Libra - Don Delillo [26]
“I have to pick up Suzanne.”
“I’ll finish this, he said.
“Don’t you have a class?”
“Canceled.”
“I want to stop at Penney’s for a couple of things.”
“We should all stop at Penney’s.”
“No but just some things I’ve been meaning to get. We won’t be long.”
“Penney’s is home to us all.”
“The light bulbs are stacked in the back stairway.”
“She reads my mind. She remembers for me.”
“I won’t be long,” she said.
Parmenter would tell him in advance if there were plans for JFK to return to Miami. Sooner or later the President would venture out with his train of attendants, protectors, handshakers and hacks, a city, a street where he’d be vulnerable. Everett was willing to wait a year for Miami. The message would be clearest there, a long-range attempt, high-angled, telescopic, without the pointless human mess some madman would create, walking out of a crowd with the family handgun.
He followed Mary Frances to the door.
He would not consider the plan a success if the uncovering of its successive layers did not reveal the CIA’s schemes, his own schemes in some cases, to assassinate Fidel Castro. This was the little surprise he was keeping for the end. It was his personal contribution to an informed public. Let them see what goes on in the committee rooms and corner offices. The pocket litter, the gunman’s effects, the sidetrackings and back alleys must allow investigators to learn that Kennedy wanted Castro dead, that plots were devised, approved at high levels, put into motion, and that Fidel or his senior aides decided to retaliate. This was the major subtext and moral lesson of Win Everett’s plan.
The two men who shared a table in the Occidental Restaurant had certain physical similarities. Both were over six feet tall, expensively dressed, robust and athletic, men clearly at ease here, in the theater of the Kennedys, the capital city that measured itself to a certain kind of manliness, a confidence and promise, the grace to take the maximum dare.
Laurence Parmenter, perhaps five years the younger of the two, spoke in the slight whine of the educated Easterner, a way of drawing out syllables to express ironic self-regard.
The other man, George de Mohrenschildt, who lived in Dallas now, spoke English with a courtly foreign accent. He was not averse to being seen as the complete continental. This is what he was. A charming and worldly man able to converse fluently in Russian, English, French, Spanish, probably Togo as well, or whatever they spoke in Togoland. (Parmenter knew he had been there in 1958, posing as a stamp collector.) Larry liked the man. He’d known him for some years and was aware that George had been debriefed by the Agency after several trips abroad. But even though their business interests had overlapped once or twice, he wasn’t sure quite what George’s racket was.
“Then in May I go to Haiti,” de Mohrenschildt said.
“Do I dare ask?”
“Ask, by all means. I’m going there to find oil for the Haitians. They’re giving me a sisal plantation as a concession.”
“Do they need help finding sisal?”
“I believe it grows aboveground.”
They held their laughter.
“You turn up in interesting places, George.”
Now they laughed, remembering the same thing, the time Parmenter walked into a dental clinic in a remote town near the CIA air base in southwest Guatemala where the Bay of Pigs was being rehearsed by Cuban pilots and American advisers. Sitting in the shabby waiting room, in an alligator shirt and madras shorts, was George de Mohrenschildt, also known as Jerzy Sergius von Mohrenschildt. He was on a