John F. Kennedy was a sometime poor speller with miserable handwriting.
He sat on the porch in his basketball shorts reading science fiction recommended by Ferrie. He dry-fired the Mannlicher. He still had the textbook from his typing class in Dallas and he sat some nights with the book open to a diagram of a typewriter keyboard. He practiced fingering the letters in alphabetical order-a with the left pinky, b with the left index finger, tapping the page repeatedly without looking down, as he'd been taught in class.
Marina said, "Papa, there is garbage."
He hung out at the Crescent City garage, which was next door to the coffee company where he worked. He came in wearing his electrician's belt with grease gun, screwdriver, pliers, friction tape, etc. He stretched his ten-minute breaks to half an hour, sitting in the office reading gun magazines and talking to the guy who ran the place. There were beer mugs sitting in the window, maps on the wall. He could kill ten minutes looking at a map.
The Crescent City garage had a contract with the U.S. government to keep and maintain a certain number of vehicles for use by local agencies.
Sundays the street was empty and the garage was closed and looked like an abandoned Spanish church inside the lowered grille, with light falling through the high dusty windows. This was where he met Agent Bateman, who had a key to the office. They went through the office and sat in one of the cars set aside for the Secret Service and FBI. He told Bateman what he'd learned at 544 Camp, which wasn't a hell of a lot. He wanted to use the Minox but Bateman said no, no, no, no. He gave Lee a white envelope containing a number of well-wrinkled bills, like money saved by children.
Lee insisted on knowing the informant number he'd been assigned and Bateman told him it was S-l 72. Then Lee said he wanted to apply for a passport and wondered if there might be a problem, due to his record as a defector. Bateman said he'd look into it.
Mosquitoes in swarms. He saw himself typing a paper on political theory, basing it on experience no fellow student could match, a half-eaten apple at his elbow.
When Lee has a certain look on his face, eyes kind of amused, mouth small and tight, he finds himself thinking of his father. He associates the look with his father. He believes it is a look his father may have used. It feels like his father. A curious sensation, the look coming upon him, taking hold in an unmistakable way, and then his old man is here, eerie and forceful and whole, a meeting across worlds.
"There's something I know about you, Leon, that I find fascinating. It's something almost no one else knows. Very few people know. You're the night-rider who took a shot at General Ted Walker two and a half months ago in Dallas."
Lee's mind went blank.
"I can't tell you how I know," Ferrie said. "But there are men who are interested in you. At first I only played a hunch. I thought Leon and I, we have a psychic bond. I took your application to Banister. I had an argument all set. I would say to Guy, 'Here is a man who wants to spy on our operations. He wants to use us but we will end up using him. Not through manipulation or political conversion. He believes in his heart that he's a dedicated leftist. But he is also a Libran. He is capable of seeing the other side. He is a man who harbors contradictions.' I was ready to say to Guy, 'Here's a Marine recruit who reads Karl Marx.' I was ready to say, 'This boy is sitting on the scales, ready to be tilted either way.''
Lee finished off his beer.
"But I didn't have to present an argument at all. All I had to do was say your name. Banister was eager to grab you and hold on. Turns out he'd been making inquiries about you on behalf of an old buddy of his. A fellow named Mackey. You were lost. Nobody knew where you went after Dallas. Guy cracked his meanest smile when I told him you were greasing coffee machines right around the corner and wanted to join our staff. He picked up the telephone. 'Look what I found.'"
Ferrie ordered two more beers and said, "You are the object of some intense scrutiny. Banister doesn't know the exact nature of the role being planned for you. But it's only a matter of time before he finds out."
Three, four, half a dozen Cubans sat around the Habana tonight in camo T-shirts and pants, boots stained with dry white mud.
"Are you afraid you'll get caught for Walker? You never mentioned Dallas to'me."
"I never mention it to anyone."
"You think they'll know. All you have to do is say the word Dallas and everyone will know. Prison is terrifying. The first thing they do when they arrest a man is look up his ass."
"I found that out in the Marines."
"They look up your ass before they know your name. It's like some Pygmy ritual in the Congo."
Lee could not drink more than a single beer without feeling funny.
"Do you practice a religion? Do you go to church?"
"I'm an atheist."
"That's dumb," Ferrie told him. "How could you be so stupid?"
"Religion just holds us back. It's an arm of the state."
"Dumb. Shortsighted. You have to understand there are things that run deeper than politics. Our political skin is just the thinnest outer crust. I was brought up a Catholic in Cleveland." Feme's eyes went comically wide as if the remark had taken him by surprise. "Penance was the major sacrament of my adolescence. I used to haunt the confession boxes. I went from one to the other. It felt more like a sin than a way of absolving sin. There was a real sneaky pleasure there. I told my sins, I made up sins, I said my act of contrition, I went to the altar rail and said my penance and then I got back in line again. On Saturday afternoon four confessionals were going full-blast. I made the circuit. Kneeling in the dark and whispering my sins to a man in skirts. I went to seminaries, twice, to learn the trade. Even started my own church. Only a fool rejects the need to see beyond the screen."
Lee went to the men's room and stood there with a static around him, like space is crisscrossed with gray lines. He stood for two minutes in the middle of the room. When he got back to the table, Ferrie started right in.
"Didn't Kennedy know how big Cuba is? Didn't anyone tell him you can't invade an island that size with fifteen hundred men?"
"Cuba is little."
"Cuba is big. Why did he consent to an invasion if he didn't mean to follow through? Why did he promise us a military victory and then back off? Because he lost his nerve. He muted everything. He soft-pedaled it. He wanted an invasion that was subtle. It's a wonder Castro realized he was under attack."
"Cuba is little."
"I'll tell you what rankles," Ferrie said, "and this is something I hear every day from Guy. Guy feels strongly about this. He thinks Kennedy and Castro are talking to each other. They're writing secret letters, they're sending emissaries back and forth. Friendly overtures. There's something they aren't telling us. Something we don't know about. There's more to it. There's always more to it. This is what history consists of. It's the sum total of all the things they aren't telling us."
Lee got in a shoving match out on the street with some Latin type who had pockmarks and a dangling silver cross. He didn't know how it started. Even gripping the man's biceps and talking into his face, he couldn't remember how the thing got started. A few people stood around mainly for lack of other amusement. Then he was home in bed.
He read gun magazines in the garage office. One of the coffee heads would appear in the door and tell him he'd better get back. Back to the motors and blowers, the hoppers, grinders, conveyor belts.
His passport arrived the day after he applied.
He walked into the spare room at home and thought some things had been moved. It couldn't be Marina, who had orders to stay out. He inspected his papers, checked the closet where he kept his guns. Something was different, an invisible whispery difference, like when you know a thing deeply in a dream without knowing how or why.