Marlene wasn’t listening. She was still staring at him and the expression on her face was not pleasant.
“What?” said Karp.
“You rat! This isn’t about the floor, or Lucy, or how hard I work. They offered you a job in Philly and you want to take it and move and you’re afraid to just come out and say it.”
Karp felt his face steam in embarrassment. A denial sprang to his lips, but, to his credit, he suppressed it. He was a rat.
“Well?” pressed his wife. “Did they?”
He nodded.
“And you want to take it.”
He nodded again.
“Christ! What I hate is having to worm stuff like this out of you like you were a little boy. Why don’t you just come up to me like a real person and talk about it?”
“I don’t know,” answered Karp, meaning that he did know. “I guess … avoiding. I really started wanting this and I knew there was going to be an incredible explosion when I told you and I was just easing into it. I’m just basically slimy that way.”
“I’ll say! So spit it out already. What is it, a glossy partnership with the white shoes, down in Philly there?”
“No. It’s a government job. In D.C.”
“Huh? Schmuck! Darling! You already got a government job. What, you just developed a sudden interest in federal crimes?”
“No, it’s with a congressional committee, working for Bert Crane. The House is reopening the Kennedy assassination case and they want me to be in charge of it, Crane does.”
Marlene was sipping at her wine when this emerged and her snort of amazement sprayed a purple mist over the nearby area, including Karp.
“I’m sorry!” she sputtered. “That was unexpected. Let me hear that again: they want you to find out who killed Kennedy?”
“Yeah. What’s wrong with that?”
“It’s looney’s what’s wrong with it,” she laughed. “I mean, I knew you were a caped crusader, but …”
“Marlene,” said Karp, his tone strict, “it’s a serious investigation: A lot of new stuff has come up.”
“Oh, yeah? Like what?” She waited. After a silence and some uncharacteristic fumfering by Karp, she added confidently, “They didn’t tell you, did they? They sold you a pig in a poke. And you bought it.” She struck her forehead to indicate the extent of her amazement.
“I can’t believe it! Especially you. Jesus, Butch! It’s like some mutt said, ‘Hey, let me walk on this one and I’ll give you Mr. Big,’ and you let him walk and then you called him up, hey, Mr. Mutt, how’s about coming down and talking about Mr. Big?”
“Bert Crane isn’t a mutt, for Chrissake, Marlene!”
“No, he’s a lawyer,” Marlene shot back. “I rest my case.”
They glared at each other for an uncomfortable few seconds. Then Marlene rose and went to her closet, where she shed her working outfit and put on a T-shirt and Osh-Kosh overalls and flip-flops. Then she began putting together a meal. Karp drifted into the kitchen. Wordlessly she put on the butcher block in front of him a tin colander loaded with washed salad ingredients. Karp got a salad bowl and tore and cut the vegetables into bits. Marlene threw a mystery casserole into the oven.
They ate a silent meal. Marlene put the little espresso maker on the stove. They listened to it hiss. Then they both said “Look” simultaneously, which made them smile.
Karp said, “Your ‘look’ first.”
“Okay, look … I’m sorry. I’m sure what’s-his-name thinks it’s a great honor to get picked for this job, and maybe you do too. I shouldn’t have pissed all over it like I did. But … we got to work stuff out like this together, Butchie, like a team. We got to think it through together, the pros and cons, for all three of us, what’s best—you know? That’s all I’m saying.”
“Okay,” said Karp. “I should’ve been straight about it. I’m a cryptic son of a bitch, all right? But … if what Crane suggested to me checks out, if we could really crack the assassination …” He waved his hands, speechless before the magnitude of those “ifs.”
“Big time, huh?”
“Not just ‘big time.’ If you want to know, it’s mainly not working for the clown anymore. It’s eating me up. Crane’s a real guy. It’d be like Garrahy again.”
Marlene took the little silvery pot off the stove and poured herself two ounces of tarry liquid into a squat clear glass cup. She put half a cube of sugar into her mouth and slurped the coffee past it until the sugar was all gone.
“Well. You shouldn’t be eaten up. Except by me, of course.” She smiled, faintly, not the real Marlene thousand-watt room-lighter, but a smile, and welcome.
“I haven’t said I would yet, Marlene,” Karp said, smiling back. “It’s still not a done deal.”
“I see in your eyes it’s a done deal, babe. You want it, you oughta go for it.”
He reached across the table and grasped her hand. “Okay. That’s good. I’ll call him tomorrow and tell him we’re coming. It’ll be okay, Marlene. Moving—it’s not the end of the universe or anything.”
“No, ’cause I’m not moving.”
He cocked his head as if he hadn’t heard her. “What?”
“What I said. Go do it! I’ll keep a candle burning in our little home against your return. I mean, how long can it take, solve the crime of the century? For you? Couple of weeks, tops.”
“Marlene, this is serious… .”
“Yeah, you keep telling me. I’ll tell you what else is serious. Ripping our life apart is serious. Dumping my career. Taking Lucy away from her grandparents and everybody she knows. Leaving our home. Serious stuff, and what’s the most serious is that I can tell you haven’t thought much about it. You hear crime of the century and Bert Crane, another solution to your perpetual lost-father complex, and you’re off and running, and let old Marlene deal with the little details.”
“That isn’t fair, Marlene.”
“No, you’re right, it isn’t. How about you springing this shit on me? Hey, babe, I got a job in D.C., pack it up! That’s fair? Look—you can’t stand working for Bloom? Fine! There’s four other DAs in the city, plus two federal prosecutors, and half a dozen other county prosecutors within commuting distance. Not to mention, I hear there’s one or two private law firms in New York. I don’t recall you beating on those doors, you can’t stand another minute of Bloom.”
Karp stood up abruptly and walked a distance away from her, his hands thrust deep in his pockets. He was angrier with her than he’d been in a good while. It was the sort of rage we experience when we have been selfish under the guise of some pretended generosity, and have been found out. Naturally, what he said then was, “You’re really being selfish, Marlene.”
She opened her mouth to say something, closed it, took a breath instead, and knocked back the rest of her wine. “I’m going to bed,” she said, and walked off.
“We haven’t finished this, Marlene,” said Karp.
She stopped and turned. There were tears in her eyes but her voice was steady. “No, but in a minute you’re going to bit me with ‘A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.’ And I agree. A man’s gotta. But a woman doesn’t, and neither does a little kid. Don’t forget to write.”
The next day, Karp called Bert Crane and told him he would take the job. Crane made enthusiastic noises of congratulation; they sounded tinny and unreal coming over the phone, and made Karp feel no better. He had a taste like bile in his mouth and his stomach was hollow and jumpy. He was stepping into a void.
Next, he went up and saw the district attorney. Bloom was sitting behind his big, clean desk, in shirtsleeves and yellow suspenders, puffing on a large cigar. He was a bland-faced medium-sized man who might have been an anchor on the six o’clock news. He had nearly every qualification for his job—a keen political instinct, the ability to generate ever-increasing budgets, a cool hand with the ferocious New York media, and a positive talent for bureaucratic management. All he lacked was an understanding of what the criminal j
ustice system was supposed to accomplish and even the faintest ability to successfully try cases.
Karp stood in front of the desk and told Bloom that he was leaving and where he was going. To Karp’s great surprise, Bloom seemed stunned and dismayed. He gestured Karp to a chair.
“What’s wrong? I thought you were happy here. You got your bureau. You’re doing great things… .”
Karp had trouble finding his voice. At last he said, “Well, I’ve been here a long time. I thought it was time to move on. And the challenge … Kennedy …”
“Crane, huh? What’s he paying you?”
Karp told him.
Bloom said, “Tell you what—it’ll take some screwing around with personnel, but I think I can beat that.”
Karp felt his mouth open involuntarily. “Um … it’s not really a money thing. It’s just time for me to do something else.”
Bloom chomped on his cigar and frowned. “You’re making a big mistake, my friend. You’ll dick around down there for a year or so until they get tired of stirring the pot and they’ll get you to write a fat report nobody’ll read, and then where are you? Out on your ass.”
“Well. I’ll have to worry about that when the time comes.”
Bloom shrugged and blew smoke. “Think about it,” he said.
Karp said he would and walked out. The feeling of weirdness, of being in a waking dream, continued unabated. Bloom being nice to him, Bloom offering him a raise, was, more than anything he could think of, a sign that his life had irrevocably changed.
In the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, a small group of men is sorting through stacks of paper. The paper has been removed from filing cabinets throughout the Agency in response to a subpoena duces tecum from the Church committee, a body established by the United States Senate to investigate certain suspected excesses of the CIA. They are obliged by law, and as federal employees, to comply with this order to yield documents, and they are complying, if reluctantly. The men have been trained in strict secrecy since early adulthood, and more than that, they have been trained to be judges of what must remain secret in order to protect the national security, and more than that, they have come to believe that they themselves are the best judges of what the national security is.
Two of the men are working with ink rollers and thick markers, blotting out the sections of these documents deemed too sensitive for the eyes of United States senators. Some documents have had nearly everything but the addresses and the letterhead blotted out in this way. They have done this many times before and are good at it.
One man walks among the desks, picking up piles of finished documents, indexing their reference numbers, and placing them in a carton for delivery to the Senate. It grows late, but the CIA is, of course, a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week operation. Nevertheless, these are all senior employees and not as young as they once were, when several of them were actual spies. They are anxious to see their suburban beds.
The man picking up the documents yawns, shares a slight joke with one of the men at the desks, and picks up by mistake the wrong pile, a thin stack of paper comprising four brief documents that were by no means ever intended to be seen by senators without being reduced to illegibility. He indites their numbers on his list, tosses them into the carton on the floor, and moves on.
THREE
Karp disliked flying, not because he was afraid of crashing—at this point in his life he might have enjoyed a quick immolation—but because airliners are not constructed with the Karps of the world in mind. From the moment he sat down in his seat to the moment he arose at flight’s end, the leg-jamming angle imposed by the cramped coach seats always produced a continuous dull ache in his bad knee. He stared out the window at greasy-looking clouds. It had been raining at La Guardia when he boarded the shuttle and the pilot had just announced that it was raining at National as well. The weather suited his mood. For the past week he and Marlene had maintained a climate of chilly formality: overcast, with no sign of clearing.
The plane lurched and dipped a wing and Karp’s window showed woolly whiteness, then glimpses of landscape, a brown, oily river lined with autumn trees; now the famous sights jumped into view, the Monument and the Capitol dome, always a little shocking to see in real life, rather than on the little screen. Another lower swoop across the Potomac and they were down at National Airport.
Karp had been in Washington only twice before, once during a high school class trip and again to give a speech on homicide prosecution to a seminar at an annual meeting of prosecutors. He recalled steamy heat, bland food, large groups of people endlessly walking. The old tag came into his mind, “A city of southern efficiency and northern charm,” and then with a little jolt he remembered that John Kennedy had said that, and here he was in that city to study the man’s death. It made him feel mildly light-headed.
He stepped into a cab at the hack stand and gave the driver the address Crane had given him. Looking out the window as the dripping scene whirled by, he tried to orient himself. It was not easy, even with reference to the little map of the District, encased in plastic and affixed to the back of the driver’s seat, which all Washington cabs must carry to show the fare zones. Orientation in Manhattan makes few demands on the intellect; it is like living on a ruler: uptown, downtown, East Side, West Side. The absence of this in other metropolises often produces a form of vertigo in longtime New York residents, that and not being able to find a decent loaf of rye bread.
So it was now with Karp. Over a bridge, across some parkland studded with monuments glowing dimly through the drizzle, through some meaningless streets, and to the door of an unprepossessing office building on Fourth Street off D: the old FBI Annex.
He took the elevator to the sixth floor and entered a scene of noisy disorder. The hallway was redolent with fresh paint, and workmen were moving desks and chairs along on dollies, stacking them in a great jumble at one end of the hallway. Karp eased around the mess, stepping carefully over the spattered drop cloths until he came to a door that bore a neat hand-lettered sign:
HOUSE SELECT COMMITTEE ON
ASSASSINATIONS
CHIEF COUNSEL
This gave on a large room full of cartons and desks and chairs scattered at useless angles. Several women dressed in jeans and casual tops were unloading cartons into steel file cabinets. A telephone technician was up on a ladder poking into a hole where a ceiling panel had been removed.
“You must be Karp,” said a clear, high voice behind him.
Karp turned and saw a thin middle-aged woman in jeans and a T-shirt, her white-blond hair done up in a neat bun. She wore large round glasses and had a pleasantly bony face.
Extending her hand, she said, “I’m Bea Sondergard. Bert’s waiting for you.”
Karp shook the hand and followed her down a short hallway.
She said, “What a mess, huh? Bert wanted to get started in D.C. as soon as possible. The federal government is not used to starting operations in a week. Or a year.”
She knocked briefly and threw open a door. Bert Crane, dressed in chinos and a worn blue Brooks Brothers shirt, was sitting on a secretary’s chair in the center of a large corner office, using a stack of cartons as a desk.
He looked up expectantly. “Phones?”
Sondergard shook her head. “Definitely by Thanksgiving—no, really, the guy said pretty soon. Look who’s here.”
Crane rose and greeted Karp. “Welcome to Washington. I wish I could have received you in more splendor. The furniture’s on order; God knows when it’ll get here. We have no phones, and I’m not sure we’re being paid.”
“Aside from that … ,” said Sondergard.
Crane grinned. “Yeah, aside from that. This is what’s known as hitting the ground running. Look, here’s the plan. I have to make some calls, assuming the phone starts working. Bea will get you started on the paperwork to get you on board. Then we’re due over at the Rayburn Building for a meeting with the chairman, show
him you can walk and talk and don’t drool. Then I’ve got a lunch with some media people, and you’re free until, let’s say, two; get back here, and we’ll talk. You should be able to catch the four o’clock shuttle.”
“Sounds good,” said Karp.
Bea Sondergard ushered him out and into her own cramped office next door, where, Karp was not surprised to see, all was in order: a desk, several chairs, a brass lamp with a shade, a typing table on which was a Lexitron word processor, and on one wall, several sheets of white chart paper displaying carefully printed lists of things to do, and flowcharts showing the order in which they were to be accomplished. The woman quickly found a manila file and handed it to him. In it were the forms without which the government would not recognize the existence of its servants. On each of the forms there was a little typed note explaining which forms were most important and offering pithy advice on what to put where.
“Very thorough,” said Karp, again not surprised. He realized, of course, that Bea Sondergard was one of the anonymous, self-effacing, and ruthlessly efficient people, almost always women, almost always in their middle years, who hold the fabric of modern civilization together by sheer force of will. There must be at least one in every organization, and in order to have any sensible interaction with a bureaucracy, the first step is to find out who she is. Bea Sondergard was the one in Crane’s outfit.
“Thank you,” said Sondergard. “I trust you won’t have any trouble with all that. We’re exempt from civil service because we work for Congress—obviously Congress isn’t going to burden itself with the nonsense they make the rest of the government go through—but it’s twisted enough as it is. Getting purchase orders and stuff through the comptroller—God knows when you’ll be able to get furniture.”
Karp looked up from “Mother’s Maiden Name.” “What’s wrong with the stuff in the hallway?”
“Oh, that! It’s just garbage the previous tenants declared surplus. It’s going out to Maryland for storage or disposal tomorrow.”
Corruption of Blood Page 4