Libra by Don DeLillo Read Free Book Online

lifelong interest. He’d done research and written papers on the subject. He was interested in hypnotism and could put people into trances. Flying was a deep and abiding interest. Ferrie had been a senior pilot for Eastern Airlines before his disease made him bald and before his sexual sport with boys became a widely known fact that Eastern officials found disconcerting. He was interested in the communistic menace. Cuba was an interest.
    Moments after he put down the phone, Ferrie was in the small room behind Guy Banister’s office, making faces in the mirror as he adjusted the semicircular eyebrows. He was on his way to a shopping center in Jeff Parish where a model fallout shelter was on display. He wanted to check the dimensions, see what kind of supplies they had and how they were stored. He already had rubber bedsheets and a battery radio with CONELRAD frequencies clearly marked. He knew about a munitions bunker to the southwest that might be converted to an effective shelter, deep in the ground, isolated, with food and water for many months. It was heart-lifting in a way to think about the Bomb. How satisfying, he thought, to live alone in a hole. Not because he resembled a mutant form of life but just to eke out extra time while all hell thundered on the surface. He’d earned a reward for his unlucky life.

    Laurence Parmenter drove toward Love Field in his rented Dodge Dart. He preferred to avoid thinking about Everett’s plan for the time being. He listened to the radio,’to an evangelist talking about retail prayer and wholesale prayer. Pray for yourself, pray for the world. Win was a bright man, dedicated, loyal to the cause, bright, very bright, but he’d suffered some kind of nervous collapse. Happens all the time. He seemed well now, alert, in full control, but an idea needs time to reveal its facets, its shifting lights and fires. Not that Larry meant to let the matter drag. He wanted Cuba back and the sooner the better. He had interests there. He had rights, claims, hidden financial involvement in a leasing company that had been working toward a huge land deal to facilitate oil drilling. This was before the plucky rebels came out of the hills.
    He would begin to think about Everett’s plan on the flight back to Washington. Sip a Beefeater martini, nibble salted nuts, pray for himself, pray for the world. A line from an old drinking song popped into his head. But where from? From Cairo, 1944, morale operations, Office of Strategic Services. Larry was part of the Groton-Yale-OSS network of so-called gentlemen spies, many of them now in important Agency positions. He was not old money, not quite elect, but still a member, ready to accede to the will of the leadership. They were the pure line, a natural extension of schoolboy societies, secret oaths and initiations, the body of assumptions common to young men of a certain discernible dash. He sang aloud, “Oh we are the jolly coverts, we lie and we spy till it hurts.” He was trying to recall the next line when the first of the airport signs appeared.
    On the radio a news announcer said that police were still keeping watch over Major General Edwin A. Walker’s home and grounds following a gunman’s attempt to kill the controversial right-wing figure one week earlier. There were no new leads in the case.
     
     
    After dark the stillness falls, the hour of withdrawal, houses in shadow, the street a private place, a set of mysteries. Whatever we know about our neighbors is hushed and lulled by the deep repose. It becomes a form of intimacy, jasmine-scented, that deceives us into trustfulness.
    Win was in the living room turning the pages of a book. This is what he did, according to his wife, instead of reading. Turned pages until there were no more. He wondered whether the two men realized he’d called them here specifically for April 17, the second anniversary of the Bay of Pigs. A thought for bedtime. He turned another page.
    Upstairs Mary Frances was