Corruption of Blood (51 page)

“Caballo again,” said Karp.

“Mmm, I rather doubt it. Armand liked the high life. He was a tire salesman and failing at it. Perhaps it was a genuine suicide. So many people die from violence in this country that our occasional additions to the toll are hardly noticed. Some coincidences really are coincidences, you know.”

As he listened, Karp found it oddly difficult to retain his interest: the crime of the century, one of the great mysteries of the ages, and it was starting to bore him. It was like being in a French chef’s kitchen without the possibility of getting a meal, or like sex without orgasm: why bother?

There was a pause, a silence, broken only by Blaine’s labored breathing. Then Marlene said, “Why? Why did you do it? I understand why Bishop and the Cubans did it, but what about you? Why did
you
want him dead?”

Blaine seemed to recover himself slightly. “Oh, that. He had to be eliminated, my dear. He was a Communist.”

“Oh, come on! Kennedy was, if anything, a right-of-center Democrat, probably to the right of Johnson if it comes to that.”

“Oh, no, I mean he was an
actual
Communist. A covert agent of the Soviet Union.”

“Wha-a-a-t!” Marlene cried.

“Yes, it was hard for me to believe too, at first. Gaiilov gave me the story in the late forties. He’d been one of Beria’s aides and the old monster boasted about it one night during the war. It didn’t mean much then—who could’ve imagined that this frail little degenerate playboy would become president of the United States some day? But Armand remembered it, and when his own people were after him, and I saved his life, he told me. They’d recruited Kennedy in Prague, in 1939. His father had sent him on a so-called fact-finding tour of Eastern Europe. Pissed the State Department boys off no end. The NKVD leaped at the chance to compromise the son of one of America’s most prominent rightists. They set a honey trap, not the hardest thing to do with JFK, and once he was in the hotel room, they drugged him and set up the cameras. An orgy scene, and not just with girls either. Once he got over his fright, he sort of warmed to the idea. It was a way of getting back at Dad, don’t you know. He hated the old bastard, as who wouldn’t? The Sovs let him sleep for a long time, of course. They had no idea he would become so prominent so quickly. He may even have imagined that with the war and all, the destruction, they might have forgotten. But when he was safely in the White House, they rang his bell. The Cuban sellout was the first payment. The Reds got a permanent base in the New World and the elimination of a bunch of missiles based in Turkey. And it was just the beginning.”

“So you’re saying it was simple patriotism!” said Marlene. “Why didn’t you go to the authorities, for God’s sake, way back then, if you knew?”

“Ah, but way back then, you’ll recall, I had made myself persona non grata with the authorities, because of Dick and the trial. And I had compromised Gaiilov totally. No one would’ve believed him. And, of course, the Prague film we did not have.”

“But Dick Dobbs was a spy and a traitor,” said Marlene. “For all practical purposes, what you did for him released a vastly more damaging agent, assuming for a minute that I believe your Kennedy story. This is patriotism?”

A look of intense pain passed over Blaine’s face, pain that was patently not of the body, pain against which morphine was impotent. “Yes. Quite correct. Of course I did stop what he was doing.”

“Ah, right,” Marlene exclaimed. “
You
must have turned the FBI onto Reltzin. He always wondered about that.”

“Yes, I did that. And then I broke their case against Dick. All I can say in justification is to quote Mr. Forster: ‘If I had to choose between betraying my friend and betraying my country, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ ” A long breath, a winning smile. “But, as you see, I made it right in the end.”

They didn’t speak at all during the ride back to the airport, not because the driver might have overheard, but because their minds had been thrown off track, and until they had done some thinking they lacked the ground for a meaningful conversation about what Harley Blaine had revealed. Marlene helped herself to several vodka tonics, but when she asked Karp whether he wanted a drink he shook his head and turned away, staring out at the darkening Texas sky.

In the airport lounge, Marlene finally broke the silence. “There are flaws, aren’t there? In what he told us.”

“Flaws?
Flaws
!” Karp expostulated. “Marlene, there are holes in that fucking story I could drive a tank through. JFK was a Communist spy? Give me a break! The guy’s a fucking maniac, an assassination buff, except instead of saying
they
did it, he’s saying
we
did it. Hey, you know what? This shit is enough to make anyone convert to the church of Warren. It’s so simple. One nut, three shots, case closed. But then you start thinking about the flaws in Warren and add on all the coincidences and the bitty little connections and before you know it you’re back at the Queen Ranch. Or in with the Mob, if that’s your fancy.”

“But all the evidence leads to Blaine,” Marlene persisted. “He knew about all the stuff you found, the chessmen … and it fits him, the clever lonely boy who never changed, who never got the girl… .”

“Marlene, cut the Psychology 101 crap! Do you honestly believe that John Kennedy was a conscious agent of the Soviet Union?”

For twenty seconds, Marlene tried hard to make herself believe it, if only for the poetic symmetry of the idea. Then she cursed and rolled her eye, and said, “No, hell, that’s too weird even for me. The interesting question is whether Harley Blaine believes it.”

“Why is that the interesting question?”

“Because this guy is the most fascinating character in the case. Him and Dobbs. Look, in 1950 they were on top of the world. Dobbs could’ve done what JFK did—House, Senate, Presidency. He was just as attractive, nearly as rich, had a better war record, and a lot more brains. Instead, he decided to screw it all up, and JFK walked off with the prize. And the fact that he was decent to Dobbs after the fall probably just added salt to the wound, from Blaine’s perspective. That’s one part of it. The other part is the crazy triangle with Selma—I don’t even want to get into that. So, late fifties—he lost his career, lost his hopes for his friend, lost his great love. What does he have left? Control, manipulation. He convinces himself that this spy gossip is true, about JFK. Hell, people have convinced themselves of crazier stuff. And think how satisfying it must have been when he heard it from Gaiilov! A new focus for his life. And Harley just happens to be sitting on a plan for a failsafe hit on a president. How can he not try it out, and on such a deserving target? The Bay of Pigs fiasco gave him the troops he needed—and the rest …”

“Is history. Yeah, and so what!” said Karp, and then, more vehemently, “I hate this. I hate what we just did, I can’t tell you how much. And I can see you sort of like it. Your clever plan worked, we got the whole story, assuming it wasn’t yet another level of Chinese box, or something a crazy old guy made up out of his head.” He slumped and looked away from her across the concourse. “And it’s something between us.”

“What? You wanted, we wanted to know the story.”

“No! Knowing the story is nothing. The
process
is what counts. The ritual, the oaths, the witnesses, the … I don’t know, the
seeing
that justice is done. We’re never going to have that, and that bastard knew that when he set this whole thing up. He’s a lawyer, maybe a great lawyer. Maybe only a really great lawyer could have arranged it so that whatever anybody ever learned about JFK, whatever the suspicions, there could never be closure, there could never be a
case.
The wound could never heal. That’s his real crime, Mr. Blaine. Christ! Even if we had a tape of what he just told us, what could we do with it?”

“We do have a tape,” said Marlene. She reached into her bag and pulled out a small Sony microrecorder. “A hundred and ten eighty-nine at People’s.”

Karp sighed. “That’s just what I mean. It’s just another story. It’s got no evidentiary context. If I played that thing to Wilkey, he’d laugh me out of his office. Shit, if somebody played it for
me,
I’d do the same. A sick old guy claiming JFK was KGB? Get out of here!”

“It’d be funny, though, if it were true,” said Marlene. “Dick Dobbs and Jack Kennedy, birds of a feather, sort of like Burgess and McLean, gentlemen traitors.”

Karp welcomed the chance to leave the subject of the assassination. Lately it had started to produce nausea and headache whenever he tried to roll it around in his mind, and he was now fighting a particularly strong attack. He asked, “And so why do you think old Dick did it?”

“Oh, that! Well, maybe he had a crackpot notion that the U.S. shouldn’t get too far ahead of the Sovs in nuclear sub design. A lot of the old atom scientists felt that way, especially during the war. But the main reason, the
psychological
reason, you should excuse the expression, I think, was to spit in the world’s eye, and maybe in the eye of his best friend, who he’d just found out was fucking his wife. Everybody thought Dick Dobbs was perfect and he couldn’t stand it, so he became a traitor. Perfection’s an unbearable burden, when you think about it.”

“Oh, it’s not so heavy,” said Karp. “I do all right with it.”

She laughed and punched his arm, then leaned against his shoulder and said, “And then there’s Hank Dobbs, betraying his trust, his oath too, to protect his father’s friend.”

“Corruption of blood,” said Karp.

“Say what?”

“Corruption of blood. It’s in the Constitution. In cases of treason, corruption of blood means any kind of civil disability imposed on a family of a traitor. The Constitution says it can only last as long as the life of the person convicted of treason—after that his family is just like everyone else.”

“How little they knew,” said Marlene.

Driving home from National Airport, Marlene asked, “Feeling better?”

“Yeah, I guess,” said Karp, eyes on the road. “I’m resigned to leaving it to the judgment of history. What if we took all our stuff and just buried it in some library? Just a mass of anonymous evidence, everything we learned.”

“Misfile it, you mean? Like under, say, millet production in Hunan 1947 to 1959?”

“Yeah. Somebody will find it someday. I mean, if I give it to Wilkey, it’ll just get ripped off and destroyed. I don’t want that to happen. And for some reason, I don’t want to write a book about it, or give it to an assassination buff.

“Is that dumb? I mean, why bury it?”

“No, I don’t think it’s dumb at all,” said Marlene. “I think it means you still have hope for a better age to come. It’s sweet.”

At the apartment, a worried Harry Bello met them at the door. “We got hit,” he said without preamble. “They trashed the bedrooms and the bathroom upstairs.”

“Did they … ?” Karp began.

“Nah, I had it with me. Me and the kid went out to get Dairy Queen.”

“Where is … ?” asked Marlene.

“I got her sleeping in front of the TV. I didn’t want her to go upstairs. All her toys are wrecked and there’s a lot of blood.”

“That’s why your friend didn’t mind talking,” said Karp. “He figured by the time we got back, all our evidence would be gone.”

Marlene didn’t listen. “Blood?” she cried, digging her nails into her cheeks. “
Mama mia,
they killed the dog!”

“Other way around,” said Bello. “Come here, I’ll show you.” In the kitchen, he indicated where he was nearly finished mopping up a trail of drying, still gluey blood that led from the stairs to the kitchen door. “And this.” He went to the refrigerator and brought out a package wrapped in a paper towel. “The dog’s fine. It’s back in the closet. I found this there.”

It was half of a human right hand, the thumb and the first two fingers, badly mangled but all too recognizable. Marlene felt her gorge rise and she turned away. Karp had a similar feeling in his gut but forced himself to examine the specimen. “The top of the index finger’s missing,” he observed. “Did you look … ?”

Harry shook his head, opened his mouth, and pointed to it.

Karp collapsed into a kitchen chair. After a moment, he found himself chuckling. “Well, what do you know? Marlene, if this guy was Caballo, your dog ate the actual trigger finger. Is this a historic moment, or what?”

Marlene stumbled to a cabinet, pulled out a flat pint of Smirnoff, got a glass and some ice, and poured herself a shot. She sat at the table and drank it down. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” she said, “but I recall that this is not the first time that we have had human body parts deposited in our actual domicile, is it? Are we doing something wrong?”

“That’s too fat a target for me to even swing at,” said Karp. “I would modify the ‘we’ part, however.”

Marlene stuck out her tongue at him.

Harry asked, “What should I do with this?”

“I don’t know,” said Marlene, “we must know somebody who needs a hand.” She sputtered and sprayed vodka and ice over the table. There followed half a minute of uncontrollable hysterical laughter; even Harry contributed a few throaty guffaws.

Still laughing, Marlene went to the refrigerator and pulled out a large olive jar. She dumped the olives onto the dish and held the jar out to Harry. He put the hand in it, and Marlene covered the thing with Smirnoff.

“Anyone want an olive?” she asked brightly.

They packed their scant possessions and spent the night in a Holiday Inn in Rosslyn. Sweetie stayed in the car.

“We’re going to lose our security deposit,” said Karp as they settled in to bed. “And the bill for this and the airfare is going to wipe out our credit. Too bad about Lucy’s bone marrow transplant.”

“No problem,” said Marlene, “I have my special rosary with the plastic beads full of water from Lourdes.”

“Oh, right,” said Karp, “how could I forget? Seriously, though, what are we actually the fuck going to do?”

“I don’t know, go back to the city. Get jobs. Live in our rapidly appreciating loft.”

“Oh, God! Interviews!” Karp moaned. “Dewey, Rip-off, and Howe. Are we going to be able to stand it?”