by Tim Kring
All he needed to do now was get Orpheus back. But he wasn’t too worried about that. He was pretty sure Chandler was going to come looking for him.
Washington, DC
November 9, 1963
Charles Jarrell took one look at the figure on his front porch, then pulled BC inside and slammed the door.
“Jesus H. Christ. Take that ridiculous thing off your head. You look like Phyllis fucking Diller.” He looked BC up and down one more time, then shook his head. “Does he know you’re here?”
BC pulled off the ratty wig and scratched his itching scalp. “Who?”
Jarrell kicked BC’s mother’s Electrolux hard enough to dent the motor’s housing. “J. Edgar Vacuum, that’s who.”
“Oh, ah—no.”
Jarrell opened his mouth, and even as a whiff of liquor-soaked breath floated BC’s way he said, “I need a drink for this,” turned on his heel, and disappeared.
He lived in a decrepit row house just a few blocks north of Capitol Hill, one of those DC neighborhoods that, forsaken by the nation’s prosperity, seemed doomed to eternal poverty. But not even the boarded-up windows and beaten-up cars on the street could have prepared BC for the chaos inside Jarrell’s house. The walls were covered with peeling paper whose color and pattern were completely obscured by a coating of cigarette smoke as sticky as creosote. Stacks of newspapers, five, six, seven feet tall, made a veritable maze of the floor, while the air was similarly partitioned by bolts—clots—of smoke. Despite the reek of tobacco, BC could smell the spicier tinge of alcohol and sweat beneath it. He’d heard the expression “down the rabbit hole” innumerable times in reference to CIA, but had never actually been in one before.
“Sit your fucking ass down, you’re making me nervous,” Jarrell said, returning from another room—or who knows, maybe just from behind a stack of paper. “This better be good, or I’ll be mailing pieces of your body to Hoover for the next several weeks.”
The newsprint- and nicotine-stained fingers of Jarrell’s left hand were tucked into a pair of ice-filled lowballs and his right hand was wrapped around a bottle of rye. He filled the two glasses to the rim and shoved one across a stack of papers that served as a coffee table. BC sat down gingerly on a sofa mummified in what could only be described as ass-wrinkled newspaper. There were several dark kinky hairs on the pages. Given the fact that what hair remained on Jarrell’s head was limply straight and gray, BC perched as close to the sofa’s edge as he could without falling off.
“Well?”
“Mr. Jarrell—”
“Aw, Jesus Fuck!” Jarrell looked around as though someone might be hiding behind a stack of newspapers. “It’s Parker! Virgil Parker!”
“Mr. Parker.” BC shook his head helplessly. “I thought you’d been fired.”
Jarrell smacked the side of his head, hard enough to make BC wince.
“Jesus, this really is amateur hour. I can tell by your ridiculous costume that you’ve at least heard of cover. So leap to the obvious conclusion.”
“Ye-es. But you don’t work for CIA under your real name. So why go to all the trouble of firing Charles Jarrell if it’s Virgil Parker who’s going to be hired by the Agency?”
For the first time, Jarrell chuckled. “Oh. Well. He really did fire me. Didn’t like the way I dressed or talked or some shit. But then he thought better of it, sent me undercover.” He waved a hand. “Enough background. What the hell are you doing here, especially if Hoover didn’t send you?”
“I need to talk to you about Orpheus.”
“Who?”
“Orpheus? Project Orpheus?”
“Never heard of it.”
“A division of MK-ULTRA? LSD experiments—”
“Oh, that? Jesus, no one’s mentioned that in a dog’s age.”
“But according to the director’s files, you’re the Bureau’s liaison—”
“You broke into the fucking Vault? Sweet mother of God, you’ve got balls, I’ll give you that. So look, CB—”
“BC actually.”
“Yeah, I don’t give a fuck. So look, CB-BC, there ain’t many of us inside Langley, so we’re spread a little thin. I’m the ‘liaison,’ as you so elegantly put it, on about forty different operations, projects, actions, and individuals at the Company. Orpheus or whatever the fuck you called it is about thirty-ninth or fortieth on my list of priorities.”
BC felt his heart sink. Jarrell seemed as ignorant as he was crazy. “There was an incident,” he said, a desperate whine making his voice sharp. “At Millbrook.”
Jarrell’s face softened slightly. “Is that where that nut job Leary set up camp? I can call someone in the Boston office, see what they know.”
“Bureau? Or … Company?”
“Jesus Christ!” Jarrell practically screamed. “I—do—not—work—for—the—fuck—ing—Bu—reau. Capisce?”
BC nodded. “A Boston agent was involved in the incident.”
“By involved, you mean died?” For the first time Jarrell perked up. “What the fuck happened?”
BC took a deep breath, then told the story as clearly as he could. Halfway through, Jarrell started drinking from BC’s glass, and by the time BC finished he’d refilled both glasses and drained them as well.
“That is the craziest bunch of horseshit I ever heard—and I’ve heard some crazy horseshit in my life.”
“I know it sounds unbelievable.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t believe you. You strike me as a man incapable of telling a lie, as your pathetic attempt at a disguise makes clear. Whether or not you know the truth is another question. What’d you say the guy’s cipher was? The swarthy fellow?”
“Melchior.”
“Melchior, Melchior.” Jarrell got up and began rummaging through the piles of newspaper, moving methodically from the living room through a wide doorway into what was probably the dining room, although it contained nothing but a maze of newspaper and boxes. As Jarrell worked his way through the stacks, BC noticed that colored slips of paper poked from them at various places—red, yellow, and blue flaps fluttering like pinfeathers. With a combination of fascination and revulsion, BC realized that the thousands of papers served as some kind of filing system, like one of IBM’s room-sized computers. Only instead of punch cards, it was newsprint.
Now Jarrell pulled a classifieds section from a stack of paper. The ads were covered with hatch marks, and Jarrell’s eyes flitted up and down the columns like a bookkeeper scanning accounts.
“Mother of fuck.” He wadded the paper and tossed it on the floor. “You had yourself a run-in with one of the Wise Men.”
BC’s brow wrinkled. “The Magi? Melchior, Balthazar, and what was the last one called?”
“Caspar. And yes, those three. But also no. By which I mean no, you literal-minded dipshit. Wise Men is Company lingo for three agents Frank Wisdom brought in with him in ’52.”
“Brought in?”
“Wisdom was OSS during the war. Was one of the advocates for a permanent agency to oversee American intelligence-gathering activities as well as a direct-action division to follow up on that intelligence when more visible options weren’t available.”
“You mean covert ops.”
“The Wiz more or less invented the concept. Legend has it that him and Joe Scheider recruited a couple-a three kids in his OSS days, was basically raising them to be spies—some spook story about sleepers and all that. In fact, now that I think of it, the program was pretty much the forerunner of Artichoke, Ultra, Orpheus, all that sci-fi crap. Anyway, the Wiz’s recruits were known as the Wiz Kids at first—big surprise, right?—which later gave way to Wise Men, which in turn led to the idea that there were three of them—Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar. According to legend, the goal was to place them in deep cover inside the Soviet Union, but Balthazar supposedly died during the course of his training, and Melchior was already too old—not to mention too dark—and ended up becoming the Wiz’s field hand.”
“And Caspa
r?” The name rang a bell, but BC couldn’t place it.
Jarrell shrugged. “Who knows? Even odds says there never was a Caspar—that the whole thing was just a story the Wiz made up, or maybe even Melchior. At any rate, Melchior got a reputation for being a crazy fuck—among other things, he’s repeatedly destroyed his own file, so no one besides the Wiz knows his real name or what he’s been up to for the last ten or twenty years.” Jarrell looked BC up and down in his vacuum repairman’s uniform. “You, my friend, are one lucky son of a bitch.”
BC ignored this.
“So how do I find him?”
“Melchior? Fat fucking chance. The Wiz had a nervous breakdown in ’56 after the whole Hungary thing blew up. I guess he’d told the rebels that if they rose up against the Soviet Union, the U.S. would help them out. But Ike, you know, he’d already fought his war, plus he had an election coming up, and he wanted nothing to do with it. Thousands of rebels were pretty much slaughtered, and the Wiz took it hard. Ended up going for shock treatments and all that, never really did recover. They farmed him out to London, then finally forced him out entirely last year. Without his patron, Melchior was pretty much persona non grata. You’d hear stories. One day he was in the Congo, the next in Southeast Asia, then he was off to Cuba. They could’ve all been true or all been lies. But the one thing I can tell you is that he don’t spend much time in DC.” Jarrell paused. “Although, come to think of it, if he is here, you might want to check out Madam Song’s.”
“And she is?”
“Oh baby.” Jarrell licked his lips like a teenager in the locker room about to describe the wonders of eating pussy. “Only the finest purveyor of female flesh on the Eastern seaboard. In addition to running an exclusive brothel, she also procures and supplies girls to mob bosses and politicians and other movers and shakers. Specializes in exotics—Orientals, Africans, niche-market cooz. She and Melchior were once ‘linked,’ as they say in the gossip pages, and there’s a reasonable chance he’s paid her a visit if he’s back in town.”
“For such a supposedly super-secret spy, his habits seem pretty well documented.”
Jarrell shook his head at BC like a disappointed teacher. “You got to understand how the trade works. There’s no such thing as a secret no one knows. Espionage is built on half truths, quarter truths, and lots and lots of lies. Every piece of useful information is attached to dozens, hundreds, of pieces of misinformation, and the best spy is the one who can sift through the bullshit to the truth. Part of it’s what we call legend—the invented story that creates an operative’s cover—and part of it’s just aura, the mystique that Melchior cultivates in order to give himself more clout out there in spyland. I’ve probably heard more stories about the Wise Men than I have about my uncle Joe, but the difference is 99.9 percent of those stories are complete and utter fabrications.”
“You don’t have an uncle Joe.”
“No.” Jarrell smiled. “But Virgil Parker does.”
“So what you’re saying is that you have no idea if Melchior really even knows Madam Song, let alone if he’ll have visited her.”
“What I’m saying is that Melchior’s name has been mentioned in connection with Song’s often enough that there’s probably something there. Whether they fucked once, or she’s an agent herself, or just runs a really good brothel, is anyone’s guess.” Jarrell shrugged. “But yeah, that’s about all the help I can give you.”
“There is one more thing. A woman. I don’t think she has anything to do with this, but—”
“Who?”
“Her name is Mary Meyer. She—”
“Yeah, I know who she is, and what she did. Who she did.”
“She gave him LSD.”
Jarrell shrugged. “So? He’s already hopped up on more pain pills and antianxiety drugs than all the housewives in Arlington combined. What’s one more?”
“She got the LSD from Edward Logan.”
Jarrell chuckled. “Well, he doesn’t appear to have developed any mental powers or turned into a zombie, so I think he’s safe, for now.”
BC stood up. “Well, thank you again.” He couldn’t help but ask. “Why did you help me?”
Jarrell poured himself his fifth or sixth whiskey before answering. He looked around the maze of newspapers with their colored markers, the myriad coded and recoded and decoded secrets they contained, then turned back to BC.
“I dunno. Because you found me, I suppose. Because you broke into J. Edgar Hoover’s Vault. Anyone who can do that is obviously fairly good at what he does. He’s also probably insane, but in a way I can identify with.” He waved his drink at the stacks of paper. “I’d say it’s better than even odds that you’re gonna end up in a body bag like Logan, but still, I’ve always been a sucker for the underdog.” He raised his drink to BC. “Good hunting.”
Washington, DC
November 10, 1963
A knock sounded at the door.
“Come in.”
Chul-moo opened the door quietly, almost apologetically.
“The senator is leaving,” he said in Korean.
Song didn’t look up from her desk. “He had a good time?”
“Laurel says he gave her a gown from a French designer. Yves Saint Laurent. Garrison says she practically had him posing for the cameras. Also, the background check on Paul Ingram came up clean.”
“If Paul Ingram is a Swedish businessman, I’m a Dallas housewife. Well, at least he’s taken the time to build a good cover. Book him for Friday. Set him up with Njeri. If he’s got any secrets, she’ll beat them out of him. Is that all?”
“There was a call from San Francisco.”
Song looked up. “Melchior’s Nazi? What did he want?”
“He said that Melchior wants us to move the new girl.”
“Move her where? The Mayflower? The Willard? Did he say why Melchior wanted her moved?” When Chul-moo shook his head, Song said, “If Melchior wants to foot the bill for different accommodations, he can call and tell me himself. Till then, she’s staying here. Please make sure Laurel gets back to the residence. I’ll see myself home.”
“Of course.” The tiniest of pauses. “Shall I check on her?”
“On?”
“The new girl?”
Chul-moo’s expression hadn’t changed, but the faintest note—of longing, pleading almost, had entered his voice. It was hard to imagine this knife of a boy asking for anything, let alone permission to visit a girl. Song had selected Chul-moo as her majordomo because his sexual taste ran to middle-aged white men, on whom he took great pleasure in exacting revenge for the destruction of his country (when Song got a client who particularly enjoyed being humiliated, she would send Chulmoo in instead of one of the girls; despite his youth, he was surprisingly learned in the ways of inflicting pain, whether lethal or remediable). Yet she could have sworn there was a note of genuine desire in Chul-moo’s voice.
“That’s not necessary. I’ll be looking in on her myself.”
“Of course.” Chul-moo wasn’t quite able to hide his disappointment. With a slight bow, he backed from the room.
Song remained in her office for another hour, reviewing the day’s takings, monetary and photographic, and checking tomorrow’s appointments, including an Iraqi Baathist who controlled nearly a third of that country’s oil, and had helped to oust General Qasim in February after the latter established ties with the Soviet Union (Qasim himself had been a client here five years ago, just before he seized power). She’d contacted CIA to see if they were interested in incriminating photographs—the man’s name was Saddam Hussein, and there was something about the set of his mouth that suggested he would get up to some very naughty things in bed—or if they wanted one of her more experienced girls to pump him for information, but the Company had turned her down, which suggested they were already working with him. That information was also valuable, although much trickier to sell, and she should have put out feelers to KGB to see if they were interested, but she was distracted
tonight. For one thing, there was this Ingram fellow, whom she was pretty sure was KGB. For another, there was “the new girl,” as Chul-moo called her. Song wasn’t sure why she’d agreed to take custody of Nancy for Melchior, especially after she’d ferried Orpheus to San Francisco free of charge. It was a scenario with many possible drawbacks, including running afoul of CIA. Song was certainly not averse to risk-taking—you didn’t build the kind of business she’d created without taking a few gambles. But it was hard to see the payoff in this deal with Melchior. Unless, of course, it was Melchior himself.
Meanwhile, there was the girl. Nancy. Song had never met someone quite like her. Someone so seemingly helpless, yet who incurred the aid of powerful forces wherever she went. One look at her and you wanted to protect her. No, that wasn’t quite it. One look from her and you wanted to protect her. Take Chul-moo. He guarded her more fiercely than any of the other girls, and she didn’t even work here. Well, not yet anyway.
Melchior’d told her that Nancy had worked as a hooker in Boston, but, unlike the girls Song hired, she didn’t seem to have entered into her profession happily. She drank too much (although she hadn’t touched a drop since coming to Song’s), and practically radiated miserableness. But that morning, before Song left the residence, she’d stopped in Nancy’s room, and Nancy had asked to work for her. Taken aback, Song had said she would think about it and get back to her at the end of the day.
She wondered about the call from Keller, though. If she had to guess, she’d say say that “Orpheus” had gotten away from the doctor and was on his way here. Well, let him come. From what she’d seen of him on the plane, he didn’t look like much of a threat, and it was going to take more than one spurned lover to break into her house.
She closed her ledger now, stored it in the safe with the day’s cash, headed for the residence. The Newport Place property was solely for business. She and the girls lived in a town house on N, directly behind the bordello and connected to it by a tunnel built with taxpayer dollars (although even the Company, who funneled her the money, didn’t know of its existence). No doubt it was an extravagance, but it was a mark of Song’s power, and she never failed to feel as though she were a queen striding the length of a great hall as she traversed the narrow cement chute. She had the palace, the imperial guard, a dozen ladies in waiting. All she lacked was a consort. If only he hadn’t been wearing that shabby suit. And those sandals. Her lip curled in disgust at the very thought.
