Karp had to admit it, Claude Wilkey knew how to run a meeting. He was running it in the wrong direction, but at a good clip. They were sitting around the conference table in the chief counsel’s office—Wilkey, Karp, V.T., several young, intense-looking men whom Wilkey had recruited, and a small, tight-faced young woman, the new administrative chief. Bea Sondergard was gone with Crane.
Wilkey was talking. He had a pleasant, light, confident voice, well suited to reasoned academic discussions. He looked like the professor he was: a bland, pale face topped by thinning brown hair, horn-rims magnifying mild blue eyes. He wore a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows over a knitted sweater bearing a diamond pattern, slacks, polished loafers, and a striped button-down shirt with a foulard tie. Everyone else in the room, including the woman, wore dark suits.
Wilkey’s lecture was well organized and easy to understand. The staff had one purpose and one purpose only: to complete the committee hearings as quickly as possible and to write a report. The staff would be reorganized into teams, each responsible for a section of the final report; the intense-looking men would be in charge of these teams. As Wilkey described their duties, Karp realized that no one was assigned to the conduct of any field investigation.
“What about the people we have in Miami, New Orleans, and Dallas?” Karp interrupted. “What happens with those operations?”
“I’m afraid we’re closing all that down,” explained Wilkey in a patient tone. “We simply don’t have time for it.”
“You read my report?” Karp demanded. He had, on Wilkey’s request, composed a brief summary of the major new leads he had uncovered: the Depuy film, the CIA papers, the interview with Mosca, the trove of material from Guel’s house, the investigation of P. X. Kelly. He had included some of the more obvious next steps.
“Yes, I did. Interesting. But really, you don’t have anything I can bring before the committee, do you? Some unsolved murders, a film of uncertain provenance, suspicions …” He glanced at his new people as if to say, This is just what we want to avoid. “No, I want to redirect the core of this effort toward the scientific analysis of solid evidence.”
“You mean like the magic bullet? That’s what you call solid evidence?”
Wilkey pursed his lips. “Yes, that’s what we have to work with. We’re going to settle the scientific issues, the forensics, the autopsy, once and for all. That’s what the Congress expects and that’s what we intend to do.”
Karp was about to make his old point about the chain of evidence for all the physical sequelae of the assassination being hopelessly corrupt, but thought better of it and slumped disconsolately in his chair. The meeting resumed. Wilkey was also, it appeared, going to deal with the organized crime issue “once and for all” as well. Karp listened without interest. Of course they would try to pin it on the Mob! Congress would love that—Wilkey had written a book on the Mafia, Karp now recalled—because of all the powers in America, the Mob was the only one that didn’t have a lobbying office in Washington. Not an official one anyway.
The meeting broke up. It was clear to Karp that the “team leaders,” all three of them Wilkey’s men, were not going to report to him in any meaningful way. It was a neat and familiar bureaucratic maneuver. The graceful thing would be for him to resign, which he intended to do as soon as possible.
He walked out of Wilkey’s office and through the corridors. There was a heightened purpose in the air. People were bustling about, carrying papers; the new people were cracking the whip.
Karp had no doubt that Wilkey would produce a professional report, on time and within budget.
He went out of the building for a bite to eat. The snow had melted off the roadways but lingered in slushy piles in the gutters. The temperature was moving up into the fifties and the cherry trees in front of the botanical gardens were showing the little knobs that would be blossoms in a week or two. He doubted that he would be there to see the famous display.
Two hot dogs and a root beer later, Karp walked back to the Annex and went to see V.T.
V.T. was arranging files on his long table, working off a large stack of paper that he was distributing among the various folders.
“What zeal!” said Karp. “I guess our new leader’s inspired you to really start working.”
“Yeah,” said V.T., “old Claude has that charismatic, inspirational quality that makes you want to do a lot of busywork, puke your guts out, and quit.”
“You’re quitting.” It was not a question.
“The resignation’s being typed,” said V.T. “In fairness to my successor, I’m just placing the last of this stuff in the personality files. Then I’m out of here. You?”
“Me too, I guess,” Karp responded in a dull tone. “I need to call Clay and tell him the party’s over.”
V.T. looked up from what he was doing and sat on his desk. “Well, it’s true. We gave it our best and we got whipped. Like Clay said, way back, we were way over our heads. If they had wanted a real homicide investigation …”
“What did they want?” asked Karp, idly flipping through some folders. “Remind me.”
“To forget. Warren was right, in a way. Blame it on a nut, conveniently dead, and forget it. And then we can blame all the failures of the country on the loss of Camelot—that fucking war, the riots, crime, greed, every goddamn thing we don’t want to take responsibility for. If only Kennedy had lived! So. Tidy up the files and go back to real life.”
“We never found out who Turm was, did we?” asked Karp waving a file.
“No, we didn’t. I doubt Mr. Wilkey will be overly concerned, however.”
“No, but I’m sure he’d like the bastard’s phony name spelled right.” He showed V.T. the file tab. “It’s not T-E-R-M. It’s T-U-R-M.”
V.T. looked at the lettering. “Turm with a U. Are you sure?”
“Positive. Mosca saw the forged passport. He made a point of mentioning it.”
V.T. turned away from him. “Turm with a U. Oh, God. Oh, shit.”
“What’s wrong? Why does it matter?”
V.T. slammed the file to the floor and whirled. His face was stricken, going white around the eyes and mouth. “Those bastards! Those fucking infantile macho bastard cocksuckers …”
“V.T., what’s—”
“Turm with a U. It was like a kid’s game with them, wasn’t it? Secret passwords and wiseass fake names. They didn’t even bother to be subtle about it, because who was going to look? And it’s an impossible move, so who would catch on? And nobody did, and now it fucking doesn’t matter.”
“Newbury, what the fuck are you talking about?”
“Turm. It’s the German for rook, the piece in chess. And, of course, there’s Bishop. And Caballo is the Spanish for knight—the one with the sneaky moves. And PXK isn’t some goddamn Irish trucking executive in Baton Rouge. It’s chess notation, but it’s a notation for an impossible move, so of course, nobody would ever get the joke. Except the bastards who thought it up.” V.T. sat on the edge of his desk and hung his head, as if exhausted.
“What do you mean, chess notation?” asked Karp.
V.T. looked at him bleakly. “In chess notation P x K, with a little x in the middle, would mean ‘pawn takes king.’ It’s never used, of course, because the king is never taken in chess. The game ends in a checkmate, when the king can’t make a legal move out of check. In real life, of course, it’s different. PXK isn’t the name of an individual; it’s what they called the operation! Pawn takes king. Well, we know who the king was. And the pawn, of course.”
“Oswald.”
“Uh-huh. Oswald. The pawn. The necessary nut. So now we have all the pieces, so to speak.” V.T. laughed bitterly. “No, one’s still missing. There’s a queen on this board, and I doubt very much if it’s Mr. Kelly of Baton Rouge.” He laughed again, a laugh edged with hysteria. “It’s the perfect paranoid confection. Of course there has to be a mastermind behind all this, pulling the strings—no, that’s mixing metaphors. Controlling the pieces.”
He got off the desk and walked toward the door.
“Where are you going?” Karp asked.
“To see if my resignation is ready for signature. If you want me, I’ll be outside the building wearing a red hat and carrying a shopping bag full of old clippings.”
Karp went back to his office and sat at his desk for a few minutes before it really hit him that he had nothing to do. He called Clay Fulton in New Orleans and left a message, and then waited around for Fulton to call back. He pulled a few files from various hiding places and stuffed them in the red envelope, tattered now from being carried around with him nearly everyplace he had gone for many weeks. He spread the material from the envelope out on his desk and looked at it. For an instant he felt a thrill of panic when he realized that the Depuy film was missing and then recovered when he recalled that he had left it at home, on the kitchen table among Marlene’s films. Or had he?
Frantically, he dialed his home number.
Marlene picked up on the first ring. “God, this is weird!” she exclaimed. “I was just about to call you.”
“You were? Is anything wrong?”
“No, I … I just found out something you need to know.” She paused. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about it on the phone.”
“Is my, is the thing I, um, left on the kitchen table … ?”
“Oh, yeah, it’s here,” said Marlene in a peculiar voice. “I’ve been playing with it. We’ll talk when you get here.”
Karp packed the red envelope and left his office, informing his secretary that he’d be working from home for the rest of the day.
“You want me to forward calls?” she asked with a knowing look; “working at home” was a well-understood Washington euphemism for looking for another job while remaining on the payroll. He nodded and left.
When Karp walked into the apartment, Marlene met him with a finger to her lips. She then turned on the radio in the kitchen to a rock station at considerable volume. Lucy was in the living room happily watching cartoons at a similar noise level.
“I was going through some of Dobbs’s later films, to finish up my notes on the case and to check whether he left any other little surprises in them.”
“Did he?”
“No,” she said. “But watch this!”
Marlene sat down behind the editor and rolled it. “A pleasant backyard barbecue. Nice house, pool. A bunch of Mexican-looking servants roasting a side of beef on a spit. Prosperous guys and women in western gear, drinking and laughing. It says ‘Texas’ doesn’t it. It is. Notice how steady the shot is? The camera’s on a tripod, panning back and forth. Everybody’s mugging for the camera. Okay, watch this! The cameraman wants to get in the frame. There’s his back, now he’s turning around and posing for the group.”
She stopped the film on one frame and Karp saw a largish, intelligent-looking man with an even-toothed smile and short, dark hair, wearing a western shirt and jeans.
“Harley Blaine,” said Marlene. She rolled the film rapidly. It flickered like an old silent movie. The partying people jumped around like fleas, gobbling their ribs, jerking their elbows as they drank. The film ended with some sort of ceremony; a fat man got a plaque from another fat man. Marlene slowed it to normal speed. There was a blackout and then the scene showed a forest at night, tropical swamp foliage, a white, open road, and then a line of military trucks approaching.
“Jesus! It’s our film!” cried Karp.
“Yep. Your film. Shot by Harley Blaine. He did his little memento of a civic party at his ranch and then he trucked on down to Louisiana to take some pictures of the counterrevolution-to-be. Which means he was up to his neck in the Cuban business too, a dozen years after he retired from the CIA.”
“But how did Depuy get hold of this?”
“No problem. We know he got it from Ferrie. Ferrie was at the training exercise. He just snitched the film. Maybe Depuy paid him for it. Maybe Blaine didn’t miss the film. Selma Dobbs’s letters have some stuff about him misplacing cameras. It was a family joke.”
“Hilarious,” said Karp. “So Ferrie gets the film and shows it to Depuy. No big deal, just Ferrie boasting and Depuy fishing for a story. After the assassination, that’s a whole different situation. Whoever did it found out that Ferrie has some evidence linking Blaine and some other CIA types to Oswald and a guy who looks a lot like Oswald, via the anti-Castro stuff. It wouldn’t have been difficult; Ferrie had the biggest mouth in Louisiana. So they ace him with a drug overdose and get the film. Meanwhile, Depuy’s on the sauce, he’s forgotten his copy of the film, or doesn’t realize its significance. He dies and his wife gives all his stuff to the AP archive.”
“So now we have the connection that explains why Hank Dobbs is jamming up the investigation,” said Marlene. “He’s working for the man who saved his father, even though Blaine has to know that Richard Dobbs was really guilty.”
“You think Blaine was blackmailing Dobbs? You think he said he’d spill the beans on the old man if Dobbs didn’t help him protect Blaine’s old CIA buddies?”
“No, that’s not it,” said Marlene definitively. “Blaine saved Richard Dobbs in 1951, in the teeth of the CIA. Why would he have pulled a switch at this late date? No, the Dobbs family was the core of his life: he loved the husband and he loved the wife. That wouldn’t change, even if he pulled the trigger on JFK himself. No, he didn’t need blackmail at all. Hank Dobbs was covering for Blaine from sheer gratitude.”
“But what the hell was he covering?” asked Karp, his brows knotting in frustration. “Blaine’s not directly tied to anyone we’ve turned up except Gaiilov, who’s peripheral to the Oswald story, as far as we know. Like you said, Blaine retired from the CIA long before JFK became president. He was on the CIA shit list, in fact, because of the Dobbs thing, and we have no evidence that he knew the one guy we’ve identified as being central to the whole thing.”
“Who?”
“Paul David, aka Maurice Bishop.”
“Oh, yeah. But wait a minute—isn’t Bishop in this film?”
“Yeah, but so’re a hundred other people. Because Blaine took the film doesn’t mean he was in bed with Bishop. Nobody we’ve talked to has ever mentioned Blaine.”
Something tugged at Marlene’s memory. She had an extraordinary memory for faces, the product of years of going through mug books, looking at the faces of sex criminals, of hours and hours spent with victims trying to tease a face out of violence-clouded memory.
“Bishop slash David is on the film, huh? Let me see if I can pick him out.”
She started to wind the film, but Karp stopped her and got out the black loose-leaf book that V.T. had assembled, consulted it, and turned to a glossy blowup of the best David/Bishop shot on the film.
Marlene looked at it and cried “Yesss! It was nagging me. I knew I’d seen that guy before, and of course, I was thinking of Blaine when I watched the film, so I was ready for the connection. This guy, ten years younger, is in a picture with Harley Blaine that’s hanging in the hallway behind Richard Dobbs’s study. Blaine knew Bishop, all right, from way back. His protégé, you might say.”
Karp sat on his excitement and tried to argue against the most obvious conclusion. “Okay, great, Blaine knew David/Bishop way back when. He took home movies of a Bishop operation. He’s still a retired guy, a lawyer, not an active spook like the rest of them.”
“Okay,” Marlene conceded, “then let’s look at this joker you were talking about, this Kelly guy in Baton Rouge? We know he’s connected because Guel was getting all that cash from PXK. Maybe we should check that out, if Blaine knows him too.”
Karp sighed and told her about V.T.’s enlightenment concerning the meaning of PXK. He concluded the tale with, “So according to Newbury, Kelly’s yet another of the ten million false trails generated by the assassination. Hell, maybe the chess names are a coincidence too. Nah, that’s hard even for me to swallow, that on top of the two murders, and seeing Oswald number two in Miami. I think the killer is really it, the core of the conspiracy. And there’s not a goddamn thing we can do about it.”
He told her about Wilkey and the meeting that morning, about V.T. quitting.
“Well, a total disaster,” Marlene said when he was finished. “What are you going to do?”
“Oh, I’ll quit too, I guess. It gripes me, though. I can’t make a case, but I’d just like to know who the queen was.”
“Queen?”
“Yeah, that’s what V.T. said. King, pawn, knight, rook, bishop. We’re not sure about the rook, Turm, except that he was apparently an expert in organizing assassinations, among other things. But the guy behind it all—the master piece on the board—V.T. called him the queen.” He laughed. “It’d be funny if it turned out to be Clay Shaw, considering.”
“Yeah, but how’s this for another fascinating coincidence. You know they have this King Ranch in Texas, supposed to be the largest ranch in the world? Well, when Harley Blaine went back to Texas, he added pieces to his parents’ old property and set himself up as a gentleman rancher. And do you know what he called his ranch, the old funster?”
“Don’t tell me.”
“Yes. The Queen Ranch.”
They were silent amid the noise from the radio and the TV. Karp reached for her hand. “Jesus, Marlene, what’re we going to do?” It was a rhetorical question, but Marlene responded with scarcely a thought.
“Well, obviously, we have to go and see Blaine. We’ll fly out to Texas, to the old Queen Ranch and have a little talk. About Dick Dobbs and John F. Kennedy.”
Karp’s wife had once again succeeded in amazing him. “Why would we want to do that, Marlene?” he asked weakly. “Why should Blaine talk to us? Because we found one of his home movies? He’ll laugh in our faces.”
“No he won’t. He’ll talk. Maybe not on a witness stand, but he’ll tell us what we want to know, which is all that matters right now. Aren’t you dying to know how he did it? Speaking of which, he’s dying himself. Maybe he’s just waiting to spill his guts.”
“That I doubt, considering he’s been working like crazy to kill the investigation, which he did. Not to mention killing people in the process. So why is he going to be such a sweetheart with you and me?”
“Because our hearts are pure and because we have a film of him screwing Selma Dobbs and proof that Richard Dobbs was a spy and a traitor. He’s not going to want that to get out.”
Karp stared at her. “Blackmail him? Are you serious?”
“Oh, silly, it won’t come to blackmail,” said Marlene lightly. “It’ll be very civilized. I’ll send him a copy of the film and tell him what we know about his involvement in Kennedy, and we’ll go out there and talk.”
Karp held his hands to his head. “I don’t believe I’m hearing this!” he shrieked. “If we’re right, this guy has already aced a couple dozen people, not to mention the president of the United States. How about if you’re wrong and he sends three guys with machine guns? Did you ever think of that?”
They locked eyes for a full minute, tense and breathing hard. At the end of this, Marlene nodded curtly once and got up from her chair. “Fine, have it your way. I’ll pack.”
“What? Wait a minute, Marlene… .”
“Why? Why wait? Just call the goddamn office and tell them you’re quitting. We can be on the road tonight, running back to New York with our tails between our legs.”
“Marlene …”
She stomped out of the room and he followed her up the stairs to their bedroom, where with violent motions she started flinging drawers open.
“Marlene, stop it!”
She turned to him, eye blazing. “Why? Hey, you were the one who wanted to find out who whacked JFK. It was no big thing for me. I was happy in New York, remember?”
“You’re not being fair,” he said, despising himself for saying it.
“Oh, for Chrissake, what does ‘fair’ have to do with it. What the problem is, is you still don’t trust my judgment. Look—I know this guy. I studied him in films over thirty years. I read nearly everything he wrote. I know how his mind works. I know what the people who were most intimate with him thought about him. I read his fucking love letters. I’m telling you that this will work.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
She paused and her face lost some of its tension. He was going to roll on it. “If it doesn’t,” she said, “we’ll both be dead. Which is why I’m going to call Harry Bello to come down here.”
“Bello? Why? What does he have to do with it?”
“Simple. We’ll tell him the whole story and leave the stuff in the envelope with him. If anything happens to us, he’ll take care of Lucy, one, and two, he’ll track them down and kill them all, all the goddamn chessmen, every one.”
Karp let out a long breath. He shrugged. “Well, since you put it that way, how can I resist?”
“Really?” said Marlene. “Really and truly?”
“Yeah, uh-huh.”
“How do you feel?” she asked challengingly.
Karp consulted his feelings, always a creaky process.
“Um, relieved, I think. Pumped. Scared shitless.”
She flung her arms around him. They hugged. They kissed, with an intensity they had not experienced for some time. She drew back from him and looked into his face, smiling. She said, “Good. That’s how I feel. If you didn’t want to feel like that a lot, you shouldn’t have married a Sicilian.”
Marlene threw on her field jacket and her Yankees cap over sweatshirt and jeans and sneakers and drove her car to downtown Rosslyn, a concentration of high-rises and commercial streets across the Potomac from Washington. She stopped first at a bank and drew five hundred dollars against the MasterCard, feeling just a twinge of guilt. After consulting a Yellow Pages, she walked three blocks to a film lab.
Placing the Dobbs film on the counter, she asked how long it would take to make a copy.
The pencil-necked young technician across the counter weighed the film in his hand. “Beginning of next week?”
“No, I need it now. I mean right now.”
He shook his head. “No way, lady. I got work piled up—”
“You do this yourself?”
“Yeah, me and another guy.”
“Do mine at the head of the line and it’s fifty in cash, under the table.”
“Uh, I don’t know… .”
“A hundred. Cash.”
He considered this for six seconds. “Okay, I’ll write up a ticket.”
“No ticket. Let’s just do it.” She moved down the counter and lifted the flap.
“Hey, um …”
“I’m coming with you. You said you were going to do it now, right?”
“Uh, yeah, but …”
“I want to watch. This is a special film.”
The technician was familiar with ‘special films,’ although this one was not as naughty as many he’d seen. Two hours later, Marlene, smelling faintly of developer, emerged from the lab and made her way to the local FedEx office. She borrowed a phone and, charging the call to her own phone, got Harley Blaine’s mailing address from a polite young voice in Texas. Then she borrowed a pen and paper from the clerk and wrote:
Dear Mr. Blaine:
The enclosed film, which no one but me and my husband (and, of course, the photographer) has seen as yet, will be of interest to you. We know about the bishop and the pawn, the knight, the rook and the queen, and what they did. I believe a conversation would be useful. Please call at your convenience. We are prepared to depart for Texas whenever you wish. Like your own, this is not a government operation.
She added her phone number and signed it, and sent it with the film copy, in the lab envelope to make clear that it was a copy, to Harley Blaine
There was a travel agency across the street, and there she purchased two open return tickets to Dallas. She was about to return to her car when she had a thought and went into a nearby People’s variety store for some additional purchases.
“Hey, there,” said a friendly voice behind her. She turned, and there was a black woman in a tan cloth coat over a pale green uniform skirt. It took a second for Marlene to recognize her as the nanny from the park.
“Hi!” said Marlene. “How’re you doing?”
“Just fine! I’m goin’ to Carolina next week. I’m starting school.”
“Dietician?”
“Nah, X ray. That food smell make me sick. How about yourself. You take my advice?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I did. I think I’m going to be working in a law office pretty soon.”
“Oooh, hey—paralegal? That’s good work that paralegal, ’cept you need clothes.” She cast a doubtful eye over Marlene’s ensemble.
“Um, yeah,” said Marlene, “except this is more like quasilegal. They don’t make you dress up as much.”
Marlene went home and called Harry and asked him to come down, without explaining the situation. Harry said, “Tomorrow afternoon.”
The following morning Karp went to the office, not at eight, as he had in the past, but around ten-thirty. The placed bustled with people who either did not meet his eye, so busy were they, or else, even worse, spoke briefly to him in sympathetic or condescending tones. Charlie Ziller was one of those who did not meet his eye. There were several call-back messages from Clay Fulton. Karp rang the New Orleans office of Pete Melchior, the retired NYPD cop turned private investigator, and found Fulton in.
“What’s up, Butch? I’ve been hearing all kinds of weird stuff.”
“It’s all true. The word is, no further field investigation. Come on home.”
“No, further … what? I was going to go to Miami and show our pictures to Odio. And this Kelly guy is looking pretty good. I got an eyewitness who saw him with Carlos Marcello a couple times back in the sixties.”
“Forget Kelly. He’s another dead end. V.T. figured it out. He’s quitting, by the way. I guess I am too.”
A long pause on the line. “That bad, huh?”
“Yeah. We got beat, old buddy. Come home.”
V.T. was in his office tossing personal items into an old leather satchel. “They accepted my resignation with regret,” he remarked as Karp came in. “Jim Phelps is getting out too.”
“Phelps? Why him? He’s a tech. I thought Wilkey wanted to up the status of the tech work.”
“Yes, up, but only in the desired direction. Phelps is convinced there was hanky-panky in the autopsy photos and the X rays. Wilkey wants a second opinion. Or a third, until, apparently, he finds a techie who believes there’s no problem.”
V.T. looked around the gutted office. “I’m off. Oh, speaking of no problem, have you seen the prelim report from Dr. Selig and the autopsy boys?”
“No, I didn’t know it was in. They don’t show me stuff anymore. What did they say?”
“Briefly, all the wounds of the two men are consistent with two shots from the upper left rear. And thus the magic bullet is still magic.”
“Wendt signed on to this shit?”
“He did not. A voice crying in the wilderness, however. He’ll get his day in front of the committee, but I doubt it’ll do much good. All the other docs, including your old buddy Selig, were being very cautious. Nobody wants to join the nut parade.” He hefted his satchel and grasped Karp’s hand. “What about you? You going to stay around for the whitewash? Tom Sawyer says it’s fun.”
“I don’t think so. Me and Marlene are going to fly down to Dallas on our own, to check something out. Marlene found some stuff. She … we think there’s a good chance that Harley Blaine, Richard Dobbs’s old lawyer, is the queen on the board.”
V.T. dropped his satchel with a bang. “You’re not serious!”
Karp nodded heavily and explained the nature of the evidence and what they had done about it. V.T. remained silent for a moment, thinking and chewing his lip. Then he said, “You think this is wise? Going out there, the two of you? Whatever you’ve got on him, this guy’s got a track record of collecting evidence from recently dead people.”
“I don’t know, V.T. I need to close this out, in my own mind. I mean, it’s completely circumstantial. There’s a million ways of laughing it out of court. The witnesses who might’ve talked are dead and the live ones aren’t talking. It’s not something I can show to Wilkey; he wouldn’t understand it, because he doesn’t have the instinct, and because he just wants to close this down with a minimum of fuss, and this could be big-time fuss. Marlene thinks there’s a chance Blaine’ll tell us something. I think you have to be Sicilian to think it’ll work, but there it is: we’re going, if Blaine calls back.”
Blaine called back at four that day. “Will you hold for Mr. Blaine?” said a polite male voice. Marlene would.
When he came on the line, Harley Blaine sounded weaker than he had some months previously, but his voice still carried the same ironic tone.
“Miss Ciampi. Well, here we are again, talking about the dear dead days of yore. Your package arrived, and I will say that I did not expect to be surprised by anything at my stage of life, but I was surprised. My heart must be stronger than my doctors are telling me, or it might’ve just gone off the rail when I saw that film. What a devil that Dick was! And we thought he couldn’t keep a secret!”
“I take it then that you didn’t know about the film, or the shots of Weinberg at Arlington,” said Marlene.
“Mmm, why don’t we reserve such conversation for our tête-à-tête. There’s a Delta plane that leaves National at ten-twenty tomorrow. Do you think you could be on it? I’ll have you met.”
“And my husband.”
“Of course, and Mr. Karp. I’ll look forward to meeting you both. Until then.”
He broke the connection.
“It was weird, Butch,” Marlene said later, when Karp had returned home and they were seated on the ratty couch in their living room. “It was like we were doing him a favor. He wasn’t even breathing hard, or no harder than he usually breathes—the guy must be on his last legs.” The front bell rang.
“That must be Harry,” said Marlene, rising.
“Or a Cuban gunman,” said Karp.
But it was Bello. They had a nice dinner. Marlene made a Sicilian dish, veal rolls with parsley and pine nuts, and Harry had brought a bottle of Vignamaggio Chianti from the city. Harry didn’t drink anymore, of course, so Marlene had most of the wine herself, and became quite merry, despite Karp’s continually referring to the dinner as the Last Meal. Harry was well briefed on the investigation and the purpose of the trip. The various negative outcomes were not mentioned, not in words, although Marlene and Bello exchanged a number of looks that contained major cable traffic.
In the morning, Karp gave Harry the thick red envelope. “Hide it behind the refrigerator,” he said. “They never look there.”
Harry accepted the thing solemnly. “Take care of her,” he said.
“Take care of Lucy,” said Karp, the statement delivered in a tone that allowed interpretation: either “for tonight” or “until age eighteen.”
“No problem,” said Harry. Meaning, either.
In the airliner, taxiing to the runway, Marlene said, offhandedly, “He wouldn’t risk bombing the plane, would he?”
“Marlene,” said Karp, “you should wait until we’re high in the air before saying things like that.” He slumped in his seat and tightened the safety belt another notch.
No fireball, however, marred an uneventful flight. At Dallas-Ft. Worth International, there was a man in the arrival lounge with a sign that said Ciampi/Karp. He was a young blond, with an unstylish crew cut and a roughly triangular physique, his big shoulders straining against a neat tan blazer. He wore brown whipcord trousers over cowboy boots, and a western shirt with a bolo tie. On the clasp of the bolo and the breast pocket of his blazer was a seal that bore a silhouette of a chess queen in white, on a dark green field.
They followed him out of the concourse to where a white Lincoln limo waited. The man held the door while they entered the back and sank into smooth, soft leather, and then he got behind the wheel and drove off.
“It’ll be about an hour, folks,” the driver said. “There’s drinks and things in the little refrigerator there, if you want.”
They each took a cold Coke. “Guy really knows how to run an assassination,” Karp whispered. “We’re going out in style.”
Marlene shushed him and looked out the smoked window. As they drove north on the Tollway, suburbs changed gradually into country: wire fences, rolling hills, white-faced cattle grazing in small herds. They left the freeway and proceeded down a succession of increasingly smaller roads until they came to a barred gate with a gatehouse nearby. The man inside it came out and swung the gate aside. He was dressed in the same costume as their driver, with the additional touch of a white Stetson. On the arch over the gate, Queen Ranch was picked out in carved wooden rustic lettering; between the two words was a large plaque with the chess queen emblem.
They drove down a graveled road, across a little stream on a wooden bridge, and there, on a slight rise in the terrain, was the house.
A bribe of four hundred dollars had gained Caballo admittance to the apartment formerly occupied by the couple Marlene called Thug ‘n’ Dwarf. The Federal Gardens manager was happy to do it, since in its currently wrecked state the apartment was unrentable, and he hadn’t gotten around to arranging the repairs. The story the thin man gave him, of having to hide out from his wife during a messy divorce, made sense to him: he’d had several himself. Cash under the table that he could conceal from his current spouse was always welcome.
Caballo waited for three days, eating cold food and sleeping a lot in the day, on the broken bed, when the man was away at work, with the stuff in his red envelope, and the woman and the child were in and out. He thought he would have to wait for the weekend. They would go out for a family excursion, and the stuff would be left behind and he could pop in and get it. He was fairly confident that he could find anything hidden in the small apartment. If not, he was perfectly prepared to burn the place down.
He listened a good deal at the party wall too, but he could hear little except the sound of the radio or the TV. He hated not knowing what was going on. This should’ve been a job for half a dozen men, with complete electronics, bugs in every room and on the car. Instead it was just him, more of Bishop’s paranoia. During his frequent light sleeps he had fitful dreams of green jungles and red earth, clumps of frightened people, explosions and screams. Pleasant dreams, in which he was in control of the situation. He woke and washed himself, giving himself a whore’s bath at the sink, using only a trickle of water to avoid making a sound. There was an old towel on the floor, smelly, but he used it anyway to dry his face and his body. He had known worse dwellings.
On the third day another man came to the apartment and the radio came on loud and stayed on until late. During the night, Caballo found a gallon jar under the sink. There was a hose attached to a spigot outside. He cut a few feet off this and slipped out to his rental car and siphoned gas, filling the jar.
The next morning Karp and his wife left, leaving the other man alone with the child. The radio stayed off, but the man and the child did not leave. Evening came; Caballo stayed alert. He had decided that if the man and the child did not leave, he would burn the place that night.
Around seven, Caballo heard their door slam, the voice of the child and the man’s deeper voice telling her not to run in the parking lot, then the sound of a car starting and pulling out.
Caballo waited two minutes. He took a miniature flashlight and a big folding knife and went out the back door. He was actually glad he did not have to burn the place. Sometimes they kept stuff in the refrigerator, where it might survive even a big fire. He intended to be on the last flight to Mexico City once the material was destroyed.
In through the kitchen door; the lock was a joke. He started his search from the top, as he had been taught long ago. Large bedroom, the adults’ obviously. Drawers out, scattered, bureaus turned over, closets emptied, pottery lamp smashed. Nothing. Slash mattresses and pillows. Kick baseboards and walls. Nothing.
Bathroom. Nothing in the medicine cabinet, ripped from the wall, or the hamper. Nothing in the toilet tank or under the sink.
Down the hall. The kid’s bedroom. Fling apart the bureau. Overturn the toy chest. Rip the mattress and the pillows again. Slash apart the stuffed animals, break the heads of the dolls. Pull down the bookcase. He made the colorful books fly, tearing the bindings, scattering the pages.
He was working fast and efficiently. No more than five minutes had elapsed since he entered the apartment. A thin sweat lay on his brow, but his hard breathing was more from excitement than exertion.
He folded his knife and put it away and flung open the door to the closet, shining in the thin beam of his flash.
The smell, the hateful smell, the scent of screaming and beating and choking and shaking. Another person, another’s scent was under it somehow, that and the reek of gasoline, soap, and anger, but there it was, definite, horrible, coming from the figure standing in the closet doorway.
Caballo saw the eyes in the thin beam, glowing disks. Another toy, was his first thought, a teddy bear. Then the eyes moved and he heard the snarling growl. He backed away a step and something enormous and black was on him like a piece of the darkness come alive. He was on his back beating at it with the puny flashlight, struggling to get his knife out of his pants pocket. There was something wrong with his right hand; he couldn’t move it. Then the pain hit him and he screamed.
The taste of blood, forbidden, exciting. The great head heaved, teeth met, the sharp carnassial teeth at the side of the jaw, cutting through flesh and tendon and bone. The screams stopped. The bad scent was gone. Sweetie played with what he had taken for a few minutes, chewing until most of the juice and all the bad scent was gone, and then went back into the closet and slept.