Suddenly, on the television, it was as if a wave of energy had crackled through the black-and-white image of lolling, sullen reporters. Our correspondent – I have no idea who it was – informed us that Lee Harvey Oswald, indicted for the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit and the only suspect in the murder of John F. Kennedy, was on his way.
Why do I relive this incident? Surely any who read these pages will have seen it for himself. There’s no suspense; it turns out the same each time the tape is run, and as movie special effects have gotten almost too realistic, so the almost chaste, bloodless death by gunshot of this appalling man is of little consequence to anybody. That is the view from a comfortable perch in our present. Then it was all different: nobody knew what the next big twist in our giant American narrative would be. Nobody could have predicted it, not even I, who had made the unpredictable happen two days earlier. Nobody had any idea that Mr. Deus Ex Machina was about to introduce himself.
I saw the surly Alek emerge from a door at the rear of the crowded room. He was shackled to a cartoon figure out of the old west, some sort of gigantic cowpoke in a smallish Stetson – it was like mine, though light where mine was gray – and what had to be called a westerner’s suit, apparently khaki. It was Captain Fritz of the Dallas Homicide Squad, but he looked to our uneducated eyes like a foursquare avatar of Texas Ranger justice. He stood out in a sea of dark suits and snap-brim hats, as if intent on representing the best of Texas to a shocked world. Next to him, Alek jauntily, perhaps even smugly, set the pace. He’d been allowed to clean up and change clothes and wore a black sweater over some kind of sport shirt. He grasped his hands at his waist and, for some reason, projected a “Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up” sense of self-possession.
I have to say that the quality of the broadcast was exceedingly fine. Every detail stood out, almost as if iridescent; the lines were bold and sharp; the depth of the image was startling. I don’t think I ever saw anything so clearly in my life.
Alek never knew what hit him. Deus ex machina hit him. Fate hit him. Retribution hit him. The fellow Ruby stepped from nowhere and jammed the pistol – a gangster’s snub-nose, so appropriate to a strip club owner – into his side. I don’t think there was a flash, but the report was enough to carry the news.
The famous photo almost does the scene a disservice. It freezes and therefore distorts. You can see Captain Fritz bending backward in surprise, Ruby hunched like a boxer who’s delivered a solid gut hit, and Alek, mouth open in pain, eyes wincing. In reality, it was so damned fast, like a man slipping under the waves in the grasp of an undertow; he’s there and then he’s gone in the flashing of a nerve synapse.
Then chaos, disbelief, the whirls of spinning figures, as people fled the shot, Alek pulled Captain Fritz down with him, and various officers leaped on Ruby and shoved him to the ground. If the famous cry “Jack, you son of a bitch” was uttered, I missed it in my disbelief. I sat back and watched the melancholy play end. Alek, uncuffed, slid onto a stretcher and wheeled out, fast. Ruby pulled away. The reporters tried to make sense of it, interviewing each other to make certain the gigantic plot twist they’d just seen had actually happened.
I got a glimpse of Alek’s colorless, expressionless, perhaps breathless face as they wheeled him out and knew he was a goner. You don’t come back from that one, for I’d gotten a good fix on the bullet’s diagonal trajectory through innards, and I knew the violence it would do to the sweetbread of mysterious but crucial organs that the middle of the body conceals.
Perhaps you’ll think better of me for it, but my first thought was sadness at his death. Another man dead of violence in America, as if I hadn’t been the one who killed the last man dead of violence in America. It seemed like a contagion. You sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind, and I had to wonder when my whirlwind would come.
I’d known him and loathed him, as all did, while at the same time understanding that he was nevertheless human, like the rest of us. Did he “deserve” it? I suppose so; Jack Ruby thought so, and a few days later, I’d hear my oldest son say, “I’m glad they got him.”
Alek was a jerk, he was a fool, he was utterly incapable of doing a single thing right, but he was human and died as all too many humans do, alone, in pain, abruptly.
It wasn’t until that night that it occurred to me, amid the hysterical news reporting, that again we’d caught another gigantic break. Luck does favor the bold, no question of it. Now that Alek’s lips were forever closed, there’d be no crazed stories of manipulations by cynical red spies who set him up and played him as a sucker. A myth wouldn’t spring forth – others did, of course, all patently incorrect – to tantalize the imaginative for decades to come. Books wouldn’t be written, not about the Red Master at least, nor movies made, nor TV series commissioned. All Alek’s secrets would be buried with him, and the narrative would shift its focus to this apparition out of Chicago Confidential, this fireplug-like gunman with his titillating connection to the demimonde and women with improbably large hair and breasts and arcs of eye shadow. I thought, You know what? I don’t have to learn a goddamn thing about Mr. Jack Ruby, and that’s okay with me.
I viewed the end of Alek in solitude, because Lon and Jimmy had already left, both of them early on Sunday the twenty-fourth.
I saw Lon before he was gone. I gave him Jimmy’s report and delivered the rifle. I watched him put the parts in the gun case. He seemed dolorous and depressed; I got little out of him. Jimmy awakened and came by, and the two embraced. Then Lon was gone, and Jimmy was off to pack for his later flight, and I was enmeshed in the Oswald denouement.
Jimmy always got it more than Lon did, and he was too professional to let it affect him. I couldn’t have known then that within six months Jimmy would be dead. Another Clandestine Services colleague enlisted him to do a routine wiretap insertion on an East-bloc embassy in Canada. It was a low-level, routine thing. But somehow he was spotted – a first – and a Mountie, of all people, saw his shadow in the alley and drew. Jimmy knew he couldn’t surrender and testify; it would embarrass too many people. He turned, and the Mountie fired one shot and Jimmy fell dead on the streets of Ottowa, the death addressed as “mysterious,” as in “Why was an American businessman messing about in the alleys behind the Czechoslovakian embassy, and why did he flee the Mountie?” Requiescat in pace, good friend, loyal operative, hero.
As for Lon, I knew I wouldn’t hear from him for a long time, until he worked some things out. If you are thinking, Danger Man, he was the only one who knew, why didn’t you have him eliminated? you’ve seen too many movies. The answer is, I don’t eliminate. I don’t even like the euphemism “eliminate” for “kill”; it sounds like cheap fiction. I am a moral murderer. I can kill only for policy. I cannot kill for personal reasons, such as to deter threat or to earn money or for the pleasure of removing one of the world’s annoyances. What will come will come, and I will accept it. If Lon went mad with guilt and decided to confess, then I would accept that decision and ride the horse where it took me. But the world wasn’t worth living in if you didn’t trust the people you loved, so I let it go at that, and that is what happened; I didn’t see him again until 1993, when he had a different name and a different identity.