Frame 232

by Wil Mara

  “And why would you do that? Why tell me? And why now?”

  “In part because of reasons you yourself have touched upon. But also for reasons of my own. Reasons that I will explain later. So are you ready to hear this?”

  Hammond looked to Olivero, who had finished his tea and was staring at nothing in particular. He’s heard it all before, probably many times, and is weary of it now. It made Hammond remember the realization that had struck earlier—There are some people who have always known.

  “Yes, I’m ready,” he replied.

  “My brother and I were very happy when we were small boys,” Galeno Clemente began. “My father made a good living, and my mother took care of our home. We always had good food, wore nice clothes, went on trips. . . . It was a wonderful way for two children to grow up.”

  “And then came Batista?”

  “That is correct. He took everything my father had worked for. First his businesses, then his house and his land. Then he took our parents from us.” Clemente waved a finger between himself and his brother, his voice rising. “His men came one day and simply took them. We never saw them again.”

  “I’m sorry,” Hammond said. “I can well imagine how difficult that must’ve been.”

  “We had no place to go and no money. We knew nothing of that kind of life. We lived in the streets and picked our food out of garbage cans. We begged, too. Some friends helped us, but most were afraid to. They were afraid of what would be done to them if they did. So we were left to fend for ourselves. The things we had to do . . . the things we saw out there . . . we lived this way for years. It changed both of us. Our innocence disappeared. We became hard men. Not boys, playing soccer with our friends like we should have been. Do you know what happens to vulnerable young boys? You do not, nor should you ever. No boy should ever have to know this.”

  Olivero moved his hand up and down—Take it easy; take it easy. Galeno leaned back, palms flat on the table, and took a deep breath. Then he came forward again.

  “We didn’t know how long we could survive, but it probably would not have been much longer. Then Fidel Castro came, and he changed everything for us. He was an avowed enemy of Batista, so we supported him. We wanted to be part of his movement, join his army of revolutionaries. We were given training, new uniforms, food, and a place to live. You must understand, Mr. Hammond; to us, this was like winning one of your American lotteries.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “When Castro came to Havana in 1959 and drove Batista out, it was one of the greatest days of my life. We had won! We had beaten the man who had taken everything from us! I had become a very good soldier by this time. Practicing in the hills, and all the guerrilla warfare . . . I discovered I had natural skill with a gun. I could hit targets others could barely see. I never missed.” He sat up proudly upon making this announcement. Then, just as suddenly, he sagged again. “Yes, I never missed. That was when it all began to go bad. After one term in the military, my brother got out. He went to school and became an engineer. But I stayed in. I was being treated like a prince for my talent. I was given extra rations, better quarters. Officers who were my superiors treated me with respect. Several of the medals I received were given to me by Castro himself. I felt like the world was in my hand. From living on the streets to receiving medals in just a few years. Do you know what this does to a young man, Mr. Hammond? It develops a sense of loyalty that goes beyond what is rational. I would’ve done anything for my leader. I would’ve walked off a cliff if he’d asked. If he had said it was for the good of the revolution, I would have done it like that!” He snapped his fingers. “And Castro knew this. He was a master of human psychology. He knew exactly how to work a person like a puppet. It wasn’t long before he was sending me all over the world to do his killing for him. I thought it was romantic and exciting. It was all for the cause, you understand. The great and noble cause.”

  He dropped his head and took several deep breaths. At first Hammond thought it was because he had become winded. Upon further reflection, he realized Clemente simply found the memories unbearable and needed to clear his mind temporarily.

  “Then Castro began loaning my services out. I’ve killed for other politicians, for wealthy businessmen, even for his family and friends. As I said, I would’ve done anything for the man. I viewed him as my savior, remember.” Clemente leveled his gaze at Hammond. “And that’s how I became involved in the plot against your president.”

  Hammond’s eyes popped wide in surprise. “Are you saying that Fidel Castro was responsible for—?”

  Clemente put a hand up. “No, no—let me finish. It was late October of 1963. I was told I would be part of a secret operation that was to take place in the United States. I had never been to the States before, and this was exciting to me. I would not receive any information about the operation until just before it began, but I was assured—as I always was—that my target was an enemy of the revolution. On November 20, I was flown to Dallas and put in a hotel room. I was told not to speak with anyone and not to leave until I received further instructions. The weapon—a bolt-action European Mauser M59 with a side-mounted sight, if you are interested in such details—was already in the room, along with a box of ammunition. The next day, a man came. He was young but very confident in himself.”

  “Do you know who it was?”

  “No, he did not give a name, and I never saw him again. He had two maps with him—one showing Dealey Plaza and the route your president would be taking, and another showing the plaza’s sewer pipes. I was required to memorize these maps while he waited because he did not want to leave them behind. He showed me where I was to go and what I was to do. Then he told me who the target was. . . .” Clemente trailed off here, head cocked slightly and one eyebrow raised. “You should know, Mr. Hammond, that I would not have hesitated to fire if Lee Harvey Oswald had not. Your president had humiliated my leader during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He had imposed an embargo on my country that crushed our economy. He was Castro’s enemy, which meant he was my enemy.” Clemente shook his head sadly, ashamedly. “That was the state of my mind at the time.”

  “So Oswald was the man who hit the president?”

  “Oh yes, of that there is no doubt.” Clemente surprised Hammond with a chuckle here. “It is amazing to me that there has been so much debate about this. I have heard arguments, for example, that he was a poor marksman who could not have possibly hit such a target from such a distance. Ridiculous. Mr. Oswald was a very good marksman, and with his weapon of choice—a single-action Carcano M91—he would have had no problem hitting his target from the sixth-floor window of the book depository. What is amazing is that he missed on the first try. With the element of surprise in his favor, that should have easily been the fatal strike.”

  “Then how did he miss?”

  “Nerves, I’m sure. He was probably very nervous. I never met him, but I have done much reading about him in the years since. He has always seemed to me the type of man whose ambitions greatly surpassed his abilities. The kind of man who, when put in critical situations, finds it hard to quiet his feelings and focus on the task at hand. A far, far too emotional individual.”

  “So there really were two gunmen,” Hammond said, mostly to himself. “Incredi—”

  “No.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Not two. Four.”

  “What?”

  “There were four snipers hired to hit your president that day.”

  “No . . . there’s no way. I don’t believe you.”

  “I was in the storm drain. That’s one. The emotional Lee Harvey Oswald was in the book depository. That’s two. Another was in the Mercantile Building on Main Street. That’s three. And the last one, number four, was in the textile building next to the book depository. What they called the Dal-Tex Building. It was on Elm Street right before Elm turned into Dealey Plaza. In fact, the man who shot the famous film, Abraham Zapruder, had an office there.”

  “But . . .
no one has ever suggested that there were four, ever. It’s impossible.”

  “Is it? Think about it, Mr. Hammond—Mr. Jason Hammond, who always seeks the truth. Think about the importance of the target. This operation could not fail. It had to work. It would have only taken one shot to get it done. The more gunmen hired, the greater the chance of success.”

  Hammond was shaking his head. “That’s incredible.”

  “Not if you look at it through the eyes of the people who wanted to do this. It was very smart.”

  “Then who was behind all this? Who was it that hired you and the others?”

  “Ah, well, that is a good question.”

  “And do you have the answer?”

  “It was everyone, Mr. Hammond.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Clemente surprised him again with a chuckle, so casual and matter-of-fact he might as well have been discussing a pleasant afternoon he’d spent at the beach. “It was your military and your Mafia and your Central Intelligence Agency and my government and others. It was all of them.”

  “That’s . . . No, that just can’t be.”

  “Of course it can. Do not think of the situation dramatically. Don’t think of it like a myth or a legend. Strip away all of that and look at it like reality. Your president made a lot of enemies, and many of them would have benefited from his death. For example, what did he say about the CIA that time? Something like—”

  “‘I want to shred the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the four winds.’”

  “That’s right. And the Mafia. All those stories about how they helped him get ahead in politics, rigging elections for him. But then after he became president, his brother Bobby, as attorney general, went after them. How much of that is now fact? And Fidel Castro . . . how many ways did President Kennedy antagonize him?”

  Hammond was shaking his head. “Still, there couldn’t have been that many people involved. To keep a secret among just two or three is nearly impossible in the corridors of power. You’re saying—”

  “You are not understanding—there were no secrets to keep.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  Clemente leaned in to get closer. “What secrets are we talking about? There was no ‘official’ assassination plan, no drawings on blackboards or signed paperwork or midnight meetings. Nothing was recorded. At some point in time, someone suggested killing your president. It was that simple. Other people heard about it, so it became something of a rumor. But rumors like that, even in your United States, come and go every day. A few people—I would be surprised if it was more than four or five—talked about how it would be done. Others may have known about it, but they said nothing. They let it happen. There may have been another twenty or thirty people like this. But only a few would have been needed to organize the operation and keep it quiet until the last minute. Those two other gunmen? They were probably loaned out like I was. Maybe one from your American military, another from your CIA.”

  “Then how come neither of them fired? Based on what you’re saying, they both would’ve had their chances before the president even reached Dealey Plaza.”

  “The one in the textile building never got a clear shot, and the other—the one in the mercantile—lost his guts. He couldn’t go through with it.” Clemente smiled here. “You know what’s amazing about the gunman in the textile building? He was caught by police shortly after the assassination and then let go. He was just a boy, really. Even younger than me at the time. He played the role perfectly, wearing a black leather jacket and looking like what Americans called a ‘greaser.’ The police thought he was a nobody. They never even took down his name. But check the records; you’ll see. They had him.”

  “How do you know all this? How could you?”

  “Because I was supposed to die,” Clemente said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “We were all supposed to die, the four of us. And three of us did.”

  “I . . . I’m not following. What does that have to do with—?”

  “We were told about each other. We knew. The man who came to my hotel room, he told me about the others. Not names, of course, but he showed me their positions on the map and said I had to fire if they did not. I should’ve realized then that he revealed this information because we were all going to be eliminated afterward.”

  “Then what about—?” Hammond stopped dead and looked away, his mouth hanging open stupidly. “Jack Ruby,” he said in a whisper. “Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby two days after the assassination.”

  Clemente was nodding. “Oswald was killed by Ruby, and Ruby never got the chance to give a full confession. If you remember, he wanted to talk to the Warren Commission, but they weren’t interested. What was never revealed was that one of the other gunmen was found dead in a hotel room in Montreal with a pistol shot to the head, and the third—the kid—was found hanging in an apartment in Paris. Both deaths occurred less than a week after the assassination. Quite coincidental, don’t you think? They were ruled suicides, but I can assure you they were not.”

  Hammond’s head felt like a balloon being inflated beyond its capacity. “So why weren’t you killed?”

  Clemente tapped the side of his nose. “Because of this, my survivalist’s instinct. A gift from the heavens. It has kept me alive many times. After Oswald was shot, I began to worry that it wasn’t just the work of an enraged patriot. Then I learned of the other two deaths.”

  “How?”

  “Because I knew people who worked in that level of society. Do you understand? It is like a community. An underground community, yes, but still a community. People know other people, and they talk. I found it unusual that these two experienced gunmen had died in the same week. It became obvious that I would be next. It started to make sense to me—once the president was dead, the people who had done the dirty work would have to go too.”

  “So you just took off?”

  “Not at first. I was supposed to meet the man who had been in my hotel room a second time, in San Antonio. There I was to be paid—$100,000 for taking part in the shooting, and another $250,000 if I had been the one who made the hit—and given a passport into Mexico. From there I would fly home to Cuba.”

  “But none of that happened?”

  “No. I escaped Dealey Plaza in the confusion the same way I entered it—through a manhole near the corner of Houston and Pacific. I took a cab back to my hotel. I waited five days, as instructed, then took another cab to a parking lot in Waxahachie. There was supposed to be a car waiting there for me. And there was. But something was not right. There were no other vehicles around, no other people. I became very suspicious. Instead of going to the car like I had been told, I took a shot at it from a distance—and it went off like a bomb.”

  “Explosives?”

  “Yes. Rigged to the door handle. A fairly common method of elimination, really.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I still had most of the money I’d been given at the beginning of the operation, so I took a bus to another town. Do you know what the name of the town was, Mr. Hammond?”

  “What?”

  “Trinity. And that was ironic, because in Trinity, sitting in yet another hotel room, I became a different man. I finally got off the road I’d been traveling since Fulgencio Batista came and took my father and mother.”

  Hammond shook his head. “I’m sorry; I don’t understand.”

  “I know, but this part of our conversation will have to wait until later because we have to get going now.”

  “Going?”

  “Yes—back to the United States.”

  “You want to come back with me?”

  “I do. I want to tell what I know. There is more, more than I have said here. I have learned much in the years since. As you say, the American people have a right to know the truth. The whole world should know. It is long past time.”

  “You’ll be locked up afterward, possibly even executed.”

 
“I am aware of this.”

  “And you still want to do it?”

  “Yes.”

  Silence fell between the three of them. The Clementes were watching Hammond intently, waiting for his response. The casual looks on their faces were somehow maddening.

  “I’m thrilled at the idea of you coming back, of course, but . . . why? What is your reason for—?”

  “We will discuss that on the way.” Galeno rose, his chair groaning on the wooden floor. “I think you will be most interested.”

  “And how do I know you won’t kill me on the boat and dump my body in the Caribbean?”

  Clemente shook his head. “I do not kill anymore. I would not even kill a fly if it landed on this table right now. I kill nothing.”

  “If we had wanted you dead,” Olivero added, “I could have taken you down when you left the Café Cantante or when you were walking back from the Cathedral of Santa Catalina. Or, for that matter, while you were sleeping in your room at the Hotel Parque Central.” He held his hands out, palms up, as if to say, See how easy it would have been?

  Galeno, amused by Hammond’s stunned expression, chuckled and said, “Come; we need to begin.”

  37

  THE PALATIAL HOME of retired Mafia boss Bernesco Magliocci sat atop a forested hill on the outskirts of Chicago, surrounded by high walls, a laser security system, and a staff of thick-necked guards who roamed the property with pistols and machine guns. Magliocci sat in his bedroom—the furnishings and decor so gaudy in their faux regality that the space looked like an ill-advised fusion of Egyptian noble and Las Vegas antique—in an upholstered chair with a snack tray in front of him. His large, deep-set eyes were trained on the flat-screen television across the room, his lips pulled back in a skeletal grin. On the screen, a young couple engaged in the kind of amorous activity that was far from appropriate for a noncable channel, even at this late hour.

  In spite of his geriatric state, Magliocci still found the images irresistible. He had not participated in such things in quite some time, although not as long ago as most would imagine. Watching it helped him to remember. Some of the women had been his wives, others disposable lovers who had come before, during, and after. Not all had been willing partners, but they had cooperated nonetheless. He held no regrets about that, for Magliocci was never one to waste energy on regret. Not for the women he had consumed, not for the millions he had accumulated through narcotics, extortion, racketeering, influence, and protection, and not for the dozens of brutal murders in which he had participated either directly or indirectly to further his interests, including the assassination of a young and handsome American president in the fall of 1963. He had no capacity for remorse and no tolerance for those who did. Humanity could be neatly cleaved between the winners and the losers, and he considered himself one of the biggest winners he’d ever known.