Libra - Don Delillo [139]
The next evening he took her to the French Quarter and they rode the streetcar home. Tourists glanced at the Russian-speaking couple. Exotic New Orleans.
They made love on the small bed in the closed room. He had the feeling she wanted more, more of something, more of body, money, things, excitement, and he knew it in the technicalities of the act, in the breathing minutes, mysteriously.
He was paid a dollar fifty an hour to grease coffee machines. The maintenance man complained that he couldn’t read Lee’s notations in the greasing log. He complained that he couldn’t find Lee, that he had to go through the building top to bottom looking for him. Lee stuck out his index finger and raised his thumb, holding the pose for a moment. Then he dropped the thumb and went “Pow.”
The main library at Lee Circle was gone. He had to ask people where the new one was located. He walked north and then east and when he found the building he took a placard out of a manila envelope and unfolded it. The placard had a hole at either end with a string going through. He stood in front of the library with the placard strung around his neck and started handing out pamphlets he’d been receiving in the mail from the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
He wore a short-sleeve white shirt and dark tie. He’d written in crayon on the placard: Viva Fidel.
About a minute and a half later the Feebees pounced. A man came sauntering up showing the grin of a long-lost pal. His name was Agent Bateman.
“Seriously. I’m not here to arrest or harass you. Let’s find a place to sit and talk.”
They went to a sorry-looking diner near the Trailways station. It was late afternoon, a Saturday, and nobody was in the place. They sat at the counter and spent some time reading the bill of fare on the wall. Agent Bateman was probably younger than he looked at first glance, a man with a longish head, balding, like a high-school coach and science teacher in a TV series.
The only thing slick about him was his shoes, which were shined into the fourth dimension.
“We have you in our files at the field office here. I’m the fellow who keeps an eye.”
“You handle my file.”
“Ever since your defection. Queries come in, due to you were born here. ”
“I like the high old ceilings and the live oaks.”
“Is that why you’re back?”
“They talked to me once before. An Agent Freitag.”
“That was Fort Worth. I am New Orleans.”
“My Russian period is over. That was long ago. Why can’t I just live my life without someone coming around, coming around?”
“I have the theory, Hey, there’s nothing in the world that’s harder to do than live a straightforward life. I go so far to say there’s no such thing.”
“What do you want?” Lee said.
“Right now? A grilled-cheese sandwich with crisp bacon, which is impossible to get because they grill everything together and the cheese gets done before the bacon. It’s a law of physics. So you get pale bubbly bacon. I know about your correspondence with Fair Play for Cuba in New York and the Socialist Workers Party and so on. Routine mail intercepts. I could spend about four hours a day making your life miserable. Visit your place of work. Put out lead sheets to have you and your wife and your relatives interviewed and reinterviewed to the end of recorded time. ”
Lee still had the placard around his neck.
“Or I could sit you down and talk to you about our mutual interests. Like you want to carry on your political activities without being pestered on a daily basis.”
“And you want.”
“There is a crackdown in progress. This anti-Castro business has gotten out of hand. There’s a group called Alpha 66 that makes hit-and-run attacks on Soviet ships in Cuban ports. People in Washington are very unhappy. It’s an embarrassment to the administration, and they’re determined to stop it, and the Bureau has orders to gather intelligence