Dragonfly

What did it mean?

Had Hennings read the book? Apparently.

Had he passed it on to West? Obviously.

Had a busy man like A.W. West taken the time to read the script, virtually overnight? So it seemed.

Why?

The next eight hours passed slowly. He paced around the room, switched on the television, switched it off, paced, switched the set on again… He ate two lunches in the hotel coffee shop, came back to his room, paced. He snacked on peanuts and would have devoured time if it had been edible.

At five-thirty, when the Phantom IV Rolls-Royce arrived, Rice was waiting for it. He identified himself to the chauffeur who came around the car to greet him, and he allowed the rear passenger door to be opened and closed for him. He was conscious of people looking at him as no one had ever looked at him before, and he felt giddy.

Behind the wheel once more, the chauffeur put down the electrically operated glass partition between the driver's and the passenger's compartments. He showed Rice the small bar — ice, glasses, mixers, four whiskies — that was hidden in the back of the front seat by a sliding chrome panel. To the left of the bar another panel concealed a small television. “If you wish to speak to me,” the chauffeur said, “push the silver intercom button. I can hear you, sir, only when the button is depressed.”

“Fine,” Rice said, numbed.

Leaving Manhattan, they crawled with the rush-hour traffic. Once on tie superhighway, however, they moved, doing nearly twice the posted speed limit. They passed four police cruisers, but were not stopped. At seven-thirty they entered the oak-framed drive that led up a gentle slope to the West mansion.

The house loomed like an ultra-expensive Swiss hotel or clinic. Warm yellow light spilled from fifty windows and painted the snow-skinned lawn. Inside, a doorman took Rice's coat, and a butler showed him to the study where A.W. West was waiting for him.

West looked like a billionaire. He didn't appear to be some sort of gangster, as Onassis did, and he didn't look like a high school principal, as David Rockefeller did; nor did he have that prim, asexual, acidic manner that made Getty seem like a Calvinist fire-and-brimstone preacher. West was tall, silver- haired, slim. He had dark eyes and a deep tan. His smile was broad and genuine. He was obviously a man who enjoyed life, enjoyed spending money every bit as much as he liked making it.

In the great man's company Rice felt awkward and insignificant. But before long they were chatting animatedly, as if they were old friends. At eight-thirty they went into the main dining room, where two maids and a butler served dinner. It was the best meal Rice had ever eaten, although; later he could not recall what most of the dishes had been. He remembered only the conversation: they discussed his book, and West praised it chapter by chapter; they discussed politics, and West agreed with him entirely. A.W. West's approval was to Rice what a voice from a burning bush might have been to a religious man. He no longer felt awkward and insignificant, and he did not overeat

After dinner they went to the library to have brandy and cigars. When he lit the cigars and poured brandy, West said, “You haven't asked why Scott sent me your book, why I read it, or why you're here.”

“I thought you'd get around to that in your own time.”

“And so I have.”

Rice, growing tense again, tasted his brandy and waited.

“It's often said that I'm one of the six or seven most powerful men in the country. Do you believe that?”

“I suppose I do.”

“Most people think I can buy and do whatever I want. But even a billionaire's power is finite — unless he's willing to risk everything.”

Rice said, “I don't understand what you're getting at.”

“I'll give you an example.” West put his cigar in an ashtray and folded his hands on his stomach. His feet were propped on a green-velvet-covered footstool. “In 1960 I was determined John Kennedy would never sit in the White House. He was soft on Communism, an admirer of Roosevelt's socialism, and a fool who refused to see Communists in the black equal-rights crusades.” West's face was red beneath his tan. “In order to stop Kennedy, I channeled three million dollars into various political organizations. I wasn't alone. Friends of mine did nearly as much. Kennedy won just the same. Then we had the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall, missiles in Cuba, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, race riots… Anyway, it was clear that Kennedy was destroying this country. And it was also clear that even a man of my power and wealth couldn't keep the Irish bastard from serving a second term. So I had him killed.”

Rice couldn't believe what he had just heard. Gaping, he waited for West to smile, waited for him to say it was a joke.

West didn't smile. “I wasn't the only one involved. I can't take all the credit. Hennings was part of it. And two other men.”

Rice shook his head and repeated the litany which the American people had been taught by television, radio, and newspapers: “Lee Harvey Oswald was a psychotic, a loner, one man with one gun.”

“Oswald wasn't very stable,” West agreed. “But he wasn't even slightly psychotic. He was a sometimes CIA agent, a scapegoat. He never pulled the trigger.”

“But the Warren Commission—”

“Wanted to reassure the public, and quickly. Those men wanted to believe in Oswald. Investigators often prove what they want to prove. They're bunded by their own precepts.”

Andrew Rice quivered inside. He felt weak, faint, almost giddy. He wanted to believe West, for if one could assassinate a President and get away with it, the future of the United States was not, would never be again, in the hands of men who were in sympathy with the worldwide Communist movement. If men of great wealth, those who had the most to lose in a Communist takeover, were willing to assume this sort of indirect leadership of the country, leadership through assassination and whatever else was necessary, then democracy and capitalism were safe for an eternity! But it was too good to be true, too easy… He said, “It's difficult to believe so many people could be misled.”

“Americans are sheep,” West said. “They believe what they're told. They don't read. Most of them are interested only in sports, work, families, screwing each other's wives… In the vernacular—'They don't know from nothing.' And they don't want to know from nothing. They're happy with ignorance.” He saw that Rice wanted to believe but was having trouble accepting it. “Look, there are enough clues in the Warren Report to convince any reasonable man that Oswald was either part of a conspiracy or a scapegoat. Yet you never bothered to study the report and piece together the facts. If you accepted the commission's verdict, why shouldn't the average man accept it. You're a genius, or near it, and you never doubted.”

“What clues?” Rice asked.

Leaning forward in his chair so that they were in Something of a huddle over the footstools between them, West began to count them off: “One, the autopsy notes were burned. Do you think that's the usual procedure in a murder case?”

“I guess it isn't.”

West smiled. “Two. Oswald was given a paraffin test to see if his cheeks held nitrate deposits — which they would have had to hold if he'd recently fired a rifle. The test was negative. In any ordinary case, in any ordinary court, this would probably have cleared him of murder. Three. The first medical report from Parkland Hospital, later confirmed by autopsy, said the President was shot in the temple. The report still stands. Yet the commission decided that Oswald shot the President in the back of the neck. One bullet?”

Rice said nothing. He was sweating.

Caught up in his argument, smiling, West said, “Four. Julia Ann Mercer, resident of Dallas, observed Jack Ruby debark from a truck and climb that grassy knoll carrying what appeared to be a rifle wrapped in newspapers. Subsequent to the assassination, she tried to report Ruby to the FBI. We had men in the FBI, and she was ignored. The next day, as you know, Ruby murdered Oswald. Five. The Zapruder film shows that the fatal shot slammed the President backward and to his left. The laws of physics insist that the bullet came from in front and to the right of him. The grassy knoll. Yet we're told he was shot from behind. Six. A Dallas businessman named Warren Reynolds