Corruption of Blood

SIX

Five in the morning and Marlene Ciampi lay sleepless on her back, studying the stamped tin pattern of the loft's ceiling. She was dying for a cigarette, but she had decided to ration herself to five per day, and the first one was going to be with coffee in a few hours, when she officially rose to start the day.

Much of her energy recently had been going into this sort of self-torment. She had become obsessive not only about smoking, but about food and booze and schedules and shopping. She thought about this, lying in bed. I'm counting everything, she thought. People are starting to look at me funny. I bought a Day-Timer in a little leather case. That's a joke. I never seemed to need one before; now I write down everything, schedule everything to the quarter hour. I'm not like this, she thought: happy-go-lucky, anything-on-a-dare Marlene. It's like I'm back in high school with the nuns.

During such musings, Marlene did not dwell on the source of these disturbing changes. She did not want to believe that Karp's leaving for Washington was involved at all. She loved Karp, although she was angry with him for leaving, but that didn't mean she was dependent on him. Dependency was the death of love, so Marlene believed, and she also knew that she should be able to do it all on her own. She had been on her own for a long time before she got together with Karp, so what was the problem now? The kid was no problem; Lucy was an angel-healthy, cooperative, a delight.

And, of course, other women did it, including black single working mothers with many fewer resources than she had; also, there were those women you read about in the magazines, "Sharon Perfect, single mom, thirty-five, cooks French cuisine for her three kids, vice-president of a major ad agency, plays cello in the local orchestra, training for the Hawaii Triathlon… (picture) Sharon's a size five, blond, the three kids are gorgeous, snapped at the family table as they discuss nuclear physics in Chinese."

With these thoughts stoking her already red-hot guilt and urging her to improve each shining hour with ever more zeal and efficiency, Marlene flung herself from bed, made a hasty ablution, and started her exercise regimen. This was an hour each day of the sort of conditioning that prizefighters use to prepare them for their literally punishing sport. Marlene's father had been a likely welterweight just after the second war and had worked his way up to a match with Kid Gavilan, and lasted one and thirty of the first round, which was why he had decided to become a plumber. He had, however, taught all of his six kids (including the three girls) how to box.

Marlene was the only one who had kept it up. She had a body bag and a speed bag set up in a corner of the loft she and Karp called the gym, and now she slipped into shorts and a T-shirt and sneakers and speed gloves, and pounded away at both bags for forty-five minutes. Then she skipped rope with all the hand-crossing, pace-changing frills you see in boxing movies, tossing her head to snap the sweat out of her eyes.

She stripped and plunged into the huge black tub. She felt better, as she always did after her violent exertions. There was nothing in fact wrong with her or her life, she decided, only with her thinking. She'd stick it out for as long as that idiot wanted to waste his time in Washington. She would flourish, in fact.

Actually, she reflected as she lolled in the steaming water, things were getting better. Bloom was paying attention to her, he had invited her to a meeting of a national advisory committee on sex crimes. And deservedly: she had racked up some nice convictions, her staff was terrific and getting better, she had earned some nice ink recently. A disloyal thought… maybe Karp's intransigence had been screwing up her career?

She left the bath and dried herself and washed her empty eye socket with saline and inserted the glassie, then walked naked to the closet area under the sleeping loft. There was a full-length mirror there and she stopped to look at herself appraisingly. Nice boobs, smallish but high yet, and well proportioned, nipples the color of Bing cherry jam. She lifted her breasts with both hands and let them drop, checking the jiggle factor. Acceptable. She turned sideways and struck a bodybuilder pose. Some good def on the biceps and triceps, belly still flat, although the washboard ridges she had boasted at seventeen were nearly gone, butt still high and solid. She turned face-to again and slumped, letting her arms hang down like an ape's. A little thickening in the waist maybe, incipient love handles. Tough shit, thirty wasn't twenty, but she was still a five and many couldn't say that. She struck a sex goddess pose and hip-twitched toward the mirror, making the sort of masturbatory breast- and crotch-rubbing motions beloved of soft-core pornographers. Hmm, better stop that; she was horny enough as it was, another reason to be irritated with the absent Karp. She must be sending out pheromones, too. Guys had started to hit on her with a regularity and intensity unusual since her mating. It was irritating and nice at the same time. The image of an affair formed itself in her animal brain and swiftly faded.

She pushed her face up against the mirror, examining it for blemishes and wrinkles. No, that was still okay; one thing, the Ciampi women had good skin. They ran to fat, but they had good skin. Her mother at fifty-seven looked under forty. Marlene herself still got carded in dark bars.

She made faces, seeking the traces of wrinkles to come. She curled her lip back and pulled her ears out, chimp fashion. Soon she was cavorting in front of the mirror, grunting and dangling her knuckles against the floor, waggling buttocks, and singing "Alley Oop."

"What're you doing, Mommy?" said her daughter, appearing from behind, her voice tinged with alarm.

Karp said, "You're going to have to get this started, guys. I have to get back to the city this weekend. In fact, I'm thinking of splitting early today."

The three of them, Karp, Fulton, and V.T., were sitting in Karp's office going over the documents from Schaller and trying to figure out what to do about them. Clay Fulton gave Karp a concerned look and asked, "Something wrong back home?"

Karp shrugged. "No. Maybe. Marlene's been sounding strange on the phone this last week."

"Marlene is strange," said V.T. "You just want to get laid while we do all the work."

"That too," said Karp. "Okay, where are we on this abortion? V.T.?"

Newbury adjusted his gold-rimmed half-glasses, the ones that he said made him look like a foreclosing banker, and consulted a sheaf of notes. "We have five documents, which we have labeled A through E. I know you've read them all, but I want to summarize them so we can all agree on what they say and what's significant in them. Document A appears to be an internal CIA report from the winter of 1962 describing the composition and capabilities of a Cuban emigre group called Brigada Sixty-one and its involvement in Operation Mongoose-where do they get these names? — which was designed to launch guerrilla raids on Cuban targets and which included a plot to kill Fidel Castro. The burden of the report is that even though President Kennedy had ordered the end of such attempts as part of the Cuban missile crisis deal with the Soviets, Brigada Sixty-one, with the help of the CIA, or some parts of it, had continued to try to infiltrate Cuba and do the regime some damage. The key section for our purposes is a list of CIA contract agents working with Brigada Sixty-one, among whom we find the name 'Lee Henry Oswald.' Also mentioned in this report is the name of the project's CIA handler, somebody named Maurice Bishop, and the name of a Cuban banker named Antonio Veroa. Veroa apparently was the leader of Brigada Sixty-one.

"Document B appears to be an after-action report, to this same Bishop, in which an actual attempt on Castro's life by Veroa and a gentleman named Guido Mosca, with some others, is described. This was in 1961. Apparently Mr. Veroa was able to rent, in his mother-in-law's name, an apartment in Havana overlooking a plaza where Castro was scheduled to give a speech, and was able to install Mosca and the others there with a hunting rifle, a machine gun, and a rocket launcher. The attempt failed, obviously, for reasons that are not covered in the text. It just says that Veroa decided that it had to be called off. Both Veroa and Mosca returned to the U.S. via Mexico. I called Ray Guma about Mosca. Goom says he's known as Jerry Legs, and was at that time an enforcer for a loan-sharking and gambling operation run by Carlos Marcello in New Orleans."

Karp nodded. Ray Guma was the homicide bureau's resident expert on the world of organized crime, or at least its Italian provinces. "Where is Mosca now? The city? Miami?"

"Guma said he'll check and get back to us."

V.T. continued, "Documents C and D are two-page memoranda on CIA letterhead. C is dated November 30, 1963, from Richard Helms to a group of CIA senior staff, directing them, in so many words, to stonewall the Warren Commission about any connection between Oswald and the Cubans working for the CIA and about any connection between anyone that turns up in the assassination investigation and Mongoose or any later CIA operations against Cuba. D is dated June 12, 1968, from Clyde Peterson, who was a special assistant in the office of the director of Central Intelligence at the time, to a group of senior CIA personnel, directing them to harass certain witnesses being called by Jim Garrison for the Clay Shaw trial.

"The last one, E, is my favorite. This is a transcription of an interview conducted by one of Schaller's investigators. The subject is Milton Thornby, one of Earl Warren's law clerks. There are two interesting sections. According to Thornby, during an early meeting of the full commission, Allen Dulles informed Warren that he had evidence that Oswald was a Soviet agent, and that if this got out, the American people would demand a retaliation that would certainly lead to a thermonuclear exchange. The other item is a report of a colloquy between old Earl and some of the senior commission staff. The staffer was objecting to taking at face value the CIA's assurance that Oswald had no intelligence connections. Were they justified in ruling out a conspiracy so early in the investigation? Warren replied with heat that there was to be no investigation in that area and that, quote, 'Our purpose is to assure the American people that the president was killed by a single man acting alone.'"

Newbury removed his glasses and rubbed his face. "So. What do we have? Evidence of a conspiracy? No, not quite. Evidence of an interest on the part of the CIA to suppress a thorough investigation? I guess. The question is, why?"

He looked at the others so they would know that this was not merely rhetorical. After a moment, Fulton said, "I hate this, but okay: because the CIA set up the hit on Kennedy."

"Okay, that's one," said Newbury.

Fulton said, "Or they didn't have anything to do with it, but Oswald worked for them or associated with some people who worked for them and they didn't want the trail to lead back to their door."

"Good. Two. Butch?"

Karp snapped back to the business at hand. He had been thinking about Marlene and the last phone conversation they had shared, about false laughter and long silences with the dead line whispering bad things to his imagination. He said, "Three, they had nothing to do with Kennedy's murder, and they didn't even know Oswald was connected with them, but the trail from Oswald led back to the Cuban involvement, and Mongoose, and using mafiosi, and the stuff they did after Mongoose, after JFK told them to stop. They couldn't let anyone follow on that trail."

"Why not?" asked Fulton. "That stuff got out anyway. And who the hell cares about some spooks playing war games. Especially as they totally screwed up the hit on Fidel."

"That might be just the point," said Karp. "I have a feeling these guys felt they had a reputation to protect. Also, the Warren Report critics who say the whole thing in Dallas was totally organized and carried out by the CIA never explain how come these guys tried to kill Castro about a dozen times and tripped all over themselves and then got Kennedy the first time out. On the other hand-"

V.T. broke in. "Stop! Now we're doing it. This is how people go crazy over this business. Look, there are ten thousand facts, or quasi facts, that have been dug up about this assassination. They've been arranged in about four hundred books and God knows how many articles, of which every one contradicts every other one, because each one selects out a group of facts and ignores others that are inconvenient to its initial thesis: the CIA did it, the Mob did it, Castro did it, and so on, of which the Warren Report itself is the most famous example. If we start doing the same thing we're going to wind up with something that's not much better than Warren in some different direction."

He took off his spectacles again, wiping them absent-mindedly on his tie. The two other men exchanged a look, and Karp asked, "So what do we do, V.T.? Hang it up and go home?"

V.T. grinned. "Don't ask me twice. No, I can think of two things. One is this stuff." He tapped the sheaf of documents. "It's new and it's a break. It's the very first documentary evidence that someone called Lee Oswald was actually connected with the CIA, actually on somebody's payroll. So we have to explore the CIA connection for all it's worth. We have to find these three guys, Veroa, Mosca, and their CIA contact, Maurice Bishop. Or whoever Bishop really is."

"What do you mean?" asked Fulton. "It's an alias?"

"Yeah, I checked already. Nobody named Maurice Bishop ever worked for the CIA. Okay, that's the first thing. The second approach is through Oswald himself."

"How do you mean?" Karp asked. "I thought he was dead. Or am I still being a dupe of the Warren Report?"

They all laughed, a relief of tension. V.T. said, "That, or a conscious tool of malign forces. No, what I mean is this. Oswald is the sole connector that links all the usual suspects, even if he was just a patsy, as he himself said when they grabbed him that day. Who are the usual suspects? CIA, commies, anticommies, Mob. Okay, Mob first. Oswald was raised by a minor Mob figure in New Orleans, his uncle, Dutz Murret. Murret's best buddy was Carlos Marcello's bodyguard and chauffeur. There's all kinds of hearsay evidence that Oswald knew Jack Ruby before, so maybe he kept his connections up with the wise guys.

"Next, commies: Oswald claimed to be a Marxist nearly all his life. Whether true or not, he certainly made the marines believe it and he did move to Russia and then married the niece of a Soviet Interior Ministry official."

"And he went to Mexico and tried to get to Cuba," added Karp.

V.T. paused and gave him an odd look. "Yes, so it seems. Although… no, let's not get into it now. Where were we? Yes, the anticommies. In Dallas, Oswald was welcomed with open arms by a group of violently anti-communist White Russians, like George de Morenschildt, Viktor Bezikoff, Armand Gaiilov, and others-not something you'd expect them to do for an actual Red. Also, on his return to New Orleans in 1963, Oswald hooked up with Gary Becker, a notorious right-winger, and Becker apparently recruited him to infiltrate pro-Castro student organizations. That seems to be the origin of the famous Fair Play for Cuba incident. Oswald hands out pro-Castro leaflets and gets into a scuffle with anti-Castro Cubans and gets arrested. He even goes on the radio to debate some anti-Castro Cuban about communism. Unfortunately, when he printed up the leaflets he used the address of Becker's organization, the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean, 544 Bank Street, on the pro-Castro leaflets. Very odd. Finally, there's the Sylvia Odio incident. Three men identifying themselves as members of an anti-Castro organization show up at the Odios' Dallas apartment one evening in September 1963. Odio's dad is a big anti-Castroite and a political prisoner in Cuba. Two of these guys are Cubans, one's an American who calls himself Leon. They talk a lot about killing Kennedy because of how he betrayed them at the Bay of Pigs and after the missile crisis. When Kennedy is shot the next month, Odio IDs 'Leon' as Oswald. Everybody who's ever talked to Odio swears she's right on, but of course Warren discounted her evidence."

"This is old stuff, V.T.," said Karp. "What's the point?"

"Wait. Now we come to the CIA connection. Oswald works at one of the most secret bases in the military, Atsugi, Japan, where they launch U-2 spy planes against Russia. He has a secret security clearance. Atsugi also happens to be the regional CIA center. At this time, although Oswald is boasting he's a commie and a Russian spy, nobody does anything about it. In fifty-nine he gets out of the marines, and despite the fact he has almost no money, he somehow gets the fare to fly to London. Then he gets to Helsinki in some way on a day when there's no commercial London-to-Helsinki flight, crosses over by train, goes to Moscow, and talks with an embassy official with strong CIA links. He defects, works in Minsk for a while, marries a Russian girl, redefects to the U.S., all without an instant's difficulty with passports or transit. This is in an era when famous people are getting their passports pulled for even the faintest pink associations. The capper to all this is that Marina Oswald paints a picture of her late husband as a feckless schmuck who could barely keep a job, just the kind of nutty loner who typically assassinates presidents of the United States. The guy apparently has no talent at all, except a talent for making big, powerful bureaucracies do anything he wanted. Oh, yeah: one other useful little skill. He can be in two places at once. In the month before the assassination, nearly a dozen witnesses have placed Oswald in interesting places-a firing range shooting his rifle, a rifle repair shop, a garage, a gas station-at times when we know he was somewhere else. And in all those places whoever it was made sure that people would remember him as Lee Oswald."

"You're buying the double-Oswald story?" asked Fulton.

"I don't know. It's one explanation of the facts, with the only other one being that a bunch of unconnected people, solid citizens, lied in concert for no reason. But that's not crucial at the moment. What is crucial is that whoever Oswald really was, he's still the key to the mystery. All the threads cross on him, and that's why the most exciting thing we've uncovered so far is this document actually naming him as a contract CIA agent."

Fulton stood up and stretched. He said, "Well, you know, V.T., this is all very fancy, but I'm just a simple street cop. Maybe before we elaborate any theories we should locate this guy, what's-his-face, Veroa, and have a chat with him. And the wise guy, Mosca. That's what I'm gonna get started on, as soon as I come off the drunk I'm gonna go on now for getting into this pile of shit in the first place."

"While you're at it," said V.T., "you could find out what old Lee was doing from August 21st to September 17th, 1963. The whole FBI was trying to find out his daily activities from his date of birth to the time he died, but nobody's ever been able to determine where he was or what he was doing for those twenty-seven days. Marina, naturally, says he was napping on the couch, but nobody else saw him during the period in question. All we know is that he was in the country on Labor Day; he visited his aunt."

"His aunt, huh?" Fulton chuckled, a rumbling noise that could be by turns delightful or threatening. Now it was somewhere in between. "That the same aunt that was seen coming out of the manhole on Dealey Plaza with the silenced forty-five? I'll check it out-it sounds like a real break." He left.

V.T. stared at the closing door. "He's pissed off. Not at me, I hope."

"No, but like he said-he's basically a street cop. He gets nervous when he doesn't know the players or the neighborhood." Karp rose, walked over to the greasy window, and stared out at an unpleasant vista of railroad tracks and freeways.

"Speaking of neighborhoods, this is the worst view available from any federal building in the area. Whoever decided to put us in this dump knew how to make a point." He stopped as a familiar scratching noise sounded behind one of the walls. "It also probably has more rats per square yard than any building they had available."

"The FBI used to be here."

"That explains it," answered Karp with a brief laugh.

V.T. did not join in. Karp looked more closely at his friend. Newbury met his gaze briefly and then turned his eyes away, as if ashamed at what they might reveal. In the moment Karp had seen something he didn't like, something he had never seen in the man before. Exhaustion? No, like Karp, he had gone through the same murderous training in the old criminal courts bureau, and he had always turned up in court crackling fresh with a jest on his lips-he was famous for it. It was something deeper-a psychic depletion, the investigator's equivalent of the thousand-yard stare that afflicts infantrymen too long on the line.

"You look beat," Karp offered. "You should take the rest of the week off." A joke; it was Friday afternoon.

V.T. said, "I am beat. This defeats me. I believe I've contracted Oswald's Syndrome. Symptoms: a chronic and progressive inability to discern fact from fiction and role-playing from personality. Distinguishable from common psychosis by the odd fact that the underlying structure of reality gradually comes to mimic the imaginary world created by the sufferer. An occupational disease of spies, counterspies, and the people who study them. Speaking of spies, did you ever hear the odd story of Evno Azev? Doesn't ring a bell? Well, around the turn of the century Azev was the most successful terrorist leader in Russia and the head of an anarchist band called the Terror Brigade. These guys carried out dozens of successful assassinations of public figures, including the minister of the interior, von Plehv, and the czar's own uncle, the grand duke Sergei. In 1908, however, it was revealed that Azev was also a senior agent of the Ohkrana, the czarist secret police. He was planning all those assassinations, see, to get in better with the terrorists, so he could betray the terrorists. So it turned out that the chief antiterrorist agent was, in fact, the best terrorist of them all. When he was exposed, in fact, the terrorist movement totally collapsed. What am I getting at? Well, compared to Lee Harvey Oswald, and his many confreres, old Evno was… I don't know-who's authentic any more? Martin Buber? You? Maybe Oswald was his own double."

V.T. got up and placed the CIA papers back into a folder. "I think I will take the rest of the week off. And perhaps more. Call me when we get a budget."

"Yeah, right. But aside from this new stuff, what else can we do meanwhile?"

"Find out who Bishop is," said V.T. "Although how to begin doing that I have no idea. Aside from that, we're dredging through the Senate material, making lists of follow-ups from the Warren stuff, Phelps is trying to get his hands on the autopsy photos and X rays… but it's all indoor sports. We need fresh stuff that hasn't been dragged over a million times, stuff from the field, stuff from new material, like this." He rattled the papers in his hand. "And without a settled budget…"

"Yeah, I know. We can't do serious investigation."

"Any word on when we'll get one?"

"No, but I have a meeting with Crane later today. That's on the list. And I'll tell him about this CIA stuff, too. Maybe he has some ideas."

V.T. started to leave.

"Take care of yourself," said Karp. "And be careful with that material. There's only three copies and I don't want any more made."

"Leaks?"

"That, and theft."

V.T. mimed an elaborate terror, clutched the file to his breast, and scurried out crabwise, looking rapidly from side to side over his shoulder.

When Karp arrived for his meeting, Crane was engrossed in a newspaper, cursing under his breath. "Did you see this shit yet?" he demanded, tossing the paper across his desk. Karp took it and read the obvious story, a short piece above the fold on the front page, headlined "Congressmen Balk on 'Police State' Tactics of Assassination Committee Chief."

"It's started," Crane said bitterly. "Yesterday I had a closed-session meeting with the full committee. I finally got them to focus on getting this damned show on the road and outlined my approach. Those two old bastards must have been on the horn to the press the minute I walked out of the room."

Which particular two old bastards Crane referred to, out of the many in Congress, was made clear by the article. Congressmen Peller and McClain expressed "grave alarm" at the plans disclosed by the committee's chief counsel to use a variety of investigative devices, including phone taps, concealed taping, lie detectors, and voice stress analyzers, in the course of the investigation.

"Big on civil liberties, are they?" Karp asked when he was done reading.

"Don't make me laugh! Peller was some kind of hanging judge down in Alabama and McClain is an ex-Un-American Activities Committee lawyer. They wouldn't know a civil liberty if it bit off their left nut. No, there's something else going on. I mean it's unique; I've been blasted plenty in the press for things I've done, but I've never been blasted for things I might do. What it is, somebody's running scared and they're putting on the pressure. I wish I knew who it was."

"I think I might have an idea who," said Karp after a moment's thought, and he told Crane briefly about what was in the new CIA documents. Crane grew increasingly excited as the story unfolded. "That's terrific stuff, Butch. It's our obvious line of inquiry. And you're right-somebody must have leaked to the committee that we've got something solid linking Oswald to the CIA."

"So our next move is?"

"Subpoena the bastards. Helms and the rest of them down to the cipher clerks. Grill 'em. Wave their own damn documents in their faces."

"Why won't they stonewall it, like they did in sixty-three?"

"Let 'em. We'll hit them with contempt citations. Somebody'll crack, when they're looking at jail time. Not the big boys maybe, but the little fish. This is great! We can start weaving a real net."

"Um, I hate to bring this up, but with what for money? Weaving is fine, but I got no weavers. I need investigators in the field, with travel and phone and equipment budgets to support them…"

"That's coming," said Crane irritably. "Bea is working up the formal budget, and I'll submit it to Flores by close of business today. He'll read it over the weekend, present it to the committee next week, and I'd expect closure on it no later than a week from now. I've asked for six and a half million. That'll support nearly two hundred people for both assassination investigations."

Karp was stunned. "That's a lot of money," he said, thinking that the typical homicide in New York was solved by two good cops with some minimal canvassing and lab work. The JFK business would need more, being spread around the country, but… Tentatively, he suggested, "Will they give us that much? I mean, if we had just a little to start, we could make some progress and then go back for more."

"That's not the way I work," Crane said with some force. "They asked me what I needed and I told them. If they don't want to shell out, it's on their heads."

To which Karp generally agreed; still, his political warning lights, dim and unreliable bulbs though they were, had started to flash. Crane was supposed to be the political mastermind of the project, but even Karp understood that a time when you were in trouble in the press was not exactly the best time to ask for a huge shitload of money from a guy who didn't like you in the first place.

The thin man did not have to wait long at the landing strip. Just after the appointed hour, he heard a droning sound and the DC-4 broke out of the clouds over the mountain and landed in a cloud of red dust. He waited while some crates were unloaded and then entered the plane and strapped himself into an uncomfortable jump seat jutting from the bulkhead.

The flight to Guatemala City took forty minutes. He walked from the military section of the field to the commercial terminal. There was a ticket waiting for him under the name he gave the girl at the Avianca counter, and he took the regular evening plane to Miami.

There was a man there waiting for him outside of customs, a short Latin man in sunglasses (though it was night) and a flowered shirt worn outside his pale lemon trousers. They went to a blue van parked outside and drove from the airport down LeJeune Road to Eighth Street, Calle Ocho, the heart of Little Havana, where they turned left. In a few minutes, they arrived at the driveway of a house painted apricot with white trim. The thin man from Guatemala got out of the van and went into the house.

In the living room, a good-looking older man of about sixty rose from a sofa and extended his hand in greeting.

"Hello, Bill," he said, smiling. "Welcome to Miami. Long time."

"Hello, Bishop," said the thin man. "Yes, a long time. Years."