Corruption of Blood kac-7 Page 7

  "What's wrong," said Karp, struck by her odd expression.

  "Oh, nothing," she said, going toward him. "I just realized I'm going to miss you." The music from the other room had turned slow.

  "Let's dance," she said, and they shuffled, locked together, weaving around the furniture.

  V.T. Newbury walked into Karp's Washington office, three weeks after his blithe agreement to take the Kennedy job, and immediately stifled a number of second thoughts. Karp looked up from his desk, which was covered with a stack of gold-stamped blue volumes, some open, some closed, all festooned with scraps of markers made of torn yellow bond. He smiled wanly.

  "Good, you made it," said Karp.

  "I did."

  "Any problems getting away?"

  "There was gnashing of teeth from one end of Manhattan to another. Three wine merchants closed their doors and the family went into mourning. Again."

  "They don't like you going to Washington?"

  "They love me going to Washington, but they were thinking of something more along the lines of deputy assistant secretary at Treasury. Where did you get this furniture?"

  "It came with the job. Like it?"

  "It's very forties. You look like General Wainwright on Corregidor."

  "I feel like it too. Have a seat, V.T. It's been sprayed for insect life, I think."

  V.T. sat on Karp's couch, an object made from the skin of a large puce nauga. You could still see where it had been shot, the holes now oozing fluffy white stuffing.

  "Your office is next door," Karp continued. "Fulton'll be across the hall."

  "He decided to come?"

  "Yeah, another divorce in the making. He'll start next week."

  "Do I get furniture as nice as this, or is yours special because you're the boss?"

  "As a matter of fact, I think you have a wooden desk. I saved it for you because I know you're the kind of guy who appreciates the little touches. The drawers don't open, but luckily we happen to have an unlimited supply of these unassembled gray steel shelves"-here Karp gestured at several long brown cartons stacked against his walls- "so that shouldn't be a problem. The good news is we're not being paid."

  "We're not?"

  "So it seems. They're fucking around with our budget on the Hill. Me and Crane and Bea Sondergard… did you meet her? Good lady. We're all on per diem and you and Clay will be too, until we get it straightened out. That means a hundred and twenty-five dollars each and every day we work, no sick leave, no vacation time, no benefits. Sound good?"

  "Irresistible. But what about the staff? If we can't hire…"

  "Well, actually, we can't hire, not yet. The commit-tee'll be staffed with people detailed from the Hill and from various federal agencies. That'll get us started, although we sort of have to take pot luck about who we get. I'm sure we'll get sent the very best people, and not the shitheads every agency in Washington has been trying to dump for years. Besides that, Bea informs me that if the per diem account runs out before we get a budget, we won't get paid at all. Not to mention, if this goes on long enough, we won't have anything in the account to pay our experts."

  "That's nice," said V.T. "How am I going to run a research operation without experts?"

  "Get with Bea on that. I don't think she actually intends to commit fraud, but she runs pretty close. It's a matter of juggling, according to her. Everybody does it."

  "Everybody does it! How often I've heard that in court, just prior to sentencing! Tell me, am I to gather from this that the sun of approval does not exactly shine from Congress on this enterprise?"

  Karp grinned. "You could say that. But as Crane keeps telling me, here we are."

  "Here we are indeed. So what should I start with meanwhile?"

  Karp pointed at his desktop. "You see all these nicely bound blue books? The Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, in twenty-six volumes. The Warren Commission."

  He rummaged through the stacks of books on his desk, jerked one out, and tossed it across to V.T. The rest of them slumped into a new configuration, like geological strata during orogeny. "I'm on volume twenty. Here's volume one, the report proper, eight hundred eighty-eight pages of crisp prose. The rest is hearings and exhibits. You'll have your very own set pretty soon, I hope. Meanwhile, don't lose my notes."

  "Read the whole thing, huh?" said V.T., hefting the volume he had just received.

  "For starters. Then there're the critics. I've collected the essential ones: Lane, Meagher, Josiah Thompson, a couple others." He pointed to a steel shelf lined with books. "Read them too. They've done a lot of work and raised some interesting questions. You'll see my notes on them-feel free to make your own. When you're finished we'll get together with Clay and map out a strategy for the investigation."

  V.T. said, "Sounds right." He paged through the book on his lap. "So. What's your take so far?"

  "Um, let me keep that to myself for now," said Karp after some thought. "I'd like your viewpoint without you knowing what I think. But, obviously, if there weren't serious problems with this beast"-he tapped the pile of blue books-"we wouldn't be here, would we?"

  "No, I guess not," said V.T. "It's hard to believe we are in any case. John F. Kennedy! It certainly stirs the old memories. You know, I met him once."

  "Oh?"

  "Yes, on a sailboat. I was something like twelve, so it must have been fifty-three or fifty-four. My uncle Tally Whitman had asked me on a sailing vacation on his boat, basically to keep my cousin Frank company. He was about my age and the problem was that Frank's sister, Maude, had invited a friend from Brearley along, and Tally didn't want the kid ganged up on by two seventeen-years-old girls.

  "Well, we set out from New Haven, where Tally kept the boat-he had a beautiful ketch, an Alden design, a forty-eight-the Melisande, it was called. Of course, in the first five minutes I fell desperately in love with Effie, the Brearley friend-who was by the way a raving beauty, in love in the way you can only fall at twelve. We gunkholed along the North Shore for a week and then crossed over to the Vineyard, and put in at Vineyard Haven. And there were the three Kennedy boys and some friends in the next slip. A bachelor outing; they'd come across from Hyannisport that day."

  "So you met him," Karp broke in. He liked V.T. a good deal, but he had a limited patience for his stories about life in high society, with endless glosses on who was related to whom, and who did what to whom at Newport in the year whatever.

  "Yes," said V.T. "I had no idea who they were, of course, but Uncle Tally had been at school with Bobby, at Choate. I was allowed to serve drinks, life's finest moment up until then. Frank was nauseated, of course. Well, I was probably a colossal bore to them all, because all I had to talk about was sailing, which I did in the most pompous way imaginable, and I must say they were nothing if not polite. The afternoon, however, wore on, and the gin flowed. I was an efficient little barman. Then I began to notice something very disturbing. I was a sheltered youth, of course, and at twelve my sexual knowledge was at the schoolboy giggle stage, but it was clear to me that Jack Kennedy was making eyes, as we then called it, at the delicious Effie. And hands, too. And she was reciprocating. I was astounded, and devastated. I mean he was an old man."

  "So did he bonk her?"

  "Not that I saw. I'm sure that Uncle Tally would never have allowed it, not on his watch. Of course, he might have bonked her thereafter; apparently he bonked everybody else. In any event, it was decided that we should race across to Hyannis the next morning, and we did. The Kennedys were good sailors, of course, but Tally was an Olympic-class skipper and I worked my young butt off, as did Frank and the girls. And we whipped them, by three boats. Jack was not amused. I mean it was ridiculous; he was really angry, red-faced, screaming at Teddy about some goof. A man who didn't like to lose. As he proved in later life, too."

  V.T. put his hands in his pockets and looked out the dirty window. "Here's the kicker: ten years later, I was at Yale, a chilly afternoon, I was getting
ready to go out in a single scull, when the crew manager came running down the ramp yelling that somebody'd just shot the president. At first I thought he meant the president of Yale. There was a radio going in the boathouse and a bunch of us sat around and listened. When they announced that he was really dead, I went back out onto the ramp and pushed my scull into the water and rowed until I was exhausted. And I'll tell you the truth, all I could think about was that day on the Vineyard when he made a drunken pass at a seventeen-year-old Brearley girl. Incredibly shaming and inappropriate, but I couldn't get it out of my head. That and this weird fantasy, about flying back in some way to my twelve-year-old self in the cockpit of the Melisande and grabbing him by the shoulders and shouting, 'Forget the girl, asshole! November 1963: don't for God's sake go to Dallas!' "

  V.T. let out an embarrassed laugh and made a gesture of helplessness.

  Karp smiled and indicated with a wave of his hand the office, and by extension the ramshackle investigation. "I guess this is the next best thing, then."

  "Sad to say," said V.T. "Sad, sad to say."

  In the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, a man received a disturbing phone call. It was a journalist calling; remarkably, this journalist was not seeking information but supplying it. The CIA has this sort of relationship with quite a number of journalists, both domestic and foreign.

  "Are you positive?" asked the CIA man.

  "Positive," replied the journalist. "I got it from one of Schaller's staff guys. They were blown away when they read them. Schaller doesn't know whether to shit or go blind."

  Schaller was a leading member of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities-the Church committee.

  The CIA man cursed briefly, then said, "This will take some controlling. All right, what's your take on Schaller's options?"

  The journalist replied, "I think he'll have to use the Castro stuff but he had some of that already, and it all leads to dead ends. The other thing, the JFK items… I don't know. It's not exactly in his line of study, and he doesn't want to look like an asshole a couple of months before election. I think he'll pass it on."

  "What, to Flores's operation?"

  "Yeah."

  "Which is not going anywhere."

  "Which is definitely not going anywhere."

  The CIA man thought about this for a while and then said, "Still, I'd like some insurance."

  "Anything I can do…," offered the journalist.

  "I'll be in touch."

  After getting off the line, the CIA man made a call to the head of the little team that had prepared the documents for the Senate Select Committee's subpoena, and gave him the reaming of his life. Then he called several other people, including a former CIA deputy director for operations, and told them what had happened. None of them was pleased.

  After that, he sat for a while, humming, tapping a pencil, making mental plans, and weighing risks. The first rule of secrecy is that every time you let someone new in on the secret, you increase the chances of exposure by a factor of two. Too many people knew about this thing already, and so if he wished to mobilize people to suppress the inadvertently leaked knowledge, it made sense to use only those who knew the story already. He went to a locked filing cabinet, unlocked it, and drew out a worn notebook. Opening it, he found a telephone number.

  He dialed it, and while he waited for the call to go through, he locked the notebook away again.

  It took a good while for the call to go through and then the CIA man had to make use of his still-fluent Spanish. Finally, in the town of Quetzaltenango, in Guatemala, a phone rang.

  FIVE

  In the weeks that ensued, Karp each morning left his furnished two-bedroom apartment in Arlington, took the metro to Federal Center, walked to the office, and there spent his days largely in reading. He had finished the Warren material and was now slogging through the recently released Church committee report on intelligence. The office of the Select Committee staff continued stinking of fresh paint and plaster dust, and still sounded with the thumps of heavy equipment being moved about. Increasingly, Karp was running into people he did not know, who claimed to work for him, or almost to work for him. He had nothing as yet for these people to do, which did not seem particularly disturbing to them, since they all seemed to have other jobs of some sort. There was a good deal of motion in the hallways, typewriters and Lexitron printers clattered away, people trailed reels of phone wire, telephones rang, and were occasionally answered. Crane was rarely in the office, as he had a series of private legal commitments still outstanding in Philadelphia. Karp had no idea what was going on.

  Late in the morning of one of these trancelike days, Karp, befuddled with reading, wandered out of his office in search of coffee. Cup in hand, he went into the small bay that was supposed to hold a reception area and the clerical pool, but which still resembled the site of a terrorist bombing. There Bea Sondergard was standing like a ringmaster, directing a team of phone engineers, a crew building partitions, and three men with huge cartons from Xerox, carrying on at the same time a conversation with a short, bespectacled, red-bearded young man. Sondergard waved Karp over and pointed him at the other man.

  "Butch, I want you to meet Charlie Ziller. Charlie's a loaner from Congressman Dobbs. Charlie, Butch Karp, your new boss." She coughed as plaster dust settled in a cloud around them. Karp shook hands with Ziller and said, "I'm sorry, we seem to be a little disorganized…"

  At this Sondergard uttered a cackling laugh and raced off after the Xerox people who were, despite her instructions, moving their copier to the wrong room.

  "Actually," said Karp, "it's a nonstop Chinese fire drill around here. Do you have a desk yet?"

  Ziller grinned engagingly and shrugged. He looked about twenty-five and had small, bright blue eyes. "No, I'm going to have a cubicle when they're built, according to Bea."

  "Great. So-you're a volunteer, or did you fuck up something important?"

  A polite laugh. "No, I wangled it, in my subtle way. The Kennedy thing-just something I've always wondered about, and maybe this is a chance to be in on the real story."

  "Another Camelot fan."

  "I guess. My folks were in the administration then and it's something that hit them pretty hard. I was in junior high at the time. Sixth period, they announced over the PA. My math teacher burst into tears. I'll never forget it; it was… I don't know, like finding out you're adopted. It shook up the whole world, you know? Especially with us all being in the government. I guess it just feels like a natural thing for me to do."

  "So what're you supposed to be doing for us?"

  Ziller shrugged again. "The representative didn't specify. I'm just supposed to come over and make myself useful."

  "Oh, yeah? Like how? Expand on your talents."

  Ziller made a self-deprecating little writhe. "I'm a staffer. I can talk on the telephone. Type on the typewriter. Go to meetings. Have lunch. That's what we do here in the nation's capital."

  "Okay," said Karp, "in that case, let's have lunch. You can show me your stuff."

  Ziller took Karp to the Green Hat, a small multileveled saloon on Maryland off Third. They walked up the Hill and behind the Capitol, Ziller pointing out the sights knowledgeably. It turned out he was a third-generation civil servant; his father was a fairly high mandarin at State, his mother a budget officer at the General Services Administration. Ziller had been educated at American U. and was one of the rare natives of the town. He seemed happy to speak freely about himself, Washington ways, and his recent job, which was staffing the House Intelligence Committee. He touched amusingly on the idiosyncrasies of various congressional characters as well, pointing out several who were dining in that very place.

  Ziller did this last discreetly, in a low voice. Most of those he indicated were solid-looking men in their fifties or sixties, with graying hair and very pink skin, but there was one woman, an undersecretary of something, lunching with another,
an assistant secretary of something else. Karp learned, whether he wanted to or not, that an undersecretary was more important than an assistant secretary, but that a deputy assistant secretary was more important than a deputy undersecretary, except at the Pentagon, where the reverse obtained.

  They ordered; food was brought. Karp found himself unexpectedly ravenous, and tore into his meal, a cheeseburger as large as a regulation Softball.

  "Good burgers here," observed Ziller as he plucked at a shrimp salad.

  "Yeah. So-how am I doing? Am I having lunch yet?"

  Ziller grinned, showing the small neat pearly teeth you get if you have been covered by the government's generous health plan from birth. "Not quite," he said. "Lunch actually happens when I tell you something I've been sworn not to tell you, and tell you not to tell anyone else, knowing that you will tell exactly the person I want to find out about it, but couldn't tell. That's having lunch."

  "And…? What's the secret?"

  Ziller shrugged and his expression became more guarded. "Avoid the apple pie. It tends to be watery."

  "I'm serious," replied Karp, placing the stump of his burger on its plate. He wiped his mouth with his napkin and regarded Ziller unsmilingly. "I appreciate the walking guidebook act, but let's not screw around with each other. Dobbs sent you over here to watch the store for him and also to slide me information he thinks I should have without having to do it officially. Obviously, you don't want to do that on our first date, so to speak; you want to feel me out a little, learn something about who I tell secrets to before you let loose, maybe check out do I know what the hell I'm doing around an investigation. I appreciate that, but here's a tip. The problem with telling me secrets, is I don't pass them on. That's because I'm basically a simple country boy. Around here, as I gather, you've got to show what you know to show everybody you're somebody. Like, 'Look at me, I know some Senator is schtupping the assistant secretary of what's-its-face, hooray.' But basically, I don't give a flying fuck about being somebody in Washington. I didn't much like it when I was somebody in New York. Plus, I left my family in the city, and as a result I'm horny and generally pissed off. I'm here to do a job and scram, the quicker the better. And I could put all the patience I have with all this shit-'don't mess with that one' and 'respect this one's fucking sensitivities'-in my belly button. I told Crane I had no political skills and it's true, and he said that was okay, and if it turns out it's not, I'm on the next plane out. You can convey the same message to Representative Dobbs." He paused and produced a mild version of his famous stare. Then he grinned, to forestall any tension.