Shift: A Novel (8 page)

For the first time all morning, Melchior’s smile was genuine. This was his moment.

He reached for his shoe, but the look of disgust on Everton’s face stopped him. He’d expected that look, even if he’d imagined it on Helms’s face rather than some mid-level functionary’s. Indeed, he’d planned the whole meeting around it. Had resurrected the ridiculous suit and sandals Segundo had given him and chosen an especially fragrant pair of socks so that the paper in his shoe would acquire a healthy tang of foot stink.

There was the look, just as he’d planned. The only problem was, it had nothing to do with Melchior’s attire, Melchior’s action, Melchior’s words, and everything to do with Melchior himself. Melchior’d seen the same expression on the faces of countless anti–Civil Rights demonstrators in the newspapers he’d been reading since he got back. It was the face of a primly dressed white girl as she threw a tomato at a black boy walking into her school in Georgia. It was the face of a uniformed police officer siccing his German shepherd on a black man attempting to use the whites-only entrance of a cafe in Mississippi. It was the face of George Wallace taking the oath of office as governor of Alabama: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Despite all the whispers referring to him as the Wiz’s pickaninny—whispers that started, he knew, with the Wiz himself—Melchior had always done his duty to Company and country, and even if he’d often felt like a second-class citizen, he’d never felt
black
. But now he knew: as far as CIA was concerned, he was just as much a nigger as Medgar Evers.

His foot was still in the air, the sandal half off his heel. He let it
hang there for one more moment, then reached down and slipped it back on, placed his foot firmly on the floor.

Everton’s hands and face relaxed, and watery pink replaced greenish white as the blood flooded to his skin.

“I want to be completely candid with you. Deputy Director Helms didn’t meet with you today because he was busy. He didn’t meet with you because you are not worth his time. You are the product of a failed experiment on the part of the former occupant of this office. You and your fellow ‘Wise Men.’”

“Caspar,” Melchior said, his voice dangerously quiet. “Balthazar.”

“I don’t care if your names are Huey, Dewey, and Louie. Deputy Director Helms feels it’s time the Company got out of science fiction and secret wars and returned to the business of gathering intelligence. The Wiz Kids were the first of the Company’s ridiculous experiments
²⁰
, from which sprang Bluebird, Artichoke, Ultra, and now Orpheus. It’s only fitting that the first should clean up the last.”

Melchior’s eyes narrowed.

“Orpheus?”

Everton was silent a moment. Then: “Did you ever meet Cord Meyer’s ex-wife, Mary?”

“Are you kidding? I never even met Cord.”

“Oh, that’s right. The Wiz liked to keep you out of the spotlight. Or, who knows, maybe you kept yourself out of the spotlight.”

“Who knows?” Melchior said. “So what’s the trouble with Mrs. Meyer?”

“She’s sleeping with the president.”

Melchior shrugged. “From what I heard, you could open a rival to the Rockettes with the girls Jack Kennedy’s bagged since he got in the White House.”

“Be that as it may,” Everton said, “none of the other girls are slipping him LSD.”
¹⁸

Melchior didn’t react for a moment. Then he leaned forward, retrieved his hat, and set it on his head.

“None of the other girls
is
slipping him LSD,” he said, smiling beneath the brim of his hat. “None of the other girls
is.”

Chandler found it disconcerting to have to look up at Eddie
Logan. The last time he’d seen him, Percy Logan’s little brother had been as short as a walking stick and almost as thin. Outwardly at least, he’d become a man.

Logan attempted to keep a neutral look on his face, but a smirk flicked at the corner of his mouth.

“Well well well,” he said as his eyes took in the whole of Chandler’s book-lined cave. “How the mighty have fallen.”

It had been so long since Chandler thought of himself as one of “the mighty” that Logan’s words didn’t really hit home. But the tone—especially coming from someone he still thought of as a pipsqueak—the tone stung.

“You must feel clever,” Chandler said. “Vindicated. What’s it been? Eleven years, three months, nineteen days?” There was an awkward pause after this figure rolled off Chandler’s tongue. Something prompted him to give the rest of it. “And three hours. And thirteen minutes.”

Logan’s eyebrows twitched. “Jesus Christ, Chandler, we were kids. You don’t think I’ve held a grudge for—how long? Eleven years, three months, eighteen—”

“Nineteen.”

A bemused smile crossed Logan’s face and he shook his head slowly. “If you want to know the truth, I was casing establishments for Naz when I saw you slumped over a martini at the King’s Head. I guess I couldn’t resist.”

“‘Casing establishments’? You were pimping her is what you were doing!”

“If the shoe fits—”

Chandler was up before he knew it. Had grabbed Logan by the lapels and, despite the fact that the former pipsqueak was now several inches taller than him, slammed him against the wall.

“How many other girls have you done this to? In how many other cities? Do you have girls skulking around bars in Greenwich Village and Georgetown, too? Maybe a little West Coast action?”

“Most girls think it’s fun.” Logan’s voice was tight.

“Fun?!”
Chandler’s knuckles were white on Logan’s lapels. “Your little bit of power’s gone to your head.”

“Nobody made Naz do anything she wasn’t already doing. Least of all me. Or did she leave that part out?”

“Let him go, Chandler.” Naz’s hand was on his shoulder, and it seemed to Chandler that she wanted him to let go of more than Logan. He held Eddie’s gaze for another moment, then released him. As soon as he stepped away, Naz put herself where he had been, and, though she didn’t touch Logan, her manner made Chandler’s seem benign by comparison.

“What did you
do
to us, Agent Logan? We have a right to know.”

The fury pouring off Naz was so palpable that Logan seemed to shrink against the wall. “Well now,” he said hoarsely. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it?”

Chandler put his hand on Naz’s elbow and drew her away from the wall. Logan relaxed visibly.

“Naz said there was some kind of drug in our drink.”

Logan took a moment to smooth his lapels with hands that were still shaking slightly. “Lysergic acid diethylamide. LSD for short. Or acid, as some of its more visionary users are starting to refer to it. That was the base of the concoction anyway. But the boys in Technical Services are like chefs—always adding a dash of this and a pinch of that. Only they know what the final formula was. Naz was only supposed to give it to
you
, but I guess she was feeling adventurous.”

“I don’t care what it’s called or what it’s made of. I want to know what it
does.”

Logan shook his head. “The real question is, what happened with you and Naz? Because I’ve seen dozens of different reactions—”

Chandler harrumphed here, and Logan colored visibly.

“—but I’ve never seen two people just stare into each other’s eyes for nearly five hours as though they were reading each other’s minds.”

Naz and Chandler would have made bad spies: at Logan’s last
phrase, they couldn’t help but look at each other, then look hurriedly away. For the first time since he’d arrived, Logan smiled.

“O the subtlety!”

Naz cleared her throat. “There was—”

“Naz, don’t!” Chandler stopped her. “You don’t know these people. Once they get their claws into you, they never let go.”

“Oh, I
know
, Chandler.” Naz’s bitterness was so strong that he had to step back from her. “But he’s all we’ve got.”

They stared at each other for a long moment. Finally Chandler nodded, and Naz turned back to Logan.

“There was a … connection. A mental connection.”

“Huh,” Logan said. “In spy school, they teach us that reluctant interviewees tend to understate the facts, often by eighty or ninety percent. If that statistic is true, then I’m guessing you guys experienced something like full-on telepathy.” He snorted at the absurdity of what he’d just said, but Naz didn’t snort, and neither did Chandler.

“Was that a possibility?” Chandler said in a level voice.

Logan just stared at him a moment, then shook his head as if to clear it.

“It depends who you talk to. Talk to Joe Scheider, he’ll say don’t be crazy, we’re just trying to make a truth serum, a knockout potion, maybe our own Manchurian candidate. But talk to Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, that lot, they’ll tell you the sky’s the limit. Telepathy, the astral plane, naked walks on the rings of Saturn.” He looked between Naz and Chandler and shook his head again. “If you’d backed me into a corner and forced me to pick sides, I guess I’d’ve gone with the headshrinker. But there you go. Sometimes even the beatniks can be right.”

Chandler nodded. “What’s the Gate of Orpheus?”

Logan glanced at Chandler sharply.

“How did you—”

“I pulled it out of your head,” Chandler said coldly, “when you were jerking off on the other side of the mirror.”

Logan’s cheeks turned bright red. His mouth opened, then closed.

“Jesus Christ.” He shook his head incredulously. “Look, all I know—”

He broke off again, his jaw hanging open as the magnitude of what
had happened settled into his brain. Nearly a minute passed before he took a deep breath and started speaking again.

“All I know is that some scientists have theorized the existence of a receptor in the brain. Just as certain people have unusually keen senses of smell or taste or rhythm, the hypothesis went, so other people might have retained some vestigial receptiveness to ergot alkaloids, which is what LSD is made from. Ergot’s a fungus that affects most grains. It’s one of those things like alcohol—its existence is so enmeshed with human civilization that most people have developed a genetic resistance to it. But, just as many Indians are especially susceptible to the effects of alcohol because they didn’t evolve with it, it seemed possible that there might also be a population, albeit a much smaller one, similarly sensitive to ergotism. Even its proponents admitted that the possibility was remote, but the consequences if it proved true were so profound that the Company couldn’t ignore it. We know the Soviets are conducting their own experiments, and we can’t risk falling behind.”

It was a moment before anyone spoke. Then Naz said:

“So how do we find out if Chandler possesses this receptor?”

Logan looked at Naz as if he’d forgotten she was in the room.

“We take a little road trip,” Logan said. “It’s time you two met LSD’s fairy godfather.”

Melchior sat in the front seat of the battered Chevy he’d pulled
from the garage beneath the Adams Morgan apartment. A hand-me-down from the Wiz, who’d driven it for half a dozen years, then passed it to his eldest son, then his youngest, then handed off what was left—rust held together by paint and prayers—to Melchior. You had to hand it to the good folks at General Motors: Melchior had hooked up the battery, and the jalopy started right up.

The radio was on. The speaker spat out angry white and defiant black voices calling one another names—nigger, redneck—in Bum Fuck, Alabama, or Shit Hole, Mississippi, the insults and epithets interrupted by hopeful or sentimental or otherwise naively wishful songs: “One Fine Day,” “Be My Baby,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” along with the indecipherable but infectious “Louie Louie.”

Outside the window, a big white house sat on the far side of a wide lawn. Picket fence, towering beeches, four Doric columns holding up the porch: the Wiz hadn’t missed a detail in his colonial fantasia. Revolutions had been planned behind those paneled doors, assassinations, infiltrations, arms sales to ex-Nazis and Muslim extremists, yet it was hard to imagine anything more coming through them than a smartly dressed housewife with her arms around a pair of well-coifed children, the beaming face of a Negro maid looking over their shoulders.

Something was coming through the door now. Something as far from that dream of domestic bliss as it was from the equally unreal world of international espionage and covert ops.

Melchior could only look at it in bits and pieces. A bathrobe. A cane. Licks of gray hair sticking out like antennas from a mostly bald head. The Negro servant was there, though. A man, not a woman, guiding the shaking figure like a parent teaching a toddler to walk. A toddler with a bottle of bourbon in his right hand and a dark patch in the middle of his half-open robe. Melchior had photographed the bodies of thirteen schoolchildren killed by an errant rocket in the mountains
of rural Guatemala, had picked up the pieces of a Company agent after the man walked by a Saigon cafe just as a shrapnel bomb went off, but he couldn’t look at the Wiz. Not like this.

Instead he looked down at the seat next to him. A creased sheet of paper sat on the passenger’s side. The blueprint had been through a lot in the past five days. There was a bullet hole in the upper-left quadrant, a few drops of dried blood in the lower left. The creases from the time it had spent folded in his shoe were so deep they’d rendered the diagram all but useless—that is, if you wanted to attempt to duplicate what had been drawn there. But you could see what it depicted just fine.

He looked up at the porch. The man in the bathrobe was talking animatedly to no one, gesticulating so wildly with his bottle that twelve-year-old bourbon splashed all over him. A part of Melchior wanted to walk up there and pour the whole bottle over the decrepit figure and set it on fire. The Wiz would have wanted him to do it. The Wiz would have put the lighter in his hands. But that wasn’t the Wiz up there. The Wiz would’ve recognized his own car. The Wiz would have told him to get his ass up there and have a drink. Of course, the Wiz would have made him use the back door, but that was the Wiz for you: you could take the boy out of Mississippi, but, as the plantation house testified, you couldn’t take Mississippi out of the boy.