Shift: A Novel (19 page)

Chandler tried to shake the image of the naked woman out of his mind, but it wouldn’t go. Instead it was joined by others. The mutilated body of a man, his skin covered with festering sores—no, not sores. Burns. Cigarette burns. A barn. Gunfire. A machine of some kind. Cracked seams, tangled wires. Was it a—

“Chandler! Concentrate!”

“Carmen,” he whispered. “Her name was Carmen.”

The man’s eyes flashed wildly.

“Oh my fucking
God
. Can you see this, Keller? It’s all there! Everything! C’mon, Chandler! Dig deeper! Show me how far it can go.”

The man’s excitement had a tang like a match lit under your nostrils. It was as if he wanted Chandler to see him in all his grotesqueness, to wallow in the filth of the things he’d done. But Chandler didn’t want to see that. He didn’t want to see anything, but he couldn’t keep the images out of his head. So much violence, so many ways people had died. So many different kinds of people: black, white, brown, yellow, like a
National Geographic
issue devoted solely to war and misery.

Since he couldn’t keep Melchior out of his mind—or keep himself
out of Melchior’s—he tried to push past those horrific images. Or, rather, before them. Before Melchior would have been old enough to serve his country. He was surprised how far he had to go. He knew Melchior was thirty-three, but though he pushed back a decade, a decade and a half, still, all he saw was war. There was another man in a lot of these pictures, an older round-faced fellow with an alcoholic nose and eyes that managed to be both jolly and mean at the same time. Frank. Frank Wisdom. The Wiz. He glowed in Melchior’s thoughts like a father—like the kind of father you wanted to kill but, in killing, would become. Chandler followed this man back in Melchior’s thoughts, all the way through his teens, through firing practice, language training, essays in coding and code-breaking and the hundred different kinds of stealth, and then suddenly he broke through to the other side.

BC didn’t have time to wash Burton’s uniform, so he sprayed
it inside and out with Lysol. Not that it was dirty—and not that Burton was a Negro—but BC had never worn another person’s clothing in his life, and the mere thought of sticking his legs where another man’s had been brought goose pimples to his thighs. He wasn’t sure how he was going to get the coveralls into the DOJ Building, though. The plan was to enter as Special Agent BC Querrey—it was unlikely anyone at the desk would have heard of his suspension—then become Gerry Burton somewhere inside. Should he put the uniform in a shopping bag? But why would an FBI agent carry a shopping bag into the Department of Justice Building, especially after hours? Should he carry a suitcase? But that would invite questions, and the answers could lead to rumors, and rumors had a way of getting back to Director Hoover. Then he realized: he could put the uniform in his briefcase! No one would ever think there would be
clothes
in a briefcase!

Then he remembered: Melchior had his briefcase.

In the end he used a valise that looked enough like a briefcase that he didn’t think anyone would notice, and if they did notice he could just say it was his overnight bag (which in fact it was, and which he’d brought into the office more than a dozen times, but which seemed to acquire a suspicious sheen when he put someone else’s clothes in it).

He waved at
the guard when he went in. He didn’t often work late, but often enough that no one was surprised to see him. What was surprising: the guard waved back, and smiled, too. It felt almost like a benediction.

At the elevator he punched the button for the fourth floor, as always. Once the doors were closed, however, he pressed three and got off there instead. The corridor was deserted, and he used Gerry Burton’s key to let himself into the maintenance closet. He took his tie off but left the rest of his suit on, figuring it would help fill out Burton’s voluminous
uniform, which hung on him like a Santa suit on a scarecrow. He was just about to head out when he saw his shoes sticking out from the pant legs—pointed black wingtips so shiny he could see his face in them, even in the dim light. Definitely not janitor shoes. He looked about for a pair of galoshes or something, but, seeing nothing, grabbed a mop instead. It had been put away damp, reeked of mildew—BC was thinking that if he
did
work for the custodial department, he would have had to report someone—and quickly, before he could stop himself, he swabbed the slimy strands over his fifteen-dollar Florsheims, even turned the mop over and scratched at them with the rough wooden handle. Only when the reflection of his face was gone did he pull Burton’s ID necklace from his suit and hang it over his head, and, taking a deep breath, he pushed open the closet door.

“Goodness gracious! You startled me!”

BC jumped so high he nearly hit the top of the door frame. A Negro woman, fifty or sixty years old but no bigger than a ten-year-old girl, stood just outside the door, a cleaning cart off to one side. BC had reached reflexively for his holster, which, fortunately, was empty, and behind the zipper of Burton’s uniform to boot, so it just looked like he was pawing at his chest.

The woman stared at him expectantly, and he realized she was waiting for him to say something. What did janitors and cleaning ladies say to one another? The thought of Gerry Burton and “Ashley” popped into his head, and he felt a blush burn his cheeks. He opened his mouth, let whatever would come out come out:

“Shee-ut.”

The woman chuckled. “No need to get nasty. I won’t tell nobody. Now get on outta my way before somebody comes.”

He took the stairs to the fourth floor. As he pushed through the door he stopped short. This was his floor. His hallway. Why hadn’t he thought of that ahead of time? Anyone who saw him would recognize him instantly. Would wonder what in the world he was doing in a janitor’s uniform. Why in the hell hadn’t he waited a couple more hours before he came in, when he would be much less likely to run into someone he knew? As a detective, he knew this was why criminals get caught: they’re so focused on the object of their crime that they forget the thousand and one things standing between them and their goal. He himself had
caught a dozen men that way, in the year and a half he spent in Profiling before his transfer to COINTELPRO. He should have known better! But he was here now. There was nowhere to go but forward. He shoved his right hand in his pocket and wrapped his fingers around Naz’s ring. He would let fate decide if he was meant to find her or not.

He trudged toward the director’s office, letting his head hang and his shoulders hunch up around his face as much as possible. He should’ve brought some kind of cap. He should have mussed his hair, but really, there was no hair to muss. He’d kept his standing Wednesday evening appointment with the barber last night. Fortunately, even though he heard plenty of activity through open doors, the corridor itself was deserted, and eventually—he didn’t remember the hallway being this long!—he found himself in front of the office of Helen Gandy, the director’s secretary. He glanced up and down, then ducked in the open door. He started to close it, then, worried it might draw attention, went straight to the double doors that led to the director’s office. He put his ear to one, heard nothing, took a six-inch metal ruler out of his pocket and slipped it between the doors, angled it back until it touched the tongue. Then, bracing himself, he leaned all his weight into the right door so that the lock’s tongue emerged a fraction of an inch from its socket in the left. At the same time he applied pressure on the ruler, and it slid down the curve of the tongue just enough to push it into its housing in the right door. Without the slightest sound, the door slid open, and there it was:

The Vault.

The director’s famed—and feared—personal files. Ten black metal cabinets, five on each side of the narrow hallway that led to the director’s office. Yet the material they contained—compromising information on Hollywood stars, leading journalists and politicians, not to mention every president since Calvin Coolidge, who’d appointed Hoover head of the (not-yet-Federal) Bureau of Investigation all the way back in 1924—was enough to have earned their owner a forty-year sinecure as the nation’s top cop. Though there were any number of more secure locations they could have been stored, the director insisted the cabinets be left here for all to pass through as they made their way to his sanctum sanctorum. The hubris was unbelievable. Ten filing cabinets containing enough material to ruin thousands of careers, bring
down administrations and corporations and probably one or two governments. All of it guarded by the same kind of lock you’d put on a bedroom door.

An elevator dinged in the corridor. BC started, then stepped into the Vault quickly, pulled the door closed. Now it was just him and the files—standard-issue four-drawer Twenty Gauge cabinets with locks that could be picked by a hairpin, nail file, or, in BC’s case, a ghost he’d made from an old padlock key.

BC scanned the cabinets. The drawers were labeled minimally: “A—
Ab irato;”
“BARKER, Ma—BIRMINGHAM, Ala.” “CARTER, James—CIA.” The file took up the entire back half of the drawer and extended into the next one, two, no,
three
drawers, a block of tens of thousands of sheets of paper the size of a bale of hay. BC stared at it in disbelief. It would take hours to search it all.

In fact, it took only minutes. J. Edger Hoover had made his name by proving that information is power, but only if you have ready access to it. In 1919, during the Palmer Raids, he compiled a list of more than 150,000 so-called “hyphenated Americans” (the phrase was President Wilson’s), i.e., potentially subversive ethnic nationals with radical affiliations or sympathies; 10,000 were arrested, about 550 deported, including Emma Goldman (who, not surprisingly, didn’t like the Soviet Union nearly as much once she had to live there). In order to achieve that kind of targeting precision, Hoover developed an indexing system that made it easy to move through his list quickly and efficiently, and, forty years later, his files were still as clearly—pedantically—demarcated. In a folder in the third drawer clearly marked “ORPHEUS, Project” BC found no fewer than six memoranda. The information itself was fairly banal. “Agent ‘Ted Morganthau’ (real name LOGAN, Edward), provided 5,000 micrograms LSD to HITCHCOCK, William
¹²
for Millbrook colony (‘Castalia’) on 2/4/63;” “ALPERT, Richard, confirmed homosexual, which fact acknowledges openly; unlikely FBI can exploit;” and so on. But on one sheet of paper BC found what he was looking for:

There were no other mentions of the name Jarrell in the Orpheus file, nor in the rest of the CIA section. BC locked that cabinet, then opened the drawer marked “Jackson, MS—KENNEDY, Joseph” and found a single entry under “Jarrell”:

There was no further information in the Jarrell file nor, when BC checked, under Parker either. BC went back to the CIA file to check under Virgil Parker just in case, but all he found was a note to “See: JARRELL, Charles.” It was a bread crumb, but it was his only lead out of the forest. Or, rather, back into it.

He was just about to leave when he stopped, went back to the files. “HARDING, Warren G.—HOOVER, Ivery.” But there was nothing on Naz. He checked on Mary Meyer next, but, though there was a folder marked “MEYER, Mary Pinchot,” the only thing in it was a note:

He’d just pushed the drawer closed when he heard a voice outside the door to the Vault. The first was familiar, although he didn’t place it immediately. The second, however, was unmistakable.

“No, Clyde,” J. Edgar Hoover said, “I think the intelligence is genuine.”

New Orleans. A hot spring day in 1942
.

The Evangelical Lutheran Bethlehem Orphanage.

A twelve-year-old boy, skinny as a fence post save for the mop of dark curls framing his round, dusky face, is shooting marbles with a group of other boys ranging in age from six to sixteen. He wins only one out of three tosses, but Chandler knows he’s faking it. Roping the crowd in, working them up, making them think they have a chance. Deception came early to … to Melchior. So that really was his name.

Suddenly the boy looks up from his game. On his bed in the future, Chandler thinks Melchior is somehow looking at him. But no. He’s watching a pair of men walk up the long narrow sidewalk that leads to the side yard of the orphanage. One is tall, with a soft-cheeked face that belies his fit frame: he isn’t fat yet, but will be one day. The other is shorter, darker, walks with a slight limp. His beard is as sharp as Mephistopheles’. Melchior is sure the man knows this and courts the comparison. He looks like the devil. The devil in a light cashmere jacket and polished wingtips that seem as sharp as his beard.

But Melchior isn’t as interested in the men as he is in their target: a child playing by himself in the grassless dust off to the side of the yard. A small-mouthed boy of three or four, his russet hair flecked with gold from long hours in the sun. He squats in his short pants as though he’s shitting his drawers, but Melchior knows he is in fact drawing in the dirt. The same face over and over again: his father, who died before he was born. In the hierarchy of lost parents at an orphanage, this is a category unto itself, and even though the boy isn’t really an orphan—his mother leaves him here Monday through Friday while she works, picks him up on the weekends she’s not looking for a new husband—the boy still has a kind of totemic status. Like Jesus, he was born without a father.