SEVENTEEN

Marlene walked in the door and was immediately hit by, “Mommy, Mommy, guess what? Sweetie bit a bad man!”

“Oh, Christ! Harry?”

“He bit him really hard and made his pants rip off!”

“Harry!”

Harry Bello strolled in from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a dish towel tucked into the front of his pants. “How’d it go?” he asked.

“What’s this about the dog?” Marlene countered.

Harry shrugged. “The kid’s right. We were walking in that park up the highway a couple miles. I got a ball for the dog, we’re throwing it. Guy gets out of this pickup and watches us for a while. The dog comes by him, chasing the ball, he makes a grab for its collar. The dog goes crazy, does his rabies act, growling, snapping. The guy backs off, makes a run for his truck, the dog goes after him, grabs his behind, rips the seat of his pants off, shorts and all. We’re just standing there, it went down so fast. The guy’s in the truck, he starts yelling his old lady paid two hundred for the dog, he’s gonna sue our ass. I gave him the eye for a while and he ran out of steam and took off.”

“He said a lot of bad words, Mommy.”

“I bet he did, honey. Harry, this guy: about six-one, two-hundred, crew cut, bent nose, looks like a bouncer in a redneck bar?”

“Yeah. You know him?”

“In a way. He used to live next door. His wife actually did buy the dog, but this bozo was always getting on her to get rid of it. I guess he found out he could get some cash for it and wanted it back. They were real mean to him anyway, and I guess old Sweetie has a long memory.” She glanced at the dish towel.

“You’re cooking?”

“Yeah, she was hungry.”

“We’re having SpaghettiOs,” crowed Lucy, and she began to hop around on one toe singing the eponymous jingle.

Marlene lowered her brows at Bello. “Harry Bello, you brought SpaghettiOs into my house?”

Bello made an appeasing gesture. “She wanted.”

“This gets out, I’ll never be able to walk down Grand Street again.”

“I got steaks for us, wine for you,” said Bello.

“Oh,” said Marlene, “in that case …”

They ate, and afterward the dog licked all the plates and crunched up the steak T-bones like potato chips.

“So, you get anything at the old lady’s?” asked Harry when they were settled over coffee.

“You could say that. I read her diaries and some old letters.”

Bello’s left eyebrow rose a quarter of an inch, to which implied query Marlene answered with a minuscule waggle of her head: no, she didn’t want me to read them, but I did anyway.

“It keeps coming back to Harley Blaine,” said Marlene. “It turns out Blaine was the one who started dating Selma, back then, and then Richard Dobbs fell in love with her, and then Harley seemed to lose interest and she started going out with Richard and then she married him. Her letters to Blaine were there too; that was one of the things a gentleman did in those days, return a lady’s letters when the romance was over. And his to her too; she kept them all those years, which tells you something. It was weird reading them in order; first, he’s hot as a furnace, swearing eternal love, quoting poetry, and then it’s like, over the course of a week, he’s turned it all off; the letters start sounding like he’s writing to a pen pal in Uganda. Then her letters get cold too. She writes him a note: he left a camera. He left a hat. Hope you are well. He left another camera.”

“The guy had a lot of cameras.”

“Yeah, well he could afford them. Then they stop writing, except for Christmas cards. She had an affair too, later on, so it wasn’t the perfect American family after all. In the diaries she talks about Richard frankly as if he were another child—‘the boys,’ as in ‘I got the boys out of the house,’ meaning Richard and Hank. In forty-five or so she falls for this guy she calls ‘Q’ in the diary and it lasts for three, four years. Intensely romantic. No letters from Q though. The diary says she wants to leave her husband, but Q won’t let her. Finally, he breaks it off. She’s crushed. She stops writing diaries. Around then is when the spy stuff started, so maybe they were afraid it would come out in the investigation.”

“Backward,” said Bello.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought too,” Marlene agreed. “Usually the lover wants the married one to leave the marriage and he or she won’t. The guy wasn’t married, whoever he was, that’s clear from the diaries. But … who knows? Maybe, like the man said, the very rich are different from you and me.”

An inquiring look from Harry.

“What’s the connection to the case? I don’t know, but there’s a pattern. Here’s Richard in the center, the golden boy. He brings Blaine in as a kind of brother, and Selma in as a kind of wife, and their job is sort of to protect him, and keep the gold shiny. They … I don’t know what’s the right word … they invested in him, like, if Richard shone, so would they. He was the center. In fact, now that I think of it, Blaine probably sort of gave Selma to Dobbs. Blaine was in love, so he said, but when the golden boy expressed an interest, it was ‘take her, she’s yours.’ Blaine’s really the most interesting character in the trio. Slick. A slick liar. And not just slick; I get the feeling of snakes below the surface. That whole CIA thing with Gaiilov and before. I’d give anything to be able to go out there and talk to him face-to-face.”

“Wizard of Oz.”

She laughed. “Yeah, right! With the dog pulling at the curtain. My God, Oz! I almost forgot. Wait a sec!”

She got up from the kitchen table and dashed into the living room, returning with her bag. She rummaged in it briefly and then placed a small, worn Kodak-yellow box on the table. “After I went through the diaries and put everything back the way it was, I didn’t have much time to look around. The rest of the attic was mostly the usual stuff—suitcases, a wardrobe with old clothes in it, furniture. I checked out the suitcases, nothing, the wardrobe, nothing, the bookcases … maybe a hundred or so books, all old kids’ stuff in complete sets, boys’ books: Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Rover Boys, Zane Grey, and a complete set of the Oz books. You know the big size, with those great pictures and the funny curvy writing in gold on the covers? Okay, I used to love them when I was a kid, so of course, I looked through them, not really looking for anything in particular, just looking at the pictures. If you want to know, I was feeling kind of grimy, like you do when you find something out about someone, something shameful, that you weren’t supposed to know, and I thought that Oz would cheer me up. But I found this”—she tapped the little box—“in a cut-out space in Tik-Tok, the Mechanical Man of Oz.”

Bello handled the little box. “So what is it?”

“Well, you can’t see much on eight-millimeter just by holding it up to the light, but it looks like a naughty movie.”

“Porn?”

“Not exactly. Not hard-core suck-fuck anyway. It looks like one of those old-fashioned amateur jobs. A couple at the beach, they take off their clothes, they fall on the blanket and so on. I just looked at the first couple of feet or so. I wish we had a projector here.” She put the film box back in her purse.

“Why’d you take it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t like the idea of the Dobbs kids visiting Granny’s in a couple years and finding it and bringing it home and running it after din-din one evening. Maybe I’ve joined up in the great goal of protecting the rep of Richard Ewing Dobbs. I think he took this film himself, by the way, and developed it too, either with actors, or with real people, as a peeping Tom. Or maybe Blaine did.”

“The skeletons,” said Harry.

“Yeah, I shook the closet and out they came.”

Harry went off to a motel around six-thirty and Karp came home just after ten. A snowstorm had hit the lower Midwest and Karp had been unable to get a direct flight back, and had spent four hours on standby in Atlanta, and was in no mood to do anything but sleep.

“How was Miami?” Marlene asked anyway when they were in bed.

“Somebody killed our two witnesses and I got shot at and Clay knocked me down and I scraped the shit out of my palms.”

“On the other hand you got some sun,” said Marlene, suppressing horror. “Who shot at you?”

“One of the guys who got killed. It’s a long story.”

“So it was a total loss?”

“No, we found some interesting stuff. It might give us a lead to this Irishman in Louisiana who might’ve been involved in some way. He was paying off this Cuban for some reason, the guy who got killed. Of course, the evidence was illegally taken, so I’ll probably go to jail, but I don’t care right now. God, I’m whipped!”

“Should I rub your back?”

“That would be nice,” said Karp, rolling over.

Marlene rubbed, and thought. “One thing, on this project I’m doing for Maggie? I’d sort of like to do some of it at home and I need something to look at eight-millimeter film with. One of those thingies with a little screen?”

“Umm. Yeah, an editor. I could bring one home. Umm. Keep doing that and you can have Cinerama.”

Karp was awakened the next morning by a peculiar feeling; someone was rubbing his hand with a hot washcloth and giggling. He had incorporated this sensation into one of those odd and vivid early-morning dreams, as one does with the sound of the alarm clock, and then the alarm clock did go off and Karp opened his eyes and looked into the red-rimmed eyes of the dog that was licking his hand.

“Yaaagh!” In one motion he heaved himself into a sitting position with a pillow between his chest and the monster. Lucy stood there in her flowered nightie, convulsed with shrill laughter. The dog panted and deposited a string of thick saliva on the bed.

“Marlene!”

She strolled in from the bathroom, brushing her hair.

“You called?”

Karp pointed mutely at the dog.

“Oh. I guess I forgot to tell you. Butch, Sweetie. Sweetie, Butch. I’m going to make some coffee.”

“Daddy, we scared you, didn’t we?” asked Lucy, still giggling.

Karp was being a model modern husband at breakfast. “What kind of dog is it?” he asked calmly.

“You’re not pissed off?”

“Surprised, maybe. But, being married to you, my life is full of surprises. I come home one day, and you’ve bought a car, even though I know we don’t have a dime. Maybe you’ll tell me someday how you did it, maybe not. I come home from a trip and there’s a washing-machine-sized dog in the house. Hey, I’m easy. So, what kind?”

“The vet said it was a Neapolitan mastiff.”

“Neapolitan, huh? This is a full-grown dog?”

“No, it’s still putting on weight. It should reach one hundred sixty pounds more or less.”

“You bought this thing?”

“No, actually, I got it from Thug ‘n’ Dwarf. They abandoned it, sort of.”

“Uh-huh. Gosh, a big dog, a big stolen dog, like that, we get back to the city, we ought to start thinking seriously about getting a house. Westchester, the Island maybe. Dog like that needs a big yard.”

“Nice try, buster, but no sale. That is an urban Neapolitan mastiff. Naples is a city. He’ll adapt to loft living, all right, probably better than some other people in the family I could mention.”

“Well, in that case,” replied Karp equably, putting on his suit coat and preparing to make his exit, “I’ll have to content myself with the pleasure of watching you, and you alone, scooping gigantic dog turds off Crosby Street each and every morning and evening.”

Karp crossed the street in front of the Annex building to avoid several of the more prominent Kennedy nuts, including the man in the red hat, and slipped into the entranceway. He had noticed in himself since the events in Miami a growing sympathy for the clan. In the office, he checked his messages, looked with distaste at a large pile of unread mail, and went immediately to Bert Crane’s office.

Who was in, for a change. Dispensing with pleasantries, he told Crane what had gone down in Florida and what they’d learned from Mosca. Crane was not slow in grasping the implications. “There’s a leak.”

“Yeah, there is. And we should be able to find it, because the only people who knew we were going down there to talk to Jerry Mosca were me; Fulton, who was with me; V.T. Newbury, who’s a total clam on stuff like this; and Dobbs and you.”

Crane caught the obvious implication and to his credit did not make any protestation, but sat in thought, chewing his lip.

Karp asked, “What about Flores?”

Crane shook his head vehemently. “Hell, no! Flores doesn’t talk to me anymore, except to issue formal reprimands, and if he did, he’d be the last person I’d give any sensitive information to. God, Butch, I can’t think of anyone around here who knew, and Lord knows Hank didn’t tell anyone on the committee. I stressed that to him very—”

Crane stopped, stricken. Karp said, “Yeah, I know. We’re in deep paranoia here. If we believe that the fact that two critical witnesses were killed before they could testify is not just a sad coincidence, then we have to believe in an active conspiracy that’s still intact and functioning.”

“And do you believe this?”

Karp nodded slowly. “I sort of have to now. Did V.T. tell you about the stuff that got stolen right out of this office? Yeah? It adds to the picture, doesn’t it? And I think I saw Caballo himself, in the flesh.”

“The Oswald look-alike? Where?”

“In Miami, right after Guel was killed. He was a block away and wearing dark glasses and a hat, but the more I think about it, the more I think that’s the guy. And why shouldn’t they use him? It’s completely safe. The guy doesn’t exist, except at the bottom of a pile of false identities. What’re we gonna do, put out an all points bulletin to pick up Lee Oswald? They’d lock us up.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Go through the motions with everything else, the medical stuff, the forensics, redo Warren. Like I’ve said before, necessary but hopeless. Nothing’s going to emerge from that but endlessly debatable minutiae. I think it’s still essential to get Paul David under oath.”

“Forget that,” Crane said. “Flores won’t have it.”

“Oh, great! How about Santos Trafficante?”

“We can try,” said Crane, “but if he declines to show, I doubt we’re going to get a contempt citation out of the chairman.”

“So we’re running a major investigation without any real judicial clout? Is that what I’m hearing?”

“For now,” said Crane

“Okay, in that case, for now, all we can do is pursue the new leads, this Turm character, and this PXK angle, in total secrecy. Clay’s still down in Miami, and I’m going to get him to New Orleans in a couple of days. Also, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to stress the ‘total’ part. Even regarding Hank.”

“Surely you don’t think …”

“I don’t know what I think, Bert. There’s … well, Marlene has been doing some research for the Dobbs family, about the father. There’s a link, or was at one time, between the family and the CIA. God knows how deep it goes.”

“That’s absurd, Butch! Without Hank Dobbs there’d be no investigation.”

Karp started to protest, but then sighed and was silent for a moment, collecting his thoughts. “Yeah, of course. I don’t know what’s happening to me. Maybe the paranoia is getting to the point where I’m not functioning anymore. And, of course, that’s the whole point of what’s happening. Whoever’s doing this, orchestrating this, knows how paranoia works. They want to keep that atmosphere going, so that reasonable people will embrace the Warren Report just to keep from going crazy. And it’s working. They know the whole pattern, so that as we expose piece after piece, they’re there before us, twisting the evidence, stealing stuff, killing witnesses.” He shook his head and rubbed his face. “So,” he asked, “how are things going here?”

Crane seemed glad to accept the change of subject. “Worse and worse. Flores has taken leave of his senses. He sent me a letter saying he doesn’t want us besmirching his name and asking for all his official stationery back.”

“His stationery? His stationery!” Karp started to laugh and it was a while before he could bring himself under control.

Crane laughed too, but then quickly sobered. “Actually, it’s not funny. He also revoked our franking privileges and told me not to make any more fiscal commitments under his name. Since legally everything we do is under his name, it means we’re essentially out of business until we can clear this up.”

“God! How’s the committee taking this?”

“Well, Hank’s gone to the leadership and is politicking like mad. It’ll come to a head over the weekend and we should have some resolution by Monday.” Crane reached over to his credenza and handed a newspaper clipping to Karp. “This was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

It was a front-page New York Times article about Crane. Karp scanned it in growing disbelief. “But this is nothing. It’s all the old crap recycled into a new piece, with some more innuendo tossed in.”

“Yeah, but it puts the seal on the tomb. For seventeen years, apparently, I’ve been causing nothing but controversy, and doing botched and questionable investigations.”

“So what’ll you do?”

“There’s nothing I can do, Butch. The press has spoken. You know very well that the last thing the Times and the Post want is for anyone to take a serious crack at Warren. They’d look like fools for endorsing it before the ink was dry if we came up with a credible alternative. My mistake was not realizing that. And … I guess I wasn’t the politician I thought I was. So …” He waved his hand weakly, taking in the office, and beyond it, the Kennedy investigation and the sticky webs of the national capital in which it now writhed.

“And there’s nothing we can do?” Karp asked inanely, knowing the answer.

“Yeah, there is,” said Crane. “Wait for Monday.”

“Nice tan,” said V.T. when Karp walked into his office.

“I don’t have a tan. I have shredded palms and a sore knee.” He displayed his hands.

“That’s too bad,” said V.T. “Perhaps next time you should choose another resort. What happened?”

Karp described briefly the events at Guel’s house, and deposited the package Fulton had found there on V.T.’s desk. He waited while V.T. perused the items in it.

“Creative bookkeeping,” said V.T., tapping the little ledger book. “Interesting. Do you recognize this character?”

V.T. was pointing to a foggy Xerox copy of what appeared to be a newspaper in Spanish, and the photograph of a man.

“No, what is it?”

“Well, from the style, I’d say it was cut from Granta, the Castro paper. It shows, and I quote, in rough translation, ‘the desperate imperialist saboteur, El Soplete, captured by the Revolutionary Militia in Cienfuegos.’ El soplete means the blowtorch. According to this, he got the handle back when he was with Batista’s secret police on account of the way he liked to extract information from prisoners. A real honeybunch. It looks like the commies shot him too. Hmm. Let me check, just to make sure.”

V.T. fingered through some files stacked on his desk, extracted one, and pulled out a couple of photographs, one a glossy, one a copy of a news photo.

“This glossy is a frame from the Depuy film. This one, one of our kids just dug it up from an old émigré newspaper. Same guy in all three, right? Allowing for age, that is. The scar on the cheek shows in each one, that and that nose.”

“Who is it?”

“Leopoldo Carrera. The guy we like for the third of the trio that visited Sylvia Odio in Dallas. Oswald, Guel, Carrera. All dead. As is the one guy we had who could confirm it, Guido Mosca.”

“Shit! But there’s still Odio herself.”

“Yeah,” said V.T. “There is, and a big priority right now is to get her to look at pictures.”

“Okay, I’ll take care of it. Meanwhile, what’s happening with this PXK thing?”

“Looking better. Mr. Kelly is well known in both Baton Rouge and New Orleans. A political contributor, conservative, maybe a Bircher. He knew Clay Shaw and he knew Depuy. He’s a trucker, and thus not unfamiliar with the Teamsters and hence with Carlos Marcello. And … are you ready for this? He ran an airfreight service back in the late fifties and early sixties, and briefly employed David Ferrie as a pilot.”

“So he could be the guy.”

“He’s certainly worth looking at in more detail,” agreed V.T.

“I should go to New Orleans.”

“Yes, if you want to pay for it yourself.”

“Oh, crap! I forgot.” Karp clenched his fists and snarled in frustration.

“Hey, lighten up,” said V.T. “We’ll know Monday if we’re all fired or if we can run a serious investigation, either of which would be a plus.”

Karp did not lighten up, either during the remainder of the day at the office, nor upon coming home. He snapped at his wife, and his child, and the dog, who did not snap in return, but whined and cringed. It was Marlene who snapped back; dinner was unpleasant.

Karp took a walk in the chill darkness after dinner and his eye fell on the yellow VW, gleaming under a streetlamp. He returned to the apartment and made some calls.

Two hours later, Lucy Karp was in the care of Harry the godfather, and Karp and Marlene were in the car headed west on U.S. 50.

“Well,” said Marlene as they cleared the outer suburbs of the capital and the land grew dark and rural, “this is quite the most romantic thing you’ve ever done.

I’m wriggling in my seat. You won’t tell me where we’re going?”

“No. Nobody knows where we’re going except me.”

She looked at his face, dimly lit by the lights of the dash: jaw tight, the muscles bunched, mouth a straight dark shadow, and there were those hard little lines he got around the eyes when he was under pressure. His hands gripped the wheel like a rally driver’s.

“You’re driving very well,” she observed. Karp was a terrible driver, but he had only stalled once in getting under way, and although he was creeping along at fifty-five on the extreme right edge of the highway, behind a big truck, Marlene was feeling more than charitable.

“Thank you,” said Karp tightly.

“You’re in hell, aren’t you?” she asked after a long pause.

“Yes. Yes, I am,” said Karp. “And it’s like it was custom designed for me, for the kind of person I am. I still can’t believe I actually volunteered for it.”

“It’s in the nature of hell to be customized. See Dante.”

“See … ?”

“Dante’s Inferno. The damned are given punishments suitable to their sins. The fornicators are locked together with their beloveds for all eternity, the gluttons are stuffed with food, and so on. Poetic justice. Gilbert and Sullivan parodied it in The Mikado.”

She sang, in a plummy alto: “‘My object all sublime, I shall achieve in time, to let the punishment fit the crime, the punishment fit the crime. And make each prisoner pent, unwillingly represent, a source of innocent merriment, of innocent merriment.’” Karp laughed, and she sang the rest of the song.

“Yeah,” said Karp, “and the homicide prosecutor is forced to work on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Nobody really wants to know who did it. He has no resources, the bad guys know what he’s doing before he does. I wonder who’s laughing.” Then he began to tell her about the case, in more detail than he had exposed it to her before, pouring out his anger and frustration. Karp was an adherent of the belief that real men handle their own problems, and turn toward their families a face of genial competence, interspersed from time to time with fits of insensate rage or, which was more common with Karp, periods of irritable sulking. This he had learned at his daddy’s knee.

Marlene, who understood this very well, received the gush of confession in near silence, only asking clarifying questions from time to time. It was curiously like interviewing a rape victim.

When he was talked out, she laid her head against his shoulder and squeezed his arm. “I’m glad you told me all that,” she said.

“You don’t mind?”

“I mind when you don’t tell me, dummy!” Marlene replied cheerfully. “Who do you think gets to carry your bile when you’re bravely suffering in silence?”

“Oh,” said Karp.

Marlene briefly considered unloading her own discomfort with the Dobbs case, but decided that the moment was inopportune. What was sauce for the gander was not necessarily sauce for the goose, and besides, she was aware of the vast gulf between the national historical importance of what Karp was doing and the relative triviality of her own recent pursuits. She was embarrassed by it, in fact. So she said instead, “So you think it was the CIA after all.”

“No, not really, not the organization. I mean what is the CIA after all? Ninety percent of it is a bunch of GS-thirteens carpooling to Rockville, and the leaders tend to be pompous assholes like Dulles. If they actually sat down and planned this thing it’d have been the fuckup of the century, especially since they would’ve had to bring the Latin American boys into it.”

“What do you mean?”

“V.T. explained it to me once. The CIA has, like … leagues, like in baseball, where they distribute their talent. The majors are in Europe, Berlin, Vienna, head-to-head with the Russkies, and maybe also Japan. Those are the key countries. Triple A is the Mideast, because of Israel and the oil. Class A is the rest of Asia. Latin America and Africa is where they put the no-hopes. I mean, if you had anything on the ball, would you really want to spend your career infiltrating the Socialist party in Bolivia or Uganda and fucking with some pathetic union movement in those places? Bugging the North Korean embassy in Quito? No, but along comes Castro. All of a sudden these no-hopes are playing in Yankee Stadium on national TV. The result—the Bay of Pigs. Back to the minors, boys. Okay, two things: One, if the top guys in the Agency wanted to whack the president the absolutely last people they would’ve picked are the guys who did that abortion, plus their track record for hitting Castro wouldn’t fill anyone with confidence. In fact, from what I’ve been able to gather, these guys, Bishop and company, were protecting Fidel like a brother. I mean, once Fidel goes, there goes their budget. Two, this is hard to explain, but it’s not a government operation, the Kennedy thing. I’ve been in government my whole life, and I’ve seen a lot of slimy deals go down, and the one characteristic they all have is stupidity and simplicity; once you pick at them, they start to unravel. People rat each other out. They leave evidence lying around. They buy yachts they can’t afford. And let’s face it, you want to start a conspiracy in the government, who’ve you got to do the job? Guys who signed up to work at a desk eight hours a day for thirty years, with no chance of layoffs and a nice pension at the end. Not your top recruits for skullduggery, right? Prime example: Watergate. Now that’s a government conspiracy.”

“So it wasn’t the CIA? But you said before …”

“No, look—I think there might’ve been, after the Bay of Pigs, something like … um, what’s that play where the knights kill that guy in the cathedral?”

“Becket. You mean like they said, ‘who will rid me of this turbulent priest’?”

“Right!” Karp exclaimed, “who will rid me of this turbulent priest. Or president, in our case. They were angry and scared, they were talking tough-guy talk. Somebody oughta shoot the bastard and save us from the commies. And the word filtered out that maybe there’d be cover available if maybe somebody did do Kennedy. And now, an idea pops up in somebody’s mind. I can see this guy, like you can see a picture in a patch of sky through a tree, by the leaves around it, a kind of negative shape. This guy is not a CIA guy but he understands how it works. He has connections to the kind of people who can do something like this. And he’s an artist. This whole thing was designed, constructed, and constructed in such a way that it would keep running, keep getting more complex and harder to figure out the more time went by. Everybody who looks at it brings something to it, because of all the pieces he put into it. You want to believe it’s a lone nut, there’s your certified loser. You want to believe it’s a CIA conspiracy, there’s the CIA assets. You want to believe it’s a Mob hit, there’s the Mob. You want to believe it’s the commies, there’s Castro and the KGB. It’s brilliant! It’s like being guarded by Bill Russell or batting against Nolan Ryan. Even though the guy’s whipping my ass, I got to give him credit.”

“So who is it? This Bishop character? Paul David.”

“Nah! David’s a bureaucrat. He can follow orders and not fuck up too much, but he didn’t have the sense not to send a picture of a guy who looked very little like Oswald from Mexico City and he messed up with the tapes. Definitely bush-league; he didn’t plan this. No way.”

“But then nobody’s left except this Irish guy, PXK.”

“Yeah, and I hope for his sake that he’s either running the show or has nothing to do with it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t want to be carrying his life insurance. Uh-oh, I think we have to turn off here.”

For the remainder of the trip, their attention was taken up with navigation on the dark roads, looking for landmarks, stopping to read Karp’s inadequate scrawled directions. Marlene felt something tugging at her mind, something buried in what Karp had told her, but for the moment she was unable to dredge up what it was.

They arrived finally in the courtyard of a stone-built, slate-roofed eighteenth-century structure. A carriage lamp threw soft yellow light on the graveled yard.

“This is it, huh?” said Marlene. “The Old Ragg Inn? Old Ragg? How romantic, how evocative of sexual denial!”

“It’s a mountain, Marlene,” said Karp.

It was a mountain, indeed, and they saw it the next morning from the windows of their room, a dun hump looming through gray mists. The valley between the inn and the mountain was lost in an earthbound cloud.

“God! It’s like fairyland,” cried Marlene sitting up in bed. “It’s like Brigadoon. Maybe when we go downstairs we’ll find a hundred years have passed and they finally found out who killed JFK.”

“Who was it?” asked Karp sleepily from beneath the thick quilt.

Marlene leaned over and whispered in his ear. “It was Jackie. She had a gun concealed in that hat. Oswald was actually her son by a concealed teenage marriage.”

He made a clumsy grab for her, but she fended him off. “You maniac! Don’t you ever get enough?”

“Me? Me?” protested Karp. “It wasn’t me who was hooting all night long.”

“Hooting? I don’t recall ever having had my ladylike intimate murmurs described as ‘hooting.’ ”

“Squealing, then,” said Karp. “Explicit language at top volume. It’s a good thing it’s the off-season and there aren’t any other guests on this hall. I was afraid they’d ask us to leave.”

“In your dreams,” sniffed Marlene and rose from the bed. “In any case, as a result of your insensate lusts, I’m covered in your effluvia, which I now intend to wash off. In the Jacuzzi.”

“This is very nice,” sighed Marlene some minutes later, when the two of them were entwined in the warm, churning waters. “It’s so colonial.”

Karp, soaping the inside of his wife’s thigh with a perfumed bath bar, agreed: “Yes, our colonial forefathers …”

“And foremothers.”

“… and foremothers of old Virginia set up their Jacuzzis first thing, right after the slave-whipping post. The Jacuzzi was actually invented by Thomas Jefferson or Patrick Henry or one of those guys.”

“Mmm, Patrick Henry. Give me lavatory or give me bath. Oh, God, don’t get me started again, I’m starving; I need food, not more of that.”

Karp obligingly shifted his ablutions to a less critical area. “Breakfast is included,” he said. “I doubt there’ll be bagels, but it’s included.”

“Good. Which reminds me: how are we affording all this luxury? Did you take a bribe?”

“No, I put it on the card.”

Marlene stared at him. “The card? Would that be the MasterCard I fought with you for a month to take out and you agreed only if we both swore that it would only be used for the most extreme emergencies, like, I believe you said, a bone-marrow transplant for Lucy. That card?”

Karp shrugged, only slightly embarrassed. “I thought it was a medical emergency. Emotional deprivation can lead to serious physical problems, you know.”

“You just wanted to get laid.”

“No, I wanted to provide you with a more suitable venue for hooting than our shitty thin-walled apartment. A little more polish on that knee?”

The phone rang. They both froze, as if about to be discovered in an illicit act.

“Who the hell is that?” asked Marlene. “Did you tell the office where you were?”

“Are you nuts? Nobody knows we’re here. I didn’t know myself until I called this joint about an hour before we left. It’s probably the desk, they want to know if we want one egg or two. Or else our car’s in the wrong place.”

Karp got out of the bath, put on one of the thick white terry cloth robes supplied by the inn, and went to answer the phone.

It was not the desk calling, but Blake Harrison, the columnist. Karp felt a pang in his vitals. He had to clear his throat heavily before responding to Harrison’s greeting, after which Harrison wasted no time on small talk.

“Butch, you’ll recall our conversation at Dobbs’s house? Well, now’s the time. Crane will be fired on Monday.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Karp replied. “The word is the committee is fairly pissed at the way Flores has been behaving. They might not let him.”

“What happens to Flores doesn’t signify, for God’s sake,” snapped Harrison impatiently. “Flores may be finished too, but that doesn’t mean Crane can stay. Trust me on this. So, what’s your answer? Are you going to take the job?”

“I’ll make that decision when it’s presented to me,” said Karp.

“Oh, stop being a prig!” Harrison shouted. “You think they’re going to put an equal-opportunity ad in the Post? You’ll be offered the job; my advice to you is to take it. You handle it properly, it can definitely lead to big things.” There was a pause. “Karp? Are you there?”

“Yes, I’m here. I was just thinking about whether I’m ready for big things. Good-bye, Mr. Harrison.” Karp put down the receiver. He could hear Harrison sputtering until the moment the connection was cut.

“Not the desk, huh?” said Marlene when Karp came back to the bathroom.

“No, it was Blake Harrison.”

“The newspaper guy? How did he find out you were here?”

Karp sat down on the rim of the tub. “Well, either somebody followed us here or somebody heard me making these reservations. Since I doubt whether anyone could’ve followed us over those mountain roads last night without us noticing, they probably either have a tap on our phone or a bug in the apartment.”

“I don’t want this to be happening,” Marlene said, and then put her hands over her ears and sank backward until the surface of the foamy water closed over her head.

Still, they managed to have a nice weekend, in the fashion of people for whom things cannot get much worse. They drove to the national park and Marlene walked out on a rock in the South Fork of the Shenandoah and sang all six verses of “Oh, Shenandoah,” with feeling. Karp walked out to join her and fell in, immersing himself to the waist. They had a couple of good meals at the inn and spent a lot of time in bed. At intervals, Marlene told Karp about the Dobbs affair, and what she had learned in the attic.

“You don’t think I’m a rat for reading that stuff, do you?” she asked after she’d finished her tale.

“Semi-ratty,” answered Karp. “I think it’s why you’re a great investigator and not that great of a prosecutor.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” she snapped, bridling.

“Just that if somebody lets you loose on a case, they better be sure they want everything to come out, and forget the niceties. What you want is truth and justice, no holds barred, and you forget the rules of evidence. You even forget the law. It’s going to get you in a shit-load of trouble some day.”

“Yeah, yeah, so you’re always telling me.” Marlene propped herself up on one elbow so she could look at him as he lay next to her. “I happen to be the best rape prosecutor they ever had up there.”

“It’s a weak league, Marlene.”

She socked him a couple of times with her pillow and then asked, “So, Mr. Lawyer, Mr. Smarty-Pants, if you’re not interested in truth and justice, why are you still on this bullshit Kennedy thing? You still think you’re going to make a case?”

“Oh, no,” said Karp blandly. “Now I’m in it for truth and justice. I’m just like you now.”

Marlene laughed and snuggled closer to him. “Oh, goody. At last, something to bring us closer together, even if it’s chicanery.” He was silent for a while and she caught a familiar, distant expression on his face. “What’re you thinking?” she asked.

“Hmm? Oh, nothing, just one of the names you mentioned—this Gaiilov. It rang some kind of bell. I’m trying to think from where.”

“From me, probably. I must’ve mentioned the great Gaiilov hunt. Or maybe Harry did. Or I murmured it in my fevered dreams.”

“Um, I don’t think so. For some strange reason, I think I heard it at the office. It’ll come to me later.” He ran his arm under her body and pulled her close. “Speaking of which … ,” he said.

Back at Federal Gardens on Sunday night, Karp made a quick search for bugs, and found one almost immediately, a small transmitter screwed into the mouthpiece of the telephone. He left it in place.

“Why did you leave it there?” asked Marlene when Karp had ushered her outside to the parking lot.

“Because if I take it out they’ll just put in another one that’s harder to find. Anyway, I think the main thing they wanted was telephone calls, and a bug like that is a lot simpler than a tap.”

Marlene shuddered and moved closer to him “Yecch! It makes me feel slimy. Do you think they bugged our bedroom too?”

“I hope so,” said Karp with a quick grin. “Let them know what they’re missing.” He hugged her and she looked up at his face and said, “This is going to be over soon, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Karp. “Real soon.”

A little past nine-thirty on Monday, a hand-delivered letter arrived at Bert Crane’s office. It was from Flores and it said that Crane was fired and had to be out of his office by 5:00 p.m. that afternoon.

“What’s the plan?” asked Karp when Crane told him.

“Committee meeting today. Hank thinks they can get this reversed. I’d like you to attend it.”

Karp did so, and in the late afternoon reported back to his boss.

“I think Flores has become unhinged,” Karp concluded. “He was behaving like a kid in a sandbox when some other kid grabs his toy truck, like this committee was his personal property. He bluntly accused Morgan of trying to steal the committee from him and become chairman. He was flinging insults at Hank too. The upshot was they reversed the firing letter. After they finally adjourned, Flores talked to a bunch of press people. He called you a rattlesnake.”

Crane chuckled. “That’s what they call ‘colorful’ on the Hill. It’s a synonym for deranged.”

“Bert, why is he doing this? I don’t get it.”

Crane made a helpless gesture with his hands. “He wanted a puppy dog. They all did, except maybe Hank and some of the King assassination people. Somebody who’d go through the motions and essentially reproduce the Warren Report, or even better, say that Oswald did it, and ‘probably’ there were some others but we didn’t know who they were. Something vague like that, enough to take off some of the heat from the critics. What they definitely did not want was a big, expensive, freewheeling investigation involving the CIA, the FBI, and the Dallas Police Force. That was my big mistake; I thought that they definitely did. That’s why I got involved and why I got you involved.” He looked sadly into Karp’s eyes. “For which I apologize.”

At four-thirty, Bea Sondergard burst into Karp’s office without knocking. She was pale and wide-eyed. “Flores sent the cops. They want Bert out by close of business. They say they have orders to seal his files.”

Karp leaped to his feet and dashed out into the corridor, heading to the door of Crane’s office. He stood in front of the door, feeling vaguely foolish, but unable to think of anything else to do. Two men in the uniform of the Capital Police, the security forces that answer to Congress, came striding purposefully down the hall.

They stopped in front of him, and one of them, a large moon-faced man of about fifty, said, “Is Mr. Crane in there?”

“Yes,” said Karp.

“Well, we got orders to remove him and take charge of all government material in his possession.”

“No,” said Karp.

“What?”

“You can’t.”

“Why not?” said the cop.

“Because I won’t let you. That’s an illegal order anyway. The full committee rescinded Mr. Flores’s order a few hours ago.”

“I didn’t hear nothing about that,” said the guard. “The shift captain told me to come down here and remove Mr. Crane, and escort him off the premises, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

As this took place, Bea Sondergard had been playing Paul Revere. The staff had gathered in murmuring clumps at both ends of the corridor, and several of the male members of the staff, and Bea herself, now moved to stand in the doorway with Karp.

The cop tried out a false smile and a pleading tone. “C’mon, mister, we’re only trying to do our job.”

“I know,” said Karp. “Nothing personal, but we’re not going to let you past. You can try to remove us by force, but in that case, if the order you’re carrying out is in fact illegal, I will press charges of assault against you, and sue both you personally and the Capital Police for damages. And if you choose to get physical there will certainly be damages.”

Karp hunched his broad shoulders and widened his legs to a fighting stance, demonstrating how the potential damages were likely to occur. There was some eyeball work between him and the cop, who was suddenly conscious that the eyes he was staring into were seven inches higher than his own. After a tense half minute, the cop said, “I’ll have to check with headquarters.”

He backed off a few yards and consulted his portable radio in low tones. Then the two cops left without a backward glance. A burst of applause from the staff. Karp was clapped on the back as he walked back to his office. Bea Sondergard, grinning, said, “A famous victory!”

“Yeah,” replied Karp sourly. “Like the Alamo.”

The next morning, early, Karp was called into Crane’s office.

“Well, I’m gone,” Crane said without preamble as Karp took a seat.

“What?”

“Yeah, I just came from Morgan’s office. Hank was there and a few others. The deal is, Flores will be replaced as chairman by Louis Watson, who’s been chairing the King operation. It’s something of a coup for the black caucus, which is how they got the leadership to go along with it. But they want a new face in my slot. They didn’t actually fire me, but it was real clear that that’s what they wanted. For whatever reason, they think I’ve shot my bolt here. And if I were to stay, the press would keep pecking at me, Flores’s friends would keep doing it too, and I’d be spending all my time answering these ridiculous charges. What do you think?”

“Yeah. I think resignation is your only option at this point.”

“I agree. The question is who replaces me.” He looked straight at Karp, who had some difficulty in meeting the other man’s gaze.

“Well,” Crane resumed, “do you want it?”

“No,” said Karp without an instant’s thought. “I don’t. If I took the job, it would be almost an endorsement of the way you’ve been treated. And I agree with you. Even with Flores gone, there’s no real political will to run a serious investigation.”

Crane nodded several times and then swiveled to look out across the railroad tracks. When he turned back to Karp he said, “Yeah, I kind of thought that’s what you’d say. But, I’ll tell you, Hank Dobbs, for one, is going to be real disappointed. He had his little heart set on you.”

That evening Karp brought home a small film-editing machine and a large red manila folder. In the folder was a copy of all the material that had been stolen plus the Depuy film and the Guel envelope and ledger. He had decided to remove it from the office entirely and carry it with him. He knew this was dumb, but he couldn’t think of anything else to do with it. It gave him something to hold on to, like a talisman. And if they tried to take it away from him, at least he’d get a look at one of the shadowy creatures who had dogged his steps for the last six months.

“I’m at National,” said Caballo.

“Good,” said Bishop. “Read the papers?”

“No, what happened?”

“The investigation just collapsed as planned,” said Bishop. He sounded pleased.

The thin man hoped that this would mean he could go back to Guatemala, where it was warm. “So that’s it?” he ventured.

“Not quite. I think we can get a tame dog in there, and then it’ll just peter out, but there’s still some sensitive material lying around. It’s basically a broom job. Take a cab to this address and stay there.” He read off an address in Alexandria. “I’ll be in touch.”

Caballo copied it down on a page ripped out of the phone book.

“Uh, Bishop. In Miami, I think that big guy, Karp? I think he might’ve seen me. Do you think we should …”

“No, no,” said Bishop, chuckling. “He’s going to be the tame dog.”