They worked the gun out of his hand and were trying to get the cuffs on. The rows were bursting with police. They gave him a little roughing up.
When they had him in handcuffs they moved him into the aisle. There were cops still banging their knees on the edges of seats, picking up their caps and flashlights. They took him out to the lobby, quick-time, pressing around him.
Wayne heard Leon's voice going out the door, "Police, police brutality."
There was a moment when the patrons didn't know what to do. Then the ones who were standing returned to their seats. Somebody called, up front, "Lights." Another guy tilted his head sideways and up, saying, "Lights, lights." They all waited in their seats, hearing the sirens go into the distance. They tried clapping hands. Then Wayne spoke up, "Lights, lights." And in fifteen seconds the house lights went down and the picture shot onto the screen.
The men settled down contentedly. Wayne felt the mood close around them, the satisfied air of resumption. It wasn't just this picture to see to the end. There was a second feature coming up, called War Is Hell.
The prisoner stood inside the jail elevator, which was sealed to ordinary traffic. Four detectives edged in tight, rangy men in dark suits and ties, high-crowned Western hats, their faces closed to interpretation.
The media crowds collected and rocked in the corridors. They were waiting for the prisoner to come down to the interrogation room here on the third floor of the Police and Courts Building. TV cameras sat on dollies and there were cables slung over windowsills, trailing through the offices of deputy chiefs. Nobody checked credentials. Reporters took over the phones and pushed into toilets after police officials. Total unknowns walked the halls, defendants from other parts of the building, witnesses to other crimes, tourists, muttering men, drunks in torn shirts. It was a roughhouse, a con-foundment. Every rumor flew. Disk jockeys arrived to fill in, blinking, flinching, wary. A reporter wrote notes on a pad he balanced on the back of the chief of police.
They set up a chant. "Let us see him, bring him down. Let us see him, bring him down."
Hours going by. Blank faces arrayed against corridor walls. Men crouched near the elevators waiting. They sensed the incompleteness out there, gaps, spaces, vacant seats, lobbies emptied out, disconnections, dark cities, stopped lives. People were lonely for news. Only news could make them whole again, restore sensation. Three hundred reporters in a compact space, all pushing to extract a word. A word is a magic wish. A word from anyone. With a word they could begin to grid the world, make an instant surface that people can see and touch together. Ringing phones, near-brawls, smoke in their eyes, a deathliness, a hanging woe. Is Connally alive? Is Johnson safe? Has SAC gone to full alert? They began to feel isolated inside this old municipal lump of Texas gray granite. They were hearing their own reports on the radios and portable TVs. But what did they really know? The news was somewhere else, at Parkland Hospital or on Air Force One, in the mind of the prisoner on the fifth floor.
Someone said he's coming. A kind of clustered stirring, like riled bees. Then formal jostling across the floor, a grab for position. When he appeared in the elevator door, a slight man in handcuffs, with a puffed eye and stubble, they went a little crazy. Stooped photographers moving backwards, hand mikes shooting out of the crowd, everybody shouting, reaching toward him. A howl, a passion washing through the corridor. Newsreel cameras floated over the heads of the men escorting him. They had to throw some elbows, working him toward the door of the interrogation room. One eye puffed, a cut over the other, his shirt hanging loose. He resembled a guy who comes out of a doorway to bum a smoke. But a protective defiance, an unyielding in his face. The flash units fired. TV floodlights cooked the nearest heads. The reporters stared and wailed. It was hard to breathe in the ruck around the prisoner. They looked at him. They all cried out.
"Why did you kill the President?"
"Why did you kill the President?"
He said he was being denied the right to take a shower. Denied his basic hygienic rights. The escorts worked him to the office door.
Questioned, arraigned, displayed in lineups. He felt the heat of the corridor mobs every time he got off the elevator, the actual roil of moist air. Assassin, assassin.
In his cell he thought about the ways he could play it. He could play it either way. It all depended on what they knew.
He had the middle cell in the maximum-security block in the jail area. They kept the cells on either side of him empty. There were two guards on constant watch in the locked corridor.
Every time they brought him back to the cell, they made him take off his clothes. He sat in the cell in his underwear. They were afraid he'd use his clothes to harm himself.
A bunk bed, a chipped sink, a sloped hole in the floor. No flush toilet. He had to use a hole.
They stared up his ass. They came and shaved some hair from his genitals, two men from the FBI, placing the samples carefully in plastic baggies.
The revolution must be a school of unfettered thought.
In the interrogation room there were Dallas police, Secret Service, FBI, Texas Rangers, county sheriffs, postal inspectors, a U.S. marshal. No tape recorder or stenographer.
No, he didn't own a rifle.
No, he hadn't shot anyone.
He was not the man in the photograph they'd found in Ruth Paine's garage-the man with a rifle, a pistol and left-wing journals. The photograph was obviously doctored. They'd taken his head and superimposed it on someone else's body. He told them he'd worked for a graphic-arts firm and had personal knowledge of these techniques. The only thing in the picture that belonged to him was the face and they'd gotten it somewhere else.
He denied knowing an A. J. Hidell.
No, he'd never been to Mexico City.
No, he wouldn't take a polygraph.
They asked him if he believed in a deity. He told them he was a Marxist. But not a Marxist-Leninist.
It was pretty clear they didn't get the distinction. Whenever they took him down, he heard his name on the radios and TVs. Lee Harvey Oswald. It sounded extremely strange. He didn't recognize himself in the full intonation of the name. The only time he used his middle name was to write it on a form that had a space for that purpose. No one called him by that name. Now it was everywhere. He heard it coming from the walls. Reporters called it out. Lee Harvey Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald. It sounded odd and dumb and made up. They were talking about somebody else.
The men in Stetsons took him back through the crowds to the jail elevator. He held his cuffed hands high, making a fist. Flashbulbs and hoarse cries. They kept shouting questions, shouting right over his answers. The elevator climbed to the cell block.
In the clink. Back in stir. Up the river. In the big house. Lights flicker when they pull the switch. So long, Ma.
Rain-slick streets.
Courses at night in economic theory.
He sat in the cell and waited for the next event. He knew it was late. He pictured Ruth Paine's street, the lawns and sycamores. Was Marina in bed, scared, sorry, thinking she might have shown him more respect, seen the seriousness of his ideas? He wanted to call her. He pictured her reaching for the phone, a drowsy arm warm from the sheets, and the trustful mumbled hello, her eyes still closed.
Never think it is your fault when I am the one. I am always the one.
Now they were coming to take him down again. He believed they would release him once he settled on the right story to tell them. The way the Russians released Francis Gary Powers. The way they released the Yale professor they arrested for spying. Trumped-up charges. Screw is slang for prison guard.