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Crane seemed glad to accept the change of subject. "Worse and worse. Flores has taken leave of his senses. He sent me a letter saying he doesn't want us besmirching his name and asking for all his official stationery back."

"His stationery? His stationery!" Karp started to laugh and it was a while before he could bring himself under control.

Crane laughed too, but then quickly sobered. "Actually, it's not funny. He also revoked our franking privileges and told me not to make any more fiscal commitments under his name. Since legally everything we do is under his name, it means we're essentially out of business until we can clear this up."

"God! How's the committee taking this?"

"Well, Hank's gone to the leadership and is politicking like mad. It'll come to a head over the weekend and we should have some resolution by Monday." Crane reached over to his credenza and handed a newspaper clipping to Karp. "This was the straw that broke the camel's back."

It was a front-page New York Times article about Crane. Karp scanned it in growing disbelief. "But this is nothing. It's all the old crap recycled into a new piece, with some more innuendo tossed in."

"Yeah, but it puts the seal on the tomb. For seventeen years, apparently, I've been causing nothing but controversy, and doing botched and questionable investigations."

"So what'll you do?"

"There's nothing I can do, Butch. The press has spoken. You know very well that the last thing the Times and the Post want is for anyone to take a serious crack at Warren. They'd look like fools for endorsing it before the ink was dry if we came up with a credible alternative. My mistake was not realizing that. And… I guess I wasn't the politician I thought I was. So…" He waved his hand weakly, taking in the office, and beyond it, the Kennedy investigation and the sticky webs of the national capital in which it now writhed.

"And there's nothing we can do?" Karp asked inanely, knowing the answer.

"Yeah, there is," said Crane. "Wait for Monday."

"Nice tan," said V.T. when Karp walked into his office.

"I don't have a tan. I have shredded palms and a sore knee." He displayed his hands.

"That's too bad," said V.T. "Perhaps next time you should choose another resort. What happened?"

Karp described briefly the events at Guel's house, and deposited the package Fulton had found there on V.T.'s desk. He waited while V.T. perused the items in it.

"Creative bookkeeping," said V.T., tapping the little ledger book. "Interesting. Do you recognize this character?"

V.T. was pointing to a foggy Xerox copy of what appeared to be a newspaper in Spanish, and the photograph of a man.

"No, what is it?"

"Well, from the style, I'd say it was cut from Granta, the Castro paper. It shows, and I quote, in rough translation, 'the desperate imperialist saboteur, El Soplete, captured by the Revolutionary Militia in Cienfuegos.' El soplete means the blowtorch. According to this, he got the handle back when he was with Batista's secret police on account of the way he liked to extract information from prisoners. A real honeybunch. It looks like the commies shot him too. Hmm. Let me check, just to make sure."

V.T. fingered through some files stacked on his desk, extracted one, and pulled out a couple of photographs, one a glossy, one a copy of a news photo.

"This glossy is a frame from the Depuy film. This one, one of our kids just dug it up from an old emigre newspaper. Same guy in all three, right? Allowing for age, that is. The scar on the cheek shows in each one, that and that nose."

"Who is it?"

"Leopoldo Carrera. The guy we like for the third of the trio that visited Sylvia Odio in Dallas. Oswald, Guel, Carrera. All dead. As is the one guy we had who could confirm it, Guido Mosca."

"Shit! But there's still Odio herself."

"Yeah," said V.T. "There is, and a big priority right now is to get her to look at pictures."

"Okay, I'll take care of it. Meanwhile, what's happening with this PXK thing?"

"Looking better. Mr. Kelly is well known in both Baton Rouge and New Orleans. A political contributor, conservative, maybe a Bircher. He knew Clay Shaw and he knew Depuy. He's a trucker, and thus not unfamiliar with the Teamsters and hence with Carlos Marcello. And… are you ready for this? He ran an airfreight service back in the late fifties and early sixties, and briefly employed David Ferrie as a pilot."

"So he could be the guy."

"He's certainly worth looking at in more detail," agreed V.T.

"I should go to New Orleans."

"Yes, if you want to pay for it yourself."

"Oh, crap! I forgot." Karp clenched his fists and snarled in frustration.

"Hey, lighten up," said V.T. "We'll know Monday if we're all fired or if we can run a serious investigation, either of which would be a plus."

Karp did not lighten up, either during the remainder of the day at the office, nor upon coming home. He snapped at his wife, and his child, and the dog, who did not snap in return, but whined and cringed. It was Marlene who snapped back; dinner was unpleasant.

Karp took a walk in the chill darkness after dinner and his eye fell on the yellow VW, gleaming under a streetlamp. He returned to the apartment and made some calls.

Two hours later, Lucy Karp was in the care of Harry the godfather, and Karp and Marlene were in the car headed west on U.S. 50.

"Well," said Marlene as they cleared the outer suburbs of the capital and the land grew dark and rural, "this is quite the most romantic thing you've ever done.

I'm wriggling in my seat. You won't tell me where we're going?"

"No. Nobody knows where we're going except me."

She looked at his face, dimly lit by the lights of the dash: jaw tight, the muscles bunched, mouth a straight dark shadow, and there were those hard little lines he got around the eyes when he was under pressure. His hands gripped the wheel like a rally driver's.

"You're driving very well," she observed. Karp was a terrible driver, but he had only stalled once in getting under way, and although he was creeping along at fifty-five on the extreme right edge of the highway, behind a big truck, Marlene was feeling more than charitable.

"Thank you," said Karp tightly.

"You're in hell, aren't you?" she asked after a long pause.

"Yes. Yes, I am," said Karp. "And it's like it was custom designed for me, for the kind of person I am. I still can't believe I actually volunteered for it."

"It's in the nature of hell to be customized. See Dante."

"See…?"

"Dante's Inferno. The damned are given punishments suitable to their sins. The fornicators are locked together with their beloveds for all eternity, the gluttons are stuffed with food, and so on. Poetic justice. Gilbert and Sullivan parodied it in The Mikado."

She sang, in a plummy alto: "'My object all sublime, I shall achieve in time, to let the punishment fit the crime, the punishment fit the crime. And make each prisoner pent, unwillingly represent, a source of innocent merriment, of innocent merriment.'" Karp laughed, and she sang the rest of the song.

"Yeah," said Karp, "and the homicide prosecutor is forced to work on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Nobody really wants to know who did it. He has no resources, the bad guys know what he's doing before he does. I wonder who's laughing." Then he began to tell her about the case, in more detail than he had exposed it to her before, pouring out his anger and frustration. Karp was an adherent of the belief that real men handle their own problems, and turn toward their families a face of genial competence, interspersed from time to time with fits of insensate rage or, which was more common with Karp, periods of irritable sulking. This he had learned at his daddy's knee.