by Don DeLillo
There were things Oswald didn’t tell Alek, like details of the MPS-16 radar system, just integrated into the network. He wanted to see how their friendship progressed. It occurred to him that the U.S. military might have to spend jillions to change the system anyhow, now that he’d crossed to the other side. How strangely easy to have a say over men and events.
The other thing he didn’t tell Alek concerned the false defector program. When nobody contacted him, Ozzie decided to sign up for a foreign-language qualification test. Russian. Just to see if he’d get noticed.
His rating was P for poor throughout.
A doctor and nurse came to give him a physical. They listened to his heart, shined a light in his ears. They weighed and measured him and went away with samples of his urine and blood. Then three men arrived and took him to a concrete building about half an hour away. He walked into a modem apartment. They had him remove objects from his pockets. They sat him down in a chair that was attached to a console equipped with graph paper, pen recorders, dials, switches, etc. They told him to put his feet flat on the floor. Then they attached tubes and devices to the arms, chest and hands of Oswaldovich. One of the men sat facing him. Is your name such-and-such? Did you ever use another name or identity? Is your favorite color blue? Are you an agent of U.S. intelligence? Are you in secret contact with anyone in this country? Is your hair brown? Have you been sent here to assassinate some person or persons? Are you married? Are you homosexual? Do you smoke or drink?
Deadpan.
No sign of Alek. Oswald stood while they unplugged him from the console. He was lonely for his friend and had a sneaking suspicion he’d messed up the test something awful.
He told them Alek had promised TV.
Someone arrived with his belongings. He stayed in the new apartment for three days. They gave him intelligence tests, aptitude tests, personality profiles, tests in English and basic math, tests in the recognition of patterns and shapes.
He dreamed of walking into the house on Ewing Street, in Fort Worth, his hair sopping wet from a swim at the Y.
Lenin and Stalin in an orange glow. Caspian Sea, largest inland sea in the world, on the boundary between Europe and Asia. Kremlin means citadel.
He is telling the story of his stay in a guarded apartment somewhere in Moscow to a man in a suit and tie. Maybe it is Richard Carlson as Herb Philbrick on TV. I Led Three Lives. Maybe it is the man at the U.S. embassy, the second secretary or consul, whatever he is called, adjusting his glasses, listening with interest to the story of an ex-Marine who has infiltrated the Soviet intelligence apparatus as part of the U.S. Navy’s false defector program.
Kirilenko stood on the parquet floor of his partitioned office in the First Section, Seventh Department, Second Chief Directorate at KGB headquarters, the Center, 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, a mass of elaborate stonework comprising an old main building, a postwar extension, a prison, Lubyanka, famous for exterminations, other, lesser buildings, and a courtyard visible through barred windows or screens of heavy-gauge mesh. He liked to think standing up.
The nice thing about the Center was the inexpensive caviar and salmon available in Building 12 across the square, and the J&B and Johnnie Walker at a dollar a bottle. The not-so-nice thing was the heavy sense of Stalinist terror. He also hated the chair they’d given him, a modern contour piece that looked ridiculous behind his old wooden desk.
All the more reason to stand. He kept his arms behind him, left hand clutching right forearm. He was thinking about the American boy, Lee H. Oswald. The lesson of Lee H. Oswald was that easy cases are never easy. It made him think of the classical axioms of his early training in geometry and arithmetic. Sad to learn that those self-evident truths, necessary truths, faltered so badly when subjected to rigorous examination. No plane surfaces here. We are living in curved space.
Alek liked the boy. Such naked aspiration in his eyes. He was trying to get a grip on the world. Facts, words, historic ideas. He struggled against his fate, yes, exactly, like someone in the social universe of Marx. He believed genuinely in high principles and aims even if he was not yet assured of a sense of perspective.
At twenty years old, all you know is that you’re twenty. Everything else is a mist that swirls around this fact.
He slit his wrist to stay in Russia.
But idealists of course are unpredictable. They tend to be the ones who turn bitter overnight, deceived by lies they’ve told themselves. Men who defect for practical reasons are easier to manage and maintain. Money, sex, frustration, resentment, vanity. We understand and sympathize. We get close to the edge ourselves sometimes.
They’d been watching him since Helsinki, where he registered at the Tomi Hotel, moved to the cheaper Klaus Kurki, applied for a visa at the Soviet consulate, told a clerk in passing that he was an ex-Marine highly qualified in radar and electronics.
A walk-in. But not so sure of himself. Not certain how to go about it.
They made it easy for him to get in, providing a visa in forty-eight hours.
In Moscow his Intourist guide, Rimma Shirokova, reported his choicest remarks to the Fourth Section of the Seventh Department, where they were passed on to Kirilenko. Alek waited, let the low officials mix things up, let the boy pace his room; had him moved to a cheaper room; waited, waited.
There were one hundred and thirty listening devices in the U.S. embassy. In his combination safe Alek had a transcript of Oswald’s remarks about revealing military secrets. Through the efforts of a clerk in the consulate section he had a photograph of Oswald’s passport as well as a copy of a confidential telegram sent from AmEmb Moscow to the Department of State concerning the young man’s statement.
MAIN REASON “I AM MARXIST.” ATTITUDE ARROGANT AGGRESSIVE.
An easy case that left Alek wondering about Oswald’s procommunist career in the military. Didn’t U.S. intelligence pick this up? Wouldn’t they want to use his political sympathies to find out what they could about the people he contacted, about KGB recruitment methods, agent training? They would turn him when it suited their purpose. That’s when he would tell them everything he’d learned, just as he was telling us.
Does Mother Russia want this boy? He was useful as a radar specialist at a U.S. base. What do we do with him here? Is it conceivable we might send him to the building on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, where he would be trained, genuinely educated, in Marx and Lenin, microphotography and secret writing, Russian and English, rebuilt so to speak, given a new identity, sent back to the West as an illegal?
That’s what they all want, isn’t it, these people who live in corners inside themselves, in blinds and hidey-holes? A second and safer identity. Teach us how to live, they say, as someone else.
The test results were in and only his urine got a passing grade. He tended toward emotional instability. Tended toward erratic behavior. Had some form of dyslexia or word-blindness. Scored fairly well in physical sciences, low in most other categories. The polygraph was more or less chaotic but then it almost always is. Inconclusive owing to various factors. Maybe the boy was scared.
An easy case—send him home—except that Alek had a quota. There was pressure to handle a certain number of recruitments, turn up beautiful information (or make it up yourself). The vital take was the U-2 data, which Alek did not wholly trust. Eighty thousand feet? Ninety thousand feet? Nothing flies that high. Fly to ninety thousand feet, you see the souls of the dead in rings of white light. The men who’d debriefed Oswald on the weather plane were officers of the GRU, military intelligence, and they hadn’t officially pronounced on the data they’d been given. What could they say? If the boy was word-blind, couldn’t he be number-blind as well?
Alek sat in the swooping chair.
A number of dangers cling to the slim figure of this Lee H. Oswald, an innocent who wanders into the outer rings of the Center, leaving thoughtful men to speculate. Are the Americans monitoring his progress? Would they let him fall into our arms if they thought he knew important things? Ats
ugi is a key base. There are reports from Hanna Braunfels, dredged from the files of the Seventh Department (Japan, India, etc.) of the First Chief Directorate. In a sense we have already gone too far with the boy, exposed too many of our methods. Despite all the tests and interviews, we may know less about him than he knows about us. In some office in the Pentagon, they are waiting to pick his brains.
Alek was paid to drive himself crazy.
One thing the tests confirmed. This was not agent material. You want self-command and mettle, a steadiness of will. This boy played Ping-Pong in his head. But Alek liked him and would arrange something decent. Has to be far from Moscow. A place where there are no foreign journalists, no chance to use him for propaganda. Give him a nice apartment, a well-paying job, a sweet subsidy in the name of the Red Cross—incentives to remain in this country. Alek had every reason to believe that Lee H. Oswald would eventually be given Soviet citizenship, become a genuine Marxist and contented worker, go to lectures and mass gymnastics, fit in, find his place in history, or geography, or whatever he was looking for. A true-blue Oswaldovich.
Still, he would recommend that surveillance be maintained, indefinitely, wherever the boy was sent.
Lee was not sure if this official was one of the men he’d seen before. There’d been so many, in the same dark suit.
The official told him he was not yet being considered for Soviet citizenship. Instead he was given Identity Document for Stateless Persons Number 311479. It was, anyway, a nice-looking piece of paper.
The official told him he was being sent to the city of Minsk. The official pronounced the name with a devastating clarity, as if moved by a painful ringing in his teeth.
Oswald cracked a little joke. “Is that in Siberia?”
The official laughed, shook the American’s hand, then clapped him hard between the shoulder blades and sent him out into the snow.
The next day the Red Cross gave him five thousand rubles, which just about knocked him flat.
One day later Lee H. Oswald, with a just-shaved look, set out by train for this place Minsk. Seven hours out of Moscow he caught twenty minutes’ sleep on a wooden bunk with a rented mattress and pillow. Then he ate meat pie and drank tea and could not recall a meal that tasted better. The land was forested here, silent and white in the Russian dusk.
2 July
David Ferrie drove the Rambler south past chemical plants where waste gas flared yellow and red. Farther on he saw oystermen’s shacks in the windy distances, set on stilts above the marsh grass. He reached a place called Wading Point, the country retreat of Carmine Latta. He went past the Dead End sign, past the No Trespassing sign, waved to three men conferring on a lawn, then turned onto a dirt road. Men were always conferring at Wading Point. He’d see them clustered at the door of one of the outbuildings or seated in a car on a rutted lane, four large men crowded into some nephew’s VW, absorbed in serious talk.
The hunched bearing, the repetitive gestures, the set jaws and fixed regard, the economy of the group, the formal air of exclusion, bodies leaning inward toward a center.
Ferrie understood the gestalt of serious talks. He’d studied psychology through the mail with Italian masters. This was long before Eastern Airlines fired him for moral turpitude and for making false claims about a medical background. As if a degree could solve the riddle of Comrade Cancer. They took away his uniform for good.
He drove to an old lodge in the swampy bottoms where Carmine liked to relax with the boys. Four of the boys were roasting a goat on a spit outside the lodge, which was weathered past the point of rustic charm, with swallows’ nests mud-stuck to the eaves. Ferrie parked in the shade and went inside. The white-haired man, bright-eyed, veined, ancient, was sitting on a sofa, drink in hand. He was frail and spotted, with the drawn and thievish look of a figure in a ducal portrait. There were times, entering his presence, when Ferrie experienced a deferential awe so complete that he found himself becoming part of the other man’s consciousness, seeing the world, the room, the dynamics of power as Carmine Latta saw them.
Carmine ran the slots. Carmine had prostitutes from here to Bossier City, a place where you could get a social disease leaning on a lamppost. There were casinos, betting parlors, drug traffic. Carmine had a third of the Cuban dope before Castro. Now he had a shrimp fleet making deliveries from Central America. There was a billion dollars a year in total business. Carmine had motels, banks, juke boxes, vending machines, shipbuilding, oil leasing, sightseeing buses. There were state officials drinking bourbon sours in his box at the racetrack. The story was he funneled half a million cash to the Nixon campaign in September 1960. What the boys call a tremendous envelope.
“My friend David W. Ferrie. What’s the W. for?”
“Wet my whistle,” Ferrie said.
Carmine laughed and pointed at the liquor cabinet. The third man in the room was Tony Astorina, driver and bodyguard, occasional courier, known as Tony Push for obscure reasons. He and Carmine were reminiscing grimly about the Attorney General. Robert Kennedy was an obsessive topic of conversation wherever Carmine settled for ten minutes. Carmine had grudges. Ferrie could see the Bobby Kennedy grudge come to life in his eyes, a determined rage, but fine and precise, carefully formed, as if the lean old face held a delicate secret within it, one last and solemn calculation.
“So what I’m saying,” Astorina said, “the whole thing goes back to Cuba. You look at everything today, the Justice Department, the pressure they’re putting. If the boys took out Castro when they were supposed to, we wouldn’t have a situation like this here.”
“That’s half true,” Carmine said. “We would have leeway, with Cuba back in the firm. The value of Cuba, you use it to relieve pressure on the mainland. But the fact is nobody ever gave the Castro matter their full attention. We weren’t very sincere.”
They all laughed at that.
“Removing Castro was strictly a CIA daydream. The boys in Florida just strung them along. They were looking to keep the prosecutors off their back. They could always claim they were serving their country. And it worked. The CIA backed them up constantly.”
“I still say everything goes back to Cuba.”
“All right. But we’re realistic people. We don’t do tricks with mirrors and false bottoms. The styles don’t match.”
Ferrie wasn’t surprised to hear them talking about delicate subjects in his presence. He did research on legal matters for Carmine and knew a great deal about his holdings and operations. He also knew the answers to some touchy questions.
Why did Carmine hate Bobby Kennedy in such a personal way, right down to the sound of his crackling Boston voice?
In early 1961 Carmine walks out of his modest house outside New Orleans and sees he is being followed by FBI. They tail his car, eat lunch at an adjoining table, photograph his movements to and from his office, above a movie theater in Gretna. It is the beginning of a campaign of total relentless surveillance carried out at the direction of the Attorney General. In March they go to Las Vegas with him, take his picture in hotels and casinos, come back with him, camp outside his house, photograph his family, the neighbors, the mailman, the boy who delivers groceries. In April they go to church with his wife and his niece, play with his great-granddaughter in a supermarket and shoot movies of his sister’s funeral. It is Carmine’s personal Bay of Pigs, coinciding in time with the better-publicized one. Although there is public ruckus here as well. Sightseers come to the street where he lives to watch the FBI watching Carmine. There are traffic jams, skirmishes with the boys. It goes on for close to a year. These men are in his face day and night. It is the systematic humiliation of a senior citizen in front of his family, his neighbors and his business associates. And that little Bobby son of a bitch is calling every shot.
Carmine said, “The CIA comes up with exotic poisons one after another. They all end up in the toilets of South Florida.”
“But if we want to clip this Castro,” Tony said.
“The word is fea
sible or not feasible. We don’t go on fools’ errands.” He stared at the glass in his hand. “Then there’s the other theory why Castro’s still alive. One of our people in Florida made a deal with him.”
Tony Astorina stood against the wall across the room. Ferrie saw in him the ruins of a certain kind of grace. He was one of those nervy sharp-dressing kids who wake up at age forty, ruefully handsome, with a wife, three babies and a liver condition, the adolescent luck and charm lost in mounting body fat. He’d worked his way from the floor of the gaming room at the Riviera in Havana. Ferrie thought he’d probably built some corpses in order to be standing where he was now.
Tony said, “Speaking of Cuba, a couple of weeks ago I dream I’m swimming on the Capri roof with Jack Ruby. The next day I’m on Bourbon Street, who do I fucking see? You talk about coincidence. ”
“We don’t know what to call it, so we say coincidence. It goes deeper,” Ferrie said. “You’re a gambler. You get a feeling about a horse, a poker hand. There’s a hidden principle. Every process contains its own outcome. Sometimes we tap in. We see it, we know. I used to run into Jack Ruby now and then. What was he doing in New Orleans?”
“Shopping for dancers. There’s a girl at the Sho-Bar he’s salivating. ”
“I was making leaflet runs in a light plane out of the Keys. A little while after Castro came in. I saw Ruby in Miami once or twice. ”
“Stop-offs,” Tony said.
“He was running cash or arms or something.”
“He was buying people out of Cuban jails.”
Ferrie was drinking scotch and soda, same as Carmine. He was watching Carmine. They shook their glasses simultaneously, rattling the cubes. The old man’s hands were long and thin. His ears were tufted with snowy hair. Ferrie smelled the roasting goat.
Tony Push said, “I remember I seen a picture six, seven months ago in a magazine. Anti-aircraft guns outside the Riviera. Dug in right in the street. Which comes a long way from what we had there. A whole city to pluck like a fruit.”