Corruption of Blood

by Robert Tanenbaum

  Newbury cocked his head and looked at Karp out of a narrow eye. “You’re joking, right?”

  “No, I’m not. You should do it. We’ll have a ball.”

  “But I’m a funny-money man. Fraud is my life.”

  “The People rest,” said Karp.

  V.T. laughed, sputtering around a mouthful of champagne. “What? You have the brass to suggest that the Warren Commission and the concept of fraud can possibly exist in the same universe of discourse? It was printed in the Times! Walter Cronkite—”

  “Will you?”

  “Of course,” said V.T., without an instant’s hesitation.

  The party wore on. People drifted away, leaving the hard-core fun lovers, who became more raucous, as if hoping to make up in noise what was lost in numbers. The sun went down; the lights were doused and replaced with candles. Around nine, Karp slipped into his private office and sat down behind his desk. He began rummaging through the drawers, extracting personal items.

  There were few of these, or few that he wished to retain, at any rate. A block of clear Lucite in which was embedded a round from an AR-16 that had been removed from his shoulder after an unsuccessful assassination attempt. A softball signed with the names of all the team members, and by Francis Phillip Garrahy, the year the DA’s team had won the city league championship. He rose and assembled a carton taken from a stack Connie Trask had provided. He thought he would not need more than one.

  Off the wall came his law school diploma and his New York bar certificate, and a framed photograph his friends had signed and given him when he had first been appointed to the homicide bureau back in Garrahy’s day.

  The door opened and Marlene came in.

  “What are you doing lurking in here?” she said, swaying slightly. She was nicely drunk.

  “I’m not lurking, I’m cleaning out.” He handed her the photograph. “I’m taking this for inspiration,” he said.

  It was a grainy reproduction of a famous World War II photograph, the charge to destruction of the Pomorske Cavalry Brigade during the Nazi blitzkrieg against Poland. In the foreground were several German tanks, and coming toward them out of the smoky distance was a long line of horsemen in white tunics and schapskas, waving pennoned lances. The gift was meant as a comment on fighting homicide in New York.

  Marlene looked at the relic, and at her own signature prominent on the bottom. “You still feel like that? Charging the tanks?”

  “I don’t know. Lately, I’ve started to see myself as being on the other side—more panzerlike. I guess I don’t like it.”

  “I thought I was supposed to be the intractable romantic in this family,” said Marlene petulantly. “You’re supposed to be the solid one. You’re supposed to be there for me.”

  Karp laughed at that and tapped the photo. “Wait—I thought I was the romantic Polish lancer, dashing into danger.”

  “Yes, but a dependable romantic Polish lancer, who helps with child care and does dishes.”

  Karp laughed again and went on with his packing. Some personal books and a few papers went into the carton. He walked to the line of bookcases that held the records of his hundred or so murder trials. He pulled out a few at random, and then put them back. “I’ll have to get Connie to pack these and send them home.”

  “God, you’re really doing it!” she said, amazement in her voice. “It just now hit me, watching you pack.”

  “Yeah, packing makes it real. I still have trouble believing it.”

  “Leaving everything …”

  “Not quite everything. V.T.’s coming along to run the research side. I think Clay Fulton’ll go for it too.”

  “How pleasant for you,” she sniffed. “Butch and his gang. What more could a boy want?”

  “You could get on the staff too, you know, if you hadn’t made up your mind to be a pain in the ass about this. We could all be together… .”

  “I’d scrub floors before I’d work for you again.”

  “You don’t have to work for me,” said Karp heatedly. They’d been through this before. “You could get a slot with Joe Lerner on the MLK side.”

  “If you ask him to hire me.”

  “Yeah! What’s wrong with that?”

  “It sucks is what’s wrong with it,” snapped Marlene, this unhelpful comment being the only way she could bring into words the complex of emotions that whipped her about when both Karp and career occupied the center of her thoughts. She knew she was a decent prosecutor, and had helped to revolutionize the handling of rape and child abuse crime in Manhattan, but she also knew that she was no Karp. Karp had over a hundred successful homicide prosecutions, Karp had been featured in a New York Times Magazine article as the iron man of the fight against crime, Karp had been appointed a bureau chief by the legendary Garrahy. And Karp was higher than she was in the hierarchy of the DA and always would be, and at some level of her mind anything she achieved in her career lay under the shadow of bimbohood: beautiful Marlene—she got where she is through the bedroom.

  That this shadow was largely of her own making did not in the least diminish the pain it caused her. She could not tolerate the thought of starting a legal career again in a new city where she did not wish to live, among strangers, where she had not even the modest reputation she possessed in New York, and where she would obtain her job on her husband’s recommendation. A bimbo in Washington, like those “secretaries” kept by congressmen you read about in the papers—it was not to be endured.

  Karp finished his packing and closed the carton. “Want to go?” he asked. She looked at him and writhed inwardly and then shook her head as if to dispel the oncoming fog of depression. In her saner moments, she was honest enough to realize that it was not Karp’s fault that she felt this way, nor his fault that he was a superstar, a workaholic, a job-obsessed, macho son of a bitch…

  “What’s wrong,” said Karp, struck by her odd expression.

  “Oh, nothing,” she said, going toward him. “I just realized I’m going to miss you.” The music from the other room had turned slow.

  “Let’s dance,” she said, and they shuffled, locked together, weaving around the furniture.

  V.T. Newbury walked into Karp’s Washington office, three weeks after his blithe agreement to take the Kennedy job, and immediately stifled a number of second thoughts. Karp looked up from his desk, which was covered with a stack of gold-stamped blue volumes, some open, some closed, all festooned with scraps of markers made of torn yellow bond. He smiled wanly.

  “Good, you made it,” said Karp.

  “I did.”

  “Any problems getting away?”

  “There was gnashing of teeth from one end of Manhattan to another. Three wine merchants closed their doors and the family went into mourning. Again.”

  “They don’t like you going to Washington?”

  “They love me going to Washington, but they were thinking of something more along the lines of deputy assistant secretary at Treasury. Where did you get this furniture?”

  “It came with the job. Like it?”

  “It’s very forties. You look like General Wainwright on Corregidor.”

  “I feel like it too. Have a seat, V.T. It’s been sprayed for insect life, I think.”

  V.T. sat on Karp’s couch, an object made from the skin of a large puce nauga. You could still see where it had been shot, the holes now oozing fluffy white stuffing.

  “Your office is next door,” Karp continued. “Fulton’ll be across the hall.”

  “He decided to come?”

  “Yeah, another divorce in the making. He’ll start next week.”

  “Do I get furniture as nice as this, or is yours special because you’re the boss?”

  “As a matter of fact, I think you have a wooden desk. I saved it for you because I know you’re the kind of guy who appreciates the little touches. The drawers don’t open, but luckily we happen to have an unlimited supply of these unassembled gray steel shelves”—here Karp gestured at several long
brown cartons stacked against his walls— “so that shouldn’t be a problem. The good news is we’re not being paid.”

  “We’re not?”

  “So it seems. They’re fucking around with our budget on the Hill. Me and Crane and Bea Sondergard … did you meet her? Good lady. We’re all on per diem and you and Clay will be too, until we get it straightened out. That means a hundred and twenty-five dollars each and every day we work, no sick leave, no vacation time, no benefits. Sound good?”

  “Irresistible. But what about the staff? If we can’t hire …”

  “Well, actually, we can’t hire, not yet. The commit-tee’ll be staffed with people detailed from the Hill and from various federal agencies. That’ll get us started, although we sort of have to take pot luck about who we get. I’m sure we’ll get sent the very best people, and not the shitheads every agency in Washington has been trying to dump for years. Besides that, Bea informs me that if the per diem account runs out before we get a budget, we won’t get paid at all. Not to mention, if this goes on long enough, we won’t have anything in the account to pay our experts.”

  “That’s nice,” said V.T. “How am I going to run a research operation without experts?”

  “Get with Bea on that. I don’t think she actually intends to commit fraud, but she runs pretty close. It’s a matter of juggling, according to her. Everybody does it.”

  “Everybody does it! How often I’ve heard that in court, just prior to sentencing! Tell me, am I to gather from this that the sun of approval does not exactly shine from Congress on this enterprise?”

  Karp grinned. “You could say that. But as Crane keeps telling me, here we are.”

  “Here we are indeed. So what should I start with meanwhile?”

  Karp pointed at his desktop. “You see all these nicely bound blue books? The Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, in twenty-six volumes. The Warren Commission.”

  He rummaged through the stacks of books on his desk, jerked one out, and tossed it across to V.T. The rest of them slumped into a new configuration, like geological strata during orogeny. “I’m on volume twenty. Here’s volume one, the report proper, eight hundred eighty-eight pages of crisp prose. The rest is hearings and exhibits. You’ll have your very own set pretty soon, I hope. Meanwhile, don’t lose my notes.”

  “Read the whole thing, huh?” said V.T., hefting the volume he had just received.

  “For starters. Then there’re the critics. I’ve collected the essential ones: Lane, Meagher, Josiah Thompson, a couple others.” He pointed to a steel shelf lined with books. “Read them too. They’ve done a lot of work and raised some interesting questions. You’ll see my notes on them—feel free to make your own. When you’re finished we’ll get together with Clay and map out a strategy for the investigation.”

  V.T. said, “Sounds right.” He paged through the book on his lap. “So. What’s your take so far?”

  “Um, let me keep that to myself for now,” said Karp after some thought. “I’d like your viewpoint without you knowing what I think. But, obviously, if there weren’t serious problems with this beast”—he tapped the pile of blue books—“we wouldn’t be here, would we?”

  “No, I guess not,” said V.T. “It’s hard to believe we are in any case. John F. Kennedy! It certainly stirs the old memories. You know, I met him once.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, on a sailboat. I was something like twelve, so it must have been fifty-three or fifty-four. My uncle Tally Whitman had asked me on a sailing vacation on his boat, basically to keep my cousin Frank company. He was about my age and the problem was that Frank’s sister, Maude, had invited a friend from Brearley along, and Tally didn’t want the kid ganged up on by two seventeen-years-old girls.

  “Well, we set out from New Haven, where Tally kept the boat—he had a beautiful ketch, an Alden design, a forty-eight—the Melisande, it was called. Of course, in the first five minutes I fell desperately in love with Effie, the Brearley friend—who was by the way a raving beauty, in love in the way you can only fall at twelve. We gunkholed along the North Shore for a week and then crossed over to the Vineyard, and put in at Vineyard Haven. And there were the three Kennedy boys and some friends in the next slip. A bachelor outing; they’d come across from Hyannisport that day.”

  “So you met him,” Karp broke in. He liked V.T. a good deal, but he had a limited patience for his stories about life in high society, with endless glosses on who was related to whom, and who did what to whom at Newport in the year whatever.

  “Yes,” said V.T. “I had no idea who they were, of course, but Uncle Tally had been at school with Bobby, at Choate. I was allowed to serve drinks, life’s finest moment up until then. Frank was nauseated, of course. Well, I was probably a colossal bore to them all, because all I had to talk about was sailing, which I did in the most pompous way imaginable, and I must say they were nothing if not polite. The afternoon, however, wore on, and the gin flowed. I was an efficient little barman. Then I began to notice something very disturbing. I was a sheltered youth, of course, and at twelve my sexual knowledge was at the schoolboy giggle stage, but it was clear to me that Jack Kennedy was making eyes, as we then called it, at the delicious Effie. And hands, too. And she was reciprocating. I was astounded, and devastated. I mean he was an old man.”

  “So did he bonk her?”

  “Not that I saw. I’m sure that Uncle Tally would never have allowed it, not on his watch. Of course, he might have bonked her thereafter; apparently he bonked everybody else. In any event, it was decided that we should race across to Hyannis the next morning, and we did. The Kennedys were good sailors, of course, but Tally was an Olympic-class skipper and I worked my young butt off, as did Frank and the girls. And we whipped them, by three boats. Jack was not amused. I mean it was ridiculous; he was really angry, red-faced, screaming at Teddy about some goof. A man who didn’t like to lose. As he proved in later life, too.”

  V.T. put his hands in his pockets and looked out the dirty window. “Here’s the kicker: ten years later, I was at Yale, a chilly afternoon, I was getting ready to go out in a single scull, when the crew manager came running down the ramp yelling that somebody’d just shot the president. At first I thought he meant the president of Yale. There was a radio going in the boathouse and a bunch of us sat around and listened. When they announced that he was really dead, I went back out onto the ramp and pushed my scull into the water and rowed until I was exhausted. And I’ll tell you the truth, all I could think about was that day on the Vineyard when he made a drunken pass at a seventeen-year-old Brearley girl. Incredibly shaming and inappropriate, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. That and this weird fantasy, about flying back in some way to my twelve-year-old self in the cockpit of the Melisande and grabbing him by the shoulders and shouting, ‘Forget the girl, asshole! November 1963: don’t for God’s sake go to Dallas!’ ”

  V.T. let out an embarrassed laugh and made a gesture of helplessness.

  Karp smiled and indicated with a wave of his hand the office, and by extension the ramshackle investigation. “I guess this is the next best thing, then.”

  “Sad to say,” said V.T. “Sad, sad to say.”

  In the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, a man received a disturbing phone call. It was a journalist calling; remarkably, this journalist was not seeking information but supplying it. The CIA has this sort of relationship with quite a number of journalists, both domestic and foreign.

  “Are you positive?” asked the CIA man.

  “Positive,” replied the journalist. “I got it from one of Schaller’s staff guys. They were blown away when they read them. Schaller doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind.”

  Schaller was a leading member of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities—the Church committee.

  The CIA man cursed briefly, then said, “This will take some controlling. All right, what�
��s your take on Schaller’s options?”

  The journalist replied, “I think he’ll have to use the Castro stuff but he had some of that already, and it all leads to dead ends. The other thing, the JFK items … I don’t know. It’s not exactly in his line of study, and he doesn’t want to look like an asshole a couple of months before election. I think he’ll pass it on.”

  “What, to Flores’s operation?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Which is not going anywhere.”

  “Which is definitely not going anywhere.”

  The CIA man thought about this for a while and then said, “Still, I’d like some insurance.”

  “Anything I can do … ,” offered the journalist.

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  After getting off the line, the CIA man made a call to the head of the little team that had prepared the documents for the Senate Select Committee’s subpoena, and gave him the reaming of his life. Then he called several other people, including a former CIA deputy director for operations, and told them what had happened. None of them was pleased.

  After that, he sat for a while, humming, tapping a pencil, making mental plans, and weighing risks. The first rule of secrecy is that every time you let someone new in on the secret, you increase the chances of exposure by a factor of two. Too many people knew about this thing already, and so if he wished to mobilize people to suppress the inadvertently leaked knowledge, it made sense to use only those who knew the story already. He went to a locked filing cabinet, unlocked it, and drew out a worn notebook. Opening it, he found a telephone number.

  He dialed it, and while he waited for the call to go through, he locked the notebook away again.

  It took a good while for the call to go through and then the CIA man had to make use of his still-fluent Spanish. Finally, in the town of Quetzaltenango, in Guatemala, a phone rang.

  FIVE

  In the weeks that ensued, Karp each morning left his furnished two-bedroom apartment in Arlington, took the metro to Federal Center, walked to the office, and there spent his days largely in reading. He had finished the Warren material and was now slogging through the recently released Church committee report on intelligence. The office of the Select Committee staff continued stinking of fresh paint and plaster dust, and still sounded with the thumps of heavy equipment being moved about. Increasingly, Karp was running into people he did not know, who claimed to work for him, or almost to work for him. He had nothing as yet for these people to do, which did not seem particularly disturbing to them, since they all seemed to have other jobs of some sort. There was a good deal of motion in the hallways, typewriters and Lexitron printers clattered away, people trailed reels of phone wire, telephones rang, and were occasionally answered. Crane was rarely in the office, as he had a series of private legal commitments still outstanding in Philadelphia. Karp had no idea what was going on.