Shift: A Novel

by Tim Kring

  “Did someone mention scoring?”

  BC turned to see a pale woman with dark hair pulled straight off her face and held in place by a large silver comb etched with some sort of Indian scrollwork. Despite the lack of hairspray or makeup (aside from some elaborate paint around the eyes, which gave her face the look of an Egyptian death mask)—not to mention the slim trousers and button-down blouse she wore—her extreme thinness and pinched tones, along with the emerald nugget on her right hand, gave her away as a member of the aristocracy.

  “Miss Hitchcock,” he said, taking a chance. He decided to drop the beatnik pose and revert to his Southern accent. “I’m so glad we’ve finally run into each other!”

  “Have we met?” Peggy Hitchcock said, looking, in the manner of one whose every social interaction is cushioned by millions of dollars, completely unconcerned that she might have forgotten an acquaintance’s name. “I don’t seem to recall your face, or your accent for that matter. Southerners are as common as dodos around here, if not quite as funny-looking.”

  BC had no idea how to take this, and decided to pass over it. He extended his hand.

  “Beauregard Gamin. We, that is I, am nothing more than a gatecrasher. I was at the Blue Note to see Miles blow”—BC had in fact read a review by Nat Hentoff of the performance in the Village Voice—“and a pretty hep character mentioned your pad was the place to meet the coolest cats in town.”

  “The coolest cats, you say?” Hitchcock’s eyebrows went up in amusement. “I think Miles is in the library. I tried to get him to play, but he’s having more fun standing around the musicians and intimidating them.”

  BC had assumed the faint sound of jazz in the apartment came from a hi-fi. He was impressed, and showed it.

  “Back in Oxford, Mississippi, where I come from, the only Negroes we ever let indoors wore livery.” He glanced at a beautiful Negress who had her arm around a bearded white man. “You can’t imagine how exciting this is for me.”

  “Change will come to the South just as it has to the North. If it’s not Martin Luther King, it’ll be Mary Jane.”

  “A wonderful girl! I hope to meet her one day!”

  Hitchcock looked at BC sharply again. “So, did I hear you say you were looking for Richard Alpert before?”

  “I’ve heard that he traffics in, how shall I put it, mind-opening experiences?”

  Hitchcock was silent for so long that BC was sure she was going to throw him out. But finally she laughed and said, “My God, Mr. Gamin, you practically sound like a G-man. Just call it acid, please.”

  BC lowered his eyes modestly. “Pardon me, Miss Hitchcock. It must be that Southern reserve.”

  “I’m from New England. From my point of view, you’re all flatulent windbags.”

  “I, ah …” BC had never spoken to a woman who was so matter-of-factly rude. “I believe flatulent windbag is redundant.”

  Hitchcock threw back her head and laughed the kind of laugh that would have caused BC’s mother to stab her in the throat with a kitchen knife.

  “Oh, you are a hoot, Mr. Gamin. You hold on. I’m going to see if I can find Dickie. Don’t hesitate to grab him if you see him. Big guy, thick beard, rather less hair on his head. Black turtleneck with a gold medallion on his chest.”

  BC waited fifteen minutes before he realized Hitchcock probably wasn’t coming back, and then began to make his way through the apartment in search of her. He’d just finished his second revolution when he turned and collided with a large, solid man. Coarse strands of beard rasped across his lips and he felt something hard strike his chest. A pair of hands landed on his hipbones, pushing him back a few inches, then held him there.

  “Easy there, young fellow,” a soothing voice, mildly redolent of anise, breathed into his face.

  BC wanted to step back, but the hands on his hips rooted him to the spot. He looked up into a tangle of black beard, liberally laced with gray. A pair of warm brown eyes sat atop furred cheeks, glinting at him like a benevolent bear’s.

  “I, uh, that is, pardon me …”

  “Do we know each other?” the man said, still holding BC in place. A big cavey warmth radiated from his chest and stomach.

  “No.” BC’s eyes fell to the gold medallion dangling from the man’s throat. “That is, are you Richard Alpert?”

  A smile appeared in the beard.

  “As long as you’re not a federal officer or vice cop, I am.”

  He laughed, and the shaking was just enough to dislodge his hands. BC stepped back.

  “My name is Beauregard Gamin.” BC stuck out his hand, which Alpert took in both of his and held softly but firmly, as though it were a wild bird. “I was hoping to meet you.”

  “And what have I done to earn the attention of such a handsome young peacock?”

  BC grinned in spite of himself, smoothing the front of his vest.

  “I heard that you, that is, it’s my understanding—”

  “Oh, are you the Southern gentleman Peggy mentioned? Goodness, she didn’t do you justice.”

  “Do you think you can help me out?”

  Alpert smirked. “It’s my mission in life to help out men such as yourself. Open your mouth and say aahh.”

  BC blushed. Before he could say anything, however, Alpert laughed and said, “Just kidding. Follow me.”

  He led BC into a nearby bedroom where two—no, three—legs protruded from a pile of jackets. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a wax paper envelope, peeked inside. BC saw something that looked like a sheet of perforated paper. Alpert tore off a stamp and held it up between two pinched fingers.

  “Now then—”

  “Actually, I’d prefer to take it with me if I can.” BC looked around the messy room. “I’ve heard that setting plays a vital role, and I’d prefer something more familiar. Intimate.”

  On the bed, the big toe at the end of one leg scratched the ankle of one of the others with a sandpapery sound.

  Alpert frowned. “A guide is every bit as important as setting, and I’m leery of leaving you alone for your first experience. LSD is an extremely powerful drug.”

  “So I’ve heard,” BC said drily.

  Alpert deliberated with himself, then shrugged. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a somewhat battered card, slipped it into the envelope with the acid, and pressed it into BC’s hand. Once again, he refused to let go.

  “These are my numbers. I want you to call me at any time—before, during, after.” He squeezed BC’s fingers. “Perhaps I can lure you to Millbrook for a more in-depth experience.”

  “Millbrook?” BC felt his hand sweating inside Alpert’s furry paws. “Miss Hitchcock has a house there, doesn’t she?”

  “Her brother, Billy. It’s quite a special place.”

  “Well, if this is everything people say it is, no doubt I’ll want a second experience.”

  “Oh, don’t take all of this at once! You’ll be jumping off rooftops thinking you can fly!”

  It was another fifteen minutes before BC could get away from Alpert, and even then it took a gaggle of floppy-haired boys and girls to drag the big man away. BC tucked the envelope inside his jacket and headed for the hall. But at the top of the stairs he was stopped by a tall, sturdy-looking man in a bland gray suit. The man opened his jacket just enough to show BC the butt of his pistol.

  “Whoa, man,” BC said. “Guns are so uncool.” He smiled, but the man didn’t get the joke.

  “I hope you will come without a fuss, Agent Querrey.”

  BC heard a trace of an accent. There was nothing particularly Russian about it, yet somehow BC knew the man was KGB. As casually as possible, he turned and looked toward the other end of the hallway. Another gray-suited man waited there. He had a softer face than his companion, with shoulders like ham hocks and a scowl curling his pudgy lips.

  BC turned back to the first agent. His eyes traveled up and down the gray suit disdainfully.

  “You could have at least dressed the part.”
<
br />   Washington, DC

  November 19, 1963

  Melchior was sitting on a bench in Fort Washington Park when Song’s Cadillac pulled up, a newspaper flapping in his hands in the breeze coming off the Potomac. He looked up with a tired smile on his face as the whiplash form of Chul-moo opened the back door, then frowned when he saw Ivelitsch step from the car. The Russian scanned the surroundings, then pulled his hat lower on his head and reached back to hand Song out of the car with a familiar air Melchior didn’t like at all.

  “What is this, the prom? Jesus Christ, Song, why don’t you just pick him up at the Soviet Embassy next time?”

  Song turned up the fur collar of her coat against the breeze. “Relax. We made sure we weren’t followed.”

  “I’m kind of surprised to see you here actually,” Ivelitsch said.

  “You don’t sound happy about it,” Melchior replied. “Actually.”

  “I don’t know why you went in in the first place. The Company suspects you of murdering three agents, after all.”

  “It was the only way to divert suspicion,” Melchior said.

  “You must have an amazing amount of confidence in your ability to bullshit. Especially with someone like James Jesus Angleton.”

  “It was just Everton,” Melchior said, glaring at the Russian’s smug, well-rested face. “Mother was out of town. I’ve never had the privilege of meeting him, which he’ll thank me for one day.” He held up his hand when Ivelitsch started to speak again. “Look, I don’t have the time or energy for chitchat. It’s been more than a week since Chandler escaped, and he’s bound to show up soon. I want to know where Naz is. Without her, we have no way of controlling him, and without him our ace in the hole is gone.”

  Ivelitsch glanced at Song before speaking. “I have men watching Millbrook and the Hitchcock woman’s apartment in New York City. If he shows up, we’ll handle him. I’m beginning to think Orpheus is a distraction. We have bigger fish to fry.”

  “I’ll have Keller give you a test flight when we get him back. Good luck to your men, by the way.”

  “If he’s as powerful as you say, what’s to stop him from plucking the secret of Naz’s whereabouts from your mind? Isn’t it safer if I don’t tell you where she is?”

  “I have to agree with Pavel,” Song said, a little too quickly for Melchior’s taste. “The fewer people who know Naz’s location, the better. And she needs to be far enough away that if Orpheus does manage to ferret out her location, we’ll be able to move her before he can get there.”

  Melchior looked between the two of them with suspicious, tired eyes. “How far, Pavel? Russia?”

  “It would be difficult to get an unwilling girl on a plane to Moscow, at least in Washington. Perhaps from another city. If we could get her on a boat to Cuba, we could handle the transfer from there much more easily.”

  “I have contacts in a few coastal cities,” Song added. “Miami, New Orleans, Houston …”

  “Jesus Christ, I wasn’t serious. You really want to send Naz to the fucking Soviet Union?”

  This time it was Song who looked at Ivelitsch before answering. “We should at least get her away from Washington. Then, if we decide we need to move her out of the country, we can.”

  “In the meantime, we have something else to deal with—namely, the real reason why you were released last night. It’s not because you managed to explain your way out of trouble. Everton let slip on his last visit to Song’s that you’re going to be sent to Dallas to retrieve an agent—”

  “It’s Caspar,” Song cut in.

  “Caspar? What the hell is he—no, wait.” Melchior turned back to Song. “I thought you said Everton came in on the second Thursday of the month. That was almost a week ago.”

  “The Company decided to send you when they found Rip’s body,” Ivelitsch said smoothly. “Angleton’s pretty sure you killed him. He thinks Raúl doubled you in Cuba.”

  “If he believed that, why didn’t he have Everton hold me when I went in last night?”

  Ivelitsch sighed as though he were trying to explain quantum mechanics to a three-year-old, or a German shepherd. “Are you familiar with Anatoliy Golitsyn?”

  “The KGB officer who defected in ’61? What about him?”

  “Mother was convinced he was a KGB plant, and he was a little, shall we say, zealous in his attempts to get him to confess. If Golitsyn went public with the details of what was done to him, it would be very embarrassing to the Company, especially on top of the flak it’s taken over the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis. He apparently commanded a healthy settlement as hush money, and Drew Everton doesn’t want something like that happening on his watch. So rather than do anything excessive in-house—”

  “They want Caspar to kill you,” Song said.

  Maybe it was because he was so tired—that pinhead Everton had kept a light shining in his face for twelve straight hours—but Melchior’s mind filled with an image of Caspar at four years old, looking up at him with trust—love—in his eyes. He saw Caspar at six, eight, ten, twelve, the love steadily replaced by a dead smirk as he attempted to maintain some sense of self while the Company put him through the wringer. Finally Caspar at eighteen, on leave from the Marines. “They’re sending me to Japan,” Melchior remembered him saying, both hands wrapped around a glass to keep them from shaking. “I guess it’s finally starting.”

  “Melchior?” Song’s voice cut into his thoughts.

  Melchior shook himself. “Last I heard, the Company’d got Caspar stationed at Atsugi. The idea was that he would stage a defection, then buy his way into KGB with secrets about the U2 program. Although, after Powers, the cat was pretty much out of the bag.”

  “That was four years ago,” Ivelitsch said. “Caspar arrived in Moscow in October 1959. Of course we suspected him of being a Company operative. Who in his right mind wants to move to the Soviet Union? We spent months trying to crack him, but he proved intractable. This seemed less due to any fortitude than simple instability. Caspar”—Melchior found it telling that Ivelitsch chose not to use Caspar’s real name, since neither he nor Song had—“suffered from paranoia and delusions of grandeur and general confusion about who he was and what he believed in. He started calling himself Alik for some reason—his wife didn’t even know his real name until after they were married.”

  “He got married?”

  “A whirlwind romance,” Ivelitsch said wryly. “Less than two months passed from the day they met until their nuptials.”

  “Hmph,” Melchior said. “That doesn’t sound convenient at all.”

  Ivelitsch didn’t respond to Melchior’s innuendo. “When Marina became pregnant, Caspar requested to return to the United States. He said he was ‘disillusioned’ by Communism.”

  “If everyone who felt that way was allowed to leave the Soviet Union, the country’d have fewer living inhabitants than Pompeii after Vesuvius blew its top. Lemme guess, you let him take the wife, too? Because she was pregnant.”

  “Ultimately we decided it was easier letting him leave than watching him all the time. As soon as he got back here, he immediately resumed his pro-Communist persona, and became a very visible supporter of the revolution in Cuba—even as, behind the scenes, he made connections with several persons involved with CIA’s program to assassinate Castro, including some associates of Sam Giancana.”

  “Giancana, huh?”

  “Do you know him?”

  “Let’s just say his name keeps coming up.”

  “Melchior,” Song said, “Caspar wouldn’t—couldn’t—kill you, could he? After all you’ve been through?”

  Melchior shook his head. “I dunno. It’s been a long time.”

  “CIA feels Caspar’s behavior has become alarmingly erratic,” Ivelitsch said. “Angleton suspects we might have doubled him even.”

  “Golitsyn, me, Caspar. Is there anyone Angleton doesn’t think is a double agent?”

  “Yes. Kim Philby.” Ivelitsch chuckled, then went on. “At
any rate, Caspar’s involvement with Giancana is entirely self-initiated. Last month he even tried to get a visa to Cuba, presumably to make an attempt on Castro’s life. And the Company’s pretty sure he was the person who took a shot at William Walker back in April.”

  “Walker’s a fascist, Castro’s a Commie,” Melchior said. “And Kim Philby’s in Russia.”

  “Scheider thinks Caspar—” Ivelitsch broke off. “What?”

  “I said, Kim Philby’s in Russia.”

  “What’s your point?” Ivelitsch said coldly.

  “My point is, you said yesterday that Philby was your mole inside CIA. But he’s been in Russia since January, which means there’s no way Angleton could have told him he wanted Caspar to kill me. Which means you got the info from someone else. I’m guessing it was Caspar himself.”

  “Pavel?” Song said. “What’s he talking about? Did you turn Caspar?”

  “Yes, Pavel,” Melchior sneered. “Did you double him? Or is he playing you? Because if the Company’s got a file on you, then this partnership is over.”

  Ivelitsch didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “You’ll have to ask him that yourself. When you see him in Dallas.”

  “Cut the bullshit, comrade. I need to know the truth before I see Caspar. Has he been in regular contact with KGB since he came back from Russia?”

  “Of course we tried to recruit him,” Ivelitsch said exasperatedly. “But Caspar’s so confused that he can no longer distinguish between legend and reality. He may well think he’s working for KGB. For all I know, he’ll tell you we have dinner once a week. But the simple truth is that he’s too crazy, even for us.”

  “So what you’re saying is that I should believe Caspar if he tells me what you want me to believe, but if he contradicts you, it’s just a delusion. You’ll understand me if I find that unsatisfactory.”