The Curator sends autopsy photos of Oswald. Nicholas Branch feels obliged to study them, although he doesn’t know what he can possibly learn here. There are the open eyes, the large wound in the left side, the two ridges of heavy stitching that meet beneath the clavicle and descend in one line to the genital area, forming the letter Y. The left eye is swiveled toward the camera, watching.
The Curator sends the results of ballistics tests carried out on human skulls and goat carcasses, on blocks of gelatin mixed with horsemeat. There are photographs of skulls with the right cranial portion blown away. There are bullet-shattered goat heads in close-up. Branch studies a picture of a gelatin-tissue model “dressed” like the President. It is pure modernist sculpture, a block of gelatin layered in suit and shirt material with a strip of undershirt showing, bullet-smoked. There are documents concerning exit velocities. There is a picture of a human skull filled with gelatin and covered with goatskin to simulate a scalp.
The Curator sends FBI memos concerning the President’s brain, which has been missing from the National Archives for over twenty years.
He sends an actual warped bullet that has been fired for test purposes through the wrist of a seated cadaver. We are on another level here, Branch thinks. Beyond documents now. They want me to
touch and smell.
He doesn’t know why they are sending him this particular grisly material after all these years. Shattered bone and horror. That’s all it means to him. There is nothing to understand, no insights to be had from these pictures and statistics, from this melancholy bullet with its nose leveled and spread like a penny left on trolley tracks. (How old he is.) The bloody goat heads seem to mock him. He begins to think this is the point. They are rubbing his face in the blood and gunk. They are mocking him. They are saying in effect, “Here, look, these are the true images. This is your history. Here is a blown-out skull for you to ponder. Here is lead penetrating bone.”
They are saying, “Look, touch, this is the true nature of the event. Not your beautiful ambiguities, your lives of the major players, your compassions and sadnesses. Not your roomful of theories, your museum of contradictory facts. There are no contradictions here. Your history is simple. See, the man on the slab. The open eye staring. The goat head oozing rudimentary matter.”
They are saying, “This is what it looks like to get shot.”
How can Branch forget the contradictions and discrepancies? These are the soul of the wayward tale. One of the first documents he examined was the medical report on Pfc. Oswald’s self-inflicted gunshot wound. In one sentence the weapon is described as 45-caliber. In the next sentence it is 22-caliber. Facts are lonely things. Branch has seen how a pathos comes to cling to the firmest fact.
Oswald’s eyes are gray, they are blue, they are brown. He is five feet nine, five feet ten, five feet eleven. He is right-handed, he is left-handed. He drives a car, he does not. He is a crack shot and a dud. Branch has support for all these propositions in eyewitness testimony and commission exhibits.
Oswald even looks like different people from one photograph to the next. He is solid, frail, thin-lipped, broad-featured, extroverted, shy and bank-clerkish, all, with the columned neck of a fullback. He looks like everybody. In two photos taken in the military he is a grim killer and a baby-face hero. In another photo he sits in profile with a group of fellow Marines on a rattan mat under palm trees. Four or five men face the camera. They all look like Oswald. Branch thinks they look more like Oswald than the figure in profile, officially identified as him.
The Oswald shadings, the multiple images, the split perceptions—eye color, weapons caliber—these seem a foreboding of what is to come. The endless fact-rubble of the investigations. How many shots, how many gunmen, how many directions? Powerful events breed their own network of inconsistencies. The simple facts elude authentication. How many wounds on the President’s body? What is the size and shape of the wounds? The multiple Oswald reappears. Isn’t that Ann in a photograph of a crowd of people on the front steps of the Book Depository just as the shooting begins? A startling likeness, Branch concedes. He concedes everything. He questions everything, including the basic suppositions we make about our world of light and shadow, solid objects and ordinary sounds, and our ability to measure such things, to determine weight, mass and direction, to see things as they are, recall them clearly, be able to say what happened.
He takes refuge in his notes. The notes are becoming an end in themselves. Branch has decided it is premature to make a serious effort to turn these notes into coherent history. Maybe it will always be premature. Because the data keeps coming. Because new lives enter the record all the time. The past is changing as he writes.
Every name takes him on a map tour of the Dallas labyrinth.
Jack Ruby was born Jacob Rubenstein. He adopted the middle name Leon to honor the memory of a friend, Leon Cooke, shot to death in a labor dispute.
There are several versions of George de Mohrenschildt’s name. He sometimes used the alias Philip Harbin.
Carmine Latta was born Carmelo Rosario Lattanzi.
Walter Everett used the cover name Thomas R. Stainback during his years in clandestine work.
Lee Oswald used about a dozen names including the backward-running O. H. Lee and the peculiar D. F. Drictal. He employed the latter in the blank space for Witness when he filled out an order form for the revolver he purchased through the mail. Branch has toiled over the inner structure of D. F. Drictal for many an hour. He feels like a child with alphabet blocks, trying to make a pretty word, and he has managed to find fragments of the names Fidel, Castro, Oswald and Dupard. It may be that D. F. Drictal is the strained merging of written and living characters, of words and politics, a witness to the decision to assassinate General Walker. Branch wonders whether Oswald registered the fact that the general’s first name and middle initial match those of Edwin A. Ekdahl, young Lee’s stepfather for a time and the man Marguerite Oswald never stopped blaming.
The Dallas disc jockey known as Weird Beard was Russell Lee Moore, who also used the name Russ Knight.
The man calling himself Aleksei Kirilenko, a KGB cover name, was in fact Sergei Broda, according to records supplied by the Curator.
After repeated requests, Branch has learned from the Curator that Theodore J. Mackey, known as T-Jay, was born Joseph Michael Horniak and was last seen in Norfolk, Virginia, January 1964, in the company of a suspected prostitute, possibly of Asian extraction, name unknown.
Mackey sat in the car listening to Frank Vásquez. Frank was excited and tired. He said everything three times and quoted Alpha leaders completely, precisely and with gestures. The two men were surrounded by swamp night, the car sitting downstream from the shack, lights off, the banjo frogs getting up a racket.
Frank’s judgment was that Alpha planned to kill the President. He seemed to think Mackey would have trouble believing this. But it was easy to believe. Mackey believed everything these days including how simple it was for Frank to walk into Alpha’s camp and out again, carrying every kind of rumor and news.
Alpha was not known for shyness or tight security. They held press conferences to announce their raids on Cuban installations and Soviet freighters. Once they invited a Life photographer on a raid, ten men in two boats. A storm ruined the mission and the pictures but Life did a story anyway. Brave boys of Alpha. South Florida was full of Alpha members, uncounted, devout, screaming in their teeth.
“And this is what you also planned, all this time, T-Jay, to get Kennedy?”
“It’s just his time has come.”
“I don’t think we kill an American president so easy. Miami, they’ll have extra protection. This is not like walking into some little capital city, walking into the palace, buying off some bodyguards with a few dollars.”
“The barrier is down, Frank. When Jack sent out word to get Castro, he put himself in a world of blood and pain. Nobody told him he had to live there. He made the choice with his brother Bobby. So it’s Jack’s own idea we’re guided by. And once an idea hits.”
“Not that I don’t wish to see it happen.”
“Oh I think it will.”
“Someone has to pay for Cuba.”
“You and I demand it, Frank.”
“And it will point to Castro. They will say here is the source. He sent the men.”
“This is what we’re looking for. But even so, if all the gears don’t mesh, at least we have our man. Someone has to die. It is very much a part of our thinking that Jack is the one.”
“This is like Alpha. Someone has to die, they say.”
“They can’t contain it anymore.”
“Do we go in with them?”
“I say why not, Frank.”
“Do you trust them to run it?”
“They cross the water to blow up Russian shipping. What the hell. This is a man in an open car.”
Frank needed to get some sleep.
“Who’s in the camp?” he said.
“Raymo and Wayne and a visitor. You don’t say too much to him. Smile nice, shake hands.”
Oswald wanted his path to be tracked and his name to be known. He had private designs, a hero’s safe haven in Cuba. He wanted to use the rifle that could be traced to him through the transparent Hidell. Mackey was cautious. The kid had a dizzying history and he was playing some kind of mirror game with Ferrie in New Orleans. Left is right and right is left. But he continued to fit the outline that Everett had devised six months earlier. There were the homemade documents, the socialist literature, the weapons and false names. He was one element of the original plan that still made sense.
Mackey trained the headlights on the skiff. Frank climbed in and switched on the deer lamp and the boat moved quietly through the duckweed and past the sunken trees.
Mackey sat in the dark again.
Some of Alpha’s boldest operations were run by elements hidden in the Agency. Alpha had CIA mentors. These were men Mackey wasn’t even close to knowing. They weren’t necessarily known to the leaders of Alpha. A case officer would show up to provide money and to advise on sabotage missions. He would limit his contacts to one or two men in Alpha. They would not know his real name or his position in the Agency. There’s always something they aren’t letting you know. Alpha was run like a dream clinic. The Agency worked up a vision, then got Alpha to make it come true.
Too many people, too many levels of plotting. Mackey had to safeguard the attempt not only from Alpha but from Everett and Parmenter. They might decide to expose the plan now that he’d removed himself from contact, leaving them to their hieroglyphics. Then Banister and Ferrie and the men dealing out the cash. He had to protect the attempt, make it safe from betrayal.
He waved a hand at the persistent hum that jumped around his ear. A mosquito is a vector of disease. He got out of the car and listened. Something felt strange. Then he heard a vast rustling in the trees, coming louder with the wind. It took him some time to realize it was only water tapping on the leaves, rainwater stirred by the wind and falling leaf to leaf, everywhere around him.
His own car was parked next to Raymo’s. It was a three-hour drive to New Orleans, where he would talk to Banister about Alpha 66. Let everyone know. Let everyone tell everyone.
Mackey would put every effort into Miami. He would put men and weapons into Miami. Agree to a joint operation with Alpha. Do the groundwork. Get people and money moving. Eighteen November in Miami. He would build a Miami façade.
In New Orleans
The first thing he did was take a bus to the end of the Lakeview line to see his father’s grave. The keeper helped him find the stone. He stood there in the heat and light, searching for a way to feel. He pictured a man in a gray suit, a collector for Metropolitan Life. Then his mind wandered through a hundred local scenes. Oh bike-riding in City Park. Seafood dinners at Aunt Lillian’s every Friday when he was eleven, after he took the train alone from Texas. He hid in the back room reading funnybooks while his cousins fought and played.
A man in a gray suit who tips his hat to women.
In Exchange Alley there was a Negro hunkered on the curb looking in the side mirror of a parked car as he shaved, his mug and his brush on the pavement next to him.
Lee looked up Oswald in the phone book, tracking lost relations.
Lee looked for work. He lied on all his job applications. He lied needlessly and to a purpose. He made up past addresses, made up references and past employment, invented job qualifications, wrote down names of companies that didn’t exist and companies that did, although he’d never worked for them.
An interviewer noted on a card:
Suit.
Tie.
Polite.
Marina sat in a chair on the screened-in side porch. She held Lee’s half-finished glass of Dr Pepper. It was nearly midnight and still wet and hot and awful. This was their home now, three rooms in a frame house with a little bit of gingerbread up top and some weedy vegetation at the front and side.
Lee was out there somewhere with the garbage. They couldn’t afford a garbage can so he slipped out three nights a week to stuff their garbage in other people’s containers. He went out wearing basketball shorts from his childhood or the childhood of one of his brothers, no top, and sneaked along the 4900 block of Magazine Street looking for a can to stuff the trash.
She watched him come back now, walking up the neighbor’s driveway, which was how you reached the entrance to their part of the house. He came onto the porch and took the glass from her hand. TV voices traveled across the backyards and drive-ways.
“I am sitting here thinking he doesn’t love me anymore.”