'Want to bet he doesn't as long as he sticks to this line of bullshit? Want to bet they'd throw away the key if he testified that David was Bishop?'
'You think the fix is in, huh? Want Al to try and check it out?'
'No, fuck it,' said Karp wearily. 'Why screw up his life too. I know when I'm whipped. Just thank the little bastard, kiss him for me, and stick him on a jet back to Miami.'
'What was that all about?' asked V.T. when Karp had finished the call. Karp told him.
'Well, then,' said V.T. brightly. 'A perfect day.'
Marlene now found herself transported to a somewhat higher circle of purgatory. Early, yet not too early, she packed young Lucy up and made her way, via several buses, to the Dobbs home in McLean. Lucy played with the Dobbs children while Maggie and Marlene had coffee and cake and discussed the day's research plans, and chatted amiably. Thereafter, Maggie disappeared, as did the children. Maggie either took them somewhere nice, or else she went on her own wife-of rounds, and left them to the efficient and grateful Gloria of El Salvador. Afternoons were spent at play group, except when it was Maggie's turn to be hostess, at which time Marlene abandoned her duties on the book and helped out with the kids.
During most of most working days, however, Marlene was left delightfully alone, in a well-appointed and cozy little room that Maggie called 'the study.' (This was different from 'the den,' a larger room, where the congressman had his home office.) There were two windows looking out at an alley of bare and graceful dogwoods; inside, the room boasted built-in walnut bookshelves, several wooden filing cabinets, a long, shiny refectory table, a blue IBM Selectric on its own stand, lighting from desk and standard lamps, a worn chaise lounge of the Dr. Freud-in-Vienna type, and a working fireplace. This last was supplied daily with logs and kindling by Manuel, the Dobbses' gardener and houseman. Marlene was thus often to be found working away in front of a cheerful blaze. In one corner of the room there was set up, incongruously, a movie projector on a rolling metal stand, and there was a folding screen that went with it.
The romance of the situation was not lost on Marlene. A poor but honest lady, down on her luck, finds genteel employment in the home of a powerful aristocrat with a dark secret-it was pure Bronte, and she luxuriated in it: the comfortable and elegant surroundings, the freedom from drudgery, the refuge from the ignominy of Federal Gardens. In that she regarded her Washington exile as a catastrophic hiatus in her real life, she had no trouble in slipping into the persona of a sort of upper servant. Sitting in front of her fire, laboring at her papers, she thought that, to complete the image, she lacked only a floor-length brown dress with buttons up the front, and a ring of keys at her waist. That and her hair in a neat bun with a center parting.
The work itself she attacked with an energy born of months of enforced intellectual idleness. Maggie had made a perfunctory start at organizing and indexing the Richard Ewing Dobbs archives, and Marlene spent several weeks updating this and becoming familiar with the material. This comprised several drawers full of clippings related to Dobbs and his arrest and trial, and the political arguments and commentary that resulted from that event; boxes of photographs, letters from prison, and other personal memorabilia; the transcript of the trial itself, with all the documents produced by discovery, and notes made by Harley Blaine, the defense lawyer; a thin sheaf of material yielded by the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act; and finally, a large archive of 8mm home movie film.
The senior Dobbs, it turned out, had been an avid home cameraman, from almost the first period in which such equipment had become available to the general public. There were four library shelves stacked with neat green file boxes in which were stored hundreds of spools in Kodak yellow cardboard sleeves, all neatly labeled with dates from the late thirties to the late fifties. Marlene had watched dozens of these films selected at random from each year of the record. At first, she ran film when she was bored with reading; later she became fascinated with the verite aspects of the record. She watched a young, soft-looking, but handsome Yalie in sleeveless sweaters, saddle shoes, and slicked-down dark blond hair become a studious grad student and then a pipe-puffing New Deal bureaucrat in baggy three-piece suits. She watched his play: horses, croquet, tennis, engaged in with other men of the same type and clouds of bright young things, that cloud gradually resolving itself into one, a slim, elegant girl with good bones, a corona of blond hair, and a dignified expression. After 1938, she appeared on nearly every reel: Selma Hewlett Dobbs, the wife, now the Widow. Marlene saw the courtship, the wedding (two reels), the honeymoon (Havana, Rio, eight reels), the new house on L Street, a more subdued Selma, her belly swelling from one reel to the next, and finally, in 1939, the infant congressman, little Hank (six reels).
Dobbs had taken his camera to war too. A whole box was devoted to shots of jungles, airstrips, warships, planes landing and taking off, and any number of what appeared to Marlene to be exactly similar views taken from the rail of some sort of vessel, of the sea at night, with flashes in the distance. Only the labels indicated that they were distant prospects of the great night battles that raged around the Solomons in 1942.
The most interesting parts of these films to Marlene were those depicting the men of the Pacific war, all deeply tanned, many pitifully thin, crop-haired, incredibly young. Like most Americans, Marlene derived her understanding of World War II from war movies, where the soldiers had been played by thirtyish 4-Fs like John Wayne and Ronald Reagan. From Dobbs's films she realized for the first time, and with some shock, that the Japanese Empire had been crushed largely by pimply teenagers and their slightly older brothers.
Dobbs had caught these young sailors and marines at their daily work, or relaxing, or lying wounded in tent hospitals, grinning often, smoking perpetually. There were shots of Dobbs too: at a desk, with a small fan cooling his sweat, in khakis boarding a PT boat, inspecting a submarine, photographing something through the nose bubble of a bomber. The most remarkable sequence was a scene in which Dobbs was shaking hands with a group of young naval officers, with PT boats in the background. One of the officers was a startlingly young Jack Kennedy.
Marlene had mentioned this to Maggie, who had rolled her eyes and said, 'Oh, yes, the meeting of the giants! I'm surprised the image isn't worn off the film. That's one of the ones they show you when they're checking you out to see if you're fine enough to be a Dobbs. The poor old bastard used to watch it over and over again, that and the other Meetings with the Great.'
She had directed Marlene to an indexed list of film spools bearing shots of Dobbs and famous people: FDR, Hopkins, Nimitz, Spruance, the Dulles brothers, Bob Hope.
And then, of course, there was Harley Blaine. Blaine was in nearly as many of the films as Dobbs's immediate family, from the Yale years onward; during the war, he was in more of them. Blaine had apparently served with Dobbs during some part of his service. There was a long series of them in navy whites working and carousing around wartime Pearl Harbor, and another series of the two of them poking around in ruins and interrogating Asians; the film labels identified Saipan and Okinawa as the venues.
Blaine apparently shared Dobbs's interest in moviemaking. They traded cameraman duties when they were together, and after a while Marlene was able to recognize their individual cinematic styles: Dobbs flitted from one subject to another in quick cuts. Blaine provided a rock-steady camera platform, focusing on one subject for long seconds and then slowly panning to another. She even learned to recognize the shadow of their heads and upper bodies when they were using the camera: Blaine had huge shoulders sloping upward to a bullet head; Dobbs had a small round head on a graceful long neck.
Maggie confirmed this observation. 'Yeah, the two of them were real pests, according to Hank and my mother-in-law. They'd sneak up on anything, one or the other of them, and get it down on film. Selma said the only place you were safe was in the toilet, and maybe not even then. When there was nobody else around they took shots of each other cutting up. Just boys at heart!'
Blaine was, of course, a key to Marlene's investigation, not only as Dobbs's lawyer at the trial, but as a lifelong friend. On a day, perhaps three weeks into her task, having read all the material in the archive and having watched dozens of hours of film, she asked Maggie whether it would be all right to call him in Texas.
They were in the kitchen; Maggie had just brought the kids home; Jeremy was napping and the girls were playing quietly in Laura's room. Maggie's reaction was not what Marlene had expected.
'Oh, my!' she exclaimed, holding her hand to her mouth. 'Call him? Is that absolutely necessary?'
'Well, yeah, Maggie. I'm looking into a case that's twenty-five years old, I guess I need to talk to the lawyer.'
A worry line dug itself deeper below Maggie's golden bangs. 'Yeah, yeah, you're right, of course. But… oh, I don't know what to do now…'
'You're worried about Hank finding out I'm doing this.'
'Yes! I know it's stupid, but…'
'But what? Tell him! I mean, it's not like it was illegal. Besides, I'm going to have to talk to Selma too, and I
