m sure. He was probably very nervous. I never met him, but I have done much reading about him in the years since. He has always seemed to me the type of man whose ambitions greatly surpassed his abilities. The kind of man who, when put in critical situations, finds it hard to quiet his feelings and focus on the task at hand. A far, far too emotional individual.”

“So there really were two gunmen,” Hammond said, mostly to himself. “Incredi
 
—”

“No.”

“Hmm?”

“Not two. Four.”

“What?”

“There were four snipers hired to hit your president that day.”

“No . . . there’s no way. I don’t believe you.”

“I was in the storm drain. That’s one. The emotional Lee Harvey Oswald was in the book depository. That’s two. Another was in the Mercantile Building on Main Street. That’s three. And the last one, number four, was in the textile building next to the book depository. What they called the Dal-Tex Building. It was on Elm Street right before Elm
turned into Dealey Plaza. In fact, the man who shot the famous film, Abraham Zapruder, had an office there.”

“But . . . no one has ever suggested that there were four, ever. It’s impossible.”

“Is it? Think about it, Mr. Hammond
 
—Mr. Jason Hammond, who always seeks the truth. Think about the importance of the target. This operation could not fail. It had to work. It would have only taken one shot to get it done. The more gunmen hired, the greater the chance of success.”

Hammond was shaking his head. “That’s
incredible
.”

“Not if you look at it through the eyes of the people who wanted to do this. It was very smart.”

“Then who was behind all this? Who was it that hired you and the others?”