"What we are mainly concerned, if there are suspicious circumstances to inform us immediately of any contact."

"You're saying let you know."

"We are asking cooperation if individuals along the lines of Marxist or communist."

"I want to know if I'm being recruited as an informer."

"We are asking cooperation."

"So if someone contacts me."

"That's right."

"I will inform the Bureau."

"That's correct."

Lee said he would think about the matter. He got out of the car and closed the door. He glanced at the license plate as he walked behind the car on his way across the street and into the house. He wrote the license-plate number in his notebook along with Agent Freitag's name. Then he looked up the Fort Worth FBI office in the phone directory and wrote that number in his book beneath the agent's name and the license plate, just to have for the record, to build up the record.

Marina called him in to dinner.

He sat in a corner of the large room and watched them talk and eat. Their conversation had a munching sound. They milled and dodged, Russians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Georgians, Armenians. It was an evening with the emigre colony, some of the twenty or thirty families in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, English-speaking, Russian-speaking, French-speaking, constantly comparing backgrounds and education. Baby June was in his lap.

Marina always looked her prettiest on these evenings. People gathered round, prodding her for news. She was recently arrived, of course, and some of them had come here decades ago, thirty years, forty years some of them. Her pure Russian impressed the old guard. She was small and frail. They pictured Soviet women as hammer-throwers, brawny six-footers who work in brick factories. She stood smoking, sipping wine. She wore the clothes they gave her. They gave her dresses and stockings, comfortable shoes. He had his book he could not afford to get typed sitting in a closet in a Carrollton Clasp envelope, notes on scraps of paper, brown bag paper, and they are giving her dental work and stockings. Everything is measured in money. They spend their lives collecting material things and call it politics.

He watched them shake hands and embrace. They complained to Marina that he did not give them a human hello. They thought he was a Soviet spy. Anyone back from Russia who did not share their beliefs was a spy for the Soviet. Their beliefs were Cadillacs and air conditioners.

They gave him shirts which he returned.

A few of them came to his house now and then to take Marina to the dentist or supermarket. Show her how to shop. Here is the baby food. Here is the Swiss cheese. He kept his library books on a small table near the door where they would have to notice as they entered and left. There were books on Lenin and Trotsky plus the Militant and the Worker. Show them who he is. They didn't want to hear what he had to say about Russia unless it was bad. They closed in on the bad.

George came and sat next to him. The only one he could talk to was George de Mohrenschildt. A tall man, warm-spirited and assured, with a relish for conversation and a voice that surrounds you like a calm day.

"You know, Lee, you have told me practically nothing about Minsk."

"It's not an interesting place."

"It's interesting to me, you know, because I lived there as a child. My father was a marshal of nobility of Minsk Province in the czarist days. Not that I cling to this nonsense. But I am Baltic nobility, which some of my wives adored."

"Minsk, we had to get on line sometimes to buy vegetables."

"You prefer Texas?"

"I don't prefer Texas. Marina prefers Texas."

"Do you want me to tell you what Dallas is? It's the city that proves that God is really dead. Look at these people, wonderful people actually, most of them, but they come by choice to this bleak empty right-wing milieu. It's the local politics they find so congenial. Anticommunist this, anticommunist that. All right they have suffered, some of them, in one way or another, sometimes horribly. You know how I feel about Marxism. I will tell you frankly the word Marxism is very boring to me. It is very hard for me to find a word or subject more boring than this. But you and I know the Soviet Union is a going concern. We accept this and accept the realities. To the old guard there is no such place. It doesn't exist. A blank on the map."

George was in his fifties, still dark-haired, broad across the chest, an oil geologist or engineer, something like that. Lee liked to switch from English to Russian and back again, talking to George. He could take the older man's kidding and teasing and even his advice. George gave advice without making you feel he wanted a week of thank-yous.

"Marina says you have written some notes or something about Minsk. Something, I don't know what she said, impressions of the city."

"Everything I learned at the radio plant plus the whole structure of how they work and live."

A woman picked up June and made the same noises that Marina's relatives used to make, shaking the baby and gabbling at her.

George said, "You know, I am sitting and looking at this wonderful child and I am saying to myself, I can't help it but she looks just like Khrushchev. She is a baby Khrushchev with a big round head, a bald head, little narrow eyes."

"Kennedy would be better, for looks."

"I admire Kennedy. I think this man is very good for the country."

"Jacqueline, for looks."

"And his wife. And Jacqueline too. I knew her on Long Island when she was a girl. Very lovely child. Although he is quite a libertine with the women, this particular President, I understand. Not that I consider this a flaw. I am the last to say. But I'll tell you about some women. They will love you for your weaknesses. They will love you precisely for your flaws. This means trouble, my friend."

Lee found the child back in his arms. He said, "What Kennedy is doing for civil rights is the most important thing. He started off badly with the Bay of Pigs disaster. But I think he learned."

"He changed."

"I saw American Negro athletes get the greatest glory for their country and then they went back home."

"It's a humiliation to me," George said, "that I am sitting in a room with not a single Negro here."

"To face blind hatred and discrimination."

"Kennedy is trying to make the shift. Painfully slow but he's doing it. It's humiliating to me that I can't befriend a Negro without consequences among my friends or in my profession. I live in University Park. We are incorporated, a township. If a Negro family tries to move in, the township buys the house at two or three times its value. The family disappears, goodbye, like magic."

"Look at the anti-Kennedy feeling here."

"Poisonous. Young Dallas matrons tell the most vicious jokes. Their eyes light up in the strangest way. It's clear to me they want him dead."

George went across the room to embrace an elderly man and woman. Lee found himself smiling at the scene. He watched people steer through the room, holding plates of food before them. A man offered Marina a cigarette from a black-and-white case. Lee had his collection. He'd written to an obscure press in New York for a twenty-five-cent booklet called The Teachings of Leon Trotsky. Back comes a letter saying it's out of print. At least they sent a letter. He saved their letters. The point is they are out there and willing to reply. He was starting a collection of documents.

She would never refuse a cigarette.

He planned to write to the Socialist Workers Party for information about their aims and policies. Trotsky is the pure form. It was satisfying to send away and get this obscure stuff in the mail. It was a channel to sympathetic souls, a secret and a power. It gave him a breadth and reach beyond the life of the bungalow and the welding company.