Shift: A Novel (43 page)

With grotesque intimacy, he leaned in again and put his mouth on BC’s, pressed hard enough that BC could feel his lips through two layers of tape. It didn’t hurt. It didn’t even feel like a kiss. But BC felt his stomach churn and had to fight the urge to vomit.

After what seemed like an eternity Melchior stood up. He smiled down at BC like a proud father, then brought his hand to the tip of BC’s nose to wipe away a drop of moisture. It could have been a bead of sweat or mucus or even a tear. Even BC didn’t know.

“Beau-Christian Querrey,” Melchior said in a voice whose solemnity was all the more oppressive for being genuine, even caring.
“You
are the burning boy. You—are—a—
faggot.”

But he wasn’t finished. He stuck his fingers in BC’s pants pocket and wormed his hand over BC’s thigh. BC turned his face away, his eyes squeezed closed, his breath whistling out of his nostrils with drops of snot.

Suddenly the hand was gone. It was a moment before BC could open his eyes. Melchior was holding Naz’s ring up to the faint light.

“I don’t think you need this anymore, do you?”

Before he left he turned on the television.

“I know daytime TV’s for housewives,” he said as he headed for the door. “But keep your eyes peeled. There just might be something interesting on today.”

As soon as
he left Wesley, Caspar went straight to the sixth floor. He wove his way through the dusty stacks of book boxes until he reached the southeast corner window, where he stood his package upright behind a stack of boxes. The tall parcel made a heavy metallic clunk as he set it on the bare concrete floor. He moved a few stacks of boxes to create a blind around the window, set three more underneath it to serve as a stand. He couldn’t bring himself to look out the window, but he did notice that the clouds were breaking up and the sunlight streamed into the little nest he’d made for himself. It was going to be a beautiful day.
The park would probably be full of people at lunchtime, all waving at the president and First Lady as they drove by.

Chandler loitered
in the shade of an oak on the eastern edge of Dealey Plaza, as far from the Book Depository as he could get without losing sight of the entrance. He’d waited to take the second half of the acid after he arrived, then maneuvered close enough to the six-story building that he was able to sift through the minds of the dozens of people inside. He didn’t have to look far. Caspar’s anxiety was like a beacon, and there, front and center in his thoughts, was Melchior. Melchior and President Kennedy and a rifle he’d hidden on the sixth floor, right by a corner window. What Chandler didn’t see was Melchior himself.

When he saw the gun—saw what Caspar planned to do with it—he was brought up short. If he confronted Caspar now or, God forbid, dragged the police in, he knew he was losing any chance he had to catch Melchior and extract Naz’s location from him. And he could see also that Caspar didn’t want to do it, and didn’t expect to. Melchior was supposed to make contact. Supposed to call it off before Caspar had to pull the trigger. Caspar seemed to think he was actually going to show up here. Chandler was inside Caspar’s head, so he knew the would-be assassin wasn’t lying to him—it was just a question of whether or not Melchior had lied to Caspar in the same way he’d lied to Song and Ivelitsch about sending Naz to Dallas. Chandler knew he was risking a lot—not just a man’s life, but the president’s and, who knows, the country’s. But the alternative was losing his last, best chance of finding Naz, and so he found the most sheltered spot he could and waited.

Searching Caspar’s mind from such a distance had used up a lot of his juice, however, and now there was the familiar fatigue. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it’d been other times, but still, yawns were splitting his jaws, and he had to smack himself in the face to stay awake. He should’ve waited, he realized now, not taken the second hit until he saw Melchior.

“Excuse me,” he said, stopping a middle-aged black woman pushing a white baby in a stroller. “Do you know what time the president’s supposed to come by?”

“Why, you early, ain’t you? Didn’t the paper say he wasn’t supposed to get by here till half past noon? It’s only—”

“Ten forty-two,” Chandler said. He made a show of looking at his wrist, but since he wasn’t wearing a watch, it didn’t help. The woman frowned and pushed her charge away.

The thoughts of passersby flickered in and out of his head. It was amazing how banal the minds of most people were. Something to eat, something to drink, something to screw. God, I hate my boss/my wife/my husband/my parents. A man sat down on the retaining wall beside the little reflecting pond. He was waiting for his secretary, with whom he was having an affair, and when he said to himself, Could you take some dick-tation, Miss Clarkson, he and Chandler chuckled at the same time. The man peered at Chandler nervously, and Chandler quickly turned away. He realized that at some point over the past month this state had become natural to him. That the time he spent unaugmented had come to seem not only vulnerable but incomplete and, even worse,
boring
. The thought filled him with self-loathing, and the self-loathing filled him with fantasies of revenge. He would make Melchior pay for what he’d done to him, and then, if he couldn’t find a way to reverse the condition, he would take his own life to end this terrifying cycle of flight and violence. Once Naz was safe, he would bring it all to an end, one way or another.

But where was Melchior?

All morning long
he had the intermittent sense that someone was peering over his shoulder. He’d whipped his head around so many times that one of his coworkers said he was acting jumpier than a man in his marriage bed with another woman. Finally, at a couple minutes before noon, he stood up from his desk.

“Guess I’ll take lunch,” he said. His manager waved at him without looking up.

He walked to the stairwell slowly, but as soon as the door was closed he bounded up the stairs to the sixth floor. As he was walking past the elevator it opened, and Charlie Givens stepped out and asked him if he was going downstairs to eat.

“No, sir,” Caspar said. He just stared at Givens, and after a moment
Givens shrugged, picked up the pack of cigarettes he’d left on top of a stack of boxes, and got back in the elevator. Caspar waited until the doors closed before he headed to the southeast corner of the building. He passed a plate with some chicken bones on it, but saw no sign of anyone else. The faint sound of motorcycles floated through open windows.

He retrieved his package from behind a wall of boxes, ripped it open as quietly as possible. He assembled the Carcano quickly, rested it on the short stack of boxes beneath the window, and then, for the first time that day, looked outside.

“Fuck.”

A line of live oaks blocked his view of this end of Houston Street, as well as the beginning of Elm. He’d seen the trees dozens of times before, of course, but never really noticed just how much they shaded the street in front of the depository—it wasn’t the kind of thing you would notice unless you were planning to shoot someone from an upper-story window. He would have to wait until the motorcade turned on Elm and was directly below the building and moving away from him—and he would have to lean halfway out the window to get a clear shot to boot. Someone in Dealey Plaza would almost certainly see him and shout, warning the president’s guards.

Not that he would do it. But Melchior had said he had to play it straight. Right to the end.

There were dozens of people in the park already. Caspar put his eye to the scope of his rifle and moved it from face to face.

Where the hell was Melchior?

Traffic had thickened
in the past hour, and the lunchtime rush was backed up for blocks around the motorcade route. Melchior was coming in from the north, so he missed most of the tie-up, but still it slowed him down, and it was after noon when he finally reached Dealey Plaza. He abandoned BC’s Rambler behind the depository and made his way around the west side of the building, figuring that if Chandler was already at the scene he’d most likely take cover in the park itself—probably in the line of trees that skirted the park’s eastern edge. It had
turned into a warm, humid day, and, what with the wig Song had packed for him, he was sweating buckets. It was almost like being back in Cuba. Fucking Cuba, where this had all started. It seemed like years ago, but it had only been a month. Four fucking weeks.

But four weeks, four months, four years, four centuries, it didn’t matter, it could all come to an end in the next four minutes if he didn’t figure out what he was going to do now. Why in the
hell
had BC shown up at the house without Chandler? And how had the detective gotten the drop on Melchior, forcing him to use the tranq meant for Orpheus—who, presumably, had followed what was otherwise a pretty obvious trail of bread crumbs leading straight to the Book Depository. All Melchior had now was a vial of acid and the Thorazine-phenmetrazine combo that protected his brain from Chandler’s when the latter’s was souped up. Oh, and the dart-shooting umbrella Ivelitsch’s techies had cooked up for him. He had that, too. He was going to have to wing it.

As he came around the side of the depository he saw that a substantial crowd had gathered in Dealey Plaza. Spectators sat on a grassy ridge this side of Elm, and more stood along both curbs. At least a hundred people were in Dealey Plaza itself. Dozens of them had cameras out, and Melchior saw one man with an eight-millimeter movie camera aimed at the gap between the two courthouses at the top of the park. That’s what he should have had Ivelitsch rig up. Not a ridiculous umbrella that managed to shoot a single dart at a time, but a bullet-shooting camera. Something that would give you a chance to fight your way out, if it came to that. Oh well. Next time.

He slipped a beret from his pocket and pulled it low on his forehead, added a pair of glasses with thick black rims, then eased himself into the crowd. He was conscious of the Book Depository on his left, row upon row of open windows looking straight down on him. For the next several minutes he was wide open. It was all up to Caspar. Either he was loyal to Melchior, and he would wait for the president to show, or someone had supplanted him in Caspar’s esteem—Scheider, the Wiz, Giancana, who knows, maybe even Ivelitsch himself—in which case Melchior was dead to rights. Here’s hoping Caspar’s marksmanship hadn’t improved in the last few years.

“All right, Chandler,” he said under his breath. “Show yourself.”

Chandler wasn’t sure
how long the void had been there before he felt it. Two minutes? Ten? It crept up on him like white noise until suddenly it was all he could hear.

Melchior.

But where was he? It was hard to pinpoint a silence, especially in the midst of so much commotion. He barely had any juice left and didn’t want to waste it. He did his best to ignore his brain, searched the crowd with his eyes instead. The feeling came from the north, toward the depository, and he began to make his way in that direction as stealthily as he could.

It was hard to see people’s faces because everyone was turned toward the eastern edge of the park, waiting for the first sign of the president’s motorcade. (Funny word, motorcade, he thought as he walked past a young black man sitting on the grass eating a sandwich. Probably supposed to be a combination of motor and parade, but it sounded more like a combination of motor and arcade—a shooting gallery—which didn’t make any sense when you thought about it.) He searched the sides of people’s faces, their physical profiles, anyone big enough to be Melchior. He found himself staring at a lot of plump women with beehives—what more unexpected disguise could there be for a man as aggressively masculine as Melchior? But unless he’d found a way to alter the shape of his face, none of the women was him.

Suddenly it came to him. Cavalcade. That’s where the cade in motorcade came from.

Jesus Christ, Chandler, he said to himself. That’s really not important right now.
Focus
.

He made his way closer to Elm. On the far side of the street, on the edge of a grassy embankment, a large man carrying a closed umbrella
¹⁵
caught his attention. The man was staring right at him, holding his umbrella in the middle so that it pointed out from his abdomen, and Chandler mistook it for a gun at first. He started to look away, then glanced back at the man’s face. A black beret was pulled down over a dense cap of stiff, straight black hair, and the rims of the man’s glasses were nearly as thick as a raccoon’s mask. Chandler had been looking for
an elaborate disguise, but now he saw that the simplest could be just as effective: he wasn’t 100 percent positive it was Melchior until the rogue spy smiled at him.

Chandler kept his eyes on Melchior’s hands as he crossed the street, but the big man merely stood there with that smile on his face. He heard motorcycles a few blocks away, a sputtering rumble punctuated by frequent backfires pulsing out of the canyon of Main Street. People strained to see the president and First Lady. Their thoughts flitted through Chandler’s head like whispers from a hidden PA system.
Almost here
, he heard, and
I wonder if she’s as pretty in real life
, and
He may be a Yankee and a papist, but he’s still the president
, and then, louder than all these other thoughts, more desperate: