Corruption of Blood (31 page)

There was a blitheness in the tone of this last remark that annoyed Karp. Crane was independently wealthy and had besides just come from a lucrative private practice, which he still spent a good deal of his time tending.

“It’s been too goddamn long already!” snarled Karp. “I have no money. I’m cashing in CDs. We’ve been paying for consultant services out of our own pockets. If there’s no closure within the next week or so, I’m going to have to start looking for another job, one with a paycheck.”

Crane seemed taken aback by this outburst. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I hadn’t realized that you were so pinched. Would a loan help?”

Karp shook his head, suddenly embarrassed for both Crane and himself. “No, no, I’ll survive. The main problem is the consultants and the travel.
We
may be assholes, but the labs and the docs and the airlines aren’t.”

“Well, I’m sure it’s just a matter of days,” said Crane soothingly. “This crisis can’t continue indefinitely. Flores can’t want the public to see him as an obstructionist, and Hank will keep up the pressure on him to get the project rolling. Honestly, I think time is on our side.”

Karp had his doubts. Later in the morning, these were confirmed when he received an unexpected call from Hank Dobbs—unexpected because Dobbs usually dealt officially with the staff through Crane, and unofficially through his minion, Charlie Ziller. The congressman came quickly to the point.

“I understand you’ve had a breakthrough,” said Dobbs. “This mobster, Guido Mosca.”

“I don’t know about ‘breakthrough,’ ” said Karp cautiously. “It’s an interesting lead.”

“But you’re pursuing it?”

“Yeah, right now we’re looking into the best way of getting Mr. Mosca to talk to us. Speaking of which, Bert tells me that you’re pushing Flores for a contempt citation on David.”

“He does, huh? I wish Bert would learn that he’s supposed to run the staff, and not speculate on, or involve himself in, the politics of the Select Committee. My God! The man is a bull in a china shop. And he hasn’t cleared up this Philadelphia Mob connection business yet either.”

“But that’s nonsense!” protested Karp.

“Of course it’s nonsense. Bert Crane is as honest as a brick. But it hasn’t been laid to rest, and obviously, if there’s even a hint of an organized-crime angle to the assassination, as it now appears to be with this Mosca character, we’re in deep trouble unless it
is
resolved, permanently. Also, he’s still spending a couple of days a week in Philadelphia on private issues, and that doesn’t look good either. Sometimes I wonder whether he really wants the job.”

“This is pretty awkward, Hank, you telling me stuff like this. Why don’t you tell it to Bert?”

“You think I haven’t? I
have,
again and again. I’m on his side, and believe me, if I wasn’t, he would have been out of here weeks ago. Look, I have a quorum call and I have to run. But I want to get together with you soon, or a long talk. Maybe a dinner at my place; God knows, the girls are thick as thieves lately, you’re the only one who’s missing. And one more thing: I appreciate the work you’ve been doing over there under very stressful conditions. And I’m going to see that you get proper recognition for it.”

“I could use some actual money,” said Karp, but Dobbs seemed to ignore this remark and got off the line before Karp was able to ask him what he imagined proper recognition to be. Also left unresolved was the relationship of Dobbs and Crane; the congressman was obviously not the staunch ally Crane thought he was. Karp wondered what Dobbs wanted to discuss at the intimate dinner he was planning.

He turned his mind with an effort to more concrete maneuverings. Guma was out, or feigning absence, when Karp called him in New York, so Karp left a message: “Tell him it’s about my trip to Miami; he’ll understand.”

A few hours (spent on desultory paperwork) later, Karp’s phone rang.

“It’s all set up, wiseass,” Guma said without preamble.

“He’ll talk to us?”

“He’ll sing ‘La Donna è Mobile’ in the key of C—whatever. Don’t say I don’t come through for you.”

“I’d never say that, Goom. My only problem is how to pay for getting him up here. We’re having a little problem with our budget. You don’t think Tony would spring for a couple of round trips?”

“Ask him yourself, you’re such a buddy of his,” snapped Guma, and he broke the connection.

Karp was therefore actually musing on travel budgets, and budgets more personal, when the phone rang again a few minutes later and it was the columnist, Blake Harrison, and thus when Harrison asked him how he was he said, flippantly, “I’m flat broke.”

Harrison chuckled briefly. “Still haven’t been paid? That’s what happens when your boss is an unskillful, rather than a skillful, peculator in the public fisc.”

“Is that going to be the subject of your next column: the great Select Committee paper clip and stationery rip-off?”

“Hardly. Have you thought any more about what I said?”

“Some,” said Karp. “But I think it’s sort of moot at this point. I’ve just about made up my mind to quit.”

“Quit?” said Harrison in a tone of astonishment. “You can’t quit now. Why are you talking about quitting?”

“Um, for some reason I have a hard time getting people to understand this, but I have no money. I haven’t been paid. The prospect of my being paid remains dim. And when I say I have no money, I don’t mean that I can’t afford to lunch at the Palm this week. I mean I can’t buy the necessities of life for my family. I have a few pathetic CDs which I am going to have to cash in early to keep us alive in New York while I look for a job.”

“You’re serious?
That’s
the hang-up? You’re that broke?”

“Oh, yes,” said Karp, wondering where this was leading.

“No problem, then. Good, very good. I’ll be speaking with you later.”

He hung up, leaving Karp with the uncomfortable sensation that a deal had been closed, in which he himself was a fungible commodity.

“I need a car,” said Marlene, shaking off her raincoat in the Dobbs kitchen. To journey from Federal Gardens to McLean, not a burden when the weather was fair and warm, was a serious trial now that the fall nastiness had set in with damp vigor.

This complaint had been voiced with increasing frequency. Maggie looked sympathetic and said, “Why don’t you buy one, then?”

Marlene shot her an uncharitable glance. “With what for money? And no, I don’t want to borrow from you either. The problem is that transit authorities understand that the only people likely to be traveling from Lower Arlington to McLean in the morning are domestic servants, so who gives a shit if they’re waiting for hours and slogging through the freezing rain. Keeps them from getting uppity.”

“Stop it!” laughed Maggie, and then more thoughtfully, “You could probably get the Mollens’ car pretty cheap.”

“Who’re the Mollens?”

“They live down the street. It’s a VW and he’s a Member from Milwaukee.” Seeing Marlene’s incomprehension, she added, “They make auto parts in Milwaukee. Can’t have a foreign car anymore. They’re hot to get rid of it and it’s a darling car. Yellow, one of the kind with a square back.”

“A D Variant,” said Marlene. “What do they want for it?”

“I could call Sheila and find out,” said Maggie helpfully, going for the phone.

The call did not encourage. “Twelve hundred!” Marlene said. “That’s about eleven hundred more than we have in our checking account. Oh, well, fuck it anyway! We were going to go into town today, right?”

So they were and so they did. The children were left with Gloria, and Marlene and Maggie climbed into the deliciously warm and mighty Mercury wagon and headed for the GW Parkway.

They went first to the East Wing of the National Gallery, where Marlene had never been before, and cooed or snarled appropriately at the various treasures, and had lunch in the restaurant there, next to the little waterfall, and then went out onto the sodden and dripping Mall and hailed a cab to take them downtown for some shopping.

Actually, Maggie shopped; Marlene only advised and by dint of sincere argument, delivered with a passion she had not required since last she stood in a courtroom, kept her friend from making the sort of egregious mistakes that had left her with a bale of pricey but useless garments. Marlene found she enjoyed this vicarious shopping. There was no guilt involved, for one thing, and there was the Pygmalion-thrill of reshaping someone who had unlimited money and zero fashion sense.

They spent nearly four hours at it, ending up at Woodies on F Street, and at last, having had most of the packages shipped, and having spent enough to buy two used Volkswagens, the two women emerged, exhausted, onto the crowded streets.

The weather had improved in those hours. The front that had brought chilling rain for the past week had apparently moved away east. The air was clear and fresh, if chilly, and blue sky was trying to pop out between masses of swiftly moving, ragged clouds. They decided to walk east on G Street to Ninth and catch a southbound cab back to the National Gallery, where they had left the Mercury.

“Feeling depressed?” asked Marlene, noting Maggie’s glum expression.

“Yes, it’s like postpartum psychosis. A huge mass of money has moved out of my account and all there is in exchange is a bunch of new clothes, which I will have to
wear
, after which they will have been
worn.
It seems so futile.”

“Gosh, I thought we were having fun.”

“Oh, yeah, I didn’t mean … I don’t know
what
I mean! I guess I just need a kind of fun that doesn’t involve spending money. If there
is
any of that kind left.” She halted and turned to face Marlene. “I’m just another discontented rich Washington matron, aren’t I? The truth—am I
pathetic
?”

“Oh, don’t start!” said Marlene, grabbing her arm and hustling her along the street. “You just need something to jazz you up a little. There’s no risk in your life, is the problem.” They were at the corner of Ninth. The sides of the streets were occupied by street vendors selling a variety of cheap articles—hats and scarves, African trinkets, knockoffs of expensive handbags, umbrellas. Marlene looked up the street and spotted the decorative lanterns that marked the precincts of Washington’s small Chinatown. She clutched Maggie’s arm. “Dim sum! I could kill for a dozen dim sum.”

“Do we have time?” asked Maggie nervously.

“No, if we’re not back on the dot, Gloria’ll ditch the kids and go back to El Salvador, but who cares? It’s just what you need; we’ll probably be poisoned and then you can stop sweating the small shit like you do and worry about something important, like your liver rotting out. Let’s go!”

They headed north on Ninth. At about the center of the block, a crowd of about a dozen people had gathered. They were representative of that quite large proportion of the citizens of Washington, D.C., who are neither tourists nor officials; nearly all of them were black, Latino, or Asian. Marlene felt a rush of nostalgia for grubby New York and pushed forward to see what they were looking at.

“It’s three-card monte,” she told Maggie in a low voice. The monte man was a heavily built, swarthy Latino with a spade beard and a black leather coat and cap. At the table, betting, were a huge black construction worker with a yellow hard hat worn backward and multiple dusty sweatshirts, a smaller construction worker, similarly attired, and a thin, ocher-colored man in a greasy black raincoat with a jerky manner and an avid look in his eye. This last was doing most of the betting, crumpled fives and ones thrust decisively down beneath a flat and heavy piece of metal on the army blanket that covered the tabletop. He won more often than he lost, cackling each time he found the ace of spades among the two red aces. The construction workers were betting too, but not winning nearly as often.

“The point is to pick the black ace after he does his shuffle. The little guy in the raincoat is the shill,” Marlene informed Maggie in the same low voice. “He’s winning most of his bets. The other guys are getting skinned.”

Marlene turned her attention to the monte man. As she suspected, he was using the standard monte hand switch. After each round he did a show, holding the diamond ace and the spade ace faceup in one hand, widely separated, and the heart ace faceup in the other. Then he’d throw them down with an exaggerated motion, so that everyone could see he was throwing diamond, spade, heart, and then he’d move the cards around a few times, to “confuse” the suckers, take bets, and do the reveal.

Of course, the “confusing” maneuvers on the table that attracted the closest attention from the bettors were entirely irrelevant, because on the initial throw-down, the monte man had switched the diamond and the spade in his hand with a lightning motion of his fingers. If you knew where to look, and Marlene did, you could spot it every time, despite the distracting motion of the other hand, the one with the ace of hearts.

Now the big construction worker uttered a cry of dismay and a curse. He’d been worked up via a few two-dollar wins to risk a twenty-dollar bet, and he’d just lost it. The hustler scooped up the bills and wrapped them ostentatiously around a thick roll of cash he pulled from his pocket. “Who wants it, who wants it?” he cried. “Double you money if you pick the black ace, double you money, les go, les go!”

“Marlene?” said Maggie, “I, um, thought you wanted to get some Chinese food.”

“Yeah, but I just had an idea,” Marlene replied, steering Maggie out of the crowd. “I can beat this guy.”

“What do you mean? I thought it was fixed.”

“It
is
fixed. That’s the point. I know how he fixes it. The problem is, how to pull it off without getting our throats cut… .”

“My God, you’re serious!”

“You betcha. I’m tired of riding the bus. Oh, hey mister!”

This was addressed to the larger of the two construction men, who were pushing their way out of the crowd. Marlene got up close to him and flashed a smile. “Look, um, I got a way you can get your money back. Interested?”

The big man looked doubtful. “Yeah, how’m I gonna do that?”

“Me and my partner here are gonna take that sucker off. When we do, they’re gonna try to come after us. I need a couple of blocking backs to slow them down for a couple of minutes. What’d you blow, around fifty? Yeah? Okay, it’s worth that, plus fifty on top.”