"Patsy!": The Life and Times of Lee Harvey Oswald (5 page)

Perhaps
, his ego wondered,
she cries because she really did love me. And, having rediscovered the joys of sex with her Brute Man, understood that she would never be able to leave again.

Castro's spirits rose as he considered the possibility that, from this day forward, she would agree to exist as his secret lover, even as he'd suggested a year ago. Finally, his infantile male fantasy would at last become a wonderful reality.

Then Castro's ever-dormant paranoia sprang to the surface. This might be something more cryptic, closer to the nightmarish fantasies that had consumed him while they sighed with joy in each other‘s arms. Fidel remained still for the better part of an hour while Lorita wept behind the closed and locked door.

Sooner or later, she must emerge. Then, I will know at once from her eyes what this latest temper-tantrum is all about.

*

“Oh, God,” Lorita whined, all the faux style and performed-sophistication gone from her movements and manner. The skinny girl with the big boobs finally opened the bathroom door. She staggered across the floor to the bed, dropping down like a wet rag. Lorita cried uncontrollably, waving her thin arms in utter frustration like an eight-year-old who did not receive her gift of choice on Christmas morn, wallowing in self-pity.

“I could fuck up anything,” she at last hissed.

“Except a fuck.”

“Right! The one thing I'm
always
good at.”

Castro roared. “What is it?” he asked, stroking her sugar-scented hair. Lorita managed to raise her now puffy face up to confront Castro, her bloodshot eyes locking with his.

“You tell me.”

For a moment, Castro froze. “Hmmm?” Then he understood. “It's as I guessed. You came here tonight to kill me.” She nodded. “For yourself, your false belief I betrayed you? Or as an agent for some outside—”

“Does it matter?”

“To me? Considerably.”

“Well, that's one of those things you may never know, not for sure. I won't tell you, even if you said that you would spare my life in exchange.” Lorita sobbed again. She was, he realized, fearful as to what she believed he would next do.

“Just one moment, my dear, darling girl.”

Castro reached down and across to the bedside cabinet, yanking open a drawer. Wiping a wet residue of tears and make-up from her cheeks, Lorita arched herself around so as to see what he had drawn from it. Her eyebrows rose at the sight of an automatic pistol.

“I knew it,” she wailed. “You would—”

“Don't be silly,” Castro reassured her. He repositioned Lorita up into a sitting position so that she again straddled his immense male girth. Now, though, as her breasts swung back and forth, like a pair of feminine pendulums, she struck him not as provocative, only pathetic.

Lorita's Brute Man handed her the gun. Her eyes revealed confusion. He smiled manically.

“Go ahead. Your assignment was to kill me? Do it.”

Castro glided the gun toward his face, opened his mouth, lowering his lips around the cigar-shaped barrel. If Lorita did as instructed, the last thing on earth Castro would see before his brains exploded out the back of his head, onto the pillow, would be her breasts swinging like two exotic dancers at a Havana casino, performing in perfect tandem ...

Lorita shifted positions, squinting, trying to find a solid position, tightening her grip on the trigger.

“Wow,” she exclaimed. “Just like in the movies!”

Spy thrillers, she meant. With the advent of the 1960s, such
Kiss! Kiss! Bang! Bang
! projects had been shot in Asia and Europe, becoming popular on the international market. In a radio report Lorita heard, owing to the new tolerance that overtook America following the election of young JFK as president, a James Bond book was being filmed by a Hollywood company, the American mainstream apparently ready for such kinky stuff.

She had read
Dr. No,
Casino Royale
and all the others, at the suggestion of Frank. He had explained that Lorita must, in real life, emulate Fleming's lethal literary ladies. Become in actuality what they embodied in his fictions. Perhaps not so imaginary, though. George explained that Fleming, whom he knew, based those ‘Bond girls' on daring women he, as an English operative during and after World War II, once worked with.

Perhaps there was no true, certain dividing line between fantasy and reality. Maybe each impacted on the other. At any rate, those novels provided her education. Lorita's job now was to live out what others read about, saw at the cinema, only dreamed of doing. For her, this constituted her ordinary life.

Well, perhaps not ordinary ... everyday yes, but—

“Oh,” Lorita squealed as he entered her again, fighting his way past the weak barrier of her panties. "Just imagine: In only a moment you'll be coming and going at the same time!"

*

Castro had remained supremely calm through all this. That unnerved Lorita, though she readied herself to complete the assassination. Yet a minute went by, then another, she unable to consummate what she had arrived for. Those pills would have allowed Lorita to remain remote from the administration of death. To pull the trigger, witness her lover's head explode like a dropped melon, brains splattering everywhere?

Ugh!

It was, simply, too much. Hard as she tried Lorita found herself gradually relaxing her finger from the trigger. “I can't,” she wailed, removing the barrel from Fidel's mouth.

“Of course you can't.” With a firm movement he took the pistol from her hand, returning it to the open drawer.

“Now what?”

“Leave.”

“Just like that?” She snapped her fingers. Castro nodded.

Wanefully, Lorita pulled herself up off the horizontal slab of male flesh and stood upright, a sad rather than glamorous figure in the now ripped strip of material partially covering her nakedness. Lorita glared back at the rough beast sprawled naked on the bed. Then, as if nothing untoward had occurred, she regained her composure, sniffed, and set about dressing, holding back tears. Once the silver sheaf again adorned her frame Lorita gathered up her purse and made ready to leave.

“Goodbye, brute man.”

Cautiously, she stepped past Castro and out the door, back into the main room without a parting glance. Once there, Lorita stopped, pulling a small object out of her purse.

“Here,” Lorita called, turning to toss the key back onto the bedroom floor.

“You won't be coming back, then?”

“Never.”

“Will there be others?”

“That's not for me to say.” She made ready to exit but halted again, glancing back over her shoulder. “When you said to me, 'no one can,' what did you mean?”

Castro gloatingly smiled from ear to ear. “I am Fidel. My destiny is to guide Cuba into its future. That was written in the stars a million years ago. No one can interfere with fate. Not even a woman as willful and wicked as you.”

"Me, wicked?
You're
the one!"

"Have it your way, Lorita. You always do."

Lorita did not know how to respond to that, so she exited the room, the suite, the hotel, and the life of Fidel Castro.

It's the Mob,
Castro thought,
remaining stock-still in the darkness. The Mafia has declared open war! Or, no. Maybe the CIA. Which one most wants me dead ...?

My worst nightmare would be both ... working together.

*

Why is it that we always think of the perfect thing to say once it is too late? For years following her hurried departure, Lorita rolled over in her mind what she might have told Fidel. Never had she revealed to him that, when she left Germany at age fifteen—truly a Lolita then—Lorita had not gone directly to Cuba to seek him out. That had been her great lie during their first meeting up in the hills. Lorita journeyed to Venezuela. There she schemed to meet and seduce Pres. Marcos Perez Jimenez, the right-wing Junta dictator. Though married, Jimenez set her up in a suite at majestic Humboldt Hotel, overlooking Caracas.

The two spent many a pleasurable hour in the king-size bed until in 1958 the communists staged a coup. Then Jimenez hurried off to America. In the land of freedom and democracy this brutal former dictator received the Legion of Merit for distinguished resistance to The Red Menace.

Sadly, he took along his wife and family but not Lorita.

Guessing that the next great Third World leader would be a communist, this the coming thing in under-developed countries, Lorita determined to become mistress to such a man. Those in the know she spoke with insisted that Fidel Castro would likely emerge as that personage. So off little Lorita trekked to Cuba, proving once and for all that the power of female beauty over the male cuts across all existing political lines.

Damn! If only I'd have thought to mention to Fidel that he'd accepted the castoff mistress of a diehard fascist as the great love of his life, such a revelation might have killed him faster than botulism or a bullet.

Why didn't I think of it then?

*

For once, and to Frank Sturgis' amazement, The Kraut showed up not only on time but early! This would be the final meeting. Their designated place, once again, was Banana Royale, 24 hours after the previous encounter. The man called George had been listening to Radio Cuba all morning.
Nothing.
Concerned, he next poured through the papers. No major revelations. Life appeared to be normal in Cuba today. That could only mean one thing: The assassination attempt had failed. This was confirmed by Lorita's rare on-time appearance, in and of itself spelling disaster.

Approaching, she employed the last refuge of a female scoundrel. Weeping openly, Lorita collapsed into George's masculine arms, spitting out a semi-coherent rant.

The Bond Girl? Gone. In her place? This sad little loser.

In a cold Cream jar? You must be kidding ... !

As he sent her packing, George wondered whether she ought to be eliminated as a security risk. If so, he would do to her what she failed to achieve with Fidel. Enjoy Lorita's fine body a final time, then ...

No. Why kill such a total klutz? Let her talk to anyone she chooses. Nobody in his right mind would believe anything such a train wreck says. Go on your merry way. And good riddance!

Now, though, he would have to meet with Joe the Courier. Inform the man born Santos Trafficante, Jr. as to what had gone down ... or rather failed to go down. Discuss what they ought to do next.

No question Castro must die. Enough with pretty women. Deadlier than the male? That adage suddenly seemed a bad joke.

George already had something else in mind. Pick a man to do the job. Some obscure fellow, secretly dreaming of glory, greatness, immortality even, while plodding unnoticed through the world. No more take-your-breath-away bitches! Some face in the crowd, an invisible man. He had several candidates in mind.

George and Joe were due back in Florida tonight. The next week they were expected to arrive in New Orleans for a top-level meeting with mob boss Meyer Lansky, where this current problem would be discussed. The Big Easy! Sturgis' favorite city, other than what he had discovered in Havana, for daylight decisions and late-night debauchery. How he loved Bourbon Street.

In truth, the top candidate on George's list had often walked that street in his youth. Feeling worthless, powerless. Dreaming of greatness, with not a clue how it might be achieved. Eager to be found, fearful that he would forever remain obscure.

“I lost it at the movies.”

—film critic Pauline Kael, 1966

 

One clammy afternoon in late April 1954, six years before Frank Sturgis returned from Cuba and, while in New Orleans, set about deciding on the right person to kill Castro, the nowhere man 'George' ultimately picked wandered aimlessly along Bourbon Street. Head bowed low, eyes on the concrete, Lee Oswald drifted past Po' Boy shops, Dixieland dens, and sleazy strip clubs.

Above the rickety door to each, neon lights blazed like electric-rainbows in the warm afternoon drizzle. The time: just before three p.m., after the lunch crowd abandoned such
declasse
havens from the real world; before the early evening clientele trickled in. At this awkward juncture in the daily pattern, few frequented the garbage-laden streets, where blues and jazz poured out of shabby, timeworn, ever-enticing buildings.

That explained why this particular visitor arrived now. Lee hated crowds, more than almost anything. Except perhaps being alone. That made no sense at all. Then again, little about Lee Harvey Oswald ever seemed ‘right' to those whom he, in the privacy of his mind, dismissed as The Normals.

Others sensed this in the youth's personality on meeting him. For all of his fifteen years, strangers had made it a point to keep their distance. Here, other stragglers passing through the dreary weather, soft rain on neon transforming urban decay into a lurid phantasmagoria, drifted past without making eye contact. Lee turned up his jacket-collar and pushed on, if with no particular place to go. As was always the case.

In his vision—that bizarre, unique way in which L.H.O. always had and, for the remainder of his brief life, would perceive the world—he'd brought the lousy weather down on this part of The Big Easy simply by showing up. He was cursed, carrying an invisible mark of Cain wherever he went. This rain, that ruined a potentially pleasant day for others, had been summoned by Lee's immense capacity for negativity. Or so he believed.

A scrawny kid, oblivious now to the rich Creole culture and Cajun lifestyle surrounding him, Lee had only a single thought on this even grayer day than usual: why had he been born? In all truth, he wished that event never occurred. As Lee had done several times previous in in his miserable excuse for a life, the youth considered purchasing a pistol at one of those seedy pawn-shops located on side-streets, then pointing the barrel at his head, bringing the dark farce to an end.