Patsy! : The Life and Times of Lee Harvey Oswald Read online

  Someday, he had silently vowed, it will all be different. I’ll show ‘em. Just wait and see. I’ll dazzle you!

  But ... when? And how?

  *

  Unlike those ragged dolls, worthless except in context, now the idea he had furtively been grasping for rose to the surface. Something some artist had said—Oh, I remember now. Warhol. Andy Warhol. The guy who took Campbells soup cans, signed his name on the label, then sold them as “art,” demanding large amounts of money from those who relished the privilege of being duped, at least as Lee Harvey Oswald saw it. One more aspect of the decadence that America, and the world, had fallen into during the first half of the 1960s. The Sweet Life. La Dolce Vita! The Sexual Revolution. All the rest of it. Old-fashioned values that had sustained the nation through the better part of two centuries suddenly abandoned now. Gone with the wind so to speak, their absence destroying the nation Lee so loved.

  Not that he had any reason to. God, how America and Americans had kicked and spit on him, pretty much from day one. That didn’t matter. Lee took solace from a line in a film, one of many he'd seen and never forgotten. Those great movie lines, experienced over and over again when he watched his favorite films on their later TV airings, branded into his memory buds as if with a hot iron. In this case, an exchange of dialogue that sustained him through the worst of times and inspired him during the best. Or, more accurately stated, the least of the bad.

  A Frank Sinatra film, of course. Nothing meant more to Lee than Sinatra: the man, the music, and most of all The Movies.

  It hadn’t been Frank, the magnet that drew Lee to that picture for the first time at age thirteen, From Here to Eternity, who spoke the line. Montgomery Clift, playing Sinatra’s best pal, ’Robert E. Lee Prewitt,’ had been the one. Right there, in that character’s very name, Lee felt entranced by his experience with the movie. His own father, who died shortly before Marguerite gave birth to Lee, had been named after that same glorious Southern general. Could this be a coincidence, or perhaps fate? Was that film, apparently meant for everybody, secretly speaking to Lee Harvey Oswald on some deep, secretive level? In case that were so, then he had better pay close attention to everything in it.

  Monty was cast as a soldier at Pearl Harbor, right before the sneak attack. A great lightweight boxer, he resisted joining the Company team for deeply personal reasons. Once, while sparring in the ring with a pal, he'd accidentally blinded the man. Afterwards, ’Prew’ took an oath to never box again. The Company Captain, a corrupt, cynical son of a bitch, wanted the championship trophy. Unofficially, he instructed his non-coms to put pressure on the kid. Making his life miserable, first with extra latrine duty and endless drills up and down a mountain while carrying his M1. Later, when that didn't work, ordering men beat Prew mercilessly

  “You must hate the army,” Prew’s girlfriend, a whore played by Donna Reed, sobbed after her lover explained to her what he’s been put through; ‘The Treatment.’ as it was referred to in the military.

  “No,” Prew laughed in that wonderfully crazy kind of way only Monty Clift could manage. Not even Sinatra himself able to pull off that little acting trick. “I love the army.” 'Alma' was stunned: “How could you?” she wanted to know, “after all it’s done to you?” Prew thought that over before answering: “Just because you love something,” he finally explained, “doesn’t mean it has to love you back.”

  Lee had never forgotten those words. Whenever he watched From Here to Eternity again, first in run-down bijous that played old movies on their second or third go-around, later on TV after Marguerite decided they could finally afford one, Lee Harvey Oswald, son of Robert E. Lee Oswald, spoke them out loud simultaneous with Montgomery Clift as Robert E. Lee Prewitt. At such moments Lee felt that he, in his remote little corner of the world, and the hero up there onscreen were one and the same.

  Lee loved America, as Prew had the army, though it had never yet loved him back. As to that dream figure in glorious black and white? That's the man he wanted to be. Or, if he could never be conventionally handsome like Clift, perhaps come to resemble Frank Sinatra as lovable little 'Angelo Maggio,' the scrawny, short guy everyone in the Company so adored.

  Lee was short and scrawny. Why didn't people love him? He'd have to figure that out, transform from a caterpillar into a beautifully colored moth, to be accepted. Always, Lee tried to work on that. So far, it hadn't clicked. Someday, he’d figure out how to do it. Then, the moment of transcendence would occur.

  *

  Anyway! That artist on TV, speaking late at night on a small indie channel that carried Open End with host David Susskind. What was his name again? Warhol! That was it. He’d said something too, another of those phrases that greatly impacted on Lee’s life. The gathered panel of experts—how I so want to be interviewed on TV someday myself!—had been speaking about the quickly changing fabric of life in our modern age.

  “Post-modern,” Warhol had called it, whatever that meant. How the new media, particularly television, altered everything. “In our time,” Warhol announced, “everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.”

  At the time, Lee scoffed at that statement. Marguerite, sitting on the couch beside him, said in that lilting voice of hers, with her faux Southern aristocrat-accent she'd picked up from watching Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind as many times as Lee had From Here to Eternity, that she believed it to be true. Then again, Lee's mother always did accept everything she heard on television. “If it weren’t true," she would insist, "they couldn’t put it on TV.”

  Over time, Lee rolled that notion around and around again until it began to make sense. Everyone, after all, did include himself. Lee Harvey Oswald, the boy who so hungered for fame ever since he could recall: a lonely if almost beautiful baby, quickly turning into a homely boy before everyone's eyes. A child who grew up on the streets, without benefit of lasting friends or any sense of family. ‘Everyone’ included him. The lowest of the low, at least as other people apparently saw him.

  Still, deep inside, L.H.O. held to a notably different vision of himself. The boy who'd been taunted by other kids until they tired of that, then ignored him. The invisible man, just like Claude Raines in the old movie, excepting that the character had willed invisibility on himself whereas he, Lee, had it imposed by others. Like the African-American character in that wonderful novel he had read by Ralph Ellison, all the while associating with the black man who went unseen in the eyes of whites passing by.

  He, too, would be famous for at least fifteen minutes. Who knew? Maybe more. Perhaps his fame would have longevity.

  Yes, Lee too would have his moment, though only if he pursued such a fruition endlessly, tirelessly, every day of his life. Fame and, with a little luck, immortality.

  *

  At 1:04 p.m. in the Parkland Memorial, Dallas, Texas, the same hospital where President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had passed away two days earlier, Lee Harvey Oswald stirred on his bed. The doctors and nurses observed the patient gasping desperately for breath even as they sensed that they were about to lose him. The medical people could not guess a final idea had passed through what was left of the 24-year-old's brain, still able to function as a terrible darkness closed in, tightening on the fast-fading cells that store memory and awareness.

  A final thought and/or emotion Lee so wanted to share with somebody—them, anyone—while time remained to do so.

  Something else I heard once. It too comes from a movie. I’m pretty sure. Most of what I know and believe does. There's an image in my mind and, in it, a great artist is interviewed by a pretty girl reporter. She asks him what he most wants to achieve in his lifetime. He responds: ’to become immortal, then die.’ All the TV cameras on him. Just as, this morning, they were on me. As I always dreamed and hoped, the whole world was watching.

  And, far more important, waiting to hear what I would say. I didn’t get it all out—only the first part, ’I’m a patsy!’

  That’s alright. Seven days
ago, I wrote everything down, the whole horrible business. What actually was going down as compared to what the public had been told by those in power and so believed. I handed my manuscript to a receptionist at FBI headquarters, right here in Dallas, a few blocks away from the book depository. With the inscription: “to be opened and made public in the case of my death.”

  Yes, yes, of course, so that means the truth will all come out. If the FBI can be trusted ...

  Not that things turned out as I hoped, what with Kennedy gone. All the same, I achieved my life’s goal. Became famous. And, as time may tell, immortal. I can stop struggling to hold on, despite all the pain. It’s okay to let go—

  *

  Less than two minutes later, the doctors and nurses of Parkland Memorial gathered close as Lee Harvey Oswald departed this world. Afterwards, when questioned by the press about what they’d seen, each shook his or her head in confusion. What these medical experts couldn’t grasp was how and why a man who must be going through such an unbearable ordeal had somehow managed to expire with a smile—a sneer, actually—on his face.

  That secret, everyone decided, Lee Harvey Oswald had taken with him to the grave.

  CHAPTER ONE:

  DEATH WISH

  “If surviving assassinations were an Olympic

  event, I would win a gold medal.”

  —Fidel Castro, 1967

  Eclectic, Frank Anthony Sturgis (CIA Codename: George) decided was the term to best describe the cityscape of Habana. At mid-morning, Sturgis had stepped out onto the sharp, jutting formation of craggy rocks by the harbor which tourists so loved to mount. Standing alone there, as if he were the most ordinary guy in the world, Sturgis had for the better part of an hour gazed out at the sharp, clean lines of El Morro lighthouse while the tide whipped white-tipped waves against its timeworn stucco surface, up onto the natural formation on which George stood. Droplets of salt water ricocheted onto his face. Later, after checking his watch to make certain he would be on time for his appointment, Sturgis strolled along the crowded Malecon, taking in the local color. This included diverse little shops where bright Cuban clothing and such enticing foodstuffs as cold pork sandwiches with thin-sliced-red-onion on a foot-long roll were hawked, in tandem with the charming array of happy, noisy people.

  At noon Sturgis continued on to Habana Vieja, the historic old city. There, ghosts of conquistadores were rumored to peek out from every alley. Sturgis paused long enough to marvel at the diversity of architectural styles, each unique building reflecting some successive era from this city’s 400-year history. Yes, he decided. The correct term is eclectic.

  For now, during this sunny siesta hour, Sturgis (or more correctly the man who had gone by that name for the past eight years) had plenty of time to closely study the appealing if incongruous arrangement of structures. He sat uncomfortably in a wobbly metal-frame chair, hunched over a small matching table ever since arriving at Banana Royale, a humble café kitty-corner to the stately Plaza de la Caterdral. Impatiently, Frank Sturgis waited for his assigned rendezvous, commencing with the arrival of his contact. Little more than a hundred feet away, the vast baroque building that lent this plaza its identity stretched high into an unblemished turquoise sky, its solid frame flanked by crumbling palaces that had somehow survived the end of the Colonial period intact. Each offered its own striking contrast to the area’s dominant centerpiece, the Caterdral itself, which in its grandeur commanded any visitor’s attention: the history of Cuba, crystallized in the building’s crumbling stones.

  When will she show up ... ? The bitch, the bitch ...

  Sturgis glanced at his watch: 2:35 P.M. already. Joe the Courier, his sea-green eyes glowing, had stopped by on time, handing George the anticipated packet at precisely 1:45. ‘The Kraut,’ as Sturgis mentally referred to the awaited young woman, apparently had decided to pull her 'how-late-can-I-make-my-grand-entrance-without-causing-you-to-throw-a-tantrum' routine. That was to be expected. Sturgis had never known a beautiful female who didn’t believe her breathtaking appearance granted her special privilege to keep the whole world waiting. Desperate to contain his mounting frustration (how dare she be late on this all-important occasion?), George forced himself to focus his mind on the remarkable buildings and architectural melange.

  The styles on view ranged from ancient Moors, Renaissance Spanish and Italian, to the art-nouveau style so trendy back in the U.S. during the 1920s. George appreciated each. Few people would have expected that from one in his profession. Thanks to a course he’d opted for at Virginia Poly-tech Institute while studying there on the G.I. Bill following his discharge from the Marines during WWII, he—Frank Angelo Fiorini then—grasped the background of each element in the wide spectrum as more casual tourists could not. Frank/George knew beauty when he saw it.

  He had always respected and admired beauty, in art as in women ... this short, dark man whose complicated and varied life (Virginia policeman, nightclub owner, gunrunner, agent) had led him here as a courier between the CIA and the Mafia, that powerful institution of organized crime with which his agency, known as The Company to members, had recently aligned.

  If that freakin’ bitch doesn’t show, what will I ...

  Then, all at once, there she was. A vision of loveliness as always, The Kraut floated toward George from around a corner, smiling brightly as if that solved everything. A triumph of her will would cause any man to forget all about being angry, even what he’d been upset about. She proceeded, in what appeared a ballet-like manner of moving, down an angular boulevard, not so much stepping across pavement like a normal human being, rather by some magic seeming to glide along on air itself. Approaching, she nodded and winked, basking in the confidence of beauty.

  How did a corny song from some old Hollywood film put it? You stepped out of a dream ... Few women George had known and bedded were capable of the heat he’d experienced with The Kraut, that cool-as-an-iceberg surface (half-German, half English) dissolving the moment this beautiful little brat hit the sheets.

  Not today, though. Not for me, at least. The Beard? Likely he’ll have her. Then, of course, she’ll ‘have’ him.

  As George reached into a jacket pocket for the cellophane wrapped package of blue pills that Joe the Courier, aka Santo Trafficante, Jr., had instructed him to pass to her, the agent considered the sleek killing-machine he had, in only a year, created out of a pretty, giddy, oblivious teenager. Now, today, the still child-like beauty, assigned the Code Name 'Lolita,' looked like something out of an Ian Fleming novel: a deliciously duplicitous dame, elegant but deadly. A fictional female agent who enjoyed sex most when knowing the man in her arms was doomed to die there. First, le petite morte. Then, the Big Chill.

  What pleasure such a woman took in slowly playing with her prey ... like a black widow spider, or some human tarantula.

  God, if only there were time to fuck her again. I’d die for ... hey, that’s funny. I didn’t mean to make a joke but I did.

  Yes, the CIA operative thought as he rose and seemingly shook hands with a friend who just happened to stroll by, one secret agent passing a packet to another, Lorita Morenz rated as a real-life Bond woman, if with a touch of an underage beach-bunny Swingin’ Sixties dream-girl thrown in for good measure.

  Truly, all men would agree, a woman to die for!

  *

  “Who is here?”

  The moment that Fidel Castro stepped into his suite at the Havana Hilton on November 30, 1960, the communist dictator sensed someone had entered earlier, awaiting him in the dark. Instinctually, Castro’s hand reached for the wall-switch so as to flip on the lights. Swift thinking prevented Castro from doing so. This hulking man grasped that so long as he and his unknown 'companion' remained in darkness, the intruder could not perceive him any more clearly than he could that hidden figure.

  Castro maintained self-control, refusing to give in to a panic that urged him to turn and dart out through the still-partially open door, back toward the elevator. When silhouet
ted against the hallway light, he would offer an easy target.

  Regaining his nerve with the speed of a man who has spent the past several years on the run, Castro kicked the door closed behind him. This decisive action plunged the living-room area of his suite into a pitch black, the window shades having earlier been drawn down. Who waited in the void? How anyone could slip past security struck Castro as beyond belief. Might one of his hand-selected bodyguards have proven susceptible to bribery?

  “Calm down, Fidel. It’s merely me.”

  Light footsteps in the dark, swiftly moving forward, all at once distinguishable. Every person has his or her own gait, this as much a signature as a fingerprint. Simultaneously, Castro experienced déjà vu owing to the familiar pungent scent of deep, spicv mango, revealing the presence of a perfume he knew well. Then Castro felt the slender arms embrace him as had happened numerous times before, followed by a furtive kiss in the night.

  “Lorita?”

  “Yes, Fidel. Your own personal little ‘Lolita’.”

  *

  The female who occupied the room with Castro now glided to the wall switch, flipping on the lights. He marveled at the 19-year-old’s body, displayed for his consideration in a skin-tight white sheath adorned with silver rhinestones. So she had come crawling back after all: the Bremen-born beauty who had made her way to Cuba, sought Castro out up in the hills during his exile, haughtily announcing to the stunned bearded-giant that she fully intended to become the divorced Castro’s lover and confidant.

  And, furthermore—just look at me, Fidel—there was not a damn thing he could do but succumb.

  “I must share this great moment in world history which is about to occur. Be at the great man's side, when the hour of triumph arrives,” Lorita had explained. He viewed her warily. Lorita might be an agent from right-wing dictator Fulgencia Batista. Or from the American Mob. Perhaps even the CIA.