Libra (17 page)

Seeing her smooth round face, doing her accented voice, he said to himself in the dark, What kind of foul-up do we have here, Oswald Lee?

Back in Atsugi he went on a movie binge. He saw every movie twice, kept to himself, spent serious time at the base library, learning Russian verbs.

 

 

Ozzie thought, What if she’s only interested in twisting me dry
^?

He met her in a flat above a bicycle shop. There was an open umbrella drying in the hall. She wore Western clothes, a raincoat over her shoulders. They shook hands like hospital roommates. She had that cropped uneven hair that was way too young and made him think she was undependable, a person who could not survive without double meanings, or saying one thing to mean the opposite.

“You are much greater value,” she said, “going on with your duties, reporting to me at regular times. Go where they send you. Why not? We wish you to get ahead. You get ahead here, not in Moscow or Leningrad.”

“What if I’m determined to go?”

“This is not the time for you.”

“Couldn’t they train me there, then send me back?”

“You are already back.”

A little joke. He told her he had no documents. Documents would come, possibly, in the near future. It all depended. In the meantime he showed his good will by reporting the number and type of aircraft in his squadron and the squawk codes for aircraft entering and exiting the identification zone. He did not tell her everything he knew about the U-2. He told her a few technical things, studying her reaction to the terms. He told her there was talk around the base that the plane’s cameras scanned through multiple apertures.

How wide a track?

He hated to say he didn’t know. She asked the names of U-2 pilots. She wanted technical manuals, instruction sheets. He gave the impression that further information would be available in the normal course of things, depending.

He definitely wanted instruction in Russian. He’d brought along an English-Russian dictionary. The sight of it made Dr. Braunfels sink deeply into her raincoat. She told him never to do that again. She would bring whatever books were needed.

They sat at the table in dim light going over pronunciations. She seemed impressed by his efforts. If he was willing to keep studying on his own, without attracting attention, she would give him as much help as she could. She talked about the language for some time, seemingly against her better judgment, drawn by his earnest desire to learn.

Working with her, making the new sounds, watching her lips, repeating words and syllables, hearing his own flat voice take on texture and dimension, he could almost believe he was being remade on the spot, given an opening to some larger and deeper version of himself. The language had a size to it, a deep-reaching honesty. He thought she was a good teacher, firm and serious, and he felt a small true joy pass between them.

He said to her, “A thousand years from now, people will look in the history books and read where the lines were drawn and who made the right choice and who didn’t. The dynamics of history favor the Soviet Union. This is totally obvious to someone coming of age in America with an open mind. Not that I ignore the values and traditions there. The fact is there’s the potential of being attracted to the values. Everyone wants to love America. But how can an honest man forget what he sees in the daily give-and-take that’s like a million little wars?”

 

 

Reitmeyer listened to the greetings, which were followed by a halting dialogue, with hand gestures, between his off-and-on buddy Oswald and a corporal named Yaroslavsky. He thought it was curious that a pair of U. S. Marines would turn up at muster every day chatting in Russian. It annoyed Reitmeyer. It definitely rubbed him the wrong way, the private joke they made of it all, laughing over certain phrases, calling each other comrade. They seemed to think this was hilarious. Seven, eight, nine days running. This half ass foreign gibberish. Only in America, as the saying goes. Except this is Japan, he reminded himself, and every day is a strange day in the fabulous East.

 

 

He watched Tammy apply eyebrow pencil to her lips, a fad among teen-age girls in JP that year. She was younger than Mitsuko but not that young. Mitsuko had vanished into the floating world and it was possible Tammy would follow any time. She posed for him now in a fluffy blouse and toreador pants. It no longer made Ozzie feel self-conscious to be seen by other Marines with a woman who was put together so well. The guys in MACS-1 couldn’t figure it out.

She took him to a place called the Loneliness Bar, where the hostesses wore swimsuits treated with a chemical substance. The idea was to strike a match on a girl’s backside as she walked by your table. Four Negro GIs went apeshit striking matches on sleek bottoms. There were matches jutting from the knuckles of every hand. They hooted and laughed, could not contain their amazement. They were young Southern Negroes, awkward and spindly, with a likable slapstick manner, and they made him wonder what had happened to Bobby Dupard. It put a kind of doom on the evening. He sat drinking beer in the stink of all those blistered match-heads, explaining his past to Tammy in simple phrases. A night in the life of the Loneliness Bar.

Three days later he felt a stinging heat when he pissed. It burned inside. Two days after that he couldn’t help noticing a thick discharge from the selfsame organ. He went to the head in the middle of the night to study the fluid, a dreadful yellowish drip. At the lab they took a series of smears and cultures, gave him nine hundred thousand units of penicillin, intramuscular, over a three-day period, and returned him to light duty.

Ozzie had the clap.

The pilot arrives in an ambulance, with armed guards. He wears a white helmet that is sealed to his airtight suit and he strides to the unmarked plane without delay. The ground crew and guards back off as the engine emits, the high-pitched signal that always brings a few men slouching out of the radar shack to watch the black-bandit jet streak down the runway. It’s over almost at once, the shrill sound rising, the strut-and-wheel devices keeping the long wings level until flying speed is reached. Then the plane is up, the pogos drop off, the men try to keep track of the fast steep climb, the brilliant leap into another skin. They scrunch up their faces, peering into the haze. But the object is already gone, part of the high quiet, the flat and seamless sky out there, leaving behind a string of soft drawled curses and murmurs of disbelief.

The pilot, sooner or later, whoever he is, whatever his base or his mission, thinks about the items stored in his seat pack. Water, field rations, flares, a first-aid kit; a hunting knife and pistol; a needle tipped with lethal shellfish toxin and concealed in a fake silver dollar. (“We’d just as soon they didn’t get a chance to interrogate you guys, not that we think you’d breathe a word. ”) There is also the delicate charge of cyclonite that will pulverize the camera and electronic equipment an undetermined number of seconds after the pilot activates the timer and gets his feet into the stirrups of the ejection seat, should the remote possibility arise that any such maneuver is necessary. (“Now, you people understand the ejection seat can cause amputation of the limbs if things don’t work just perfect, so maybe you ought to figure on slipping quietly over the side, like you don’t want to wake the kids.”) He can’t help thinking, sooner or later, about the worst that could happen. A stall at extreme altitudes. Or an SA-2 missile just happens to detonate nearby, knocking out a stabilizer. (“Not that the bastards have the know-how to go that high. ”) Next thing he knows he is out in the stratosphere, sky-hiking with a pack on his back, and he tries to convince a somewhat dreamy hand to jerk the pull-ring. At fifteen thousand feet it happens automatically, swat, the orange plume streaming out of his shoulder blades. It becomes a matter of dignified descent. He comes floating down out of the endless pale, struck simultaneously by the beauty of the earth and a need to ask forgiveness. He is a stranger, in a mask, falling. People come into view, farm hands, children racing toward the spot where the wind will set him down. Their rough caps are tilted back. He is near enough to hear them calling, the words bounced and steered and elongated by the contours of the land. The land smells fresh. He is coming down to springtime in the Urals and he finds that this privileged vision of the earth is an inducement to truth. He wants to tell the truth. He wants to live another kind of life, outside secrecy and guilt and the pull of grave events. This is what the pilot thinks, rocking softly down to the tawny fields of a landscape so gentle and welcoming it might almost be home.

Laurence Parmenter booked a seat on the daily flight to the Farm, the CIA’s secret training base in Virginia. The flight was operated under military cover and used mainly by Agency people with short-term business at the base.

The Farm was known officially by the cryptonym ISOLATION. The names of places and operations were a special language in the Agency. Parmenter was interested in the way this language constantly found a deeper level, a secret level where those outside the cadre could not gain access to it. It was possible to say that the closest brotherhood in the Agency was among those who kept the crypt lists, who devised the keys and digraphs and knew the true names of operations. Camp Peary was the Farm, and the Farm was ISOLATION, and ISOLATION probably had a deeper name somewhere, in a locked safe or some computer buried in the ground.

He showed his laminated badge to the MP at the gate. The badge was coded to reveal to the trained eye just how much clearance the owner had. After his letter of reprimand, Parmenter had been assigned to what was joshingly called the slave directorate, a support division of clandestine services, and he’d been issued a new badge with a diminished number of little red letters around the edges. His wife said, “How many letters do you have to lose before you disappear?”

T. J. Mackey was waiting at the gatehouse. He wore well-pressed fatigues and had the distant look of a doorman in a gold coat outside a new hotel. Basically he doesn’t want his friends to see him.

He took Parmenter to the JOT area, where junior officer trainees received instruction in everything from the paramilitary arts to counterintelligence. They sat alone in one of four sections of bleacher seats that formed an amphitheater over a pit area. Two young men were grappling in the dust. An instructor circled them in a busy way, speaking a language Larry did not recognize.

“Things broke our way early,” he said to Mackey, “but we’ve reached a static period.”

“I’ve been in touch with Guy Banister.”

“Camp Street.”

“That’s the one. He talked to the Dallas field office of the FBI about this Oswald. They finally got him an answer. He left Dallas April twenty-four or twenty-five.”

“There’s a Russian wife.”

“Left Dallas May ten with their baby.”

“Nobody knows where.”

“That’s right.”

“Which leaves us groping.”

“I thought you had a line of communication.”

“George de Mohrenschildt. But he’s in Haiti. Besides I don’t want him to know how interested we are in Oswald.”

“How interested are we?”

“He sounds right, politically and otherwise. Win wants a shooter with credentials. He’s an ex-Marine. I managed to get access to his M-1 scorebook and other records.”

“Can he shoot?”

“It’s a little confusing. The more I study the records, the more I think we need an interpreter. He was generally rated poor. But it looks like he did his best work the day he fired for qualification. He got a two-twelve rating that day, which makes him a sharp-shooter. Except they gave him a lower designation. So either the number is wrong or the designation is wrong.”

“Or the kid cheated.”

“There’s something else we ought to discuss, although I told Win it seems way too soon. Accidental hits.”

“You want a realistic-looking thing. That means multiple rounds flying from a number of directions.”

“Win says hit the presidential limousine, hit the pavement, hit a Secret Service man. Just don’t shoot anyone in the car.”

“Hit a Secret Service man.”

“Hit, don’t kill.”

“This isn’t a controlled experiment,” Mackey said.

“If at all possible, you try to wound one of the men in the follow-up car. The way these things work, there are two agents on each running board of the follow-up car. That’s four dangling men. And the car is going about twelve miles an hour. And it’s only five feet behind the presidential car, which makes it perfectly plausible, an agent taking a bullet meant for the President.”

“Where do we do it?”

“Miami.”

“Good enough.”

“If at all possible, that’s where Win says we do it.”

“It ought to be Miami.”

“Definitely.”

“Agreed.”

“Sooner or later the President will take a swing through Florida. All the political signs point that way.”

Two more young men entered the pit. Mackey said they were South Vietnamese being trained for the secret police. Foreigners attending sessions at the Farm were known as black trainees. A few of them, on sensitive assignments, had been brought to the U.S. under conditions so secure, according to Mackey, that the men did not necessarily know what country they were in. Larry thought this was farfetched. Look at the damn trees, you know you’re in Virginia. But he was careful to say nothing to T-Jay. T-Jay was not to be disputed on subjects central to his interests.

He told Parmenter he would stay in close touch with Guy Banister. Banister’s detective agency was the. Grand Central Station of the Cuban adventure. Every type renegade passed through. Guy would help them locate a substitute for this kid who’d disappeared. Someone rated expert with a rifle and scope. A shooter who could blast a finger off a dangling man.