The Third Bullet by Stephen Hunter
He was the betrayed man. For an instant, but only an instant, I felt a mote of sympathy for him. He’d been looking through the scope, trying to get on target for his third shot, when he’d seen what only Lon had seen—though within months, thanks to Mr. Zapruder, the world would see it. Alek, with his low, weaselly cunning, would know in that instant he was tricked and abandoned. Stupendous fury must have overcome him, replaced in seconds with abject, sickening panic. Along with thoughts along the line of: Fucked again, failed again, now I’m really cooked. Or maybe there’d been a twinge of ego gratification in what had to be his impending destruction: at last he was important enough to betray. His paranoid fantasy had at last come true. He was that crazy. Somehow he’d gotten downstairs and out of the building before it was sealed. Now he had no place to go, he had no escape plan, he knew the Wagoneer wouldn’t be waiting at Houston and Pacific, that it wouldn’t be long before a canvass was taken at the depository and his absence was discovered, a few minutes beyond that when his FBI record was connected to his name. He knew he was about to become the most hunted man on earth.
He already looked it. He knew he was the patsy. He was grim, hunched, angry, churning ahead with menace and dread in his beady eyes. His skin was ashen, his hair was all messed up, his cheeks were hollow, his jowls set hard, as if he were grinding his teeth. Though muscular, he had his hands jammed into his pockets, which narrowed his shoulders and gave him an almost negligible slenderness. He was the quintessential man of the fringes, aware that the bright glare of the world’s attention was to be focused on him. No trained clandestine operative would have presented such an obvious profile to the world, but nobody else was paying much attention either. He fought against the human current that gushed toward Dealey and the scraps and fragments of hope that filled the air. I heard them too.
“Maybe he’s okay. Head wounds bleed a lot.”
“They got him to the hospital in minutes, maybe seconds. These days, docs can do anything.”
“Maybe it was a grazing wound, you know, splashed some blood but didn’t do any real harm. That happened more’n you’d think in the war.”
“A guy that vigorous, he’ll be up and about and playing touch football in a few days!”
Impervious, head down, clothes ever grubby and attitude ever surly, Alek bucked ahead, ducking, stutter-stepping, evading, and soon I lost sight of him. His destiny lay elsewhere.
I got Lon all the way down to the sidewalk and joined the human tide. Everywhere I looked, small scenes of grief played out: a Negro woman had collapsed and was shrieking violently, there seemed to be cops everywhere, children cried, women wept, the men had that grave, glaring war face that I’d seen and would see again in Vietnam. The pedestrian masses overspilled the streets, and traffic was at a standstill. We could see more and more police cars converging on the scene, though trapped in the amber of people and vehicles, going nowhere. Guns had come out, and I think federal agents had arrived with their tommy guns, or maybe it was Dallas Homicide with all the firepower. I don’t know who they thought they were going to fight; maybe some red sniper nest defended by machine guns on the sixth floor of the Book Depository.
That was the focus of the attention. It was surrounded by policemen and cars and earnest federal agents who’d taken out their badges and pinned them on the lapels of their dark suits. Many had pistols out too. At the same time, the television trucks—remember, TV news was in its infancy then, and the camera equipment was cumbersome—had somehow bulled their way through, gotten their cameras out, and set up shots. I could see, every which way, earnest reporters addressing the tripod-mounted eyes of the networks and the locals. (I think Dan Rather was there somewhere.) Farther down the hill, I could see armed officers on the grassy knoll that would become such a feature, and all across the green emptiness of Dealey, small groups of people stood, many pointing, first at the looming Book Depository, then at the grassy knoll. Nobody pointed at Dal-Tex.
And the noise. I can’t quite describe it, but it was as if, involuntarily, every one of the thousands of folks there had started to moan or snort or breathe too heavily. A persistent murmur filled the air, not the surge of joy I’d heard from Dal-Tex 712 but something guttural and low, animalistic. No one person contributed that much, but it was the voice of the collective unconscious expressing its horror and grief and regret. I’d never heard before and would never again hear anything like that.
I got Lon across Elm and we began to push our way up Houston toward Main. People stormed by us, late to the party but intent on joining. Nobody gave a damn about us except for one cop at the corner of Main and Elm, who noted me waiting for the solid stream of traffic to break to get across, and when I was about to give up and go up Main, he took command of the traffic, whistle and attitude at full blast, and cleared a space for us to get across. I nodded thanks to him, and he nodded back; that was my only encounter with law enforcement that day, and I’ll bet in ten seconds the officer had forgotten all about it.
I continued down Houston until I reached Commerce and started up it. The Adolphus was ten or so blocks away. Then, miraculously, I was able to flag a cab. I gave him the hotel and got Lon in. The driver couldn’t stop jabbering.
“Did you see it?”
“No,” I said, which should have been sufficient, but like any guilty man, I overexplained. “We were at the doctor’s for my brother’s checkup.”
He didn’t notice. His mind was obsessed with what had happened ten minutes ago. “Man, I can’t believe it. Can you, mister? Holy cow, it’s such a tragedy. He was such a handsome young man. And that wife. God, what a dish. She was Jean Simmons and Dana Wynter combined with a little Audrey Hepburn. Oh, Lord, what she must be going through. I heard on the cop channel, they drilled him square in the head and there wasn’t anything left and—”
“Is it official? Is he dead?”
“I don’t know. God, what a mess.”
It took some time to fight our way up Commerce—it was as if the city had shut down everywhere except Dealey Plaza—but eventually, we arrived at the Adolphus. The doorman, solemn as was everybody, helped me get Lon out of the cab seat and into his chair. I could see he had been crying.
The crying continued inside, where a few old ladies of the flowery Southern-gentlewoman sort sat in a corner of the lobby, two of them in tears, the other two ministering to them with white hankies. I heard someone ask if the show at the Century Room would be canceled that night.
“I need a drink,” said Lon.
“Good idea,” I said.
I wheeled us through the lobby, past the Grand Staircase and the elevators, and into the dark Men’s Bar, surprisingly crowded, surprisingly quiet, dominated by a large black-and-white TV above the mirror at the center. We found a table with a good view of it, requested that the waiter turn it up, and went through the Texan idiocy of the bottle club.
“Jenkins,” I said, giving my official cover name, under which I was registered. “I have a bottle of bourbon, J.B.; could I have a shot straight and a glass of ice water?”
Lon remembered his own nom de guerre, laid claim to his bottle of Southern Comfort, and ordered his own straight shot, with ice on the side.
“Bring both bottles, sirs?” the waiter asked.
“Yes,” I said, “I think we’re going to need them.”
I checked my watch. By now it was 1:39. Evidently, Walter Cronkite had just announced, then taken off his glasses and pinched his nose, that JFK was gone. Someone said something wise, and someone else closed him down fast Texas-style with “Shut up, Charlie Tait, or dadgum, I will shut you up myself.”
We sat there all afternoon in the dark silence, watching the images float across the screen. We watched the discovery of Alek’s rifle and the three cartridge cases, we heard of the swearing in of Lyndon Johnson, all without comment. The news came shortly thereafter that a cop had been shot to death in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas, but nobody knew whether it was related to the president’s death except me. Alek’s roomin
ghouse was in Oak Cliff; it had to be him, and the description of the assailant—young white man, five-ten or so, muscular build, under thirty—had to be him. At the time, I thought, Damn, I told him not to bring a gun, and the bastard disobeyed me! I knew I never should have counted on him and cursed myself doubly for springing such a dangerous incompetent on the snoozing world. Later, I realized he’d gone all the way back across town to retrieve the pistol, so he had at least stayed under discipline until he understood that he’d been betrayed. That was all I could have asked of him.
I said a prayer for the policeman. Hypocritical, no? But hypocrisy is one sin I cannot evade; it is, after all, the core of my profession, a demure churchgoing dad and Yalie by weekend who plots murder by weekday. I was quick to come to terms with it. I concluded in the end that I had done all that was possible to ensure such an outcome would not happen. It did anyway because of the intractability of the piteous Alek. It is a misfortune but not a tragedy. All operations of force—we were to learn this in spades in the coming decade—involve risk of collateral damage. The policeman, like the president, made his career decision based on a cost-benefit analysis, took his chances, and his number came up. That is the wicked way of the real world, morally justifiable if the ends themselves are morally justifiable. So it goes.
“I don’t think I can take any more of this,” Lon finally said.
“You okay?” I said.
“I’ve felt better,” he replied.
“Remember,” I said. “The long view.”
“Easy to say,” he said. “Not so easy to do.”
“I’ll push you,” I said, and started to get up.
“Hugh, I’ve had enough of you for one day, all right?”
He wheeled himself out of the bar, and I watched him propel himself across the lobby to the elevator, where another guest had to punch his floor. He rolled into the car, the brass doors closed behind him, and off he went.
I went back to the bourbon and the television. I watched Air Force One take off with the new president, the body of the old president, and that poor crushed rose of a woman who was, just two hours ago, the glamour center of the world.
At about 3:20, it came. It signified the beginning of a new phase, one in which I was extremely vulnerable, as was the agency for which I worked (and which I loved), whose reputation and possible ruin I had risked.
This from Dallas. The police department arrested a twenty-four-year-old man, Lee H. Oswald, in connection with the slaying of a Dallas policeman shortly after President Kennedy was assassinated. He also is being questioned to see if he had any connection with the slaying of the president. Oswald was pulled yelling and screaming from the Texas Theatre in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas . . .
It didn’t take long for them to round him up, did it? About two hours, and in that time he’d managed to kill a policeman. What a complete fool he was. Again it made me sick, and I took another bolt of the hooch, which hit like a mallet, driving me further into blur. I think I phased out after that, as the bourbon took over, and I fell into a stupor. I was not behaving well. This was not in the “Pip-pip, onward and upward” tradition of the agency and all its Skull and Bonesers. The event had reduced me to alcoholic stupor.
I don’t remember going upstairs to my room or taking a shower. Or climbing into my pajamas. I don’t remember going facedown on the bed.
I do remember waking up around midnight. And I remember the panic I felt.
Where was Jimmy Costello?
CHAPTER 18
These strange ‘visions,’ for such they must be called, are extremely vivid in some cases but are almost incredible to the vast majority of mankind, who would set them down as fantastic nonsense. Nevertheless they are familiar parts of the mental furniture of the rest, whose imaginations they have unconsciously framed and where they remain, unmodified or unmodifiable, by teaching.”
Bob squinted, feeling his brow crunch in pain. So wrote Francis Galton in the late nineteenth century, and Bob thought: What the fuck?
If he understood it, and he wasn’t sure he did, Niles Gardner had been fascinated by whatever thing it was that Sir Francis had noted 120 or so years earlier, some “fantastic vision” disease or condition. It had to do with colors showing up when cued by encounters with nothing of color. A letter could have a color to it or, in this case, a number.
He seemed to be saying or acknowledging or somehow having fun with—there was an unidentifiable sense of lightness to it, humor, almost a joke—how he saw certain things in color. He would always see the number four as blue, which was why he had four junky ceramic bluebirds on his shelf, and the number six as green, which was why he had a magazine illustration from the fifties that incidentally displayed six green elm trees. Most provocatively, he saw the number nine as red, which was why he had a Mauser 96 pistol lying around, one of the few Mausers designated by the numeral 9 engraved in the grip, then painted red, and known forever after as Red Nines.
Swagger sat in the business office of the Adolphus, where he was again staying in Dallas, and banged his head against the enigma at a computer monitor that the hotel provided its guests. Outside the door, prosperous men seemed to push to and fro; by extreme happenstance, the hotel was that weekend the site of some sort of JFK Assassination Research meeting.
Swagger had ridden down in the elevator with a batch of them, mostly heavyset white guys in sport shirts who hung together.
“Y’all interested in the assassination?” he asked one.
“Mmm,” said the man, looking off, as if he had some big secrets cooking and couldn’t share them with an outsider. Maybe he was the guy who realized that the Commies had not one or two but three Oswald clones in play on November 22.
Swagger looked back at his notepad, where, in childish script, in an attempt to keep it straight and orderly, he had inscribed some notes that anyone else might see as insane.
“Blue = 4, Green = 6, Red = 9,” read one line.
“Maybe numbers not as significant as colors?”
“Maybe sequence isn’t important?”
“Maybe it’s not a code, it’s just what he sees?”
“Why would Hugh have anything to do with 4, 6, or 9, or blue, green, or red?”
That was a stumper. He was, he realized, on the second step, but only on the basis of fragile assumption. That assumption: that Hugh’s last, best, lost work name was a reflection of Niles and Hugh’s love of Nabokov, and that it involved a pun, possibly cross-lingual, that could be noted only by someone who knew it existed.
So: what linked them?
But: there was no direct link between the three numbers, the three colors, and Hugh.
Except: the pistol, as his son noted, stood for espionage. It had to. It was exactly the implement any spy in the twenties or thirties might have carried if he didn’t have a Luger. What were its advantages over a Luger?
More firepower, ten rounds to seven.
Longer barrel, meaning more accuracy.
More ergonomic, because its weight was ahead of the trigger, not above it, as in a Luger.
More psychologically threatening to an opponent.
More flexible, as it could be mounted to a shoulder stock and used for longer-range shooting.
It did have disadvantages.
Bigger, heavier.
A little harder to load, with a stripper clip that demanded fine motor control to mate with the interior magazine lips, rather than a magazine, which, by gross motor movement, could just be shoved into the Luger’s grip.
Harder to conceal, maybe very difficult to conceal, because it was bigger.
Yet these were the sort of things a Bob Lee Swagger would consider, not a Niles Gardner. Niles, after all, was a lit guy, not a gun guy. He wouldn’t be thinking tactically but symbolically, and in his brain, the glamour and the romance and the vividness of classical prewar espionage, back when it was called the Great Game, was just as easily conveyed by the Mauser as by the Luger.
Maybe the meaning o
f the gun as tool was of less importance to Niles than the meaning of it as symbol. In his mind, it could and probably would be his image of his friend the heroic (three tours in ’Nam!) Hugh Meachum. After all, Hugh was the man Niles could never be but would always want to be. The gun, solid steel, precise, deadly, able to destroy at long distance, concealable under a Burberry trench coat, the indispensable leverage that enabled its possessor to control any dangerous transaction, was a perfect projection into objective reality that expressed all the Hugh traits that Niles didn’t have.
As Niles’s mind had to work, Hugh was the Red Nine. It had to be that way. Maybe the assumption wasn’t so small after all. The “Red” association was another buttress in the argument, for it conjured up Russia, which, after all, had been Hugh’s primary target, the Vietnam tours being mere diversions. It all fit together.
But it went nowhere. It didn’t connect to Nabokov, it didn’t connect to the Agency. It just sat there, an old pistol on a dead man’s desk, its secrets locked away, only a glow of hopes or fantasies about it, its sole uniqueness the Red Nine on its grip.
I wish I had a drink. I wish I had a cigarette. I wish I had a whore. I wish I had a mansion by the sea.
No, he didn’t. He didn’t wish he had any of those.
I wish I had an answer.
He thought that maybe that answer lay somewhere within the work of Sir Francis Galton, cousin to Darwin, Victorian polymath (Bob had to look up the new word).
He Googled Sir Francis.
The Wikipedia entry came up first, and he absorbed the info quickly.
Eugenicist. Another word to look up.
Hmm, seems to believe smart people should breed and dumb ones shouldn’t.
Fingerprints.
Hmm, noted the uniqueness of fingerprints, classified them, and thus invented the forensic discipline of fingerprint index, and thus, in one sense, was the father of scientific crime investigation.
Heredity.
Believed passionately in the power of genes (obviously, eugenics and fingerprints) and that talent clusters could be associated with certain families, i.e., those of the “superior” English upper class, into which he was born.
He already looked it. He knew he was the patsy. He was grim, hunched, angry, churning ahead with menace and dread in his beady eyes. His skin was ashen, his hair was all messed up, his cheeks were hollow, his jowls set hard, as if he were grinding his teeth. Though muscular, he had his hands jammed into his pockets, which narrowed his shoulders and gave him an almost negligible slenderness. He was the quintessential man of the fringes, aware that the bright glare of the world’s attention was to be focused on him. No trained clandestine operative would have presented such an obvious profile to the world, but nobody else was paying much attention either. He fought against the human current that gushed toward Dealey and the scraps and fragments of hope that filled the air. I heard them too.
“Maybe he’s okay. Head wounds bleed a lot.”
“They got him to the hospital in minutes, maybe seconds. These days, docs can do anything.”
“Maybe it was a grazing wound, you know, splashed some blood but didn’t do any real harm. That happened more’n you’d think in the war.”
“A guy that vigorous, he’ll be up and about and playing touch football in a few days!”
Impervious, head down, clothes ever grubby and attitude ever surly, Alek bucked ahead, ducking, stutter-stepping, evading, and soon I lost sight of him. His destiny lay elsewhere.
I got Lon all the way down to the sidewalk and joined the human tide. Everywhere I looked, small scenes of grief played out: a Negro woman had collapsed and was shrieking violently, there seemed to be cops everywhere, children cried, women wept, the men had that grave, glaring war face that I’d seen and would see again in Vietnam. The pedestrian masses overspilled the streets, and traffic was at a standstill. We could see more and more police cars converging on the scene, though trapped in the amber of people and vehicles, going nowhere. Guns had come out, and I think federal agents had arrived with their tommy guns, or maybe it was Dallas Homicide with all the firepower. I don’t know who they thought they were going to fight; maybe some red sniper nest defended by machine guns on the sixth floor of the Book Depository.
That was the focus of the attention. It was surrounded by policemen and cars and earnest federal agents who’d taken out their badges and pinned them on the lapels of their dark suits. Many had pistols out too. At the same time, the television trucks—remember, TV news was in its infancy then, and the camera equipment was cumbersome—had somehow bulled their way through, gotten their cameras out, and set up shots. I could see, every which way, earnest reporters addressing the tripod-mounted eyes of the networks and the locals. (I think Dan Rather was there somewhere.) Farther down the hill, I could see armed officers on the grassy knoll that would become such a feature, and all across the green emptiness of Dealey, small groups of people stood, many pointing, first at the looming Book Depository, then at the grassy knoll. Nobody pointed at Dal-Tex.
And the noise. I can’t quite describe it, but it was as if, involuntarily, every one of the thousands of folks there had started to moan or snort or breathe too heavily. A persistent murmur filled the air, not the surge of joy I’d heard from Dal-Tex 712 but something guttural and low, animalistic. No one person contributed that much, but it was the voice of the collective unconscious expressing its horror and grief and regret. I’d never heard before and would never again hear anything like that.
I got Lon across Elm and we began to push our way up Houston toward Main. People stormed by us, late to the party but intent on joining. Nobody gave a damn about us except for one cop at the corner of Main and Elm, who noted me waiting for the solid stream of traffic to break to get across, and when I was about to give up and go up Main, he took command of the traffic, whistle and attitude at full blast, and cleared a space for us to get across. I nodded thanks to him, and he nodded back; that was my only encounter with law enforcement that day, and I’ll bet in ten seconds the officer had forgotten all about it.
I continued down Houston until I reached Commerce and started up it. The Adolphus was ten or so blocks away. Then, miraculously, I was able to flag a cab. I gave him the hotel and got Lon in. The driver couldn’t stop jabbering.
“Did you see it?”
“No,” I said, which should have been sufficient, but like any guilty man, I overexplained. “We were at the doctor’s for my brother’s checkup.”
He didn’t notice. His mind was obsessed with what had happened ten minutes ago. “Man, I can’t believe it. Can you, mister? Holy cow, it’s such a tragedy. He was such a handsome young man. And that wife. God, what a dish. She was Jean Simmons and Dana Wynter combined with a little Audrey Hepburn. Oh, Lord, what she must be going through. I heard on the cop channel, they drilled him square in the head and there wasn’t anything left and—”
“Is it official? Is he dead?”
“I don’t know. God, what a mess.”
It took some time to fight our way up Commerce—it was as if the city had shut down everywhere except Dealey Plaza—but eventually, we arrived at the Adolphus. The doorman, solemn as was everybody, helped me get Lon out of the cab seat and into his chair. I could see he had been crying.
The crying continued inside, where a few old ladies of the flowery Southern-gentlewoman sort sat in a corner of the lobby, two of them in tears, the other two ministering to them with white hankies. I heard someone ask if the show at the Century Room would be canceled that night.
“I need a drink,” said Lon.
“Good idea,” I said.
I wheeled us through the lobby, past the Grand Staircase and the elevators, and into the dark Men’s Bar, surprisingly crowded, surprisingly quiet, dominated by a large black-and-white TV above the mirror at the center. We found a table with a good view of it, requested that the waiter turn it up, and went through the Texan idiocy of the bottle club.
“Jenkins,” I said, giving my official cover name, under which I was registered. “I have a bottle of bourbon, J.B.; could I have a shot straight and a glass of ice water?”
Lon remembered his own nom de guerre, laid claim to his bottle of Southern Comfort, and ordered his own straight shot, with ice on the side.
“Bring both bottles, sirs?” the waiter asked.
“Yes,” I said, “I think we’re going to need them.”
I checked my watch. By now it was 1:39. Evidently, Walter Cronkite had just announced, then taken off his glasses and pinched his nose, that JFK was gone. Someone said something wise, and someone else closed him down fast Texas-style with “Shut up, Charlie Tait, or dadgum, I will shut you up myself.”
We sat there all afternoon in the dark silence, watching the images float across the screen. We watched the discovery of Alek’s rifle and the three cartridge cases, we heard of the swearing in of Lyndon Johnson, all without comment. The news came shortly thereafter that a cop had been shot to death in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas, but nobody knew whether it was related to the president’s death except me. Alek’s roomin
I said a prayer for the policeman. Hypocritical, no? But hypocrisy is one sin I cannot evade; it is, after all, the core of my profession, a demure churchgoing dad and Yalie by weekend who plots murder by weekday. I was quick to come to terms with it. I concluded in the end that I had done all that was possible to ensure such an outcome would not happen. It did anyway because of the intractability of the piteous Alek. It is a misfortune but not a tragedy. All operations of force—we were to learn this in spades in the coming decade—involve risk of collateral damage. The policeman, like the president, made his career decision based on a cost-benefit analysis, took his chances, and his number came up. That is the wicked way of the real world, morally justifiable if the ends themselves are morally justifiable. So it goes.
“I don’t think I can take any more of this,” Lon finally said.
“You okay?” I said.
“I’ve felt better,” he replied.
“Remember,” I said. “The long view.”
“Easy to say,” he said. “Not so easy to do.”
“I’ll push you,” I said, and started to get up.
“Hugh, I’ve had enough of you for one day, all right?”
He wheeled himself out of the bar, and I watched him propel himself across the lobby to the elevator, where another guest had to punch his floor. He rolled into the car, the brass doors closed behind him, and off he went.
I went back to the bourbon and the television. I watched Air Force One take off with the new president, the body of the old president, and that poor crushed rose of a woman who was, just two hours ago, the glamour center of the world.
At about 3:20, it came. It signified the beginning of a new phase, one in which I was extremely vulnerable, as was the agency for which I worked (and which I loved), whose reputation and possible ruin I had risked.
This from Dallas. The police department arrested a twenty-four-year-old man, Lee H. Oswald, in connection with the slaying of a Dallas policeman shortly after President Kennedy was assassinated. He also is being questioned to see if he had any connection with the slaying of the president. Oswald was pulled yelling and screaming from the Texas Theatre in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas . . .
It didn’t take long for them to round him up, did it? About two hours, and in that time he’d managed to kill a policeman. What a complete fool he was. Again it made me sick, and I took another bolt of the hooch, which hit like a mallet, driving me further into blur. I think I phased out after that, as the bourbon took over, and I fell into a stupor. I was not behaving well. This was not in the “Pip-pip, onward and upward” tradition of the agency and all its Skull and Bonesers. The event had reduced me to alcoholic stupor.
I don’t remember going upstairs to my room or taking a shower. Or climbing into my pajamas. I don’t remember going facedown on the bed.
I do remember waking up around midnight. And I remember the panic I felt.
Where was Jimmy Costello?
CHAPTER 18
These strange ‘visions,’ for such they must be called, are extremely vivid in some cases but are almost incredible to the vast majority of mankind, who would set them down as fantastic nonsense. Nevertheless they are familiar parts of the mental furniture of the rest, whose imaginations they have unconsciously framed and where they remain, unmodified or unmodifiable, by teaching.”
Bob squinted, feeling his brow crunch in pain. So wrote Francis Galton in the late nineteenth century, and Bob thought: What the fuck?
If he understood it, and he wasn’t sure he did, Niles Gardner had been fascinated by whatever thing it was that Sir Francis had noted 120 or so years earlier, some “fantastic vision” disease or condition. It had to do with colors showing up when cued by encounters with nothing of color. A letter could have a color to it or, in this case, a number.
He seemed to be saying or acknowledging or somehow having fun with—there was an unidentifiable sense of lightness to it, humor, almost a joke—how he saw certain things in color. He would always see the number four as blue, which was why he had four junky ceramic bluebirds on his shelf, and the number six as green, which was why he had a magazine illustration from the fifties that incidentally displayed six green elm trees. Most provocatively, he saw the number nine as red, which was why he had a Mauser 96 pistol lying around, one of the few Mausers designated by the numeral 9 engraved in the grip, then painted red, and known forever after as Red Nines.
Swagger sat in the business office of the Adolphus, where he was again staying in Dallas, and banged his head against the enigma at a computer monitor that the hotel provided its guests. Outside the door, prosperous men seemed to push to and fro; by extreme happenstance, the hotel was that weekend the site of some sort of JFK Assassination Research meeting.
Swagger had ridden down in the elevator with a batch of them, mostly heavyset white guys in sport shirts who hung together.
“Y’all interested in the assassination?” he asked one.
“Mmm,” said the man, looking off, as if he had some big secrets cooking and couldn’t share them with an outsider. Maybe he was the guy who realized that the Commies had not one or two but three Oswald clones in play on November 22.
Swagger looked back at his notepad, where, in childish script, in an attempt to keep it straight and orderly, he had inscribed some notes that anyone else might see as insane.
“Blue = 4, Green = 6, Red = 9,” read one line.
“Maybe numbers not as significant as colors?”
“Maybe sequence isn’t important?”
“Maybe it’s not a code, it’s just what he sees?”
“Why would Hugh have anything to do with 4, 6, or 9, or blue, green, or red?”
That was a stumper. He was, he realized, on the second step, but only on the basis of fragile assumption. That assumption: that Hugh’s last, best, lost work name was a reflection of Niles and Hugh’s love of Nabokov, and that it involved a pun, possibly cross-lingual, that could be noted only by someone who knew it existed.
So: what linked them?
But: there was no direct link between the three numbers, the three colors, and Hugh.
Except: the pistol, as his son noted, stood for espionage. It had to. It was exactly the implement any spy in the twenties or thirties might have carried if he didn’t have a Luger. What were its advantages over a Luger?
More firepower, ten rounds to seven.
Longer barrel, meaning more accuracy.
More ergonomic, because its weight was ahead of the trigger, not above it, as in a Luger.
More psychologically threatening to an opponent.
More flexible, as it could be mounted to a shoulder stock and used for longer-range shooting.
It did have disadvantages.
Bigger, heavier.
A little harder to load, with a stripper clip that demanded fine motor control to mate with the interior magazine lips, rather than a magazine, which, by gross motor movement, could just be shoved into the Luger’s grip.
Harder to conceal, maybe very difficult to conceal, because it was bigger.
Yet these were the sort of things a Bob Lee Swagger would consider, not a Niles Gardner. Niles, after all, was a lit guy, not a gun guy. He wouldn’t be thinking tactically but symbolically, and in his brain, the glamour and the romance and the vividness of classical prewar espionage, back when it was called the Great Game, was just as easily conveyed by the Mauser as by the Luger.
Maybe the meaning o
As Niles’s mind had to work, Hugh was the Red Nine. It had to be that way. Maybe the assumption wasn’t so small after all. The “Red” association was another buttress in the argument, for it conjured up Russia, which, after all, had been Hugh’s primary target, the Vietnam tours being mere diversions. It all fit together.
But it went nowhere. It didn’t connect to Nabokov, it didn’t connect to the Agency. It just sat there, an old pistol on a dead man’s desk, its secrets locked away, only a glow of hopes or fantasies about it, its sole uniqueness the Red Nine on its grip.
I wish I had a drink. I wish I had a cigarette. I wish I had a whore. I wish I had a mansion by the sea.
No, he didn’t. He didn’t wish he had any of those.
I wish I had an answer.
He thought that maybe that answer lay somewhere within the work of Sir Francis Galton, cousin to Darwin, Victorian polymath (Bob had to look up the new word).
He Googled Sir Francis.
The Wikipedia entry came up first, and he absorbed the info quickly.
Eugenicist. Another word to look up.
Hmm, seems to believe smart people should breed and dumb ones shouldn’t.
Fingerprints.
Hmm, noted the uniqueness of fingerprints, classified them, and thus invented the forensic discipline of fingerprint index, and thus, in one sense, was the father of scientific crime investigation.
Heredity.
Believed passionately in the power of genes (obviously, eugenics and fingerprints) and that talent clusters could be associated with certain families, i.e., those of the “superior” English upper class, into which he was born.