Corruption of Blood

by Robert Tanenbaum

  “Of course,” said Karp, “but they don’t know how we plan to use it. They might even be hoping it’s still buried in that pile of crap they gave the Senate committee. Once it’s out …”

  “Yeah, the shit hits the fan. So what do we have to throw to the dogs?”

  “In the way of progress? Nothing, frankly. The investigation hasn’t really started, because I can’t do any investigating, because I don’t have any money.”

  “Yes, yes, I know that,” said Crane testily. “I’m working on it. But I have to give them a taste, a scent of something that’s worth the budget I’m asking for.” He thought for a moment, leaning back and considering the little dots in the stained acoustic tiles of the ceiling. “How about this? We’ve uncovered conclusive evidence that shows the CIA was involved with Oswald before the assassination. Just that. And that we believe a thorough independent investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency will be a key first step in our work. I could use that in my speech to the caucus. What do you think?”

  Karp made a helpless gesture with his hands. “Hey, what do I know? I told you I was out of my depth here. Sure, try it. It probably won’t make things any worse.”

  They turned then to administrative details, and the meeting lasted only a few more minutes. Crane had a TV interview to go to and Karp had a meeting with Charlie Ziller.

  Back in his office, Karp called Marlene at the Arlington apartment, but she was out. He was glad of that, having urged her for many days now to get out of the house and do something. It was starting to irritate him. She was a few blocks from the metro and a few stops on that from the wonders of tourist D.C., most of which were free or near enough to it. And, God knew, she had all the free time in the world, while he was working eighty-hour weeks.

  Restless, he got up and moved through the warren of offices. Everyone he looked in on seemed to be doing something, although Karp could not have said with assurance what those things were. In the corridor, he spied V.T., dressed for the outdoors in a double-breasted camel hair coat.

  “Going out?” asked Karp.

  V.T. looked down at his coat and then, quizzically, at Karp. “I can see you’re still a sharp investigator. You know, there was a dead rat in my office this morning.”

  “No kidding? A big one?”

  V.T. regarded him bleakly. “Let’s say it was larger than any rat I have found in my office heretofore, and far larger than any rat I expected to find in my office when I graduated from Harvard Law School. No, make that any rat who was not a paying client.”

  “What can I say, V.T.? It’s hell on earth and it’s my fault. Where are you off to anyway?”

  “Away from rat-land, mainly. No, I’m going over to Georgetown to follow up on something. Maybe a lead on Lee’s lost weeks.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, August 21 to September 17. We’ve been checking out the people that Oswald knew at that period and seeing if we can develop any secondary sources—on people like Gary Becker, David Ferrie, the New Orleans Cubans on both sides. Nearly all the principals are dead now. So, in checking out David Ferrie, we came up with the name of a small-time reporter named Jerry James Depuy …”

  “Who got this?”

  “Pete Melchior, our guy in New Orleans. He’s really good. Anyway, Depuy was apparently doing a story on Ferrie, except Ferrie died in 1967. Depuy was well known in New Orleans saloons for bragging about how when his book on Ferrie came out, he’d be rich and famous, and so forth, the usual failed reporter stuff. Nevertheless, worth checking out—he did know Ferrie, maybe Ferrie knew something about where Lee was, that he hadn’t told anyone else but Depuy. But Depuy died too, in seventy-four. Pete went out to his house, and the widow told him that she’d cleaned out all Jerry James’s stuff, and that should’ve been that, another dead end, except I recalled that the Associated Press had a program of checking the estates of reporters who had kicked off and seeing whether they hadn’t saved stuff of historical significance—original notes and so on. The AP also has a JFK archive at Georgetown, full of that same sort of original material and I thought just possibly …”

  “That’s quite a long shot,” said Karp.

  “Long shots are the only shots we have, my child,” replied V.T. “See you.”

  Ziller was waiting for Karp in his office, standing by the desk. The young man offered his usual bright smile. Karp said, “Hello, Charlie,” and sat behind the desk, while Ziller went over to the foul green couch. Karp caught himself looking at the papers and folders on his desk, checking whether anything had been disturbed. Nothing seemed to be, and Karp felt foolish and paranoid.

  “What’s up?”

  Ziller said, “A small victory. I saw Mark Lane today and he handed me this little gem. I think I mentioned it. He got it from a FOIA dump from the Bureau.”

  Karp took the paper. One of the original Warren critics, Lane was to the Freedom of Information Act what Menuhin was to the violin. He could get stuff out of it that seemed impossible for most others.

  “God, it is signed by Hoover!” Karp exclaimed.

  The paper, dated November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination, was a memo from J. Edgar Hoover to FBI supervisory staff, in which Hoover said that the FBI had determined that the voice of the man identifying himself as “Lee Henry Oswald” on a tape recording of a conversation recorded in October 1963, between that man while talking on the phone inside the Soviet embassy to an official of the Cuban embassy in Mexico City, was not the voice of the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.

  “Interesting, huh?” said, Ziller, grinning broadly.

  “You could say that,” Karp agreed. He tapped the memo with a finger. “Do we have this tape?”

  “Unfortunately, no.” Ziller leafed quickly through a thick stack of notes. “According to Lane, and I checked this with the Warren testimony, the CIA claimed that they routinely destroy the embassy bugging tapes every week. Of course, at the time of Warren, nobody knew that the FBI thought it wasn’t Oswald.”

  “The FBI doesn’t have it?”

  “No—according to them. You think the tape itself is critical?”

  “I don’t know about critical, but assuming we had an investigation going here, and assuming we happened to find a guy who was in Mexico City on that day and had some ties with Oswald, or the CIA, and assuming we could get a voiceprint off of him and it happened to match the Soviet embassy tape, we might be in a position to ask the son of a bitch a couple of questions. But since we don’t have an investigation …” He shook his head and flipped the memo onto his desk. “Another one for the files.”

  Ziller asked, “No word on the budget, yet, I take it?”

  “Yeah, the word is soon. Crane’s all excited about going to speak to the Democratic caucus, he thinks that’ll help.”

  Ziller looked startled. “He’s going to what?”

  “Speak to the Dems. Why, what’s wrong? Apparently they invited him.”

  “I bet they did. You realize Flores is gonna go ballistic over this.”

  “Why? Isn’t he a Democrat?”

  “Sure,” said Ziller, “and he’s just going to love having somebody he regards as his personal employee speak to his own leadership and, probably, ask them for a shitload of money, for something ninety percent of them wish would crawl back under a rock. It’s a neat scam, though. I wonder who thought it up.”

  “Scam? You think it’s a setup of some kind?”

  “Most assuredly,” replied Ziller with confidence.

  “But why would Bert … ,” Karp began and then stopped with a curse. He’d had exactly the same thought. “No, I’m not going to get started on this shit. Crane’s the political guru; let him do it his way. Meanwhile, let’s go back for a minute to J. Edgar here. Okay, it’s a day after Kennedy’s shot. The FBI and the CIA are going crazy, they’re running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Who is this schlemiel who just shot the president? The FBI says, ‘Oh, my God, he’s on our list! One of our guys visited him
in Dallas. How do we cover our ass? Oh, yeah, he must be a lone nut, no politics, no spying—that’s the story, stick to it!’ Now over to the CIA. They’re going, ‘Oh, my God, we got a contract with this little fucker. Bury it! Uh-oh, he showed up in Mexico, we got him on tape. No, it wasn’t really him!’ There’s chaos. Helms and the big boys are trying to find out what really happened at the same time they’re trying to cover up the Oswald connection, and cut the trail that leads back to the Cubans and the Mob business with Castro. They’re going crazy and they start to fuck up. A picture of some short, stocky guy who’s obviously not Oswald gets sent to Washington. Then a tape gets sent to the FBI that’s not Oswald either. But Oswald has to be in Mexico—that’s right away part of the legend, he has to be this marginal commie trying to get back to Cuba. Besides, if he wasn’t down there, where the fuck was he? Who was in Mexico City pretending to be Oswald, and why? So all this stuff gets buried. The bus ticket is conveniently found in his stuff by the amazing Marina. It goes into the Warren Report as gospel: Yeah, boss, Ozzie was south of the border.”

  “You think he wasn’t?” asked Ziller.

  “The fuck I know!” snapped Karp. “But V.T. said that Oswald is the key, and it’s true whether it’s the real one or the fake one, if any. This whole cover-up is designed to do just two things: one, make it impossible to determine exactly how and why and by whom JFK was shot, and two, to obscure who and what Oswald was. The things’re connected, and they’re connected through the Central Intelligence Agency. Crane just told me he plans to blitz the Agency for starters, so let’s do it.”

  Ziller nodded after a moment’s hesitation, and asked, “Starting where?”

  “With whoever it was at the CIA who supplied the phony picture and the tape to the FBI. That guy, what’s his name? Two first names. You know—he testified to the Warrens back then.”

  “Paul Ashton David,” said Ziller.

  “Yeah, him. Let’s get him in here and talk to him. Crane wanted something to show to the committee; let’s show them Mr. David.”

  The fourth week in purgatory, thought Marlene as she pushed the stroller down the rutted sidewalk alongside Wilson Boulevard; only a thousand years to go.

  After that evening with Bloom, she had dragged herself to work for a few days, increasingly depressed and ineffective. Of course, she was no longer invited to nice meetings in the DA’s office, and she could not tell anyone why. Not Karp. Not any of the women in the office. Not her relatives. Friends? Well, did she really have any friends? Who would want to be friends with such a degraded slimeball as Marlene? She had called in sick for a day, then a week, and then she cleaned out her desk. Let Luisa run the unit. Let him try and get into her pants.

  On this morning, Marlene was in her full crazy-lady regalia, wearing her brother’s old army field jacket over a red T-shirt she had slept in, and a misbuttoned tan acrylic cardigan. Below this were gray sweatpants and ragged black high-top Converse sneakers. On her head was a venerable New York Yankees hat. Her hair was unwashed and pulled back with a rubber band, and she wore, as she had for some weeks now, the black patch over her missing eye.

  The child in the stroller, in contrast, was immaculately turned out, in a darling lined and belted cherry-colored raincoat, a soft felt hat with a fabric rose in its band, a rust turtleneck jersey with little birdies embroidered on it, nut brown corduroys, red Mary Janes, and fuzzy woolen leg warmers. Lucy’s hair shone and her face was scrubbed pink. The message was clear to anyone with the faintest grasp of sidewalk semiotics: I may be a wreck, but I am not a Bad Mother.

  The two of them were going to a playground Marlene had discovered during an earlier expedition. The playground at Federal Gardens was in her opinion unsuitable even for a kid raised in New York, its equipment rusty and covered with lethal surfaces and its sandbox full of cat turds. Besides that, it was frequented by chain-smoking women in their twenties who came out in hair curlers and tatty bathrobes, and talked with one another about daytime TV and about how dumb their husbands were, and screamed in harpy voices at their grubby kids. Marlene had rediscovered the difference between being Bohemian and being white-trash poor.

  As mother and daughter rumbled along they sang, or rather Marlene sang and Lucy pitched in when she knew the lyrics. They sang Lucy’s favorite rock classics: “Heart of Gold,” “One-Trick Pony,” and “Hotel California,” all of which Marlene considered to be superior to “Itsy-Bitsy Spider.”

  They arrived at the playground, which was built off a side street to the main boulevard, and which served a newish middle-class district of large wooden or brick homes, the kind that have black metal carriage lamps in front of them, to indicate that the owners could afford a coach-and-four if they so desired. The playground equipment was new and artistically woody. Big aircraft tires were also used, for climbing and swinging, and to contribute the proper environmentally responsible effect.

  There were several women and children in the playground when Marlene and Lucy arrived. Unlike the women in Federal Gardens, these were either well dressed in conservative sweater and slacks combos or obvious nannies: one black woman and two Latinas. The nannies sat separately and stared dully at their charges. The four mothers chatted on a bench. Marlene sat on a bench with the black woman, who was young, thin, and wore a pale green uniform with a pink cardigan draped over her shoulders. A baby slept wrapped in woolens in a large gleaming maroon baby carriage, which the nanny jiggled from time to time with a white-shod foot.

  Marlene stretched out her legs gratefully and pulled a cigarette pack out of her bag. It was turning into a fairly nice day. The sun was a bright coin shining down through the leafless maples and there was no wind. Lucy had gone immediately to the sandbox and was playing happily there with her Barbie and her lavender My Little Pony. Two husky boys of five or so were constructing piles and ditches with Tonka trucks and shovels. They ignored her, and she them.

  Marlene lit her Marlboro, blew out a cloud of smoke, and gradually became conscious that the nanny on the other end of the bench was looking at her.

  Marlene nodded. “Nice day,” she observed.

  “Sure is. I can’t stand it when it rains all day and you get cooped up in the house. Say, I left mine back at the house … would you … ?” She gestured toward her mouth.

  Marlene moved closer to her and handed her the pack and matches.

  “I ain’t seen you around here,” the nanny said after lighting up. “Where you work?”

  “I’m sorry, work … ?”

  “Yeah.” The nanny cocked a hand toward the sandbox. “Where’s the kid live?”

  Marlene pointed vaguely. “Oh, east of here. Off Wilson.”

  The woman looked Marlene over and chuckled. “How you get away with that? They cut me loose I showed up dressed like y’all.”

  Marlene shrugged. “Different strokes. I guess it makes them feel liberal, I dress like I want.”

  “You lucky, girl. People I work for—they like, Lincoln didn’t free no niggers. But they pay pretty good. How about y’all? You makin’ it?”

  “Barely,” said Marlene. “My husband got a job down here and we just moved.”

  “Yeah, I’d move too, but I ain’t got the coins yet. Good thing, though: I got my mama here. She watches my two, and I watch the white folkses’. But not for long. Jerome, that’s my husband? He got a job in a factory down in Raleigh. I save up enough, we gonna all move down there, get me a good job, maybe a house.”

  “You sound like you’ve got your act together,” said Marlene.

  The woman grinned, showing a flash of gold. “We just startin’ in, sister. They got a community college in Raleigh. I figure I could study X ray technician. That or dietician. Get me a qualification, a AA degree, you know? And then, while I’m working, my husband’ll go to school.” She went on in this vein for some time, and Marlene was content to let the chatter wash over her, sitting in the weak sun and smoking and watching the children play. Time drifted by.

  The nanny sto
pped abruptly, and smiled sheepishly at Marlene, as if embarrassed to have blown too loudly on her own horn. “You could do that too, you know,” she said. “Go to school. You speak real good English. Them over there”—she motioned to the Latina nannies—“they some kinda Guatemalas. Hell, I don’t even think they speak Spanish. So, how long you been here?”

  “In Washington?”

  “No, the country. The U.S.”

  “Um, oh, years and years.”

  “Where from?”

  “Ah, Palermo?”

  “What’s that, one of them islands?”

  “It’s on an island.”

  “Well, if you don’t want to be watching other folkses’ kids all your life, go to a school. Get you some qualification—”

  This useful advice was interrupted by a loud shriek from the sandbox. One of the little boys had snatched Lucy’s My Little Pony and, sporting the bully’s nasty grin, was dangling it by its long acrylic mane. Lucy stood in front of him with her fists clenched. “That’s mine! Give it back!” she yelled. The boy ignored her and started to twirl the toy horse around by its hair. Lucy made a grab for it and the boy pushed her hard in the chest. She staggered back a few paces, and looked over at Marlene, who had tensed but hadn’t moved.

  Lucy dropped her raincoat, crouched, adopted the boxer’s stance she had been taught from infancy, took two steps forward and hit the kid twice in the mouth with straight left jabs. Startled, the boy dropped the pony and threw a roundhouse preschool right. Lucy checked this easily with her left, stepped in close, and crossed a solid right to the nose. And again. Blood spurted and the kid collapsed howling in the sand. Lucy picked up her My Little Pony and began unconcernedly currying the sand from its tresses.

  The mother of the wounded child now came racing from her klatch, crying “Jason! Jason!” and swept up her kid, who was now blue with howling and still pouring with what the sportswriters used to call claret. The woman pulled a wad of tissues from her pocket and held it to the child’s nose. After a few minutes, she put the still-sniveling boy on the ground and leaned over Lucy menacingly. “Did you see what you did!” she shouted, grabbing Lucy by the shoulder and waving a finger. “You made Jason bleed. You’re a very naughty, naughty girl.” Lucy looked at her wide-eyed, and then over at Marlene, who was up and over to Lucy’s side in a flash.