Libra (19 page)

When the messages were broadcast, Larry was in Washington at the Agency’s invasion headquarters, a tempo building near the Lincoln Memorial. He was eating a soggy meal off a paper plate when news hit the control room that JFK would not approve air cover for the landings. The men did not accept it at first. Too unbelievably stupid and cruel. A colonel in golf togs walked through. The men shouted at superiors, damn near grew violent. Someone vomited lazily in a wastebasket, leaning over with his hands on his knees. Win Everett arrived from Miami, wrote out a letter of resignation, tore it up, flew back to Miami to be with exile leaders who were confined in a barracks at Opa-Locka so they would not leak word of the landings. It was the first major death watch in South Florida that week.

No one used the term textbook operation. Three days later Radio Swan was still on the air, promising the abandoned troops in Zapata swamp that help was on the way. Larry slept on a cot in grubby clothes but made it a point to shave every day. Shaving had an impact on his morale and he needed all the help he could get. Several weeks earlier he’d borrowed heavily to buy stock in Francisco Sugar at depressed prices. Sugar was the word going round. There were stunning profits to be made, insiders said, once the plantations were back in U.S. control.

“People think we’re the strangest marriage,” Beryl said.

“Why should they? Who? What’s strange about us?”

“Only everything.”

“People think we’re interesting. That’s my impression.”

“They think we’re strange. We have nothing in common. We have no practical reason for being. We never even talk about practical things.”

“We have no children. We’re not parents. Parents talk about practical things. They have reasons to be practical.”

“With or without children. Believe me. We’re considered strange.”

“I don’t think we’re strange. I think we’re interesting.”

“We’re interesting in a way. But we’re also strange. I’m the one they focus on. I’m the stranger of the two.”

“I don’t like conversations like this. I don’t know how to have these conversations.”

“They’re probably not a good idea.”

“So let’s change the subject,” he said.

“Although the fact of the matter is you’re far stranger, love, than I could ever think of being.”

“Strange how? I’m not strange. I don’t like this at all.”

“Strange like a man. Strange like someone I could never know the heart of, the truth of.”

“This is thankfully outside my range.”

“I don’t think I could ever begin to imagine in years and years of living intimately with a man what it is like to be him.”

“Funny. I thought women were the secret.”

“No no no no no,” she said softly, as if correcting a touchy child. “That’s the wisdom handed down from man to boy, through the ages, a hundred generations of knowledge and experience. But it is just another Agency lie.”

From the moment the CIA monitored a rebel broadcast on January 1, 1959, announcing that the tyrant Batista had fled the country at 2:00 A.M. and that Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz was the supreme leader of the Cuban revolution, from that moment to this, four and a half years later, as he stood in his striped robe mixing a drink for his wife, Larry Parmenter had been involved in one or another plot to get Cuba back. Soldiering on, Beryl said. She liked to remind him that he was not vindictive, had no strong political convictions, did not hate Castro or wish to see physical harm come to him. Larry was famous in fact for going to a costume party as Fidel Castro, with beard, cigar, khaki fatigues, about a month before the invasion. Seemed funny at the time.

One thing Larry didn’t like at all. This was the kind of fellow he’d occasionally had to deal with in joint efforts to recover investments in Cuba. The gambling interests, the casinos and hotels, the men who bought off officials routinely, who sent a steady traffic of couriers with hefty satchels moving through the Bahamas to the International Credit Bank in Geneva—men who thought longingly of the millions they’d once skimmed from the gaming tables in Havana. He wanted nothing to do with those roly-poly wops.

 

 

Earlier that day a young man walked into the outer office at Guy Banister Associates in New Orleans. Delphine Roberts was at her desk typing a revised list of civil-rights organizations for Banister’s files. The young man stood patiently waiting, in jeans with rolled cuffs, two days’ stubble on his chin. Delphine stopped typing long enough to pat her teased hair, a nervous habit she was determined to overcome. Then she resumed her work, aware that the young man was studying a calendar on the wall in order to kid himself into thinking he was not being made to wait. She knew all the styles. She could type a complicated text and scrutinize a visitor at the same time. This visitor had a little smile that seemed to say, Here I am—just the fellow you’ve been waiting for.

“I would like to fill out an application for a position with the firm. ”

Delphine kept on typing.

“You have people who do undercover work, I believe, like mingle with students or go to political meetings. I am referring to collecting information. I want to apply to become an undercover agent. I have a verified alias. I have served in the armed forces. And I have lived abroad in a situation that gave me special depth into the communist mentality.”

Delphine was not surprised. They had some thought-provoking individuals walking in unannounced at 544 Camp. This address tended to draw people from a colorful range of backgrounds.

She stopped typing long enough to give the young man an application. He said he had to get back to work at the coffee company around the comer but he would fill out the form and return it in the morning. Then he was gone.

David Ferrie came out of the small back room and said in his routine disbelieving’ whisper, “Who on earth was that?”

“He has a verified alias.”

“Do we have forms for undercover agents?”

“No. It’s just a normal form.”

“Like height and weight.”

“Whatever it says. I don’t know.”

“Like insanity in the family. Or give us the history of your disease. ”

“It says whatever you want it to say, Dave. I’m very, very busy. ”

“How can a person explain his disease on a printed form?”

David Ferrie went into Guy Banister’s office, which was empty, and looked out the street-side window, trying to catch a glimpse of the young man whose voice he’d just been listening to. Had he caught something familiar in the tone? Would he be able to match a body to the voice? He looked at the swarm of people moving down the street. Dark folks aplenty, he thought. But no sign of the sweet-voiced boy who wants to be a spy.

Even coming back he was a military man. His father was a veteran. His brothers were in the service. My own brother was a navy man. We were a serviceman family. He sent me a regular allotment every month out of his pay and when he heard about my injury, which I said in a letter, he put in for a hardship discharge as I was disabled from work and trying for six months to collect on my claim. He was stationed in California then and they let him go early in order to help his mother. This is the injury of a candy jar falling off a shelf that four doctors have taken x-rays of my nose and face and there is travel time and carfare and the store is still holding tight to their cash. I am a disabled woman who can’t collect. It is like the days of Mr. Ekdahl, a ten-thousand-dollar-a-year man with an expense account who fixed it so my welfare was ignored.

I am leaving out Lee had a beautiful voice and sang beautifully at age six in Covington, Louisiana. He sang a solo in the Lutheran church, “Silent Night,” and that can be verified.

Now this boy comes home from the service and says he will work on a cargo ship and send money home to me. That was our only conversation over three days where he slept on a col in the kitchen, which was the only place I had for him, plus he told me that he passed his high-school-level tests, Mother, which I don’t know why you need this to lift crates on a boat. He was here only parts of three days before packing a bag and leaving. Then I received a letter postmarked New Orleans that he has booked passage on a ship to Europe. It is painful to accept, your honor. There is nothing in the letter that says cargo. There is nothing about he will work his way for a certain time until I have found a larger place for us to live. It is, “I have booked passage.” It is, “My values are very different from Robert’s or yours.” It is, “I did not tell you about my plans because you could hardly be expected to understand.”

It is the struggle hanging over my life that made him go away.

 

 

Postcard #3. Aboard the freighter SS
Marion Lykes
bound for Le Havre. The oddball loner has little to say to the three other passengers on the sixteen-day crossing. Gray seas, high swells, missed meals. He tells them he is going to school in Switzerland but doesn’t mention the name of the institution or the course of study he plans to follow. He avoids a passenger’s friendly attempts to take his picture. She is a nice enough lady whose husband is a lieutenant colonel, U.S. Army, retired. You’d think in the middle of the ocean he’d be able to sit on deck without answering questions from some clear-eyed military type. He talks least of all to the fourth passenger, his cabin mate, a boy just out of high school and on his way to France to study French. He is a Texas boy and just close enough to Lee outwardly to be the world’s preferred version of the type.

It is like the shadow of his own life keeps falling across his path.

He watches them at dinner in the officers’ mess and he thinks he knows why they look so satisfied with themselves. They have begun to feel the bond of being American. They almost glow with self-awareness, headed for foreign shores, surrounded and attended by a partly foreign and mainly dark-skinned crew, delighting in their own straightforward and affirmative ways, their democratic values, their moral strength, the way they hold their knife and fork, smiling over the glitter, and this is why he will not eat with them or share their conversation.

The spiral rind of a tangerine sits in a white saucer in front of him. He thinks of the nine months he spent at the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro in California, after Japan. He continued his Russian studies, learned some Spanish (it was the time of Fidel Castro) and developed a neat little deception for the venture he was now engaged in.

At the base library he found a catalogue listing the names of colleges abroad. He scanned the list for obscure schools in certain locations, then wrote away for an application. Albert Schweitzer College. Churwalden, Switzerland. He needed to invent a reason to travel abroad because a Marine has two years in the reserve after active duty.

On the application form he listed under special interests:
Philosophy, Psychology, Ideology, Football, baseball, tennis, Stamp collecting.

Vocational interest (if decided upon):
To be a short story writer on contemporary American life.

In certain light the sea goes green, a slow dullish tumble he watches from the deck. When he goes below again he lies on his bunk, aware of the great slow creaking of the ship, like a mind stirring around him. Hawsers are ropes for mooring.

On the Albert Schweitzer application he made it a point to mention that after the term was completed he planned to attend the summer session of the University of Turku—Turku, Finland.

Hidell creeps closer to the East.

Mary Frances parked under an oak tree on the circular drive outside the College of Education Building, or Old Main. It pleased her that Win’s office was in the oldest building on campus. The building pleased her with its arched entranceways and two-story columns. Denton had its hidden streets, its sense of languorous history, an old American stillness, wistful and unchanged, and these older traces too, older ideas and values scored in limestone and marble, in scroll ornaments atop a column or in the banknote details of a frieze. The Old Main, the county courthouse, the broad-fronted homes, the homes with deep shady porches, the trees, the streets named for trees—all this pleased her, made her think that happiness lived minute by minute in the things she saw and heard. Being happy was a small awareness, the sum of small awarenesses, day by day, minute by minute, and you knew it now, in the hair and skin as much’ as in the heart.

Suzanne sat next to her mother, arms at her sides, slim white legs pointed straight out, a show’ of mock obedience. They were not talking to each other.

You could be happy now. It did not have to be experienced in retrospect, as Win believed, as he liked to explain in his mild way, with the face he called a failed professor’s tipped slightly right. It was not a slow-working glow or meditation. You could feel it now, collect it in the names of things around you, in chinaberry, oak and slippery elm. It pleased her to live here, after Miami, Havana, Mexico City, Guatemala City, temporary housing in southeast Virginia (ISOLATION), dusty tracts of identical homes near the Carolina coast (ISOLATION TROPIC).

They would go to the Steak House on South Locust for jumbo shrimp with salad, french fries and hot rolls and then Win would suggest an ice cream at Lane’s.

Bright hot skies.

Silence in the car, on the burning lawns.

Suzanne was holding her breath.

 

 

In his basement office in the Old Main, Win Everett was on the phone with Parmenter.

“How does Mackey know all this if he hasn’t made contact?”

“Whatever T-Jay knows comes out of Banister’s office. Oswald confides in one of Banister’s people.”

“Go ahead.”

“In January he orders a snub-nose .38 from a firm in Los Angeles. In March he sends away to Chicago for an Italian carbine with a sniper’s scope.”