"I could tell them I'm starting an organization."

"This is a thought."

"A local office, like, Fair Play for Cuba."

"This has possibilities."

"I could get pamphlets from New York in large quantities, plus application forms."

"This is promising," Bateman said. "You tell Banister you will start a chapter right here in town. This will draw pro-Castro people to your door. You'll gather names and addresses. Banister loves a good list."

"It goes round and round."

"You seem to pretend."

"But I'm not pretending."

"But you are pretending."

They ate their lunch. Bateman explained that if Guy Banister wanted to check Oswald's background, he would naturally contact the local FBI office, specifically Bateman, who would provide highly selective information. He also explained that he wasn't allowed to drink coffee. The Director had placed a ban, making the Bureau free of addictive stimulants.

"I think Banister will be interested. But don't expect funds. This would be a tiny sideline for him. I'll arrange an informant's fee of two hundred dollars a month. Out of this, you run your project. And of course you tell me what they're doing at 544 Camp Street. Because they're doing something all the time."

"I want to study politics and economics."

"You're an interesting fellow. Every agency from here to the Himalayas has something in the files on Oswald, Lee. One thing I have to be sure about. No one else shares your services. This is Bureau policy. I can't do business with an informant who has a relationship with another agency. Are we okay on that?"

"We're okay," Lee told him.

"You can carry on your politics in the open. That's the charm of the thing. And you're right around the corner from those people. Location-wise, it's perfect."

Lee took a bus down to Camp Street, the placard back in the envelope, and walked around the building several times. Streets in deep shade. No one around but winos in Lafayette Square and a woman in a long coat and heavy white socks who seemed upset that he was walking behind her. She stopped to let him pass, muttering urgently, her hand making a motion like hurry up.

Trotsky is the pure form.

The rear seat of an automobile lay in the middle of the sidewalk. A man coated in dirt and vomit was spread out there, one arm dangling, and he looked so sick or hurt or crazy it was not possible to enjoy the picture of a car seat without a car, plunked down on a sidewalk.

Trotsky brushing roaches off the page, reading economic theory in a hovel in eastern Siberia, exiled with his wife and baby girl.

On Monday, during his ten-minute break from work, he went to 544 and got an application from a secretary. The building had two entrances, two addresses. One for who you are, one for who you say you are.

He bought a Warrior-brand rubber stamping kit for ninety-eight cents. He wrote to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, asking for a charter, and before getting a reply he went to a printer, said his name was Osborne and got a thousand handbills printed. Hands Off Cuba! He stamped some with his own name, some with Hidell. Then he rented a post-office box, went to another printer, ordered application forms and membership cards. He got Marina to forge the signature A. J. Hidell in the space for chapter president and sent two honorary memberships to officials of the Central Committee, Communist Party U.S.A.

He went out in his gold shorts and thong sandals at midnight, dumping garbage in other people's cans, sometimes ranging three or four blocks before he found a can with room to spare for one more bag of bones and slop.

When he took the filled-out application back to Guy Banister Associates he saw a man at the building entrance who looked familiar. It was Captain Ferrie, the Civil Air Patrol instructor, the man who kept mice in a cage in his hotel room back about seven years ago, Lee recalled, when he and his friend Robert were tracking down a.22 for sale. Lee drew closer and saw there was something very different about the man. He seemed to have tufts of fur glued to his head, like handfuls of animal hair just pasted on. His eyebrows were high and shiny.

Ferrie seemed to be expecting him.

"You were in the office yesterday or day before. Am I right?"

"I was applying for a job part-time."

"Undercover work. I heard your voice. I said to myself I know that voice. Another lost cadet come back to Cap'n Dave."

They laughed, standing in the entranceway. A car stopped suddenly and pigeons fired up from the square across the street.

"Isn't life fantastic?" Ferrie said.

The Fair Play Committee discouraged him from opening a branch office. But they were nice and polite and made spelling mistakes and anyway the important thing was the correspondence itself. He would keep everything. These were his papers. When the time came he would be able to present Cuban officials with documentary proof that he was a friend of the revolution.

Besides he didn't need New York's backing to open an office. He had his rubber stamping kit. All he had to do was stamp the committee's initials on a handbill or piece of literature. Stamp some numbers and letters. This makes it true.

David Ferrie took him to the Habana Bar, a gloom palace near the waterfront. Open round the clock, Latin rhythms on the juke box, people with a look about them of chronic absenteeism, some failure to cohere-exiles, cargo handlers, seamen without papers, half a dozen amorphous others, mainly solitary men sitting well spaced at the long bar.

Ferrie and Oswald took a table.

"The man who runs this place is involved with the Cuban Revolutionary Council."

"Which side are they?" Lee said.

"Don't you want to take a guess?"

"The look of this place."

"Sadder than shit."

"Anti-Castro."

"The Feebees come in here to talk to him about who's who in the movement. They don't know what they're doing otherwise. They see a Mex kid with a butch haircut and think he's a Cuban warrior."

"Where did you get that word?"

"Feebees? That's my word. A long-time word of mine."

"I thought it was my word."

"You must have heard it from me," Ferrie said. "This happens all the time. People think they invent things they actually heard from me. I have a way of creeping into people's minds. I get inside people's minds."

A nasal voice, sinuously trailing the question of whether it ought to be believed.

"We have definite ESP, you and I. It probably covers years and continents. Have you ever lived outside the U.S.?"

Lee nodded.

"We probably had each other in range all that time. I want to experiment with remote hypnotism. Hypnotism over the phone or on TV. A fantastic political weapon. Some woman is after me for so-called hypnotizing her son so I could orally stimulate his geniials. I give flying lessons to boys at Lakefront,"

Ferrie took him to visit a man who lived in a restored carriage house on Dauphine Street, behind a high white wall with a red door in the middle of it. His name was Clay Shaw and he was tall and middle-aged, with a sculptured head and striking white hair. He stood in the middle of the large room that occupied the entire main floor. Silk curtains, bronzework, cork floors covered with Oriental rugs. Two young men were seated, alert and bright as weathercocks.

"When is your birthday?" Shaw said first thing.

"October eighteen," Lee said.

"Libra. A Libran."

"The Scales," Ferrie said.

"The Balance," Shaw said.

It seemed to tell them everything they had to know.

Clay Shaw wore well-made casual clothes and had the easy manner of someone clearly educated to all the right things. When he smiled, a vein seemed to flash from the corner of his right eye to his hairline.

He said, "We have the positive Libran who has achieved self-mastery. He is well balanced, levelheaded, a sensible fellow respected by all. We have the negative Libran who is, let's say, somewhat unsteady and impulsive. Easily, easily, easily influenced. Poised to make the dangerous leap. Either way, balance is the key."