“I don’t know anyone there since Susan Okada died. And I hate to play that card.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“I have an idea, though.”
“You attack the CIA with an M-16. When you’re captured, you escape and recapture your capturers, and we interrogate them.”
“Exactly. That’s it. What could go wrong? No, no, it’s actually subtle.”
“This I gotta hear.”
Swagger flew to Washington a few days later. It was a wretched flight through lightning and cloud, not smooth, and as usual, his mind would not settle down. He tried to nap, couldn’t, got up and went to the bathroom, earning displeasure from the flight attendant because the seat-belts sign was lit.
He returned, sat back, glad he had gotten an aisle seat, and tried once again to relax, tried again not to look at his watch or disturb the person next to him, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Of course not. Just a slumbering American male, teacher, salesman, lawyer, father, uncle, brother, what have you. Mr. Ordinary. Sleeping through it all.
But his hair was slightly disheveled, maybe that was it, like Oswald’s, and the next thing Swagger knew, he was back on the run with Ozzie Rabbit, who, despite the fact that he is the object of a city-wide manhunt and has only a limited amount of time to escape, has risked everything to return to the one place the police will expect him at any second to retrieve his revolver.
Why didn’t he have it with him in the first place?
A gun makes a man comfortable. Swagger remembered his own recent adventures with the .38 Super in Dallas and Comrade Ixovich’s GSh-18 in Moscow. Not using them, having them. The weight, the reminding pull on the waistline, the density, the pressure of the hard metal against the flesh. If you knew someone was going to try to kill you, that pressure was what let you operate. You were armed. You could fight. It was the enabler of all those who, for whatever reason, knew they would travel in violence’s way.
Oswald knew that up front. He had to know that. Yet he didn’t carry his pistol with him, even though it was designed for that reason.
It was, after all, a midframed revolver with a snub-nosed barrel, built explicitly for undercover use, for concealment. It’s the gun you carry when you can’t carry a gun. His ability to hide it really wasn’t an issue. While the gun – a Smith & Wesson .38 Special of the model known as M&P, originally chambered in the less powerful British .38 S&W round, then rechambered for the more powerful Special, its barrel cut down for that “detective” look – is no derringer, it can be easily concealed. After all, that is its point. For example, he could (as he did later) have tucked it in his belt, under a shirt or sweater. Since nobody was looking for it, it would have been an easily sustained deceit. Or he could have taped it to the barrel or the forestock of the Mannlicher-Carcano and concealed it in the same paper sack that held the rifle. He could have taped it to his own ankle. He could have hidden it in a sock and secured the sock to the barrel. Lacking tape, he probably could have hidden it in the pocket of loose-fitting pants and kept his hand on it to keep its weight from distending the trousers, attracting attention. He could have carried it in a readily secured lunch pail or bag.
He knew he was going to shoot the president of the United States. He knew he was going to be the object of a big-time manhunt. He knew armed policemen would be hunting and ultimately confronting him. He probably dreamed of a glorious death in a blazing gun battle at the hands of law enforcement as the fitting climax to his heroic sacrifice. Yet he leaves his snub-nosed revolver at home.
This struck Bob as either the product of a mind too deranged and incoherent to have brought off the assassination in the first place or, at the least, a curiosity.
The fact that he didn’t bring it was superseded only by the astonishment that he went back, an immense risk, to retrieve it.
So here was a question: what happened that made the revolver so valuable after the assassination? Clearly, something happened. Clearly, Oswald’s circumstances changed, and his thinking and tactics changed.
Swagger listed the things that his subconscious had brought to his attention: three odd behaviors in a few minutes, from 12:20 to 1 p.m., November 22. First, from two abject failures, Oswald makes a great recovery and shoots on the president. Then he arms himself for a ninety-foot walk across an empty room. With the manhunt tightening around him, he passes up a bus out of town and takes an incredible risk to get home and arm himself again when he could have been armed all along.
“Excuse me,” said his seatmate. “I have to go to the john.”
“Sure,” said Bob, and radio contact with station KLHO was lost.
The house looked like a book, a slim volume packed into a shelf of larger, more intimidating tomes. The others were mansions set back from the brick sidewalks of Georgetown, under the place’s looming elms, but this humble dwelling was like a ragged paperback squished between the heavier works. It was a wood-frame, with white shingles and a mansard roof and a sidewalk around back, where perhaps someone once built a modest garden. The shutters were black, the door was red, the number sixteen stood out in brass next to it, and when he knocked, a man his own age answered.
He put out his hand. “Sergeant Swagger? Or do you prefer ‘mister’?” he asked. The man appeared unlikely to have been shot at and looked comfortable in a professorial way; he wore corduroys, a blue button-down shirt, wire-rimmed glasses. His hair was a softly tousled white, as if on some bird’s breast.
“Mr. Gardner, thank you. Bob is what I prefer.”
“Please, then, come in. Call me Harry. I’m very pleased about this. I love to talk about Dad.”
“That’s what” – Bob mentioned a name – “told me.”
The fellow named was an editor in the Washington bureau of Newsweek, to whom Bob had arranged an introduction via a mutual friend, because the editor’s first book was called The New Heroes: The CIA’s First Generation of Cold Warriors, a multi-biography of some Agency stars of the postwar years.
Gardner led Bob into a well-furnished if old-fashioned living room, revealing the house’s surprising depth, then to a study lined with books. He taught at Georgetown University Law School some blocks away.
“Please, sit down. Coffee, something stronger?”
“No, thank you.”
“I’ve been told you almost won the Vietnam War single-handedly.”
“No sir. My one accomplishment was to come back more or less intact. All the truly brave men died over there.”
“I’m sure you’re too modest. I heard the word ‘greatness’ whispered.”
“The whisper should have been ‘lucky old crank.’”
Harry laughed. “Very good answer. Anyway, Dad. You wanted to know about Dad. He was a hero in his way as well.”
“I understand. What put me on to your father were the several references to him in the New Heroes book. He was Boswell, the biographer. He put together fictitious lives that the Agency forgers documented – legends, I guess they’re called in the trade – and as these fictitious men, our people went out and penetrated or at least operated in dangerous areas.”
“Dad never lost a man. No agent who went underground as a Boswell construction was ever arrested or tortured or imprisoned. He brought ’em back alive. He was very, very proud of that.”
“Yes sir. As well he might be.”
“But I have to tell you, Bob, Dad was also discreet. Believe me, I should know, I tried to write his biography. I went through everything. All his papers, all his notes, all his diaries, all his unfinished novels. The man committed nothing to paper, and when I was growing up, in this house, mum was the word. He never brought work home with him, which is another way of saying he was almost never home because he stayed in Langley eighteen hours a day.”