Stephen Hunter - The Third Bullet

He laughed.

“Ever hear of an Argentine writer called Jorge Luis Borges?” I said.

“No. Hemingway’s as far as I go.”

“He writes stories in the form of fictional essays. Conjectures on this or that, always astonishing in their brevity and their insight. In one, he postulates that the true son of God was Judas, not Christ. Anybody could be Christ, suffering and becoming immortal. But it took a strength of character that only the son of God could muster to make the crucifixion possible, by the betrayal. That was the true heroism, the true sacrifice, for without it, there was nothing. He didn’t bear the pain of the cross for a day, he bore the pain of hatred, exile, universal loathing, all that, forever. That was strength.”

“Sounds crazy to me,” he said. “Your Bor-haze, or whatever, carries no weight with me. How do you know you’ll prevent this war? Maybe this Texan, Johnson, maybe he’ll wage the same war.”

“He won’t. He’s a New Deal Democrat forged in the crucible of thirties Washington. He has no interest in military adventurism, nothing to prove, because he’s an older man with plenty of mistresses and an ugly wife. He’ll use his time in office to siphon money off to Texas and his cronies in the party; he’ll give a lot to Negroes so Lippmann will write well of him; he’ll build dams and highways and buildings with his name on them. Like all of them, he’ll screw everything in heels. He has no interest in foreign affairs. I’ve looked at it carefully. Internationally, he’s as sober as Eisenhower; domestically, he wants to be the next FDR. He’s FDR with ants in his pants. The last thing he wants is to go off on a crazy crusade in a foreign swamp. It’s way too expensive.”

“This thing, this ambush? You don’t even know if it’s possible.”

I suppose I knew I had him then. He’d gone in a single breath from the strategic to the tactical. He didn’t realize it, but he’d surrendered on the strategic. Now it was a matter of details.

“We’re so close, Lon. We’ve solved the ballistic issue, we have the best rifle shot in the world, we have a silenced rifle, the most advanced assassination tool in the world, we have a prime patsy who will, I say again, will take the blame for us, the poor dummy, and we have the best breaking-and-entering man in America. And we have JFK in an open-top limousine parading by at twelve thirty p.m. the day after tomorrow. We have one thing yet to do, and it’s something that should be within any case officer’s reach. We have to find a place to shoot in reasonable proximity to Oswald’s at about the same moment, and while everybody is going after him, I will push you away in your wheelchair, and we’ll have martinis and steaks that night.”

“It’s not a joke, Hugh. Killing a man, a young beautiful man, no matter the reason, it’s not a joke.”

He was right. My foolish attempt at levity had sabotaged the moment.

“I overplayed that hand, I know. It was stupid. I apologize to you, Lon; you deserve better from me. No, we won’t celebrate, we’ll mourn along with the rest of America, and we’ll never boast or tell. But we will save thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of lives.”

“Damn you again, Hugh. You are so willful, so convincing.”

“Let me sell Jimmy and see what he comes up with. If he comes up with something that’s workable, then make up your mind. If you still don’t want to do it, fine. I suppose I did my best. We’ll go back to the Walker thing, as we originally planned.”

That was how we left it. I pushed him back, and he retired to his room for a nap. I called Jimmy. There was no answer.

I saw him get aboard the bus near the depository, and I followed it across the long aqueduct over the Trinity River all the way back to Oak Cliff, through the late-afternoon Dallas traffic. I wasn’t interested in the bus so much as in who else was interested in it. I looked for black Ford coupes, maybe with antennas, G-man cars. Neither the Bureau nor the Secret Service was there or shared any interest in Comrade Oswald; they were, as usual, profoundly asleep on the job. I could almost hear them snoring. Zzzzzz-zzzzzz.

In Alek’s neighborhood, I watched from across North Beckley as he got out; again, no other cars were parked on the street, and the two other men who got out at the same stop disappeared in another direction. Alek walked by me, oblivious to all in the fading light, his details hard to make out.

Even from the few lines the declining sun revealed, you could read him: he was like a figure out of Walt Kelly or Al Capp, a caricature of grumpy hostility, a stumping, glaring, shabby figure, all lines in face and body pulled down as if by overwhelming gravity, broadcasting the message DO NOT APPROACH OR YOU WILL BE FIRED UPON. No wonder the idiot was friendless, always getting in fights or bitter arguments, a trial to those few who had decided to let him into their lives, a wife beater, a jerk. Yet he became the ball bearing of history. How utterly strange and unpredictable.

I flashed my lights. He looked up, startled, recognized the Wagoneer by shape, and came over and got in.

I pulled away. “Good evening, Alek,” I said.

“Good evening, Comrade,” he said, “I’m set,” or something similar in his garbled Russian. “On Friday evening, I will go to Fort Worth and return Monday morning with the rifle for–”

“Alek,” I said, “I take it you haven’t read today’s paper. Or talked to coworkers in the plant?”

“I read papers a day late. It’s cheaper, I get them from the garbage. As for coworkers, they are not worth–”

“All right, all right. Time is short, the stakes are high. Now listen to me carefully. Don’t say a thing. Don’t react or have a bowel movement or begin to hip-hooray. The situation has changed radically.”

I felt him turn. “The ears are all of me,” he said, his clumsy literal translation, I’m guessing, of “I’m all ears,” for which there was no Russian equivalent.

Idiot! Agh. Anyway, I went ahead. “On Friday, at around twelve thirty, a motorcade will pass in front of your building on Elm Street. In an open limousine will be the president of the United States. Alek, can you alter history for us with one shot of your rifle? It is a great opportunity, so great that one must suspect the laws of the universe are turning in favor of our moral insistence on progress. Alek, can you do this thing for us? Are you the man who has been sent to do this thing?”

I heard his breath being swallowed, I heard him gulping. I couldn’t bear to look at his face, for I knew I would see a cavalcade of madness, narcissism, greed, and ambition and that his beady little vermin eyes would burn hot and fierce. The worst are full of murderous intensity, I thought.

“Comrade,” he finally said, and then he blurted off into English, “Jesus Christ, yes, goddammit, I have waited my whole life for this, oh, I will in one strike change the course of history, I will show the world the magnificence–”

“Settle down, you fool,” I said. “You’re carrying on like a schoolgirl. Get ahold of yourself and listen to me, all right?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” he said, still in English.

“In Russian. I insist, all discussions of this matter must be held in Russian.”

“Yes sir.”

“This is the sort of thing we do reluctantly, but we do not want this young man sending troops off to invade Cuba or anywhere, and he shows signs of instability, poor judgment, downright imbecility. He is too easily influenced, too desperately ambitious. He has no moral character. He is the kind of sparkler who could start an atomic war. He must be stopped, and a responsible leader put in charge of your nation. Alek, you must understand, in pulling that trigger, you are not destroying, you are building.”