Flickering screen, grainy image, the whir of the projector on a rickety wooden desk, four men sitting around the desk on uncomfortable straight chairs, watching people die. Three Chinese men in gray pajamas kneel before a pit, three soldiers shoot them in the back of the head. They fall forward in unison. A machine gun mounted on the back of a truck shoots down a row of naked civilians of all ages and both sexes. Nazis in Poland. Old NKVD footage: a prisoner brought into a small room, is seated on a chair, as at a concert. Behind the prisoner’s head, a little door like a dumbwaiter opens: a slight puff of pale smoke and the man falls forward. Various African executions next, obscure and degrading. One famous one: the Vietnamese colonel executing the prisoner with a pistol after the Tet attacks.
“Watch this one, it’s the only nonexecution,” said V.T.
Wartime, a trench filled with men dressed in motley uniforms, many sporting crossbelts, bandoliers, and odd black, tasseled hats. The men scramble out of the trench and one of them, on rising above the protection of the earth, is struck in the head by a bullet. His head jerks away from the shot, a cloud of dark material seems to rise from his skull like a departing soul, the tassel on his hat bounces up, obscenely playful, and he is flung backward into the trench.
For nearly twenty minutes they watched gunshot deaths representing nearly every one of the monstrous governments and antigovernments the century has produced in such profusion. Karp, watching, wondered how the victims kept their apparent equanimity. None of them looked like they were going to the beach, but neither did they seem particularly concerned. One woman, standing in her underwear before the guns, smoothed the hair of her daughter, as if they were posing for a photograph. All the victims had but one thing in common: when the bullets struck them, they fell or jerked away from the shots, which was the point of the present show.
The film whipped out of the slot and chattered, the screen went white. V.T. clicked off the projector and switched on the lights. Karp and the two other men blinked and stretched. To break the silence, Karp said, “What, no cartoons?”
The laughter was brief and uncomfortable, and Karp was annoyed at himself for the flippancy. He looked around the room at the men. V.T. displayed his usual bland, contained exterior, although there were still those dark circles under his eyes that Karp did not recall from their years together in New York. Jim Phelps, the photo expert, appeared grim and suspicious, as he did when viewing any film that he had not personally examined with a hand lens. He tapped nervously on a pile of manila envelopes he had brought with him, as if anxious for his part of the session to begin. The fourth man, Dr. Casper Wendt, seemed most affected by the film. The coroner of a large Midwestern city, Wendt was a vociferous member of the forensic pathology panel Karp had set up. Although he had seen any number of dead bodies in his practice, he was obviously less familiar with the actual process that rendered them so, although he was also one of the great students of all the Kennedy assassination amateur films. Wendt was thin and tall with glabrous blue eyes and a prim, reserved expression. Pale and distracted now, he absently polished his glasses on his tie.
Karp now addressed him. “So, Doc, what do you make of all this?”
Wendt carefully donned his glasses and said, “Very … I’m not sure ‘interesting’ is the correct word. No, informative, in a hideous way. These are armed forces archival films?”
“Yeah, from Aberdeen,” said Karp. “There’s a group out there that studies battle wounds. They have a lot more than the ones we just saw, but I thought these might give us the idea. I guess you noticed the main point in all these shootings.”
“Quite,” said Wendt. “It is obvious that we do not observe in any of these events a movement in the direction from which the shot originated. Such a movement on the part of Kennedy has, of course, been noted by some observers in the Zapruder film. Nevertheless, I would hesitate to call these examples probative in the present case, as confirming that the backward movement of the president was the result of a shot from in front.”
“What do you mean?” asked Karp, surprised.
“I mean only that because the actual autopsy was so badly botched, we cannot recreate the possible neuromuscular sequelae of any of the shots that struck the president. Thus we cannot absolutely exclude the possibility that the observed motion was, in fact, the result of a shot from the rear. The various theories that have been put forward, that, for example, the pressure built up by the shock of the bullet, when expelled from the front of the skull, acted as a jet, propelling the body backward, or that some odd neurological event occurred that caused the muscles of the back to contract, with the same result, can therefore not be entirely contradicted. I personally think such sequelae are unlikely, highly unlikely, but they cannot be scientifically ruled out without extensive further experimentation.”
Wendt always talked like this, as if he were reading from a double-columned, small-print forensic pathology text. Karp tried to conceal his frustration, asking calmly, “What sort of experimentation? I thought the Warren Commission already did that.”
“They shot a goat, with inconclusive results,” said Wendt, not disguising his contempt. “Essentially, they were hoping to demonstrate that a bullet such as Warren exhibit 399, the famous magic bullet, could penetrate layers of bone and tissue and emerge as relatively unaffected as 399 was, which, if one believes the single-bullet theory, went through the president’s back, emerged through his neck, went through Governor Connally’s body, shattering a rib, exited his body, went through his wrist, producing a comminuted fracture of the radius, and penetrated his thigh. In this they were entirely unsuccessful, as, in my opinion, anyone is bound to be. You cannot make such wounds and end up with a bullet that looks like that.”
“Yeah, right, but we’re not talking about the magic bullet now. We know the magic bullet is garbage, not so much because it couldn’t do the things you said, or because the shot trajectories are doubtful, but because we have no damn idea what the bullet really is. All we know about it for sure is that it was fired from Oswald’s rifle. It was found on a stretcher at Parkland? What stretcher? Who found it? Who handled it? If it was pulled from Connally’s body and popped into an evidence bag in the operating room, then fine, we’d have to deal with it seriously, but since it wasn’t—well, I wasn’t brought up to consider crap like that real evidence.”
Wendt seemed taken aback at this, since he had devoted years to criticizing the magic bullet’s anomalously pristine appearance. Karp continued, “No, what we’re about today is the shot or shots that killed Kennedy, the head shots. Specifically, what’re the possibilities of a head shot from the front?”
Wendt pursed his lips, as if loath to let a speculative remark pass through them. “As to that, I would allow the possibility of an explosive or fragmenting bullet arriving from that direction, simultaneously, or nearly simultaneously, with the shot from the rear. But since we do not have the brain correctly preserved in formalin, nor any sections that might have been made from the brain, we can never arrive at a definitive conclusion on this point.”
“But you do have something to work with,” Karp pressed. “I mean we do have an autopsy panel under way.”
Karp had been hearing odd things from the autopsy panel. Murray Selig had been uncharacteristically oblique on the few occasions that Karp had reached him by phone, and so he had invited Wendt, the maverick, and famous for his critique of the Warren procedures, for an informal consultation to try and get some straight answers. Which, in the event, he was finding hard to extract.
A smile suggested itself on Wendt’s thin lips. “Yes, assuredly, but an autopsy panel without a corpse to work on is more of a debating society than a panel of scientists. Essentially, we are limited to perusing secondhand evidence and with photographic material only, the Parkland and the autopsy photos and X rays. I have suggested, without much success, a program of—”
“The photos are faked,” said Phelps, loudly and confidently. “So are the skull X rays.”
He had their attention.
Without another word he pulled a packet of eight-by-ten glossies out of one of the envelopes and spread them across the desk.
“This is supposed to be the back of Kennedy’s head,” Phelps said, “with the entry wound of the head shot near the cowlick.” He indicated a photograph of the back of the dead man’s head, the hair damp and matted, a rubber-gloved hand holding it in position by a lock of hair. “This is an obvious composite forgery. You can see the matte lines where it was pieced together. That was done, of course, to hide the huge exit wound in the back of the skull.”
Karp stared at the photograph while Phelps traced the supposed join with a pencil. Karp shrugged and said “Okay, let’s say I take your word for it—”
“You don’t have to take my word for it. I spoke to Floyd Riebe, the photographer who took the photograph at Bethesda. He said there was a huge hole in the back of Kennedy’s head. The Parkland doctors said the same thing originally too. Also, look at this blowup of frame 335 of Zapruder.” He dealt a color eight-by-ten from the stack. “The top of his head is obviously missing.” They all stared at the blurry horror. Karp turned to Wendt. “Doc, what do you think?”
Wendt paused judiciously, then responded, “This is obviously inconsistent with the X rays we have been given.”
Phelps had an answer to that too. He pulled out a positive print of an X ray and placed it next to a different glossy, the most gruesome picture yet. It showed a three-quarter right-side view of the corpse’s face, with the brains bubbling up out of the skull like a party hat. “This is supposed to be a right-side lateral X ray. It shows massive damage to the right front side of the face. But no damage to that side of the face was ever described by any witness, either at Parkland or at Bethesda. And obviously, from this photograph, there’s no such damage.”
“Did the Warren people see this stuff?” asked V.T.
“Justice Earl Warren saw them,” replied Phelps in a sneering tone. “The story is, he was so shocked by them that he refused to allow them to be made public, and they were never shown to the commission.”
While they thought about this, Phelps brought out some more pictures and added them to his gallery on the wooden desk. “This is a picture of the top of the head. See this line? It’s surgery. And nobody ever mentioned a surgical procedure on the top of the head. The Bethesda autopsy team said that the skull was so shattered that they were able to lift the brain out without any further cutting of the skull.”
“What are you saying?” asked Karp uneasily.
“I’m saying that between Parkland and Bethesda, somebody worked on the body. They cut out the brain and modified the skull to make the single-shot-from-the-rear theory plausible.” This was said with profound assurance, as if anyone with eyes could plainly see it.
Karp snapped a lidded-eye look toward V.T., who kept his face blank. It was Wendt who responded first, and with some vigor:
“There is absolutely no evidence for any such interference. None. Nor would any such alterations be feasible in the time allowed, even if we assume that the president’s body was so poorly guarded that it could have been removed from its coffin on the presidential airplane and spirited away to a secret dissecting room before being delivered to Bethesda.”
“What about this photograph?” snapped Phelps “There is clearly evidence of surgery and—”
“So you say,” replied Wendt, “but I see a badly shattered calvarium from which nearly anything could be construed. I am not a photographic expert, of course, but I believe that interpreting autopsy photographs as to forensic content is well within my professional purview. You say the X rays and some of the prints are faked. It may well be so, but until I and the other members of the forensic pathology panel are so informed officially, we will continue to base our findings on them.”
“What, on faked evidence?” Phelps retorted. “What’s the goddamn point of that!” He addressed Karp, his eyes sparking. “This is big, damn it. This is evidence of conscious treason by a huge conspiracy involving people close to the top of the government. How else could they have—”
“Stop!” said Karp, holding up his big hand like a traffic cop. Dueling experts, the prosecutor’s nightmare, and he was sick of it. “First of all,” he said sharply, “treason is not a word I want to hear around this office. We’re not investigating treason, we’re investigating, if that’s still the right word, a homicide.”
“But, it’s the president … ,” Phelps began.
“Assassinating the president is not treason,” said Karp forcefully. “Even a coup is not treason. Treason shall consist in levying war against the United States and giving aid and comfort to its enemies. It’s in the Constitution, the only crime defined in the Constitution. So forget treason. Conspiracy to commit murder, interfering with an investigation, tampering with and withholding evidence—that’s different, and we may have found evidence of all of that. It’s enough.” He shot the famous stare around the table. Nobody spoke, and he resumed. “Now, as to these photos: Jim, write your report. We’ll get some independent source to confirm or reject your findings and then we’ll see. Dr. Wendt—I’ll try to get funds for the sort of experimental testing you’re interested in, if you’ll give me an outline of the sort of stuff you want to do.”
This speech was delivered in a tone of finality. Phelps, still bristling and muttering, shoved his photographs back into their envelopes. V.T. took him aside and spoke earnestly to him for some minutes in a low voice. Karp turned to the coroner. “Sorry about this, Doc. Things are apt to get heated around here.”
Wendt tried on a smile. “It was sweetness and light, I assure you, compared with some of our panel’s meetings.”
“Oh? What’s the problem? Murray throwing his weight around?”
“Not at all. But there seems to be a certain … reluctance to stray too far from the Warren findings. Whether Mr. Phelps’s theories about the documentary material will have any weight with them I can’t say.”
Karp couldn’t say either. Wendt took his leave and Phelps left too.
“Well, that was certainly fun,” said V.T. when they were alone. He fussed with the projector and began to rewind the film. “Don’t mind Phelps. He really is a top-notch photo analyst.”
“Yeah, with a good imagination. Did you see the back of Kennedy’s head missing in that film?”
V.T. shrugged. “Like you said, we’ll get somebody else to check it out.”
“Right. Meanwhile, the inmates are in charge of the asylum. The secret dissection, my God! You know we’re doomed, don’t you?”
“Semidoomed, maybe. One still has hopes. One of the little threads might pull something loose.”
“Maybe, but I doubt it,” said Karp. “And you know why?” He clenched his fists and adopted a Job-like pose, his arms and face raised to the uncaring heavens, and shouted, “Because this isn’t a real investigation!”
“My, my, Butch,” said V.T. in a soothing tone. “You seem to be having a nervous breakdown. Would you like to watch the executions film again? It might settle your nerves.”
Karp snorted and rumbled, “Speak for yourself, buddy. You look like shit—you must’ve dropped ten pounds since you got here.”
“Yes, well, as you know, you can’t get a decent knish in this town.”
There was some more of this weak humor, and they were laughing companionably when a secretary stuck her head in and said Fulton was on the line and did Karp want it sent in here.
“What’s happening, Clay?” said Karp when they were connected.
“I’m at the Sheraton in Reston,” said Fulton. “This old spooks’ meeting’s just breaking up.”
“And?”
“Zilch. I waltzed our boy up to Mr. David and he introduced himself as Antonio Veroa. David didn’t bat an eye. He just said, ‘I’m happy to meet you. I know the name, of course.’ Then Veroa moved on. When I asked him if David was Bishop, he looked sort of funny, and he said, ‘They are very similar in appearance but that is not Bishop.’ ”
“Oh, shit!”
“My feelings exactly. So—what should we do with Mr. Veroa now?”
“Crap, I don’t know! We might as well ship him back to Miami. Did Al Sangredo pull up anything on the drug charge against Veroa?”
“Yeah, it’s apparently some heavy weight of coke, found in his boat. He could go away for a long time.”
“Want to bet he doesn’t as long as he sticks to this line of bullshit? Want to bet they’d throw away the key if he testified that David was Bishop?”
“You think the fix is in, huh? Want Al to try and check it out?”
“No, fuck it,” said Karp wearily. “Why screw up his life too. I know when I’m whipped. Just thank the little bastard, kiss him for me, and stick him on a jet back to Miami.”
“What was that all about?” asked V.T. when Karp had finished the call. Karp told him.
“Well, then,” said V.T. brightly. “A perfect day.”
Marlene now found herself transported to a somewhat higher circle of purgatory. Early, yet not too early, she packed young Lucy up and made her way, via several buses, to the Dobbs home in McLean. Lucy played with the Dobbs children while Maggie and Marlene had coffee and cake and discussed the day’s research plans, and chatted amiably. Thereafter, Maggie disappeared, as did the children. Maggie either took them somewhere nice, or else she went on her own wife-of rounds, and left them to the efficient and grateful Gloria of El Salvador. Afternoons were spent at play group, except when it was Maggie’s turn to be hostess, at which time Marlene abandoned her duties on the book and helped out with the kids.
During most of most working days, however, Marlene was left delightfully alone, in a well-appointed and cozy little room that Maggie called “the study.” (This was different from “the den,” a larger room, where the congressman had his home office.) There were two windows looking out at an alley of bare and graceful dogwoods; inside, the room boasted built-in walnut bookshelves, several wooden filing cabinets, a long, shiny refectory table, a blue IBM Selectric on its own stand, lighting from desk and standard lamps, a worn chaise lounge of the Dr. Freud-in-Vienna type, and a working fireplace. This last was supplied daily with logs and kindling by Manuel, the Dobbses’ gardener and houseman. Marlene was thus often to be found working away in front of a cheerful blaze. In one corner of the room there was set up, incongruously, a movie projector on a rolling metal stand, and there was a folding screen that went with it.
The romance of the situation was not lost on Marlene. A poor but honest lady, down on her luck, finds genteel employment in the home of a powerful aristocrat with a dark secret—it was pure Brontë, and she luxuriated in it: the comfortable and elegant surroundings, the freedom from drudgery, the refuge from the ignominy of Federal Gardens. In that she regarded her Washington exile as a catastrophic hiatus in her real life, she had no trouble in slipping into the persona of a sort of upper servant. Sitting in front of her fire, laboring at her papers, she thought that, to complete the image, she lacked only a floor-length brown dress with buttons up the front, and a ring of keys at her waist. That and her hair in a neat bun with a center parting.
The work itself she attacked with an energy born of months of enforced intellectual idleness. Maggie had made a perfunctory start at organizing and indexing the Richard Ewing Dobbs archives, and Marlene spent several weeks updating this and becoming familiar with the material. This comprised several drawers full of clippings related to Dobbs and his arrest and trial, and the political arguments and commentary that resulted from that event; boxes of photographs, letters from prison, and other personal memorabilia; the transcript of the trial itself, with all the documents produced by discovery, and notes made by Harley Blaine, the defense lawyer; a thin sheaf of material yielded by the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act; and finally, a large archive of 8mm home movie film.
The senior Dobbs, it turned out, had been an avid home cameraman, from almost the first period in which such equipment had become available to the general public. There were four library shelves stacked with neat green file boxes in which were stored hundreds of spools in Kodak yellow cardboard sleeves, all neatly labeled with dates from the late thirties to the late fifties. Marlene had watched dozens of these films selected at random from each year of the record. At first, she ran film when she was bored with reading; later she became fascinated with the vérité aspects of the record. She watched a young, soft-looking, but handsome Yalie in sleeveless sweaters, saddle shoes, and slicked-down dark blond hair become a studious grad student and then a pipe-puffing New Deal bureaucrat in baggy three-piece suits. She watched his play: horses, croquet, tennis, engaged in with other men of the same type and clouds of bright young things, that cloud gradually resolving itself into one, a slim, elegant girl with good bones, a corona of blond hair, and a dignified expression. After 1938, she appeared on nearly every reel: Selma Hewlett Dobbs, the wife, now the Widow. Marlene saw the courtship, the wedding (two reels), the honeymoon (Havana, Rio, eight reels), the new house on L Street, a more subdued Selma, her belly swelling from one reel to the next, and finally, in 1939, the infant congressman, little Hank (six reels).
Dobbs had taken his camera to war too. A whole box was devoted to shots of jungles, airstrips, warships, planes landing and taking off, and any number of what appeared to Marlene to be exactly similar views taken from the rail of some sort of vessel, of the sea at night, with flashes in the distance. Only the labels indicated that they were distant prospects of the great night battles that raged around the Solomons in 1942.
The most interesting parts of these films to Marlene were those depicting the men of the Pacific war, all deeply tanned, many pitifully thin, crop-haired, incredibly young. Like most Americans, Marlene derived her understanding of World War II from war movies, where the soldiers had been played by thirtyish 4-Fs like John Wayne and Ronald Reagan. From Dobbs’s films she realized for the first time, and with some shock, that the Japanese Empire had been crushed largely by pimply teenagers and their slightly older brothers.
Dobbs had caught these young sailors and marines at their daily work, or relaxing, or lying wounded in tent hospitals, grinning often, smoking perpetually. There were shots of Dobbs too: at a desk, with a small fan cooling his sweat, in khakis boarding a PT boat, inspecting a submarine, photographing something through the nose bubble of a bomber. The most remarkable sequence was a scene in which Dobbs was shaking hands with a group of young naval officers, with PT boats in the background. One of the officers was a startlingly young Jack Kennedy.
Marlene had mentioned this to Maggie, who had rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, yes, the meeting of the giants! I’m surprised the image isn’t worn off the film. That’s one of the ones they show you when they’re checking you out to see if you’re fine enough to be a Dobbs. The poor old bastard used to watch it over and over again, that and the other Meetings with the Great.”
She had directed Marlene to an indexed list of film spools bearing shots of Dobbs and famous people: FDR, Hopkins, Nimitz, Spruance, the Dulles brothers, Bob Hope.
And then, of course, there was Harley Blaine. Blaine was in nearly as many of the films as Dobbs’s immediate family, from the Yale years onward; during the war, he was in more of them. Blaine had apparently served with Dobbs during some part of his service. There was a long series of them in navy whites working and carousing around wartime Pearl Harbor, and another series of the two of them poking around in ruins and interrogating Asians; the film labels identified Saipan and Okinawa as the venues.
Blaine apparently shared Dobbs’s interest in moviemaking. They traded cameraman duties when they were together, and after a while Marlene was able to recognize their individual cinematic styles: Dobbs flitted from one subject to another in quick cuts. Blaine provided a rock-steady camera platform, focusing on one subject for long seconds and then slowly panning to another. She even learned to recognize the shadow of their heads and upper bodies when they were using the camera: Blaine had huge shoulders sloping upward to a bullet head; Dobbs had a small round head on a graceful long neck.
Maggie confirmed this observation. “Yeah, the two of them were real pests, according to Hank and my mother-in-law. They’d sneak up on anything, one or the other of them, and get it down on film. Selma said the only place you were safe was in the toilet, and maybe not even then. When there was nobody else around they took shots of each other cutting up. Just boys at heart!”
Blaine was, of course, a key to Marlene’s investigation, not only as Dobbs’s lawyer at the trial, but as a lifelong friend. On a day, perhaps three weeks into her task, having read all the material in the archive and having watched dozens of hours of film, she asked Maggie whether it would be all right to call him in Texas.
They were in the kitchen; Maggie had just brought the kids home; Jeremy was napping and the girls were playing quietly in Laura’s room. Maggie’s reaction was not what Marlene had expected.
“Oh, my!” she exclaimed, holding her hand to her mouth. “Call him? Is that absolutely necessary?”
“Well, yeah, Maggie. I’m looking into a case that’s twenty-five years old, I guess I need to talk to the lawyer.”
A worry line dug itself deeper below Maggie’s golden bangs. “Yeah, yeah, you’re right, of course. But … oh, I don’t know what to do now… .”
“You’re worried about Hank finding out I’m doing this.”
“Yes! I know it’s stupid, but …”
“But what? Tell him! I mean, it’s not like it was illegal. Besides, I’m going to have to talk to Selma too, and I doubt that she’s going to swear secrecy. The worst that could happen is that he’ll yell at you and tell me to stop. I mean, he doesn’t strike me as such a tyrant.”
“Oh, no, he’s not, not at all. It’s just he’s so sensitive about this whole thing with his dad.”
She hemmed and hawed for a time, but under Marlene’s cold eye, and not wanting to look like a jerk in front of a woman she regarded as the epitome of courage (and of course Marlene would never try to hide stuff from her husband for fear of an argument), she gave over Blaine’s private number and said that she would break the news to Hank.
The call to Texas was answered by a man with a soft accent. Marlene explained who she was and what she wanted. The man asked her to hold. There was a hiatus of perhaps three minutes. Then another voice came on the line, with a similar accent but a different and more impressive timbre, a voice that reminded Marlene of Lyndon B. Johnson’s: cast iron with a coating of honey.
“So you’re gonna write all about Dick Dobbs,” said Blaine after the brief pleasantries were concluded.
“Well, I don’t know about ‘write,’” said Marlene. “Maggie’s asked me to do the research. Find out the facts, and so on.”
“Find out the facts, hey? That’ll take some doing. I hope you’re not an old lady.”
“No, sir, but I’m working on it. Tell me, do you get to Washington much? This kind of thing might be easier to do face-to-face.”
“Oh, no, I stick close to home nowadays. I been under the weather.”
“I’m sorry—I hope I’m not disturbing you.”
“No, that’s fine. I don’t get many calls lately either. I’m always glad to chat with a lady. So, tell me, what’ve you made so far of the great case of U.S. v. Dobbs?”
“I’ve gotten as far as confusion, as a matter of fact,” said Marlene, not particularly amused by the “lady” business.
A gravelly laugh. “I’m not surprised. I guess you been reading all the commentary?”
“Yes. And it’s either a right-wing plot to destroy a patriotic American who was a premature peaceful coexistence advocate or a foiled left-wing conspiracy to disarm the United States and deliver it into the hands of the Soviets. It’s impossible to figure out which because, as you know, the case was never resolved. The right-wingers claim it was dropped as a part of the conspiracy, with the treacherous Harley Blaine threatening to blow the whistle and reveal national security secrets. The other side claims it was a victory for civil liberties in the dark days of McCarthyism, won by that great civil libertarian Harley Blaine. So my first question is, which Harley Blaine am I talking to?”
Another laugh, and then a long coughing spasm. “Sorry ’bout that,” Blaine said. “Guess I’m not used to having my aged ears jangled by impertinent remarks—no, don’t apologize—it’s good for me—gets the old juices flowing again. Which Harley Blaine, huh? Well, miss, here’s the main thing you have to understand. Dick Dobbs was my best friend. He was the one interested in politics, not me. When he got into trouble I figured my job was to get him out of it, whatever it took, and I did that. Whatever a bunch of eggheads and pissant hack writers said about it afterward—hell, I never paid any mind to it at all and neither did Dick. The Harley Blaine you’re talking to is the only one there ever was, a good friend and a damn good lawyer.”
“Okay, fine, but how did you get him off. There was something about a defector you uncovered—”
“Hell, the government’s case didn’t amount to a hill of beans,” Blaine interrupted. “What they had was the uncorroborated testimony of an admitted spy, that Weinberg fella, and a bunch of papers. There was no question that the papers came from Dick. The question was, did Dick give ’em to Weinberg or did Weinberg steal them? They didn’t have a scut of real evidence that Dick had turned them over. Weinberg had no messages, no communications from Dick at all, and he had free access, as a clerk, to everything in Dick’s office. Of course, in those days an accusation was about the same as a conviction. They got Alger Hiss and fried the Rosenbergs on cases just about as bad. I wasn’t about to let that happen to Dick.”
“So you short-circuited the process with this mysterious defector.”
“I did. You’ll want to know how I pulled it off?” Teasingly.
“Yes. According to the articles and books I’ve read, you’ve never been straight on the issue. That’s what’s fed the conspiracy accusations over the years.”
“Well, Miss Ciampi, I don’t reckon a smart girl like you would’ve swallowed much of that old horseshit—pardon my French.”
“Does that mean you’re going to tell me the real story, Mr. Blaine?”
There was a long pause on the line, long enough to make Marlene think she might have been cut off. But Blaine remained connected. He cleared his throat heavily and said, “Matter of fact, I told Selma the whole thing, back then, Selma and Dick both. I told them what I’d found out, and how I’d found it out, and I said I wasn’t going to use it unless they thought it was right. I said, and I remember this like it was yesterday, the two of them holding hands, sitting on straight chairs in the interview room in that damn prison they had him in, and I told them that the government was bound and determined to see Dick convicted of treason and that they would find some way to do it, and that they’d probably ask for the death penalty. And Dick asked me, would it hurt the country, what I was planning to do, and I said, no, I didn’t think so, and he told me to go ahead with it. Damned if I knew if it’d hurt the country. About then I wouldn’t’ve cared if it meant the Russian navy could steam into New York. I just wanted him out of that place and safe.”
He paused again, and Marlene heard the sound of drinking and a clunking noise, as if a glass had been set down. “So there’s no reason not to let you in on the conspiracy after all this time. Everyone’s dead, just about, except me and Selma, and a bunch of the small fry. The judge and prosecutor gone; Dick, of course. The chief witness, Weinberg, died in prison. Lord knows where Reltzin and Gaiilov are, dead too, probably. And as far as national security”—he drew the word out long and mockingly—“I expect the Republic will survive the revelation.”
“Gaiilov?” asked Marlene.
“Hah! See, you’ve wormed it out of me already. Yeah, that was the boy. Armand Dimitrievitch Gaiilov. Talk about your conspiracy! My Lord, you couldn’t start a conspiracy in this country if your life depended on it; folks here just like to talk too much. They ain’t comfortable with secrets. How it happened, I was sitting in the Navy Club in Washington worrying about how I was going to get Dick out of this mess, when I heard two fellas talking. They were huddled together at the bar and I was sitting in a club chair about six feet away with my back to them. They were sort of arguing in a polite way about something or other and then I heard a name that made my ears perk up. I had good hearing back then; getting deaf as a post now. I got this thing makes the phone louder. Anyway, one of ’em said something like, ‘But he says that Weinberg was the only contact,’ and the other one said, ‘Well yes, that’s the point. He’s trying to protect Dobbs. It means he’s a mole.’ And the other one said, ‘Damn it, Gaiilov’s no mole. He’s given us loads of stuff that checks out,’ and then he went on to name all kinds of stuff with names like Hatrack and Boneyard, secret files of various kinds, I imagined, but by then I wasn’t really paying too much attention. When they left, I asked the barman who they were and he gave me a couple of names and I checked them out and sure enough they were CIA.”
“How did you do that—check them out?”
“Oh, it wasn’t much of a problem. Washington was still a small town back then. I’d had some connection with naval intelligence, being a former naval person and all, and I asked some friends and they asked their friends and that’s how it was done. What it was, anyway, was that an employee of the Soviet mission to the UN in New York had just walked out one day and stopped in at FBI headquarters and said he wanted to defect. He claimed to be KGB. Of course, the CIA got into it right away, and of course they leaned on this guy something fierce to make sure that he wasn’t a phony defector. It stirred up quite a ruckus in the Agency, so I learned, because one faction, Bissell and them in operations, thought he was genuine, and another faction, Angleton and his friends, thought he was a phony, a double agent. Anyway, the real kicker was that this joker, Gaiilov, said he knew all about Reltzin and Weinberg, and yeah they were spies, but he’d never heard anybody in the KGB mention Dick Dobbs.”
“The point being,” Marlene put in, “that if you thought Mr. Gaiilov was a double, then you’d expect him to try to cover for Dobbs, the master spy, but if you thought he was on the level, then Dobbs had to be innocent.”
The man chuckled, a dry rustling sound. “Yep, you got it. I reckon you can figure out the rest. I called a meeting in Judge Palmer’s chambers with the U.S. attorney, Paul Gerrigan, and I told him that I intended to call Armand Gaiilov as a witness. Well, when that got back to the CIA it let the skunk loose in amongst the choir. There was a great gnashing of teeth, I expect, and it must’ve brought the internal battle to a head. The last thing they wanted was a fella who they didn’t know whether he was a spy or not getting hauled up in open court under oath to testify about Dick Dobbs. So they said they wouldn’t do it, couldn’t do it, for national security reasons, and I said in that case, I’d settle for a subpoena duces tecum—the transcripts of all their debriefs of Gaiilov. Well, of course, they said I couldn’t have that either. Judge Palmer hemmed and hawed, and I got shouted at a good deal, and accused of being a Red communist myself, but after Palmer had stared down the barrel of the Sixth Amendment for a while, he told them they had to let Gaiilov testify. He said, ‘Gentlemen, the Constitution in the instant case allows me no leeway. The witness may indeed refuse to answer on grounds of national security or prior oath, at which point I will make a determination as to whether such refusal is justified, but there can be no prior bar to Mr. Dobbs’s right to call whomsoever he will to his defense.’ ”
“And the government dropped the case.”
“They did.”
“Very fancy,” said Marlene, with sincerity.
“Why, thank you kindly, miss. I thought so myself at the time.”
“Weren’t you worried that he might get up on the stand and lie for the Agency and say that Dobbs was the one?”
“Oh, that was a possibility, of course. On the other hand, a good half of the CIA had staked their reputations on the idea that Gaiilov was genuine. If he lied about Dick, I would’ve treated him as a hostile witness, and then I’d’ve had reasons to call the CIA big shots up there to confirm, or try to deny, Gaiilov’s original exculpation of Dick. No way they were going to open up that bag of cats. They’d’ve looked like a bunch of fools. And, my dear, if there’s one thing the CIA can’t stand, it’s public embarrassment. They don’t mind one bit walking out there to the wall with a blindfold and a last cigarette, but make ’em look like a horse’s ass? Hell, they’d do anything on God’s earth to stop that.”
“Well, this has been real interesting, Mr. Blaine, and I don’t want to take up any more of your time. I’d just like to ask: do you have any material you think would be useful on this project—from the case, or from your association with Mr. Dobbs? And could you give me the names of anyone who might’ve been familiar with the case that I could talk to?”
There was a pause while the man thought. “No-o, as for the papers, I think I already sent the case papers and all some years back, when Hank started this thing. I told him then I didn’t think it was a good idea to dredge all this up again, but he was determined, so I just sent him a whole stack of stuff.”
“Films too?”
“I guess there might’ve been some films. Hell, Dick and I could hardly ever tell which of our stuff was whose. He’s probably got nearly everything I do. On the people side: hell, it’s been a quarter of a century, near about. Like I said, judge, prosecutor, and defendant all in their graves, and the defense’s got one foot in. The little fry? Well, any of them who had something to say, they’ve said it already in books and such. Look, miss, I got to go. This damn nurse’s pestering me again, I reckon she found some poor inch of my hide without a needle hole in it and it offends her.”
“Oh, sure, sorry—one last thing. Would you know how I could find out what happened to either Reltzin or Gaiilov? Even if they’re dead, they might have had friends or family. There might be papers left behind… .”
“Oh, Lord! I couldn’t even guess at how to help you there. Reltzin probably got shipped back to the Soviets. They got most of their nationals back in exchanges. Gaiilov? I heard he passed on, the lucky man.”
After she’d hung up, Marlene paged through her notes, puzzled. She found it odd that a man who recalled the exact words of a judge’s decision a quarter century past should be so hazy about so much else, for example, about what had become of the Russians. Of course, he was obviously ill, and memory got funny when that happened; for all Marlene knew he had a brain tumor. But that business about overhearing the two CIA guys in a bar—that sounded funny too. She drew a circle around that section of her notes, and around the Russian names, and then made a note to herself to call on Mrs. Selma Hewlitt Dobbs. The Widow.
Karp got through to Ray Guma in New York late in the day.
“Goom? Butch.”
“Butch?” said Guma in exaggerated puzzlement. “Do I know a Butch?”
Karp said, “I’m sorry, perhaps I have the wrong number; I was trying to reach the Association of Chubby Italian Attorneys with Mob Connections.”
“Oh, that Butch. You never call, you never write… . So, how the hell are ya, buddy? You solve the big one yet?”
“We expect an arrest momentarily. Actually, that’s why I called. I’m gonna offer you a rare opportunity to serve your country.”
“Wait a minute, let me put my hand on my wallet. Okay, I got it. Shoot—what can I do for you?”
“The Buonafacci kid you got on that rape charge. I could use a little favor from Tony and I thought it might be better if the ask came from you.”
A loud noise, like the sucking of a gas pump at the dregs of a tank, came through the receiver.
“What’s the joke, Goom?” snapped Karp.
“The joke, sonny boy, is that you got to take a number on that one. Stand behind the velvet rope. Narco’s drooling, racket’s got their nose so far up my ass I don’t have room for my hemorrhoids. I’m the queen of the prom on this one. I got to pick and choose.”
“Goom, for Chrissake, it’s not the Gambinos’ next smack shipment; it’s a lousy phone call to a retired wise guy, a soldier, is all. We just want to talk to him, and not about anything that’s going to involve Tony or anybody current in any of the families.”
“Who’s this soldier?”
“Guido Mosca. Jerry Legs.”
“Oh, yeah! V.T. called me about him a while back. So you found him, huh? I personally never had the pleasure. What, he’s in Miami?”
“Yeah. We figure it’ll jog his memory if Tony asks him.”
“Yeah, I guess,” said Guma reflectively. “What do you want to ask him about? Like, did he pop a cap on JFK?”
“No, just some other stuff. About some things that went down in New Orleans in sixty-three. Mosca’s name showed up on some documents. He was pally with some guys that Oswald was pally with—it’s just background, painting in some of the numbers.”
“You’re not off on this horseshit that it was a Mob contract on Kennedy, are you?” Guma asked.
“Well … I’d say it’s still on the table. Why?”
“Because it’s total garbage,” said Guma angrily. “The Mob whacks their own guys or guys who take their dough and then try to fuck them. If they whacked people who just pissed them off or put them in jail, Tom Dewey and Estes Kefauver wouldn’t have lasted long, not to mention you and me. You know why that is? Back in the nineteen-tens, I forget where, Cincinnati, or Columbus, some old-time wise guys knocked off a crusading police chief, a straight-up guy, just like they used to do in the old country, and what happened was a mob came stomping into the Italian section of town and burned it down and lynched any guinea they could get their hands on. So, since then, it’s been a no go: don’t fuck with the government guys, except with bribes. The other reason is, the Mob couldn’t pull it off, not like whoever actually did it did it.”
“I don’t see why not,” said Karp.
“Come on, Butch! It ain’t their style. They don’t go in for long-gun shots. Bugsy Siegel excepted, I don’t know a case in this country where a Mob hit used a rifle. Short range is what they like, or a big bomb.”
“What about Jack Ruby? That was short range.”
Guma chuckled. “Ah, well, Jack Ruby. I’ll give you Jack Ruby.”
“So why did he kill Oswald, if the Mob wasn’t involved in the JFK thing?”
“I didn’t say they weren’t involved. Fuck I know if they were or weren’t involved. They’re involved in everything else, they might’ve been involved in this too. They do stuff for money, you know? What I said was, the JFK hit wasn’t a Mob contract.”
“Okay, whatever,” Karp said. “I still need to talk to Jerry Legs. And don’t tell me I got to stand on line, because if you do, I’ll get on a plane and fly down to Miami and talk to Tony Bones myself, and if your name should come up in the conversation, I don’t know, some of the smart shit you’ve pulled on him over the years might slip out… .”
“Ah, Butch, come on, don’t even joke about that business,” said Guma, genuine alarm in his voice. Guma had for years walked the delicate line between relations with the Mob for which armed response was highly unlikely and those for which it was far too likely for comfort. Karp remained silent, and after a long moment, Guma breathed out a sigh and said, “Okay, you rat, I’ll see what I can do.”
“How was your trip?” asked Bishop. His voice over the phone seemed to come from far away, although he could have been in the next room in the Alexandria motel.
“It’s fucking cold here, Bishop,” said Caballo. “I hate the cold. I’m a sunshine soldier.”
“It’s only about forty.”
Caballo ignored this. “What’s the deal?”
“You need to pick up a package.”
“Black bag?”
“No, our contact will collect the necessary material and give it to you.”
“I can’t believe this! You brought me up here to be a fucking courier?”
“No, of course not! They made a copy of the film. The other items, the documents, are neither here nor there and can be explained away. Not the film. So …”
“That’s the black bag.”
“Yes,” said Bishop. “A man named Karp. It should be easy.”