Libra - Don Delillo [62]
Delphine was not surprised. They had some thought-provoking individuals walking in unannounced at 544 Camp. This address tended to draw people from a colorful range of backgrounds.
She stopped typing long enough to give the young man an application. He said he had to get back to work at the coffee company around the comer but he would fill out the form and return it in the morning. Then he was gone.
David Ferrie came out of the small back room and said in his routine disbelieving’ whisper, “Who on earth was that?”
“He has a verified alias.”
“Do we have forms for undercover agents?”
“No. It’s just a normal form.”
“Like height and weight.”
“Whatever it says. I don’t know.”
“Like insanity in the family. Or give us the history of your disease. ”
“It says whatever you want it to say, Dave. I’m very, very busy. ”
“How can a person explain his disease on a printed form?”
David Ferrie went into Guy Banister’s office, which was empty, and looked out the street-side window, trying to catch a glimpse of the young man whose voice he’d just been listening to. Had he caught something familiar in the tone? Would he be able to match a body to the voice? He looked at the swarm of people moving down the street. Dark folks aplenty, he thought. But no sign of the sweet-voiced boy who wants to be a spy.
In Fort Worth
Even coming back he was a military man. His father was a veteran. His brothers were in the service. My own brother was a navy man. We were a serviceman family. He sent me a regular allotment every month out of his pay and when he heard about my injury, which I said in a letter, he put in for a hardship discharge as I was disabled from work and trying for six months to collect on my claim. He was stationed in California then and they let him go early in order to help his mother. This is the injury of a candy jar falling off a shelf that four doctors have taken x-rays of my nose and face and there is travel time and carfare and the store is still holding tight to their cash. I am a disabled woman who can’t collect. It is like the days of Mr. Ekdahl, a ten-thousand-dollar-a-year man with an expense account who fixed it so my welfare was ignored.
I am leaving out Lee had a beautiful voice and sang beautifully at age six in Covington, Louisiana. He sang a solo in the Lutheran church, “Silent Night,” and that can be verified.
Now this boy comes home from the service and says he will work on a cargo ship and send money home to me. That was our only conversation over three days where he slept on a col in the kitchen, which was the only place I had for him, plus he told me that he passed his high-school-level tests, Mother, which I don’t know why you need this to lift crates on a boat. He was here only parts of three days before packing a bag and leaving. Then I received a letter postmarked New Orleans that he has booked passage on a ship to Europe. It is painful to accept, your honor. There is nothing in the letter that says cargo. There is nothing about he will work his way for a certain time until I have found a larger place for us to live. It is, “I have booked passage.” It is, “My values are very different from Robert’s or yours.” It is, “I did not tell you about my plans because you could hardly be expected to understand.”
It is the struggle hanging over my life that made him go away.
Postcard #3. Aboard the freighter SS Marion Lykes bound for Le Havre. The oddball loner has little to say to the three other passengers on the sixteen-day crossing. Gray seas, high swells, missed meals. He tells them he is going to school in Switzerland but doesn’t mention the name of the institution or the course of study he plans to follow. He avoids a passenger’s friendly attempts to take his picture. She is a nice enough lady