"It's been known, if you believe half what these assassination nuts say."
"Fuck it!" said Karp. "I'm not that paranoid yet." He picked up his briefcase, shrugged into a suit jacket and his raincoat, and headed for the door.
Fulton issued a rough laugh. " 'Yet' is the right word, baby. We're just starting out."
Karp reached the Dirksen Senate Office Building six streets away without being gunned down by Cuban paramilitaries or Texas fascists, nor succumbing to the more likely ambuscade from one of the dozens of Kennedy-assassination nuts that had started to haunt the Select Committee's staff.
The interview with Senator Schaller did not go quite as Ziller had predicted. Schaller proved to be a bluff, square-faced, stocky man with thinning reddish hair, who presented himself in the antique Trumanesque style that had been abandoned by many of his colleagues for the blow dryer and the spin doctor. He had the papers right on his desk and made no bones about what they were. He regretted not having used them himself, cursed the CIA in earthy barnyard terms, and wished Karp good luck. The whole thing took eight minutes, and involved a crushing handshake that seemed to last nearly a third of the entire interview.
Karp walked back to the Annex at a good clip, making one detour at Third Street to avoid the guy with the funny orange hair who had counted thirty-eight shots in Dealey Plaza. His first stop was the Xerox room, where he made a copy of the Schaller papers. His next stop was Fulton's office.
Karp handed the thin stack of originals to the detective and sat down in a creaky wooden swivel chair to read the copy. For the next twenty minutes there was silence but for the rustle of pages and the creak of Karp's old chair as both men read. Karp finished his reading before Fulton did and, taking out a pen, began to reread, making notes.
Fulton indicated he was done reading by scooping up the pile of pages on his desk and neatly squaring the edges of the stack. He placed the documents in the center of his steel desk and looked at them with an odd expression. Karp studied his friend's face curiously. Was it fear he observed? Unlikely. Clay Fulton possessed more physical courage than any man Karp had ever met. Disgust? Maybe. Karp was fairly disgusted himself.
He asked, "What do you think, Clay?"
Fulton met his eyes, his expression one of the most profound bafflement. "What do I think? I think we should've stayed in town. We're way over our heads here, boy. Way, way, way over our heads."
In a small whitewashed room in Quetzaltenango in Guatemala, a thin, bearded man packed his suitcase. The phone call from Washington had been unexpected but not disturbing. The man was used to phone calls interrupting his life and asking him to travel to another part of the world to do odd things.
This is what he does for a living, goes places and does things in response to phone calls. He is not exactly a professional assassin. There may, in fact, be no such thing, despite the fantasies of fiction writers, and were there to be such a profession, it would not be staffed by elegant men who wear dinner clothes and drink champagne in tony resorts. This is simple economics: it is so easy to kill people, and there are so many who will gladly do it cheaply, that it would be hard to command a high living from that trade. The thin man has, however, killed any number of people for money, but only as an ancillary, if critical, activity, just as a chauffeur may wash a car, or a waiter may wipe down a table.
He is not exactly a spy either, or a mercenary soldier, although he has spied and fought for gold. He has also run a bar in Honduras and managed a small air-shipping service. Essentially, he does what certain people tell him to do. It is the only fixed point in his life, and it gives him the closest feeling he ever has to a feeling of security.
He completed his packing, put on a khaki baseball hat, turned to leave the room, but stopped at a cracked mirror tacked up by the door and looked at his face. He was nearly forty. He had brown eyes and crisp, short brown hair. He did not think that anyone will recognize his face at his destination. He had aged and grown a beard and it had been a long time.
The thin man walked down a narrow flight of stairs and entered a room with several desks and chairs in it. A brown-skinned soldier in green fatigues sat in one of them, tilted back against the wall, reading a magazine, his rifle leaning against the wall next to him.
The thin man asked, "Has Chavez gone out to the airstrip yet?" His Spanish was quite good, almost unaccented.
The soldier said, "No, the truck's still outside." He took in the suitcase. "Going somewhere?"
"Yes. I have to meet a plane."
"What should I tell them?"
"Tell them I'll be back, but I'm not sure when," the thin man said, and walked into the steamy evening.
SIX
Five in the morning and Marlene Ciampi lay sleepless on her back, studying the stamped tin pattern of the loft's ceiling. She was dying for a cigarette, but she had decided to ration herself to five per day, and the first one was going to be with coffee in a few hours, when she officially rose to start the day.
Much of her energy recently had been going into this sort of self-torment. She had become obsessive not only about smoking, but about food and booze and schedules and shopping. She thought about this, lying in bed. I'm counting everything, she thought. People are starting to look at me funny. I bought a Day-Timer in a little leather case. That's a joke. I never seemed to need one before; now I write down everything, schedule everything to the quarter hour. I'm not like this, she thought: happy-go-lucky, anything-on-a-dare Marlene. It's like I'm back in high school with the nuns.
During such musings, Marlene did not dwell on the source of these disturbing changes. She did not want to believe that Karp's leaving for Washington was involved at all. She loved Karp, although she was angry with him for leaving, but that didn't mean she was dependent on him. Dependency was the death of love, so Marlene believed, and she also knew that she should be able to do it all on her own. She had been on her own for a long time before she got together with Karp, so what was the problem now? The kid was no problem; Lucy was an angel-healthy, cooperative, a delight.
And, of course, other women did it, including black single working mothers with many fewer resources than she had; also, there were those women you read about in the magazines, "Sharon Perfect, single mom, thirty-five, cooks French cuisine for her three kids, vice-president of a major ad agency, plays cello in the local orchestra, training for the Hawaii Triathlon… (picture) Sharon's a size five, blond, the three kids are gorgeous, snapped at the family table as they discuss nuclear physics in Chinese."
With these thoughts stoking her already red-hot guilt and urging her to improve each shining hour with ever more zeal and efficiency, Marlene flung herself from bed, made a hasty ablution, and started her exercise regimen. This was an hour each day of the sort of conditioning that prizefighters use to prepare them for their literally punishing sport. Marlene's father had been a likely welterweight just after the second war and had worked his way up to a match with Kid Gavilan, and lasted one and thirty of the first round, which was why he had decided to become a plumber. He had, however, taught all of his six kids (including the three girls) how to box.
Marlene was the only one who had kept it up. She had a body bag and a speed bag set up in a corner of the loft she and Karp called the gym, and now she slipped into shorts and a T-shirt and sneakers and speed gloves, and pounded away at both bags for forty-five minutes. Then she skipped rope with all the hand-crossing, pace-changing frills you see in boxing movies, tossing her head to snap the sweat out of her eyes.
She stripped and plunged into the huge black tub. She felt better, as she always did after her violent exertions. There was nothing in fact wrong with her or her life, she decided, only with her thinking. She'd stick it out for as long as that idiot wanted to waste his time in Washington. She would flourish, in fact.