Before the murder attempt comes the provocation.

He'd devised a top-secret memo from the Deputy Director Plans to selected members of the Senior Study Effort, dated May 1961. It concerned the assassination of foreign leaders from a philosophical point of view. It also included a fragment from the psalm-book, not known to the outside world. Terminate with extreme prejudice. Parmenter was handling the actual production of the memo on a suitable typewriter and stationery.

Two. Through his contacts in Little Havana, Everett had planted a cryptic news item in an exile magazine published in New Jersey. The story, from an unnamed source, concerned an operation run in July 1961 by the Office of Naval Intelligence out of Guantanamo, the U.S. base near the eastern end of Cuba. The story was fabricated but the plan itself was real, involving the assassination of Fidel Castro and his brother Raul. This news item would be found among the subject's effects after the failed attempt on the life of the President.

Three. He was working on a scheme involving telephone notes on pages of stationery used by the Technical Services Division. Doodles, phone numbers, abbreviations of the names of advanced poisons produced by a special unit of the division, known entertainingly as the Health Alteration Committee. A person following the sequence of phone numbers would be led along a serendipitous path with a number of ordinary stops (florist, supermarket) as well as the home of an exile leader in Miami, a motel in Key Biscayne known to be mob-run, a yacht moored at a Miami marina-living quarters of the CIA's chief of station.

He headed toward the car.

Local color, background, connections for investigators to ponder. He had other schemes, other documents, authentic, relating to attempts on Castro's life-attempts he'd personally been involved in at the planning stage. It would be up to Parmenter to get this reading matter, circuitously, into the hands of journalists, subcommittee members and anyone else who might bring them to light. Once people saw the attempt on the President as a Cuban response to repeated efforts of U.S. intelligence to murder Castro, we were all halfway home to getting the island back.

He saw them sitting in the car. He began to smile, shielding his eyes from the sun. He approached the front door on the passenger side. The wet grass looked spangled in the heat and glare. He tiptoed closer, smiling broadly, waiting for Suzanne to spot him.

Guy Banister sat alone in the Katz amp; Jammer Bar. He had his private spot at the near end, where the bar curves into the wall. He liked to sit with his back against the wall, looking out to the street, to the neon heads bobbing past the Falstaff sign in the high window.

His doctor told him don't drink. He drank. Don't smoke. He smoked. Give up the detective agency. He worked longer hours, compiled longer lists, shipped arms, stored munitions, ran a network of clean-cut boys who spied on local universities.

Dave Ferrie had this routine about a tumor growing on his brain. But it was Banister who had blackouts and dizzy spells, who sat at his desk and watched his hand start trembling, way out there, as if it belonged to someone else.

He was sixty-three years old, twenty years in the Bureau, a decorated agent drinking alone in a bar.

He carried a blue-steel Colt under his jacket, chambered for the.357 magnum cartridge. Guy sincerely believed the old reliable. 38 special with standard police loads was simply not enough gun for the type of situation a man of his standing might run into any time of day or night. Amen. Beautiful auburn glitter at the bottom of the glass. He knocked back the last of the bourbon and watched the man come forward.

"We got him coming out of the Biograph in Chicago, July of '34, shot him dead in an alleyway three doors down from the theater."

"This is who are we talking about now," says the jug-eared barman.

"Mr. John Dillinger. This is who. Fill the fucking glass."

"Rocks or not?"

"Famous finish. Old Dillinger buffs could tell you what was playing at the movie house when we gunned him down."

"All right I'll bite."

"Manhattan Melodrama with Clark Gable."

The barman poured the drink, oblivious.

"Whenever there's a famous finish in the vicinity of a movie house, it behooves you to know what's playing."

"I don't doubt it, Mr. Banister."

"This is history with a fucking flourish."

He'd shipped munitions to the Keys for the bombing of refineries, for the Bay of Pigs. There was so much ordnance stored in his office he had to get Ferrie to take some home. Ferrie had land mines stacked in his kitchen. With dozens of factions angling for a second invasion, something had to happen soon. The government knew it. Raids and seizures were commonplace now. Things were turning upside down.

He saw the kid Oswald walk past the window on his way home from work at the William Reily Coffee Company. Another bobbing head in the great New Orleans current.

The hand starts trembling way out there. It has nothing to do with him.

He worked longer hours, compiled longer lists. He had researchers coming up with names all the time. He wanted lists of subversives, leftist professors, congressmen with dubious voting records. He wanted lists of niggers, nigger lovers, armed niggers, pregnant niggers, light-skinned niggers, niggers married to whites. You couldn't photograph a nigger. He'd never seen a picture of a nigger where you could make out the features. It's just a fact of nature they don't emit light.

The Times-Picayune was full of stories about the civil-rights program of JFK. You could photograph a Kennedy all right. That's what a Kennedy was for. The man with the secrets gives off the glow.

We gave away Eastern Europe. We gave away China. We gave away Cuba, just ninety miles off our coast. We're getting ready to give away Southeast Asia. We'll give away white America next. We'll give it to the Nee-groes. One thing Guy couldn't stand about these sit-ins and marches. When the goddamn whites get to singing. The whole occasion falls apart. It makes everyone feel bad.

He called the barman over.

"You know this Kennedy goes around with ten or fifteen people who look just like him. You know about that?"

"No."

"You never heard about that?"

"I never heard he had anybody."

"He has got them," Banister said.

"That look like him."

"He has got about fifteen. Whenever he goes anyplace, they go too. They're on constant fucking standby. You know why? Diversionary. Because he knows he's made a lot of people mad."

He was as old as the century, twenty years in the Bureau, a dignitary in the local police until he fired his gun into the ceiling of some tourist bar.

He finished his drink and got up to leave.

Public enemy number one. Sweltering night in July. We got him in an alley near the Biograph.

His office was next door to the bar but he did not use the Camp Street entrance, which was where they'd be waiting to blast him if and when the time came, now or later, day or night. He used the side entrance, on Lafayette, and trudged up the stairs to the second floor.

Delphine was at the desk in the outer office. She gave him a little prissy look that meant she knew he'd been drinking. With a mistress like this, he didn't need a wife.

"There's something I think you definitely ought to know," she said.

"Chances are I do know."

"Not this you don't."

He sat on the vinyl sofa that Ferrie said carried cancer agents and took his time shaking a cigarette out of the pack and lighting it. He had a Zippo he'd carried through the war that still worked perfect, with a whoosh and flare.

"It's about this Leon upstairs, whatever his name is, working in the vacant room."

"Oswald."