Al considered briefly, then shook his head.

“No, I take that back. He knew he was a big deal. It was just a matter of waiting for the rest of the world to catch up on that. So there he is, in my face—choking distance, and don’t think the idea didn’t cross my mind—”

“Why didn’t you? Or just cut to the chase and shoot him?”

“In front of his wife and baby? Could you do that, Jake?”

I didn’t have to consider it for long. “Guess not.”

“Me either. I had other reasons, too. One of them was an aversion to state prison . . . or the electric chair. We were out on the street, remember.”

“Ah.”

“Ah is right. He still had that little smile on his face when he walked up to me. Arrogant and prissy, both at the same time. He’s wearing that smile in just about every photograph anybody ever took of him. He’s wearing it in the Dallas police station after they arrested him for killing the president and a motor patrolman who happened to cross his path when he was trying to get away. He says to me, ‘What are you looking at, sir?’ I say ‘Nothing, buddy.’ And he says, ‘Then mind your beeswax.’

“Marina was waiting for him maybe twenty feet down the sidewalk, trying to soothe the baby back to sleep. It was hotter than hell that day, but she was wearing a kerchief over her hair, the way lots of European women do back then. He went to her and grabbed her elbow—like a cop instead of her husband—and says, ‘Pokhoda! Pokhoda!’ Walk, walk. She said something to him, maybe asking if he’d carry the baby for awhile. That’s my guess, anyway. But he just pushed her away and said, ‘Pokhoda, cyka!’ Walk, bitch. She did. They went off down toward the bus stop.

And that was it.”

“You speak Russian?”

“No, but I have a good ear and a computer. Back here I do, anyway.”

“You saw him other times?”

“Only from a distance. By then I was getting real sick.” He grinned. “There’s no Texas barbecue as good as Fort Worth barbecue, and I couldn’t eat it. It’s a cruel world, sometimes. I went to a doctor, got a diagnosis I could have made myself by then, and came back to the twenty-first century. Basically, there was nothing more to see, anyway. Just a skinny little wife-abuser waiting to be famous.”

He leaned forward.

“You know what the man who changed American history was like? He was the kind of kid who throws stones at other kids and then runs away. By the time he joined the Marines—to be like his brother Bobby, he idolized Bobby—he’d lived in almost two dozen different places, from New Orleans to New York City. He had big ideas and couldn’t understand why people wouldn’t listen to them. He was mad about that, furious, but he never lost that pissy, prissy little smile of his. Do you know what William Manchester called him?”

“No.” I didn’t even know who William Manchester was.

“A wretched waif. Manchester was talking about all the conspiracy theories that bloomed in the aftermath of the assassination . . . and after Oswald himself was shot and killed. I mean, you know that, right?”

“Of course,” I said, a little annoyed. “A guy named Jack Ruby did it.” But given the holes in my knowledge I’d already demonstrated, I suppose he had a right to wonder.

“Manchester said that if you put the murdered president on one side of a scale and Oswald—

the wretched waif—on the other, it didn’t balance. No way did it balance. If you wanted to give Kennedy’s death some meaning, you’d have to add something heavier. Which explains the proliferation of conspiracy theories. Like the Mafia did it—Carlos Marcello ordered the hit. Or the KGB did it. Or Castro, to get back at the CIA for trying to load him up with poison cigars. There are people to this day who believe Lyndon Johnson did it so he could be president. But in the end . . .” Al shook his head. “It was almost certainly Oswald. You’ve heard of Occam’s Razor, haven’t you?” It was nice to know something for sure. “It’s a basic truism sometimes known as the law of parsimony. ‘All other things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the right one.’ So why didn’t you kill him when he wasn’t on the street with his wife and kid? You were a Marine, too.

When you knew how sick you were, why didn’t you just kill the little motherfucker yourself ?”

“Because being ninety-five percent sure isn’t a hundred. Because, shithead or not, he was a family man. Because after he was arrested, Oswald said he was a patsy and I wanted to be sure he was lying. I don’t think anybody can ever be a hundred percent sure of anything in this wicked world, but I wanted to get up to ninety-eight. I had no intention of waiting until November twenty-second and then stopping him at the Texas School Book Depository, though—that would have been cutting it way too fine, for one big reason I’ll have to tell you about.” His eyes no longer looked so bright, and the lines on his face were deepening again. I was scared by how shallow his reserves of strength had become.

“I’ve written all this stuff down. I want you to read it. Actually, I want you to cram like a bastard. Look on top of the TV, buddy. Would you do that?” He gave me a tired smile and added, “I got my sittin-britches on.”

It was a thick blue notebook. The price stamped on the paper cover was twenty-five cents.

The brand was foreign to me. “What’s Kresge’s?”

“The department store chain now known as Kmart. Never mind what’s on the cover, just pay attention to what’s inside. It’s an Oswald timeline, plus all the evidence piled up against him . . .

which you don’t really have to read if you take me up on this, because you’re going to stop the little weasel in April of 1963, over half a year before Kennedy comes to Dallas.”

“Why April?”

“Because that’s when somebody tried to kill General Edwin Walker . . . only he wasn’t a general anymore by then. He got cashiered in 1961, by JFK himself. General Eddie was handing out segregationist literature to his troops and ordering them to read the stuff.”

“It was Oswald who tried to shoot him?”

“That’s what you need to make sure of. Same rifle, no doubt about that, ballistics proved it. I was waiting to see him take the shot. I could afford not to interfere, because that time Oswald missed. The bullet deflected off the wood strip in the middle of Walker’s kitchen window. Not much, but just enough. The bullet literally parted his hair and flying wood splinters from the munting cut his arm a little. That was his only wound. I won’t say the man deserved to die—very few men are evil enough to deserve being shot from ambush—but I would have traded Walker for Kennedy any day of the week.”

I paid little attention to that last. I was thumbing through Al’s Oswald Book, page after page of closely written notes. They were completely legible at the beginning, less so toward the end. The last few pages were the scrawls of a very sick man. I snapped the cover closed and said, “If you could confirm that Oswald was the shooter in the General Walker attempt, that would have settled your doubts?”