Contact with wealthy and influential men was a bracing experience for someone who'd been brought up to believe in the American genius for making leaps to new levels of privilege. Being rich, he saw, was something you grew into. The Agency had huge collections of intelligence on banana republics and their leaders. Larry traded secrets for pieces of promising action. He spent time in Cuba, setting up transactions between the Batista government and interests in the U.S. He helped arrange mineral surveys, land-development deals, drilling contracts, casino franchises. He traveled to Oriente Province to learn the extent of the rebel threat to cane fields controlled by U.S. firms. The extent was considerable. When the American executives left their palm-shaded streets and large white houses, when the cooks and gardeners looked for new situations, when the company guards fled, when the local army post was overrun, Laurence Parmenter's fortune was still in the ground of the unexplored oil properties of Cuba.
"I admire that robe, Larry. You look like Orson Welles in deep focus."
He stood in the doorway smiling absently at the familiar flatness in her voice, not quite hearing what she said.
"On second thought I'll tell you what you look like. You look like one of those corrupt barons in Ivan the Terrible, got up deli-ciously in animal skins. Make me a drink so I can keep you company. We ought to keep each other company."
After the revolution came the plan to invade. He helped set up the Double-Chek Corporation, a front for the recruitment of pilot instructors. Gibraltar Steamship came next, a company whose nominal head was a former State Department officer and ex-president of United Fruit. Parmenter himself could not always tell where the Agency left off and the corporations began. There were men related by blood and by marriage; there were company directors who were former high-ranking intelligence officers; there were government advisers who were once company directors. It was a society he recognized as a better-working version of the larger world, where things have an almost dreamy sense of connection to each other. Here the plan was tighter. These were men who believed history was in their care.
Gibraltar Steamship provided cover for propaganda operations against Cuba. The device was Radio Swan, a transmitter stored in an oversized trailer on a remote island in the western Caribbean. Great Swan Island was the product of hundreds of years of bird droppings. There were three coconut palms, twenty-eight people. Lovely numbers, everyone agreed, pointing toward barrenness and isolation, the soul-testing elements of the trade. For the invasion Parmenter used the same broadcast techniques that had worked in Guatemala. Cryptic messages from spy movies of the forties. "Attention, Eduardo, the moon is red." Romantic imagery employing the names of local wildlife. "The barracuda sleeps at sundown." "The shark leaves a golden trail." Mackey would later tell Parmenter that in his LCI lying to off Blue Beach, this gibberish had the sound of a mind unraveling. It diminished the whole operation, made comic fucking opera of troops in combat.
When the messages were broadcast, Larry was in Washington at the Agency's invasion headquarters, a tempo building near the Lincoln Memorial. He was eating a soggy meal off a paper plate when news hit the control room that JFK would not approve air cover for the landings. The men did not accept it at first. Too unbelievably stupid and cruel. A colonel in golf togs walked through. The men shouted at superiors, damn near grew violent. Someone vomited lazily in a wastebasket, leaning over with his hands on his knees. Win Everett arrived from Miami, wrote out a letter of resignation, tore it up, flew back to Miami to be with exile leaders who were confined in a barracks at Opa-Locka so they would not leak word of the landings. It was the first major death watch in South Florida that week.
No one used the term textbook operation. Three days later Radio Swan was still on the air, promising the abandoned troops in Zapata swamp that help was on the way. Larry slept on a cot in grubby clothes but made it a point to shave every day. Shaving had an impact on his morale and he needed all the help he could get. Several weeks earlier he'd borrowed heavily to buy stock in Francisco Sugar at depressed prices. Sugar was the word going round. There were stunning profits to be made, insiders said, once the plantations were back in U.S. control.
"People think we're the strangest marriage," Beryl said.
"Why should they? Who? What's strange about us?"
"Only everything."
"People think we're interesting. That's my impression."
"They think we're strange. We have nothing in common. We have no practical reason for being. We never even talk about practical things."
"We have no children. We're not parents. Parents talk about practical things. They have reasons to be practical."
"With or without children. Believe me. We're considered strange."
"I don't think we're strange. I think we're interesting."
"We're interesting in a way. But we're also strange. I'm the one they focus on. I'm the stranger of the two."
"I don't like conversations like this. I don't know how to have these conversations."
"They're probably not a good idea."
"So let's change the subject," he said.
"Although the fact of the matter is you're far stranger, love, than I could ever think of being,"
"Strange how? I'm not strange. I don't like this at all."
"Strange like a man. Strange like someone I could never know the heart of, the truth of."
"This is thankfully outside my range."
"I don't think I could ever begin to imagine in years and years of living intimately with a man what it is like to be him."
"Funny. I thought women were the secret."
"No no no no no," she said softly, as if correcting a touchy child. "That's the wisdom handed down from man to boy, through the ages, a hundred generations of knowledge and experience. But it is just another Agency lie."
From the moment the CIA monitored a rebel broadcast on January 1, 1959, announcing that the tyrant Batista had fled the country at 2:00 a.m. and that Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz was the supreme leader of the Cuban revolution, from that moment to this, four and a half years later, as he stood in his striped robe mixing a drink for his wife, Larry Parmenter had been involved in one or another plot to get Cuba back. Soldiering on, Beryl said. She liked to remind him that he was not vindictive, had no strong political convictions, did not hate Castro or wish to see physical harm come to him. Larry was famous in fact for going to a costume party as Fidel Castro, with beard, cigar, khaki fatigues, about a month before the invasion. Seemed funny at the time.
One thing Larry didn't like at all. This was the kind of fellow he'd occasionally had to deal with in joint efforts to recover investments in Cuba. The gambling interests, the casinos and hotels, the men who bought off officials routinely, who sent a steady traffic of couriers with hefty satchels moving through the Bahamas to the International Credit Bank in Geneva-men who thought longingly of the millions they'd once skimmed from the gaming tables in Havana. He wanted nothing to do with those roly-poly wops.
Earlier that day a young man walked into the outer office at Guy Banister Associates in New Orleans. Delphine Roberts was at her desk typing a revised list of civil-rights organizations for Banister's files. The young man stood patiently waiting, in jeans with rolled cuffs, two days' stubble on his chin. Delphine stopped typing long enough to pat her teased hair, a nervous habit she was determined to overcome. Then she resumed her work, aware that the young man was studying a calendar on the wall in order to kid himself into thinking he was not being made to wait. She knew all the styles. She could type a complicated text and scrutinize a visitor at the same time. This visitor had a little smile that seemed to say, Here I am-just the fellow you've been waiting for.