The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [28]
FOUR
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Patchen listened to Christopher’s theory without speaking. They sat close together, away from the walls, in a sitting room at the Statler Hotel in Washington. Christopher had refused to use a safe house: they were equipped with microphones and tape machines. Even in the hotel room, he had turned on the television and the radio at full volume. Patchen’s face was very close to Christopher’s. The blue flicker of the television screen reflected in Patchen’s glasses.
Patchen said, “Of course. Why didn’t anyone else see it?”
“There’s no evidence yet. It’s just a feeling.”
“It’s obvious. No one else had a motive. All the other theories leave that out. No one had a strong enough motive—except these people.”
“It looks like a perfect operation,” Christopher said. “It may be impossible to string everything together. They’ll have had airtight security. Maybe only two or three people know— and there’s no way of being sure who they are.”
“Do you think they killed Oswald?”
“No,” Christopher said. “If I’m right about how they handled him, it would have been wasteful. He didn’t know who they were. They must have told him they’d get him out after the shooting, set him up as a hero under a fake identity. He would have believed that.”
Patchen said, “They had to find somebody Oswald would trust. Someone he already knew.”
“Who did he know? Nobody. All they needed was someone under discipline; the contact had to have bona fides. Probably a Communist of some kind.”
“But how did they know about Oswald?”
“They went looking. He must have been in a lot of card files,” Christopher said. “They had to have an American gunman. Only a nut would do it—no professional killer is going to shoot the President of the United States. Gangsters are too patriotic.”
“How much have you put together?”
“Only the probabilities—but it’s clear enough why they had to run the operation,” Christopher said. “The psychology can’t be questioned. They believed Kennedy had done this thing to them—whether he did or not doesn’t matter. The way they think, they couldn’t do anything but kill Kennedy in return. It’s an imperative with them—insult for insult, blood for blood.”
“Let’s come back to that. How did they run the operation?”
“They had everything they needed,” Christopher said. “First, total security. They had all the money they needed, and secure contacts all over the world. All they lacked was the assassin.”
“How could they know Oswald would do it?”
“Oswald was easy enough to understand.”
“They had no time to assess him. What if he turned them down?”
“They would have killed him,” Christopher said. “He was unstable. But I think they were confident he’d try it, and that he’d succeed.”
“They needed confidence, if they thought they could get away with it,” Patchen said.
“David, they’ve gotten away with it. No one even suspects them.”
“Yes. Killing Kennedy made everyone forget they even existed.”
“I’ll bet that surprised them. They’re going to be tough— they’ll never believe we didn’t think of them right away. They must imagine we’ve got a thousand men working on them right now.”
“They don’t know how dumb we can be,” Patchen said.
Patchen massaged his bad leg, aware of the pain in it again. “No one is going to thank you for this, you know.”
Christopher shrugged.
“Do you want to be assigned to this—do it yourself?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know if it’ll be possible. We’ll have to tell the White House, and the liaison hasn’t changed. It’s still Foley. Johnson kept him on, with all the others.”
“Who else can go? Who can you tell, even inside the outfit?”
Patchen rose and limped to the window; he bent the slats of the Venetian blind and looked down at the traffic on K Street. The back of his suit was a mass of wrinkles, and he looked as if he had not slept for a long time. He expelled his breath; it was almost a laugh that he uttered.
“‘The dog it was that died,’ “ he said.
He touched Christopher’s shoulder and pointed at the telephone. After Patchen had closed the door