Corruption of Blood

by Robert Tanenbaum

  “Next, commies: Oswald claimed to be a Marxist nearly all his life. Whether true or not, he certainly made the marines believe it and he did move to Russia and then married the niece of a Soviet Interior Ministry official.”

  “And he went to Mexico and tried to get to Cuba,” added Karp.

  V.T. paused and gave him an odd look. “Yes, so it seems. Although … no, let’s not get into it now. Where were we? Yes, the anticommies. In Dallas, Oswald was welcomed with open arms by a group of violently anti-communist White Russians, like George de Morenschildt, Viktor Bezikoff, Armand Gaiilov, and others—not something you’d expect them to do for an actual Red. Also, on his return to New Orleans in 1963, Oswald hooked up with Gary Becker, a notorious right-winger, and Becker apparently recruited him to infiltrate pro-Castro student organizations. That seems to be the origin of the famous Fair Play for Cuba incident. Oswald hands out pro-Castro leaflets and gets into a scuffle with anti-Castro Cubans and gets arrested. He even goes on the radio to debate some anti-Castro Cuban about communism. Unfortunately, when he printed up the leaflets he used the address of Becker’s organization, the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean, 544 Bank Street, on the pro-Castro leaflets. Very odd. Finally, there’s the Sylvia Odio incident. Three men identifying themselves as members of an anti-Castro organization show up at the Odios’ Dallas apartment one evening in September 1963. Odio’s dad is a big anti-Castroite and a political prisoner in Cuba. Two of these guys are Cubans, one’s an American who calls himself Leon. They talk a lot about killing Kennedy because of how he betrayed them at the Bay of Pigs and after the missile crisis. When Kennedy is shot the next month, Odio IDs ‘Leon’ as Oswald. Everybody who’s ever talked to Odio swears she’s right on, but of course Warren discounted her evidence.”

  “This is old stuff, V.T.,” said Karp. “What’s the point?”

  “Wait. Now we come to the CIA connection. Oswald works at one of the most secret bases in the military, Atsugi, Japan, where they launch U-2 spy planes against Russia. He has a secret security clearance. Atsugi also happens to be the regional CIA center. At this time, although Oswald is boasting he’s a commie and a Russian spy, nobody does anything about it. In fifty-nine he gets out of the marines, and despite the fact he has almost no money, he somehow gets the fare to fly to London. Then he gets to Helsinki in some way on a day when there’s no commercial London-to-Helsinki flight, crosses over by train, goes to Moscow, and talks with an embassy official with strong CIA links. He defects, works in Minsk for a while, marries a Russian girl, redefects to the U.S., all without an instant’s difficulty with passports or transit. This is in an era when famous people are getting their passports pulled for even the faintest pink associations. The capper to all this is that Marina Oswald paints a picture of her late husband as a feckless schmuck who could barely keep a job, just the kind of nutty loner who typically assassinates presidents of the United States. The guy apparently has no talent at all, except a talent for making big, powerful bureaucracies do anything he wanted. Oh, yeah: one other useful little skill. He can be in two places at once. In the month before the assassination, nearly a dozen witnesses have placed Oswald in interesting places—a firing range shooting his rifle, a rifle repair shop, a garage, a gas station—at times when we know he was somewhere else. And in all those places whoever it was made sure that people would remember him as Lee Oswald.”

  “You’re buying the double-Oswald story?” asked Fulton.

  “I don’t know. It’s one explanation of the facts, with the only other one being that a bunch of unconnected people, solid citizens, lied in concert for no reason. But that’s not crucial at the moment. What is crucial is that whoever Oswald really was, he’s still the key to the mystery. All the threads cross on him, and that’s why the most exciting thing we’ve uncovered so far is this document actually naming him as a contract CIA agent.”

  Fulton stood up and stretched. He said, “Well, you know, V.T., this is all very fancy, but I’m just a simple street cop. Maybe before we elaborate any theories we should locate this guy, what’s-his-face, Veroa, and have a chat with him. And the wise guy, Mosca. That’s what I’m gonna get started on, as soon as I come off the drunk I’m gonna go on now for getting into this pile of shit in the first place.”

  “While you’re at it,” said V.T., “you could find out what old Lee was doing from August 21st to September 17th, 1963. The whole FBI was trying to find out his daily activities from his date of birth to the time he died, but nobody’s ever been able to determine where he was or what he was doing for those twenty-seven days. Marina, naturally, says he was napping on the couch, but nobody else saw him during the period in question. All we know is that he was in the country on Labor Day; he visited his aunt.”

  “His aunt, huh?” Fulton chuckled, a rumbling noise that could be by turns delightful or threatening. Now it was somewhere in between. “That the same aunt that was seen coming out of the manhole on Dealey Plaza with the silenced forty-five? I’ll check it out—it sounds like a real break.” He left.

  V.T. stared at the closing door. “He’s pissed off. Not at me, I hope.”

  “No, but like he said—he’s basically a street cop. He gets nervous when he doesn’t know the players or the neighborhood.” Karp rose, walked over to the greasy window, and stared out at an unpleasant vista of railroad tracks and freeways.

  “Speaking of neighborhoods, this is the worst view available from any federal building in the area. Whoever decided to put us in this dump knew how to make a point.” He stopped as a familiar scratching noise sounded behind one of the walls. “It also probably has more rats per square yard than any building they had available.”

  “The FBI used to be here.”

  “That explains it,” answered Karp with a brief laugh.

  V.T. did not join in. Karp looked more closely at his friend. Newbury met his gaze briefly and then turned his eyes away, as if ashamed at what they might reveal. In the moment Karp had seen something he didn’t like, something he had never seen in the man before. Exhaustion? No, like Karp, he had gone through the same murderous training in the old criminal courts bureau, and he had always turned up in court crackling fresh with a jest on his lips—he was famous for it. It was something deeper—a psychic depletion, the investigator’s equivalent of the thousand-yard stare that afflicts infantrymen too long on the line.

  “You look beat,” Karp offered. “You should take the rest of the week off.” A joke; it was Friday afternoon.

  V.T. said, “I am beat. This defeats me. I believe I’ve contracted Oswald’s Syndrome. Symptoms: a chronic and progressive inability to discern fact from fiction and role-playing from personality. Distinguishable from common psychosis by the odd fact that the underlying structure of reality gradually comes to mimic the imaginary world created by the sufferer. An occupational disease of spies, counterspies, and the people who study them. Speaking of spies, did you ever hear the odd story of Evno Azev? Doesn’t ring a bell? Well, around the turn of the century Azev was the most successful terrorist leader in Russia and the head of an anarchist band called the Terror Brigade. These guys carried out dozens of successful assassinations of public figures, including the minister of the interior, von Plehv, and the czar’s own uncle, the grand duke Sergei. In 1908, however, it was revealed that Azev was also a senior agent of the Ohkrana, the czarist secret police. He was planning all those assassinations, see, to get in better with the terrorists, so he could betray the terrorists. So it turned out that the chief antiterrorist agent was, in fact, the best terrorist of them all. When he was exposed, in fact, the terrorist movement totally collapsed. What am I getting at? Well, compared to Lee Harvey Oswald, and his many confreres, old Evno was … I don’t know—who’s authentic any more? Martin Buber? You? Maybe Oswald was his own double.”

  V.T. got up and placed the CIA papers back into a folder. “I think I will take the rest of the week off. And perhaps more. Call me when we get a budget.”

  “Yeah,
right. But aside from this new stuff, what else can we do meanwhile?”

  “Find out who Bishop is,” said V.T. “Although how to begin doing that I have no idea. Aside from that, we’re dredging through the Senate material, making lists of follow-ups from the Warren stuff, Phelps is trying to get his hands on the autopsy photos and X rays … but it’s all indoor sports. We need fresh stuff that hasn’t been dragged over a million times, stuff from the field, stuff from new material, like this.” He rattled the papers in his hand. “And without a settled budget …”

  “Yeah, I know. We can’t do serious investigation.”

  “Any word on when we’ll get one?”

  “No, but I have a meeting with Crane later today. That’s on the list. And I’ll tell him about this CIA stuff, too. Maybe he has some ideas.”

  V.T. started to leave.

  “Take care of yourself,” said Karp. “And be careful with that material. There’s only three copies and I don’t want any more made.”

  “Leaks?”

  “That, and theft.”

  V.T. mimed an elaborate terror, clutched the file to his breast, and scurried out crabwise, looking rapidly from side to side over his shoulder.

  When Karp arrived for his meeting, Crane was engrossed in a newspaper, cursing under his breath. “Did you see this shit yet?” he demanded, tossing the paper across his desk. Karp took it and read the obvious story, a short piece above the fold on the front page, headlined “Congressmen Balk on ‘Police State’ Tactics of Assassination Committee Chief.”

  “It’s started,” Crane said bitterly. “Yesterday I had a closed-session meeting with the full committee. I finally got them to focus on getting this damned show on the road and outlined my approach. Those two old bastards must have been on the horn to the press the minute I walked out of the room.”

  Which particular two old bastards Crane referred to, out of the many in Congress, was made clear by the article. Congressmen Peller and McClain expressed “grave alarm” at the plans disclosed by the committee’s chief counsel to use a variety of investigative devices, including phone taps, concealed taping, lie detectors, and voice stress analyzers, in the course of the investigation.

  “Big on civil liberties, are they?” Karp asked when he was done reading.

  “Don’t make me laugh! Peller was some kind of hanging judge down in Alabama and McClain is an ex-Un-American Activities Committee lawyer. They wouldn’t know a civil liberty if it bit off their left nut. No, there’s something else going on. I mean it’s unique; I’ve been blasted plenty in the press for things I’ve done, but I’ve never been blasted for things I might do. What it is, somebody’s running scared and they’re putting on the pressure. I wish I knew who it was.”

  “I think I might have an idea who,” said Karp after a moment’s thought, and he told Crane briefly about what was in the new CIA documents. Crane grew increasingly excited as the story unfolded. “That’s terrific stuff, Butch. It’s our obvious line of inquiry. And you’re right—somebody must have leaked to the committee that we’ve got something solid linking Oswald to the CIA.”

  “So our next move is?”

  “Subpoena the bastards. Helms and the rest of them down to the cipher clerks. Grill ’em. Wave their own damn documents in their faces.”

  “Why won’t they stonewall it, like they did in sixty-three?”

  “Let ’em. We’ll hit them with contempt citations. Somebody’ll crack, when they’re looking at jail time. Not the big boys maybe, but the little fish. This is great! We can start weaving a real net.”

  “Um, I hate to bring this up, but with what for money? Weaving is fine, but I got no weavers. I need investigators in the field, with travel and phone and equipment budgets to support them… .”

  “That’s coming,” said Crane irritably. “Bea is working up the formal budget, and I’ll submit it to Flores by close of business today. He’ll read it over the weekend, present it to the committee next week, and I’d expect closure on it no later than a week from now. I’ve asked for six and a half million. That’ll support nearly two hundred people for both assassination investigations.”

  Karp was stunned. “That’s a lot of money,” he said, thinking that the typical homicide in New York was solved by two good cops with some minimal canvassing and lab work. The JFK business would need more, being spread around the country, but … Tentatively, he suggested, “Will they give us that much? I mean, if we had just a little to start, we could make some progress and then go back for more.”

  “That’s not the way I work,” Crane said with some force. “They asked me what I needed and I told them. If they don’t want to shell out, it’s on their heads.”

  To which Karp generally agreed; still, his political warning lights, dim and unreliable bulbs though they were, had started to flash. Crane was supposed to be the political mastermind of the project, but even Karp understood that a time when you were in trouble in the press was not exactly the best time to ask for a huge shitload of money from a guy who didn’t like you in the first place.

  The thin man did not have to wait long at the landing strip. Just after the appointed hour, he heard a droning sound and the DC-4 broke out of the clouds over the mountain and landed in a cloud of red dust. He waited while some crates were unloaded and then entered the plane and strapped himself into an uncomfortable jump seat jutting from the bulkhead.

  The flight to Guatemala City took forty minutes. He walked from the military section of the field to the commercial terminal. There was a ticket waiting for him under the name he gave the girl at the Avianca counter, and he took the regular evening plane to Miami.

  There was a man there waiting for him outside of customs, a short Latin man in sunglasses (though it was night) and a flowered shirt worn outside his pale lemon trousers. They went to a blue van parked outside and drove from the airport down LeJeune Road to Eighth Street, Calle Ocho, the heart of Little Havana, where they turned left. In a few minutes, they arrived at the driveway of a house painted apricot with white trim. The thin man from Guatemala got out of the van and went into the house.

  In the living room, a good-looking older man of about sixty rose from a sofa and extended his hand in greeting.

  “Hello, Bill,” he said, smiling. “Welcome to Miami. Long time.”

  “Hello, Bishop,” said the thin man. “Yes, a long time. Years.”

  SEVEN

  “I can’t believe I did that!” cried Marlene in anguish. “I yelled at a secretary. In public!”

  She was in private now, in her tatty little office, with Luisa Beckett, her deputy. “What happened?” asked Beckett.

  “Oh, nothing, just stupidity. I was in a rush to get to court to answer motions on the Schaffter thing, People v. Melville, and I just reached into the drawer and grabbed the red-tabbed file that’s supposed to have all the motions and responses in it and of course I didn’t check it and when I got there I looked and found it was full of Q and A’s. No motions.”

  “Marva mixed up the tabs again.”

  “Right. And so I got chewed out by the judge, who was fucking Hannegan, who hates me anyway, and I had to run back here and get the motions and run back and get there all sweaty like a kid on his first day in criminal courts. And of course got snickered at by all attending, and then I got back here, and Marva and Beverly were lounging around comparing nails, and I guess I just lost it. “Good Christ! I called her a … a… .”

  “Not a dumb nigger, I hope,” said Beckett.

  “No, a stupid bitch!” wailed Marlene, and pressed her face against her desk, with her arms wrapped around her head.

  “She’ll get over it,” said Beckett soothingly. “Don’t take it so hard. Everybody gets mad sometimes. You’ve been under a strain.”

  Marlene looked up. “Yeah, I have. So have you, so has everybody on the staff, so has fucking Marva, probably, but we don’t all carry on like that. Face it, I’m losing my mind.”

  “No you’re not,” said Beckett a
utomatically. Marlene stared at her more closely, searching her face for signs of the sort of patronizing looks people use to calm the loony down before punching 911. But Beckett seemed merely embarrassed. As well she might be, Marlene thought miserably. One of the very rare black female ADAs, and Marlene’s protégée for the past four years, Beckett was a rail-thin, pale tan woman who might have been extruded from Kevlar, and who had never been observed to exhibit any emotion except fury at rapists. Marlene figured there was a personal story behind that, but she had never asked and Luisa had never volunteered. They were close comrades on the job, but not really friends.

  Marlene swallowed hard and said with a sigh, “Oh, I’m being a baby. I didn’t mean to lay a trip on you. Just, lately—it’s like someone’s running fingernails over my blackboard all the time. I can’t relax. I’m obsessive. Like this filing system that Marva screwed up. Did I really need it? I don’t know—I sort of got on all right before I set it up. I mean, I was never famous for losing stuff. But lately, I feel everything’s slipping away, that if I don’t keep track of things, minutely, everything will sort of dissolve—I’ll dissolve, or crack, or fall into little pieces… .”

  Her voice died away. Great! Now Luisa would be positive her boss was crazy. Marlene’s face colored with embarrassment. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Beckett, looking at her impassively, as if waiting for this display of weakness to be over so that they could get down to business again. A good prosecutor, Beckett, but not much of a confidante.

  Marlene cleared her throat and said, as briskly as she could manage, “So. You came in here for a reason, right?”