"Let's dance," she said, and they shuffled, locked together, weaving around the furniture.
V.T. Newbury walked into Karp's Washington office, three weeks after his blithe agreement to take the Kennedy job, and immediately stifled a number of second thoughts. Karp looked up from his desk, which was covered with a stack of gold-stamped blue volumes, some open, some closed, all festooned with scraps of markers made of torn yellow bond. He smiled wanly.
"Good, you made it," said Karp.
"I did."
"Any problems getting away?"
"There was gnashing of teeth from one end of Manhattan to another. Three wine merchants closed their doors and the family went into mourning. Again."
"They don't like you going to Washington?"
"They love me going to Washington, but they were thinking of something more along the lines of deputy assistant secretary at Treasury. Where did you get this furniture?"
"It came with the job. Like it?"
"It's very forties. You look like General Wainwright on Corregidor."
"I feel like it too. Have a seat, V.T. It's been sprayed for insect life, I think."
V.T. sat on Karp's couch, an object made from the skin of a large puce nauga. You could still see where it had been shot, the holes now oozing fluffy white stuffing.
"Your office is next door," Karp continued. "Fulton'll be across the hall."
"He decided to come?"
"Yeah, another divorce in the making. He'll start next week."
"Do I get furniture as nice as this, or is yours special because you're the boss?"
"As a matter of fact, I think you have a wooden desk. I saved it for you because I know you're the kind of guy who appreciates the little touches. The drawers don't open, but luckily we happen to have an unlimited supply of these unassembled gray steel shelves"-here Karp gestured at several long brown cartons stacked against his walls- "so that shouldn't be a problem. The good news is we're not being paid."
"We're not?"
"So it seems. They're fucking around with our budget on the Hill. Me and Crane and Bea Sondergard… did you meet her? Good lady. We're all on per diem and you and Clay will be too, until we get it straightened out. That means a hundred and twenty-five dollars each and every day we work, no sick leave, no vacation time, no benefits. Sound good?"
"Irresistible. But what about the staff? If we can't hire…"
"Well, actually, we can't hire, not yet. The commit-tee'll be staffed with people detailed from the Hill and from various federal agencies. That'll get us started, although we sort of have to take pot luck about who we get. I'm sure we'll get sent the very best people, and not the shitheads every agency in Washington has been trying to dump for years. Besides that, Bea informs me that if the per diem account runs out before we get a budget, we won't get paid at all. Not to mention, if this goes on long enough, we won't have anything in the account to pay our experts."
"That's nice," said V.T. "How am I going to run a research operation without experts?"
"Get with Bea on that. I don't think she actually intends to commit fraud, but she runs pretty close. It's a matter of juggling, according to her. Everybody does it."
"Everybody does it! How often I've heard that in court, just prior to sentencing! Tell me, am I to gather from this that the sun of approval does not exactly shine from Congress on this enterprise?"
Karp grinned. "You could say that. But as Crane keeps telling me, here we are."
"Here we are indeed. So what should I start with meanwhile?"
Karp pointed at his desktop. "You see all these nicely bound blue books? The Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, in twenty-six volumes. The Warren Commission."
He rummaged through the stacks of books on his desk, jerked one out, and tossed it across to V.T. The rest of them slumped into a new configuration, like geological strata during orogeny. "I'm on volume twenty. Here's volume one, the report proper, eight hundred eighty-eight pages of crisp prose. The rest is hearings and exhibits. You'll have your very own set pretty soon, I hope. Meanwhile, don't lose my notes."
"Read the whole thing, huh?" said V.T., hefting the volume he had just received.
"For starters. Then there're the critics. I've collected the essential ones: Lane, Meagher, Josiah Thompson, a couple others." He pointed to a steel shelf lined with books. "Read them too. They've done a lot of work and raised some interesting questions. You'll see my notes on them-feel free to make your own. When you're finished we'll get together with Clay and map out a strategy for the investigation."
V.T. said, "Sounds right." He paged through the book on his lap. "So. What's your take so far?"
"Um, let me keep that to myself for now," said Karp after some thought. "I'd like your viewpoint without you knowing what I think. But, obviously, if there weren't serious problems with this beast"-he tapped the pile of blue books-"we wouldn't be here, would we?"
"No, I guess not," said V.T. "It's hard to believe we are in any case. John F. Kennedy! It certainly stirs the old memories. You know, I met him once."
"Oh?"
"Yes, on a sailboat. I was something like twelve, so it must have been fifty-three or fifty-four. My uncle Tally Whitman had asked me on a sailing vacation on his boat, basically to keep my cousin Frank company. He was about my age and the problem was that Frank's sister, Maude, had invited a friend from Brearley along, and Tally didn't want the kid ganged up on by two seventeen-years-old girls.
"Well, we set out from New Haven, where Tally kept the boat-he had a beautiful ketch, an Alden design, a forty-eight-the Melisande, it was called. Of course, in the first five minutes I fell desperately in love with Effie, the Brearley friend-who was by the way a raving beauty, in love in the way you can only fall at twelve. We gunkholed along the North Shore for a week and then crossed over to the Vineyard, and put in at Vineyard Haven. And there were the three Kennedy boys and some friends in the next slip. A bachelor outing; they'd come across from Hyannisport that day."
"So you met him," Karp broke in. He liked V.T. a good deal, but he had a limited patience for his stories about life in high society, with endless glosses on who was related to whom, and who did what to whom at Newport in the year whatever.
"Yes," said V.T. "I had no idea who they were, of course, but Uncle Tally had been at school with Bobby, at Choate. I was allowed to serve drinks, life's finest moment up until then. Frank was nauseated, of course. Well, I was probably a colossal bore to them all, because all I had to talk about was sailing, which I did in the most pompous way imaginable, and I must say they were nothing if not polite. The afternoon, however, wore on, and the gin flowed. I was an efficient little barman. Then I began to notice something very disturbing. I was a sheltered youth, of course, and at twelve my sexual knowledge was at the schoolboy giggle stage, but it was clear to me that Jack Kennedy was making eyes, as we then called it, at the delicious Effie. And hands, too. And she was reciprocating. I was astounded, and devastated. I mean he was an old man."
"So did he bonk her?"
"Not that I saw. I'm sure that Uncle Tally would never have allowed it, not on his watch. Of course, he might have bonked her thereafter; apparently he bonked everybody else. In any event, it was decided that we should race across to Hyannis the next morning, and we did. The Kennedys were good sailors, of course, but Tally was an Olympic-class skipper and I worked my young butt off, as did Frank and the girls. And we whipped them, by three boats. Jack was not amused. I mean it was ridiculous; he was really angry, red-faced, screaming at Teddy about some goof. A man who didn't like to lose. As he proved in later life, too."
V.T. put his hands in his pockets and looked out the dirty window. "Here's the kicker: ten years later, I was at Yale, a chilly afternoon, I was getting ready to go out in a single scull, when the crew manager came running down the ramp yelling that somebody'd just shot the president. At first I thought he meant the president of Yale. There was a radio going in the boathouse and a bunch of us sat around and listened. When they announced that he was really dead, I went back out onto the ramp and pushed my scull into the water and rowed until I was exhausted. And I'll tell you the truth, all I could think about was that day on the Vineyard when he made a drunken pass at a seventeen-year-old Brearley girl. Incredibly shaming and inappropriate, but I couldn't get it out of my head. That and this weird fantasy, about flying back in some way to my twelve-year-old self in the cockpit of the Melisande and grabbing him by the shoulders and shouting, 'Forget the girl, asshole! November 1963: don't for God's sake go to Dallas!' "