Corruption of Blood

FIVE

In the weeks that ensued, Karp each morning left his furnished two-bedroom apartment in Arlington, took the metro to Federal Center, walked to the office, and there spent his days largely in reading. He had finished the Warren material and was now slogging through the recently released Church committee report on intelligence. The office of the Select Committee staff continued stinking of fresh paint and plaster dust, and still sounded with the thumps of heavy equipment being moved about. Increasingly, Karp was running into people he did not know, who claimed to work for him, or almost to work for him. He had nothing as yet for these people to do, which did not seem particularly disturbing to them, since they all seemed to have other jobs of some sort. There was a good deal of motion in the hallways, typewriters and Lexitron printers clattered away, people trailed reels of phone wire, telephones rang, and were occasionally answered. Crane was rarely in the office, as he had a series of private legal commitments still outstanding in Philadelphia. Karp had no idea what was going on.

Late in the morning of one of these trancelike days, Karp, befuddled with reading, wandered out of his office in search of coffee. Cup in hand, he went into the small bay that was supposed to hold a reception area and the clerical pool, but which still resembled the site of a terrorist bombing. There Bea Sondergard was standing like a ringmaster, directing a team of phone engineers, a crew building partitions, and three men with huge cartons from Xerox, carrying on at the same time a conversation with a short, bespectacled, red-bearded young man. Sondergard waved Karp over and pointed him at the other man.

"Butch, I want you to meet Charlie Ziller. Charlie's a loaner from Congressman Dobbs. Charlie, Butch Karp, your new boss." She coughed as plaster dust settled in a cloud around them. Karp shook hands with Ziller and said, "I'm sorry, we seem to be a little disorganized…"

At this Sondergard uttered a cackling laugh and raced off after the Xerox people who were, despite her instructions, moving their copier to the wrong room.

"Actually," said Karp, "it's a nonstop Chinese fire drill around here. Do you have a desk yet?"

Ziller grinned engagingly and shrugged. He looked about twenty-five and had small, bright blue eyes. "No, I'm going to have a cubicle when they're built, according to Bea."

"Great. So-you're a volunteer, or did you fuck up something important?"

A polite laugh. "No, I wangled it, in my subtle way. The Kennedy thing-just something I've always wondered about, and maybe this is a chance to be in on the real story."

"Another Camelot fan."

"I guess. My folks were in the administration then and it's something that hit them pretty hard. I was in junior high at the time. Sixth period, they announced over the PA. My math teacher burst into tears. I'll never forget it; it was… I don't know, like finding out you're adopted. It shook up the whole world, you know? Especially with us all being in the government. I guess it just feels like a natural thing for me to do."

"So what're you supposed to be doing for us?"

Ziller shrugged again. "The representative didn't specify. I'm just supposed to come over and make myself useful."

"Oh, yeah? Like how? Expand on your talents."

Ziller made a self-deprecating little writhe. "I'm a staffer. I can talk on the telephone. Type on the typewriter. Go to meetings. Have lunch. That's what we do here in the nation's capital."

"Okay," said Karp, "in that case, let's have lunch. You can show me your stuff."

Ziller took Karp to the Green Hat, a small multileveled saloon on Maryland off Third. They walked up the Hill and behind the Capitol, Ziller pointing out the sights knowledgeably. It turned out he was a third-generation civil servant; his father was a fairly high mandarin at State, his mother a budget officer at the General Services Administration. Ziller had been educated at American U. and was one of the rare natives of the town. He seemed happy to speak freely about himself, Washington ways, and his recent job, which was staffing the House Intelligence Committee. He touched amusingly on the idiosyncrasies of various congressional characters as well, pointing out several who were dining in that very place.

Ziller did this last discreetly, in a low voice. Most of those he indicated were solid-looking men in their fifties or sixties, with graying hair and very pink skin, but there was one woman, an undersecretary of something, lunching with another, an assistant secretary of something else. Karp learned, whether he wanted to or not, that an undersecretary was more important than an assistant secretary, but that a deputy assistant secretary was more important than a deputy undersecretary, except at the Pentagon, where the reverse obtained.

They ordered; food was brought. Karp found himself unexpectedly ravenous, and tore into his meal, a cheeseburger as large as a regulation Softball.

"Good burgers here," observed Ziller as he plucked at a shrimp salad.

"Yeah. So-how am I doing? Am I having lunch yet?"

Ziller grinned, showing the small neat pearly teeth you get if you have been covered by the government's generous health plan from birth. "Not quite," he said. "Lunch actually happens when I tell you something I've been sworn not to tell you, and tell you not to tell anyone else, knowing that you will tell exactly the person I want to find out about it, but couldn't tell. That's having lunch."

"And…? What's the secret?"

Ziller shrugged and his expression became more guarded. "Avoid the apple pie. It tends to be watery."

"I'm serious," replied Karp, placing the stump of his burger on its plate. He wiped his mouth with his napkin and regarded Ziller unsmilingly. "I appreciate the walking guidebook act, but let's not screw around with each other. Dobbs sent you over here to watch the store for him and also to slide me information he thinks I should have without having to do it officially. Obviously, you don't want to do that on our first date, so to speak; you want to feel me out a little, learn something about who I tell secrets to before you let loose, maybe check out do I know what the hell I'm doing around an investigation. I appreciate that, but here's a tip. The problem with telling me secrets, is I don't pass them on. That's because I'm basically a simple country boy. Around here, as I gather, you've got to show what you know to show everybody you're somebody. Like, 'Look at me, I know some Senator is schtupping the assistant secretary of what's-its-face, hooray.' But basically, I don't give a flying fuck about being somebody in Washington. I didn't much like it when I was somebody in New York. Plus, I left my family in the city, and as a result I'm horny and generally pissed off. I'm here to do a job and scram, the quicker the better. And I could put all the patience I have with all this shit-'don't mess with that one' and 'respect this one's fucking sensitivities'-in my belly button. I told Crane I had no political skills and it's true, and he said that was okay, and if it turns out it's not, I'm on the next plane out. You can convey the same message to Representative Dobbs." He paused and produced a mild version of his famous stare. Then he grinned, to forestall any tension.

Ziller made a mock swipe at his brow and said, "Well, that was a cold douche. Are you always this charming?"

"No," Karp said, still smiling, "sometimes I'm extremely obnoxious. For example, when I think somebody is not telling me stuff I need to know."

"Which is certainly not the case here. Look, we're on the same side. I'm from the federal government and I'm here to help you."

"Help me how?"

Ziller laughed, "No, it's a joke-the third biggest lie."

"Meaning?"

"That's right, you probably haven't heard it eight million times: What are the three biggest lies in the world? Answer: I'll respect you in the morning; the check is in the mail; and I'm from the federal government and I'm here to help you. Ho, ho. Well, I really am here to help you."

Karp waited, his expression neutral. Ziller took a breath and resumed.

"Okay, I got this from a buddy of mine who shall remain nameless. He's a staffer with the Church committee."

"The Senate Intelligence investigation."

"Yes, the Intelligence investigation. Church is the chair, but Dick Schaller is the leading light. They subpoenaed a shitload of stuff from the CIA and most of it was either trash or blanked out-par for the course with the spooks-but there was one incredibly juicy little package that came through untouched. Some of it bears heavily on the JFK investigation."

"In what way?"

"This I don't know, but my guy says it's dynamite."

"And Schaller is going to give us this stuff?"

"Yeah. What he wants is to get rid of it. The investigation is finished, the report is out. The last thing he needs is to be sitting on something this big that he didn't use."

Karp frowned. "Wait a minute. What you're saying is that a U.S. senator had information germane to the assassination of the president and he's playing footsy with it? He's not going public with it immediately?"

"That's not the point. It was ancillary to the intelligence investigation proper, and if he used it, he'd have had to branch off down a line of investigation he chose not to pursue."

"Why not?"

Ziller paused and said meaningfully, "Because in certain quarters of this town, getting excited about who did JFK is considered on the same level as having food stains on your tie or walking around with your fly open."

"That's good to know," said Karp, and then asked, "So what do I do? Beg him?"

"No, we'll set up an appointment, you'll go over to the Dirksen Building, you'll chat, talk about the weather, and when you leave the stuff'll be in your briefcase."

"Great," said Karp. "Is that it?"

"No, Mark Lane has some dynamite stuff he got on an FOIA request from the FBI, another miracle. There must be a rat in the public information office there," said Ziller. He looked at his watch and beckoned to the waitress for the check. "I have to run; there's a staff meeting over at Rayburn in ten minutes."

"Wait a second-what's this about Mark Lane and a rat in the FBI?"

"Yeah, it's a long story. It's another document, and I'm sure Lane'll be around to see us. It's apparently signed by J. Edgar Hoover's own soft, pink hand." He stood up. "I should be able to start full-time next week, if that's okay."

"Yeah, sure, fine," said Karp, feeling vaguely one-upped and unsure about whether it was fine or not.

Back in the office, Karp found a message from V.T. on his desk. V.T. himself was in his own dingy room poking into one of several heavy cartons made of a dark, waxy-looking cardboard.

"What's up, V.T.?"

"How was your lunch?"

"I had the cheeseburger special. What's in the boxes?"

"National Archives," said V.T. "Your research director has been researching, and I had these sent over. It's the photographic stuff, copies they let us have. The actual stuff, they send a guy over and he watches it. I imagine we'll need to do that when we go to hearings."

"What actual stuff?"

"Oh, the Rifle. The Bloody Shirt. The Magic Bullet. I went over there this morning. They let me Handle the Items. You get a chill."

"I bet. So you got all the evidence and autopsy shots?"

"Those they had. Plus the films. That's what I wanted to show you. I set up a projector already."

V.T. led the way to a freshly painted bare room down the hall, in the center of which he had a projector set up on a metal typing table. There were two straight chairs on either side of it. The blinds were closed, and when V.T. shut the door and clicked off the lights, the room became quite dark.

"What are we watching?" asked Karp, sitting in one of the chairs.

"You're a trained investigator-see if you recognize it."

V.T. flicked the projector switch and sat down. The white wall opposite lit up. The usual leader numbers counted down and there was a message informing the viewer that this film was copyrighted by Life magazine and a brief look at the seal of the National Archives. Then bright sunlight, a road, a crowd, a motorcade coming down a street, led by motorcycle cops, preceding an open limousine in which two men and two women are waving and smiling.

Karp realized that he had never actually seen the film shot by Abraham Zapruder on assassination day, although he had seen the grainy color stills made from it. It was different, more chilling, in motion. He asked, "This is the original?"

"No, that's in a vault at Time-Life. This is the archival copy. Let me slow it down for you."

V.T. turned a lever and the scene slowed to a nightmare crawl. The Kennedy limo passed behind a large sign and emerged, the president grimaced and snapped both his hands up to his throat, elbows high, then John Connally puffed his cheeks out in pain and slumped to the side, then Kennedy's head exploded in a pink cloud. Jackie scrambled out onto the rear deck of the car, a big Secret Service man leaped up on the rear deck and thrust her back into her seat, the car accelerated and moved away until it vanished under a freeway overpass. The screen went white again and the most famous snuff film ever made was over.

"Like to see it again?" asked V.T.

"Yeah. Can you stop it on a particular frame?"

"No, not with this projector. I want to get us a Moviola for that and for some other film material I have. There are eight-by-ten prints of each frame, of course, but they're not as… compelling as seeing the real thing. I'm also going to go back to the city and take a look at the original. What I hear is that it's got detail you can't see on the archival copies."

"That's interesting. I mean why take any trouble to make a good copy? It's just the most important piece of film in history. If Zapruder hadn't shot that film, we'd both be back in the city, eating bagels and putting asses in jail. There wouldn't be an investigation. There wouldn't be any single-bullet theory because you wouldn't need one, because without the film to time the bullet impacts and show their order in detail, all you got is a dead guy, a wounded guy, and a rifle in a high building. Let's see it again."

V.T. rewound it and they watched the Zapruder film again at normal speed. It took twenty-two seconds. They were silent for the few seconds it took to rewind.

"Again?" asked V.T.

"Not right now," said Karp. He rose, stretched, and turned on the lights. "We have a photo tech yet?"

"Uh-huh. I convinced Jim Phelps to join the cause. You don't recognize the name? He's the guy who liberated the Zapruder film and he's done some interesting enhancements. He impressed me. A certain passionate sincerity that ought to balance my own blithe amateurism."

"I'll need to meet him."

"I'll set it up. Also, I have that list for the autopsy panel you wanted."

"Murray's heading it, right?" Newbury bobbed his head in assent, but with a sour expression on his face.

"What's the matter, you have something against Murray Selig?" Karp asked.

"No, not as such. The credentials are fine. You can't beat chief medical examiner in New York City. On the other hand, you and he have been pretty tight over the years. His objectivity may be called into question. It might have been better to give it to someone with whom we have no prior connection."

"Come on, Murray's the best in the business. You think he's going to shave the findings to make me happy?"

V.T. shrugged. "You're the boss. Okay, next: I'm going to set up an index for the materials we're gathering. I'll base it on the index Sylvia Meagher made in sixty-four, of course. We'd really be even further up shit's creek without that. And I'll make a separate list of the stuff we should have that's missing, not that I have very high hopes of finding it." He rose and sighed and ran his hand through his fine pale hair.

It struck Karp that V.T. had been putting in hours as long as his own and even after a few weeks his face was beginning to show the strain.

"Fulton's coming on Monday?" V.T. asked.

"Yeah. He called yesterday. He's got his little mafia of retired cops ready to start as contract investigators. Speaking of which, first thing Monday we should have a meeting. I'll get Selig to come down, and you should get your photo guy in. I'll try to figure out which of the people wandering around here knows what the hell they're doing."

V.T. nodded unenthusiastically and went to the door. Karp said, "I'd like to see that fist of missing stuff as soon as possible. I'm going over to see the Senate Intelligence Committee. Maybe they'll know about some of it."

"Tomorrow morning all right?"

"Sure. Like what kind of stuff, by the way?"

V.T. shot him a glum look. "Like Kennedy's brain, for starters. And it's probably not in the Dirksen Building."

Karp read for the rest of the day until his eyes burned. He reached the end of a chapter and threw the heavy book on a pile. He'd gone through three yellow pads making notes on the Warren Report, cross-checking his reading with the critical works also spread out across his desk: Meagher's Accessories after the Fact, Thompson's Six Seconds in Dallas, Lane's Rush to Judgment, Epstein's Inquest. He reviewed his notes and distributed more little yellow slips among the critical books. As always, he finished these sessions with an incipient headache and a queasy sensation in his belly.

Having entered this work without any prejudgment of the Warren Report, he had never concerned himself particularly with its critics. He had read the Times and watched Uncle Walter on CBS like millions of Americans, and the idea that a lone nut had shot the president was perfectly reasonable to him. He also had a deep-seated reluctance to accept the idea of conspiracy on the part of government agencies, even though he had in his career exposed several such conspiracies.

That was the point, in fact. If he had exposed conspiracies, and he was a law-enforcement official, it was difficult to believe that other law-enforcement officials could not have done likewise. Since none had, in the last decade, it had seemed to him probable that no conspiracy existed. He also had a professional's reluctance to accept the conclusions of amateurs. In his long experience at the DA's office in New York, and in contradiction to the great mass of popular culture pertaining to the subject, no amateur, no Miss Marple, no Poirot, no Sam Spade, no Lew Archer, had ever contributed in the slightest to the solution of a homicide. Private investigators were a joke among the pros he worked with.

After three weeks of study, however, these beliefs had been seriously eroded, and he had conceived a ferocious resentment against the people associated with the Warren Commission. His reading had shown him what any experienced homicide prosecutor would have gathered. The commission report was not an investigation that might have substituted for a trial of the dead Oswald, but merely a prosecutor's brief, and not a very good one at that. As Crane had suggested at their first meeting, Karp would have laughed out of his office a junior ADA who had waltzed in with something of this quality as prep work for the trial of a street mutt accused of popping a whore.

He had seen a similar botch any number of times in training ADAs: love at first sight. The cops provide a likely suspect; the kid gathers evidence that aids in convicting that suspect, and shows up at Karp's pretrial meeting with a fat file and a big grin, which grin Karp demolishes by pointing out all the things the defense is going to bring up that the kid didn't think about, or didn't think were important. The autopsy. Did you see the films? Are the wounds consistent with the weapon we say he used? What about that weapon? Chain of evidence? Do you have it, an unbroken written record of everyone who touched it from the time it was found in possession of the defendant to the present instant? You "think" so? Not good enough. What about the witnesses? You got "most of them"? Why not all of them? They didn't see anything or they didn't see what you thought they should have seen? Better apply for a continuance, kid. You're not ready for court.

And that was what happened on Karp's watch in a cheap street killing of a nobody. This-he glanced in distaste at the nicely bound blue volumes-was an investigation of the murder of a president in front of umpteen thousand people, supervised by the chief justice of the United States. Karp recalled what Bert Crane had said about Warren and his report-that Warren was rusty, that the problem with the report was the peculiar life histories of both the main suspect and the guy who'd shot him. The critics made much of that too, but Karp thought both they and Crane were off the mark. The problem with this thing was that it was a lousy investigation. A third-year law student could've come in off the street and walked Lee Harvey Oswald through its gaping holes.

Karp rose, put his suit jacket on, grabbed some more reading material, and threw it into an accordion folder. He walked through the deserted office and out into the darkening streets. The Federal Center metro station was a block away, and he took the Red Line train to the Court House stop in Arlington.

The Federal Gardens Apartments consisted of four two-story red brick buildings with tacky and pretentious white colonial porticoes, despite which they remained easily distinguishable from Mount Vernon. Most of Karp's neighbors appeared to be noncommissioned military on temporary assignments or the kind of working stiffs that dressed in uniforms with embroidered name tags. There was a rusty playground set in the worn grassy quadrangle, which was littered with trash and forgotten plastic toys. There were lots of children in the complex, although Karp, who left for work at seven and returned after dark, saw them mainly on weekends. He heard them often enough, though. The interior walls were thin.

He entered his apartment and turned on the light. A small living room contained a nubby plaid couch, an easy chair with a reddish flowered slipcover worn at the arms, a scratched blond wood coffee table, a standard lamp with a rusty nylon shade. In the rear of the ground floor there lurked a tiny dim kitchen and a dining alcove with a table of the same blond wood and four chairs. There was a dark stain on the table in the shape of a map of China, where someone had once spilled ink, probably during the second Roosevelt administration. Up a narrow flight of stairs were two bedrooms and a bath. The place was dark and low-ceilinged, but it was cheap and ten minutes by train to Karp's office.

Cheap was the main thing. Housing prices in the District had exploded in the seventies and Karp had vastly underestimated the cost of keeping two households. As it was likely that he would be unemployed after the committee concluded its work, he had resolved not to touch his small savings until then. He now understood why congressmen took bribes.

Karp changed into comfortable clothes, went down to the kitchen, and heated up and consumed, without tasting it, a TV dinner. Then he went into the living room, lay down on the couch, and read for ten minutes before falling into a profound sleep.

He awoke with a start to the sound of a violent argument in the apartment next door. Screaming, breaking things, and an unfamiliar sound, the whining and barking of a dog. The quarrel reached a crescendo and then abruptly terminated with a slamming door and a final crash of something breaking. The whining and barking, however, continued. Karp cursed and checked his watch. He was late for his nightly phone call.

Marlene was cool when she answered, as if she were speaking to a distant relative.

"How're things?" he asked.

"Not bad." And, away from the mouthpiece, muffled: "It's Daddy."

"Got a new husband yet?"

"Yeah, I just picked this dude off the street, name of Frank or Ralph, something like that-anyway, he's far better than you in every possible way."

"Good. As long as you're happy."

"I'm euphoric," she said, and then after a brief pause, "I was on TV yesterday."

"Yeah? What, you hosted 'Saturday Night Live'?"

"Almost as good. I talked to the National Association of Attorneys General about rape. One of the locals picked up about twelve seconds of moi for the local news. I did my line about how after the legislature changed the law on corroborative evidence, our conviction rate went up thirty percent."

"That's great, Marlene! God, Bloom usually hogs that whole thing for his buddies and his own self."

"Yeah, well apparently, I'm one of Bloom's buddies now," she said.

"Oh?"

"Yeah, a bunch of feminists had a rally in front of the courts building and the TV gave them a big play. Apparently, car theft gets something like eighty times the investigative resources that rape gets, and forget about narco. Also there was a series about rape in the Voice and a piece in New York with a couple of juicy horror stories. Mr. Bloom was very glad to have his very own pet feminist talk to the press."

"So you're famous."

"Please! Quasi-famous at the most."

"Like it?"

A pause. "Yeah. Yeah, I do. It's nice to get some recognition, and I think it'll be good for the program."

"You get any new staff yet?"

"No, but… what's that supposed to mean?"

"It means don't hold your breath. Bloom is a master of the meaningless gesture. He could be setting you up."

"I can take care of myself," Marlene snapped, with more edge than she had intended. "Just because you've had a running war with him for all these years doesn't mean I have to. We're separate people, something which has been getting a lot clearer to me since you left."

"Marlene, what are you talking about?" Karp demanded, his voice rising. "Bloom is a corrupt fuck, and you know it."

A pause. "Let's change the subject, Butch," said Marlene coolly. "What's going on down there? Solved the crime of the century yet?"

"Yeah, well, it would help if I had a staff, or money to pay one, or an office that worked, but besides that it's going great. Why don't you come down here for the weekend? I miss you."

"I have stuff to do and no money. Why don't you come up here?"

"Same answer."

"Great. Well, in that case, I'll see you when I see you. Here, talk to your daughter."

Clunking of phone, sound of tiny running feet. His heart clenched.

"Daddy, I have an elephant balloon."

"That's great, baby," said Karp, and chatted with his daughter for a few minutes, in the sort of unrewarding and stumbling conversation possible with a three-year-old who is really only interested in when you're coming home.

"Lucy, good night now," said Karp. "Let me talk to Mommy again."

But the child placed the phone carefully back on the hook, and Marlene did not call back. After some moments of agonized waiting, Karp punched up their number, but hung up before it could ring.

On the Monday following another miserable work-clogged and lonely weekend, Karp for the first time marshaled his investigative staff. They met in a small windowless office that had been designated the conference room. It was bare and dusty except for two long folding caterer's tables placed end to end and a motley collection of chairs, which the attendees had dragged from their own offices. There were little piles of dead cockroaches on the floor and the room stank of a recent extermination.

It was not, Karp thought, a particularly impressive group for the task at hand. Most of them were young, in their mid to late twenties, congressional staff types, all of them, male and female, wearing neat career suits in muted colors. There were also several older men in cheaper suits who exuded the vague bonhomie that marked them as political hacks. Karp was sure that none of them had ever investigated a homicide or worked a major criminal case. Bright or slow, ambitious or defeated, they were paper pushers all.

V.T. Newbury was, of course, solid, but Karp had his doubts about whether Newbury or anyone else could form this mob into an effective research organization. Karp glanced across the table at Clay Fulton, who gave him a hooded, eye-rolling look. Fulton was solid too, but even under his supervision none of these people was going to be able to hit the streets of a strange town and ferret out secrets from the lowlifes. Ziller was there- Karp still didn't know quite what to make of him-as was Jim Phelps, V.T.'s photo expert; short, bearded, wearing a cheap tan safari suit. At the end of the table sat a small dapper man with a brush mustache and heavy black horn-rimmed glasses-Dr. Murray Selig, former chief medical examiner of New York and the chairman of the forensic panel.

Karp began, "This is our first general meeting and I hope it's our last. I hate meetings." Muffled, polite laughter. "This staff is still small enough so that we can talk to each other just about every day. I also want to minimize written reports and bureaucratic garbage as much as possible. I assume you've all met V.T. here. He'll lay out the research assignments for each of you. The well-dressed gentleman sitting across from me is Clay Fulton, on leave from the New York PD. He'll handle all the fieldwork with such of you as he thinks can help out. We've divided the work into a number of lines of research in two big groupings. First, we want to know to the extent possible what really happened in Dallas that day. We're therefore going to reexamine, one, the ballistics and other forensic material, two, the photographic evidence, including the various amateur films, and, three, there'll be a special reexamination of the autopsy evidence by Dr. Selig and his team of forensic pathologists.

"The second grouping is concerned with why Kennedy was shot and whether the actual facts of the crime were covered up by either governmental or nongovernmental sources, or a combination of the two. The recent Church committee report gives us some reason to believe that neither the CIA nor the FBI was perfectly forthcoming with Warren. We're going to look into, one, the Cuba connection, right- and left-wing versions, and the CIA involvement; two, we're going to review the investigation of Oswald's background; three, we're going to check out the organized crime connection; and four, we're going to see what we can find out about Jack Ruby."

Karp then read off a list of assignments and looked up. Everyone except Fulton, Selig, and Newbury was scribbling away on pads. Karp continued, "V.T. has set up a filing system and an initial set of leads for each group. We'll expect you all to use your heads in following them up. I'm available any time for a conference on any particular problem, but I'm not going to have time to nursemaid you through this. One other thing: I intend to run this as a professional investigation. You'll hear a lot about political sensitivities and pressures. I want you to ignore them. The reason we're here, the reason the Warren Commission screwed up, was just that kind of knuckling under to politics, and I'm not going to be party to a repetition of that. All we're going to be concerned with here is evidence and the best interpretation of that evidence, on the basis of our professional judgment and not a damn thing else."

He paused and looked around the table. Some of the faces bore faint smirks or incipient expressions of disbelief. Then he added, "Some of you may have problems with that, in which case you're welcome to leave. And I can guarantee you this: if you sign on here and I do find out you're crimping the investigation to suit somebody's political agenda, you're out and I don't care who your patron is. I know Bert Crane will support me on this. Okay, any questions?"

A silence, then a series of anticlimaxes. Somebody asked about furniture. Another asked about travel funds, and a third raised the critical issue of whether congressional staff parking privileges would be retained. It was a replay of the conversation between Flores and Crane. Karp referred these matters to Sondergard. Nobody seemed to have any substantive questions about who shot JFK. The meeting broke up in the usual burble of cross-conversation, centering around V.T. Karp slipped out feeling tense and irritated.

Later, Karp sat in his office with Fulton and Murray Selig. "Welcome to the funhouse," he said.

"You got yourself a problem, boychik," said the pathologist. "Comparatively, I got it easy."

"You're satisfied with the panel?" Karp asked.

"Oh, yeah, all good people. That's not the issue, though."

"What is?"

"The material. If the material isn't there, how are we going to come up with anything different than Warren did?"

"Oh, come on, Murray!" Karp snapped. He reached for the summary volume of the Warren Report and flipped it open to the famous ugly profile drawing of JFK with the trajectory of the magic bullet going through its neck. "Are you going to endorse this crap?"

Selig smiled and placed his hands over his ears. "I don't want to hear it. We'll look at the evidence available and we'll judge from that. You know how I work."

Karp tossed the volume down with a bang that raised a little flurry of plaster dust. "Yeah, right. Sorry, I know you'll do what's right."

Then the three men, who had worked together on hundreds of violent deaths over many years, chatted briefly about the simpler cases of the past, until Selig had to leave to catch a plane back to the city.

When he had gone, Fulton observed, "He's right, you know. Autopsy could draw a blank on this one."

Karp shook his head. "I don't believe it. This"-he motioned at the blue book-"is a lie. Murray won't be party to a lie. I don't expect him to get the full story, but I'd be willing to bet he'll explode this one."

Fulton shrugged. "Maybe. I hope so. Meanwhile, what are we going to do about this investigation? That crew in there couldn't find a cat in a grocery bag. You in deep shit here, Stretch."

"We in deep shit, you mean. Any ideas?"

Fulton rubbed his hand slowly over his close-cropped head for a moment before he replied. "Well, there's you and me and V.T. Maybe a couple of the crew'll turn out to be some good. They can't all be as useless as they look."

"You mentioned ex-cops on the phone."

"Uh-huh, cops on pensions, here and there. They'd be willing to pitch in."

"Like who?"

"Al Sangredo, used to work the Two-five?"

"Yeah, way back. He still alive?"

Fulton chuckled. "Al better not hear you say that. Yeah, he's down in Miami. Got a private license, still dabbles a little. He's up for it. He's a Spaniard, but he can get into the Cuban business down there. He was Fidel's bodyguard for the cops when he made that New York visit back in the fifties, so he knows the other side too. Apparently they hit it off, him and Fidel."

"Oh, great! That's a desirable reference in Little Havana."

Fulton laughed. "Then there's Pete Melchior in New Orleans…"

"What about here?" Karp asked impatiently. Fulton gave him a disbelieving look and shot back, "Man wasn't killed here, son. We don't need no more people here in D.C. We're damn lucky that New York cops hit the warm climates a lot when they throw in their tin. Spend the bribe money in peace. This is gonna be cleared up in Texas, probably New Orleans, maybe Miami, if the Cubans are connected up to it, like the Senate Intelligence report says. I think I got a guy in Dallas too. What I mean is, we need folks know those towns, which I don't and neither do you."

Karp shook his head as if trying to throw off sleep and sighed. "Yeah, sorry. That's what this fucking place does to you. I been here a lousy month and I'm starting to think the world ends at the Beltway, like everybody else." He looked at his watch. "I have to get over to Schaller's office."

"The CIA stuff?"

"Yeah."

"You want me to come with you?"

Karp gave Fulton a puzzled look and opened his mouth to say something like, "No, why should you," when the other man's implication struck him, generating an unwelcome shiver.

Karp laughed unconvincingly. "You think Langley is going to gun me down on Independence Avenue and steal back their files?"

"It's been known, if you believe half what these assassination nuts say."

"Fuck it!" said Karp. "I'm not that paranoid yet." He picked up his briefcase, shrugged into a suit jacket and his raincoat, and headed for the door.

Fulton issued a rough laugh. " 'Yet' is the right word, baby. We're just starting out."

Karp reached the Dirksen Senate Office Building six streets away without being gunned down by Cuban paramilitaries or Texas fascists, nor succumbing to the more likely ambuscade from one of the dozens of Kennedy-assassination nuts that had started to haunt the Select Committee's staff.

The interview with Senator Schaller did not go quite as Ziller had predicted. Schaller proved to be a bluff, square-faced, stocky man with thinning reddish hair, who presented himself in the antique Trumanesque style that had been abandoned by many of his colleagues for the blow dryer and the spin doctor. He had the papers right on his desk and made no bones about what they were. He regretted not having used them himself, cursed the CIA in earthy barnyard terms, and wished Karp good luck. The whole thing took eight minutes, and involved a crushing handshake that seemed to last nearly a third of the entire interview.

Karp walked back to the Annex at a good clip, making one detour at Third Street to avoid the guy with the funny orange hair who had counted thirty-eight shots in Dealey Plaza. His first stop was the Xerox room, where he made a copy of the Schaller papers. His next stop was Fulton's office.

Karp handed the thin stack of originals to the detective and sat down in a creaky wooden swivel chair to read the copy. For the next twenty minutes there was silence but for the rustle of pages and the creak of Karp's old chair as both men read. Karp finished his reading before Fulton did and, taking out a pen, began to reread, making notes.

Fulton indicated he was done reading by scooping up the pile of pages on his desk and neatly squaring the edges of the stack. He placed the documents in the center of his steel desk and looked at them with an odd expression. Karp studied his friend's face curiously. Was it fear he observed? Unlikely. Clay Fulton possessed more physical courage than any man Karp had ever met. Disgust? Maybe. Karp was fairly disgusted himself.

He asked, "What do you think, Clay?"

Fulton met his eyes, his expression one of the most profound bafflement. "What do I think? I think we should've stayed in town. We're way over our heads here, boy. Way, way, way over our heads."

In a small whitewashed room in Quetzaltenango in Guatemala, a thin, bearded man packed his suitcase. The phone call from Washington had been unexpected but not disturbing. The man was used to phone calls interrupting his life and asking him to travel to another part of the world to do odd things.

This is what he does for a living, goes places and does things in response to phone calls. He is not exactly a professional assassin. There may, in fact, be no such thing, despite the fantasies of fiction writers, and were there to be such a profession, it would not be staffed by elegant men who wear dinner clothes and drink champagne in tony resorts. This is simple economics: it is so easy to kill people, and there are so many who will gladly do it cheaply, that it would be hard to command a high living from that trade. The thin man has, however, killed any number of people for money, but only as an ancillary, if critical, activity, just as a chauffeur may wash a car, or a waiter may wipe down a table.

He is not exactly a spy either, or a mercenary soldier, although he has spied and fought for gold. He has also run a bar in Honduras and managed a small air-shipping service. Essentially, he does what certain people tell him to do. It is the only fixed point in his life, and it gives him the closest feeling he ever has to a feeling of security.

He completed his packing, put on a khaki baseball hat, turned to leave the room, but stopped at a cracked mirror tacked up by the door and looked at his face. He was nearly forty. He had brown eyes and crisp, short brown hair. He did not think that anyone will recognize his face at his destination. He had aged and grown a beard and it had been a long time.

The thin man walked down a narrow flight of stairs and entered a room with several desks and chairs in it. A brown-skinned soldier in green fatigues sat in one of them, tilted back against the wall, reading a magazine, his rifle leaning against the wall next to him.

The thin man asked, "Has Chavez gone out to the airstrip yet?" His Spanish was quite good, almost unaccented.

The soldier said, "No, the truck's still outside." He took in the suitcase. "Going somewhere?"

"Yes. I have to meet a plane."

"What should I tell them?"

"Tell them I'll be back, but I'm not sure when," the thin man said, and walked into the steamy evening.