'It must be nice to have your wife and kid here in Washington,' said Bert Crane conversationally. 'How are they settling in?'
'Oh, just fine,' said Karp. 'It's an adjustment.'
'I'm looking forward to meeting her. You'll be at the Dobbses' tomorrow night, right?'
Karp had forgotten the dinner party. He always forgot parties. In the city, Marlene had kept track of their social obligations. He hoped she had kept track of this one, and secured a baby-sitter. Somehow he doubted it; Marlene wasn't into tracking anything anymore. He said, 'Oh, yeah, we'll be there.'
'Good. Dobbs is doing us a favor on this one, you know. Parties are where things happen in this town, or so I'm given to believe. We haven't quite burrowed in on the social side the way I'd hoped we would. These damn loose ends up in Philadelphia-I haven't stroked egos and bought lunches to the extent I should have.' He rubbed his face and stared briefly out of his window at the train yards. Karp thought he looked more drawn and tired than he had in his plush Philadelphia office that first day. These were changes similar to those Karp saw every day in his own mirror. The expression 'pecked to death by ducks' popped into his mind.
'Things are looking up, though,' Crane resumed. 'I've just been invited to address the Democratic caucus. This could be a turning point for us, but we need something splashy, some breakthrough, to throw to the dogs.' He looked at Karp speculatively. 'That CIA stuff we got from Schaller, for example…'
'You're not serious.'
Crane flushed and opened his mouth to say something else, but instead sighed and grumbled, 'No, damn it, now they've got me doing it. I never thought I'd be in a position where leaking material in an investigation would look good. No, obviously, once that stuff gets loose, everybody remotely associated with any leads it provides will head for the tall timber. Or worse. Of course, they know we've got it.'
'Of course,' said Karp, 'but they don't know how we plan to use it. They might even be hoping it's still buried in that pile of crap they gave the Senate committee. Once it's out…'
'Yeah, the shit hits the fan. So what do we have to throw to the dogs?'
'In the way of progress? Nothing, frankly. The investigation hasn't really started, because I can't do any investigating, because I don't have any money.'
'Yes, yes, I know that,' said Crane testily. 'I'm working on it. But I have to give them a taste, a scent of something that's worth the budget I'm asking for.' He thought for a moment, leaning back and considering the little dots in the stained acoustic tiles of the ceiling. 'How about this? We've uncovered conclusive evidence that shows the CIA was involved with Oswald before the assassination. Just that. And that we believe a thorough independent investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency will be a key first step in our work. I could use that in my speech to the caucus. What do you think?'
Karp made a helpless gesture with his hands. 'Hey, what do I know? I told you I was out of my depth here. Sure, try it. It probably won't make things any worse.'
They turned then to administrative details, and the meeting lasted only a few more minutes. Crane had a TV interview to go to and Karp had a meeting with Charlie Ziller.
Back in his office, Karp called Marlene at the Arlington apartment, but she was out. He was glad of that, having urged her for many days now to get out of the house and do something. It was starting to irritate him. She was a few blocks from the metro and a few stops on that from the wonders of tourist D.C., most of which were free or near enough to it. And, God knew, she had all the free time in the world, while he was working eighty-hour weeks.
Restless, he got up and moved through the warren of offices. Everyone he looked in on seemed to be doing something, although Karp could not have said with assurance what those things were. In the corridor, he spied V.T., dressed for the outdoors in a double-breasted camel hair coat.
'Going out?' asked Karp.
V.T. looked down at his coat and then, quizzically, at Karp. 'I can see you're still a sharp investigator. You know, there was a dead rat in my office this morning.'
'No kidding? A big one?'
V.T. regarded him bleakly. 'Let's say it was larger than any rat I have found in my office heretofore, and far larger than any rat I expected to find in my office when I graduated from Harvard Law School. No, make that any rat who was not a paying client.'
'What can I say, V.T.? It's hell on earth and it's my fault. Where are you off to anyway?'
'Away from rat-land, mainly. No, I'm going over to Georgetown to follow up on something. Maybe a lead on Lee's lost weeks.'
'Oh?'
'Yeah, August 21 to September 17. We've been checking out the people that Oswald knew at that period and seeing if we can develop any secondary sources-on people like Gary Becker, David Ferrie, the New Orleans Cubans on both sides. Nearly all the principals are dead now. So, in checking out David Ferrie, we came up with the name of a small-time reporter named Jerry James Depuy…'
'Who got this?'
'Pete Melchior, our guy in New Orleans. He's really good. Anyway, Depuy was apparently doing a story on Ferrie, except Ferrie died in 1967. Depuy was well known in New Orleans saloons for bragging about how when his book on Ferrie came out, he'd be rich and famous, and so forth, the usual failed reporter stuff. Nevertheless, worth checking out-he did know Ferrie, maybe Ferrie knew something about where Lee was, that he hadn't told anyone else but Depuy. But Depuy died too, in seventy-four. Pete went out to his house, and the widow told him that she'd cleaned out all Jerry James's stuff, and that should've been that, another dead end, except I recalled that the Associated Press had a program of checking the estates of reporters who had kicked off and seeing whether they hadn't saved stuff of historical significance-original notes and so on. The AP also has a JFK archive at Georgetown, full of that same sort of original material and I thought just possibly…'
'That's quite a long shot,' said Karp.
'Long shots are the only shots we have, my child,' replied V.T. 'See you.'
Ziller was waiting for Karp in his office, standing by the desk. The young man offered his usual bright smile. Karp said, 'Hello, Charlie,' and sat behind the desk, while Ziller went over to the foul green couch. Karp caught himself looking at the papers and folders on his desk, checking whether anything had been disturbed. Nothing seemed to be, and Karp felt foolish and paranoid.
'What's up?'
Ziller said, 'A small victory. I saw Mark Lane today and he handed me this little gem. I think I mentioned it. He got it from a FOIA dump from the Bureau.'
Karp took the paper. One of the original Warren critics, Lane was to the Freedom of Information Act what Menuhin was to the violin. He could get stuff out of it that seemed impossible for most others.
'God, it is signed by Hoover!' Karp exclaimed.
The paper, dated November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination, was a memo from J. Edgar Hoover to FBI supervisory staff, in which Hoover said that the FBI had determined that the voice of the man identifying himself as 'Lee Henry Oswald' on a tape recording of a conversation recorded in October 1963, between that man while talking on the phone inside the Soviet embassy to an official of the Cuban embassy in Mexico City, was not the voice of the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.
'Interesting, huh?' said, Ziller, grinning broadly.
'You could say that,' Karp agreed. He tapped the memo with a finger. 'Do we have this tape?'
'Unfortunately, no.' Ziller leafed quickly through a thick stack of notes. 'According to Lane, and I checked this with the Warren testimony, the CIA claimed that they routinely destroy the embassy bugging tapes every week. Of course, at the time of Warren, nobody knew that the FBI thought it wasn't Oswald.'
'The FBI doesn't have it?'
'No-according to them. You think the tape itself is critical?'
'I don't know about critical, but assuming we had an investigation going here, and assuming we happened to find a guy who was in Mexico City on that day and had some ties with Oswald, or the CIA, and assuming we could get a voiceprint off of him and it happened to match the Soviet embassy tape, we might be in a position to ask the son of a bitch a couple of questions. But since we don't have an investigation…' He shook his head and flipped the memo onto his desk. 'Another one for the files.'
Ziller asked, 'No word on the budget, yet, I take it?'
