Mile 81 (9 page)

Vada called to the men and they stopped almost in front of the restaurant. Robert grinned and took Marina’s carry-bag. Lee’s expression was . . . amused? Knowing? Maybe both. The tiniest suggestion of a smile dimpled the corners of his mouth. His nondescript hair was neatly combed. He was, in fact, the perfect A. J. Squared Away in his pressed white shirt, khakis, and shined shoes. He didn’t look like a man who had just completed a journey halfway around the world; there wasn’t a wrinkle on him and not a trace of beard-shadow on his cheeks. He was just twenty-two years old, and looked younger—like one of the teenagers in my last American Lit class.

So did Marina, who wouldn’t be old enough to buy a legal drink for another month. She was exhausted, bewildered, and staring at everything. She was also beautiful, with clouds of dark hair and upturned, somehow rueful blue eyes.

June’s arms and legs were swaddled in cloth diapers. Even her neck was wrapped in something, and although she wasn’t crying, her face was red and sweaty. Lee took the baby. Marina smiled her gratitude, and when her lips parted, I saw that one of her teeth was missing. The others were discolored, one of them almost black. The contrast with her creamy skin and gorgeous eyes was jarring.

Oswald leaned close to her and said something that wiped the smile off her face. She looked up at him warily. He said something else, poking her shoulder with one finger as he did so. I remembered Al’s story, and wondered if Oswald was saying the same thing to his wife now:
pokhoda, cyka
—walk, bitch.

But no. it was the swaddling that had upset him. He tore it away—first from the arms, then the legs—and flung the diapers at Marina, who caught them clumsily. Then she looked around to see if they were being watched.

Vada came back and touched Lee’s arm. He paid no attention to her, just unwrapped the makeshift cotton scarf from around baby June’s neck and flung
that
at Marina. it fell to the terminal floor. She bent and picked it up without speaking.

Robert joined them and gave his brother a friendly punch on the shoulder. The terminal had almost entirely cleared out now—the last of the deplaning passengers had passed the Oswald family— and I heard what he said clearly. “Give her a break, she just got here. She doesn’t even know where here is yet.”

“Look at this kid,” Lee said, and raised June for inspection. At that, she finally began to cry. “She’s got her wrapped up like a damn Egyptian mummy. Because that’s the way they do it back home. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Staryj baba!
Old woman.” He turned back to Marina with the bawling baby in his arms. She looked at him fearfully.
“Staryj baba!”

She tried to smile, the way people do when they know the joke is on them, but not why. I thought fleetingly of Lennie, in
Of Mice and Men.
Then a grin, cocky and a little sideways, lit Oswald’s face. it made him almost handsome. He kissed his wife gently, first on one cheek, then the other.

“USA!” he said, and kissed her again. “USA, Rina! Land of the free and home of the turds!”

Her smile became radiant. He began to speak to her in Russian, handing back the baby as he did so. He put his arm around her waist as she soothed June. She was still smiling as they left my field of vision, and shifted the baby to her shoulder so she could take his hand.

I went home—if I could call Mercedes Street home—and tried to take a nap. I couldn’t get under, so I lay there with my hands behind my head, listening to the uneasy street noises and speaking with Al Templeton. This was a thing I found myself doing quite often, now that I was on my own. For a dead man, he always had a lot to say.

“I was stupid to come Fort Worth,” I told him. “If I try to hook up that bug to the tape recorder, someone’s apt to see me. Oswald himself might see me, and that would change everything. He’s already paranoid, you said so in your notes. He knew the KGB and MVD were watching him in Minsk, and he’s going to be afraid that the FBI and the CIA are watching him here. And the FBI actually
will
be, at least some of the time.”

“Yes, you’ll have to be careful,” Al agreed. “It won’t be easy, but I trust you, buddy. it’s why I called you in the first place.”

“I don’t even want to get near him. Just seeing him in the airport gave me a class-A case of the willies.”

“I know you don’t, but you’ll have to. As someone who spent damn near his whole life cooking meals, I can tell you that no omelet was ever made without breaking eggs. And it would be a mistake to overestimate this guy. He’s no super-criminal. Also, he’s going to be distracted, mostly by his batshit mother. How good is he going to be at anything for awhile except shouting at his wife and knocking her around when he gets too pissed off for shouting to be enough?”

“I think he cares for her, Al. At least a little, and maybe a lot. in spite of the shouting.”

“Yeah, and it’s guys like him who are most likely to fuck up their women. Look at Frank Dunning. You just take care of your business, buddy.”

“And what am I going to get if I do manage to hook up that bug? Tape recordings of arguments? Arguments in
Russian? That’ll
be a big help.”

“You don’t need to decode the man’s family life. it’s George de Mohrenschildt you need to find out about. You have to make sure de Mohrenschildt isn’t involved in the attempt on General Walker. Once you accomplish that, the window of uncertainty closes. And look on the bright side. if Oswald catches you spying on him, his future actions might change in a
good
way. He might not try for Kennedy after all.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“No. Actually I don’t.”

“Neither do I. The past is obdurate. it doesn’t want to be changed.”

He said, “Buddy, now you’re cooking . . .”

“With gas,” I heard myself muttering. “Now I’m cooking with gas.”

I opened my eyes. I had fallen asleep after all. Late light was coming in through the drawn curtains. Somewhere not far away, on Davenport Street in Fort Worth, the Oswald brothers and their wives would be sitting down to dinner—Lee’s first meal back on his old stomping grounds.

Outside my own little bit of Fort Worth, I could hear a skip-rope chant. it sounded very familiar. I got up, went through my dim living room (furnished with two thrift-shop easy chairs but nothing else), and twitched back one of the drapes an inch or so. Those drapes had been my very first installation. I wanted to see; I didn’t want to be seen.

2703 was still deserted, with the FOR RENT sign double-tacked to the railing of the rickety porch, but the lawn wasn’t deserted. There, two girls were twirling a jump rope while a third stutter-stepped in and out. Of course they weren’t the girls I’d seen on Kossuth Street in Derry—these three, dressed in patched and faded jeans instead of crisp new shorts, looked runty and underfed—but the chant was the same, only now with Texas accents.

“Charlie Chaplin went to
France!
Just to watch the ladies
dance!
Salute to the
Cap’un!
Salute to the
Queen!
My old man drives a sub-ma-rine!”

The skip-rope girl caught her foot and went tumbling into the crabgrass that served as 2703’s front lawn. The other girls piled on top of her and all three of them rolled in the dirt. Then they got to their feet and went pelting away.

I watched them go, thinking
I saw them but they didn’t see me. That’s something. That’s a start. But Al, where’s my finish?

De Mohrenschildt was the key to the whole deal, the only thing keeping me from killing Oswald as soon as he moved in across the street. George de Mohrenschildt, a petroleum geologist who speculated in oil leases. A man who lived the playboy lifestyle, mostly thanks to his wife’s money. Like Marina, he was a Russian exile, but unlike her, from a noble family—he was, in fact,
Baron
de Mohrenschildt. The man who was going to become Lee Oswald’s only friend during the few months of life Oswald had left. The man who was going to suggest to Oswald that the world would be much better off without a certain racist right-wing ex-General. if de Mohrenschildt turned out to be part of Oswald’s attempt to kill Edwin Walker, my situation would be vastly complicated; all the nutty conspiracy theories would then be in play. Al, however, believed all the Russian geologist had done (or
would
do; as i’ve said, living in the past is confusing) was egg on a man who was already obsessed with fame and mentally unstable.

Al had written in his notes:
If Oswald was on his own on the night of April 10
^th
, 1963, chances that there was another gunman involved in the Kennedy assassination seven months later drop to almost zero.

Below this, in capital letters, he had added his final verdict:
GOOD ENOUGH TO TAKE THE SON OF A BITCH OUT.