“That’s why I want you with him at a discreet distance. It’s possible he’ll get scared in the dark. If he turns the wrong way at the river, he’ll be miles from a bus stop. It’ll all be different in the dark. He was supposed to do it in the dark to familiarize himself, but he’s such a disorganized twit, I don’t know.”
“I’ll lead him by the nose if I have to.”
“Good man, Jimmy. Now let’s go into the Patio, get a table, and try their margaritas.”
So we did, three merry murderers having a good time on the patio of the Patio, which would soon be the scene of our crime. Since the duty day was done and we were on to the bonding aspect of the operation, I passed on the tequila drink and knocked back three vodka martinis, and Lon kept up with me, though he was a bourbon guy, and Jimmy sipped beer, regaling us with stories of his youthful run-ins with a Sergeant O’Bannon of Boston’s Fifth Precinct in the North End of town, where it was still more a suburb of Dublin than Beacon Hill. He told a funny story in perfect dialect. There was hardly anything Jimmy wasn’t good at.
I arose early, took the Wagoneer to Alek’s neighborhood, parked well down from his roominghouse, and waited for him to emerge. He was late, as usual. (The idiot was on time for only one thing in his life, the murder of JFK.) I let him turn the corner on the way to the bus stop, then pulled up to him. No one was close enough to hear us in Russian.
“Good morning, Alek. Hop in, I’ll run you downtown.”
He got in, and I took a U-turn to avoid driving by the bus stop where a few commuters waited, in case any of them happened to notice the highly unusual spectacle of the grumpy Lee Harvey Oswald being picked up in a large American vehicle.
“Tell me what you’ve been up to, Alek,” I said.
“I memorized the plan. I went to the Patio twice, walking it, getting used to the lighting. I will make a good shot.”
“Excellent,” I said. “Earlier that night, we’ll move in some old wooden crates. You can use them for support so you don’t have to try any fancy positions.”
“I’m a Marine Sharpshooter.”
I knew that Sharpshooter was a relatively easy distinction to attain in the Marines; he had not made Expert.
“I have complete faith in you. And you have walked your escape route? You won’t get lost in the dark? I worry about you being arrested, going the wrong way home, and singing like a canary.”
“I will die before talking, Comrade,” he said fiercely. “You can count on my love of socialism and the working fellow to get me through any ordeal the fascists have in mind!”
“Well said,” I replied. “That’s the kind of spirit we need.”
There was nothing particularly memorable about the discussion. He had a kind of morose personality and didn’t seem agitated about what lay ahead. We just went through the details rather dully, without much sparkle at all.
“Any more visits from the FBI?”
“Nah. Maybe Agent Hotsy is bored with me.”
“How’s Marina?”
“She’s fine. I’ll see her this weekend and Junie and new baby Audrey. Also, I’ll get the rifle.”
“Any problems getting it out of the house?”
“No sir.”
“You know she’ll look for it when the news comes, and not seeing it, she’ll conclude you went back on your word and murdered him.”
“She won’t talk,” he said. He held up a fist. “I am the king of my house, and the wench” – he used a cruel Russian word, devushka – “knows better than to betray me.”
He guided me through traffic, which thickened as we drew near to Dealey Plaza along Houston Street, after crossing the river. In a block or so, we were there, and I had my first look at Alek’s place of employment, with its Hertz sign set on the diagonal above. I cannot say I paid it much attention, because at that point Dealey Plaza and the Texas Book Depository were utterly meaningless to me. I had no revelation, no surge of heartbeat, no epiphany. The structure was a big, ugly building on the edge of a municipal park of no particular charm, brick, six or seven stories tall, completely without character. The cars whizzed by it, all the other buildings were equally uninteresting, even the triangle of grass that constituted the plaza lacked feature or interest. I regret many things I did over the next few days, and among them – not the first but up there nonetheless – was that I made the Book Depository eyesore a historical shrine, never, ever to be demolished.
“That’s it,” he said.
“Okay, I’ll turn here so nobody sees you get out of this car. Oh, I wanted to get the diagram from you.”
He reached into his jacket and pulled it out, the only article except for the box of cartridges I’d given him that both of us had touched. I knew I’d burn it at the first opportunity.
I dropped him at the corner of Main and Elm, then turned left on Elm, passing under the shadow of the Book Depository as I headed down the slight slope of Elm to the triple overpass a hundred yards ahead. I came within sixty or seventy feet of the even more famous grassy knoll on the right. In all the years that followed, I always had a smile – perhaps the only one the operation ever produced on my face – at the expense of the lunatics who believed that the little green lump explained everything.
I found a way to reverse my direction, got back to Commerce, and in ten blocks or so reached the Adolphus. There, I made phone calls to Jimmy and Lon to set up a real-time run-through that night, as we would do for the next six nights, to get used to the routes, the patterns of the shadows, the rhythm of the traffic, the different hues of darkness as the conditions altered the nighttime weather.
That night after dinner, I had a moment of happiness and calm. I was doing something big that I thought would help my country at the cost of one small, worthless, ugly man. It did not feel wrong at all to me, and I had no doubts, no qualms, no reservations. I was going to make a difference. I was going to change history.
The next morning, Wednesday, November 20, 1963, I woke, ambled groggily to my door, opened it, and grabbed the newspaper, the Morning News I think it was, and before I sat down, I saw the headline: “JFK Motorcade Route Announced.” I had not known Jack Kennedy was coming to Dallas on the twenty-second. But as my eyes ran down the story, I saw the names of streets I had driven the morning before: “. . Houston to Elm, Elm under the triple overpass. .,” and I knew in an instant that I had been given a chance few men have. Circumstance had bent itself to offer me an opportunity that was not only the logical outcome to my ruminations, but almost a moral obligation. Who could say no to such a possibility? Not Hugh.
Ah, Vod. So dependable. Such a friend, an ally. Vod always has my back, my best interests at heart, my happiness paramount in its fermented little potato brain. With Vod at my side as well as in my blood, I launch into the final act, which would leave me, theoretically at least, history’s most abominable man. I slew the prince who was the king. I widowed the goddess of all our dreams; I made Ari Onassis possible. (There’s one I know I’ll never be forgiven for!) Oh, and I orphaned those two little so-cute-it-hurts-even-now kids. Bad Hugh. Hugh, you bastard. Vod, a little help here, please.
I knew I had to convince three people to help me tilt Operation LIBERTY VALANCE a little bit, so that instead of shooting General Edwin Walker on November 25, 1963, we would shoot John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963, two and a half days hence.
The three people were Lon Scott, Jimmy Costello, and myself. As for Alek – Lee Harvey Oswald – I knew the glory pig would take zero convincing. The idiot would be like a rabid dog pulling on a leash. He might have come up with it himself if he’d read the paper. It was everything his fetid little sewer-Commie mind demanded and had dreamed about for years. His eagerness would surely get him killed and everyone else electrocuted. But I felt I could control him and improvise a new plan so brilliant that even he couldn’t screw it up too badly. I would see him tonight at the bus stop.