The Third Bullet - Страница 55

“Lon, please-”

“I will be on a flight to Richmond by three if you say one more word, Hugh.”

I let the conversation simmer off into silence for a bit. Finally, I came back with what I knew was the weakest of propositions. “Just let me make the argument.”

“My mind is made up. As soon as I saw the paper, I knew how that devious little insect that you call a brain would set its antennae to twitching, its mandibles to grinding, its pincers to snapping, and I knew exactly where you’d go. I know you better than you know yourself, Hugh. Anyhow, what’s the point of listening to the argument? There’s only one argument, really. You believe you can pull off the biggest coup in history. You would call it an ‘operation’ in your spy-novel lingo, so as to distance yourself from it, as if it’s scientific or medical. It’s hubris, Hugh. It’s just hubris.”

“Lon, you are-”

“I know you, Hugh. I know you.”

“If you’ve made up your mind, how can it hurt to hear my argument? I assure you, it has nothing to do with me, my needs, any of that. The psychology involved is yours, Lon. I will make you see how it has to do with your needs, and you will see your duty clearly.”

“Oh, right. Oh, that’s rich. Hugh, you are a bastard.”

“That’s what they pay me for. The things I’ve authorized, you wouldn’t believe, the things I’ve seen. Please, Lon, meet me in the lobby in ten. We’ll go for a little walk.”

“Agghh.” He snorted, signifying surrender.

I pushed him in silence across the street from the hotel. I didn’t head south, down Commerce toward Dealey, but north, and then I turned east down a street I don’t remember. It was November 20, 1963. The sun was out, and true fall, as we New Englanders would recognize it, had yet to begin. The leaves were still green. In late November! We arrived after a block or two at a small park that seemed to be dedicated to some glorious Texan or other who had triumphed at the Battle of Squashing Mexicans or some such. That’s what we did in the Agency-if not Mexicans, some other little brown tribe, anyone who got in our way. That’s what I helped us do. We were in the empire business, after all, and I was paid to make sure that empire stayed strong and lasted forever, and anyone who opposed us got squashed. If the empire was to fall, it wouldn’t be on my watch.

We sat in the sun. Should I say birds sang, the wind blew gently, the sun was bright, the world seemed full of hope? Maybe all that is true. I have no idea.

“Get on with it, goddammit,” Lon said. “I don’t have all day.”

“I just have one question,” I said. “Request, actually. Then I’ll shut up.”

He waited.

Finally, I said, “Lon, tell me about the chair.”

“The what?”

“The chair. The one you’re sitting in. It’s made of steel. I can see a label; I think it was manufactured by Ridgeway Medical Equipment Company, Rahway, New Jersey.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t talk about such things.”

“No, tell me. You’re a goddamn noble Roman, Lon. I know you too. You’re sick with honor. You’ll never complain, you’ll never cease to maintain the code. Stoic, dignified, without complaint to the end, a study in Protestant rectitude and Western heroism. You’re braver than John Wayne, Gary Cooper, or-”

“They’re actors,” said Lon.

“Audie Murphy, Neville Brand, I don’t know, the boys who raised the flag on Iwo, Robert C. Scott, Cord Meyer, Bill Morgan, Joe McConnell, Major Darby.”

“It’s nothing to do with courage. It’s the practicality of acceptance and resignation. It’s doing the best you can with what you’ve got.”

“Tell me, Lon. You’ve never told anyone, probably not even yourself. Tell me.”

Lon waited a bit. Then he said, “All right. S4 is lousy. It stinks. It’s no fun. It’s better than S3, it’s better than any of the Ts, it’s much better than any of the Cs. But still: it’s lousy. I get sores on my legs, and I don’t even feel them. But the pants are smeared with blood and pus and have to be thrown away because no dry cleaning gets it out. I shit in my diapers and don’t know I’ve done it, and I have to somehow deal with the diapers on my own, in my room at night, a truly repulsive job. I worry that there’ll be a leak, that I’ll offend, that something humiliating will happen. I get bruises on my spine, and sometimes they climb above S-4 and I get tremendous pains. I sometimes remember my legs in my dreams, remember walking, feel the experience, and almost believe that, by some miracle, I’ve- But then I wake up, dead from the waist down. Psychologically, that’s hard to take, particularly the seven hundredth time or so. I have nightmares about Dad. He had a look on his face for a split second, before the horror came over him as he saw what had happened. I saw it as I twisted around to see what the hell had happened and saw him standing there with the rifle on the ground before him. I think about that look. Was it a smile? It could have been a smile! I–I don’t know. There was something there, a kind of, I don’t know, satisfaction or something. Dad was great, considering. Until he died, he did everything he could to make my life livable. He spent a fortune, he was with me nearly every single day. I know that he hated himself for the accident, and that it took twenty-five years off his life, but still. . That look. A father’s worries about usurpation. His inability to get totally behind somebody who will replace him.”

He was silent for a while, gathering wind. He had never spoken of such things.

“The women,” he said. “I don’t know if it was better to have had a decent amount of intimacy before or to lose your sexuality as a virgin, because then you’d never remember, never know what you were missing. I have no policy position here. But I smell women’s perfume, I see the crease between their breasts, I see the tops of their stockings. It happens all the time, because around me they’re not so guarded in their body movements; they know I’m out of the game. They’re not being cruel, it’s just their nature. They love to put out the sniff of sex, but they hold it back until the wedding night to make sure he shows up at church. That whole ritual guardedness, the flash, the tease, the lean-over, the crossed legs, that’s all missing around me, because, absent a working penis, I’m one of the gals. That’s what happens to us S4s. So I see breasts and even thighs all the time. And I remember, and it makes me crazy, and I have to get through it on what I suppose is Yankee grit or something. But I hate it. I hate them, yet I yearn to be around them, to smell them, to see them smile, to make them laugh, to know that except for the one thing, I would be with them. Instead, I’m the witty eunuch in the chair, the gelded stallion, so charming yet so unable to satisfy and give to them what they desire, children and dick. So yes, Hugh, the chair is no fun. I’m guessing you probably already deduced that with your spy’s keen powers of observation. What the hell does this have to do with anything?”

“Lon,” I said, “Kennedy is going to send thousands of young Americans off to a war we cannot win. He’s going to do that because he wants the reelection, and he can’t be called soft on communism. We were going to correct that problem by eliminating a fellow who called him soft on communism the loudest. Now I see it. We have a chance not to ‘correct’ but to ‘eliminate.’ To erase totally.

“I directed you to the chair you ride in all day long because thousands of boys will come back from the war in those chairs. At some point or other, all of them will wish they had been killed. Because they won’t have your strength, your heroism, your ‘Yankee grit,’ as you call it. They’ll have nothing and they’ll get nothing. You command the gun world with your shooting skills, you have extraordinary resources of intelligence, charm, and will, to say nothing of a considerable personal fortune. These poor boys will have none of that. They’ll just have the chair. You hate the chair, but you have managed to transcend it. They won’t have that chance, Lon, and you know it. The chair will turn their lives into daily torture. Forever and ever and ever, which is how long they’ll feel their lives lasting. So that is why I ask you to do this, Lon. Not for my hubris but for yours. Keep those boys out of their metal chairs. Endure, publically if you get caught or privately if you don’t, the mantle of regicide, the man who killed the king. If you can bear the chair, you can bear that easily enough.”

He laughed.

“Ever hear of an Argentine writer called Jorge Luis Borges?” I said.

“No. Hemingway’s as far as I go.”

“He writes stories in the form of fictional essays. Conjectures on this or that, always astonishing in their brevity and their insight. In one, he postulates that the true son of God was Judas, not Christ. Anybody could be Christ, suffering and becoming immortal. But it took a strength of character that only the son of God could muster to make the crucifixion possible, by the betrayal. That was the true heroism, the true sacrifice, for without it, there was nothing. He didn’t bear the pain of the cross for a day, he bore the pain of hatred, exile, universal loathing, all that, forever. That was strength.”

“Sounds crazy to me,” he said. “Your Bor-haze, or whatever, carries no weight with me. How do you know you’ll prevent this war? Maybe this Texan, Johnson, maybe he’ll wage the same war.”

“He won’t. He’s a New Deal Democrat forged in the crucible of thirties Washington. He has no interest in military adventurism, nothing to prove, because he’s an older man with plenty of mistresses and an ugly wife. He’ll use his time in office to siphon money off to Texas and his cronies in the party; he’ll give a lot to Negroes so Lippmann will write well of him; he’ll build dams and highways and buildings with his name on them. Like all of them, he’ll screw everything in heels. He has no interest in foreign affairs. I’ve looked at it carefully. Internationally, he’s as sober as Eisenhower; domestically, he wants to be the next FDR. He’s FDR with ants in his pants. The last thing he wants is to go off on a crazy crusade in a foreign swamp. It’s way too expensive.”