by Tim Kring
“Here is a bulletin from CBS News. In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.”
For a moment BC has the distinct thought that his mouth would be hanging open if it weren’t taped closed. He stares at the screen, but there are just the white letters, the black background, the preternaturally calm voice of the nation’s first anchorman.
“More details just arrived. These details about the same as previously. President Kennedy shot today just as his motorcade left downtown Dallas. Mrs. Kennedy jumped up and grabbed Mr. Kennedy. She called, ‘Oh no!’ The motorcade sped on. United Press says that the wounds for President Kennedy perhaps could be fatal. Repeating, a bulletin from CBS News: President Kennedy has been shot by a would-be assassin in Dallas, Texas. Stay tuned to CBS News for further details.”
In the background another voice is heard—“Connally, too”—and then the screen cuts to a spoon swinging back and forth like a pendulum, a heart beating with the regularity of a metronome—or, rather, a metronome beating with the regularity of a heart. “It takes more than an instant to make a real cup of coffee.”
A commercial for Nescafé. Behind his gag, BC finds himself giggling. Maybe that’s what the old man was drinking. A promo for that evening’s episode of Route 66 follows. BC stares at the face of George Maharis, his dark hair rippling as he sits behind the wheel of the famous red Corvette, and then for some reason he remembers hearing that the car Buz and Tod drive is really light blue. Apparently it photographs better in black-and-white than an actual red car. Just one more sign, if you still needed it, that things aren’t always what they seem.
Be that as it may, BC thinks as he resumes his struggle to get free, it’s doubtful Route 66 is going to be on the air tonight.1
Moscow, USSR
November 24, 1963
The apartment’s right on the Moskva. Picture-postcard views, even if the wind off the river comes colder and harder than bullets, and reeks of rotten fish besides. Four rooms, each practically as big as a swimming pool. Fourteen-foot ceilings, eighteen-karat gold detailing on the paneling, marquetry on the floor so intricate that it looks more like embroidery than oak and sandalwood and mother-of-pearl. It’s the kind of place that would have belonged to a minor noble or major bureaucrat under the tsars, and now only goes to one of the Party faithful—or a prominent defector.
“Caspar’s apartment in Minsk wasn’t half as nice as this, I can tell you that much,” Ivelitsch says when he shows it to Melchior. “And it’s a hell of a lot nicer than my place.”
“I’m not a defector,” Melchior growls. “Neither was Caspar.”
“Yeah, yeah, tell that to your neighbor, Kim Philby.”
Right now, though, Melchior’s less concerned with his new home than the man he’s sharing it with. He’s asleep right now, on a hospital bed outfitted with shackles at wrist, ankle, and waist, and enclosed inside a big steel cage to boot. He’s been asleep for two solid days.
“Why isn’t he waking up?”
“I don’t understand,” Keller says, flipping pages on his clipboard, flitting from one instrument to the next. “I’ve given him Preludin, epinephrine, methamphetamine. I even gave him cocaine—enough to give an elephant a heart attack. But his pulse is barely ten beats per minute. Are you sure you didn’t give him too much sedative?”
“I told you, I didn’t give him anything. He collapsed in the car on the way to Song’s—on the way to the plane. Hasn’t woken up since.”
“Melchior.” Ivelitsch is standing in the living room doorway. “You might want to look at this.”
“I’m not letting you out of that cage until you figure out what’s wrong, Doctor,” Melchior says, striding into the other room. “Either you wake that man up or you die in there with him.”
The living room is empty save for a huge console television and a massive broken chandelier hanging over it like a glacier punching a hole in the sky. Beneath it, the TV looks more like Pandora’s box than a modern technological conveyance. It even sounds creepy, voices from six thousand miles away booming out of the shot speaker like ghosts looking for a way out of hell. The tiny screen shows a shallow brick alcove crammed with people. Flashing lights, garbled voices, an air of eager, almost greedy expectation so palpable you can almost see it, although it’s probably just static.
An announcer is speaking, but Melchior concentrates on the noises coming from the alcove itself. Suddenly the pitch heightens several notches, the camera flashes grow even more frenetic; a moment later Caspar melts out of the shadows. His hands are cuffed in front of him, his hair is mussed, and there are bruises on his forehead and lip. He walks slowly, as though dazed or drugged. His right elbow is held by a man dressed all in white, his left by a man dressed all in black, the two men towering over him like a pair of angels bickering over the soul of a little boy.
“It’s a police station,” Ivelitsch says. “What the hell can—”
“There,” Melchior says, pointing to a flicker of movement from the right side of the screen even as a voice rises above the din of the crowd:
“Do you have anything to say in your defense?”
A gunshot rings out. The crowd yells, but Caspar’s groans are louder. The men holding him try to support him, but he falls to the floor.
“He’s been shot!” the announcer says. “He’s been shot!”
“I told you,” Melchior says, heading back to the other room. “We don’t have to worry about Caspar.”2
Camagüey Province, Cuba
October 12, 1964
It’s been a long pregnancy. Eleven months, maybe more, yet the mother has borne it stoically. Indeed, she doesn’t seem to have suffered at all, and, despite the worries of the women in the village, who dote on her like one of their own daughters, she insists her baby will be fine. She refuses their gifts of spicy food, warm rum, doses of castor oil. He will come when he’s ready, she tells them, not a moment before.
He is ready now.
Louie Garza stands at the back of the room, leaning on his cane more out of habit than necessity. Tropical Storm Isbell is gathering strength off the western coast of the island, pushing cold damp winds ahead of it that aggravate the old injury to his hip. A stiff breeze whips the curtains, the bed skirts, Naz’s hair, but she has insisted the windows be left open.
Louie’s angled himself so he can’t see what’s happening beneath the sheet that covers Naz’s legs but can still see her face. It’s unreal. Her face, that is. Serenely calm and beautiful, like that of a woman waking up after a peaceful night’s sleep rather than engaged in the agony of childbirth. One of the women who styles herself Naz’s abuela has embroidered her a brightly colored pillowcase, so that it seems her face rests on a kaleidoscopic rainbow.
“Empuja,” the midwife says, but quietly. Furtively. “El viene ahora.”
Naz smiles wider. If she is pushing, it doesn’t show on her face. “I know he’s coming. Just like the storm.”
“Empuja,” the midwife says again, and crosses herself behind the sheet.
A gust of wind shakes the whole house and a ceramic pitcher smashes on the floor. A thread of water snakes across the floor toward Louie’s feet, but he doesn’t notice. His eyes are glued to Naz’s face. For a single moment her brows knit together, more in concentration than pain, as if she is willing her child into existence. The next minute the midwife is calling,
“¡Es aquí! ¡Es aquí!”
Despite his yearlong gestation, the baby is normal-sized, even a bit small. But his limbs are strangely articulate and fine—not thin but lean, as if he has already started to tone his muscles and burn off his baby fat. He is as calm as his mother. His eyes are open, and he doesn’t cry as the midwife wipes him clean, wraps him in a blanket, and carries him across the room. He looks not at his mother or the woman holding him but directly at Louie, and when the midwife offers him the baby, Naz
’s guard hesitates, looks at the mother.
“Do you want to hold him first?”
Naz shakes her head. The wind whips her hair around, a dark halo at the center of the riot of color on the pillowcase. Her dark eyes stare at nothing—nothing in the room anyway—and her smile grows even wider.
“Take the boy to him. I’ve already told him everything he needs to know.”
“To—the father?” Louie still hasn’t accepted the baby from the midwife, who seems eager to have it out of her arms.
“To Melchior,” Naz says, smiling radiantly. “I want him to see the face of the man who will kill him one day.”3
Arlington National Cemetery
November 22, 1965
Beneath its hollow cross the tombstone reads only:
FRANK
WISDOM
JUNE 23, 1909
OCTOBER 29, 1965
The grave is almost a month old, but for some reason the sods haven’t taken yet. Though the rest of the cemetery is uniformly, immaculately green, the grass over the Wiz’s grave is brown and friable—so dry that the man carrying a bouquet of forget-me-nots imagines it would crunch beneath his shoes if he dared to step on it. “Happens sometimes,” a passing groundskeeper tells him. “Don’t worry, sir, it’s already scheduled for resodding.”
The man with the flowers nods. He doesn’t bother to point out that the brown strands extend well beyond the rectangle of cut sods laid atop the grave itself—that its tentacles spiral out a good six inches in every direction like a negating kaleidoscope sucking the color from everything it touches. As soon as the groundskeeper is gone, the man pulls a bullet-shaped lead from his pocket. The lead is attached to a long coil of wire and the man drops it in the center of the brown patch, then glances at what looks like a watch on his wrist to confirm what the grass has already told him. He reels the lead up, drops it in his pocket, and turns away; almost as an afterthought, he tosses the flowers behind him.
Something about the gesture stops him in his tracks. A memory shakes him like a muscle spasm. A hot spring day in New Orleans in 1942, a marble toss he made without looking. The day it all started. He knew it even then, even if the Wiz didn’t, or Caspar.
He turns, and when he steps on the grave to lean the flowers against the headstone, the grass does indeed break beneath his shoes. There’s not enough radiation to worry about—not for a few seconds anyway—but even so, he takes care not to touch the ground or the stone or the rotten flowers that already adorn the site, and then he turns and makes his way to the pay phones outside the chapel.
Only someone watching would notice that he doesn’t put any money in the machine or place a collect call, just punches several long strings of numbers. It takes nearly two minutes for the connection to be made. Finally a click, a hollow “Da?”
“It’s leaking,” Melchior says, and hangs up.4
Dallas, TX
January 3, 1967
“Credentials?”
The police officer guarding the hospital door is soft but solid and has a no-nonsense air about him. He peers at the badge the man in the white coat shows him, then scrutinizes the face that goes with it.
“I ain’t seen you before.”
In answer the man pulls his coat open, revealing a Star of David hanging from a chain around his neck.
“Oh. Go on in, Mister, uh”—the man glances at the badge—“Rabbi Gaminsky.”
BC slips past the guard. Once in the room he pulls a plastic-bottomed steel wedge from his pocket and slides it beneath the door, just in case the room’s occupant makes a fuss. But the person on the bed doesn’t wake up, so BC pulls out a needle and, ignoring the IV line, slides it directly into an arm. Epinephrine, aka adrenaline. The same stuff Melchior had used to save his life just over three years ago.
Jack Ruby’s eyelids flutter apart, barely, his lips part the tiniest sliver as though a knife has sliced them open.
“Who …” His voice breaks. He swallows and tries again. “Who are you?”
“You haven’t got much time left, Mr. Ruby. I’ve come to give you the chance to make things right.”
Ruby stares at him a moment and then, as if it takes all his strength, turns away. His body is so desiccated that when he turns, strands of hair break from his head and fall to the pillow. The thin lines wavering on the white background remind BC of staff paper for some reason, the blank pages of an unfinished symphony that he has been desperately trying to complete for the past three years.
“Mr. Ruby, you told Dallas Deputy Sheriff Al Maddox last month that someone gave you an injection for a cold but that it really contained cancer cells. It wasn’t cancer cells, Mr. Ruby. It was a radioactive poison taken from a Soviet nuclear bomb stolen from Cuba. You said: ‘The people who had an ulterior motive for putting me in the position I’m in will never let the true facts come aboveboard.’ Who are these people, Mr. Ruby? Tell me their names so I can bring them to justice for President Kennedy’s murder—and yours.”
It is a long time before Ruby answers. Then: “No one,” he says.
“You know that’s not true, Mr. Ruby. You gave Sheriff Maddox a note in which you said that President Kennedy was killed as part of a conspiracy. Who was involved in that conspiracy? What were their names?”
Ruby’s head shakes again. More strands of hair fall to the pillow. “There was no one.”
“Mr. Ruby, please. You told a psychiatrist named Werner Teuter that you were framed to kill Caspar—to kill Lee Harvey Oswald, just as he said he was a patsy for someone else. Who, Mr. Ruby? Who framed you?”
At the name Caspar, Ruby’s eyes sharpen, but then his lids fall closed and a long, wet breath bubbles from his nostrils.
“Does the name Caspar mean anything to you, Mr. Ruby? What about Orpheus? Melchior? Do these names mean anything to you, Mr. Ruby? Please, Mr. Ruby. This is your last chance to make it right.”
Ruby’s voice, when it comes, seems to leak from him like his breath, as if he is not speaking but expiring.
“There is nothing to hide,” he whispers. “There was no one else.”5
Camagüey Province, Cuba
June 19, 1975
Over the course of the past twelve years her garden has grown remarkably. Her corn is the sweetest in the province, her tomatoes the largest, her beans more numerous. It helps that the local children come over after school to work with her, that women give her fish heads to sow and men give her a share of the manure the state has allocated them for their own plantings. No doubt the time and energy expended on this half acre of land are a profligate waste of resources in a managed economy. But they produce some gorgeous fruits and vegetables, a small portion of which she trades for rice, the rest of which she gives away.
Her garden has matured, but she hasn’t. For twelve years he’s been watching her, and Louie Garza would swear she hasn’t aged a day. Only sometimes, when he’s standing across a field, say, or on the second floor of the house he shares with her, watching her toil away in her garden, he seems to see cracks in her facade—gray hairs among the black, wrinkles at the sides of her eyes and mouth, the beginning of a sag in her breasts. It makes no sense, of course. Even if these signs were real, he wouldn’t be able to see them from so far away. And when he approaches her, they always disappear, and she becomes ageless again, perfect. It is as if, in waiting for the day when Orpheus comes for her, she has decided to keep herself exactly as she was the last time he saw her.
But all that is changing now. The icy Russian stands on the porch of the house Naz and Louie have lived in for more than a decade, looking out at her as she weeds a patch of amaranth.
“Do you have to take her?” Louie does a poor job of keeping the pleading note out of his voice.
“Melchior’s convinced she’s the only thing that can wake Chandler up.”
Louie has no idea who Chandler is. Which is to say, he knows that Chandler is the same person as the Orpheus Naz sometimes speaks of, and knows that for the past twelve years Melchior
and the Russian have been trying to wake him from a coma, but what they expect him to say or do when he wakes up has never been specified. It seems a little unreal to him. As unbelievable as Naz’s unchanging beauty must sound to anyone who doesn’t live with her. But who is he to doubt? It isn’t Chandler he cares for. It’s only Naz.
As the Russian heads out into the garden, Louie hooks the tall man’s arm with his cane.
“I’ve protected her for twelve years. I won’t let you hurt her.”
The Russian looks first at Louie’s cane, then at Louie. His eyes are as cold as the land he comes from and wants to take Naz to.
“I don’t think I could hurt her even if I wanted to. But just to put your mind at ease: I’m under strict orders to bring her back unharmed. Melchior’s convinced himself that she’s somehow the key to everything.”
Louie nods, and releases the Russian. As Ivelitsch turns and heads into the garden, he glances at the syringe he’s palming in his right hand.
“He didn’t say I couldn’t have a little fun, though,” he says, and, baring his teeth in a smile that practically causes the plants to wilt, he strides toward Naz.6
San Francisco, CA
March 30, 1981
It takes BC a moment to find the light switch in his basement office—it’s hiding under a piece of paper he must have taped up the last time he was down, and the room’s two tiny windows, similarly covered, let in no light at all. He finds it finally, clicks it, and, one by one, the fluorescent rectangles flicker into life. The steady, measured brilliance of American industry illuminates the seven-hundred-square-foot space, every inch of which is covered with newspaper clippings and photographs and Xeroxes and other bits of evidence and clues. Even the door, when it falls closed, is revealed to be covered with flowcharts and diagrams scribbled in marker, pen, pencil, something that looks like lipstick or blood. Red, blue, and green threads connect various faces and places with one another in a system not even he fully understands anymore. He is like a spider who has woven a web around his own body, trapping himself. At least there’s Scotch.
