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

  A lethal Lolita, perhaps? I should send her away at once. Just in case. But of course she is far too lovely for that.

  So Castro had taken Lorita for his mistress. Together, they would enter Havana atop a tank, several days following the New Year’s Eve Revolution of December 31, 1958.

  *

  “How did you get in?”

  “With this.”

  Lorita held high the key he had presented to her that first night together here, before the once-spectacular relationship soured. Castro recalled the incident that had precipitated her bitterness. Lorita yelped like a slapped puppy when he informed her that, having now been recognized as Cuba's supreme leader, perhaps it was time to reconcile with his estranged wife Mirta.

  “What? You bearded bastard! After all I’ve—”

  Whether a marital reconciliation could be managed, Castro explained, he absolutely must bring his son, young Fidel, here to live with him.

  Listen to reason, will you? The legendary American newsman Edward R. Murrow had contacted him, requesting a “Person to Person” interview for CBS later that year. Imagine that!

  “I want to sit beside you at that moment,” Lorita said.

  “Lorita, stop screaming. Be reasonable.”

  “Reasonable? If you truly loved me, you’d want the entire world to know of our great love.”

  “Even a communist must deal with appearances—”

  “You’re a phony. Everything I believed that you stood for was but a show. You’re no better than the man you ousted.”

  At that moment, Castro’s ego deflated. His mind knew that Lorita had spoken a truth he lived in daily denial of. The giant then lost control and slapped Lorita hard across her cheek. He knew this to be a great mistake even before the contact could be completed yet had not been able to halt the movement of his arm in mid-air. As his club-like hand whacked against the tiny female’s face, Lorita emitted a shriek which resounded throughout the room, likely the entire hotel. Castro knew that momentarily guards would rush in to check on his well-being.

  Before that could occur, Lorita leaped up off the couch and vaulted out the door. She tore past captain of guards Puto Valle and several others who, stunned by the sight, threw themselves up against the corridor walls, allowing this raging banshee to pass. However lacking in education, all knew one line of poetry by male instinct: Hell have no fury like a woman scorned!

  *

  “Why did you come back?” Castro asked as Lorita confidently marched to the living room’s far end. From there, she jauntily proceeded to enter the adjoining bedroom the two had shared for a glorious period, their intense bouts of sex deeply missed by this prominent world leader. Castro had but two weaknesses: fine Cuban cigars and lovely women from anywhere. Young women in particular; Lorita had been seventeen when first they met.

  Why do we men so desire the Lolitas of this world?

  Castro could not phrase the answer to his unspoken question. He understood that, like all men, most of them less ambitious and accomplished than himself, her youthfulness appealed to him as much as her slender shape and Baby Doll face. Like every student able to get his hands on a copy of Vladimir Nabokov's forbidden tome, young Castro had read the era's most talked about novel while pursuing law at university ... dreaming about the forbidden pleasures described therein.

  Might a touch of Humbert Humbert exist in every man?

  “Guess,” Lorita responded.

  That is so like her. Flirtatious, enticing, always eager to play out her little-girl games.

  Once, a year earlier, she’d insisted he dress up as a 1930s Chicago gangster while she costumed herself as his flapper girl in a short skirt of the type worn by women in Hollywood movies depicting that era. Had they reflected the truth about the jazz age? Who knows, who cares! The idealized world up there on the silver screen was so preferable to its real-life predecessor. On yet another occasion, Lorita had arrived with a box containing a pirate outfit for him, harem girl costume for herself. Their Arabian night had followed, lasting until dawn crept in through a thin crack between the drawn shade and the window's bottom.

  That night, their bedroom transformed into a rediscovered Bagdhad. Not as that city had ever been but as recreated by Hollywood as a garish fantasy for mass consumption. The suite could be any alternative-world they chose to imagine. During technicolor nights, reality virtually disappeared, replaced by Tinseltown fantasies Lorita conjured up and Castro shared.

  Often, Lorita had insisted that her Brute Man, as she half-jokingly referred to Fidel, play out with her some elaborate scenes from specific films she had watched as a child. Lorita, having long since memorized the dialogue, now committed it to paper, insisting that Fidel learn his lines and not deviate from them. Magic reigned supreme, at least until the morning when he would put on his fatigues and return to the office.

  “What do you most want from life, Lorita?”

  “You’d laugh if I told you.”

  “No, no. I promise not to."

  “Alright, then. Everything I’ve ever seen in the movies. American movies, that is. Not those horrid 'realistic' ones the European filmmakers now choose to produce.”

  That was then. This, now. Things change. Loyalties are tested. Love dies. Or does it? She did come back—

  “Again, Lorita. Why are you here? To forgive my rash act, which I’ve already apologized for, and return to me, or—”

  “‘Or’ what, my ‘brute’?”

  Moving without realizing he was doing so, mesmerized by her presence in a manner he remained unaware of, Castro followed Lorita into the bedroom. If he had carefully thought through what could follow, Castro might have held back in doubt. His mind, though, was not at this moment the organ that controlled Castro. Dutifully, he trudged along as Lorita danced off ahead of him, a wood-sprite from some fairytale. Castro felt drawn as if by a magnet, his cumbersome feet helpless pieces of metal, pulled by some invisible force he could not control...

  “So, Lorita. Now: Do you kiss me or kill me?”

  Already, Lorita had slipped out of her silk sheath, this crumpled in a shimmering heap on the floor. She wore only her Midnight Black lingerie, presenting herself to Castro as he had most loved to gaze on her. By the time he finally stepped into the room, Lorita was curled up on the huge bed like some smug, self-serving Persian cat. She even purred with superiority.

  “Tell me, Fidel: which do I appear about to do?”

  “Perhaps first one, then—”

  “Come,” Lorita whispered, stretching her slender arms out invitingly. “Either way, accept your fate.”

  “Dust be my destiny, then?”

  “You, and every man who ever lived.”

  *

  “So,” Lorita asked after they were, at least temporarily, finished, “are you alive or dead?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Castro responded with a half-hearted laugh, “dead to the world.”

  “But your great worry has not materialized. There may not be much of you—or any man—left after I ravish my lover. Still, Fidel, your heart beats. You breathe.”

  Even in the darkness of the bedroom, just enough light from outside trickled in a window where the shade had been less than fully drawn that Lorita could make out his frown of concern.

  “The night is still young. My guess is that your little drama is but partially played out.”

  “You know me too well,” Lorita laughed. This was not one of her agreeable child-woman giggles. Lorita’s tone struck Castro as provocative. “Yet you allowed me to join you here. Why—”

  “I could not send you away.” He ran his hands over her tight frame, enjoying each contour, every curve to her hard boned structure and the soft white flesh covering it. “You knew I would not be able to so.”

  “Yes,” Lorita coldly answered. “I did know that.”

  “Yet it was important to you that I say so?”

  “Of course. You men experience the world primarily through your eyes. Women? Our ears. Things
must be articulated for us. We need to hear such words spoken, even if we already know.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Understand? Of course not. But how could you? No man ever understands how a woman thinks. Or feels.”

  She rose up in bed and, with a sudden and swift movement, swiveled about like some sleek jungle cat moving on all four paws, then perched herself above him, staring down arrogantly. Castro, his thick body weighing him on the bed like an anchor, gazed up at the elegant creature. Seemingly so vulnerable, all the same the true conqueror, at least for the moment, of a man who had conquered this sector of the globe.

  Lorita considered Castro with eyes no longer sweet, as they had appeared minutes ago; now, suddenly hard, cruel, rapturous in the power she wielded over him. The Beard! Feared by many, adored by just as many others. Yet a slight female, little more than a hundred pounds in weight, reigned over one of the world’s most important and powerful men.

  Always, from the beginning of time, it had been this way.

  Though Castro might have crushed her with his large hands, he could never do such a thing. His fate rested in her small hands and, he knew, equally small mind.

  Men are such fools. Thank God for that! Or what would we women do? Even now I can feel his naive male anticipation. He waits to learn whether he will live or die. Well, you wait. Don't worry; it won't be long before Fidel learns his destiny.

  “So,“ he sighed as she leaned down, certain in her movement to lightly brush her warm, light-brown hair across his face, “you would kill me after what we’ve just experienced?”

  “Well, Fidel, I certainly wouldn’t have killed you before.” With that, Lorita lowered herself further, kissing him.

  A split second before she pulled her mouth up and away, Lorita bit Castro’s lower lip. When he yelped like a puppy dog surprised by a sudden whelp, her lithe body experienced orgasm.

  “That hurt,” Castro whined.

  “It was supposed to,” she answered before, while tossing him a tantalizing glance, she slipped off. Standing upright now, Lorita seized her black-bikini-bottom and drew it up and over her legs with a finesse suggesting worldliness far beyond her years. It occurred to Castro that Lorita purposefully only half-dressed when she did not also restore her bra to the rich rack of flesh the shimmering velvet device earlier held firmly in place. This allowed Lorita’s sweet breasts to swing provocatively as she moved. Castro watched spellbound, amazed at the infinite ways in which such a women could, with the simplest gesture, reduce a man, even a great man, to rubble.

  “I’ll be back,” she cooed. Lorita reached for her purse and tip-toed toward the adjoining bathroom, where she had so often cleaned herself after the fact, to coin a phrase.

  “To ... finish the job?”

  "Oh, Fidel,” she sighed, “stop, already. It was fun playing out our little scenario. That’s over now. Both of us know that was nothing more than one more movie-game of choice.”

  “Was it?” he called after as Lorita closed the door. “Then why return to me? You still haven‘t explained—”

  *

  The bathroom light switched on, the door now locked behind her, Lorita reached into her purse and drew out an ovular-shaped bottle of cold cream. Here Lorita had hidden the botulin pills passed on to her by her CIA contact Frank Sturgis, he having received them from the Miami-based mobster Santo Trifficante; to 'George' from 'Joe the Courier,' according to their codenames.

  The time had come. Lorita would in a moment employ the capsules to kill Castro. She knew the man referred to by his enemies as The Beard (a codename too) well enough to guess that on some level, however deep within his dark psyche, Castro longed for it. During their time together, he—supremely confident in khakis in public, what he brazenly referred to as 'the world of men’—had revealed his many insecurities and private fantasies to the woman beside him late at night, when sleep, desperately longed for, refused to descend and offer its healing powers.

  No man, Lorita understood, ever sensed his mortality more than Castro. Intriguingly, he did not, like most people, fear death itself. For Castro, horror existed in the thought of a bullet or knife wielded by some male assassin. On the other hand, an obsession from youth haunted Castro’s imagination: to ’pass’ in the arms of some dark angel, a belle dame sans merci, as some poet put it. As a child, he had seen a vampire movie. In it, a beautiful woman wearing a black velvet cape approached a male victim, biting him on the neck with her fangs. The young Fidel wondered, in the clammy darkness of that theatre, whether others in the audience, like himself, did not so much fear this mysterious figure but longed to be her next victim.

  To die for love ... Every man has his secrets. This, Lorita knew, was Castro's private fantasy. No one knew but she. Perhaps he had whispered this to her in some perverse hope that Lorita would make his dream come true.

  Well, now: your fantasy is about to become real ...

  Lorita opened the jar, sticking her right hand inside to remove the pills from their creamy ivory-white base. Such a wonderful inspiration this had been, hiding them here. Even the oh, so careful Valle, the most loyal of bodyguards, had not thought to search in this unlikely spot while inspecting Lorita some hours earlier. Never trusting of her, Valle had appeared eager to find some sort of weapon on Lorita's person. There had been none. So Valle allowed her to pass, gloating at the thought of white-hot passion which his beloved leader would soon enjoy.

  In a moment Lorita would, pills in hand, exit the bathroom, rejoin her Fidel, slip the botulin into the glass of water her lover, always consumed by thirst, invariably kept handy on a stand beside his bed. She would hand him the glass, excitedly watching as he accepted the drink. Of course, he would again consider her closely, wondering if this were indeed his moment of truth. But he would drink. Of that, she had no doubt.

  For Castro had to learn if Lorita’s surrender had been only an elaborate ruse. There was but one way to discover that for certain. So Castro would drink. How had an ancient philosopher that her Brute Man once quoted, many months earlier, put it? The end of man is to know. Despite his undeniable greatness, Fidel Castro was in the end nothing but a man. So he would follow the way of all flesh ... and at the end ... ‘know.’

  “Oh!” Lorita gasped, realizing something had gone terribly wrong. The botulin pills, which she believed would remain solid in the cold-cream base, had decomposed. Mistakenly she’d assumed their coating was hard enough to maintain itself here. George had informed her that any extreme heat might render the pills unusable. He hadn’t said a word about cold! Teary-eyed, Lorita stared down in disappointment. The odd blue color had leaked through the ivory cream, making it appear like semi-liquid marble. Castro could hardly be expected to swallow that.

  Only a moment before, she had embodied the perfect female assassin: sleek, cool, determined. Like something out of one of the James Bond novels George, during her period of training, had given to her read. Now, Lorita felt like a loser: naïve, inept.

  What to do? The answer to that would have been predictable to anyone who knew her. Lorita stomped her feet, furiously shook her head, then sat down on the toilet and wept like a baby.

  *

  Do I hear Lorita sobbing? Yes, I’m sure that‘s what the sound is. What’s wrong now?

  For a moment Castro considered hurrying across the room and joining her to comfort his Lolita. Lorita always succumbed to some sort of sentimentality women revel in and men cannot grasp.

  Perhaps, his ego wondered, she cries because she really did love me. And, having rediscovered the joys of sex with her Brute Man, understood that she would never be able to leave again.

  Castro’s spirits rose as he considered the possibility that, from this day forward, she would agree to exist as his secret lover, even as he’d suggested a year ago. Finally, his infantile male fantasy would at last become a wonderful reality.

  Then Castro’s ever-dormant paranoia sprang to the surface. This might be something more cryptic, closer to the night
marish fantasies that had consumed him while they sighed with joy in each other‘s arms. Fidel remained still for the better part of an hour while Lorita wept behind the closed and locked door.

  Sooner or later, she must emerge. Then, I will know at once from her eyes what this latest temper-tantrum is all about.

  *

  “Oh, God,” Lorita whined, all the faux style and performed-sophistication gone from her movements and manner. The skinny girl with the big boobs finally opened the bathroom door. She staggered across the floor to the bed, dropping down like a wet rag. Lorita cried uncontrollably, waving her thin arms in utter frustration like an eight-year-old who did not receive her gift of choice on Christmas morn, wallowing in self-pity.

  “I could fuck up anything,” she at last hissed.

  “Except a fuck.”

  “Right! The one thing I’m always good at.”

  Castro roared. “What is it?” he asked, stroking her sugar-scented hair. Lorita managed to raise her now puffy face up to confront Castro, her bloodshot eyes locking with his.

  “You tell me.”

  For a moment, Castro froze. “Hmmm?” Then he understood. “It’s as I guessed. You came here tonight to kill me.” She nodded. “For yourself, your false belief I betrayed you? Or as an agent for some outside—”

  “Does it matter?”

  “To me? Considerably.”

  “Well, that’s one of those things you may never know, not for sure. I won’t tell you, even if you said that you would spare my life in exchange.” Lorita sobbed again. She was, he realized, fearful as to what she believed he would next do.

  “Just one moment, my dear, darling girl.”

  Castro reached down and across to the bedside cabinet, yanking open a drawer. Wiping a wet residue of tears and make-up from her cheeks, Lorita arched herself around so as to see what he had drawn from it. Her eyebrows rose at the sight of an automatic pistol.

  “I knew it,” she wailed. “You would—”

  “Don’t be silly,” Castro reassured her. He repositioned Lorita up into a sitting position so that she again straddled his immense male girth. Now, though, as her breasts swung back and forth, like a pair of feminine pendulums, she struck him not as provocative, only pathetic.