Libra (49 page)

“Don’t you like being fussed after?”

“Not the way you do it. ”

“The housewife who never has time for herself. Doesn’t she relish a little attention?”

“Not the way you do it. Looking so stricken. It chills my blood.”

He laughed. They heard Suzanne walk through the kitchen singing a rhyme popular with local kids. Mackey had eluded all attempts by Parmenter to trace him. What did it mean? Larry said he probably just walked off. Doesn’t want to do it. Wants to change careers. It’s over. We tried.

Parmenter himself was in Buenos Aires getting a preview of his new job. This is the future of the Agency, he said to Everett. Keeping track of world currencies. Moving and hiding money. Building reserves of money. Financing vast operations with complex networks of money.

Lancer is coming to Texas.

“Did you notice the casual tone?” Mary Frances said.

“It’s a kids’ jingle. What sort of tone?”

“No but the way she sort of rehearsed the casualness. So we wouldn’t know we were supposed to hear.”

“It was casual because it was casual.”

“Where’s the steak knife you were using to scrape paint? We keep losing knives.”

Premonition. The story about the President’s trip was in the Record-Chronicle a week ago. A brief tour of Texas in November, after his swing through Florida. Stops at Houston, San Antonio, Fort Worth and Dallas. Buried inside the paper. Three or four lines that only a person with a compelling interest in the President’s whereabouts might take note of. Win thought it was eerie that President Jack would be headed in this general direction. The plot coming to the plotter. Assuming he made it past Miami. Because Parmenter might be wrong. Something might still be in force, some movement, a driving logic.

“I can’t find the paint scraper,” he said.

“Just leave the knives alone.”

“There’s something about a paint scraper. You know it’s there. You’re looking right at it. But you can’t quite pick it out of the background. Let’s face it, the background is vast and confusing.”

He wanted a way out of guilt and fear. He was not strong enough to survive the damage this operation might cause if it developed a second life. He half yearned to be found out. It would be a deliverance in a way to be confronted, polygraphed, forced to tell the truth. He believed in the truth. He feared and welcomed the chance to be polygraphed. The Office of Security had models designed to fit in suitcases. You could be fluttered in your home. They would arrive with a two-suit Samsonite case. Unpack the machine, mix some control questions in with the serious stuff. His body would do the rest, yield up its unprotected data. The machine intervenes between a man and his secrets. There is something intimate about the polygraph. It measures skin conduction and hears you sweat. It allows you to give yourself away. Lies quicken the breath. They make the blood pound. It was such an old-fashioned idea, dated and quaint, but he’d seen himself how well it worked. Failed one test. Broke down at the start of another. Polygraph. A nice technical sound to it, a specialist’s sound, but still traditional, decipherable, from the Greek.

“Where is she?” He called out, “Where’s my little girl?”

“In her room,” Mary Frances said.

He called out, “But we want her down here. We need some serious cheering up.”

“Once she’s in her room, the subject’s closed. The day is definitely over.”

“I had to share a room,” he said.

“I had my own, thank God.”

“I think you’ll find that the great figures of history rarely had their own rooms.”

“I loved my room,” she said.

“Are you saying nothing ever again has been quite so nice?” He called out, “Come down and talk to us or we’ll be very unhaaaappy.”

He went out to the porch to investigate a noise. He stood there smoking. He could hear the radio faintly. An old voice, a radio voice from another era can bring back everything. This was a house that nurtured memories. The curved porch. The oak posts furled in trumpet vines.

He knew all the techniques ever devised to beat the machine but he also knew he would be helpless to bring them into play. He believed in the polygraph. He wanted to cooperate, show everyone the machine was working well. Devices make us pliant. We want to please them. The machine was his only hope of deliverance after what he’d done, what he’d loosed into the crowd. A way out of death. Because in time a pity would fall across their faces. They would all see he only wanted what was right for his country. He loved his country. He loved Cuba, knew the language and the literature. He would go beyond yes and no. Tell them about the deathward-tending logic of a plot. T-Jay is out there somewhere, chewing gum and squinting in the light. They would nod and understand. A forgiveness would come to their eyes. Because they are not, after all, unmerciful men. Say what you will about the Agency. The Agency forgives.

God is alive and well in Texas.

He went inside and turned off the radio. The day wasn’t half done and it was time to go to bed again. He checked the front door and turned off the porch light. He walked down the hall for the millionth time, checked the back door, checked to see that the oven was off. The last thing downstairs was the oven, except for the kitchen light. He turned off the kitchen light and began to climb the stairs.

He slipped near the top of the stairway, an ordinary misstep, no harm, no deeper meaning, but Mary Frances was out of the bedroom in a silent burst to take him by the elbow and lead him inside.

He sat at the edge of the bed taking off his shoes. She watched him, reading his face for signs.

“Just a little slip,” he said.

“It sounded.”

“Just an ordinary fool missing a step.”

“You have a seminar tomorrow. Arts and Sciences Building. Ten A.M.”

“I want you to be well,” he said. “You have to be absolutely well. We can’t have a situation where you’re not completely yourself. I couldn’t even begin to carry on if you somehow weren’t well. I count on you for everything that matters.”

The Agency forgives. There wasn’t a man in the upper ranks of the four directorates who didn’t understand the perils of clandestine work. They would be pleased by his willingness to cooperate. What’s more, they would admire the complexity of his plan, incomplete as it was. It had art and memory. It had a sense of responsibility, of moral force. And it was a picture in the world of their own guilty wishes. He was never more surely an Agency man than in the first breathless days of dreaming up this plot.

He stood at the side of the bed in his pajamas. He’d forgotten to register the fact that the oven was off. He would have to go back downstairs to check the oven. Mary Frances lay in the dark, already sleep-breathing, deep and even. He has to see that the oven is off and he has to register the fact. This means they are safe for another night.

 

 

Mackey stood by the refrigerator drinking water from a pitcher. He wore-a sweatsuit and baseball cap. He’d taken to running at night to keep his weight down.

He took off the cap and blew into it. Then he sat at the kitchen table and peeled an orange. The house was at the end of an unfinished street about half a mile from the heart of Little Havana.

Raymo walked in. He said, “When did you get back?”

“This afternoon.”

“Did you hear there’s word going around? Somebody in Chicago’s planning the same thing.”

“Banister called. He got a look at an FBI teletype. An attempt on the life.”

“Four-man team. At least one of them might be Cuban. JFK’s supposed to be in Chicago like November second.”

“We have to wait our turn.”

“If word leaks out there, same thing could happen to us.”

“I’m counting on it,” T-Jay said. “In fact I’m taking steps to make it happen. It’s the only way we’ll succeed. We’re going in quick and tight. You keep it quiet. You don’t tell Frank or Wayne.”

“Forget Miami.”

“That’s right. ”

“Then we don’t bring Leon here.”

“That’s right.”

“Where is he?”

“He took a Transportes del Norte bus to Laredo. I’m betting he took a Greyhound from there to Dallas. Main thing is the Cubans didn’t take him. No visa for Leon. It’s beginning to take shape. Small, spur-of-the-moment, that’s what we want. An everyday Texas homicide.”

“JFK.”

“Goes to Dallas next month. The man’s a serious traveler. And wherever he goes, somebody wants a piece of him. Deep sweats of desire and rage. I don’t know what it is. Maybe he’s just too pretty to live.”

He detached a couple of wedges from the orange and handed them to Raymo.

“Somebody keeps an eye on Leon.”

“I think Leon will be hiding from us,” T-Jay said. “He knows what we’re up to and he doesn’t necessarily approve. For the time being, we have our own model Oswald. Alpha is running people up and down the state. Eventually we’ll have to pinpoint the original.”

“When we took him to Houston he doesn’t say ten words to me. He only talked to Frank.”

“What did he say to Frank?”

“He got after Frank right away. He wanted some Spanish les- sons.

 

 

Suzanne sat up in bed in the dark. She knew they were asleep. Once the radio hum withdrew from the wall by her ear, all she had to do was count to a hundred. Both sound asleep. If she was going to move the Little Figures, now was the time. She needed a safer hiding place. The closet had so much junk they would clean it any day and the Little Figures were hidden in one of the pockets on the shoe bag that hung inside the door. Once they found the Little Figures, that was the end of Suzanne. She would have no protection left in the world.

Lucky she had a good new place to keep them safe.

She got out of bed and raised the shade halfway, letting in light from the streetlamp. Then she moved softly in her nightgown that touched the floor. She took the Little Figures out of the shoe bag and sat them down on the narrow ledge behind the old bureau that used to belong to Grandma. The ledge stuck out about an inch near the bottom of the bureau. Hers was the only hand that could fit between the bureau and the wall. That was the perfect place because the Figures were already seated so they balanced just right. They were a clay man and a clay woman that her best friend, Missy, had given her as, a birthday present. They were Indians who dwelt in pueblos and their hair and their clothes were painted black, with little black dots for the eyes and mouth.

She got back into bed and pulled the covers up.

The Little Figures were not toys. She never played with them. The whole reason for the Figures was to hide them until the time when she might need them. She had to keep them near and safe in case the people who called themselves her mother and father were really somebody else.

Four women sat around the table in Mrs. Ed Roberts’s kitchen, drinking coffee and passing the time of day. A basket of folded laundry rested on the counter. Ruth Paine gestured again, calling for a pause. They all waited. Then she spoke softly in her halting Russian to Marina Oswald, who listened and smiled, a finger curled through the handle of her cup. The talk was kids, husbands, doctors, the usual yakkety-yak, but Ruth found it interesting. A chance to speak Russian. Mrs. Bill Randle, sitting next to her, nodded periodically as she translated. And Dorothy Roberts studied Marina’s face to see that she was getting it. They wanted her to feel she was part of things.

The kids made a racket in the next room. Ruth Paine told her two neighbors that Marina’s husband was having no luck finding work. He was living in a rooming house in Oak Cliff until he could find a job and an apartment for his family. Marina was due any day, of course.

Dorothy Roberts mentioned Manor Bakeries. They had a home-delivery service. Then there was Texas Gypsum, where somebody said they were hiring.

Ruth Paine said Marina’s husband didn’t drive, so that cut down the prospects.

Mrs. Bill Randle, Linnie Mae, said maybe she would have a piece of that coffee cake after all. It looked real good.

Dorothy Roberts said, “Is it warm for October or is it just me?”

A van door slammed across the street.

Then Linnie Mae Randle mentioned her brother. How he was saying the other day he thought they needed another fellow at the book warehouse where he worked, on the edge of downtown Dallas.

Ruth translated for Marina.

One of the little girls came in, wetting her finger to pick crumbs off the tabletop.

Dorothy opened the door to the carport.

“Out on Elm Street,” Linnie Mae said. “Near Stemmons Freeway.”

Five minutes later Ruth and Marina and June Lee and Ruth’s small children, Sylvia and Chris, cut across the lawn to the Paine residence next door, a modest ranch house with an attached garage. Ruth turned at the door and watched Marina coming along slowly, vast, wide, ferrying one more soul across the darkness and into the world, or into suburban Dallas. The Oswald family was catching up to the Paines. Not that Ruth minded. She didn’t even mind having Lee come out to visit once a week. She was separated from her husband and it was nice, actually, having a man to do certain jobs around the house.

Inside, Marina asked Ruth if she would telephone. Ruth looked in the phone directory for Texas School Book Depository. She talked to a man named Roy Truly about a job for a young veteran of the armed forces whose wife is expecting a child, and they already have a little girl, and he has been out of work for a while, and is desirous of employment, and is willing to work part-time or full-time, and is there a possibility of an opening?

Marina stood nearby, waiting for Ruth to translate.

It was a seven-story brick building with a Hertz sign on the roof. Lee was an order-filler. He picked up orders from the chute on the first floor and fixed them to his clipboard. Then he went up to six, usually, to find the books. Most of the order-fillers were Negroes. They had elevator races in the afternoon. Gates slamming, voices echoing down the shaft, laughter, name-calling. He took the books down to the girls on one, to the wrapping bench, where the merchandise was checked and shipped.