"Good. Two. Butch?"
Karp snapped back to the business at hand. He had been thinking about Marlene and the last phone conversation they had shared, about false laughter and long silences with the dead line whispering bad things to his imagination. He said, "Three, they had nothing to do with Kennedy's murder, and they didn't even know Oswald was connected with them, but the trail from Oswald led back to the Cuban involvement, and Mongoose, and using mafiosi, and the stuff they did after Mongoose, after JFK told them to stop. They couldn't let anyone follow on that trail."
"Why not?" asked Fulton. "That stuff got out anyway. And who the hell cares about some spooks playing war games. Especially as they totally screwed up the hit on Fidel."
"That might be just the point," said Karp. "I have a feeling these guys felt they had a reputation to protect. Also, the Warren Report critics who say the whole thing in Dallas was totally organized and carried out by the CIA never explain how come these guys tried to kill Castro about a dozen times and tripped all over themselves and then got Kennedy the first time out. On the other hand-"
V.T. broke in. "Stop! Now we're doing it. This is how people go crazy over this business. Look, there are ten thousand facts, or quasi facts, that have been dug up about this assassination. They've been arranged in about four hundred books and God knows how many articles, of which every one contradicts every other one, because each one selects out a group of facts and ignores others that are inconvenient to its initial thesis: the CIA did it, the Mob did it, Castro did it, and so on, of which the Warren Report itself is the most famous example. If we start doing the same thing we're going to wind up with something that's not much better than Warren in some different direction."
He took off his spectacles again, wiping them absent-mindedly on his tie. The two other men exchanged a look, and Karp asked, "So what do we do, V.T.? Hang it up and go home?"
V.T. grinned. "Don't ask me twice. No, I can think of two things. One is this stuff." He tapped the sheaf of documents. "It's new and it's a break. It's the very first documentary evidence that someone called Lee Oswald was actually connected with the CIA, actually on somebody's payroll. So we have to explore the CIA connection for all it's worth. We have to find these three guys, Veroa, Mosca, and their CIA contact, Maurice Bishop. Or whoever Bishop really is."
"What do you mean?" asked Fulton. "It's an alias?"
"Yeah, I checked already. Nobody named Maurice Bishop ever worked for the CIA. Okay, that's the first thing. The second approach is through Oswald himself."
"How do you mean?" Karp asked. "I thought he was dead. Or am I still being a dupe of the Warren Report?"
They all laughed, a relief of tension. V.T. said, "That, or a conscious tool of malign forces. No, what I mean is this. Oswald is the sole connector that links all the usual suspects, even if he was just a patsy, as he himself said when they grabbed him that day. Who are the usual suspects? CIA, commies, anticommies, Mob. Okay, Mob first. Oswald was raised by a minor Mob figure in New Orleans, his uncle, Dutz Murret. Murret's best buddy was Carlos Marcello's bodyguard and chauffeur. There's all kinds of hearsay evidence that Oswald knew Jack Ruby before, so maybe he kept his connections up with the wise guys.
"Next, commies: Oswald claimed to be a Marxist nearly all his life. Whether true or not, he certainly made the marines believe it and he did move to Russia and then married the niece of a Soviet Interior Ministry official."
"And he went to Mexico and tried to get to Cuba," added Karp.
V.T. paused and gave him an odd look. "Yes, so it seems. Although… no, let's not get into it now. Where were we? Yes, the anticommies. In Dallas, Oswald was welcomed with open arms by a group of violently anti-communist White Russians, like George de Morenschildt, Viktor Bezikoff, Armand Gaiilov, and others-not something you'd expect them to do for an actual Red. Also, on his return to New Orleans in 1963, Oswald hooked up with Gary Becker, a notorious right-winger, and Becker apparently recruited him to infiltrate pro-Castro student organizations. That seems to be the origin of the famous Fair Play for Cuba incident. Oswald hands out pro-Castro leaflets and gets into a scuffle with anti-Castro Cubans and gets arrested. He even goes on the radio to debate some anti-Castro Cuban about communism. Unfortunately, when he printed up the leaflets he used the address of Becker's organization, the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean, 544 Bank Street, on the pro-Castro leaflets. Very odd. Finally, there's the Sylvia Odio incident. Three men identifying themselves as members of an anti-Castro organization show up at the Odios' Dallas apartment one evening in September 1963. Odio's dad is a big anti-Castroite and a political prisoner in Cuba. Two of these guys are Cubans, one's an American who calls himself Leon. They talk a lot about killing Kennedy because of how he betrayed them at the Bay of Pigs and after the missile crisis. When Kennedy is shot the next month, Odio IDs 'Leon' as Oswald. Everybody who's ever talked to Odio swears she's right on, but of course Warren discounted her evidence."
"This is old stuff, V.T.," said Karp. "What's the point?"
"Wait. Now we come to the CIA connection. Oswald works at one of the most secret bases in the military, Atsugi, Japan, where they launch U-2 spy planes against Russia. He has a secret security clearance. Atsugi also happens to be the regional CIA center. At this time, although Oswald is boasting he's a commie and a Russian spy, nobody does anything about it. In fifty-nine he gets out of the marines, and despite the fact he has almost no money, he somehow gets the fare to fly to London. Then he gets to Helsinki in some way on a day when there's no commercial London-to-Helsinki flight, crosses over by train, goes to Moscow, and talks with an embassy official with strong CIA links. He defects, works in Minsk for a while, marries a Russian girl, redefects to the U.S., all without an instant's difficulty with passports or transit. This is in an era when famous people are getting their passports pulled for even the faintest pink associations. The capper to all this is that Marina Oswald paints a picture of her late husband as a feckless schmuck who could barely keep a job, just the kind of nutty loner who typically assassinates presidents of the United States. The guy apparently has no talent at all, except a talent for making big, powerful bureaucracies do anything he wanted. Oh, yeah: one other useful little skill. He can be in two places at once. In the month before the assassination, nearly a dozen witnesses have placed Oswald in interesting places-a firing range shooting his rifle, a rifle repair shop, a garage, a gas station-at times when we know he was somewhere else. And in all those places whoever it was made sure that people would remember him as Lee Oswald."
"You're buying the double-Oswald story?" asked Fulton.
"I don't know. It's one explanation of the facts, with the only other one being that a bunch of unconnected people, solid citizens, lied in concert for no reason. But that's not crucial at the moment. What is crucial is that whoever Oswald really was, he's still the key to the mystery. All the threads cross on him, and that's why the most exciting thing we've uncovered so far is this document actually naming him as a contract CIA agent."
Fulton stood up and stretched. He said, "Well, you know, V.T., this is all very fancy, but I'm just a simple street cop. Maybe before we elaborate any theories we should locate this guy, what's-his-face, Veroa, and have a chat with him. And the wise guy, Mosca. That's what I'm gonna get started on, as soon as I come off the drunk I'm gonna go on now for getting into this pile of shit in the first place."
"While you're at it," said V.T., "you could find out what old Lee was doing from August 21st to September 17th, 1963. The whole FBI was trying to find out his daily activities from his date of birth to the time he died, but nobody's ever been able to determine where he was or what he was doing for those twenty-seven days. Marina, naturally, says he was napping on the couch, but nobody else saw him during the period in question. All we know is that he was in the country on Labor Day; he visited his aunt."