Wendt tried on a smile. "It was sweetness and light, I assure you, compared with some of our panel's meetings."
"Oh? What's the problem? Murray throwing his weight around?"
"Not at all. But there seems to be a certain… reluctance to stray too far from the Warren findings. Whether Mr. Phelps's theories about the documentary material will have any weight with them I can't say."
Karp couldn't say either. Wendt took his leave and Phelps left too.
"Well, that was certainly fun," said V.T. when they were alone. He fussed with the projector and began to rewind the film. "Don't mind Phelps. He really is a top-notch photo analyst."
"Yeah, with a good imagination. Did you see the back of Kennedy's head missing in that film?"
V.T. shrugged. "Like you said, we'll get somebody else to check it out."
"Right. Meanwhile, the inmates are in charge of the asylum. The secret dissection, my God! You know we're doomed, don't you?"
"Semidoomed, maybe. One still has hopes. One of the little threads might pull something loose."
"Maybe, but I doubt it," said Karp. "And you know why?" He clenched his fists and adopted a Job-like pose, his arms and face raised to the uncaring heavens, and shouted, "Because this isn't a real investigation!"
"My, my, Butch," said V.T. in a soothing tone. "You seem to be having a nervous breakdown. Would you like to watch the executions film again? It might settle your nerves."
Karp snorted and rumbled, "Speak for yourself, buddy. You look like shit-you must've dropped ten pounds since you got here."
"Yes, well, as you know, you can't get a decent knish in this town."
There was some more of this weak humor, and they were laughing companionably when a secretary stuck her head in and said Fulton was on the line and did Karp want it sent in here.
"What's happening, Clay?" said Karp when they were connected.
"I'm at the Sheraton in Reston," said Fulton. "This old spooks' meeting's just breaking up."
"And?"
"Zilch. I waltzed our boy up to Mr. David and he introduced himself as Antonio Veroa. David didn't bat an eye. He just said, 'I'm happy to meet you. I know the name, of course.' Then Veroa moved on. When I asked him if David was Bishop, he looked sort of funny, and he said, 'They are very similar in appearance but that is not Bishop.' "
"Oh, shit!"
"My feelings exactly. So-what should we do with Mr. Veroa now?"
"Crap, I don't know! We might as well ship him back to Miami. Did Al Sangredo pull up anything on the drug charge against Veroa?"
"Yeah, it's apparently some heavy weight of coke, found in his boat. He could go away for a long time."
"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 Am
ericans, 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 doubt that she's going to swear secrecy. The worst that could happen is that he'll yell at you and tell me to stop. I mean, he doesn't strike me as such a tyrant."
"Oh, no, he's not, not at all. It's just he's so sensitive about this whole thing with his dad."
She hemmed and hawed for a time, but under Marlene's cold eye, and not wanting to look like a jerk in front of a woman she regarded as the epitome of courage (and of course Marlene would never try to hide stuff from her husband for fear of an argument), she gave over Blaine's private number and said that she would break the news to Hank.
The call to Texas was answered by a man with a soft accent. Marlene explained who she was and what she wanted. The man asked her to hold. There was a hiatus of perhaps three minutes. Then another voice came on the line, with a similar accent but a different and more impressive timbre, a voice that reminded Marlene of Lyndon B. Johnson's: cast iron with a coating of honey.
"So you're gonna write all about Dick Dobbs," said Blaine after the brief pleasantries were concluded.
"Well, I don't know about 'write,'" said Marlene. "Maggie's asked me to do the research. Find out the facts, and so on."
"Find out the facts, hey? That'll take some doing. I hope you're not an old lady."
"No, sir, but I'm working on it. Tell me, do you get to Washington much? This kind of thing might be easier to do face-to-face."
"Oh, no, I stick close to home nowadays. I been under the weather."
"I'm sorry-I hope I'm not disturbing you."
"No, that's fine. I don't get many calls lately either. I'm always glad to chat with a lady. So, tell me, what've you made so far of the great case of U.S. v. Dobbs?"
"I've gotten as far as confusion, as a matter of fact," said Marlene, not particularly amused by the "lady" business.
A gravelly laugh. "I'm not surprised. I guess you been reading all the commentary?"
"Yes. And it's either a right-wing plot to destroy a patriotic American who was a premature peaceful coexistence advocate or a foiled left-wing conspiracy to disarm the United States and deliver it into the hands of the Soviets. It's impossible to figure out which because, as you know, the case was never resolved. The right-wingers claim it was dropped as a part of the conspiracy, with the treacherous Harley Blaine threatening to blow the whistle and reveal national security secrets. The other side claims it was a victory for civil liberties in the dark days of McCarthyism, won by that great civil libertarian Harley Blaine. So my first question is, which Harley Blaine am I talking to?"
Another laugh, and then a long coughing spasm. "Sorry 'bout that," Blaine said. "Guess I'm not used to having my aged ears jangled by impertinent remarks-no, don't apologize-it's good for me-gets the old juices flowing again. Which Harley Blaine, huh? Well, miss, here's the main thing you have to understand. Dick Dobbs was my best friend. He was the one interested in politics, not me. When he got into trouble I figured my job was to get him out of it, whatever it took, and I did that. Whatever a bunch of eggheads and pissant hack writers said about it afterward-hell, I never paid any mind to it at all and neither did Dick. The Harley Blaine you're talking to is the only one there ever was, a good friend and a damn good lawyer."
"Okay, fine, but how did you get him off. There was something about a defector you uncovered-"
"Hell, the government's case didn't amount to a hill of beans," Blaine interrupted. "What they had was the uncorroborated testimony of an admitted spy, that Weinberg fella, and a bunch of papers. There was no question that the papers came from Dick. The question was, did Dick give 'em to Weinberg or did Weinberg steal them? They didn't have a scut of real evidence that Dick had turned them over. Weinberg had no messages, no communications from Dick at all, and he had free access, as a clerk, to everything in Dick's office. Of course, in those days an accusation was about the same as a conviction. They got Alger Hiss and fried the Rosenbergs on cases just about as bad. I wasn't about to let that happen to Dick."
"So you short-circuited the process with this mysterious defector."
"I did. You'll want to know how I pulled it off?" Teasingly.
"Yes. According to the articles and books I've read, you've never been straight on the issue. That's what's fed the conspirac
y accusations over the years."
"Well, Miss Ciampi, I don't reckon a smart girl like you would've swallowed much of that old horseshit-pardon my French."
"Does that mean you're going to tell me the real story, Mr. Blaine?"
There was a long pause on the line, long enough to make Marlene think she might have been cut off. But Blaine remained connected. He cleared his throat heavily and said, "Matter of fact, I told Selma the whole thing, back then, Selma and Dick both. I told them what I'd found out, and how I'd found it out, and I said I wasn't going to use it unless they thought it was right. I said, and I remember this like it was yesterday, the two of them holding hands, sitting on straight chairs in the interview room in that damn prison they had him in, and I told them that the government was bound and determined to see Dick convicted of treason and that they would find some way to do it, and that they'd probably ask for the death penalty. And Dick asked me, would it hurt the country, what I was planning to do, and I said, no, I didn't think so, and he told me to go ahead with it. Damned if I knew if it'd hurt the country. About then I wouldn't've cared if it meant the Russian navy could steam into New York. I just wanted him out of that place and safe."
He paused again, and Marlene heard the sound of drinking and a clunking noise, as if a glass had been set down. "So there's no reason not to let you in on the conspiracy after all this time. Everyone's dead, just about, except me and Selma, and a bunch of the small fry. The judge and prosecutor gone; Dick, of course. The chief witness, Weinberg, died in prison. Lord knows where Reltzin and Gaiilov are, dead too, probably. And as far as national security"-he drew the word out long and mockingly-"I expect the Republic will survive the revelation."
"Gaiilov?" asked Marlene.
"Hah! See, you've wormed it out of me already. Yeah, that was the boy. Armand Dimitrievitch Gaiilov. Talk about your conspiracy! My Lord, you couldn't start a conspiracy in this country if your life depended on it; folks here just like to talk too much. They ain't comfortable with secrets. How it happened, I was sitting in the Navy Club in Washington worrying about how I was going to get Dick out of this mess, when I heard two fellas talking. They were huddled together at the bar and I was sitting in a club chair about six feet away with my back to them. They were sort of arguing in a polite way about something or other and then I heard a name that made my ears perk up. I had good hearing back then; getting deaf as a post now. I got this thing makes the phone louder. Anyway, one of 'em said something like, 'But he says that Weinberg was the only contact,' and the other one said, 'Well yes, that's the point. He's trying to protect Dobbs. It means he's a mole.' And the other one said, 'Damn it, Gaiilov's no mole. He's given us loads of stuff that checks out,' and then he went on to name all kinds of stuff with names like Hatrack and Boneyard, secret files of various kinds, I imagined, but by then I wasn't really paying too much attention. When they left, I asked the barman who they were and he gave me a couple of names and I checked them out and sure enough they were CIA."
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