"I was up there after lunch trying to track down some files that just got up and walked off. There was no one in the office. Just small piles of handbills on a table. What do they say? Hands off Cuba. Fair Play for Cuba. This is pro-Castro material sitting on a table right over our heads."
Guy Banister gave a little twirl of the hand that held the cigarette.
"Go ahead, what else," he said, an amused light in his eye.
"This is no joke, Guy. There is inflammatory reading matter in that little office."
"Just you make sure those circulars don't get up and walk off in this direction. I don't want them down here. He has his work, we have ours. It amounts to the same thing."
"Then you know about it."
"We'll just see how it all works out."
"Well what do you know about him?"
"Not a hell of a lot, personally. He's working mainly with Ferrie. Ferrie recommended him. He's a David Ferrie project:"
"I wonder what that means," Delphine said.
Banister smiled and got up. He put his cigarette in the ashtray on the desk… Then he stood behind Delphine's chair and massaged her shoulders and neck. On the desk was a recent issue of On Target,the newsletter of the Minutemen. A line in italics caught his eye,
Even now the crosshairs are centered on the back of your neck.
Something in the air. There were forces in the air that men sense at the same point in history. You can feel it on your skin, in the tips of your fingers.
"What about the fellow who called early this morning?" Del-phine said. "He sounded far away in more ways than one."
"Did you wire him fifty dollars?"
"Just like you said."
"One of Mackey's people. New to me. I told him how to contact T-Jay."
She put her hand to her hair, looking toward the smoked-glass panel on the office door.
"Do I get to see my G-man later tonight?"
He reached across her shoulder for his cigarette.
"I want you to start a file," he told her, "before you leave the office. Fair Play for Cuba. Give it a nice pink cover."
"What do I put in the file?"
"Once you start a file, Delphine, it's just a matter of time before the material comes pouring in. Notes, lists, photos, rumors. Every bit and piece and whisper in the world that doesn't have a life until someone comes along to collect it. It's all been waiting just for you."
Wayne Elko, an out-of-work pool cleaner, sat on a long bench in the waiting room at Union Station this chilly a.m. in Denver.
It occurred to Wayne that for some time now he was always arriving or departing. He was never anywhere you could actually call a place. He wasn't here and wasn't there. It was like a problem in philosophy.
Next to him on the bench was his khaki knapsack and an over-the-hill shopping bag from some A amp;P on the Coast. His life in material things he carried in these two weary pokes.
He was a long-chance man. This was a term from the real frontier a hundred years ago. For twenty dollars he'd roll your odometer back twenty thousand miles. Took about fifteen minutes.
For a hundred dollars he'd set a charge of plastique and blow the car into car heaven if your insurance needs were such. Except he'd probably do it free. Just for the science involved.
Early light collected at the tall arched windows. The benches were thirty feet long, with high backs, curved backs, nicely polished. Giant chandeliers hung above him. The waiting room was empty except for two or three station familiars, the two or three shadowy men he saw at every stop, living in the walls like lizards. The silence, the arched windows, the wooden benches and chandeliers made him think of church, a church you travel to on trains, coming out of the noise and steam to this high empty place where you could think your quietest thoughts.
He was asleep ten minutes on the bench when a cop bounced his nightstick off Wayne's raised knee. It made a sound like he was built of hollow wood. Welcome to the Rockies.
He got up, took his things, crossed the street and went immediately to sleep on the concrete loading-platform of a warehouse. This time it was trucks that got him up. He wandered an area of refrigerated warehouses with old dual-gauge tracks intersecting on the cobbled streets. At Twentieth and Blake he saw a man swabbing a garbage truck. They had a hundred wrecked cars behind barbed wire and a thousand specks of broken glass every square foot. It was the broken-glass district of Denver. At Twentieth and Larimer he saw some men with a stagger in their gait. Early-rising winos out for a stroll. Baptist Mission. Money to Loan. A guy with a Crazy Guggenheim hat came pitching down the street; might be Indian, Mexican, mix-blood or who knows what, muttering curses in some invented tongue. Made Wayne think of the faces in the Everglades and on No Name Key during his training with the Interpen brigade. All those guys who'd fought for Castro and then crossed over. Dark rage in every face. Fidel betrays the revolution.
He'd lived with a shifting population of rogue commandos in a boardinghouse on Southwest Fourth Street in Miami. They spent weeks at a time training in the mangrove swamps and went on forays along the Cuban coast in a thirty-five-foot launch, mainly to land agents and shoot at silhouettes. Otherwise they stayed close to the clapboard house, cleaning submachine guns in the backyard. Judo instructors, tugboat captains, homeless Cubans, ex-paratroopers like Wayne, mercenaries from wars nobody heard of, in West Africa or Malay. They were like guys straight out of Wayne's favorite movie, Seven Samurai, warriors without masters, willing to band together to save a village from marauders, to win back a country, only to see themselves betrayed in the end. First it was Navy jets making reconnaissance runs over No Name Key, snapping little pix of the muddy boys. Next it was five Interpen commandos picked up for vagrancy, courtesy of the Dade County sheriff. Then U.S. customs officers pounced, arresting a dozen men, including Wayne Elko in battle gear and a lampblacked face, just as they were setting out for Cuba in the twin-engine launch.
JFK had made his deal with the Soviets to leave Castro alone. Incredible. The same man Wayne would have voted for if he'd gotten around to registering. He believed in country, loyalty, mountains and streams. They were all tied together.
He found a telephone and made a collect call to the New Orleans number T. J. Mackey had given him about a year earlier. He told the woman at the other end he wished to speak to a Mr. Guy Banister.
"This is Wayne Elko calling. It seems like I have washed up in Denver, Colorado, tell T-Jay, and I am looking for a chance at some employment."
Win Everett was in his basement at home, hunched over the worktable. His tools and materials were set before him, mainly household things, small and cheap-cutting instruments, acetate overlays, glues and pastes, a soft eraser, a travel iron.
He felt marvelously alert, sure of himself, putting together a man with scissors and tape.
His gunman would emerge and vanish in a maze of false names. Investigators would find an application for a post-office box; a certificate of service, U.S. Marine Corps; a Social Security card; a passport application; a driver's license; a stolen credit card and half a dozen other documents-in two or three different names, each leading to a trail that would end at the Cuban Intelligence Directorate.
He worked on a Diners Club card, removing the ink on the raised letters with a Q-tip doused in polyester resin. A radio on a shelf played soothing music. He pressed the card against the warm iron, heating it slowly to flatten the letters. Then he used a razor blade to level the remaining bumps and juts. He would eventually reheat the card and stamp a new name and number on its face with an addressograph plate.