Shift: A Novel

by Tim Kring

  There will be a mighty conflagration, and all men will have to wade through a stream of molten metal that will seem like warm milk to the just and a torrent of igneous lava to the wicked.

  He didn’t ask himself how this was happening or if it could possibly have something to do with last night. When he finally looked up, it was just after four. A stack of pages sat next to the typewriter. He was about to count them when the number came to him: seventy-two. He had no idea how he knew this number, but he knew it was accurate. He threw the pages into his briefcase and ran out the front door. The campus was half a mile away. He was going to have to sprint if he wanted to get this in on time. He set off down Brattle Street at a run, but before he’d gone half a block he pulled up short. Something had caught his eye. A stack of newspapers at the corner kiosk. The Worker, of all papers. He glanced at the headline—FPCC AND DRE FACE OFF ON NEW ORLEANS RADIO—then realized it was the words above the headline that had caught his eye. I.e., Friday, November 1, 1963.

  Friday?

  Friday?!

  Never mind that he was able to see letters a quarter-inch high from ten feet away (and at a run to boot): if the paper was right, he’d somehow lost five days. He stood there dumbfounded, wracking his mind for some memory of the last 120 hours. Had he slept it all away? Wandered through it in some kind of alcohol blackout? An image of Urizen flashed in his mind again, stamped on a little square of translucent paper that floated in a glass of clear liquid for a second before dissolving. The taste of warm vodka was so palpable that his eyes watered.

  Confused and frightened, he turned and walked back home. His key was in the door when he heard a throat clear. Even before he turned, he felt her. Her sense of barely controlled panic as she waded through the pyroclastic emotions streaming by with the other people on the sidewalk. She was hunched inside a dark jacket, her face shielded by sunglasses with lenses as big as the saucers on which espresso is served in cafes in the Latin Quarter of Paris. The most real thing about her seemed to be the ruby ring on her right hand, which she twisted nervously with the fingers of her left.

  “Naz.” Chandler’s voice was as dry as the crust of food on the plates in his sink upstairs. “I—I thought I dreamed you up.”

  Naz didn’t say anything for so long that Chandler thought she was just another hallucination. Then:

  “I think you did,” she said, and fell into his arms.

  CIA Headquarters, McLean, VA

  November 1, 1963

  In the wake of his Caribbean sojourn, the Halls of Justice seemed bland and expensive. Terrazzo floors speckled black and brown like a wren’s egg, buffed walnut wainscoting giving way to Listerine-colored walls. Sure, the slate roofs of Cuba’s government buildings were leaking and the rococo wallpaper had been repatterned by gunfire. But the Cubans made all this seem intentional. Not decrepit or disheveled, but déshabillé, as the French would have it, which made the whole setup somehow alluring. Sexy even. Give the Communists a few more years and they would no doubt erect buildings like this one: fish belly–white on the outside, every bit as soulless within. But they’d never be able to afford the telling details: the all-pervasive hum of thousands of coffee-makers, Dictaphones, and air conditioners, and of course the immeasurable wattage of infinite fluorescence. Melchior pulled his hat down lower on his forehead. The Wiz always said a spy had only three natural enemies: cheap liquor, cheap girls, and bright lights.

  On the beaded glass of the nearest doorway, three letters were stenciled in gold and outlined in black, like the office of a private dick in a forties noir:

  D.D.P.

  No name was painted on the door, but if he squinted Melchior could make out the ghostly outline of the words FRANK WISDOM just above the title. Whoever’d scraped the paint off had scratched the glass in the process, indelibly etching the Wiz’s name into the door and rendering him more of a presence than he’d ever been during his tenure as chief of covert ops. This seemed a fitting tribute, since the Wiz had spent even less time in this office than Melchior had in the Adams Morgan apartment he’d owned for the past eight years.

  The door opened. A gray suit appeared. The suit had a head. The head had a face. The face had a mouth. The mouth said:

  “You can come in now.”

  The soles of Melchior’s sandals squeaked on epoxied marble when he stood up. He twisted his left shoe a little, which made the sound louder, longer. To an observer it might’ve looked as though he was just being obnoxious, a high schooler sliding his sneakers on a freshly waxed basketball court. Indeed, his whole demeanor exuded contempt for protocol and propriety, from his too-long and slightly oily hair to his ill-fitting linen suit to the utterly ridiculous woven leather sandals on his feet. But in fact all he was doing was adjusting the inner liner of his shoe, which had bunched up because of the piece of paper folded between it and the sole. A piece of paper worth more than this whole building, although Melchior would settle for an office in it, as long as it came with a pretty secretary.

  The man who’d opened the door showed him into the inner office, then, instead of leaving, closed the door, walked around Melchior, and took a seat at the desk. The nameplate in front of him read RICHARD HELMS. Melchior’d never met Helms in person, but he’d seen his picture in the paper often enough. This wasn’t Helms.

  Melchior was intrigued.

  As soon as he sat down, the man seemed to forget about Melchior. He began flipping through the pages of a file on the desk. Melchior’s presumably. Melchior noted with pride the thinness of the sheaf of pages. Agents whose tenure with the Company was half his had files two, three, four feet thick, but there were only twenty or thirty pages on the desk. Even so, he didn’t like this self-important functionary looking at it. Where in the hell was Dick Helms? Given the fact that Melchior had worked side by side with the former occupant of this office for nearly two decades—not to mention the importance of the intelligence he’d gathered in Cuba—surely he rated a meeting with the current DDP?

  Helms’s surrogate continued to ignore him, so Melchior plopped into one of the green leather chairs in front of the desk. The surrogate sighed but didn’t look up.

  “I didn’t ask you to sit down.”

  Melchior lifted both feet off the floor and held his battered sandals in the air. After fifteen months on his feet—and who knows how long on their previous owner—the soles were so worn that when he curled his toes the brown leather wrinkled like skin. So thin that you could see the outline of the piece of paper just under the leather of the left shoe, if you knew what you were looking at.

  Finally the man behind the desk raised his eyes.

  “I’m sorry Deputy Director Helms wasn’t able to meet with you today. I’m Drew Everton. Acting assistant deputy director for the Western Hemisphere Division.”

  “How in the hell do they fit all that on your card?”

  Everton rolled his eyes. “Would you put your feet down, please?”

  Melchior smiled. “I just wanted the Company to see what I’ve had to endure for the sake of my country. I been walking around in a pair of huaraches for more than a year. My feet,” he said, letting them plop one at a time to the floor, “are fucking tired.”

  Cambridge, MA

  November 1, 1963

  Once upstairs, Chandler didn’t know what to do: sit Naz down and ask her a thousand and one questions or throw her on the bed and ravish her.

  “I slept for five days. Five days.”

  Naz shrugged. “I know.”

  Chandler pulled up short. “How do you know?”

  He was behind her at that point. Her hair was looser than it had been a day and a half ago, fell down her back in lush ringlets. She wore a dark sweater, threadbare but cashmere. It clung to her back, which seemed as tiny and delicate as the thorax of a wasp. A skirt of pale gray wool rode softly over her hips; silk stockings added gloss to the curve of her calves. When Naz said, “You know how I know,” Chandler started, because he’d been so caught up in her body that h
e’d almost forgotten she was in the room.

  “Don’t start in with that stuff about mind-reading and mental telepathy and extrasensory perception.”

  “All those terms mean the same thing. And I never mentioned any of them.”

  “ESP can refer to all sorts of phenomena. Remote viewing, precognition—”

  “Would you be more comfortable if you predicted the results of next year’s election?”

  “I do not believe—”

  “Chandler.”

  “—in ESP or secret CIA drug programs or two-way mirrors in seedy motels or—”

  “Chandler.”

  “—the existence of a part of the brain called the Gate of Orpheus—”

  “Chandler!”

  Chandler, pressed against the wall, looked at Naz as if she were a rising flood and he was trapped on the roof of his house.

  “Your father’s name was John Forrestal.”

  “Anyone could have found that out. My family is well known.”

  “He hung himself from the chandelier in his office,” Naz said over him. “‘Puto deus fio. I am becoming a god.’ What was my father’s name?”

  “How should I—”

  “What was his name, Chandler?”

  “Anthony,” Chandler said helplessly.

  “And my mother?”

  “Saba,” he whispered.

  “Your mother disappeared after your father hung himself,” she continued. “You always suspected your grandmother chased her away. What’s Saba mean?”

  “What’s—”

  “Answer the question, Chandler.”

  “A breeze. A gentle breeze.” He looked at Naz abjectly. “How do I—how do we know these things?”

  “Answer the question, Chandler. You know how.”

  “The … drug?”

  Naz nodded.

  “You gave me a drug. Someone—Morganthau?—made you give me a drug.”

  Again Naz nodded.

  “And it opened the Gate. The Gate of Orpheus.”

  For the first time a look of doubt—fear—crossed Naz’s face.

  “That’s the part I don’t understand. Morganthau never mentioned anything about a Gate of Orpheus. I thought I was in your mind, or that we were in each other’s. But now I think it was just you. Your”—her hands reached for a word—“consciousness somehow expanded into my mind. Into Morganthau’s.”

  Chandler didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “He was really behind the mirror?”

  Naz looked away. “He said he’d have me arrested if I didn’t cooperate. Solicitation,” she said, using the polite word. “He—”

  “—photographs you,” Chandler finished for her. “How many—? Forty-one,” he answered himself. He answered himself because it was all there. Everything Naz had ever done. Her first sex, her first drink, her first time trading sex for drink. Somehow it was all in his mind. And he knew he was in her mind in the same way. All of him, residing forever behind those beautiful dark eyes.

  He cleared his throat. “Morganthau’s real name. It’s—”

  “Logan. Eddie Logan. I know. Now I know.” She shook her head in wonder. “Do you remember what you said in the hotel room? You said, ‘I’m here too.’” She took his hand, squeezed it as hard as she could. “I’m here, Chandler. I’m here too.”

  Her touch sent an electric tingle through his body, and Chandler felt a dopey but wondrous smile spreading across his face. But at the same time there was fear: not of the connection, of how it came to be or what it meant for the future, but the idea that it might be lost somehow, someday. Because if he lost the piece of himself that was her, he would never be whole again.

  Another quotation sprang to his mind. Not one he’d learned for his dissertation, just something he’d read somewhere, sometime. The gods sent Orpheus away from Hades empty-handed, and doomed him to meet his death at the hands of women. Plato, he remembered then. The Symposium. Unlike most classical thinkers, Plato hadn’t revered Orpheus, but considered him a coward because he was unwilling to die for love. But that’s stupid, he told himself. I’m not—

  “Chandler?” Naz’s voice cut into his thoughts. Her mouth was still open, but before she could say something else a knock sounded at the door.

  CIA Headquarters, McLean, VA

  November 1, 1963

  “So.” Everton took a cigarette from a gold case monogrammed RH and lit it with a crystal lighter the size of an inkwell. “What’s with the hat? Afraid I’ll get a good look at your face, Melchior?”

  Since it looked like he was going to have to deal with this fool, Melchior took a moment to scrutinize him. Or, rather, his clothes. Everton was clearly less man than mannequin, a prop wrapped in the uniform of his class. His gray wool suit, though perfectly tailored and brand-new, was ten years out of style (the lapels were practically as wide as a beauty queen’s sash, for one thing, the serge so stiff it looked like it would stand up on its own). But that was hardly surprising: fashion trends would be beneath the notice of the acting assistant deputy director for the Western Hemisphere Division, and no doubt his tailor had been cutting his suits the same way since prep school. From the crisply symmetrical half-Windsor knot to the double peaks of his white pocket square to the gold Longines with its plain leather strap peeking out from his French cuffs, Melchior couldn’t find a single aspect of the man that didn’t reek of Wasp prudery. Even his gold wedding band, narrow as solder wire and (tastefully) unpolished, seemed to hide inside the hairs on his knuckle. Really, he was the type of man who could just disappear, and it would be months before even his wife noticed.

  Melchior took his hat off and set it on Richard Helms’s desk.

  “I’m not the one who should be afraid,” he said, pulling a Medaille d’Or from his breast pocket and lighting it with his Zippo. “Drew.”

  Everton’s eyes followed the glowing tip of Melchior’s cigar like a rabbit transfixed by a swaying snake.

  “The elusive Melchior,” he said, averting his gaze with difficulty. “I’ve always wanted to meet you, just to find out if you were real. That story with the slingshot still makes the rounds.”

  “You should see what I can do with a cigar.”

  Everton ashed so hard he broke his cigarette in half.

  “I, ah, read about that in your report. Actually, I have a few questions about your account of your time in Cuba.”

  Melchior waved the cigar like a magic wand. “Ask away.”

  It took Everton another moment to tear his eyes from Melchior’s cigar.

  “Right. So. Twenty-three months ago you were dropped into the Zapata Swamp as part of Operation Mongoose. There were six people on your team: you, two American freelancers, and three Cuban defectors with contacts in the anti-Communist resistance movement. You yourself are reputed to have extensive and impressive field credentials from Eastern Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia, among other places, yet within a week of your arrival all three Cubans were dead, one of the freelancers had been deported, the other was MIA, and you were in Boniato Prison.”

  “That sounds about right.” Melchior puffed contentedly. “Rip ever turn up? I owe that son of a bitch for ditching me.”

  A thick stream of smoke from the broken cigarette spiraled in the air between Everton and Melchior. Melchior could tell Everton wanted to put the cigarette out, but he just kept talking.

  “After nine months behind bars, you claim that not only were you released, but were brought to the office of Raúl Castro and asked to keep an eye on Red Army activity in Cuba.”

  “He gave me this suit too.” Melchior flipped open the left lapel, revealing the small hole over the heart. “Took it off a man he’d had executed. Was nice enough to have it cleaned first, but he left this memento mori to make sure I knew what the stakes were. Even threw in a pair-a shoes. Well, sandals, really.” Melchior lifted his feet again, waggled them at Everton.

  Everton threw up his hands, which caused the smoke from his broken cigarette to dance around l
ike an impish genie.

  “You have to realize the idea that Fidel Castro’s brother hired a CIA agent to work for him defies credulity.”

  “With all due respect, Acting Assistant Deputy Director for the Western Hemisphere Division Everton”—Melchior sucked air dramatically—“the Company sent me to Cuba to try to get El Jefe to smoke an exploding cigar, so I’m not sure where you get off saying what’s credulous or not.”

  “Desmond Fitz—ugh.” Everton couldn’t take it anymore. He grabbed a pencil and used the eraser to stamp out the broken cigarette. “Desmond FitzGerald read too many James Bond novels,” Everton said when the smoke had finally dissipated, leaving behind the smell of burning Hevea brasiliensis sap, “and is a little too impressed by what Joe Scheider17 cooks up in his labs.”

  Melchior rolled his eyes. The exploding cigar had been a stupid idea, but it was hardly the point. “Why is it so far-fetched that a pair of totalitarian governments should be prone to the same factionalism that’s in the process of ripping apart this country, not to mention this agency?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Listen, Drew. I been back in the States three days. Just about the longest time I been here since I was thirteen. But it didn’t take me more than three hours to see that there’s been a shift. This country’s splitting in half. Democrats on one side, Republicans on the other. Liberals and conservatives, reformers and old guard, beatniks and squares. What was the gap in the last election? A hundred thousand votes out of seventy million? High school elections have more swing than that.”

  “Kennedy won. That’s all that matters.” Everton didn’t sound at all pleased by this fact.

  “With a little help from Momo Giancana,” Melchior said, “who, I gotta say, seems to be moving in very elite circles these days.”