by Tim Kring
He leaned on the umbrella heavily. “Where is she?” he demanded.
Melchior’s smile was a sickening parody of innocence. “What do you mean, where is she? You’re Orpheus. That means she’s in hell.”
Another image of Naz’s dying face flashed in his mind, and Chandler shook his head to clear it. That was a mistake: again Melchior had to grab him to keep him from falling over. Chandler shook him off roughly, doing his best to steady himself as the acid continued to flood his system.
“You—you added something to the LSD.”
Melchior’s smirk grew wider. “Several somethings in fact. Among others: psilocybin to increase the hallucinogenic power, sodium pentathol to render you open to suggestion, and a heaping spoonful of methamphetamine just to make you crazy.”
“Yeah, well, crazy or not, I’m going to rip your brain apart.”
“I don’t think so,” Melchior said. “I may play fast and loose sometimes, but I never make mistakes.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out an empty pill bottle. “While you went fishing in my brain, I took another pill. You won’t be getting back in for a while.”
Chandler pushed—pushed hard—but it was like trying to get the water out of a sponge with a needle. It would take ten thousand pricks before he accomplished anything. Melchior’s nose wrinkled. It was obvious he was feeling something, but not enough to really hurt him.
“I’ll save you the effort,” he said. “She’s in Cuba. Trust me,” he threw in, when it looked like Chandler might turn and run. “I can have her killed a dozen different ways before you could get out of the country, let alone into Cuba. Listen to me,” he hissed, stepping closer to Chandler. “I know you know Caspar’s in the building behind me. I know you know he’s got a rifle, and I know you know he’s going to shoot the president. I want you to help him.”
Chandler was fighting a fresh wave of dizziness, and he barely heard what Melchior said. “Help him?”
“Caspar never was the best marksman. Help him find his target. Steady his hand. Pull the trigger for him if you have to.”
“Help him?” Chandler said again, but even as he spoke Chandler’s brain was reaching out. It was like Melchior’s words were a map, guiding Chandler to Caspar’s brain.
“But … but why?” he said, trying to fight the connection, feeling it grow stronger instead.
“Why? Because at any point in the past two weeks you could have gone to the police, and you refused to. Because all you could think about was getting your girlfriend back—a girl you spent less than a week with, who you slept with all of one time. For her you were willing to sacrifice your duty not just to your country but to your beliefs. It’s time you learned that there are consequences for putting yourself ahead of everyone else. This morning I killed the only woman I might have ever loved—and now you and everyone else are going to learn what it means to cross me. Now, help Caspar make his shot or I swear to God I’ll pull the top of Naz’s skull off with my bare hands and eat her brains for dinner.”
The whole time Melchior spoke, the connection to Caspar grew more and more palpable. Chandler felt the gun as if it were in his own hands, smelled the dust from thousands and thousands of boxed books. The concrete was hard under his knees, and he had to fight the urge to fidget. No, Chandler told himself. Caspar’s knees. Caspar was fighting the urge to fidget, not Chandler. Caspar was looking desperately for Melchior, the scope of his rifle ignoring the motorcade as it moved from one face in the crowd to the next. Chandler could see the faces through the crosshairs. Male and female, black and white, their attention focused on the long line of motorcycles and limousines, their hands shading their eyes from the death pointing down at them from sixty feet above, and as he looked at one innocent face after another he had an idea. He pushed deeper into Caspar’s mind, found what he was looking for, pulled it out, and put it before Caspar’s eyes. The gun angled to the left.
The few seconds it took the motorcade to complete its left turn onto Elm and enter the shelter of the live oaks growing in front of the depository seemed to take all of Caspar’s life.
He stopped looking through the crowd for Melchior and instead angled the rifle just past the last oak and waited. Melchior had told him he had to play it straight right up until the end.
Suddenly a thought flickered through his head and he jerked the gun a few inches to the left. The view through the scope blurred, settled, and there he was.
Melchior.
He stood on the edge of the street, casually talking to a second man who leaned on an umbrella. He never once looked up at the window.
He hates you.
The thought seemed to come out of the ether, and Caspar twitched so hard he nearly pulled the trigger.
He’ll sacrifice you to his game.
Caspar took his eye from the scope, shook his head to clear it. KGB had said things like that to him, when they were trying to turn him. Had said the Wiz sent him behind enemy lines to be slaughtered, just like he’d done with all those poor boys in the Ukraine and Korea. Caspar could almost believe that about the Wiz. But Melchior? Melchior was his friend.
You’re just his patsy.
Caspar leaned forward, looked through the scope again. Melchior was still right there. He could do it. Do what the Company had asked him, and maybe then he could be Lee again. Just Lee. But in order to do that he would have to kill Tommy. But—but Tommy was already dead. Melchior had said so. Just like he’d said Lee was dead. There was just Melchior now. Melchior and Caspar. If Caspar killed him, he’d be all alone.
Do it, the voice hissed in his ear. Do it!
A tap on the shoulder brought Chandler’s attention back to the street. Melchior’s smile hadn’t faded, but his voice was deadly serious.
“I should tell you that if I don’t check in at exactly 1 p.m., Naz will be killed anyway. Just in case you’re getting any crazy ideas about having Caspar shoot me instead of the president.”
Chandler glared at him. If pure hatred could have killed Melchior, he’d have burst into flames. But all he did was return Chandler’s gaze with that implacable smile on his face. Chandler pushed at Melchior’s brain again, but all he got was that spongy nothingness.
“Not me,” Melchior said, shaking his head. “The president.”
The president. Chandler looked up. He could see him now. His car had just made the turn off Houston onto Elm. In a minute or two he’d pass through the Triple Underpass and get on the freeway and be away, safe to lead America to a new era of peace and tolerance, to Africa and Asia and all the way to the goddamned moon. His smile was as bright as the noon sun.
In desperation Chandler cast his mind wider, looking for someone in the crowd who could help him. But who? If he tipped off one of the policemen or Secret Service agents and got Melchior arrested, he was as good as killing Naz. If he started some kind of mass panic like he had in Texas, who knew how many people might die.
He found himself thinking of the burning boy. Even though the figure was nothing more than a figment of his imagination—his mixed with BC’s and all the other minds he’d come into contact with—he somehow felt that it would know what to do. A part of him willed the flaming angel to make an appearance, but it refused to come.
“It’s now or never, Chandler,” Melchior said. “Do it. Or Naz dies.”
Not knowing what else to do, Chandler reached out to the only other mind he could think of: the president’s. He felt the ache in the man’s arm as he waved at the crowd, in his jaw as he flashed that famous smile. The ache that throbbed in his lower back beneath his brace despite all the painkillers and other drugs that flowed through his veins. In the past week alone he’d taken Demerol, Ritalin, Librium, thyroid hormone, testosterone, and gamma globulin, and before he consented to get in the car this morning he’d had two injections of procaine to ease the pain in his back. Good lord, Chandler thought, the president of the United States was on more drugs than he was!
As he smiled and waved at the last of the spect
ators, Jack Kennedy suddenly found himself thinking about Mary Meyer. How funny to think about her now! He glanced over at Jackie guiltily, then looked away again. It wasn’t the fact that he’d slept with her that made him feel guilty—he and Jackie had worked out that part of their marriage a long time ago. It was the fact that she’d given him marijuana and LSD several times, and in the White House to boot. Jackie would’ve flipped if she’d found out about that—she had enough trouble covering up his affairs and his illnesses. Jack hadn’t cared much for the hallucinatory aspects of LSD—he saw enough unbelieveable things in his daily security briefing—but the euphoria was the best painkiller he’d ever experienced. For twelve blissful hours the pain in his back had been like a glob of Silly Putty he could knead and play with. God, that’d be nice right now. Here it was just after noon and his back was killing him, and instead of relief he had to face an interminable luncheon at the Trade Mart, all for the sake of securing a half dozen votes that probably wouldn’t make any difference at all next November.
As Chandler absorbed all of this he stared at the president’s retreating form. So Jack Kennedy was one of the chosen few who’d been turned on to LSD. Who’d’ve guessed?
Then, with a start, he realized someone else was looking at Kennedy, his gaze doubly focused through the sights of his rifle and Chandler’s own attention. Chandler felt Caspar’s finger on the trigger, realized it was starting to squeeze, and, not knowing what else to do, he pushed at Caspar’s mind, and at the same time snapped open his umbrella.
“What the—!” Standing on the edge of Dealey Plaza, James Tague jerked his head as something stung his cheek. At the same time, he heard a loud pop from off to his right.
“Oh no, no, no!” John Connally said in the seat in front of the president’s. Chandler heard him clearly. He knew that the governor of Texas had recognized the sound of a gunshot, unlike the president and his wife and most of the security detail—including the limo driver, who, mistaking the sound for a blowout, stepped on the brakes instead of the gas. At least Caspar had missed. But he was getting ready to fire again, and this time it was Kennedy Chandler pushed. Duck! he screamed into the president’s mind, and the president leaned forward. But it was too late. Chandler felt the bullet slam into the base of Kennedy’s neck, nick his spine, and spit out of his throat just below his Adam’s apple. Somehow, though—a miracle!—it missed hitting any vital organs, even as it ripped its way through Governor Connally’s abdomen and wrist.
But the gun was still in Caspar’s hands. He wasn’t thinking about Melchior now, or why he was doing what he was doing. His Marine training had kicked in, and he’d shot the bolt on his rifle and re-aimed. His attention was focused squarely and solely on the president. It was as if the two were linked by a high-tension wire.
Desperate now, Chandler dove deep into Caspar’s mind, trying to find someone Caspar could never shoot. But it seemed that Caspar wanted to shoot everyone. The president’s visage gave way to Castro’s first, then Khrushchev’s, and then to the man with the pointed beard who’d plucked him from the orphanage with the Wiz all those years ago, and then Frank Wisdom himself, beery, bloated, and bellicose. Then Melchior. Not Melchior as he was now but Melchior as a teenager: thin, scrappy, defiant, adaptable. A survivor, unlike Caspar. Unlike Lee. And then that image faded away before another, wavering, indistinct, two-dimensional—a black-and-white photograph that Chandler was only able to flesh out with the greatest effort of will.
“Lee,” Robert Edward Lee Oswald said. “Son, what are you doing?”
“Daddy?” Caspar peered through the scope.
“Put down the gun,” Robert Oswald said. “Come on, Lee. That’s not how your mother raised you.”
Melchior stared at the retreating limousine. A dozen cops and agents had drawn their guns, and people were starting to yell and point in every direction. A Secret Service agent was jumping onto the trunk of Kennedy’s limo. In another second he would throw himself over the president’s body and the opportunity would be gone.
Melchior pushed Chandler’s umbrella down with one hand, reached into his pocket with the other.
“She’s pregnant,” Melchior said. “It won’t be just her who dies.” And then, opening his hand, he showed him what he’d pulled from his pocket.
Chandler looked down at Melchior’s hand. At first he thought Melchior was holding a ball of blood. A ball of blood connected to a silver loop of tissue. But then he realized the ball was actually a ruby—Naz’s ruby—and the loop was the ring on which it was mounted, and the ring was still on—still on—
It was still on her finger.
“This is just a taste of what I’ll do to her,” Melchior said. “Now, shoot him.”
Chandler stared at the finger. Sixty feet above him, Caspar saw it—saw a finger stained with blood at any rate, and knew it to be his own. He looked down at his father in the limousine.
“Lee’s dead,” he whispered. “He died when you did.” And then his severed finger squeezed the trigger.
Chandler felt Caspar’s finger pull the trigger. The president’s thoughts vanished from Chandler’s brain like light disappearing from a shattered bulb. A thousand other minds rushed in to fill the vacuum. The First Lady’s, and the agents in the car, and the sheriffs on their motorcycles, and the hundreds and hundreds of spectators all staring with horror at the fleeing limousine, but over it all came Melchior’s voice.
“Good job, son. I knew I could count on you.”
Chandler whirled on him. He was about to throw himself on him but he was overcome by a fit of dizziness and almost fell over.
“Why don’t you sit down for a spell?” Melchior said as everyone began running—after the limousine, away from the shots, toward anything that would pass for cover. Everywhere Chandler looked he saw open mouths, but the roar of the gunning motorcycles drowned out all the other sounds, so it seemed that the people around him were screaming silently. On the trunk of the president’s car Jackie was crawling toward something that looked like a bloody toupee.
Melchior pulled a small zippered case from his pants. He held it up to his face for a moment as though it were a walkie-talkie, but when he took it back down Chandler saw a man running past him, a camera stuck to his eye. Melchior unzipped the case, and Chandler saw that it was empty save for a single cigar, which Melchior pulled out and unwrapped casually, as though he were in a drawing room rather than at the scene of an assassination.
The familiar exhaustion was setting in now. An immense tiredness that seemed to leech the marrow from Chandler’s bones, leaving him as helpless as a marionette whose strings have been cut off.
“What—what is that?”
“This?” Melchior brought the cigar to his lips, lit it with a series of lip-smacking puffs. “As Dr. Freud says, Chandler, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
He stood up then, glanced at the Triple Underpass through which the last of the motorcade had disappeared, then reached down and pulled Chandler to his feet.
“You—you killed him.”
Melchior puffed ruminatively at his cigar. “Who can say who really killed JFK? Was it me? Was it Caspar? Was it you? Was it that guy up on that grassy knoll?”
Melchior pointed. Chandler looked. He didn’t see anything, but Jean Hill and Tom Tilson and Ed Hoffman did. The figure was blurry and disappeared almost as quickly as it appeared. Who knows, maybe their own minds made it up, but they would all swear till their dying day that they’d seen a man with a gun there.
The two men started walking up the grassy slope toward the rear parking lot where Melchior had parked BC’s Rambler. After only a few steps, though, Melchior stopped. He was staring at a small russet-haired man walking quickly out the front entrance of the depository. His hands were clenched in fists and his small, nearly lipless mouth was set in a hard line; it was obvious he was doing his best not to run. He looked neither left nor right but Chandler thought he saw his eyes flicker in their direction, a glance filled with a combina
tion of fear and confusion and pride. His face, too, winked across Dealey Plaza. For most people, it merged with the image that showed up on their televisions later that night, but for some—for Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig especially—it would haunt them for years. Craig swore he saw a man matching the description of Lee Harvey Oswald14 get into a car on the far side of the grassy knoll, a light green Nash Rambler driven by a dark-complected man.15
“Where are you taking me?” Chandler said as he slumped in the car.
“Into the future,” Melchior said as he climbed behind the wheel. “Into the brave new world that you and I made together.”
Dallas, TX
November 22, 1963
On the television, a middle-aged woman and an old man sip from ornately patterned coffee cups. Despite the seriousness of the situation, BC can’t help but think of J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson and their talk of gravy boats and butter dishes. He stares at the TV out of one eye even as he continues to try to work his right arm free of the duct tape binding it to the chair. The tape has bunched into a gooey, fibrous strand, making it stronger than ever, but also slightly looser. BC has yanked so hard his skin has torn, and a trickle of blood encircles his wrist like a bracelet. He wiggles even more, using the blood as lubricant.
“I have some very interesting information,” the woman says even as the old man slurps his coffee like someone who’s just wandered out of a desert. “Your great-grandson and his mother are going to have Thanksgiving dinner with us.”
“I must say, I’m surprised,” the old man responds, although all his attention seems focused on his cup. Maybe his lines are written there? He’s lowering his face for another slurp when the whine of feedback shrieks from the TV’s single speaker, and the picture fades to a black screen emblazoned with white letters.
A moment later, the articulate, assertive voice of Walter Cronkite takes shape out of the black screen like God speaking from the void. But it’s not the beginning of the world Cronkite is narrating. It’s the end.