"Well, I'm miserable too," said Marlene, thinking once again of the first conversation she had had that day with a cigarette-bumming woman on a bench, and what she had concluded from it, "but I'm damned if I'm going to be maudlin. Come on, fuck 'em all! We'll join the… Wife-Of Self-Defense Association."
Maggie gave her a long unfocused look. "Is there one?"
"I think we just formed it. You can be the first president."
"No," said Maggie instantly. "You be the first president. I have to be the secretary."
That started them giggling. Marlene exclaimed, "I love it! It's even got a good acronym. WOSDA."
"Yeah," said Maggie, "as in 'Darling, WOSDA matter with you now?"
By the time Karp tracked Marlene down, an hour or so later, they were still laughing like banshees, clinging to each other on the green bench, the empty bottle stashed behind a potted oleander.
Bishop visited the house in Little Havana over the weekend. The thin man was watching golf on television when he strode in.
"Interested in a little work?" Bishop asked.
"No, I like sitting on my ass watching golf," said the thin man sourly.
"Jerry James Depuy," said Bishop, "may have become a tiny problem."
"I thought he was dead."
"Yeah, he's dead. His works have apparently outlived him. Apparently some ex-cop was asking questions of the widow. It turns out this guy works for the House committee on contract. She told him that she'd given all his stuff to the AP and they'd given it to Georgetown U. for their Kennedy archive."
"So? Aside from that bullshit with Ferrie, he didn't know dick."
"Yes, well, we always knew Ferrie was one of the weak links. Secrecy was not his strong suit. He liked to brag. The point is, it turns out that among the material passed on to the archive were several spools of eight-millimeter film."
The thin man looked away from the TV for the first time. He stared straight into Bishop's eyes. "I got that film, if that's what you're thinking. When Ferrie went down."
"Yes, you did, the original reels. But film can be copied. It's entirely possible that the little asshole showed the film to Depuy and Depuy copied it. I went to the archive myself the other day and found that the committee staff had already grabbed Depuy's material."
"But you don't know that the film they have is Ferrie's film."
"No, I don't," Bishop agreed. "But the possibility is extremely disturbing. We're going to be busy people if a copy survived. And if the people looking at it understand what it means."
TEN
"What else did you find besides this film?" asked Karp, as V.T. threaded the Moviola editor in the dim room.
"Some notebooks, mainly concerned with Depuy's coverage of Garrison's prosecution of Clay Shaw, lots of clippings of same, the original manuscripts of his filed stories, an address book. Notes for a book on Ferrie and the New Orleans right-wing scene that never got past the interview stage. Like that."
"Anything there?"
"I haven't really scoured it, to be honest. This film hit me in the eye right away and I've been looking at it ever since."
After threading the film, V.T. cranked the handle for about fifteen seconds, taking up film until a piece of yellow paper popped out of the spool and fluttered to the floor. Then he switched on the screen light.
"It's show time," he said, and began to crank the Moviola. Karp leaned forward in his chair and concentrated. The small square screen showed a shadowy landscape, some bushes and trees, then a road. The film was black-and-white and grainy, or perhaps the graininess was just an artifact of the ground-glass screen of the editing machine. In any case, the film seemed to have been shot in bad light, at dusk perhaps, or in moonlight.
The camera panned across dark woods that seemed vaguely tropical-palmettos, Spanish moss, and hanging vines-past an open field, and onto the road again. A line of two-and-a-half-ton military trucks appeared, moving slowly, their headlights cut to thin slits. The trucks stopped and soldiers leaped out and lined up on the road. They were dressed in fatigues and soft caps. Most carried rifles, but there were some with machine guns and mortar components, and Karp spotted one with a folded bazooka.
The film now cut jerkily to maneuvers: the soldiers rushed across the field and flung themselves down, while others provided covering fire. The film was silent, but you could see the pinpoints of fire from the rifles and the shimmering gouts of muzzle blast from the machine guns. It cut to a mortar team firing, dropping the shells in odd silence down the tubes and shielding their ears from the blasts. Karp was no expert, but they seemed well drilled.
"Where is this happening, V.T.? And what's the point?"
"Patience. Aren't you interested in how we trained all the brave anticommunist Cubans?"
"Is that what this is? The Bay of Pigs?"
V.T. stopped cranking. "No, they trained those in Guatemala; this is Louisiana, and if we assume that the film was processed shortly after it was taken, from the markings on the leader it's the early summer of 1963. It's an illegal operation."
"How do you know where it is?" Karp asked.
"Watch."
V.T. started the film moving again. Now the camera was obviously in a vehicle of some kind, an open vehicle because the camera could pan around 360 degrees. A jeep: the well-known square hood flashed by and then the backs of the heads of two men with military caps on. A white road sign loomed up and started to whip by. V.T. stopped the movement again. The road sign had the shape of Louisiana and a number.
"We know just where this is, right by Lake Pontchartrain, near New Orleans. Okay, this part is important." He cranked slowly. The jeep ride ended and the camera cut to a group of five men standing around a jeep, talking, as troops filed by in the background. V.T. froze a frame and pointed with a pencil.
"Okay, these two guys look like Cubans, we haven't identified them yet. This stocky guy with the round face is Antonio Veroa, of Brigada Sixty-one fame-the star of document A. The tall, ugly guy here is Gary Becker, the head of the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean."
"Who's the other guy in civilian clothes?" asked Karp, indicating a tall man with dark hair, a prominent nose, and deeply impressed wrinkles under his eyes. He was turning away from the lens as the shot opened, as if more interested in some background object than in the conversation the men were having; that, or he had a predisposition to avoid being the subject of photography.
V.T. said, "Also a blank. It's a little hard to ID him because he's turning away like that. Now watch this."
He edged the film forward. In the treacly movements of slow motion, the camera's view moved to another group of men standing by a truck. One of the men in the group turned around and smiled at the camera. It was actually more of a smirk than a smile, the famous smirk.
"Holy shit!" said Karp. "It's him."
"So it seems," said V.T. "Perhaps a sort of private ROTC weekend away from the lovely Marina, or maybe this was during the time he was actually living in New Orleans."
Karp was looking at the other men in the group around Lee Harvey Oswald. "Who are they?"
"It'd be nice to find out. I'll have portrait blowups made of every identifiable face in this film and get my people on it. But there's more."
He turned more quickly now, the figures moving with the comic velocity of Keystone Kops. The screen brightened. It was full day. Some men were shooting pistols at a crude outdoor firing range, firing at man-shaped targets nailed to trees. Karp recognized Veroa, in civvies this time, holding an army.45 and smiling. The view moved unsteadily back to the shooting; the camera jumped slightly at each soundless explosion. Two men, grinning, held up a well-punctured target. A man in a black T-shirt and ball cap sat at a table loading bullets into pistol magazines. He looked up for an instant, frowned, spoke briefly, and lowered his head again so that the bill of the cap obscured his face. V.T. backed the film to the few frames that showed his face.
"Oswald again," said Karp.
"Looks like it," sai
d V.T. "It's got to be some time later than in the first scenes, because his sideburns've grown longer."
V.T. cranked the film forward for another few seconds. More shooting, men posing with weapons, then a close-up of a round-faced man with a fright wig and patently phony, impossibly thick eyebrows.
"David Ferrie," said V.T. Unnecessarily: nobody else looked like Ferrie.
The film moved on and then Oswald in his ball cap and black T-shirt returned. The shot was taken from the rear and showed him standing, aiming at a target twenty-five yards downrange and firing off seven shots rapidly. V.T. slowed the film. The thin puffs of smoke from the pistol, his arm moving up in response to the recoil, took on a ghastly slowness. The camera moved in for a close-up of the head of the target silhouette. It was shredded and flapping away from its fiberboard backing.
"Terrific," said Karp tightly. "It's like a coming attractions trailer for the Zapruder film." They looked at the frozen target in silence for a while. V.T. moved the film again through another twenty seconds of paramilitary dullness. He stopped cranking, pulled the film from the viewer, and began to wind back.
"What's on the front end of the spool?" he asked.
"Nothing," said V.T. "Home movies. A barbecue somewhere. A Kiwanis award of some kind."
"Ferrie was in Kiwanis?"
"No, but I doubt the cameraman was Ferrie. Ferrie didn't own a movie camera that we know of and of course he's there in the picture."
"So who took the film and how did Ferrie get hold of it?"
"This we don't know," said V.T. with a sigh. "In fact, we don't know its provenance at all: who took it, why they took it, or how it got from whoever took it, to Ferrie, to Depuy, or why." He grinned without humor. "In short, it's just like all the other fucking evidence in this case."
Karp rose stiffly and wiggled his bad knee. "But it's great stuff. It puts Oswald with the Cubans."
"Assuming it's Oswald. Assuming it's real."
"We could show it to Veroa," said Karp.
"We have Veroa?"
"Yeah, I didn't tell you. It was no big thing-he was in the book. Al Sangredo, Fulton's guy in Miami, just talked to him in Little Havana. I'm going to get Clay to go down there and pick him up."
"He'll cooperate?" asked V.T., surprise in his voice.
Karp shrugged. "He's on parole on a federal drug charge. You have to assume he's interested in helping the government."
V.T. let out a bitter laugh. "Yes, he would be-in real life. In this investigation, on the other hand, it might be just as well to assume the opposite."
"That's a point," said Karp. "We'll have to see. Meanwhile, and in the same vein, make a copy of that film and bury it. And V.T.? Don't show it to anyone else but Clay. Oh, yeah, and I guess Ziller too. He's a spy for Dobbs, but, hell, if Dobbs is bent we might as well pack it in anyway. He's the only friend we got on the committee."
"Are you serious about restricting access? I mean I'm paranoid too, but that's a little extreme."
"Yeah, I'm serious. Have blowups made at a private lab, and you can show those to your photo-analysis people, but keep the actual film to yourself."
"Can we afford a private lab?"
"You can," said Karp.
"Still no budget, huh?"
"Afraid not."
V.T. switched on the lights and collected the film. "You going to see Crane? Yeah? Ask him if we can have a bake sale and a dance at the gym. I mean, this sucks!"
When Karp arrived for his regular Monday meeting, Crane was talking to Bea Sondergard. They both froze for an instant and stared at him, as if they had been deep in conspiracy against the Republic. Sondergard's face seemed drawn, and her eyes lacked their usual tolerant good humor.
Karp hesitated in the doorway and said, "Sorry-I'll come back later…"
But Crane waved him in. "No, we were just finishing up. Come in and sit down." To Sondergard he said, in a lower tone, "Stop worrying-we'll be fine."
The woman sighed and said, " 'We' is not the problem, Bert. As far as I'm concerned they can all kiss my sweet patootie. It's you I'm scared for."
"What was that about?" Karp asked when Sondergard had gone out.
"Oh, administrative horseshit, the usual crying and moaning," Crane said, waving his hand in a limp circle to indicate the triviality of it all.
"I heard it was more serious than that."
Crane gave a snort of derision. "You and Bea both. Am I going to have to hold your hand too? Look-what it is, there was a piece in the Post today. Flores sent me a letter citing irregularities in staff expenditures and of course the son of a bitch leaked it simultaneously to the press. He told me I am to incur absolutely no further expenses until this issue has been resolved by the committee. According to him, I'm encouraging some kind of sybaritic lifestyle off the public fisc without doing a damn thing to earn it." He smiled and tapped his desk. "This desk was specifically mentioned along with its cost. I guess I thought when they hired me that I'd have a desk, but I guess I was wrong. So Bea's pretty upset. She feels responsible for her usual efficiency. And then there's this."
Crane reached into his wastebasket and pulled out a folded newspaper and waved it. "Have you seen this piece of shit yet?"
Karp had not, but of course he knew what it was.
"Philadelphia," he said.
"You read it?"
"I heard about it. You're in with the Mob."
"Trash, a total lie. I'm going to bring a libel suit that'll kick their teeth in. My only worry is that this and the budget thing are going to occupy the caucus and the press so much that they'll totally forget why they got me here in the first place."
"You're not still going to the caucus?" Karp had blurted it out without thought and he was dismayed when Crane gave him a searching look.
"Yeah, I'm still going," he snapped. "Why the devil shouldn't I? I haven't done anything wrong. If I lie low, it'll just give them something else to yap about."
Karp nodded and held his tongue. He knew Crane was wrong and that Harrison had been right. The man was doomed. The worst thing he could possibly do now was to continue his defiance of Flores. He should have canceled his appearance before the Democratic caucus, should have apologized to Flores, should have sucked ass for all he was worth, so that they would let him alone. He should have then proceeded with the investigation, in secrecy, covering the real work with a cloak of supine amiability until he had some politically potent findings, preferably some that implicated Flores or his cronies, or that were so explosive that they couldn't be suppressed. But Crane, it seemed, was just like Karp. That was the problem. And nothing could be done.
After a brief, empty silence, Karp rattled his notes, cleared his throat, and launched into his briefing. Most of it was concerned with the film V.T. had found, the Cuban connection, and the proposal to have the CIA man Paul A. David testify.
"When is he scheduled?" asked Crane.
"Wednesday, day after tomorrow."
"Any problems?"
"No, except for the usual CIA stuff about not violating secrecy."
"Mmm. On that score-he'll be our first major witness. Do you think it's a good idea to start out with the CIA?"
This startled Karp. "Bert, we had this discussion. You said we should bear down on Langley, and that's what I'm doing. I didn't think good idea or bad idea. Our only new material-the documents from Schaller, the letter from Hoover, and now this film-all suggest CIA connections, and participation in suppressing evidence. It makes sense to start off with a senior CIA guy who might have been directly involved with concocting a phony story."
"I take your point," said Crane, "but I've been thinking about it some more. It's starting to strike me as, well, backward. It might make more sense to start with the assassination proper: the shots, the trajectories, the witnesses, the evidence inculpating Oswald, the autopsy…"
"You mean present it like Warren," Karp said, and when Crane nodded, he continued, "No, the problem with that is that there's no point at all in mo
st of the forensic stuff. It's all corrupt. Every piece of it. We don't have reliable chains of evidence for anything. The bullets, the photographs, the X rays-God knows where they came from or who handled them. The autopsy was totally fucked. We have no access to the body. The tissue slides are missing. The witnesses? All interrogated originally by people we know had some sort of ax to grind-the FBI or the Dallas cops or the Warren people-oh, yeah, and the assassination buffs, of course. The surviving witnesses have told their story so many times that any connection between what they're saying and what actually happened is probably coincidental. So, absent actual, legally probative evidence, we have to rely exclusively on experts, which means, as you know as well as I do, that for any three experts saying one thing, I can get three other experts to say the opposite. Even so, ninety percent of Warren and ninety percent of the anti-Warren writing has focused on the minutiae surrounding a single question: Did the shots that killed Kennedy come from a single known rifle on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository? That question is a waste of time. Oh, yeah, we'll go through the motions, but it's going to be essentially a dead end, and irrelevant. Any real advances we make will be made through completely fresh material, stuff that hasn't been totally mangled, like the evidence I just mentioned. It tells us two things: one, the CIA was actively involved in stonewalling on this case; and two, Oswald was definitely involved with anti-Castro Cubans and with the CIA. Whether Oswald killed Kennedy alone, or with help, or was just a patsy is something that can't ever be established from the existing Dallas evidence. But there's at least a slight chance that if we follow up this new stuff we'll find something that'll give us the real story."
Crane was silent for a long while after this. He swiveled his chair around to stare out the window, at the rail yards, or perhaps at nothing. Finally, he said, "You're right, of course. But…" Crane looked directly at him. "I don't want this degenerating into a Jim Garrison circus. I won't have that."
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