Hank emitted a low, macho chortle and said something like “If it came to that, he’s the one I’d be worried about,” and then, “Why don’t you leave that joker? We can go to Reno for the divorce, and Vegas for the wedding.”
As they drove he went on trying to impress her that way, and she had continued to blow smoke out the passenger window of his Ford Galaxie. She was glad that her face was averted when they pulled up at a tiny clapboard house on West Neely where she finally glimpsed the man she’d come to Dallas in search of. Oswald was in the living room. She saw him clearly through the window, and the wife had her back to Lee trying to stop the baby from crying.
“Who were they?” Marilyn asked, a few minutes after they drove on.
“He’s a pain in my ass. She’s his pain-in-the-ass Russian wife.”
“You mean they’re commies?” She couldn’t risk doing the doe-eyes that had worked so well for her as Marilyn, but with Hank, a skeptical tone had the same tongue-loosening effect.
“Sort of. We sent him over around the time of the U-2 debacle. We sent a bunch like him—U.S. Marines posing as socialist sympathizers. Marines are catnip for the KGB; they go nuts when they get their hands on those boys. We figured they’d pick them up, some of them would succeed in infiltrating, and some of them they’d sniff out and send back, but either way we win. The ones they send back give us a picture of their operation, how they handle defectors. But they knew right away with this guy. Locked him in a mental hospital, made it look like he’d attempted suicide, interrogated him, sent him to the boonies, got him to knock up one of theirs. Waited for him to get sick of Russian winters. Easy as pie.”
“So he’s a traitor? And she’s controlling him with her bedroom wiles, something tawdry like that.”
“Lord no. She’s just a kid, and he’s a nutcase. Unstable. Can’t believe the Marines ever took him in the first place. Fancies himself some kind of boy-genius double agent. She might have some training, but she’s low level, if she’s anything. We’ve been trying to use the situation with Marina—that’s the wife—get him to infiltrate communist groups here, but so far he just keeps fucking up. Like I said, pain in my ass.”
Oh, Hank, you goddamn idiot, she thought.
But it was the final piece she’d needed to make sense of the jumble of coded messages and notes she had discovered in Alexei’s bungalow. Dallas had already been her destination, almost as soon as her death was publicized, because that was where Alexei had been headed. Or anyway where his final airplane ticket would have taken him. The month that followed had been agony for so many reasons, but mostly what she remembered was the confusion over who she ought to be looking for, and how frustrated she’d been trying to make sense of the numerical messages from Moscow. She’d never known humidity like that, and had smoked cigarettes out the motel window, and watched how the elms wept with summer rain. She had tried not to cry too much, and tanned by her motel swimming pool once the storms passed, and went to the movies at night to quiet her mind.
The theater near her third motel had been playing old war movies, and one night she watched a Nazi melodrama that involved a book cipher, and realized what those numbers were for. It had taken her some months to find an antiquarian shop (she’d had to drive all the way to New Orleans) that had the same edition of the complete Shakespeare that lay on Alexei’s unmade bed the day she’d gone to his Hell’s Kitchen apartment. She had always suspected that he chose Hal as their code name for Jack to stroke her literary pretensions, but now she saw that it fit into the larger system, too. Perhaps everything in this life has at least two reasons, she’d thought as she began running her fingers over the pages of Alexei’s diary once again. The codes had her thumbing to Lear and The Tempest, until she understood that a mariner named Oswald had been of interest to Alexei for a long time, and that he had returned to the country in June of 1962.
Lonely, imaginative, delusions of historical destiny, Alexei had written in November 1958. That might have been an observation about her, but in November of 1958 they hadn’t spoken in almost ten years.
Likes publicity about self, Alexei had jotted in November of 1959.
This, too, might have been about her, but in the fall of 1959 she had been in New York avoiding the press, and her contact with Alexei was minimal. Once she had decided it was in reference to another publicity hound, this phrase had led her to the library, and an article that ran in the Dallas Morning News on November 1, 1959, about a local Marine named Oswald defecting to the Soviet Union. According to Alexei’s coded messages, his mariner returned to the new world in June 1962, which was about when Alexei had tried to strangle her—the night he had told her that her replacement was already on his way. This time the newspapers didn’t care—there was no mention of a Marine named Oswald in June 1962—but she was beginning to understand the scheme by then. She had the code, so she knew that Oswald had notified Alexei that he was living at his mother’s in Fort Worth, but suggested his handler put off traveling to Texas a few months, as he was being monitored by a man named Hank Foley.
But she had not known, until Hank Foley had driven her down Neely Street at eleven miles an hour, where to find him. Or why Alexei, in his communications with Moscow, had begun, in the spring of 1961, to reference Oswald’s twin.
“Some double agent,” Hank had muttered, and clapped a hand on her knee as he sped off. But once he said it she knew it was true, and not in the way he meant.
There was Oswald, and there was Oswald’s twin. Oswald was a lonely and imaginative Marine whom Alexei had encountered in California, probably while he was on leave, sometime in late 1958. Oswald’s twin was a highly trained Soviet agent who had been groomed his entire life for a single, elite mission. Oswald was a troubled romantic, who believed his intelligence ought to mean something. It would have been easy for Alexei to manipulate him, as it had been easy for Alexei to manipulate her, and with the courtly, erudite Russian’s encouragement, Oswald had returned to the base in Japan where he was stationed, and made himself conspicuous to CIA recruiters, who in turn had sent him off to renounce his citizenship at the American embassy in Moscow, prompting the newspaper mentions of which he was apparently proud. Oswald’s twin was a skilled sniper, a master of accents, a perfect mimic, and, she presumed, indifferent to fame. In the summer of 1962, the CIA had made it easy for their agent Oswald, along with his new Russian wife, to return to the United States. But they had gotten Oswald’s twin instead.
Maybe, like the “father” she had seen through a false mirror in Payne Whitney, the face of Oswald’s twin had been reconstructed. He had been given the face of a former Marine with intelligence connections and a family to go home to in Texas. Of course, Alexei knew every detail of that connection, his habits of speech and the way he thought, and would have passed the information on to Oswald’s twin, so that he could better play the part. With a shudder, Marilyn realized that the slight, dark-haired man she had been trying to locate in Dallas was not American at all. Was that twitchy, resentful gaze his own, or was it an exquisitely honed impression? The real Lee Harvey Oswald was still in Russia, if he was anywhere, and whether his fate was a labor camp or a grand apartment and a new girl from the provinces every month, she would never know. Apparently Alexei had not cared what had happened to him, or had not needed to be told.
She might have shared her theory with Hank, but she knew nobody truly important would need to brag and strut the way he did. He had no real power, and would only get in her way. She had continued their affair long enough to collect some tidbits about what he had been up to, Oswald’s movements over the summer and early fall, when he had made trips to New Orleans and Mexico City. Hank had sent him on the first trip to try and infiltrate Castro supporters, and the second to try and get into Cuba itself (with the ultimate goal of assassinating El Comandante, Hank implied, although she doubted it), but both missions had failed. Hank chalked this up to incompetence, but Marilyn was becoming ever more convinced that the man he was calling Oswa
ld had been born in another world and had failed on purpose. He might even, in the Soviet embassy in Mexico City, have been able to communicate with Moscow without the usual subterfuge.
“He’s on his own now,” Hank said disgustedly, and indeed, Oswald had gone on to procure an actual job for the first time in many months, moving boxes at the Texas School Book Depository on Elm. Marilyn learned this from her own surveillance, not from Hank, whom she was relieved to have no further use for. She expressed anxiety over her husband’s possible hiring of a private detective, and from then on avoided Florence’s Hotsy-Totsy.
A month passed. She switched motels twice, to keep people from remembering her, and also to shake off her dread, and she seemed to have succeeded on both counts. She considered several methods of terminating Oswald, but she hesitated, knowing that he had been trained to kill, as she had not. And she wanted to know for sure that she had the right man, that she really was putting an end to the last of Alexei’s schemes. The weather was moody, the week before Thanksgiving, when the harried waitress slipped her eggs and toast onto the counter and refilled her coffee mug, and she had almost forgotten the details of Hank Foley’s enthusiastic lovemaking, and these both did much for her spirits. She broke the yolk with the tip of her toast, and put it into her mouth distractedly.
“He has some nerve, coming to god’s country,” said the man next to her.
“That commie traitor,” added his companion.
“That treasonous bastard.”
“That pinko Harvard boy.”
“Give me Friday off, boss.” The man next to her chuckled as he lifted a phantom rifle, peered through a phantom scope. “I’ll do ’im myself.” As he imitated the sound of a gun firing, he jerked at the phantom kickback, and Marilyn, sitting beside him, felt it, too.
“May I see that?” She leaned in with a broad smile and indicated the newspaper in front of the one called boss.
“Sure thing, little lady, so long as you ain’t one of those girls with cotton-candy brains swooning every time Kennedy comes on the TV.”
“I’ll tell you straight, I voted for him back in ’60, but I won’t make that mistake next year.”
This seemed to satisfy the man, and he shoved the newspaper in her direction and went on loudly expressing his displeasure with the president, to the delight of the other men with their elbows on the diner counter. She might have been offended had she listened. But this kind of talk was always going on somewhere in Dallas, and she had quickly become absorbed in the paper and could no longer hear. Her heart was cold, and her mind had begun to tick. So this was how it happened. Where in the city was the man calling himself Oswald, and had he read the newspaper? Or did he already know what had been printed there for anyone to see? President Kennedy was in Texas as of yesterday, and tomorrow morning he would take a short flight from Fort Worth and proceed slowly by motorcade through downtown Dallas, through the canyon of office buildings on Main Street, passing Oswald’s workplace right about noon.
FORTY-THREE
Dallas, November 1963
SLEEPLESSNESS she now regarded as a gift; and after she learned that Jack was coming to town, she did not want to rest.
That afternoon she took an extra thousand out of the reserve of cash she had found in Alexei’s suitcase (“my inheritance,” as she darkly referred to it in her thoughts), and trailed Oswald home from work. He had no car of his own, but she was familiar with his figure by then, his quick, purposeful stride, and spotted him when he left the Book Depository building and climbed into another man’s car. She followed them into the leafy suburbs—not to the rooming house that he’d moved into about a month ago, after Hank washed his hands of him, but to the home of a Russophile divorcée where his wife had been staying as of late. Marilyn had speculated that their living apart was to protect her from what he planned, keep her isolated and unaware of his preparations. As she sat in her Pontiac listening to the predawn rain hitting the metal roof, she wondered that he was there to sleep with her tonight because he knew he could be captured tomorrow, and never have a woman again. Were they really in love, or merely coconspirators? But in the early morning, when he stepped through the front door, she saw that there was another reason. The wife kissed him good-bye, and handed him a large package.
The same man drove him back into the city. Marilyn followed at a good distance, but arrived in time to watch him walk into the seven-story building from its Houston Street entrance, just before eight o’clock, still clutching the package. She knew she should stay. Wait to see if he left work early, monitor his movements. But she had learned the route of the presidential motorcade published in the Times Herald, the same illustration Oswald had surely memorized by now. She knew the layout of the Book Depository—once he’d gotten the job there, she had gone to the library to study its plans, and so knew its layout, its stairwells and elevators. Of course he might use whatever was in that package at another location, but her intuition was that he had taken the job there with a larger purpose. He must have known that it had big windows, a perfect vantage of the prominent plaza below. By eight the streets were already closed off to traffic, and policemen patrolled the area the president would be passing through. If Oswald tried to put a rifle together out-of-doors, they would find him. No—she felt sure that he would remain in the place where his presence would attract no notice, the place where he was expected to be.
The minutes passed slowly. She had never, in all her years of desperation, actually doubted in tomorrow, but she did now. Sitting in the darkness last night, outside the house where Oswald slept, she had remembered an evening spent with Alexei—this was before she really knew Jack, and the situation had seemed too wild to take seriously—when they’d drunk old-fashioneds in a bar that played a prize fight on the radio. He had been fatherly, and she had been a sucker for it. “Spying is much like boxing,” Alexei had observed, another of his epigrams. “You study your opponent’s feints and hooks until you know him like you know yourself. Often, in the end, one feels strangely closer to their adversary than to their lover.”
She did not believe herself to have intimate knowledge of Oswald. His eyes were opaque to her; they revealed no motivation. But she had observed him carefully enough that she sensed what he was going to do almost as he did it. And she knew he was good, much better than she was, that he was more likely to survive their coming confrontation. She comforted herself that what she did was out of love, and that his motivation must be weak by comparison. She still loved Jack, and that was why she couldn’t resist pulling away from the depository, heading to the airport to catch a glimpse of him. Tomorrow she might be dead, and she felt her resolve would be stronger if she saw him one last time.
Dallas was the perfect setting. The animosity that part of the country held for the eastern president with the civil rights agenda and the peace rhetoric was such that the law might actually let Oswald escape if he succeeded. But he wouldn’t succeed, she told herself. He was better than she was, but he didn’t control the weather, his bad luck—it was raining, and when it rained the president’s motorcade was covered with bulletproof glass, a fact she had learned by studying the details of every report on Jack’s public appearances since she’d gone underground. She knew how they protected him, and had imagined what gaps Oswald might take advantage of. Whatever he had planned for today he wouldn’t be able to see through. But she would be there, she would make sure he was her man; and she would take him out.
As she drove toward the airport she listened to the radio. The local station broadcast speeches being made at the presidential breakfast in Fort Worth, and she half listened to the reporter’s commentary. It was all business talk, war talk, lauding the Texas contribution to the defense industry, flattering the locals’ Texan pride, which she had become well acquainted with over the last year. B-58, he said, and Vietnam. She only half paid attention, allowed herself to drift into the confident tone of his voice. “Military procurement in this state totals nearly one and a quarter bil
lion dollars, fifth highest in the Union …,” he was saying in that rousing orator’s voice. “There are more military personnel on active duty in this state than in any in the nation save one—” He broke off, and for a fleeting moment she heard a note of the urbane, ironical man she’d known, as he muttered, “And it’s not Massachusetts,” under his breath, and laughed at his own joke like a little boy while the crowd broke into applause.
She squeezed her eyes and gripped the wheel. It was enough, most of the time, to know that she was making right what she had done wrong, that she was living to keep Jack safe now. But when she heard him laugh, and remembered what it was to lie between sheets with him, far away from the world’s troubles, she felt a seam rip open in her chest, and it took all her concentration to keep the car straight. So much depended on it; she had sacrificed too much already to succumb to emotion now.
Anyway, she was not the only one who loved him. When she arrived, several hundred people had already gathered on the tarmac just to see their leader with their own eyes, and maybe to touch his hand. The whole scene was perfect, like something in the movies. The airport was called Love Field, and the gray clouds drifted off, making room for blue sky, as the white jet plane descended through the atmosphere. Golden light filtered over everyone and everything. Mrs. Kennedy appeared first, in pink, and was handed a large bouquet of roses, and the president came after her, his thick, neatly trimmed bronze hair one shade darker than his skin. The spectators cheered, and her heart cracked over the white flash of his smile. Oh, how she wanted him. She had to glance away and think what a drab story it would have been without the parts where they’d been alone together, talking idly over a drink in some forgotten place. He jogged quickly down the steps and disappeared into the waiting crowd.