“So it’s no sniper rifle?”
“It’s basically a piece of junk. Barely accurate, shoddily made, ugly as sin, with a cranky bolt throw. It shows that the Italians never took war seriously, particularly when you compare it to a brilliant piece of engineering like a Mauser. Now, the cartridge it shoots is more interesting and probably deserved a better rifle than the Mannlicher. It’s a mediumbore, flat shooting round, meant for battle at more or less longer ranges. The bullet is heavy for its size, with a thick copper coating to hold it together on those rare occasions when Italian marksmanship prevails. It’s a viable round for just about any thin-skinned game animal up to and including a whitetail. I’d use it on a man before I’d use it on a bear.”
“If you hit a man in the head with it?”
“Good-bye head, assuming a relatively short range, out to two hundred meters.”
“Hmm,” I said, by which utterance I meant information received but not processed.
“What have you got in mind, Hugh? Is this about some kind of Cuban invasion operation because you have a line on ten thousand Mannlicher-Carcanos real cheap? If so, I’d strongly suggest that you avoid the temptation. There’s a lot better rifles available in surplus than pieces of junk manufactured by people who eat spaghetti for lunch and take a nap every afternoon.”
“Thanks, Lon. Let me ask you this – what can you do with it?”
“Do with it? Kill out to two hundred or so meters, small-game animals, human beings, possibly rabbits if you could hit them, which is doubtful. Shoot targets unsatisfyingly. Grow annoyed at the roughness of its action and the sloppiness of its trigger. Cut it up for firewood. That’s about all. But I’m a snob, don’t listen to me.”
“No, no, that’s not what I meant. I suppose I meant could you – uh – counterfeit it?”
“You mean build a fake one? Good God, Hugh, that’s ridiculous.”
“I’m not explaining myself well, because I don’t have the vocabulary. I’m thinking about forensics, about the clues guns leave that identify them. It’s not something I know anything about except from Perry Mason. Here’s what I think I mean. If you knew you had an agent who was going to shoot somebody with a Mannlicher-Carcano, but you didn’t trust that person to make the shot, could you do something so that somebody else who was a much better shot could shoot the person with, I don’t know, the same bullet or the same kind of rifle at the same time, but it had been fixed so that no investigator would ever figure out that the second gunman with the second rifle and the second bullet was there? Counterfeit in that sense, I mean.”
“Is this for your next James Bond novel, Hugh?”
“I wish I were that clever, Lon.”
“Well. . let me think, okay? I’m guessing another requirement would be a silencer. It’s really called a suppressor. You know, so the real assassin’s shot doesn’t draw attention.”
“They have such things?” I asked. I was so naive then.
“Yes, it’s not just a movie gimmick. Hiram Maxim figured it out over sixty years ago. Any clever machinist can handle it. It’s just a tube with baffles and chambers and holes in it. I’ll look into it and call you back and–”
“No, no, let me call you back. When, a week, next Saturday, will you be available?”
“Hugh, I live in a wheelchair. I’m always available,” he said cheerily.
I sold Cord on a scouting trip to Boston for PEACOCK, had Travel book me, moved five thousand dollars from the PEACOCK account to Larry Hudget’s FOXCROFT account, knowing he hadn’t bothered to master the finances and would never find it, drew a check, and cashed it in a small bank in the Negro section of D.C. where I’d done some business and could trust Mr. Brown to be discreet. The next day I flew to Boston, checked in to the Hilton in Cambridge, then took a cab to the airport and paid cash for a ticket to Dallas, TWA. In my grip was a suit that I had bought in Moscow in 1952, which fit as well as a shirt I’d picked up in Brno a few years ago, and a black tie I’d bought from Brooks Brothers when I had to attend Milt Gold’s father’s funeral. I figured even a genius like Alek wouldn’t notice the difference in tailoring quality between the Brooks tie and the GUM suit, which looked and fit as if assembled by chimpanzees.
I checked in to the Adolphus, rented a car, and put on my Russian monkey suit. It felt odd to walk across the hotel’s pretentious old-oak lobby with its Harvard eating-club flourishes, dressed like a kulak afraid he was about to be arrested. Nobody noticed. It was Texas, after all. Nobody notices anything down there.
An hour or so later, I parked my rental car across the street and watched when the downtown bus dropped off its passengers at 5:38 p.m. on the corner of Zane and North Beckley, in the suburb (across the Trinity River aqueduct) called Oak Cliff. It was probably November 5, 1963, maybe the sixth. I had no trouble spotting him. He wasn’t cut out for any kind of undercover work, because if any cop or agent were searching for a spy, they’d pick Lee Harvey Oswald out of any crowd. He was more substantial than I expected. I thought he’d be a feral little rat, quick and shifty, ready to pounce on any morsel of cheese. But he was thick, solidly muscled, stumpy rather than fast, solid rather than limber or light on his feet. You couldn’t miss him.
He looked miserable. His charmless, uninteresting face was set on grim to the highest number; he looked around sullenly as if waiting for the FBI to arrest him already; and he radiated a leave-me-alone frequency at its highest pitch. About four people got off, and the three others knew each other and were joshing and talking, the way guys do the world over, and Alek just blew through and by them, head down, walking steadily down North Beckley. It wasn’t far, because his room-inghouse, at 1026 North Beckley, was just a few houses down from the Zane – N. Beckley intersection. Nevertheless, he passed within five feet of me on the sidewalk, completely oblivious, and I got a good look, not that there was much to see. Head slumped forward, shoulders slouchy, he plodded along in cheap workingman’s clothes that probably wouldn’t be changed that week. He wore a pair of gray chinos, black Oxford shoes of inferior manufacture, and a green jacket – not a sport coat, a kind of golflike jacket – over a brown shirt, all nondescript. I watched as he turned in to the roominghouse, a run-down dwelling as nondescript as he was.
I moved the car to the next block and, through my rearview mirror, watched and waited. In forty-five minutes he reemerged, his hair wet from a quick standing bath, but otherwise dressed the same. This time he walked more jauntily to the bus stop, climbed aboard, paid his nickel, and sat halfway back. I followed a few car lengths behind, saw where he was dropped, waited until he went into a building, and then parked and moseyed in. It was the Dougan Heights branch of the Dallas Public Library, and I quickly checked the meeting bulletin board and saw that in room 4, the Soviet-American Friendship Society had convened. The prospect of spending a couple of hours with a crowd of American Commies whining about capitalism plus a few bored FBI agents nauseated me, so I drove to a good restaurant, had a steak, and got to bed early.
The next morning either I was early or he was late. But I saw him coming down the street to the bus stop finally, after missing the 8:17 and the 8:33. I was again wearing my GUM suit, and I’d done a little purposely bad buzzing with my electric Remington, giving myself that raw, poorly barbered look seen all through the East bloc, where tonsorial grace had not yet penetrated. Did I think Alek would notice these things? Probably not consciously, but one never knows what the unconscious picks up and how that contributes to frame of mind, receptivity, trust, and malleability. If I had been able to come up with Russian underwear on such short notice, I’d have worn it too.