The Third Bullet

“‘Crazy with honor’ is the phrase that comes to mind. Did you step out of a thirties movie?”

“Ms. Reilly, I don’t know enough to know what a thirties movie would be. I only know what I’ve got to do.”

“You are so insane, it’s kind of impressive.”

“Maybe so. Anyhow, enough on me. Let’s get back to tomorrow. Let me tell you, if Stronski says it’s guaranteed, it’s guaranteed. It’s safe.”

He explained the details. “The lieutenant colonel himself will give us ID badges and escort us to the ninth floor. He will show us where we need to be. We have six hours. No photos, no notes. All by memory. What we’re looking for isn’t that big a deal. As I say, the Russian James Bond. We have to find out if he visited or worked in the Mexico City embassy in September through November of 1963.”

“See,” she said, “that’s the other thing.”

“I know it is. You see what this is about.”

“I know Lee Harvey Oswald went to the Mexico City Russian embassy sometime in 1963, trying to get a visa or something. He failed, I guess. I think it’s all been looked at.”

“It has. Over and over again. A man named Norman Mailer even managed to interview all the KGB people and examine the records. There’s nothing there. Case closed. History reclaimed. End of story. That’s what I believed too, until a few weeks ago.”

“And now you believe a Russian James Bond killed JFK?”

“No. I don’t know enough to believe anything. I will tell you, however, why I think that if – I do say if – there was some kind of game being played, it had to be played through the Russians. Maybe in a big way, maybe in a small way.”

The waiter cleared the plates.

She ordered a vodka tonic. “I think I’ll need this.”

He stuck with koka. “A few weeks ago a piece of information came to me. It was too mundane for anyone to have made up. There was no profit in it, and it was transferred over the years through completely normal, workaday people, none of them troublesome in any way, all of them sane, productive, middle- class. It was about a tread-print on the back of a coat. Stupid, huh? Briefly, it suggested that a rifle may have been present in something called the Dal-Tex Building in November 1963. Dal-Tex is right across the street from the Book Depository, and its windows give virtually the same angle on the limo on Elm Street as the sixth-floor ‘sniper’s nest’ of the Book Depository. The treadprint suggested the presence of someone I know about who was a superb rifleman.”

“He would be the second gunman?”

“Possibly. Just barely possibly. But the coat could have also been owned by an old-boy Texas pheasant hunter, and it was his daughter’s bicycle that put the treadprint there. Still, worth investigating.”

“So that was what the man went to Dallas to investigate. Then he got killed. Then you went to Dallas. And a Russian tried to kill you. Is that how the Russians come into this?”

“Possibly. It’s another indicator that somehow in this thing, all lines of possibility run through Russia. But the fact that the guy who tried to kill me was Russian wasn’t the thing I zeroed on.

“What I’ve done is, I’ve tried to isolate hard data points from the Warren Commission report, that is, the things that we know happened, times, dates, places, all multiply verified. And I’ve tried to triangulate from that a possible scenario by which someone besides Oswald could have been involved. I have worked hard trying to find the intersection of certain streams of information that were necessary for anyone trying to kill Kennedy. If I can find a place and a time where all the lines come together, that would be the place to start. My only technique is trial and error, try this, try that, try something else. Believe me, I ain’t no genius. But I’ve come to something. And that something has to be at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City in the late fall of 1963.”

“Tell me. Wait, the vodka hasn’t arrived. If I’m going to spend ten years sunbathing in the Gulag archipelago, I’ll want to know why.”

He waited, composing his thoughts. The vodka and the new koka came. She took a swig. “Very good. The world is nicely blurred. Please proceed.”

“If anything of a conspiratorial nature happened,” Bob said, “it had to have sprung from the intersection, by chance, of five elements. I say ‘elements.’ They tell me it’s a lousy word because it means ‘stuff.’ That’s because the five things are different in nature, and no word other than ‘stuff’ collects them all.”

“I’m listening.”

“The first four are pieces of information. Three are related but separated in time. One is completely unrelated, from left field, and it arrives real late. The fifth isn’t information at all; it’s a personality.”

“Okay. I can follow that, and I get lost in Agatha Christie, much less le Carre.”

“First bit of information: someone had to know that a man named Lee Harvey Oswald existed. And that he was kind of a pathetic screwball with dreams of glory that his sad little life couldn’t possibly support. Who would know that?”

“His mom? His poor wife?”

“The second thing they had to know was that he had homicidal tendencies. He was violent. It went with his loser personality. They must have known that he had a rifle with a telescopic sight and that on April 10, 1963, he had taken a shot at and missed Major General Edwin A. Walker.”

“I think I remember that.”

“Walker was a right – wing general who had just resigned in scandal when it was learned he was indoctrinating his troops – the Twenty-fourth Infantry Division, in Germany – with John Birch propaganda. He was briefly notorious. As a civilian, he was even more annoying to many people: he gave speeches, he made accusations, he showed up at various civil rights demonstrations and was violently segregationist, he called Kennedy pink, the whole nine yards.”

“Okay. Oswald took a shot. Someone mysterious and conspiratorial knows that.”

“The third thing they had to know was that he worked in a building on Elm Street in Dallas, Texas, called the Texas Book Depository. But since he didn’t start working until October 14, they couldn’t have known until then.”

“Who is they?”

“That’s where we’re going. Who would care enough about this little schnook to record those pieces of information? The FBI questioned him, the CIA debriefed him, but both dismissed him as a twerp, unlikely to be of any consequence. They had no idea about the Walker shooting.”

“I have you.”

“The late piece of information was that on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 19, 1963, the Dallas Times Herald announced that JFK was going to be parading down Elm Street in front of the Texas Book Depository at twelve thirty in the afternoon on Friday, two and a half days later. Remember this – they couldn’t possibly find Oswald in that short amount of time. And they couldn’t possibly have predicted that Kennedy would pass within seventy-five feet of this screwball. So, you ask, who knew all that about Oswald? Not the FBI. Not the CIA.”

“I know the answer. I know what you want me to say.”

“Of course. The Russians. He’d been to them. He’d begged them to take him back. He said he’d do anything for them. I’m sure he bragged about the shot he’d taken at Walker as the proof of his willingness to serve. They knew. They had to know. But all that was in September. He didn’t start at the depository, as I say, until October 14. How’d they know he was working there over a month later?”

“I don’t know.”

“This is where the Russian James Bond factors in. The fifth element.”

“Hmm,” she said.

“Someone who would see the potential in Oswald after the Walker shot and establish a clandestine communication. So he would be up-to-date. He would know Oswald was working at the Depository. See?”

“I see theoretically.”

“We need a certain personality. Actually, I say James Bond, but I’m being inaccurate. James Bond is an operator. We don’t need an operator. What we need is a case officer. Do you know what a case officer is?”

“I’ve heard the term, but that’s about it.”

“He would be the guy like the movie producer. He has the vision. He sees the possibilities. He sets the goal.