The Third Bullet

Оглавление

We finished without much chatter, and I paid, and out we went to the car. It was dark now, and twenty minutes had passed since we had spoken. His face was knit tight, I guessed partly in fear of saying something stupid, partly in confusion. He could not meet my eyes.

When the car doors were closed and I’d pulled out into traffic, I finally said, “Alek, you know how it works, don’t you?”

“Sir?” he said in English.

“That is, the organization I represent.”

“I suppose so. You find people who-”

“No, no, not the idealized, the propagandized, version. I mean the reality. That reality is that it’s a big organization and it has many subunits, many departments, many cells, all of them driven by ego, fear, ignorance, full of average men attempting to curry favor with supervisors, attempting to be supervisors, out of nothing more than petty ambition. Some work at cross-purposes to others, some work at purposes that have no relationship whatsoever to the purposes others work to accomplish, and the communication between them is at all times inefficient, even weak.”

“Yes sir,” he said.

“Kostikov and Yatskov, for example, they’re in a division that is charged with servicing and monitoring our embassies abroad. They watch for spies, they try to recruit spies, they also have responsibilities for vetting defectors, dealing with walk-ins, this and that. Their hope is to get through thirty-five years without making a bad mistake or offending a superior; if they accomplish that, they get a medal, a nice but hardly remunerative stipend, and possibly a small dacha outside Moscow in one of the less fashionable districts. If so, they can consider themselves heroes and successes, you see?”

“I do.”

“To them, you are simply a problem they do not care to deal with. Imagination is not their strong suit. Career-wise for them-and there is no other concern-it’s best you go away fast and forever and not upset or reroute the Kostikov Express to a dacha.”

“Yes sir.”

“But I’m in a different department. When news reaches me of the crazy American who says he took a shot at General Walker, I’m not annoyed, I’m fascinated. I have to learn more. My department has use for people like the crazy American; we’re charged with actually accomplishing something, not merely maintaining a security perimeter.”

Alek nodded.

“We occasionally do what’s called ‘wet work.’ Can you guess the meaning of ‘wet’?”

“Underwater,” the idiot said.

I sighed. “Try again, Alek.”

“Oh. Blood. You kill people.”

“Rarely. Sometimes. It’s always a tricky decision. It’s not like there’s a double-oh license or anything and we can go about blasting people with burp guns. But yes, sometimes, when necessary, say a defector, a murderer of one of our people, a particularly loathsome political opponent, then we may kill people.”

We reached his neighborhood. I pulled up a few doors down from his roominghouse, because I had no way of knowing if people there knew him and might remember him getting out of a car driven by a stranger.

“Alek,” I said, “I have a present for you. It’s in the glove compartment. Please reach in and get it.”

He opened the glove box and took out a white box of Western Cartridge co. 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition. He held it in his hand, jostled it, felt its considerable weight. His eyes lit up.

“Bullets,” he said. “For my gun.”

“You know Kostikov and Yatskov thought you were making up your story. So did everyone in the apparatus. Except me. I thought: Perhaps this man, who lies about so much and has not finished one thing in his life, nor impressed one person, perhaps he is telling the truth about the shooting. That’s why I had to know you, Alek, I had to look into you. That’s why the travel, the investigation, all the interviews. But not till now, this second, have I confirmed for myself that yes, you are the rare man who believes in the cause so much that he will do the wet work for it. It’s easy to hand out flyers and go to meetings with homos and Negroes and federal agents. It’s easy to defect if you get to marry the sexiest Russian babe and begin fucking her right away. It’s easy to tell people that you’re a red, that you believe in the workingman, and that changes must be made, because you like the attention it gets and the ruckus it causes. The campuses and beatnik cafes are full of such worthless scum. But rare, truly rare, is the man for whom the revolution is worth dying for and worth killing for. He would be the man of action, an ideal. I believe you are such. Now get out, go home, go to bed, and prepare for another day of glory boxing books on the sixth floor. I will contact you again after these matters settle in that tiny little rathole you call a mind.”

“But I-”

“GO!” I commanded, and out he scooted.

CHAPTER 15

A week passed before Swagger dropped in on Richard again, this time intercepting him at a pharmacy where he was picking up prescriptions. “Damn!” said Richard, jumping visibly when his old pal Jack Brophy showed up from nowhere. “You are tricky,” he declared.

“I’m paranoid as hell,” Swagger said. “I’ve done some work and have made some progress. Don’t want any of those other boys knocking me off.”

“You might be better off to relax and let me introduce you to some people who might be able to help you.”

“Too shaky for that, Richard. You mean well, but I’ve got spiders in my mind telling me every-goddamned-body is spying on me.”

“I got it, I got it. Well, how about this-I think I could help you, no one else involved.”

“How’s that?”

Richard laid out his plan. He knew someone in the Dallas Association of Nursing Homes, which put out a weekly bulletin. His idea was to run an ad requesting that anyone who had worked in the Dal-Tex Building in ’63 and wanted to share memories with a researcher contact Richard. Then Richard, with Jack along, would interview. That way they could at least get a sense of how likely it was that a brazen penetration like the one Jack envisioned had happened.

Swagger thanked him, thought it over, watched him surreptitiously for a number of days, then okayed the idea.

The next week they visited three homes and talked to three old gadflies, two of whom said it was possible, one who said it wasn’t.

“The building was particularly deserted that day,” Mrs. Kolodny recalled. “We all rushed down at noon to get good spots to see the president. And afterward, who wanted to go back to work? I didn’t go back to work until Monday. It was so sad.”

Mr. O’Farrell disagreed, primarily because, it turned out, he was an amateur assassinologist.

“If you look, you’ll see that the Houston Street side of the building had a fire escape. And there was a bunch of people sitting there watching the president. Now, if someone fired a rifle shot, they’d be the closest, they’d be the ones who’d hear it and testify that a shot came from just forty or fifty feet above them. Yet there’s no testimony to that effect, goddammit. So how could it be?”

Swagger said, “Possibly they used a silencer.”

“Silencer, shmilencer,” said the old guy. “Hollywood crap! That’s what you get from TV and the goddamn movies! No silencer really silences. You can’t make a sound that loud and sharp go away. It might be lowered somewhat, but if he was shooting out the window, they’d feel the shock wave and they’d hear something damn suspicious. The only thing any of those folks heard was what everyone else heard, which was three loud cracks from the rifle of no one other than Mr. Lee Harvey Oswald.”

Swagger knew this not to be the case absolutely, as the sound itself could be modulated by a variety of techniques, primarily the efficacy of the suppressor and its location in an otherwise sealed room. A savvy shooter would place himself well back from the narrowly opened window, containing much of the sound and much of the shock wave. Unless the people beneath were listening for it and had experience with the vibratory patterns of suppressed weapons, it was unlikely that any lower-floor fire-escape sitters noticed a thing, what with so much else going on simultaneously.

Swagger ambushed Richard at the Palm over his weekly steak and martini.

“Mind if I join you?” Swagger said, appearing from nowhere just as Richard had finished his meat and put in an order for coffee and Key lime pie.

“Man,” said Richard, “you were in the spy business. I know you were. You move too silently, you follow too well.”

“Ain’t true a bit,” said Swagger. “I picked up my skills by being worried about Communist guerrillas in the mountains of Ecuador. Had a run-in with the same mob, different race, in Malaysia. Those were men who wanted us exploiters of the wonderful peasants dead. I developed a sixth sense for danger, and I learned how to disappear in plain sight. I was once three feet away from two guerrillas with AK-47s and went so still, they looked right past me, and here I am to tell the tale.”

“You could have fooled me.”

“Anyway, I wanted to tell you about something I discovered on the Net that’s interesting to me. A lot of it is shit, but this gal seems to know a thing or two.”

Swagger went on for a few minutes about the discovery. Some researcher had noted that when the FBI expert Robert Frazier had talked about the relative zero of the Hollywood scope on the Oswald rifle, it was clear that Frazier, a distinguished high-power marksman, was unfamiliar with scopes and unaware that if a scope is miszeroed, it will shoot groups in the same spot on the target relative to its miscalculated aiming point, altered only by the geometric progression of the range. If it’s an inch low and an inch to the right at fifty yards, it will be two inches low and two inches to the right at a hundred yards, and three inches low and three inches to the right at 150 yards, out until the distance where gravity and falling velocity have a larger influence than the scope misadjustment.