by James Philip
What did these people think they had to be so goddammed proud of?
Galen Cheney seemed to be reading his thoughts.
“Their time will come, son,” he murmured sagely, careful to conceal his misgivings about the decision he had taken a fortnight ago to engage such an unworthy man in his crusade. However, God had spoken to him; even the least worthy of turncoats might be of service to the Lord in times such as these. These were indeed the strangest of times; who could doubt that the end of days would soon be upon Mankind?
Nowadays, a more prosaic consideration was that so many of his brethren in the Brotherhood of Liberty had fallen in the Battle of Washington, or since been hunted down by the monstrous forces of the ungodly charlatans who still ruled in this corrupt land, that if the Lord’s work was to be continued then sometimes unworthy men like the man before him might be given the opportunity to excel in the sight of the Lord. No matter how distasteful that was to a righteous man, such was the price the Lord demanded of his servants in times such as these when good men so easily despaired of their eternal souls.
Great vengeance had been wrought; Galen Cheney had exacted it on the evil doers who had failed their fellow men on seventeen occasions in the month of December before, reluctantly, covering his tracks and going underground again. The Brotherhood must be rebuilt, renewed and it was now clear that many –if not most – of the brethren from before the uprising would have to be abandoned to their fate. While he had personally opposed the uprising in Washington – it was too early and the ranks of the guilty had hardly been thinned around the edges – others eager for the ‘final confrontation’, Armageddon, had shouted him down. A man of less faith would have walked his own path but he was not the man to stand between a godly brother and his yearning for revelation. The rebellion had failed. So be it; that was the Lord’s doing. The struggle went on and the struggle was now Galen Cheney’s life’s work.
“I ain’t about to start going to church,” the small man said, uneasy under the relentless scrutiny.
“No,” the older man agreed. “I want you to keep away from my people.”
“Oh,” the other man had half-expected an argument. “Then why are we meeting here,” he waved around, “where everybody can see us?”
“Nobody ever remembers seeing anybody at a place like this, son.” Galen Cheney’s tone reflected his frustration to be having to work with such unpromising material. It vexed him also that he knew so little about Lee Harvey Oswald and that there was no time to fill in the gaps in his history or the questions that those gaps prompted.
“Why do I have to go on working at that fucking book warehouse on Dealey Plaza?” The younger man followed up this complaint with another. “Have you any idea how fucking boring it is filing books all fucking day long?”
The older man’s expression remained impassive.
Oswald was like so many of the people who had come to the Brotherhood via criminal or anarchistic routes, recommended by third parties who invariably melted away into the amorphous milieu of American society like snakes into the long grass. Oswald was angry, disaffected, a man who could not be trusted to know any of the Brotherhood’s secrets.
“Why did you lie to me about coming from New York?” Galen Cheney asked lowly. The kid had been born in New Orleans, his father had died two months before his birth and this event had doomed Oswald to what sociologists called a ‘broken childhood’. Cheney had no time for psychologists or other behavioural ‘experts’. Bad parent equalled bad child; poor exemplars bred failure in their offspring and in any sensible society bad parents would be punished for their lack of rectitude and their crimes against the wider communion. His people in New York had ferreted around about the two adolescent years Oswald had spent in the Bronx before his mother returned to Louisiana in 1954.
A school psychiatrist had described 13 year old Oswald as living a ‘vivid fantasy life, turning around the topics of omnipotence and power through which he tries to compensate for his present shortcomings and frustrations’. The diagnosis was unambiguous; a ‘personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies’ requiring ongoing treatment. But shortly afterwards Oswald had been taken to New Orleans by his mother because of the threat of his being removed from her care, ostensibly to enable him to finish his schooling. In 1956 mother and son had come to Fort Worth where Oswald had quit school – Arlington Heights High School – at the age of seventeen to join the Marines. By any standards this was an unlikely decision for a kid who had claimed to be a Marxist when he was fifteen, and a year later written to the Socialist Party of America claiming to have been studying ‘socialist principles’.
The thing Galen Cheney mistrusted the most about Oswald was that he was the kind of man to whom trouble naturally gravitated like iron filings to a magnet. Trouble and therefore attention. Unprepossessing to look at – five feet eight inches tall and sparsely built – the Marine Corps had trained him as a radar operator and posted him to Tokyo. Initially qualified as a sharpshooter, he had later been downgraded to a marksman just before he left the Marines on a hardship discharge claiming he needed to care for his mother. Although described as ‘competent’ while in the Marines he was court-martialed for inadvertently shooting himself in the elbow with an unauthorized hand gun – which was the sort of thing that told one a lot about what kind of soldier he had been - and a second time for picking a fight with the NCO whom he blamed for his original court-martial. Demoted from private first class to private he had served a brief period of stockade time.
It was one of Oswald’s character traits that he seemed pathologically unable to learn from his mistakes because he was later disciplined while stationed in the Philippines; this time for discharging his rifle into the jungle without good cause while on sentry duty one night.
Oswald reeked ‘unreliable’ from every pore, an impression exacerbated by his pipsqueak voice and querulous, suspicious manner. But then it was his inherent unreliability which made him so expendable and from Galen Cheney’s perspective that more than compensated for his obvious shortcomings as a potential assassin.
Had it not been for the oddity of Oswald’s known background he would not have touched the mixed up young misfit with a proverbial barge pole. Nothing would be so important in the coming months as laying false trails; ideally false trails which further confused the already muddy waters around the genesis of the resistance and the manner in which the recent, failed rebellion had been mounted. For this purpose at least, if not for the one the self-important little fool imagine himself perfectly suited, a man like Oswald might be invaluable in the coming weeks.
This was because Oswald had a gold plated, well documented link to Russian, Communism and the Soviet Union.
Within a month of his compassionate discharge from the Marine Corps, Lee Harvey Oswald had travelled the Soviet Union.
It had been a long planned, uncharacteristically carefully thought through journey. Oswald had taught himself Russian during his time in the Marines, saved $1,500 and secretly determined to seek Soviet citizenship. He was desperately seeking his moment in the limelight but it never happened. Although Associated Press had reported his defection to the Soviet Union, his ‘defection’ was unreported in the majority of syndicated papers and even the papers which picked it up, only gave it a few column inches on inside pages. Oswald had believed that he would be famous, in the event hardly anybody anywhere, including in the Soviet Union – where the authorities thought he was an attention-seeking crackpot, an embarrassment to be quietly tolerated and thereafter, ignored - had been overly interested. Perhaps, the best comment on the affair was that made by the Marine Corps; it amended his discharge papers to read: ‘Undesirable’.
Galen Cheney did not understand why his government had allowed Oswald to come back to the United States after he got bored in Russia; or for that matter why it had not charged him for betraying secrets to the Soviets on his return. And as for granting him a $400 repatriation loan,
well, decisions like that told one everything one needed to know about the government!
Oswald and his wife Marina – a nineteen year old pharmacology student when they married – and their baby daughter June, born in February 1962, had returned to America in the June before the October War. By all accounts Oswald was mortified that his return, or rather, his ‘reverse defection’, had attracted absolutely no interest in the printed or in any other media. Typically, while he was an older, much travelled man now fluent in Russian he was no wiser for his experiences. Nor had he turned into any kind of responsible family man. Incapable of holding down a regular job for more than a month or two, he was constantly disappointed with the low esteem in which he was held by those around him. His failures were always somebody else’s fault; the whole World was a conspiracy to prevent him fulfilling his destiny. It was not that he was stupid, just that he was a narcissistic deadbeat; prime material for Galen Chaney’s purposes with readily identifiable psychological buttons which might be punched at any time to point him in the desired direction.
“Do you want to be famous?” Galen Cheney asked the younger man, knowing it was the only thing Lee Harvey Oswald had ever wanted to be.
“What are you talking about?” The younger man asked suspiciously.
“You didn’t do what you were told to do when you tried to kill General Walker the first time in April. When you listened to what I told to do last month you put an end to him. I need to know if you’ve learned that lesson.”
The Brotherhood of Liberty had had no particular beef with Major General Edwin Anderson Walker. The man’s time had passed and he had become an embarrassment to the Army. If he had been less strident, less obviously unstable his views and political commitment might have been useful to the Brotherhood; regrettably Walker had courted publicity and drawn the unwelcome attention of the Justice Department down upon himself and would have been a liability in the present crisis.
Walker was a decorated war hero unable to separate his right-wing conservative beliefs from his duties as an Army officer. Dwight Eisenhower had been forced to publicly criticize him for mixing politics with soldiering but had refused to accept his resignation in 1959. However, sent to Germany to command the 24th Infantry Division Walker had transgressed again. Having described Eleanor Roosevelt and former President Harry S. Truman as being ‘pink’ – communists by any other name – and attempting to compel troops under his command to vote according to his wishes, he was formally censured by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and when he offered his resignation on this, the second occasion, President Kennedy had readily accepted it. Walker had run for Governor of Texas and lost in 1962; after that he had completely gone off the rails. Arrested in October 1962 for leading riots against the admittance of a black student to the all-white University of Mississippi, the United States Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had briefly had him committed to a psychiatric hospital.
It was unclear to Galen Cheney why exactly Oswald had become so fixated on Walker; but it was serendipitous that his obsession had provided an opportunity to hone the blunt instrument he had represented into something a little sharper, keener and malleable.
Oswald’s first cack-handed attempt on General Walker’s life had been a pot shot at the man through a window. Oswald’s single ill-directed shot had struck the window frame and showered his target with wood splinters.
Cheney’s people had taken Oswald up country for a couple of weeks, made sure he practiced hard enough to shoot straight and then encouraged him to put an end to Walker. This time he had hit Walker with two of his three shots at a range of approximately three hundred yards while Walker ranted to a crowd of red necks in Randol Mill Park in Arlington. One bullet had clipped the victim’s shoulder, the other had blown away the top half of his head
Cheney had planned to leave it longer before he returned to well, to leave the young man a while to bask in the glory of his first ‘kill’.
However, opportunities to assassinate the President of the United States of America were few and far between; that was why he had encouraged Oswald to apply for the job at the Texas School Book Depository.
“Okay. I got it right the second time,” Lee Harvey Oswald growled as deeply as his somewhat squeaky voice permitted. “Now what?”
“Now we know we can trust you go after bigger fish.” Cheney’s mouth twitched into a chilly, fleeting smile that was gone in a moment. “You never know, maybe you’ll be famous after all, son.”
Chapter 36
Sunday 12th January 1964
Gretsky’s, Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles
Judy had fallen in love with the weird old house hidden away up the top of the canyon at first sight. Admittedly, she and Sam had been the next thing to dead on their feet after three months literally fighting for their lives in the American North West, British Columbia and on the road back to California, but she had – honest to God – fallen in love with Gretsky’s on that spring day last year.
Up until about a month ago her new life in the Canyon had been idyllic; she was in love with a man who adored her, her baby was due any day, what could possibly go wrong?
Apart from pretty much everything!
A cold wind was blowing down from the mountains that morning and now and then Gretsky’s creaked and flexed as if it was alive, bending a little with every sudden squally gust of the oddly wintery weather that had been funnelling down the Canyon for most of the last week.
The house had been built – if one was being pedantic, half-built – by a silent movie star in the late 1920s who had drunk himself to death when, so the story went, people fell about laughing every time he auditioned for a ‘talking’ part. Allegedly, he was one of those over-sized, deep-chested guys who had a high pitched girl’s voice. In any event the house had been left derelict, empty, save for the snakes, the coyotes and the rats for several years before a real estate magnet had acquired it for a song as part of a job lot of falling down buildings and vacant plots of land in 1938. He had used Gretsky’s and its outhouses for his offices and then World War II had kick started a new California land grab and the rest, as they say, ‘is history’. Much of the house’s singular character and all its quirks including its name, ‘Gretsky’s’, resulted from the period of three years when it had been the long-departed shyster real estate tycoon’s bridgehead in the Hollywood Hills.
The original building had never been finished, its eastern end terminating in a slab-sided wooden wall. Fortuitously, this happened to be the side of the house that was invisible from the road otherwise passersby would think that a giant shark had bitten off one end of the structure. Sheltering in the shadow of the abbreviated mansion – even what survived of the original design was very, very big with fifteen rooms and a thirty feet long, dry for many years, oval swimming pool on a terrace hanging precipitously over a twenty feet drop to the bush and scrub below – were the ‘barracks’, big solid timber ‘long houses’ partitioned into smaller ‘living areas’ connected with a crazy tangle of plumbing, and overhead electricity and telephone cables. Weeds and vines almost enveloped these outhouses in the summer but the trees and vegetation kept the sun off the roofs for several hours each day and in the fall and winter sheltered the ramshackle cluster of dwellings from the normally arid wind off the mountains.
Vincent Meredith got to his feet as Judy came into the room, as did a svelte man in an expensive suit whom she guessed was in his fifties or early sixties. Vincent’s companion had about him the air of an expensive big city attorney so she automatically assumed he must work for Ben and Margaret Sullivan.
“This is Frank Lovell, he’s from the State Department,” Vincent Meredith said to introduce the stranger.
While Judy was momentarily unable to speak, too stunned; behind her Sabrina Henschal made an odd choking sound.
“The State Department?” The older woman spat out incredulously. Quickly overcoming her astonishment.
“The Secretary has asked me to do what I can to finesse the situatio
n,” Frank Lovell declared apologetically, smiling sternly. He focused on Judy. “Your father-in-law has been appointed United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Mrs Brenckmann. In my capacity as senior counsel to the Secretary of State I am in California to see what can be done to avoid your husband’s present situation embarrassing the department...”
“Embarrassing the department!” Judy retorted angrily. She hardly ever raised her voice; this time she very nearly shouted.
“Forgive me, I didn’t put that very well...”
“Sam was almost burned to death and then the cops framed him!”
“Yes, quite. Unfortunately, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office is extremely sensitive about outside interference in its business from within the state of California, let alone Washington. There is a great need for great discretion in this matter.”
Judy was proud of the way she had held herself together the winter after the war; that she had refused to give in, refused to die like so many others but she had had Sam beside her then and the last month had been like some nightmarish Kafkaesque tragedy. The last two times Vincent Meredith had driven her to the California Institute for men at Chino, San Bernardino, she never got to see Sam; he was in the prison hospital and nobody would tell her why. Last week Columbia Records had ‘voided’ Sam’s contract and presented her with a bill of over $5,000 for their inconvenience, LAPD cruisers routinely pulled up outside Gretsky’s and watched the old house; she had got to the point where she was afraid to go anywhere, say anything to anybody she did not know, and when she was left alone she usually ended up crying, or afraid or just staring into space like an idiot until Tabatha cried for attention.