Libra - Don Delillo [64]
They would go to the Steak House on South Locust for jumbo shrimp with salad, french fries and hot rolls and then Win would suggest an ice cream at Lane’s.
Bright hot skies.
Silence in the car, on the burning lawns.
Suzanne was holding her breath.
In his basement office in the Old Main, Win Everett was on the phone with Parmenter.
“How does Mackey know all this if he hasn’t made contact?”
“Whatever T-Jay knows comes out of Banister’s office. Oswald confides in one of Banister’s people.”
“Go ahead.”
“In January he orders a snub-nose .38 from a firm in Los Angeles. In March he sends away to Chicago for an Italian carbine with a sniper’s scope.”
“Armed and dangerous,” Win said softly.
“Plus. Are you ready? He’s handing out pro-Castro leaflets on the street. He was on the docks two or three days ago pushing leaflets at sailors off an aircraft carrier.”
Everett looked into space.
“How does this fit in with the fact that he has the use of an office in the same building as Banister’s detective agency, right above Banister’s office, which is the damn pivot point of the anti-Castro crusade in Louisiana?”
“It doesn’t fit in,” Parmenter said.
“I’m glad you said that. I thought I might be missing something.”
“All I know is what T-Jay tells me. As follows. The subject walks into Banister’s office looking for an undercover job. Banister installs him in a broom closet upstairs. This little-bitty room becomes the New Orleans headquarters of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. And the subject hits the streets in a white shirt and tie, handing out leaflets.”
They talked about Oswald as the subject in the same way they referred to the President as Lancer, which was his Secret Service code name. Habit. One wants the least possible surface to which pain and regret might cling—anyone’s, everyone’s pain. A thought for late afternoon.
“Let me understand the sequence,” Win said. “The subject leaves Dallas. He is gone, out of our lives, a promising part of our operation lost forever.”
“Then he turns up in the one place we would never expect to find him.”
“He turns up, out of nowhere, in New Orleans, in Guy Banister’s office, looking for an undercover assignment. The same fellow who defected to the bloody Soviet Union, who used his mail-order rifle to take a shot at General Walker. Strolls right into the middle of the enemy camp.”
“Mackey was supposed to ask Guy Banister to find a substitute for our boy. What happens? The original walks in off the street.”
Everett searched his pockets for a cigarette.
“You’ve got to get close to the subject,” he said.
“Oh no.”
“Look, Larry.”
“I don’t want personal contact any more than you do, my friend. Give him to Mackey.”
“Where is he?”
“Still at the Farm as far as I know.”
“All right. Look. Get me a sample of the kid’s handwriting.”
“I’ll talk to T-Jay right away.”
The hallway was empty. Win climbed the stairs to the main floor. Nobody at the desk. He went outside. School year ended, slow-moving figures in the distance, summer students, maintenance men, and a lawn sprinkler sending out spray in overlapping. arcs, all the lazy brightness of cobwebbed grass.
Before the murder attempt comes the provocation.
He’d devised a top-secret memo from the Deputy Director Plans to selected members of the Senior Study Effort, dated May 1961. It concerned the assassination of foreign leaders from a philosophical point of view. It also included a fragment from the psalm-book, not known to the outside world. Terminate with extreme prejudice. Parmenter was handling the actual production of the memo on a suitable typewriter and stationery.
Two. Through his contacts in Little Havana, Everett had planted a cryptic news item in an exile magazine published in New Jersey. The story,- from an unnamed source, concerned an operation run in July 1961 by the Office of Naval Intelligence out ofGuantánamo, the U. S. base near the eastern end of Cuba. The story was fabricated but the plan itself was real, involving the assassination of Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl. This news item would be found