Now they laughed, remembering the same thing, the time Parmenter walked into a dental clinic in a remote town near the CIA air base in southwest Guatemala where the Bay of Pigs was being rehearsed by Cuban pilots and American advisers. Sitting in the shabby waiting room, in an alligator shirt and madras shorts, was George de Mohrenschildt, also known as Jerzy Sergius von Mohrenschildt. He was on a walking tour of Central America, he said.
"That whole thing ended horribly," George said, "if I can actually say it has ended."
"I think you can say that."
"This administration still bullies Castro. It's ridiculous and unnecessary. I'll go even further. This whole administration revolves around the floating cinder of little communist Cuba. It's something of a joke, Larry, and I say this knowing which side of the Cuban fence you are on. Of course this is your job and I respect it."
"This was my job. I'm doing strictly support work now."
"I would like to believe the administration has no more designs on Cuba."
"Believe it, George. The missile crisis was resolved with the understanding that we wouldn't invade Cuba. Kennedy had the chance to get rid of Castro and he ends up guaranteeing the man's job. There is widespread lack of interest right now. Commitment to this issue is absolutely nil. The administration went from passionate and total dedication to an attitude of complete aloofness and indifference and they did it in goddamn record time."
"It's the American disease," George said with a warm smile.
De Mohrenschildt was a petroleum engineer by profession but didn't seem to spend much time at it. He was on his fourth wife, Larry knew, and they tended to be women from wealthy families.
But his marriages didn't explain his apparent association with Nazis in World War II, his apparent ties to Polish and French intelligence, his expulsion from Mexico, his apparent communist leanings when he was at the University of Texas, his Soviet contacts in Venezuela, the discrepancies in his stated history, his travels in West Africa, Central America, Yugoslavia and Cuba.
George had a tendency to be detained or shot at for sketching coastal installations in strategic areas.
But he knew Jackie Kennedy or her parents or someone in the family, and he spent time at the Racquet Club when he was in New York, and he was technically entitled to call himself a baron. It was part of George's attractiveness that he continually emerged from a different past.
"When do you leave Washington?"
"I go to New York tomorrow, then back to Dallas."
"I thought Dallas was Walker country," Larry said. "Who's taking potshots at the general?"
"He's a complete fascist degenerate, this man Walker. A very dangerous man with his racism, his anti-Castro crusades. This is what I mean about Cuba. Cuba stirs up the worst kind of American obsession. Here is a general who is relieved of his command for preaching right-wing politics, who leads a racist campaign in Mississippi, who is put in the loony bin, who settles down in Dallas where we see him in the papers every day with his John Birch Society nonsense and his Cuban tirades. Raw hate, Larry. Two men died in Mississippi because of Walker's provocations. He's a little Hitler plain and simple."
"You sound as though you'd like to take a crack at him yourself."
"I'm telling you, I wouldn't mind. As a matter of fact, I think I know who tried to kill him."
A waiter plunged after a dropped spoon.
"A boy I know in Dallas," George said. "I call him a boy. Maybe he's twenty-two, twenty-three. Now that I'm past fifty, they all look like boys and girls. But as long as the boys don't look like girls and vice versa."
"What got him interested in Walker?"
"The easy answer is politics. In 1959, an ex-Marine, what does he do? He defects to the Soviet Union. They send him to a factory in Minsk. Disillusionment sets in, of course, and back he comes. Naturally the Agency is interested. Domestic Contacts asks me to talk to the boy."
"A friendly debriefing."
"Exactly. I'm to take the fatherly approach. Find out what he saw, heard, smelled and tasted. It wasn't long before we started to like each other. In fact I think my own feelings about General Walker may have influenced Lee to take a shot at him."
"But you're not absolutely sure."
"Not absolutely."
"He hasn't said he did it."
"He hasn't said anything. But there were indications, certain signs, an atmosphere, you know? Plus a curious photograph he sent me. I'm frankly sorry he missed."
They returned to their food, their lunch. The voices and noise around them became apparent once more, a tide of excited news, a civilized clamor. George said something perfectly right about the wine, swirling it in the high-stemmed tulip glass. An attractive woman hurried toward a table, showing the happy exasperation that describes a journey through traffic snarls and personal dramas to some island of prosperous calm. There were times when Larry thought lunch in a superior restaurant was the highlight of Western man.
"You mentioned politics," he said. "How far left is this young friend of yours?"
"There is politics, there is emotion, there is psychology. I know him quite well but I wouldn't be completely honest if I said I could pin him down, pin him right to the spot. He may be a pure Marxist, the purest of believers. Or he may be an actor in real life. What I know with absolute certainty is that he's poor, he's dreadfully, grind-ingly poor. What's the expression I want?"
"Piss-poor."
"Exactly. He's married to a lovely, lovely girl. Really, Larry, one of those flawed Russian beauties. Innocent and frail. She speaks a lovely true Russian. Not Sovietized, you know? Her uncle is a colonel in the MVD."
Larry couldn't help laughing. It was all so curiously funny. It was rich, that's what it was. Everyone was a spook or dupe or asset, a double, courier, cutout or defector, or was related to one. We were all linked in a vast and rhythmic coincidence, a daisy chain of rumor, suspicion and secret wish. George was laughing too. A wonderful woodwind rumble. They looked at each other and laughed. They laughed in appreciation of the richness of life, the fabulous and appalling nature of human affairs, the good food and drink, the superior service, the wrecked careers, the whole teeming abscess of folly and regret. Larry felt flush and well fed, a little tipsy, all the right things. The Honduran ambassador said hello. A man from Pemex stopped to tell a richly filthy joke. It was a lovely lunch. It was great, rich, lovely and perfectly right.
Parmenter took the Agency shuttle bus back to Langley. Then he wrote a memo to the Office of Security requesting an expedite check on George de Mohrenschildt.
Somewhere in his room of theories, in some notebook or folder, Nicholas Branch has a roster of the dead. A printout of the names of witnesses, informers, investigators, people linked to Lee H. Oswald, people linked to Jack Ruby, all conveniently and suggestively dead. In 1979 a House select committee determined there was nothing statistically abnormal about the death rate among those who were connected in some way to the events of November 22. Branch accepts this as an actuarial fact. He is writing a history, not a study of the ways in which people succumb to paranoia. There is endless suggestiveness. Branch concedes this. There is the language of the manner of death. Shot in back of head. Died of cut throat. Shot in police station. Shot in motel. Shot by husband after one month marriage. Found hanging by toreador pants in jail cell. Killed by karate chop. It is the neon epic of Saturday night. And Branch wants to believe that's all it is. There is enough mystery in the facts as we know them, enough of conspiracy, coincidence, loose ends, dead ends, multiple interpretations. There is no need, he thinks, to invent the grand and masterful scheme, the plot that reaches flawlessly in a dozen directions.