Stephen Hunter - The Third Bullet

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” he said.

He didn’t, of course, and I was fooling myself, really, throwing a last grenade into my own lingering defenses; I was arguing with myself.

“Alek, if you are to do this thing, you must do it under our absolute discipline. We will provide you with an escape route. We will get you to a safe house, we will get you out of the country, we will get you to your glory in Havana and your rightful place among the revolutionary fighters. In a year or so, we will get your wife and children to you. But this can be guaranteed only if you submit and trust absolutely our rules, do you understand?”

“I agree, I agree. I hear what you’re saying. If it comes to it, I won’t let them take me alive. I’ll have my pistol with me, I’ll go down shooting, as I am willing to die for–”

“No, no, no,” I said, fearing this idiot on a shooting rampage in downtown Dallas, “you must not bring your pistol. Believe me” – I struggled for the appropriate fiction to disabuse him – “if you kill the president on a policy issue and because of your own sense of idealism, however warped they may think it, you will be reviled but respected. You will have a legacy of courage and dignity. If you also shoot some postman or some housewife, you become another punk Negro murderer, and your electrocution will be cheered by your own children, and you do not want that. Believe me, leave the pistol at home; swear to me you will harm no one except your target. That is the discipline we demand. We are not butchers, we are scientific Marxists.”

“Yes sir,” he said.

“Tell me how you would proceed.”

He laid out the obvious. He’d have to go home tomorrow night – Thursday – to get the rifle; he would break it down so it could be disguised and carry it into the building in a brown paper bag. Nobody would challenge him. He would go to the sixth floor, which was largely deserted, as it was pure stock storage area. He would situate himself overlooking Elm as it passed by Dealey Plaza on the way to the triple overpass, and he would shoot the president as he passed by.

“Which window will you shoot from?” I asked.

“What?”

“Which window? You have your choice of any; which window do you chose?”

“Uh, I guess the one in the middle.”

“Why?”

“It’s in the middle.”

“Excellent reasoning. You are a genius. Where on Elm will you shoot the president? That’s the determining factor on the window. You cannot make these things up on the spot. You of all people cannot make things up on the spot, because you will do it stupidly.”

“Where should I shoot?”

“You know the building at the street.”

“I – I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to make any–”

“Idiot. You want him where he’s closest and slowest. Any map should give you the answer. Where will he be closest and slowest? This is why you’re such a failure, Alek. You don’t think. You just make things up!”

His face knitted in shame. Then I saw a bulb go on behind that dull face, those dim eyes. Bingo! Eureka!

“When he’s turning the corner. He has to turn the corner from Houston to Elm. It’s very sharp.”

“Excellent. It’s a hundred and twenty degrees. The car is big, it will pivot slowly. For all intents and purposes, he will be standing still. His chest will be open to you at a range of about seventy-five feet. An idiot could make the shot.”

“I’m not an idiot,” he said. “Sure, I make mistakes, but everybody–”

“Which window, Alek?”

“The corner window. The closest window to him. If I planned to shoot later, as he went down Elm, then I would move to another window down Elm.”

“Excellent,” I said, glad that he had figured out this elementary riddle (though no conspiracy theorists did, I might add) so that I could praise him and raise his spirits. “You shoot him when he’s closest, when he’s stillest. One shot, center chest, easy to make.”

“Fish in a barrel,” he said in English with that dreadful smirk.

“After shooting,” I instructed, “you will have little time to make your escape. The police will be in the building within minutes. Drop the rifle, walk, do not run, downstairs, being careful not to acquire oxygen debt so you are swallowing for air. Look no one in the eye, but do not shirk either. Your face is neutral. Exit the building and slip off into the mob. It will be chaos outside. Proceed down Houston Street one block to the corner of Houston and Pacific. You will see this car, though I might not be driving, and it could be anyone, a couple, an old lady, a Mexican, a hepcat. Climb in the back and lie down on the floor. Commit yourself to a long, boring drive. In a few hours we will have you at a safe house, and at that point, you can relax, eat, drink. The next day, or really the next night, we will move you out of the country. These will be an arduous few days demanding stamina, commitment, attention to detail, and obedience. Trust us, Alek, will you? Can you?”

He said yes.

“I wish we had time for run-throughs, for rehearsals, for shooting practice, for all of that. Can you hit that easy, almost stationary target under seventy-five feet away?”

“I’m a good shot. I won’t miss,” he said.

“All right. We must make do with what has been given us. For some reason, history has chosen you. You have to justify that choice. I believe in you, Alek, as no one else has. You owe me, you owe your true motherland, you owe history. You must not fail.”

“Comrade, I swear to you–”

I cut him off, as we were a few doors down from his house, and I gave him a Russian hug, smelling the body odor of a man who seldom bothered with hygiene, fastidious New England priss that I am and always will be.

“Now go, little Alek, and become a hero.”

He stepped out of the door, and I pulled out, leaving him behind.

You’re thinking: Okay, Hugh. Call your friend Jack Ruby and set the second part of the plan in operation. Tell us about Jack, how you manipulated him, how far back you old buddies went, your underworld ties, the implicit sponsorship of the Mob, particularly the Trafficante connection, running through the attempts on Castro that your own section, Clandestine Services under the great Cord Meyer, had set up.

Hah. The joke’s on you, friend. You shouldn’t be thinking about Jack Ruby, unless you sloppily missed the Warren Commission detail that he’d sent a Western Union moneygram to one of his strippers a full forty minutes after the announced transfer time of Alek to a more secure locale; he didn’t show up at the station basement until a full hour after that designated time, so he could have had no idea that Alek was in the building. Though that is the sort of thing the conspiracy hucksters always fail to mention, it destroys any possibility of Ruby as anything but a random mote of dust adrift on the currents of history, being blown this way and that.

For the record, I never heard of Jack Ruby until shortly after he finished poor Alek and took over the story himself. I suppose this may be counted as several of the immense strokes of good fortune that Operation LIBERTY VALANCE enjoyed, though perhaps it was meaningless in the end. The truth is, I planned to betray Oswald to the police; I expected him to be picked up and eventually electrocuted.

I didn’t think it mattered. His personality – I am no psychiatrist, but I’d studied him enough and been around him enough – had the smell of disintegration. He was a crackpot to begin with, with enormous mental disorders that had afflicted him his whole life. The outward manifestations were hotheadedness, empathy with outre causes and policies, lack of attention to details, sloppiness in all manners of being. He was a man at war, though primarily with himself. I suppose, inside, he hated his absent father and his overbearing, vulgar, disorganized mother; he hated himself for his continual incompetence and his total inability to engage people at any level; for his utter intellectual mediocrity. He worshipped the god of communism, knowing little about it. He had a streak of melodramatic vainglory – more than a streak, it was perhaps the largest part of his identity. I do think that he genuinely didn’t care if he lived or died; he was willing to risk his own life in an attempt to fulfill his most urgent need, which was to matter and no longer be a marginal loser detested by all. Loved or hated, it made no difference to him; that his name would be on the world’s lips with this opportunity, it was an aphrodisiac that his dull-normal mind and undisciplined lunacy could not have resisted. I believe he would have taken those shots whether or not we existed.