Libra - Don Delillo [99]
A tugboat moved through the harbor dawn, and bridges emerged, piers, highway lights along the Hudson.
If they could only make it to Texas, things would be all right.
PART TWO
Somebody will have to piece me together....
JACK RUBY
Testimony
15 July
The woman knew some ways to disappear. You could be alone in a room with her and forget she was there. She fell into stillness, faded into things around her. T-Jay liked to imagine this was a skill she’d been refining for years.
He stood at the window eating grapes from a paper bag torn open down the side. Norfolk was a foreign city. It was where trainees from the Farm came to practice the dark arts. Break-ins, dead drops, surveillance exercises, audio penetrations. Newport News and Richmond were also designated foreign. Baltimore was foreign off and on. But T-Jay wasn’t here to supervise a break-in and grade the fellows on technique.
She sat on the bed dealing two hands of five-card draw and playing both hands. She was Formosan, she said, and looked young enough to be a war orphan in a public service ad. This was his third visit to the narrow room. She wore a T-shirt stenciled USS Dickson, which he hadn’t noticed her putting on. Her nakedness was un-striking, so natural it seemed involuntary. He could easily believe she lived that way.
He watched her crash a magazine against the wall, trying to bat a horsefly. Seconds later he forgot her again.
The thing that hovers over every secret is betrayal. Sooner or later someone reaches the point where he wants to tell what he knows. Mackey didn’t trust Parmenter. There were a thousand career officers like Parmenter. Their strongest conviction is lunch. He didn’t trust Frank Vásquez. Frank had spied on fellow exiles at Mackey’s direction in the months before the invasion. Frank was hard to figure. He had the heart of a chivato, a bleating little goat-face spy, but he was also quietly determined once he had an object in mind. Mackey didn’t trust David Ferrie. Ferrie knew that weapons for the operation were being supplied by Guy Banister. He probably also knew that Banister had offered to channel cash from the New Orleans rackets to maintain the team of shooters. The larger the secret, the less safe it was with someone like Ferrie. There were others who would have to be recruited. Eventually one of them would reach the point. He knew how they thought, these men who float through plots devised by others. They want to give themselves away, in whispers, to someone standing in the shadows.
He drew a chair up to the bed and played one of the poker hands. Why did he have the feeling he was spoiling her fun? She had short chopped hair and narrow hips and a casual, almost dismissive manner, a kind of body slang that T-Jay took to be her free adaptation of the local style. She walked like a girl shooting a cart down a supermarket aisle.
“I ought to teach you gin rummy. It’s a better game for two to play.”
“Why, you coming back?”
“I might.”
“You might not.”
“I might not.”
“So why do I learn?” she said.
He liked the idea that whores were profound. He was respectful of whores. They were quick in their perceptions—it was a quick business—and he sometimes had the feeling they could tell him things about himself that he’d missed completely. They had access to the starker facts. This made him wary and respectful.
She took his right hand and placed it against hers, palms touching. He didn’t get the point at first. Then he realized she was comparing the size of their hands. The difference made her laugh.
“What’s funny?”
She told him his hand was funny.
“Why mine? Why not yours?” he said. “If the difference is great, maybe you’re the funny one, not me.”
“You’re the funny one,” Lu Wan said.
She matched left hands now and fell sideways to the bed laughing. Maybe she thought they were two different species. One of them was exotic and it wasn’t her.
The beer was warm now. He shook the bottle and looked at her.