"I brought him here," Ferrie said, "to see your collection of whips and chains."
Everyone laughed.
"Clay has whips and chains, black hoods, black capes."
"For Mardi Gras," one of the young men said, and everyone laughed again.
Lee felt his smile floating in the air about six inches from his face. They stayed fifteen minutes and went out into the twilight.
"Do you believe in astrology?" Lee said.
"I believe in everything," Ferrie told him.
He took Lee to his apartment, dark rooms with broken furniture and religious objects. The bookshelves were covered in wood-grain Con-Tact paper and bowed under the weight of many hundreds of medical books, law books, encyclopedias, stacks of autopsy records, books on cancer, forensic pathology, firearms.
Barbells on the floor. A framed document on the wall, a Ph.D. in psychology from Phoenix University-Bari, Italy.
Lee used the bathroom. Amber vials of pills and capsules filled the glass trays. There were loose capsules all over the floor and in the tub. Layers of sticky filament coated the washbasin and the wall next to it-whatever kind of glue he used to attach his mohair wig.
In the living room Ferrie began speaking about his condition even before Oswald emerged from the toilet.
"It's called alopecia universalis. Of mysterious etiology and without known cure. Instead of hiding it, I adorn it, I dress it up. God made me a clown, so I clown it up. When my hair started coming out, I thought it meant imminent apocalypse, the Bomb falling on Louisiana. The Bomb would seal my authenticity, make me a saint. Fallout shelters were called family rooms of tomorrow. I was ready to live in the meanest hole. The missile crisis came. This was the purest existential moment in the history of mankind. I was completely hairless by then. Let me tell you I was ready. Push the button, Jack. The only way I could forgive Kennedy for being Kennedy was if he rained destruction down on Cuba. I bought ten cartons of canned food and let my mice go free."
Ferrie looked out the window. On the wall next to him was a picture of Jesus with eyes that track the person passing by. Feme's voice coming in a whisper now.
"Then there's the theory about high altitudes. Hair falling out so suddenly and completely. Exposure to high altitudes. Pilots have been afflicted, men who spent too much time at ultra-high altitudes, like U-2 pilots."
"Did you ever fly a U-2?"
"I can't tell you that. It's the deepest secret in the government, the names of men who fly those planes. But let me ask you a question, speaking of secrets. Why do you want a job doing undercover work for the anti-Castro movement when it's clear to me that you're a Castro partisan, a soldier for Fidel?"
He turned away from the window and looked directly at Lee, who found the only way to answer was his funny little smile.
That was how it started. Lee sat many nights on the screened porch cleaning the Mannlicher, working the bolt on the Mann-licher, after midnight, formulating plans.
He'd learned from the Militant that he could get a visa to Cuba in Mexico City, evading the travel ban. He could work for the revolution as a military adviser. An old and deep ambition. They would be happy to have an ex-Marine with progressive ideas.
He collected correspondence and put it in the spare room with all his other papers, with Castro speeches and booklets on socialist theory.
He handed out leaflets on the Dumaine Street wharf and talked to a dozen sailors about Fair Play for Cuba. A port policeman came and ordered him off.
Ferrie let him play both sides. Banister gave him a small office at 544 to store material. He hardly talked to Banister. Banister gave the impression of being hard to talk to. Lee stamped the Camp Street address on some of his material. They let him come and go.
A crazy summer. Storms shaking the city almost every afternoon. Heat lightning at night. Clouds of mosquitoes blowing in from the salt marshes. As weeks passed he sensed a change around him. People at 544 began to regard him differently-the Cubans who came and went, the young men who posed as Tulane students to collect information on left-wingers and integrationists. Lee was becoming less a curiosity or puzzle. He felt he walked in a special light. They were looking at him carefully now.
Banister's secretary thought his first name was Leon. Ferrie started calling him Leon, after Trotsky. Mistakes have this way of finding a sweet meaning.
The First Lady was pregnant, just like Marina. He read somewhere that the President liked James Bond novels. He went to the branch library on Napoleon Avenue, a little one-story brick building, and took out some Bond novels. He read that the President had acquainted himself with works by Mao Tse-tung and Che Guevara. He went to the library and got a biography of Mao. He got a biography of the President which said that Kennedy had read The White Nile. He went to the library to get The White Nile but it was out. He took The Blue Nile instead.
John F. Kennedy was a sometime poor speller with miserable handwriting.
He sat on the porch in his basketball shorts reading science fiction recommended by Ferrie. He dry-fired the Mannlicher. He still had the textbook from his typing class in Dallas and he sat some nights with the book open to a diagram of a typewriter keyboard. He practiced fingering the letters in alphabetical order-a with the left pinky, b with the left index finger, tapping the page repeatedly without looking down, as he'd been taught in class.
Marina said, "Papa, there is garbage."
He hung out at the Crescent City garage, which was next door to the coffee company where he worked. He came in wearing his electrician's belt with grease gun, screwdriver, pliers, friction tape, etc. He stretched his ten-minute breaks to half an hour, sitting in the office reading gun magazines and talking to the guy who ran the place. There were beer mugs sitting in the window, maps on the wall. He could kill ten minutes looking at a map.
The Crescent City garage had a contract with the U.S. government to keep and maintain a certain number of vehicles for use by local agencies.
Sundays the street was empty and the garage was closed and looked like an abandoned Spanish church inside the lowered grille, with light falling through the high dusty windows. This was where he met Agent Bateman, who had a key to the office. They went through the office and sat in one of the cars set aside for the Secret Service and FBI. He told Bateman what he'd learned at 544 Camp, which wasn't a hell of a lot. He wanted to use the Minox but Bateman said no, no, no, no. He gave Lee a white envelope containing a number of well-wrinkled bills, like money saved by children.
Lee insisted on knowing the informant number he'd been assigned and Bateman told him it was S-l 72. Then Lee said he wanted to apply for a passport and wondered if there might be a problem, due to his record as a defector. Bateman said he'd look into it.
Mosquitoes in swarms. He saw himself typing a paper on political theory, basing it on experience no fellow student could match, a half-eaten apple at his elbow.
When Lee has a certain look on his face, eyes kind of amused, mouth small and tight, he finds himself thinking of his father. He associates the look with his father. He believes it is a look his father may have used. It feels like his father. A curious sensation, the look coming upon him, taking hold in an unmistakable way, and then his old man is here, eerie and forceful and whole, a meeting across worlds.
"There's something I know about you, Leon, that I find fascinating. It's something almost no one else knows. Very few people know. You're the night-rider who took a shot at General Ted Walker two and a half months ago in Dallas."