Libra - Don Delillo [131]
Marina and Lee came to the door. George said to Lee in his biggest voice, “So my friend. How come you missed that son of a bitch?”
He waited for the sure laugh. But they retreated to the living room. There was a shrinking in the air. Obviously the joke was not so funny in this household.
He handed over the Easter bunny and told them he was going to Haiti, long-term business, let’s keep in touch.
He watched Lee’s face change. He felt bad about that. He was leaving the boy without someone to go to with his ideas and his troubles. Marina went to the kitchen to make tea and George talked in her general direction about his vision of Haiti. Hotels, casinos, hydroelectric plants, food-processing plants. Lee sat on the sofa. His peculiar smile appeared, the little smirk that made George think of a comedian in a silent film with the screen going dark around his head.
“So someone finally smiles. It’s a very delayed reaction. I walk in the door with a joke, no one makes a sound. I think I’m in the valley of lost souls. Now I see a smile peeping out. What is so amusing? Please. Inform me.”
“I sent you a picture,” Lee said.
“What picture?”
“It’s the kind of picture a person looks at and maybe he understands something he didn’t understand before.”
“Sounds mysterious,” George said.
“Maybe he sees the truth about someone.”
Driving home George thought about the heavy schedule of appointments he had in New York and Washington, preparing the way for various aspects of the Haitian venture. He had the Bureau of Mines, Lehman Trading, Chase Manhattan, Manufacturers Hanover Trust, the Pentagon, the ICA, the CIA. The last in fact was strictly social, lunch with an old Agency friend, Larry Parmenter, a Bay of Pigs character but otherwise decent and amusing, a chap who knew his wines.
He sat at his desk opening and reading three days of mail. He came to the envelope addressed by Lee Oswald. Just a snapshot inside. It showed Lee dressed in black, holding a rifle in one hand, some newspapers in the other. Am I interested or bored, thought George. He looked at the reverse side. It was inscribed To my friend George from Lee Oswald.
George checked the postmark on the envelope. April 9. One day before the attempt on General Walker.
He looked at the second inscription. This was in Russian, clearly in Marina’s handwriting and evidently written without Lee’s knowledge, sneaked in before he sealed and mailed the envelope—a private message from the wife of the poseur to the sophisticated older friend.
Hunter of fascists—ha ha ha!!!
6 September
Wayne Elko sat at the window of a shotgun shack in the bayous west of New Orleans. There was no glass in the windows, just dusty plastic stripping, and he looked at three blurry men taking target practice in a mixed stand of cypress and willow.
There were other shacks in the area, here and there, used by weekenders who came out frogging and crawfishing.
Early mist. The gunfire sounded small and distant, little pop-gun compressions in the heavy air.
David Ferrie, a magnetic presence, a humorous master of games, was shooting at tin cans with a .22.
The swag-belly Cuban, Raymo, had a modified Winchester he liked to break down and reassemble, running a patch through the bore, sandpapering the stock.
The third man, named Leon, worked the bolt on an ancient carbine; sighted, fired, worked the bolt.
This was a new and hastily assembled camp, Ferrie explained, which is why the lack of creature comforts. The regular setup was at Lacombe, nearer New Orleans, where a number of anti-Castro factions had trained in guerrilla tactics until federal agents raided, grabbing a huge store of dynamite and bomb casings. This project would be kept small and restricted. Speak to no one. Respect the environment. Wait for the moment.
Wayne thought these were rules that verged on mystical.
He knew they weren’t here just to fire weapons. T-Jay wanted them