The Third Bullet (53 page)

I doubt he was nervous. He was too exuberant, too happy, too coursing with energy. I can see him, crouched and hiding behind the fortress of boxes he’d arranged on the sixth floor of the Book Depository, his eyes beady, his face tight with the characteristic smugness that so exiled him from his fellow man, presidential assassin or no, thinking not What if I miss? but Hurry up, hurry up! He must have been hungry for his destiny, for his entry into history. He wasn’t giving escape or survival a thought, but concentrating entirely on getting the job done to the best of his meager abilities. Consider his mind at the moment: he was about to strike a blow not merely at the United States, which he claimed to loathe, but at all those who’d seen him as he was—a fringe man clearly unable to hold a job, much less have a career, a life of normalcy and contribution—and insisted on reporting the bad news: You are nobody. You are not equipped to compete. Your destiny is nothingness. So this was his moment: to all of them, he was saying
I exist!
in thunder. But do not abjure the political for the psychological: he was a true believer, so true that he could and would kill for his principles. That puts him at the very end of the spectrum of political behavior, though it does not push him
off it. In some fashion that he probably could not articulate, he thought he was birthing a new socialist world, and his idealism loaned him the self-esteem nothing else had provided for him. Then there was greed, the treasure at the end of the rainbow. That was the idealized image of himself as hero of Havana, in the ’53 Cadillac convertible with Dr. Castro on the Malacón, waving to the throng. That was a risk worth dying for. He must have been, all taken into account, one of the world’s happiest men in the split second before he pulled the trigger.

As we were, he was alerted to the approach of the killing moment not by his watch but by the roar of the crowd as its crescendo followed the motorcade down Main like a human wave. He saw it emerge, the long boatlike vehicle, with its bounty of politicians and wives, as it turned for its one-block run down Houston. I’m guessing it was here that the rifle flew to his shoulder and he edged closer to the window, not caring if he was seen (several witnesses noted him all but hanging out of the frame). The car reached its 120-degree turn at Elm, rotating slowly to the left. Question: why didn’t he fire then? Car hardly moving, Kennedy as close as he would be, probably under seventy-five feet, head-on, pivoting slightly as the automobile pivoted; plus, instructions from his Russian control that this was the moment. Why would he go against his own instincts as well as orders from a superior whom he feared and loved? Again speculation: the safety? He pulls, ugh, nothing happens, so he breaks his line of vision through the scope, unshoulders the rifle, finds the safety—a poorly placed button half under the protruding rear of the firing pin assembly—and struggles to get it off. Perhaps his heavy sweating occluded the scope, and he saw nothing and had to quickly clean it with his shirt collar. Whatever, it was already going wrong for him, one tenth of a second in.

Desperately, he frees the mechanism, throws it to his shoulder, and fires the first shot in haste. True to form, a clean, clear, almost comical miss. I hold with many that the bullet, sailing along at that leisurely two-thousand-feet-per-second velocity, broke apart on the curb, depositing only its wan spray of fragments into the limo. He rushed, his trigger
squeeze was a mess, the target was lost in the single tree that stood between him and his quarry, and the first shot, the closest shot, was a complete failure.

The man is haunted by folly. Now he’s in a panic, having missed pitifully, given up his position, fair game for counter-snipers (there weren’t any that day, though there would be evermore), and he hasn’t even hit the car!

He labors through the cocking motion, the rifle jerked from his shoulder by the raggedness of the manipulation, and he comes back “on target.” His finger lunges against the coarse grind of the pull, and my guess is that the crosshairs weren’t anywhere near the target when he fired, for the simple reason that he hit it.

Or did he? Yes, according to the commission, he did, with the famed magic bullet that drilled through the president’s upper back and exited his throat, its angle adjusted slightly by the muscle tissue through which it had traveled, which also cost it enormous velocity; then, spinning sideways, it hit Governor Connally in the back (its impression recorded indelibly in scar tissue), sliced through his body, exited much damaged (despite claims to the contrary), and drilled his wrist and his thigh. Then it tumbled, spent, hot, mangled, to rest in the folds of his jacket, to be discovered by a technician that afternoon at the hospital on the governor’s gurney after the governor was removed. Oh, what a bad boy that bullet was! The mischief it unleashed! What grist for the mills of the ignorant, the malicious, the embittered lefty proletariat-intellectuals! Yet I knew then and I know now that the bullet did what Arlen Specter said it did. It is beyond dispute.

What isn’t much thought about is the next issue.
Alek thought he missed!
I have seen a fair number of men shot. It’s not usually like the movies, which instruct us to the theory of the instant, spastic reaction, the firing of all nerves simultaneously and the twitchy-legged death tumble to Earth. It can happen that way. It happens other ways too. Often men don’t even know they’ve been hit. They think it’s a punch or they’ve bumped into a door or they notice nothing at all, and not until
they look and see blood welling (and sometimes it doesn’t even well!) do they comprehend after putting two and two together that they’ve been shot. It cannot be predicted. Each wound is different, based on a thousand or so factors from velocity, bullet shape, angle of strike, muscles and/or bones encountered, vitality of target, blood pressure, speed of target, target’s relationship to solidity on Earth (standing, sitting, moving, whatever), weather, barometric pressure, and on and on and on. There is no knowing, so anybody who tells you what should have happened—and infers, from the fact that it didn’t happen, something is amiss—is a bald-faced liar.

Let us not concentrate on what was happening. Let us concentrate on what Alek
thought
was happening. What he saw through the fuzzy optics of his Hollywood—the brand, not the town—Japanese scope was . . . nothing. Look at Zapruder’s film. We don’t see the hit because the president is behind the sign, but when he emerges, the only thing that’s happened is that he’s begun to lean forward a bit, and his hands have come up, which are probably not visible to Alek, if he’s looking at all, and he’s probably not because he’s lost in the drama of cocking the rifle for the second time. When Alek returns to the scope, Kennedy’s head and posture may be incrementally degraded, but that’s too subtle for Alek to note.

In his mind: utter panic, complete self-loathing. Physiology: fingers bloated with blood, oxygen debt, woozy vision, yips coursing through his arms and trunk, sweat sliding down his face and flanks, presentiment of doom. Target: small, getting smaller as the vehicle pulls away (though it doesn’t speed up), slight left-to-right movement produced by the angle of the street relative to the position of the shooter.

Our boy is not in a good spot to make the next shot.

He tries to steer the scope crosshairs onto—where? Having missed twice—from his point of view—he has no idea where to hold for a killing shot. He has no idea of the index between point of aim and point of impact, he’s in a shooter’s no-man’s-land, even as he’s taken the slack
out of the trigger and sustains it right at the tipping point between shot and no shot.

Suddenly, the president’s head explodes.

Alek is so startled that his own trigger jerks and he fires his third bullet, but his jump at the sight of the destruction of the skull is so intense that his third bullet goes sailing off to the general southwest, presumably landing in some distant Oz beyond the triple overpass, never to be noted or found. It was an awesome break for us; it meant that witnesses saw him fire his third shot, it squared all accounting of bullets, shells, and wounds, it forever connected Alek to the event, lacking any tangible, empirical evidence of our existence, and it cemented all investigative effort to the Book Depository and to Alek. Cops are predictable; they want to put things in a box, and the sooner and tighter it fits, the happier they are, and the more outsiders tug and pull and poke at the contents of the box, the more stubborn and angry they become. It’s all personal to them.

Back to Alek, for whom the world has just changed mightily.

Given to paranoia anyway, he sees in that second that a conspiracy against him does exist, that he is a patsy, he is a chump, a fool. He’s been set up to take the fall, and that reality becomes instantly clear. (Let us also postulate that his narcissism is secretly pleased; he is important enough to destroy!)

He realizes that all he believed in was false, that there was no Russian agent, he is not working for KGB, there’s no escape car awaiting him, he will not be hustled away and secreted to Havana and the loving ministrations of Dr. Castro. Instead, he’s the sucker at the center of every James M. Cain novel, every film noir, lost in a nightmare city as forces so vast he cannot imagine them grind into position to crush him.

It occurs to him that his life might be in danger. He knows the sixth floor is empty only because it always has been empty, but that wisdom is no longer operative; it is from a different world. It occurs to him that his death is absolutely necessary for the new narrative. It may be that a
detective, a security guard, an armed citizen in the know might already be there, hiding behind his own clump of boxes, ready to step out and issue the coup de grâce and become both the hero of America and the secret lynchpin of the plot against Alek.

He does what any man in such circumstances would do.

He cocks the rifle, throwing another shell into the chamber, finger to trigger, slack removed, weapon at the ready, and like a patrolling infantryman in an ambush area, he hastens the ninety-five feet diagonally across the empty space to the one stairway down, ready to respond to any emerging attackers. Nobody’s there. And no bullet comes crashing through the windows to snipe him as he sought to snipe the president.

He pauses at the head of the stairs, hating to relinquish his weapon. But he knows that he can’t emerge into society at the site of a presidential assassination with a rifle in his hands. So he stuffs the rifle between two book crates at the top of the stairs, where it will be found an hour later by a detective. That is why it wasn’t found abandoned in the sniper’s nest; that is why it was loaded and cocked.

He heads downstairs, and his adventures in the building, back in society, have been well chronicled. He slides into a chair in the lunchroom, is accosted by a policeman and identified by a coworker, and once the policeman heads upstairs, Alek zips out the front door.

Now what? He knows there’ll be no pickup awaiting him at the corner of Houston and Pacific, and there may be ambushers. Instead of heading north up Houston, where we were nominally waiting to pick him up, he turns east and heads up Elm, past the Dal-Tex Building. That is where I see him as I am pulling Lon out of the lobby while we beat our own hasty retreat from the seventh floor.

Alek continues to surge up Elm for another four blocks. Let us assume it is in this period that he more or less returns to his rational mind. He knows it’s a matter of time before they locate the sniper’s nest and the rifle, take a canvass of employees at TBD and note that he’s the only one missing, though he’s been noted earlier as present, so they’ll know he left right after the shooting. Possibly that’s not paramount in
his mind. He thinks he’s being hunted by his own co-conspirators, and he remembers my warning him against bringing the handgun, because I was gaming him into being the easy prey that would be the exclamation point on our operation.

I don’t believe he thinks he can get away, as in escape to a new life. Impossible. He wasn’t stupid, just incompetent. But at that point in his life, I think the one possibility of victory he saw, the one glimmer of hope, was to defend himself against his murderers, not the police or FBI. If he could shoot one of them and bring the bag to the cops, it would be proof of sorts that he’d been manipulated, though he hadn’t worked out the allegiance issues and didn’t know who had used him.

Again, as for any man on the run, his first impulse would have been to get a gun, which explains why, after walking away from the site of the assassination, he climbed aboard a bus headed down Elm Street back to the site of the assassination. No one has bothered to work out the destination of that bus: it was to the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. He wasn’t fleeing crazily, as so many have stated; he was going to get the gun.

Soon enough, the bus is moored in traffic a block east of the assassination site. Time is ticking by, he knows that the police effort is grinding along, possibilities are being examined, questions asked and answered, the winnowing process begun, and that it will cast him up quickly.