He drew a chair up to the bed and played one of the poker hands. Why did he have the feeling he was spoiling her fun? She had short chopped hair and narrow hips and a casual, almost dismissive manner, a kind of body slang that T-Jay took to be her free adaptation of the local style. She walked like a girl shooting a cart down a supermarket aisle.

"I ought to teach you gin rummy. It's a better game for two to play."

"Why, you coming back?"

"I might."

"You might not."

"I might not."

"So why do I learn?" she said.

He liked the idea that whores were profound. He was respectful of whores. They were quick in their perceptions-it was a quick business-and he sometimes had the feeling they could tell him things about himself that he'd missed completely. They had access to the starker facts. This made him wary and respectful.

She took his right hand and placed it against hers, palms touching. He didn't get the point at first. Then he realized she was comparing the size of their hands. The difference made her laugh.

"What's funny?"

She told him his hand was funny.

"Why mine? Why not yours?" he said. "If the difference is great, maybe you're the funny one, not me."

"You're the funny one," Lu Wan said.

She matched left hands now and fell sideways to the bed laughing. Maybe she thought they were two different species. One of them was exotic and it wasn't her.

The beer was warm now. He shook the bottle and looked at her.

"Stores close," she said.

It was Everett who'd made the leap. Everett took the once-bold idea of assassinating Castro and turned it over in his mind, finding it unworkable and crude. He struck a countermeasure that made better sense on every level. It was original, spare and clean. The man we really want is JFK. Mackey gave him every credit. Everett was a complex and passionate man who could think economically. All over Langley and Miami they were still formulating plans to hit Fidel. It was an industry like wood pulp or shoes. Everett had seen the logic in staying home. The idea had power and second sight. Of course Everett did not plan to shoot Kennedy in the strict sense. Only to lay down fire in the street. He wanted a surgical miss.

The second leap was Mackey's. He made it after hearing Everett's plan, driving alone toward the Louisiana border, his sunglasses on the dash in the softfall of evening light, two years to the day after Pigs. They had to take it one more step. Everett's obsession was scattered in technique. The plan grew too twisty and deep. Everett wanted mazes that extended to infinity. The plan was anxious, self-absorbed. It lacked the full heat of feeling. They had to take it all the way. It was a revelation to him that in the moment he saw what had to be done, feeling the crash of air on the hood of the car, he felt the oddest goddamn sympathy for President Jack.

There was fruit juice in the refrigerator. He drank some and handed her the bottle. She wiped her mouth with her hand, then drank and wiped her mouth again. A ship's horn sounded on the river. He took the bottle and put it down and she slipped out of the T-shirt. He put a knee to the edge of the bed, watching her pass imperceptibly into a second skin. All trace of personality was gone. He'd never known a woman who phased so completely into her body. She had a body that could reshape itself, roll itself into a straw ball, make sex a little mystery of sun-glint and shadow. He had a hand on the bedpost. They were screwing on top of a magazine and the pages stuck to her, rattling hard.

In stages, through a marriage, a career of sorts as a roving paramilitary, a fall from official grace, he had become a man with no fixed address. To a certain way of thinking, this was the stuff of paramount despair. He was getting on to forty, loose in the world, nothing to show for the time and risk. Yet here he was, starting up his car for the long drive south and feeling a curious edge of contentment, feeling charged with advantage. He had Jack Kennedy's picture stuck in his mind and nobody even knew he was out here, a man they used to pay to teach other men the fundamentals of deadly force.

Win Everett was in his daughter's room listening to her read from a book of stories with pop-up figures. Mary Frances left these story sessions to him. She was impatient with Suzanne's actressy moods and thought the child ought to be learning to read, not deliver lines. Win followed every word. His face changed as the girl's did, shifting through emotions and roles.

It was uncanny how these tales affected him, gave him a sense of what it was like to be a child again. He found he could lose himself in the sound of her voice. He searched her face, believing he could see what she saw, line by line, in the grave and fateful progress of a tale. His eyes went bright. He felt a joy so strong it might be measured in the language of angelic orders, of powers and dominations. They were alone in a room that was itself alone, a room that hung above the world.

Later he sat downstairs turning the pages of a magazine. He knew he'd become remote from the cutting edge of the operation. He used Parmenter to talk to Mackey. They both used Mackey to find out what was going on at 544 Camp Street. He was wary of Oswald. He only wanted to know selective things. He was putting too much distance between himself and the others. Did he expect his themes to develop in the field through otherworldly means? He was making the same mistakes the Senior Study Effort had made before the Cuban invasion. He didn't know if he could pull himself out. He half wanted to lose control. He wanted a way out of fear and premonition.

Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death. He believed that the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot. A narrative plot no less than a conspiracy of armed men. The tighter the plot of a story, the more likely it will come to death. A plot in fiction, he believed, is the way we localize the force of the death outside the book, play it off, contain it. The ancients staged mock battles to parallel the tempests in nature and reduce their fear of gods who warred across the sky. He worried about the deathward logic of his plot. He'd already made it clear that he wanted the shooters to hit a Secret Service man, wound him superficially. But it wasn't a misdirected round, an accidental killing, that made him afraid. There was something more insidious. He had a foreboding that the plot would move to a limit, develop a logical end.

Lancer is going to Miami.

Mary Frances moved past the doorway. Then she ran water in the kitchen. He heard her looking for something on the back stairway. He heard the kitchen radio. He waited for her to pass by the porch window with the watering can. It was an old metal can, gray and dented, and he waited to hear her walk across the porch. He listened carefully. She was still in the kitchen. That was all right.

As long as he knew where she was. She had to be close and he had to know where she was. Those were the two inner rules.

He heard an old familiar voice on the kitchen radio, some voice from the old days of radio, couldn't quite recall the man's name, but famous and familiar, with laughter in the background, and he sat very still as if to draw out the moment, struck by the complex emotion carried on a voice from another era, tender and shattering, a three-line joke that brings back everything.

He turned another page.

There was no date set for the President's trip. But it is definitely going to happen, said Parmenter. He wants to go to Florida because the state voted Republican in 1960 and because the whole South is pissing blood over his civil-rights program. Cape Canaveral, Tampa, Miami. There'll be a motorcade in Miami.

Mary Frances was in the doorway wearing rubber gloves, a scrub brush in her hand.