It snowed six and a half inches one Thursday, which meant that the entire federal government ground to a halt, it being a well-known condition of employment in the federal bureaucracy that you never have to drive in snow. The snowfall and its attendant disasters occupied a good chunk of the Post's front page, but that newspaper did reserve five or six inches on page eleven for an announcement that a man named Claude Wilkey had been selected to replace Bert Crane. Karp noted with ironic amusement that Dobbs had indeed taken his advice: Wilkey was a professor at an Ivy League law school, and as far as Karp could determine from the brief vita in the Post, he had never tried a case in his life.
Karp decided to use his unexpected snow holiday to review the concordance that V.T. had made of the Depuy film. He did not imagine that this evidence would ever appear in a court of law, not the way things appeared to be going, but he was a pro, and he thought that there might be a faint chance of catching something that others had missed.
He had set up the little editor on the kitchen table and was anticipating a boring but restful winter's afternoon of running through the Depuy film frame by frame and editing the concordance. This proved more difficult than he had expected. Like many (perhaps all) men whose profession requires the exercise of abstract thought, he had little attention to spare for the concrete realities of domestic life. If he had, he would never have embarked on a project requiring concentration and careful manipulation of a notoriously cranky device in the kitchen of a tiny apartment containing an active and curious three-year-old, an extremely large dog, an intelligent woman in the final stages of a large project that also required the use of that very same machine, in the aftermath of a blizzard that confined them all to close quarters. A more sensitive man would never have started such a project under these circumstances; a more sensitive man would therefore probably not have discovered how and why John F. Kennedy was slain, a discovery that Karp ever afterward would associate with the smell of cocoa boiling over, with gray light and swirling snow.
Karp's first mistake was being charmed by his daughter's identification of the film editor as a "dolly television." He agreed that it was indeed a dolly TV (ho ho!) but that Daddy had to play with it for now. This offended Lucy's well-developed sense of justice and entitlement; the dolly TV should be in her room so her dollies could watch it. Explanations. Whining. Tantrum.
"Can't you… um… go someplace?" Karp pleaded to his wife, amid the wails.
"Go where?" replied Marlene. "It's the Antarctic out there. Also, I was planning to use the machine today. I didn't expect to have you stumbling around the house."
Karp threw up his hands and choked off a nasty response. "Okay, I'll go out with her, and you can use the machine, and then you can watch her and I'll work." He turned to the child. "How about that, Lucy?" he asked, summoning his final reserves of good nature. "You want to go play in the snow?"
Lucy sniffled back tears and nodded solemnly.
"Take the dog," said Marlene.
When she was alone in the house, Marlene made herself a pot of coffee, drank some, lit a cigarette, and spent ten minutes just listening to the quiet. Then she rewound the film Karp had been looking at and spooled in the film she had taken from the Dobbs attic.
The first few seconds were an establishing shot of a locale: a stretch of wide, calm water, a bay of some sort, a deserted beach, and a large white beach cottage. It was very early in the morning. Marlene stopped the film and studied the building curiously. Then she stripped the film out of the camera and went to get a box containing several of the Dobbs films she wanted to look at again, found one, mounted it, and rolled it for a minute or so until she found a film of a family party in the summer of fifty-five and the Dobbs and Hewlett cousins playing on the beach in front of a beach cottage. She had been right; the place in the attic film was the isolated cottage belonging to Selma Dobbs's family, at Niantic on the Sound.
Replacing the attic film, Marlene rolled on. A couple emerged from the house. The woman, a trim, pretty blond in her late thirties, was wearing a two-piece suit from the postwar era, and carrying a beach blanket. The man wore trunks and carried a bottle of champagne and two stemmed glasses. They were laughing. The woman spread the blanket and they sat on it and drank champagne and kissed and laughed and watched the sun climb higher over the Sound.
There was a cut and suddenly the man and the woman were much closer. The cameraman had changed lenses and was now shooting through a big telephoto. The image was grainier, but not grainy enough to prevent Marlene from seeing that the woman was Selma Dobbs and the man was Harley Blaine.
Marlene watched, fascinated, as the wine was finished and the kissing became more passionate. They wrapped themselves in the beach blanket; bathing suits were tossed out on the beach. The blanket became a wriggling, heaving tube. The blanket fell away; they didn't miss a stroke. Marlene tried to reconcile her image of the austere dowager she had met with this abandoned creature being pounded into the sand, her back arched in ecstasy, her legs wrapped around her lover's neck. The camera panned slowly from her face, an orgasmic mask, down to Blaine's thrusting hips. Marlene felt her face grow hot, a combination of intense embarrassment and turn-on.
Another cut, a longer blackout. Bright sun again. The couple were splashing into the water, nude. They embraced and kissed in the water. Blackout again. This time it was evening and the shot was through the window of one of the cottage's bedrooms. Marlene stopped the film and thought for a moment. The bedroom was on the second floor. The cameraman must have been lying on the peaked roof of the nearby garage. A determined photojournalist, thought Marlene; and she was almost certain that she knew who it was, based on her considerable familiarity with the man's work. For some insane reason, Richard Ewing Dobbs, that great American, had hidden in bushes and crouched on a slanted roof to take movies of his wife screwing his best friend.
Marlene had another cigarette and thought about what this discovery meant. Harley Blaine was obviously the "Q" of Selma Dobbs's diary. The reluctance of Q to countenance a breakup of the Dobbs marriage was thus explained: Blaine's loyalty to Richard Dobbs was greater than his desire for Selma. That also threw light on that odd break in the tone of Blaine's early love letters. He had given his girlfriend to Dobbs. Fifteen years and a long war later the former sweethearts had obviously kicked free of the traces, jumped into a hopeless affair, and become the subject of an interesting short blue movie, shot by the cuckold.
Or maybe Dobbs was in on it; maybe they knew he was filming? Maybe they took turns with the camera. Was that too outre even for the rich? Marlene felt out of her depth; the sexual perversions that had come her way over the years, although remarkably varied, had lacked the flavor of real decadence, and ran more to simple wackos like the corpse fucker, Oscar Sobell.
Marlene cranked the film rapidly backward through the viewer, having forgotten that Karp had specifically told her not to do that or the thing would jam, and sure enough the thing jammed. She peered into the film-advance mechanism. It looked like a splice had come loose and jumped the sprockets, causing the film to pile up behind it.
She was just about to try to fix it when the front door burst open and Karp and Lucy bounced in, red-faced and soaking wet. Sweetie came in too, and dashed toward the kitchen, tongue out and dripping spit, raining chunks of matted snow from its coat. Marlene saw what was going to happen and shouted, "Nooo!" The dog stood in the center of the kitchen and shook itself vigorously, coating every surface and Marlene with a good three quarts of freezing water.
"We want cocoa! We want cocoa!" chanted Karp and Lucy in chorus.
"You planned this," said Marlene, wiping her face with the dish towel.
"Me?" said Karp, giggling with his daughter.
Thirty minutes later, they had all changed clothes, toweled the dog dry, and mopped the floor. Marlene was melting chocolate on the stove, the little girl and the dog were watching TV, and Karp was at the kitchen table looking doubtfully at his editing machine. The radio wa
s turned up loud, against the bugging.
"You screwed it up," he said.
"A splice broke."
Karp popped the hatch on the advance mechanism and pried the errant film out. "This is the porn film the old lady had in her attic? How was it? Pretty hot?"
Marlene told him about the film and its main characters and what she had surmised about its auteur.
Karp whistled. "That's quite a story, babe. What're you going to do with it?"
"God knows! This is going to destroy the Dobbses if it gets out-" She stopped, struck by a thought. "Hey, do you think…?"
"Mmm, yeah, I'm following you. It could explain why Dobbs is messing with the assassination investigation."
"What, you mean somebody is blackmailing him with this stuff? But who? And why?"
"Well, the 'why' part is easy," replied Karp. He had smoothed the film down on the edit block and was about to repair the splice, a skill he had picked up in recent months.
"There's any number of people who'd like the investigation to dry up and blow away. As to who-you got me there, kid. Are you sure the camera guy was Dobbs's old man?"
"Pretty sure. It was sort of the same kind of movie he always made: quick nervous pans and arty cuts, using a telephoto for close-ups. And the film was there where only he could've put it. Why, are you thinking that maybe some… agency made it? The FBI or the Russians? Or a private eye?" She was stirring milk into the chocolate, making it smooth.
"I don't know," said Karp. "We'll probably never know, but it's… hmm, that's peculiar."
"What?"
"There's another splice real close to the one you broke, let's see, two, four, eight frames away. Why would anyone want to splice a third of a second into a home movie? You practically wouldn't even be able to register that you saw it before it was gone."
Marlene put down her spoon and looked over his shoulder. "What's in those frames? Can you just stick it under the gizmo there?"
Karp placed a frame from the start of the spliced strip over the little window in the editor and snapped the mechanism shut.
"Just a guy in a raincoat. Looks like a cemetery." Karp tugged at the free end of the film and drew it through the viewer. The man in the film knelt swiftly and placed a bouquet on a grave and then stood up again and faced the camera. Then the film showed the window of the house in Niantic.
"Pull it back, pull it back!" cried Marlene.
"You want the guy again?" said Karp. "I want to see the hot stuff."
But he pulled the film back to show the man's face.
"Oh, my God!" said Marlene weakly. She sat down in a chair, her knees trembling. "That's Weinberg. That was a picture of him leaving a bouquet of flowers at a grave at Arlington. That's how they did it, how he signaled where he dropped the microfilmed secrets for Reltzin. And Dobbs took a picture of him doing it. That means he knew Weinberg and knew what he was doing, just like Weinberg said. Which means he really was a spy and a traitor. Which means Gaiilov must have lied, because Blaine told him to or because he really was a double agent… Oh, God, I'm nauseous already from this." She held a hand up over her mouth and stared at her husband with wide eyes.
"You could ask Gaiilov," said Karp.
"Yeah, right, if I could find him. He's probably in Bolivia."
"No, he's in Texas. In Dallas, as a matter of fact," said Karp with a calmness he did not feel. "Calls himself Galinski."
"What! How did you…?"
"I asked V.T. and he told me. I guess I just forgot until now."
"Tell me!"
"V.T. said he's a member of the Dallas Russian community. His name came up because he was one of the people who knew Lee Oswald and his wife and because he had some kind of shadowy CIA connection-we thought-just like de Morenschildt and some others."
"And he's obviously keeping an even lower profile, because Harry didn't turn him up in any of the usual checks," said Marlene. After a moment, she continued, twirling her fingers through her hair, as she did while in intense thought. "So here's Harley Blaine's pet ex-spy, who knew Oswald, who knew that Richard Dobbs was guilty and lied about it, and here we also have Richard Dobbs's son, working himself into a position of influence on the assassination committee, and pushing for a strong investigation, he says, but really steering the investigation away from the CIA, or why would he have arranged to have those memos and the film ripped off, and have told someone you were going to Miami to see those guys, and that must mean-" She stopped, confused. "What must it mean?"
"It means we're becoming Kennedy nuts," said Karp sourly. He tapped the film on the editor. "But for sure this is blackmail material. If somebody else has this information, Dobbs is in their pocket. The only question is who."
"You think your Irishman in New Orleans?"
"Baton Rouge. Yeah, he's looking better and better. I want to go out there and take a look at him. And then talk to Gaiilov in Dallas. And maybe Blaine too."
"I want to come," said Marlene.
He stared at her. Behind her, unwatched, the cocoa boiled over, filling the apartment with the dark, cloying odor of burned chocolate.
The man called Caballo looked out on the falling snow and felt cold. He hated snow, not only because it was cold, but because it meant he couldn't move, couldn't do what he had come to Washington to do. He hated Washington too. The public buildings all looked like prisons to him. They were full of little people making little rules for other people to follow, pretending that you could live real life according to lists of rules. Caballo knew that wasn't true. You just had to do what was necessary; you had to survive. That was why he liked Guatemala, that and the climate.
On the second day after the blizzard, Bishop called.
"There's a little hitch," he said.
"There's always a little hitch lately," replied Caballo, with uncharacteristic impatience.
"Oh? Getting antsy, are you?"
"Yeah. I want to do the job and get out of here. I'm getting a bad feeling about this operation. What was that hitch, anyway?"
"Our candidate elected not to take over the investigation. However, the man they found is just as good, maybe better. We won't have any trouble with him. But this man, Karp, is still something of a loose cannon. He has a copy of the film, and we need it back."
"We should do him, Bishop. I told you, he saw me."
"Don't touch a hair on his head!" Bishop snapped. "That's all we need. And don't give me any smart ideas about convenient accidents. We're past all that. The lid is just about nailed down once and for all and I'm not looking forward to spending the rest of my life waiting for another investigation. Nor are you, I imagine." He waited, but the other man said nothing. "This is a retrieval, pure and simple. You'll wait for the apartment to be completely empty, and then you'll go in and get it. And Bill?"
"Yeah?"
"Don't get seen again. Our friend would be extremely upset if you were seen again."
NINETEEN
Karp had to admit it, Claude Wilkey knew how to run a meeting. He was running it in the wrong direction, but at a good clip. They were sitting around the conference table in the chief counsel's office-Wilkey, Karp, V.T., several young, intense-looking men whom Wilkey had recruited, and a small, tight-faced young woman, the new administrative chief. Bea Sondergard was gone with Crane.
Wilkey was talking. He had a pleasant, light, confident voice, well suited to reasoned academic discussions. He looked like the professor he was: a bland, pale face topped by thinning brown hair, horn-rims magnifying mild blue eyes. He wore a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows over a knitted sweater bearing a diamond pattern, slacks, polished loafers, and a striped button-down shirt with a foulard tie. Everyone else in the room, including the woman, wore dark suits.
Wilkey's lecture was well organized and easy to understand. The staff had one purpose and one purpose only: to complete the committee hearings as quickly as possible and to write a report. The staff would be reorganized into teams, each responsible for a section of the
final report; the intense-looking men would be in charge of these teams. As Wilkey described their duties, Karp realized that no one was assigned to the conduct of any field investigation.
"What about the people we have in Miami, New Orleans, and Dallas?" Karp interrupted. "What happens with those operations?"
"I'm afraid we're closing all that down," explained Wilkey in a patient tone. "We simply don't have time for it."
"You read my report?" Karp demanded. He had, on Wilkey's request, composed a brief summary of the major new leads he had uncovered: the Depuy film, the CIA papers, the interview with Mosca, the trove of material from Guel's house, the investigation of P. X. Kelly. He had included some of the more obvious next steps.
"Yes, I did. Interesting. But really, you don't have anything I can bring before the committee, do you? Some unsolved murders, a film of uncertain provenance, suspicions…" He glanced at his new people as if to say, This is just what we want to avoid. "No, I want to redirect the core of this effort toward the scientific analysis of solid evidence."
"You mean like the magic bullet? That's what you call solid evidence?"
Wilkey pursed his lips. "Yes, that's what we have to work with. We're going to settle the scientific issues, the forensics, the autopsy, once and for all. That's what the Congress expects and that's what we intend to do."
Karp was about to make his old point about the chain of evidence for all the physical sequelae of the assassination being hopelessly corrupt, but thought better of it and slumped disconsolately in his chair. The meeting resumed. Wilkey was also, it appeared, going to deal with the organized crime issue "once and for all" as well. Karp listened without interest. Of course they would try to pin it on the Mob! Congress would love that-Wilkey had written a book on the Mafia, Karp now recalled-because of all the powers in America, the Mob was the only one that didn't have a lobbying office in Washington. Not an official one anyway.
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