"His aunt, huh?" Fulton chuckled, a rumbling noise that could be by turns delightful or threatening. Now it was somewhere in between. "That the same aunt that was seen coming out of the manhole on Dealey Plaza with the silenced forty-five? I'll check it out-it sounds like a real break." He left.
V.T. stared at the closing door. "He's pissed off. Not at me, I hope."
"No, but like he said-he's basically a street cop. He gets nervous when he doesn't know the players or the neighborhood." Karp rose, walked over to the greasy window, and stared out at an unpleasant vista of railroad tracks and freeways.
"Speaking of neighborhoods, this is the worst view available from any federal building in the area. Whoever decided to put us in this dump knew how to make a point." He stopped as a familiar scratching noise sounded behind one of the walls. "It also probably has more rats per square yard than any building they had available."
"The FBI used to be here."
"That explains it," answered Karp with a brief laugh.
V.T. did not join in. Karp looked more closely at his friend. Newbury met his gaze briefly and then turned his eyes away, as if ashamed at what they might reveal. In the moment Karp had seen something he didn't like, something he had never seen in the man before. Exhaustion? No, like Karp, he had gone through the same murderous training in the old criminal courts bureau, and he had always turned up in court crackling fresh with a jest on his lips-he was famous for it. It was something deeper-a psychic depletion, the investigator's equivalent of the thousand-yard stare that afflicts infantrymen too long on the line.
"You look beat," Karp offered. "You should take the rest of the week off." A joke; it was Friday afternoon.
V.T. said, "I am beat. This defeats me. I believe I've contracted Oswald's Syndrome. Symptoms: a chronic and progressive inability to discern fact from fiction and role-playing from personality. Distinguishable from common psychosis by the odd fact that the underlying structure of reality gradually comes to mimic the imaginary world created by the sufferer. An occupational disease of spies, counterspies, and the people who study them. Speaking of spies, did you ever hear the odd story of Evno Azev? Doesn't ring a bell? Well, around the turn of the century Azev was the most successful terrorist leader in Russia and the head of an anarchist band called the Terror Brigade. These guys carried out dozens of successful assassinations of public figures, including the minister of the interior, von Plehv, and the czar's own uncle, the grand duke Sergei. In 1908, however, it was revealed that Azev was also a senior agent of the Ohkrana, the czarist secret police. He was planning all those assassinations, see, to get in better with the terrorists, so he could betray the terrorists. So it turned out that the chief antiterrorist agent was, in fact, the best terrorist of them all. When he was exposed, in fact, the terrorist movement totally collapsed. What am I getting at? Well, compared to Lee Harvey Oswald, and his many confreres, old Evno was… I don't know-who's authentic any more? Martin Buber? You? Maybe Oswald was his own double."
V.T. got up and placed the CIA papers back into a folder. "I think I will take the rest of the week off. And perhaps more. Call me when we get a budget."
"Yeah, right. But aside from this new stuff, what else can we do meanwhile?"
"Find out who Bishop is," said V.T. "Although how to begin doing that I have no idea. Aside from that, we're dredging through the Senate material, making lists of follow-ups from the Warren stuff, Phelps is trying to get his hands on the autopsy photos and X rays… but it's all indoor sports. We need fresh stuff that hasn't been dragged over a million times, stuff from the field, stuff from new material, like this." He rattled the papers in his hand. "And without a settled budget…"
"Yeah, I know. We can't do serious investigation."
"Any word on when we'll get one?"
"No, but I have a meeting with Crane later today. That's on the list. And I'll tell him about this CIA stuff, too. Maybe he has some ideas."
V.T. started to leave.
"Take care of yourself," said Karp. "And be careful with that material. There's only three copies and I don't want any more made."
"Leaks?"
"That, and theft."
V.T. mimed an elaborate terror, clutched the file to his breast, and scurried out crabwise, looking rapidly from side to side over his shoulder.
When Karp arrived for his meeting, Crane was engrossed in a newspaper, cursing under his breath. "Did you see this shit yet?" he demanded, tossing the paper across his desk. Karp took it and read the obvious story, a short piece above the fold on the front page, headlined "Congressmen Balk on 'Police State' Tactics of Assassination Committee Chief."
"It's started," Crane said bitterly. "Yesterday I had a closed-session meeting with the full committee. I finally got them to focus on getting this damned show on the road and outlined my approach. Those two old bastards must have been on the horn to the press the minute I walked out of the room."
Which particular two old bastards Crane referred to, out of the many in Congress, was made clear by the article. Congressmen Peller and McClain expressed "grave alarm" at the plans disclosed by the committee's chief counsel to use a variety of investigative devices, including phone taps, concealed taping, lie detectors, and voice stress analyzers, in the course of the investigation.
"Big on civil liberties, are they?" Karp asked when he was done reading.
"Don't make me laugh! Peller was some kind of hanging judge down in Alabama and McClain is an ex-Un-American Activities Committee lawyer. They wouldn't know a civil liberty if it bit off their left nut. No, there's something else going on. I mean it's unique; I've been blasted plenty in the press for things I've done, but I've never been blasted for things I might do. What it is, somebody's running scared and they're putting on the pressure. I wish I knew who it was."
"I think I might have an idea who," said Karp after a moment's thought, and he told Crane briefly about what was in the new CIA documents. Crane grew increasingly excited as the story unfolded. "That's terrific stuff, Butch. It's our obvious line of inquiry. And you're right-somebody must have leaked to the committee that we've got something solid linking Oswald to the CIA."
"So our next move is?"
"Subpoena the bastards. Helms and the rest of them down to the cipher clerks. Grill 'em. Wave their own damn documents in their faces."
"Why won't they stonewall it, like they did in sixty-three?"
"Let 'em. We'll hit them with contempt citations. Somebody'll crack, when they're looking at jail time. Not the big boys maybe, but the little fish. This is great! We can start weaving a real net."
"Um, I hate to bring this up, but with what for money? Weaving is fine, but I got no weavers. I need investigators in the field, with travel and phone and equipment budgets to support them…"
"That's coming," said Crane irritably. "Bea is working up the formal budget, and I'll submit it to Flores by close of business today. He'll read it over the weekend, present it to the committee next week, and I'd expect closure on it no later than a week from now. I've asked for six and a half million. That'll support nearly two hundred people for both assassination investigations."
Karp was stunned. "That's a lot of money," he said, thinking that the typical homicide in New York was solved by two good cops with some minimal canvassing and lab work. The JFK business would need more, being spread around the country, but… Tentatively, he suggested, "Will they give us that much? I mean, if we had just a little to start, we could make some progress and then go back for more."