by Tim Kring
Chandler’s mouth hung open a moment.
“I’d say something about what a terrible world we live in, but what’s the point?”
BC shrugged. “I don’t know why it made such a big impression on me. I mean, it was my father’s memory, not mine. But I’ve dreamed of him for years. That boy. I don’t think he was going to attack them. I think he was going to tell them something.”
“Tell them what?”
“I don’t know. Warn them maybe.”
“Warn them?”
“That there are consequences. That no victory is ever clean, or total.” He looked up at Chandler. “We’ll find her, Chandler. I don’t care how long it takes.”
Chandler didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “Do you have any acid?”
BC pulled a small rectangle of blotter paper from his pocket. “Courtesy of Richard Alpert. If you’d just waited for me—”
“Okay, okay,” Chandler said, laughing BC’s protest away. “At least we don’t have to worry about that.” He reached for the bottle and poured a couple of tall drinks. Six hours later, when BC woke up, thickheaded, dry-mouthed—and completely naked—Chandler was gone.
Matanzas Province, Cuba
November 22, 1963
Giancana’d provided four men with the boat, and Ivelitsch made them row the last mile to shore. The coastline was free of settlement as far as the eye could see, but Ivelitsch wasn’t taking any chances that someone might hear the motor.
Garza was waiting for them on the dock, his cane in his left hand, a shuttered lantern in his right.
“Comrade. It’s nice to meet you again.”
“Again?” Ivelitsch squinted in the moonlight. “It was you? In Camagüey? I take it the medicine worked.”
Garza smiled. “Sorry to send you on a wild-goose chase.”
“Water over the bridge, as the Americans say. Well, let’s do this. The sun will be up soon.”
“The fishing boats will be out before that.” Garza flashed his light behind him, illuminating an old pickup that seemed more rust than metal. “It’s in the back.”
Even with five men—Garza’s hip wasn’t strong enough to support that kind of weight—it was still almost an hour before the half-ton bomb was in the boat. Dawn glimmered on the horizon, and a bird had started to sing a loud, tuneless solo.
“I understand you have something for me,” Garza said when they were done.
Ivelitsch went below, came out a moment later with Naz’s unconscious body draped over his shoulder. He laid her on the dock, then handed Garza a brown glass bottle with an eyedropper built into the lid.
“Keep her out until you get to the safe house. Trust me, you’ll have a much easier time of it.”
“Uh, sure,” Garza said, looking at the wisp of a girl lying on the dock. “Is that all?”
“I think I can handle this last thing myself,” Ivelitsch said, pulling an automatic pistol from his jacket.
“Wha—” Garza said, but Ivelitsch was already firing. Ten seconds later, all four of Giancana’s men were dead. Ivelitsch got back in the boat. Garza expected him to toss the bodies overboard, but all he did was kick away the man slumped over the wheel.
“You’ve joined a very select group, Mr. Garza,” Ivelitsch said, starting the boat. He gunned the motor—something about having a nuclear bomb in the hold had apparently made him unconcerned about detection. “I’d advise you to remember just what the price of admission is. I’ll dump the bodies in the Straits,” he added. “Save you the trouble of having to bury them.”
“Uh, thanks. I must’ve missed that entry in Miss Manners.” Garza nudged the girl on the pier with his left foot. “Any other instructions?”
Ivelitsch was backing the boat from the dock. “Keep her alive. What happens to the kid is up to you.”
“The kid?”
Ivelitsch didn’t bother to look back. “Apparently she’s knocked up.”
The boat’s nose pointed seaward now; Ivelitsch opened the throttle and it roared out of the lagoon. When it was gone, Garza looked down at the beautiful sleeping face of the girl on the dock. Only then did he realize the Russian hadn’t told him her name. So much for Miss Manners.
He reached down for her—it was going to be awkward dragging her to the truck with his bum leg—but just as his hand touched hers, the girl’s eyes fluttered open. Despite himself, Garza jumped back.
The girl looked neither right nor left, but stared straight into Garza’s eyes.
“Where am I?”
The girl’s eyes seemed as deep as a lagoon as well, and the longer Garza stared into them, the deeper he fell. He suddenly realized he didn’t know if the girl had spoken to him in English or Spanish.
“Eres en Cuba,” he said quietly, then added, “Miss Haverman.” It occurred to him again that Ivelitsch had never told him the girl’s name, but really, what else could it be?
Still Naz stared straight into his eyes. She didn’t speak—at any rate he didn’t see her lips move—but even so, Garza was sure she’d asked him a question. Requested a favor. There was only one answer possible.
“No te preocupadas, Miss Haverman,” he said, his voice more sincere than it had ever been in his life. He dropped his cane and hoisted her into his arms; if his leg hurt him, he didn’t feel it. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.”
Dallas, TX
November 22, 1963
“Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid!” BC yelled at himself as he ran onto the—splash!—wet balcony of his motel. This was the second time Chandler had given him the slip in three days. Why the hell hadn’t he handcuffed him to the bed?
The sky was clotted with clouds leaking gray drizzle; an oily puddle filled in the space where he’d parked last night, so Chandler’d been gone for a while. A young couple was loading suitcases into a pale bluish greenish Rambler and BC yelled down to them.
“Wait!”
“What’s the holdup?” The husband smiled brightly at BC as he ran up.
“FBI.” BC flashed a counterfeit badge he’d purchased for all of five dollars. “I’m commandeering this car for official business.” He’d backed out of the space before he noticed the baby in the seat beside him, handed it off to its startled-looking mother through the window.
There was no map in the car, so it took him the better part of an hour to find the first address Jarrell had written down. Thank God he’d committed them to memory—Chandler’d taken the list, even though he said his own memory had become virtually eidetic. The place was all the way out in north Dallas, a withered single-story ranch with a picture window veiled by wrinkled blinds. BC drove right past the house and parked the Rambler halfway down the block, then made his way to the house using a few stunted live oaks for cover. The rain had stopped by then, but the air was thick with moisture steaming off the ground in the rising heat. The brown lawn, though wet, was otherwise unwatered and unmown. Moreover, the strands of grass that had sprung from the cracks in the driveway were a good six inches long, which is to say: no one was using this driveway.
No one lived here.
Two scenarios sprang to BC’s mind. The first, unlikely, was that the house was a decoy to draw BC and Chandler away from Melchior’s real target. The second, more probable, was that it was a trap.
BC immediately ducked behind a straggly hedge that separated the house from its neighbor and made his way toward the back fence. He peered through a crack, saw nothing, vaulted the fence, and crept toward the corner of the house. The first window he came to was uncurtained, the room beyond empty save for a bare mattress and box spring, an open closet with a few bent hangers on the rod. He tried the sash. It was locked. He went to the second window. This one was narrow, opened onto a small bathroom. More to the point, the lock had been forced and the wet ground below was trampled with fresh footprints. Somehow BC knew: Chandler. His first thought was Thank God! and his second was I am going to kill you!
He had to take his jacket off to squeeze through
the narrow aperture, and even so a button snapped off his shirt as he shimmied into the house. The little noise it made as it bounced off the linoleum sounded loud as a gunshot in BC’s ears, but the rest of the house remained quiet. The bathroom door stood open to the hall. Bedrooms to the left, living quarters to the right. It seemed unlikely that Melchior would be waiting in a bedroom. BC drew his gun and went right.
It was only three steps to the end of the hall—carpeted, so his feet made no sound. He peeked around the corner, and there he was. Not Chandler.
Melchior.
He sat with his back to BC in a wooden chair, facing the front door. Something lay across his lap, and in the shadows BC took it for a rifle at first, then realized it was just an umbrella. It seemed to be dry, which meant that he’d been here for a while. His breathing was slow and deep, but BC knew he wasn’t sleeping. He was waiting.
He leveled his gun at Melchior’s head and cocked it.
“Don’t move.”
Melchior didn’t move. Didn’t even twitch. He was so still that BC wondered if maybe he actually was sleeping, but then:
“Why, Beau-Christian Querrey. You got the drop on me. Congrats.”
“Put your hands in the air where I can see them.”
“Here?” Melchior extended his arms to either side like Christ on the cross. “Or here?” He pointed them straight up in the air like Superman.
“Get down on the floor. Keep your hands away from your body.”
“Stand up, sit down, lie down. I feel like I’m back in mass.” He stood up, and the umbrella on his lap fell to the floor. He stepped over it, his arms still raised, sank to one knee, then both, then lowered his upper body to the floor. The whole time he never looked back at BC. “From all the rigamarole, I’m betting you don’t have any handcuffs on you, do you? What are you going to do, use your tie?”
In fact, BC had been wondering just that, and, angrily, he reached for the knot and pulled it sharply.
Melchior moved at exactly the same moment. BC didn’t even know what he’d done, but suddenly the chair was flying toward him. It smacked the gun and a shot went off, slanting into the wall and blowing out a piece of plaster the size of his thigh, but BC managed to keep hold of his weapon. Melchior, meanwhile, had rolled to his knees and grabbed his umbrella and was holding it out like a sword.
BC couldn’t help but smile.
“What is that, some kind of—”
There was a pfft and something that felt like a linebacker’s helmet smashed into BC’s gut and he staggered backward. His back hit the wall behind him and the gun fell from his hand and then he fell forward onto his face.
He was dead before he hit the floor.
BC had no fewer than five addresses for Caspar. Five, and Chandler had no idea where any of them were. Thank God there was a map in BC’s rental car.
The first was way up in north Dallas. Chandler wasn’t sure what sort of dosage was in the blotter paper BC had procured from Richard Alpert, so he ripped it in half and downed the first part on the drive over; he pushed at the silent single-story ranch when he finally found it, but felt nothing. He broke in anyway. Circled around to the backyard and popped a half-rotted window frame out of its housing. His eyes only confirmed what his mind had already told him: the place was empty and, judging from the layer of dust that covered everything, long deserted.
The next address was on Marsalis Street. It was just after five when Chandler got there, but an old woman was already up, washing the breakfast dishes. Her tenants, she told him, worked first shift at the string bean factory in Fort Worth, had to be in by seven. She remembered Caspar vividly, although she knew him by another name. It was only because Chandler could see the face in her mind that he knew she was talking about the person he was looking for.
“Oh, sure, Lee Oswald. Troubled boy, what with all those Cuba pamphlets and that Communist wife. Pretty girl, though, when her face wasn’t so bruised you couldn’t see it.”
“He hit her?” Chandler couldn’t help but think of Naz.
“He’d fly into these rages,” she said matter-of-factly, as though describing the propensity of flies to work their way through a window screen. “I couldn’t tell you what brought ’em on. News stories usually. One day it was Castro, the next day the president. Then it was Khrushchev or some mob boss that that Kennedy brother was grilling on the TV. He was one of them people who have an opinion about anything and everything, but God help the poor soul who tried to make sense of ’em all.”
“Did he leave any word where he was going?”
“Well, his wife was in N’Orleans last I heard. He went after her, I guess to try to get her back.” She shuddered. “He’ll find her. He was a confused boy, but you could tell he was one of them who never stops till he gets what he wants.”
Chandler pushed then, just a little, to make sure she was telling the truth, and all of it. There was nothing else there. Caspar seemed hardly to have made an impression on her.
Beckley Street next. It was six thirty when he got there. The landlady confirmed Caspar lived there—she knew him as Lee as well, but he’d told her it was his surname and went by his initials, O.H. She told Chandler that Mr. Lee had spent last night with his wife out to Irving.
“Irving?” Chandler held out the piece of paper with the list of addresses on it. “This one here—2515 West Fifth?”
“Why, yes, I do believe—”
But Chandler had already turned and gone.
Morning traffic was starting to pick up, and it took another hour to get out there. Chandler could feel the juice trickling from his veins and knew time was running out. He was kind of surprised he still had any left actually. He’d taken the hit almost three hours ago. Massive hits seemed to jump-start his metabolism, racing through his body before leaving him exhausted, whereas small doses metered themselves out slowly, such that he was hardly aware there was any drug in him—save for the fact that he could pull images from people’s minds, of course, push other ones in their place.
The thirty-year-old woman who answered the door in Irving told him that Caspar had left to catch a ride to work with—
Chandler couldn’t wait. He pushed, and grabbed the name from the woman’s mind. Wesley Frazier. He lived right up the block. Chandler ran there. The door was answered by a young woman. Frazier’s sister.
“Wes and Lee have already gone—”
Chandler pushed so hard that Frazier’s sister stumbled backward. He saw Caspar putting a long brown-paper package into the backseat of Wesley’s ’59 Chevy and then get in the passenger seat.
Frazier’s sister was wavering back and forth in the doorway like a blade of grass in the wake of a speeding car. Chandler pushed more, saw Wesley telling his sister he’d got a job at Texas School Books a couple of months ago, saw his sister asking him if there was maybe another job there for Marina’s husband, Lee. “Although I heard her call him Alik once,” he saw Wesley’s sister saying. “You think maybe that’s Russian for Lee?”
Chandler pushed so hard that Frazier’s sister fell back on her sofa. She didn’t know the exact address of the School Book Depository, but she knew it was on Dealey Plaza. Something flickered in her mind, and with the last of his juice Chandler pulled it out of her. It turned out to be the cover of the newspaper. A map. The president’s motorcade route. He followed the arrows. Main. Houston. Elm.
“W-why, yes,” Frazier’s sister said absently, though Chandler hadn’t said anything. “That is where it’s at.”
“That’s handy,” Chandler said, and ran for his car.
Five minutes later Frazier’s sister blinked rapidly, noticed the open door.
“Durn pollen,” she said, getting up slowly and shuffling to the door. “Give me a helluva headache.”
Wesley kept up a steady patter as he drove them to work: the rain, the fact that his car battery was low, the president’s visit. In the passenger’s seat Caspar sat quietly, eyes forward, hands on thighs. The absurdity of it all, he th
ought. He’s a spy, for God’s sake. He’s worked for the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America and the Committee for State Security of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Has more aliases than the nitwit in the seat beside him has brain cells. A Wiz Kid, for Christ’s sake, yet here he is, hitching a ride to work because he can’t afford a car of his own, and doesn’t have a driver’s license either. Today was not the day to risk a moving violation.
“I heard the only reason he got in in ’60 was because Joe paid the mob to stuff the boxes in Chicago or some such,” Wesley was saying, “but I don’t think Johnson can give him Texas and Georgia this time around. Not with the Civil Rights Bill hanging over—”
The Chevy went over a bump and the paper-wrapped package in the backseat reverberated with a loud metal clank.
“Curtain rods,” Caspar said, even though Wesley didn’t ask. Even though he’d said it when he first got in the car, had said it yesterday, too, when he’d asked Wesley for a ride to work this morning. He’d told Wesley he was going to spend the night with Marina in Irving to see his daughters and pick up some curtain rods she’d bought for him so he could have some privacy in the rooming house he stayed in on Beckley Street.
“All the same I think I’ll go see him.” Wesley was prattling on. “The newspaper said the motorcade’s supposed to pass by work around noon, twelve thirty, so maybe I’ll eat lunch in the park and wave to him and Jackie when they go by. She’s a classy lady. Motorcade,” he added. “Mo-tor-cade. Kind of a strange word when you think about it.”
