Harley Blaine’s house was not the house in the Depuy film. That had been a traditional ranch house with a patio. Karp and Marlene now entered a much larger, more contemporary structure, a place of sheer white walls cut with the narrow clefts of windows.
“The architect was obviously inspired by The Guns of Navarone,” Marlene whispered as their driver ushered them into an entrance hall tiled in glazed blue Mexican ceramic. “Notice how the house is on a little rise with the trees and shrubs cut back for a couple hundred yards? And the slit windows. The joint is a fortress.”
“Yeah, you expect to see Richard Widmark coming down a rope in a watch cap,” Karp agreed. “Speaking of movies, what happened to the lion and the scarecrow? And why are we whispering?”
Marlene suppressed a giggle. “I think we’re trying to not scream. I wonder where the dungeons are?”
They were led through several doors and found themselves again in sunlight. The house was built around a vast atrium, glass-covered and heavily planted along its borders. Its center was occupied by a large swimming pool. By this stood a hospital-style bed. On the bed lay Harley Blaine.
“Have a seat,” said Blaine when they approached the bed. “Welcome to Texas. And the Queen Ranch.” They sat in the two elegant sling chairs that had been placed next to a low table by the bedside. “There are refreshments on that little bar by the pool, and I have arranged a luncheon for you all. I regret that I take my own nourishment nowadays through a tube.”
He smiled, a ghastly sight. Blaine was wasted in the manner of victims of end-stage cancer, shocking to Marlene, whose image of him was based on films taken from his early youth onward to maturity. Once a good-sized man with a full head of hair, he had become a living skeleton, his head a death camp inmate’s skull bearing a few wisps of dull fuzz. His eyes, however, sunken as they were, still blazed with energy, and with, Marlene thought, an unnatural, puckish glee that seemed almost obscene in so devastated a frame.
She looked at her husband, who appeared distinctly uncomfortable, his skin pale and damp-looking, his jaw tight and twitching, his hands clenching and uncoiling. It occurred to her that the last time he saw someone in this state it had been his mother lying there, and he had been fourteen.
Karp was thinking of his mother, but his discomfort arose from rage. He was considering why the eyes of this criminal, who had done so much evil, should shine so with intelligence and life, while those of his mother, who had been sweet and mild her whole life, had, at the same state in her disease, held nothing but pain and idiotic terror. In was another item in Karp’s pending lawsuit against God, and it was all he could do to keep from smashing his fists into the man’s face, smashing it like a rotten pumpkin.
Blaine was talking to Marlene again, in his soft, breathy voice, and Karp had to focus his attention to hear what was being said. Small talk. Their flight, the climate, the house. “It’s quite an interesting house,” he said, naming its features and the famous architect who had designed them. “I regret I can’t show you around personally, but—”
“Yes, it’s a lovely house, Mr. Blaine,” Marlene broke in. “I especially admired the fields of fire.”
Blaine chuckled hoarsely. “You are a card, ma’am. And observant too, as I have come to know. Yes, the place is defensible, no doubt. I have, or had, some business partners who were at times prone to take extreme measures in pursuit of what they considered proper redress of grievances.” He paused and glanced at Karp. “But I see your husband is growing impatient. Perhaps we can turn to the purpose of your visit. This film. What are your intentions regarding this unfortunate item? I trust you understand the effect that publicizing it would have on the Dobbs family.”
“Yes, I do,” said Marlene. “And I, we, don’t have any wish to hurt them. But what I do with the film is entirely up to you, Mr. Blaine.”
“Is it? That sounds suspiciously like a blackmailer’s speech. What sort of behavior on my part would be satisfactory?”
“Cut the crap, Blaine!” Karp snarled. “You know damn well we came here to find out how you killed Kennedy. So let’s have it—from the beginning!”
At first they thought he was having a fit. He had thrown his head back against the pillows and a high rasping noise was emanating from his open mouth. Some tears rolled down his cheeks from his tightly shut eyes. But as Marlene glanced around nervously for someone to call, Blaine’s face relaxed, and it turned out that he had only been having a laugh.
“Ahh, how very New York, Mr. Karp! How very tough! Direct and to the point. Well, first of all, I should tell you that when I heard the news about the tragic end of our late president, I was on board the cruise ship Pride of Norway in transit between Cancun and Trinidad. Like everyone else, I remember it quite clearly. For some days it cast quite a pall on the public merrymaking, although privately many of my shipmates wept only crocodile tears. The cruise was organized here in Texas, and Mr. Kennedy was not popular among certain circles in Texas.”
“But you did it,” Karp persisted, “wherever you were personally on November twenty-second. You thought up this whole chess-piece plot, this PXK thing. You’re the queen. Bishop was your boy, and Caballo was Bishop’s boy. You were neck-deep with anti-Castro Cubans. Your money financed the whole thing, the payoffs to Angelo Guel came from you, and you had Mosca and Guel killed when we got to them.”
“There are many conspiracy theories, Mr. Karp,” said Blaine in a mild tone. “That would seem to be a particularly florescent one and impossible to prove.”
“I know it’s impossible to prove,” admitted Karp. “That’s why we’re here blackmailing you into telling us the truth.”
Blaine smiled and his eyes sparkled wetly. “Yes, truth. So hard to determine after the passage of years. So far, in many cases, from justice. ‘What is Truth, said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.’ Bacon. Do you know the essay? I see that Miss Ciampi does. I’ve always wondered whether, if Pilate had stayed for an answer, he would have gotten anything he could’ve understood from Jesus.”
Karp said, “Let’s get out of here, Marlene. This guy just wants to blow smoke.”
Marlene gathered her purse. “Well, it’s been pleasant meeting you, Mr. Blaine. I’m sorry we couldn’t come to an agreement.”
Blaine flapped his hand, waving them back to their seats. “Sit down, sit down. I’m sick and I tend to ramble.” His voice grew sharper. “All right, my direct New York friends, let’s horse-trade. You want a full accounting of how John F. Kennedy was killed, in return for which you will undertake to destroy the original of the film you most assuredly have in your possession. Obviously, I will never myself be a witness before any panel or court. I am, in several ways, beyond the reach of the law. In any case, we are not at a deposition, are we? You are not yourselves here in any legal guise, unless during my recent absence from the bar the threat of blackmail has been added to the armamentarium of congressional inquiry. Our status is thus that of … I won’t say friends … acquaintances, doing one another reciprocal favors. I satisfy your curiosity; you relieve a family I cherish from the threat of embarrassment. Agreed?”
Marlene assented immediately. It took Karp longer. At last, he nodded his head, feeling miserable, as his urge to know triumphed over whatever trace of responsibility to the House committee remained in him.
“Well, then,” Blaine began, “you might trace my involvement way back to the year 1947. The CIA was a new agency, full of piss and vinegar. It was formed, you’ll recall, in the wake of the worst intelligence catastrophe in U.S. history, the penetration of the Manhattan Project by Soviet agents. That the Soviets could, with relative ease, break into the most secret project of all, was on everyone’s mind. Counterintelligence on domestic soil was supposed to be the province of the FBI, but we considered them a bunch of clowns, chasing parlor pinks and harmless socialists under the command of a megalomanic fraud. Putting J. Edgar Hoover up against Lavrenty Beria and his men—it was preposterous! And, of course, we feared even worse penetrations. What if they had a mole in the heart of our political process itself? Such a person, in public office, could do far worse damage than a mere cipher clerk or some such, the sort of people the FBI seemed competent to tackle. So we set up an … informal study group, let’s say, to discuss the issue. I was a member, and my task was to design a program for the elimination by extreme measures of a prominent American politician known to be in the service of the Soviets: assassination, to be blunt. This was all theoretical, mind; we were just playing safe.
“I therefore studied assassinations with great vigor, and came to the conclusion that in the domestic context, there were only three major approaches: one, the feigned accident; two, the sacrificial attentat at close range; and three, the attack at long range, with the assassin escaping. There are problems with all of these. As I’m sure you know, with recent advances in forensic techniques, it is nearly impossible to successfully feign an accident, especially if the victim is important enough to warrant an exhaustive investigation. And the FBI, despite their shortcomings in other areas, are superb in this narrow field. For the sacrificial attack, one needs a madman. Madmen are easy to come by, but difficult to point at the desired target. We tried some … experiments. They were unsuccessful, both with natural and induced mania. The third method has many advantages, both in terms of control, and as a way of sending a message to our adversaries that we are onto their plot. But it shares the disadvantage of the first method. It is hard to get away with it. As I pondered this problem, it occurred to me that a melding, so to speak, of the second two methods might offer a solution. That is, if one committed the actual assassination with a trained professional, and was afterward able to blame it on a madman, one might have the best of both. The work would be efficiently done, and the hue and cry and the subsequent investigation would be truncated by the existence of a plausible dupe. I wrote a paper on this, which was quite well received. That was the origin of PXK. It was quite irregular and so secret that it did not bear a standard code name. As far as the CIA proper is concerned, no such project ever existed.
“To understand the next phase, you have to know that every intelligence agency is plagued by volunteers—individuals who wish to become spies. Virtually all of them are useless for real intelligence work, unstable, maniacal, lazy, or criminal types for the most part, but some of them can be used as pigeons, that is, as false members of a spy network who can distract the attention of counterintelligence operatives, and can be betrayed to them with misleading or damaging information in their heads. Lists are kept of such potential pigeons at foreign CIA stations; I began to keep such a list of American citizens for PXK.”
“Oswald,” said Karp.
“Indeed, Oswald was precisely the type, but of course, I was long gone from the CIA by the time Oswald entered its purview, during his time as a marine in Japan, in 1958. Nevertheless, PXK was still alive. Lists were still maintained, and a marine spouting Marxist propaganda at a top-secret radar base could not have escaped the attention of those who maintained them. Bureaucracy, even invisible bureaucracy, has considerable inertia. The man you know as Maurice Bishop found Oswald’s name and looked him up in Texas in 1962, and cultivated him, using some of our old assets in the White Russian community.”
“Okay, we know you knew Bishop from way back,” Marlene said. “How did he suddenly surface with reference to Oswald and PXK?”
“Oh, Bishop was quite ready to kill Kennedy from the moment the Bay of Pigs invasion was betrayed. He simply didn’t know how to carry it off. He came to me and I told him about the PXK plan and how to find out who was on the current list. There were several potential candidates, but Oswald was by far the best: the infantile Marxism, the megalomania, the propensity for violence, the Soviet defection, even the family link to organized crime. He was perfect. The final joy was when Bishop met Oswald and realized that the man bore a close resemblance to … I believe you know him as William Caballo. It was obvious that we had the germ of a perfect PXK operation.
“The next step was to get Oswald deep into the Cuban exile orbit. He was told that he was being prepared to assassinate Fidel Castro, then we switched him to Kennedy. In fact, he did not care at all whom he was going to shoot. He was in it for the thrill. At last he was being taken seriously by important people and embarking on large undertakings. He was told, of course, to maintain his leftist connections, which he did to the extent he was capable of performing any assigned task. The story Bishop gave him was that as a good leftist, it would be easy for him to get close to Castro, as if even the most incompetent Communist counterintelligence apparat would have taken more than three minutes to see through him. And the Cubans, as poor Bishop learned, are far from incompetent.
“Bishop assembled the other members of the team and gave them the operational names by which you know them. A romantic, Bishop, like so many of the people who entered the CIA just after the war. Of course, PXK gave him the chess theme, so I suppose I am responsible for that bit of fun. The assassination was planned and the necessary arrangements were made, and then everything fell apart. A complete failure.”
“What!” Marlene and Karp spoke in unison.
“I mean, of course, the first attempt. In Miami, 1961. Oswald had wandered off somewhere, and missed the pickup. Bishop was in a rare state. He wanted to scratch Oswald and start afresh with somebody else, but I dissuaded him. I recall telling him that we would never again find somebody with so many of the characteristics we wanted in a lone, deranged assassin. Except the ability to fire a rifle accurately, of course, which we did not in this case require. I suggested Dallas as the next venue. This was in June of sixty-three, just after the Dallas speech was scheduled.”
“But Oswald only got his job in the book depository in October,” said Karp.
“That’s right. The book depository wasn’t part of the original plan. We were exploring ways to work the thing at the airport, or the Trade Mart where he was giving the speech. I had the group up here for a couple of weeks in late August, early September, to work out alternate plans. It was quite professional, with little models of the various buildings and escape routes. Oswald was very impressed. He stayed on for some special training, we called it, in which drinking and willing ladies figured prominently. During that period, Caballo went to Mexico City. We cut Oswald loose on October third, and he went back to Dallas. He wanted money, which we refused to give him. He had to fit into his background we said, he had to get a regular job. He didn’t like that much, but we knew that with serious money in his pocket, he might decide to do anything—go to China, or Australia, or God knows what. As I said, an extremely unstable young man. During the next month, of course, Caballo was also in Dallas, being Oswald, shooting his rifle, for example, buying ammunition for it, making himself memorable, as he had on the bus trip and at the Communist embassies in Mexico.”
“Oswald gave his rifle to Caballo?” asked Karp in disbelief.
“Of course not. Ah, a clarification. Caballo and Oswald had no contact, of course. Bishop kept them strictly apart at the guerrilla operations and during training. It was Turm and Bishop who acted as intermediaries throughout all of this. Turm got the rifle; he admired the weapon and said he wanted to have it checked out by a gunsmith. Oswald was ridiculously proud of that piece of junk. It also gave us the premise for the real assassination weapons.”
“Real … ?”
“Yes. Caballo procured four mint M1938 Mannlicher-Carcano rifles from the same series as Oswald’s own. He cut the barrels down, tuned them up nearly to match standards, and fitted them with folding stocks and high-quality optics. The finished weapons were works of art, a little over twenty inches long and concealable under a jacket when they were folded.”
“But the ballistics still wouldn’t match Oswald’s rifle,” Karp objected. He realized he was treating Blaine like just another Kennedy nut with a theory.
Blaine seemed to realize this and gave him a long, humorous stare. “No, but they’d be close, perhaps close enough for government work, as the saying goes, and of course the ammunition was exactly the same as Oswald’s. In any case, while this was going on, Oswald got the job in the book depository, in mid-October I think, and shortly after that, the White House added plans for a motorcade to the trip. Bishop, through his sources, was able to get preliminary plans for the route, and when we saw where they intended to go, everything fell into place. The other plans were immediately abandoned and we settled on a shooting from the book depository. Perhaps that was foolish, but I balanced the possibility of something going amiss in a more spontaneous plan against the overwhelming advantage of having the shooting done from Oswald’s place of work.
“In the morning, Oswald dutifully brought his silly rifle in his homemade paper sack. The plan called for him to shoot from the second-floor window, from which he had an easier escape route. Just after he arrived, however, Carrera walked in and told him that the plan had been canceled, that the FBI had become suspicious of him, and that he was to hide his rifle on the sixth floor behind some cartons, lie low, and await orders.”
“He bought that?”
“Oh, yes. He was already nervous from his earlier contretemps with Agent Hosty. It was plausible.”
“Not to mention that he was basically a paranoid maniac to begin with,” added Marlene.
“How true,” said Blaine. “In any case he did as he was told. Carrera stayed on the second floor and went to the window.”
“Nobody noticed him?” asked Karp.
“Another Latino man in work clothes in a book warehouse? This was not the Federal Reserve, Mr. Karp; people were coming in and out with deliveries all the time. Caballo came in about eleven and went to the sixth floor. He talked to no one, but several of Oswald’s co-workers saw him and accepted him as Oswald. He removed Oswald’s rifle from its bag and arranged the bag and rifle artistically in the places where they were to be found by the police. He placed three spent cartridges from Oswald’s rifle, brass that he’d secured at the firing range, on the floor.”
“Why three?” asked Karp.
Blaine shrugged. “I have no idea. He was improvising by then. Perhaps he and Carrera agreed that they would only need three shots. Now to the event: the motorcade arrived and made the turn onto Elm Street. Carrera fired first, striking Kennedy in the upper back. Kennedy moved in reaction to that shot, and that threw Caballo’s aim off and he hit Governor Connally instead. A few seconds after that, he fired again and hit Kennedy in the back of the head. Carrera folded his weapon, stuck it under his jacket, and walked out the back. He went one street over, where Guel was waiting for him in a station wagon. Caballo picked up his own spent cases and walked down the stairs and out the back too, with the weapon under his jacket. Unfortunately he was seen doing it, which made for some confusion afterward, since Oswald was at that time having his famous Coke in the second-floor lunchroom. Of course, as soon as Oswald learned that the president—not Castro—had really been shot, he realized that something was desperately wrong. He simply left and went home, without even trying to take his rifle. Naturally, Bishop, who had excellent connections with the Dallas Police Force, was able to leak Oswald’s description and address to them. Unfortunately, they dispatched Officer Tippet.”
“Why unfortunately,” Marlene asked.
“I mean unfortunately for Tippet. Tippet and Oswald knew each other. They were rather birds of a feather, in fact: tough-talking real men with guns. They used to meet at Jack Ruby’s place. Oswald had armed himself and was wandering aimlessly. He now must have understood that all his delusions had come to nothing; he was simply being set up as a fall guy for the assassination. When Tippet approached him, Oswald panicked and killed him.”
“So Tippet wasn’t sent to assassinate Oswald?” asked Karp.
“Not by us, at any rate. No, we had Ruby set up to do that from the beginning. I thought an assassin assassin, so to speak, with organized-crime connections, was a nice touch. The last little item was that Turm went up to Parkland and dropped the magic bullet on a stretcher lying in the hallway. That was, of course, one of the errors; he should have used a banged-up slug; he had plenty, from his target practice with Oswald’s rifle. The other error was the shot from the second floor. A proper autopsy would have recognized that this shot was angled upward and could not possibly have come from the sixth floor.”
“What about the autopsy?” Karp asked. “Did you fiddle with that too?”
“No, in fact, we simply trusted to the incompetence and confusion of the federal government, a never-failing friend. The Secret Service, the FBI, and of course, our own CIA had all been very derelict, which helped prove my theory. Once a plausible patsy was presented to them, moreover, one who had all the kaleidoscopic qualities of Lee Harvey Oswald, every responsible party would join in the effort to enhance evidence pointing to Oswald and suppress any which did not or which pointed back at the agency in question. And so it proved; as you should know, it is proving so yet.”
Blaine relaxed back onto his pillow and closed his eyes. He looked utterly spent. Karp and Marlene waited for him to resume, but instead a dark woman in a nurse’s uniform strode out onto the terrace, nodded at the two of them, smiled at Blaine, and said, “It’s time, Mr. Blaine.” She knelt and released the brakes on the bed, and switched on a motor. Blaine said, “I’m sorry I am unable to continue for the moment. I have to get my oil changed. Perhaps this would be a good time for you to have lunch.”
The mechanized bed rolled off, guided by the nurse. A Mexican in a white coat brought out a tray with an assortment of sandwiches and fruit and set it down on the little table.
They ate without much appetite, speaking little, as if the place were listening, as if Blaine were still there.
An hour passed. The nurse rolled Blaine back to the terrace. He asked how their lunch had been and whether they wanted anything. The treatment he had received seemed to have exhausted him even more. He was speaking very slowly now, with long pauses between thoughts.
“Where were we? Ruby, of course, did his part the following day. He had cancer, you know, and we took care of his family. By that time, the group had scattered. The Dallas police and the FBI combined to make a botch of the evidence. The seed was planted for a thousand conspiracies, of which our little impromptu would appear as just one. I must say, however, that you came as close as anyone to ferreting us out. Bishop was quite beside himself when he learned you had the film and were on to Mr. Mosca.”
Karp ignored the implied compliment. “What about the grassy knoll shot?” he demanded. “Who did that?”
“That? If there ever was such a shot, I’m as much in the dark about it as you. Have you ever seen a bullfight? No? Well, on occasion, people in the stands become so overwhelmed by the event that they leap out into the arena and try to work the bull themselves. They call them espontáneos. That’s what the Grassy Knoll shot was, I believe, an espontáneo, one of the many citizens of Dallas who wanted Kennedy dead. Perhaps it was another conspiracy; we certainly didn’t have any fake Secret Service men about. Or perhaps it was an actual lone nut.” He uttered a hacking chuckle. “Ironic, when you come to think of it. All that trouble, my precious PXK operation, the clever plans, and all we had to do was sit back and watch some idiot Birchers with a deer rifle do the job. In fact, if I were still hale, I could take you on a round of bars and barbecue joints in south Dallas and find half a dozen men who’d confess to being the trigger man on the grassy knoll. It’s a wonder that anyone in Dealey Plaza survived the day.”
Karp asked a few more questions, which Blaine answered with declining strength, about the murders committed as part of the cover-up. Blaine acknowledged them, but did not seem to know the details. He assumed they had been ordered by Bishop and carried out by Caballo.
“What about Gaiilov?” Marlene asked.
“Ah, yes. Very sad, and very coincidental. Do you know that just this morning poor Armand took his own life by means of a shotgun blast to the head?”
“Caballo again,” said Karp.
“Mmm, I rather doubt it. Armand liked the high life. He was a tire salesman and failing at it. Perhaps it was a genuine suicide. So many people die from violence in this country that our occasional additions to the toll are hardly noticed. Some coincidences really are coincidences, you know.”
As he listened, Karp found it oddly difficult to retain his interest: the crime of the century, one of the great mysteries of the ages, and it was starting to bore him. It was like being in a French chef’s kitchen without the possibility of getting a meal, or like sex without orgasm: why bother?
There was a pause, a silence, broken only by Blaine’s labored breathing. Then Marlene said, “Why? Why did you do it? I understand why Bishop and the Cubans did it, but what about you? Why did you want him dead?”
Blaine seemed to recover himself slightly. “Oh, that. He had to be eliminated, my dear. He was a Communist.”
“Oh, come on! Kennedy was, if anything, a right-of-center Democrat, probably to the right of Johnson if it comes to that.”
“Oh, no, I mean he was an actual Communist. A covert agent of the Soviet Union.”
“Wha-a-a-t!” Marlene cried.
“Yes, it was hard for me to believe too, at first. Gaiilov gave me the story in the late forties. He’d been one of Beria’s aides and the old monster boasted about it one night during the war. It didn’t mean much then—who could’ve imagined that this frail little degenerate playboy would become president of the United States some day? But Armand remembered it, and when his own people were after him, and I saved his life, he told me. They’d recruited Kennedy in Prague, in 1939. His father had sent him on a so-called fact-finding tour of Eastern Europe. Pissed the State Department boys off no end. The NKVD leaped at the chance to compromise the son of one of America’s most prominent rightists. They set a honey trap, not the hardest thing to do with JFK, and once he was in the hotel room, they drugged him and set up the cameras. An orgy scene, and not just with girls either. Once he got over his fright, he sort of warmed to the idea. It was a way of getting back at Dad, don’t you know. He hated the old bastard, as who wouldn’t? The Sovs let him sleep for a long time, of course. They had no idea he would become so prominent so quickly. He may even have imagined that with the war and all, the destruction, they might have forgotten. But when he was safely in the White House, they rang his bell. The Cuban sellout was the first payment. The Reds got a permanent base in the New World and the elimination of a bunch of missiles based in Turkey. And it was just the beginning.”
“So you’re saying it was simple patriotism!” said Marlene. “Why didn’t you go to the authorities, for God’s sake, way back then, if you knew?”
“Ah, but way back then, you’ll recall, I had made myself persona non grata with the authorities, because of Dick and the trial. And I had compromised Gaiilov totally. No one would’ve believed him. And, of course, the Prague film we did not have.”
“But Dick Dobbs was a spy and a traitor,” said Marlene. “For all practical purposes, what you did for him released a vastly more damaging agent, assuming for a minute that I believe your Kennedy story. This is patriotism?”
A look of intense pain passed over Blaine’s face, pain that was patently not of the body, pain against which morphine was impotent. “Yes. Quite correct. Of course I did stop what he was doing.”
“Ah, right,” Marlene exclaimed. “You must have turned the FBI onto Reltzin. He always wondered about that.”
“Yes, I did that. And then I broke their case against Dick. All I can say in justification is to quote Mr. Forster: ‘If I had to choose between betraying my friend and betraying my country, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ ” A long breath, a winning smile. “But, as you see, I made it right in the end.”
They didn’t speak at all during the ride back to the airport, not because the driver might have overheard, but because their minds had been thrown off track, and until they had done some thinking they lacked the ground for a meaningful conversation about what Harley Blaine had revealed. Marlene helped herself to several vodka tonics, but when she asked Karp whether he wanted a drink he shook his head and turned away, staring out at the darkening Texas sky.
In the airport lounge, Marlene finally broke the silence. “There are flaws, aren’t there? In what he told us.”
“Flaws? Flaws!” Karp expostulated. “Marlene, there are holes in that fucking story I could drive a tank through. JFK was a Communist spy? Give me a break! The guy’s a fucking maniac, an assassination buff, except instead of saying they did it, he’s saying we did it. Hey, you know what? This shit is enough to make anyone convert to the church of Warren. It’s so simple. One nut, three shots, case closed. But then you start thinking about the flaws in Warren and add on all the coincidences and the bitty little connections and before you know it you’re back at the Queen Ranch. Or in with the Mob, if that’s your fancy.”
“But all the evidence leads to Blaine,” Marlene persisted. “He knew about all the stuff you found, the chessmen … and it fits him, the clever lonely boy who never changed, who never got the girl… .”
“Marlene, cut the Psychology 101 crap! Do you honestly believe that John Kennedy was a conscious agent of the Soviet Union?”
For twenty seconds, Marlene tried hard to make herself believe it, if only for the poetic symmetry of the idea. Then she cursed and rolled her eye, and said, “No, hell, that’s too weird even for me. The interesting question is whether Harley Blaine believes it.”
“Why is that the interesting question?”
“Because this guy is the most fascinating character in the case. Him and Dobbs. Look, in 1950 they were on top of the world. Dobbs could’ve done what JFK did—House, Senate, Presidency. He was just as attractive, nearly as rich, had a better war record, and a lot more brains. Instead, he decided to screw it all up, and JFK walked off with the prize. And the fact that he was decent to Dobbs after the fall probably just added salt to the wound, from Blaine’s perspective. That’s one part of it. The other part is the crazy triangle with Selma—I don’t even want to get into that. So, late fifties—he lost his career, lost his hopes for his friend, lost his great love. What does he have left? Control, manipulation. He convinces himself that this spy gossip is true, about JFK. Hell, people have convinced themselves of crazier stuff. And think how satisfying it must have been when he heard it from Gaiilov! A new focus for his life. And Harley just happens to be sitting on a plan for a failsafe hit on a president. How can he not try it out, and on such a deserving target? The Bay of Pigs fiasco gave him the troops he needed—and the rest …”
“Is history. Yeah, and so what!” said Karp, and then, more vehemently, “I hate this. I hate what we just did, I can’t tell you how much. And I can see you sort of like it. Your clever plan worked, we got the whole story, assuming it wasn’t yet another level of Chinese box, or something a crazy old guy made up out of his head.” He slumped and looked away from her across the concourse. “And it’s something between us.”
“What? You wanted, we wanted to know the story.”
“No! Knowing the story is nothing. The process is what counts. The ritual, the oaths, the witnesses, the … I don’t know, the seeing that justice is done. We’re never going to have that, and that bastard knew that when he set this whole thing up. He’s a lawyer, maybe a great lawyer. Maybe only a really great lawyer could have arranged it so that whatever anybody ever learned about JFK, whatever the suspicions, there could never be closure, there could never be a case. The wound could never heal. That’s his real crime, Mr. Blaine. Christ! Even if we had a tape of what he just told us, what could we do with it?”
“We do have a tape,” said Marlene. She reached into her bag and pulled out a small Sony microrecorder. “A hundred and ten eighty-nine at People’s.”
Karp sighed. “That’s just what I mean. It’s just another story. It’s got no evidentiary context. If I played that thing to Wilkey, he’d laugh me out of his office. Shit, if somebody played it for me, I’d do the same. A sick old guy claiming JFK was KGB? Get out of here!”
“It’d be funny, though, if it were true,” said Marlene. “Dick Dobbs and Jack Kennedy, birds of a feather, sort of like Burgess and McLean, gentlemen traitors.”
Karp welcomed the chance to leave the subject of the assassination. Lately it had started to produce nausea and headache whenever he tried to roll it around in his mind, and he was now fighting a particularly strong attack. He asked, “And so why do you think old Dick did it?”
“Oh, that! Well, maybe he had a crackpot notion that the U.S. shouldn’t get too far ahead of the Sovs in nuclear sub design. A lot of the old atom scientists felt that way, especially during the war. But the main reason, the psychological reason, you should excuse the expression, I think, was to spit in the world’s eye, and maybe in the eye of his best friend, who he’d just found out was fucking his wife. Everybody thought Dick Dobbs was perfect and he couldn’t stand it, so he became a traitor. Perfection’s an unbearable burden, when you think about it.”
“Oh, it’s not so heavy,” said Karp. “I do all right with it.”
She laughed and punched his arm, then leaned against his shoulder and said, “And then there’s Hank Dobbs, betraying his trust, his oath too, to protect his father’s friend.”
“Corruption of blood,” said Karp.
“Say what?”
“Corruption of blood. It’s in the Constitution. In cases of treason, corruption of blood means any kind of civil disability imposed on a family of a traitor. The Constitution says it can only last as long as the life of the person convicted of treason—after that his family is just like everyone else.”
“How little they knew,” said Marlene.
Driving home from National Airport, Marlene asked, “Feeling better?”
“Yeah, I guess,” said Karp, eyes on the road. “I’m resigned to leaving it to the judgment of history. What if we took all our stuff and just buried it in some library? Just a mass of anonymous evidence, everything we learned.”
“Misfile it, you mean? Like under, say, millet production in Hunan 1947 to 1959?”
“Yeah. Somebody will find it someday. I mean, if I give it to Wilkey, it’ll just get ripped off and destroyed. I don’t want that to happen. And for some reason, I don’t want to write a book about it, or give it to an assassination buff.
“Is that dumb? I mean, why bury it?”
“No, I don’t think it’s dumb at all,” said Marlene. “I think it means you still have hope for a better age to come. It’s sweet.”
At the apartment, a worried Harry Bello met them at the door. “We got hit,” he said without preamble. “They trashed the bedrooms and the bathroom upstairs.”
“Did they … ?” Karp began.
“Nah, I had it with me. Me and the kid went out to get Dairy Queen.”
“Where is … ?” asked Marlene.
“I got her sleeping in front of the TV. I didn’t want her to go upstairs. All her toys are wrecked and there’s a lot of blood.”
“That’s why your friend didn’t mind talking,” said Karp. “He figured by the time we got back, all our evidence would be gone.”
Marlene didn’t listen. “Blood?” she cried, digging her nails into her cheeks. “Mama mia, they killed the dog!”
“Other way around,” said Bello. “Come here, I’ll show you.” In the kitchen, he indicated where he was nearly finished mopping up a trail of drying, still gluey blood that led from the stairs to the kitchen door. “And this.” He went to the refrigerator and brought out a package wrapped in a paper towel. “The dog’s fine. It’s back in the closet. I found this there.”
It was half of a human right hand, the thumb and the first two fingers, badly mangled but all too recognizable. Marlene felt her gorge rise and she turned away. Karp had a similar feeling in his gut but forced himself to examine the specimen. “The top of the index finger’s missing,” he observed. “Did you look … ?”
Harry shook his head, opened his mouth, and pointed to it.
Karp collapsed into a kitchen chair. After a moment, he found himself chuckling. “Well, what do you know? Marlene, if this guy was Caballo, your dog ate the actual trigger finger. Is this a historic moment, or what?”
Marlene stumbled to a cabinet, pulled out a flat pint of Smirnoff, got a glass and some ice, and poured herself a shot. She sat at the table and drank it down. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” she said, “but I recall that this is not the first time that we have had human body parts deposited in our actual domicile, is it? Are we doing something wrong?”
“That’s too fat a target for me to even swing at,” said Karp. “I would modify the ‘we’ part, however.”
Marlene stuck out her tongue at him.
Harry asked, “What should I do with this?”
“I don’t know,” said Marlene, “we must know somebody who needs a hand.” She sputtered and sprayed vodka and ice over the table. There followed half a minute of uncontrollable hysterical laughter; even Harry contributed a few throaty guffaws.
Still laughing, Marlene went to the refrigerator and pulled out a large olive jar. She dumped the olives onto the dish and held the jar out to Harry. He put the hand in it, and Marlene covered the thing with Smirnoff.
“Anyone want an olive?” she asked brightly.
They packed their scant possessions and spent the night in a Holiday Inn in Rosslyn. Sweetie stayed in the car.
“We’re going to lose our security deposit,” said Karp as they settled in to bed. “And the bill for this and the airfare is going to wipe out our credit. Too bad about Lucy’s bone marrow transplant.”
“No problem,” said Marlene, “I have my special rosary with the plastic beads full of water from Lourdes.”
“Oh, right,” said Karp, “how could I forget? Seriously, though, what are we actually the fuck going to do?”
“I don’t know, go back to the city. Get jobs. Live in our rapidly appreciating loft.”
“Oh, God! Interviews!” Karp moaned. “Dewey, Rip-off, and Howe. Are we going to be able to stand it?”
“I always liked Cheating, Poore, Widdowes, and Leffing,” said Marlene.
“Hell, you don’t have to worry, your good buddy Bloom will take you back.”
Oh, shit, thought Marlene. It was like the moment when you’re lying on your back after an overindulgence and you know that whatever you do you are going to end up on your knees with your head over the toilet. Marlene sighed and said, “Um, not really.” And it all came out.
Karp considered this for a long moment and then said, “You popped him good, huh?”
“Yeah. I think he lost a couple of caps.”
“Well, that solves one problem anyway.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean he’s gone. I’ll take him out. I’ll find a way. He’ll go. I might let him keep his law license, I don’t know. But it’ll mean we can both go back to work for the DA.”
“You’re not pissed?”
“No,” said Karp in surprise. “Why should I be pissed? You didn’t try to rape him, he tried to rape you.”
Marlene felt the most wonderful relaxation seeping into her body; she felt little demons flying in panic out of her fingertips. She started to giggle. “Oh, dear, we can go back to working our asses off among the scum of the earth. What joy! I’ve never been so happy.”
She stretched languorously and rolled over. “But you know what I’d really like to do, though. I’d like us to live in a classy midtown hotel, with lots of art deco furniture, and solve high-tone crimes that don’t involve severed body parts. Nick and Nora Charles never had to cope with body parts that I can recall.”
“Dear, Nick and Nora were childless, wealthy alcoholics, none of which we are. And they were fictional.”
“But they had a dog,” said Marlene sleepily. “We have a dog. It’s a start.”
“It’s not a start. If you recall, Asta was a cute little thing that Nora could scoop up at a run when she jumped into a cab to chase the bad guy down Fifth Avenue. Your dog is the size of a taxicab. It’s not the same thing. Marlene?”
“Sleep,” said Marlene.
The next day, before they checked out, Karp dressed carefully in a blue suit and went down to the Annex Building to quit, asking Marlene to pick him up at Georgetown University at around noon. He took his raincoat. A front was coming through and the sky was dark and blustery, and rain was falling when he left the metro at Federal Center Southwest.
Wilkey, he learned, was up on the Hill. Karp found a vacant typewriter, hunt-and-pecked out a brief letter of resignation, and left it on Wilkey’s desk. Before leaving, he added to his list of recent crimes against the United States by stealing a case box from the supply room. He transferred the material from the tattered red envelope into the case box and left without a backward look.
Karp stuck the phone message slip back in the box. He read over what he had written and tossed the stack of legal bond into the box too. The other material followed. Carrying his raincoat and the case, he went back into the library archives, row upon row of dusty boxes stacked on steel shelves. He selected a particularly disused-looking section at random and put the case into one of the boxes.
Marlene was waiting for him in her yellow car, just beyond the ornate iron gates. It had stopped raining, or rather the rain had turned into a thick drizzling mist.
“Where to, chief?” asked Marlene.
“Daddy, are we going back to New York?” Lucy asked from the backseat.
“Yeah, baby, but first I want to stop somewhere.”
Karp got behind the wheel and drove across the Key Bridge to Arlington. He took the turnoff to the cemetery. “I’ve never been. I thought we’d pay our respects on the way home.”
He parked in the lot. The mist was thicker in the low land by the river. Lucy was delighted with it and trotted up ahead until she was lost from view and then ran back giggling. “Don’t get too far, Lucy!” Marlene called out.
They stood in front of Kennedy’s grave, with its yellow flame, for a minute or so, in private thought. Then Karp asked, “What about Maggie Dobbs?”
“I was by there while you were in the library. We had tea. I handed over all the material and my notes, except for the film. I think she was glad to see my back, poor lady. But it’s her life.”
“You told her he didn’t do it.”
“Yeah. I mean, what the hell! Why should the dead plague the living?” She addressed the grave: “Including you.”
“What did you do with it? The film.”
“I have it right here.” She patted her bag. “You know, the place is deserted. If Lucy wasn’t running around, we could rip off a quick one right here. On the grave.”
Karp laughed. “Yeah, right. Being him, he’d probably look down and laugh.”
“Up and laugh. If Sister Mary Agnes at St. Joe’s wasn’t just jiving us about mortal sin and the sanctity of the sacrament of marriage, where he is, he’d have to be looking up.”
She stepped forward and took the roll of film out of her bag. She stripped it in long loops off the spool and held an end over the eternal flame. It caught immediately, and the old celluloid stock started burning fiercely. She threw the flaming coils onto the pathway and they watched it, silently, as it turned to indecipherable ashes.