by Don DeLillo
They held their laughter.
“You turn up in interesting places, George.”
Now they laughed, remembering the same thing, the time Parmenter walked into a dental clinic in a remote town near the CIA air base in southwest Guatemala where the Bay of Pigs was being rehearsed by Cuban pilots and American advisers. Sitting in the shabby waiting room, in an alligator shirt and madras shorts, was George de Mohrenschildt, also known as Jerzy Sergius von Mohrenschildt. He was on a walking tour of Central America, he said.
“That whole thing ended horribly,” George said, “if I can actually say it has ended.”
“I think you can say that.”
“This administration still bullies Castro. It’s ridiculous and unnecessary. I’ll go even further. This whole administration revolves around the floating cinder of little communist Cuba. It’s something of a joke, Larry, and I say this knowing which side of the Cuban fence you are on. Of course this is your job and I respect it.”
“This was my job. I’m doing strictly support work now.”
“I would like to believe the administration has no more designs on Cuba.”
“Believe it, George. The missile crisis was resolved with the understanding that we wouldn’t invade Cuba. Kennedy had the chance to get rid of Castro and he ends up guaranteeing the man’s job. There is widespread lack of interest right now. Commitment to this issue is absolutely nil. The administration went from passionate and total dedication to an attitude of complete aloofness and indifference and they did it in goddamn record time.”
“It’s the American disease,” George said with a warm smile.
De Mohrenschildt was a petroleum engineer by profession but didn’t seem to spend much time at it. He was on his fourth wife, Larry knew, and they tended to be women from wealthy families. But his marriages didn’t explain his apparent association with Nazis in World War II, his apparent ties to Polish and French intelligence, his expulsion from Mexico, his apparent communist leanings when he was at the University of Texas, his Soviet contacts in Venezuela, the discrepancies in his stated history, his travels in West Africa, Central America, Yugoslavia and Cuba.
George had a tendency to be detained or shot at for sketching coastal installations in strategic areas.
But he knew Jackie Kennedy or her parents or someone in the family, and he spent time at the Racquet Club when he was in New York, and he was technically entitled to call himself a baron. It was part of George’s attractiveness that he continually emerged from a different past.
“When do you leave Washington?”
“I go to New York tomorrow, then back to Dallas.”
“I thought Dallas was Walker country,” Larry said. “Who’s taking potshots at the general?”
“He’s a complete fascist degenerate, this man Walker. A very dangerous man with his racism, his anti-Castro crusades. This is what I mean about Cuba. Cuba stirs up the worst kind of American obsession. Here is a general who is relieved of his command for preaching right-wing politics, who leads a racist campaign in Mississippi, who is put in the loony bin, who settles down in Dallas where we see him in the papers every day with his John Birch Society nonsense and his Cuban tirades. Raw hate, Larry. Two men died in Mississippi because of Walker’s provocations. He’s a little Hitler plain and simple.”
“You sound as though you’d like to take a crack at him yourself.”
“I’m telling you, I wouldn’t mind. As a matter of fact, I think I know who tried to kill him.”
A waiter plunged after a dropped spoon.
“A boy I know in Dallas,” George said. “I call him a boy. Maybe he’s twenty-two, twenty-three. Now that I’m past fifty, they all look like boys and girls. But as long as the boys don’t look like girls and vice versa.”
“What got him interested in Walker?”
“The easy answer is politics. In 1959, an ex-Marine, what does he do? He defects to the Soviet Union. They send him to a factory in Minsk. Disillusionment sets in, of course, and back he comes. Naturally the Agency is interested. Domestic Contacts asks me to talk to the boy.”
“A friendly debriefing.”
“Exactly. I’m to take the fatherly approach. Find out what he saw, heard, smelled and tasted. It wasn’t long before we started to like each other. In fact I think my own feelings about General Walker may have influenced Lee to take a shot at him.”
“But you’re not absolutely sure.”
“Not absolutely.”
“He hasn’t said he did it.”
“He hasn’t said anything. But there were indications, certain signs, an atmosphere, you know? Plus a curious photograph he sent me. I’m frankly sorry he missed.”
They returned to their food, their lunch. The voices and noise around them became apparent once more, a tide of excited news, a civilized clamor. George said something perfectly right about the wine, swirling it in the high-stemmed tulip glass. An attractive woman hurried toward a table, showing the happy exasperation that describes a journey through traffic snarls and personal dramas to, some island of prosperous calm. There were times when Larry thought lunch in a superior restaurant was the highlight of Western man.
“You mentioned politics,” he said. “How far left is this young friend of yours?”
“There is politics, there is emotion, there is psychology. I know him quite well but I wouldn’t be completely honest if I said I could pin him down, pin him right to the spot. He may be a pure Marxist, the purest of believers. Or he may be an actor in real life. What I know with absolute certainty is that he’s poor, he’s dreadfully, grindingly poor. What’s the expression I want?”
“Piss-poor. ”
“Exactly. He’s married to a lovely, lovely girl. Really, Larry, one of those flawed Russian beauties. Innocent and frail. She speaks a lovely true Russian. Not Sovietized, you know? Her uncle is a colonel in the MVD.”
Larry couldn’t help laughing. It was all so curiously funny. It was rich, that’s what it was. Everyone was a spook or dupe or asset, a double, courier, cutout or defector, or was related to one. We were all linked in a vast and rhythmic coincidence, a daisy chain of rumor, suspicion and secret wish. George was laughing too. A wonderful woodwind rumble. They looked at each other and laughed. They laughed in appreciation of the richness of life, the fabulous and appalling nature of human affairs, the good food and drink, the superior service, the wrecked careers, the whole teeming abscess of folly and regret. Larry felt flush and well fed, a little tipsy, all the right things. The Honduran ambassador said hello. A man from Pemex stopped to tell a richly filthy joke. It was a lovely lunch. It was great, rich, lovely and perfectly right.
Parmenter took the Agency shuttle bus back to Langley. Then he wrote a memo to the Office of Security requesting an expedite check on George de Mohrenschildt.
Somewhere in his room of theories, in some notebook or folder, Nicholas Branch has a roster of the dead. A printout of the names of witnesses, informers, investigators, people linked to Lee H. Oswald, people linked to Jack Ruby, all conveniently and suggestively dead. In 1979 a House select committee determined there was nothing statistically abnormal about the death rate among those who were connected in some way to the events of November 22. Branch accepts this as an actuarial fact. He is writing a history, not a study of the ways in which people succumb to paranoia. There is endless suggestiveness. Branch concedes this. There is the language of the manner of death. Shot in back of head. Died of cut throat. Shot in police station. Shot in motel. Shot by husband after one month marriage. Found hanging by toreador pants in jail cell. Killed by karate chop. It is the neon epic of Saturday night. And Branch wants to believe that’s all it is. There is enough mystery in the facts as we know them, enough of conspiracy, coincidence, loose ends, dead ends, multiple interpretations. There is no need, he thinks, to invent the grand and masterful scheme, the plot that reaches flawlessly in a dozen directions.
Still, the cases do resonate, don’t they? Mostly anonymous dead. Exotic d
ancers, taxi drivers, cigarette girls, lawyers of the shopworn sort with dandruff on their lapels. But through the years the violence has reached others as well, and with each new series of misadventures Branch sees again how the assassination sheds a powerful and lasting light, exposing patterns and links, revealing this man to have known that one, this death to have occurred in curious juxtaposition to that.
George de Mohrenschildt, the multinational man, a study in divided loyalties or in the irrelevance of loyalty, the man who befriended Oswald, dies in March 1977, in Palm Beach, of a blast through the mouth with a 20-gauge shotgun. Ruled a suicide.
One week later, in Miami Beach, police find the body of Carlos Prío Socarrás, former President of Cuba, millionaire gunrunner, linked by an informer to Jack Ruby. The body sits in a chair, a pistol nearby. Ruled a suicide.
David William Ferrie, the professional pilot, amateur researcher in cancer, anti-Castro militant, is found dead in his apartment in New Orleans in February 1967, five days after his name is linked in the press to the assassination of the President. Natural causes, says the coroner, but some people wonder how Ferrie had time to type a farewell note to a friend in the middle of a brain hemorrhage. (“Thus I die alone and unloved.”) Among his possessions are three blank passports, a one-hundred-pound bomb, a number of rifles, bayonets and flare guns and a complete library of books and other materials, as of that date, on the Kennedy assassination.
Eladio del Valle, a friend of David Ferrie and head of the Free Cuba Committee, is found dead the same day, in a car in Miami, shot several times in the chest at point-blank range, his head split open by an ax. No arrests in the case.
The documents are stacked everywhere. Branch has homicide reports and autopsy diagrams. He has the results of spectographic tests on bullet fragments. He has reports by acoustical consultants and experts in blur analysis. He studies blurs himself, stooped over photos taken in Dealey Plaza by people who thought they were there to see the head of state come riding nicely by. He has a magnifier. He has detailed maps of photographers’ lines of sight.
The Curator sends transcripts of closed committee hearings. He sends documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, other documents withheld from ordinary investigators or heavily censored. He sends new books all the time, each with a gleaming theory, supportable, assured. This is the room of theories, the room of growing old. Branch wonders if he ought to despair of ever getting to the end.
The FBI’s papers on the assassination are here, one hundred and twenty-five thousand pages, no end of dread and woe. The Curator sends new material on Oswald’s stay in Russia, gathered from a KGB defector (not the first such defector to offer a version of events). There is new material on Everett and Parmenter, on Ramón Benítez, Frank Vásquez, Data trickling down the years. Water dripping into his brain pan. There is 544 Camp Street in New Orleans, the most notorious address in the chronicles of the assassination. The building is long gone and the site is an urban renewal plaza now. The Curator sends recent photos and Branch understands that he must study them, although they do not pertain to the case. There are granite benches, brick paving, a piece of sculpture with a subsidized look about it, called “Out of There.”
Branch must study everything. He is in too deep to be selective.
He sits under a lap robe and worries. The truth is he hasn’t written all that much. He has extensive and overlapping notes—notes in three-foot drifts, all these years of notes. But of actual finished prose, there is precious little. It is impossible to stop assembling data. The stuff keeps coming. There are theories to evaluate, lives to ponder and mourn. No one at CIA has asked to see the work in progress. Not a chapter, a page, a word of it. Branch is on his second Curator, his sixth DCI. Since 1973, when he first set to work, he has seen Schlesinger, Colby, Bush, Turner, Casey and Webster occupy the Director’s chair. Branch doesn’t know whether these men were told that someone is writing a secret history of the assassination. Maybe no one knows except the Curator and two or three others in the Historical Intelligence Collection at CIA. Maybe it is the history no one will read.
T. J. Mackey stood across the street from the shabby three-story building where Guy Banister’s detective agency was located. His light-brown hair was cut close and he wore a sport shirt and sunglasses, the shirt tight across his upper body. He had a way of clenching and unclenching his right fist. There was a bird tattooed there, in the webbing between thumb and index finger, and when he opened his fist the bird spread its blue wings.
He was watching someone on Camp Street, a rattled old woman, an outcast in a long coat and white ankle socks, one of the lost bodies of New Orleans this uneasy spring of 1963, already too hot, too heavy and wet. He was interested in the way she kept adjusting her pace as she walked down the street. She slowed down to let others get ahead of her. In a wary crouch she moved along the wall at number 544, swinging an arm out to wave people on. She wanted everybody up ahead, where she could see them all.
Mackey enjoyed this. He’d been in the city over a week now and had seen many a jumpy drunk but no one with this kind of paranoid wit.
Around were old warehouses and coffee-roasting plants, fifty-cent-a-night hotels. Over the original entranceway at 544, bricked up now, he could make out an inscription: Stevedores and Longshoremens Building. He crossed the street and went in. The offices of Guy Banister Associates were on the second floor. Banister was at his desk,. a tough and somber man in his sixties. Twenty years in the FBI, deputy superintendent of the New Orleans police, a member of the John Birch Society and the Minutemen. He opened a bottom drawer when Mackey walked in. Invitation to a drink. T-Jay waved it off and took a chair.
“You don’t drink with me. You don’t tell me where the hell you’re staying.”
“I leave tomorrow.”
“Where to?”
“The Farm.”
“Must be a great life, showing kids from Swarthmore how to break a chinaman’s neck.”
“It’s an assignment.”
“It’s a fucking shame, that’s what it is, T-Jay, a man like you, who risked his life. This Kennedy, he has things to answer for. First he launches an invasion without adequate air support, then he makes the movement pay for it. He’s got people raiding our guerrilla bases, seizing arms shipments all over.”
“What am I here for? You’ve had time, Guy.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“You’ve got more guns than the Mexican army.”
“There’s priorities,” Banister said. “It’s looking like a busy summer we got coming.”
“I’ll need to see some money. Upkeep, monthly payments, a healthy severance.”
“How many men?”
“Let’s say several. Plus I may need a pilot.”
“He’ll walk in the door in ten minutes.”
“Goddamn.”
“Calm down.”
“Not him.”
“Never mind appearances or what he says for effect. Ferrie’s a capable son of a bitch. He can fly a plane backwards. He has first-rate contacts. He does work for Carmine Latta’s lawyer. He goes out to Latta’s house and comes back with money in fucking duffel bags. It’s all for the cause. He can lease a small plane, no questions asked, no records kept. Right now I’ve got him looking for a C-47 which I want to use to ship explosives out of here.”
Banister opened the desk drawer again, took out a fifth of Early Times and reached back to snatch two coffee mugs from a shelf.
“I’m sending select items to one of our staging areas in the Keys,” he said. “Rifle grenades, land mines, dynamite, antitank guns, mortar shells. Listen to this: canisters of napalm.”
Mackey noted the look in that silvery eye. Banister’s rage toward the administration was partly a reaction to public life itself, to men who glow in the lens barrel of a camera. Kennedy magic, Kennedy charisma. His hatred had a size to it, a physical force. It was the thing that kept him going after career disappointments, bad health, a forced retirem
ent. Mackey briefly met his eye. So many meanings crowded in, memories, sadnesses, convictions, lost Cuba, Cuba to come—a moment so humanly dense, rich in associations, such deep readings, the power of things unsaid, that T-Jay looked away. They were entertaining too many of the same thoughts.
“Where did you get the hardware?”
“A bunker in the woods. We put the key in the lock and there it was.”
“Who arranged that?” Mackey said.
“It’s a CIA weapons cache. Stuff never used at the Bay of Pigs. Which I assume you know.”
“I don’t know much these days.”
“We have recruits coming in all the time. They want another crack at Fidel. We train them at a camp not far from here. We’ve had no problems up to now, knock fucking wood, which is something I personally see to, working it out with the feds. But this Kennedy, he’s making all kinds of moves against us. Did you know he’s got exile leaders restricted to Dade County? They can’t travel out of the county. He’s normalizing with Castro. He’s dealing with the Soviets. They got a deal cooking. Cuba is guaranteed communist. From which Jack gets a second term unmolested by Moscow. He is interested in his own protection and security, which I believe he is correct in wishing to increase.”
He poured the bourbon.
“What about the thing in Dallas,” he said, “a couple of weeks ago?”
“The Walker shooting.”
“Did they catch the nigger that did it?”
Mackey caught the sly tone of the older man’s voice. Walker had been consuming news space like a movie star in a fever of insecurity. Being shot at over a backyard fence by a sniper on tiptoes, and missed, was just about the perfect payoff Mackey could imagine for a certain kind of fame. It reduced the man to the status of casual target for some gun-toting Mr. Magoo.
“Now, assuming I can come up with the rifles.”
“Plus scopes.”
“What do I do with them?”
“Hold them,” Mackey said.
“Who are we talking about here?”