In was another item in Karp's pending lawsuit against God, and it was all he could do to keep from smashing his fists into the man's face, smashing it like a rotten pumpkin.
Blaine was talking to Marlene again, in his soft, breathy voice, and Karp had to focus his attention to hear what was being said. Small talk. Their flight, the climate, the house. 'It's quite an interesting house,' he said, naming its features and the famous architect who had designed them. 'I regret I can't show you around personally, but-'
'Yes, it's a lovely house, Mr. Blaine,' Marlene broke in. 'I especially admired the fields of fire.'
Blaine chuckled hoarsely. 'You are a card, ma'am. And observant too, as I have come to know. Yes, the place is defensible, no doubt. I have, or had, some business partners who were at times prone to take extreme measures in pursuit of what they considered proper redress of grievances.' He paused and glanced at Karp. 'But I see your husband is growing impatient. Perhaps we can turn to the purpose of your visit. This film. What are your intentions regarding this unfortunate item? I trust you understand the effect that publicizing it would have on the Dobbs family.'
'Yes, I do,' said Marlene. 'And I, we, don't have any wish to hurt them. But what I do with the film is entirely up to you, Mr. Blaine.'
'Is it? That sounds suspiciously like a blackmailer's speech. What sort of behavior on my part would be satisfactory?'
'Cut the crap, Blaine!' Karp snarled. 'You know damn well we came here to find out how you killed Kennedy. So let's have it-from the beginning!'
At first they thought he was having a fit. He had thrown his head back against the pillows and a high rasping noise was emanating from his open mouth. Some tears rolled down his cheeks from his tightly shut eyes. But as Marlene glanced around nervously for someone to call, Blaine's face relaxed, and it turned out that he had only been having a laugh.
'Ahh, how very New York, Mr. Karp! How very tough! Direct and to the point. Well, first of all, I should tell you that when I heard the news about the tragic end of our late president, I was on board the cruise ship Pride of Norway in transit between Cancun and Trinidad. Like everyone else, I remember it quite clearly. For some days it cast quite a pall on the public merrymaking, although privately many of my shipmates wept only crocodile tears. The cruise was organized here in Texas, and Mr. Kennedy was not popular among certain circles in Texas.'
'But you did it,' Karp persisted, 'wherever you were personally on November twenty-second. You thought up this whole chess-piece plot, this PXK thing. You're the queen. Bishop was your boy, and Caballo was Bishop's boy. You were neck-deep with anti-Castro Cubans. Your money financed the whole thing, the payoffs to Angelo Guel came from you, and you had Mosca and Guel killed when we got to them.'
'There are many conspiracy theories, Mr. Karp,' said Blaine in a mild tone. 'That would seem to be a particularly florescent one and impossible to prove.'
'I know it's impossible to prove,' admitted Karp. 'That's why we're here blackmailing you into telling us the truth.'
Blaine smiled and his eyes sparkled wetly. 'Yes, truth. So hard to determine after the passage of years. So far, in many cases, from justice. 'What is Truth, said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.' Bacon. Do you know the essay? I see that Miss Ciampi does. I've always wondered whether, if Pilate had stayed for an answer, he would have gotten anything he could've understood from Jesus.'
Karp said, 'Let's get out of here, Marlene. This guy just wants to blow smoke.'
Marlene gathered her purse. 'Well, it's been pleasant meeting you, Mr. Blaine. I'm sorry we couldn't come to an agreement.'
Blaine flapped his hand, waving them back to their seats. 'Sit down, sit down. I'm sick and I tend to ramble.' His voice grew sharper. 'All right, my direct New York friends, let's horse-trade. You want a full accounting of how John F. Kennedy was killed, in return for which you will undertake to destroy the original of the film you most assuredly have in your possession. Obviously, I will never myself be a witness before any panel or court. I am, in several ways, beyond the reach of the law. In any case, we are not at a deposition, are we? You are not yourselves here in any legal guise, unless during my recent absence from the bar the threat of blackmail has been added to the armamentarium of congressional inquiry. Our status is thus that of… I won't say friends… acquaintances, doing one another reciprocal favors. I satisfy your curiosity; you relieve a family I cherish from the threat of embarrassment. Agreed?'
Marlene assented immediately. It took Karp longer. At last, he nodded his head, feeling miserable, as his urge to know triumphed over whatever trace of responsibility to the House committee remained in him.
'Well, then,' Blaine began, 'you might trace my involvement way back to the year 1947. The CIA was a new agency, full of piss and vinegar. It was formed, you'll recall, in the wake of the worst intelligence catastrophe in U.S. history, the penetration of the Manhattan Project by Soviet agents. That the Soviets could, with relative ease, break into the most secret project of all, was on everyone's mind. Counterintelligence on domestic soil was supposed to be the province of the FBI, but we considered them a bunch of clowns, chasing parlor pinks and harmless socialists under the command of a megalomanic fraud. Putting J. Edgar Hoover up against Lavrenty Beria and his men-it was preposterous! And, of course, we feared even worse penetrations. What if they had a mole in the heart of our political process itself? Such a person, in public office, could do far worse damage than a mere cipher clerk or some such, the sort of people the FBI seemed competent to tackle. So we set up an… informal study group, let's say, to discuss the issue. I was a member, and my task was to design a program for the elimination by extreme measures of a prominent American politician known to be in the service of the Soviets: assassination, to be blunt. This was all theoretical, mind; we were just playing safe.
'I therefore studied assassinations with great vigor, and came to the conclusion that in the domestic context, there were only three major approaches: one, the feigned accident; two, the sacrificial attentat at close range; and three, the attack at long range, with the assassin escaping. There are problems with all of these. As I'm sure you know, with recent advances in forensic techniques, it is nearly impossible to successfully feign an accident, especially if the victim is important enough to warrant an exhaustive investigation. And the FBI, despite their shortcomings in other areas, are superb in this narrow field. For the sacrificial attack, one needs a madman. Madmen are easy to come by, but difficult to point at the desired target. We tried some… experiments. They were unsuccessful, both with natural and induced mania. The third method has many advantages, both in terms of control, and as a way of sending a message to our adversaries that we are onto their plot. But it shares the disadvantage of the first method. It is hard to get away with it. As I pondered this problem, it occurred to me that a melding, so to speak, of the second two methods might offer a solution. That is, if one committed the actual assassination with a trained professional, and was afterward able to blame it on a madman, one might have the best of both. The work would be efficiently done, and the hue and cry and the subsequent investigation would be truncated by the existence of a plausible dupe. I wrote a paper on this, which was quite well received. That was the origin of PXK. It was quite irregular and so secret that it did not bear a standard code name. As far as the CIA proper is concerned, no such project ever existed.
'To understand the next phase, you have to know that every intelligence agency is plagued by volunteers- individuals who wish to become spies. Virtually all of them are useless for real intelligence work, unstable, maniacal, lazy, or criminal types for the most part, but some of them can be used as pigeons, that is, as false members of a spy network who can distract the attention of counterintelligence operatives, and can be betrayed to them with misleading or damaging information in their heads. Lists are kept of such potential pigeons at foreign CIA stations; I began to keep such a list of American citizens for PXK.'
'Oswald,' said Karp.
'Indeed, Oswald was precisely the type, but of course, I was long gone from the CIA by the time Oswald entered its purview, during his time as a marine in Japan, in 1958. Nevertheless, PXK was still alive. Lists were still maintained, and a marine spouting Marxist propaganda at a top-secret radar base could not have escaped the attention of those who maintained them. Bureaucracy, even invisible bureaucracy, has considerable inertia. The man you know as Maurice Bishop found Oswald's name and looked him up in Texas in 1962, and cultivated him, using some of our old assets in the White Russian community.'
'Okay, we know you knew Bishop from way back,' Marlene said. 'How did he suddenly surface with reference to Oswald and PXK?'
'Oh, Bishop was quite ready to kill Kennedy from the moment the Bay of Pigs invasion was betrayed. He simply didn't know how to carry it off. He came to me and I told him about the PXK plan and how to find out who
