Libra - Don Delillo [29]
One week later, in Miami Beach, police find the body of Carlos Prío Socarrás, former President of Cuba, millionaire gunrunner, linked by an informer to Jack Ruby. The body sits in a chair, a pistol nearby. Ruled a suicide.
David William Ferrie, the professional pilot, amateur researcher in cancer, anti-Castro militant, is found dead in his apartment in New Orleans in February 1967, five days after his name is linked in the press to the assassination of the President. Natural causes, says the coroner, but some people wonder how Ferrie had time to type a farewell note to a friend in the middle of a brain hemorrhage. (“Thus I die alone and unloved.”) Among his possessions are three blank passports, a one-hundred-pound bomb, a number of rifles, bayonets and flare guns and a complete library of books and other materials, as of that date, on the Kennedy assassination.
Eladio del Valle, a friend of David Ferrie and head of the Free Cuba Committee, is found dead the same day, in a car in Miami, shot several times in the chest at point-blank range, his head split open by an ax. No arrests in the case.
The documents are stacked everywhere. Branch has homicide reports and autopsy diagrams. He has the results of spectographic tests on bullet fragments. He has reports by acoustical consultants and experts in blur analysis. He studies blurs himself, stooped over photos taken in Dealey Plaza by people who thought they were there to see the head of state come riding nicely by. He has a magnifier. He has detailed maps of photographers’ lines of sight.
The Curator sends transcripts of closed committee hearings. He sends documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, other documents withheld from ordinary investigators or heavily censored. He sends new books all the time, each with a gleaming theory, supportable, assured. This is the room of theories, the room of growing old. Branch wonders if he ought to despair of ever getting to the end.
The FBI’s papers on the assassination are here, one hundred and twenty-five thousand pages, no end of dread and woe. The Curator sends new material on Oswald’s stay in Russia, gathered from a KGB defector (not the first such defector to offer a version of events). There is new material on Everett and Parmenter, on Ramón Benítez, Frank Vásquez, Data trickling down the years. Water dripping into his brain pan. There is 544 Camp Street in New Orleans, the most notorious address in the chronicles of the assassination. The building is long gone and the site is an urban renewal plaza now. The Curator sends recent photos and Branch understands that he must study them, although they do not pertain to the case. There are granite benches, brick paving, a piece of sculpture with a subsidized look about it, called “Out of There.”
Branch must study everything. He is in too deep to be selective.
He sits under a lap robe and worries. The truth is he hasn’t written all that much. He has extensive and overlapping notes—notes in three-foot drifts, all these years of notes. But of actual finished prose, there is precious little. It is impossible to stop assembling data. The stuff keeps coming. There are theories to evaluate, lives to ponder and mourn. No one at CIA has asked to see the work in progress. Not a chapter, a page, a word of it. Branch is on his second Curator, his sixth DCI. Since 1973, when he first set to work, he has seen Schlesinger, Colby, Bush, Turner, Casey and Webster occupy the Director’s chair. Branch doesn’t know whether these men were told that someone is writing a secret history of the assassination. Maybe no one knows except the Curator and two or three others in the Historical Intelligence Collection at CIA. Maybe it is the history no one will read.
T. J. Mackey stood across the street from the shabby three-story building where Guy Banister’s detective agency was located. His light-brown hair was cut close and he wore a sport shirt and sunglasses, the shirt tight