Shift: A Novel

by Tim Kring

  Melchior came closer to gulping than he ever had in his life.

  “What I’m saying, Mr. Giancana, is that if you take this bomb off my hands, I’ll take care of your Kennedy problem. For good.”

  Two hours later, he called Song from Midway. Ivelitsch answered, and before Melchior could say anything, the Russian relayed what had happened at Peggy Hitchcock’s apartment in New York. The story seemed fuzzy to Melchior, like a TV station on a rainy day, but he was too wired to pay it any real attention. He was so jumpy after his interview with Giancana he was practically twitching.

  “Yeah, whatever, Pavel, great men you’ve got working for you. I don’t give a shit right now. Put Song on.”

  There was a disgruntled pause, the sound of muffled voices, then Song came on the phone.

  “Is this line secure?” Melchior asked.

  “We change it every month.”

  “It’s the nineteenth. The Company’s had nearly three weeks to tap it, if they’re watching you. Is this line fucking secure?”

  “Calm down, Melchior. Why would CIA be watching me?”

  “Because they’re watching me. Jesus Christ, get with the program.”

  “Melchior—”

  “Look, just shut up and listen. Things are gonna happen fast now, or they’re not gonna happen at all. Our friend in the Windy City tells me you know Jack Ruby.”13

  There was a pause. Song’s frustration came through the line like radiation.

  “Song!” Melchior could barely keep from shouting. “Do you know Jack Ruby? The Carousel Club? Dallas fucking Texas?”

  “I don’t exactly know him,” Song said coldly. “The Carousel gets its dancers through the Guild of Variety Artists—the Strippers Union—which is run out of Chicago, if you take my meaning. I once sent our friend in Chicago a rather beautiful blonde to dance for him at a private party. Somehow Ruby got wind of it and developed the notion that I’m in the habit of supplying girls to every whiskey-soaked dance club from here to Vegas.”

  “Yeah, well, his dream’s about to come true. I want you to call him and tell him you’re sending Nancy to Dallas. Chul-moo is your pilot, right?”

  “Yes—”

  “Bring her in your plane. We’re gonna need it afterward. Just the three of you. There’s a little strip in north Dallas called Addison. Use that one instead of Love Field.”

  “After what? And what’s wrong with Love?”

  “Jesus Christ, Song, are you out of your fucking mind! Air Force One is gonna be at Love. The place’ll be crawling with Secret Service.”

  “Melchior? What the hell are you planning?”

  “You’ll know soon enough. Now, get your ass to Dallas. Just you, Chulmoo, Nancy, and the plane. Got it?”

  “I can’t just close up shop for a couple of days to ferry—”

  Melchior banged the receiver against the side of the booth.

  “Are you fucking listening to me, Song? If this works, you’re going to be closing permanently. Now, call Ruby, tell him you’re sending Nancy to Dallas, and get your ass down there!”

  The phone was silent so long that Melchior wondered if he’d broken it when he smashed the receiver. Then:

  “Jesus Christ, Melchior.” Song’s voice was hushed. Not frightened, but awed. “They’ll send an army after you. You’ll be running for the rest of your life.”

  “I already am running. But once this is over, they won’t know who they’re chasing.”

  A crackly voice in the background called Melchior’s flight to Dallas.

  “Listen to me, Song. Don’t lose faith in me. This was your idea, remember? This whole damn thing was your idea. Believe in it. Believe in me. Now, put Pavel on the phone.”

  “I’ve been on the whole time.”

  “Of course you have, you eavesdropping fuck. I need you to send a couple of telegrams. One to Cuba. The other to Dallas.”

  “Ah.” There was a pause. “To whom should I address the second one?”

  Ivelitsch’s voice was flat. Incurious. Unimpassioned. Melchior remembered what he’d said in Union Station yesterday afternoon, just before he’d shot one of his own men and forced Melchior to kill two Company agents. Everyone who knows you has to die. It was all in a day’s work to him.

  “Send it to Alik. Alik Hidell.”

  “And what do I tell—”

  “Tell him it’s time. Time to do what you trained him to do in Russia.”

  Washington, DC

  November 19, 1963

  In the house on Newport Place, Song and Ivelitsch sat in her office, their conversation punctuated by an occasional whip crack from the second floor, where Chul-moo was helping one of the girls with a prominent lobbyist for the tobacco industry. The lobbyist had just seen a draft of the Surgeon General’s impending report on smoking and health and felt he needed to atone for the sins of his profession.

  “The idea of the sleeper took hold in American intelligence right after Stalin detonated his first bomb,” Song told Ivelitsch. “Suddenly it was undeniably clear that the Soviets were way ahead in the spy game. The Americans lacked experience. What they did have was dollars, and a willingness to try just about anything. Joe Scheider, who was then little more than a hyper-patriotic postdoctoral student with degrees in psychiatry and chemistry, floated the idea of trolling orphanages in search of bright kids who could essentially be raised by the Company as intelligence agents, placed in situ as children, and activated when and if they were needed. There were any number of problems with this plan, but chief among them was the fact that Caspar, Scheider’s star recruit, turned out not to be an orphan. His mother left him at the orphanage Monday through Friday, but took him home weekends. Most weekends anyway. Scheider refused to give up, however. He directed Frank Wisdom to act as a paternal surrogate—Caspar’s own father had died before he was born—and, although Caspar was raised by his mother and a couple of stepfathers, the Wiz and other Company men had frequent contact with him through various extracurricular activities. They helped him develop a dual identity. Publicly he was an outspoken socialist, carting around copies of The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, but privately he was training to become a double agent inside the KGB, joining the Civil Air Patrol in his early teens, then dropping out of high school to enlist in the Marines when he turned seventeen. But, as you saw in Russia, juggling both identities proved too much for him. Caspar wasn’t sure if he hated America or loved it, if he was working for the triumph of the proletariat or trying to expose the duplicities of the Communist paradise. The only thing that never wavered was his loyalty. Not to the Company or the Wiz or Scheider. To Melchior. I can’t believe he’d ever shoot him.”

  Pavel Semyonovitch Ivelitsch listened to Song’s lecture respectfully, smiling when the tobacco lobbyist moaned particularly loudly. He didn’t understand masochism. The world was full of people trying to lord it over you—why pay someone to add to that? He’d much rather be the one holding the whip. Now he looked at Song pointedly.

  “Would it be such a bad thing if he did?”

  Song’s eyes narrowed. “You think we can go it alone?”

  “I think Melchior’s ambivalence could be our undoing. His loyalty to the Company is essentially mercenary, but his loyalty to the Wiz is, like Caspar’s loyalty to him, personal, and considerable.”

  “But with the Wiz gone, Melchior knows there’s no place left for him in the Company. They already sent Rip Robertson to kill him, and now they’re trying to get Caspar to do it. He’s got no one else to turn to except us.”

  “For our sake, I hope you’re right.”

  “Maybe you don’t understand what just happened on the phone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dallas? Jack Ruby? The Carousel Club? Melchior could’ve sent us a coded telegram, but he mentioned those names out loud. On purpose. He’s trying to find out if anyone in the Company besides Everton is spying on him.”

  “Because?”

  “Don’t play dumb, Pavel. He’
s not just going rogue. He’s going away. He’s going to kill everyone who can identify him. When this is over, only you and I will know that he ever existed, let alone that he still does.”

  A smile flickered over Ivelitsch’s mouth. “I’m almost impressed. But can he pull it off?”

  “You mean logistically? Or temperamentally? Logistically I think it’s doable. For twenty years he’s been in the field. He’s virtually unknown by Company brass, let alone other agents. Everton’s the only person in Langley besides the Wiz who’s seen his face in the past decade.”

  “What about the other Wiz Kids?”

  Song shrugged. “As near as I can tell, that’s a story Melchior made up himself.”

  “And Caspar? Can he kill him?”

  “I don’t know. Something’s changed in him since he came back from Cuba, and it’s not just getting hold of this bomb, or even Orpheus. He’s become more calculating. Maybe he’s just realized that with the Wiz out of the picture, he has to plan a different future for himself, but he’s a much more ruthless man than the one I met a decade ago.”

  Ivelitsch shook his head. “I meant, will Caspar try to kill Melchior?”

  Song looked at Ivelitsch sharply. “You know why Caspar was sent to Russia, don’t you?”

  “Presumably to infiltrate—”

  “Caspar couldn’t have infiltrated his mother’s house. He carries a sign over his head that says ‘SPY’ in neon letters.”

  “Then why send him to the Soviet Union?”

  “Because even if he was a spy, he was still a self-proclaimed defector. A former Marine. A man who could confirm the existence of the U2 program, which evidence could have been used to execute Francis Gary Powers had the Politburo chosen to go down that route. He could have been sent on a whistle-stop tour of the hinterlands to lecture on the evils of capitalism while simultaneously keeping him away from state secrets. TASS and Pravda could have had a field day with him. All he needed was a single photo op with Premier Khrushchev.”

  “To—kill him?” Ivelitsch’s eyebrows went up, though it was impossible to tell if he was amazed or merely amused. “This sounds more like Mother than the Wiz. It also sounds like a suicide mission.”

  “Be that as it may, it didn’t work. And now Caspar’s back in the States, still looking for a leader to kill.”

  Ivelitsch shook his head. “What a curious profession we have. So. I take it this is your way of saying Caspar will do it.”

  “I think he’ll try. Whether he’ll pull it off is another thing. Among other things, he’s not a particularly good shot.”

  “And if he misses? Melchior will kill him?”

  “Like I said, something’s happened to alienate him from the Company. I don’t know what he’s capable of now.”

  “You think he wants revenge?”

  “It’s more than that. He wants to prove them wrong. He has to make himself believe that he’s not just the Wiz’s pickaninny after all.”

  “I don’t like it. An intelligence agent’s actions should be convoluted, but his motivations should always be crystal clear and simple. Zeal or greed I understand, even glory, but this is oedipal—messy—and it has a damn good chance of blowing up in our faces.”

  “Well, for now we have to trust him. He’s brilliant in the field, and every king needs a general.” She looked at Ivelitsch pointedly. “I can manage him.”

  “Every king needs a queen as well,” Ivelitsch said, giving Song a tight-lipped smile. “Just make sure you’re not trying to manage all of us.”

  Suddenly there was a crash in the hallway, and Ivelitsch jerked upright.

  “What the hell—”

  Song felt a familiar dull thud in her head. Immediately she understood.

  “Orpheus!”

  Ivelitsch looked at her sharply. “How do you know?”

  “No time to explain. We have to get out of here.”

  “Nix that,” Ivelitsch said, pulling his gun from his jacket. “I’m going to take care of this Orpheus problem once and for all.”

  “Pavel, no—”

  But it was too late. Ivelitsch pulled open the door and strode into the hall.

  New York, NY

  November 19, 1963

  Chandler paced the floor of the SRO for all of five minutes after BC headed to Peggy Hitchcock’s apartment in his ridiculous getup, then grabbed one of the ex–FBI agent’s new blazers and headed out into the bright fall afternoon. An idea had come to him when BC showed him his beatnik costume. It was a long shot, but if it worked he’d be on his way to Naz before BC even got to Hitchcock’s home. And if it didn’t, he’d be back in the hotel before BC returned, none the wiser.

  It was only a few blocks to Washington Square Park. The Village was another country to the one that existed north of Fourteenth Street, another world to Beacon Hill. Chandler had laughed uproariously at BC’s thrift store finds, yet they were tame compared to the outfits he saw here: men in vests that appeared to be made of bear fur, flared black leather pants that rode below what would have been the waistband of the underwear, had the people in question been wearing any. The only ties he saw were wrapped around foreheads, the only dresses were dashikis and sarongs, and just as likely to be on men as on women. At one point he saw a slim man in pressed chinos and starched white shirt and severely parted hair, but when he got closer he realized it was actually a woman, her breasts flattened by some kind of binding, her upper lip darkened with pencil. There were several interracial couples as well—black girls and white men, but also black men and white girls. Sweet-smelling home-rolled cigarettes were passed freely from hand to hand around the park’s central fountain. It was one big party, and Chandler was there to get in on the fun. Not marijuana, though. He needed something stronger.

  He walked through the park searching for the right person. Finally he saw a young man sitting with a tall drum between his dungarees, the only thing that covered his skinny body in the nippy evening besides a length of light brown hair. The man’s eyes darted from place to place, as if he were watching butterflies or hummingbirds flit through the air. The sky was empty, though. The man was clearly hallucinating.

  Chandler took off his tie and opened the top couple of buttons on his shirt, then ambled up to the man and sat down on the bench a few feet from him.

  “Nice day, huh?”

  The man’s head continued to dart this way and that.

  “I said, nice day, isn’t it?”

  The man looked over at him. “Oh, sorry, man. I didn’t realize you were real.”

  You don’t know the half of it, Chandler thought. Aloud he said again, “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?”

  “You think that changes things?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “If you call the day nice? Do you think the sun hears you and decides to shine brighter? The wind decides to ease up just enough to rustle the leaves? The day don’t need any compliments from you, man. The day just is. All you got to be is in it.”

  “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.