Libra - Don Delillo [105]
There was another man in the car, an Agent Mooney. Agent Freitag sat in the front seat with Mooney. Lee sat in back, leaving the rear door open. He thought of a word, Feebees, for FBI. It was dinnertime and sweltering.
“What this is, we want to know about your period of time in the Soviet Union,” Agent Freitag said. “And being back here, who has contacted you at any time that we should know about.”
“So if I have something sensitive I know about, they would want to hear it.”
“That’s correct.”
“I assemble ventilators. This is not a sensitive industry.”
“You would be surprised how many people link the name Oswald to turncoat and traitor.”
“Let me state I was never approached or volunteered to Soviet officials any information about my experiences while a member of the armed forces.”
“Why did you travel to the Soviet Union?”
“I don’t wish to relive the past. I just went.”
“That’s a long way to just go.”
“I don’t have to explain.”
“Are you a member of the Communist Party of the United States?”
“No.”
Agent Mooney took notes.
“Are you willing to talk to us hooked up to a polygraph?”
“No. Who told you where to find me?”
“It wasn’t hard.”
“But who told you?”
“We talked to your brother.”
“He told you where I live.”
“That’s correct,” Freitag said with some satisfaction. There was a line of beady glisten above his lip.
“Am I being put under surveillance?”
“Would I tell you if you were?”
“Because I was watched in Russia.”
“I thought everyone was watched in Russia.”
Agent Mooney laughed quietly, his head bobbing.,
“My wife is holding dinner,” Lee said.
“How is it you were able to get your wife out? They don’t let people out just by asking.”
“I made no arrangements with them to do anything.”
They covered several subjects. Then Freitag made a faint gesture to his partner, who put away his pen and notebook. There was a pause, a clear change in mood.
“What we are mainly concerned, if there are suspicious circumstances to inform us immediately of any contact.”
“You’re saying let you know.”
“We are asking cooperation if individuals along the lines of Marxist or communist.”
“I want to know if I’m being recruited as an informer.”
“We are asking cooperation.”
“So if someone contacts me.”
“That’s right.”
“I will inform the Bureau.”
“That’s correct.”
Lee said he would think about the matter. He got out of the car and closed the door. He glanced at the license plate as he walked behind the car on his way across the street and into the house. He wrote the license-plate number in his notebook along with Agent Freitag’s name. Then he looked up the Fort Worth FBI office in the phone directory and wrote that number in his book beneath the agent’s name and the license plate, just to have for the record, to build up the record.
Marina called him in to dinner.
He sat in a corner of the large room and watched them talk and eat. Their conversation had a munching sound. They milled and dodged, Russians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Georgians, Aimenians. It was an evening with the émigré colony, some of the twenty or thirty families in the Dallas—Fort Worth area, English-speaking, Russian-speaking, French-speaking, constantly comparing backgrounds and education. Baby June was in his lap.
Marina always looked her prettiest on these evenings. People gathered round, prodding her for news. She was recently arrived, of course, and some of them had come here decades ago, thirty years, forty years some of them. Her pure Russian impressed the old guard. She was small and frail. They pictured Soviet women as hammer-throwers, brawny six-footers who work in brick factories. She stood smoking, sipping wine. She wore the clothes they gave her. They gave her dresses and stockings, comfortable shoes. He had his book he could not afford to get typed sitting in a closet in a Carrollton Clasp envelope, notes on scraps