Corruption of Blood

by Robert Tanenbaum

  Bathroom. Nothing in the medicine cabinet, ripped from the wall, or the hamper. Nothing in the toilet tank or under the sink.

  Down the hall. The kid’s bedroom. Fling apart the bureau. Overturn the toy chest. Rip the mattress and the pillows again. Slash apart the stuffed animals, break the heads of the dolls. Pull down the bookcase. He made the colorful books fly, tearing the bindings, scattering the pages.

  He was working fast and efficiently. No more than five minutes had elapsed since he entered the apartment. A thin sweat lay on his brow, but his hard breathing was more from excitement than exertion.

  He folded his knife and put it away and flung open the door to the closet, shining in the thin beam of his flash.

  The smell, the hateful smell, the scent of screaming and beating and choking and shaking. Another person, another’s scent was under it somehow, that and the reek of gasoline, soap, and anger, but there it was, definite, horrible, coming from the figure standing in the closet doorway.

  Caballo saw the eyes in the thin beam, glowing disks. Another toy, was his first thought, a teddy bear. Then the eyes moved and he heard the snarling growl. He backed away a step and something enormous and black was on him like a piece of the darkness come alive. He was on his back beating at it with the puny flashlight, struggling to get his knife out of his pants pocket. There was something wrong with his right hand; he couldn’t move it. Then the pain hit him and he screamed.

  The taste of blood, forbidden, exciting. The great head heaved, teeth met, the sharp carnassial teeth at the side of the jaw, cutting through flesh and tendon and bone. The screams stopped. The bad scent was gone. Sweetie played with what he had taken for a few minutes, chewing until most of the juice and all the bad scent was gone, and then went back into the closet and slept.

  TWENTY

  Harley Blaine’s house was not the house in the Depuy film. That had been a traditional ranch house with a patio. Karp and Marlene now entered a much larger, more contemporary structure, a place of sheer white walls cut with the narrow clefts of windows.

  “The architect was obviously inspired by The Guns of Navarone,” Marlene whispered as their driver ushered them into an entrance hall tiled in glazed blue Mexican ceramic. “Notice how the house is on a little rise with the trees and shrubs cut back for a couple hundred yards? And the slit windows. The joint is a fortress.”

  “Yeah, you expect to see Richard Widmark coming down a rope in a watch cap,” Karp agreed. “Speaking of movies, what happened to the lion and the scarecrow? And why are we whispering?”

  Marlene suppressed a giggle. “I think we’re trying to not scream. I wonder where the dungeons are?”

  They were led through several doors and found themselves again in sunlight. The house was built around a vast atrium, glass-covered and heavily planted along its borders. Its center was occupied by a large swimming pool. By this stood a hospital-style bed. On the bed lay Harley Blaine.

  “Have a seat,” said Blaine when they approached the bed. “Welcome to Texas. And the Queen Ranch.” They sat in the two elegant sling chairs that had been placed next to a low table by the bedside. “There are refreshments on that little bar by the pool, and I have arranged a luncheon for you all. I regret that I take my own nourishment nowadays through a tube.”

  He smiled, a ghastly sight. Blaine was wasted in the manner of victims of end-stage cancer, shocking to Marlene, whose image of him was based on films taken from his early youth onward to maturity. Once a good-sized man with a full head of hair, he had become a living skeleton, his head a death camp inmate’s skull bearing a few wisps of dull fuzz. His eyes, however, sunken as they were, still blazed with energy, and with, Marlene thought, an unnatural, puckish glee that seemed almost obscene in so devastated a frame.

  She looked at her husband, who appeared distinctly uncomfortable, his skin pale and damp-looking, his jaw tight and twitching, his hands clenching and uncoiling. It occurred to her that the last time he saw someone in this state it had been his mother lying there, and he had been fourteen.

  Karp was thinking of his mother, but his discomfort arose from rage. He was considering why the eyes of this criminal, who had done so much evil, should shine so with intelligence and life, while those of his mother, who had been sweet and mild her whole life, had, at the same state in her disease, held nothing but pain and idiotic terror. In was another item in Karp’s pending lawsuit against God, and it was all he could do to keep from smashing his fists into the man’s face, smashing it like a rotten pumpkin.

  Blaine was talking to Marlene again, in his soft, breathy voice, and Karp had to focus his attention to hear what was being said. Small talk. Their flight, the climate, the house. “It’s quite an interesting house,” he said, naming its features and the famous architect who had designed them. “I regret I can’t show you around personally, but—”

  “Yes, it’s a lovely house, Mr. Blaine,” Marlene broke in. “I especially admired the fields of fire.”

  Blaine chuckled hoarsely. “You are a card, ma’am. And observant too, as I have come to know. Yes, the place is defensible, no doubt. I have, or had, some business partners who were at times prone to take extreme measures in pursuit of what they considered proper redress of grievances.” He paused and glanced at Karp. “But I see your husband is growing impatient. Perhaps we can turn to the purpose of your visit. This film. What are your intentions regarding this unfortunate item? I trust you understand the effect that publicizing it would have on the Dobbs family.”

  “Yes, I do,” said Marlene. “And I, we, don’t have any wish to hurt them. But what I do with the film is entirely up to you, Mr. Blaine.”

  “Is it? That sounds suspiciously like a blackmailer’s speech. What sort of behavior on my part would be satisfactory?”

  “Cut the crap, Blaine!” Karp snarled. “You know damn well we came here to find out how you killed Kennedy. So let’s have it—from the beginning!”

  At first they thought he was having a fit. He had thrown his head back against the pillows and a high rasping noise was emanating from his open mouth. Some tears rolled down his cheeks from his tightly shut eyes. But as Marlene glanced around nervously for someone to call, Blaine’s face relaxed, and it turned out that he had only been having a laugh.

  “Ahh, how very New York, Mr. Karp! How very tough! Direct and to the point. Well, first of all, I should tell you that when I heard the news about the tragic end of our late president, I was on board the cruise ship Pride of Norway in transit between Cancun and Trinidad. Like everyone else, I remember it quite clearly. For some days it cast quite a pall on the public merrymaking, although privately many of my shipmates wept only crocodile tears. The cruise was organized here in Texas, and Mr. Kennedy was not popular among certain circles in Texas.”

  “But you did it,” Karp persisted, “wherever you were personally on November twenty-second. You thought up this whole chess-piece plot, this PXK thing. You’re the queen. Bishop was your boy, and Caballo was Bishop’s boy. You were neck-deep with anti-Castro Cubans. Your money financed the whole thing, the payoffs to Angelo Guel came from you, and you had Mosca and Guel killed when we got to them.”

  “There are many conspiracy theories, Mr. Karp,” said Blaine in a mild tone. “That would seem to be a particularly florescent one and impossible to prove.”

  “I know it’s impossible to prove,” admitted Karp. “That’s why we’re here blackmailing you into telling us the truth.”

  Blaine smiled and his eyes sparkled wetly. “Yes, truth. So hard to determine after the passage of years. So far, in many cases, from justice. ‘What is Truth, said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.’ Bacon. Do you know the essay? I see that Miss Ciampi does. I’ve always wondered whether, if Pilate had stayed for an answer, he would have gotten anything he could’ve understood from Jesus.”

  Karp said, “Let’s get out of here, Marlene. This guy just wants to blow smoke.”

  Marlene gathered her purse. “Well, it
’s been pleasant meeting you, Mr. Blaine. I’m sorry we couldn’t come to an agreement.”

  Blaine flapped his hand, waving them back to their seats. “Sit down, sit down. I’m sick and I tend to ramble.” His voice grew sharper. “All right, my direct New York friends, let’s horse-trade. You want a full accounting of how John F. Kennedy was killed, in return for which you will undertake to destroy the original of the film you most assuredly have in your possession. Obviously, I will never myself be a witness before any panel or court. I am, in several ways, beyond the reach of the law. In any case, we are not at a deposition, are we? You are not yourselves here in any legal guise, unless during my recent absence from the bar the threat of blackmail has been added to the armamentarium of congressional inquiry. Our status is thus that of … I won’t say friends … acquaintances, doing one another reciprocal favors. I satisfy your curiosity; you relieve a family I cherish from the threat of embarrassment. Agreed?”

  Marlene assented immediately. It took Karp longer. At last, he nodded his head, feeling miserable, as his urge to know triumphed over whatever trace of responsibility to the House committee remained in him.

  “Well, then,” Blaine began, “you might trace my involvement way back to the year 1947. The CIA was a new agency, full of piss and vinegar. It was formed, you’ll recall, in the wake of the worst intelligence catastrophe in U.S. history, the penetration of the Manhattan Project by Soviet agents. That the Soviets could, with relative ease, break into the most secret project of all, was on everyone’s mind. Counterintelligence on domestic soil was supposed to be the province of the FBI, but we considered them a bunch of clowns, chasing parlor pinks and harmless socialists under the command of a megalomanic fraud. Putting J. Edgar Hoover up against Lavrenty Beria and his men—it was preposterous! And, of course, we feared even worse penetrations. What if they had a mole in the heart of our political process itself? Such a person, in public office, could do far worse damage than a mere cipher clerk or some such, the sort of people the FBI seemed competent to tackle. So we set up an … informal study group, let’s say, to discuss the issue. I was a member, and my task was to design a program for the elimination by extreme measures of a prominent American politician known to be in the service of the Soviets: assassination, to be blunt. This was all theoretical, mind; we were just playing safe.

  “I therefore studied assassinations with great vigor, and came to the conclusion that in the domestic context, there were only three major approaches: one, the feigned accident; two, the sacrificial attentat at close range; and three, the attack at long range, with the assassin escaping. There are problems with all of these. As I’m sure you know, with recent advances in forensic techniques, it is nearly impossible to successfully feign an accident, especially if the victim is important enough to warrant an exhaustive investigation. And the FBI, despite their shortcomings in other areas, are superb in this narrow field. For the sacrificial attack, one needs a madman. Madmen are easy to come by, but difficult to point at the desired target. We tried some … experiments. They were unsuccessful, both with natural and induced mania. The third method has many advantages, both in terms of control, and as a way of sending a message to our adversaries that we are onto their plot. But it shares the disadvantage of the first method. It is hard to get away with it. As I pondered this problem, it occurred to me that a melding, so to speak, of the second two methods might offer a solution. That is, if one committed the actual assassination with a trained professional, and was afterward able to blame it on a madman, one might have the best of both. The work would be efficiently done, and the hue and cry and the subsequent investigation would be truncated by the existence of a plausible dupe. I wrote a paper on this, which was quite well received. That was the origin of PXK. It was quite irregular and so secret that it did not bear a standard code name. As far as the CIA proper is concerned, no such project ever existed.

  “To understand the next phase, you have to know that every intelligence agency is plagued by volunteers—individuals who wish to become spies. Virtually all of them are useless for real intelligence work, unstable, maniacal, lazy, or criminal types for the most part, but some of them can be used as pigeons, that is, as false members of a spy network who can distract the attention of counterintelligence operatives, and can be betrayed to them with misleading or damaging information in their heads. Lists are kept of such potential pigeons at foreign CIA stations; I began to keep such a list of American citizens for PXK.”

  “Oswald,” said Karp.

  “Indeed, Oswald was precisely the type, but of course, I was long gone from the CIA by the time Oswald entered its purview, during his time as a marine in Japan, in 1958. Nevertheless, PXK was still alive. Lists were still maintained, and a marine spouting Marxist propaganda at a top-secret radar base could not have escaped the attention of those who maintained them. Bureaucracy, even invisible bureaucracy, has considerable inertia. The man you know as Maurice Bishop found Oswald’s name and looked him up in Texas in 1962, and cultivated him, using some of our old assets in the White Russian community.”

  “Okay, we know you knew Bishop from way back,” Marlene said. “How did he suddenly surface with reference to Oswald and PXK?”

  “Oh, Bishop was quite ready to kill Kennedy from the moment the Bay of Pigs invasion was betrayed. He simply didn’t know how to carry it off. He came to me and I told him about the PXK plan and how to find out who was on the current list. There were several potential candidates, but Oswald was by far the best: the infantile Marxism, the megalomania, the propensity for violence, the Soviet defection, even the family link to organized crime. He was perfect. The final joy was when Bishop met Oswald and realized that the man bore a close resemblance to … I believe you know him as William Caballo. It was obvious that we had the germ of a perfect PXK operation.

  “The next step was to get Oswald deep into the Cuban exile orbit. He was told that he was being prepared to assassinate Fidel Castro, then we switched him to Kennedy. In fact, he did not care at all whom he was going to shoot. He was in it for the thrill. At last he was being taken seriously by important people and embarking on large undertakings. He was told, of course, to maintain his leftist connections, which he did to the extent he was capable of performing any assigned task. The story Bishop gave him was that as a good leftist, it would be easy for him to get close to Castro, as if even the most incompetent Communist counterintelligence apparat would have taken more than three minutes to see through him. And the Cubans, as poor Bishop learned, are far from incompetent.

  “Bishop assembled the other members of the team and gave them the operational names by which you know them. A romantic, Bishop, like so many of the people who entered the CIA just after the war. Of course, PXK gave him the chess theme, so I suppose I am responsible for that bit of fun. The assassination was planned and the necessary arrangements were made, and then everything fell apart. A complete failure.”

  “What!” Marlene and Karp spoke in unison.

  “I mean, of course, the first attempt. In Miami, 1961. Oswald had wandered off somewhere, and missed the pickup. Bishop was in a rare state. He wanted to scratch Oswald and start afresh with somebody else, but I dissuaded him. I recall telling him that we would never again find somebody with so many of the characteristics we wanted in a lone, deranged assassin. Except the ability to fire a rifle accurately, of course, which we did not in this case require. I suggested Dallas as the next venue. This was in June of sixty-three, just after the Dallas speech was scheduled.”

  “But Oswald only got his job in the book depository in October,” said Karp.

  “That’s right. The book depository wasn’t part of the original plan. We were exploring ways to work the thing at the airport, or the Trade Mart where he was giving the speech. I had the group up here for a couple of weeks in late August, early September, to work out alternate plans. It was quite professional, with little models of the various buildings and escape routes. Oswald was very impressed. He stayed on
for some special training, we called it, in which drinking and willing ladies figured prominently. During that period, Caballo went to Mexico City. We cut Oswald loose on October third, and he went back to Dallas. He wanted money, which we refused to give him. He had to fit into his background we said, he had to get a regular job. He didn’t like that much, but we knew that with serious money in his pocket, he might decide to do anything—go to China, or Australia, or God knows what. As I said, an extremely unstable young man. During the next month, of course, Caballo was also in Dallas, being Oswald, shooting his rifle, for example, buying ammunition for it, making himself memorable, as he had on the bus trip and at the Communist embassies in Mexico.”

  “Oswald gave his rifle to Caballo?” asked Karp in disbelief.

  “Of course not. Ah, a clarification. Caballo and Oswald had no contact, of course. Bishop kept them strictly apart at the guerrilla operations and during training. It was Turm and Bishop who acted as intermediaries throughout all of this. Turm got the rifle; he admired the weapon and said he wanted to have it checked out by a gunsmith. Oswald was ridiculously proud of that piece of junk. It also gave us the premise for the real assassination weapons.”

  “Real … ?”

  “Yes. Caballo procured four mint M1938 Mannlicher-Carcano rifles from the same series as Oswald’s own. He cut the barrels down, tuned them up nearly to match standards, and fitted them with folding stocks and high-quality optics. The finished weapons were works of art, a little over twenty inches long and concealable under a jacket when they were folded.”

  “But the ballistics still wouldn’t match Oswald’s rifle,” Karp objected. He realized he was treating Blaine like just another Kennedy nut with a theory.

  Blaine seemed to realize this and gave him a long, humorous stare. “No, but they’d be close, perhaps close enough for government work, as the saying goes, and of course the ammunition was exactly the same as Oswald’s. In any case, while this was going on, Oswald got the job in the book depository, in mid-October I think, and shortly after that, the White House added plans for a motorcade to the trip. Bishop, through his sources, was able to get preliminary plans for the route, and when we saw where they intended to go, everything fell into place. The other plans were immediately abandoned and we settled on a shooting from the book depository. Perhaps that was foolish, but I balanced the possibility of something going amiss in a more spontaneous plan against the overwhelming advantage of having the shooting done from Oswald’s place of work.