Libra - Don Delillo [141]
“We’re okay,” Lee told him.
“You can carry on your politics in the open. That’s the charm of the thing. And you’re right around the corner from those people. Location-wise, it’s perfect.”
Lee took a bus down to Camp Street, the placard back in the envelope, and walked around the building several times. Streets in deep shade. No one around but winos in Lafayette Square and a woman in a long coat and heavy white socks who seemed upset that he was walking behind her. She stopped to let him pass, muttering urgently, her hand making a motion like hurry up.
Trotsky is the pure form.
The rear seat of an automobile lay in the middle of the sidewalk. A man coated in dirt and vomit was spread out there, one arm dangling, and he looked so sick or hurt or crazy it was not possible to enjoy the picture of a car seat without a car, plunked down on a sidewalk.
Trotsky brushing roaches off the page, reading economic theory in a hovel in eastern Siberia, exiled with his wife and baby girl.
On Monday, during his ten-minute break from work,, he went to 544 and got an application from a secretary. The building had two entrances, two addresses. One for who you are, one for who you say you are.
He bought a Warrior-brand rubber stamping kit for ninety-eight cents. He wrote to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, asking for a charter, and before getting a reply he went to a printer, said his name was Osborne and got a thousand handbills printed. Hands Off Cuba! He stamped some with his own name, some with Hidell. Then he rented a post-office box, went to another printer, ordered application forms and membership cards. He got Marina to forge the signature A. J. Hidell in the space for chapter president and sent two honorary memberships to officials of the Central Committee, Communist Party U.S.A.
He went out in his gold shorts and thong sandals at midnight, dumping garbage in other people’s cans, sometimes ranging three or four blocks before he found a can with room to spare for one more bag of bones and slop.
When he took the filled-out application back to Guy Banister Associates he saw a man at the building entrance who looked familiar. It was Captain Ferrie, the Civil Air Patrol instructor, the man who kept mice in a cage in his hotel room back about seven years ago, Lee recalled, when he and his friend Robert were tracking down a .22 for sale. Lee drew closer and saw there was something very different about the man. He seemed to have tufts of fur glued to his head, like handfuls of animal hair just pasted on. His eyebrows were high and shiny.
Ferrie seemed to be expecting him.
“You were in the office yesterday or day before. Am I right?”
“I was applying for a job part-time.”
“Undercover work. I heard your voice. I said to myself I know that voice. Another lost cadet come back to Cap’n Dave.”
They laughed, standing in the entranceway. A car stopped suddenly and pigeons fired up from the square across the street.
“Isn’t life fantastic?” Ferrie said.
The Fair Play Committee discouraged him from opening a branch office. But they were nice and polite and made spelling mistakes and anyway the important thing was the correspondence itself. He would keep everything. These were his papers. When the time came he would be able to present Cuban officials with documentary proof that he was a friend of the revolution.
Besides he didn’t need New York’s backing to open an office. He had his rubber stamping kit. All he had to do was stamp the committee’s initials on a handbill or piece of literature. Stamp some numbers and letters. This makes it true.
David Ferrie took him to the Habana Bar, a gloom palace near the waterfront. Open round the clock, Latin rhythms on the juke box, people with a look about them of chronic absenteeism, some failure to cohere—exiles, cargo handlers, seamen without papers, half a dozen amorphous others, mainly solitary men sitting well spaced at the long bar.
Ferrie and Oswald took a table.
“The man who runs this place is involved with