The next day, Karp called Bert Crane and told him he would take the job. Crane made enthusiastic noises of congratulation; they sounded tinny and unreal coming over the phone, and made Karp feel no better. He had a taste like bile in his mouth and his stomach was hollow and jumpy. He was stepping into a void.
Next, he went up and saw the district attorney. Bloom was sitting behind his big, clean desk, in shirtsleeves and yellow suspenders, puffing on a large cigar. He was a bland-faced medium-sized man who might have been an anchor on the six o'clock news. He had nearly every qualification for his job-a keen political instinct, the ability to generate ever-increasing budgets, a cool hand with the ferocious New York media, and a positive talent for bureaucratic management. All he lacked was an understanding of what the criminal justice system was supposed to accomplish and even the faintest ability to successfully try cases.
Karp stood in front of the desk and told Bloom that he was leaving and where he was going. To Karp's great surprise, Bloom seemed stunned and dismayed. He gestured Karp to a chair.
'What's wrong? I thought you were happy here. You got your bureau. You're doing great things…'
Karp had trouble finding his voice. At last he said, 'Well, I've been here a long time. I thought it was time to move on. And the challenge… Kennedy…'
'Crane, huh? What's he paying you?'
Karp told him.
Bloom said, 'Tell you what-it'll take some screwing around with personnel, but I think I can beat that.'
Karp felt his mouth open involuntarily. 'Um… it's not really a money thing. It's just time for me to do something else.'
Bloom chomped on his cigar and frowned. 'You're making a big mistake, my friend. You'll dick around down there for a year or so until they get tired of stirring the pot and they'll get you to write a fat report nobody'll read, and then where are you? Out on your ass.'
'Well. I'll have to worry about that when the time comes.'
Bloom shrugged and blew smoke. 'Think about it,' he said.
Karp said he would and walked out. The feeling of weirdness, of being in a waking dream, continued unabated. Bloom being nice to him, Bloom offering him a raise, was, more than anything he could think of, a sign that his life had irrevocably changed.
In the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, a small group of men is sorting through stacks of paper. The paper has been removed from filing cabinets throughout the Agency in response to a subpoena duces tecum from the Church committee, a body established by the United States Senate to investigate certain suspected excesses of the CIA. They are obliged by law, and as federal employees, to comply with this order to yield documents, and they are complying, if reluctantly. The men have been trained in strict secrecy since early adulthood, and more than that, they have been trained to be judges of what must remain secret in order to protect the national security, and more than that, they have come to believe that they themselves are the best judges of what the national security is.
Two of the men are working with ink rollers and thick markers, blotting out the sections of these documents deemed too sensitive for the eyes of United States senators. Some documents have had nearly everything but the addresses and the letterhead blotted out in this way. They have done this many times before and are good at it.
One man walks among the desks, picking up piles of finished documents, indexing their reference numbers, and placing them in a carton for delivery to the Senate. It grows late, but the CIA is, of course, a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week operation. Nevertheless, these are all senior employees and not as young as they once were, when several of them were actual spies. They are anxious to see their suburban beds.
The man picking up the documents yawns, shares a slight joke with one of the men at the desks, and picks up by mistake the wrong pile, a thin stack of paper comprising four brief documents that were by no means ever intended to be seen by senators without being reduced to illegibility. He indites their numbers on his list, tosses them into the carton on the floor, and moves on.
THREE
Karp disliked flying, not because he was afraid of crashing-at this point in his life he might have enjoyed a quick immolation-but because airliners are not constructed with the Karps of the world in mind. From the moment he sat down in his seat to the moment he arose at flight's end, the leg-jamming angle imposed by the cramped coach seats always produced a continuous dull ache in his bad knee. He stared out the window at greasy-looking clouds. It had been raining at La Guardia when he boarded the shuttle and the pilot had just announced that it was raining at National as well. The weather suited his mood. For the past week he and Marlene had maintained a climate of chilly formality: overcast, with no sign of clearing.
The plane lurched and dipped a wing and Karp's window showed woolly whiteness, then glimpses of landscape, a brown, oily river lined with autumn trees; now the famous sights jumped into view, the Monument and the Capitol dome, always a little shocking to see in real life, rather than on the little screen. Another lower swoop across the Potomac and they were down at National Airport.
Karp had been in Washington only twice before, once during a high school class trip and again to give a speech on homicide prosecution to a seminar at an annual meeting of prosecutors. He recalled steamy heat, bland food, large groups of people endlessly walking. The old tag came into his mind, 'A city of southern efficiency and northern charm,' and then with a little jolt he remembered that John Kennedy had said that, and here he was in that city to study the man's death. It made him feel mildly light-headed.
He stepped into a cab at the hack stand and gave the driver the address Crane had given him. Looking out the window as the dripping scene whirled by, he tried to orient himself. It was not easy, even with reference to the little map of the District, encased in plastic and affixed to the back of the driver's seat, which all Washington cabs must carry to show the fare zones. Orientation in Manhattan makes few demands on the intellect; it is like living on a ruler: uptown, downtown, East Side, West Side. The absence of this in other metropolises often produces a form of vertigo in longtime New York residents, that and not being able to find a decent loaf of rye bread.
So it was now with Karp. Over a bridge, across some parkland studded with monuments glowing dimly through the drizzle, through some meaningless streets, and to the door of an unprepossessing office building on Fourth Street off D: the old FBI Annex.
He took the elevator to the sixth floor and entered a scene of noisy disorder. The hallway was redolent with fresh paint, and workmen were moving desks and chairs along on dollies, stacking them in a great jumble at one end of the hallway. Karp eased around the mess, stepping carefully over the spattered drop cloths until he came to a door that bore a neat hand-lettered sign:
HOUSE SELECT COMMITTEE ON ASSASSINATIONS
CHIEF COUNSEL
This gave on a large room full of cartons and desks and chairs scattered at useless angles. Several women dressed in jeans and casual tops were unloading cartons into steel file cabinets. A telephone technician was up on a ladder poking into a hole where a ceiling panel had been removed.
'You must be Karp,' said a clear, high voice behind him.
Karp turned and saw a thin middle-aged woman in jeans and a T-shirt, her white-blond hair done up in a neat bun. She wore large round glasses and had a pleasantly bony face.
Extending her hand, she said, 'I'm Bea Sondergard. Bert's waiting for you.'
Karp shook the hand and followed her down a short hallway.
She said, 'What a mess, huh? Bert wanted to get started in D.C. as soon as possible. The federal government is not used to starting operations in a week. Or a year.'
She knocked briefly and threw open a door. Bert Crane, dressed in chinos and a worn blue Brooks Brothers shirt, was sitting on a secretary's chair in the center of a large corner office, using a stack of cartons as a desk.
He looked up expectantly. 'Phones?'
Sondergard shook her head. 'Definitely by Thanksgiving-no, really, the guy said pretty soon. Look who's
