“A month before that crash, Leland came to see me. He was upset and needed to get something off his chest. He mentioned Frank Knox being at Albert Norris’s store on the afternoon Norris died, but Frank had been dead over a year by this time. Leland wanted to tell me about another man who’d been there, but I stopped him. Something in his manner told me how explosive that information was.” Dad shakes his head and picks up his cigar. “I wish now that I’d responded differently, but at the time … Leland was truly terrified. I urged him to confide in someone who could actually do something about what he knew—the FBI, or a moderate politician—but he didn’t. After he died, I wondered whether there might have been some sort of foul play involved, but the FAA didn’t find anything suspicious about the crash. What could I do?”
The tone in my father’s voice is both alien and familiar; it’s the voice of witnesses who stood by while someone else was being robbed, beaten, or killed. “You could have told the FBI about Frank Knox threatening Albert Norris. You could have told them that the man who collided with Dr. Robb’s plane had probably murdered Norris along with his brother!”
Dad’s unblinking gaze silences me. “If I’d done that,” he says softly, “you and I might not be sitting here now. Your mother might be a widow. You don’t know what those men were capable of. It’s not very honorable, I know, but that’s the choice I made.”
I want to argue, but who am I to question my father about decisions made during a time I lived through as a little boy under his protection?
Before I can remind him of my other questions, he says, “As for saving Viola … all I did was send a request through Ray Presley to Brody Royal and Claude Devereux.”
“You knew that they had ties to the Double Eagles?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute. But as for your question, I simply told them I was sure that Viola had no intention of speaking to the authorities. I think Royal or Devereux or someone up the line believed me, and they knew I understood that if she talked, Viola wouldn’t be the only one to pay a price. In any case, they let her live. That’s all I can tell you about that.”
“And this photo? With Royal and the others?”
Dad slides the image back toward me, but his eyes remain on it. “Leland took that picture. It was 1966. I don’t know how Henry Sexton got hold of it. Lee used to fly us to gun shows back in the sixties. That one was in Biloxi. You know I hate the water, but Lee had committed us to go deep-sea fishing with Royal and Devereux, who were down there on business. Dixie Mafia business, probably. Anyway, we’d run into Ray Presley at the show, so he joined us. The whole cruise only lasted five or six hours. I hadn’t known Royal at all before that. But afterward …” Dad is looking at me but seems not to see me.
“What?”
“Another man came along on that trip. A tall, lanky fellow— ex-military. At first the cruise was fun and games. We caught a few mackerel, and drank enough beer to pretend we were extras in To Have and Have Not. That’s when Lee shot this picture. But Royal and the lanky fellow were serious drinkers. And the more they drank, the more they talked. The more they talked, the more frightened I got. Lee, too.”
“What did they talk about?”
“Paramilitary operations, mostly. The military guy turned out to be ex-army, but on the CIA payroll. He’d worked down at a camp training Cuban expatriates for the Bay of Pigs. He knew Frank and Snake Knox from there, and I gathered that he already knew Ray, too. They talked about Guatemala, Chile, Cuba, even Eastern Europe. Coups d’état, past and present. When this guy went to the head, Brody told us he was some kind of CIA trigger man. Royal was tied in with all this somehow, politically. He was a big anticommunist, I guess. He seemed to be a link between Marcello and the CIA, anyway. I thought about all this a few minutes ago, when you said something about Royal being involved in a plot to kill Robert Kennedy.”
“Did Royal talk about Kennedy on that trip?”
Dad sighs, then answers in a reluctant voice. “Not Bobby. But Jack … yes. When the CIA guy and Royal were the drunkest—when we were finally headed back to the marina—they started talking about Dallas. That’s all the CIA guy called it: Dallas. But it was the way he said it that chilled me. Like he’d been there. He was furious at whoever had planned the operation, and kept saying how unprofessional it was. Now and then he’d cuss up a storm in French. When I tried to move away from them, Devereux cornered me in the bow and started trying to involve me in a personal injury lawsuit he had going.”
Dad laughs bitterly, and the result is like a painful cough. “That voyage turned into a damned nightmare. By the time we got back to Biloxi, the CIA guy was ready to fight somebody—anybody. Brody apologized and asked whether Leland or I could sedate him. He was serious. But we didn’t have any drugs with us. We got the hell off that boat as fast as we could and took off.”
“Why would Dr. Robb go into business with Royal after that?”
“Lee was already partners with Brody by that time. I think the next day he told himself he’d imagined most of what we’d heard. But I’d recognized the edge in that guy’s voice, from Korea. I’d run across a few intelligence types over there, guys nobody wanted to mess with. There’s a dark undercurrent to American power, Penn, and Royal and his friend were part of that. And since we’re showing each other old snapshots … let me show you one.”
He turns and reaches back into the bookshelf behind him and pulls out a worn copy of Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son, by William Alexander Percy, the Mississippi soldier and poet who raised his second cousin Walker Percy. Fanning the pages, Dad pulls out a faded color photo and slides it slowly across his desk.
“I only have this because Percy’s book was in my office the year of the fire,” he says with ineffable grief. We almost never speak of the event that destroyed the priceless library my father spent most of his life amassing, or the human cost that dwarfed the loss of those treasured books. Yet on this night, when Ray Presley’s name has already been spoken, it seems more than apropos.
Examining the picture, I see a little boy who looks like me standing beside a seesaw on the now-vanished playground of St. Stephen’s grade school. Back then St. Stephen’s was still an Episcopal school, and our classes were held in an antebellum mansion downtown.