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?”