“Oh, Karp? We worked together in the old homicide bureau. No sparks or anything. Then we were at this party and he got plastered and I had to drag him home. I crashed on his bed. The next morning I was taking a shower, and he came stumbling in, hung over, and there and then, to the surprise of both of us, we fell on each other like animals and fucked our brains out. The rest is history.”
“Oh, see, that’s what I mean!” cried Maggie. “Nothing like that ever happens to me.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, the unexpected. The dramatic. The exciting.”
“Well, as to that, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, the so-called exciting life. A lot of it is pissing in your panties. And besides, my life, ninety percent of it, is just like yours. Shopping, cleaning, taking care of the kid, working.” She paused and looked at Maggie. “If you’re bored you could get a job.”
“Oh, right, that’s what he always says. It’s not being bored. Besides, I had a job, until Jeremy came. It’s more like—I don’t know—my life is in a, like a railroad siding, just waiting for an engine to pull me along the track again. And Hank is like some kind of express train roaring along the other track getting farther and farther away.” She reached for the bottle and refilled her glass.
“What did you do, when you worked?” asked Marlene.
“Oh, some job in O’Neill’s office. Hank got it for me, of course. Just, basically, your D.C. job: sitting around answering phones with other wife-ofs and the little hard chargers starting their Hill careers. Then when I quit, it was supposedly to start working on the files, getting the book ready, but I haven’t honestly had the energy. And Hank hasn’t said anything, but when I try to talk to him about the way I feel, he gives me this look, like I’m letting down the team.”
“But you’re still basically okay. You and him.”
“Oh, like do we love each other. Oh, yeah.” She twirled a lock of her shining hair, looked toward the heavens, and laughed. “Still madly in love!”
“What with? What do you like about him besides that he thinks you’re letting down the team?”
“Oh, see, I didn’t really mean that,” explained Maggie in a nervous rush. “Actually, he’s wonderful. The minute he looked at me, I went all squooshy.”
“What was it? Body?”
“No, although that was all right—he was on the crew at Yale. No, it was something about his head, or his face. A look. You know, it was sort of intelligent, but not smart-alecky, and noble, and with depth. Like he was injured somewhere inside and hiding the wound. You know what he reminded me of? That central figure in Picasso’s Saltimbanques, the one in profile?”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s one of my favorite paintings,” said Marlene, thinking that guys who had that look probably got unbelievable amounts of pussy off little blond art lovers. Or Italian tough girls. Karp, of course, had it too.
“Oh, mine too!” said Maggie, delighted. “It’s in the National. We have to go see it.”
“Yes, two aging housewives standing rapt in front of a seventy-year-old painting, our knees trembling, our undies slowing getting damp …”
“Oh, stop it!” Maggie shrieked, and threw a blouse at Marlene.
Marlene caught it and glanced at the label. “Mmm … nice silk. From Bloomie’s.” She sat up and held the sleeves wide, framing Maggie’s face over it. “It’s not your color, really. What do you wear it with?”
“Nothing!” Maggie wailed. “I never wear it. I have cubic yards of clothes and I never have anything to wear.”
“Drag ’em out,” said Marlene, focusing her attention. “Let’s see what we got.”
An hour or so later, the two women stood looking at a gaudy pile of fabric three feet high, stacked on the bedroom floor.
“God, this is so embarrassing!” said Maggie with feeling. “I feel like such a jerk.”
“I still don’t understand it, really,” said Marlene. “You know you can’t wear all these saturated colors and wild prints with your coloring. And besides”—she lifted up a scarlet brocade jacket and a chrome yellow skirt— “none of this stuff makes outfits. Why on earth did you buy it all?”
“I don’t know. I go into a store to shop and something happens—I become a zombie. I feel this pressure crushing down on me, and I guess I just buy the flashiest thing in sight and dash out. Or else, maybe I desperately want to be someone who can wear an acid green pantsuit.”
“Well, at least you’ll make Goodwill happy. I bet a lot of their customers can wear this stuff.” Marlene held a red-white-and-blue bulky-knit sweater up to her chest, struck a Foreign Legion salute, and started to hum the “Marseillaise.”
“Oh, stop!” laughed Maggie. “Actually, that’d look great on you. Why don’t you pick out what you want and take it?”
Marlene dropped the sweater and gave Maggie a sharp glance.
Maggie blushed rosily and put her hand to her mouth. “Oh, God, I didn’t mean …”
“No, I appreciate it, but the funny thing is I really have lots of clothes. I just didn’t bring them with me into exile.” She quickly related the story of her hasty departure from New York, leaving out the shameful proximate cause.
This, of course, was exactly what Maggie wanted to know. It struck her as astounding that someone with Marlene’s extraordinary life, and moreover, one with impeccable Waffen-feminist credentials (“You ran a rape bureau?”), would dump it to go be a wife-of in Washington. She probed uncomfortably close to the real reason, and rather than snapping out that it was none of her business and perhaps adding that they were not actually schoolgirls pouring out their little hearts, Marlene changed the subject.
“What was that all about, what you said a minute ago—about files and a book?”
“Oh, that!” Maggie seemed to slump. A tiny, worried indentation appeared beneath the glossy bangs. “You don’t want to hear it.”
“Yeah, I do. It’s something to do with your husband?”
“Oh, all right,” Maggie sighed resignedly. “My husband, prince that he is, whom I love dearly, has this little obsession. I assume you’re familiar with the Dobbs case?”
“No, what case?”
“See? Everybody in the known universe has forgotten about it but Hank Dobbs. Oh, yeah, and, of course the Widow Dobbs. Hank thinks it’s on everybody’s mind as soon as they meet him. Of course, he’s been elected to Congress three times and nobody’s so much as mentioned it, but there it is.”
“What’d Hank do, anyway?”
“Hank? Nothing. This is about his father, Richard. Ewing. Dobbs.” She said the name portentously, like a butler announcing a belted earl. She was fairly wasted by now, sitting tailor-fashion at the foot of the bed, with the second bottle of wine tucked in the cavity of her crossed legs. They had dispensed with glasses by this time. Maggie continued in the same exaggerated “Masterpiece Theatre” diction.
“Mr. Dobbs, as I never stop getting told by my husband, and the Widow, and all my in-laws, was … a prince. A perfect prince. Brilliant? Of course. Yale blah-blah, Harvard blah-blah. Brave? Of course! Decorated for bravery in the Pacific, Navy Cross blah-blah. Every little boy’s dream of a daddy? Of course! Riding fishing boating skating baseball blah-blah-blah. I am not privy to the secrets of the marriage bed, but I have no reason to believe he would not have won the Distinguished Service Medal there too.
“Okay,” she adopted a more normal tone, “after the war, Richard and Selma Hewlett Dobbs, that’s the Widow, and little Hankie, go to Washington, to make a career. Richard gets a job with naval intelligence. Very important, hush-hush work. He rises, he has a brilliant career ahead of him—secretary of the navy, probably, and who knows? The sky’s the limit. The family’s wealthy and well connected in Connecticut politics, not the Kennedys quite, but in the same general zone. Richard, of course, knew Kennedy, knew him quite well, and didn’t think all that much of him. According to report.”
“Did you ever meet him? Richard, I mean,” Marlene interrupt
ed.
“Yes, a couple of times. He died in sixty-three. Right before Kennedy. Of course, by then he was totally destroyed by what happened. I remember a shy man with tinted glasses, who didn’t say much. A sad, sad man, around whom everyone walked on eggs. Excruciatingly careful not to disturb him through word or deed.”
“You know, now that you remind me, the name does ring a faint bell. Wasn’t he involved in the Joe McCarthy business—some kind of communist accusation?”
“Oh, it was far, far more than an accusation, my dear. Richard Ewing Dobbs was tried for and nearly convicted of treason black as night.”
“My God! This was what, during Korea?”
“Yes, indeed, and they’d just fried the Rosenbergs. It was a capital case. But what happened was that Harley Blaine stepped in and saved the day.” Seeing Marlene’s uncomprehending look, she added, “The lawyer. From Texas?”
The name stirred vaguely in Marlene’s memory. One of the great defense lawyers of an earlier decade. She asked, “He was the defense.”
“Yes, but there’s more to it than that. Harley and Richard were biddies. Buddies. God, I have to lay off this wine. The kids will be back any minute. Well, they were friends from college. Went to Yale and then Harvard together and they were in the navy together. Started in Washington about the same time too. Anyway, what you have to understand is, when the thing happened to Richard, he became a pariah. That was how it was in the fifties. People he’d known for years cut him dead on the street. People wouldn’t let their kids play with Hank anymore. Like that. Except for Harley. And apparently John Kennedy. Harley quit his government job in the Pentagon and took up Richard’s defense. Kennedy didn’t do that, but at least he didn’t go out of his way to shun him. That was important.”
“What had he done? I mean, why did they accuse him?”
“Well, that was the strange thing about it. Basically, the FBI had caught an employee of the Soviet embassy, a guy named Viktor Reltzin. Reltzin was an actual spy, no question about it. They caught him with top-secret technical data on the nuclear submarine-building program, which was getting started then. Reltzin claimed that he was just a courier. The way they worked it was, on a specific day each week, Reltzin would go out to Arlington Cemetery and check out a particular grave marker. There’d be a special arrangement of flags and flowers on the grave and that’d tell Reltzin where to pick up the secret stuff, a wastebasket or a hollow tree, whatever. And Reltzin would use the same method to communicate with his contact. ‘Dead-drops’ is the term, I think. You sure you don’t remember this? It was a big scandal—using the graves of American heroes to commit treason and all. No? Well, believe me it was a big thing at the time. We have the clippings. Anyway, they put the screws on Reltzin and he gave them the name of his contact, who was a low-level Navy Department clerk named Jerome Weinberg. So the FBI set a trap… . My God! Look at the time! The play group will be over by now.”
“Uh-oh—don’t tell me we have to drive over there and pick them up?”
“No,” said Maggie, with a silly grin. “The Winstons have a driver. A drive-ah. Claude. Claude will deliver our little dears in the Caddy. Let’s go downstairs so we can greet their smiling faces at the door. Or their shrieking faces, as the case may be.”
The two women walked unsteadily down the stairway and into the kitchen, a big, cheery, light-filled room with built-in everything of the latest design, and divided by a long butcher-block counter. Maggie got coffee and hot chocolate efficiently started. Marlene was mildly surprised that Maggie could still function. Functionality while stoned was apparently a quality required in the wife-of business.
“So what happened then?” Marlene asked. “With Reltzin and what’s his name? Weinstein.”
“Weinberg. Oh, they nailed him delivering a package at Arlington. He cracked right away and said that he got the secrets from Richard Dobbs. That was it. They came and arrested him the day before Thanksgiving, 1952. No bail, of course. He was in jail for nineteen months while the trial went on. But Harley got him off in the end.”
“How did he do that?”
“Well, all the government had was Weinberg’s say-so, that and Richard’s fingerprints on the documents. But they were his documents to begin with, so that didn’t mean much. Then there was some secret stuff that I’m not really clear on. Harley Blaine found out that the CIA had this Russian defector, and that the defector claimed that Richard was innocent, that Weinberg had made the whole thing up to cover himself, to play that he was just the delivery boy. ‘Agent Z’ they called him, the defector. Very cloak-and-dagger. So the CIA said they couldn’t let the agent testify because of national security, and Harley said he was going to subpoena him anyway, and they went eyeball to eyeball on it and the CIA said no go and that was it. The judge threw out the case. But that didn’t help Richard much. He was ‘accused traitor Richard Ewing Dobbs’ for the rest of his life.”
“That’s some story,” said Marlene. “So what does Hank want you to do with it after all this time? You said a book… .”
“Yes, the book. He’s collected boxes of stuff over the years. The trial transcripts, clippings, papers written about the case. It was quite a thing for a while among the liberals. Richard was what I think they called prematurely coexistent. He was opposed to the nuclear sub program. He thought it was a provocation, especially if the subs were going to have nukes in them. He thought it probably wasn’t a good idea to have a navy captain who might be cut off from communications with the outside be responsible for pushing a button that might blow up the world. Richard didn’t think much of most navy captains. There was a lot of talk about a dark conspiracy. Dreyfus Two.”
“You’re saying somebody set him up?”
Maggie shrugged. “What do I know? It’s the family myth, anyway. Rickover and the hard-line cold warriors did him in. That’s what the book’s supposed to be about, but”—she shrugged again, helplessly—“I’ve made a start, an index of the material we have, and I’ve made a trip or two to archives, but Christ, Marlene, I did some research in college, but this needs a pro, a lawyer preferably, or a real investigative reporter.”
“Why doesn’t he hire one?”
“Control. He wants to keep total control. And I am apparently the only person he considers under total control, lucky me.” She let out a bitter laugh. “Maybe when the kids are grown, if I still have a brain in my head …”
“Or … ,” said Marlene tentatively.
“Or what?”
“Well, my dear, not to blow my own horn, but beneath these colorful rags is a fairly hotshot criminal investigator. I could maybe take a look at your stuff—at least get you started.”
Maggie’s eyes went wide. “Oh, God, would you really? Oh, but Hank might, I don’t know …” She stopped in confusion.
“Object?” offered Marlene, raising an eyebrow. “To a woman who made a total ass of herself at his party delving into the intimate family secrets? Well, you don’t have to tell him unless you want to.”
Maggie was pacing back and forth behind the counter, conflicting emotions playing over her small features. Finally, she whirled, jutted her sharp chin, brought her fist down on the counter, and said, “Yeah! Let’s go for it!”
The women shook hands and laughed. Then a doubtful look appeared on Maggie’s face. “But, Marlene, I mean you can’t just do this, like, for nothing … your time …”
At that moment a heavy car door slammed and they heard shrill voices and the sound of footsteps on gravel. The back door flew open with a crash and the children dashed in, Laura dragging a sniveling Jeremy behind her. “Mommy!” she yelled. “Stupid Jeremy wet his pants!”
Marlene said, “Maggie, I tell you what. Just handle the three kids for half days. I’ll take care of the investigation, and I’ll owe you.”
The thin man stood at the Eastern Airlines counter at Miami International and passed a stack of cash over the counter. The clerk printed out his ticket, and said, “Did you want to make your retu
rn flight arrangements now, Mr. Early?”
“No, I don’t know how long I’ll be staying there.”
The machine whirred and spat out the ticket, which was snapped into a folder and handed over with a smile. “Boarding in fifteen minutes, Mr. Early, and thank you for flying Eastern.”
The thin man walked toward the gate. He was tired. Bishop had mobilized him early in the morning, after a night spent at jai alai and drinking in Cuban after-hours places, noisy, garishly decorated rooms lit like supermarkets. He had recognized several people, from the old days, but nobody had recognized him.
James Early was just one of the four aliases he was able to adopt with the various ID papers he had stashed in his soft nylon carry-on bag. He hadn’t used Bill Caballo in a dozen or more years, although people who knew him from those days usually called him Bill. It had been longer than that since he had used the name his parents had given him at birth. Had anyone shouted that name out now, as he moved slowly toward the gate, he wouldn’t have looked up, or indicated by the slightest movement that he recognized it. It was not training that enabled him to do this, but a peculiarity of mind, a vagueness of the sense of identity. The thin man was like a boat. It didn’t matter what name you painted on the stern; the important thing was that it floated and went where you wanted to go.
The thin man passed his ticket to the stewardess at the mouth of the jetway, and boarded flight 54 to National Airport in Washington, D.C.
TWELVE
Flickering screen, grainy image, the whir of the projector on a rickety wooden desk, four men sitting around the desk on uncomfortable straight chairs, watching people die. Three Chinese men in gray pajamas kneel before a pit, three soldiers shoot them in the back of the head. They fall forward in unison. A machine gun mounted on the back of a truck shoots down a row of naked civilians of all ages and both sexes. Nazis in Poland. Old NKVD footage: a prisoner brought into a small room, is seated on a chair, as at a concert. Behind the prisoner’s head, a little door like a dumbwaiter opens: a slight puff of pale smoke and the man falls forward. Various African executions next, obscure and degrading. One famous one: the Vietnamese colonel executing the prisoner with a pistol after the Tet attacks.
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