Corruption of Blood (27 page)

“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 interrupted.

“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 return 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.

“Watch this one, it’s the only nonexecution,” said V.T.

Wartime, a trench filled with men dressed in motley uniforms, many sporting crossbelts, bandoliers, and odd black, tasseled hats. The men scramble out of the trench and one of them, on rising above the protection of the earth, is struck in the head by a bullet. His head jerks away from the shot, a cloud of dark material seems to rise from his skull like a departing soul, the tassel on his hat bounces up, obscenely playful, and he is flung backward into the trench.

For nearly twenty minutes they watched gunshot deaths representing nearly every one of the monstrous governments and antigovernments the century has produced in such profusion. Karp, watching, wondered how the victims kept their apparent equanimity. None of them looked like they were going to the beach, but neither did they seem particularly concerned. One woman, standing in her underwear before the guns, smoothed the hair of her daughter, as if they were posing for a photograph. All the victims had but one thing in common: when the bullets struck them, they fell or jerked
away
from the shots, which was the point of the present show.

The film whipped out of the slot and chattered, the screen went white. V.T. clicked off the projector and switched on the lights. Karp and the two other men blinked and stretched. To break the silence, Karp said, “What, no cartoons?”

The laughter was brief and uncomfortable, and Karp was annoyed at himself for the flippancy. He looked around the room at the men. V.T. displayed his usual bland, contained exterior, although there were still those dark circles under his eyes that Karp did not recall from their years together in New York. Jim Phelps, the photo expert, appeared grim and suspicious, as he did when viewing any film that he had not personally examined with a hand lens. He tapped nervously on a pile of manila envelopes he had brought with him, as if anxious for his part of the session to begin. The fourth man, Dr. Casper Wendt, seemed most affected by the film. The coroner of a large Midwestern city, Wendt was a vociferous member of the forensic pathology panel Karp had set up. Although he had seen any number of dead bodies in his practice, he was obviously less familiar with the actual process that rendered them so, although he was also one of the great students of all the Kennedy assassination amateur films. Wendt was thin and tall with glabrous blue eyes and a prim, reserved expression. Pale and distracted now, he absently polished his glasses on his tie.