The Blonde (48 page)
“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.
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 billion 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.
The jubilation of the throng told her where Jack was, as did the slow progress of his wife’s pink pillbox hat. Marilyn kept glancing away toward the motorcade vehicles lined up ahead. What she saw made her body cold. There were no more rain clouds, not as far as the eye could see, and a team of men in dark suits was removing the clear, bulletproof bubble from atop the shiny black Lincoln that Jack would ride in. She turned and walked fast toward her own car. Her limbs were rigid with urgency now, and she was angry at herself for having indulged in sentimentality on this of all mornings.
She checked the pistol in her glove compartment for the tenth time that day, made sure it was loaded. Once she started up the engine, steered her car in the direction of Lemmon Avenue, she permitted herself four choking
sobs. It wasn’t pretty crying, and she didn’t hold back. She had to get it out and make herself hard inside, and ready.
A long time ago, when she still believed that writers could be her friends, she had sat drinking champagne with a young reporter who had told her, offhandedly at the beginning of the interview, that she wouldn’t have to worry about him running late because he had a date at eight. She’d held his attention long past midnight, saying very confessional things that kept him scribbling and bright-eyed. “I guess I always knew I belonged to America, and to the world. Not because I’m especially beautiful, or because I have any real talent, but because I’ve never belonged to anybody in my life,” she had told him, not knowing why, just that it sounded interesting and would make him stay. By the time she saw the quote in a magazine she had forgotten the whole episode, and for years she’d wondered what had possessed her to say that. But now, on a Friday afternoon in Texas, she finally understood what those words meant.
Dallas, November 1963
HE would not have noticed her except that the sun came out just when the jet landed, and it flashed in her mirrored pilot’s sunglasses catching his attention. She looked like any other Dallas housewife, her hair mousy brown and held back with a headband, her boxy jacket and black slacks unremarkable. But he happened to be looking at her at the same moment that the first lady appeared in the door of the airplane, wearing a suit of pink, nubby wool with black trim. Every other woman in the crowd gasped and jockeyed for a better view of her outfit. This woman stood away from the others, and when she saw Mrs. Kennedy she averted her gaze.
Walls had not been immediately fond of Mrs. Kennedy, either. She could be socially peculiar, almost shy, and while he allowed that a certain kind of man should be expected to stray from his marriage to some degree, he had, during the years he shadowed Marilyn Monroe, developed a distaste for the willful blindness Mrs. Kennedy had shown in the face of her husband’s transgressions. This distaste was heightened last fall, when he had been assigned to the president’s Secret Service detail. “You could have any job you wanted,” the attorney general chuckled, when Walls came to collect on the promised favor. “And the biggest post you could think of was getting in line to take a bullet for my brother. Well, I guess we’ve done our job making it all look pretty glamorous.” But Walls didn’t see the glamour—the mood in the White House, when he started protecting its occupants, was gloomier than he’d imagined from the pretty pictures that ran in
Life
. The president was reckless in those days, like a man who has had a premonition of the end, and
Walls saw that behavior mimicked by his fellow agents. They picked up their boss’s scraps, escorted the party girls to bars when their shifts were done, and often drank straight through to the beginning of the next workday. Every one of those girls seemed to Walls a potential threat, and he couldn’t understand how the other Secret Service men could be so nonchalant about them. He was mocked for his seriousness, of course—“I guess you think Linda here is a Soviet assassin?” they’d laugh, tightening their grip on Linda’s waist.