"What do you mean?"

"It's a question do I want to cut class."

"I will need an accomplice, Bobby. This is not just walk in and shoot him. The house is located in such a way. There's an alley. We may need a car."

"I can get a car. I can always borrow a car. I don't know about dependable running. Just so we put him on the ground. That man got to taste some blood."

"They have a phrase they use in Russian for assassinations that involve blood being spilled. Mokrie dela. Which is wet affairs. Like the ice pick they used on Trotsky."

"Just so we do it to him," Bobby said.

They moved to Neely Street, nearby, another furnished apartment, two rooms in a frame house with a concrete porch and a balcony with sagging posts. They could put out flowerpots and pretend it's Minsk. There was a small additional room, the size of a walk-in closet, where Lee could work on his notebook and keep his correspondence and other writings.

They moved their belongings in Junie's stroller. They made six or seven trips, dishes, baby things, letters from Russia. Lee made the last trip alone, pushing the stroller west on Neely wearing most of the clothes he owned, to save another trip.

The little room could be entered from the living room and from the staircase outside their flat. Both doors could be locked from inside. It was like an airtight compartment, part of the building but also separate from it. He called the room his study. He squeezed a lamp table and chair in there and set to work on his notes for the death of the general.

He began taking photographs of Walker's house. He had a box camera he carried in a paper bag on the bus back and forth. He photographed the lattice fence behind the house, the alleyway that extended from the parking lot of the Mormon church to Avondale Street. He took some pictures of the railroad tracks where he could hide the gun if necessary.

There is a world inside the world.

He made detailed notes on the location of windows at the rear of the house. He studied maps of Dallas. He put the finishing touches on the false documents he'd made after hours at work. When the Hidell gun arrived at the post office, he'd have Hidell identification to claim the package. He did the typing for the documents on his machine at school.

He felt good about having Dupard behind him. Downtrodden. Dupard was the force of history, the show of a solid front against the far-right surge.

He used Hidell again, March 12, sending a money order for $21.45 to Klein's Sporting Goods in Chicago for a 6.5-millimeter Italian military rifle, the Mannlicher-Carcano, equipped with a four-power scope.

The rain fell on empty streets.

What a sense of destiny he had, locked in the miniature room, creating a design, a network of connections. It was a second existence, the private world floating out to three dimensions.

He went to a gun shop and bought an ammunition clip that would fit the Mannlicher, so he could fire up to seven rounds before reloading.

Rain-slick streets. He walked to the speed wash and talked excitedly with Dupard about the logic of a long-range shot, given the layout of the house and grounds. Then he let himself back into the study and no one even knew he'd been gone.

He stood barefoot in the living room in his pajamas, working the bolt. He jerked the handle, brought the bolt rearward, then drove it forward, jerking the handle down. He turned up the handle, drew the bolt back, drove it forward, jerking the handle down. He turned toward the mirror over the sofa. He jerked the bolt handle, drew the bolt back, then drove it forward, jerking the handle down. Marina was out at the store. Junie sat in the high chair near the window, rolling a marble back and forth across the tray.

There was a yard behind the house, a small dirt enclosure with a couple of forsythia shrubs. A clothesline ran parallel to the back fence and Marina stood there hanging diapers. The ground-floor tenants were away.

Ten minutes passed. Lee came down the exterior wooden steps. He carried the rifle in one hand, a couple of magazines in the other. He wore a black pullover shirt, short-sleeve, and a pair of dark chinos. The revolver was snug on his hip.

Marina watched him set the rifle against the stairway and climb back up. He returned seconds later with his box camera, an Imperial Reflex he'd bought cheap in Japan.

"Why do you want to do this?" she said. "If we are seen by a neighbor."

"It's for Junie, to remember me by."

"Does she want her father in a picture with guns? I don't know how to take a picture."

"You hold the camera at your waist."

"I've never taken a picture in my life."

"No matter what. I want you to keep a print for my little girl."

"Dressed all black. It's foolish, Lee. Who are you hunting with that gun? The forces of evil? I want to laugh. It's stupid. It impresses no one. It's pure and simple show."

He posed in a corner of the yard, the rifle in his right hand, muzzle up, butt end pressing on his waist, just inches from the bolstered. 38. The magazines, the Militant and the Worker, were in his left hand, fanned like playing cards.

She snapped the shutter,

He posed one more time, the rifle in his left hand now, the magazines held under his chin with the word Militant visible above the fold, his shadow trailing to the wooden gate and his thin smile carried forward by light and time into the frame of official memory.

Lee stood in a corner of the Gulf station on North Beckley, eight-thirty sharp, the stink of gasoline hanging low in the night. It was ninety-nine degrees. It was record-breaking heat for this date. He had a military slicker draped over his left shoulder and held a half-finished Coke in his right hand, drawn from the machine nearby, just as a reason to be here.

He kept his eye on a tan Ford turning slowly into the station and coming to a stop near the service area. It looked like a 1950 model, thereabouts. He watched Dupard get out and stand by the open door, peering. Bobby wore light-blue coveralls and a little round cap, with the words American Bakery embroidered across his shirtfront and a heavy dusting of flour on his face and clothes, whiting his eyebrows and the backs of his hands.

Lee walked toward the car, his left arm stiff beneath the slicker, the rifle held parallel to his body with the butt wedged in his armpit. They did not speak until the car was on the street, headed north, the rifle on the floor behind the seat.

"But how come, Bobby?"

"What?"

"You're in work clothes."

"I had a chance to make some overtime, which I'm forced to accept it if I'm not doing no laundry tonight."

"Am I keeping you from the laundry? Is that what this is all about?"

"I'm just saying. The chance came up. I squeezed in four extra hours."

"You can be identified. This is not a night you want to stand out."

"Nobody sees shit. We go in quick and dark. Where's the handgun?"

Lee took the. 38 out of his belt and put it on the seat between them.

"Did you get the bullets?" he said.

"Totally," Dupard said. "I got fifteen bullets I bought right off the street from some school kid. They're like two different-make bullets but they're.38 specials, so I don't foresee no problem."

"I don't foresee using them. It's just in case."

At the first red light Bobby swung out the cylinder of the gun and took six cartridges from the breast pocket of his uniform. He inserted them in the chambers.

"I'll tell you a good sign," Lee said. "I order the handgun in January, I order the rifle in March. Both guns arrive the same day. My wife would say it's fate."

"What did you tell her about tonight?"

"She thinks I'm at typing class. I dropped out of typing class two weeks ago. I got fired from my job last Saturday was my last day."