Libra - Don Delillo [125]
“Who is the shooter?”
“I am,” Oswald said.
“You sure about that. ”
“I am the one that does it.”
“If it’s the seventeenth, I have to see if there’s class.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a question do I want to cut class.”
“I will need an accomplice, Bobby. This is not just walk in and shoot him. The house is located in such a way. There’s an alley. We may need a car.”
“I can get a car. I can always borrow a car. I don’t know about dependable running. Just so we put him on the ground. That man got to taste some blood.”
“They have a phrase they use in Russian for assassinations that involve blood being spilled. Mokrie dela. Which is wet affairs. Like the ice pick they used on Trotsky.”
“Just so we do it to him,” Bobby said.
They moved to Neely Street, nearby, another furnished apartment, two rooms in a frame house with a concrete porch and a balcony with sagging posts. They could put out flowerpots and pretend it’s Minsk. There was a small additional room, the size of a walk-in closet, where Lee could work on his notebook and keep his correspondence and other writings.
They moved their belongings in Junie’s stroller. They made six or seven trips, dishes, baby things, letters from Russia. Lee made the last trip alone, pushing the stroller west on Neely wearing most of the clothes he owned, to save another trip.
The little room could be entered from the living room and from the staircase outside their flat. Both doors could be locked from inside. It was like an airtight compartment, part of the building but also separate from it. He called the room his study. He squeezed a lamp table and chair in there and set to work on his notes for the death of the general.
He began taking photographs of Walker’s house. He had a box camera he carried in a paper bag on the bus back and forth. He photographed the lattice fence behind the house, the alleyway that extended from the parking lot of the Mormon church to Avondale Street. He took some pictures of the railroad tracks where he could hide the gun if necessary.
There is a world inside the world.
He made detailed notes on the location of windows at the rear of the house. He studied maps of Dallas. He put the finishing touches on the false documents he’d made after hours at work. When the Hidell gun arrived at the post office, he’d have Hidell identification to claim the package. He did the typing for the documents on his machine at school.
He felt good about having Dupard behind him. Downtrodden. Dupard was the force of history, the show of a solid front against the far-right surge.
He used Hidell again, March 12, sending a money order for $21.45 to Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago for a 6.5-millimeter Italian military rifle, the Mannlicher-Carcano, equipped with a four-power scope.
The rain fell on empty streets.
What a sense of destiny he had, locked in the miniature room, creating a design, a network of connections. It was a second existence, the private world floating out to three dimensions.
He went to a gun shop and bought an ammunition clip that would fit the Mannlicher, so he could fire up to seven rounds before reloading.
Rain-slick streets. He walked to the speed wash and talked excitedly with Dupard about the logic of a long-range shot, given the layout of the house and grounds. Then he let himself back into the study and no one even knew he’d been gone.
He stood barefoot in the living room in his pajamas, working the bolt. He jerked the handle, brought the bolt rearward, then drove it forward, jerking the handle down. He turned up the handle, drew the bolt back, drove it forward, jerking the handle down. He turned toward the mirror over the sofa. He jerked the bolt handle, drew the bolt back, then drove it forward, jerking the handle down.
Marina was out at the store. Junie sat in the high chair near the window, rolling a marble back and forth across the tray.
There was a yard behind the house, a small dirt enclosure with a couple of forsythia shrubs. A clothesline ran parallel to the back fence and Marina stood