Corruption of Blood

FIFTEEN

"I still say," said Karp, "we should've flown back yesterday and made Mosca go with us."

Fulton, who was checking out the hang of his jacket and the tuck of his sport shirt in the motel room mirror, gave him a look. It was not the first time since their interview with the mobster that Karp had expressed such sentiments, nor the sixth either. It was starting to get on his nerves.

"Will you relax, for Chrissake!" Fulton snapped. "I should've left you in the office. Look! We're gonna go out now and get in the car, and drive somewhere and have a nice breakfast out on the beach, somewhere where we can get a decent bagel, like you're always bitching about, and then we're gonna drive out to Mr. Mosca's little house and pick him up and if his girlfriend's there we'll look at her tits for a couple minutes, and then we'll drive to the airport and be on the ten-ten flight to National."

"I don't want any breakfast," said Karp. "I want my hands on Guido Mosca. I want his head cradled on my lap. I want him up there in front of the committee, tying Paul Ashton fucking David to Bishop, and to a shooter who looks just like Lee Harvey Oswald and to Cuban shooters who didn't like Kennedy, and to Oswald himself and to whoever this Turm character is. This is the case, Clay. It's coming together-I can feel it."

"Can I at least get some coffee?"

"Yeah, if you can find a drive-through. And I want you to roll by the window," said Karp, and strode out of the room.

Fifteen minutes later they were at the house on the canal. The patio was deserted. A slight breeze ruffled the water of the pool. Fulton went to the glass door and rang the bell. After a minute, he rang again and rapped on the door with his knuckles. "Jerry's a late sleeper," he remarked.

"I hope so," said Karp, rapping on the glass himself. Fulton said, "Keep ringing. I'll check the front."

Fulton's shout brought Karp running around the side of the house. The detective was at the end of the dock, kneeling over a brightly colored mound. Karp felt his heart wrench around in his chest. He slowed his step. There was obviously no hurry anymore.

"Shot through the middle of the chest at long range," said Fulton, rising from the corpse. "Probably from those bushes across the canal." He looked at Karp and shrugged. "Okay, I was wrong. Who knew?"

"I'll take that literally. Who did know? The only people I told at the Washington end about coming down here to get Mosca were Crane… and Hank Dobbs. You tell anyone?"

"Hell, no! But you forgot one thing-Tony Bones knew all about it."

"Yeah, but why would Tony have his own guy whacked? He wants to take over South Florida when Trafficante kicks off. There's no damn reason for him to give us the go-ahead, and then give Mosca the go-ahead to talk to us, if all the time he was planning to kill him. The whole thing is too small-time. We do Tony a little favor, go easy on his kid, he does us a little favor, gets one of his guys to talk to us. It's not serious Mob business."

"Somebody Tony told, then?" offered Fulton.

"Yeah, and we're gonna have a talk with Tony about that. But what I think is, this isn't a Mob hit at all. This is a guy who likes to stand off and pop people with a rifle." Fulton thought about this for a while.

"You think the same guys, the Kennedy guys?"

"It's a possible, yeah, and it means somebody's following us. Or knows what we're doing."

Fulton gestured toward where Mosca's body lay. "Whatever, we got to call the sheriff."

"No, call Al Sangredo. Let him call the sheriff and explain the situation here. A little professional courtesy would go down pretty good, and besides, the last thing I want is to get our names involved in a local investigation. Meanwhile…" Karp gave the house a long, significant look.

"We toss his place."

"You toss his place, Detective. I'm a lawyer. My place is lounging by the pool, contemplating the majesty of the Constitution, and feeling like an asshole."

Later that afternoon, Karp and Fulton were eating pastrami in Sheffler's, a large, bright, highly chilled eatery on Collins in North Miami Beach. Al Sangredo was sitting across from them, sipping on a cup of coffee brewed at about a third of the octane rating he was used to, and listening to the two of them bring him up-to-date around mouthfuls of greasy pink meat. When they were finished, Sangredo said quietly, "That's quite a story. I hope you're not holding anything back from the sheriff about this hit. I vouched for you guys and I have to live in this town."

Sangredo was a big man, six-four, two-seventy. He was a retired NYPD homicide cop who had worked with Fulton for fifteen years in Harlem, a datum recorded in his black eyes, which, under an enthusiastic growth of eyebrow, were hard, suspicious, and intelligent. He had the usual tan of the region and his skin was smooth and relatively unlined for a man of fifty-seven. In a city full of "Spanish," he was distinguished by being an actual Spaniard, and he carried himself with the requisite dignity. Fulton assured him that he was not withholding anything germane to a homicide investigation, although he might have had he found anything worthwhile in his quick search of Mosca's house. Jerry Legs was, however, not the sort of mafioso who keeps careful records.

"So," Sangredo continued, "you really think it was the Kennedy people did this?"

"It's our working assumption," answered Karp. "The question is, what do we do about it. You ever run into a Cuban named Angelo Guel?" He pulled out the photograph of Guel. "He'll be older, of course."

Sangredo studied the picture and slowly shook his head. "It's not a face that sticks in my mind. You think he knows something?"

"I don't know, but I'd like to speak to any Cuban mercenary who was standing on a street corner in New Orleans with Lee Oswald in the fall of sixty-three. Of course, there's no way of telling if he's in Miami or not. We should've asked Mosca if he knew where Guel was. Shit, now there's a million things I wish I'd've asked him, but I thought I'd have plenty of time to pump his brains."

"So, what do we do?" mused Sangredo. "I could try to find that girlfriend of his. She wasn't in the house, but she'd been there. She must've taken off as soon as she found the corpse."

Karp shrugged. He wasn't interested in girlfriends. "No, it's Guel we need. And this other Cuban, Carrera. And the mysterious Mr. Turm, whatever his real name is. I'm thinking this is the Sylvia Odio team, the three guys who stopped by her house in Dallas right before the assassination and told her they were going after Kennedy. Two Cubans, one named Angelo, one named Leopoldo, and an American named Leon. If Angelo was Guel-God, he even used his real name! — and Leopoldo was Carrera, then we know who Leon was, for sure. Odio IDed that Leon was Oswald to the FBI after the shooting. Mosca must've seen them in New Orleans just before they left for Dallas."

"Wait a second," said Fulton. "The problem with the Odio story was that at the time she got that visit, Oswald was on his way to Mexico-" He stopped. "Oh, shit!"

"Right," said Karp grimly. "It wasn't Oswald in Mexico at all. It was our lookalike-Caballo. He was on the bus, and he made sure that people on the bus remembered him. He's the voice on the tape the CIA sent to the FBI and then conveniently erased. He's the reason why the cameras outside the Soviet and Cuban embassies happened to go down on the day he was there, because even if he's a close match to Oswald, an actual photograph could've been analyzed to show that it really wasn't Oswald. And that, of course, explains how Oswald was identified leaving a rifle at a gun shop, cashing a big check at a little grocery store, going to a rifle range, and driving a car, even though he was other places at those times and even though he didn't know how to drive. Yeah, that was a slipup! Who would've believed that a macho American man couldn't drive a car? No, guys, this is it. This is the case. V.T. told me early on that Oswald was the key, whether he did it or not, and he was right."

Fulton had been nodding enthusiastically as Karp spoke, and his bloodhound instincts were aroused. "Okay, then the first thing we got to do is find this Odio woman and flash the pictures we got of Guel and the other people on that film, see if any of them ring a bell."

"I wouldn't do that," said Sangredo. They stared at him.

"Why the hell not?" asked Fulton.

"Because the woman's burned out. She's been telling the same story for twelve years and all it's got her is grief. She's had threats from the nutso Cubanos. Every assassination buff in the country wants to show her a picture."

"You know her?" asked Karp, amazed.

"Not exactly. But I know people who know her. She lives here in Miami, in what they call seclusion. My advice is, get your ducks in a row before you go see her. Find Guel and get a decent picture of him, him and this Carrera, instead of the fuzzy shit you showed me, then go see her. Because you're only going to get one shot at her and it better be right."

They all thought about this for a while. Then Karp said, "Okay, let's go for Guel. What'll it take to find him?"

Sangredo considered this in his cautious way. "Um, well, I'm one guy. I have some contacts with the sheriff and Miami PD. I could run checks."

"And we have guys in New Orleans and Dallas could do the same thing," said Fulton. "But it's going to take some time."

"Which we don't have," said Karp. "Mosca was aced right under our noses. It could happen to Guel too, if we start getting close."

Sangredo looked at him sharply. "It sounds like you're saying you guys got a leak up there."

"It's a possibility," replied Karp. "That, or we're being followed. Which is one reason why I don't want you to do what you just suggested. I don't want the cops involved." He held up a hand against the expostulations of the other two men. "No, listen! This isn't business as usual. The assassination nuts have made a lot of hay about all the people connected to the Kennedy thing who've died under mysterious circumstances over the years; I'm not saying I'm buying that whole line, but I'll go with some of it, especially after what happened this morning. So the fewer people who know we're after Guel and Carrera, the better."

"But, hell, Butch," Sangredo complained, "if I got to work alone it's going to take years to find the bastards."

"I didn't say alone," answered Karp. "My thought is we should have a talk with Tony Buonafacci."

They stared at him, stupefied. Fulton stuck a finger in his ear and screwed it around vigorously. "Hey, sorry," he said, "I must be getting deaf. I thought you just said we should bring the fucking Mafia in to look for this potential key witness."

"I did. No, wait! It makes sense. Tony's going to be pissed somebody whacked a made guy on his turf, one, and two, Tony doesn't particularly like Cubans and he'd be glad to finger one of them. A couple of years ago, when a bunch of Cuban gunslingers were taking potshots at me, Ray Guma sent a material witness in the case down here to Tony and she was fine. So…"

"Damn it, Butch," said Fulton, "that's not the same thing. We still haven't cleared up the possibility that the Mob is involved in this thing. We set them loose on this and even if they do find our guys they're just as likely to end up like Johnny Roselli did last summer. They cut his legs off and stuffed him into an oil drum and threw his legs in there too. He was still alive when they dumped the can in the water. You want to work with these assholes?"

"No, but there's Mob and Mob. Look, Tony told Mosca to spill the beans. Mosca did. Did you think he was shitting us? No, me neither. There's a possibility that Marcello in New Orleans was involved in it. Some Cubans who might've worked for Trafficante may have been involved in it. And I bet if we had the old man, Santos, on a hot grill he could tell us a lot about what really went down. But Tony's not connected to that end. He's out of the Bollano outfit in Brooklyn. Marcello's New Orleans, which is part of the Chicago outfit. There's not much love lost between New York and Chicago, especially since Chicago's got the gold mine in Vegas tied up tight. No, if Tony can slip it to Chicago in some minor, undetectable way, he's not going to lose sleep over it."

"This is incredible," said Fulton. "In all the years I worked with you, you always made it a rule not to get in bed with the Mob, and now here you're diving in and pulling up the covers."

"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.

She watched him as he fussed with something at a sideboard: a samovar, a tall brass one with a blue flame under it. He was not a large man, but he held himself erect. Marlene judged him to be about seventy. He had an egg-shaped head downed with sparse cropped grayish hair of the type blonds grow when old, and a blunt Russian nose. When he turned toward her, bearing a lacquered tray with two tall glasses on it, his eyes, the color of ancient blue jeans, gazed intermittently at her between the flashes from round wire spectacles.

The tea glasses were fitted with brass holders. Marlene sipped: blazing hot, bitter, smoky, strong.

"Do you like it?" asked Reltzin.

"It's fine, Mr. Reltzin," said Marlene. She took a cube of sugar from a small brass bowl and popped it into her mouth, slurping the tea past the sweet lump until it was dissolved. Reltzin smiled at her, showing a glimpse of bad Soviet dentistry, and did the same.

"So," said Reltzin when they had slurped sufficiently and eaten a sandwich and talked a bit about beverage-drinking customs in various parts of the world, "you are writing a book about Richard Dobbs."

"Not exactly. I'm doing research for one. Your name, of course, came up."

"But I didn't know Dobbs, except by reputation, of course."

"True," said Marlene. "But you knew Jerome Weinberg. And Armand Dimitrievitch Gaiilov."

A tiny look of surprise at the mention of the latter name, a little hardness showing momentarily in the blue eyes. "Yes, Weinberg. A walk-in at the embassy. I was on duty that day and so I was designated as the contact. You understand that every Soviet embassy has standing orders on how to treat such walk-ins. Most are valueless, but occasionally we got a prize. Like Weinberg."

"Just a minute: you're saying you were a KGB officer?"

"NKVD, actually. This was in 1950. Yes, a very small NKVD officer. But Weinberg was a very big catch. He was a records clerk in the Navy Department and he had access to plans for nuclear submarines. At that time, the idea that you could build a submarine that would never have to surface, that could approach a hostile shore and fire nuclear missiles at an enemy city, this was just beginning to be discussed in military circles. So it was vital for us to understand how far the Americans had gone in both theory and practice. All of this Weinberg offered us."

"He said he came from Dobbs?"

"Most assuredly! That was what convinced us to trust him. We knew who Dobbs was, of course. An important figure."

"What proof did he have that he was working for Dobbs?" asked Marlene, scribbling notes.

"Well, proof!" answered Reltzin, with a dismissive and elegant gesture of his long-fingered hands. "He had the material, from the highest levels of naval planning, with Dobbs's initials on them. We copied them and he brought them back the same day. A good communist, Weinberg," he added reflectively. "This is why he did it."

"And he said Dobbs was a communist too?"

Reltzin smiled, "Oh, no, Weinberg considered him to be what Lenin called a useful idiot. A man of, shall we say, somewhat foggy political beliefs. He thought the nuclear submarine program an idiocy. He thought if he gave away the secrets, the Soviet Union would of course develop its own program apace, and then, when the navy found this out, they would cancel their own program." His lifted eyebrows and rolled eyes indicated what he thought of this absurdity.

"You must understand, Miss Ciampi, that at this date the Soviet Union had just completed one of the greatest coups in the history of espionage, the capture of the secret of the atomic bomb, from the most closely guarded place in North America. Fuchs and Greenglass passed the secrets out right under the noses of your security officers. Harry Gold made regular visits to the Soviet consulate in New York. No one suspected the operation until we, the USSR that is, exploded the bomb. So, you understand, we thought we were dealing with the same hopeless sort of amateurs."

"Not quite; you got caught."

Reltzin nodded agreeably. "Yes, indeed, red-handed, so to speak." He waited for Marlene to appreciate his little joke. "It was a complete surprise, I may say. I had no indication from Weinberg or from our various sources in the U.S. government that anyone had any suspicion. A curious matter. In any case, I was captured. Ordinarily, when an embassy official is caught spying, he is declared persona non grata and shipped home. The country caught spying retaliates by expelling one of the other nation's diplomats and that is the end of the matter. In my case, however…"

"Yes?"

"In my case, they wanted me to testify against Dobbs. I refused, naturally. And then they said that they would let the authorities in the Soviet Union know that I had revealed damaging material, that I, in fact, had betrayed Weinberg for what we used to call imperialist gold. This, of course, was in the Stalin years. I would have been shot immediately. So, I was allowed to defect. They pumped me, I told what I knew, which was not very much. I was a very small apparatchik, as I have said. And they gave me this life." He gestured broadly to the apartment. "I am in the stamp business, by the way: specialty Eastern Europe and the Far East."

"You did better than Weinberg, anyhow," said Marlene.

"Oh, yes, Weinberg was given thirty years, the same as Harry Gold. But he was a traitor. The only reason they didn't execute him was that he informed on Dobbs."

"He lied about Dobbs, you mean. To save his own neck he threw them a bigger fish."

A wintry smile. "Did he? Perhaps. I never had reason to believe that Weinberg was lying about Dobbs, but maybe you are correct. Who can tell? Weinberg was assassinated in prison two years after he began his term."

"You say, 'assassinated'?"

"Well, murdered at any rate. His throat was cut. I understand they never found the killer. Perhaps only a feeble attempt was made to find him."

"What did you think when the case against Dobbs collapsed?"

"Well, at the time, I couldn't understand it. But later things leaked out, and of course, there was the lawyer-Dobbs's lawyer, Blaine-and gradually I was able to put together what must have happened."

"Which was?"

"Oh, well, the papers were full of speculation about this mysterious Mr. X that Blaine was threatening to call as a witness that Dobbs was innocent. Of course, I knew that this had to be Gaiilov, because Gaiilov had been turned in Japan, then he doubled, and then he defected just as our counterintelligence people were about to grab him. Blaine was the CIA agent who turned him, there in Japan. So, of course he knew that the CIA would never let him testify in open court. Even his whereabouts were secret. Also there were many in the CIA who did not believe that Gaiilov was really a defector, so it would've been doubly embarrassing to the government. So to speak." He smiled again.

Amusing man, Mr. Reltzin, thought Marlene, smiling back. Hard to remember he had been a functionary in one of the most horrendous organizations in human history.

"So he wasn't exchanged either," said Marlene. "He's still in the U.S.?"

"I would think so, although I really have no idea. It's over twenty-five years now. I doubt that he is high on the KGB's list of targets. Higher than me, perhaps, but not very high. And as you see, I live comfortably, an American citizen, with a small business. I expect Gaiilov may be similarly situated. Or perhaps not."

"How do you mean?" Marlene had caught an odd tone in his last remark.

Reltzin sipped some tea and then looked away, up at the ceiling, or perhaps into the past. "He had a reputation, in the service. A high liver-women, gambling, yes, but more-he was a… how can I say this… an adventurer; spying, conspiracy, this was his life's blood. Intelligence services are wise to restrict their recruitment of such types, you understand, but each service must have some of them. Ah, reckless, that is the word I was looking for. Reckless. So. Perhaps he died, from this. Or he has become old and careful. I'm sorry I can't help you."

"No, you've been more than helpful, Mr. Reltzin," said Marlene.

"I am happy to," said Reltzin. "Perhaps you could in return do me a small service." He rose and went over to a bookcase and returned with a small portrait in a silver frame. A thin woman in early middle age peered out, squinting against the sun. With her was a younger woman, pretty in her dowdy clothes, and a little girl, in blond pigtails, holding her hand. "My family," said Reltzin. "They were taken, of course. I tell myself, they would have been taken anyway, if I had returned, but… you perhaps have contacts, with the government? They must all be dead, but, if you could, I would like to know. If you could."

"How did it go?" asked Bishop.

The man who called himself Caballo said, "Hold on," walked over and turned down the television and picked up the phone again. He said, "No problem. So, there's just Guel left here, right?"

"Right. But the situation with Guel is that he's apt to have papers."

"You're thinking a fire?"

"Yes, that would be best," said Bishop. "Make it a hot one."