Free Libra by Don DeLillo Page B

Mary Frances to the door.
    He would not consider the plan a success if the uncovering of its successive layers did not reveal the CIA’s schemes, his own schemes in some cases, to assassinate Fidel Castro. This was the little surprise he was keeping for the end. It was his personal contribution to an informed public. Let them see what goes on in the committee rooms and corner offices. The pocket litter, the gunman’s effects, the sidetrackings and back alleys must allow investigators to learn that Kennedy wanted Castro dead, that plots were devised, approved at high levels, put into motion, and that Fidel or his senior aides decided to retaliate. This was the major subtext and moral lesson of Win Everett’s plan.
     
     
    The two men who shared a table in the Occidental Restaurant had certain physical similarities. Both were over six feet tall, expensively dressed, robust and athletic, men clearly at ease here, in the theater of the Kennedys, the capital city that measured itself to a certain kind of manliness, a confidence and promise, the grace to take the maximum dare.
    Laurence Parmenter, perhaps five years the younger of the two, spoke in the slight whine of the educated Easterner, a way of drawing out syllables to express ironic self-regard.
    The other man, George de Mohrenschildt, who lived in Dallas now, spoke English with a courtly foreign accent. He was not averse to being seen as the complete continental. This is what he was. A charming and worldly man able to converse fluently in Russian, English, French, Spanish, probably Togo as well, or whatever they spoke in Togoland. (Parmenter knew he had been there in 1958, posing as a stamp collector.) Larry liked the man. He’d known him for some years and was aware that George had been debriefed by the Agency after several trips abroad. But even though their business interests had overlapped once or twice, he wasn’t sure quite what George’s racket was.
    “Then in May I go to Haiti,” de Mohrenschildt said.
    “Do I dare ask?”
    “Ask, by all means. I’m going there to find oil for the Haitians. They’re giving me a sisal plantation as a concession.”
    “Do they need help finding sisal?”
    “I believe it grows aboveground.”
    They held their laughter.
    “You turn up in interesting places, George.”
    Now they laughed, remembering the same thing, the time Parmenter walked into a dental clinic in a remote town near the CIA air base in southwest Guatemala where the Bay of Pigs was being rehearsed by Cuban pilots and American advisers. Sitting in the shabby waiting room, in an alligator shirt and madras shorts, was George de Mohrenschildt, also known as Jerzy Sergius von Mohrenschildt. He was on a walking tour of Central America, he said.
    “That whole thing ended horribly,” George said, “if I can actually say it has ended.”
    “I think you can say that.”
    “This administration still bullies Castro. It’s ridiculous and unnecessary. I’ll go even further. This whole administration revolves around the floating cinder of little communist Cuba. It’s something of a joke, Larry, and I say this knowing which side of the Cuban fence you are on. Of course this is your job and I respect it.”
    “This was my job. I’m doing strictly support work now.”
    “I would like to believe the administration has no more designs on Cuba.”
    “Believe it, George. The missile crisis was resolved with the understanding that we wouldn’t invade Cuba. Kennedy had the chance to get rid of Castro and he ends up guaranteeing the man’s job. There is widespread lack of interest right now. Commitment to this issue is absolutely nil. The administration went from passionate and total dedication to an attitude of complete aloofness and indifference and they did it in goddamn record time.”
    “It’s the American disease,” George said with a warm smile.
    De Mohrenschildt was a petroleum engineer by profession but didn’t seem to spend much time at it. He was on his