"I haven't said I would yet, Marlene," Karp said, smiling back. "It's still not a done deal."
"I see in your eyes it's a done deal, babe. You want it, you oughta go for it."
He reached across the table and grasped her hand. "Okay. That's good. I'll call him tomorrow and tell him we're coming. It'll be okay, Marlene. Moving-it's not the end of the universe or anything."
"No, 'cause I'm not moving."
He cocked his head as if he hadn't heard her. "What?"
"What I said. Go do it! I'll keep a candle burning in our little home against your return. I mean, how long can it take, solve the crime of the century? For you? Couple of weeks, tops."
"Marlene, this is serious…"
"Yeah, you keep telling me. I'll tell you what else is serious. Ripping our life apart is serious. Dumping my career. Taking Lucy away from her grandparents and everybody she knows. Leaving our home. Serious stuff, and what's the most serious is that I can tell you haven't thought much about it. You hear crime of the century and Bert Crane, another solution to your perpetual lost-father complex, and you're off and running, and let old Marlene deal with the little details."
"That isn't fair, Marlene."
"No, you're right, it isn't. How about you springing this shit on me? Hey, babe, I got a job in D.C., pack it up! That's fair? Look-you can't stand working for Bloom? Fine! There's four other DAs in the city, plus two federal prosecutors, and half a dozen other county prosecutors within commuting distance. Not to mention, I hear there's one or two private law firms in New York. I don't recall you beating on those doors, you can't stand another minute of Bloom."
Karp stood up abruptly and walked a distance away from her, his hands thrust deep in his pockets. He was angrier with her than he'd been in a good while. It was the sort of rage we experience when we have been selfish under the guise of some pretended generosity, and have been found out. Naturally, what he said then was, "You're really being selfish, Marlene."
She opened her mouth to say something, closed it, took a breath instead, and knocked back the rest of her wine. "I'm going to bed," she said, and walked off.
"We haven't finished this, Marlene," said Karp.
She stopped and turned. There were tears in her eyes but her voice was steady. "No, but in a minute you're going to bit me with 'A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.' And I agree. A man's gotta. But a woman doesn't, and neither does a little kid. Don't forget to write."
The next day, Karp called Bert Crane and told him he would take the job. Crane made enthusiastic noises of congratulation; they sounded tinny and unreal coming over the phone, and made Karp feel no better. He had a taste like bile in his mouth and his stomach was hollow and jumpy. He was stepping into a void.
Next, he went up and saw the district attorney. Bloom was sitting behind his big, clean desk, in shirtsleeves and yellow suspenders, puffing on a large cigar. He was a bland-faced medium-sized man who might have been an anchor on the six o'clock news. He had nearly every qualification for his job-a keen political instinct, the ability to generate ever-increasing budgets, a cool hand with the ferocious New York media, and a positive talent for bureaucratic management. All he lacked was an understanding of what the criminal justice system was supposed to accomplish and even the faintest ability to successfully try cases.
Karp stood in front of the desk and told Bloom that he was leaving and where he was going. To Karp's great surprise, Bloom seemed stunned and dismayed. He gestured Karp to a chair.
"What's wrong? I thought you were happy here. You got your bureau. You're doing great things…"
Karp had trouble finding his voice. At last he said, "Well, I've been here a long time. I thought it was time to move on. And the challenge… Kennedy…"
"Crane, huh? What's he paying you?"
Karp told him.
Bloom said, "Tell you what-it'll take some screwing around with personnel, but I think I can beat that."
Karp felt his mouth open involuntarily. "Um… it's not really a money thing. It's just time for me to do something else."
Bloom chomped on his cigar and frowned. "You're making a big mistake, my friend. You'll dick around down there for a year or so until they get tired of stirring the pot and they'll get you to write a fat report nobody'll read, and then where are you? Out on your ass."
"Well. I'll have to worry about that when the time comes."
Bloom shrugged and blew smoke. "Think about it," he said.
Karp said he would and walked out. The feeling of weirdness, of being in a waking dream, continued unabated. Bloom being nice to him, Bloom offering him a raise, was, more than anything he could think of, a sign that his life had irrevocably changed.
In the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, a small group of men is sorting through stacks of paper. The paper has been removed from filing cabinets throughout the Agency in response to a subpoena duces tecum from the Church committee, a body established by the United States Senate to investigate certain suspected excesses of the CIA. They are obliged by law, and as federal employees, to comply with this order to yield documents, and they are complying, if reluctantly. The men have been trained in strict secrecy since early adulthood, and more than that, they have been trained to be judges of what must remain secret in order to protect the national security, and more than that, they have come to believe that they themselves are the best judges of what the national security is.
Two of the men are working with ink rollers and thick markers, blotting out the sections of these documents deemed too sensitive for the eyes of United States senators. Some documents have had nearly everything but the addresses and the letterhead blotted out in this way. They have done this many times before and are good at it.
One man walks among the desks, picking up piles of finished documents, indexing their reference numbers, and placing them in a carton for delivery to the Senate. It grows late, but the CIA is, of course, a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week operation. Nevertheless, these are all senior employees and not as young as they once were, when several of them were actual spies. They are anxious to see their suburban beds.
The man picking up the documents yawns, shares a slight joke with one of the men at the desks, and picks up by mistake the wrong pile, a thin stack of paper comprising four brief documents that were by no means ever intended to be seen by senators without being reduced to illegibility. He indites their numbers on his list, tosses them into the carton on the floor, and moves on.
THREE
Karp disliked flying, not because he was afraid of crashing-at this point in his life he might have enjoyed a quick immolation-but because airliners are not constructed with the Karps of the world in mind. From the moment he sat down in his seat to the moment he arose at flight's end, the leg-jamming angle imposed by the cramped coach seats always produced a continuous dull ache in his bad knee. He stared out the window at greasy-looking clouds. It had been raining at La Guardia when he boarded the shuttle and the pilot had just announced that it was raining at National as well. The weather suited his mood. For the past week he and Marlene had maintained a climate of chilly formality: overcast, with no sign of clearing.
The plane lurched and dipped a wing and Karp's window showed woolly whiteness, then glimpses of landscape, a brown, oily river lined with autumn trees; now the famous sights jumped into view, the Monument and the Capitol dome, always a little shocking to see in real life, rather than on the little screen. Another lower swoop across the Potomac and they were down at National Airport.