Win sat alone on the porch. There was a glass of lemonade on a wicker table. Plants stood in tubs and window boxes, in terracotta pots on the steps. The brick walk was bordered in monkey grass. He waited for Mary Frances.
Of all the cities where the attempt might be made, Miami was the clear choice. Hundreds of exile factions lived there, conspired and squabbled, waited for another chance-movimientos, juntas, uniones. Win imagined how word would flash through the area, through all his old exile haunts, La Moderne Hotel, the offices of the Frente leadership. Miami had a resonance, an ardor. It was a city of open wounds, of explosive politics and feelings. This very inflammability, this Cuban heat and light, made him determined to keep the plan a secret from anti-Castro leaders.
Kennedy had been in Miami four months earlier to accept the brigade flag from survivors of the invasion, many just ransomed from Cuban prisons. This was the necessary cleansing of emotions. The failure was now openly acknowledged, commemorated before forty thousand people in a football stadium, all the repressed material sent in reconverted waves into Televisionland, where Everett had sat watching. He respected the President for going to Miami. He was surprised and touched when the President's wife spoke Spanish to brigade members. But the ceremony had not renewed the cause, the forceful devotion to a free Havana. He saw it now as pure public relations, the kind of gleaming imagery that marked every move the administration made.
The car pulled up and he went down the steps to help Mary Frances take the groceries inside. He gripped the heavy bags. A wind sprang from the east, an idea of rain, sudden, pervading the air. He saw himself go inside, a fellow on a quiet street doing ordinary things, unafraid of being watched.
He stood in the pantry and she handed things in to him. The bulb had blown and he stood in the dimness putting objects on shelves. The faintly musty smell, the coolness of the small room, the familiar labels on jars and cans made him feel like an ancient and tired child, someone allowed to relive the simplest, the deepest times, moments that left a scar on the heart-not an evidence of some detailed pain but only of time itself, systemic, heavy with loss. He tried to register the idea of the burnt-out bulb so he wouldn't forget to replace it. He heard a shaking in the sky and thought of thunderstorms when he was a boy growing up in the country, the boy who tried not to seem smarter than his older brothers, seeing the light change, the landscape become serious, solemn. Everything ran with fear. It leapt out of the air into things and into children. Those smoky storms approaching. He used to stand in the pantry counting to fifty because that's when the thunder would stop.
"I have to pick up Suzanne."
'Til finish this," he said.
"Don't you have a class?"
"Canceled."
"I want to stop at Penney's for a couple of things."
"We should all stop at Penney's."
"No but just some things I've been meaning to get. We won't be long."
"Penney's is home to us all."
"The light bulbs are stacked in the back stairway."
"She reads my mind. She remembers for me."
"I won't be long," she said.
Parmenter would tell him in advance if there were plans for JFK to return to Miami. Sooner or later the President would venture out with his train of attendants, protectors, handshakers and hacks, a city, a street where he'd be vulnerable. Everett was willing to wait a year for Miami. The message would be clearest there, a long-range attempt, high-angled, telescopic, without the pointless human mess some madman would create, walking out of a crowd with the family handgun,
He followed Mary Frances to the door.
He would not consider the plan a success if the uncovering of its successive layers did not reveal the CIA's schemes, his own schemes in some cases, to assassinate Fidel Castro. This was the little surprise he was keeping for the end. It was his personal contribution to an informed public. Let them see what goes on in the committee rooms and corner offices. The pocket litter, the gunman's effects, the sidetrackings and back alleys must allow investigators to learn that Kennedy wanted Castro dead, that plots were devised, approved at high levels, put into motion, and that Fidel or his senior aides decided to retaliate. This was the major subtext and moral lesson of Win Everett's plan.
The two men who shared a table in the Occidental Restaurant had certain physical similarities. Both were over six feet tall, expensively dressed, robust and athletic, men clearly at ease here, in the theater of the Kennedys, the capital city that measured itself to a certain kind of manliness, a confidence and promise, the grace to take the maximum dare.
Laurence Parmenter, perhaps five years the younger of the two, spoke in the slight whine of the educated Easterner, a way of drawing out syllables to express ironic self-regard.
The other man, George de Mohrenschildt, who lived in Dallas now, spoke English with a courtly foreign accent. He was not averse to being seen as the complete continental. This is what he was. A charming and worldly man able to converse fluently in Russian, English, French, Spanish, probably Togo as well, or whatever they spoke in Togoland. (Parmenter knew he had been there in 1958, posing as a stamp collector.) Larry liked the man. He'd known him for some years and was aware that George had been debriefed by the Agency after several trips abroad. But even though their business interests had overlapped once or twice, he wasn't sure quite what George's racket was.
"Then in May I go to Haiti," de Mohrenschildt said.
"Do I dare ask?"
"Ask, by all means. I'm going there to find oil for the Haitians. They're giving me a sisal plantation as a concession."
"Do they need help finding sisal?"
"I believe it grows aboveground."
They held their laughter.
"You turn up in interesting places, George."
Now they laughed, remembering the same thing, the time Parmenter walked into a dental clinic in a remote town near the CIA air base in southwest Guatemala where the Bay of Pigs was being rehearsed by Cuban pilots and American advisers. Sitting in the shabby waiting room, in an alligator shirt and madras shorts, was George de Mohrenschildt, also known as Jerzy Sergius von Mohrenschildt. He was on a walking tour of Central America, he said.
"That whole thing ended horribly," George said, "if I can actually say it has ended."
"I think you can say that."
"This administration still bullies Castro. It's ridiculous and unnecessary. I'll go even further. This whole administration revolves around the floating cinder of little communist Cuba. It's something of a joke, Larry, and I say this knowing which side of the Cuban fence you are on. Of course this is your job and I respect it."
"This was my job. I'm doing strictly support work now."
"I would like to believe the administration has no more designs on Cuba."
"Believe it, George. The missile crisis was resolved with the understanding that we wouldn't invade Cuba. Kennedy had the chance to get rid of Castro and he ends up guaranteeing the man's job. There is widespread lack of interest right now. Commitment to this issue is absolutely nil. The administration went from passionate and total dedication to an attitude of complete aloofness and indifference and they did it in goddamn record time."
"It's the American disease," George said with a warm smile.
De Mohrenschildt was a petroleum engineer by profession but didn't seem to spend much time at it. He was on his fourth wife, Larry knew, and they tended to be women from wealthy families.
But his marriages didn't explain his apparent association with Nazis in World War II, his apparent ties to Polish and French intelligence, his expulsion from Mexico, his apparent communist leanings when he was at the University of Texas, his Soviet contacts in Venezuela, the discrepancies in his stated history, his travels in West Africa, Central America, Yugoslavia and Cuba.