Libra - Don Delillo [186]
They set up a chant. “Let us see him, bring him down. Let us see him, bring him down.”
Hours going by. Blank faces arrayed against corridor walls. Men crouched near the elevators waiting. They sensed the incompleteness out there, gaps, spaces, vacant seats, lobbies emptied out, disconnections, dark cities, stopped lives. People were lonely for news. Only news could make them whole again, restore sensation. Three hundred reporters in a compact space, all pushing to extract a word. A word is a magic wish. A word from anyone. With a word they could begin to grid the world, make an instant surface that people can see and touch together. Ringing phones, near-brawls, smoke in their eyes, a deathliness, a hanging woe. Is Connally alive? Is Johnson safe? Has SAC gone to full alert? They began to feel isolated inside this old municipal lump of Texas gray granite. They were hearing their own reports on the radios and portable TVs. But what did they really know? The news was somewhere else, at Parkland Hospital or on Air Force One, in the mind of the prisoner on the fifth floor.
Someone said he’s coming. A kind of clustered stirring, like riled bees. Then formal jostling across the floor, a grab for position. When he appeared in the elevator door, a slight man in handcuffs, with a puffed eye and stubble, they went a little crazy. Stooped photographers moving backwards, hand mikes shooting out of the crowd, everybody shouting, reaching toward him. A howl, a passion washing through the corridor. Newsreel cameras floated over the heads of the men escorting him. They had to throw some elbows, working him toward the door of the interrogation room. One eye puffed, a cut over the other, his shirt hanging loose. He resembled a guy who comes out of a doorway to bum a smoke. But a protective defiance, an unyielding in his face. The flash units fired. TV floodlights cooked the nearest heads. The reporters stared and wailed. It was hard to breathe in the ruck around the prisoner. They looked at him. They all cried out.
“Why did you kill the President?”
“Why did you kill the President?”
He said he was being denied the right to take a shower. Denied his basic hygienic rights. The escorts worked him to the office door.
Questioned, arraigned, displayed in lineups. He felt the heat of the corridor mobs every time he got off the elevator, the actual roil of moist air. Assassin, assassin.
In his cell he thought about the ways he could play it. He could play it either way. It all depended on what they knew.
He had the middle cell in the maximum-security block in the jail area. They kept the cells on either side of him empty. There were two guards on constant watch in the locked corridor.
Every time they brought him back to the cell, they made him take off his clothes. He sat in the cell in his underwear. They were afraid he’d use his clothes to harm himself.
A bunk bed, a chipped sink, a sloped hole in the floor. No flush toilet. He had to use a hole.
They stared up his ass. They came and shaved some hair from his genitals, two men from the FBI, placing the samples carefully in plastic baggies.
The revolution must be a school of unfettered thought.
In the interrogation room there were Dallas police, Secret Service, FBI, Texas Rangers, county sheriffs, postal inspectors, a U.S. marshal. No tape recorder or stenographer.
No, he didn’t own a rifle.
No, he hadn’t shot anyone.
He was not the man in the photograph they’d found in Ruth Paine’s garage—the man with a rifle, a pistol and left-wing journals. The photograph was obviously doctored. They’d taken his head and superimposed it on someone else’s body. He told them he’d worked for a graphic-arts firm and had personal knowledge