Libra - Don Delillo [143]
Ferrie looked out the window. On the wall next to him was a picture of Jesus with eyes that track the person passing by. Ferrie’s voice coming in a whisper now.
“Then there’s the theory about high altitudes. Hair falling out so suddenly and completely. Exposure to high altitudes. Pilots have been afflicted, men who spent too much time at ultra-high altitudes, like U-2 pilots.”
● “Did you ever fly a U-2?”
“I can’t tell you that. It’s the deepest secret in the government, the names of men who fly those planes. But let me ask you a question, speaking of secrets. Why’do you want a job doing undercover work for the anti-Castro movement when it’s clear to me that you’re a Castro partisan, a soldier for Fidel?”
He turned away from the window and looked directly at Lee, who found the only way to answer was his funny little smile.
That was how it started. Lee sat many nights on the screened porch cleaning the Mannlicher, working the bolt on the Mannlicher, after midnight, formulating plans.
He’d learned from the Militant that he could get a visa to Cuba in Mexico City, evading the travel ban. He could work for the revolution as a military adviser. An old and deep ambition. They would be happy to have an ex-Marine with progressive ideas.
He collected correspondence and put it in the spare room with all his other papers, with Castro speeches and booklets on socialist theory.
He handed out leaflets on the Dumaine Street wharf and talked to a dozen sailors about Fair Play for Cuba. A port policeman came and ordered him off.
Ferrie let him play both sides. Banister gave him a small office at 544 to store material. He hardly talked to Banister. Banister gave the impression of being hard to talk to. Lee stamped the Camp Street address on some of his material. They let him come and go.
A crazy summer. Storms shaking the city almost every afternoon. Heat lightning at night. Clouds of mosquitoes blowing in from the salt marshes. As weeks passed he sensed a change around him. People at 544 began to regard him differently—the Cubans who came and went, the young men who posed as Tulane students to collect information on left-wingers and integrationists. Lee was becoming less a curiosity or puzzle. He felt he walked in a special light. They were looking at him carefully now.
Banister’s secretary thought his first name was Leon. Ferrie started calling him Leon, after Trotsky. Mistakes have this way of finding a sweet meaning.
The First Lady was pregnant, just like Marina. He read somewhere that the President liked James Bond novels. He went to the branch library on Napoleon Avenue, a little one-story brick building, and took out some Bond novels. He read that the President had acquainted himself with works by Mao Tse-tung and Che Guevara. He went to the library and got a biography of Mao. He got a biography of the President which said that Kennedy had read The White Nile. He went to the library to get The White Nile but it was out. He took The Blue Nile instead.
John F. Kennedy was a sometime poor speller with miserable handwriting.
He sat on the porch in his basketball shorts reading science fiction recommended by Ferrie. He dry-fired the Mannlicher. He still had the textbook from his typing class in Dallas and he sat some nights with the book open to a diagram of a typewriter keyboard. He practiced fingering the letters in alphabetical order—a with the left pinky, b with the left index finger, tapping the page repeatedly without looking down, as he’d been taught in class.
Marina said, “Papa, there is garbage.”
He hung out at the Crescent City garage, which was next door to the coffee company where he worked. He came in wearing his electrician’s belt with grease gun, screwdriver, pliers, friction