Moscow
It was a perfect twilight in utopia as couples strolled, children frolicked, lovers squeezed, dogs yipped, and intellectuals theorized in the park off Ukrainski Boulevard. They glided with the radiant happiness of those who were happy to be who they were where they were when they were. “Life, it’s good” seemed to be the prevailing ethos. Lights winked in the soft darkness, more show than anything else, for in this urban playing field, there was no crime, or very little, nearly full employment, and low taxes. The dark for once concealed the construction frenzy of backhoes, bulldozers, and cranes as daytime Moscow reconstructed itself for about the thirtieth time in its long and convoluted history, this time giving capitalism a good shot even as the citizens ebbed and flowed through and around all the projects, dashing nimbly to avoid being crushed, either by the errant construction machine or that jet-black gleaming Ferrari whistling down the cobblestones at ninety per. Meanwhile, observing without comment, stone or steel men in greatcoats with those clamshell World War II helmets and the old red tommy guns, with their signature ventilated barrels and gangster-style seventy-one-round drums, stood fifteen feet tall every block or two, as if unsure whether this was what all their fighting and dying had protected and made possible.
Flanked by the nine-story banks of the Kutuzovsky 7 apartment complex and nestled under trees, the restaurant Khachapuri was operating at full meat ahead. It was a place that specialized in animal parts on sticks. They arrived glistening yet crisp, with the fat broiled out of them by raw flame, chunks of pure protein whose odor filled the air and made one think of Cossack camps along the Don after a good day massacring Tsarist infantry in about 1652. The restaurant itself had a Cossack quality, as it was an open-air tent affiliated with the kitchen of a bar in the building across the sidewalk, and a gathering place for those of the new generation seeking sustenance, vodka, and comradeship, at which it excelled in providing.
Swagger, of course, couldn’t try the vodka, knowing he’d end up in Siberia with a new Uzbek wife and nine children, plus some really cool tattoos; he wasn’t hungry, though the meat smells touched some primal thing in him; and the comradeship he sought was of a particular kind.
He leaned alone at the bar, drinking koka, as Coca-Cola was called here in the capital city, and watching the proceedings with a wary eye, not quite willing to buy in to it. Something held him back, history perhaps, his own as well as his country’s and his culture’s. It was hard to believe he’d been nurtured to hate all these people and they’d turned out to be so beautiful, energetic, and happy. Gee, folks, he thought, glad we didn’t blow you to nuclear shreds in about 1977; that would have been a big mistake.
It was his second day in Moscow. The first he’d spent wandering from his room at the Metropol onto Red Square and around the area and being stunned for the first time by the sheer joy of the city, a dusty, ramshackle, still-makeshift-after-865-years place. The ranks of Stalinist apartment buildings, with their dour exteriors and their ancient memories of tears and slaughter, all had been invaded by retail at the ground level and boasted gaudy signals of various frivolous goods, every luxury car and perfume and fashion designer known to man. In at least seven points on the horizon, brand-new Dallases of steel and chrome pierced the sky, lording over the five-story flatness of the now-dead Communist reality at their feet. It was a true gold-rush city, even if over a millennium old and the site of a massacre hall of fame. He couldn’t get over how the place throbbed.
He saw her then. She had the smart, tough look of a journalist, nothing to her of show or pretense, just a kind of irony playing through her eyes under her American hairstyle. She wore pants and a black T-shirt, as fitted the warm weather, and looked comfortable among the natives.
“Ms. Reilly? I’m Swagger.”
“Oh,” she said, “the great Swagger. Nice to meet a hero.” Handshakes, tight smiles, a little awkwardness.
“I’m just a beat-up goat trying to stay on the wagon around all this potato juice,” he said.
“The Russians do squish a nice potato. Here, I’ll get us seated.”
He followed her to the maitre d’s station, and the maitre d’ in turn led them through the tent, past family and office parties of swilling laughers and carnivores, to a smallish table at the margins of the place, which looked out on the recreations of the vast parkland, crosscut with walkers on both two and four legs and other sorts of relaxed civilians.
“You weren’t followed?” he asked.
“This is exciting,” she said. “No one’s ever asked me that before. No, I don’t think so. The Russians don’t follow American reporters anymore. They’re much more interested in making money.”
“So I’ve heard. Anything’s for sale in Moscow.”
“Anything,” she said.
“What about rent?” he said. “See, I want to rent the Lubyanka for a night.”
She laughed. “Good luck with that. You must know oligarchs.”
“Since I don’t know what an oligarch is, I don’t know if I know any. What are they, by the way? I saw that word in the English-language paper.”
“Rich guys. Tycoons, billionaires, conspicuous consumers. Mostly ex-KGB goons. They were buddies with Yeltsin in ’93, and when he dismantled the state economic apparatus, they butted their way to the head of the line and got all the pie. In short order, they became mega-rich. Pie, pie, pie, all day long. Now they drive around in gold-plated limos, marry flight attendants, buy American sports teams, try to get on Page 6, and generally run the place. Abramovich, Krulov, Alekperov, Vekselberg, Ixovich. One of ’em is married to Yeltsin’s daughter, as a matter of fact. Will and I did a story on them. Petonin, Tarkio, a couple more I can’t think of.”
“The names would be lost on me anyhow. But it sounds typical. That’s how headquarters towns always work. Anyhow, nice of you to meet me.”
“How couldn’t I? I did some checking, and if half the rumors are true, it’s like meeting John Wayne and Ted Williams and Audie Murphy in one man. Plus, your daughter says you’re a teddy bear.”
It was through his daughter, Nikki, a TV news reporter in Washington, that Swagger had effected a meet-up with Kathy Reilly, the Washington Post’s correspondent in Moscow.
The waitress came, and the reporter consulted the menu, which essentially consisted of meat with more meat, some other kinds of meat, some usual meat, some unusual meat, and, of course, meat. Kathy Reilly ordered some meat.
“So you’re working for the FBI, is that right?” she said.
“More or less. That’s what Nikki believes, that’s what the Russians believe. But they also believe my name is Jerry Homan and that I’m a special agent. I have all the credentials and diplomatic okays to back it up. I did meet with the State Department-FBI liaison guy at our embassy, and he thinks I’m who I say I am.”
“Wow. Undercover stuff. This is turning into something glamorous. What’s it all about?”
“Short version, I was asked to look into the death of a man in Baltimore by hit-and-run. He’d just returned from Dallas, where he’d been asking pointed questions. I went to Dallas and asked the same pointed questions. Sure enough, someone tried to kill me, hit-and-run.”
“It didn’t work out for him, I take it.”
“Not exactly. Fortunately, I’d contacted an FBI agent in Dallas, a fine man with whom I’ve worked before, and he agreed to run me as a contract undercover even though I was the one who brought it to him. It was a thin fiction, but it held up. Then it turned out that the fellow who tried to kill me was what you might call a trophy. Russian mafioso, associated with something called the Iz-may-lov-skay-a gang here.”
“Okay, now I’m impressed.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Very bad.”
“This character was wanted by Interpol all over Europe, he was wanted by the Moscow police, and he had relocated to a Coney Island outpost of the Iz-may-what’s-it empire and was doing jobs for them and freelancing. Technically, I’m here to try to find out from this end who he was working for. Not which family, but who contracted with that family either here or in New York to hire him and for what reason. I’ve got an appointment with a top Russian gang cop in a few days to try to get some dope. We may talk to some snitches and so forth.”
“You don’t want to get too close to the Izmaylovskaya boys, take it from me,” she said.
“I’m just going to ask some polite questions and go on my way. No need to mix it up with the locals.”
“Sound policy. I will tell you, and you didn’t hear it from me, that the oligarch Krulov is said to be most intimately associated with the Izmaylovskayas. His enemies had a way of disappearing or getting hit by vagrant untraceable cars.”
“Krulov,” said Swagger, marking it down internally.
The dinner arrived. It appeared to be meat. There were also suspicious vegetables, which Swagger avoided, and some soups, equally menacing. He did enjoy the animal he ate, whatever species it might have been, however it died. “It’s very good,” he said.
“She said you needed a favor. It happens that this is a perfect time. My husband is in Siberia-no, I didn’t send him, he’s covering an oil conference-and I’m sort of at loose ends, with only thumbsuckers due. So I can take you around, introduce you to people, if you want.”
“I’m not sure you should be seen with me. These people are serious. That’s why I asked to meet after dark, close to home, at a loud public place.”
“Do you think-”
“I just don’t know. I do know if you look into Russian mafia, you can get dead all of a sudden. I might have some skills that would help me get out of a tight, dangerous situation, but unless you’ve had a lot of SEAL training, I doubt that you do.”
“Not unless it’s slipped my mind.”
“Nikki says you speak Russian well but that you read it very well.”
“I can get by on the streets. I read it like a native.”
“I’m trying to get hold of some records. Copies won’t work; I have to see the actual files and try to determine to what, if any, degree they’ve been tampered with. I’m hoping you’ll read them for me. Or at least scan them. I hope to arrange it discreetly, so you’ll be in no danger of exposure. Is that a possibility?”
“I suppose it is. What are you looking for?”
“The Russian James Bond,” he said. “Circa 1963. I can feel him. I can recognize his talent, his imagination, his will, his decisiveness, his creativity. He was their top agent, and in 1963, it’s possible he pulled off the operation of the century. I’ve come to Moscow for him.”
It was another box of a building, this one much bigger. No bricks, some sort of yellow stucco, maybe ten stories tall, with all the early twentieth- or late nineteenth-century gewgaws, like pillars and arches and stone window frames, its flat roof festooned with radio communications antennas. And it was gigantic, about a block wide, a huge chunk of real estate eating up land on an empty Moscow circle a mile from Red Square.
“That’s it, huh?” Swagger asked.
“In the flesh. Or in yellow stucco. Source of evil, source of cunning, source of murder, violence, conspiracy, treachery, torture. It’s a very bad place. You did not want to make people in that building angry with you.”
“I get it.”
“Nothing military in there,” said Mikhail Stronski. “It’s all secret-agent spy shit, games in games in games, always fucking people up.”
It was the Lubyanka: former home of the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, MGB, NKVD, and KGB, and now FSB. During the purges, many were hauled here from Swagger’s polished luxury hotel, the Metropole, which in the thirties housed the wreckers and oppositionists of Comintern, and in Lubyanka’s cellars, they were shot behind the ear. No one knew what became of the bodies. Maybe they were still there.
“It’s hard to hate a building,” said Swagger.
“This one, no problem.”
Stronksi was a heavyset man with a glowering face that seemed like a map of Eastern-bloc misfortune. He had wintry gray eyes under wintry gray hair and heavy bones, and looked as if he could crush a diamond between his fingers, or at least fracture it a little bit. He had a bear’s body, yet at fifty-seven he moved with surprising grace. He had been in the same business as Swagger, but his outfit was called Spetsnaz, and he practiced the trade in Afghanistan-fifty-six kills.
An American gun writer who’d come to Russia to do a feature on the new Russian sniper rifle, the 12.7 mm KSVK, had found him and interviewed him; Swagger saw the story, contacted the gun writer, got the e-mail address and a recommendation, and reached out across the ocean to another high-grass crawler, another brother of the one-shot kill, another infiltrator and exfiltrator who knew too much about certain things but would never speak of them. Stronski had heard of Swagger-it was a small world, after all-so the two men were a natural fit, having killed for a king whom they later doubted, having lost too many good friends for a cause that now seemed to mean nothing in the world, yet sought for certain recondite skills that never go out of fashion.
“This woman, she’s okay?” Stronski asked.
“She’s not of our world, which I like. No games to her. I haven’t told her everything; that’s tonight. But she reads your language as well as a native-”
“I love her already.”
“-and she’s super-smart and tough. It’ll be fine if I can get her to feel secure. Like all Americans, she’ll fear the building.”
The two sat in an elegant restaurant, called Spy for the irony (irony was as new to Moscow as capitalism), that fronted Dzerzhinsky Square and lurked three hundred yards across the circle from the Lubyanka. They were on the balcony of the third floor, eating blintzes and caviar and cold slices of salmon, Stronski throwing down vodka, Swagger trying to keep up with old-fashioned water.
“We fear that building too. A good young fellow named Tibolotsky, good operator, brave as hell, spotted for me in the mountains, he voiced doubts about the war. He was fighting it; his right, no? Someone informs KGB, and young fellow is disappeared. Wrong for him to fight so hard and end up in cell or worse. That is why I hate bastards so goddamn much.”
“The politicals were always assholes,” Bob said. “I lost a spotter, and politicals were involved. Any apparatus in the world, the politicals are assholes.”
“It’s true,” said Stronski.
“You’ve made the arrangements?”
“I have. You have the cash?”
“Smuggled in, in my shoe. You trust this fellow?”
“I do. Not because he’s brave but because in Moscow, corruption is like any commodity. He has to deliver or it gets out, and new business goes to the competition. So the market guarantees this lieutenant-colonel will shoot straight and deliver, not his own honesty, of which, of course, he has none.”
“If Stronski says yes, I say yes. I trust Stronski.”
“I am as crooked as all of them. I extend certain courtesies to Brother Sniper, that’s all.”
“Fair enough.”
“Now put your hand under table and receive.”
“Receive what?”
“You will see.”
Swagger received. It felt like a Glock 19, loaded, from the weight, three- or four-inch barrel, no 1911 but nevertheless substantial in feel and lethal in purpose. The slide was steel, though ceramically finished for dullness and durability, the frame some sort of super-polymer. He held it out of sight under the table and looked down and saw that it was a near-Glock, dark and blunt, no safety, nothing to catch or pull on fast removal. It was a generation more streamlined than Glock’s stolid Teutonic brick, and its ergonomics were better; it slid into, rather than fought, his hand. He turned it and saw the marking in Cyrillic, and under that in English on the slide, IxGroup, 9 MM. He slid it into his belt, behind the point of his hip, under the coat.
“I have enemies. Maybe they get on to you from me. Moscow is full of bad people. You can never tell. That gun, freshly stolen from factory, no serial number. If you get in trouble, use and ditch. It can’t be traced.”
“It’s not a Glock?”
“GSh-18, better than Glock. Eighteen in magazine, double action, from the Instrument Design Bureau KPB, in Tula. Manufactured by IxGroup, meaning rich guy named Ixovich, one of our new big oligarchs.”
“Just learned the word.”
They made their plans.
You couldn’t help but love the Metropole, the famous old hotel where Swagger had booked himself. Rich in history, it was also-at least in the new Moscow-rich in appointments, possibly restored to something like prerevolutionary glory. Everywhere glitter, glass, shiny brass, marble, full of beautiful people. Even the whores sitting in the bar were high-class.
Yet Swagger tried to see it as it had been in 1959, when it housed, for a few troubling weeks, the melancholy Lee Harvey Oswald, as the Russians tried to figure out what to do with him. In those days, before the fall of the reds and the infusion of Finnish capital, the hotel must have been a dump, smelling of cabbage, vodka, and sewage, dour and dank and grim. It fit the self-exiled American perfectly, a man with a dismal past and not much future, who’d as yet impressed nobody in his short life.
When he got to his room, Swagger found that Oswald wouldn’t go away. The little hangdog mutt, radiating anger and self-pity, tracked him at every stop in the classy room that, in dumpier days, could have housed the would-be defector.
The whole thing turned on him, didn’t it? You couldn’t ask why. There was no point in asking why. The only question had to be how.
Don’t think of him as a man, Swagger instructed himself. Think of him as an agent, a servo-mechanism, some anonymous hinge in history that did what he did, and you have to figure out how he did it. It wasn’t as simple as waking up one day and deciding to kill the president. There were too many factors involved and too many questions to answer.
Swagger wished he had vodka. He wished he had a cigarette. Many a man had gotten through a bad night in the Metropole on vodka and cigarettes. Maybe Oswald himself, as the bosses figured out his immediate fate.
Little fucker. Who would have guessed?
Don’t think about that, Swagger ordered himself again. Think only of the how.
Don’t waste your time on his feckless, difficult personality, his pitiful upbringing, his learning problems, his attitude problems, his bullying problems, his endless string of small-time failures, his temperament, his vanity and narcissism, as all are on record. Anyone can look up Lee Harvey Oswald and conclude that he was exactly the type of lazy loser who might abandon the ongoing parade of nothingness that would be his life in exchange for eternal notoriety.
Instead, let’s stick to the how of the act. Not did he do it, but could he do it?
Swagger tried to make contact with him through the only vessel that connected them, the one he loved and Oswald hated: the United States Marine Corps. After all, Oswald was a trained rifleman, as his scores attested, particularly in the sitting position, similar to the position he fired from in the Book Depository. Similar but not exact: different stresses, different angles, different muscles involved, and while some skills are transferable, position to position, some are not. His training-which, after all, had been five full years previous-was entirely restricted to the iron-sighted M-1 Garand rifle. Swagger remembered his own M-1, even to the serial number, 5673326, built by Harrington amp; Richardson. Oswald’s had to be about the same: a nine-and-a-half-pound semi-auto with well-calibrated aperture sights, heavy recoil, and no necessary manipulation between shots. Both men had to master the fundamentals, as universally, the Marine Corps does a good job of building them in.
Swagger presumed Oswald had mastered the most basic of basics: solid position, bone-on-bone support, sling management, focus on sights, trigger s-q-u-e-e-z-e, breath control. Would that be enough? For one shot, possibly. But he missed his first, not his last, shot. Baffling. You would think it the opposite. Because after the first shot, it’s all new again.
He’s got to manipulate the bolt, which takes him out of position, he’s got to refind the position on the fly, he’s got to reassert his concentration, his breath control, his trigger squeeze. Rather than fighting him, the Carcano with its cheap-jack Japanese sights is overresponsive to his commands, because it is so much lighter than the Garand, at under six pounds. Then he has to reacquire the target through the lens of the scope. And since Garands aren’t scoped, he’s used to seeing the target in his peripheral vision as he brings the recoiling rifle back toward it on the shooting range. With the Carcano, after the first shot, he is looking at blur, so he has to do two things quickly. First of all, he has to refind the proper eye position so he’s able to see through it clearly, and then he has to reacquire the target, which, being transported by vehicle at unknown speed, is in a different place. Still, Swagger had to admit, much of this is instinctive, and a relatively competent Marine-trained shooter such as Oswald, especially with a little practice time, ought to be able to bring it off. It was not likely he made the shot, but it was at least possible. You couldn’t deny that reality.
Still, the scope presented a whole host of problems. For example, the FBI gun expert Robert Frazier testified that when the rifle and scope arrived in FBI HQ on Tuesday, November 27, 1963, the plate holding the scope to the rifle was extremely loose. Moreover, it was secured to the receiver by only two screws, although the metal of both the scope and the rifle receiver had been machined to accept four.
Why was the scope loose? Was that the condition under which Oswald fired the rifle? Frazier testified that he assumed it had been loosened in Dallas for fingerprinting; that is, disassembled, fingerprinted, then reassembled somewhat haphazardly. Yet no inquiry to Lieutenant Carl Day, the Dallas fingerprint expert, was ever made, so it is unknown in what condition Day received the rifle. It seemed odd that Day would have disassembled the rifle, because he was a salty old pro and would have known it was highly unlikely to find prints on the few centimeters of metal that the scope rings covered, and that the integrity of the piece as a whole was more important. It was also unlikely that, had he disassembled the rifle, he would have reassembled it haphazardly. It wasn’t his nature.
Swagger knew that the screw-tightness issue was important because the looser the scope, the more it deviates from the point of impact. At each shot, it resets itself. Even a slightly loose scope equates to misses in the field, so a remarkably loose scope would make accurate shooting almost impossible.
However, at a certain point, the FBI was required to make accuracy tests with the rifle. According to everything Swagger had read, the rifle could not be zeroed-that is, its point of aim indexed to its point of impact-under any circumstances, as it was presented to the FBI shooters. A machinist had to grind out two spacers-called “shims”-that were inserted at some point, between the mount and the receiver or between the ring and the scope, to provide extra metal that would align the scope at an angle otherwise unattainable. Then the whole thing was tightened up for shooting. If that was so, it was highly improbable that Oswald, lacking those adjustments, could have hit the head shot.
Bugliosi suggested that it was a moot point, since Oswald would have diverted to the iron sights he was used to from his Garand experience. Highly unlikely. The nonadjustable battle sights on the Model 38 were set to the anticipated distance of engagement, which was three hundred meters. To hit the small and diminishing target in the back of the limo with iron sights, Oswald would have had to know the distance, would have needed much experience discovering the relationship of the point of impact to the point of aim, would have had to display unusually sound, to say nothing of quick, math skills in estimating how much below the target he would have to hold to hit at 263 feet with sights regulated to 875 feet, known where that spot was on the blank of the limo trunk behind the president-it would have been a low hold, a very low hold-and squeezed off the shot precisely. Very few people could make that shot on the first try.
Sitting there in his room, vodkaless and cigaretteless, Swagger came to a conclusion: it was not impossible but was highly unlikely that the shot could have been made by Oswald. And that led him to another key question: why did Oswald’s shooting, over the course of the engagement, as his own desperation increased and the distances expanded, improve radically?
Same meat, different restaurant. This one was a sort of porch to a classic old-Moscow property on a busy downtown street, open-air, and the patrons sat on cushions instead of chairs, lounging like pashas as the skewers loaded with animal were brought, along with spices and other vivid treats. Hookahs were available, and the Russians, not having received the cancer memo yet, greedily sucked on them or on cigarettes. Meanwhile, just outside, a backhoe struggled with the hard earth; to get into the restaurant, you had to walk on a wooden board over the shattered concrete. If the backhoe happened to squash you, it wasn’t your day. It was like a Panzer out there, hard to ignore.
“Sorry I’m late,” said Swagger, showing up at five after the hour.
“It’s not a problem,” said Kathy Reilly, putting away her Black-Berry.
“Were you followed?”
She laughed. “I wish. My days are so routine, a little excitement like that couldn’t hurt.”
“It could,” he said, “and I hope to spare you that. You were followed-by me. That’s why I’m late. I tailed you back to your building a few nights ago, then picked you up tonight as you left and was with you on the subway and everything.”
“I–I never saw you,” she said, a little nonplused.
“I followed you to see if anyone else was following you. The answer, both the first time and tonight, was no. So we’re clean, I think. We can continue, if you’ll still play.”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “It’s so Cold War. I love it. Have you arranged for the files?”
“Absolutely. I know they’ll be there.”
“Great. And where is there?”
“The ninth floor. They centralized their archives a few years ago, with the idea of moving them all to digitalization. But the budget never caught up, so it’s still old paper, some of it a century or two old. Very delicate. Fortunately, we don’t have to do a lot of digging. We’re just going to look at one month, one year.”
“You said 1963.”
“September. Maybe October, maybe November.”
“Of 1963.”
“That’s right.”
“And where is this archive? Ninth floor of?”
“Lubyanka.”
He waited. Her eyes stayed calm, maybe fell out of focus for a fraction of a second, then returned to the full-on gaze.
“I take it you’re not joking?”
“No. Please, it takes some getting used to.”
“You’ll have to explain.”
“We’re not parachuting onto the roof or shooting our way in. We’re not blowing a vault or tunneling up from underground. We’re traveling by that glamorous transportation means called the elevator.”
“I don’t-”
“Money. I’ve bribed, through my friend Stronski, an SVR lieutenant colonel. To show you how serious I am about this, I’m giving him forty thousand, American cash. Mine. Not the FBI’s; mine, hard-earned.”
“Swagger, you spent forty thousand dollars of your own money on this?”
“I did. I’d do it again. I gave a woman my word I’d look into the death of her husband. I ain’t near where I have to be on that one. There’s other issues too. Anyhow, to me, the money don’t mean a thing. I’ll spend it all if I have to. I gave my word, I got myself engaged, and maybe there’s some other memories yelling at me. I’ll do what I have to do.”
“‘Crazy with honor’ is the phrase that comes to mind. Did you step out of a thirties movie?”
“Ms. Reilly, I don’t know enough to know what a thirties movie would be. I only know what I’ve got to do.”
“You are so insane, it’s kind of impressive.”
“Maybe so. Anyhow, enough on me. Let’s get back to tomorrow. Let me tell you, if Stronski says it’s guaranteed, it’s guaranteed. It’s safe.”
He explained the details. “The lieutenant colonel himself will give us ID badges and escort us to the ninth floor. He will show us where we need to be. We have six hours. No photos, no notes. All by memory. What we’re looking for isn’t that big a deal. As I say, the Russian James Bond. We have to find out if he visited or worked in the Mexico City embassy in September through November of 1963.”
“See,” she said, “that’s the other thing.”
“I know it is. You see what this is about.”
“I know Lee Harvey Oswald went to the Mexico City Russian embassy sometime in 1963, trying to get a visa or something. He failed, I guess. I think it’s all been looked at.”
“It has. Over and over again. A man named Norman Mailer even managed to interview all the KGB people and examine the records. There’s nothing there. Case closed. History reclaimed. End of story. That’s what I believed too, until a few weeks ago.”
“And now you believe a Russian James Bond killed JFK?”
“No. I don’t know enough to believe anything. I will tell you, however, why I think that if-I do say if-there was some kind of game being played, it had to be played through the Russians. Maybe in a big way, maybe in a small way.”
The waiter cleared the plates.
She ordered a vodka tonic. “I think I’ll need this.”
He stuck with koka. “A few weeks ago a piece of information came to me. It was too mundane for anyone to have made up. There was no profit in it, and it was transferred over the years through completely normal, workaday people, none of them troublesome in any way, all of them sane, productive, middle-class. It was about a tread-print on the back of a coat. Stupid, huh? Briefly, it suggested that a rifle may have been present in something called the Dal-Tex Building in November 1963. Dal-Tex is right across the street from the Book Depository, and its windows give virtually the same angle on the limo on Elm Street as the sixth-floor ‘sniper’s nest’ of the Book Depository. The treadprint suggested the presence of someone I know about who was a superb rifleman.”
“He would be the second gunman?”
“Possibly. Just barely possibly. But the coat could have also been owned by an old-boy Texas pheasant hunter, and it was his daughter’s bicycle that put the treadprint there. Still, worth investigating.”
“So that was what the man went to Dallas to investigate. Then he got killed. Then you went to Dallas. And a Russian tried to kill you. Is that how the Russians come into this?”
“Possibly. It’s another indicator that somehow in this thing, all lines of possibility run through Russia. But the fact that the guy who tried to kill me was Russian wasn’t the thing I zeroed on.
“What I’ve done is, I’ve tried to isolate hard data points from the Warren Commission report, that is, the things that we know happened, times, dates, places, all multiply verified. And I’ve tried to triangulate from that a possible scenario by which someone besides Oswald could have been involved. I have worked hard trying to find the intersection of certain streams of information that were necessary for anyone trying to kill Kennedy. If I can find a place and a time where all the lines come together, that would be the place to start. My only technique is trial and error, try this, try that, try something else. Believe me, I ain’t no genius. But I’ve come to something. And that something has to be at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City in the late fall of 1963.”
“Tell me. Wait, the vodka hasn’t arrived. If I’m going to spend ten years sunbathing in the Gulag archipelago, I’ll want to know why.”
He waited, composing his thoughts. The vodka and the new koka came. She took a swig. “Very good. The world is nicely blurred. Please proceed.”
“If anything of a conspiratorial nature happened,” Bob said, “it had to have sprung from the intersection, by chance, of five elements. I say ‘elements.’ They tell me it’s a lousy word because it means ‘stuff.’ That’s because the five things are different in nature, and no word other than ‘stuff’ collects them all.”
“I’m listening.”
“The first four are pieces of information. Three are related but separated in time. One is completely unrelated, from left field, and it arrives real late. The fifth isn’t information at all; it’s a personality.”
“Okay. I can follow that, and I get lost in Agatha Christie, much less le Carre.”
“First bit of information: someone had to know that a man named Lee Harvey Oswald existed. And that he was kind of a pathetic screwball with dreams of glory that his sad little life couldn’t possibly support. Who would know that?”
“His mom? His poor wife?”
“The second thing they had to know was that he had homicidal tendencies. He was violent. It went with his loser personality. They must have known that he had a rifle with a telescopic sight and that on April 10, 1963, he had taken a shot at and missed Major General Edwin A. Walker.”
“I think I remember that.”
“Walker was a right-wing general who had just resigned in scandal when it was learned he was indoctrinating his troops-the Twenty-fourth Infantry Division, in Germany-with John Birch propaganda. He was briefly notorious. As a civilian, he was even more annoying to many people: he gave speeches, he made accusations, he showed up at various civil rights demonstrations and was violently segregationist, he called Kennedy pink, the whole nine yards.”
“Okay. Oswald took a shot. Someone mysterious and conspiratorial knows that.”
“The third thing they had to know was that he worked in a building on Elm Street in Dallas, Texas, called the Texas Book Depository. But since he didn’t start working until October 14, they couldn’t have known until then.”
“Who is they?”
“That’s where we’re going. Who would care enough about this little schnook to record those pieces of information? The FBI questioned him, the CIA debriefed him, but both dismissed him as a twerp, unlikely to be of any consequence. They had no idea about the Walker shooting.”
“I have you.”
“The late piece of information was that on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 19, 1963, the Dallas Times Herald announced that JFK was going to be parading down Elm Street in front of the Texas Book Depository at twelve thirty in the afternoon on Friday, two and a half days later. Remember this-they couldn’t possibly find Oswald in that short amount of time. And they couldn’t possibly have predicted that Kennedy would pass within seventy-five feet of this screwball. So, you ask, who knew all that about Oswald? Not the FBI. Not the CIA.”
“I know the answer. I know what you want me to say.”
“Of course. The Russians. He’d been to them. He’d begged them to take him back. He said he’d do anything for them. I’m sure he bragged about the shot he’d taken at Walker as the proof of his willingness to serve. They knew. They had to know. But all that was in September. He didn’t start at the depository, as I say, until October 14. How’d they know he was working there over a month later?”
“I don’t know.”
“This is where the Russian James Bond factors in. The fifth element.”
“Hmm,” she said.
“Someone who would see the potential in Oswald after the Walker shot and establish a clandestine communication. So he would be up-to-date. He would know Oswald was working at the Depository. See?”
“I see theoretically.”
“We need a certain personality. Actually, I say James Bond, but I’m being inaccurate. James Bond is an operator. We don’t need an operator. What we need is a case officer. Do you know what a case officer is?”
“I’ve heard the term, but that’s about it.”
“He would be the guy like the movie producer. He has the vision. He sees the possibilities. He sets the goal. His talent is putting a team together to get the job done. He keeps everybody focused. He adjudicates. He administers. He finances. He hires, he fires. He’s the tough guy, not the creative guy. He does logistics. He gets everybody there when they have to be there. He figures out cover stories, escape routes, all the petty details that the specialists are too good for. He’s the guy who makes it happen. He’s the guy we’re looking for.”
She said nothing.
“Here’s what I’m seeing. Maybe this isn’t exactly how it happened, but I’m guessing it’s close. Oswald does his crybaby number for the KGB and, of course, is laughingly turned down. Ha ha, what a schmuck. But there’s this guy-maybe he’s GRU or some other branch of the apparatus-and he hears about Oswald, particularly the part about trying to hit General Walker. And unlike the stooges, he thinks, You know, this guy has possibilities. So he tracks him down in Mexico City, which would be easy, as there’s a whole Sunday, September 29, when we don’t know what Oswald did.
“He says, speaking in Russian lingo that would astound Lee, ‘Say, Comrade, let me buy you a beer.’ He says, ‘You know, they all think you’re a loser, but I’d like to give you a chance. If you want that chance, you have to clean up your act. None of this letters-to-the-editor bullshit, none of this Fair Play for Cuba bullshit, none of this reading the Party newspaper in the cafeteria. You get a job, you live straight, you work hard, you put your ‘radical past’ behind you. Your goal is to get a job in the next ten years in aeronautics, defense, high-tech engineering, medicine, something where you can do us some good. Can you do that?’
“Oswald is flattered. Nobody’s ever trusted him before, thought he was worth a damn. ‘Yeah, sure,’ he says. The guy says, ‘Look, I’m giving you an address. You can send me a letter there. Any place I am in the world, I will get that letter quickly. Now go home, get to work, and keep me up-to-date.’
“Oswald goes home. He gets the Book Depository job. ‘Dear Comrade, I am now gainfully employed at the Book Depository at blah-blah Elm Street. My plan is to remain here five years, complete high school, be a success, put all crazy radical childishness behind me, and then maybe begin some college as a way of getting into the sectors you need me to be in. Yours truly, Comrade Lee Harvey Oswald.’
“Our guy’s got one of those case-officer minds that doesn’t forget anything. It happens. The really talented guys have them. When he finds out Kennedy’s going to Dallas, he thinks of Lee Harvey, and when he sees the route-two and a half days before-he sees he’s got the chance of a lifetime. He’ll never have another chance like this. He flies to Dallas, he meets Lee on that Thursday, he says, ‘You’ve got to do this, Comrade.’”
“But would KGB-”
“See, maybe it’s rogue. Maybe he knows the general committee would never say yes. Too risky. But he doesn’t see it as risky at all. And he can take out a guy who’s making noise in Vietnam and putting pressure on Cuba and looking for a place to draw a line in the sand and replace him with a Texas guy who knows nothing about foreign policy and just wants to be the next FDR. It’s easy as pie. He can do it.”
She said, “It sounds original. But I don’t know enough to point out your errors.”
“Oh, they’re there. For one thing, this whole thing started with someone looking at the Dal-Tex as the site for another rifle. So if there’s another rifle, there’s a complex ballistic-deceit issue involved. I’ll spare you the details, but no one could have figured out the complexities of it, recruited another shooter, found him the place to shoot, and gotten him in and out without a hitch in two days. Not even the greatest case officer in the world. It can’t be done. That’s the crucial issue of the assassination. How did they set it up so fast? The route wasn’t known until the nineteenth. I just can’t get by that.”
“Maybe. .” she started. Then, “No, I don’t know.”
“Anyhow, that’s why I’m here; that’s why I’m hoping you’ll help me. There’s not much else I can say, Ms. Reilly.”
“I told you, it’s so cold-war, how could I turn it down? Maybe, maybe, maybe somewhere down the line, there’s a story in it for me.”
“If there’s a story, you’ll get it.”
Was she sold? Enough to do the job, which, after all, was only scanning old files, looking for records of visits by Soviet intelligence personnel to one embassy over a relatively short period of time.
Nothing to it.