“You don’t drink with me. You don’t tell me where the hell you’re staying.”
“I leave tomorrow.”
“Where to?”
“The Farm.”
“Must be a great life, showing kids from Swarthmore how to break a chinaman’s neck.”
“It’s an assignment.”
“It’s a fucking shame, that’s what it is, T-Jay, a man like you, who risked his life. This Kennedy, he has things to answer for. First he launches an invasion without adequate air support, then he makes the movement pay for it. He’s got people raiding our guerrilla bases, seizing arms shipments all over.”
“What am I here for? You’ve had time, Guy.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“You’ve got more guns than the Mexican army.”
“There’s priorities,” Banister said. “It’s looking like a busy summer we got coming.”
“I’ll need to see some money. Upkeep, monthly payments, a healthy severance.”
“How many men?”
“Let’s say several. Plus I may need a pilot.”
“He’ll walk in the door in ten minutes.”
“Goddamn.”
“Calm down.”
“Not him.”
“Never mind appearances or what he says for effect. Ferrie’s a capable son of a bitch. He can fly a plane backwards. He has first-rate contacts. He does work for Carmine Latta’s lawyer. He goes out to Latta’s house and comes back with money in fucking duffel bags. It’s all for the cause. He can lease a small plane, no questions asked, no records kept. Right now I’ve got him looking for a C-47 which I want to use to ship explosives out of here.”
Banister opened the desk drawer again, took out a fifth of Early Times and reached back to snatch two coffee mugs from a shelf.
“I’m sending select items to one of our staging areas in the Keys,” he said. “Rifle grenades, land mines, dynamite, antitank guns, mortar shells. Listen to this: canisters of napalm.”
Mackey noted the look in that silvery eye. Banister’s rage toward the administration was partly a reaction to public life itself, to men who glow in the lens barrel of a camera. Kennedy magic, Kennedy charisma. His hatred had a size to it, a physical force. It was the thing that kept him going after career disappointments, bad health, a forced retirement. Mackey briefly met his eye. So many meanings crowded in, memories, sadnesses, convictions, lost Cuba, Cuba to come—a moment so humanly dense, rich in associations, such deep readings, the power of things unsaid, that T-Jay looked away. They were entertaining too many of the same thoughts.
“Where did you get the hardware?”
“A bunker in the woods. We put the key in the lock and there it was.”
“Who arranged that?” Mackey said.
“It’s a CIA weapons cache. Stuff never used at the Bay of Pigs. Which I assume you know.”
“I don’t know much these days.”
“We have recruits coming in all the time. They want another crack at Fidel. We train them at a camp not far from here. We’ve had no problems up to now, knock fucking wood, which is something I personally see to, working it out with the feds. But this Kennedy, he’s making all kinds of moves against us. Did you know he’s got exile leaders restricted to Dade County? They can’t travel out of the county. He’s normalizing with Castro. He’s dealing with the Soviets. They got a deal cooking. Cuba is guaranteed communist. From which Jack gets a second term unmolested by Moscow. He is interested in his own protection and security, which I believe he is correct in wishing to increase.”
He poured the bourbon.
“What about the thing in Dallas,” he said, “a couple of weeks ago?”
“The Walker shooting.”
“Did they catch the nigger that did it?”
Mackey caught the sly tone of the older man’s voice. Walker had been consuming news space like a movie star in a fever of insecurity. Being shot at over a backyard fence by a sniper on tiptoes, and missed, was just about the perfect payoff Mackey could imagine for a certain kind of fame. It reduced the man to the status of casual target for some gun-toting Mr. Magoo.
“Now, assuming I can come up with the rifles.”
“Plus scopes.”
“What do I do with them?”
“Hold them,” Mackey said.
“Who are we talking about here?”
“Keep them absolutely secure and ready.”
“What is the subject of this meeting? Because I have to know there’s complete trust between us. ”
“You do know. Take my word. Or I wouldn’t be here.”
“Don’t make me feel I’m getting too old for certain operations. This is my trade. There’s only one subject for people like us.”
Paint flakes on the desktop and floor, steel cabinets covered in dust. Inside the cabinets were Banister’s intelligence records. He kept files on people who volunteered for the anti-Castro groups in the area. He kept microfilmed records of left-wing activity in Louisiana. He had the names of known communists. He had material supplied by the FBI on Castro agents and sympathizers. Mackey had seen handbooks on guerrilla tactics, back issues of a racist magazine Guy published. There were files on other organizations renting space at 544 Camp, past and present, including the Cuban Revolutionary Council, an alliance of anti-Castro groups put together by the CIA with Banister’s help.
“People like us,” he said to Mackey, “we have this dilemma we have to face. Serious men deprived of an outlet. Once we’re pushed out, how do we retire to a chair on the lawn? Everyday lawful pursuits don’t meet our special requirements.” He laughed happily. “For twenty-some-odd years in the Bureau I lived in a special society that pretty much satisfied the most serious things in my nature. Secrets to trade and keep, certain dangers, an opportunity to function in tight spots, wave a gun in people’s faces. That’s a charmed society. If you’ve got criminal tendencies, and I’m not saying this is true of you or me, one of the places to make your mark is law enforcement.” A short happy laugh. “How much of my manhood is watery puke? That’s what I want to know. I was involved in the Dillinger case, earliest days of my career. Public enemy number one. Famous finish, got him coming out of a movie house in Chicago, sweltering night, the Biograph. I was with the Office of Naval Intelligence in the war, just like young Jack Kennedy.” He took a swallow. “Spy work, undercover work, we invent a society where it’s always wartime. The law has a little give.”
He set the mug of bourbon to one side and ran his hand over the newspapers and files to find his cigarettes.
“In John Birch,” he said, “we have a hundred thousand members. Way out of hand. Then there’s General Ted Walker going on tour with the Reverend Billy James Hargis, coast to coast, in ten-gallon hats. The Minutemen are leaner, move close to the ground. But there’s a fervor I don’t trust. They’re waiting for the Day. They’ve got their ammo clips hidden in the garage and they know the Day is fast approaching. They get their politics all mixed up with the second coming of Christ. I respect your methods, T-Jay. You want a unit that’s small, tight and mobile. None of these bullshit mailing lists. You don’t want theory and debate. Just impact. Two or three men to do serious things.”
David Ferrie walked in wearing an undersized panama hat and a turtleneck shirt with a drooping collar. To Mackey, who’d met him once before, he had a look of sad apology, like a man who’d betrayed a public trust. (Banister claimed he was a defrocked priest.) He moved in a languid glide, loafers slapping.
He said to Banister, “Shouldn’t be drinking this time of day.”
“What do we have in the storeroom?”
Ferrie glanced at T-Jay.
“Some old, old Springfields. Thirty-aught-six. I mean old. We have M-1s, a whole raft of Yugoslav Mausers with markings stamped in Russian if that impresses you. We have some M-4s out by Lacombe. I burnt off a magazine only yesterday. ”
“Where do we keep our scopes?” Banister said.
“Most of the scopes and mounts are out at the camp. We have some extra-long target scopes stored here. Of course it depends on what you want to shoot. Hairy big game like Fidel, you want a wide field of view because he’s always in motion. The fact is I used to admire Dr. Castro, secretly. A brief moment only. I wanted to fight by his side.”
His voice was whispered, incredulous; something about the curious paths of his own life caused him endless surprise. The face itself was disbelieving, the stark pasted brows looped high over his pale eyes. Nothing he said could be separated from the eerie facts of his appearance, least of all, apparently, by Ferrie himself.
“Where would you park a light plane below the border?” Mackey said. “Figure you’re leaving home in a hurry.”
“I’d point her right on down to Matamoros. Below Brownsville. There’s a field there. You want to go deeper into Mexico, you can play hopscotch on dry lakes. Avoid populated areas entirely.”
“No offense. How old are you?”
“Forty-five. Perfect astronaut age. I’m the dark scary side of John Glenn. Great health except for the cancer eating at my brain.”
“You’ll die violently,” Banister said.
“I want to believe it.”
“A nacho stuck in your throat.”
“I speak Spanish,” Ferrie said, amazed to hear it.
He went into the small room behind the office, where Delphine Roberts was compiling one of the lists that someone in the firm was always gathering material for. Delphine was Banister’s secretary and research aide, a nailed-down American, middle-aged, with airy spraywork hair.
“These are supposed to be runless stockings,” she said.
“Everything is supposed to be something. But it never is. That’s the nature of existence.”
“I know. You studied philosophy where was it.”
“Did you eat lunch?”
“I’m back on Metrecal.”
“But you’re a wisp, Delphine.”
He turned on the little TV.
“Why do you think a Negro would want to be a communist?” she said, running a finger down the list. “Isn’t it enough for them being colored? Why would they want a communistic tinge added on?”
“Are you saying why be greedy?”
“I’m saying don’t they have enough trouble. Besides, if you’re colored, you can’t be anything else.”
She worked at a Formica desk by the window. A cardboard shirt support was taped over a hole in the screen.
“I priced a bomb shelter last week,” Ferrie told her.
“It’s not the bombs coming out of the sky I worry about. The missile crisis came and went. It’s the troops that will just appear one quiet morning, armies landing on the beaches, paratroops dropping through the clouds. Guy received a report that the Red Chinese are massing troops in Baja California. ”
“I have private torments, Delphine. They require something larger than an army.”
They were watching As the World Turns. Ferrie sat in a folding chair with his legs crossed. He took off his hat and placed it on his right kneecap.
“I say to myself, I wonder why Delphine comes to this rat-trap office every day. A woman like her. With a background and so forth. A real pretty house on Coliseum Street. Social niceties, let’s say. The DAR.”
“This is the real work of the nation. What could I accomplish in the City Council or some ladies’ group? Guy Banister is the vanguard of what is going on in this country, so far as actually making an impact. Recruiting, training, collecting information. I feel like this is a contribution I can make that I couldn’t do in the normal ways, through committee work and so forth.”
She glanced at Ferrie’s faded red toupee, an object that resembled some windblown piece of street debris. She looked at the sloped forehead, the somewhat Roman profile, eagle-beaked, oddly impressive despite the man’s overgrown ears, the clownish aspects of his appearance. In fact she’d seen the profile before she ever met Ferrie. There was a mug shot in Banister’s files. It commemorated two arrests in 1961, in Jefferson Parish, for what were officially described as crimes against nature.
They watched TV.
“Dave, what do you believe in?”
“Everything. My own death most of all.”
“Do you wish for it?”
“I feel it. I’m a walking sandwich board for cancer.”
“But you talk about it so readily.”
“What choice do I have?” he said.
On the screen two women commenced a dialogue in slow and measured movements, over coffee, with solemn pauses for hurt and angry looks. Delphine went back to her work, trying to listen past the TV set to the voices in the next room, the remote and private drone that fixed the limits of her afternoons.
“Why are homosexuals addicted to soap opera?” Ferrie said absently. “Because our lives are a vivid situation.”
Delphine fell forward in bawdy laughter. Her upper body shot toward the desk, hands gripping the edges to steady her. She sat there rocking, a great and spacious amusement. David Ferrie was surprised. He didn’t know he’d said something funny. He thought the remark was melancholy, sadly philosophical, a throwaway line for an aimless afternoon. Not that this was the first time Delphine had reacted so broadly to something he said. She considered his mildest comic remarks automatically outrageous. She had two kinds of laughter. Lewd and bawdy and abandoned, the required worldly response to Ferrie’s sexual status, her sense of a kind of anal lore that informed the sources of his humor. Softer laughter for Banister, throaty, knowing, wanting to be led, rustling with complicities, little whispery places in her voice, a laughter you could not hear without knowing they were lovers.
“It’s not just Kennedy himself,” Banister was saying on the other side of the door. “It’s what people see in him. It’s the glowing picture we keep getting. He actually glows in most of his photographs. We’re supposed to believe he’s the hero of the age. Did you ever see a man in such a hurry to be great? He thinks he can make us a different kind of society. He’s trying to engineer a shift. We’re not smart enough for him. We’re not mature, energetic, Harvard, world traveler, rich, handsome, lucky, witty. Perfect white teeth. It fucking grates on me just to look at him. Do you know what charisma means to me? It means he holds the secrets. The dangerous secrets used to be held outside the government. Plots, conspiracies, secrets of revolution, secrets of the end of the social order. Now it’s the government that has a lock on the secrets that matter. All the danger is in the White House, from nuclear weapons on down. What’s he plotting with Castro? What kind of back channel does he have working with the Soviets? He touches a phone and worlds shake. There’s not the slightest doubt in my mind but that a movement exists in the executive branch of the government which is totally devoted to furthering the communist cause. Strip the man of his powerful secrets. Take his secrets and he’s nothing.”