Libra - Don Delillo [30]
He was watching someone on Camp Street, a rattled old woman, an outcast in a long coat and white ankle socks, one of the lost bodies of New Orleans this uneasy spring of 1963, already too hot, too heavy and wet. He was interested in the way she kept adjusting her pace as she walked down the street. She slowed down to let others get ahead of her. In a wary crouch she moved along the wall at number 544, swinging an arm out to wave people on. She wanted everybody up ahead, where she could see them all.
Mackey enjoyed this. He’d been in the city over a week now and had seen many a jumpy drunk but no one with this kind of paranoid wit.
Around were old warehouses and coffee-roasting plants, fifty-cent-a-night hotels. Over the original entranceway at 544, bricked up now, he could make out an inscription: Stevedores and Longshoremens Building. He crossed the street and went in. The offices of Guy Banister Associates were on the second floor. Banister was at his desk,. a tough and somber man in his sixties. Twenty years in the FBI, deputy superintendent of the New Orleans police, a member of the John Birch Society and the Minutemen. He opened a bottom drawer when Mackey walked in. Invitation to a drink. T-Jay waved it off and took a chair.
“You don’t drink with me. You don’t tell me where the hell you’re staying.”
“I leave tomorrow.”
“Where to?”
“The Farm.”
“Must be a great life, showing kids from Swarthmore how to break a chinaman’s neck.”
“It’s an assignment.”
“It’s a fucking shame, that’s what it is, T-Jay, a man like you, who risked his life. This Kennedy, he has things to answer for. First he launches an invasion without adequate air support, then he makes the movement pay for it. He’s got people raiding our guerrilla bases, seizing arms shipments all over.”
“What am I here for? You’ve had time, Guy.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“You’ve got more guns than the Mexican army.”
“There’s priorities,” Banister said. “It’s looking like a busy summer we got coming.”
“I’ll need to see some money. Upkeep, monthly payments, a healthy severance.”
“How many men?”
“Let’s say several. Plus I may need a pilot.”
“He’ll walk in the door in ten minutes.”
“Goddamn.”
“Calm down.”
“Not him.”
“Never mind appearances or what he says for effect. Ferrie’s a capable son of a bitch. He can fly a plane backwards. He has first-rate contacts. He does work for Carmine Latta’s lawyer. He goes out to Latta’s house and comes back with money in fucking duffel bags. It’s all for the cause. He can lease a small plane, no questions asked, no records kept. Right now I’ve got him looking for a C-47 which I want to use to ship explosives out of here.”
Banister opened the desk drawer again, took out a fifth of Early Times and reached back to snatch two coffee mugs from a shelf.
“I’m sending select items to one of our staging areas in the Keys,” he said. “Rifle grenades, land mines, dynamite, antitank guns, mortar shells. Listen to this: canisters of napalm.”
Mackey noted the look in that silvery eye. Banister’s rage toward the administration was partly a reaction to public life itself, to men who glow in the lens barrel of a camera. Kennedy magic, Kennedy charisma. His hatred had a size to it, a physical force. It was the thing that kept him going after career disappointments, bad health, a forced retirement. Mackey briefly met his eye. So many meanings crowded in, memories, sadnesses, convictions, lost Cuba, Cuba to come—a moment so humanly dense, rich in associations, such deep readings, the power of things unsaid, that T-Jay looked away. They were entertaining too many of the same thoughts.
“Where did you get the hardware?”
“A bunker in the woods. We put the key in the lock and there it was.”
“Who arranged that?” Mackey said.
“It’s a CIA weapons cache. Stuff never used at the Bay of Pigs. Which I assume you know.”
“I don