Shift: A Novel (47 page)

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

Beneath its hollow cross the tombstone reads only:

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

“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

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

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.

He pulls a bottle and crystal tumbler from a cabinet, pours himself a finger of rich amber liquid, knocks it back, pours himself another. It’s his birthday, after all. His forty-third. There’s no mirror in the room but he knows what he looks like well enough. Knows that he looks good for his age—damn good—but that, even so, he’s not the twenty-five-year-old kid who got sucked into this wild-goose chase eighteen years ago. There’s gray at his temples, even more in his beard when he doesn’t shave, lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth that don’t go away even when he’s not squinting or frowning.

As he sips his second drink he remarks, not for the first time, the similarity between his office and Charles Jarrell’s home, and thinks he will have to let Duncan down here to vacuum and dust and put things in piles. But he knows that sooner or later—a few days, a few weeks, the difference means little measured against eighteen years—a new inspiration will strike, a connection he missed before, a lead he failed to follow, and he will come down and tape things to the wall again, draw lines between them as, for the thousandth time, the ten thousandth, he
tries to figure out where Melchior disappeared—and Chandler, and Naz, and Ivelitsch. Song, well. Song he found a long time ago. Her body had been dropped outside of Brownsville, Texas, just north of the Rio Grande. She was dressed in a peasant blouse bordered with a floral Mayan collar, a chain of Day of the Dead skulls draped around her neck. Her hair had been hacked into a crude bob, her face bludgeoned to conceal the more Asiatic of her features, but one look at her unlined hands should have told anyone that she wasn’t another illegal immigrant hoping to toil her way out of Mexican fields and into the service of some middle-class white American woman looking for a maid—even if, for some reason, Melchior had cut off a finger and taken it as a trophy. BC hadn’t bothered to point any of this out to the local PD, however. It wasn’t Song he was looking for.

He sips at his Scotch and tries to tell himself that his fervor is as strong as ever, but the fact is, it’s been so long since the last time he was down here that everything is covered under a layer of dust. In his head, Naz’s face shines as brightly as it ever did, and Chandler’s, and even Melchior’s, but the truth is nearly two decades have gone by. God only knows what they look like now. More than likely at least one of them is dead, and it’s a fair bet they all are. For, of them all, the only one he’s gotten any leads on at all is Pavel Semyonovitch Ivelitsch, who, as far as BC can tell, still works for KGB. The most likely scenario is that he duped Melchior into turning Chandler over to him, probably as a way of recovering the bomb that had been stolen in Cuba, and then, when he got it back—Jack Ruby’s death is proof that he got it back—he killed them all. Gunned them down like the Bolsheviks gunned down the Romanovs. The only thing that gives him any hope at all is the trips that Ivelitsch continued to take to Cuba, but the last one happened in 1975, and though BC has visited the island three times, he’s never figured out what Ivelitsch was doing there. It’s a beautiful country, after all. Not even Communism can sully the Caribbean or dim the tropical sunshine. Maybe he was just going on vacation.