The Second Letter

by Robert Lane

  The Florida air tousled her hair like it was trying to rip it off her head. She kept her eyes straight ahead as if there was oncoming traffic that commanded her attention, except there wasn’t. We crossed the final bridge to my island and neither of us spoke another word.

  How strange that my quest to get the letter was partially driven by my indebtedness to the man who helped me secure Kathleen’s life. And how that very quest may have inadvertently caused a gulf between us that no bridge could span. I’d known this woman less than a year, and we both bore scars on the left side. Not far from the heart.

  Walk away. For her sake, walk away.

  We pulled into my driveway, and I desperately wanted to say something, but nothing came, and as I was thinking, I got out of her car. Before I knew it I was in my house, and I hadn’t said a damn thing.

  Oddly enough, that which is not spoken or never heard, which is never written and carries no weight, packs the biggest punch of all.

  CHAPTER 38

  The letter lay on the glass table in the middle of my screened porch next to the sports section that proclaimed in World War Two victory font that the Rays had just swept the Yankees.

  Garrett looked as if he’d sweated away most of the water in the bay and took another mouthful from his bottle. The Tampa Bay Times was scattered on the glass table that needed to be cleaned. The blind was halfway down, filtering the relentless sun, but you could still feel the heat from the ball of fire ninety-three million miles away. On the water there was an open bow boat with four young girls in swimsuits. One of them had a serious camera. I assumed they were from the marine institute that was around the corner.

  “I don’t know how you stand it,” he said.

  “You’ve got to be out before the sun and realize you don’t set any personal best in the summertime.”

  “And swimming?”

  “Even tougher. The pool and Gulf are too warm to get anything other than a leisurely workout.”

  “I don’t think ‘leisurely’ and ‘workout’ belong in the same sentence,” Garrett said. He glanced down at the table. “Where did you get the Copacabana ashtray? I don’t recall seeing it before.”

  “I dunno. Picked it up along the way.”

  “You going to call Kittredge?”

  “Did this morning. Left a message with his boy that our business is settled.”

  I propped my feet on top of the letter. A couple hundred feet off the west end of the dock a dolphin cleared the water. Then again. The girls in the boat swung around toward that direction. Camera ready.

  “Nevis?” Garrett asked.

  “Haven’t a clue. I can’t tell them apart from this distance.” I wanted to ask if he really saw Nevis give me a boost into the boat, but that was a bridge you cross only once. A lone woman in a sailboat headed out to the vast waters of the Gulf. Neither of us spoke until she passed.

  “Colonel called,” Garrett said.

  “You tell him we ran into the FBI and they look a shitload better than him?”

  “I did tell him other agencies of our federal government were on the scene, but for an entirely different matter. He wasn’t concerned or interested. Said that’s the way it’s going to be from now on.”

  “Versus how it’s going to be in the past?”

  “Don’t even think we’re even. ‘Leisurely workout’ is a classic.”

  The final chorus of “Run” by Collective Soul spilled out of my massive living room floor speakers.

  “How does he want it returned?” I asked.

  “Mail.”

  “As in, put it in a larger envelope, lick a Disney commemorative stamp, maybe one of Goofy since no one knows who, or what, he/she really is, and place in my box with the little red flag sticking up? Maybe set up a lemonade stand next to it?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Ten cents a cup?”

  “Make it five. Times are hard.”

  “Seriously.”

  “He said double wrapped was fine.”

  Double wrapped is an inner envelope marked classified placed inside a larger envelope and sent via a registered service. It is standard procedure for secret information. That was not the colonel’s preferred method. He insisted on hand carried in a double-locked bag out of MacDill Air Force Base, which was standard for any material classified higher than secret.

  We didn’t say anything for a moment. I thought I knew what was coming and was already telling myself to let it go. I had become suspicious when Garrett told me the colonel wanted me to proffer a deal to Escobar. I told myself that I knew this is how the world spun and not to be surprised when I kept learning that lesson—crossing that bridge—over and over. There are invisible strings of random cords of folly that bind us all together, and the sooner we accept that, the closer we come to understanding.

  “When did they decide this?” I asked.

  “Said the guys up top just sent it down yesterday.”

  “Believe him?” I wondered who was “up” to send things “down,” and where the hell their authority came from.

  “Does it matter?”

  “What’s the official line?”

  “Routine declassification of nonmaterial information no longer considered or deemed to be paramount to national defense.”

  “Freedom of Information breathing down someone’s neck,” I said.

  “Most likely.”

  “And if they decided this a week earlier?”

  “None of it would have occurred.”

  “Alternate history.”

  “Happens every day.”

  “Open it together?”

  “You go right ahead,” Garrett said. “I’m going to take an outdoor shower and try to cool down—I’m just generating heat. My flight is at 1:10. I got a car coming, save you a trip to Tampa.”

  “Appreciate that, Tonto.”

  “You can have Florida in the summer,” he said on his way out the door.

  “I’ll take it,” I said to my empty screened porch. “Every day.”

  I considered the faded and dirty white envelope under my bare left foot. Dulles. Rusk. McNamara. Once powerful men that sand swept away.

  A pelican perched on one of the lift’s pilings. My boat needed a good waxing. Double wax on the west side due to the direct sun. I wondered where the lone woman in the sailboat was headed. I hoped the girls with the camera got a good shot of the dolphin. The name “Collective Soul” was taken from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Ayn—rhymes with “pine”—used the phrase to connote the mass of humanity that interferes with individualism. The group’s founding member just liked the name; he wasn’t really into Rand’s “objectivism.” Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, however, was. He was part of Rand’s inner circle in his youth. Married Andrea Mitchell. Good catch, Al. I heard the Larry Clinton band’s rendition of “I Hear Music” from my speakers. A minor bandleader from a time when even the big names were forgotten.

  My mind, like the world, was on shuffle. I wondered if anything would change once I opened the letter.

  I got a knife from the kitchen and returned to the porch. I picked up the envelope and slit it open. I put it down. I picked it up. I glanced up as two Jet Skis churned up the water off my dock and assailed the air with their obnoxious roar. While I looked at the water and wished they would find another area to buzz, I reached in and extracted the letter. I took one last look at the drawbridge across the bay, caught a dolphin breaking the water’s surface to my right, and read the letter.

  It was dated February 8, 1961. From Allen Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, to Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. I knew both secretaries came into power with Kennedy in January 1961. Dulles was a holdover from the previous administration. The transfer of power is always a dicey business.

  The letter was “in response to the request by both of you for a perusal of agency’s opinions on matters recently discussed.” It provided a terse overview of global CIA operations. I
t also gave a dismal view of US objectives and failures in Korea and concluded that a single nuclear bomb at the onset of the war would have in all “calculable probability” greatly reduced the total number of dead, likely prevented further escalation, and resulted in a US victory. The agency’s conclusion was that if the United States should find itself involved in similar situations in the future to not shy away from the “power of a single hydrogen bomb dropped in a heavily populated and industrial zone.

  “Just as it did in the conclusion of the Pacific war,” the letter concluded, “the bomb does not kill as much as it saves lives.”

  There was a sentence worth framing. I imagined Bobby McNamara by that point realized that he was no longer selecting Falcon transmissions.

  But it carried little significance to me compared to what followed.

  The letter went on to note strong dissent within the agency. Dulles warned that one tenured agent requested his “vociferous disagreement concerning the appraisal of atomic weapons as well as US policy that aggressively sought to manipulate and interfere with other sovereign powers” be recorded. He also cautioned that this individual was outspoken in criticizing the agency for its “hodgepodge collection of street thugs” that comprised Operation Pluto. Despite a “failed effort to reason with him,” Dulles wrote that this “rogue thinker” was still loose. If the upcoming operation were not successful, “we could ill afford second-guessing and inside dissension” All parties, he wrote, would need “to support the decision.”

  Operation Pluto, I recalled, was the code name for the Bay of Pigs. Dulles was already covering his ass. He had likely talked Kennedy and his virgin cabinet into supporting the plan. The last thing Dulles needed, especially if it failed, was a strong voice of dissention from within his own ranks that proved Dulles wrong.

  It didn’t work. Dulles, as Mary Evelyn had pointed out, took the fall and his gold watch in November of that year. The tenured agent?

  Theodore Wayne Sullivan. The man who died twice.

  James Harrison’s buddy.

  I thought of the Bay of Pigs. April 17‒19, 1961. A disaster, as the name would suggest. Fifteen hundred CIA- and mafia-trained “street thugs,” thieves, rapists, and guns-for-hire couldn’t overthrow Castro’s 25,000 armed men. I recalled Garrett and my earlier conversation regarding Dulles and the second death of Harrison. I’d double down on my bet: Dulles was out to get Sullivan. I doubt that Rusk and McNamara knew to what extend Dulles would go to silence his critics. I assumed both men, Rusk and McNamara, knew not to ask too many questions. You really don’t want to know what the head of the CIA has immersed himself in.

  The letter concluded by stating separate reports would be forthcoming on Iran and the escalating tension in French Indo-China.

  When I was finished, I picked up the empty envelope and opened it to place the letter back inside. As I did, I noticed that there was a second letter along with a handwritten note. I pulled out the handwritten note and marveled at the neat penmanship. It was from Theodore Sullivan.

  Washington, DC, April 12, 1961

  Dear Dottie,

  If you are reading this, you have gotten my call, for I can bear it no longer.

  I apologize that I did not place this in your hand. I am to be in the possession of neither letter. I know asking you to hide these letters is the act of a coward. So be it.

  The first letter is self-explanatory. I stole it. It will bear witness to the diseased logic that infects men’s minds. We cannot succumb to men of power and persuasion who have lost sight of humanity in their pursuit of political dogma.

  After the agency exorcised me from Southeast Asia, both Jim and I, as you know, have been heavily involved in the Cuba matter and that brings me to the second letter.

  I found it in his room at the Hotel Florida in Havana the day his plane went down. He only planned to be in the states for a few days and left most things in his room. I can only assume that Jim banged it out during his last night on that rickety Remington portable that he traveled with. I took it before other agents swept the site. Our mission was classified and anything in his room would have been archived with government documents. I assure you there was nothing of interest to you other than this letter.

  As you know, I had fallen from grace due to my viral anti-aggression stance. However, I was soon to become an even more vocal dissident of the agency for its going to bed with the Outfit, the Chicago mafia, in order to finance Operation Pluto. I’m fairly certain you will know it as the Bay of Pigs. It is yet to occur as of this writing but will commence within the week and, I fervently believe, fail soon thereafter. The Kennedy brothers succumbed to the power of Dulles and made promises to the Mafia in return for their cooperation. Who knows what repercussions could result from such an alliance? Who can foretell what events being in bed with the devil will alter? Why is madness, so plain and simple, so excruciating hard to see? I have exceeded what I thought I was capable of, but I fear it is not enough. I have made monstrous enemies. Enough. To the point.

  I am embarrassed to say that I breathe only by the allure of a common street girl. Jim and I spent our last night together at an expatriate bar called Sloppy Joe’s. We were to depart the next morning. Jim, as always, excused himself early and retired, although he obviously hit the typewriter’s keys before the pillow. I drank, as I often do, and ended up in a room and with a girl that I do not remember entering. In either sense.

  I was in sorry shape the following morning.

  I was supposed to deliver a diplomatic pouch to Miami. I always filed a flight plan, but I rarely adhered to them and had no such intention to do so on that day. Jim went instead.

  Jim’s plane did not go down in a summer squall. It was shot from the sky.

  “A failed effort to reason with him.”

  It was I they were after.

  I am so sorry,

  Teddy

  I blew out my breath. Francine barked next door. Did Sullivan ever come clean with Dorothy Harrison? Was I the first to know, half a century later? And what did I know?

  That Sullivan was about to squeal his displeasure over the Bay of Pigs. Win or lose, Sullivan was prescient enough to know that doing business with the Mafia, and the agency’s constant urge to orchestrate coups like high school musicals, was all very wrong. Sullivan needed to be silenced. Dulles whacked his own man, but got the wrong one. I wondered if things got too complicated and I stood tall if I, too, would someday fall from the sky.

  I picked up the second letter. It was from Jim Harrison to his wife, Dorothy.

  I read it.

  I read it again.

  I placed it gently on the table and for a long time I sat and stared out at the water, but I cannot remember anything I saw or heard.

  Tinker Bell rang.

  Time to drink.

  CHAPTER 39

  If I had a giant saltshaker, I’d sprinkle the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico and pour the whole damn thing down my throat like a giant margarita.

  But I didn’t. I headed to the hotel.

  I grabbed a high stool in the shade of the white canopy that covered the bar and did my best to keep the world at bay. I had the choice bird-dog spot. My back was to the pink lady. The bar, boardwalk, beach, and Gulf of Mexico were stacked in front of me like French pastries at a Versailles picnic. The place was a smorgasbord of flesh as women competed to see who could clothe themselves the least. I just didn’t need that shit today.

  Kathleen had called and reminded me that we were attending the museum’s fund-raiser the following evening. She said that she would meet me there, as she wanted to arrive early.

  Neither of us fell for it. Our conversation had been blunt and was the only words that we had spoken to each other since my silent exit from her car.

  The low afternoon sun burned the water into a blinding glare. Figures on the beach and paddleboarders in the shallow waters appeared as silhouetted shadows cut from black cardboard. A slight breeze whisked a translucent wisp of sand over t
he beach like a low-gliding ghost. One solitary lady stood at water’s edge, and then she sat and stared out at the sea. Every time I go to the beach I see that: some cutout cardboard with their back to the noise and contemplating the great flatness. My spot on the west coast of Florida was not a location to me but a woman I loved and not nearly as problematic as the other one in my life.

  My wide sunglasses blocked my eyes and my baseball cap was low over my face. For amusement I studied the patrons at the bar. I discovered a new species and dubbed them “drink holders.” Bibo obtineo. They can’t keep their paws off the drink parked in front of them. They need to retain some form of physical contact, usually a hand that delicately caresses the base of the drink. Maintaining the lifeline. I wondered if that sliver of contact was a culmination of their dreams and hard work. A reward for the days of their lives that they had traded away for money. It all seemed hollow, but that’s what I wanted to see and that is what I would see. The hell with it. I stuffed another sliced lime into the Corona’s long neck.

  Fucking Escobar. He would have died rather than turn over the letter, but he wouldn’t let Elvis die for it. Fuck Victor too, while I’m at it. Was lowering his gun when I shot. Knew it then, know it now. Then bleeding like he had all the time in the world to die. Just a terrible thing to witness—life losing The Battle and then “poof” like it was never there.

  Gotta admit, though, it was sort of handy having old Victor and Escobar to kick around. It kept me from thinking about what’s-her-face.

  “She said I could find you here,” the guy next to me said. I didn’t know if he was even talking to me.

  I didn’t remember him moving in. Last time I checked there was a flabby guy camped out there with cheeks that looked like fishing weights draped under his eyes. Flabby had a gold chain around his neck and a diamond ring the size of my swollen left cheek. But he was gone. Maybe he died and they hauled his ass away. I just don’t know.

  My new buddy was an old guy, at least to be sitting at the bar. Not that I got anything against old guys sitting at the bar, it seemed like a fine retirement plan, but you don’t see that very often. He wore a faded straw boater that looked like it had put in its share of years keeping the rays off his head. His skin, already a Caribbean brown, was tanned from a lifetime in the sun. He wore a faded red but clean short sleeve shirt with a palm pattern. He had on long pants and worn sandals. Nashville’s latest twenty-two-year-old blonde diva gushed through the speakers sharing with the world her first love, first breakup, or first fuck. I couldn’t keep them straight or figure out why anyone even cared. I’d drop a grand to hear the Chairman of the Board, but that era slipped out a long time ago.