Libra - Don Delillo [27]
“That whole thing ended horribly,” George said, “if I can actually say it has ended.”
“I think you can say that.”
“This administration still bullies Castro. It’s ridiculous and unnecessary. I’ll go even further. This whole administration revolves around the floating cinder of little communist Cuba. It’s something of a joke, Larry, and I say this knowing which side of the Cuban fence you are on. Of course this is your job and I respect it.”
“This was my job. I’m doing strictly support work now.”
“I would like to believe the administration has no more designs on Cuba.”
“Believe it, George. The missile crisis was resolved with the understanding that we wouldn’t invade Cuba. Kennedy had the chance to get rid of Castro and he ends up guaranteeing the man’s job. There is widespread lack of interest right now. Commitment to this issue is absolutely nil. The administration went from passionate and total dedication to an attitude of complete aloofness and indifference and they did it in goddamn record time.”
“It’s the American disease,” George said with a warm smile.
De Mohrenschildt was a petroleum engineer by profession but didn’t seem to spend much time at it. He was on his fourth wife, Larry knew, and they tended to be women from wealthy families. But his marriages didn’t explain his apparent association with Nazis in World War II, his apparent ties to Polish and French intelligence, his expulsion from Mexico, his apparent communist leanings when he was at the University of Texas, his Soviet contacts in Venezuela, the discrepancies in his stated history, his travels in West Africa, Central America, Yugoslavia and Cuba.
George had a tendency to be detained or shot at for sketching coastal installations in strategic areas.
But he knew Jackie Kennedy or her parents or someone in the family, and he spent time at the Racquet Club when he was in New York, and he was technically entitled to call himself a baron. It was part of George’s attractiveness that he continually emerged from a different past.
“When do you leave Washington?”
“I go to New York tomorrow, then back to Dallas.”
“I thought Dallas was Walker country,” Larry said. “Who’s taking potshots at the general?”
“He’s a complete fascist degenerate, this man Walker. A very dangerous man with his racism, his anti-Castro crusades. This is what I mean about Cuba. Cuba stirs up the worst kind of American obsession. Here is a general who is relieved of his command for preaching right-wing politics, who leads a racist campaign in Mississippi, who is put in the loony bin, who settles down in Dallas where we see him in the papers every day with his John Birch Society nonsense and his Cuban tirades. Raw hate, Larry. Two men died in Mississippi because of Walker’s provocations. He’s a little Hitler plain and simple.”
“You sound as though you’d like to take a crack at him yourself.”
“I’m telling you, I wouldn’t mind. As a matter of fact, I think I know who tried to kill him.”
A waiter plunged after a dropped spoon.
“A boy I know in Dallas,” George said. “I call him a boy. Maybe he’s twenty-two, twenty-three. Now that I’m past fifty, they all look like boys and girls. But as long as the boys don’t look like girls and vice versa.”
“What got him interested in Walker?”
“The easy answer is politics. In 1959, an ex-Marine, what does he do? He defects to the Soviet Union. They send him to a factory in Minsk. Disillusionment sets in, of course, and back he comes. Naturally the Agency is interested. Domestic Contacts asks me to talk to the boy.”
“A friendly debriefing.”
“Exactly. I’m to take the fatherly approach. Find out what he saw, heard, smelled and tasted. It wasn’t long before we started to like each other. In fact I think my own feelings about General Walker may have influenced Lee to take a shot at him.”
“But you’re not absolutely sure.”
“Not absolutely.”
“He hasn’t said he did it.”
“He hasn’t said anything. But there were indications, certain signs, an atmosphere, you know? Plus a curious photograph he sent me. I’m frankly