Shift: A Novel (57 page)

“Agent Querrey? I wish you wouldn’t chew your lip like that. It’s hardly becoming in a representative of the Bureau.”

BC blinked his eyes rapidly, took a moment to consider everything the director had just told him. He’d never heard of Hoover telling a joke. He’d heard that Hoover had interfered with American citizens in left-wing groups in clear violation of their First Amendment rights. He’d heard also that Hoover had cut deals with gangsters in Chicago, New York, and Miami to the effect that if they confined their business to prostitution and narcotics and a little bit of honest graft at the dockyards—and continued to maintain a hardline anti-Communist stance—he wouldn’t sic the Bureau on them. He’d heard that Hoover’s mania for keeping up appearances was a reaction to his father’s nervous breakdown, that his hatred of miscegenation stemmed from the fact that he himself was mulatto, and that he was sexually involved with Associate Director Clyde Tolson, and was wont to sport black cocktail dresses at their all-male soirées. But he had never heard of Hoover telling a joke, and he didn’t want to know what would happen if he laughed in his boss’s face. But still:

“Orpheus?”

An actual expression flickered across the director’s face. It was hard to read, yet BC could have sworn it was consternation, as if the director had been caught out. “The code name for the project,” he said, waving a hand as if the term were of no importance. “As with all CIA terminology, its meaning is unclear. It seems to be used variously to refer to the drug, the ‘receptor’ in the brain to which the drug is meant to ‘bind,’ and the person to whom the drug is administered.”

The director paused. He was not generous with his time, and this had already been a long briefing. His mouth pursed, his cheeks stretched like egg whites beaten to within an inch of their life. Then:

“We find ourselves in a curious position, Agent Querrey. On the one hand, we have ridiculous claims of chemically engineered secret agents that, on the face of it, defy credulity. On the other, we have evidence of ten years’ worth of CIA experiments on a single compound, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars and at least one life lost. And, finally, we have a supporting cast of players who all bear watching. This Timothy Leary character was kicked out of West Point and three or four subsequent colleges, and earlier this year attempted to found something that looked like a Communist cult in Mexico. Billy Hitchcock has simply extraordinary amounts of capital, not to mention influential positions on the boards of several of the nation’s top banks and a desire to leave his mark on the world. And then there’s the breakthrough itself. As I stated, we don’t know its exact nature, but we do know it centers around two persons who are, shall we say, of interest to the American intelligence community. The first is a young woman by the name of Nazanin Haverman, whose parents were killed for aiding CIA in the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh’s Communist regime in Persia, and who may well bear animus against this country for failing to protect them. The second is a man named Chandler Forrestal, nephew of the late secretary of war—and one of the founders of CIA—James Forrestal. Both the secretary and his brother John, Chandler’s father, took their own lives, the former in response to the failure of Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s plan to liberate the Ukraine from the Soviet Union, and the latter in response to his failure to successfully negotiate the business world. In addition to suggesting a family history of mental instability, this personal history also gives Chandler as good a reason as Miss Haverman to hold a grudge against the United States. So I submit to you that, though the possibility of any sort of science fiction–type success with this Orpheus project is extraordinarily slim, it still behooves the Bureau to investigate. Given the family connections borne by Messrs. Forrestal and Hitchcock—oh, and Miss Haverman is the goddaughter of Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of Teddy—it also calls for extreme discretion, which is why you were especially chosen for the task. You have a reputation for curmudgeonly reticence that would be seen as an indication of antisocial tendencies in anyone other than an agent of the Counter Intelligence Program, where it is instead admirable.”

Hoover paused, and glanced at his watch.

“The ten twenty-seven will get you into Pennsylvania Station at three fifty-eight,” he said in a voice that had slipped back into its executive tone. “An agent will have a car waiting for you. If you beat rush hour, you should make it there without difficulty. I had one of Clyde’s boys fill a suitcase for you, so you can leave immediately.”

BC heard heavy footsteps behind him, turned to see the tall, athletic form of Associate Director Tolson walking out of the Vault with one of his—well, his mother’s—suitcases. The suitcase had been in his mother’s—well, his—bedroom, in the closet, behind a box of Eddie Bauer, L.L. Bean, and Sears and Roebuck catalogs that had accumulated since his mother died. Certain pages had been dogeared in these catalogs, displaying items of clothing that, let’s just say, wouldn’t have fit BC, and he searched Associate Director Tolson’s face to see if “his boy” had reported this to him. But all the associate director said was:

“Agent McClain says your underwear drawer is better organized than Miss Gandy’s files. He also tells me you have a very nice Hepplewhite secretary.”

The secretary was in the downstairs study, where, presumably, Agent McClain had not expected to find any clothes needed for a weekend trip. BC wondered when McClain had broken into his house. It was barely nine thirty, after all. He must have been waiting outside for BC to go to work this morning.

“It’s, ah, it’s a reproduction.”

The associate director shrugged. “Although the director has quite a passion for antiques, they were never really my thing.”

BC thought about saying “It’s a reproduction” again. He didn’t.

“One last thing,” the director said. BC turned back to the desk and, with a sinking heart, saw that a book had materialized in Hoover’s hand. The slant of his smile had grown especially long, slicing open his pasty face like a baked potato. “You’ll need some reading material for the train.”

Forty-eight minutes after he left J. Edgar Hoover’s office, BC was seated in the smoke-filled first-class compartment of the 10:27 bound for New York’s Pennsylvania Station. An officious Negro conductor, his uniform as square on his shoulders as a Marine’s dress blues, helped BC get settled. He punched his ticket, stowed his suitcase in the overhead rack, folded BC’s coat and placed it beside the bag, then laid his hat atop the coat. Finally he lowered the table between BC’s seat and the empty one across from it and set a small foil ashtray on it. He performed each of his tasks with the methodical slowness of someone who marks time not in seconds and minutes but in actions repeated thousands of times a day.

“Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?” the conductor said, already turning away, and BC only shook his head at the stiff fabric stretching between the man’s shoulders. Before his time in Counter Intelligence, BC would have hardly noticed the man, but ten months of surveilling civil rights meetings in chapels and gymnasiums and dusty fairgrounds across Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi had made him acutely conscious of the people who opened doors for him, took his tickets, brought him food, washed his clothes, and generally stepped to one side when he walked down the street. BC wouldn’t have described himself as a warm person, let alone empathetic; he was quite aware that he was a stiff, shy man who immersed himself in his job the same way this Negro conductor hid inside his uniform. But he prided himself on being polite, especially to his inferiors, and he was deeply disturbed by the thought that he’d spent the last twenty-seven years unwittingly offending a segment of society whose lot in life was hard enough as it was. That he didn’t recognize this disturbance as guilt speaks to the times as much as the person, but even so, he couldn’t help but stare at the conductor as he worked his way down the aisle. BC wondered how deep a grudge the man bore, how sharp. Did he harbor dreams of racial equality or just revenge? Well, probably neither. Not this man. He wore his ridiculous uniform (brass buttons, gold braids, a flat-topped cap with a shiny black visor) like an embarrassing chastity belt that nonetheless protected him from the world’s unwanted advances. It was pretty clear his only desire was to get through the day unscathed, and the next, and the next, and the next, until he was finally eligible for his pension.

BC’s briefcase, filled with a half dozen vague-looking reports on Leary and LSD and something called “The Orphic Flag,” sat next to his seat, but he had chosen to pull out the director’s parting gift instead, deeming it the least far-fetched of his choices of reading material.

The Man in the High Castle
by Philip K. Dick. It sat on the fold-out table before him like a fish waiting to have its belly slit so it could be boned. Well,
de
-boned. Beau-Christian Querrey was not exactly known for his boning.

The black cover had large graphics of the flags of imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, as well as the tagline, or subtitle: “An electrifying novel of our world as it might have been.” Since every novel was essentially a story of the world “as it might have been,” this struck BC as a particularly pointless addendum, even for a work of science fiction.

He traced the book’s edges with his fingertips. His “book reports” had started ten months ago, concurrent with his transfer to COINTELPRO. The genesis had been peculiar, to say the least. In June 1961, during his regular perusal of the major East Coast papers, the agent had read an account of an unusual suicide in Boston. A Harvard freshman had thrown himself into the Charles River wearing a trench coat whose pockets were weighted with old-fashioned flatirons. The pockets had been sewn shut so the irons wouldn’t fall out, as had the coat itself, sealed with thick twine from collar to hem, as if the victim wanted to make sure he wouldn’t slip out of the garment underwater; on top of that, his shoelaces had been knotted together, which would have made swimming that much more difficult. The story pricked at BC’s consciousness, and he called the Boston field office and asked them obtain the body for forensic examination before it was interred. It turned out that the victim had freshly broken bones in both hands, which suggested he’d been in a rather serious fistfight, and cast doubt on the idea that he could have sewn himself into his own coat. There was also a note on his person, sealed in wax paper so it wouldn’t deteriorate in the water, in which the victim said he was killing himself because he felt an incestuous attraction to his sister—a rather remarkable claim, since the victim turned out to be an only child. The victim had been a frequent visitor to Harvard’s student counseling center, however, where he was known as a borderline personality with the “potential” for hallucinations, and the Boston office was reluctant to comply with BC’s request that the death be declared a homicide. BC was insistent: the murderer, he said, had recreated a scene from William Faulkner’s 1929 novel
The Sound and the Fury
, in which Quentin Compson, a mentally unbalanced Harvard freshman, kills himself because he feels attracted to his sister Caddy; the crime had even taken place on the same day as Quentin’s suicide, June 2.

With a dearth of forensic evidence and a lack of support from his superiors, BC’s only investigative lead was the press. He looked in the Boston papers first, combing through two years’ worth of issues before casting his net wider. It took nearly a month before he found what he was looking for: a series of three deaths on eastern Long Island—a hit-and-run of a young woman, and a murder-suicide involving a middle-aged man and the husband of the woman who’d died in the hit-and-run. The murdered man had been shot and was found face down in a pool; the suicide—and presumed cuckold—had then shot himself. BC was willing to admit that the tableau from
The Sound and the Fury
was a bit esoteric, but was surprised no one caught a full-scale reproduction of the climax of
Gatsby
, especially since it had taken place in Great Neck, the inspiration for Fitzgerald’s fictional town of West Egg. The
Gatsby
reenactment had occurred almost a year before the Boston murder—at the beginning of fall, just as in the novel. If the Boston drowning was the killer’s first crime since that one, it suggested he worked slowly and methodically, which meant BC should have a few months to catch him before he struck again. But as with the Faulkner recreation, there was no physical evidence. So how to anticipate the killer’s next move?

The only thing to go on was the books themselves. Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Two of the three great American writers of the first half of the century, the third being Ernest Hemingway. BC put out a call for libraries up and down the Atlantic seaboard to be on the lookout for runs on Hemingway’s books. Two weeks later he found what he was looking for: a Providence, Rhode Island, man by the name of Freddie Pyle had spent the past two months reading Hemingway’s complete oeuvre in the public library in Fall River, Massachusetts; before that he’d spent several months reading Faulkner novels, and before that—bingo!—F. Scott Fitzgerald. Agents rushed Pyle’s house, but he’d either spotted them or, even worse, had already departed to commit his next crime. The last book he’d checked out was
The First Forty-Nine Stories
(an awkward title, BC thought, but he guessed that if you only had forty-nine stories then, well, you only had forty-nine stories, though surely a fiftieth would have come along eventually). The agent spent a feverish day and night scrutinizing every story, every sentence, every word in the volume. The first two crimes had been site-specific, so there was every reason to assume the next one would be as well. The only problem was, Hemingway didn’t seem to have written a story set on the East Coast. It was only on his third go-through that BC realized the story called “The Killers” took place in a town called Summit. There was a Summit, New Jersey, forty-five minutes outside New York City. The Bureau thought it was a long shot and wanted to place a call to the local PD and leave it at that, but BC knew he was right. He took a sick day—his first in four years—and raced to New Jersey.