Shift: A Novel (37 page)

“Oh, uh, right.” Chandler paused. “Do you think maybe you could help me with that?”

“I don’t think you’re ready for my trip, man.” The man flicked the shiny lapel of BC’s jacket. “I think it’d blow the mind of a square like you.”

“You’d be surprised.”

It took Chandler a half hour more to convince Wally to give him a taste. There was just enough LSD in the grubby little square Wally pulled from his pocket to set Chandler’s mind a-tingle, but it was enough. He was able to push Wally to give him the rest of his stash—four more light hits—and then he wandered around the park, reaching into people’s minds to see if anyone was carrying. By the time he left he had six hits of LSD, as well as three hundred dollars in cash. He hailed a cab on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Washington Square North.

“Where to?” said the old Italian man behind the wheel.

“Washington, DC.”

“You mean Penn Station?”

“No,” Chandler said. “I want you to drive me to Washington, DC. Now.”

Chandler had never
seen the gray-eyed man who stepped into the hallway of Song’s establishment, but he recognized him from the snippets he’d pulled from BC’s mind. This was the man who’d taken Naz.

The man jerked his pistol at Chandler. Chandler concentrated. The acid he’d scored in Washington Square Park was substantially weaker than the stuff Keller had been giving him, and he’d used a lot of it getting the cabbie to drive him out of New York City before ditching him at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike. He’d downed everything he had left ten minutes before he knocked on the front door of the Newport Place house. It would have to be enough. He forced his way into Ivelitsch’s mind and grabbed.

As Ivelitsch leveled his gun at Chandler, the weapon suddenly turned on its holder, hissing like a cobra. He screamed and threw it from his hands.

Chandler picked up the gun while Ivelitsch blinked in confusion—not just at what had happened with the gun, but how quickly Chandler retrieved it. He’d never seen a man move so fast.

As Chandler was aiming the gun at Ivelitsch he saw a flicker of movement to his right. Song, leaping for him with a knife in her hand. He reached, pulled, thrust.

Melchior had briefed Song on what to expect. She knew the pit that opened in the floor beneath her feet was just an illusion. But even so, the vision was too real to resist. She screamed as she fell into the void.

As Song fell to the carpet, Chandler pounced. He’d never struck a woman before, but he kicked her viciously in the head. Her skull smashed into the wainscoting and she lay inert.

Ivelitsch had recovered enough to charge. Chandler used the gun this time. He’d never shot anyone either, but he squeezed the trigger and a globe of blood burst from Ivelitsch’s shoulder. Ivelitsch slammed against the flowered wallpaper and slumped to the floor.

Chandler advanced with the gun extended. Ivelitsch’s eyes flickered up the hall, where Chul-moo’s bare legs protruded from the security booth. He saw no sign of Garrison or Junior, but it wasn’t difficult to imagine that they’d been similarly dispatched.

“Where is she?”

A trained professional, Ivelitsch didn’t react. He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it to his shoulder to stanch the flow of blood.

“Who?”

Chandler’s eyes narrowed, and he pushed as hard as he could. A wave of fire washed over Ivelitsch’s body and he screamed hysterically until Chandler relaxed. Even so, he continued rolling on the ground in an effort to douse the flames for several seconds, until Chandler kicked him onto his back and put the gun in his face.

“Where?”

Ivelitsch stared up into the face of Orpheus. It was implacable and otherworldly. The face of a man possessed by love and hatred. His flesh still scalded and he couldn’t believe he was alive.

“Wh-what
are
you?”

But Chandler didn’t respond. The answer to his question had floated to the top of Ivelitsch’s brain like a drowned corpse rising from the bottom of a lake.

A nightclub, a portly balding man. He pushed at Ivelitsch’s brain until he had a name, a location.

Jack Ruby.

The Carousel Club.

Dallas
.

He brought the butt of the pistol down as hard as he could on Ivelitsch’s skull and, like an unplugged TV, the picture snapped to black.

¹⁹

The integrity and vitality of our system is in greater jeopardy than ever before in our history. Even if there were no Soviet Union we would face the great problem of the free society, accentuated many fold in this industrial age, of reconciling order, security, the need for participation, with the requirement of freedom. We would face the fact that in a shrinking world the absence of order among nations is becoming less and less tolerable. The Kremlin design seeks to impose order among nations by means which would destroy our free and democratic system. The Kremlin’s possession of atomic weapons puts new power behind its design, and increases the jeopardy to our system. It adds new strains to the uneasy equilibrium-without-order which exists in the world and raises new doubts in men’s minds
whether the world will long tolerate this tension without moving toward some kind of order, on somebody’s terms.

The risks we face are of a new order of magnitude, commensurate with the total struggle in which we are engaged. For a free society there is never total victory, since freedom and democracy are never wholly attained, are always in the process of being attained. But defeat at the hands of the totalitarian is total defeat. These risks crowd in on us, in a shrinking world of polarized power, so as to give us no choice, ultimately, between meeting them effectively or being overcome by them.

—NSC-68, issued April 14, 1950; signed by President Truman, September 30, 1950; declassified 1975

This is a serious course upon which we embark. I would not recommend it except that the alternative is much more serious.

—Harry S. Truman, March 12, 1947

“Boo.”

The slim, russet-haired man gasped when Melchior stepped from behind the flaking bark of a sycamore tree. He stumbled backward several steps, barely managing to keep from falling. Melchior might’ve liked to think he still had that kind of effect on Caspar after all these years, but the sweet smell of whiskey carried in the warm air.

When the man had finally recovered his balance, he squinted against the shadows, his right hand already inside his jacket.

“Tommy? Is it really you?”

“Hey, Caspar,” Melchior said. “It’s been a while.”

When BC got back to the hotel and found Chandler gone, he
stared at the whorls of grime crusted beneath the radiators as though Chandler might take shape out of the shadows. But all he saw was a stack of empty suitcases—six of them, because, like a turtle, a snail even, he had to carry his clothes on his back. A rack of clothes sagged beneath the weight of the brightly colored suits and shirts and sweaters and slacks BC had purchased when he tried to reinvent himself as some kind of playboy–cum–private eye. Who in the hell did he think he was? James Bond? Sam Spade? Philip Marlowe? He wasn’t even Paul Drake, the nebbishy gumshoe Perry Mason used to do his legwork. He was just the ugly duckling who’d tried to convince himself he was a swan—or a peacock, judging by the clothes. All that was needed was a feather boa and the wardrobe would’ve fit in perfectly in a showgirl’s dressing room.

Somehow in less than three weeks he’d lost everything. Not just his job but his career. Not just his home but his inheritance. Not just Chandler and Naz: himself. How had he let Chandler slip away? And why had he run? Didn’t he realize BC had given up everything—
everything
—to help him get Naz back, to get back at Melchior and get his world back on track?

He lifted a silk tie from the riotous lattice of color that covered the bureau. The tie was black and narrow, woven of wool rather than silk. Matte rather than shiny, like a pencil line. He should just save everyone the trouble and hang himself with it.

He continued looking at the tie until suddenly it occurred to him that it was also the same color as Naz’s eyes. As her face flashed in his mind, he understood how it could captivate you. Capture you really. Take hold of your soul and never let go. He remembered the dance in her room at Madam Song’s, felt her hip bones beneath his fingertips, the gentle press of her chest against his. And he remembered the feeling
that had filled the room when Song came in. Hatred as palpable as an undertow, as toxic as poison gas, and every bit as indiscriminate.

He continued staring at the black tie, only now it reminded him of Millbrook’s shadowed forests. And then a lightbulb went on over his head: Millbrook.

It was one of the basic tenets of investigation. When you can’t go forward, go backward. He didn’t know where Chandler had gone—or where the presumed KGB agent had taken Naz—but he knew where they’d started from. And Chandler’d wanted to go to Millbrook in the first place. He knew how dangerous Melchior was: surely he wouldn’t go after him without all the LSD he could get his hands on? BC tried to tell himself it was the logical choice, but really, logic had left the building a long time ago.

He cinched the tie around his neck, just tightly enough that he felt each breath as it squeezed past the knot like an egg swallowed whole. It was uncomfortable, but it also reminded him he was alive. He grabbed his wallet, his jacket, his gun—at least Chandler had left him that—and headed for his car.

“Damn it, Chandler!” he muttered to himself as he raced for his car. “After everything I’ve
done
for you!”

Caspar’s hands twitched as he uncorked the bottle Melchior’d
brought with him—his whole body twitched, not like a drunk’s, but like a man who feels bugs crawling over his skin. He scratched and rubbed and slapped at imaginary pests, pausing only long enough to down one shot of whiskey, then a second.

“You hear ’bout the Wiz? They say Joe Scheider fried his brain. Say he sits around in his bathrobe all day and pisses his pants like a goddamn nutcase.”

“Don’t you believe it,” Melchior said, sipping at his own glass. For once he didn’t feel like drinking. “The Wiz’ll be running ops long after you and I are rotting in some unmarked grave.”

Caspar’s face lit up. “You remember when you shot him? With that slingshot? I wish you’d shot the doc. I never liked him. I liked the Wiz well enough, but I never liked Doc Scheider.”

Melchior sipped his whiskey and let Caspar talk.

“I was just Lee then, wasn’t I? No Caspar then. No Alik. No Alik Hidell or O. H. Lee. Just Lee. I liked it when I was just Lee.”

“You were all alone then.”

Caspar shook his head like a rag doll. “I had my mother. I had you, too.” The assertion was almost violent. “And I had me,” he added in a tiny, self-pitying voice. He downed another shot of whiskey. Then, smiling brightly: “I got a wife now. She had a daughter. Today.”

A wife, a daughter, Melchior thought. Another man would have said their names, but all Caspar did was smile at him hopefully, as if begging Melchior to confirm the truth of what he’d said.

“I got two daughters now,” Caspar said beseechingly.
“Two.”

“Who does?” Melchior said. “Caspar? Alik? Or Lee?”

Caspar looked at him with a stricken expression. “I do.”

Melchior tipped more whiskey into Caspar’s glass. Caspar looked at it as though it was one of Joe Scheider’s potions, then, like a good boy, took his medicine. His shirt opened as he leaned forward, and Melchior
noticed something around his neck. A string of beads. Skulls, it looked like. Hundreds of them, hanging down inside his shirt.

“They’re trying to make me do things,” Caspar said. “Not me, though. They want Caspar to do them.”

“You are Caspar.”

Caspar shook his head. “I’m Lee.”

“Marina thinks you’re Alik.”

“I’m
Lee.”

“You can be whoever you want to be.”

Caspar stared at Melchior with a stricken expression. “Alik Hidell bought the guns,” he whispered. “Not me.”