Corruption of Blood (6 page)

Extending her hand, she said, “I’m Bea Sondergard. Bert’s waiting for you.”

Karp shook the hand and followed her down a short hallway.

She said, “What a mess, huh? Bert wanted to get started in D.C. as soon as possible. The federal government is not used to starting operations in a week. Or a year.”

She knocked briefly and threw open a door. Bert Crane, dressed in chinos and a worn blue Brooks Brothers shirt, was sitting on a secretary’s chair in the center of a large corner office, using a stack of cartons as a desk.

He looked up expectantly. “Phones?”

Sondergard shook her head. “Definitely by Thanksgiving—no, really, the guy said pretty soon. Look who’s here.”

Crane rose and greeted Karp. “Welcome to Washington. I wish I could have received you in more splendor. The furniture’s on order; God knows when it’ll get here. We have no phones, and I’m not sure we’re being paid.”

“Aside from that … ,” said Sondergard.

Crane grinned. “Yeah, aside from that. This is what’s known as hitting the ground running. Look, here’s the plan. I have to make some calls, assuming the phone starts working. Bea will get you started on the paperwork to get you on board. Then we’re due over at the Rayburn Building for a meeting with the chairman, show him you can walk and talk and don’t drool. Then I’ve got a lunch with some media people, and you’re free until, let’s say, two; get back here, and we’ll talk. You should be able to catch the four o’clock shuttle.”

“Sounds good,” said Karp.

Bea Sondergard ushered him out and into her own cramped office next door, where, Karp was not surprised to see, all was in order: a desk, several chairs, a brass lamp with a shade, a typing table on which was a Lexitron word processor, and on one wall, several sheets of white chart paper displaying carefully printed lists of things to do, and flowcharts showing the order in which they were to be accomplished. The woman quickly found a manila file and handed it to him. In it were the forms without which the government would not recognize the existence of its servants. On each of the forms there was a little typed note explaining which forms were most important and offering pithy advice on what to put where.

“Very thorough,” said Karp, again not surprised. He realized, of course, that Bea Sondergard was one of the anonymous, self-effacing, and ruthlessly efficient people, almost always women, almost always in their middle years, who hold the fabric of modern civilization together by sheer force of will. There must be at least one in every organization, and in order to have any sensible interaction with a bureaucracy, the first step is to find out who she is. Bea Sondergard was the one in Crane’s outfit.

“Thank you,” said Sondergard. “I trust you won’t have any trouble with all that. We’re exempt from civil service because we work for Congress—obviously Congress isn’t going to burden itself with the nonsense they make the rest of the government go through—but it’s twisted enough as it is. Getting purchase orders and stuff through the comptroller—God knows when you’ll be able to get furniture.”

Karp looked up from “Mother’s Maiden Name.” “What’s wrong with the stuff in the hallway?”

“Oh, that! It’s just garbage the previous tenants declared surplus. It’s going out to Maryland for storage or disposal tomorrow.”

“I’ll take it.”

“Seriously? It’s tacky in the extreme.”

“No problem.”

“Well, well. You must have flunked bureaucrats school. I thought you looked like class,” she said, beaming a smile that showed large teeth and a significant spread of pale pink gum. “I bet you
do
find out who killed Kennedy.”

Later, on the short walk up the slope to the Rayburn, Crane, now in a slick gray suit, said, “Let me fill you in on George Flores. Six-term rep from the Twentieth District. That’s Dallas, by the way, and probably not by accident. Flores was not a big enthusiast for starting this committee, but once it got the go-ahead from the House leadership, he moved in fast. Why? Who knows? It may just be that he doesn’t want anyone stirring up his patch without being able to look over their shoulder.

“As far as the rest of the committee goes, they’ll be inclined to let Flores take the lead. Frank Morgan’s a solid guy, he’s a black caucus leader, but he’s mainly interested in the MLK side. On your side, I’d have to say the main guy would be Hank Dobbs.”

“Who is … ?”

“Representative from the Second District in Connecticut. He’s Richard Ewing Dobbs’s kid, by the way.” Karp gave him a blank look. Crane shook his head in amazement. “How soon they forget! Richard Ewing Dobbs? Doesn’t ring a bell? How about Alger Hiss? Julius and Ethel Rosenberg?”

“Them I know. His father was a spy?”

“Accused spy. One of the great liberal cause célèbres of the bad old fifties. We don’t discuss it with Hank, incidentally. He’s a little raw on the subject. Anyway, of the committee as a whole, he’s probably the strongest supporter of the way we want to do things.”

“A friend, in other words,” Karp ventured.

Crane sniffed, “I wouldn’t go quite that far. You know the saying—if you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog. But an ally, at least—and I think you and he will get along.”

They reached the undistinguished sugar-white pile with the acromegalic statues flanking the entrance and went in. Walking down the broad corridors toward Flores’s office, Karp was gratified to see actual lobbyists plying their trade, speaking in small confidential groups to one another or surrounding a striding representative in a slowly moving pack, like hyenas tugging at a dying wildebeest.

They arrived at the appointed hour and were told to wait in an anteroom. Karp looked around with interest. He had never been in a congressman’s office before. On the walls, posters showed the Dallas skyline and a rodeo. There was a Lone Star flag on display and a Remington knockoff of a buckaroo on a side table, which also held a selection of magazines devoted to Texas, Dallas, government, and Mexican-Americans, several in Spanish. The walls of the waiting area were paneled in dark wood and there was a rug on the floor emblazoned with the congressional seal.

A head-high wall of frosted glass ran across the width of the room, and looking over it Karp observed that it was crowded with cubicles so small that it seemed incredible that any normal human beings could work in them.

He observed as much to Crane, who chuckled. “Those are congressional staff, not human beings. Congressional staff have the worst working conditions and longest hours of anybody in the country. The whole place is one huge sweatshop. The laws of this great nation are written by twenty-five-year-olds in the last stages of exhaustion, breathing the farts of their neighbors. That’s why the government works so well.”

He glanced at his watch and then at a clock embedded in a bronze longhorn on the receptionist’s desk. “George is showing he’s a congressman and we work for him. If we were voters, he’d’ve been out here ten minutes ago.”

Flores made them wait for fifteen minutes. When he emerged it was behind a group of elderly ladies chattering in drawls, patently voters all. The congressman pumped schmaltz without stopping in a thick Texas drawl until the last of the ladies had cleared the outer door, at which time the broad smile, very white against his tan face, faded to mere cordiality.

He shook hands with Crane and turned to be introduced to Karp. The smile lost a few watts as he shook hands. The congressman was only five feet five. Karp had observed this before, the reflexive pugnacity of the short when confronting someone of Karp’s size. Flores squeezed a little harder than necessary; Karp pretended to flinch, conscious of being on his best behavior and not wanting to screw things up for Crane.

Flores ushered them into his office. Whatever constraints applied to staff space obviously did not apply to the elected representatives of the people. The private office was large, darkly paneled, and supplied with broad windows looking out across Independence Avenue. Flores sat behind a large mahogany desk, flanked by the flags of his state and nation. Karp and Crane arranged themselves in comfortable chairs facing the desk, which was covered with papers and the sort of knickknacks that public figures accumulate over the years.

There was a side table with various awards and plaques on it, and the usual wall full of framed photographs showing Flores with people even more prominent than he, that or doing something notable, like posing in a hard hat digging a spadeful of earth with a silvery shovel. The three men exchanged pleasantries. Karp thought that he had already discovered one difference between New York and Washington: the social bullshit segment of meetings seemed to go on longer down here. Flores and Crane chatted on about some people Karp did not know and he felt his attention wander.

On the surface of the desk in front of Karp, amid the commemorative medals, flag stands, and objects embedded in Lucite was a rough-looking tool, a dark, mattocklike blade attached to a stumpy handle. Flores caught him looking at it and smiled. “You know what that is?” he asked.

Karp did not.

“It’s a short hoe.
La cortita.
The backbreaker. My grandfather used one of those all his life, migrant labor; when he was an old man he was bent over like a question mark. And my father, before he got out of it. And me too, a summer. I keep the goddamn thing there to remind me where I come from.”

There did not seem to be anything to say to this revelation, so Karp smiled politely and waited for what would come. In any case, the social preamble seemed to be over.

Flores leaned back in his high-backed leather chair and laced his fingers. He had a large square face the color and texture of worn leather, set off by extravagant gray-shot sideburns and a thick Villista mustache. His hair was dark and swept back, and he had black, shiny eyes that seemed to be all pupil. These now bored in on Karp.

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Flores began. “Bert here’s filled me in and I’ve asked around. Y’all have quite a record. You seem to be a hard charger.” He paused. “And that concerns me. I’ve already mentioned this to Bert when he brought up your name, and I’m going to have to say it to you. This investigation is not the same kind of thing as a New York street shooting. The whole country’ll be looking at what you do. Every move you make’ll be raked over by the press and squeezed to see if it’s got any political juice in it. Not only that, y’all’re working for the Congress now. It’s a whole different branch of government. It has … different ways of doing things. Political ways. You following me?”

The word “sure” formed on Karp’s tongue, but he could not bring it into the air. There were limits, after all. He said instead, “No, as a matter of fact, I don’t follow you at all. I’m a homicide investigator and prosecutor. I look at the evidence and shape a case. I don’t see what politics has to do with it.”

Flores smiled at this statement as he might have at the burbling of a small child. “Son, this is Washington, D.C. Ain’t nothing happens here doesn’t have some political angle. You might
think
it don’t when you do it, but there’s sons-of-bitches make it their whole life’s work to
find
some politics in it and beat you over the head with it.” He paused to let this wisdom settle.

“Now, the reason I’m telling you this is that if you want to work for me we got to get one thing straight from the get-go. Y’all work for Bert Crane here, and Bert Crane works for me. Not only do I expect to be kept informed about what you’re doing, but I expect that you and the professional staff of the Select Committee will be, let’s say,
guided,
by me in all of your work. That means one thing’s more important than anything else: no surprises. Your chairman does not want to get a call one evening from the
Post
or CBS asking me what I think of the latest thing y’all’ve done and me not know what the hell they’re talking about. You following me now?”

Karp nodded. “Right. No surprises.”

The conversation then turned to the details of staffing and logistics. There was some confusion here and Karp could tell that Crane and Flores were fencing. Neither said anything solid about how much staff he could expect and what his budget was going to be. This was something of a shocker; Karp had supposed that it was all greased and ready to go.

The two men got into an argument about parking spaces and then one about how the letterhead of the investigation staff was going to read. Karp felt he had nothing to contribute to this discussion and remained silent, growing ever more bored and irritated, and thinking that working with a short hoe was probably good preparation for this sort of work, although perhaps more stimulating.

After twenty minutes of palaver over trivialities, a call came through and the congressman picked up the phone and snapped at the operator. Then he cradled the phone in his neck and said, smiling, “I got to take this one, boys.” He extended a hand to each of them in turn, and Karp noted that this time Flores did not feel obliged to squeeze hard.

“What the hell was that all about?” asked Karp when they were in the hallway again.

Crane placed a hand on Karp’s shoulder. “Welcome to Washington.”

“No, really. Did he mean that shit about running everything through him?”

Crane laughed, the booming sound echoing in the hallway, drawing stares. “Oh, God, no! Let me translate. What he meant was, if things go well and we don’t raise any flak, he gets the credit. If we raise any flak, we’re on our own. There’s no conceivable way he can oversee our investigation. He’s got way too much on his plate, like all these jokers. Matter of fact, any involvement with government at all takes him away from his real occupation, which is getting elected every two years. That’s the full-time job. He didn’t really bear down on the staff issues, for which you can be grateful. That’s why I kept him on the stationery and the rest of the horse puckey.”

“What about the staff?”

“Well, you’ll be lucky to hire the main people—your personal secretary, the head of research, the chief field investigator. The others … well, congressmen have folks to whom they owe jobs, besides which, everybody on the committee will want at least one personal spy in the organization.”