Things at last came to a head at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. One day during a slack moment John Graef had noticed that Lee was reading the Russian humor magazine, Krokodil. “I wouldn’t bring anything like that down here again,” Graef warned him quietly, “because some people might not take kindly to your reading anything like that.”1 Graef had also noticed that Lee’s appearance was going downhill markedly. He used to dress well for work, but now he was wearing nothing but a white T-shirt with his slacks. Nor had the quality of his work improved. Lee worked fast, everyone agreed on that, and he tried almost desperately to work well. But in the course of a normal day, many more of his jobs than average had to be done over because they failed to meet company standards. Graef hated to fire any trainee, but, he said, “I reached the opinion that he would never be the kind of employee I was looking for, giving him every chance.”2
Graef did not have his own office, so he spoke to Lee in the most deserted spot he could find, a place in the darkroom where he could lower his voice and break the news without embarrassing Lee. He told him that business was pretty slow, “ ‘but the point is that you haven’t been turning the work out like you should. There has been friction with other people and so on’ … I told him, ‘I think you tried to do the work, but I just don’t think you have the qualities for doing the work that we need.’ ”
Graef recalled that Lee made no outburst, no protest. “He took this the whole time looking at the floor, I believe, and after I was through he said, ‘Well, thank you.’ And he turned around and walked off.”3
The date of this conversation must have been Monday, April 1, for on the top of his time sheet that day, Lee wrote: “Please note new mailing add. P.O. Box 2915.”4 Until almost the very end, the company had had no address for Lee but that of Gary Taylor, the one he had been using when he found the job six months before.
Lee worked at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall the rest of that week, through April 6. He did not tell Marina he had been fired. He kept to himself his disappointment at losing the only job he had ever really liked. His failure had almost certainly been caused by the emotional troubles that became apparent in mid-January. Those troubles must have made it exceedingly taxing for him to do precise work requiring concentration. And they destroyed his capacity to get along with the other men. For example, he had become unable to tolerate the presence of anybody near him in the close confines of the darkroom. It was a vicious circle, for Lee’s frustration and sense of failure on the job, which are vividly described by everyone who worked with him, must have made his emotional trouble worse. Next there was his indecision in February about whether and when to kill Walker, and the accompanying torment that nearly erupted in murderous violence at home. Then in March, with his mind made up and his energies released, he took on a crushing schedule—long hours at work, constant checking at the post office, typing classes, and late hours at night while he painstakingly prepared his documents and his plan of attack. Graef said later that Lee took the news more quietly than most men would have; the subdued response was typical of him.
Lee’s timing was uncanny. Somehow he managed to be fired between the date when he received notice that his weapons had arrived and the date when Walker was expected back.5 This coincidence, together with Lee’s own behavior, gives rise to doubt as to what it was he wanted most. In March he had written confidently to his brother Robert that he had become “adept” in his work and was expecting a raise. Yet he flaunted a Russian newspaper, which contributed greatly to his being fired. And when, after he was fired, his colleague Dennis Ofstein gave him the names of other printing plants where he might look for work, Lee merely laughed his wry laugh and said that if he failed to find anything else, he could always go back to Russia.6
The truth appears to be that Lee, even now, needed a final push to go through with his plan to shoot Walker. The arrival of his guns was a portent, but by itself it was not enough. By maneuvering matters, or helping maneuver them, in such a way that he was fired, Lee handed himself a part of the “trigger” he required. All his life he had responded to being hurt, or rejected, by whirling around and hurting someone else. The firing was a catalyst—it would help galvanize him into making his characteristic response. And the rest of the push he needed would be supplied by the return of the Evil Man himself.
Marina, meanwhile, had found a friend, her first since she had given up her Russians. She was an American named Ruth Hyde Paine.
They had met at a party on February 22 given by Everett Glover, a chemist at Socony Mobil Oil in Dallas and a tennis-playing friend of the de Mohrenschildts.7 Glover knew that Marina was badly treated by her husband and was in need of a friend with whom she could speak Russian. He invited six or eight guests to the party, among them Ruth and Michael Paine, who were in a madrigal-singing group with him. Michael was unable to come, but Ruth attended the party. Most of the evening she chatted with Marina in her halting Russian while Lee held forth on his experiences in the Soviet Union. Ruth was studying Russian and hoped to teach it. If Marina needed a friend who spoke Russian, Ruth did, too.
Ruth drove to Neely Street to visit Marina twice during the first half of March, and the two women took their children to the park. June Oswald was one year old, and Ruth’s two children were two and three years old. The two mothers talked while their children played together. Ruth’s spoken Russian was hesitant, and Marina’s English was almost nonexistent. Still, Marina, frank as always, managed to convey the worst of her troubles: she was pregnant again and ashamed to let the Russians, who were her only friends in Dallas, know it; her husband wanted to send her back to Russia, a sort of divorce without a divorce, and Marina did not want to go. Ruth, who at thirty-one was ten years Marina’s senior, felt that this girl did indeed need a friend. On her third visit, toward the end of March, she picked up June and Marina and drove them to her house in Irving, Texas, a suburb on the other side of town. Marina enjoyed the outing hugely.
Ruth and Michael Paine invited the Oswalds to supper at their home on Tuesday, April 2, and undertook to arrange transportation. Michael Paine was a research engineer at Bell Helicopter Corporation, on the road between Dallas and Fort Worth. He left work sometime after five that afternoon and drove to Oak Cliff. He found the apartment on Neely Street and arrived just before seven o’clock.8
Marina was not yet ready. She had not packed the baby’s diapers, bottles, and toys and could not decide what to take. Michael welcomed the delay. He had heard about Lee’s experiences in the Soviet Union and was glad of a chance to talk to him before the evening got under way. He was curious to find out what made Lee “tick.” But from the outset Michael was upset by the scene before him: Lee Oswald ordering his frail-looking wife around (in Russian) like a drill instructor, telling her in a loud, harsh voice what to pack but doing nothing to help. He sat on the sofa talking to Michael, interrupting himself only to bark out a new order. “Here is a little fellow who certainly insists on wearing the pants,” Michael thought. And he considered Lee’s treatment of Marina “outrageous.”
Nevertheless, Michael said later that their conversation was “the most fruitful half-hour” he and Lee ever spent.9 Lee was as frank as he had it in him to be. Why, Michael asked, had he gone to Russia? Lee said he hated exploitation, adding with an edge in his voice that the company that employed him—a printing and engraving plant—earned a lot more from his labor than it ever paid back to him. He did not mention that he had just been fired.
Michael noted that Lee’s voice was laced with scorn for both Russia and America. In Russia, he said, you could not choose your job or where you were going to live; why, you could not even own a rifle unless you belonged to a club that was really a paramilitary organization. Lee clearly adored rifles.
Marina had now packed, the car was bursting with baby things, and they were off to Irving. On the way, Marina recalls, Lee was shy, and Michael did most of the talking. Once they were at dinner, however, the feeling crept over Michael once again that Lee’s treatment of his wife was “medieval torture.” Marina caught snatches of the conversation, and Lee had to translate the rest, which he did with an air of supreme annoyance, as if it were an imposition. So perfunctory were his interpolations that Michael did not trust them and wished that Ruth were translating instead. She might not be as fluent as Lee, but she would be at pains to give a full account. Michael was appalled that Marina had no way of communicating with anyone except through Lee and was dependent on him for everything she knew. “Take that away,” Michael thought a trifle grimly, “and he will lose his power over her.”
Lee was scrupulously polite to Ruth. He asked where she had learned Russian and whether she had found it hard, adding that he was delighted that Marina now had a friend with whom she could speak her own language.
After supper Ruth and Marina washed dishes and spoke Russian in the kitchen, while the men sat in the living room and picked up their conversation where they had left off. They discussed Russian and American politics, and when the name of General Walker came up, Michael later remembered, Lee smiled an “inscrutable” smile.10
When the women rejoined them, Michael tried to include Marina in the conversation. But once again, Michael recalls, Lee kept “slapping her down” and “calling her a fool.” The whole evening left Michael “shocked” and “offended.” He thought that Lee’s behavior toward Marina, his treating her like a vassal and enjoying it, was in cruel contrast with the affection he showed toward his child. Then and there Michael conceived the idea of helping Marina “escape,” of freeing her from “her bondage and servitude to this man.” The idea was uncharacteristic, for Michael Paine was a man who respected privacy above everything. He would not for the world intervene in someone else’s affairs unless goaded by outrage and an inner, irresistible prompting. But so appalling was Lee’s treatment of Marina, so offensive to his notion of human dignity, that a reservoir of charity opened up in him that he would have denied he possessed at all. Still, Michael kept his calm politeness. On the way home in the car, Marina remembers that the two men talked again about politics.
Lee’s feelings about the evening contrasted sharply with Michael’s. He was elated when he got home. “Look,” he said, “I’ve found you a friend to talk Russian to. You will help her with her Russian and she will help you learn English.” Lee was also pleased that Ruth was the mother of small children. That way neither of the women would have time for “foolish” things. “She will be good for you,” he told Marina. “She’s a fine, upright person and she’ll have a good influence on you. She’ll show you how to be an American mother.”
“Am I a bad mother, then?” Marina asked.
“No. I didn’t mean that. But she can tell you better than I can how things are done over here.”
Lee also liked Michael, who had listened, or so it seemed to him, to his political ideas with respect. As for Marina, she was grateful to her husband for sanctioning this new friendship, for she had nobody else. It was one of the very few times Lee ever mentioned that she might learn English, and that pleased her, too. It did not occur to her that Lee may have been looking forward to a moment, in the not too distant future, when she would need an American friend who spoke Russian. Ruth and Michael Paine fitted very neatly into his plans.11
Lee had not yet tried out his new weapons. As nearly as can be determined, it was on Wednesday, April 3, the day after the dinner at the Paines’, that he used his rifle for the first time.12 He signed out of work at five, rode the bus home, slipped upstairs to fetch his rifle, and slipped out again without Marina’s hearing him. Moving as rapidly as he could, he walked a half-dozen blocks to the corner of Sixth Street and Beckley Avenue and boarded an inbound bus. He rode a mile and a half, a five- to seven-minute ride, to the intersection of West Commerce Street and Beckley Avenue. He got off the bus and strode quickly down the levee to an uninhabited area 35 feet below called the Trinity River bottom.13 There he practiced with his second-hand Mannlicher-Carcano C2766 and his four-power telescopic sight. He did not have much time, for the sun set at about 6:45 P.M.
The tasks Lee had to accomplish were these: He had to get the feel of the trigger action of this particular rifle, which was new to him and more powerful than any he had used before; and he had to learn to work the bolt smoothly so as not to disturb the alignment of the barrel. He also had to adjust the sight so that all his shots landed within a fairly small radius. It was the first time he had owned a four-power sight, and he had to get used to it. According to experts, learning to use a telescopic sight is easy (General Walker calls it “very easy”) and a skill that vastly enhances accuracy. It has been estimated that a man of Oswald’s training and experience would be able to adjust to the new rifle and scope, “would be capable of sighting that rifle in well, firing it,” with only ten rounds of practice.14
Oswald was apparently confident in his ability to handle firearms. Small-game hunting with his brothers in his early years seems to have given him an ease and familiarity with guns. His training in marksmanship in the Marine Corps, at Camp Pendleton, California, was intensive, and he learned to sight, aim, and fire from a variety of positions at targets up to five hundred yards away.
In December 1956, at the end of his training, Oswald was tested and scored 212—two points above the minimum for “sharpshooter” on a scale of expertise ranging in ascending order from “marksman” to “sharpshooter” to “expert.” By civilian standards he was an excellent shot. Two and a half years later, in May 1959, on another range where the details of weather, light, quality of rifle, and ammunition are not known, Oswald scored 191, only one point over the minimum for “marksman.” But those test results would establish him, by civilian standards, “as a good to excellent shot.” Moreover, he now had a four-power telescopic sight, which would more than compensate for a lack of recent practice.
On Friday, April 5, two days after his first practice session with his new rifle, Lee signed out of work at 5:05 and arrived home just as Marina was about to take the baby for a walk. Out of breath, Lee announced that he would like to join them; go on ahead, he said, and he would catch up with them. Marina pushed the baby slowly in her stroller, and Lee caught up with them before they had walked two blocks. He was moving even more rapidly than usual, and Marina could not help noticing that he was carrying his rifle, clumsily wrapped in his green Marine Corps raincoat.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Target practice,” he replied and asked her to walk him to the bus stop.
Marina was angry and disappointed. As often happened between them, he had promised her something, then yanked it away, in this case the pleasure of a walk. When they came within sight of the bus stop, she burst into open reproach.
“Instead of coming with us, you go someplace to shoot.”
“It’s none of your business. I’m going anyway!” He caught a glimpse of the bus over his shoulder and started sprinting.
“Don’t bother to come home at all,” she shouted after him. “I won’t be waiting for you. I hope the police catch you there.”
As the bus flashed by, she saw a sign in front: “Love Field.” But by the time she got to the bus stop, Lee had leaped aboard and was gone.
Lee was too secretive to show his face on a rifle range, and there is no evidence that he did so at any time following his return from Russia. So anomalous was he, however, that he was perfectly capable of climbing onto a crowded bus carrying a rifle poorly concealed in his raincoat. It was about nine o’clock when Lee returned home. He said he had been practicing, and Marina told him to watch out for the police. He said that where he had been, there was no one around to hear him practice.15
Marina had said that she watched Lee clean the rifle three to five times that week. The first time was March 31, the day she took his photograph, when he cleaned the rifle “on the sofa” although he did not fire it that day. Thus it is possible that the evenings of Wednesday, April 3, and Friday, April 5, are the only occasions Lee ever practiced firing the Mannlicher-Carcano. However, Saturday was his last day at work, and he may have practiced on Sunday, April 7. Marina could not have seen him clean the rifle after that—Lee did not have it at home.
Marina detested the rifle. She dreaded it and found its presence in the apartment distasteful. Terrified lest it go off, she never went near it, never touched it or moved it no matter where it might be. Compulsive housekeeper though she was, she did her cleaning in a careful circle all around it. Yet she did not ask any questions. Lee had said he was going hunting, and it made sense to her that he might go target-shooting first.
Sometime that first week of April, on Thursday or Friday, the 4th or 5th, Jeanne de Mohrenschildt came to call. George was away in New York, and Jeanne, anticipating that they would soon be leaving Dallas for good, had already quit her job. She had free time during the day and the use of George’s convertible, and she paid her first visit to Marina on Neely Street. Somehow as she was showing Jeanne around, Marina was drawn, not to Lee’s “office” but to a clothes closet where he was keeping his rifle.
“Look at that!” Marina said. “We have barely enough to eat and my crazy husband goes and buys a rifle.” She told Jeanne that Lee had been practicing with it.
Jeanne’s father had been a gun collector, and she knew her way around rifles. Instantly, she spotted something that meant nothing at all to Marina: Lee’s gun had a telescopic sight. She said nothing to Marina, but she filed the fact away in her mind; when George got back from New York, she seems to have told him that poor as the Oswalds were, Lee had bought a rifle with a scope and had been practicing.16
Marina’s worst worry that week had nothing to do with the rifle or with her husband’s target practice. She was upset because he was talking in his sleep again—the first time in six weeks. She did as he had told her and woke him each time he started talking. But during those last days of March and early in April, she sometimes had to wake him twice a night. She was beginning to be afraid that he was ill.
Saturday, April 6, was Lee’s last day at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. He worked from 8:00 A.M. to 5:30 P.M., then returned home. He still had not told Marina that he had been fired. On Sunday, April 7, he vanished. He left the apartment with his rifle and stayed out all day. When he came home for supper at six that night, he no longer had the rifle. He left the apartment again after supper, and Marina does not remember at what hour he came home.
Lee’s activities that Sunday will never be known. But General Walker was due back in Dallas early the following week, and it is almost certain that Lee was keeping watch on his house at No. 4011 Turtle Creek Boulevard. He was ready to put his plan into action, and he later explained to Marina that he buried his rifle near Walker’s house that Sunday, in a wooded spot beside some railroad tracks that he had picked out and photographed exactly one month before. Lee’s hiding place, rendered better hidden still by large stacks of underbrush nearby, was in a park running northeast to southwest of Walker’s house, 25 to 30 feet above street level next to a footpath 90 feet from the curb line of Turtle Creek Boulevard. By the most direct auto route, it was not quite half a mile from the point where the footpath met the curb line to the Walker house. On foot, however, the spot could be reached by walking east or southeast from the rear of the house, and the distance was somewhat less.17
Monday, April 8, was Lee’s first day out of work. He deceived Marina by rising early as usual, putting on a T-shirt, and leaving the apartment as if he were going to work. Again he was out all day, and only one of his activities is known. He visited the Texas Employment Commission and told the sympathetic ladies there that he was out of a job. This time they did not come up with any leads. Once again he may also have been watching Walker’s house. If so, he surely noticed increased activities there. Walker came back, he himself recalls, “in the late afternoon or break of evening” that day.18
Lee had his supper at six. Then he went out again, and Marina, who had no idea that he had quit typing school, assumed that he had gone to Crozier Tech. She noticed that he returned earlier than usual after typing class, but it did not occur to her to ask why.
It was several days before she learned where he had been. After supper he bought a newspaper and boarded a bus, not the bus he took to Crozier Tech but one of several buses that would carry him close to the spot where he had buried his rifle. He was on his way to shoot General Walker.
On the bus, Lee was to claim later to Marina, he glanced at the church announcements in the paper. They were more numerous and more prominent than usual because it was Holy Week, the week between Palm Sunday and Easter. Reading the paper, he noticed that the Church of Latter Day Saints, the Mormon church at 4027 Turtle Creek Boulevard just behind General Walker’s house, was having a service Wednesday night that would get out at about nine o’clock. “Good,” Lee thought. “There’ll be people and cars around there on Wednesday and I’ll have a better chance of getting away.” He climbed off the bus, came home, and postponed his attack.19
The next day, Tuesday, April 9, Lee no longer pretended to go to work. He told Marina that it was a holiday and he was going to collect his paycheck. For the third time since his final Saturday at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, he was gone the whole day. He came home at six and after supper walked down the street as he often did to buy a newspaper and a bottle of Dr. Pepper. When he returned, he sat out on the balcony, where, after two months of being irritable—not, Marina says, on an ascending curve of irritability but merely irritable all the time, with an occasional outcropping of good humor—he unexpectedly turned tender toward her. “Come sit with me,” he coaxed her onto the balcony. He asked in the friendliest way whether she had heard from her girlfriends in Russia? Had she seen anything special in Soviet Belorussia or Krokodil? He drank a sip or two of his Dr. Pepper, then handed the bottle to her and grandly urged her to drink it all.
On the morning of Wednesday, April 10, Marina thought Lee looked pensive and rather sad. With tears in his eyes, he confessed at last that he had lost his job. “I don’t know why,” he said. “I tried. I liked that work so much. But probably the FBI came and asked about me, and the boss just didn’t want to keep someone the FBI was interested in. When will they leave me alone?”
Marina ached with sympathy. She had no idea how to comfort him, and when he went out for the day, she supposed he was looking for work. He was dressed in his good gray suit and a clean white shirt.20
As nearly as Marina can recall, Lee did not come home for supper that night. She waited until seven, an hour past their usual suppertime, then absent-mindedly cooked something for herself. Between eight and nine she was busy putting June to bed. Then she began to grow uneasy. Lee had taught her not to pry, not even to ask herself what he might be up to. He had accustomed her to his absences at hours when most workingmen and, above all, most family men, are at home with their wives. But Marina knew her husband well. For months he had been tense, preoccupied, ready, like his rifle, to “go off.” Nor, despite efforts to censor her curiosity, could she suppress an awareness that his comings and goings had been out of the ordinary. Now it turned out that he had been fired. Marina sensed, too clearly for her own peace of mind, that this element on top of the rest made up a recipe for danger, although what kind of danger she could not have said.
While she was waiting for Lee, she thought back to the last time he had been so late. It was their last week on Elsbeth Street, late in February.21 Frantic with worry, she had gone to the Tobiases next door and asked if she might use the phone. With Mrs. Tobias doing the dialing, she called George de Mohrenschildt, told him Lee had not come home, and asked him to find out what he could. George called the printing plant, then called back to report that Lee had left hours before. When he came home that night, Lee was angry at what Marina had done. He said his boss disapproved when the men got phone calls at work. He told her never to do it again.
Now Marina’s resources were more meager still. She no longer had a neighbor with a phone, and Lee no longer had a job where, in a pinch, she could try to reach him. There was nothing she could do but wait. She paced anxiously from room to room, doing her best not to think. On an impulse, about ten o’clock, she opened the door to her husband’s study. There on the desk she saw a key with a sheet of paper lying under it. At the sight of the key, Marina felt a thud inside: Lee was never coming back.
She picked up the paper and read the note he had left her in Russian.22
1. Here is the key to the post office box which is located in the main post office downtown on Ervay Street, the street where there is a drugstore where you always used to stand. The post office is four blocks from the drugstore on the same street. There you will find our mailbox. I paid for the mailbox last month so you needn’t worry about it.
2. Send information about what has happened to me to the Embassy [the Soviet Embassy in Washington] and also send newspaper clippings (if there’s anything about me in the papers). I think the Embassy will come quickly to your aid once they know everything.
3. I paid our rent on the second so don’t worry about it.
4. I have also paid for the water and gas.
5. There may be some money from work. They will send it to our post office box. Go to the bank and they will cash it.
6. You can either throw out my clothing or give it away. Do not keep it. As for my personal papers (both military papers and papers from the factory), I prefer that you keep them.
7. Certain of my papers are in the small blue suitcase.
8. My address book is on the table in my study if you need it.
9. We have friends here and the Red Cross will also help you.
10. I left you as much money as I could, $60 on the second of the month, and you and Junie can live for two months on $10 a week.
11. If I am alive and taken prisoner, the city jail is at the end of the bridge we always used to cross when we went to town (the very beginning of town after the bridge).
Marina’s eyes took in what Lee had written, but her brain did not. She had no idea what his message was supposed to convey. Only two words meant anything to her. They were “prisoner” and “jail.” She saw them and started shaking all over.
At 11:30 Lee walked in, white, covered with sweat, his eyes glittering.
“What’s happened?” Marina asked.
“I shot Walker.” He was out of breath and could barely get out the words.
“Did you kill him?”
“I don’t know.”
“My God. The police will be here any minute. What did you do with the rifle?”
“Buried it.”
Marina’s teeth started to chatter. She was certain that police dogs would track down the rifle and be at the house any second.
“Don’t ask any questions.” Lee switched on the radio. There was no news. “And for God’s sake don’t bother me.” He peeled off his clothing and hurled himself on the bed. There he lay, spread-eagled, on his stomach. He fell asleep right away and slept soundly the whole night through.
Marina could not go to sleep. She lay awake for hours listening for the barking of police dogs and the footsteps of policemen on the staircase. She glanced over at Lee, who was lying like a dead man beside her, and she felt sorry for him. She felt a pity almost physical in its closeness and fear of what the police would do to him. “There will be time,” she thought, “to scold him and punish him later. But not now. Not while he is in danger.”
An idea flickered across her mind. She would go to the police and tell them, in sign language or some other way, what her husband had done. She put the thought aside. The truth is that she had no one to lean on but Lee and was deathly afraid of losing him. “I’ll be alone without a husband,” she said to herself, “and what good will that do anyone?” Nor, with her lack of English, did she know how to tell her story, much less make anyone believe her. The police would only send her home, and Lee would give her a beating.
So great was Marina’s dependence upon Lee that she did not consider other alternatives. She was forever picking up loose change from Lee’s bureau and buying the cigarettes he forbade her. She could have picked up a dime, called the de Mohrenschildts from a public phone, and asked them to drive her to the police station and interpret for her. Failing the de Mohrenschildts, she could, in sign language or in some other way, have asked her former neighbors, the Tobiases, to help, and they lived just around the corner. Nor did it occur to her that the police might be able to find a Russian interpreter.
Even if Marina had considered any of these alternatives, there was another factor that would have held her back: her Russianness.
She had grown up in a world where police spies are everywhere and it is your duty by law to inform on anyone, even the person closest to you, if you know he has committed a crime. Failure to do so makes you criminally as liable as he. In such an environment the only honor, the only way of keeping faith, is never, ever, to inform. The law says you must; Marina’s private morality says that you must not. And so it would be one thing to scold Lee harshly, to his face, and try to change him, or even to appeal to friends to try to change him, but quite another to go to the police or involve the state in any way. To do that would breach a relationship beyond repair.
Marina would have been incapable of going to court even in self-defense when her stepfather tried to frame her as a prostitute. As she saw it, her going to court against him, even though it was he who brought the charges, would have destroyed their relationship. Now it was the same with Lee. A wife would have to hate her husband to inform on him. How on earth could they live with one another, much less trust one another, after that? She did not know that in this matter Soviet and American law are directly opposite. Here, in most states, it was not her duty to go to the police; and she would not in any state have been allowed to testify against Lee in court. But since she assumed that her legal duty in the United States was exactly what it would have been in Russia, her failure to act made her in her eyes—and perhaps in Lee’s—his accomplice.23
So Marina did not go to the police, or consider it for more than a moment or two. Although she told herself that it was her legal duty to inform on Lee, her personal morality stressed loyalty to her husband above everything. And this loyalty was to expose her to a crushing sense of guilt when many people told her that if only she had gone to the police “after Walker,” a later, lethal event would not have happened. But even after that event, Marina’s feelings of guilt continued to cluster incongruously around the dim, but intact, figure of General Walker. Her guilt over her failure to inform on Lee “after Walker” was to save her, until she could better bear it, from facing the huge, intangible and infinitely more complex question of what responsibility, if any, she bore in a much greater tragedy.