"Patsy!": The Life and Times of Lee Harvey Oswald Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.’
    â€œOh!” 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