The Third Bullet - Страница 10

“Good. See, I get into it through the guns. I’m a shooter. I actually did a lot more hunting than whoring and drinking and feeling sorry for myself, and I’ve seen a lot of animals and even some men die when hit by a high-powered bullet, or even, believe it or not, a low-powered six-point-five. My work has been on guns and ballistics, and now the problem is to make it fit the possibilities of the day.”

“Got it. See, I think it’s good that you don’t come into it with the preset conviction that ‘The CIA Did It’ or ‘Dallas Right-Wing Oil Bastards Did It,’ because that skews your thinking.”

“Exactly.”

“You know what, Jack? I’m way behind in my shipping. I more or less survive by mail order. Man, without the Internet, I’d be trying to get by on a major’s pension from Big Green.”

“Army?”

“Intel. Twenty years, mostly Germany. Anyhow, I’m thinking maybe we ought to meet for dinner and talk there. Is that something you’d be up for?”

“Only if it’s on me.”

“Great. Better than I hoped for. Where you staying? I can at least come to you.”

“The Adolphus.”

“Oh, then the French Room,” Richard said airily, and Swagger knew it was a joke, for the French Room was the swanky hotel’s glamorously decadent restaurant.

“Seriously, go down one block to Main, go up Main, there’s a great Mex place called Sol Irlandes.”

“Got it,” said Swagger.

“See you at eight. It’s an easy walk.”

“Okay,” said Richard, after a long grateful swallow of Tecate, “I didn’t bring the file, because I am the file. But when you come back, I can pull all the pictures and references for you, or I can attach it to an e-mail and ship it to you, whichever.”

“Great,” said Swagger.

“Meanwhile, I’ll call Dave Arons, who manages the building for its owners, Galaxy Capital Limited. Dave’s okay, he gets it; I’ll tell him you’re an old friend, very trustworthy. He just doesn’t want loonies parading through there in tinfoil hats.”

“I left mine in Boise.”

Around them, the dark restaurant hummed with commerce. It seemed to be a popular place, maybe because the salsa was so good. Swagger sipped his Diet Coke.

“By the way, they’re playing down the connect to the assassination, even if they’ve got an assassination museum souvenir shop right there on their corner, at Houston and Elm.”

“I noticed it,” said Bob. “I didn’t go in.”

“They now call it 501 Elm, not Dal-Tex.”

“Makes sense.”

“Good marketing move, I think. Okay, right now Dal-Tex is featured in at least thirty-eight of the two hundred sixty-five formally recognized conspiracy theories. It’s got the angles, and as you’ll find, access and egress on that day was more or less easy. It wasn’t closed down till twelve-thirty-nine or so, so a team could have gotten out pretty easy. But you probably know neither Bugliosi nor Posner, the two great Warren Commission acolytes who’ve studied all the theories, give it much time of day. They don’t even bother to rebut it. When you think about it, maybe that’s sensible. I mean, man, it would have taken some balls. Go into a public building, crack an office, pop the president, and walk out whistling ‘Dixie’ ten seconds before the cops arrive. Balls and luck. Over two hundred people worked in that building.”

“Weren’t most of them at Dealey, like Mr. Zapruder?”

“There’s always some guy hanging around.”

“Maybe they were disguised.”

“Possible, I suppose. But disguised as what? A giant charm bracelet? No way strangers can disguise themselves as friends.”

“‘Giant charm bracelet’?”

“Sorry, Woody Allen line. Not funny if you don’t love Woody.”

“I must have missed it,” Swagger said. “Anyhow, on the disguise thing, maybe it was long-term. The group rented an office before, and after the shooting stayed there for six months, when the lease was up. No, wait, dammit, the route wasn’t known till the twentieth.”

“That would free you up to the big deep-conspiracy thing, where some sinister force buried in government uses its tentacles to manipulate things into place far in advance.”

“I’m an engineer. I have a distrust of big plans, because I’ve made my money troubleshooting when big plans go wrong, and believe me, they go wrong all the time. It’s better to have a plan than not have a plan, but at the same time, no plan survives contact with reality.”

“You sound military, Jack. I was in for twenty, I saw it happen all the time.”

“I was in the marines for a-”

“The limp, Vietnam?” interrupted Richard.

“Nah. Ecuador. A piece of drill bit going a thousand feet a second. That was my real education. The engineering teaches you that a plan is a set of assumptions or diagrams that are wrong or impossible. Everything affects everything, everything changes, and you end up in a place you never thought you’d be.”

“I agree.”

“Still, dammit, the angle of any of six windows to that X on Elm Street gives us exactly the brain shot that killed the president. It’s attractive to a conspiracy theorist.”

“It is. You say your thing is ballistics?”

“Yeah. I think I’ve figured out some things as to how there could have been another gun, but no forensic evidence of it.”

“Fascinating. But don’t tell me, because you’ll be angry at yourself in the morning.”

“I wasn’t going to. ‘Intellectual property,’ as you say. For a mining engineer, the whole world is secured by mineral rights. That’s what I bring to the table, and it makes me kind of paranoid.”

“That’s fine. Also, as it turns out, I’m not much of a gun guy, and I’d have no way to evaluate it.”

“That’s a common failing in this assassination research world,” said Bob, taking another sip of Diet. “Too many gun opinions by people who don’t know a damned thing about guns. A lot of time has been wasted.”

“I’ll tell you why. Because it’s so big. In order to make sense of it and make fair assumptions, you’ve got to have expertise in too many areas. The medical people know nothing about guns and the gun people know nothing about the Mafia and the Mafia people know nothing about the CIA and the CIA people know nothing about the Cubans and so sooner or later you’re making judgments on something you know nothing about, and the result is always nonsense.”

“Let me ask you, Richard,” said Bob, “do you have a theory?”

“My problem is that I know too much about it. I can’t judge anymore. I see the flaws in everything, the contradictions, the micro findings. I could do twenty minutes on the metallurgical analysis of the bullet fragments found on the floor of the limousine and whether it disproves a second-gun theory or buttresses it, and it’s arguable either way. But I have no real opinion as to which side of the issue is correct. How can I judge? I wish I could forget some of the stuff I know, but I can’t make it go away. It’s my curse. On the other hand, it made me a good intel analyst, and it helps me in my chosen line of work.”

“Got it.”

“But since you’re paying-do you mind if I order another beer?”

“Go ahead.”

“I will share with you the one theory I’ve heard that explains everything. I may have made it up, I may have heard it somewhere, I don’t know, it was just in my mind one day. Perhaps God put it there. It accounts for every nuance and inconsistency and witness confusion and everything. The only problem is, after I tell you, I’ll have to kill you.”

Where is this guy going? Swagger thought.

“I’m not going to live much longer anyhow, so you may as well fire away.”

“Let me ask you one favor. Don’t interrupt when I say something that doesn’t accord with the thing we laughingly call ‘history.’ It’ll all become clear in the end.”

“I’m listening,” said Bob.

“On November 22, 1963,” Richard began, “a screwball Marxist loser named Lee Harvey Oswald, for reasons too banal to be believed, fired three shots at the president of the United States, who by utter coincidence showed up outside his workplace window one day. The first shot missed, because Oswald was an idiot. The second shot hit Kennedy under the neck, in the high back. It drove through his body, deflecting because of the president’s heavy neck musculature, hit Governor Connally in the back, passed through him, and hit him in the wrist and finally the thigh. Oswald’s third shot missed, because he was an idiot.

“Oswald is not important, but let’s stay with him for a second. He panicked, raced downstairs, and there met a police officer named Marion Baker, who commanded him to halt. Oswald instead bolted by the officer and headed out the door of the Texas Book Depository, and Officer Baker drew and fired. End of Oswald.

“What happened to Kennedy is the gist of our story. His Secret Service driver raced to Parkland Hospital, less than five minutes away, and a very good team of emergency physicians got to work. It was touch and go, nip and tuck, all through the day and night. In the morning Kennedy finally stabilized. Though feeble from the devastating wound, he hung on, sustained by his incredible will to live and the good wishes and hopes of millions around the world.

“The recovery was slow and painful. Lyndon Johnson became acting president in his absence and ruled judiciously, as guided by Kennedy’s advisers, and made no tragic, boneheaded decisions. No Vietnam, obviously. Meanwhile, Kennedy grew stronger and stronger each day. It was feared that his spine was damaged and that he would be paralyzed, but by the narrowest of margins, that proved not to be the case. During this time, his wife, Jackie, hovered like an angel at his bedside, and perhaps the power of her love was another force for the good in helping the man regain his capacities as he healed slowly over the months. He sat up in March ’64, he took his first tentative steps in May, and by August he returned to the White House (LBJ, of course, had never moved in) and began to take up light duties. By the convention, in mid-August, he was able to give a rousing speech and was renominated by unanimous acclaim. He barely had to campaign and barely did campaign, and his opponent, Barry Goldwater, was wiped out at the polls in November. Less than a year after the tragedy in Dallas, he was re-inaugurated as president and began his second term.