Marina: (Speaks Russian—scolding and laughing at the same time.)
(More splashing. Marina is humming some pop song from KLIF. It sounds sweet.)
Lee: “Mama, bring us our toys!”
Marina: “Da, da,always you must have the toys.”
(Splashing, loud. The door to the bathroom must be all the way open now.)
Marina: (Speaks Russian.)
Lee (pouty little boy’s voice): “Mama, you forgot our rubber ball.”
(Big splash—the baby screams with delight.)
Marina: “There, all toys for preence and preencessa.”
(Laughter from all three—their joy turns me cold.)
Lee: “Mama, bring us a (Russian word). We have water on our ear.”
Marina (laughing): “Oh my God, what next?”
I lay awake a long time that night, thinking of the three of them. Happy for once, and why not? 214 West Neely wasn’t much, but it was still a step up. Maybe they were even sleeping in the same bed, June for once happy instead of scared to death.
And now a fourth in the bed, as well. The one growing in Marina’s belly.
4
Things began to move faster, as they had in Derry, only now time’s arrow was flying toward April 10 instead of Halloween. Al’s notes, which I had depended on to get me this far, became less helpful. Leading up to the attempt on Walker’s life, they concentrated almost solely on Lee’s actions and movements, and that winter there was a lot more to their lives, Marina’s in particular.
For one thing, she had finally made a friend—not a sugar daddy wannabe like George Bouhe, but a woman friend. Her name was Ruth Paine, and she was a Quaker lady.Russian speaker,Al had noted in a laconic style not much like his earlier notes.Met at party, 2(??)/63. Marina separated from Lee and living with the Paine woman at the time of the Kennedy assassination.And then, as if it were no more than an afterthought:Lee stored M-C in Paine garage. Wrapped in blanket.
ByM-C,he meant the mail-order Mannlicher-Carcano rifle with which Lee planned to kill General Walker.
I don’t know who threw the party where Lee and Marina met the Paines. I don’t know who introduced them. De Mohrenschildt? Bouhe? Probably one or the other, because by then therest of the émigrés were giving the Oswalds a wide berth. Hubby was a sneering know-it-all, wifey a punching bag who’d passed up God knew how many chances to leave him for good.
What I do know is Marina Oswald’s potential escape-hatch arrived behind the wheel of a Chevrolet station wagon—white over red—on a rainy day in the middle of March. She parked at the curb and looked around dubiously, as if not sure she had come to the right address. Ruth Paine was tall (although not as tall as Sadie) and painfully thin. Her brownish hair was banged over a huge expanse of forehead in front and flipped in back, a style that did not flatter her. She wore rimless glasses on a nose splashed with freckles. To me, peering through a crack in the curtains, she looked like the kind of woman who steered clear of meat and marched in Ban the Bomb demonstrations… and that was pretty much who Ruth Paine was, I think, a woman who was New Age before New Age was cool.
Marina must have been watching for her, because she came clattering down the outside stairs with the baby in her arms, a blanket flipped up over June’s head to protect her from the drifting drizzle. Ruth Paine smiled tentatively and spoke carefully, putting a space between each word. “Hello, Mrs. Oswald, I’m Ruth Paine. Do you remember me?”
“Da,”Marina said. “Yes.” Then she added something in Russian. Ruth replied in the same language… although haltingly.
Marina invited her in. I waited until I heard the creak of their footsteps above me, then donned the earphones connected to the lamp bug. What I heard was a conversation in mixed English and Russian. Marina corrected Ruth several times, sometimes with laughter. I understood enough to figure out why Ruth Paine had come. Like Paul Gregory, she wanted Russian lessons. I understood something else from their frequent laughter and increasingly easy conversation: they liked each other.
I was glad for Marina. If I killed Oswald after his attempt on General Walker, the New Agey Ruth Paine might take her in. I could hope.
5
Ruth only came twice to Neely Street for her lessons. After that, Marina and June got in the station wagon and Ruth drove them away. Probably to her home in the posh (at least by Oak Cliff standards) suburb of Irving. That address wasn’t in Al’s notes—he seemed to care little about Marina’s relationship with Ruth, probably because he expected to finish Lee long before that rifle ended up in the Paines’ garage—but I found it in the phone directory: 2515 West Fifth Street.
One overcast March afternoon, about two hours after Marina and Ruth had departed, Lee and George de Mohrenschildt showed up in de Mohrenschildt’s car. Lee got out carrying a brown paper sack with a sombrero and PEPINO’S BEST MEXICAN printed on the side. De Mohrenschildt had a six-pack of Dos Equis. They went up the outside staircase, talking and laughing. I grabbed the earphones, heart pumping. At first there was nothing, but then one of them turned on the lamp. After that I might have been in the room with them, an unseen third.
Please don’t conspire to kill Walker,I thought.Please don’t make my job harder than it already is.
“Pardon the mess,” Lee said. “She doesn’t do anything much these days but sleep, watch TV, and talk about that woman she’s giving lessons to.”
De Mohrenschildt spoke for awhile about some oil leases he was trying to get hold of in Haiti, and spoke harshly of the repressive Duvalier regime. “At the end of the day, trucks drive through the marketplace and pick up the dead. Many of them are children who’ve starved to death.”
