Corruption of Blood (37 page)

“Oh, that,” said Karp airily. “That’s for a regular investigation, where you’re eventually going to do some serious law. What we’re doing now is some kind of political horseshit. At this stage I just want to find out who killed Kennedy and how they did it. As for rules—no rules.”

After lunch, Karp called V.T. in Washington.

“Butch, am I glad you called!”

“Why, what’s up?”

“I can’t find the file. Tell me you took it with you!”

“What file, V.T.? All I have here are the stills from the Depuy film.”

“Oh, God! We’ve been ripped off! The file with the original Depuy film and documents and the original CIA stuff is missing. The last time I used it was the day before yesterday, and I went to add some stuff to it, and I pulled the phony jacket in the health insurance drawer where we kept it, and it was gone.”

“Who knew where we kept it?”

“Hell,
I
don’t know, Butch,” said V.T. irritably. “This isn’t the KGB. People are in and out of here all day. It wouldn’t take a master spy to notice that we always head for the admin files after we use that material.”

“But we have copies.”

“Yeah, sure,” said V.T. “I had a copy of the film made, and Xeroxes of all the other stuff, one set. I’ve got it stashed in the—”

“No! Not over the phone. Just keep it safe, for God’s sake. Without that film we’ve got zip.”

“Mmm, I detect new levels of paranoia blossoming. Not that I blame you. Okay, ready for some good news? I think I found PXK.”

“You did? Great, great! What is it?”

“It’s a Baton Rouge trucking concern. Right area, convenient to New Orleans and its colorful fascists. It’s owned by a gentleman named Patrick Xavier Kelly.

“I’m having Pete Melchior check him out, find out if he knew Depuy, and run his name by the local cops, see if there’s any connection to Ferrie or that Camp Street crowd.”

“That sounds good, V.T.,” said Karp, his mood lifting slightly. “Here’s the situation down here. By the way, this is for you, me, and Bert—nobody else.” Then he related the gist of what Mosca had revealed, and what had happened afterward. V.T. was silent throughout this narration, and afterward he made no response but to ask when Karp would be returning; and, after having been told two or three days, he said good-bye and broke the connection, as Karp had expected. V.T. was smart enough to understand that Mosca’s murder and Karp’s warning meant that there was a leak at the Washington end. Then Karp called home.

Marlene was actually relieved when Karp informed her that he would be away for several days, maybe a week. She felt she needed the time to see if Sweetie was going to work out. Marlene expected a lot of her mate, but even she thought that adding a dog the size of a young bear to the household, that dog being uncontrollable, might be an excessive demand.

But Sweetie, as it turned out, proved more than controllable, and was, in fact, eager to please. Marlene got some dog-training books out of the library and bought a leash and a long line, and she and Lucy devoted an entire day to the first few chapters. We learned “no”; we learned to go on the leash without jerking Mommy off her feet; we almost learned “down”; we learned “come,” which is easy, but we failed miserably at “stay,” which is hard. We also learned our name is Sweetie. We got to eat a cubic foot of kibble, and rode to the store in the back of the VW hatchback, and did a good deal of face-licking and general running around. Heaven.

“Let’s knock it off, honey,” said Marlene to her daughter as the four o’clock sun began its descent into the trees.

“Is Sweetie trained now?” asked Lucy.

“Um, well, we made a start. We’ll do some more tomorrow.”

“Could we, could we train him to bite bad people, like on TV?”

“It’s a possibility,” said Marlene cautiously. “Do you have any bad people in mind?”

“Yes, Jeremy,” said Lucy in a low and menacing voice.

“Jeremy Dobbs? But he’s just a little boy. I thought you liked him.”

“I hate him. He broke my pink crayon. On
purpose
!”

There followed a discussion of criminal intent and the nature of just punishment, which Marlene thought went pretty well, and they drove back from the park where they had been running the dog to their apartment. The mention of Jeremy Dobbs had raised in Marlene’s mind the problem of what she was going to do with her new monster while she worked at Maggie’s. Maggie had no dog, and Marlene suspected she was a cat sort of person, and one who would not appreciate Sweetie being given the run of her lovely gardens, winter or not. Even Marlene experienced a frisson of fear when she saw Sweetie standing next to Lucy, and realized that it could, if driven by some unknowable doggy impulse, take the child’s head off with a snap of its jaws. No, let’s wait awhile before we spring Sweetie on old Maggs, was Marlene’s thought.

Marlene started dinner and Lucy and the dog went up to Lucy’s room. The animal had been quickly integrated into Lucy’s fantasy play, which was rich and weird. Marlene could hear her chatting to Sweetie, as to her various dolls and toys. The dog had decided to sleep in Lucy’s room, or rather in the closet thereof, the twin of the one from which Marlene had rescued it in the identical apartment next door. Marlene suspected that it had been confined there when indoors for nearly its entire life; pathetic, but there it was. Home was prison was home. Marlene had seen it often enough with criminals. Another oddity: Sweetie didn’t bark, a characteristic that Marlene also attributed to its deprived puppyhood. It made a variety of yipping and groaning noises instead. Marlene’s training books said that excessive barking could be “corrected” by early discipline, which apparently Thug ‘n’ Dwarf (probably mostly Thug) had been excessively free with. So: the world’s only wimpy hellhound, and perhaps it was for the best, all things considered. It gave her another excuse to keep Sweetie; the poor thing wouldn’t last a minute in a pound pen. Dachshunds would cream it.

Marlene went into Lucy’s room to announce dinner. Sweetie was lying on Lucy’s bed wrapped in an old pink baby blankie, with a knitted pink doll’s bonnet set absurdly on top of its massive head, and on its face there was an expression of forlorn and pathetic helplessness.

“We’re playing baby,” Lucy announced.

Marlene broke up.

The phone rang during dinner, and when Marlene answered it a familiar low voice said, “Tomorrow. I’m driving.”

“Harry,” said Marlene, “first you say, ‘Hello, how are you,’ then you do a little small talk, and then you say what you’re going to do. Remember? We’re supposed to work on our conversational skills.”

“How’s the kid?” said Harry Bello, refusing to be drawn.

“The kid’s fine, Harry. Did you have any problem getting away on short notice?”

“I took a leave. Around four.”

That concluded the conversation. Marlene had left a message at Harry’s office the previous day. “Tell him I’d like to see him and that I have a situation here where I could use his help.” This was the response. Harry knew “come” as well as Sweetie did. It still made Marlene sad, and a little guilty—her hold and Lucy’s hold over Harry Bello—but not quite sad and guilty enough to make her not use it.

Maggie Dobbs was repotting a rare white frangipani she had grown from seed. Behind her in the conservatory she could hear Manuel working, mixing potting soil, mumbling to himself, singing snatches of tuneless song. She spent an hour or so out here most mornings, while Gloria was getting the children up and fed. Hank was long gone to the Hill, to start his usual twelve hours. It was the most peaceful and nearly the most satisfying part of her day. The plants, unlike most of the other organisms in her life, were content to merely be. Their demands were modest and easily satisfied with a slight displacement of position, a little more or less to drink, a few spoonfuls of this or that.

“There! Comfy now?” she said to the frangipani, and felt herself blush. Talking to plants, the first sign. She put the frangipani firmly back on its shelf. On the other hand they didn’t talk back, didn’t look at you as if you were not quite up to it, didn’t roll their eyes to heaven at one of your remarks and make you feel like a dunce. She took her apron off and hung it up and as she walked down the aisle to the door a blood-red mass of begonia caught her eye and she shivered slightly, recalling the bloodied face of the monte man and the smear on the window and the waving knife. There was that too, the problem of Marlene.

She left the conservatory and went to the kitchen, poured a cup of coffee, and tried to relax into the reassuring chatter and clatter of breakfast time. It was all very well to complain about being bored and to joke about the wife-of blues, but joking and complaining were one thing; actually
leaving
the comfortable middle-class bubble in which she had spent her entire life, and entering a world in which men carried knives and waved them in your face, spraying blood, in the company of a … a—Maggie Dobbs did not exactly know what Marlene was, but what it was frightened her. And yes, she was admirable, but Maggie was starting to realize that admiration and participation were quite different things.

And, of course, she had involved Marlene in the book project. She recalled Hank’s reaction when she had first told him about what Marlene was doing. His face had flushed and his eyes had opened wide and his mouth had dropped open, and she had braced herself for a scolding, but somehow it hadn’t happened. That was odd; as if Hank had
wanted
Marlene involved for some reason, and she thought she had seen in the moment, just before he would have started yelling at her, a calculation replace the anger in his eyes.

The phone rang. It was Marlene, calling to say she wouldn’t be by today and maybe the next day too. Something had come up—a visitor from out of town. Maggie hung up the phone and felt a wave of relief. She was ashamed of it, but it was relief all the same.

Harry Bello stiffened when Lucy came into the living room, followed by Sweetie.

“A dog,” he said flatly, meaning, “Unnatural mother, how can you let my precious goddaughter in the same house as this drooling monster?”

“Relax, Harry. He’s a sweetheart,” said Marlene, leaning over, grabbing the dog by its ears, and swinging the huge, jowly head from side to side. “Aren’t you a sweetheart? Aren’t you? Aren’t you a lily-livered candy-ass?”

The dog licked her face ecstatically and thrashed its whiplike tail.

“See, he’s harmless,” said Marlene.

But Harry wasn’t looking at the dog or at her; he was staring at Lucy, who was ignoring him.

“Aren’t you going to say hello to Uncle Harry?” Marlene asked. “Come on, Lucy, give him a hug and a kiss.”

Lucy endured an embrace and then scampered up the stairs to her own room, followed by Sweetie. Marlene took in the stricken expression on Harry’s usually blank face and said, “Oh, Harry, they’re like that at this age. She’ll come around.”

“She forgot me already,” said Harry, a faint whiff of accusation in his tone.

“No, she hasn’t, Harry. You’ll spend some time, she’ll see you, she’ll get used to you again—don’t worry about it.” What Marlene did not voice was her understanding that Lucy didn’t have to make nice to Harry because Harry was so obviously enslaved. She loved him in exactly the same way that she was coming to love Sweetie. Now she had two dogs.

Marlene made coffee and they sat at the kitchen table while Marlene spread out her notes and files on Reltzin and Gaiilov, and laid out the Dobbs project, what she had learned and what she wanted Harry to do.

“How long do you think?” she asked after Harry had sat silently shuffling bits of paper for a while.

He shrugged. Tapping a yellowed magazine photograph of Reltzin, he said, “Him? A couple of days. He goes to concerts, he’s a citizen, he’s got a job or a pension, a phone, electric. There’s ways. The other one, the spy? Who knows? We don’t have a picture? No? Then it depends. The guy wants to stay lost and he’s got experts to help him, then probably never, with just me working. If he don’t give a damn somebody finds him? It depends on the breaks. Maybe this Reltzin sends him a birthday card every year. We find him, we’ll know better.”

In fact, it took Harry Bello somewhat under forty-eight hours to find Viktor Reltzin. Marlene had made a bed for Harry on the couch, which he occupied only intermittently and for short periods. Otherwise he worked the streets and the phones. Through liberal and illegal use of his NYPD detective’s shield, Harry got into the Kennedy Center’s concert subscription records, and there he was. Harry then confirmed that indeed a man named Reltzin, with the right stats and face, lived in an apartment on Connecticut Avenue near Kalorama. He had an unlisted phone number, which did not prevent Harry from finding out what it was. Marlene called it.

A mild voice with a faint Slavic accent answered. Marlene had decided not to dissemble at all. If Reltzin hung up she’d figure out something else, but she thought that someone who had dwelt long in the tangled world of espionage, and who retained the grace to nod to the widow of an accused spy in public, might not be averse to some plain dealing.

And so it proved. Reltzin agreed at once to see her. Would this afternoon be convenient? It would.

Marlene dressed in a dark pink De La Renta suit and a patterned black silk shirt she had rescued from Maggie’s discard pile and altered to fit. She had to run out to the mall on Route 50 to get fresh hose and a pair of black heels. Thus attired, she left Lucy with Bello and the other dog and drove into town.

Reltzin’s building was one of the noble brownish piles that line the upper reaches of Connecticut Avenue south of the zoo. The man who opened the door for her was neatly dressed in a dark blue suit, the jacket buttoned over a quiet tie. The face was neat as well, the expression controlled and formally attentive. He gestured her inside. Marlene was glad she had thought to dress up; this man would not have been pleased to entertain Marlene in her usual gypsy rags.

“I have prepared tea,” he said, and led her through a dark green-painted, dimly lit foyer to a large room not much less dim.

He motioned, and she sat on a heavy gray brocade sofa in front of a low mahogany table upon which tea things were laid. The windows of the room were obscured with thick maroon velvet drapes. Yellow light came from two standard lamps with fringed shades. Marlene glanced at the coffee table. There was a plate of petit fours and one of little sandwiches, made of white bread with the crusts cut off. Reltzin had gone through some trouble. She peeked at a sandwich: egg salad. It occurred to Marlene that perhaps he did not have many visitors.