Shift: A Novel

by Tim Kring

  “I think it’s a combination of motor and parade,” Caspar said.

  “But then it’d be motorade. It’s more like motor and arcade.”

  “Arcade?”

  “You know,” Wesley said. “A shooting gallery.”

  When they got to work Caspar got out of the car almost before it stopped and grabbed the package from the backseat and tucked it up under his arm to make it as inconspicuous as possible. As soon as he did that, however, he thought that maybe it looked like he was trying to hide it, but at the same time he was afraid that if he rearranged the package it would draw too much attention to it, so he left it where it was and started off at a fast walk to the main building. Wesley stayed in the car gunning the engine to charge the battery, but he rolled down the window and asked if Caspar needed a ride home. Caspar said he wasn’t going back to Irving that night. Wesley didn’t ask why.

  “Damn it, damn it, damn it, damn it, DAMN it!”

  Melchior stared at BC’s facedown body, the umbrella still quivering in his hand. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to have happened. Chandler was supposed to have come. The tranq was for him, not BC. Keller’d phoned him the new formula yesterday, and Melchior’d raced around town after he got out of jail, buying some ingredients here, stealing others there, but even so, he’d only been able to rig up a single shot. Keller was sure it would be enough to knock even Chandler out. Melchior’d asked how strong it was. “Don’t prick your finger” was all Keller said, “unless you want a chemical lobotomy.”

  The fallen detective’s bladder had released, and a dark stain was spreading out in the dingy flat pile of the carpet. Melchior kicked BC over, did a cursory pulse check, but it was clear he was dead. The fat needle hung from his stomach. A button was missing from his shirt and the skin underneath was stained with a few drops of blood. It was the shirt that got Melchior. Not the blood, not the corpse itself. The goddamn shirt. Mercerized white cotton, with silk piping and French cuffs held closed with knots of silver. This wasn’t the same man Melchior’d met on the train three weeks ago. He’d remade himself entirely to pursue this thing. To pursue Melchior, and Chandler, and Naz. Remade himself first into a dandy, and now into a corpse.

  “Aw, fuck it. Fuck you, BC Querrey. Fuck you.”

  Melchior fell to his knees, careful to avoid the puddle of urine, ripped the man’s shirt open so violently that three more buttons flew across the room. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a flat zippered case, opened it. There were more syringes in there, including one with a three-inch needle, and a couple of vials, one of which was filled with epinephrine (there was also a Medaille d’Or tucked into a corner of the case, which Melchior planned on smoking after he got Chandler on Song’s plane). Keller had made Melchior carry the epinephrine in case the sedative cocktail proved too strong even for Chandler’s souped-up constitution. Melchior prepared the shot, then slammed it into BC’s chest so hard he heard a rib crack. BC’s body convulsed so violently that the needle on the syringe almost broke off inside his body, which really would have been the coup de grâce, but Melchior was able to jerk it out and step out of the way before BC coughed and choked and spewed a thin spray of vomit into the air.

  Before BC was fully conscious, Melchior plopped him into the chair and duct-taped his wrists and ankles to it, making sure to pull the man’s sleeves and pants out of the way so the tape adhered directly to BC’s skin. He did this not out of any concern for BC’s expensive clothes but to make sure the detective wasn’t going to get himself free in a hurry. By now some semblance of awareness was coming back to BC’s eyes, but his limbs still seemed beyond his control. His head sagged on his shoulder, and he could only watch dully as Melchior tied him to the chair. He was so quiet that when he did finally speak Melchior almost jumped, because he’d almost forgotten BC was there.

  “Why?”

  Melchior didn’t answer. He’d secured BC’s thighs now, his upper arms, his chest.

  “Why did you save me?”

  Melchior pulled a long piece of tape from the roll.

  “Spit.”

  “Wha—”

  Melchior slapped him in the face.

  “Spit.”

  BC spat a thin stream of blood, bile, and saliva onto his thighs, and then Melchior put the piece of tape over his mouth and wrapped it all the way around his head, twice. Only then did he answer BC’s question.

  “I don’t know really,” he said, stepping back and looking at the trussed detective as though he were a mannequin being dressed for a window display. “Call it a hunch. An impluse. Everybody needs someone to keep him honest, and I guess that’s what you are for me. In case I ever forget what I’m doing is illegal, immoral, and entirely selfish. In case I start to confuse it with virtue or vision. I’m just a thug, Beau, and having you on my ass reminds me that that’s all I’ll ever be. Timor mortis exultat me,” he said. “The fear of death excites me.”

  He leaned in close now, so close that BC could feel the heat radiating off his face.

  “The way I see it,” he said quietly, “you didn’t really get into this fairly. Started off at a disadvantage, as it were, a pawn in somebody else’s fight. Hell, I thought you were completely incompetent when I first met you, but somehow you managed to survive, and learn, and look at you now: you came this close to taking me out this morning. So I’m going to give you a piece of advice: next time you see me, shoot first, ask questions later. Because that’s what I’ll do to you.”

  He paused a moment, looking into BC’s eyes with equal parts contempt and curiosity. Sweat rolled out from beneath the wig he was wearing, and his exhalations were wet on BC’s skin.

  “They’re going to say that what happened today changed things,” he whispered finally. “Don’t you believe them. The shift happened a long time ago, and it’s a lot bigger than you or me or Chandler or even Jack Kennedy. You should read that book the director gave you—or Fahrenheit 451, or 1984, or, hell, The Manchurian Candidate, the very novel that inspired Project Orpheus. The sci-fi guys have always known good and evil aren’t mutually exclusive, let alone capitalism and communism. That two opposing forces come to look more and more like each other the longer they fight. Up till now it’s been fiction. But after this it’ll be truth. The thing is, though, the truth will have turned into lies, because everything will be about ‘subjectivity,’ everything will be about ‘distrust of authority.’ It’ll be chaos masquerading as reason until someone or something comes along with the authority to lull people into believing that some truths really are incontrovertible: God, maybe, or country, or, who knows, maybe just selfishness as opposed to self-inspection and self-improvement. But no matter how it plays out, it translates into big profit for anyone willing to exploit people’s fears.” Melchior stepped back slightly. “Twenty years in intelligence and I never really got that,” he said, shaking his head. “Not till I met you—someone idealistic enough to actually believe everything his government told him, even though it resulted in his own persecution. And to show you how much I appreciate your gift, I want to give you something too.”

  With grotesque intimacy, he leaned in again and put his mouth on BC’s, pressed hard enough that BC could feel his lips through two layers of tape. It didn’t hurt. It didn’t even feel like a kiss. But BC felt his stomach churn and had to fight the urge to vomit.

  After what seemed like an eternity Melchior stood up. He smiled down at BC like a proud father, then brought his hand to the tip of BC’s nose to wipe away a drop of moisture. It could have been a bead of sweat or mucus or even a tear. Even BC didn’t know.

  “Beau-Christian Querrey,” Melchior said in a voice whose solemnity was all the more oppressive for being genuine, even caring. “You are the burning boy. You—are—a—faggot.”

  But he wasn’t finished. He stuck his fingers in BC’s pants pocket and wormed his hand over BC’s thigh. BC turned his face away, his eyes squeezed closed, his breath whistling out of his nostrils with drops of snot.
<
br />   Suddenly the hand was gone. It was a moment before BC could open his eyes. Melchior was holding Naz’s ring up to the faint light.

  “I don’t think you need this anymore, do you?”

  Before he left he turned on the television.

  “I know daytime TV’s for housewives,” he said as he headed for the door. “But keep your eyes peeled. There just might be something interesting on today.”

  As soon as he left Wesley, Caspar went straight to the sixth floor. He wove his way through the dusty stacks of book boxes until he reached the southeast corner window, where he stood his package upright behind a stack of boxes. The tall parcel made a heavy metallic clunk as he set it on the bare concrete floor. He moved a few stacks of boxes to create a blind around the window, set three more underneath it to serve as a stand. He couldn’t bring himself to look out the window, but he did notice that the clouds were breaking up and the sunlight streamed into the little nest he’d made for himself. It was going to be a beautiful day. The park would probably be full of people at lunchtime, all waving at the president and First Lady as they drove by.

  Chandler loitered in the shade of an oak on the eastern edge of Dealey Plaza, as far from the Book Depository as he could get without losing sight of the entrance. He’d waited to take the second half of the acid after he arrived, then maneuvered close enough to the six-story building that he was able to sift through the minds of the dozens of people inside. He didn’t have to look far. Caspar’s anxiety was like a beacon, and there, front and center in his thoughts, was Melchior. Melchior and President Kennedy and a rifle he’d hidden on the sixth floor, right by a corner window. What Chandler didn’t see was Melchior himself.

  When he saw the gun—saw what Caspar planned to do with it—he was brought up short. If he confronted Caspar now or, God forbid, dragged the police in, he knew he was losing any chance he had to catch Melchior and extract Naz’s location from him. And he could see also that Caspar didn’t want to do it, and didn’t expect to. Melchior was supposed to make contact. Supposed to call it off before Caspar had to pull the trigger. Caspar seemed to think he was actually going to show up here. Chandler was inside Caspar’s head, so he knew the would-be assassin wasn’t lying to him—it was just a question of whether or not Melchior had lied to Caspar in the same way he’d lied to Song and Ivelitsch about sending Naz to Dallas. Chandler knew he was risking a lot—not just a man’s life, but the president’s and, who knows, the country’s. But the alternative was losing his last, best chance of finding Naz, and so he found the most sheltered spot he could and waited.

  Searching Caspar’s mind from such a distance had used up a lot of his juice, however, and now there was the familiar fatigue. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it’d been other times, but still, yawns were splitting his jaws, and he had to smack himself in the face to stay awake. He should’ve waited, he realized now, not taken the second hit until he saw Melchior.

  “Excuse me,” he said, stopping a middle-aged black woman pushing a white baby in a stroller. “Do you know what time the president’s supposed to come by?”

  “Why, you early, ain’t you? Didn’t the paper say he wasn’t supposed to get by here till half past noon? It’s only—”

  “Ten forty-two,” Chandler said. He made a show of looking at his wrist, but since he wasn’t wearing a watch, it didn’t help. The woman frowned and pushed her charge away.

  The thoughts of passersby flickered in and out of his head. It was amazing how banal the minds of most people were. Something to eat, something to drink, something to screw. God, I hate my boss/my wife/my husband/my parents. A man sat down on the retaining wall beside the little reflecting pond. He was waiting for his secretary, with whom he was having an affair, and when he said to himself, Could you take some dick-tation, Miss Clarkson, he and Chandler chuckled at the same time. The man peered at Chandler nervously, and Chandler quickly turned away. He realized that at some point over the past month this state had become natural to him. That the time he spent unaugmented had come to seem not only vulnerable but incomplete and, even worse, boring. The thought filled him with self-loathing, and the self-loathing filled him with fantasies of revenge. He would make Melchior pay for what he’d done to him, and then, if he couldn’t find a way to reverse the condition, he would take his own life to end this terrifying cycle of flight and violence. Once Naz was safe, he would bring it all to an end, one way or another.

  But where was Melchior?

  All morning long he had the intermittent sense that someone was peering over his shoulder. He’d whipped his head around so many times that one of his coworkers said he was acting jumpier than a man in his marriage bed with another woman. Finally, at a couple minutes before noon, he stood up from his desk.

  “Guess I’ll take lunch,” he said. His manager waved at him without looking up.

  He walked to the stairwell slowly, but as soon as the door was closed he bounded up the stairs to the sixth floor. As he was walking past the elevator it opened, and Charlie Givens stepped out and asked him if he was going downstairs to eat.

  “No, sir,” Caspar said. He just stared at Givens, and after a moment Givens shrugged, picked up the pack of cigarettes he’d left on top of a stack of boxes, and got back in the elevator. Caspar waited until the doors closed before he headed to the southeast corner of the building. He passed a plate with some chicken bones on it, but saw no sign of anyone else. The faint sound of motorcycles floated through open windows.

  He retrieved his package from behind a wall of boxes, ripped it open as quietly as possible. He assembled the Carcano quickly, rested it on the short stack of boxes beneath the window, and then, for the first time that day, looked outside.

  “Fuck.”

  A line of live oaks blocked his view of this end of Houston Street, as well as the beginning of Elm. He’d seen the trees dozens of times before, of course, but never really noticed just how much they shaded the street in front of the depository—it wasn’t the kind of thing you would notice unless you were planning to shoot someone from an upper-story window. He would have to wait until the motorcade turned on Elm and was directly below the building and moving away from him—and he would have to lean halfway out the window to get a clear shot to boot. Someone in Dealey Plaza would almost certainly see him and shout, warning the president’s guards.

  Not that he would do it. But Melchior had said he had to play it straight. Right to the end.

  There were dozens of people in the park already. Caspar put his eye to the scope of his rifle and moved it from face to face.

  Where the hell was Melchior?

  Traffic had thickened in the past hour, and the lunchtime rush was backed up for blocks around the motorcade route. Melchior was coming in from the north, so he missed most of the tie-up, but still it slowed him down, and it was after noon when he finally reached Dealey Plaza. He abandoned BC’s Rambler behind the depository and made his way around the west side of the building, figuring that if Chandler was already at the scene he’d most likely take cover in the park itself—probably in the line of trees that skirted the park’s eastern edge. It had turned into a warm, humid day, and, what with the wig Song had packed for him, he was sweating buckets. It was almost like being back in Cuba. Fucking Cuba, where this had all started. It seemed like years ago, but it had only been a month. Four fucking weeks.

  But four weeks, four months, four years, four centuries, it didn’t matter, it could all come to an end in the next four minutes if he didn’t figure out what he was going to do now. Why in the hell had BC shown up at the house without Chandler? And how had the detective gotten the drop on Melchior, forcing him to use the tranq meant for Orpheus—who, presumably, had followed what was otherwise a pretty obvious trail of bread crumbs leading straight to the Book Depository. All Melchior had now was a vial of acid and the Thorazine-phenmetrazine combo that protected his brain from Chandler’s when the latter’s was souped up. Oh, and the dart-shooting umbrella Ivelitsch’s techies had coo
ked up for him. He had that, too. He was going to have to wing it.

  As he came around the side of the depository he saw that a substantial crowd had gathered in Dealey Plaza. Spectators sat on a grassy ridge this side of Elm, and more stood along both curbs. At least a hundred people were in Dealey Plaza itself. Dozens of them had cameras out, and Melchior saw one man with an eight-millimeter movie camera aimed at the gap between the two courthouses at the top of the park. That’s what he should have had Ivelitsch rig up. Not a ridiculous umbrella that managed to shoot a single dart at a time, but a bullet-shooting camera. Something that would give you a chance to fight your way out, if it came to that. Oh well. Next time.

  He slipped a beret from his pocket and pulled it low on his forehead, added a pair of glasses with thick black rims, then eased himself into the crowd. He was conscious of the Book Depository on his left, row upon row of open windows looking straight down on him. For the next several minutes he was wide open. It was all up to Caspar. Either he was loyal to Melchior, and he would wait for the president to show, or someone had supplanted him in Caspar’s esteem—Scheider, the Wiz, Giancana, who knows, maybe even Ivelitsch himself—in which case Melchior was dead to rights. Here’s hoping Caspar’s marksmanship hadn’t improved in the last few years.

  “All right, Chandler,” he said under his breath. “Show yourself.”

  Chandler wasn’t sure how long the void had been there before he felt it. Two minutes? Ten? It crept up on him like white noise until suddenly it was all he could hear.

  Melchior.

  But where was he? It was hard to pinpoint a silence, especially in the midst of so much commotion. He barely had any juice left and didn’t want to waste it. He did his best to ignore his brain, searched the crowd with his eyes instead. The feeling came from the north, toward the depository, and he began to make his way in that direction as stealthily as he could.