Big Bang

by Jonathan Lethem, David Bowman

Genres: Literary Fiction; Humor & Satire

Synopsis

Set in the 1950's, this epic, Warholian novel presents a brilliant and wholly original take on the years leading up to the Kennedy assassination. Where were you when you first heard President Kennedy had been shot? This is a question most people can answer, even if the answer is "I wasn't born yet." In this epic novel, David Bowman makes the strong case that the shooting on November 22nd, 1963 was the major, defining turning point that catapulted the world into an entirely new stratosphere. It was the second big bang. In this hilarious, lightning-fast historical novel, Bowman follows the most famous couples of the decade as their lives are torn apart by post-war's new normal. We see Lucille Ball's bizarre interrogation by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and Jackie Onassis' moonlight cruise with Frank Sinatra. We follow Norman Mailer and Arthur Miller as they attempt to get quickie divorces together at a loophole resort in Nevada and watch a young Howard Hunt snoop around South America with the newly founded CIA. A young Jimi Hendrix, now the epitome of counterculture cool, tries his luck as a clean cut army recruit. Written with an almost documentary film like intensity, BIG BANG is a posthumous work from the award-winning author of Let the Dog Drive. A riotous account of a country, perhaps, at the beginning of the end.

Release date: January 15, 2019

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 640

Sample

Chapter 1

Go back to 1950, thirteen years prior to Kennedy’s gundown in Dallas. Three young male American expatriates are living in Mexico City.

The word young is used with its 1950s implication. This is and was a decade when even men in their late thirties were considered young.

One of the men is thirty-two. On his deathbed many years after November 22, 1963, he will claim that he was part of the conspiracy to murder President Kennedy. In 1950, this man brought his wife and their three-year-old daughter to this 5.2-square-mile capital built by the Aztecs in 1325. The Aztecs named it Tenochtitlán. The city had once been a Venice-like metropolis crisscrossed with canals as well as pyramids where the hearts of prisoners were ripped out from their chests. The Aztecs had faith this bloodletting kept the sun arcing across the sky.

This book’s eldest expatriate is thirty-six. He brought his common-law wife, his son, and his stepdaughter with him to Mexico City.

The youngest expatriate is twenty-seven. He brought only his wife, as they had no children. Each of these American men is unknown in 1950. The eldest will become a notorious modernist writer, his reputation greater than the number of actual readers who opened his books. The man whose age was in the middle will commit numerous political crimes, but will only be charged with a specific burglary that will force the resignation of an American president. The youngest of the three will become the enemy of this decade’s relentless fecundity, this Baby Big Bang—year after year in the 1950s nearly four million newborns pop up in suburban hospitals situated discreetly on the peripheries of clusters of cookie-cutter fake-colonial snout houses where each parent keeps a well-thumbed copy of Dr. Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care beside the bed.

This trio’s brief Mexican exile is a poignant lens to use to view the U.S.A. from.

—Norte America.

—Gringolandia.

*  *  *

The youngest expatriate is Carl Djerassi—pronounced Ger-AH-see. Djerassi looks a bit like a Semitic Desi Arnaz. Djerassi arrives in Mexico City around Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). Djerassi was born in Vienna when Sigmund Freud had still been alive. When he was sixteen, Carl’s parents sent him to New York City to escape Hitler’s imminent Blitzkrieg. Djerassi would attend college in Missouri and Ohio, finally earning a PhD from the University of Wisconsin. This man, who will exhibit a lifelong dedication to women and sex, and sex and women, was a carnal numbskull in college. He knew that possession of an automobile was the only way his generation could enjoy sex or a reasonably close facsimile, yet Djerassi never learned to drive. In fact, in Ohio, he took cello lessons instead of driving classes. At the start of the war, Djerassi was both a virgin and 4-F. He transcends that first affliction in 1943—his wedding night spent with his bride, Virginia, in a Pullman compartment clacking through the dark toward an Atlantic shore honeymoon.

Professionally, Djerassi would become a steroid man. ‘Steroids are solid alcohols that occur widely in plants and animals,’ he’d explain. ‘The best-known steroid is cholesterol.’ If you didn’t stop him, Djerassi would tell how all steroids (and all sterols) are based on a chemical skeleton that consists of carbon and hydrogen atoms arranged in four fused rings, generically known as ‘perhydrocyclopentanophenanthrene’—Djerassi always enunciating that boa constrictor word with smug fluidity.

Djerassi’s first job was working in New Jersey for a Swiss chemical company called CIBA. They held a patent for cholesterol, a steroid that was considered a good thing back then as cholesterol was a thinking man or woman’s steroid—10 percent of the brain is composed of cholesterol. Djerassi was part of the team that invented a powerful antihistamine for CIBA called pribenzamine. A chemical triumph. Djerassi was hot. He was recruited by a Mexico City pharmaceutical company called Syntex (from Synthesis and Mexico), led by Budapest-born chemist George Rosenkranz, who found himself exiled in Mexico after the war.

Djerassi’s New Jersey colleagues think he is crazy moving down to Mexico. Djerassi defends his decision: ‘Everyone assumes that serious chemistry stops at the Rio Grande. It doesn’t. I’m gambling that being in the backwater I can establish a scientific reputation.’ Then he speaks Latin, ‘Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi’ and translates, ‘What is allowed to God is not permitted to an ox.’

No one in New Jersey ever asks him what this means. Additionally, no one in New Jersey ever asks what his wife, Virginia, thinks about this Mexican relocation.

*  *  *

The gringo of the middle comparative age of thirty-two is an American spy named Howard Hunt. He is the head of the CIA office stationed in Mexico City. This town serves as the espionage portal to all of Central America. Spies are as numerous as drunks sleeping it off in city doorways and gutters.

Hunt works out of Uncle Sugar’s embassy in Mexico City. (Uncle Sugar = Uncle Sam = U.S.A.) It is a nondescript Latin moderne eighteen-story office building on the Reforma.

Hunt is a spy who could look good posing for a photo wearing an ascot.

In the 3-D of real life, Hunt’s face has more than a few Bob Hope angles. This is the difference between a handsome man and a comedian. In addition, Hunt’s complexion is permanently pale as if he were some eternal Norwegian. Hunt even spent time in Hollywood and never tanned. In Mexico, he has remained relentlessly white. Hunt is a gringo’s gringo. Often, his cover name is ‘Mr. White.’

Hunt’s spycraft is not assassination or molehood. He is an expert in Black Propaganda—forging reports or counterfeiting documents—stating something untrue, then planting fake spots in radio news or newspapers. Misinformation has always been as powerful as revealed secrets.

Hunt’s thirty-year-old wife, Dorothy, is also a spy. She was born Dorothy Wetzel in Ohio on an April Fools’ Day. After the Second World War, she worked for the OSS (progenitor of the CIA). She was adept at tracking down Nazi money and artwork for nineteenth-century-born William Averell Harriman. This man was the same Yale Bonesman Harriman who along with his cohort Prescott Bush had invested money for and with the Nazis in Berlin until FDR made such activities illegal. Dot’s travels for Harriman took her to Calcutta and New Delhi. She suffered a brief marriage to an alcoholic French count. She ended up stationed in Shanghai. There, she met E. Howard Hunt, also of the OSS.

Dot Hunt is not conventionally pretty. She is more an askew beauty. Her face is severe and masculine. Her hair, short. She has an Indira Gandhi profile. There is some Oglala Sioux in her blood. Her smile and laugh are never generous, but regal—you pleased her so rather than kill you she would laugh at you.

In Mexico City, Dot primarily functions as Howard’s confidante. She possesses security clearance so her husband can tell her his secrets. She also just found out that she is pregnant with their second child. Dorothy Hunt is perhaps the only expatriate mother in Mexico who never opened Dr. Spock. Why bother? A nanny dealt with the baby.

‘Another nanny will deal with the new one when it comes.’

*  *  *

Virginia Djerassi. Curly black hair. Ice-cream-scoop chin. Glasses. In early 1950, Carl Djerassi divorces Virginia in Cuernavaca so he can marry his pregnant mistress, Norma—petite, pleasant face. It never fully penetrates Djerassi’s consciousness that both his wives are gentiles. And even though divorce is anathema up in Gringolandia, Djerassi’s soul remains more European than American. Divorce is not a life-or-death situation. Djerassi’s own parents divorced when he was six and didn’t inform him until he was thirteen. Soon after Virginia Djerassi’s Mexican divorce, she marries a Mexican national and gets pregnant.

*  *  *

Our eldest gringo is William Seward Burroughs II—or ‘Seward,’ as the Mexican newspapers will call him one year from now after he shoots a woman in the head. He was born in safe-as-milk St. Louis, the grandson of the inventor of the rosary of capitalism, the adding machine. Young Burroughs never held a job, except once as an exterminator in Chicago. His mother sent him $200 a month allowance (about $1,500 in modern funds). During WWII, Burroughs had been drafted and classified 1-A in the infantry. His mother managed to get her son a civilian disability discharge.

His mother also wrote books on flower arranging.

During the war, Burroughs was in Manhattan and met a married woman nine years his junior named Joan Vollmer. She is now a divorcé living as Burroughs’s common-law wife. She already had a daughter before giving birth to Burroughs’s son. Before Mexico City, both Joan and Burroughs were arrested and jailed and even did time in American asylums. Their last stop in the U.S.A. was Texas, where Burroughs was a passenger in a car that was stopped by cops who found marijuana stashed in the glove compartment. Burroughs was arrested. Trial was set for late October. A week before Halloween, Burroughs and Joan packed Joan’s daughter and the couple’s son in their car and fled down the dove-gray Pan American Highway to Mexico City.

On good days in Mexico City, Burroughs does not look like a desperado. He is tall and lanky and dresses like he was born to the gentry. He’s always been that way. He looked like a middle-aged lawyer even as a kid going to boarding school in pre–atom bomb Los Alamos. In Mexico City, Burroughs’s good days become far and few. Mostly the man looks cadaverously beat. Joan’s looks suffer as well. She was once a tall-drink-of-water five-foot-six Botticelli beauty. In Mexico City, she often appears more beat than even Burroughs does. Her slight childhood polio limp becomes pronounced. She has open sores on her arms. She lives on Benzedrine and hundreds of daily sips of tequila. Her husband has stopped sleeping with her and returned to sex with street boy-meat. Her husband also has a healthy appetite for bennies and horse. He is a local feature on Dolores Street where the Chinese junkies give him a nod as they slouch against the glass windows of the Exquisito Chop Suey joint. Junk is cheap on Dolores Street. A habit for horse only costs thirty dollars a month; up in the U.S.A. it’s three hundred per month. On Dolores Street, Burroughs avoids pantopon cut with milk sugar. Burroughs loves eating yen pox—opium ash with coffee. He knows that Our Lady of Chalma is the patron saint of junkies. Finally, Burroughs possesses, as the Mexican police will one day say, a ‘dedication’ to alcohol.

*  *  *

Carl Djerassi has a mixed view of Mexico City. He likes that in a city spread over such a large area, most people leave you alone—everywhere except certain neighborhoods near Colonia Guerrero where strangers are always asking ‘¿Qué buscas, amigo?’

What are you looking for, friend?

‘Nothing. Besides, I’m no friend.’

Djerassi likes the steam of the tamale stalls under the statues of the Angel of Independence and Diana the Huntress on Paseo de la Reforma. The traffic of Mexico City is Cairo mixed with Florence. The population—Calcutta mixed with Beverly Hills.

As for William Burroughs, he loves the calves’ heads bobbing in the boiling cauldrons of soup at outdoor stalls. He loves the city’s scent of wormseed—a smell like gasoline mixed with orange juice. The hoarse voices of Mexican women who smoke Faros amuse Burroughs. Faros are Mex cigarettes so poignant they are wrapped in rice paper sweetened with sugar. Burroughs believes Mexico is an ‘Oriental country’ amplifying centuries of ‘disease and poverty and degradation and stupidity and slavery and brutality and psychic and physical terrorism.’ Mexico is chaotic in that way dreams are chaotic. ‘I like it myself,’ Burroughs writes in a letter to his young friend Jack Kerouac, ‘but it isn’t everybody’s taste.’

*  *  *

Howard Hunt was not just a spy.

He was a novelist.

He already had four hardcover novels published as well as two cheap paperback originals scheduled to come out that year. Hunt had once been a Promising Young Writer. One year after Pearl Harbor, his first novel, East of Farewell, a realistic war tale about a U.S. destroyer in the North Atlantic, was excerpted twice in the sophisticated magazine The New Yorker before publication by Alfred Knopf. The reviews were good, but the novel was topped by the daily war news in the Sunday Mercury or Chicago Tribune, making the book out-of-date on a daily basis. Still, Hunt won a Guggenheim Fellowship. He wrote three more novels that were best sellers, then forgotten. Like everyone else’s, Hunt’s postwar literary career was overshadowed by Norman Mailer’s. Mailer was a Jew five years Hunt’s junior. Mailer’s first book, a Pacific theater war novel, The Naked and the Dead, was published in 1948. It got raves and glory and was a best seller. The Providence Journal in Rhode Island proclaimed it ‘The most important American novel since Moby-Dick.’ No newspaper in Rhode Island, or anywhere else, had or would ever compare anything Howard Hunt wrote to Moby-Dick.

*  *  *

Howard Hunt and Norman Mailer were both Magnificent Narcissists, as were many of the ex-G.I. alpha dogs who fathered the Baby Big Bang of the 1950s. Mailer married six years earlier when he was twenty. In the years immediately after the war, young men had been expected to marry at ages twenty to twenty-two, getting hitched one and a half years earlier than their fathers had. By 1950, Mailer had fathered only one child—social leprosy as an American marriage was expected to produce 2.2 kids per family. The social pressure against single-child households was even stronger than that against childless marriages.

Mailer would come through before his death. He would prove himself an unconventional patriarch who would burn through six wives and contribute his seed to the production of at least eight children.

Perhaps more important, Mailer would have written thirty-one books.

*  *  *

Carl Djerassi was a narcissist but not magnificent. You already know that he was 4-F during the war. He had always been a realist when it came to offspring. ‘Americans mistakenly believe that we are creating an extension of ourselves,’ he said often. ‘But in the animal world sex is merely extending the species.’ Mailer’s nine children were not and would never be little Mailers according to Djerassian logic.

They were little Americans.

Little Semitic Americans.

*  *  *

William Burroughs was a junkie with newfound aspirations to be a writer. Until Mexico City, Burroughs abhorred writing. It disgusted him to put thoughts or feelings in words on paper. Now he was working on a novel, egged on by his comrade Allen Ginsberg, a twenty-four-year-old aspiring poet (and the son of a card-carrying Communist mother). Their friend Jack Kerouac was twenty-eight. Harcourt Brace was about to publish Kerouac’s first novel, The Town and the City, that spring. Burroughs followed Kerouac’s tenet that a novel was only a memoir with the names changed. The book Burroughs was writing concerned being a junkie in New York City and New Orleans and Mexico City. It was titled Junky. Burroughs wrote to Kerouac: ‘There are some students at Mexico City University who are successful writers. I am trying to make a deal with one of them to rewrite Junky in a saleable form. It is doubtful whether I am capable of writing anything saleable.’

*  *  *

Joan and Bill Burroughs’s kids, Julie and Bill Jr., are six and three, respectively. Joan was never exactly sure who Julie’s real father was, but she convinced the soldier she was married to at the time that Julie was his. The girl is already six, yet she has not been toilet trained. Joan could not be bothered. Bill Jr. had been produced by Burroughs’s seed in a New York hotel room. Bill Jr. did not use the potty either.

Dr. Spock had no advice for this situation.

If Dr. Spock had been dead, he would have rolled over in his grave to hear of a six-year-old American-born child who was not toilet trained.

‘Children are innocent like animals,’ Joan once said to Burroughs. He was cleaning his shoes after stepping in an arrangement of small child turds.

‘You don’t know the nonsense you speak,’ Burroughs replied. ‘Everything defaults to evil. America was old and dirty and evil before the settlers, even before the Indians. There is even worse evil down here in the heart of Mexico.’

‘Oh, pasha, you old poop. You sound like some sour pilgrim. Bill, you’re a Calvinist. You were born guilty. Everyone else was born innocent. The rest of us only get dirtied up after we become adults. Our mind gets Swiss cheesed by the disturbances of life. Listen to the kids talking while they’re still kids. They are candid and immaculate and have all the finesse of’—she pointed to her chest—‘their mother.’ Then Joan unconsciously strutted in a circle around the room. ‘Bill Jr. told me that he was going to run away from home. I asked him, Where to? He said, I am running away to Vermont or maybe Asia.’ Joan started her second circle. ‘I showed Julie a picture in a book of Adam and Eve. She asked me, Which one is Adam and which one is Eve? I can’t tell. They don’t have any clothes on.’

*  *  *

Howard Hunt needs a writer to translate a book written in Spanish by Peruvian ex-Communist Eudocio Ravines revealing his disdain for Marxism. Hunt summons a twenty-five-year-old kid down to Mexico City to do it.

The kid is named William Buckley Jr.

Buckley is good at brownnosing.

Nose. Nosing. Noses. This elitist pup of a papist talks through his nose with a pretentious drawl. Buckley is even more of a nasal conservative snob than his boss Hunt. The lad has a book coming in 1951. Not a novel. An intellectual memoir titled God and Man at Yale. Knopf is not his publisher. It will be the first title from a new conservative publisher named Regnery. In his book, Buckley claims Yale University undermined ‘her’ students’ Christian beliefs while promoting Keynesian economics, which are only one step from collectivism, i.e., Communism.

Buckley is Roman Catholic, but that didn’t stop him from becoming a Bonesman (as had George H. W. Bush, etc.). Catholicism was working-class, but Buckley was born with a silver spoon down his throat. Hunt was the one who had to work his way through Brown University playing trumpet for the Frank Rollin Orchestra.

Playing music was the only time Howard Hunt transcended his Jim Crow soul. The most ethereal experience he’d ever had with another man or even woman was with an African-American man—Charlie Christian, Benny Goodman’s electric guitarist, who had died in 1942 at the age of twenty-five. Their encounter was at a Manhattan jam party after a Benny Goodman show. Hunt had only been in the audience, but he brought his horn. Now Hunt was in a cellar filled elbow-to-elbow with professional pipes and amateur blowers. Hunt was just a kid in college and he suddenly blew out of the ruckus and began a piercing solo. Hunt was not sure where his breath was coming from, but Hunt knew his breath was genius. Everyone stopped playing. They were listening. Everyone except Charlie Christian. He picked his electric guitar faster to keep up with Hunt. Charlie Christian anticipated Hunt’s every note before Hunt blew it. Hunt was furious at first. Hunt didn’t want to be shadowed by any black alley cat. Then Christian stopped anticipating what Hunt would blow, and he and that white trumpeter found themselves playing a heartfelt duet. The notes rounded around each other, sometimes in harmony, sometimes dissonance. Sometimes Hunt was the goat and Christian was the leopard. Other times Hunt sharked while Christian oystered up. Hunt closed his eyes, and then was afraid to open them because he was crying. When the jam was over, Christian passed him by, two swarthy women playfully gripping his arms. ‘Cool as a jewel, cry-baby,’ Charlie Christian said to Howard Hunt with a smile. Christian then escorted his women away.

*  *  *

The acid guitarist who went by the moniker Jimi Hendrix will become a character in this narration. Why not mention him now? Jimi Hendrix was born Johnny Allen Hendrix in 1942. He was a mutt before Obama—part black (Al, his father), part Cherokee (Lucille, his mother). Lucille was just seventeen when she had Jimi. Al was twenty-three and stationed in the South Pacific. Al returned to Seattle in ’45 and discovered his first son had been dumped with his grandmother down in Berkeley. Al drove south from Washington, through Oregon, into California to retrieve his kid. Al Hendrix changed that shirttail’s name to James Marshall.

Jimi Marshall Hendrix.

Life with father and son—strangers actually—was chaotic. Relatives would all tell different stories. Al would even write a biography, but much of what he would write would be pure fiction or at best an embellishment of what really happened.

In Seattle, Al gets back together with Lucille. They have more kids. Lucille gives birth to a boy she names Joseph. Al isn’t the father. It will be said that the father is Filipino, but that could be wrong.

*  *  *

In the beginning of his career, William Buckley Jr. used snobbery as self-defense. It would transform into Buckley’s unpleasant first-strike airs. One morning at Uncle’s embassy, Hunt passed by Buckley’s desk and said, ‘Mistah Buckley, at the Colombian embassy cocktail party last night, a woman whom I shall not name said that Mexico was a country ruled by innocent Fascism. I didn’t ask what she meant.’

Buckley furrowed his eyes.

‘What did she mean, young Buckley?’

‘She probably meant something akin to innocent homosexuality.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Unconsummated man love.’

‘Any form of homosexuality is guilty, Mistah Buckley!’

The young man smiled using his thin lips and showing his well-bred teeth: ‘She probably meant soft Fascism.’

Hunt gave a theatrical frown. ‘Which is?’

‘Criminality without ideology. Mexican politics has always been criminal, yet Mexicans have burrito ambitions. The presidency is limited to a single term of six years. Since the president doesn’t have to worry about reelection or impeachment, he can spend six years doing whatever he wants.’

‘Hmm. The woman who used that term is an elitist [crude term for vagina].’

Buckley smiled. ‘The elite in Mexico City are anti-American in public, while in private they fight tooth ’n’ nail to protect their membership in the Chapultepec Country Club.’

Hunt gave a Disney-wicked smile. ‘I have a membership in the Chapultepec Country Club.’

Buckley had no reaction.

‘I’ll take you there for cocktails someday if you continue to be a good lad.’

*  *  *

William Burroughs was as Ivy League as Hunt and Buckley—Burroughs being a Harvard man. Back in ’41, Burroughs’s father told his son that a Columbia alumni, Colonel Donovan, class of ’38, was creating a ‘spy outfit’ in D.C. ‘Bill’ Burroughs took a train to the capital and met Colonel Donovan at his office. Donovan’s nickname was ‘Wild Bill.’ The two Bills got along. It seemed certain that Burroughs would join the CIA, making him a peer with Howard Hunt.

But this was not to be.

Donovan’s second-in-command came into the office to check out the new recruit. It turned out the guy, James Phinney Baxter, had been Burroughs’s housemaster at Harvard. Baxter despised Burroughs. After the recruit left the interview, Baxter told Donovan what a misfit Burroughs was.

William Burroughs did not become a spy.

Chapter 2

Saturday night in Mexico City.

The Djerassis and the Hunts went as separate couples to see Uncle Vanya performed at Mexico City College. (Howard Hunt only tolerated Chekhov because the Russian doctor was pre-Stalin.) Both couples ended up separately at a popular student hangout afterward, the Bounty Bar. This semi-dive was decorated with a nautical theme. The bar was comfortably empty—that is, there were just enough other customers drinking at tables so the two couples didn’t feel they were alone on a stage. The bartender was black-skinned, but he was smiling and drinking a Pepsi. Safe. The two couples recognized each other from the Chekhov audience and then sat down at a table together. The wives ordered cocktails. The men, Carta Blanca. The beer was served in ceramic mugs like coffee. The gringos sipped their drinks. Made small talk. ‘Mexican beer is supposed to be so good because of all the Nazi brewers that came here after the War.’ While they chatted, the men checked out the cleavage of each other’s wife. The women considered, without getting into details, what it would be like to sleep with the other’s husband. By the time the first round was over, the women were laughing. Dot’s laugh was deep. Norma’s was shrill and annoying. Yet, as she laughed, she displayed an open yap filled with flawless dentality. Someone’s wife pointed to the stuffed fish on the wall and said, ‘I don’t get it. The sailor theme—the name.’

‘Yes,’ said the other wife. ‘What’s with the Bounty Bar? Bounty for what?’

‘Mutiny on the Bounty,’ Djerassi said with a generous smile.

*  *  *

In the middle of the second round, one wife said to the other, ‘Let’s go powder our noses.’ They rose and went as a pair to the ‘Señoritas’ Inodoro.’ The men watched the legs of each other’s wife. Djerassi then began a monologue about his work with steroids. Hunt felt like cutting in to brag about his au courant triumph, his men successfully sneaking into the Guatemalan embassy, but he couldn’t talk about that to a civilian.

CIA work. For Your Eyes and Ears Only.

The Guatemalan embassy was located two blocks from Uncle’s. Hunt could stand at his office window with binoculars and peer into all the Guatemalan offices facing his building. Guatemala had a legally elected president. The president was a liberal. Guatemala was on Hunt’s anti-commie radar. Getting into the Guatemalan embassy pulled on Hunt’s psyche the way a particular mountain tugs a mountaineer.

First, Hunt mounted twenty-four-hour surveillance of the building. His crew got blueprints. They recruited a maid, Juanita García, who planted a microphone in the Guatemalan ambassador’s office. The CIA listening post was located in an apartment inside the embassy’s very building, recording on tape recorders every sound the microphone picked up. Juanita even made a putty imprint of the ambassador’s safe’s keyhole. She also supplied Hunt with a key to the embassy service door.

Hunt had another agent make friends with the night watchman. In 1972 at the Watergate Hotel, it never dawned on Howard Hunt to cultivate the night watchman, Frank Wills. The Guatemalan embassy’s night watchman was a janitor named José Corrida Detoros. Hunt’s undercover man and Señor Detoros became card-playing/tequila-drinking buddies.

Hunt decided his burglars would go in Friday night, just as he would with his first attempt at breaking into Watergate.

*  *  *

Do you remember that when the Watergate burglars were arrested it had been their fourth failed attempt to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee? First, Howard Hunt’s men will try to break into the office on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. Hunt will stage a fake business dinner for the ‘Ameritas Corporation’ at the Continental Room, a sublevel restaurant inside the Watergate complex. He’ll round up around eight Cubans to pretend that they’re businessmen. The plan will be: After watching bogus business movies while eating a tough steak dinner, everyone will leave the restaurant but Hunt and a Cuban. The two will hide inside a closet. After the Continental Room closes down for the night, they will sneak into the Watergate’s stairwell and creep up to the Democrats’ office on the sixth floor.

Here goes: Hunt and the Cuban slip out of the closet. The pair find the stairwell door locked. The entrance to the restaurant is also locked. The entire front wall of the Continental Room is glass. Hunt and his Cuban can be seen in the now empty hallway. The two hear custodians talking. Then a night watchman. Hunt and the Cuban spend the rest of the night hiding together again in the closet. On Saturday night things go better. Hunt’s Cubans make it up to the DNC’s door, but the lock man doesn’t have the right pick. The mission is aborted. On Memorial Day itself, the lock man flies all the way down to Florida to get the right jimmies and flies back to D.C. as the sun is going down. They’ll try to burglarize the Democrats for a third time.

This time they get in. They open safes. They photograph documents. They plant bugs. They leave.

Tuesday morning, Hunt finds that none of the bugs works. Two weeks later, Hunt and his Cubans return to the Watergate. They have new state-of-the-art bugs. One of the burglars, a non-Cuban, needlessly slips a strip of tape over the latch of the door in the stairwell. Here comes the night watchman, Mr. Frank Wills, the guy Howard Hunt ignored. Wills notices the tape and peels it off. Next, the non-Cuban comes by and sees that the tape is missing. He retapes the lock. Ten minutes after that, the night watchman sees that the tape has returned! He telephones the Washington, D.C., Police Department.

*  *  *

Yet, twenty-one years earlier in Mexico City?