The Third Bullet (39 page)

His face was so lively and intelligent that people oftentimes didn’t realize he was moored in that hateful steel chair, S4 forever. He’d gotten awfully good with it over the years, and he may have been the one who
invented the wheel ring of smaller circumference than the rubber tire he used to propel himself. He could probably climb a mountain in the thing, or rob a bank, or go up or down stairs. But it got to him, I know it did. His vitality crushed into that metal framework, his liveliness anchored by the great dead wastage of his lower body, his talent frustrated by his immobility.

It took a bit, as it always does when you recruit a solid citizen to go against all that he’s been taught, but I had advantages. I knew he read Lippman in the
Post
and admired Murrow on CBS and had what might be called “enlightened” social ideas about Negroes and Jews, and while he wanted to destroy communism, he didn’t particularly want to kill anyone doing it, especially not millions of innocent Russian peasants. We all felt that way. And he hated, as did most Ivy League people, General Walker, who seemed part of a long tradition of recent American troglodytes, from Martin Dies to Joe McCarthy to Richard Nixon to the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan, men who saw Commies everywhere and made it much tougher on those of us charged with fighting real Commies, men who hated Negroes and wished them to stay backward and pathetic and never equal under law or in opportunity, men who still hated Jews and thought they secretly controlled everything, men who just hated because that was all they had been taught to do.

When I explained my fears that Walker’s right-wing pressure might force the callow and decadent JFK into doing another stupid thing, this time a stupid
tragic
thing, and assured Lon there was no chance whatsoever of being caught and laid the plan out for him, he finally agreed. Let it be known here and now that he never asked for a cent, he never got a cent, he never discussed a cent. He did it because I convinced him that it was the right thing to do, and he believed in me.

There was some logistics planning to be done, but that’s always a task at which I excel. I got a big chunk of operating funds out of the black budget by my usual means, bought each of the tickets at a different travel agency, paying cash, booked rooms for us from the nineteenth to the twenty-sixth at the Adolphus under fake names—easily done in
those precomputer days—used a fellow in the gray economy who did a lot of intelligence trade work to put together fake driver’s licenses for the three of us, and made sure everything was delivered and nothing was written.

I had my own career to tend to, so I worked extra-hard in the meetings and at appending notes to reports and keeping Cord up-to-date on PEACOCK and the like. I was busy, or at least I gave the impression of being busy. My one worry was that Kennedy would make another mistake and we’d find ourselves on crisis footing and stuck in weeks of eighteen-hour days while the grown-ups at State worked out ways to prevent him from ending the world in fire. I guess those midweeks in November, he was busy screwing Cord’s ex-wife, Marilyn, Angie, and everybody except poor forlorn Jackie, when he wasn’t plotting his next campaign. He didn’t seem to do much except think about his career and wait for things to happen. It was that hunger that killed him: the trip to Dallas was strictly politics and had nothing to do with his actual job as president.

In any case, I sold Cord, who had seemed hazier and more morose of late and perhaps was drinking more than he should, as his nose was turning into a big red blob, on another PEACOCK trip—this time, to make it easier on myself, to the south. The idea was to hit the prestige North Carolina schools, like Duke and Wake Forest and the University of NC, and spend a week trolling for talent down there. For some reason, North Carolinians always did well in prestige journalism circles, possibly because, although they were Southern, they weren’t
too
Southern. From my point of view, the hop to Dallas from Raleigh and back was much easier and less exhausting or time-consuming than the one to Dallas via Cambridge.

The night came when Lon, Jimmy, and I met as a team for the first time. It was November 19, 1963. I had rented a Jeep Wagoneer, and the three of us drove from the Adolphus, a grand hotel that bathed in the red glow of the neon pegasus atop the Magnolia Petroleum Company next door, out to the Patio and got acquainted, first with one another and second with the field upon which our operation would transpire.
It was a good trip. Jimmy and Lon bonded instantly, and it was understood, without having to be explained, that Jimmy would be the action guy, the assister, Lon’s special friend. Lon would shoot; he was the artist, the special talent, who made the thing work. I would supervise, though discreetly, more by studiously considered suggestion than direct order; I would also handle everything organizational, logistically and strategically. It was a good healthy dynamic. There is no I in “team,” or so they say, and for the three of us, it was true.

I drove, Lon was in the back where he’d be a week hence, and Jimmy sat next to me. We had not much trouble negotiating the Dallas traffic. I can remember only a little about the drive over to the neighborhood: the colors of the early 1960s. Somehow, in the soft air of that time and place and season, they were lighter. I can’t put my finger on it, and no words may exist, at least within my reach, to describe it, but everything was less urgent, less hard-edged, and more light filled the air. The great Nabokov could probably conjure it in two or three words, but I grope and babble. It was as if America was too comfortable for primary colors; they would come later, after the event I engineered, during Vietnam, during the huge change in demographics as the ignorant generation whose fathers had won the war took over. But not then, not yet. Everything was softer, lighter, quieter. I don’t know how else to make you feel it.

Speak, memory. Now I remember pulling into a parking space about forty yards down from the Patio and sitting there for a bit, letting it soak in.

“This is where we’ll be?” said Lon. “Suppose we can’t find parking.”

“The two nights I visited, there were ample spaces,” I said. “I can’t imagine we’ll have trouble late on a Monday night.”

“Where’ll the other guy be, Mr. Meachum?” Jimmy asked.

“See the alley directly across from the restaurant? I’ve told him to take up a position, entering from the rear. We’ll place some wooden crates there so he can get a good braced position. We’ll have to walk the range, but I’m guessing it’ll be about seventy yards.”

“And you want me there?”

“This guy is such a jerk, I’m not sure how he’ll do. If someone confronts him, if he gets confused, if he loses confidence—in all those circumstances, you may have to intercede. You’ve got a slapper?”

That was a cop’s blackjack, a flat, flexible piece of leather with about a pound of buckshot sewn into it; a master could whack a man to unconsciousness with one quick blow.

“I do, and it’s saved my bacon more times than I can remember,” Jimmy said.

“That would be your move. It’s messy, but we can’t kill any private citizen; we just have to get Alek out of there cleanly. Do you see any problems, Lon?”

Lon grunted. “This is sort of like
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
I’m John Wayne. I do the real killing. I must say, Hugh, I never thought I’d get a chance to play the John Wayne role.”

We laughed. We were all John Wayne fans.

“Technically, it’s an easy shot off a rest. I am worried about a deflection. It appears I’ll be shooting through some bushes.”

“If you want, Mr. Scott, I can visit some night late and discreetly trim what needs to be trimmed. We’ll take that worry off you.”

“Great idea,” I said. It was. I hadn’t thought of it. I’m glad Jimmy, ever practical, had.

“Then our patsy falls back through the alley, cuts between two houses, turns right, hides the rifle under the Forty-fifth Street Bridge, takes off his galoshes, climbs up to Forty-fifth Street, and takes a bus home. Can he do that?”

“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.