Corruption of Blood (43 page)

“You’re driving very well,” she observed. Karp was a terrible driver, but he had only stalled once in getting under way, and although he was creeping along at fifty-five on the extreme right edge of the highway, behind a big truck, Marlene was feeling more than charitable.

“Thank you,” said Karp tightly.

“You’re in hell, aren’t you?” she asked after a long pause.

“Yes. Yes, I am,” said Karp. “And it’s like it was custom designed for me, for the kind of person I am. I still can’t believe I actually volunteered for it.”

“It’s in the nature of hell to be customized. See Dante.”

“See … ?”

“Dante’s
Inferno.
The damned are given punishments suitable to their sins. The fornicators are locked together with their beloveds for all eternity, the gluttons are stuffed with food, and so on. Poetic justice. Gilbert and Sullivan parodied it in
The Mikado
.”

She sang, in a plummy alto: “‘My object all sublime, I shall achieve in time, to let the punishment fit the crime, the punishment fit the crime. And make each prisoner pent, unwillingly represent, a source of innocent merriment, of innocent merriment.’” Karp laughed, and she sang the rest of the song.

“Yeah,” said Karp, “and the homicide prosecutor is forced to work on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Nobody really wants to know who did it. He has no resources, the bad guys know what he’s doing before he does. I wonder who’s laughing.” Then he began to tell her about the case, in more detail than he had exposed it to her before, pouring out his anger and frustration. Karp was an adherent of the belief that real men handle their own problems, and turn toward their families a face of genial competence, interspersed from time to time with fits of insensate rage or, which was more common with Karp, periods of irritable sulking. This he had learned at his daddy’s knee.

Marlene, who understood this very well, received the gush of confession in near silence, only asking clarifying questions from time to time. It was curiously like interviewing a rape victim.

When he was talked out, she laid her head against his shoulder and squeezed his arm. “I’m glad you told me all that,” she said.

“You don’t mind?”

“I mind when you
don’t
tell me, dummy!” Marlene replied cheerfully. “Who do you think gets to carry your bile when you’re bravely suffering in silence?”

“Oh,” said Karp.

Marlene briefly considered unloading her own discomfort with the Dobbs case, but decided that the moment was inopportune. What was sauce for the gander was not necessarily sauce for the goose, and besides, she was aware of the vast gulf between the national historical importance of what Karp was doing and the relative triviality of her own recent pursuits. She was embarrassed by it, in fact. So she said instead, “So you think it was the CIA after all.”

“No, not really, not the organization. I mean what is the CIA after all? Ninety percent of it is a bunch of GS-thirteens carpooling to Rockville, and the leaders tend to be pompous assholes like Dulles. If they actually sat down and
planned
this thing it’d have been the fuckup of the century, especially since they would’ve had to bring the Latin American boys into it.”

“What do you mean?”

“V.T. explained it to me once. The CIA has, like … leagues, like in baseball, where they distribute their talent. The majors are in Europe, Berlin, Vienna, head-to-head with the Russkies, and maybe also Japan. Those are the key countries. Triple A is the Mideast, because of Israel and the oil. Class A is the rest of Asia. Latin America and Africa is where they put the no-hopes. I mean, if you had anything on the ball, would you really want to spend your career infiltrating the Socialist party in Bolivia or Uganda and fucking with some pathetic union movement in those places? Bugging the North Korean embassy in Quito? No, but along comes Castro. All of a sudden these no-hopes are playing in Yankee Stadium on national TV. The result—the Bay of Pigs. Back to the minors, boys. Okay, two things: One, if the top guys in the Agency wanted to whack the president the absolutely last people they would’ve picked are the guys who did that abortion, plus their track record for hitting Castro wouldn’t fill anyone with confidence. In fact, from what I’ve been able to gather, these guys, Bishop and company, were protecting Fidel like a brother. I mean, once Fidel goes, there goes their budget. Two, this is hard to explain, but it’s not a government operation, the Kennedy thing. I’ve been in government my whole life, and I’ve seen a lot of slimy deals go down, and the one characteristic they all have is stupidity and simplicity; once you pick at them, they start to unravel. People rat each other out. They leave evidence lying around. They buy yachts they can’t afford. And let’s face it, you want to start a conspiracy in the government, who’ve you got to do the job? Guys who signed up to work at a desk eight hours a day for thirty years, with no chance of layoffs and a nice pension at the end. Not your top recruits for skullduggery, right? Prime example: Watergate. Now that’s a government conspiracy.”

“So it
wasn’t
the CIA? But you said before …”

“No, look—I think there might’ve been, after the Bay of Pigs, something like … um, what’s that play where the knights kill that guy in the cathedral?”

“Becket.
You mean like they said, ‘who will rid me of this turbulent priest’?”

“Right!” Karp exclaimed, “who will rid me of this turbulent priest. Or president, in our case. They were angry and scared, they were talking tough-guy talk. Somebody oughta shoot the bastard and save us from the commies. And the word filtered out that maybe there’d be cover available if maybe somebody
did
do Kennedy. And now, an idea pops up in somebody’s mind. I can see this guy, like you can see a picture in a patch of sky through a tree, by the leaves around it, a kind of negative shape. This guy is not a CIA guy but he understands how it works. He has connections to the kind of people who can do something like this. And he’s an artist. This whole thing was designed, constructed, and constructed in such a way that it would keep running, keep getting more complex and harder to figure out the more time went by. Everybody who looks at it brings something to it, because of all the pieces he put into it. You want to believe it’s a lone nut, there’s your certified loser. You want to believe it’s a CIA conspiracy, there’s the CIA assets. You want to believe it’s a Mob hit, there’s the Mob. You want to believe it’s the commies, there’s Castro and the KGB. It’s brilliant! It’s like being guarded by Bill Russell or batting against Nolan Ryan. Even though the guy’s whipping my ass, I got to give him credit.”

“So who is it? This Bishop character? Paul David.”

“Nah! David’s a bureaucrat. He can follow orders and not fuck up too much, but he didn’t have the sense not to send a picture of a guy who looked very little like Oswald from Mexico City and he messed up with the tapes. Definitely bush-league; he didn’t plan this. No way.”

“But then nobody’s left except this Irish guy, PXK.”

“Yeah, and I hope for his sake that he’s either running the show or has nothing to do with it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t want to be carrying his life insurance. Uh-oh, I think we have to turn off here.”

For the remainder of the trip, their attention was taken up with navigation on the dark roads, looking for landmarks, stopping to read Karp’s inadequate scrawled directions. Marlene felt something tugging at her mind, something buried in what Karp had told her, but for the moment she was unable to dredge up what it was.

They arrived finally in the courtyard of a stone-built, slate-roofed eighteenth-century structure. A carriage lamp threw soft yellow light on the graveled yard.

“This is it, huh?” said Marlene. “The Old Ragg Inn? Old
Ragg?
How romantic, how evocative of sexual denial!”

“It’s a mountain, Marlene,” said Karp.

It was a mountain, indeed, and they saw it the next morning from the windows of their room, a dun hump looming through gray mists. The valley between the inn and the mountain was lost in an earthbound cloud.

“God! It’s like fairyland,” cried Marlene sitting up in bed. “It’s like Brigadoon. Maybe when we go downstairs we’ll find a hundred years have passed and they finally found out who killed JFK.”

“Who was it?” asked Karp sleepily from beneath the thick quilt.

Marlene leaned over and whispered in his ear. “It was Jackie. She had a gun concealed in that hat. Oswald was actually her son by a concealed teenage marriage.”

He made a clumsy grab for her, but she fended him off. “You maniac! Don’t you ever get enough?”

“Me? Me?” protested Karp. “It wasn’t me who was hooting all night long.”

“Hooting?
I don’t recall ever having had my ladylike intimate murmurs described as ‘hooting.’ ”

“Squealing, then,” said Karp. “Explicit language at top volume. It’s a good thing it’s the off-season and there aren’t any other guests on this hall. I was afraid they’d ask us to leave.”

“In your dreams,” sniffed Marlene and rose from the bed. “In any case, as a result of your insensate lusts, I’m covered in your effluvia, which I now intend to wash off. In the Jacuzzi.”

“This is very nice,” sighed Marlene some minutes later, when the two of them were entwined in the warm, churning waters. “It’s so colonial.”

Karp, soaping the inside of his wife’s thigh with a perfumed bath bar, agreed: “Yes, our colonial forefathers …”

“And foremothers.”

“… and foremothers of old Virginia set up their Jacuzzis first thing, right after the slave-whipping post. The Jacuzzi was actually invented by Thomas Jefferson or Patrick Henry or one of those guys.”

“Mmm, Patrick Henry. Give me lavatory or give me bath. Oh, God, don’t get me started again, I’m starving; I need food, not more of
that
.”

Karp obligingly shifted his ablutions to a less critical area. “Breakfast is included,” he said. “I doubt there’ll be bagels, but it’s included.”

“Good. Which reminds me: how are we affording all this luxury? Did you take a bribe?”

“No, I put it on the card.”

Marlene stared at him. “The card? Would that be the MasterCard I fought with you for a month to take out and you agreed only if we both swore that it would only be used for the most extreme emergencies, like, I believe you said, a bone-marrow transplant for Lucy.
That
card?”

Karp shrugged, only slightly embarrassed. “I thought it
was
a medical emergency. Emotional deprivation can lead to serious physical problems, you know.”

“You just wanted to get laid.”

“No, I wanted to provide you with a more suitable venue for hooting than our shitty thin-walled apartment. A little more polish on that knee?”

The phone rang. They both froze, as if about to be discovered in an illicit act.

“Who the hell is that?” asked Marlene. “Did you tell the office where you were?”

“Are you nuts? Nobody knows we’re here. I didn’t know myself until I called this joint about an hour before we left. It’s probably the desk, they want to know if we want one egg or two. Or else our car’s in the wrong place.”

Karp got out of the bath, put on one of the thick white terry cloth robes supplied by the inn, and went to answer the phone.

It was not the desk calling, but Blake Harrison, the columnist. Karp felt a pang in his vitals. He had to clear his throat heavily before responding to Harrison’s greeting, after which Harrison wasted no time on small talk.

“Butch, you’ll recall our conversation at Dobbs’s house? Well, now’s the time. Crane will be fired on Monday.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Karp replied. “The word is the committee is fairly pissed at the way Flores has been behaving. They might not let him.”

“What happens to Flores doesn’t signify, for God’s sake,” snapped Harrison impatiently. “Flores may be finished too, but that doesn’t mean Crane can stay. Trust me on this. So, what’s your answer? Are you going to take the job?”

“I’ll make that decision when it’s presented to me,” said Karp.

“Oh, stop being a prig!” Harrison shouted. “You think they’re going to put an equal-opportunity ad in the
Post
? You’ll be offered the job; my advice to you is to take it. You handle it properly, it can definitely lead to big things.” There was a pause. “Karp? Are you there?”

“Yes, I’m here. I was just thinking about whether I’m ready for big things. Good-bye, Mr. Harrison.” Karp put down the receiver. He could hear Harrison sputtering until the moment the connection was cut.

“Not the desk, huh?” said Marlene when Karp came back to the bathroom.

“No, it was Blake Harrison.”

“The newspaper guy? How did he find out you were here?”

Karp sat down on the rim of the tub. “Well, either somebody followed us here or somebody heard me making these reservations. Since I doubt whether anyone could’ve followed us over those mountain roads last night without us noticing, they probably either have a tap on our phone or a bug in the apartment.”

“I don’t want this to be happening,” Marlene said, and then put her hands over her ears and sank backward until the surface of the foamy water closed over her head.

Still, they managed to have a nice weekend, in the fashion of people for whom things cannot get much worse. They drove to the national park and Marlene walked out on a rock in the South Fork of the Shenandoah and sang all six verses of “Oh, Shenandoah,” with feeling. Karp walked out to join her and fell in, immersing himself to the waist. They had a couple of good meals at the inn and spent a lot of time in bed. At intervals, Marlene told Karp about the Dobbs affair, and what she had learned in the attic.

“You don’t think I’m a rat for reading that stuff, do you?” she asked after she’d finished her tale.

“Semi-ratty,” answered Karp. “I think it’s why you’re a great investigator and not that great of a prosecutor.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” she snapped, bridling.

“Just that if somebody lets you loose on a case, they better be sure they want everything to come out, and forget the niceties. What you want is truth and justice, no holds barred, and you forget the rules of evidence. You even forget the law. It’s going to get you in a shit-load of trouble some day.”