ceiling.
'You're seeing a connection,' said V.T.
Karp looked at him. 'Shit, V.T, how do I know? Everybody knows everybody else. Dobbs knows Blaine, and he's leaking stuff to somebody. Blaine was CIA, and we know that the CIA is stonewalling. Blaine knows Gaiilov and Gaiilov knew Oswald. Now, if P. X. Kelly knows Oswald, Blaine, or Gaiilov…'
'We'd all put on grins and say 'small world' in chorus.'
Karp, deep in thought, strolled around the cluttered office. V.T. had brought a rickety conference table in and covered it with labeled folders. Karp asked, 'What's all this stuff?'
'Oh, just an idea, speaking of small world. I'm making a central file of every name that's come up in the investigation with all the information we have on each person and cross-references to all the other files. Maybe it'll turn something up.'
'Yeah, well make one for Representative Henry Dobbs too.'
'I'll do that,' said V.T., laughing. 'Oh, as to accomplishments, look at this.' He tossed Karp a black loose-leaf notebook.
Karp riffled it. 'What is it?'
'It's a sort of concordance for the Depuy film. It describes each shot, giving frame numbers and naming the people in each one, those we've identified. Where we haven't ID'd them, we give them numbers. And it includes whatever info we have on them, all in one place. You might want to check it out against the film. I've seen it so many times, I've probably made some mistakes.'
'Okay,' said Karp, 'I might do that. Maybe I'll spot P. X. Kelly behind a bush waving a handful of cash.'
A week passed, and then another. Crane's resignation was on the front page for a day, and then the assassination committee seemed to drop from the national view, like a doomed DC-10 vanishing from a radar scope. Crane slipped away back to Philadelphia after a small cheerless staff dinner. Karp had one brief meeting with Louis Watson, the new chairman. Watson said he was counting on Karp to hold the staff together until a new director could be found, and Karp said that he would try to do so. They did not discuss the work of the staff or assassination theories.
It snowed six and a half inches one Thursday, which meant that the entire federal government ground to a halt, it being a well-known condition of employment in the federal bureaucracy that you never have to drive in snow. The snowfall and its attendant disasters occupied a good chunk of the Post's front page, but that newspaper did reserve five or six inches on page eleven for an announcement that a man named Claude Wilkey had been selected to replace Bert Crane. Karp noted with ironic amusement that Dobbs had indeed taken his advice: Wilkey was a professor at an Ivy League law school, and as far as Karp could determine from the brief vita in the Post, he had never tried a case in his life.
Karp decided to use his unexpected snow holiday to review the concordance that V.T. had made of the Depuy film. He did not imagine that this evidence would ever appear in a court of law, not the way things appeared to be going, but he was a pro, and he thought that there might be a faint chance of catching something that others had missed.
He had set up the little editor on the kitchen table and was anticipating a boring but restful winter's afternoon of running through the Depuy film frame by frame and editing the concordance. This proved more difficult than he had expected. Like many (perhaps all) men whose profession requires the exercise of abstract thought, he had little attention to spare for the concrete realities of domestic life. If he had, he would never have embarked on a project requiring concentration and careful manipulation of a notoriously cranky device in the kitchen of a tiny apartment containing an active and curious three-year-old, an extremely large dog, an intelligent woman in the final stages of a large project that also required the use of that very same machine, in the aftermath of a blizzard that confined them all to close quarters. A more sensitive man would never have started such a project under these circumstances; a more sensitive man would therefore probably not have discovered how and why John F. Kennedy was slain, a discovery that Karp ever afterward would associate with the smell of cocoa boiling over, with gray light and swirling snow.
Karp's first mistake was being charmed by his daughter's identification of the film editor as a 'dolly television.' He agreed that it was indeed a dolly TV (ho ho!) but that Daddy had to play with it for now. This offended Lucy's well-developed sense of justice and entitlement; the dolly TV should be in her room so her dollies could watch it. Explanations. Whining. Tantrum.
'Can't you… um… go someplace?' Karp pleaded to his wife, amid the wails.
'Go where?' replied Marlene. 'It's the Antarctic out there. Also, I was planning to use the machine today. I didn't expect to have you stumbling around the house.'
Karp threw up his hands and choked off a nasty response. 'Okay, I'll go out with her, and you can use the machine, and then you can watch her and I'll work.' He turned to the child. 'How about that, Lucy?' he asked, summoning his final reserves of good nature. 'You want to go play in the snow?'
Lucy sniffled back tears and nodded solemnly.
'Take the dog,' said Marlene.
When she was alone in the house, Marlene made herself a pot of coffee, drank some, lit a cigarette, and spent ten minutes just listening to the quiet. Then she rewound the film Karp had been looking at and spooled in the film she had taken from the Dobbs attic.
The first few seconds were an establishing shot of a locale: a stretch of wide, calm water, a bay of some sort, a deserted beach, and a large white beach cottage. It was very early in the morning. Marlene stopped the film and studied the building curiously. Then she stripped the film out of the camera and went to get a box containing several of the Dobbs films she wanted to look at again, found one, mounted it, and rolled it for a minute or so until she found a film of a family party in the summer of fifty-five and the Dobbs and Hewlett cousins playing on the beach in front of a beach cottage. She had been right; the place in the attic film was the isolated cottage belonging to Selma Dobbs's family, at Niantic on the Sound.
Replacing the attic film, Marlene rolled on. A couple emerged from the house. The woman, a trim, pretty blond in her late thirties, was wearing a two-piece suit from the postwar era, and carrying a beach blanket. The man wore trunks and carried a bottle of champagne and two stemmed glasses. They were laughing. The woman spread the blanket and they sat on it and drank champagne and kissed and laughed and watched the sun climb higher over the Sound.
There was a cut and suddenly the man and the woman were much closer. The cameraman had changed lenses and was now shooting through a big telephoto. The image was grainier, but not grainy enough to prevent Marlene from seeing that the woman was Selma Dobbs and the man was Harley Blaine.
Marlene watched, fascinated, as the wine was finished and the kissing became more passionate. They wrapped themselves in the beach blanket; bathing suits were tossed out on the beach. The blanket became a wriggling, heaving tube. The blanket fell away; they didn't miss a stroke. Marlene tried to reconcile her image of the austere dowager she had met with this abandoned creature being pounded into the sand, her back arched in ecstasy, her legs wrapped around her lover's neck. The camera panned slowly from her face, an orgasmic mask, down to Blaine's thrusting hips. Marlene felt her face grow hot, a combination of intense embarrassment and turn- on.
Another cut, a longer blackout. Bright sun again. The couple were splashing into the water, nude. They embraced and kissed in the water. Blackout again. This time it was evening and the shot was through the window of one of the cottage's bedrooms. Marlene stopped the film and thought for a moment. The bedroom was on the second floor. The cameraman must have been lying on the peaked roof of the nearby garage. A determined photojournalist, thought Marlene; and she was almost certain that she knew who it was, based on her considerable familiarity with the man's work. For some insane reason, Richard Ewing Dobbs, that great American, had hidden in bushes and crouched on a slanted roof to take movies of his wife screwing his best friend.
Marlene had another cigarette and thought about what this discovery meant. Harley Blaine was obviously the 'Q' of Selma Dobbs's diary. The reluctance of Q to countenance a breakup of the Dobbs marriage was thus explained: Blaine's loyalty to Richard Dobbs was greater than his desire for Selma. That also threw light on that odd break in the tone of Blaine's early love letters. He had given his girlfriend to Dobbs. Fifteen years and a long war later the former sweethearts had obviously kicked free of the traces, jumped into a hopeless affair, and become the subject of an interesting short blue movie, shot by the cuckold.
Or maybe Dobbs was in on it; maybe they knew he was filming? Maybe they took turns with the camera. Was
