The Third Bullet (18 page)

“Wow,” said Swagger. “Kathy, you’re in the wrong business. You should have been an intelligence analyst.”

“I’ve looked at a lot of Russian documents, a lot of reports. I get used to the style, the diction, the nomenclature, even the bureaucratic culture. It hasn’t changed all that much since ’63, even if everything else has. This has the feel of the authentic, so I don’t think there’s any suggestion that someone came back to it and tampered with the evidence to hide James Bond’s visit.”

“That damn James Bond,” said Swagger. “He’s never around when you need him.”

The next day, Swagger as “Agent Homan” had his sitdown with the ranking gang specialist of the Moscow police, who, well known on the international circuit and a Moscow rep to Interpol, spoke fluent English. They sat in the inspector’s office, glass-enclosed, off the usual bright, impersonal ward of the organized-crime squad on the third floor of Moscow’s central police station.

“This fellow Bodonski, he was a nephew of the Izmaylovskaya boss, or in their language,
avtoritet
, also a Bodonski,” said the inspector as they looked over the thick Bodonski file and Swagger saw a photo of the man he’d killed. Bodonski had been handsome, dashing, even, with thick sweeps of dark hair and piercing eyes. He must have had the gangster way with women. The last time Swagger had seen him—which was also the first and only—his face had been pancaked into the steering wheel of his car, and what flesh was visible in the nest of crushed plastic and bent steel looked like the rotting fruit of a watermelon smashed against a brick wall. Too bad for him.

“He was a tough guy, very capable,” the inspector continued. “If someone topped him, whoever did it must have been a tough guy in his own right.”

“Inspector,” said Swagger, “he just shot him. It wasn’t a fight. A gun is always tougher than a man. Even a man in a car.”

“The car was coming right at the man, as I hear it.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“So that man, if he panics and runs, as most will do, Bodonski breaks his spine in two. He did it enough here. We have him for at least fifteen hits, which was why his uncle suggested he get out of town. Anyway, your man on the gun, he didn’t panic, he stood and fired well. Bravo. My compliments.”

“I’ll tell him you said so.”

“This Izmaylovskaya is the toughest of the gangs in town. Most of these outfits, they call themselves a
bratva,
meaning ‘brotherhood.’ It gives them some gentility, like a guild or something, a group of business associates looking out for each other. Not the Izzies; they just go by ‘gang.’ Their specialty is applied force. Murder for hire, extortion, human trafficking. The dirty end of the stick. Much more disciplined, much more violent, much scarier. They’re smaller—three, four hundred, maybe—than the brotherhoods, which may have as many as five thousand men. They’re not Jewish, they make no show of religious belief or ethnic identity. Hard guys, killers, danger boys. They take their money up front, lots of it. You want to swindle a financier, you go somewhere else; you want to murder your boss, the Izzies are for you.”

“Any connections? Gangs usually flourish where they have some kind of semi-official connection with power.”

“Only rumors. Nobody talks. You only get out of that gang the way Bodonski did, on a slab in the morgue. Nobody gets inside, as each rank is tattooed with a code of stars and dragons, and all the codes have to be perfect or you go swimming in the River Moscow with a zinc sink chained to your ankle. I’ll be honest: it’s a thing I can’t look into closely or I’ll be the one with my spine broken in two on the street, but the rumors say they have an affiliation with oligarchs. The one most usually named is Viktor Krulov.”

“I heard the name before. I think we have oligarchs too.”

“Yeah, everywhere, the same smart guys figure out how to get to
the front of the line and get all the potatoes. They get so big, you can’t stop ’em. If I go against an oligarch, I don’t mind telling you, my wife is looking for a new husband.”

“Let me ask you this: since there was no personal reason for this Bodonski to hit our undercover, clearly, he was a professional doing a job. How would you go about hiring him? Would you do it from Moscow, or could you do it from New York?”

“Good question, which I will have to look into. See, with other groups, much bigger groups, there is more sophistication. They have lawyers, brokers, advertising directors, journalists all on the payroll. Many ways to approach them, to slip through that portal between legal service and illegal service, like a murder. With the Izzies, it’s different: they’re so small, they’re so specialized. You would have to know exactly who to go to. There would be one guy, that’s all.”

“Do you have a source who could tell you the name of that guy in New York?”

“Again, I’ll put it out. How long are you going to be here? You want to go on raids, we do a ceremonial raid once a week so it looks like we have a chance of enforcing the law against the
bratvas.
It’s a big joke; everybody laughs and goes out drinking together afterward. Certain sums are passed. Do I shock you?”

“No, I appreciate the honesty, Inspector.”

“Agent Homan, I don’t want to represent myself as a hero above it all. I take my envelope too, I know the rules, I know what can and can’t be asked and what will and won’t be answered.”

“Am I getting you? You will ‘ask’ about that name I requested, but you won’t really
ask
about that name. Is this the message I’m getting?”

“I’m trying to be honest and don’t want to get your hopes too high.”

“It’s not a problem. You have to do what you have to do. You live here, I don’t.”

“This I can tell you. You say two killings, one in Baltimore, one in Dallas. For a known man with a high rep, Bodonski would expect
big dollars, plus expenses. I’m thinking fifty thousand dollars for one, maybe a discount, only twenty-five thousand dollars for the other if business has been done before. Not small change. Whoever paid, he had big money to spend, and he had highly sophisticated connections. He is not a small fry. This is not something that would be arranged to punish an adulterer, squelch a debtor, get a store owner to pony up his monthly. This is quality work, big-time stuff, usually for other bosses, big debtors, well-guarded politicians.”

“You’ve been a great help, Inspector.”

“Wish I could help more, Agent Homan. Do give my congratulations to the shooter. He was a man in a million.”

“So I will,” said Bob.

T
he man wore the baggy, nondescript workingman’s grunge so common in Eastern Europe and Russia, corduroys, an untucked plaid shirt, an indifferent burgundy jacket of some Chinese miracle fabric whose zipper didn’t quite work, a watch cap pulled low over his eyes. He carried no luggage, though anyone with a close eye for observation might have noted a bulge on his hip, even possibly suspected that it represented the sleek lines of an IxGroup GSh-18. But nobody had that close an eye. He was too ordinary.

He was one of Moscow’s unseen millions. The cheekbones suggested Magyar or Tartar; the gray hair, full and brushy, suggested good genes; and he kept his mouth closed because his teeth were too bright and he knew few Russian factory men used Crest White Strips. He had picked up a pair of red and white Nike rip-offs made in Malaysia, and he walked like any of the proletariat of the earth, head down, hands stuffed disconsolately into his jacket pockets, not quite homeless but seemingly without destination, past or future. Flashing Russian Federation ID, he checked in to a workingman’s hotel in a zone far out of the flashier precincts of the new Moscow, disco king, BMW and Porsche capital, Armani outpost of the world. There he sat in his room and waited for four days, eating mainly from food-dispensing machines in the Underground station nearby, where his lack of Russian wouldn’t cause problems or be noted, nursing his scraggy beard and unkempt hair. He let his teeth turn yellow with disinterest and the hair in his nostrils grow repulsively.

He had one companion on this journey into shadow: Lee Harvey Oswald. The killer would not leave him alone and haunted his dreams.
Swagger could not stop thinking about him; it seemed just when sleep was deepest, Lee Harvey would poke him in the ribs and start muttering in his ear. Actually, it was his subconscious muttering in his ear, and the damned thing was no respecter of regular work hours.

So Swagger blinked awake in his Russian shithole, more like a fifties-man-on-the-run hideout than anything, and a voice was muttering to him about the timing.

The timing, it kept saying, the
timing
.

The timing was 4:17 a.m., that was the timing.

But no sleep returned, and the voice grew louder, and he saw that the muttering came from his own throat.

Timing. Timing! Timing: this is where most conspiracy theories wander out into the ozone. Because the time schedule was so fucking fast from the evening of November 19, when the route became known, to the early afternoon of November 22, when the kill shot was delivered—sixty-six hours—a great number of things had to happen very quickly. Those who wanted to believe in conspiracy could only ascribe that kind of speed and efficiency to the result of deep government intrigue. Someone in “deep government,” in a shadow department of great but unseen influence, was able to arrange something far in advance so that immaculate long-range planning could be initiated: Oswald had to be found and brought under discipline, a job for him had to be arranged, and that job had to be on the motorcade route that itself had to be forced on the Kennedy people. Since only CIA was paid to do such things professionally, quite naturally, CIA was almost always invoked. Since both CIA and FBI had previous knowledge of, ran files on, and had dealings with Oswald, their presence could be quite naturally inferred. But that was all shit.

The hard data points of the assassination totally dismissed any deep-government intrigue; rather, things happened as they do normally: by chance opportunity, by whimsy, turning on someone’s eavesdropping.

Swagger felt he was on to something. He ordered himself to begin
at a beginning: how did Lee Harvey Oswald end up in the Texas Book Depository on November 22, 1963? Swagger recalled Posner and Bugliosi. The first hard fact that would never go away was that he got the job before there’d been any announcement that JFK would come to Dallas at a specific time and date (there was a general acknowledgment that the president, for political reasons, would have to make a Texas trip “in the fall”). So any idea of “placing” Oswald in TBD was absurd on its face. What would be the point of placing him in
any
building in Dallas against the faint possibility that the president might someday drive by? Don’t make me laugh. And that becomes even more ridiculous in view of what actually happened.

He got that job the way most people get most jobs. Someone who knew that he was looking for work heard a certain place was hiring, made some phone calls, notified Lee, and Lee showed up in a place he’d never heard of, was hired in the lowliest of positions—essentially a stock boy—and started work the next morning, Wednesday, October 16, at $1.25 an hour. Were these CIA or military-industrial-complex shadow agents or even Men from U.N.C.L.E. or SPECTRE manipulating bureaucracies to bring killer and victim within range? Hardly. They were the redoubtable Ruth Paine, a sublimely decent Quaker gal who had met and taken a liking to Marina Oswald and was trying to help her by helping her husband, whom she didn’t like much—she had a nose for character, that one—and Roy Truly, supervisor of the Book Depository, who was always filling his staff of clerks with transients, knowing that the jobs were perishable and demanded little except a strong back and a willingness to do boring, menial work. In fact, Truly was responsible for another facility and assigned Oswald to the Dallas building only on a whim; he could have as easily sent him to the suburbs. By what secret method did the U.N.C.L.E. agent Ruth Paine learn that Truly was hiring? She heard a neighbor’s son had just been hired there!

Swagger was now up, walking about, the muttering getting louder.

Later that week, the White House announced that there would be a
fall trip. But planning didn’t begin on the trip for some time. Agendas had to be worked out and translated into schedules, which had to be coordinated with Texas officials as well as the vice president’s office. All this took time and negotiation, and it wasn’t until November 16 that the Dallas Trade Mart was selected as the site for the president’s 1 p.m. luncheon speech. The Secret Service advance party didn’t arrive in Dallas until the seventeenth, to begin the more intensive preparation for the trip; and it wasn’t until the nineteenth, when two Secret Service officers and two ranking Dallas officers drove the routes from Love Field, where the president would arrive on the twenty-second, to the Trade Mart, that a certain route—the one that took the president down Main, to a right-hand jog on Houston, to a sharp left-hand turn down Elm to access the Stemmons Freeway entrance—was selected.

At best, a “mole” representing the deep-government conspiracy could have alerted the kill team the night of the nineteenth; but in all likelihood, the killer (or killers) didn’t find out about it until the next morning, when the route ran on the front page of the
Dallas Morning News.
Since Oswald was in the habit of reading day-old newspapers, he probably didn’t learn about it until November 21, the day before.