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.
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
