“They see the great sugar plantations and the slave-labor farms of United Fruit turned over to the farmers. They see Standard Oil sent packing. They see the casinos, all run by the Lansky Mob

—”

“I know it,” Lee said.

“—shut down. The donkey-shows have stopped, my friend, and the women who used to sell their bodies . . . and their daughters’ bodies—have found honest work again. A peon who would have died in the streets under the pig Batista can now go to a hospital and be treated like a man. And why? Because under Fidel, the doctor and the peon stand as equals!”

“I know it,” Lee said. It was his default position.

De Mohrenschildt leaped from the couch and began to pace around the new playpen. “Do you think Kennedy and his Irish cabal will let that billboard stand? That lighthouse, flashing its message of hope?”

“I sort of like Kennedy,” Lee said, as if embarrassed to admit it. “In spite of the Bay of Pigs.

That was Eisenhower’s plan, you know.”

“Most of the GSA likes President Kennedy. Do you know what I mean by the GSA? I can assure you that the rabid she-weasel who wrote Atlas Shrugged knows. Great Stupid America, that’s what I mean. The citizens of the USA will live happy and die content if they have a refrigerator that makes ice, two cars in their garage, and 77 Sunset Strip on their boob tubes. Great Stupid America loves Kennedy’s smile. Oh yes. Yes indeed. He has a wonderful smile, I admit it. But did not Shakespeare say a man can smile, and smile, and be a villain? Do you know that Kennedy has okayed a CIA plan to assassinate Castro? Yes! They’ve already tried—and failed, thank God—three or four times. I have this from my oil contacts in Haiti and the DR, Lee, and it’s good information.” Lee expressed dismay.

“But Fidel has a strong friend in Russia,” de Mohrenschildt went on, still pacing. “It isn’t the Russia of Lenin’s dreams—or yours, or mine—but they may have their own reasons for standing with Fidel if America tries another invasion. And mark my words: Kennedy is apt to try it, and soon.

He’ll listen to LeMay. He’ll listen to Dulles and Angleton of the CIA. All he needs is the right pretext and then he’ll go in, just to show the world he’s got balls.” They went on talking about Cuba. When the Cadillac returned, the rear seat was full of groceries—enough for a month, it looked like.

“Shit,” Lee said. “They’re back.”

“And we are glad to see them,” de Mohrenschildt said pleasantly.

“Stay for dinner,” Lee said. “Rina’s not much of a cook, but—”

“I must go. My wife is waiting anxiously for my report, and I’ll give her a good one! I’ll bring her next time, shall I?”

“Yeah, sure.”

They went to the door. Marina was talking with Bouhe and Orlov as the two men lifted cartons of canned goods from the trunk. But she wasn’t just talking; she was flirting a little, too.

Bouhe looked ready to fall on his knees.

On the porch, Lee said something about the FBI. De Mohrenschildt asked him how many times. Lee held up three fingers. “One agent called Fain. He came twice. Another named Hosty.”

“Look them right in the eye and answer their questions!” de Mohrenschildt said. “You have nothing to fear, Lee, not just because you are innocent, but because you are in the right!” The others were looking at him now . . . and not just them. The jump-rope girls had appeared, standing in the rut that served as a sidewalk on our block of Mercedes Street. De Mohrenschildt had an audience, and was declaiming to it.

“You are ideologically dedicated, young Mr. Oswald, so of course they come. The Hoover Gang! For all we know, they’re watching now, perhaps from down the block, perhaps from that house right across the street!”

De Mohrenschildt stabbed his finger at my drawn drapes. Lee turned to look. I stood still in the shadows, glad I’d put down the sound-enhancing Tupperware bowl, even though it was now coated with black tape.

“I know who they are. Haven’t they and their CIA first cousins been to visit me on many occasions, trying to browbeat me into informing on my Russian and South American friends? After the war, didn’t they call me a closet Nazi? Haven’t they claimed I hired the tonton macoute to beat and torture my competitors for oil leases in Haiti? Didn’t they accuse me of bribing Papa Doc and paying for the Trujillo assassination? Yes, yes, all of that and more!” The jump-rope girls were staring at him with their mouths open. So was Marina. Once he got going, George de Mohrenschildt swept everything before him.

“Be courageous, Lee! When they come, stand forward! Show them this!” He grasped his shirt and tore it open. Buttons popped off and clattered to the porch. The jump-rope girls gasped, too shocked to giggle. Unlike most American men of that time, de Mohrenschildt wore no undershirt.

His skin was the color of oiled mahogany. Fatty breasts hung on old muscle. He pounded his right fist above his left nipple. “Tell them ‘Here is my heart, and my heart is pure, and my heart belongs to my cause!’ Tell them ‘Even if Hoover rips my heart out of me, it will still beat, and a thousand other hearts will beat in time! Then ten thousand! Then a hundred thousand! Then a million!’” Orlov put down the box of canned goods he was holding so he could offer a round of light satiric applause. Marina’s cheeks were flaming with color. Lee’s face was the most interesting one.

Like Paul of Tarsus on the Damascus Road, he’d had a revelation.

The blindness had dropped from his eyes.

3

De Mohrenschildt’s preaching and shirt-ripping antics—not so very different from the tent-show shenanigans of the right-wing evangelists he reviled—were deeply troubling to me. I had hoped that if I could listen in on a heart-to-heart between the two men, it might go a long way toward eliminating de Mohrenschildt as a real factor in the Walker attempt, and hence the Kennedy assassination. I’d gotten the heart-to-heart, but it made things worse instead of better.

One thing seemed clear: it was time to bid Mercedes Street a not-so-fond adieu. I had rented the ground-floor apartment at 214 West Neely. On the twenty-fourth of September, I packed up my aging Ford Sunliner with my few clothes, my books, and my typewriter, and moved them to Dallas.

The two fat ladies had left behind a sickroom-stenchy pigsty. I did the cleanup myself, thanking God that Al’s rabbit-hole emerged in a time when aerosol air-freshener was available. I bought a portable TV at a yard sale and plunked it down on the kitchen counter next to the stove (which I thought of as the Repository of Antique Grease). As I swept, washed, scrubbed, and sprayed, I watched crime shows like The Untouchables and sitcoms like Car 54, Where Are You?

When the thumps and shouts of the kids upstairs quit for the night, I turned in and slept like the dead. There were no dreams.

I held onto my place on Mercedes Street, but didn’t see much at 2703. Sometimes Marina popped June into a stroller (another gift from her elderly admirer, Mr. Bouhe) and rolled her up to the warehouse parking lot and back again. In the afternoons, after school let out, the jump-rope girls often accompanied them. Marina even jumped herself a couple of times, chanting in Russian. The sight of her mother pogoing up and down with that great cloud of dark hair flying made the baby laugh. The jump-rope girls laughed, too. Marina didn’t mind. She talked a lot with them, and never looked irritated when they giggled and corrected her. She looked pleased, in fact. Lee didn’t want her to learn English, but she was learning it anyway. Good for her.