Shift: A Novel (2 page)

Not that any of this mattered to Eddie Bayo.

“I don’t wanna have to ask you again, Eddie,” his captor said in Spanish not just perfect, but perfectly Cuban, albeit in a guttural kind of way.

“Fuck your mother,” Bayo gasped against the foot on his throat. His snarl didn’t really come off, given that his upper lip looked like a slug that’d been ground beneath someone’s heel—which, in fact, it had.

Melchior brought the glowing tip of his cigar to Bayo’s right nipple. “My mother, being long dead, has a snatch that’s too dried up for my taste.” Flesh sizzled; smoke tickled his nostrils; Bayo’s throat convulsed beneath the foot on his Adam’s apple but all that came out was a strangled gurgle. When Melchior took the cigar away, Bayo’s nipple looked like a volcanic crater. A dozen more black and red coronas were scattered across his chest, although it would have taken a particularly rarefied eye to notice that they occupied the same relative positions as the major Hawaiian volcanoes. Geography had been one of the Wiz’s first lessons to his protégé, along with the importance of keeping yourself amused.

A hole flashed behind the notch of his lapel as Melchior reached into his breast pocket for his Zippo, and he rubbed it lightly between his fingers; he could just feel the dried blood that kept it from fraying.

“You’re running out of skin, Eddie,” he said, relighting. “I’m gonna have to go for the eyes soon. Believe me when I tell you, few things hurt more than a cigar in the eye.”

Bayo said something unintelligible. Behind his back his bound hands audibly scratched against the splintered floorboards, as though he hoped he could still dig himself out of this one.

“What was that, Eddie, I couldn’t make it out. Your mouth must be dry from all the screaming. Here, let me help.” Melchior grabbed a long-necked bottle of rum, poured the shot on Bayo’s chest rather than in his mouth. Bayo moaned as the alcohol burned his wounds but didn’t actually start screaming until Melchior sparked his lighter against the spilled rum. Six-inch tongues of flame danced on Bayo’s skin for
almost a full minute. A boxer once told Melchior that you didn’t know how long a minute was until you stepped in the ring with Cassius Clay, but Melchior was pretty sure Bayo would take exception to that statement.

When the flames finally went out, Bayo’s skin was bubbling like a pancake that needed turning over. Melchior puffed on his cigar. “Well?”

“Why should I … tell you … anything?” Bayo panted. “You’re just gonna … kill me … when you get … what you want.”

Melchior’s lips curled around his cigar in a private smile. In the past two decades he’d heard people beg for their lives in more languages than the Hay-Adams had flags flying from its facade. But truth be told (and like most people who worked in intelligence, he’d long since forgotten what the word meant) he’d never actually killed someone in cold blood. Oh, he’d commissioned half a dozen hits in his day, shot his fair share of men in combat, but always under orders. Never once had he taken the law into his own hands, let alone gone Double-O on someone. But he was tired of Cuba—tired of this and every other banana republic and oil emirate and strategically significant sand spit he’d been deployed to over the past twenty years, and, now that the Wiz had been retired, he knew he was only one suicide mission away from being
under
the field rather than
in
it. He needed Bayo’s confession. Not just to learn the location of his rendezvous with a group of rogue Red Army officers, but to earn the security of an office in Langley. The field nigger was finally moving into the big house, and wasn’t
no one
gonna get in his way. Least of all Eddie Bayo.

“I like the No. 4,” he said now, holding out the panatela as though evaluating it for purchase. “A simple cigar, but solid. Complements just about anything without overpowering it. You can smoke one with your morning coffee or wait till your after-dinner cognac. Hell, it even makes this disgusting Cuban rum taste okay. And of course the thinness”—Melchior jammed the cigar into the hollow of Bayo’s left nostril—“allows for precision targeting.”

Bayo’s scream was like two plates of steel sliding against each other. The Cuban rolled and thrashed on the floor until once again Melchior put his sandaled foot on the man’s throat.

“Roasted meat,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “Lookit that. I finally found something the No. 4 don’t go with.”

“You don’t get it,” Bayo spat when he could talk again. “This is bigger than a two-bit thug like you. Russians won’t back down. They got nothing to lose.”

Melchior pulled his knife from its sheath.

“I don’t got any safety pins on me, so I’m gonna have to slice your eyelid off so you can’t blink. I imagine that’ll hurt a fair bit, but it’s gonna feel like heaven compared to the sensation of having your eyeball melted down like tallow. That’s candle wax made from animal fat for an ignoramus like you. Like the kind the Nazis made from the Jews. You want your sister to see you looking like that, Eddie?” He dropped to one knee. “You want Maria to see her big brother looking like a burned-out kike blubber candle?” Melchior sucked at the cigar, getting it brighter and brighter. “How old is she now? Maria. Eleven? Twelve?”

“Not even you—”

“Yes, Eddie, I would. If it would get me off this shit-fuck island, I would gladly lay Fidel Castro on the altar of the Catedral de San Cristóbal de la Habana in front of a full congregation and stick a communion wafer on the head of my dick and shove it between what I assume, based on his beard, are a couple of incredibly hairy ass cheeks. And I wouldn’t even
enjoy
that. Especially the hairy part. But Maria? She’s a pretty girl. No one’s ever stubbed a cigar out on
her
face. And no one ever will. Not if you talk to me.”

He brought the cigar an inch away from Bayo’s left eye.

“Talk to me, Eddie. Save us both the trouble.”

Bayo had cojones, you had to give him that. Melchior was pretty sure it was the threat to his sister that broke him, not the pain. He whispered the name of a village about seven clicks away, close to the border of Las Villas.

“The big plantation south of town got burned out during the fighting in ’58. Meeting’s in the old mill.”

Melchior jammed the cigar in his mouth and jerked Bayo to his knees. The seared skin of Bayo’s chest split like wet paper when Melchior pulled him up, and a mixture of blood and pus spilled from the seam and ran down his stomach. But all Bayo did was bite his lip and close his eyes.

“You’re a good man, Eddie. You can rest easy with the knowledge
that your sister will never know what you did for her. Unless of course I go to the meet and no one shows.”

Bayo didn’t say anything, and Melchior exchanged his knife for his pistol, brought the gun to the back of Bayo’s head. A shot to the back of the head sent a message. If you were going to execute someone, you might as well make it count. Still, the gun in his hand felt ponderously large and heavy, and Bayo’s head seemed suddenly very small, as if, if Melchior’s hand didn’t stop shaking, he might miss. He brought the gun so close to Bayo’s head that it tapped against his hair like a typewriter key worried by a twitching finger.

“They’ll kill you, too,” Bayo said, a desperate whine in his voice.

Melchior laid his thumb on the hammer to still it. “I’ll take my chances.”

“Not the Russians. The Comp—”

Bayo jerked to the left—even managed to get a foot on the floor before Melchior squeezed the trigger. Clumps of brain splattered across the room, along with his right ear and half his face. He remained upright for a second or two, wobbling like a metronome, then fell forward. His cracked skull shattered when it hit the floor, and his head flattened out like a half-inflated basketball.

As the reverberations of the shot faded from the room, it occurred to Melchior that he should have cut Bayo’s throat with his knife. He only had five bullets left in his gun. Four now. If Bayo hadn’t lunged, he would’ve remembered that before he pulled the trigger.

“Damn it, Eddie. You went and ruined it.”

Well, that was Cuba for you. It could take the fun out of just about anything.

Fifteen hundred miles north as the crow flies (no airplane had
made the journey since the embargo had started in February) Nazanin Haverman walked into a dingy bar in East Cambridge, Massachusetts. Morganthau had selected the King’s Head because it was far enough from Harvard Yard that the usual rabble didn’t frequent the place, yet still well known among “a certain set,” as he called it. Naz hadn’t asked who the members of that set were, but somehow she suspected they were responsible for the smug graffito scribbled on a months-old mimeograph advertising Martin Luther King’s March on Washington:

There was a mirror in the vestibule, and Naz looked in the glass with the disinterested gaze of a woman who’s long since learned to inspect her war paint without reckoning the face beneath. She took her gloves off, easing the right one over the big ruby on her third finger, which she rubbed, less for good luck than to remind herself that she still had it—that she could still sell it if things got really bad. Then, keeping her gait as steady as she could—she’d primed herself with one or two gin and tonics before she left home—she headed down the narrow corridor toward the bar.

It hit her as she paused in the jaundiced light over the inner door. The cigarette smoke and the stale odor of spilled drinks and the urgent murmur of voices, the sidelong glances and equally circumspect feelings that accompanied them. A miasma of frustrated, sexually charged emotions swirled around her as palpably as the bolts of smoke, and against its press all she could do was fasten her eyes on the bar and forge ahead. Fifteen steps, she told herself, that’s all she had to take. Then she could center herself around a tall, cold glass of gin.

Her form-fitting pearl gray suit directed the men’s eyes to her hips,
her waist, her breasts, the single open button of décolletage in her white silk blouse. But it was her face that held them. Her mouth, its fullness made even more striking by deep red lipstick that picked up the color of the ruby on her right hand, her eyes, as dark and shiny as polished stone, but slightly blurred, too—anthracite rather than obsidian. And of course her hair, a mass of inky black waves that sucked up what little light there was and radiated it back in oil-slick rainbows. A hundred times she’d had it straightened with the fumy chemicals Boston’s blanched housewives used to relax their hair, a hundred times it had sprung back to curl, and so, in lieu of the elaborately sculpted coifs that helmeted the rangy blondes and brunettes in the room, Naz’s hair was piled against her skull in a thick mass that framed her face in a dark rippling halo. There was too much of it for her to wear one of the pillbox hats that Mrs. Kennedy had made all the rage, so she wore a bandeau instead, perched precariously forward on her head and held in place with a half dozen pins that pricked at her skull.

The girls noticed her too, of course. Their stares were as hard as the men’s, if significantly less sympathetic. It was a Sunday, after all. Business was slow.

“Beefeater and tonic
, easy on the tonic,” Naz said to the bartender, who was already setting a chilled Collins glass on the bar. “A splash of Rose’s lime, please. I haven’t eaten anything all day.”

She tried not to gulp her drink as she perched herself on the bar stool, not quite facing the room—that would read as too obvious, too desperate—but not quite facing the bar either. The perfect angle to be looked at, yet not seem to look back. There was the mirror over the bar for that.

She brought her glass to her lips, was surprised to find it empty. That was quick, even for her.

That’s when she noticed him. He’d stationed himself at the darkest corner of the bar, faced his drink like a defendant before a judge. Both hands were wrapped around the stem of his martini and his gaze was aimed directly at the olive at the bottom of the shallow pool. There was a sober expression on his face—
ha!
—as if he regarded what the drink was telling him very, very seriously.

Naz shifted her gaze to the mirror to study him more openly, tried to sort his vibe from the general miasma in the room. A new word, vibe. Part of the hipsters’ jargon, which was creeping into the language like uncracked peppercorns that popped between your teeth. But you didn’t need a special vocabulary to see that something was bothering this guy. A bitter olive that only a river of gin could keep below the surface. The sharpness of his eyes, the broad plain of his forehead below his dark hair, the delicate movement of his fingers all said that he was an intelligent man, but this wasn’t a problem he could solve with his mind. His shoulders were broad, his waist narrow, and, though he hunched over his martini like a dog guarding a bone, his spine was supple, not bowed. So he was athletic, too. But there were some things you couldn’t run away from. Some things only alcohol could keep at bay.

With a start, Naz realized the man was watching her as intently as she was watching him, his amused smile bracketed by a pair of C-shaped dimples. Caught out, she shifted her gaze from the mirror to his eyes.

“The last time a pretty girl stared at me this hard, my house brothers had written D-I-M-E on my forehead.”

Naz reached for her glass, then remembered it was empty. The jig was up. She abandoned her empty glass and walked down to the end of the bar. If nothing else, she was pretty sure he was good for a drink.

Up close he was easier to read. His vibe. His energy. He was troubled, sure, but he was also horny. He was here for a drink, but he’d take something more if it came his way. It just had to be someone he could pretend was as complicated as himself. As—what was the word the beatniks liked?—deep, that was it.

She smiled as politely as her mother had taught her all those years ago. “Dime? Or perhaps
di me
. Spanish for—”

“‘Tell me.’” An embarrassed chuckle. “It’s rather more jejune than that.”