Corruption of Blood

FOUR

"I don't see what's so funny," said Karp to the ceiling. He was in his office at the New York DA, his soon-to-be-former office. On a nearby chair, a chunky, milk chocolate-skinned man in a tan, pin-striped, double-breasted suit was bent over with helpless laughter. It was the hiccupping kind of laughter, nearly soundless, the infectious kind, and Karp himself felt it tickling his own face.

"It's a good opportunity-," he added.

The laughter increased in intensity, and the other man, who was a detective lieutenant in the New York Police Department, started to lose control of his limbs and slide off his seat.

Karp started to laugh too, as the thought of trying to convince a hysterically laughing man to take charge of the field investigation of the death of John F. Kennedy suddenly struck him as hilarious.

Several minutes passed in this way, and when the lieutenant, whose name was Clay Fulton, and who was Karp's oldest and best friend in the cops, had advanced to the stage of gasping "Oh, God" and wiping his eyes with his lemon silk handkerchief, Karp took up his case again.

"Seriously, Clay…"

"Oh, God, don't start," Fulton groaned. "My heart can't take much of this anymore."

"Seriously," Karp persisted. "I think it's a good deal. You were set to retire from the job anyway."

"You are serious about this," said Fulton, sitting up again.

"I keep saying."

"You're going to go find out who aced JFK, and you want me to help you?"

"You got the picture. What's your problem?"

Fulton let out a whoosh of breath and scratched the side of his heavy jaw. He regarded Karp through narrowed eyes. "Well, I got a couple. One, what makes you think we're gonna do any good on a thirteen-year-old investigation, that the guys who were there when the corpse was still warm couldn't've done?"

"Maybe they didn't want to. Maybe they were incompetent. Besides, it was Texas. You ever been in Texas?"

"Yeah, in the army. Why?"

"Well, so you know what it's like. Do they have food? Do they have shows? Do they have clothes? They're hicks, face it. So, get a couple of sharp New York kids like us in there, a little hustle-it'll be a whole different story."

Fulton laughed again. "So what you're saying is because you can't get a knish in Texas, we'll make it happen thirteen years later, where they drew a blank?"

"That's it. I rest my case."

Fulton stared at him for a moment and said, smiling, "You need professional help, not a cop."

"Come on, Clay. You're a homicide investigator. Investigate the homicide of the century! What're you gonna do when you retire? Security for department stores? Teach at John Jay? You'll go batshit."

"This is for me, right? You're doing me a favor? Just a minute, let me make sure my wallet's still here." He patted at his suit coat pocket. "Okay, wise guy, how long you figure this gig is going to take? Months? Years?"

"This I don't know," admitted Karp. "Say a year…"

"Okay, that means I'm gonna have to go to Martha and say, 'Guess what, baby? We're going south. Back to the land o' cotton…' "

"Oh, horseshit, Clay! Washington isn't the South!"

"Do tell," said Fulton, giving Karp a hard look. "And there's Texas, too. Those old boys're gonna love having a big-city nigger poking around in what they did or didn't do, the heaviest case they ever saw."

Karp was taken aback, and felt himself flush with embarrassment. It had not occurred to Karp that Fulton and his wife would be at all discommoded by moving from their apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to a city that was still heavily segregated, in fact if not in law, or that poking into a Texas investigation might be a problem for a black man.

Karp said, "Okay, forget it. I wasn't thinking…"

Fulton stood up, leaned over, and placed his hand on Karp's arm. "No, I appreciate being asked… I guess."

He perched on the edge of the desk and looked at Karp with the fatherly expression he sometimes assumed with the younger man. He was only twelve years older, but he had spent most of his adult life as a street cop uptown, which worked out to an effective seniority of about a thousand and four years.

"Goddamn," said Fulton, shaking his head and grinning, showing his gold tooth, "our little Butch's really gonna do it. A long time, the two of us."

"Yeah, eleven years. Dr. Fulton's College of Criminal Knowledge for green-ass prosecutors. I would've sunk like a stone, you hadn't grabbed me by the shorts."

"Mooney McPhail."

Karp smiled. "Yeah, Mooney McPhail. An easy grounder to short and I bobbled it."

"You were second seating for Joe Lerner."

"Right, another blast from the past. He's in on this too, by the way, the MLK side. I had a witness said she saw Mooney use the knife, and picked him out of the lineup. That was the case. Holy shit! What a fuckup!"

"Only she didn't. It was her sister saw it and she told-what the hell was her name? — Esther, Ethyl?"

"Methyl," said Karp.

"Methyl, right. She got the whole story from the sister and she decided to be the witness, because the sister had the arth-a-ritis."

"Yeah, it would've been a classic, if it'd come out on cross. Defense would've asked, 'Did you actually observe this with your own eyes,' and old Methyl would've said, 'Oh, no, my sister told me the whole story and she don't lie.' Case dismissed."

Fulton laughed. "Turned out the sister didn't see it either. Took me a month to find the girl who told the sister… Damn!"

"What?"

"It just flashed on me, where I was."

"What, when you found the witness?"

"No, where I was when I found out about Kennedy. I was up on St. Nick, up around 'forty-third, making a collar. Some pimp cut a girl. I was a detective second out of the Two-eight. I had him in cuffs on the street and my partner, Mike Samuels, was just opening the car, and I looked up and there was a crowd of about fifty people around this appliance and stereo store, pressed up against the grilles. They had a bunch of TVs there, on all the time. We locked the mutt in the back and I went over to see what was going on. We'd been in the building maybe forty minutes with this asshole, and in that time Kennedy'd been shot and pronounced dead. The man never meant that much to me personally, but it was a hell of a jolt-the president and all that. But the people on the sidewalk, most of them were carrying on like it was Lincoln all over again, a couple of old church ladies hollering, 'Sweet Jesus God… ' "

Fulton paused for a deprecating chuckle. "It affected a lot a folks up there. I guess it's… they've seen a lot of young men die for no reason, just from meanness and stupidity. It must've kind of crystallized the whole thing for them. My mom, now… still got a magazine cover of JFK framed, and Bobby too. Right next to Dr. King. And Jesus, of course. Hell of a thing!" He shook his head.

"Anyway, I ran back to the car and told Samuels what was up, and of course, he had to go over and check it out for himself. The mutt asks me what's up and I tell him and he says, 'Well, fuck him! When we gonna move?' Like he was late for a big date."

Fulton stood up and said, "Tell you one thing. I do this, and it works, I'd get my momma off my case. She's been pissed at me for joining the cops from day one. Can you believe, she still introduces me: 'This is my eldest, Clayton, first college graduate in the family and he threw it all away to be with the police.' "

Karp brightened. "So you will think about it."

"I'll think about it, boss. We're in the thinking stage here. Give me a couple of days. Meanwhile, I'll see you later on at the party."

"You're not supposed to tell me about it," said Karp glumly. "It's supposed to be a surprise."

Four hours later, Karp was in that state of woozy euphoria he obtained through drink, a state that for him lasted about twelve minutes before being replaced by faint nausea and a sick headache. Karp couldn't drink at all, this lapse being a source of keen amusement to his friends and his wife, all of whom could put it away pretty good.

The farewell party was well under way. The homicide bureau had kicked in for a catered spread-chopped liver, little shrimpy hors d'oeuvres, fried wontons, tiny pizzas-and some decent liquor and beer. There were about fifty people in the bureau's outer office, where the desks had all been pushed to the walls. The secretaries had set up a big boom box, which was now blasting out the Village People's "YMCA" for the fifth time and people were getting funky in the center of the floor, doing the peculiar spastic dancing that made the 1970s such a world of fun.

"No more," said Karp to the man attempting to refill his glass with champagne. "I'll get blotto."

"That's the point," said the man, continuing to pour. "If the guest of honor can walk out steadily, it's an insult to his friends. We'll carry you on a door."

The man's name was Vernon Talcott Newbury. He was a lawyer in the fraud bureau and Karp's closest friend among the people he had started with in the old DA's office. A rare bird, Newbury, in the gritty environs of 10 °Centre Street: rich, for one thing, very rich, a sprig of a family of New York bankers who regarded the Rockefellers as pushy newcomers. Yale College and Harvard Law for another, unlike most of the people working at the DA, who were more likely to have come from places like Fordham and St. Johns. A lean, small man with longish, ash blond hair, he had the remarkable good looks, "chiseled" as the expression has it, of one of the gentlemen in white tie that Charles Dana Gibson used to draw in company with his famous girls.

Karp had never figured out what had brought V.T., as he was universally known, into the DA, or what kept him there. V.T. would not give a straight answer. "One slums," he might say, or, "My family are practitioners of fraud; I prefer to study it." It did have something to do with his family, Karp had concluded early on: that great intermarried, extended family of WASPs, with names off the street signs of lower Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn, as exotic as Nepalese to Karp, and as fascinating. Such clans tend to produce at least one maverick in each generation, and V.T. was the one in his. He might as easily, and with about the same level of family disapproval, have chosen to have become a lion tamer at Ringling's or opened a delicatessen in Passaic.

Karp himself had a contracted family, and had he been a reflective type he might have considered that a vicarious association was one of the things that attracted him to V.T., as well as to his wife, whose clan was also vast.

There she was now, dancing with a young black paralegal. She was wearing a full plum maxiskirt with the bottom three buttons undone, so that as she danced it whirled upward, showing her thin and splendid legs. Her black curls were shoulder length and cut so that they fell over the left side of her face. In that way, if Marlene held her head cocked, as she always did, it would be more difficult for someone to tell that her right eye was glass.

This damage had never interested him; he had loved her before, when she was stunning and perfect, and afterward, when she was merely a gorgeous exotic. As always, when he watched her dance, he was excited and vaguely saddened at the same time. Marlene loved to dance; Karp did not. He hadn't even before his knee had been replaced, thinking himself gawky on the floor and conspicuous with it.

As he watched, she caught his eye and winked and went through a set of parodically dirty contortions.

"Marlene's not going down with you, I hear," said V.T.

"Not right away," said Karp, turning back to his friend. "We're being modern."

V.T. nodded and smiled ruefully. He himself had been carrying on for a number of years a hopeless affair with an artist who lived in the Berkshires and who would on no account move to the city. "Yes," he said, "how well I know it! Prisoners of women's liberation, a burgeoning gulag. And without even the balm of self-pity, since we richly deserve anything they can dish out, we swine. Sins of the fathers. The best cure is more wine."

He poured himself another glass of champagne. V.T. had sprung for a case of Moet magnums, a typical gesture, and one that had contributed mightily to the current hilarious mood of the party. Nor had he stinted himself in the use of his own gift. A bar of scarlet had appeared across his cheekbones, and his intelligent blue eyes were starting to approximate the cheap plastic glitter of a baby doll's.

"Fuck 'em, anyway," said Karp woozily. "You know, Newbury, you should get out of here, too."

"Why? The party's roaring and we have four bottles of wine left."

"No, I don't mean the party. I mean the DA's." Karp put an affectionate arm across Newbury's shoulder. "Look, V.T., I have a slot for a head of research on our staff. Why don't you take it?"

Newbury cocked his head and looked at Karp out of a narrow eye. "You're joking, right?"

"No, I'm not. You should do it. We'll have a ball."

"But I'm a funny-money man. Fraud is my life."

"The People rest," said Karp.

V.T. laughed, sputtering around a mouthful of champagne. "What? You have the brass to suggest that the Warren Commission and the concept of fraud can possibly exist in the same universe of discourse? It was printed in the Times! Walter Cronkite-"

"Will you?"

"Of course," said V.T., without an instant's hesitation.

The party wore on. People drifted away, leaving the hard-core fun lovers, who became more raucous, as if hoping to make up in noise what was lost in numbers. The sun went down; the lights were doused and replaced with candles. Around nine, Karp slipped into his private office and sat down behind his desk. He began rummaging through the drawers, extracting personal items.

There were few of these, or few that he wished to retain, at any rate. A block of clear Lucite in which was embedded a round from an AR-16 that had been removed from his shoulder after an unsuccessful assassination attempt. A softball signed with the names of all the team members, and by Francis Phillip Garrahy, the year the DA's team had won the city league championship. He rose and assembled a carton taken from a stack Connie Trask had provided. He thought he would not need more than one.

Off the wall came his law school diploma and his New York bar certificate, and a framed photograph his friends had signed and given him when he had first been appointed to the homicide bureau back in Garrahy's day.

The door opened and Marlene came in.

"What are you doing lurking in here?" she said, swaying slightly. She was nicely drunk.

"I'm not lurking, I'm cleaning out." He handed her the photograph. "I'm taking this for inspiration," he said.

It was a grainy reproduction of a famous World War II photograph, the charge to destruction of the Pomorske Cavalry Brigade during the Nazi blitzkrieg against Poland. In the foreground were several German tanks, and coming toward them out of the smoky distance was a long line of horsemen in white tunics and schapskas, waving pennoned lances. The gift was meant as a comment on fighting homicide in New York.

Marlene looked at the relic, and at her own signature prominent on the bottom. "You still feel like that? Charging the tanks?"

"I don't know. Lately, I've started to see myself as being on the other side-more panzerlike. I guess I don't like it."

"I thought I was supposed to be the intractable romantic in this family," said Marlene petulantly. "You're supposed to be the solid one. You're supposed to be there for me."

Karp laughed at that and tapped the photo. "Wait-I thought I was the romantic Polish lancer, dashing into danger."

"Yes, but a dependable romantic Polish lancer, who helps with child care and does dishes."

Karp laughed again and went on with his packing. Some personal books and a few papers went into the carton. He walked to the line of bookcases that held the records of his hundred or so murder trials. He pulled out a few at random, and then put them back. "I'll have to get Connie to pack these and send them home."

"God, you're really doing it!" she said, amazement in her voice. "It just now hit me, watching you pack."

"Yeah, packing makes it real. I still have trouble believing it."

"Leaving everything…"

"Not quite everything. V.T.'s coming along to run the research side. I think Clay Fulton'll go for it too."

"How pleasant for you," she sniffed. "Butch and his gang. What more could a boy want?"

"You could get on the staff too, you know, if you hadn't made up your mind to be a pain in the ass about this. We could all be together…"

"I'd scrub floors before I'd work for you again."

"You don't have to work for me," said Karp heatedly. They'd been through this before. "You could get a slot with Joe Lerner on the MLK side."

"If you ask him to hire me."

"Yeah! What's wrong with that?"

"It sucks is what's wrong with it," snapped Marlene, this unhelpful comment being the only way she could bring into words the complex of emotions that whipped her about when both Karp and career occupied the center of her thoughts. She knew she was a decent prosecutor, and had helped to revolutionize the handling of rape and child abuse crime in Manhattan, but she also knew that she was no Karp. Karp had over a hundred successful homicide prosecutions, Karp had been featured in a New York Times Magazine article as the iron man of the fight against crime, Karp had been appointed a bureau chief by the legendary Garrahy. And Karp was higher than she was in the hierarchy of the DA and always would be, and at some level of her mind anything she achieved in her career lay under the shadow of bimbohood: beautiful Marlene-she got where she is through the bedroom.

That this shadow was largely of her own making did not in the least diminish the pain it caused her. She could not tolerate the thought of starting a legal career again in a new city where she did not wish to live, among strangers, where she had not even the modest reputation she possessed in New York, and where she would obtain her job on her husband's recommendation. A bimbo in Washington, like those "secretaries" kept by congressmen you read about in the papers-it was not to be endured.

Karp finished his packing and closed the carton. "Want to go?" he asked. She looked at him and writhed inwardly and then shook her head as if to dispel the oncoming fog of depression. In her saner moments, she was honest enough to realize that it was not Karp's fault that she felt this way, nor his fault that he was a superstar, a workaholic, a job-obsessed, macho son of a bitch…

"What's wrong," said Karp, struck by her odd expression.

"Oh, nothing," she said, going toward him. "I just realized I'm going to miss you." The music from the other room had turned slow.

"Let's dance," she said, and they shuffled, locked together, weaving around the furniture.

V.T. Newbury walked into Karp's Washington office, three weeks after his blithe agreement to take the Kennedy job, and immediately stifled a number of second thoughts. Karp looked up from his desk, which was covered with a stack of gold-stamped blue volumes, some open, some closed, all festooned with scraps of markers made of torn yellow bond. He smiled wanly.

"Good, you made it," said Karp.

"I did."

"Any problems getting away?"

"There was gnashing of teeth from one end of Manhattan to another. Three wine merchants closed their doors and the family went into mourning. Again."

"They don't like you going to Washington?"

"They love me going to Washington, but they were thinking of something more along the lines of deputy assistant secretary at Treasury. Where did you get this furniture?"

"It came with the job. Like it?"

"It's very forties. You look like General Wainwright on Corregidor."

"I feel like it too. Have a seat, V.T. It's been sprayed for insect life, I think."

V.T. sat on Karp's couch, an object made from the skin of a large puce nauga. You could still see where it had been shot, the holes now oozing fluffy white stuffing.

"Your office is next door," Karp continued. "Fulton'll be across the hall."

"He decided to come?"

"Yeah, another divorce in the making. He'll start next week."

"Do I get furniture as nice as this, or is yours special because you're the boss?"

"As a matter of fact, I think you have a wooden desk. I saved it for you because I know you're the kind of guy who appreciates the little touches. The drawers don't open, but luckily we happen to have an unlimited supply of these unassembled gray steel shelves"-here Karp gestured at several long brown cartons stacked against his walls- "so that shouldn't be a problem. The good news is we're not being paid."

"We're not?"

"So it seems. They're fucking around with our budget on the Hill. Me and Crane and Bea Sondergard… did you meet her? Good lady. We're all on per diem and you and Clay will be too, until we get it straightened out. That means a hundred and twenty-five dollars each and every day we work, no sick leave, no vacation time, no benefits. Sound good?"

"Irresistible. But what about the staff? If we can't hire…"

"Well, actually, we can't hire, not yet. The commit-tee'll be staffed with people detailed from the Hill and from various federal agencies. That'll get us started, although we sort of have to take pot luck about who we get. I'm sure we'll get sent the very best people, and not the shitheads every agency in Washington has been trying to dump for years. Besides that, Bea informs me that if the per diem account runs out before we get a budget, we won't get paid at all. Not to mention, if this goes on long enough, we won't have anything in the account to pay our experts."

"That's nice," said V.T. "How am I going to run a research operation without experts?"

"Get with Bea on that. I don't think she actually intends to commit fraud, but she runs pretty close. It's a matter of juggling, according to her. Everybody does it."

"Everybody does it! How often I've heard that in court, just prior to sentencing! Tell me, am I to gather from this that the sun of approval does not exactly shine from Congress on this enterprise?"

Karp grinned. "You could say that. But as Crane keeps telling me, here we are."

"Here we are indeed. So what should I start with meanwhile?"

Karp pointed at his desktop. "You see all these nicely bound blue books? The Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, in twenty-six volumes. The Warren Commission."

He rummaged through the stacks of books on his desk, jerked one out, and tossed it across to V.T. The rest of them slumped into a new configuration, like geological strata during orogeny. "I'm on volume twenty. Here's volume one, the report proper, eight hundred eighty-eight pages of crisp prose. The rest is hearings and exhibits. You'll have your very own set pretty soon, I hope. Meanwhile, don't lose my notes."

"Read the whole thing, huh?" said V.T., hefting the volume he had just received.

"For starters. Then there're the critics. I've collected the essential ones: Lane, Meagher, Josiah Thompson, a couple others." He pointed to a steel shelf lined with books. "Read them too. They've done a lot of work and raised some interesting questions. You'll see my notes on them-feel free to make your own. When you're finished we'll get together with Clay and map out a strategy for the investigation."

V.T. said, "Sounds right." He paged through the book on his lap. "So. What's your take so far?"

"Um, let me keep that to myself for now," said Karp after some thought. "I'd like your viewpoint without you knowing what I think. But, obviously, if there weren't serious problems with this beast"-he tapped the pile of blue books-"we wouldn't be here, would we?"

"No, I guess not," said V.T. "It's hard to believe we are in any case. John F. Kennedy! It certainly stirs the old memories. You know, I met him once."

"Oh?"

"Yes, on a sailboat. I was something like twelve, so it must have been fifty-three or fifty-four. My uncle Tally Whitman had asked me on a sailing vacation on his boat, basically to keep my cousin Frank company. He was about my age and the problem was that Frank's sister, Maude, had invited a friend from Brearley along, and Tally didn't want the kid ganged up on by two seventeen-years-old girls.

"Well, we set out from New Haven, where Tally kept the boat-he had a beautiful ketch, an Alden design, a forty-eight-the Melisande, it was called. Of course, in the first five minutes I fell desperately in love with Effie, the Brearley friend-who was by the way a raving beauty, in love in the way you can only fall at twelve. We gunkholed along the North Shore for a week and then crossed over to the Vineyard, and put in at Vineyard Haven. And there were the three Kennedy boys and some friends in the next slip. A bachelor outing; they'd come across from Hyannisport that day."

"So you met him," Karp broke in. He liked V.T. a good deal, but he had a limited patience for his stories about life in high society, with endless glosses on who was related to whom, and who did what to whom at Newport in the year whatever.

"Yes," said V.T. "I had no idea who they were, of course, but Uncle Tally had been at school with Bobby, at Choate. I was allowed to serve drinks, life's finest moment up until then. Frank was nauseated, of course. Well, I was probably a colossal bore to them all, because all I had to talk about was sailing, which I did in the most pompous way imaginable, and I must say they were nothing if not polite. The afternoon, however, wore on, and the gin flowed. I was an efficient little barman. Then I began to notice something very disturbing. I was a sheltered youth, of course, and at twelve my sexual knowledge was at the schoolboy giggle stage, but it was clear to me that Jack Kennedy was making eyes, as we then called it, at the delicious Effie. And hands, too. And she was reciprocating. I was astounded, and devastated. I mean he was an old man."

"So did he bonk her?"

"Not that I saw. I'm sure that Uncle Tally would never have allowed it, not on his watch. Of course, he might have bonked her thereafter; apparently he bonked everybody else. In any event, it was decided that we should race across to Hyannis the next morning, and we did. The Kennedys were good sailors, of course, but Tally was an Olympic-class skipper and I worked my young butt off, as did Frank and the girls. And we whipped them, by three boats. Jack was not amused. I mean it was ridiculous; he was really angry, red-faced, screaming at Teddy about some goof. A man who didn't like to lose. As he proved in later life, too."

V.T. put his hands in his pockets and looked out the dirty window. "Here's the kicker: ten years later, I was at Yale, a chilly afternoon, I was getting ready to go out in a single scull, when the crew manager came running down the ramp yelling that somebody'd just shot the president. At first I thought he meant the president of Yale. There was a radio going in the boathouse and a bunch of us sat around and listened. When they announced that he was really dead, I went back out onto the ramp and pushed my scull into the water and rowed until I was exhausted. And I'll tell you the truth, all I could think about was that day on the Vineyard when he made a drunken pass at a seventeen-year-old Brearley girl. Incredibly shaming and inappropriate, but I couldn't get it out of my head. That and this weird fantasy, about flying back in some way to my twelve-year-old self in the cockpit of the Melisande and grabbing him by the shoulders and shouting, 'Forget the girl, asshole! November 1963: don't for God's sake go to Dallas!' "

V.T. let out an embarrassed laugh and made a gesture of helplessness.

Karp smiled and indicated with a wave of his hand the office, and by extension the ramshackle investigation. "I guess this is the next best thing, then."

"Sad to say," said V.T. "Sad, sad to say."

In the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, a man received a disturbing phone call. It was a journalist calling; remarkably, this journalist was not seeking information but supplying it. The CIA has this sort of relationship with quite a number of journalists, both domestic and foreign.

"Are you positive?" asked the CIA man.

"Positive," replied the journalist. "I got it from one of Schaller's staff guys. They were blown away when they read them. Schaller doesn't know whether to shit or go blind."

Schaller was a leading member of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities-the Church committee.

The CIA man cursed briefly, then said, "This will take some controlling. All right, what's your take on Schaller's options?"

The journalist replied, "I think he'll have to use the Castro stuff but he had some of that already, and it all leads to dead ends. The other thing, the JFK items… I don't know. It's not exactly in his line of study, and he doesn't want to look like an asshole a couple of months before election. I think he'll pass it on."

"What, to Flores's operation?"

"Yeah."

"Which is not going anywhere."

"Which is definitely not going anywhere."

The CIA man thought about this for a while and then said, "Still, I'd like some insurance."

"Anything I can do…," offered the journalist.

"I'll be in touch."

After getting off the line, the CIA man made a call to the head of the little team that had prepared the documents for the Senate Select Committee's subpoena, and gave him the reaming of his life. Then he called several other people, including a former CIA deputy director for operations, and told them what had happened. None of them was pleased.

After that, he sat for a while, humming, tapping a pencil, making mental plans, and weighing risks. The first rule of secrecy is that every time you let someone new in on the secret, you increase the chances of exposure by a factor of two. Too many people knew about this thing already, and so if he wished to mobilize people to suppress the inadvertently leaked knowledge, it made sense to use only those who knew the story already. He went to a locked filing cabinet, unlocked it, and drew out a worn notebook. Opening it, he found a telephone number.

He dialed it, and while he waited for the call to go through, he locked the notebook away again.

It took a good while for the call to go through and then the CIA man had to make use of his still-fluent Spanish. Finally, in the town of Quetzaltenango, in Guatemala, a phone rang.