Libra - Don Delillo [36]
Finally the taxi stopped outside.
He went into the bathroom and ran cold water over his hands, trying to ease the sting where the lotion had failed. He’d contracted malaria during his Indonesian stint and felt the effects now and then, a sense that his body was a swamp. He went to the door and waited.
His wife cut him once, swinging a knife across the kitchen table and catching the left side of his jaw, after a night of who knows what. He never thought of her by name. He thought of her being somewhere very vague, in a room with curtains, never moving from the chair. This is what happens to loved ones who go away. We make them sit in a room forever.
The woman came in, wearing a hard tan, her skin smoked and cracked. She said she was Rhonda. She had heavy dark makeup that made him think of nights at the shore and gonorrhea.
“Casal said be nice to you.”
“What do you think he meant by that?”
She smiled and unzipped her skirt. Casal was the bartender at the Habana, a waterfront dive that catered to merchant seamen, Cubans with a grudge and other floating bodies on the tide.
All night it sounded across the water. “Listen, my brothers, to the roar of the white typhoon.” It was the grimmest, most godawfu! thing, to be ashamed of your country.
Win Everett was in pajamas looking at a two-day-old copy of the Daily Lass-O, the student newspaper at TWU. There were contests for yell leaders and twirlers. A nationwide search was under way for a typical coed. He sat in an armchair in a comer of the bedroom. He learned from the paper that the school’s original name was the Texas Industrial Institute and College for the Education of White Girls of the State of Texas in the Arts and Sciences. He skipped the piece on JFK.
The phone rang downstairs. He heard Mary Frances walk into the kitchen and pick up the receiver. She came to the foot of the stairs and he dropped the newspaper, waiting to hear her call his name.
She watched him come down the stairs, looking nearly weightless in his pajamas, that softness of step he’d developed only lately, as if to show someone watching that he’d taken the path of self-effacement. They touched lightly as he moved past and she knew it meant they would make love on the fresh sheets with the window open and the smell of rain and dripping leaves still in the air.
Parmenter calling from a public booth. Win could hear traffic noises, excited air. He watched Mary Frances start upstairs, her hand leaving the carved newel and slipping along the handrail, barely touching.
“How do we proceed?”
“The phone is, secure. They’re not interested in me anymore. Besides, I’ve cleaned it.”
A brief laugh. “You know how to do that?”
“I tinker in the basement,” Win said.
“Do you know a man named George de Mohrenschildt?”
“No.”
“Does odd jobs for Domestic Contacts. I find out he’s also hooked to Army Intelligence. Cuba via Haiti. He’s on the way to Haiti. It probably involves an arms deal. George comes across pro-Castro. I believe this is a genuine attachment. He thinks we’ve behaved rather badly. But the fact is, if my information is correct, he’s working against Castro interests, or will be as soon as he gets to Haiti. In any case George doesn’t concern us directly. He has a young friend, a kid he debriefed on behalf of the Agency. A defector who repented, more or less, after two years plus in the USSR. I got George to tell me his name and I’ve done some checking. There’s a 201 file on the kid dating to December 1960.”
“Did SR Division