In the morning Karp found a message waiting for him at the office telling him that Hank Dobbs wanted to see him. Karp dutifully trudged up the Hill, the red folder enclosed in a cheap government briefcase.
Dobbs greeted him warmly and led him into his private office. Dobbs seemed to have expanded since Karp had last seen him; he filled more space, his motions were more abrupt, more decisive, his eye harder. The various manipulations that had led to the downfall of Flores had added to his stature as a man to be counted in the inner workings of Congress. He had saved the leadership from embarrassment, and that was always a consideration when the plum assignments were handed out. This new status showed in his mien, more subtle than the fruit-salad ribbons oh the chest of a soldier, but as readable to those in the know.
After giving Karp a brief appreciation of the politics of the committee, Dobbs began speaking of “your” staff, and “your” plans, as if offering the job of chief counsel to Karp obliquely, as if they had already agreed that Karp was already installed.
Karp interrupted. “Hank, I don’t know if you’re planning to formally offer me Bert’s job, but just to clear the air, I want you to know that I’ve decided not to take it.”
Dobbs stopped with his mouth open, and the color drained from his face. “What! Why not?”
Startled by the force of this reaction, Karp stumbled through a version of the explanation he had given Crane the day before.
“But that’s crazy!” said Dobbs, and now color flooded into his face, making the freckles stand out like nail-heads. “You have to take it! What do you think all this has been about?”
“I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about,” said Karp.
“Oh, don’t play innocent, for God’s sake, Butch! Crane has been doomed for months, ever since those stories broke and he put in that crazy budget, and I’ve been busting my hump trying to make sure that when the crash came, you’d be wired for the job.” He got up from behind his desk and paced in agitation. “Jesus! I’ve been goddamned horse-trading with half the committee to get you positioned, and now you have the gall to tell me you won’t take it?”
He stared at Karp, his blue eyes like gas flames. “What else’re you going to do, huh? You have a wife and a child. Hell, I even arranged for free day care for your kid and gave your wife something to keep her busy. God, man, think! You haven’t got a dime. What do you think’s available to you in this town? A GS-thirteen U.S. attorney job? You know how many of those guys would commit murder for this kind of chance? Running a big investigation—it’s a launching platform, it’s national recognition: the sky’s the limit here, Butch.”
Dobbs began to expatiate about how high the sky was, and as he spoke, illumination struck Karp like a slow, painful dawn after a night of bad dreams. He knew this was an important moment in his life, a place of many branchings. Part of him wanted badly to take this job, to be friends with people like Hank Dobbs, and Hank Dobbs’s friends, to have a nice house in McLean, or Kalorama, or Cleveland Park, to do this little job they wanted him to do and then wait around for an assistant AG slot when the administration was right, or when it wasn’t, a high-visibility job on a congressional staff. He could write legislation; he could go after big-time criminals; the FBI would jump when he cracked the whip; he could even have the FBI some day.
The only hitch was that the part of him that wanted the job would become, should he take it, the whole of him. His father would like that. Karp would know senators. He might even know the president. He would be on television behind the podium with a cabinet agency seal on it, pointing at charts, and he would be driven around in large cars, the kind with the little reading lamp behind the rear seat, provided so that important people might not lose even a few minutes of precious study time as they were driven to and from home during the hours of darkness.
And Marlene, what would she make of the new Karp, the wholly owned subsidiary Karp, the great success? Well, she would get used to it. There would be advantages for her too, she’d already received some and would get more, if she’d only learn how to behave… .
Suddenly, almost without consciously willing it, Karp found himself on his feet.
Dobbs stopped talking and looked up at him in surprise.
“No,” Karp said, and again, “No. Sorry, but I can’t do it.” He really was sorry and he really couldn’t do it.
Dobbs struggled to control himself, being enough of a politician and student of human nature to realize that shouting and bluster would not work with this one. In a meliorative tone he said, “Butch, come on—sit down, we’ll talk it through. If you have problems, or questions, or concerns, I’m sure we can work them out.”
Karp remained standing. He said, “Actually, Hank, I do have some questions. I’d like to know who you told that I was going to Miami and who I was going to see there.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
Karp ignored this protest. “Whoever you told, he told somebody else, and two critical witnesses were killed right in front of our noses. I know the leak had to come from you because you’re the only one besides Bert and my immediate staff who knew why we were going to Miami. I told you myself, dummy that I am, remember? Another question: did you know my apartment was bugged? Your buddy Blake Harrison sure did; he located me over the weekend with information he got from that bug. So he’s connected to the people who want this all derailed. What is he, CIA? He was nearly as forceful as you in urging me to take this job. So I’ve been asking myself why two such well-established and powerful people want me to be chief counsel.”
“Butch, sit down… .”
“I mean, it’s not like I’m going to be allowed to do any real investigation—I don’t think that’s on anyone’s agenda right now. So it can’t be my legal brilliance; Bert is brilliant too, and you didn’t like him too much.”
“Butch, will you just sit down and listen?”
“So it must be you think I’m hungrier than Bert, hungrier and more desperate. The trouble with Bert is that he’s from a Main Line family and he’s got an independent income and a big law practice. Karp, on the other hand, as you just put it so well, doesn’t have a dime—no, wait, I’m almost finished. So you think when you get me in there, with the salary and all the perks, and all the promises, like you just explained it to me, you figure I’ll just kind of roll over and let you have the kind of whitewash you want.”
Dobbs sprang to his feet as well and slammed his fist down on his desk. “God damn it,” he shouted, “that’s horseshit and you know it! If it wasn’t for me, there wouldn’t be a serious investigation at all.”
Karp leaned across the desk and placed his face within a foot of Dobbs’s. Quietly, speaking quickly in the frozen moment, he said, “Yeah, I know. That’s what Bert said too. And I can’t figure it out. You want a real investigation; I know you don’t believe in Warren; but you’re also working a game, Hank. For whatever reason, you’re trying to steer the investigation in a certain direction—toward something or away from something, I don’t know which. I tell you what, Hank: I’ll make a deal with you. You tell me the full story, who you told and who he’s really working for, and why you’re doing what you’re doing, and I’ll take the job.”
Karp had been staring into Dobbs’s eyes as he said this, so he could see the fear come into them.
“My God!” said Dobbs. “You’ve turned into some kind of paranoid maniac.”
Karp stood up and turned to go. Almost as an aside, he said, “By the way, Hank, one of my people saw your boy Charlie Ziller swipe a bunch of evidence from the office a couple of weeks ago. Who did he give it to?”
“They couldn’t have—,” Dobbs blurted, and then stopped short, his face blanching.
“No? Why couldn’t they have? Because he did it late at night? Because he swore that no one was watching? I don’t think you ever actually practiced any criminal law, did you, Hank? And for sure you were never a prosecutor. Otherwise, you would’ve learned that trick the first week. So, who got the package? Harrison? The CIA? It doesn’t really matter because I have copies of everything.”
In a strangled voice he said, “Get out!”
“Okay, but one thing, Representative Dobbs, some advice. You ought to make sure that whoever you hire to replace Bert is someone who never saw the inside of a courtroom. It’ll make things a lot easier on you.”
Karp walked back down the Hill through a cold, light drizzle, feeling on the one hand pretty good and on the other like a prize schmuck, not an unfamiliar combo to him.
In the office, he told Crane he’d turned down the job, leaving the other conversation out of it. Then he went to see V.T.
V.T. was on the phone. When Karp walked in he said into the receiver, “Oh, wait a sec, he just walked in.” He held the receiver out to Karp. “It’s Fulton in Louisiana. He wants to talk to you.”
“Clay. You find out anything?”
“Yeah,” said Fulton, “I found out folks in Baton Rouge don’t like smart nigger cops from New York.”
“Ah, shit, Clay, I’m sorry. You got into trouble, right?”
“A couple of the local redneck cops rousted me. I flashed my buzzer, but they thought I stole it. I had to do my Sidney Poitier impression.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Hey, it was interesting, what can I say? Pete Melchior saved my ass. Anyway, we’re still looking into this P. X. Kelly guy. So far, no connections with any Cubans. We’re trying to get hold of his bank records—that’s what I was talking to V.T. about—to see if we can match those transfers to Guel. What’s going on up there? I heard about Crane.”
“Well, we’re sort of on hold here, Clay. Dobbs just offered me Crane’s job, and I turned it down.”
“You what?”
“I turned it down. Dobbs is our leak. No, I can’t get into it now, it’s a long story, and besides, I’m not sure that this line isn’t bugged too.”
“As bad as that, huh?”
“Maybe worse. Look, meanwhile, keep working the PXK angle. There’s got to be something; I can feel it. Oh, see if you can find any connection between Kelly and Henry Dobbs, or his family.”
“Yeah, right. We’re gonna get yanked, aren’t we?”
“Probably, but let’s get as much done as we can until the ax falls.”
Hanging up, Karp turned to V.T. and told him what had happened at Dobbs’s office. V.T. took it with his typical aplomb. “Well, well, Hank has a taste for conspiracy, just like dear old dad.”
“I thought he didn’t do it. That’s what Marlene’s been trying to prove—oh, that reminds me. Marlene mentioned a name that rang a bell and I said I’d try to track it down. Gaiilov? Did you mention it?”
“Maybe, in passing. Armand Gaiilov, he calls himself Arnie Galinski nowadays, is one of the Dallas Russians who were friendly with Lee and Marina when they came back to Texas after their Russian stay. De Morenschildt’s another.”
“Gaiilov knew Oswald?” said Karp, amazed.
“Yeah, sure. Half the people in Texas knew Oswald, to hear them tell it, almost as many as people who were involved in the conspiracy. What about it? What’s Marlene’s angle here?”
“Nothing. Just that, well, this Gaiilov was apparently the Soviet agent who saved Richard Dobbs’s ass when he was accused of spying. Dobbs’s lawyer, Harley Blaine, waved Gaiilov in the government’s face and they dropped the charges. And you say he knew Oswald.” Karp stood with his hands in his pockets staring up at the stained ceiling.
“You’re seeing a connection,” said V.T.
Karp looked at him. “Shit, V.T, how do I know? Everybody knows everybody else. Dobbs knows Blaine, and he’s leaking stuff to somebody. Blaine was CIA, and we know that the CIA is stonewalling. Blaine knows Gaiilov and Gaiilov knew Oswald. Now, if P. X. Kelly knows Oswald, Blaine, or Gaiilov …”
“We’d all put on grins and say ‘small world’ in chorus.”
Karp, deep in thought, strolled around the cluttered office. V.T. had brought a rickety conference table in and covered it with labeled folders. Karp asked, “What’s all this stuff?”
“Oh, just an idea, speaking of small world. I’m making a central file of every name that’s come up in the investigation with all the information we have on each person and cross-references to all the other files. Maybe it’ll turn something up.”
“Yeah, well make one for Representative Henry Dobbs too.”
“I’ll do that,” said V.T., laughing. “Oh, as to accomplishments, look at this.” He tossed Karp a black loose-leaf notebook.
Karp riffled it. “What is it?”
“It’s a sort of concordance for the Depuy film. It describes each shot, giving frame numbers and naming the people in each one, those we’ve identified. Where we haven’t ID’d them, we give them numbers. And it includes whatever info we have on them, all in one place. You might want to check it out against the film. I’ve seen it so many times, I’ve probably made some mistakes.”
“Okay,” said Karp, “I might do that. Maybe I’ll spot P. X. Kelly behind a bush waving a handful of cash.”
A week passed, and then another. Crane’s resignation was on the front page for a day, and then the assassination committee seemed to drop from the national view, like a doomed DC-10 vanishing from a radar scope. Crane slipped away back to Philadelphia after a small cheerless staff dinner. Karp had one brief meeting with Louis Watson, the new chairman. Watson said he was counting on Karp to hold the staff together until a new director could be found, and Karp said that he would try to do so. They did not discuss the work of the staff or assassination theories.
It snowed six and a half inches one Thursday, which meant that the entire federal government ground to a halt, it being a well-known condition of employment in the federal bureaucracy that you never have to drive in snow. The snowfall and its attendant disasters occupied a good chunk of the Post’s front page, but that newspaper did reserve five or six inches on page eleven for an announcement that a man named Claude Wilkey had been selected to replace Bert Crane. Karp noted with ironic amusement that Dobbs had indeed taken his advice: Wilkey was a professor at an Ivy League law school, and as far as Karp could determine from the brief vita in the Post, he had never tried a case in his life.
Karp decided to use his unexpected snow holiday to review the concordance that V.T. had made of the Depuy film. He did not imagine that this evidence would ever appear in a court of law, not the way things appeared to be going, but he was a pro, and he thought that there might be a faint chance of catching something that others had missed.
He had set up the little editor on the kitchen table and was anticipating a boring but restful winter’s afternoon of running through the Depuy film frame by frame and editing the concordance. This proved more difficult than he had expected. Like many (perhaps all) men whose profession requires the exercise of abstract thought, he had little attention to spare for the concrete realities of domestic life. If he had, he would never have embarked on a project requiring concentration and careful manipulation of a notoriously cranky device in the kitchen of a tiny apartment containing an active and curious three-year-old, an extremely large dog, an intelligent woman in the final stages of a large project that also required the use of that very same machine, in the aftermath of a blizzard that confined them all to close quarters. A more sensitive man would never have started such a project under these circumstances; a more sensitive man would therefore probably not have discovered how and why John F. Kennedy was slain, a discovery that Karp ever afterward would associate with the smell of cocoa boiling over, with gray light and swirling snow.
Karp’s first mistake was being charmed by his daughter’s identification of the film editor as a “dolly television.” He agreed that it was indeed a dolly TV (ho ho!) but that Daddy had to play with it for now. This offended Lucy’s well-developed sense of justice and entitlement; the dolly TV should be in her room so her dollies could watch it. Explanations. Whining. Tantrum.
“Can’t you … um … go someplace?” Karp pleaded to his wife, amid the wails.
“Go where?” replied Marlene. “It’s the Antarctic out there. Also, I was planning to use the machine today. I didn’t expect to have you stumbling around the house.”
Karp threw up his hands and choked off a nasty response. “Okay, I’ll go out with her, and you can use the machine, and then you can watch her and I’ll work.” He turned to the child. “How about that, Lucy?” he asked, summoning his final reserves of good nature. “You want to go play in the snow?”
Lucy sniffled back tears and nodded solemnly.
“Take the dog,” said Marlene.
When she was alone in the house, Marlene made herself a pot of coffee, drank some, lit a cigarette, and spent ten minutes just listening to the quiet. Then she rewound the film Karp had been looking at and spooled in the film she had taken from the Dobbs attic.
The first few seconds were an establishing shot of a locale: a stretch of wide, calm water, a bay of some sort, a deserted beach, and a large white beach cottage. It was very early in the morning. Marlene stopped the film and studied the building curiously. Then she stripped the film out of the camera and went to get a box containing several of the Dobbs films she wanted to look at again, found one, mounted it, and rolled it for a minute or so until she found a film of a family party in the summer of fifty-five and the Dobbs and Hewlett cousins playing on the beach in front of a beach cottage. She had been right; the place in the attic film was the isolated cottage belonging to Selma Dobbs’s family, at Niantic on the Sound.
Replacing the attic film, Marlene rolled on. A couple emerged from the house. The woman, a trim, pretty blond in her late thirties, was wearing a two-piece suit from the postwar era, and carrying a beach blanket. The man wore trunks and carried a bottle of champagne and two stemmed glasses. They were laughing. The woman spread the blanket and they sat on it and drank champagne and kissed and laughed and watched the sun climb higher over the Sound.
There was a cut and suddenly the man and the woman were much closer. The cameraman had changed lenses and was now shooting through a big telephoto. The image was grainier, but not grainy enough to prevent Marlene from seeing that the woman was Selma Dobbs and the man was Harley Blaine.
Marlene watched, fascinated, as the wine was finished and the kissing became more passionate. They wrapped themselves in the beach blanket; bathing suits were tossed out on the beach. The blanket became a wriggling, heaving tube. The blanket fell away; they didn’t miss a stroke. Marlene tried to reconcile her image of the austere dowager she had met with this abandoned creature being pounded into the sand, her back arched in ecstasy, her legs wrapped around her lover’s neck. The camera panned slowly from her face, an orgasmic mask, down to Blaine’s thrusting hips. Marlene felt her face grow hot, a combination of intense embarrassment and turn-on.
Another cut, a longer blackout. Bright sun again. The couple were splashing into the water, nude. They embraced and kissed in the water. Blackout again. This time it was evening and the shot was through the window of one of the cottage’s bedrooms. Marlene stopped the film and thought for a moment. The bedroom was on the second floor. The cameraman must have been lying on the peaked roof of the nearby garage. A determined photojournalist, thought Marlene; and she was almost certain that she knew who it was, based on her considerable familiarity with the man’s work. For some insane reason, Richard Ewing Dobbs, that great American, had hidden in bushes and crouched on a slanted roof to take movies of his wife screwing his best friend.
Marlene had another cigarette and thought about what this discovery meant. Harley Blaine was obviously the “Q” of Selma Dobbs’s diary. The reluctance of Q to countenance a breakup of the Dobbs marriage was thus explained: Blaine’s loyalty to Richard Dobbs was greater than his desire for Selma. That also threw light on that odd break in the tone of Blaine’s early love letters. He had given his girlfriend to Dobbs. Fifteen years and a long war later the former sweethearts had obviously kicked free of the traces, jumped into a hopeless affair, and become the subject of an interesting short blue movie, shot by the cuckold.
Or maybe Dobbs was in on it; maybe they knew he was filming? Maybe they took turns with the camera. Was that too outré even for the rich? Marlene felt out of her depth; the sexual perversions that had come her way over the years, although remarkably varied, had lacked the flavor of real decadence, and ran more to simple wackos like the corpse fucker, Oscar Sobell.
Marlene cranked the film rapidly backward through the viewer, having forgotten that Karp had specifically told her not to do that or the thing would jam, and sure enough the thing jammed. She peered into the film-advance mechanism. It looked like a splice had come loose and jumped the sprockets, causing the film to pile up behind it.
She was just about to try to fix it when the front door burst open and Karp and Lucy bounced in, red-faced and soaking wet. Sweetie came in too, and dashed toward the kitchen, tongue out and dripping spit, raining chunks of matted snow from its coat. Marlene saw what was going to happen and shouted, “Nooo!” The dog stood in the center of the kitchen and shook itself vigorously, coating every surface and Marlene with a good three quarts of freezing water.
“We want cocoa! We want cocoa!” chanted Karp and Lucy in chorus.
“You planned this,” said Marlene, wiping her face with the dish towel.
“Me?” said Karp, giggling with his daughter.
Thirty minutes later, they had all changed clothes, toweled the dog dry, and mopped the floor. Marlene was melting chocolate on the stove, the little girl and the dog were watching TV, and Karp was at the kitchen table looking doubtfully at his editing machine. The radio was turned up loud, against the bugging.
“You screwed it up,” he said.
“A splice broke.”
Karp popped the hatch on the advance mechanism and pried the errant film out. “This is the porn film the old lady had in her attic? How was it? Pretty hot?”
Marlene told him about the film and its main characters and what she had surmised about its auteur.
Karp whistled. “That’s quite a story, babe. What’re you going to do with it?”
“God knows! This is going to destroy the Dobbses if it gets out—” She stopped, struck by a thought. “Hey, do you think … ?”
“Mmm, yeah, I’m following you. It could explain why Dobbs is messing with the assassination investigation.”
“What, you mean somebody is blackmailing him with this stuff? But who? And why?”
“Well, the ‘why’ part is easy,” replied Karp. He had smoothed the film down on the edit block and was about to repair the splice, a skill he had picked up in recent months.
“There’s any number of people who’d like the investigation to dry up and blow away. As to who—you got me there, kid. Are you sure the camera guy was Dobbs’s old man?”
“Pretty sure. It was sort of the same kind of movie he always made: quick nervous pans and arty cuts, using a telephoto for close-ups. And the film was there where only he could’ve put it. Why, are you thinking that maybe some … agency made it? The FBI or the Russians? Or a private eye?” She was stirring milk into the chocolate, making it smooth.
“I don’t know,” said Karp. “We’ll probably never know, but it’s … hmm, that’s peculiar.”
“What?”
“There’s another splice real close to the one you broke, let’s see, two, four, eight frames away. Why would anyone want to splice a third of a second into a home movie? You practically wouldn’t even be able to register that you saw it before it was gone.”
Marlene put down her spoon and looked over his shoulder. “What’s in those frames? Can you just stick it under the gizmo there?”
Karp placed a frame from the start of the spliced strip over the little window in the editor and snapped the mechanism shut.
“Just a guy in a raincoat. Looks like a cemetery.” Karp tugged at the free end of the film and drew it through the viewer. The man in the film knelt swiftly and placed a bouquet on a grave and then stood up again and faced the camera. Then the film showed the window of the house in Niantic.
“Pull it back, pull it back!” cried Marlene.
“You want the guy again?” said Karp. “I want to see the hot stuff.”
But he pulled the film back to show the man’s face.
“Oh, my God!” said Marlene weakly. She sat down in a chair, her knees trembling. “That’s Weinberg. That was a picture of him leaving a bouquet of flowers at a grave at Arlington. That’s how they did it, how he signaled where he dropped the microfilmed secrets for Reltzin. And Dobbs took a picture of him doing it. That means he knew Weinberg and knew what he was doing, just like Weinberg said. Which means he really was a spy and a traitor. Which means Gaiilov must have lied, because Blaine told him to or because he really was a double agent… . Oh, God, I’m nauseous already from this.” She held a hand up over her mouth and stared at her husband with wide eyes.
“You could ask Gaiilov,” said Karp.
“Yeah, right, if I could find him. He’s probably in Bolivia.”
“No, he’s in Texas. In Dallas, as a matter of fact,” said Karp with a calmness he did not feel. “Calls himself Galinski.”
“What! How did you … ?”
“I asked V.T. and he told me. I guess I just forgot until now.”
“Tell me!”
“V.T. said he’s a member of the Dallas Russian community. His name came up because he was one of the people who knew Lee Oswald and his wife and because he had some kind of shadowy CIA connection—we thought—just like de Morenschildt and some others.”
“And he’s obviously keeping an even lower profile, because Harry didn’t turn him up in any of the usual checks,” said Marlene. After a moment, she continued, twirling her fingers through her hair, as she did while in intense thought. “So here’s Harley Blaine’s pet ex-spy, who knew Oswald, who knew that Richard Dobbs was guilty and lied about it, and here we also have Richard Dobbs’s son, working himself into a position of influence on the assassination committee, and pushing for a strong investigation, he says, but really steering the investigation away from the CIA, or why would he have arranged to have those memos and the film ripped off, and have told someone you were going to Miami to see those guys, and that must mean—” She stopped, confused. “What must it mean?”
“It means we’re becoming Kennedy nuts,” said Karp sourly. He tapped the film on the editor. “But for sure this is blackmail material. If somebody else has this information, Dobbs is in their pocket. The only question is who.”
“You think your Irishman in New Orleans?”
“Baton Rouge. Yeah, he’s looking better and better. I want to go out there and take a look at him. And then talk to Gaiilov in Dallas. And maybe Blaine too.”
“I want to come,” said Marlene.
He stared at her. Behind her, unwatched, the cocoa boiled over, filling the apartment with the dark, cloying odor of burned chocolate.
The man called Caballo looked out on the falling snow and felt cold. He hated snow, not only because it was cold, but because it meant he couldn’t move, couldn’t do what he had come to Washington to do. He hated Washington too. The public buildings all looked like prisons to him. They were full of little people making little rules for other people to follow, pretending that you could live real life according to lists of rules. Caballo knew that wasn’t true. You just had to do what was necessary; you had to survive. That was why he liked Guatemala, that and the climate.
On the second day after the blizzard, Bishop called.
“There’s a little hitch,” he said.
“There’s always a little hitch lately,” replied Caballo, with uncharacteristic impatience.
“Oh? Getting antsy, are you?”
“Yeah. I want to do the job and get out of here. I’m getting a bad feeling about this operation. What was that hitch, anyway?”
“Our candidate elected not to take over the investigation. However, the man they found is just as good, maybe better. We won’t have any trouble with him. But this man, Karp, is still something of a loose cannon. He has a copy of the film, and we need it back.”
“We should do him, Bishop. I told you, he saw me.”
“Don’t touch a hair on his head!” Bishop snapped. “That’s all we need. And don’t give me any smart ideas about convenient accidents. We’re past all that. The lid is just about nailed down once and for all and I’m not looking forward to spending the rest of my life waiting for another investigation. Nor are you, I imagine.” He waited, but the other man said nothing. “This is a retrieval, pure and simple. You’ll wait for the apartment to be completely empty, and then you’ll go in and get it. And Bill?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t get seen again. Our friend would be extremely upset if you were seen again.”