Dobbs had taken his camera to war too. A whole box was devoted to shots of jungles, airstrips, warships, planes landing and taking off, and any number of what appeared to Marlene to be exactly similar views taken from the rail of some sort of vessel, of the sea at night, with flashes in the distance. Only the labels indicated that they were distant prospects of the great night battles that raged around the Solomons in 1942.
The most interesting parts of these films to Marlene were those depicting the men of the Pacific war, all deeply tanned, many pitifully thin, crop-haired, incredibly young. Like most Americans, Marlene derived her understanding of World War II from war movies, where the soldiers had been played by thirtyish 4-Fs like John Wayne and Ronald Reagan. From Dobbs's films she realized for the first time, and with some shock, that the Japanese Empire had been crushed largely by pimply teenagers and their slightly older brothers.
Dobbs had caught these young sailors and marines at their daily work, or relaxing, or lying wounded in tent hospitals, grinning often, smoking perpetually. There were shots of Dobbs too: at a desk, with a small fan cooling his sweat, in khakis boarding a PT boat, inspecting a submarine, photographing something through the nose bubble of a bomber. The most remarkable sequence was a scene in which Dobbs was shaking hands with a group of young naval officers, with PT boats in the background. One of the officers was a startlingly young Jack Kennedy.
Marlene had mentioned this to Maggie, who had rolled her eyes and said, "Oh, yes, the meeting of the giants! I'm surprised the image isn't worn off the film. That's one of the ones they show you when they're checking you out to see if you're fine enough to be a Dobbs. The poor old bastard used to watch it over and over again, that and the other Meetings with the Great."
She had directed Marlene to an indexed list of film spools bearing shots of Dobbs and famous people: FDR, Hopkins, Nimitz, Spruance, the Dulles brothers, Bob Hope.
And then, of course, there was Harley Blaine. Blaine was in nearly as many of the films as Dobbs's immediate family, from the Yale years onward; during the war, he was in more of them. Blaine had apparently served with Dobbs during some part of his service. There was a long series of them in navy whites working and carousing around wartime Pearl Harbor, and another series of the two of them poking around in ruins and interrogating Asians; the film labels identified Saipan and Okinawa as the venues.
Blaine apparently shared Dobbs's interest in moviemaking. They traded cameraman duties when they were together, and after a while Marlene was able to recognize their individual cinematic styles: Dobbs flitted from one subject to another in quick cuts. Blaine provided a rock-steady camera platform, focusing on one subject for long seconds and then slowly panning to another. She even learned to recognize the shadow of their heads and upper bodies when they were using the camera: Blaine had huge shoulders sloping upward to a bullet head; Dobbs had a small round head on a graceful long neck.
Maggie confirmed this observation. "Yeah, the two of them were real pests, according to Hank and my mother-in-law. They'd sneak up on anything, one or the other of them, and get it down on film. Selma said the only place you were safe was in the toilet, and maybe not even then. When there was nobody else around they took shots of each other cutting up. Just boys at heart!"
Blaine was, of course, a key to Marlene's investigation, not only as Dobbs's lawyer at the trial, but as a lifelong friend. On a day, perhaps three weeks into her task, having read all the material in the archive and having watched dozens of hours of film, she asked Maggie whether it would be all right to call him in Texas.
They were in the kitchen; Maggie had just brought the kids home; Jeremy was napping and the girls were playing quietly in Laura's room. Maggie's reaction was not what Marlene had expected.
"Oh, my!" she exclaimed, holding her hand to her mouth. "Call him? Is that absolutely necessary?"
"Well, yeah, Maggie. I'm looking into a case that's twenty-five years old, I guess I need to talk to the lawyer."
A worry line dug itself deeper below Maggie's golden bangs. "Yeah, yeah, you're right, of course. But… oh, I don't know what to do now…"
"You're worried about Hank finding out I'm doing this."
"Yes! I know it's stupid, but…"
"But what? Tell him! I mean, it's not like it was illegal. Besides, I'm going to have to talk to Selma too, and I doubt that she's going to swear secrecy. The worst that could happen is that he'll yell at you and tell me to stop. I mean, he doesn't strike me as such a tyrant."
"Oh, no, he's not, not at all. It's just he's so sensitive about this whole thing with his dad."
She hemmed and hawed for a time, but under Marlene's cold eye, and not wanting to look like a jerk in front of a woman she regarded as the epitome of courage (and of course Marlene would never try to hide stuff from her husband for fear of an argument), she gave over Blaine's private number and said that she would break the news to Hank.
The call to Texas was answered by a man with a soft accent. Marlene explained who she was and what she wanted. The man asked her to hold. There was a hiatus of perhaps three minutes. Then another voice came on the line, with a similar accent but a different and more impressive timbre, a voice that reminded Marlene of Lyndon B. Johnson's: cast iron with a coating of honey.
"So you're gonna write all about Dick Dobbs," said Blaine after the brief pleasantries were concluded.
"Well, I don't know about 'write,'" said Marlene. "Maggie's asked me to do the research. Find out the facts, and so on."
"Find out the facts, hey? That'll take some doing. I hope you're not an old lady."
"No, sir, but I'm working on it. Tell me, do you get to Washington much? This kind of thing might be easier to do face-to-face."
"Oh, no, I stick close to home nowadays. I been under the weather."
"I'm sorry-I hope I'm not disturbing you."
"No, that's fine. I don't get many calls lately either. I'm always glad to chat with a lady. So, tell me, what've you made so far of the great case of U.S. v. Dobbs?"
"I've gotten as far as confusion, as a matter of fact," said Marlene, not particularly amused by the "lady" business.
A gravelly laugh. "I'm not surprised. I guess you been reading all the commentary?"
"Yes. And it's either a right-wing plot to destroy a patriotic American who was a premature peaceful coexistence advocate or a foiled left-wing conspiracy to disarm the United States and deliver it into the hands of the Soviets. It's impossible to figure out which because, as you know, the case was never resolved. The right-wingers claim it was dropped as a part of the conspiracy, with the treacherous Harley Blaine threatening to blow the whistle and reveal national security secrets. The other side claims it was a victory for civil liberties in the dark days of McCarthyism, won by that great civil libertarian Harley Blaine. So my first question is, which Harley Blaine am I talking to?"
Another laugh, and then a long coughing spasm. "Sorry 'bout that," Blaine said. "Guess I'm not used to having my aged ears jangled by impertinent remarks-no, don't apologize-it's good for me-gets the old juices flowing again. Which Harley Blaine, huh? Well, miss, here's the main thing you have to understand. Dick Dobbs was my best friend. He was the one interested in politics, not me. When he got into trouble I figured my job was to get him out of it, whatever it took, and I did that. Whatever a bunch of eggheads and pissant hack writers said about it afterward-hell, I never paid any mind to it at all and neither did Dick. The Harley Blaine you're talking to is the only one there ever was, a good friend and a damn good lawyer."