Marlene, who understood this very well, received the gush of confession in near silence, only asking clarifying questions from time to time. It was curiously like interviewing a rape victim.
When he was talked out, she laid her head against his shoulder and squeezed his arm. "I'm glad you told me all that," she said.
"You don't mind?"
"I mind when you don't tell me, dummy!" Marlene replied cheerfully. "Who do you think gets to carry your bile when you're bravely suffering in silence?"
"Oh," said Karp.
Marlene briefly considered unloading her own discomfort with the Dobbs case, but decided that the moment was inopportune. What was sauce for the gander was not necessarily sauce for the goose, and besides, she was aware of the vast gulf between the national historical importance of what Karp was doing and the relative triviality of her own recent pursuits. She was embarrassed by it, in fact. So she said instead, "So you think it was the CIA after all."
"No, not really, not the organization. I mean what is the CIA after all? Ninety percent of it is a bunch of GS-thirteens carpooling to Rockville, and the leaders tend to be pompous assholes like Dulles. If they actually sat down and planned this thing it'd have been the fuckup of the century, especially since they would've had to bring the Latin American boys into it."
"What do you mean?"
"V.T. explained it to me once. The CIA has, like… leagues, like in baseball, where they distribute their talent. The majors are in Europe, Berlin, Vienna, head-to-head with the Russkies, and maybe also Japan. Those are the key countries. Triple A is the Mideast, because of Israel and the oil. Class A is the rest of Asia. Latin America and Africa is where they put the no-hopes. I mean, if you had anything on the ball, would you really want to spend your career infiltrating the Socialist party in Bolivia or Uganda and fucking with some pathetic union movement in those places? Bugging the North Korean embassy in Quito? No, but along comes Castro. All of a sudden these no-hopes are playing in Yankee Stadium on national TV. The result-the Bay of Pigs. Back to the minors, boys. Okay, two things: One, if the top guys in the Agency wanted to whack the president the absolutely last people they would've picked are the guys who did that abortion, plus their track record for hitting Castro wouldn't fill anyone with confidence. In fact, from what I've been able to gather, these guys, Bishop and company, were protecting Fidel like a brother. I mean, once Fidel goes, there goes their budget. Two, this is hard to explain, but it's not a government operation, the Kennedy thing. I've been in government my whole life, and I've seen a lot of slimy deals go down, and the one characteristic they all have is stupidity and simplicity; once you pick at them, they start to unravel. People rat each other out. They leave evidence lying around. They buy yachts they can't afford. And let's face it, you want to start a conspiracy in the government, who've you got to do the job? Guys who signed up to work at a desk eight hours a day for thirty years, with no chance of layoffs and a nice pension at the end. Not your top recruits for skullduggery, right? Prime example: Watergate. Now that's a government conspiracy."
"So it wasn't the CIA? But you said before…"
"No, look-I think there might've been, after the Bay of Pigs, something like… um, what's that play where the knights kill that guy in the cathedral?"
"Becket. You mean like they said, 'who will rid me of this turbulent priest'?"
"Right!" Karp exclaimed, "who will rid me of this turbulent priest. Or president, in our case. They were angry and scared, they were talking tough-guy talk. Somebody oughta shoot the bastard and save us from the commies. And the word filtered out that maybe there'd be cover available if maybe somebody did do Kennedy. And now, an idea pops up in somebody's mind. I can see this guy, like you can see a picture in a patch of sky through a tree, by the leaves around it, a kind of negative shape. This guy is not a CIA guy but he understands how it works. He has connections to the kind of people who can do something like this. And he's an artist. This whole thing was designed, constructed, and constructed in such a way that it would keep running, keep getting more complex and harder to figure out the more time went by. Everybody who looks at it brings something to it, because of all the pieces he put into it. You want to believe it's a lone nut, there's your certified loser. You want to believe it's a CIA conspiracy, there's the CIA assets. You want to believe it's a Mob hit, there's the Mob. You want to believe it's the commies, there's Castro and the KGB. It's brilliant! It's like being guarded by Bill Russell or batting against Nolan Ryan. Even though the guy's whipping my ass, I got to give him credit."
"So who is it? This Bishop character? Paul David."
"Nah! David's a bureaucrat. He can follow orders and not fuck up too much, but he didn't have the sense not to send a picture of a guy who looked very little like Oswald from Mexico City and he messed up with the tapes. Definitely bush-league; he didn't plan this. No way."
"But then nobody's left except this Irish guy, PXK."
"Yeah, and I hope for his sake that he's either running the show or has nothing to do with it. Otherwise, I wouldn't want to be carrying his life insurance. Uh-oh, I think we have to turn off here."
For the remainder of the trip, their attention was taken up with navigation on the dark roads, looking for landmarks, stopping to read Karp's inadequate scrawled directions. Marlene felt something tugging at her mind, something buried in what Karp had told her, but for the moment she was unable to dredge up what it was.
They arrived finally in the courtyard of a stone-built, slate-roofed eighteenth-century structure. A carriage lamp threw soft yellow light on the graveled yard.
"This is it, huh?" said Marlene. "The Old Ragg Inn? Old Ragg? How romantic, how evocative of sexual denial!"
"It's a mountain, Marlene," said Karp.
It was a mountain, indeed, and they saw it the next morning from the windows of their room, a dun hump looming through gray mists. The valley between the inn and the mountain was lost in an earthbound cloud.
"God! It's like fairyland," cried Marlene sitting up in bed. "It's like Brigadoon. Maybe when we go downstairs we'll find a hundred years have passed and they finally found out who killed JFK."
"Who was it?" asked Karp sleepily from beneath the thick quilt.
Marlene leaned over and whispered in his ear. "It was Jackie. She had a gun concealed in that hat. Oswald was actually her son by a concealed teenage marriage."
He made a clumsy grab for her, but she fended him off. "You maniac! Don't you ever get enough?"
"Me? Me?" protested Karp. "It wasn't me who was hooting all night long."
"Hooting? I don't recall ever having had my ladylike intimate murmurs described as 'hooting.' "
"Squealing, then," said Karp. "Explicit language at top volume. It's a good thing it's the off-season and there aren't any other guests on this hall. I was afraid they'd ask us to leave."
"In your dreams," sniffed Marlene and rose from the bed. "In any case, as a result of your insensate lusts, I'm covered in your effluvia, which I now intend to wash off. In the Jacuzzi."
"This is very nice," sighed Marlene some minutes later, when the two of them were entwined in the warm, churning waters. "It's so colonial."
Karp, soaping the inside of his wife's thigh with a perfumed bath bar, agreed: "Yes, our colonial forefathers…"