The Third Bullet - Страница 36

There was much less of Hugh five years later. He’d been no macho jock dominating the back pages of the Daily, only a sub on the Bulldog basketball five. Besides the cage mediocrity (best game: eight points against Brown his senior year), he appeared in only one other notice, his election to the board of the Yale Review, though Bob couldn’t force himself to look that up and see Hugh’s undergraduate poetry. Hugh was smarter: he graduated with cum laude honors; Lon did not.

Back in Washington, Swagger had the entire fifties-sixties run of the National Rifle Association’s American Rifleman publication shipped to his hotel room off an Internet purchase. He spent nights going through the volumes, tracking Lon’s early run of brilliant victories in competitive shooting at the national level, even finding a picture of Lon standing with a trophy exactly where Bob stood with the same trophy twenty-five years or so later. Bob had no father to stand behind him, but Lon’s beamed proudly from behind his so-accomplished son, who, in just a few years, he would paralyze from the waist down.

By day, at the Library of Congress, Bob combed the gun magazines of the same fifties-sixties for Lon’s work as a writer, as an inveterate reloader and experimenter, as a rifle intellectual, if such a thing existed, and saw that he was as revered as Jack O’Connor, Elmer Keith, and the others of that golden age. Bob could find no mention of the paralyzing accident, or the supposed “death” in 1965, but after a several-year interval, the byline John Thomas Albright began to appear and did so steadily for the next twenty-five years.

That left one more stop: a visit to Warren, Virginia, near Roanoke, where Lon “died.” Swagger learned there only what he already knew: the death was a thin counterfeit, all the documents forged, all the newspaper accounts based on a funeral-parlor press release. The body, naturally, had been cremated, the ashes scattered.

Suddenly, there was no place left to go. No one was following him. Nobody was cyber-mining him. Nobody was trying to kill him. It seemed that when he had lost Hugh’s scent, Hugh had lost his, even if it wasn’t clear whether Hugh Meachum existed.

The Memoirs of a Case Officer

BY HUGH MEACHUM

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,” writes the great Russian novelist Nabokov. Well, we’ll see about that.

I am undisputedly a murderer, but my prose style has been abraded of its sparkle, if there was ever sparkle to begin with, by four decades of filing largely unread administrative reports, a few research papers, too many after-action reports. My daily vodka intake hardly helps matters, nor does the arbitrariness of my memory. Speak, memory, I command; it responds with vulgarity. The issue is whether my old and creaky imagination will be stimulated by recollection and at least propel my words to the level of readability, or whether this record will disintegrate into drivel and incoherence. That would be a shame. I have much to tell.

For though I’m a dismal writer, I’m a great murderer. I’ve never pulled a trigger, but I’ve sent hundreds, maybe thousands, to their deaths in that bureaucratic intelligence-agency way: I’ve planned and authorized assassinations, raids, and commando assaults, the necessary by-product of which is murder. I supervised Phoenix for a year in Vietnam and made a jaunty figure with a boonie hat and a Swedish submachine gun slung under my arm, even if I never fired the damned thing, which was annoyingly heavy. Phoenix probably killed at least fifteen thousand, including some who were actually guilty. I put together and managed from close at hand all manner of paramilitary black operations, involving every sin known to man. Then I went home and slept in a warm bed in a very nice home in Georgetown or Tan Son Nhut. You’re probably right to despise me. But you don’t know the half of it.

I am also the man who murdered John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth president of the country in whose services I labored so bloodily. I did not pull the trigger, but I saw the opportunity, conceptualized it, found the necessary arcane talents to staff it, recruited those talents, handled logistics, egress, and fallback via safe routes and counter-narrative alibis, also, as it turned out, unnecessary. Moreover, I was in the room when the trigger was pulled. Then my shooter put his rifle away, and we left to be quickly absorbed in the public frenzy of grief and mourning. Nobody stopped us, nobody questioned us, nobody was interested in us. By four o’clock, we were back at the bar at the Adolphus.

It was, as you must know, a perfect crime. No six-or was it eight or ten? — seconds in American history has been more studied than those between which Alek, poor little mutt, fired the first shot (and missed) and my cousin fired the last shot (and hit). Yet in all the years and against all investigation and attempts to comprehend, in all the theories, in the three-thousand-odd books by clowns of various mispersuasion, no one has ever come close to penetrating our small, tight, highly professional conspiracy. Until now.

I sit on my veranda. I am eighty-three healthy years old and hope to be around for at least another twenty. Before me the meadow, the valley, the purple forests, the river. The land is mine as far as the eye can see, and it is well patrolled by security. In the large house behind me are servants, a Japanese porn-star mistress, a chef, a masseuse (and occasional mistress), a gym, nine bedrooms, a banquet room, an indoor pool, the most elaborate entertainment center on Earth, and an array of real-time communications devices by which I can administer my empire; in short, the products and perks of a vastly remunerative and productive life. I’m worth more than several small countries.

At long last, five decades later, there is a tremor in my world. A threat. A possibility. A chance of discovery and destruction, even vengeance. It has impelled me to sit out here in the warm sunlight with a yellow tablet of legal paper and a cupful of Bic ballpoints (though I’m a traditionalist, I’m not so goofy as to insist on a fountain pen) and tell the story in my own hand. At any moment in the next few days, a phone will ring and tell me if the threat has gotten larger or has gone away forever. But as I’m a man who generally finishes what he starts, I expect that no matter the outcome of the drama being played-again, at my insistence and according to my instructions-I will finish this manuscript. Assuming I haven’t been interrupted by a bullet, I will consign it to my safe. Maybe when I die, it will become known and shake the foundations of history. Maybe it will disappear, tossed into the furnace like Citizen Kane’s sled. That’s beyond my control and therefore beyond my care. I know only that now, for the first time, I will set it down. Speak, memory.

Though I am naturally reticent, resolutely shallow, and not one for self-analysis, I feel obligated to produce a few brisk paragraphs of pedigree record-straightening. I am Hugh Aubrey Meachum, of the Hartford Meachums. It’s old Yankee machinist and tinkerer stock, with branches in the hardscrabble farming that Connecticut offers. My forebears were known for a shrewd eye on the dollar and opportunities to make it; quiet, severe faces (men and women); good hair; and taciturnity, with a black streak of alcoholism and melancholy evincing itself a couple of times in each generation. Given that as my stock, I was more fully formed by three mentors, about the first two of whom I will say just a bit.

The first would be a man named Samuel Colt. I was wise enough to pick as a great-great-grandfather an otherwise odious tyrant named Cyrus Meachum, who did one intelligent thing in a legendarily grim life as a Hartford hardware-store owner. He believed in young Samuel Colt and his twirling new gizmo called the revolver, and invested in the sprout’s first Connecticut plant (the first of all, in New Jersey, had failed). It was an excellent career move, as all of us subsequent generations of Meachums have benefited from the colonel’s invention, in a never-ending supply of just enough moolah to let us do what we wanted instead of what we needed. We had the best of schools, the best of holidays, the pleasures of big houses on hills under towering elms and of hearing the peasantry call our fathers “sir.” We rode the genocide of the Indians, the elimination of the Moros, the whipping of the Hun, the destruction of the Nazis, and the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity sphere to financial independence, happily. A few of us died in each of those campaigns, and my father, a career diplomat who served in the State Department before the war-in Paris, where I was raised, 1931–1937, where I picked up the language easily and totally-and in an outfit much heralded and, like all intelligence agencies, almost wholly worthless, called the Office of Strategic Services, which was actually more Red than Moscow was in the thirties! Then back to State for a genteel gentleman’s career. Thank you, Colonel Colt, for underwriting it all.

Here I should insert a footnote about the language that I learned “easily and totally.” It was not French, though I speak French. It was Russian. My nanny, Natasha, was an exiled White, a duchess, no less. An exquisite and cultured lady, she moved in high White circles, and Paris before the war was the White Russian Moscow, with the largest population of exiles anywhere on Earth. They were brilliant if deluded people: immensely cultured, extravagantly cosmopolitan, charming and witty and bold to a fault, of extremely high native IQ, generously seeded with genius, indefatigable in battle and literature. After all, they produced not only the great Nabokov but Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as well. I may have even, as a small child, attended a soiree where N. himself was present, though I have no memory of it. So Russian was my first language, with a bit of aristocratic frost to it; meanwhile, my parents were busy doing the Paris scene, all but ignoring me, for which I thank them. Natasha’s lessons were far more meaningful and lasting than anything they could have taught me. This will explain much of what is to come in the tale ahead.