The idea was that Marina and the child would come to live with Mrs. Chestnoy, who welcomed the company and the chance to practice her Russian. They would use Djevdjevich’s car for moving the crib and what few other items Marina had. On the afternoon when Djevdjevich and Mrs. Chestnoy arrived, Lee was gone and Marina was nursing a black eye. Mrs. Chestnoy remembered vividly this one particular thing that Marina had said—as Mrs. Chestnoy, later, told the Warren Commission—because at the time she had congratulated herself, privately, on her improving ear for spoken Russian. The remark had passed quickly from Marina to Djevdjevich. It gave her a small shock of satisfaction, said Mrs. Chestnoy, that she had caught the statement at all. One of those breakthrough moments that anyone experiences in the course of learning a language. So she remembered vividly, she swore. According to Mrs. Chestnoy, Marina had said to Djevdjevich:
“My fool of a husband spent that money you gave him on a rifle.”
The translation was Mrs. Chestnoy’s, Barry says. But she also recited it into the record in Russian, exactly as she claimed to have heard it, and the Commission’s interpreter (the same one who had worked Marina’s testimony) later verified the translation.
Barry repeats: “ ‘My fool of a husband spent that money you gave him on a rifle.’ ”
In her own testimony to the Warren Commission, Marina neither confirmed this nor denied it. She couldn’t recall. She seemed to be very confused, and frightened. She contradicted herself on a number of points. It was possible, yes, that she had said such a thing. What money, then? the Commission demanded. When exactly had Djevdjevich given it? How much? Was she present at the time it changed hands? What had been said between Alex Djevdjevich and Lee Oswald? Marina didn’t seem to know. She couldn’t answer. She couldn’t remember.
But Djevdjevich, Barry says, was adamant. No, he told the Commission. No, Mrs. Chestnoy is a very nice woman but she no more speaks Russian than a parrot does. Such a statement was never made. Nothing remotely like that. Mrs. Chestnoy was mistaken.
“All right now,” Barry says. “Here’s where it gets interesting.”
By this point he and Kessler are both seated on the floor, at opposite sides of the room, the scotch bottle having rolled to a dead empty stop on the carpet halfway between them. Sometime in the past hour Kessler has removed his left shoe, evidently. He wiggles his toes and observes with fascination that they respond almost perfectly to the neural signals. The shoe is nowhere visible, but it can’t have gone far.
“All right now,” Kessler agrees.
“In the first week of April 1963, Oswald was fired from his job. Latest in a long sorry series. This particular job had been at a printing company called Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall.”
“Chiggers-Chives-Stovall,” Kessler repeats.
“But that’s not important,” says Barry. “The name.”
“Oh.”
“He takes a bus to New Orleans and disappears for two weeks.”
“He disappears,” says Kessler. “The son of a gun.”
“First three days of that time he was registered at a YMCA. Supposedly looking for work. According to the official understanding. Then gone. His movements, his whereabouts, his associations, and his activities all unaccounted for. Presumably, but not certainly, he was still somewhere in the New Orleans area. Then at the beginning of May he turned up again, hired on as a shipper in the warehouse of a coffee company. From that point until November, most of his movements are traceable. Pretty strange, some of them—his wildcat excursion to Mexico City, for instance, raising hell at the Cuban consulate there when they wouldn’t give him a visa—but at least traceable.”
“Oswald in Mexico. Cuban consulate. This stuff is all so morbidly, inexhaustibly intriguing,” Kessler says disconnectedly. “Isn’t it? And we’ll never come to the end of it all, will we? A century from now it’ll be only more muddled. Twelve million people will each have a great-grandparent who was in Dealey Plaza that day and heard machine-gun fire from the grassy knoll.”
Barry ignores him. Barry, for some reason, is slightly more sober. “Meanwhile Alex Djevdjevich had left on his trip to Jakarta. According to the official understanding.”
As he and Irene did before the Amazon adventure, Djevdjevich had again said his good-byes and made careful arrangements for the handling of his business and personal affairs. It was expected to be a lengthy absence. He might have to stay out there well over a year, he told friends, establishing trade compacts with the Sukarno regime and founding a new airline, then dealing with the problem of landing rights throughout Southeast Asia. And this time, he told the friends, he would be taking his daughter Tatiana along with him. Her mother had been committed to an expensive sanitarium two years before, Barry explains, and since then Tatty had been living with an aunt. A maternal aunt, who was also now the girl’s legal guardian. But the aunt had agreed with this idea, that Tatty should accompany her father. At least that’s what Djevdjevich told the Warren Commission, Barry says.
“Nineteen sixty-three. Tatty was fourteen,” says Kessler. “Sixty-three minus forty-nine.”
“Correct. Seventh grade. He knew of an excellent school in Singapore, run by British nuns. He could see her on every holiday. It would give her some rich polyglot experience, like his own.”
“British nuns? There are no British nuns,” says Kessler.
“French nuns, then.”
“Better.”
“Or Chinese nuns.”
“Make it French. I think French is what you want.”
So Djevdjevich went off on his trip, Barry says. April of 1963, he closed up his house in Dallas and left. Almost exactly the same time that Oswald, having booted the last Dallas job, made his temporary move to New Orleans. They never saw each other again—so we’re told. And as Djevdjevich had predicted, his sojourn in Indonesia was a long one. Much water meanwhile passing over the dam. By the time he came back Lee Oswald was infamous and dead. The Warren Commission had evidently reached Djevdjevich in Jakarta, through our embassy there, and requested firmly that he get his ass back to testify. He was an American citizen by then, on an American passport, so there was hardly a choice. But he told the Commission’s assistant staff counsel, when they met here in Washington for their official sessions, that this attention threatened to destroy his business position. Mr. Sukarno was very nervous about assassinations, assassination plots, coups, the whole dreary subject. The Diem brothers had just been dispatched too, remember, Barry says. Sukarno was seeing shadows in every archway, according to Djevdjevich. Djevdjevich himself was just heartbreakingly innocent of anything but the most trivial, accidental connection with Lee Oswald, of course, yet the Commission’s very interest in him as a witness might seem to cast Djevdjevich in a damaging light. It’s all in the record, Barry says, volume something of the Warren Commission hearings: Alex Djevdjevich’s entire testimony. With fully three pages at the start devoted to his complaints, Barry says, about how his good reputation might be darkened in the paranoid mind of Sukarno. He put the staff lawyer right on the defensive—got the man making all manner of ridiculous placative statements. Now of course no one doubts your own character, Mr. Djevdjevich, we will exercise every precaution, Mr. Djevdjevich, et cetera. I can assure you that this Commission has no desire blah blah blah. You can read it, Barry says. Bad technique. But the Warren Commission wanted order, neatness, politeness, reassurance; most of all, closure. You can get that right out of the published record, you can taste it and smell it, Barry says vehemently. They did not want to dig into some endless rat hole of troubling possibilities. They did not want to discover, for instance, that Alex Djevdjevich was lying.
“Was he?” says Kessler.
“He always was. At least a little. That’s the whole point with Djevdjevich, for God’s sake. How could they miss it?”
“But about Oswald?”
“I don’t know, Michael. Very possible. There
were a couple problems with this Indonesia story.”
“Let me guess. For starters, none of it happened.”
“No. No, some of it definitely happened,” Barry says. “They definitely traced him to Jakarta in early ’64. But the girl Tatiana wasn’t with him. And she wasn’t in Singapore. She had spent the year at a boarding school in Massachusetts, according to what I was told.”
“No doubt a rich polyglot experience in its own right.”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Did you get that from her directly?”
“No. I never found her. She had long since changed her name, by the time I came along. Distancing herself from the whole deal. Which was understandable, I suppose. Even Djevdjevich himself hadn’t heard from her in five years. So he said.”
“Maybe he didn’t want you to find her.”
“Maybe indeed. It occurred to me.”
“What else?”
“A certain hotel registration ledger,” Barry says. “A piece of phantom evidence that bedeviled me for an entire year.”
He never actually saw this hotel ledger himself, Barry explains. He heard about it from other people—most of whom had likewise never seen it themselves, the difference being their general inclination to believe in it, nevertheless, like a theological axiom. The ledger from the Hotel Chantilly: aha, yes of course. These people from whom he heard of it were assassination-conspiracy buffs, full-time amateur sleuths, obsessive about the subject and ecstatically paranoid, a whole weird subculture of folk in the grip of a dementia that is possibly only an acute version, Barry says, of what you mentioned. What we all suffer from chronically. The morbid and inexhaustible fascination. But chronic is not acute. There’s a line worth drawing. These buffs, so called, they are just way out there beyond healthy skepticism, beyond cynicism, beyond wild suspicion, Barry says. They are liberated from reality and common logic, many of them anyway, into an exquisitely cabalistic evermore. They hold conventions, you know. They gather to trade theories and give presentations of what passes for new evidence, and to hoot chorally at the official understanding—which, bad as it is, comes closer to plausibility than much of what they offer, Barry says. They refer to each other as independent researchers. Little old ladies, emeritus acid-heads, many many varieties of crank. I met a retired newspaper editor, otherwise quite sane and intelligent, who had bought Jack Ruby’s can opener at an auction, Barry says. Not for any evidential value, God knows, but just as a ghoulish sort of souvenir. He showed it to me. A rusty can opener. He carried it wrapped in a piece of chamois. I mean yipe, Barry says. Of course they can talk about the Zapruder film for hours, citing the various frame numbers from memory. Muzzle velocities of a Mannlicher-Carcano, Oswald’s riflery rating from the Marines. The forty-three material witnesses who had died oddly or violently by November of 1966, despite ten-million-to-one statistical odds against that, as supposedly certified by one of London’s top actuarial firms. Who had made a mistake in math, by the way, Barry says. Never mind that. Never mind the more banal forms of good sense. Every coincidence is sinister, for these people. Every loose thread in even the woolliest snarl of random and contradictory data makes them smirk knowingly, not to be fooled. Meanwhile, they themselves float free of rational tethering, riding all the more strangely ionized breezes. Gnostics. They know what they know. And that is: that an elaborate, inept, and uneconomical conspiracy culminated successfully at Dallas and then was followed by the most enviably efficient cover-up. And Alex Djevdjevich, by no great surprise, ranks high among their favorite topics.
I went to one of their gatherings, in Ann Arbor, Barry says, and a half dozen of them told me about the Hotel Chantilly ledger. But none of them had actually seen it. In private ownership, I was told. In the collection of still another buff. A strange soul who kept his distance from the others. If they called him a strange soul I knew he had to be something, Barry says. If he existed at all. Later I did find one guy who claimed to have seen the ledger firsthand: a drunk in a fly-ridden motel room outside of Pensacola, with a four-day beard and darting eyes. Yes he could tell me about the Chantilly ledger did I bring whiskey, was what he said, no pause for breath. That was another false lead. I’d wasted a day on the road, driving over from Jacksonville. The FBI even had a file on this man, I found out, for a whole history of trying to sell—
“The ledger,” says Kessler impatiently.
“Right. The ledger. Now even if it did exist, of course, in the hands of some gnome, that would prove nothing. You’d want to bring in a handwriting expert, an ink and paper expert, run the thing under every sort of scanner. It could easily be faked.”
“Suppose it wasn’t.”
Then you had an interesting piece of neglected evidence, maybe, says Barry.
The Hotel Chantilly was in New Orleans, just five or six blocks from the building on Camp Street where Oswald briefly rented an office, that summer, for the pro-Castro organization of whose New Orleans chapter he seems to have been the sole member. The Chantilly was a dive, Barry says, crumbling, robustly disreputable. Long since torn down for urban renewal. No one knows where the owner went. No one knows where the records went, if there were any records. But the mythology tells of a registration ledger, the old-fashioned type, folio size—a sacred relic, to the conspiracy buffs—in which, during those two lost weeks after Oswald first arrived in New Orleans, someone signed in as “A. J. Hidell.”
“A. J. Hidell,” Kessler repeats, trying it for the feel. “Means nothing to me.”
“Oswald’s favorite alias, at that time. It’s the one he used when he ordered the rifle. Also for some of his P.O. boxes.”
“Is that all?”
“No. Another name turned up on the same ledger page. So they say. A different room on a different floor. But overlapping with A. J. Hidell’s stay at the Chantilly during two nights of the first week.”
“Lamont Cranston.”
“No, but you’re close.”
“Harry Houdini.”
“Ari Delevoreas,” Barry says.
Kessler sucks at the dry sticky rim of his whiskey glass, struggling to concentrate, struggling to focus. It seems as though this phantom ledger might be as significant as Barry implies, yes, though he can’t be sure. He can’t quite see the pattern. He is so very plastered he can barely sit up.
“Now let’s think about this carefully,” Barry says.
Kessler is all for that, in principle. He tries to do his part. He exerts himself on some eyebrow isometrics.
“Let’s think about it in these terms,” Barry says. “Let’s attempt to interpret Alex Djevdjevich’s behavior in the light of his connection with Lee Oswald. Rather than vice versa, as the others have all tried to do.” Barry seems to be getting only more lucid, which Kessler takes for an altogether bad sign in a man with a head full of Cutty Sark and a missing wife and swing set. The inability to be drunk, despite high intake, being perhaps a symptom of some sort of emotional aridity. “Let’s pretend that Alex Djevdjevich—and not Lee Oswald—is the object of our primary interest.”
“Good idea,” says Kessler.
“Fine. All right. Now. It’s December of 1963. Here you are: Alex D. Roughly a year before, you loaned or gave Lee Harvey Oswald—as he is suddenly so famously remembered, though the middle name is new to you—a year before, you gave this man some money. With which he bought a cheap rifle. Maybe that was precisely the purpose for which the money was offered; maybe not. Leave that question aside, for the moment. No one knows about the small grant-in-aid, not yet anyway, besides you and his widow and perhaps a few others. Okay. What would you do?”
“Where am I?” says Kessler.
“Oh, say you’re in New Orleans. Some quiet retreat there. A cheap hotel.”
“December of ’63?”
“December.”
“I’d get on the first plane for Indonesia,” says Kessler.
; “Good. All right. Thank you, Michael. Now: now you’re in Indonesia. Several months have passed. One morning you receive a telegram, delivered personally by a second secretary from the U.S. Embassy, stating that the Warren Commission wants to talk to you. In Washington, D.C.”
Kessler ponders for a moment. “I wouldn’t go.”
“Your passport is at stake.”
“So what? Passports are expendable, for a charming guy like me. I’d fly to Amsterdam and get a new one from the Yugoslavs.”
“Okay. You wouldn’t go. Preferring to expatriate. Fair enough. But can you imagine any circumstances under which you might fly back to testify?”
Kessler labors at that one like a cub bear trying to unscrew the lid on a jar of mayonnaise. Barry waits.
“If I was innocent and cocky,” says Kessler. Barry nods but does not smile. “Or if I was guilty of something, and under orders to keep it covered up.”
Barry smiles.
Back in February of 1976, at the New Orleans Marriott, Barry asked Alex Djevdjevich about the Hotel Chantilly. Djevdjevich frowned. He wagged his head side to side in what seemed like soul-weary disgust. Yes, he knew all about that story, he told Barry. He had gotten calls about it even, from strangers, bizarre individuals, in some cases at alarming hours of the night. One of these callers had even offered to sell Djevdjevich the original Chantilly ledger. Sell it to him, Djevdjevich repeated indignantly. Blackmail and harassment. But Djevdjevich had done nothing for which to be blackmailed. It was all pure concoction, a brain-sick lie launched by someone who wished to destroy Alex Djevdjevich’s reputation, ruin his life totally—and who nearly had. Yes of course he had used the name Ari Delevoreas, in Cairo during the war, for the very good reason that Barry had already heard explained. No he had never registered at the Hotel Chantilly—not in spring of 1963 while Oswald was there, nor at any other time. No. Issuing these denials, Djevdjevich grew gradually quieter, more subdued, finally his voice sank to a whisper, as though his energy were running down. The very mention of the Hotel Chantilly seemed to sap and sadden him. No, he said. No. Shook his head again. No, it just wasn’t true. This was late in the morning of the second day. Barry then asked him about the photograph.
The Soul of Viktor Tronko (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 26