Lee's mind went blank.

"I can't tell you how I know," Ferrie said. "But there are men who are interested in you. At first I only played a hunch. I thought Leon and I, we have a psychic bond. I took your application to Banister. I had an argument all set. I would say to Guy, 'Here is a man who wants to spy on our operations. He wants to use us but we will end up using him. Not through manipulation or political conversion. He believes in his heart that he's a dedicated leftist. But he is also a Libran. He is capable of seeing the other side. He is a man who harbors contradictions.' I was ready to say to Guy, 'Here's a Marine recruit who reads Karl Marx.' I was ready to say, 'This boy is sitting on the scales, ready to be tilted either way.''

Lee finished off his beer.

"But I didn't have to present an argument at all. All I had to do was say your name. Banister was eager to grab you and hold on. Turns out he'd been making inquiries about you on behalf of an old buddy of his. A fellow named Mackey. You were lost. Nobody knew where you went after Dallas. Guy cracked his meanest smile when I told him you were greasing coffee machines right around the corner and wanted to join our staff. He picked up the telephone. 'Look what I found.'"

Ferrie ordered two more beers and said, "You are the object of some intense scrutiny. Banister doesn't know the exact nature of the role being planned for you. But it's only a matter of time before he finds out."

Three, four, half a dozen Cubans sat around the Habana tonight in camo T-shirts and pants, boots stained with dry white mud.

"Are you afraid you'll get caught for Walker? You never mentioned Dallas to'me."

"I never mention it to anyone."

"You think they'll know. All you have to do is say the word Dallas and everyone will know. Prison is terrifying. The first thing they do when they arrest a man is look up his ass."

"I found that out in the Marines."

"They look up your ass before they know your name. It's like some Pygmy ritual in the Congo."

Lee could not drink more than a single beer without feeling funny.

"Do you practice a religion? Do you go to church?"

"I'm an atheist."

"That's dumb," Ferrie told him. "How could you be so stupid?"

"Religion just holds us back. It's an arm of the state."

"Dumb. Shortsighted. You have to understand there are things that run deeper than politics. Our political skin is just the thinnest outer crust. I was brought up a Catholic in Cleveland." Feme's eyes went comically wide as if the remark had taken him by surprise. "Penance was the major sacrament of my adolescence. I used to haunt the confession boxes. I went from one to the other. It felt more like a sin than a way of absolving sin. There was a real sneaky pleasure there. I told my sins, I made up sins, I said my act of contrition, I went to the altar rail and said my penance and then I got back in line again. On Saturday afternoon four confessionals were going full-blast. I made the circuit. Kneeling in the dark and whispering my sins to a man in skirts. I went to seminaries, twice, to learn the trade. Even started my own church. Only a fool rejects the need to see beyond the screen."

Lee went to the men's room and stood there with a static around him, like space is crisscrossed with gray lines. He stood for two minutes in the middle of the room. When he got back to the table, Ferrie started right in.

"Didn't Kennedy know how big Cuba is? Didn't anyone tell him you can't invade an island that size with fifteen hundred men?"

"Cuba is little."

"Cuba is big. Why did he consent to an invasion if he didn't mean to follow through? Why did he promise us a military victory and then back off? Because he lost his nerve. He muted everything. He soft-pedaled it. He wanted an invasion that was subtle. It's a wonder Castro realized he was under attack."

"Cuba is little."

"I'll tell you what rankles," Ferrie said, "and this is something I hear every day from Guy. Guy feels strongly about this. He thinks Kennedy and Castro are talking to each other. They're writing secret letters, they're sending emissaries back and forth. Friendly overtures. There's something they aren't telling us. Something we don't know about. There's more to it. There's always more to it. This is what history consists of. It's the sum total of all the things they aren't telling us."

Lee got in a shoving match out on the street with some Latin type who had pockmarks and a dangling silver cross. He didn't know how it started. Even gripping the man's biceps and talking into his face, he couldn't remember how the thing got started. A few people stood around mainly for lack of other amusement. Then he was home in bed.

He read gun magazines in the garage office. One of the coffee heads would appear in the door and tell him he'd better get back. Back to the motors and blowers, the hoppers, grinders, conveyor belts.

His passport arrived the day after he applied.

He walked into the spare room at home and thought some things had been moved. It couldn't be Marina, who had orders to stay out. He inspected his papers, checked the closet where he kept his guns. Something was different, an invisible whispery difference, like when you know a thing deeply in a dream without knowing how or why.

A woman who looks Seminole somehow, squat-headed, whatever they look like, he doesn't really know, comes walking out of a crowd in the French market nearly scaring him with the strange flat eyes of some burning saint.

He remained the only member of the Fair Play for Cuba chapter in New Orleans. Didn't mean a thing. Summer was building toward a vision, a history. He felt he was being swept up, swept along, done with being a pitiful individual, done with isolation.

Marina pushed the stroller along their street. She tried to read the street names set into the sidewalk in light-blue tile.

Would he try to send his wife and baby to Russia or would they all go to little Cuba, where there was a purer socialism and a true joy among the people?

Last night she got up for a glass of water at 2:00 A.M. and found him sitting on the porch in his underwear with the rifle across his lap.

He had nosebleeds in the night. Once she watched his body shake for half an hour.,

She made him translate magazine stories about the Kennedys. He didn't mind doing it and sometimes added details not in the stories.

In pictures taken near the sea, with the wind ruffling his hair, the President looked like her old boyfriend Anatoly, who had unruly hair and kissed her in a way that made her dizzy.

Lee didn't wash for days at a time. He wore the same clothes and told her not to mend his socks or patch the elbows of threadbare sweaters. This was a complete turnabout. Here I am, he seemed to say. Look at what the system stamps out.

She knew, she was absolutely certain that Mrs. Kennedy would give birth to a boy. It was sure to be a boy, she told Lee, and then they would have a boy themselves, soon after.

She was ashamed to confess she was a woman of moods.

She was pregnant like Mrs. Kennedy but had not been examined by a doctor yet. Lee took her to Charity Hospital, a massive gray building that looked like a place you entered only once, never to emerge. In the marble lobby were enormous portraits of doctors in robes, doctors with the sky behind them, men with more important things on their mind than the gall bladder and kidneys. The trouble started at the information booth. A woman told Lee this was a state hospital and people could be treated free only if they'd been Louisiana residents for a certain period. Marina had not been living here long enough.

All that marble. It made her feel like a refugee. Lee followed a doctor down the corridor, almost begging. He picked up another doctor coming back this way, pleading and arguing at the same time, his face twisted and pale.