Libra - Don Delillo [136]
Oswald even looks like different people from one photograph to the next. He is solid, frail, thin-lipped, broad-featured, extroverted, shy and bank-clerkish, all, with the columned neck of a fullback. He looks like everybody. In two photos taken in the military he is a grim killer and a baby-face hero. In another photo he sits in profile with a group of fellow Marines on a rattan mat under palm trees. Four or five men face the camera. They all look like Oswald. Branch thinks they look more like Oswald than the figure in profile, officially identified as him.
The Oswald shadings, the multiple images, the split perceptions—eye color, weapons caliber—these seem a foreboding of what is to come. The endless fact-rubble of the investigations. How many shots, how many gunmen, how many directions? Powerful events breed their own network of inconsistencies. The simple facts elude authentication. How many wounds on the President’s body? What is the size and shape of the wounds? The multiple Oswald reappears. Isn’t that Ann in a photograph of a crowd of people on the front steps of the Book Depository just as the shooting begins? A startling likeness, Branch concedes. He concedes everything. He questions everything, including the basic suppositions we make about our world of light and shadow, solid objects and ordinary sounds, and our ability to measure such things, to determine weight, mass and direction, to see things as they are, recall them clearly, be able to say what happened.
He takes refuge in his notes. The notes are becoming an end in themselves. Branch has decided it is premature to make a serious effort to turn these notes into coherent history. Maybe it will always be premature. Because the data keeps coming. Because new lives enter the record all the time. The past is changing as he writes.
Every name takes him on a map tour of the Dallas labyrinth.
Jack Ruby was born Jacob Rubenstein. He adopted the middle name Leon to honor the memory of a friend, Leon Cooke, shot to death in a labor dispute.
There are several versions of George de Mohrenschildt’s name. He sometimes used the alias Philip Harbin.
Carmine Latta was born Carmelo Rosario Lattanzi.
Walter Everett used the cover name Thomas R. Stainback during his years in clandestine work.
Lee Oswald used about a dozen names including the backward-running O. H. Lee and the peculiar D. F. Drictal. He employed the latter in the blank space for Witness when he filled out an order form for the revolver he purchased through the mail. Branch has toiled over the inner structure of D. F. Drictal for many an hour. He feels like a child with alphabet blocks, trying to make a pretty word, and he has managed to find fragments of the names Fidel, Castro, Oswald and Dupard. It may be that D. F. Drictal is the strained merging of written and living characters, of words and politics, a witness to the decision to assassinate General Walker. Branch wonders whether Oswald registered the fact that the general’s first name and middle initial match those of Edwin A. Ekdahl, young Lee’s stepfather for a time and the man Marguerite Oswald never stopped blaming.
The Dallas disc jockey known as Weird Beard was Russell Lee Moore, who also used the name Russ Knight.
The man calling himself Aleksei Kirilenko, a KGB cover name, was in fact Sergei Broda, according to records supplied by the Curator.
After repeated requests, Branch has learned from the Curator that Theodore J. Mackey, known as T-Jay, was born Joseph Michael Horniak and was last seen in Norfolk, Virginia, January 1964, in the company of a suspected prostitute, possibly of Asian extraction, name unknown.
Mackey sat in the car listening to Frank Vásquez. Frank was excited and tired. He said everything three times and quoted Alpha leaders completely, precisely and with gestures. The two men were surrounded by swamp night, the car sitting downstream from the shack, lights off, the banjo frogs getting up a racket.
Frank’s judgment was that Alpha planned