Libra - Don Delillo [82]
“So there’s still activity,” he said. “There’s this friend of mine who works in a Chevy dealership. He makes napalm in his basement with gasoline and baby soap. I sleep in a car in the lot. I’m the unofficial watchman.”
“What T-Jay wants is just, like you stick around a couple of days. ”
“I’ve been looking for him.”
“He’s a pretty busy guy,” Raymo said unconvincingly.
The dog lay throbbing in the shade.
Frank Vásquez showed up with a wife, two kids and some food. The wife and kids took a peek at the visitor. Wayne waited for someone to say, “Mi casa es suya.” He got a little charge from the Old World graces. But they slipped back inside, leaving his smile hanging like a rag on a stick.
The three men ate a meal in the humming midday heat. Wayne could find out nothing of substance from the two Cubans. The smaller the talk, the clearer it became that something serious was in the works. The meal was so entrenched in seriousness, in that grave Latin manner and tact, that Wayne was outright convinced this was no mission to harass the Cuban coast as he’d done so many times with the boardinghouse commandos.
He told Raymo and Frank about the operations he’d been involved in. Many fabulous snafus. Squalls, Cuban gunboats, pursuit by police launches. He described how T-Jay had appeared out of nowhere—they didn’t even know if he was Agency or not—to give them special training in weapons and night fighting. They needed every little extra they could get.
With Interpen, Wayne was still in the high-scream tempo of his paratroop days. He was rounding out his youth. The business at hand gave every sign of being very different. A dark and somber plan. Just look at Frank Vásquez. Sad-eyed, long-faced, earnest, with little to say outside of what his family had suffered, which he narrated tersely, like a documentary of a war a hundred years ago.
It hit Wayne Elko with a flash and roar that this was like Seven Samurai. In which free-lance warriors are selected one at a time to carry out a dangerous mission. In which men outside society are called on to save a helpless people from destruction. Swinging those two-handed swords.
Win Everett sat in his office on the empty campus of Texas Woman’s University. All that heat and light made him grateful for the gloom of the basement nook. Here he worked patiently on his bitterness, honing and refining. It was something he returned to periodically as if to some legend of his youth, a golden moment on a football field or frozen pond, some enterprise of such flawless proportions that he could forget it only at the risk of deep-reaching loss.
The office was a place to come to when Mary Frances and Suzanne were not at home. He didn’t mind being alone here. It was a place to sit and think, searching for a grim justice in the very recollection of what they’d done to him—a place to refine and purify, to hone his sense of the past. The fluorescent light buzzed and flickered. When the room grew warm he took off his jacket, folded it neatly lengthwise, then over double, and dropped it softly on a cabinet.
It was no longer possible to hide from the fact that Lee Oswald existed independent of the plot.
T-Jay had picked the lock at 4907 Magazine Street in New Orleans. This became necessary when he learned there was no sample of the subject’s handwriting at Guy Banister Associates. The files contained a single document, his job application, filled out in block letters and unsigned.
Lee H. Oswald was real all right. What Mackey learned about him in a brief tour of his apartment made Everett feel displaced. It produced a sensation of the eeriest panic, gave him a glimpse of the fiction he’d been devising, a fiction living prematurely in the world.
He already knew about the weapons. Mackey confirmed the weapons. A 38-caliber revolver. A bolt-action rifle with telescopic sight.
He knew about the leaflets. Oswald was handing out leaflets in the street. The headline