Corruption of Blood

by Robert Tanenbaum

  This can’t go on, she thought, and lit a cigarette from the butt of the one she was smoking—a bad sign—but what could stop it? She wasn’t going to sink down into ultimate depression; the crazy scene at the Dobbses’ showed that well enough. But was she going to keep on being naughtier and naughtier until something broke? She thought of Maggie Dobbs and the mad laughing in the greenhouse …

  “It’s a lady,” said Lucy. Marlene took the receiver, knowing that it was Maggie calling, ready to give her “this is amazing, I was just thinking about you,” and was oddly shocked to hear instead the voice of Luisa Beckett.

  After some stilted preliminaries, Beckett said, “The reason I called, I thought you’d want to know. Morgan got sentenced on a 130.65, three counts. Max of fifteen.”

  “Oh, honey, that’s terrific!” cried Marlene. The 130.65 was first-degree sexual abuse, a Class D felony; the baby raper would be away for at least seven years, if he survived at all at the very bottom of the Attica pecking order.

  “Yeah, well, I thought you’d like to know. It was your case.” Luisa’s tone was dull and tired, and vaguely guilt-making.

  “So. How’re things?”

  “Okay. You know, the usual.”

  Marlene brought up some cases, as conversation, but Luisa did not seem to want to converse. Why the hell had the woman called anyway? What did she want, an apology for leaving them in the lurch? For fucking up? Marlene persisted mulishly, picking at the scab.

  “What about that mobster, Buona-something? What happened with him?”

  “Buonafacci. We’re not handling that anymore. Your old buddy Guma’s got it.”

  “Guma? Why’s he got it? It’s a rape case.”

  “Yeah, well he must’ve pulled some strings with narco or one of the real bureaus. They figure they can hold the rape over him, Buonafacci, and he’ll help them out somehow. Don’t ask me, I just work here.”

  There didn’t seem to be much to say after that. Marlene finished the call feeling, if possible, worse than she had before it. The dog was howling again. Marlene got Lucy dressed and threw on her own rags in a concentrated fury, scattering sparks and cigarette ashes over everything, leaving the breakfast dishes in the sink, which she herself considered the very lowest level of sluthood, and was just wheeling the stroller out when the phone rang again.

  “This is amazing,” Marlene said to Maggie Dobbs. “I was just thinking about you.”

  Karp noticed the change when he walked in that evening. There was music playing, one of Marlene’s tapes, and instead of the sour old-paint and steam-heat smell that was the base pong of the Federal Gardens, the apartment was redolent with the perfume of a Marlene dinner in preparation—garlic, onions, oregano, wine—that and patchouli incense, also a Ciampi trademark.

  Lucy came dashing out of the kitchen and leaped into his arms. “Daddy, we went to the zoo!”

  “Really? Who did you go with?”

  “Um, Laura, she’s my friend. And a lady. We saw monkeys. They were throwing their poop!”

  Karp carried her into the kitchen, where Marlene was setting the table with the cheap ware provided by the building management. There was, however, a bunch of yellow mums in a mayonnaise jar in the center of the table, and there was a checked red-and-white paper tablecloth. Two green Coke bottles held tall candles. Karp put his daughter down and leaned over and kissed his wife.

  “I’m impressed,” he said.

  “You like it? You don’t think it’s too Lady and the Tramp? Pathetic?”

  “Not at all. Are we celebrating something?”

  “No, why? Oh, you mean why the switch from Blanche DuBois to Betty Crocker?” Leaning down to check the oven. “I just had a nice day, and I thought, after reading the Post, that you probably didn’t have a nice day, so I thought maybe I would take vacation from self-pity and make a real dinner and have some wine and pretend that we’re still alive down here.” Interruption by Lucy on the subject of the great apes. Microlesson in natural history supplied.

  “Who’s this Laura?” Karp asked.

  “Maggie Dobbs’s six-year-old. Maggie called me up and invited me for a day at the zoo since we got this nice break in the weather. So we went.”

  “She came here?”

  “Of course not. I have some pride left. No, I arranged to meet her at the Rosslyn metro and she came by in her big blue Mercury wagon and off we went. Lucy and Laura fell in love. We saw the zoo, we went shopping in a nonpeckerwood supermarket up on Connecticut, where I bought real food. What can I say? It was magic.”

  “You like her? Maggie Dobbs I mean.”

  “Yeah, she’s okay. Not my usual type of pal, but nice. Sweet-natured, generous. Funny too. I think she’s a little dominated by the congressman. He’s real ambitious, wants to be a senator or in the cabinet, for starters.

  Anyhow, it’s a lot of pressure on her, parties, waving to the crowds, doing good works. She showed me how to wave to a crowd for two hours without your arm falling off. It’s a real technique.” Marlene demonstrated, also miming a fixed and glassy smile, through which she said, “I think dinner’s ready.”

  So it was. They ate: meat-stuffed shells with sauce and cheese on top, salad with roasted peppers, and a bottle of reasonable domestic red. Lucy nodded off at the table. They stashed her in bed and moved to the living room, and sat on the tatty couch and finished their bottle.

  “Well, this is indeed very similar to real life,” observed Marlene, sighing contentedly. They sat in their old companionability, speaking of the day’s events. Marlene mentioned her call from Luisa, Karp talked about the film and his meeting with Crane. Suddenly he broke off and looked directly at her, his gaze intense.

  “All right. Now that you got me drunk I’m going to make a confession,” he said. “It was a serious mistake coming here, taking this job. You were right and I was wrong. It’s totally fucked. Crane is going to be out on his ass in a fairly short time and then I don’t know what I’m going to do. I screwed up and I screwed you up and I’m sorry.”

  Marlene, who would have given anything to hear this a couple of months ago, found herself curiously unaffected, and certainly nowhere near a disposition to gloat. She snuggled closer to her husband and said, “Well, it could be worse. Maybe we both needed a break from the DA, and this is better than a stretch in a mental hospital.” Laughing. “Marginally better, anyway. You think the investigation is totally fucked?”

  “I don’t know. I think there’ll be a narrow window for doing decent work between now and when whoever comes after Crane clamps down. Something could break.”

  “You don’t think you’ll get the slot if Crane goes?”

  Karp considered this for a moment in silence, thinking about Harrison’s offer. “I might get it offered but I don’t know if I’d take it. I think it’d come with too many strings. It’s a political job, and I probably wouldn’t be much good working the politics of it, not even as good as Bert, which as we now know isn’t good enough. I mean, what I am is a prosecutor. That’s all I really know how to do.”

  “Well they definitely have the right film,” said Bishop over the phone. “And one of their investigators is headed for Miami to see Veroa.”

  The thin man turned the sound down on the movie he was watching on television and repositioned the handset against his ear. “Do we need to do something about Veroa?”

  “No, Veroa’s solid. I doubt he’ll identify me with what we have hanging over him, and he doesn’t know the rest of it at all.”

  “Others do.”

  “Yes. Although I’d say there are no more than two who could be damaging enough in the short run to require extreme intervention,” agreed Bishop.

  “So you want me to …”

  “No. Not yet. Let’s see what emerges.”

  “You’re cutting it close. If they find out about P—”

  “Shut up! For God’s sake, man, this is an unsecured line. And yes, close is how I like to cut it. As you should know.”

 
ELEVEN

  Karp stood in front of the counsel’s table and looked down at the witness. Behind and above Karp sat Flores and four other members of the subcommittee, barricaded by their high dais. From his chair at the first witness table Paul A. David projected an air of irritable boredom. The bony face with the heavily ringed eyes told all who watched that a hardworking public servant was being subjected to unwarranted abuse.

  Karp almost believed it himself. The guy was good, you had to give him that. Karp had ducked a million lies from culprits of various types in his career, but he could not recall a more bland and skillful liar than Mr. David. David was sticking to the same story he had given the Warren people. A man identifying himself as Lee Harvey Oswald had arrived in Mexico City on September 27, 1963. Thereafter, he had gone to the Cuban embassy and asked about a transit visa to Cuba; when told he had to go to the Soviet embassy for clearance, he went there too. The CIA had photo surveillance of both places and telephone taps and wall bugs as well. Oswald’s voice, asking about applying for a visa to visit the Soviet Union through Cuba, had supposedly been recorded on tape, and the tape shipped to CIA headquarters.

  “And what happened to this tape, Mr. David?” Karp asked.

  “As I’ve said many times before, since we had no idea Oswald would become important later, the tapes were routinely destroyed by recycling, approximately a week after they were made.”

  “That would be early October? Assuming, of course, that the call was made on or about October 1, 1963. Yes? Good. Now let’s turn to the photographic evidence. It’s clear that the photo forwarded as being Oswald bears no resemblance to Oswald. Why was that?”

  “It was a mix-up,” said David in a tired voice. “Our cameras had malfunctioned.”

  “All the cameras at both Communist embassies broke down just as Oswald walks in? In all the time he was in Mexico City flitting back and forth among the embassies, you don’t have a single clear picture of him?”

  “Yes. As I said, we couldn’t know he was going to be important.”

  “So, no pictures, but you did have a tape of his voice. That’s how we know he was in Mexico, right?”

  “Yes, that and identification by people working in the Cuban embassy.”

  “Yes,” said Karp, “all those identifications. Well, obviously someone went to Mexico City and asked about those visas, and got his voice recorded. Mr. David, are you aware that shortly after the assassination, and a full month after you have testified that this tape was destroyed, the FBI listened to that tape and concluded that it was not the voice of Lee Harvey Oswald?”

  You had to give him credit. He didn’t blink. “I’m not aware of that,” he said.

  “So the tapes were in fact not destroyed.”

  “They were destroyed.”

  “Not according to J. Edgar Hoover,” said Karp, brandishing a photocopy of the FBI memo. It was entered into evidence and David was given a chance to study it.

  “So,” Karp continued, “if the tapes were routinely destroyed as you claim, Mr. David, how do you explain the FBI listening to them a month afterward?”

  “I can’t explain it,” said David.

  “Does the CIA have a copy of this tape still in its possession?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Then who, if you know, ordered this evidence destroyed, after Lee Harvey Oswald became a suspect in the murder of President Kennedy?”

  “I can’t answer that,” said David.

  “What does that mean?” asked Karp sharply. “You haven’t the knowledge or you refuse to share it with the committee?”

  Then occurred the oddest thing that had ever happened to Karp in the course of questioning witnesses. David said, “I don’t care to answer any more questions.” Then he rose, turned, and walked out of the room.

  Karp gaped, his brain frozen. He thought inanely of calling out to David to stop, and checked himself, thus avoiding seeming even more of a fool than he now felt himself to be. Flushing pink, he looked frantically up at the dais. There was no help there. Flores was conferring with Representative Morgan. The other members seemed bemused, including Dobbs, who was staring vacantly at the door closing behind David.

  “Mr. Chairman,” said Karp at last, “I think we have cause for a contempt citation here.”

  A frown and a significant pause. “The subcommittee will take this under advisement. Call the next witness.”

  Who was an official of the FBI; as it turned out, he didn’t know where the tape was either.

  When the hearings at last adjourned, Karp returned to the Fourth Street building in a foul mood, bit the heads off two junior staff who approached him with minor problems, and retired to his office, seething. Crane was not in. Sondergard was closeted with a trio of suits from the comptroller general. V.T. was with the photo analysts.

  Karp tried to get interested in a report about nuclear magnetic resonance as a technique for comparing bullet fragments and found himself reading the same paragraph for the third time.

  He was not, it appeared, interested in nuclear magnetic resonance. What he was interested in was Paul Ashton David. The man’s face swam into his mind’s eye, its calm assurance irritating even in memory. And something else about it, something he couldn’t pin down. A face from the past?

  He shook these maunderings away and refocused on how to nail David’s slick CIA ass to the wall. On this too he was drawing a blank. The problem was secrecy. If the CIA was allowed to be the sole judge of what could be revealed and what could remain hidden for reasons of national security, then the committee might as well hang it up. Karp was willing to bring it to the test of a subpoena, and he thought that Crane would back him on it. The CIA people might claim that their oath of secrecy took precedence over the obligations under a testamentary oath. Fine—they would jail David on contempt charges, and then get the next guy in line and jail him, and so on. Obviously it would be subject to judicial clarification, maybe even a Supreme Court case. Karp started to feel better. He got out a pad and began making notes for a succulent piece of legal research.

  The phone interrupted him.

  “Butch? Clay here. I’m at National, just got in. Where do you want me to bring Veroa?”

  “He’s with you? How is he?”

  “He’s fine. Doesn’t say much. Didn’t give me any trouble about coming up either. Kind of a mild chubby little guy, an accountant. Doesn’t strike me as much of a terrorist leader. You sure we got the right guy?”

  “What did you expect, a slouch hat, flaming eyes, a beard, and one of those round bombs with a smoking fuse? Believe me, he’s no sweetheart. I tell you what—stick him in the TraveLodge down the street—no, why don’t you bring him over to the office. I want him to watch our movie.”

  They arrived forty minutes later. Veroa did indeed look like an accountant: tall for a Cuban, about five-nine, mustached, with thick black-rimmed glasses and a soft-looking pear-shaped body. Karp went into the file room, and from a locked file in a drawer labeled Administration Forms withdrew the spool of film. He called Charlie Ziller in to run the machine. Fulton, Karp, and Veroa grouped themselves in front of the screen while Ziller cranked the film up to the point marked by the little paper slip. The screen lit up on the road through the swamp.

  “This is you, right, Mr. Veroa?” asked Karp when the right frames came by. “Freeze it right here, Charlie.”

  Veroa peered at the dim scene of the men around the jeep. “Yes, that is me. Younger, of course.”

  “Could you identify the other men for us?”

  “Some, I think.” He placed his finger on a squat, pop-eyed man standing near the jeep. “This is Angelo Guel. And here is Gary Becker.” He rattled off some more Cuban names. He had forgotten who the driver was. Fulton wrote down the names in a notebook, also marking down the frames they appeared in.

  “Who’s the tall guy with his face moving away from the camera?” Karp asked. “Near the front wheel.”

  “That is Maurice Bishop.”
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br />   “It is, huh? Are you sure?”

  “Oh, yes. He was in charge of the whole operation. I knew him quite well.”

  “Good, okay roll it slow until I tell you to stop. A little more, more, stop! Do you recognize this man?” Karp pointed.

  “It looks like Lee Oswald, but it is dark. I can’t be sure.”

  “You never met him at these exercises?”

  Veroa shrugged. “No, but there were many hundred men, and many exercises. He was not active, if he was there at all. I did actually meet him once, though.”

  “You did? When?”

  “In September of sixty-three. I went to meet with Bishop at a hotel in Dallas, and Oswald was with him.”

  There was silence in the little room while they all digested that. “Let’s, uh, move on, Charlie. Okay, Mr. Veroa, here’s a scene in broad daylight. Let’s see what you make of this.”

  The man in the black shirt and ball cap appeared.

  “Oswald again, right?” Karp asked.

  Veroa shook his head. “No, I know who that is. That is Bill Caballo.”

  “A Cuban?”

  “No, not Cuban. But he spoke Spanish, I think with a Central American accent. An American. Bishop gave him to us, for weapons training. He was an expert with small arms, and an armorer.” They were all staring at him. Veroa glanced back at the screen. “He resembles Oswald, certainly, especially in the shape of the face and the coloring. But Caballo was thinner. He had many … what? Pecas—freckles on his arms and his hands. Also, he was shorter than me, and Oswald was perhaps a little taller than me.”

  “But it might have been possible to confuse one with the other, huh? If you had never seen both of them together?”

  A slight nod. “Yes, in that case, perhaps. I knew Caballo more than I knew Oswald. I met Oswald only that one time, with Bishop. Really, I didn’t even remember that he was on this exercise, on this film. So I would not have confused them.”

  They watched the film a few times more, with Veroa filling in as many details as he remembered on the recognizable people shown in it. Then they grilled him for some additional hours about his long association with the man he knew as Maurice Bishop: the initial contact while Veroa was still in Cuba, the conversion of an unassuming but patriotic Cuban accountant into an underground agent, the failed assassination attempt against Castro, the escape from Cuba, the foundation of Brigada 61, the raids, the additional attempt on Castro’s life in Chile, in 1971. Bishop had been closely involved as a planner and financier throughout his clandestine career, purportedly as the representative of “anticommunist businessmen.” The CIA had never been mentioned.