The Third Bullet bls-8

by Stephen Hunter

  “I have an idea, though.”

  “You attack the CIA with an M-16. When you’re captured, you escape and recapture your capturers, and we interrogate them.”

  “Exactly. That’s it. What could go wrong? No, no, it’s actually subtle.”

  “This I gotta hear.”

  - - - -

  Swagger flew to Washington a few days later. It was a wretched flight through lightning and cloud, not smooth, and as usual, his mind would not settle down. He tried to nap, couldn’t, got up and went to the bathroom, earning displeasure from the flight attendant because the seat-belts sign was lit.

  He returned, sat back, glad he had gotten an aisle seat, and tried once again to relax, tried again not to look at his watch or disturb the person next to him, Lee Harvey Oswald.

  Of course not. Just a slumbering American male, teacher, salesman, lawyer, father, uncle, brother, what have you. Mr. Ordinary. Sleeping through it all.

  But his hair was slightly disheveled, maybe that was it, like Oswald’s, and the next thing Swagger knew, he was back on the run with Ozzie Rabbit, who, despite the fact that he is the object of a city-wide manhunt and has only a limited amount of time to escape, has risked everything to return to the one place the police will expect him at any second to retrieve his revolver.

  Why didn’t he have it with him in the first place?

  A gun makes a man comfortable. Swagger remembered his own recent adventures with the .38 Super in Dallas and Comrade Ixovich’s GSh-18 in Moscow. Not using them, having them. The weight, the reminding pull on the waistline, the density, the pressure of the hard metal against the flesh. If you knew someone was going to try to kill you, that pressure was what let you operate. You were armed. You could fight. It was the enabler of all those who, for whatever reason, knew they would travel in violence’s way.

  Oswald knew that up front. He had to know that. Yet he didn’t carry his pistol with him, even though it was designed for that reason.

  It was, after all, a midframed revolver with a snub-nosed barrel, built explicitly for undercover use, for concealment. It’s the gun you carry when you can’t carry a gun. His ability to hide it really wasn’t an issue. While the gun – a Smith & Wesson .38 Special of the model known as M&P, originally chambered in the less powerful British .38 S&W round, then rechambered for the more powerful Special, its barrel cut down for that “detective” look – is no derringer, it can be easily concealed. After all, that is its point. For example, he could (as he did later) have tucked it in his belt, under a shirt or sweater. Since nobody was looking for it, it would have been an easily sustained deceit. Or he could have taped it to the barrel or the forestock of the Mannlicher-Carcano and concealed it in the same paper sack that held the rifle. He could have taped it to his own ankle. He could have hidden it in a sock and secured the sock to the barrel. Lacking tape, he probably could have hidden it in the pocket of loose-fitting pants and kept his hand on it to keep its weight from distending the trousers, attracting attention. He could have carried it in a readily secured lunch pail or bag.

  He knew he was going to shoot the president of the United States. He knew he was going to be the object of a big-time manhunt. He knew armed policemen would be hunting and ultimately confronting him. He probably dreamed of a glorious death in a blazing gun battle at the hands of law enforcement as the fitting climax to his heroic sacrifice. Yet he leaves his snub-nosed revolver at home.

  This struck Bob as either the product of a mind too deranged and incoherent to have brought off the assassination in the first place or, at the least, a curiosity.

  The fact that he didn’t bring it was superseded only by the astonishment that he went back, an immense risk, to retrieve it.

  So here was a question: what happened that made the revolver so valuable after the assassination? Clearly, something happened. Clearly, Oswald’s circumstances changed, and his thinking and tactics changed.

  Swagger listed the things that his subconscious had brought to his attention: three odd behaviors in a few minutes, from 12:20 to 1 p.m., November 22. First, from two abject failures, Oswald makes a great recovery and shoots on the president. Then he arms himself for a ninety-foot walk across an empty room. With the manhunt tightening around him, he passes up a bus out of town and takes an incredible risk to get home and arm himself again when he could have been armed all along.

  “Excuse me,” said his seatmate. “I have to go to the john.”

  “Sure,” said Bob, and radio contact with station KLHO was lost.

  - - - -

  The house looked like a book, a slim volume packed into a shelf of larger, more intimidating tomes. The others were mansions set back from the brick sidewalks of Georgetown, under the place’s looming elms, but this humble dwelling was like a ragged paperback squished between the heavier works. It was a wood-frame, with white shingles and a mansard roof and a sidewalk around back, where perhaps someone once built a modest garden. The shutters were black, the door was red, the number sixteen stood out in brass next to it, and when he knocked, a man his own age answered.

  He put out his hand. “Sergeant Swagger? Or do you prefer ‘mister’?” he asked. The man appeared unlikely to have been shot at and looked comfortable in a professorial way; he wore corduroys, a blue button-down shirt, wire-rimmed glasses. His hair was a softly tousled white, as if on some bird’s breast.

  “Mr. Gardner, thank you. Bob is what I prefer.”

  “Please, then, come in. Call me Harry. I’m very pleased about this. I love to talk about Dad.”

  “That’s what” – Bob mentioned a name – “told me.”

  The fellow named was an editor in the Washington bureau of Newsweek, to whom Bob had arranged an introduction via a mutual friend, because the editor’s first book was called The New Heroes: The CIA’s First Generation of Cold Warriors, a multi-biography of some Agency stars of the postwar years.

  Gardner led Bob into a well-furnished if old-fashioned living room, revealing the house’s surprising depth, then to a study lined with books. He taught at Georgetown University Law School some blocks away.

  “Please, sit down. Coffee, something stronger?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “I’ve been told you almost won the Vietnam War single-handedly.”

  “No sir. My one accomplishment was to come back more or less intact. All the truly brave men died over there.”

  “I’m sure you’re too modest. I heard the word ‘greatness’ whispered.”

  “The whisper should have been ‘lucky old crank.’”

  Harry laughed. “Very good answer. Anyway, Dad. You wanted to know about Dad. He was a hero in his way as well.”

  “I understand. What put me on to your father were the several references to him in the New Heroes book. He was Boswell, the biographer. He put together fictitious lives that the Agency forgers documented – legends, I guess they’re called in the trade – and as these fictitious men, our people went out and penetrated or at least operated in dangerous areas.”

  “Dad never lost a man. No agent who went underground as a Boswell construction was ever arrested or tortured or imprisoned. He brought ’em back alive. He was very, very proud of that.”

  “Yes sir. As well he might be.”

  “But I have to tell you, Bob, Dad was also discreet. Believe me, I should know, I tried to write his biography. I went through everything. All his papers, all his notes, all his diaries, all his unfinished novels. The man committed nothing to paper, and when I was growing up, in this house, mum was the word. He never brought work home with him, which is another way of saying he was almost never home because he stayed in Langley eighteen hours a day.”

  “I see.”

  “I don’t know if I can be of help to you. I just don’t know a lot. Maybe if you told me specifically what it is you’re after.”

  “Yes sir,” said Bob. “There is a slight possibility, and I can offer you no proof, that somewhere in the world a man is living under a ‘bi
ography’ that your father assembled for him. It still hasn’t been penetrated, as an example of your father’s genius.”

  “Wouldn’t it be in the Agency work-name registry?”

  “If he exists, he would have managed to remove it. He was a sly dog, this guy.”

  “All right. Can you tell me his name?”

  “You’ll scoff. According to all documents, he died in 1993.”

  “Hugh Meachum! Yes, Hugh was capable of something like that. Hugh was the best. My father loved Hugh. Hugh was the ideal agent: bold, cunning, unbearably brave, but nothing like James Bond, whom Dad loathed. Hugh was smart and never showy. He didn’t need recognition or glory. The work was reward enough. He was like a priest, a Jesuit, I think. Intense, not macho, dryly witty. Many a time Hugh has sat in the chair you’re sitting in now, drinking my mother’s wicked vodka martinis, his beautiful wife, Peggy, over there, Dad and my mother here on the sofa, the four of them laughing like hyenas.”

  “Hugh was quite a guy, no doubt.”

  “Anyhow, he would be, what, eighty-five or so if still alive.”

  “Eighty-two. Born in 1930.”

  “Old-school spy. Raised in France, spoke Russian, French, and German flawlessly, Yale lit major, turned out to have the gift for the game.”

  “That sounds like him.”

  “I can’t tell you anything specific about Hugh. Neither Hugh nor Dad would talk about specifics. They were so disciplined, it couldn’t have happened or been committed to paper. They distrusted journalists, even if at one time Dad was a journalist.”

  “It’s more a mind-set. By that I mean your father had a technique for building a legend. It may have varied case by case, but it had tendencies. It had patterns. It had technique. Possibly you would know that, or you could have discerned it or inferred it. So if you could talk about that subject, you might give me some road signs I’d be on the alert for as I continue with my inquiry.”

  “I’m not going to ask you what for. If you’re vouched for by the right people and you fought hard for your country, then I’ll take you at face value.”

  “I would tell you if I could. Thanks for not making me cook up a lie.”

  “If it’s about the war, then I can tell you Hugh was against it, that I know. I heard him arguing quite explicitly with Dad. He’d been over there early; I’m guessing he was involved in the plotting against Diem, so Hugh was definitely a good guy.”

  “See, I didn’t know that. Very interesting,” said Swagger, thinking, That’s one for the bastard. He may have killed Kennedy, but he tried to keep me alive. “Anyhow, as a result of my investigations, I’ve come upon some indicators that Hugh might be alive but underground for one reason or other.”

  “Yes. A man like Hugh made a lot of enemies.”

  “He can clear up some things if I can get him to talk.”

  “If Hugh doesn’t want you to catch up with him, you won’t be catching up with him. He’s that clever. Maybe in his old age, he’d spill his secrets. And they’d be many and interesting. He does know a lot about Vietnam – he tried to stop it, failed, and then waged it hard as any man. Any man except possibly you. He had three tours in heavy danger. He was a wanted man. And the two of you – boy, I’d like to be a fly on the wall during that conversation!”

  “I’m just an Arkansas farm boy. I wouldn’t say much.”

  “Sure. Anyhow, Dad. How would Dad proceed in building a legend? That’s the issue, right?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “It depended on whose influence he was feeling most keenly. He was remarkably sympathetic, picking things up from the air, it seemed. A movie would stimulate him, and he’d draw on images from it. Something would happen in the news that would set him off, he’d learn a new name, it would buzz around in his head until he found a way to use it. A painting could do it, and he was an inveterate museumgoer. He was a stimulus junkie, needed provocation to work. Do you have a time frame?”

  “I’m guessing – middle seventies, early eighties. Vietnam’s over and done, no one wants to think about it. China’s coming up.”

  “Dad was not one they’d go to for something Chinese.”

  “It could be American.”

  “It could be. But again, not Dad’s forte. He was classic himself, old espionage. Ohio State, but he could hold his own with the snooty Ivies.”

  “Russia, East-bloc countries, the Cold War. The old standbys.”

  “The eternal enemy. Okay,” said Harry Gardner. “That would be Dad. Got it. One word: Nabokov.”

  Bob blanked, and knew his eyes registered emptiness.

  “Nabokov, the writer, the genius.”

  “Well, sir,” said Bob, “one of my embarrassments is how poorly educated I am. I have tried to catch up, but a day doesn’t go by when I don’t humiliate myself by exposing my ignorance. I never heard of any Nabokov. I even had to look up Boswell to figure out what it meant.”

  “Vladimir Nabokov. White Russian, born at the turn of the century. St. Petersburg. Lost it all in the Revolution, and the family fled to Paris, where all the White Russians went. Cambridge education. IQ 353 or something like that. Spoke English, French, and German as well as Russian, spoke ’em all brilliantly. Wrote intricate, troubling books, usually about intellectuals, with always an undercurrent of dark sexuality and violence. Probably regarded humans as another specimen to be mounted on a needle and studied. He was a butterfly collector too.”

  “Your father was an admirer?”

  “A devotee. As was Hugh. They’d rather sit in this room and argue Nabokov and smoke and drink and laugh than almost anything. So whether it was conscious or unconscious, I’m betting that any work product Dad turned out was touched by Nabokov’s influence. And what would that be?

  “Nabokov loved all the candy corn of prose, puns, allusions, cross-linguistic wordplay, wit for wit’s sake. I’ll give you an example. You’ve heard of Lolita?”

  “Old man, young girl. Dirty as hell, that’s all I know.”

  “Believe me, it’s the cleanest dirty book ever written. But the bad guy is a TV writer named Clare Quilty, Q-U-I-L-T-Y, who ultimately steals Lolita from Humbert and uses her for his own purposes. Nabokov loves to play games with the names and at one point has Humbert muse in French something like ‘that he is there,’ and in French it’s qu’il t’y, that is, Q-U-apostrophe-I-L-space-T-apostrophe-Y. You see how it works? It’s a pun but in two languages, the phrase in French, the name in English.”

  “So a Boswell work name would have a pun in two languages?”

  “This is literature, not physics, so nothing is definite. It would be a hint, a shade, a ghost of a meaning subtly brushing against a word. If the name were a Russian name – this is a real simple example – Dad might have come up with Babochkin. That means ‘butterfly man,’ and Nabokov was known as a world-class butterfly collector. So anyone looking for a giveaway who happened to know that Dad, in his Nabokovian phase, was the author of the legend and spoke fluent Russian might look at a list of names, and immediately, Babochkin would stand out. It would be a dead giveaway. Of course, that’s the principle as enacted at a primitive level. If he were doing it for real, it would be much subtler and go through a batch of meanings and languages before it gave up its final meaning. It would bounce-bounce-bounce all over the place. And no one would ever get that last meaning because you’d have to know such a broad range of disciplines, languages, cultures. That was the sort of thing he liked to do.”

  “I think I got it,” said Swagger.

  “Would you like to see Dad’s office? I kept it the way he had it when he died. I think it’s a kind of portrait of the way his mind worked. You might enjoy it.”

  “Great. That’d be very helpful.”

  “Okay, come this way.” Harry took Swagger up a narrow, creaky back staircase, down a crooked hallway, and into a room off to one side, with a window staring at nothing except the vines on the house next door. Bob looked: this was the mind of Niles Gardner, creator of lege
nds, who always brought ’em back alive.

  “This is where Dad tried to write his novels,” Harry said. “I’m afraid it never worked out. He was a brilliant beginner, but whatever it is that brings the writer back to the chair week after week and month after month, Dad lacked. He didn’t have it in him to finish. By the time he was halfway through with anything, he’d changed so much intellectually that he no longer recognized the person who began the story and had no sympathy for him and the characters he’d created. A lot of geniuses never finish their novels, I guess.”

  “It’s too bad,” Bob said. “He must have had a lot to say.”

  The wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor shelves were crammed, spine out, with books, books, more books, arranged alphabetically. Many were foreign, and of the ones in English, Bob recognized no titles except some Hemingway and Faulkner. A couple of incongruities stood out. For example, there were four ceramic bluebirds on one of the shelves, papa, mama, and two babies. There was a surprisingly sentimental picture, or more of an illustration, of six green elms against a countryside. The oddest thing of all was on the desk, piled with pages of typescript. An old Underwood typewriter, battleship – gray and weirdly tall and complicated, stood in the center. On the desk were jars of paper clips, pens – and a pistol.

  “I see what you’re looking at. Yes, for some reason, Dad glommed on to this old thing and wouldn’t let go of it.”

  Harry picked it up carelessly by the barrel, and Bob recognized it as a C-96 Mauser, commonly called a “Broomhandle,” for it carried that shape in a grip that plunged almost at 90 degrees from the intricately machined receiver. The handle was freed up to be unique because it had no responsibilities for containing a magazine; the magazine was contained in a boxlike structure ahead of the trigger. The barrel was long, the whole thing oddly awkward and beautiful.

  “I’m sure you know more about these things than I do,” said Harry, handing it over.

  Bob pulled back the bolt latch on the receiver – it was so early in the evolution of semi-automatic technology that it didn’t have a slide – to expose the chamber, revealing the gun to be empty. “Mauser Broomhandle,” he said.