The Third Bullet (26 page)

“So a Boswell work name would have a pun in two languages?”

“This is literature, not physics, so nothing is definite. It would be a hint, a shade, a ghost of a meaning subtly brushing against a word. If the name were a Russian name—this is a real simple example—Dad might have come up with Babochkin. That means ‘butterfly man,’ and Nabokov was known as a world-class butterfly collector. So anyone looking for a giveaway who happened to know that Dad, in his Nabokovian phase, was the author of the legend and spoke fluent Russian might look at a list of names, and immediately, Babochkin would stand out. It would be a dead giveaway. Of course, that’s the principle as enacted at a primitive level. If he were doing it for real, it would be much subtler and go through a batch of meanings and languages before it gave up its final meaning. It would bounce-bounce-bounce all over the place. And no one would ever get that last meaning because you’d have to know such a broad range of disciplines, languages, cultures. That was the sort of thing he liked to do.”

“I think I got it,” said Swagger.

“Would you like to see Dad’s office? I kept it the way he had it when he died. I think it’s a kind of portrait of the way his mind worked. You might enjoy it.”

“Great. That’d be very helpful.”

“Okay, come this way.” Harry took Swagger up a narrow, creaky back staircase, down a crooked hallway, and into a room off to one side, with a window staring at nothing except the vines on the house next door. Bob looked: this was the mind of Niles Gardner, creator of legends, who always brought ’em back alive.

“This is where Dad tried to write his novels,” Harry said. “I’m afraid it never worked out. He was a brilliant beginner, but whatever it is that brings the writer back to the chair week after week and
month after month, Dad lacked. He didn’t have it in him to finish. By the time he was halfway through with anything, he’d changed so much intellectually that he no longer recognized the person who began the story and had no sympathy for him and the characters he’d created. A lot of geniuses never finish their novels, I guess.”

“It’s too bad,” Bob said. “He must have had a lot to say.”

The wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor shelves were crammed, spine out, with books, books, more books, arranged alphabetically. Many were foreign, and of the ones in English, Bob recognized no titles except some Hemingway and Faulkner. A couple of incongruities stood out. For example, there were four ceramic bluebirds on one of the shelves, papa, mama, and two babies. There was a surprisingly sentimental picture, or more of an illustration, of six green elms against a countryside. The oddest thing of all was on the desk, piled with pages of typescript. An old Underwood typewriter, battleship-gray and weirdly tall and complicated, stood in the center. On the desk were jars of paper clips, pens—and a pistol.

“I see what you’re looking at. Yes, for some reason, Dad glommed on to this old thing and wouldn’t let go of it.”

Harry picked it up carelessly by the barrel, and Bob recognized it as a C-96 Mauser, commonly called a “Broomhandle,” for it carried that shape in a grip that plunged almost at 90 degrees from the intricately machined receiver. The handle was freed up to be unique because it had no responsibilities for containing a magazine; the magazine was contained in a boxlike structure ahead of the trigger. The barrel was long, the whole thing oddly awkward and beautiful.

“I’m sure you know more about these things than I do,” said Harry, handing it over.

Bob pulled back the bolt latch on the receiver—it was so early in the evolution of semi-automatic technology that it didn’t have a slide—to expose the chamber, revealing the gun to be empty. “Mauser Broomhandle,” he said.

“Yes, exactly. Winston Churchill carried one in the cavalry charge
at Omdurman in 1898, when it was the latest newfangled thing. I think Dad kept it around because it reminded him of classical espionage. You know, Europe in the thirties, Comintern, the Storm Petrels, the recruitment of the Cambridge Four, the Gestapo, Gauloises, POUM, the novels of Eric Ambler and Alan Furst, that sort of thing. That was when espionage was romantic, and he loved that part of it, as opposed to the cruel war he was engaged in fighting, where the stakes involved nuclear exchange and maybe global annihilation.”

Swagger looked at the old pistol, feeling its cavalryman’s solidity. Loading was problematic, especially on horseback: ten rounds held in stripper clips had to be indexed into grooves in the magazine, then forced down into the gun by a finger’s pressure. You wouldn’t want to do that with dervishes whacking at you. Swagger turned it this way and that, somewhat charmed by its ugly beauty or its beautiful ugliness. He noted the number nine cut into the wooden grip to signify its calibration.

“You won’t mention the gun to anybody, will you? Definitely illegal by current D.C. law.”

“Your secret is safe with me,” Swagger said.

“I have no objection if you want to stay here and go through the papers to your heart’s content. I will tell you that when Dad died in ’95, a team from the Agency came and went through everything. They took a few papers, that’s all, but they assured me that everything that remained was of a nonclassified nature.”

“That’s very kind of you, sir,” said Bob, “but for now I don’t think it’s necessary. Maybe when I have more information somewhere down the line and have something exact to look for, then I might come by again, if the invitation is still open.”

“Anytime. Anytime. As I say, talking about Dad is always fun for me. Those were great days, that was a great war he fought. We won that one, didn’t we?”

“So they say,” said Bob.

In his Washington hotel room that night, Bob didn’t need to sleep to get to the subject at hand. Old man Gardner had raised it himself. Pistols. His was an ancient thing, from the Jurassic of the semi-auto age two centuries earlier. Yet it meant something to the old guy, even if he wasn’t an operational type who might have used it in hot or cold blood, hopelessly obsolete or not.

Swagger opened his laptop, went online, and quickly acquired the basic info about the C-96 pistol, confirming what he knew with more details. He also learned the source of the nine on the grip, seeing that during World War I, the inscription was the Prussian way of informing the troops that this variation was a 9 mm instead of a Mauser 7.65 mm, like the earlier 96s. The thorough Germans even painted the nine red, and the pistols became known as “Red Nines,” even if old Gardner’s red had worn off. Then Swagger had a thought: Red Nine. Four bluebirds, Blue Four. Green trees, Green Six.

Bob wrestled with that. Radio codes, somehow? Map coordinates? Agent work names? A way to remember the number 946? Or, er, 649. Or 469.

He came up with exactly nothing except a headache and a feeling of stupidity. This wasn’t his game. He went back to his game.

When he tried to price the Red Nine on the GunsAmerica website, that vast repository of used firearms, he came across something else: a S&W M&P .38 of exactly the sort Lee Harvey had gone all the way home in the middle of a manhunt to carry. It rolled up the screen, and Bob fixed on it, recognizing the sweep and balance of the brilliant Smith design, which had lasted over a century, the odd orchestration of ovals and curves arranged in a stunningly aesthetic package that achieved, as had just a few other handguns, an accidental classicism.

How odd it was that Oswald had risked all to go back for a gun he could have brought with him. Try as he had, Bob hadn’t cracked that particular nut. Maybe Oswald was going to head to General Walker’s
and take him out too, as his last beau geste to the world he was leaving behind. Maybe he thought, if trapped, he could administer his own coup de grâce?

The only coup de grâce he administered was to a poor man named J. D. Tippit, who, like Bob’s father, had done his duty and caught a slug for his trouble.

J. D. Tippit was the forgotten victim of that bloody day. A Dallas policeman, he was armed with a description of the assassin—it nailed Lee Harvey to a T—and ordered into Oak Cliff, closer to downtown, to patrol and scan. He spotted a man who matched perfectly. The fellow walked, perhaps too hastily, up Tenth Street in Oak Cliff. Tippit trailed the walker from his squad car, then halted and hailed him over. Their conversation is forever lost. At one point it seems that Oswald satisfied the inquiry, left the squad car, and began to depart. But Tippit had a second thought, called, and got out of his car. It does no good to wonder why, in that age of less politically correct policing, he didn’t brace the suspect more aggressively, at gunpoint, and put him in cuffs before sorting things out. He chose the courteous way and took three bullets as a consequence.

But what was odd wasn’t Tippit’s politeness, Swagger thought, with the silhouette of the stubby revolver before him on the screen, so much as the intensity of Oswald’s homicidal response. It is known that the man had a temper and was prone to and not afraid of interpersonal violence, as frequent arguments and fistfights attest, but at the same time he was a yakker, a talker, a debater. He may have had or believed he had the skills to talk his way out of anything. He may have thought he’d done so. When he was hailed a second time and saw the officer emerging from the car, he never deployed those skills. His whole personality was based on them, his sense of self. Yet he abandoned them and drew and fired.

A case can be made: he snapped. He was a fugitive on the edge of rational control, his mind wasn’t working properly, and he saw that
he had to act or wake up on death row. In a panic, he did that. Swagger thought: I suppose that makes sense, at least as much sense as anything, even if it contradicts his basic character.

But what happened next is even more peculiar and out of character. Why did Oswald walk to the prone body and fire a last shot point-blank into the head? You might say execution-style, but that would be wrong. It wasn’t style, it
was
execution.

It seems to have attracted little attention, but it puzzled Swagger deeply. He might concede that a fleeing man in a panic with no impulse control and abject fear for his life would draw and shoot. Almost certainly, he would turn and walk away rapidly. He is killing to live.

That is not what happened. Instead of turning, Oswald deliberately closed the ten feet of distance between them, bent over the fallen man, and delivered the brain shot at such close range that he could see the face as he drove the bullet into the head, see the spew of blood and the fall across the body of that utter stillness that marks the dead from the living. Why? It makes no sense in terms of his situation, and it really makes no sense in terms of his politics and previous behavior.

He never hated JFK. He wasn’t a punisher, a psychopath, a coup de grâce giver, a scalper, a Bushido warrior who took the skull knot of his fallen adversary. His killing never had that personal edge of contempt. Yet in this instance, he goes the extra effort to lean over and deliver the final expression of contempt with the brain shot at close range.

Why?

The next day was the first stop on what Swagger thought of as the Hugh-Lon Grand Tour. From Georgetown, he traveled to Hartford and went through birth records, finding out that indeed a Hugh Aubrey Meachum was born in 1930, to Mr. David Randolph Meachum
and his wife, the former Rose Jackson Dunn, both of whom listed their address as American Embassy, Paris, France. He found Lon as well, born five years earlier to Jeffery Gerald Scott and his wife, the former Susan Marie Dunn, address Green Hills Ranch, Midland, Texas. Evidently, the Dunn sisters preferred that their beloved Hartford OB-GYN deliver their children in the comforting confines of Hartford Episcopalian Hospital.

On then to New Haven, mostly decayed old city but part of it medieval university, with real ivy on the towers and buildings clotted with elm and oak, the whole thing a delusion of propriety and yet oddly comforting. He didn’t bother with Yale itself. Who’d cooperate with a cranky geezer with a cowboy accent and boots, who looked like Clint Eastwood on a bad-hair day? It probably intimidated him a little too, maybe the only thing that ever had.

The public library was more accommodating; it had bound copies of the
Yale Daily News
that yielded information without attitude, and paging through the lost and forgotten record of elite success on the gloried fields of New Haven had a weird feel, as if he were on a different planet so far from the squalor of his own upbringing in the hills of Polk County, Arkansas. But Yale in the forties: what a glorious place it must have been, as half the faces later achieved, under the camouflage of more chin and less hair, national distinction of some form or other. Of the cousins, Lon Scott was by far the more outstanding, particularly as a fullback and linebacker for the Bulldogs. Many old photos showed that particular form of American male beauty, the square, symmetrical face, the strong nose and jaw, the ease of smile and warmth of eye. Confidence: it was born into this man as surely as his blond hair and the aquiline blade of his nose, broken once to great dramatic effect on some ball field somewhere. Swagger remembered Lon—then calling himself John Thomas Albright—stuffed in his hole on the ridge over Hard Bargain Valley in the desolate Ouachitas of 1993, head destroyed by the energy of Nick Memphis’s six-hundred-yard shot. It came to that? Yes, it did. So sad. Three touchdowns
against Harvard, led the league in points scored (few field goals in those days except by the rare drop kick), to say nothing of his spring glories, where, for four years running, he won the Ivy rifle championships in standing and prone. It was too bad the war couldn’t have lasted a little longer, for Lon’s skills at riflery and football would have done the American forces good wherever he served.