Shift: A Novel (11 page)

Suddenly an idea came to him.

“Are you really CIA?” he said. “Or is this just some elaborate prank the director worked up to, I don’t know, trick me into divulging Bureau secrets to unauthorized personnel?”

The man placed a spread-fingered hand on his chest, and for the first time BC noticed the hole under his lapel, just over his heart. “Did I ever say I was CIA?”

“Because if you
are
CIA,” BC continued, “it seems like an awfully big coincidence that we’re on the same train, in the same car, at the same time.”

“Coincidental?” The man waggled his cigar like Groucho Marx. “Maybe even suspicious? Or just too good to be true? Who knows, maybe the Company sent someone to follow you up to Millbrook?”

BC opened his mouth, then closed it. This wasn’t proof that the man was CIA, after all. He could still be the director’s stool pigeon. He’d heard stranger rumors about his boss.

“So tell me, Beau.” BC’s companion was clearly enjoying his indecision. “What’d the director tell you about Project Orpheus? I’m guessing from your choice of reading material that he either told you nothing at all, or, even more likely, he told you
everything
, and you can’t quite bring yourself to believe it, because then you’d have to admit to yourself that not only the Central Intelligence Agency but the Federal Bureau of Investigation is spending thousands—millions—of dollars on investigations that can only be called, well, stupid as shit. Pure science fiction,” he said, tapping the cover of BC’s book. “Truth serums. Brainwashing. Manchurian candidates even.”

“The
Manchurian Candidate
⁸
is a novel,” BC said, grabbing his book and staring down at the cover.
An electrifying novel of our world as it might have been
. He flipped the book open and pretended to read the first page, which happened to be blank.

“C’mon, Beau, I’m trying to help you out. Restore your faith in your employer. You don’t think the director’d send an agent of the prestigious Counterintelligence Program all the way up to New York State to check out a bit of science fiction, do you? There’s got to be something else involved, right?
Someone
else maybe? A VIP who has to be handled delicately? Lemme guess. He mentioned Chandler Forrestal? Told you how prominent his family is?”

BC did his best to remain impassive, even as he turned the page so
violently he nearly ripped it. If this guy didn’t work for the director, he had a bug in his office.

“Lemme save you the trouble of guessing. It’s not Mr. Forrestal Director Hoover’s worried about. It’s Jack Kennedy.”

Despite himself, BC giggled. “What, does he nip up there for the weekend in Marine One?”

“Gosh, that’d be fun, wouldn’t it, albeit a misallocation of taxpayer dollars. But the truth is the president of the United States of America doesn’t have to travel four hundred miles to get his fix. One of his girlfriends brings it to him. Now, how do you think the public would react if they found out, one, that the president has a squeeze on the side, two, that she’s supplying him with a drug that has the potential to render the leader of the free world susceptible to mind control, and, three, that said drug is being tested by the Central Intelligence Agency—an organization that just happened to put together a private little war in Cuba a few years back that almost launched World War Three?” The man puffed on his cigar. “I mean, certain people might get a little worked up about that, don’t you think? If not John Q. Public, then maybe Barry Goldwater or Nelson Rockefeller?”

BC could only stare at the man. One heard stories, of course. Rumors. Marilyn Monroe. But who wouldn’t sleep with Marilyn Monroe? Even Jackie couldn’t hold that against him.

“You seem skeptical, so let me give you a few more details. A few years back the Company tasked several agents with recruiting prostitutes as part of a project called Ultra. In exchange for not going to jail, the girls slipped their johns whatever drug the Company was investigating—LSD, psilocybin, what have you—and the supervising agent recorded the results on a movie camera. Ultra’s pretty much fizzled out by now, but the practice lives on in Orpheus. Only this time it’s not just hookers. See, the field agent in charge is one of those prep school boys, an entitled East Coast establishment prick, and just for kicks he shares his wares with his society friends, one of whom is Mary Meyer.” The man paused to puff on his cigar. “She’s the president’s squeeze,” he said, “in case you didn’t put all that together.”

BC continued to stare at the man. Finally he laughed. “You’re your own worst enemy. Don’t you know the first rule of lying: keep it simple, and keep it short.”

“That’s two rules,” the man said. “And I ain’t lying.” All the mirth had vanished from his voice.

“I mean, good Lord. Isn’t Mary Meyer Cord Meyer’s
wife?”

“Ex-wife.”

“The man’s number three or four at the—”

“At the good ol’ C-I-of-A.” The man’s smile was not so much triumphant as vindictive. “Yes sir, Special Agent Query. You are the president’s harem boy. You are John F. Kennedy’s
eunuch.”

BC didn’t know what was behind the anger on the man’s face, but he knew it was a lot older than this train ride, and, despite the heat in the car, he felt a sudden chill on his sweat-dampened spine. He reached for his drink, took a big swallow before he remembered what it was. He wasn’t a teetotaler, but he could count the number of alcoholic beverages he’d consumed on the fingers of one hand, and the rum entered him like a furnace blast. In a matter of seconds he felt sweat on his forehead, under his arms, trickling down the small of his back into the little gap where the waistband of his underwear (which had indeed been marked “Querrey,” so that the Negro laundress his mother had used for more than twenty years wouldn’t give her son’s jockey shorts to someone else) pulled away from the cleft of his buttocks.

The thought of perspiration pooling in his underwear made BC sweat even harder, and the thought of his own buttocks made him blush like a high schooler pantsed in front of the whole school. He desperately wanted something cold to drink, but the only thing in front of him was a glass of warm rum. He looked at it, then looked at the man across from him, who was following BC’s internal debate as if he could read his mind. Fuck it, BC thought, although he didn’t think the word “fuck.” He didn’t think the word “it” either, since just thinking the word “it” doesn’t make a lot of sense. He didn’t think. He just reached for the glass and drank it all down.

The man across the table looked at BC for a moment, then, without taking his eyes from BC’s, put his cigar out on the cover of BC’s novel.

“My oh my. This is going to be a fun ride, ain’t it?”

It wasn’t.

Five minutes outside Pennsylvania Station, BC excused himself
to use the lavatory. As he stepped out of the W.C., he noticed the Negro conductor farther up the car, pulling ticket stubs from the tops of seats. BC approached him, waited until the man had finished what he was doing.

“Yes, sir?” The conductor didn’t look at him.

BC had already pulled a pair of fives from his wallet—all the money he had until the banks opened on Monday. “I’d like to pay you. For our drinks.”

The conductor unfolded the bills and handed one back.

“Keep it,” BC said. “For the trouble.” He tried to meet the conductor’s eye but the man refused to look at him. “If there’s a problem with my companion. If he makes a complaint. I’d like to …” He didn’t know how to finish. “I’d like to speak in your defense. If I may.”

The conductor continued to stare at the two bills in his hand.

“It’s just that, well, how could I do that?”

“How …?”

“How can I identify you?”

For the first time, the conductor looked up, and BC was surprised to see that his eyes were filled not with fear or shame but fury.

“I
have
a name.” The man’s voice was so guttural that BC thought he might actually bite him.

A glint of gold on the man’s chest caught the agent’s eye. BC Querrey, who had noted that the soles of the conductor’s shoes were more worn on their outside edges than the inside, suggesting an internal torsion in the tibia, as well as the fact that the middle button of his jacket had fallen off at some point and been sewn back on with yellow thread rather than the gold that adhered the top and bottom buttons to the placket, had not noticed that the man who had visited his seat thirteen times in the past four hours was wearing a name tag:

“Ah,” BC said, or sighed. “Yes.” Having seen the man’s name, he now found it impossible to use it. “Well, if there’s a problem, please don’t hesitate to contact me.” He handed the man one of his business cards even as, with a lurch and a hiss, the train came to a stop.

With a start, BC turned from the conductor and hurried down the aisle. He’d been so focused on making amends that he’d completely forgotten the train was reaching its destination. He weaved in and out of passengers, pardon-me-ma’aming and excuse-me-sirring his way with increasing speed, until he burst through the doors of his car. The seats were empty, the passengers queued at either end of the aisle waiting for the doors to open. It took only the briefest glance for BC to see that the CIA man was gone, along with his—i.e., BC’s—briefcase.

BC ran to his seat. The only thing left on the table was the novel by Philip K. Dick, the half-smoked cigar sitting on top of it like a turd. BC noted that the book was turned toward his companion’s seat and, flicking the cigar off it, he flipped open the cover. A folded, wrinkled piece of paper fell out, on which had been hastily scrawled:

The piece of paper was moist, as if it had soaked up some of the CIA man’s—Melchior’s—sweat, and BC unfolded it delicately, as much to avoid getting the moisture on his hand as to keep from tearing the paper. The diagram that emerged didn’t make any sense at first. It showed a complicated mechanical device, possibly an engine of some kind. Most of the captions were written in what BC thought was a Cyrillic alphabet, but one English word popped off the page: “Polonium-210.”

“Oh, my God.”

BC grabbed his coat and hat from the luggage rack, swept up the book and paper from the tabletop—and, on impulse, the cigar butt too—and sprinted down the aisle. Before he’d taken two steps, the doors swished apart and people spilled out of the car like water through
the opened gates of a dam. BC pushed his way through the crowd, his head darting left and right for a sign of Melchior—and then suddenly he was on the platform, and he pulled up short.

He stood there with his bundle clutched to his chest like a refugee as the bombers scream across the sky. The train shed of the nation’s largest and busiest rail station occupied an enormous dusky cavern that receded into the distance on every side of him—acre upon acre of fretted steel columns reaching more than a hundred feet into the air and supporting a barrel-vaulted ceiling made of what seemed like millions of grimy panes of glass. At one end were a dozen arched tunnels disappearing into the bowels of the earth, at the other an equal number of staircases climbing two stories to the crowded concourse. But it was a cloudy day, and what little light managed to penetrate the filthy ceiling cast thick, oily shadows that confounded the eye, and on top of that at least two other trains were loading and unloading passengers: hundreds of people were pushing and weaving their way along the platform, nearly all of them shrouded in rain-darkened jackets and hats. BC’s eyes flitted desperately from one to the next. Melchior had been carrying neither coat nor hat, and BC did his best to confine his search to the bare heads. There were only a few, but in the murky light every exposed head seemed uniformly dark. Any of the men could have been Melchior—or none of them.

He sprinted for the stairs at the end of the platform, ran into the station’s world-famous waiting room. He didn’t notice the immense coffered ceilings, the pink marble floors (muddied on this wet day, and stained with tens of thousands of footprints), the diffuse light streaming in through arched windows taller and wider than his house in Takoma Park. He raced across the waiting room—two blocks long and nearly half a block wide—up the stairs, out the front entrance. At least he didn’t have to look for his car. A two-door coupé, mint green and shiny, individual raindrops glittering on its freshly waxed hood like a thousand slivers of glass, was parked directly in front of the main door, chaperoned by a nattily dressed young man leaning against a No Parking sign. He looked mightily pleased with himself.

BC ran up to the man, fumbling through the bundle of his coat to retrieve his wallet. He flashed his badge.

“Special Agent Querrey. Is this my car?”

“Nineteen sixty-two Chevrolet Corvair,” the man drawled like a car salesman. “I’d roll the windows down if I was—”

BC pushed the man out of the way, threw his bundle into the passenger’s seat, and—after pumping the gas too hard and flooding the engine and waiting five minutes for the plugs to clear—squealed down Seventh Avenue. Before he’d gone a single block the cabin had filled with noxious fumes coming in through the air vents, and he had to roll the window down.

He caught a last glimpse of the station’s facade in the rearview mirror, five hundred feet of Doric columns stretching out like God’s own picket fence. It really was impressive—more imposing than the biggest monuments in Washington—but he thought he remembered hearing talk of tearing it down. But in truth BC was less concerned with the possibility of New York losing its grandest edifice than with his own loss of a smaller piece of property. Not his briefcase: his bookmark, which, like his house, his name, and his sense of revulsion at the crude workings of the human body, he’d inherited from his mother. Thus are history’s losses measured: eight acres of stone and glass and steel on the one hand; on the other, an ivory sliver no bigger than a driver’s license. Both smudged from years of contact with human hands, and even more obscured by the shroud of sentiment that makes it difficult for us to see clearly the things we hold most dear. It would be the bookmark BC missed more in the years to come, Pennsylvania Station having played a significant role in the life of New York City but not in his.