The Third Bullet - Страница 68

“The smell continues, and I realize it’s rising out of my own clothes. I feel around with my fingers and come across a spot on my overcoat upon which the rifle has lain, and it’s damp, and I bring it to my nose, and that smell nearly knocks me out. I’ve got the picture. Somehow I arranged myself in a certain position, and the rifle action had slid out of its pouch a bit. It laid on its side over a long time, and whatever Mr. Scott used in cleaning and lubricating it-”

“Hoppe’s 9,” I said. “It’s a bore solvent and lubricant. He uses it to clean, then he lightly coats everything with it as a lube. Yeah, it’s pungent.”

“That’s it, then. Anyhow, this stuff has to obey gravity. It begins to seep downward, and it starts dripping out. This happens over and over as I’m lying there, and a stain is spreading. Fortunately, from the way I’ve got my things arranged, it’s all on the overcoat and none on the suit coat, which I’d pushed back so it didn’t get lumpy on me.

“Now I’ve got a problem. It’s not just the stain but it’s the smell. Suppose, as I’m heading back to the car, I’m stopped. The cops are sure to be about. I can talk my way out of anything, and I’ve got my James Delahanty O’Neill card and Massachusetts license to get me out. But that stain’s standing out like a bull’s-eye on my chest, and maybe these Texas coppers know guns and can ID the smell. Not good.

“After I climb down, I take the coat off and fold it. It turns out they used that shelf to store carpeting, so I slide the coat into the carpeting so that it’s covered by a lot of weight. I smooth the carpeting over it. You can’t tell from looking at it that the old carpeting pile contains a coat, and it’s so heavy that I’m thinking it’ll contain that smell forever, at least until it evaporates.

“That leaves me with only my suit coat to hide the strap with the rifle parts, and it’s not long enough. I figure I can make it out of the building unseen, and then I’ll dump the rifle behind some garbage cans. I’ll go to the car, come back, drive around a bit to make sure no cop car is patrolling, and jump out and secure the rifle. That’s my plan, and that’s what I did, and I didn’t have no problem. It seems there’s lots of folks out, they keep going down to the depository, which is all lit up, and they’re placing wreaths and bunches of flowers on the hill. Anyway, sir, that’s the story.”

“I think we’re okay,” I said. “They’re so convinced it’s Alek and only Alek, and he’s probably beginning to think that way himself, they’ll never do the kind of search that would uncover the coat.”

“Possibly in a year, when all this settles down, you’d want me to return and revisit and remove that piece of evidence.”

“I wouldn’t do it too soon, Jimmy. I’d wait to see how the trial goes, I’d wait to see if the investigation stays with Alek or they tire of him and branch out. If the government commits to Alek and history commits to Alek, nobody’ll ever look any further. It could lie there for fifty years and never be seen and never tell its story. In the meantime, get some sleep, and I will too, and there’s nothing left for us to do here except make a low-profile exit from Dallas and return to our lives. You’ve done great, Jimmy.”

I shook his hand. For the first time in twenty-four hours, I felt the weight of dread come off my shoulders, and the air tasted clean on the way down. I took a last sip of the bourbon and this time enjoyed the mallet. It amplified the feeling. I realized then: we’d done it.

And that’s the way it happened. I have to laugh anytime I encounter the “deep plot” theory with various government (ours, theirs, anybody’s) manipulating forces, making exquisite plans based on surgical precision and split-second timing (the clandestine operation on JFK’s body on the tarmac at Andrews being the most hilarious). It happened the way everything happens; it was part of the world, not an exception to it. We had a plan for something else, and from that basic text we improvised, we adapted, we bluffed and lied and risked, and we brought it off. We were given an opportunity and maximized it, but we couldn’t have done it if we weren’t already there, on the ground, in midoperation, on another mission. It changed its essence and the scope of its ambition, seizing on the one-in-a-billion happenstance that put JFK seventy-five feet outside the Book Depository, and even that opportunity Alek the Idiot blew. Still, we prevailed. It was, like everything, ramshackle, clumsy, full of mistakes, and unconscionably lucky. We threw it together, that’s all, because it seemed right and moral, at least to me, and because it was, I believed, my duty.

I won’t argue the morality and I won’t-can’t-argue the strategic outcome in the next years. I will say this: as espionage, it was a masterpiece.

CHAPTER 19

The lawyers-Adams’s in Hartford, Connecticut, and Bob’s, actually a recruited FBI surrogate in Boise, Idaho-dickered for a couple of weeks on issues that lawyers find fascinating: share of profits (equal), share of expenses (equal), no first-class travel (a major concession for Marty), equal exposure in the case of lawsuits for libel, misrepresentation, the expropriation of intellectual property, and so forth.

Meanwhile, Swagger heard from Kathy Reilly in Moscow that his friend and ally Stronski had been released from the hospital, with no charges filed, and had promptly disappeared, figuring he was on an Izzy hit list. A day later, Stronski himself checked in: “Am fine, brother. You saved my life. One second later on that shot, Stronski is dead. I owe all. See you soon.”

Then word came from the “lawyer” that the contract, basically boilerplate with a filigree or two, was okay. Swagger arranged to have it sent to him at the Adolphus, where he stayed in the open as Jack Brophy. Richard was witness to his signing, and it was sent off to Marty for countersigning along with Bob’s hastily written notebook, recording all his late-night ideas, for Marty’s perusal.

The word came back quickly, via an e-mail.

“This is brilliant. Much more than I expected, and it seems to dovetail exactly with what I have suspected but was unable to articulate. I especially like your focus on Oswald’s behavior in the two hours of freedom he had left. It seems you’ve noticed things nobody else has, and all point to a conspiracy of the sort that could easily involve our friends, the happy cousins Hugh and Lon and maybe a few others. Let me come to Dallas and meet with you, and I will tell you what my contribution to our cause is to be. I think you’ll be impressed. French Room again. On me! No need to split expenses on this one, I’m so happy!”

They met in the French Room three days later, ate more sliced carrots, filigreed celery, thigh of rabbit marinated for three weeks in squid broth, and plum-banana tart under a glaze of honey and strawberry, all to Marty’s narration, which was complete to all apostrophes and something he called an apercu. There wasn’t even a Richard Monk along to absorb some of Marty’s excess attention and keep the conversation from becoming too Marty to bear.

Finally, Marty relented and got to his tale over the last morsel of bunny.

“Suppose,” he started, “Lon Scott-after all, not a sociopath or natural-born killer by any means-returned to his home in Virginia on November 24, 1963, with two pieces of luggage. One contained clothes. The other contained a Model 70 Winchester rifle that he had used to put an exploding bullet into the head of John F. Kennedy.

“Like any man who’s never killed, Lon feels contrition, regret, doubt, self-loathing. This can but double, triple, multiply grotesquely as the week wears on, and after it the months and the years, and the man he’s killed is declared in the popular culture a secular saint, a martyred king-Camelot! — and, finally, a demigod. Lon cannot bear to confront the instrument by which the deed was done, for that is to acknowledge that he was the one who did it; and so he commands a servant to stuff it in a closet somewhere. There it sits and sits and sits.

“Let us consider such an object, the case in which the rifle is stored. It’s leather, possibly from Abercrombie and Fitch, about a yard long and half a yard wide, able to contain the two parts of the rifle, stock and action/scope, plus the tube of the suppressor, in parallel on velvet cushion. There’s plenty of room for the bolt, for the screws, maybe a two- or three-piece cleaning rod, a pack of patches, a brush, a small container of Hoppe’s 9, a small bottle of lubricating oil, and a rag or chamois for mopping up.

“Maybe in the case as well are two or three extra rounds, that is, of the counterfeit iteration on which you have such provocative insights. Suppose, further, a metallic residue could be removed carefully from the uncleaned barrel, and that residue, by neutron-activation hocus-pocus, would link it to only one kind of bullet at the exclusion of all others, the Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5 manufactured by Western Cartridge Company in the mid-fifties. That’s the point, if I understand it, right, Jack?”

“That’s right, Marty.”

“Let us further allow that in those days they always put a luggage destination tag on every suitcase, which one can fairly guess bore the initials of the ultimate destination-in his case, Richmond-and wrapped it around the handle, and there was some kind of adhesive or stickum by which the two ends were joined. And suppose they were always dated. And Lon’s name and address would have been validated by another tag.

“We have this object, linked by dated tags to Dallas, November 22, 1963, never opened, because Lon never again used or touched the rifle. It is physical proof that Lon was in Dallas that weekend; Lon, one of the greatest shots in the world. We have physical proof that he had a rifle capable of firing a bullet into the president. We have several samples of the cartridge, possibly with Lon’s fingerprints. We have the rifle itself with his fingerprints or DNA traces on it. The barrel of the rifle will contain metallic traces that can be linked metallurgically to the bullet that assassinated the president. Your Honor, I rest my case: whoever has possession of that case has physical proof of the conspiracy to murder the thirty-fifth president of the United States and, by fair inference, the identity of the man who pulled the trigger. Such a discovery would force a reopening of the case, and reopened, the case would lead straight to wherever it would lead, perhaps to the CIA cousin Hugh Meachum. The jig, as they say, would be up. Do I have your interest yet, Jack?”