Shift: A Novel (10 page)

“I did a stint as muscle for a couple-a casinos in Havana back in the fifties,” the man said. “Embargo or no embargo, there’s no substitute for a fine Cuban.”

The man opened his pocketknife forty-five degrees, unwrapped the cigar, placed it in the notch between blade and handle, popped the end off with a snap as quick and clean as the jaws of a caiman. It shot straight up like a jumping jack, came to rest on the man’s closed briefcase, looking for all the world like a severed fingertip.

BC stared at it for a long moment, then looked up to find the man watching him, an amused, contemptuous smile playing over his thick, moist lips.

“Go on,” he said tauntingly. “Smell it.”

Biting back his revulsion, BC picked up the nubbin and brought it to his nose. A rich, deep, spicy scent went right past his nostrils to the back of his throat, and his mouth immediately filled with water. He wanted to swallow, but didn’t want the man to see him do it, so he just sat there, the cigar-end resting beneath his nose, his mouth filling with saliva like a plugged sink with a leaky faucet.

The man tongued the end of his cigar until it glistened like a Tootsie Roll. Only then did he reach for his matches, light one (not on the box, but on the back of his thumbnail, which was as rough as an emery board), hold it a fraction of an inch from the cigar’s tip. His lips sputtered like a landed fish as he sucked in a series of rapid inhales. Little rings of smoke erupted between each puff, till at length the cigar’s cherry glowed red as a nickel pulled from a campfire. He took a longer drag, held it in his mouth a moment, then blew a single perfect smoke ring directly at BC. Though it dissipated before it reached him, it still seemed to BC that the ring slipped around his head like a halo, or a noose.

“So, Beau,” the man said in a voice thickened by smoke and satisfaction, “where’s J. Edna sending you today?”

BC’s fingers twitched and the cigar-end shot up in the air. He
opened his mouth, remembered it was full of saliva and sucked it down, choked, coughed, managed to get his arm up in time, ended up splattering the sleeve of his suit with a constellation of droplets that coalesced into a black wet patch the size of a beef cutlet. A fair amount of spittle had landed on his companion’s briefcase as well and, after staring at it like a kindergartner regarding an incriminating pool of urine beneath his desk, BC pulled his sleeve into his palm and began wiping at it with slow, mortified strokes. Wool not being the most absorbent of fabrics, all this did was smear the saliva into long smooth arcs. It did, however, bring up a bit of a shine on the worn leather of the man’s briefcase.

When the man finally stopped laughing, he nudged BC’s briefcase with the toe of one of his worn sandals. The tag lay so that the address label was exposed.

The man snickered. “I bet it says the same thing inside your underpants.”

BC reached a hand down to turn the address label over, as if this could somehow remove its information from his seatmate’s mind.

“Who do
you
work for?”

The man puffed on his cigar before answering. “Let’s just say we’re in related but tangential fields.”

“You’re CIA?”

The man’s eyes widened. “Maybe you’re not as green as you look.”

Just then the conductor reappeared with the man’s drink—the spy’s
drink, as unlikely as that seemed. The conductor unfolded a napkin on the table and set the drink on it. He had to nudge the man’s briefcase toward the window to do this, and BC could see that his fingers were shaking, half retracted inside his gold-piped maroon cuff like the limb of a frightened turtle. He put his hands behind his back after he set the drink down, then stood there. The hot rum steamed on the table, giving off an aroma of sugar and stale blood.

The CIA man picked up the drink, drained it in one long swallow, set it back in its ring on the napkin.

“That was so good I think I’ll have another.”

The conductor paused, then picked up the glass. “Pardon me, sir …”

“I can’t drink ‘pardon me, sir,’ and you can’t feed your family ’thout this job, so I suggest you hurry if you want to keep it.” He paused just long enough to make his last word gratuitous; then:
“Boy.”

“Yes, sir. It’s just that, sir, there’s a, well, you see, sir, there’s a charge—”

“Hell’s bells, boy, why didn’t you say you was buying? Ask my friend Beau here if he wants one too.”

“Of course, sir. But that would be
two
drinks, sir—”

“It’ll be three actually, countin’ whatever Beau has. Now ask him what he wants, boy, before you end up buying everyone in this car free drinks from here to Pennsylvany Station.”

It seemed to BC that the conductor shrank even more as he turned toward him. He was nothing but a suit now, a pair of frightened eyes.

Before the man could ask, BC shook his head. “I’m all right, s-sir.”

“Oh, I
like
that!” the CIA man said as the conductor scurried off. “‘S-s-s-s-s-sir.’ Trying to show some
respeck
to the Negro people, even though it don’t come
nat’ral.”
The man leaned back in his seat, kneeing BC’s legs toward the aisle so he could stretch out his own. His accent, which came and went with the conductor, shifted once again, from the fields to the Big House. “Lemme guess,” he said in the relaxed drawl of a plantation owner, “you a Southern boy, but just barely. Maryland, maybe DC proper. Maybe even Arlington. But no farther down. If you was from farther down, you wouldn’t-a stuttered when you said
sir
. You wouldn’t-a said it a-tall.”

BC stared at the man, trying to decide what to say. In the end, manners won out.

“I’m from Takoma Park.”

“Hell, you almost home then.”

With a start, BC realized the train was moving. Had been for some time—they’d crossed the Maryland border already.

“Lemme guess. PG County? You got yourself a little bit of a race problem in PG, don’t you? Darkies moving in, flatbed trucks loaded down with corn-shuck mattresses and pickaninnies. Your people get out in time? Hell, what am I saying? Look at that suit. Of course they didn’t. Stuck with some big old row house, I bet, tall and narrow in the front but stretching way back to one-a them little kitchen gardens that don’t get enough sunlight to grow anything besides beans and lettuce. Couldn’t sell a place like that for ten cents on the dollar right now, what with the character of the neighborhood changing the way it has. Well, you couldn’t sell it to a white family anyway.”

The man’s ability to read BC was a bit unnerving. There was a stunted apple tree in the back garden, but still.

He reached for his book and held it up as if it were a shield. “If you don’t mind—”

“Wuzzat?” the man said, screwing up his face and squinting at the book as though it were a Polynesian totem or the innards of a Japanese transistor radio.

“It’s, uh, a novel. A work of, um, ‘alternative history.’”

“Huh. Not
too
redundant.”

“Beg pardon?”

“C’mon, Beau. History’s full of alternate versions, depending on who’s doing the telling. What’d your momma call the Civil War?”

BC colored slightly. “The War of Northern Aggression.”

“See what I mean? To good old-fashioned Christians like your momma, the war was all about common Yankees trampling on Southern pride. To Negroes like our overstepping conductor, it was about ending slavery. To Abe Lincoln, it was about preserving the Union. It’s just a matter of who you ask.” Without warning he snatched the book from BC’s hands. “Lemme guess. J. Edna told you to look for ‘anti-American content’ so he can decide whether to put”—he glanced at the book cover—“Mr. Philip K. Dick on a watch list, along with Norman Mailer and Jimmy Baldwin and Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs and Henry Miller and Ken Kesey and—stop me if I get one
wrong. No? Jesus Chris, Beau, who do you work for? The FBI or the Library of Congress?”

“I’m looking for subversive content. Not anti-American.”

“How in the hell can a novel be subversive? It’s all made up.”

“It can put ideas in people’s heads.”

“Well, golly, we wouldn’t want to do that, would we?”

BC smiled tightly and held out his hand. “Still, if it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll get back to it.”

“Get back to it?” the man scoffed. “You haven’t even started it.”

“How did you—”

“No bookmark. And if I know my Beau
Query
—and I think I do—I bet you got yourself a personalized bookmark that moves from book to book, and you never start a new one before finishing the last.”

“My
name
is
Querrey
. Beau-Christian
Querrey.”

“Don’t blame me for that. I only just met you.” The man grinned. “C’mon. Show me the bookmark.
Come on.”

Despite himself, BC snorted and reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a wafer-thin rectangle the size of a charge plate. It was made of ivory, however, rather than cardboard or plastic, and had a finely engraved image of—

“Why, that’s just
too
poignant, ain’t it?” The CIA man snatched the bookmark from BC’s hand. “Huck and Tom rafting down the Mississippi. Poignant and pointed. Practically
on—the—nose,”
he said, tapping his broad nostrils with the corner of the card. “Well, now, that’s got a edge to it.” He rasped the bookmark over the shiny stubble on his cheek. “Bet you use that to cut pages, too, don’t you?”

BC would have snatched the bookmark from the man’s hand, but it had belonged to his mother, and his mother had taught him not to snatch.

“But now lemme think here,” the man said, scratching his face with the bookmark and staring at the book in his other hand. “Subversive content, sub-ver-sive con-tent. Why, that sounds like COINTELPRO work to me. So I gotta ask: what’d you do to get demoted?”

“Counterintelligence is one of the most prestigious—” BC stopped himself. This interrogation had reached an absurd pitch. Had the man researched him before getting on the train? And if so, why?

“See, only two kinds of agent end up in Counterintelligence: the
ones who’ve served the Bureau long enough to prove to J. Edna that their first loyalty is to him rather than the law, in which case they’re sent out to infiltrate whatever group’s got his panties in a bunch—socialists, suffragettes, and of course the darkies—and the ones who’re a little too independent for their own good. Maybe they open up a closed case to prove someone was convicted on faulty or, dare I say it, falsified evidence, or they call the local paper before they make a bust to make sure their picture ends up on the front page. The only thing J. Edna hates more than an open case is when a story about the Bureau mentions someone’s name other than his. Of course he can’t fire you for doing your job, so instead you get mustered out of—” He squinted at BC. “Organized Crime? Behavioral Profiling?”

“Profiling.” BC sighed.

“And now you’re reading weirdo novels looking for subversive content and taking long train rides to—well, I guess we’re back where we started, ain’t we? Where
are
you heading today, Beau?”

The man’s read on his career was so accurate that BC had to laugh, if uncomfortably.

“At this point I’m pretty sure there’s nothing I can say about myself that you don’t already know, so why don’t you tell me something: were you really in Cuba?”

The man’s lips curled oddly around his cigar, and it took BC a moment to realize he was smiling.

“Would you like me to have been in Cuba, Beau?”

“I’d like you to be in Cuba right now.”

A roar of laughter erupted from the man’s mouth.

“D’you hear that, boy? He’d like me to be in Cuba right now! That’s the best thing I heard since you called me a nigger!”

BC looked over his shoulder, saw the Negro conductor marching slow and steady down the aisle with a glass in each hand. He set the drinks down and scurried away, even as wet smoky laughter continued to burble out of BC’s companion’s throat.

“Let me explain the difference between an intelligence agent and a federal agent, Beau. See, a spy understands information’s value isn’t its accuracy, but how it can be deployed. The question isn’t, Was I in Cuba, but, Can I make you
believe
I was in Cuba?”

BC couldn’t help himself. He made a grab for his book, but the man was faster, held it above his head like a game of keep-away. But then, smiling, he tossed it to BC, who held it in both hands like a puppy for one embarrassing moment, then set it on the table.

The man sucked on his cigar and smiled wickedly. “What was his name?”

“Who?” BC said, although he knew what the man was talking about.

“The guy you got out of jail.”

BC rolled his eyes. “Roosevelt Jones.”

“Well, that answers my next question, don’t it?”

“Yes.” BC sighed. “He was a Negro.”

The CIA man scrutinized him a moment, and then a broad smile spread across his face.

“You got your picture in the paper too, didn’t you?”

BC had been waiting for the question. “Well, I couldn’t very well get an innocent man out of jail and then leave a crime unsolved, could I?”

The CIA man laughed even louder than he had before. “Well, get a load-a you! I wouldn’t-a thought you had it in you.” Suddenly the man’s voice leveled. “Well?”

Once again BC knew what the man was referring to; once again he pretended ignorance.

“Well what?”

“Yeah, you might be a good detective, but you’re a terrible actor. So just tell me: did the Bureau manufacture evidence to convict Nigger Jones?”

BC steeled himself.

“No.”

The man smiled again, but this time it was a mean smile. Mean, but not surprised, which only made BC’s shame greater.

“Like I said, Beau: you’re a terrible actor.”

BC’s eyes dropped, and there was the novel the director had given him that morning. He couldn’t decide which was more absurd: the man sitting across from him, or the fact that he was being paid six thousand dollars a year to read a book.