Shift: A Novel

by Tim Kring

  Melchior looked down at the blueprint again. At the time, he hadn’t been sure why he didn’t give it to Everton. Oh sure, he was pissed off. But he’d been pissed off at the Company a million times before, over substantive issues, like the refusal to support the Hungarian uprising in ’56 or the idiocy of sending fourteen hundred poorly trained men into Cuba on the heels of a wildly popular revolution. But now he knew that he could’ve never given the paper to Everton. Not even if Everton had shaken his hand and offered him the country’s thanks and given him a corner office and a secretary who didn’t wear panties. Because Melchior didn’t work for Everton and he didn’t work for the Company and he didn’t work for the United States of America. He worked for the Wiz, and even after Drew Everton had stared at him like a Klansman looking at a black man with his dick in the lily-white pussy of Mrs. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Melchior would’ve still walked across that wide green lawn beneath the shade of the towering beeches and up the bluestone steps flanked by those Doric columns and handed that piece of paper to the Wiz. All the Wiz had to do was cock a finger at him, say “Git on up here, boy,” as though he were calling his dog for dinner.

  “Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest,” Melchior said to the empty car. Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself.

  The Wiz hadn’t taught him Latin, but he’d taught him that phrase. But that wasn’t the Wiz up there.

  The Wise Men were on their own.

  Camagüey Province, Cuba

  November 1, 1963

  Maria Bayo trembled before the tall man in the gray suit. He wasn’t a particularly big man—he was in fact as lean as a knife—and he’d done nothing to threaten the eleven-year-old. But there was something dead about his gray eyes and hair so blond it was the color of ice, and inside the gray suit his wiry body was taut as an icicle. Maria had never seen an icicle, but she thought it must be the worst thing in the world: water rendered hard as steel, and just as sharp.

  “What is this barn used for?” the iceman said in heavily accented Spanish—the same Spanish used by the soldiers who wore uniforms with the hammer and sickle in their insignia.

  Maria looked back at the car the iceman had driven her in. She hadn’t wanted to get in the car with him, but she had wanted to get out of it even less when she saw where he was taking her.

  “It’s a mill, señor,” Maria said, looking back at the car, gauging how long it would take her to run to it. “No one uses it since the revolution.”

  “There are tire tracks leading to the door, fresh bullet holes in the wall.”

  Long before the Communists came to power, Cuba’s proletariat had learned to hide things from whoever was running the country. Whether it was a party official or tax man or sugar hacendado, the people in power made their money off the backs of the poor. But Maria was too scared to lie. Too scared to lie well anyway. Her brother had disappeared, and she was afaid she would disappear too.

  “Maybe it was the American in the village. I never saw him in a truck, though.”

  “How do you know he was American?”

  “He wasn’t hungry.”

  The iceman nodded, then leaned close to her. “And how do you know it was a truck, if you never saw it?”

  “N-n-no one from my village comes here, señor. The dogs guard it. They kill anyone who comes close.”

  “Dogs?”

  “The wild dogs.” Maria’s head swiveled around, as if just mentioning the dogs could bring them. “They say the ones who guard this barn developed a taste for human flesh. Even one bite from them will make you sick.”

  Pavel Semyonovitch Ivelitsch paused. His men had shot four of the animals when they arrived this morning—mangy skin-and-bones wraiths with sores all over their bodies. The men said the dogs had stalked them as though they were a herd of deer or tapir. They’d found a couple of human skeletons, too. Ivelitsch had assumed the dogs were rabid. But now he was wondering.

  “Maybe the man was in a truck with something like this in the back?” He drew on the ground, a complex arrangement of squares and tubes.

  Maria shrugged. “There are many trucks, but usually they are covered. Farmers want to hide their produce from the inspectors so they can keep some for the black market.”

  “That is bad Communism.”

  “Yes, but good for their wallets, and their stomachs.”

  The iceman smiled, but at the same time he was using his shoe to rub out the image in the dirt. He moved his foot methodically back and forth until every trace of the drawing had been completely erased—so completely that Maria wished she hadn’t seen it, because he clearly wanted it to remain secret.

  Just then Sergei Vladimirovich Maisky came out of the barn, the wand of a Geiger counter dangling from his hand like a golf club. He took off his headphones and scratched his bald, sunburned scalp.

  “Nothing, sir.”

  Ivelitsch had a hunch.

  “Wave your wand over the dogs.”

  “The dogs, sir?” Sergei Vladimirovich was a thin, bookish man, and his lip curled in disgust.

  “Humor me.”

  Sergei Vladimirovich walked over to the motley pile half hidden by some bushes. The carcasses hadn’t begun to smell, but there were so many flies buzzing around them that they could be heard from twenty feet away.

  Seeing the pile, Maria’s eyes went wide with horror and she crossed herself. “You shouldn’t have killed the dogs. They will only send worse next time.”

  Ivelitsch, who’d seen the mutilated corpse of her brother, thought perhaps the little girl was right, but he said nothing. He watched his man wave the Geiger counter over the grisly pile. After less than a minute Sergei Vladimirovich turned and ran back to Ivelitsch.

  “You were right, comrade!” he yelled in Russian. “All of them! Trace amounts of radiation!”

  Ivelitsch turned back to Maria. He squatted down, being careful not to put the knees of his suit on the dirt, and took one of her hands in his. It was a hot day, but his hand was as cold as the Arctic fields she imagined had spawned him.

  “Do you know anyone who has been made sick by these dogs?”

  Maria opened her mouth but nothing came out.

  Ivelitsch squeezed her hand. Not enough to hurt. Just enough to press the chill to the bone.

  “Listen to me, little girl. I am the man they sent to take the place of the dogs, and it will be much better for you and your neighbors if you tell me what I need to know.”

  Maria swallowed. “M-my uncle.”

  “Take me to him.”

  Washington, DC

  November 4, 1963

  As part of the privileges of his first-class ticket, the tall young man in the gray suit was helped into his seat on the 10:27 Pennsylvania Railroad bound for New York City by an elderly Negro conductor decked out in full livery—brass buttons, gold braids, a flat-topped cap with a shiny visor. The conductor projected officiousness and obsequiousness in equal measure as he punched the young man’s ticket, stowed his suitcase in the overhead rack, and laid his hat atop it. Finally he lowered the table between the man’s seat and the empty one across from it and set a foil ashtray atop faux wood-grained plastic.

  “Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?”

  The conductor was already turning away, his uniform as square on his shoulders as a Marine’s dress blues, and, although the young man would have liked an RC Cola, he only shook his head at the stiff fabric stretching across the man’s retreating back.

  At twenty-five, Beau-Christian Querrey couldn’t have looked more like a G-man if he’d tried. Six-one, narrow waist, shoulders broad as a yoke; dark suit, white shirt, skinny black tie held in place with a brass clip. A buzz cut crowned the whole package, number one on the back and sides, three-quarters of an inch left on top. Though the effect was probably meant to be martial, there was something about his high forehead and wide, wondering eyes that made it seem like a little boy’s first-day-of-school crew cut.

  Despite outward appear
ances, however, he didn’t feel like an FBI agent. Hadn’t felt like one for the past year, since he’d been “promoted” from Behavioral Profiling to the Counterintelligence Program. But this latest assignment took the cake.

  He sighed now, set his briefcase on the table, opened it. On the left sat a stack of folders held together with typewritten labels: MK-ULTRA16 and ORPHEUS, GATE OF. On the right sat a hardcover book: The Man in the High Castle7 by Philip K. Dick. The black cover depicted the flags of imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, as well as the tagline: “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. Nevertheless, in light of his morning meeting with Director Hoover4, it seemed the less far-fetched of his two choices for reading material, and, sighing again, he placed it on the table, snapped his briefcase closed, and set it in the aisle beside his seat.

  Before he could crack the cover, however, a commotion at the far end of the car distracted him. He looked up to see the Negro conductor with his hand on the shoulder of a large, suety figure in a wrinkled navy blazer. BC was surprised at the old man’s boldness. They were still forty miles due south of the Mason-Dixon Line, after all, sixty by the train tracks.

  “Sorry, son,” the conductor said in a weary voice, “you got to ride in the lead car till the train reaches Bal’more.”

  The big man turned beneath the conductor’s hand like a statue rotating on a plinth. You could practically hear stone grinding against stone as he pivoted on the soles of—BC wasn’t sure what you’d call the shoes he was wearing. Some kind of woven sandals, the leather worn away almost to nothing. The man’s dark hair had been brilliantined to his skull, but even so the distinctive ringlets were visible. His nose was thick, his lips full, his skin olive-colored, as they say, but an olive not fully ripened—if he was a Negro, as the conductor had assumed, he was a watery specimen of the race. But the more BC looked at him, the more he thought it just as likely that the man was simply a swarthy white fellow, in which case—

  The conductor’s eyes widened as he realized his error, and he shrank within his uniform. BC prayed the passenger would handle the situation with dignity, but, given the man’s appearance—not just the swarthiness and slovenliness, but the flush that had turned his cheeks from olive to tomato—that didn’t seem likely.

  “What did you just say to me, boy?”

  The accosted man’s large, powerful frame outlined the conductor in wrinkled shadow. He tapped his finger into the side of the conductor’s head hard enough to knock the older man’s cap askew.

  “I ast you a question, boy.”

  The conductor’s head wobbled up and down as though his cap had grown too heavy for his neck to support.

  “I’m sorry, sir. Here, sir, let me take your briefcase—”

  “You touch my case and I’ll break your arm, boy. Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. There’s a nice seat—”

  “Get outta my sight before I have you strung up behind the pump house so I can beat the black off your ass.” The big man elbowed past the conductor and lumbered down the aisle.

  Please, BC said to himself, don’t let him sit—

  “Goddamn uppity niggers.” The man dropped into the seat opposite BC. Knees the size of cannonballs collided with his, bumping the fold-out table so hard the foil ashtray flew away like a flying saucer. The man slapped his briefcase on the table’s quivering surface. “I blame Martin Luther King.”

  A pause while he spun the dials of the lock on his briefcase, a loud click as it snapped open. He opened the case and riffled through what sounded like a ream of wadded paper.

  “What the hell are you staring at?”

  “P-pardon me,” BC stuttered. “I just—”

  “And get me a goddamn rum toddy!” the man hollered over his shoulder. “Goddamn nigger calls me out in front of a respectable crowd of my peers, I need a drink, I don’t care if it is ten thirty in the goddamn morning.”

  The briefcase snapped closed, and the man began setting out items on its scarred surface with ritualistic precision: an aluminum humidor sized for a single cigar; a box of wooden matches; and, instead of a cutter, a small, well-worn, pearl-handled pocketknife.

  BC stole another glance at the man’s face. Noted again the tinge of color. The full lips, broad nose, small ears, the tight curl of his hair. Really, it was anyone’s guess.

  “Sicilian.” BC didn’t see the man look up but suddenly his glittering black eyes were boring directly into BC’s watery blues. “Mafiosi, paisanos, and the blood of Aetna. But no darkie.”

  Caught out, BC dropped his gaze. The man was sliding a cigar from the humidor as though it were some rare species of butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. BC noted the marque on the cigar’s band: La Gloria Habana.

  “I did a stint as muscle for a couple-a casinos in Havana back in the fifties,” the man said. “Embargo or no embargo, there’s no substitute for a fine Cuban.”

  The man opened his pocketknife forty-five degrees, unwrapped the cigar, placed it in the notch between blade and handle, popped the end off with a snap as quick and clean as the jaws of a caiman. It shot straight up like a jumping jack, came to rest on the man’s closed briefcase, looking for all the world like a severed fingertip.

  BC stared at it for a long moment, then looked up to find the man watching him, an amused, contemptuous smile playing over his thick, moist lips.

  “Go on,” he said tauntingly. “Smell it.”

  Biting back his revulsion, BC picked up the nubbin and brought it to his nose. A rich, deep, spicy scent went right past his nostrils to the back of his throat, and his mouth immediately filled with water. He wanted to swallow, but didn’t want the man to see him do it, so he just sat there, the cigar-end resting beneath his nose, his mouth filling with saliva like a plugged sink with a leaky faucet.

  The man tongued the end of his cigar until it glistened like a Tootsie Roll. Only then did he reach for his matches, light one (not on the box, but on the back of his thumbnail, which was as rough as an emery board), hold it a fraction of an inch from the cigar’s tip. His lips sputtered like a landed fish as he sucked in a series of rapid inhales. Little rings of smoke erupted between each puff, till at length the cigar’s cherry glowed red as a nickel pulled from a campfire. He took a longer drag, held it in his mouth a moment, then blew a single perfect smoke ring directly at BC. Though it dissipated before it reached him, it still seemed to BC that the ring slipped around his head like a halo, or a noose.

  “So, Beau,” the man said in a voice thickened by smoke and satisfaction, “where’s J. Edna sending you today?”

  Washington, DC

  November 4, 1963

  BC’s fingers twitched and the cigar-end shot up in the air. He opened his mouth, remembered it was full of saliva and sucked it down, choked, coughed, managed to get his arm up in time, ended up splattering the sleeve of his suit with a constellation of droplets that coalesced into a black wet patch the size of a beef cutlet. A fair amount of spittle had landed on his companion’s briefcase as well and, after staring at it like a kindergartner regarding an incriminating pool of urine beneath his desk, BC pulled his sleeve into his palm and began wiping at it with slow, mortified strokes. Wool not being the most absorbent of fabrics, all this did was smear the saliva into long smooth arcs. It did, however, bring up a bit of a shine on the worn leather of the man’s briefcase.

  When the man finally stopped laughing, he nudged BC’s briefcase with the toe of one of his worn sandals. The tag lay so that the address label was exposed.

  If found, please return to:

  Beau-Christian Querrey

  c/o Federal Bureau of Investigation

  Washington 25 D.C.

  The man snickered. “I bet it says the same thing inside your underpants.”

  BC reached a hand down to
turn the address label over, as if this could somehow remove its information from his seatmate’s mind.

  “Who do you work for?”

  The man puffed on his cigar before answering. “Let’s just say we’re in related but tangential fields.”

  “You’re CIA?”

  The man’s eyes widened. “Maybe you’re not as green as you look.”

  Just then the conductor reappeared with the man’s drink—the spy’s drink, as unlikely as that seemed. The conductor unfolded a napkin on the table and set the drink on it. He had to nudge the man’s briefcase toward the window to do this, and BC could see that his fingers were shaking, half retracted inside his gold-piped maroon cuff like the limb of a frightened turtle. He put his hands behind his back after he set the drink down, then stood there. The hot rum steamed on the table, giving off an aroma of sugar and stale blood.

  The CIA man picked up the drink, drained it in one long swallow, set it back in its ring on the napkin.

  “That was so good I think I’ll have another.”

  The conductor paused, then picked up the glass. “Pardon me, sir …”

  “I can’t drink ‘pardon me, sir,’ and you can’t feed your family ’thout this job, so I suggest you hurry if you want to keep it.” He paused just long enough to make his last word gratuitous; then: “Boy.”

  “Yes, sir. It’s just that, sir, there’s a, well, you see, sir, there’s a charge—”

  “Hell’s bells, boy, why didn’t you say you was buying? Ask my friend Beau here if he wants one too.”

  “Of course, sir. But that would be two drinks, sir—”

  “It’ll be three actually, countin’ whatever Beau has. Now ask him what he wants, boy, before you end up buying everyone in this car free drinks from here to Pennsylvany Station.”

  It seemed to BC that the conductor shrank even more as he turned toward him. He was nothing but a suit now, a pair of frightened eyes.

  Before the man could ask, BC shook his head. “I’m all right, s-sir.”