The Third Bullet (41 page)

“Lon,” I said, “Kennedy is going to send thousands of young Americans off to a war we cannot win. He’s going to do that because he wants the reelection, and he can’t be called soft on communism. We were going to correct that problem by eliminating a fellow who called him soft on communism the loudest. Now I see it. We have a chance not to ‘correct’ but to ‘eliminate.’ To erase totally.

“I directed you to the chair you ride in all day long because thousands of boys will come back from the war in those chairs. At some point or other, all of them will wish they had been killed. Because they won’t have your strength, your heroism, your ‘Yankee grit,’ as you call it. They’ll have nothing and they’ll get nothing. You command the gun world with your shooting skills, you have extraordinary resources of intelligence, charm, and will, to say nothing of a considerable personal fortune. These poor boys will have none of that. They’ll just have the chair. You hate the chair, but you have managed to transcend it. They won’t have that chance, Lon, and you know it. The chair will turn their lives into daily torture. Forever and ever and ever, which is how long they’ll feel their lives lasting. So that is why I ask you to do this, Lon. Not for my hubris but for yours. Keep those boys out of their metal chairs.
Endure, publically if you get caught or privately if you don’t, the mantle of regicide, the man who killed the king. If you can bear the chair, you can bear that easily enough.”

He laughed.

“Ever hear of an Argentine writer called Jorge Luis Borges?” I said.

“No. Hemingway’s as far as I go.”

“He writes stories in the form of fictional essays. Conjectures on this or that, always astonishing in their brevity and their insight. In one, he postulates that the true son of God was Judas, not Christ. Anybody could be Christ, suffering and becoming immortal. But it took a strength of character that only the son of God could muster to make the crucifixion possible, by the betrayal. That was the true heroism, the true sacrifice, for without it, there was nothing. He didn’t bear the pain of the cross for a day, he bore the pain of hatred, exile, universal loathing, all that, forever.
That
was strength.”

“Sounds crazy to me,” he said. “Your Bor-haze, or whatever, carries no weight with me. How do you know you’ll prevent this war? Maybe this Texan, Johnson, maybe he’ll wage the same war.”

“He won’t. He’s a New Deal Democrat forged in the crucible of thirties Washington. He has no interest in military adventurism, nothing to prove, because he’s an older man with plenty of mistresses and an ugly wife. He’ll use his time in office to siphon money off to Texas and his cronies in the party; he’ll give a lot to Negroes so Lippmann will write well of him; he’ll build dams and highways and buildings with his name on them. Like all of them, he’ll screw everything in heels. He has no interest in foreign affairs. I’ve looked at it carefully. Internationally, he’s as sober as Eisenhower; domestically, he wants to be the next FDR. He’s FDR with ants in his pants. The last thing he wants is to go off on a crazy crusade in a foreign swamp. It’s way too expensive.”

“This thing, this ambush? You don’t even know if it’s possible.”

I suppose I knew I had him then. He’d gone in a single breath from the strategic to the tactical. He didn’t realize it, but he’d surrendered on the strategic. Now it was a matter of details.

“We’re so close, Lon. We’ve solved the ballistic issue, we have the best rifle shot in the world, we have a silenced rifle, the most advanced assassination tool in the world, we have a prime patsy who will, I say again,
will
take the blame for us, the poor dummy, and we have the best breaking-and-entering man in America. And we have JFK in an open-top limousine parading by at twelve thirty p.m. the day after tomorrow. We have one thing yet to do, and it’s something that should be within any case officer’s reach. We have to find a place to shoot in reasonable proximity to Oswald’s at about the same moment, and while everybody is going after him, I will push you away in your wheelchair, and we’ll have martinis and steaks that night.”

“It’s not a joke, Hugh. Killing a man, a young beautiful man, no matter the reason, it’s not a joke.”

He was right. My foolish attempt at levity had sabotaged the moment.

“I overplayed that hand, I know. It was stupid. I apologize to you, Lon; you deserve better from me. No, we won’t celebrate, we’ll mourn along with the rest of America, and we’ll never boast or tell. But we will save thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of lives.”

“Damn you again, Hugh. You are so willful, so convincing.”

“Let me sell Jimmy and see what he comes up with. If he comes up with something that’s workable,
then
make up your mind. If you still don’t want to do it, fine. I suppose I did my best. We’ll go back to the Walker thing, as we originally planned.”

That was how we left it. I pushed him back, and he retired to his room for a nap. I called Jimmy. There was no answer.

I saw him get aboard the bus near the depository, and I followed it across the long aqueduct over the Trinity River all the way back to Oak Cliff, through the late-afternoon Dallas traffic. I wasn’t interested in the bus so much as in who else was interested in it. I looked for black Ford coupes, maybe with antennas, G-man cars. Neither the Bureau nor the Secret Service was there or shared any interest in Comrade Oswald; they
were, as usual, profoundly asleep on the job. I could almost hear them snoring. Zzzzzz-zzzzzz.

In Alek’s neighborhood, I watched from across North Beckley as he got out; again, no other cars were parked on the street, and the two other men who got out at the same stop disappeared in another direction. Alek walked by me, oblivious to all in the fading light, his details hard to make out.

Even from the few lines the declining sun revealed, you could read him: he was like a figure out of Walt Kelly or Al Capp, a caricature of grumpy hostility, a stumping, glaring, shabby figure, all lines in face and body pulled down as if by overwhelming gravity, broadcasting the message DO NOT APPROACH OR YOU WILL BE FIRED UPON. No wonder the idiot was friendless, always getting in fights or bitter arguments, a trial to those few who had decided to let him into their lives, a wife beater, a jerk. Yet he became the ball bearing of history. How utterly strange and unpredictable.

I flashed my lights. He looked up, startled, recognized the Wagoneer by shape, and came over and got in.

I pulled away. “Good evening, Alek,” I said.

“Good evening, Comrade,” he said, “I’m set,” or something similar in his garbled Russian. “On Friday evening, I will go to Fort Worth and return Monday morning with the rifle for—”

“Alek,” I said, “I take it you haven’t read today’s paper. Or talked to coworkers in the plant?”

“I read papers a day late. It’s cheaper, I get them from the garbage. As for coworkers, they are not worth—”

“All right, all right. Time is short, the stakes are high. Now listen to me carefully. Don’t say a thing. Don’t react or have a bowel movement or begin to hip-hooray. The situation has changed radically.”

I felt him turn. “The ears are all of me,” he said, his clumsy literal translation, I’m guessing, of “I’m all ears,” for which there was no Russian equivalent.

Idiot! Agh. Anyway, I went ahead. “On Friday, at around twelve
thirty, a motorcade will pass in front of your building on Elm Street. In an open limousine will be the president of the United States. Alek, can you alter history for us with one shot of your rifle? It is a great opportunity, so great that one must suspect the laws of the universe are turning in favor of our moral insistence on progress. Alek, can you do this thing for us? Are you the man who has been sent to do this thing?”

I heard his breath being swallowed, I heard him gulping. I couldn’t bear to look at his face, for I knew I would see a cavalcade of madness, narcissism, greed, and ambition and that his beady little vermin eyes would burn hot and fierce. The worst are full of murderous intensity, I thought.

“Comrade,” he finally said, and then he blurted off into English, “Jesus Christ, yes, goddammit, I have waited my whole life for this, oh, I will in one strike change the course of history, I will show the world the magnificence—”

“Settle down, you fool,” I said. “You’re carrying on like a schoolgirl. Get ahold of yourself and listen to me, all right?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” he said, still in English.

“In Russian. I insist, all discussions of this matter must be held in Russian.”

“Yes sir.”

“This is the sort of thing we do reluctantly, but we do not want this young man sending troops off to invade Cuba or anywhere, and he shows signs of instability, poor judgment, downright imbecility. He is too easily influenced, too desperately ambitious. He has no moral character. He is the kind of sparkler who could start an atomic war. He must be stopped, and a responsible leader put in charge of your nation. Alek, you must understand, in pulling that trigger, you are not destroying, you are building.”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” he said.

He didn’t, of course, and I was fooling myself, really, throwing a last grenade into my own lingering defenses; I was arguing with myself.

“Alek, if you are to do this thing, you must do it under our absolute discipline. We will provide you with an escape route. We will get you to
a safe house, we will get you out of the country, we will get you to your glory in Havana and your rightful place among the revolutionary fighters. In a year or so, we will get your wife and children to you. But this can be guaranteed only if you submit and trust absolutely our rules, do you understand?”

“I agree, I agree. I hear what you’re saying. If it comes to it, I won’t let them take me alive. I’ll have my pistol with me, I’ll go down shooting, as I am willing to die for—”

“No, no, no,” I said, fearing this idiot on a shooting rampage in downtown Dallas, “you must
not
bring your pistol. Believe me”—I struggled for the appropriate fiction to disabuse him—“if you kill the president on a policy issue and because of your own sense of idealism, however warped they may think it, you will be reviled but respected. You will have a legacy of courage and dignity. If you also shoot some postman or some housewife, you become another punk Negro murderer, and your electrocution will be cheered by your own children, and you do not want that. Believe me, leave the pistol at home; swear to me you will harm no one except your target. That is the discipline we demand. We are not butchers, we are scientific Marxists.”

“Yes sir,” he said.

“Tell me how you would proceed.”

He laid out the obvious. He’d have to go home tomorrow night—Thursday—to get the rifle; he would break it down so it could be disguised and carry it into the building in a brown paper bag. Nobody would challenge him. He would go to the sixth floor, which was largely deserted, as it was pure stock storage area. He would situate himself overlooking Elm as it passed by Dealey Plaza on the way to the triple overpass, and he would shoot the president as he passed by.

“Which window will you shoot from?” I asked.

“What?”

“Which window? You have your choice of any; which window do you chose?”

“Uh, I guess the one in the middle.”

“Why?”

“It’s in the middle.”

“Excellent reasoning. You are a genius. Where on Elm will you shoot the president? That’s the determining factor on the window. You cannot make these things up on the spot. You of all people cannot make things up on the spot, because you will do it stupidly.”

“Where should I shoot?”

“You know the building at the street.”

“I— I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to make any—”

“Idiot. You want him where he’s closest and slowest. Any map should give you the answer. Where will he be closest and slowest? This is why you’re such a failure, Alek. You don’t think. You just make things up!”

His face knitted in shame. Then I saw a bulb go on behind that dull face, those dim eyes. Bingo! Eureka!

“When he’s turning the corner. He has to turn the corner from Houston to Elm. It’s very sharp.”

“Excellent. It’s a hundred and twenty degrees. The car is big, it will pivot slowly. For all intents and purposes, he will be standing still. His chest will be open to you at a range of about seventy-five feet. An idiot could make the shot.”

“I’m not an idiot,” he said. “Sure, I make mistakes, but everybody—”

“Which window, Alek?”

“The corner window. The closest window to him. If I planned to shoot later, as he went down Elm, then I would move to another window down Elm.”

“Excellent,” I said, glad that he had figured out this elementary riddle (though no conspiracy theorists did, I might add) so that I could praise him and raise his spirits. “You shoot him when he’s closest, when he’s stillest. One shot, center chest, easy to make.”

“Fish in a barrel,” he said in English with that dreadful smirk.

“After shooting,” I instructed, “you will have little time to make your escape. The police will be in the building within minutes. Drop the rifle, walk, do not run, downstairs, being careful not to acquire oxygen
debt so you are swallowing for air. Look no one in the eye, but do not shirk either. Your face is neutral. Exit the building and slip off into the mob. It will be chaos outside. Proceed down Houston Street one block to the corner of Houston and Pacific. You will see this car, though I might not be driving, and it could be anyone, a couple, an old lady, a Mexican, a hepcat. Climb in the back and lie down on the floor. Commit yourself to a long, boring drive. In a few hours we will have you at a safe house, and at that point, you can relax, eat, drink. The next day, or really the next night, we will move you out of the country. These will be an arduous few days demanding stamina, commitment, attention to detail, and obedience. Trust us, Alek, will you? Can you?”