Libra - Don Delillo [68]
JFK had made his deal with the Soviets to leave Castro alone. Incredible. The same man Wayne would have voted for if he’d gotten around to registering. He believed in country, loyalty, mountains and streams. They were all tied together.
He found a telephone and made a collect call to the New Orleans number T. J. Mackey had given him about a year earlier. He told the woman at the other end he wished to speak to a Mr. Guy Banister.
“This is Wayne Elko calling. It seems like I have washed up in Denver, Colorado, tell T-Jay, and I am looking for a chance at some employment.”
Win Everett was in his basement at home, hunched over the worktable. His tools and materials were set before him, mainly household things, small and cheap—cutting instruments, acetate overlays, glues and pastes, a soft eraser, a travel iron.
He felt marvelously alert, sure of himself, putting together a man with scissors and tape.
His gunman would emerge and vanish in a maze of false names. Investigators would find an application for a post-office box; a certificate of service, U.S. Marine Corps; a Social Security card; a passport application; a driver’s license; a stolen credit card and half a dozen other documents—in two or three different names, each leading to a trail that would end at the Cuban Intelligence Directorate.
He worked on a Diners Club card, removing the ink on the raised letters with a Q-tip doused in polyester resin. A radio on a shelf played soothing music. He pressed the card against the warm iron, heating it slowly to flatten the letters. Then he used a razor blade to level the remaining bumps and juts. He would eventually reheat the card and stamp a new name and number on its face with an addressograph plate.
He’d picked up a certain amount of sleazy tradecraft in his early years as an operations officer. Before that he’d taught in a series of small liberal-arts colleges in the Midwest, places like Franklin, in Indiana, where a perceptive colleague, affiliated somehow or other with CIA, recruited him for covert training. The idea seemed immediately right, a possible answer to the restlessness he’d felt working through his system, a sense that he needed to risk. something important, challenge his moral complacencies, before he could see himself complete. Soon he was taking handy instruction in Flaps & Seals, or how to read other people’s mail without letting them know about it, and remembering now and then those sleepy afternoons at little Franklin College. After some years in Havana and Central America, including duty as chief of station in Guatemala City, he was one of several men assigned to coordinate the training of a Cuban exile brigade. He was in a constant hurry after that. Underwater demolition in Puerto Rico and North Carolina, paratroop maneuvers outside Phoenix, teams to organize in Nicaragua, Miami, Key West.
He felt sharp now, better than he’d felt in some time, on top of things, alert.
The young man’s address book would be next. A major project. Once he had a handwriting sample, Win would scratch onto those miniature pages enough trails, false trails, swarming life,. lingering mystery, enough real and fabricated people to occupy investigators for months to come.
He unscrewed the top of the Elmer’s Glue-All. He used his X-Acto knife to cut a new signature strip from a sheet of opaque paper. He checked the length and width of the strip against the bare space on the back of the credit card. Then he dribbled