The Curator sends transcripts of closed committee hearings. He sends documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, other documents withheld from ordinary investigators or heavily censored. He sends new books all the time, each with a gleaming theory, supportable, assured. This is the room of theories, the room of growing old. Branch wonders if he ought to despair of ever getting to the end.

The FBI's papers on the assassination are here, one hundred and twenty-five thousand pages, no end of dread and woe. The Curator sends new material on Oswald's stay in Russia, gathered from a KGB defector (not the first such defector to offer a version of events). There is new material on Everett and Parmenter, on Ramon Benitez, Frank Vasquez. Data trickling down the years. Water dripping into his brain pan. There is 544 Camp Street in New Orleans, the most notorious address in the chronicles of the assassination. The building is long gone and the site is an urban renewal plaza now. The Curator sends recent photos and Branch understands that he must study them, although they do not pertain to the case. There are granite benches, brick paving, a piece of sculpture with a subsidized look about it, called "Out of There."

Branch must study everything. He is in too deep to be selective.

He sits under a lap robe and worries. The truth is he hasn't written all that much. He has extensive and overlapping notes- notes in three-foot drifts, all these years of notes. But of actual finished prose, there is precious little. It is impossible to stop assembling data. The stuff keeps coming. There are theories to evaluate, lives to ponder and mourn. No one at CIA has asked to see the work in progress. Not a chapter, a page, a word of it. Branch is on his second Curator, his sixth DCI. Since 1973, when he first set to work, he has seen Schlesinger, Colby, Bush, Turner, Casey and Webster occupy the Director's chair. Branch doesn't know whether these men were told that someone is writing a secret history of the assassination. Maybe no one knows except the Curator and two or three others in the Historical Intelligence Collection at CIA. Maybe it is the history no one will read.

T. J. Mackey stood across the street from the shabby three-story building where Guy Banister's detective agency was located. His light-brown hair was cut close and he wore a sport shirt and sunglasses, the shirt tight across his upper body. He had a way of clenching and unclenching his right fist. There was a bird tattooed there, in the webbing between'thumb and index finger, and when he opened his fist the bird spread its blue wings.

He was watching someone on Camp Street, a rattled old woman, an outcast in a long coat and white ankle socks, one of the lost bodies of New Orleans this uneasy spring of 1963, already too hot, too heavy and wet. He was interested in the way she kept adjusting her pace as she walked down the street. She slowed down to let others get ahead of her. In a wary crouch she moved along the wall at number 544, swinging an arm out to wave people on. She wanted everybody up ahead, where she could see them all.

Mackey enjoyed this. He'd been in the city over a week now and had seen many a jumpy drunk but no one with this kind of paranoid wit.

Around were old warehouses and coffee-roasting plants, fifty-cent-a-night hotels. Over the original entranceway at 544, bricked up now, he could make out an inscription: Stevedores and Long-shoremens Building. He crossed the street and went in. The offices of Guy Banister Associates were on the second floor. Banister was at his desk, a tough and somber man in his sixties. Twenty years in the FBI, deputy superintendent of the New Orleans police, a member of the John Birch Society and the Minutemen. He opened a bottom drawer when Mackey walked in. Invitation to a drink. T-Jay waved it off and took a chair.

"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. Feme'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."