The Third Bullet - Страница 57

“Which window, Alek?”

“The corner window. The closest window to him. If I planned to shoot later, as he went down Elm, then I would move to another window down Elm.”

“Excellent,” I said, glad that he had figured out this elementary riddle (though no conspiracy theorists did, I might add) so that I could praise him and raise his spirits. “You shoot him when he’s closest, when he’s stillest. One shot, center chest, easy to make.”

“Fish in a barrel,” he said in English with that dreadful smirk.

“After shooting,” I instructed, “you will have little time to make your escape. The police will be in the building within minutes. Drop the rifle, walk, do not run, downstairs, being careful not to acquire oxygen debt so you are swallowing for air. Look no one in the eye, but do not shirk either. Your face is neutral. Exit the building and slip off into the mob. It will be chaos outside. Proceed down Houston Street one block to the corner of Houston and Pacific. You will see this car, though I might not be driving, and it could be anyone, a couple, an old lady, a Mexican, a hepcat. Climb in the back and lie down on the floor. Commit yourself to a long, boring drive. In a few hours we will have you at a safe house, and at that point, you can relax, eat, drink. The next day, or really the next night, we will move you out of the country. These will be an arduous few days demanding stamina, commitment, attention to detail, and obedience. Trust us, Alek, will you? Can you?”

He said yes.

“I wish we had time for run-throughs, for rehearsals, for shooting practice, for all of that. Can you hit that easy, almost stationary target under seventy-five feet away?”

“I’m a good shot. I won’t miss,” he said.

“All right. We must make do with what has been given us. For some reason, history has chosen you. You have to justify that choice. I believe in you, Alek, as no one else has. You owe me, you owe your true motherland, you owe history. You must not fail.”

“Comrade, I swear to you-”

I cut him off, as we were a few doors down from his house, and I gave him a Russian hug, smelling the body odor of a man who seldom bothered with hygiene, fastidious New England priss that I am and always will be.

“Now go, little Alek, and become a hero.”

He stepped out of the door, and I pulled out, leaving him behind.

You’re thinking: Okay, Hugh. Call your friend Jack Ruby and set the second part of the plan in operation. Tell us about Jack, how you manipulated him, how far back you old buddies went, your underworld ties, the implicit sponsorship of the Mob, particularly the Trafficante connection, running through the attempts on Castro that your own section, Clandestine Services under the great Cord Meyer, had set up.

Hah. The joke’s on you, friend. You shouldn’t be thinking about Jack Ruby, unless you sloppily missed the Warren Commission detail that he’d sent a Western Union moneygram to one of his strippers a full forty minutes after the announced transfer time of Alek to a more secure locale; he didn’t show up at the station basement until a full hour after that designated time, so he could have had no idea that Alek was in the building. Though that is the sort of thing the conspiracy hucksters always fail to mention, it destroys any possibility of Ruby as anything but a random mote of dust adrift on the currents of history, being blown this way and that.

For the record, I never heard of Jack Ruby until shortly after he finished poor Alek and took over the story himself. I suppose this may be counted as several of the immense strokes of good fortune that Operation LIBERTY VALANCE enjoyed, though perhaps it was meaningless in the end. The truth is, I planned to betray Oswald to the police; I expected him to be picked up and eventually electrocuted.

I didn’t think it mattered. His personality-I am no psychiatrist, but I’d studied him enough and been around him enough-had the smell of disintegration. He was a crackpot to begin with, with enormous mental disorders that had afflicted him his whole life. The outward manifestations were hotheadedness, empathy with outre causes and policies, lack of attention to details, sloppiness in all manners of being. He was a man at war, though primarily with himself. I suppose, inside, he hated his absent father and his overbearing, vulgar, disorganized mother; he hated himself for his continual incompetence and his total inability to engage people at any level; for his utter intellectual mediocrity. He worshipped the god of communism, knowing little about it. He had a streak of melodramatic vainglory-more than a streak, it was perhaps the largest part of his identity. I do think that he genuinely didn’t care if he lived or died; he was willing to risk his own life in an attempt to fulfill his most urgent need, which was to matter and no longer be a marginal loser detested by all. Loved or hated, it made no difference to him; that his name would be on the world’s lips with this opportunity, it was an aphrodisiac that his dull-normal mind and undisciplined lunacy could not have resisted. I believe he would have taken those shots whether or not we existed.

Most important, I believed if he was captured, he’d find the pressures too much, and in time his mind would fall apart. He wouldn’t be able to recall his own truth. First he’d claim he alone authored the deed and cling to that for months because he wanted the glory, the notoriety, the fame. Finally, he’d tell them the “truth,” as he imagined it, that he’d been picked up by a Soviet agent, coached and prepped for a mission against General Walker, and at the last moment diverted to the president as target when that opportunity revealed itself. Dutifully, the FBI would check out the tale and find no evidence of it. No one would remember seeing Alek in the presence of this agent; someone at a desk near mine in Langley-maybe it would even be me! — would be given the mission of discovering if there had been any remote possibility of Soviet involvement and, using sources, networks, leverage, penetration, and analysis, would produce a report in a year that, aside from the idiot’s attempts to secure a visa from the Russian embassy in Mexico City in September, there had been no record, no rumors, no traces of Soviet contact with Oswald.

If Oswald went through photo albums of known agents in order to ID his mysterious mentor, he’d come up with nothing, for in truth I looked far more like Dave Guard of the Kingston Trio than I did Vassily Psycholosky, KGB killer and goon.

If all went well, there would be no physical evidence-no fingerprints, no footprints, no jimmied locks, nothing slightly out of the ordinary, nothing ambiguous in meaning; the clincher would be the ballistics, which, as I have explained, would suggest his rifle and his rifle alone.

As I drove away, he receded into the shadows. I would see him only one more time-the closest our plot would come to discovery. I quickly headed downtown to the Adolphus, where I still had to talk to Jimmy, to convince him, and where we had a great deal of planning to do.

When I got back to the hotel, I was not surprised to see Jimmy waiting for me in the lobby.

“Hi, Mr. Meachum,” he said, rising, smiling in that Irish way, “how about letting me buy you a drink.”

“Sure,” I said, and like two cronies from an Oklahoma vacuum-cleaner manufacturer, we trundled off to the dark Men’s Bar, not the Adolphus’s famous Century Room, where a Rosemary or a Gigi or a Maryanne was singing. We found a table well away from the few other drinkers left, ordered up our poison, and waited for the girl to bring it and then to depart. For the record, in those days Texas had insane drinking laws, and we’d had to “join” the club in order to receive our own private bottles.

“So, Jimmy,” I said, “I’ve been trying to reach you. Have you spoken to Lon yet?”

“No, I haven’t. I thought I’d let the two of you work things out between you today. It seemed like a good time to take a little break.”

“Actually, it was. From what you’re saying, I guess you’ve figured it all out. That I want to change the nature but not the purpose of the mission. Same operational principles, different target. Lon, to be fair, is not so sure. He didn’t sign up for what I’m proposing. Neither did you. Neither, come to think of it, did I. But it’s here, it won’t go away; I believe it can be done. I also believe it should be done. It’s really just a continuation of the original idea. Do you want the full nine-ninety-five sales pitch or the bargain-basement four-ninety-five version? It’s getting late and I haven’t eaten yet, so I suppose the five-buck version will have to do.”

“Mr. Meachum, you don’t have to break a sweat. I get it. If you say it needs doing, then I’m the one to do it. Loyalty. You boys in your outfit, you got me out of prison and got me a new life doing what I do best and doing some good in the world. Never thought I’d have a shot at a house in the suburbs and two boys in private school, which is what I have today. I’ll sail with you to hell or the edge of the world, whichever comes first.”

“You’re a good man, Jimmy.”

“Plus, I hate them Castle Irish. Always putting on the airs, always carrying on like they weren’t bog-slogging peat burners like the rest of us. My father hated them, his father before him hated ’em more than the English. You’re doing me old dad a favor, and he’s smiling in heaven.”

“You’re a great man, Jimmy. Knowing I have you along means I know we can do this thing.”

“That we can. Do you know what I did today?”