Shift: A Novel (20 page)

The name comes to Chandler before he even realizes he is curious. Caspar.

Melchior has adopted Caspar in the way bullies sometimes adopt the helpless: this one and this one only will I protect. A large part of Melchior protects Caspar just for the many chances it gives him to fight—the child is so moony that older boys cannot resist picking on him—but there is some part of him that genuinely loves his charge. Loves him like a farmer loves his only hog, right up until the time he slices its throat.

The two men have reached Caspar. Melchior can tell from the way they approach him that they picked him out ahead of time. The bearded one takes notes in a spiral-bound notebook even as the tall man squats down in a kind of giant-sized replica of Caspar. He points at the picture in the dust. Melchior sees his mouth move, imagines his insipid question.
Whatcha drawing there, young feller?
He is pleased to see that Caspar’s mouth doesn’t move.

“Say, are you playing or what?”

One of the boys is impatient. One of the older, bigger boys. None of the smaller ones would dare question him in this way. Melchior turns, glances at the iridescent orbs scattered in front of the brick wall. Nine of them—his is the tenth and final shot. The farthest is a little more than an inch from the wall. He needs to shoot inside it to win.

He turns back to Caspar. The bearded man is talking to him now. Caspar has fallen back on his ass, looks up at the man as if transfixed. The man’s beard cuts the air like a fang.

“I
said
, are you gonna—”

Melchior shoots without looking. The chorus of groans tells him he has won even before he turns to collect his money and marbles, then starts across the playground.

“I thought I told you not to talk to strangers.”

Caspar looks up, scared at first, then brightening at the sight of Melchior. He points at his drawings.

“They was asking me about my daddy.”

“You don’t have no daddy. Now, run along.”

Caspar stares confusedly between Melchior and the men. It is clear he wants to do what Melchior says, but the men are grown-ups. They trump him. He takes a half step backward, a half step forward.

“My daddy’s in heaven.”

The tall man stands, gives Melchior an amused, annoyed look. He seems to think the mere fact of his gaze will banish Melchior, and when the boy stands his ground, he says, “This here’s none of your business, boy. Whyn’t
you
run along?”

His accent is deep but not local. Southern but not city. Gentry, like the people whose house his aunt cleaned, before he got to be too much for her and she sent him here.

The bearded man looks not at him but at Caspar.

“Look at his face, Frank. See how torn he is—he doesn’t know whether to obey his friend or us. He’s trying to think of a way he can win both our approval.”

“What are you guys, a couple-a perverts? Can’t you screw each other instead-a little boys?”

The man called Frank whistles. He is entertained, but it is a nasty kind of pleasure—the kind the Romans took in watching Christians being mauled by lions and barbarians. Melchior knows immediately that not only will this man hit a kid, he’ll enjoy it.

“You sure got a pair, don’t you, boy? Got a mouth, too, and I don’t like that. Now, hightail your ass outta here, or I’m-a stick my foot so far up it you’re gonna taste shoe leather.”

Melchior holds his ground. Gives the man a look that tells him if he hits him he’d better knock him
out
, because he
will
fight back.

“You been drinking,” he says, “cheap shit, too,” and turns on his heel. He walks not toward the orphanage but toward the withered live oak in the northern corner of the playground. His pace is steady, neither too fast nor too slow. The last thing he hears is Frank saying,

“The first thing we gonna teach you, son, is not to hang around with niggers.”

Only when he reaches the live oak does he turn around. The bearded man has taken Caspar’s hand and is leading him toward the gate. Caspar walks slowly, looking around in every direction. Frank has an impatient look on his face, like he just wants to kite the kid under his arm and get going. He, too, is looking around.

By now Melchior has retrieved his slingshot, and he pulls one of the marbles he has just won from his pocket.

“Timor mortis exultat me.”

The words come to his lips unbidden, and he pauses with the marble in the pocket of his weapon. After his mother disappeared, the nuns had taught him to say the Office of the Dead as though she’d died rather than run off. The only phrase he remembered was
timor mortis conturbat me
, “the fear of death disturbs me,” and that only because he’d come across a variation of it a few years earlier when he read
The Once and Future King: timor mortis exultat me
—“the fear of death excites me”—which warriors said before going into battle. He doesn’t know why the phrase comes to his lips now, but even as he releases the first shot, he knows that it will stay with him for the rest of his life.

The marble catches the bearded man in the temple. He screams and falls to the ground.
Timor mortis exultat me:
it’s not the warrior’s fear of death that excites him, but his enemy’s, and as Melchior watches the bearded man crawl like a scared dog behind a withered primrose, he thinks, Oh yes, he’ll remember this sensation forever.

The man called Frank is reaching for the inside pocket of his coat like a heavy in a gangster movie, but before he can pull his hand out, Melchior’s second shot catches him in the cheek. He staggers backward but doesn’t fall or cry out. But he doesn’t take his hand out of his jacket either.

“The next one takes out an eye,” Melchior calls quickly, calmly. “Now, let go of him and get the hell outta here.”

The bearded man is cowering behind the bush, but Frank is looking at the blood on his fingers with wide-eyed wonderment. A huge smile splits his face.

“You see that, Joe? He made that shot at twenty-five yards.”

A prick in
his arm; sludge filling his veins, his brain. A terrific weight that seemed to press down on him from inside and out at the same time. The room returned, fuzzy edged, its colors paled to duns and grays. Keller was pulling a syringe from his arm.

“Enough for today,” he said.

As an irresistible fatigue sapped the energy from his limbs, Chandler’s head lolled to the side. There he was: Melchior. His eyes were
closed and his clothes disheveled and drenched with sweat, but a strange smile was plastered on his face.

Chandler’s own eyes were drooping as Melchior’s opened. He looked over at Chandler, his expression exhausted but satisfied, like a man who’s just been serviced by his favorite whore.

“We gotta do that again,” he said.
“Soon.”

There was nowhere to hide in the Vault, so BC ran into the
director’s office. It, too, was wide open. No closets, no nooks and crannies, not even a couch to scurry behind. The largest object in the room was the desk. If Hoover sat down, BC would be found instantly, but it was his only shot.

As he ducked behind the desk, he noticed the curtains on the window: thick blue muslin draperies that billowed all the way to the floor. Without giving himself time to think, he stepped behind the nearest one even as the key turned in the door to the Vault. As the curtain stilled around his body like a mummy’s bandages, he remembered the director’s story about Amenwah, although the truth is he felt more like Polonius. He hoped Hoover had left his sword at home that day.

The door opened and the director’s voice sailed into the room.

“Well, we’ll just have to put the squeeze on him tomorrow morning. A Junghans would be a rare prize indeed.”

Junghans? The name rang a bell, but BC couldn’t place it. German possibly, or Dutch, neither of which was the Bureau’s province. Perhaps a smuggling ring? BC tried to concentrate, but it was hard, with the director’s chair squeaking a few inches in front of him and dust tickling his nostrils. He bit back a sneeze. His hand was in his pocket, squeezing Naz’s ring as though, like the Ring of Gyges, it could make him invisible.

A drawer opened, papers rustled. “Billy was telling me about a little place in Oak Hill the other day.”

“Really?” the voice of Associate Director Tolson said. “The land of lawn jockeys and chipped chamber pots?”

“Billy says he found a John Pennington gravy boat there.”

“No!”

“He says he did. I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“I once saw a Pennington butter dish with a group of Chinamen
fishing for carp, or whatever they fish for in China. I tell you, you could practically hear the wind rustle in the reeds.”

Now BC had to bite back a laugh as well as a sneeze. Here he was, a fly on the wall in the office of J. Edgar Hoover, and the director and his second in command were discussing gravy boats and butter dishes!

“Ah, here they are. Leave a note for Helen to order me another pair tomorrow, would you, Clyde.”

“Already did.” A pause, then: “Your dinner disagreeing with you, John?”

“What? No. Just”—an audible sniff—“someone used too much Lysol when they cleaned tonight.”

A chuckle. “I’ll have someone fired, okay, John?”

The chair squeaked as Hoover stood up. “Very funny, Clyde. I want them shot.” A guffaw, then: “Come on, let’s go home.”

Footsteps receded across the carpet.

“So’d you hear about Caspar?”

“The friendly ghost?”

“Just came back from Mexico City. Spent a few days trying to get a visa to Russia.”

“Didn’t he just come back from there?”

“Last year.”

“Interesting. I wonder what the Company’s cooking up now.”

“The Dallas office sent a man to his house twice, but he’s been conveniently out both times, so they’re going to pay him a visit where he wo—”

A sputtering motorcycle on the street below drowned out the director’s voice, and by the time it sped away the door to the Vault had closed. BC waited a moment to make sure they were gone, then let out the biggest sneeze of his life.

Melchior did his best to relax on the flight back to DC. It was
hard. His brain was whirring and whizzing around like clock parts spun free from each other, cogs, gears, levers, and arrows all floating free inside the vast cavernous space that was his mind. Because that’s what Chandler had done. He’d made Melchior’s brain real to him. Physical. Not physical like a bunch of cells, but physical like a space. A place. An underground city populated by memories so far gone that he’d forgotten he’d forgotten them. Chandler’d walked around his mind like a beat cop, poking his nose in this door, peeping through that window. Who knew how much he’d seen, how much he’d learned before Melchior, with a supreme effort of will, had been able to lead him to that particular memory. To the one event in his life he’d taken greater care to conceal than anything else. He suspected that he’d only half chosen it. That Chandler had gone looking too. For the thing that had turned Melchior into Melchior. Well, it certainly explained the narrative of his life. Whether it explained his character was anybody’s guess.

And then … what? What the fuck had Chandler done? He’d made it
real
somehow. Melchior knew it had just been an illusion. But there was no way you could’ve convinced him of that while it was going on. He’d been twelve years old again, Caspar was four, the Wiz was still
compos mentis
, and Doc Scheider was still looking for guinea pigs to turn into zombies. But at the same time he was still Melchior, the thirty-three-year-old field agent whose two decades of experience changing identities the way other people change clothes had made him able to see this history as just another illusion, just another legend. He’d watched himself with an unparseable combination of hope and hatred, unsure which were his feelings now and which the feelings of the boy in the orphanage. And even as he raised the slingshot and fired at the Wiz, he couldn’t decide if he was making the biggest mistake of his life. If he should have killed the man who stole his life—stole his life but
gave him a new one in exchange—rather than impressing him with his marksmanship.

And now, like the Wiz, he’d made his own discovery. As assets go, Chandler was off the charts. There’d never been anything like him before, and if the information Melchior had gathered on Ultra and Orpheus was complete, there never would be again. It wasn’t some new drug that Joe Scheider had cooked up that had turned Chandler into Orpheus and could create a legion of similarly super-powered soldiers. Logan had given the same cocktail to too many people for that to be true. No, it was something inherent in Chandler. Call it a gene, call it a receptor, call it the Gate of Orpheus, but if anyone else out there possessed it, the chance of that person getting hold of the kind of pure LSD that Chandler had been given was virtually nonexistent. All Melchior had to do now was figure out how to control him—though he had a pretty good idea how to do that. Because all the time Chandler had been poking around in his brain, he’d been looking for something. For someone. Naz. Melchior was pretty sure he hadn’t found out what had happened to her, because if he had, he would have ripped Melchior’s mind apart. Four days he’d known her, and he’d apparently spent several of those in a delirium. Yet the immensity of his desire was such that Melchior knew that as long as he could keep Naz’s fate a secret, he could control Chandler. Melchior had bedded women on five continents, but he’d never felt a thousandth of what Chandler felt for Naz. She must have been something else in the sack.

It was funny that he hadn’t seen what had happened to her though. He’d missed a few things, chief among them Melchior’s real name, and Caspar’s. Who knows, maybe it was because it’d been so long since he’d thought of himself as anything other than Melchior, or thought of Caspar as anything other than Caspar. Or maybe Chandler was so overwhelmed by his newfound abilities that he couldn’t fully control where they took him—if Melchior’s brain was a city, then it was a labyrinth on the order of Venice or Paris, and Chandler lacked a map and could only fumble about blindly, looking for beacons or signposts that stood out in the maze. That day in the orphanage was certainly a landmark. It was the day the Wiz gave him a chance at a life that mattered. But the name he’d had that day, that name hadn’t meant shit. If someone called it out
on the street, he wouldn’t even turn around. Caspar, of course, still had to go by his real name, but it was a hollow symbol at this point, as unreflective of the man who bore it as the dog-eared copy of Marx he carried into boot camp.