Libra

by Don DeLillo

  “Then how do I get in?”

  “I’m saying, Jack. There’s an alley that runs along the east side of the building. You’re inconspicuous here. Halfway down there’s a door to the new part of the building, the municipal annex. This door is always locked except tomorrow we arrange it’s open. There is no guard on the door. You go in the building. Once you’re inside you see elevators and stairs. You take the stairs down. They’re fire stairs. This is how you get in the basement.”

  “How do they bring him out?”

  “Handcuffed to a detective. Another detective on the other side. What kind of gun do you have?”

  “Snub-nose .38. Fits in a pants pocket.”

  “You’ll have the heaviest hard-on in America.”

  Karlinsky laughed bleakly, a growl down in the throat. Jack sat behind the desk, looking blank. The conversation ended here.

  Jack was alone for an hour figuring out how to meet recent wages and bills without the weekend receipts. This kind of petty arithmetic tightened his skull.

  He looked in his address book for a number. Then he called Russell Shively, his detective friend, at home. It was after 3:00 A.M. Jack listened to the lonely phone ringing.

  “Yes. Who’s this?”

  “Hello Russell.”

  “Who the hell is this?”

  Jack paused.

  “They are going to kill that bastard Oswald in the police basement tomorrow during the transfer to the county jail.”

  He paused again, then put down the phone.

  Lee Harvey Oswald was awake in his cell. It was beginning to occur to him that he’d found his life’s work. After the crime comes the reconstruction. He will have motives to analyze, the whole rich question of truth and guilt. Time to reflect, time to turn this thing in his mind. Here is a crime that clearly yields material for deep interpretation. He will be able to bend the light of that heightened moment, shadows fixed on the lawn, the limousine shimmering and still. Time to grow in self-knowledge, to explore the meaning of what he’s done. He will vary the act a hundred ways, speed it up and slow it down, shift emphasis, find shadings, see his whole life change.

  This was the true beginning.

  They will, give him writing paper and books. He will fill his cell with books about the case. He will have time to educate himself in criminal law, ballistics, acoustics, photography. Whatever pertains to the case he will examine and consume. People will come to see him, the lawyers first, then psychologists, historians, biographers. His life had a single clear subject now, called Lee Harvey Oswald.

  He and Kennedy were partners. The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live.

  The more time he spent in a cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now. This charged him with strength. There was clearly a better time beginning, a time of deep reading in the case, of self-analysis and reconstruction. He no longer saw confinement as a lifetime curse. He’d found the truth about a room. He could easily live in a cell half this size.

  Sunday morning. Jack did the normal shuffling, getting the day going. It took him a certain time to beam in on things. He drank some grapefruit juice and paced the living room. George was on the sofa reading a newspaper and Jack kept going by with that stare of his that reached only a foot into the world.

  “Jack, for me to express a facial nature, you know it’s hard with words, but I don’t think you look so good.”

  Jack turned on TV. He washed and shaved, using a Wilkinson sword blade for the name appeal and smacking on aftershave so it hurt. He made scrambled eggs and coffee and looked at the first section of the Times Herald, still in his shorts, while he ate. There was an open letter to Caroline Kennedy that was so emotional it choked off his ability to swallow. In his mind he rehashed the tragedy of the President and his lovely family.

  The telephone rang. It was Brenda Jean Sensibaugh, Baby LeGrand, calling from her apartment in Fort Worth.

  “Jack, the rent is due. There is nothing to eat in the house for me and the kids.”

  “I barely pick up the phone.”

  “I’m coming to the point so we don’t waste time. Last night was supposed to be pay night.”

  “You know damn well why we closed.”

  “I’m not stating it was wrong to close. Just tell me how I get from one week to the next without a pay night.”

  “You already drew some on your salary.”

  “Don’t be hateful or short with me, Jack. I’m asking a small advance so my children will have a meal before the day is over. I am one of your dependables and you know it. I’m only asking what I need to get through the day food-wise and place a little sum in my landlord’s fist to keep him quiet.”

  “How much, bitch?”

  “Twenty-five dollars. I can’t get all the way to Dallas but if you could telegraph a money order or however they do it, I can go downtown and pick it up.”

  Jack realized there was a Western Union only half a block from the Police and Courts Building. Lucky for her. If he hurried he could wire twenty-five dollars to Brenda and then go shoot that bastard Oswald.

  He took a Preludin with his coffee dregs and got dressed. Dark suit, gray fedora, Windsor knot in his silk tie. He picked up Sheba and told George he was going to the club. Downstairs he dropped the dog in the front seat and started up the car.

  He was running late. If I don’t get there in time, it’s decreed I wasn’t meant to do it. He drove through Dealey Plaza, slightly out of the way, to look at the wreaths again. He talked to Sheba about was she hungry, did she want her Alpo. He parked in a lot across the street from the Western Union office. He opened the trunk, got out the dog food and a can opener and fixed the dog her meal, which he left on the front seat. He took two thousand dollars out of the moneybag and stuffed it in his pockets because this is how a club owner walks into a room. He put the gun in his right hip pocket. His name was stamped in gold inside his hat.

  He went across the street and filled out the form to send the money. The clerk time-stamped the receipt 11:17. Jack was even later than he thought. For the first time he put a little hurry in his day and in less than four minutes he stood in the dark garage below police headquarters.

  If I get in this easy, it means they want me to do it.

  He walked across the deserted parking area toward a pair of unmarked Fords waiting in the space between the ramps. He heard voices saying, “Here he comes, here he comes,” and at first he thought they meant him. He walked up a slight incline and stood at the edge of a group of reporters. Vault noises, voices, hollow bouncing sounds filled the areaway, car engines, clanking equipment. There were plainclothes cops and white-hatted brass everywhere. Detectives lined the walls leading from the jail office to the ramps. Russell was standing right there but Jack didn’t have time to catch his eye. Most of the newsmen and three TV cameras were clustered on the ramp to Jack’s right, leading to Main Street. An armored bank truck waited at the top of the other ramp.

  “Here he comes.”

  “Here he comes.”

  “Here he comes.”

  The timing was split-second, the location was pinpoint. Spotlights came on. Everything was black and white, highlights and heavy shadows. He saw a cluster of police come out of the jail office escorting the prisoner, who wore a dark sweater and looked like nobody from nowhere.

  There was a movement of reporters. Then flashbulbs, shouts echoing off the walls, and it all seemed strange to Jack, already seen, and he stood in the artificial glare in the dank basement with the ramps stained by exhaust smoke and a charge of octane in the air.

  Here he comes.

  Jack came out of the crowd, seeing everything happen in advance. He took the revolver out of his pocket, bootlegging it, palming it on his hip. A path opened up. There was no one between him and Oswald. Jack showed the gun. He took a last long stride and fired once, a mid-body shot from inches away. Oswald’
s arms crossed on his body and his eyes went tight. He made a sound, a deep grunt, heavy and desolate. He began his fall through the world of hurt.

  A tumble of bodies over the gunman, all these men in Stetsons heavy-breathing, struggling for the weapon, someone’s knee emplaced in Jack’s gut. He was at a loss to understand their attitude. None of this was necessary if they knew him. He felt even worse, hearing Russell Shively’s voice pitch above a dozen other noises, saying, “Jack, Jack, you son of a bitch.”

  A shot.

  There’s a shot.

  Oswald has been shot.

  Oswald has been shot.

  A shot rang out.

  Mass confusion here.

  All the doors have been locked.

  Holy mackerel.

  A shot rang out as he was led to the car.

  A shot.

  Mass confusion here.

  Rolling and fighting.

  As he was being led out.

  Now he’s being led back.

  Oswald shot.

  The police have the entire area blocked off.

  Everybody stay back is the yell, is the yell.

  A stocky man with a hat on.

  Oswald doubled over.

  One of the wildest scenes.

  Screaming red lights.

  A man in a gray hat.

  Somehow he got in.

  The police protection and the police cordons.

  People. Policemen.

  Here is young Oswald now.

  He is being hustled out.

  He is lying flat.

  There is a gunshot wound in his lower abdomen.

  He is white.

  Oswald white.

  Lying in the ambulance.

  His head is back.

  He is unconscious.

  Dangling.

  His hand is dangling over the edge of the stretcher.

  And now the ambulance is moving out.

  Flashing red lights.

  Young Oswald rushed out.

  He is white, white.

  Remember the ambulance in Atsugi, camouflage-green, wavering in the heat haze on the tarmac, and the pilot climbing out?

  Lee didn’t feel real good. First they shot him, then they tried to give him artificial respiration. He learned in Marine training this is the last thing you do for a man with abdominal injuries.

  He could see himself shot as the camera caught it. Through the pain he watched TV. The siren made that panicky sound of high speed in the streets, although he had no sense of movement. A man spoke close to him, saying if he had anything he wanted to say he was going to have to say it now. Through the pain, through the losing of sensation except where it hurt, Lee watched himself react to the augering heat of the bullet.

  Remember how the pilot looked, a spaceman in a helmet and rubber suit?

  Everything was leaving him, all sensation at the edges breaking up in space. He knew he was still in the ambulance but couldn’t hear the siren any longer or the voice of the man who wanted him to speak, a friendly type Texan by the sound of him. The only thing left was the mocking pain, the picture of the twisted face on TV. Die and hell in Hidell. He watched in a darkish room, someone’s TV den.

  The falling away of things we carry around with us, twilight and chimney smoke. What is metal doing in his body?

  He was in pain. He knew what it meant to be in pain. All you had to do was see TV. Arm over his chest, mouth in a knowing oh. The pain obliterated words, then thought. There was nothing left to him but the pathway of the bullet. Penetration of the spleen, stomach, aorta, kidney, liver and diaphragm. There was nothing left but the barest consciousness of bullet. Then the bullet itself, the copper, lead and antimony. They’d introduced metal into his body. This is what caused the pain.

  But remember the men watching the jet take off? Could hardly believe how quick it lost itself in mist.

  They logged him in at Parkland at 11:42. Chief complaint, gunshot wound.

  The heart was seen to be flabby and not beating at all. No effective heartbeat could be instituted. The pupils were fixed and dilated. There was no retinal blood flow. There was no respiratory effort. No effective pulse could be maintained. Expired: 13:07. Two sponges missing when body closed.

  Aerospace.

  It is the white nightmare of noon, high in the sky over Russia. Me-too and you-too. He is a stranger, in a mask, falling.

  If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It’s the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.

  But maybe not. Nicholas Branch thinks he knows better. He has learned enough about the days and months preceding November 22, and enough about the twenty-second itself, to reach a determination that the conspiracy against the President was a rambling affair that succeeded in the short term due mainly to chance. Deft men and fools, ambivalence and fixed will and what the weather was like. Branch not only has material resulting from the Agency’s internal investigations—Everett and Parmenter cooperated to varying degrees—but he also has key information about the last stages of the plot derived from sources inside Alpha 66.

  The stuff keeps coming. The Curator sends FBI surveillance logs. He sends a thirty-five-hour film chronology of unedited network footage shot during the weekend of November 22. He sends a computer-enhanced version of the Zapruder film, the 8mm home movie made by a dress manufacturer who stood on a concrete abutment above Elm Street as the shots were fired. Experts have scrutinized every murky nuance of the Zapruder film. It is the basic timing device of the assassination and a major emblem of uncertainty and chaos. There is the powerful moment of death, the surrounding blurs, patches and shadows.

  (Branch’s analysis of the film and other evidence leads him to believe the first shot came much sooner than most theories would allow, probably at Zapruder frame 186. Governor Connally was hit two point six seconds later, at Zapruder 234. The shot that killed the President, crushingly, came four point three seconds after that. Even though he has reached firm conclusions in this area, Branch will study the computerized version of Zapruder. He is in too deep to stop now.)

  The Curator sends a special FBI report that includes detailed descriptions of the dreams of eyewitnesses following the assassination of Kennedy and the murder of Oswald.

  The Curator sends material on Bobby Dupard. Branch knows about Dupard only through the Curator. But how does the Curator know? Did Dupard tell someone about his role in the attempt on Walker? Did Oswald let his name slip to someone in New Orleans?

  There are worrisome omissions, occasional gaps in the record: Of course Branch understands that the Agency is a closed system. He knows they will not reveal what they’ve learned to other agencies, much less the public. This is why the history he has contracted to write is a secret one, meant for CIA’s own closed collection. But why are they withholding material from him as well? There’s something they aren’t telling him. The Curator delays, lately, in filling certain requests for information, seems to ignore other requests completely. What are they holding back? How much more is there? Branch wonders if there is some limit inherent in the yielding of information gathered in secret. They can’t give it all away, even to one of their own, someone pledged to confidentiality. Before his retirement, Branch analyzed intelligence, sought patterns in random scads of data. He believed secrets were childish things. He was not generally impressed by the accomplishments of men in the clandestine service, the spy handlers, the covert-action staff. He thought they’d built a vast theology, a formal coded body of knowledge that was basically play material, secret-keeping, one of the keener pleasures and conflicts of childhood. Now he wonders if the Agency is protecting something very much lik
e its identity—protecting its own truth, its theology of secrets.

  The Curator begins to send fiction, twenty-five years of novels and plays about the assassination. He sends feature films and documentaries. He sends transcripts of panel discussions and radio debates. Branch has no choice but to study this material. There are important things he has yet to learn. There are lives he must examine. It is essential to master the data.

  Ramón Benítez, the man on the grassy knoll, is seen in a photograph taken in April 1971 at the dedication of the eternal flame in Cuban Memorial Plaza on Southwest Eighth Street in Miami. An urn containing the flame rests on a twelve-foot column. Five plaques list the names of the fallen—los mdrtires de la brigada de asalto. The Curator forwards vague reports that Benitez, using another name, drove a taxi for some years in Union City, New Jersey. Otherwise, nothing.

  Also present in the crowd that day, caught in photographs, is Antonio Veciana, the founder of Alpha 66. Eight and a half years later he will be shot and wounded in Miami. This will happen after publication of the House select committee’s report on assassinations—a report that includes Veciana’s allegation that Lee Oswald met with a member of U.S. intelligence in Dallas some time before November 22. No arrests in the case.

  Brenda Jean Sensibaugh, the stripper to whom Jack Ruby wired money, is found hanging by her toreador pants in a holding cell in Oklahoma City, June 1965, after an arrest on charges of soliciting for the purpose of prostitution. Ruled a suicide.

  Two days later, Bobby Renaldo Dupard is shot to death during a holdup at Ray’s Hardware in West Dallas, where he was employed as assistant manager. Branch immediately connects the name of the store with one of those useless clinging facts that keep him awake at night. This is where Jack Ruby, in 1960, bought the gun he used to kill Oswald.

  Jack Leon Ruby dies of cancer in January 1967 while awaiting retrial for the murder of Oswald. In his time in prison he attempts suicide by ramming the cell wall with his head and by trying to jam his finger in a light socket while standing in a puddle of water.