Shift: A Novel (23 page)

Melchior used the building’s rear exit (whose light fixture kept mysteriously shorting out no matter how often the super repaired it) and hurried up the tree-shadowed street to the Chevy the Wiz had given him. He took four consecutive left turns to make sure he wasn’t being followed, then drove randomly for eleven minutes before pulling over at the next pay phone he saw. He dialed the rendezvous number exactly thirty minutes after Keller had called his apartment.

“He’s escaped!” the doctor screamed into his ear before the phone had finished its first ring.

Melchior swallowed his fury. He’d prepared himself for news of Chandler’s death—Keller’s time experimenting on Jews in concentration
camps hadn’t exactly left him with a delicate hand—but escape was unacceptable.

“What happened?”

“He got Steve to break down the door. Then he overpowered those thugs you hired.”

Melchior wanted to know how, exactly, Chandler had gotten Steve to break down a steel door, but there wasn’t time for that now.

“Did the guards say anything?”

“Only that Orpheus was very … unusual.”

“We already know that.”

“I mean physically. They said he moved with incredible speed.”

“You’re sure it wasn’t the Thorazine?”

“I don’t know, but …” Keller paused, and Melchior could hear the doctor’s mind racing.

“What?”

“It’s probably nothing. But assuming that the guards’ perceptions were accurate, then their testimony suggests that Chandler’s power is less mental than neuronal.”

“In English.”

“CIA theorized that the Gate of Orpheus would activate some specifically mental ability. But Leary felt the Gate was a processing station that would affect
all
the senses. He believed LSD didn’t so much activate a dormant part of the brain as increase the central nervous system’s ability to process stimuli that the senses weren’t normally aware of.”

“Once again, Doctor: in English.”

“Chandler’s ability to pull images from people’s minds might simply be one aspect of an augmented ability to perceive sensory impulses. If that’s the case, he can also see better, hear better, react faster than normal human beings. Who knows, he might be able to slow or increase metabolic processes to give himself extra energy when he needs it, or speed up his healing time in response to an injury. Certainly that would explain the hibernation effect that seems to happen when he’s sleeping.”

“Jesus. Are we talking Superman stuff, or what?”

“Well, given the fact that he wasn’t able to break his restraints, I don’t think we’re facing a serious increase in strength. But he knocked two armed men unconscious in about forty-five seconds.”

Melchior whistled, then stopped himself halfway through. A shadow had ducked behind the trunk of an elm halfway up the street. It could have been nothing. But if he’d been followed, the Company would dump the pay phone’s call log and find the lab in San Francisco before Keller could clean it out—and thus discover that Chandler was alive, in which case Melchior would not only have to chase Chandler, but beat CIA to him.

“Et in Arcadia ego,”
he whispered.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Melchior said. “Listen carefully: I want you to go to checkpoint four. You’ll find a phone number written on the bottom of the coin bank. Add seven to the odd numbers and nine to the even numbers. In the case of double digits, use the figure in the ones column. Do you have that?”

“Checkpoint four, seven odds, nine evens.” One thing you could say about Nazis: they were good at taking direction.

“Good. Call that number. Say that you’re a friend of the senator’s and that you won’t be able to come in on Friday. Is that clear?”

An excited tremor fluttered the doctor’s voice. “It’s the girl, isn’t it? Miss Haverman? You didn’t kill her after all.”

“I’ll call you at checkpoint five in twelve hours. If I don’t call, assume the worst.”

“What should I do about”—a little tremor of eagerness vibrated Keller’s voice—“the guards?”

“Do your worst,” Melchior said, and hung up.

He’d glimpsed the shadow twice while he gave Keller his instructions. Definitely a tail. Even worse, he was practically on top of Melchior’s car. If Melchior walked back to the vehicle, he was as good as caught. But if he walked away, the tail would know he’d been made and would take off. And Melchior needed to find out what this was about—Cuba, or Orpheus, or if the Company was just watching him for the sake of watching him.

There was nothing else to do. He exited the booth and started for his car. He kept his hands out of his pockets to allay any suspicion he was reaching for a weapon, kept moving his head slightly, as though he were still looking out for anyone watching.

He’d picked a residential street to discourage gunfire. He guessed
that the tail would circle the tree as he passed, come out behind him with his weapon drawn. If the tail just stepped out in front of him, he was caught. But …

He passed within a foot of the tree. He didn’t see any movement. The tail was good. He’d kept the tree perfectly between him and his target. As soon as Melchior was abreast of the tree, he reached for his gun. It was out as he stepped off the sidewalk and began to loop around the tree.

A blur shot from the shadows. Melchior felt a sharp pain in his hand as his gun was kicked from his fingers, bounced off the hood of a parked car, and skittered into the street.

He didn’t wait to see his assailant. He brought his hand down in a wide arc as fast as he could, let his attacker’s momentum carry him into harm’s way. His hand connected with the man’s wrist before the rest of his body was visible. The man held on to his gun, though, and Melchior grabbed the wrist and smashed it into his kneecap. The man grunted in pain but still kept hold of his gun, and now his left fist was smashing into the side of Melchior’s face. Melchior continued to pound the man’s right wrist into his knee. After nearly a dozen blows the gun fell from the man’s spasming fingers and Melchior kicked it under the nearest car. He jumped back, panting heavily, blood leaking down his cheek from a cut beside his right eye. Only then did he see his attacker’s face.

“Hey, Melchior,” Rip Robertson said in a voice that still carried a faint reek of Cuban rum. “Long time no see.”

San Francisco didn’t live up to the hype. For one thing, the famous
hills, so pretty in postcards and movies, were a pain in the ass to trek up and down, particularly in a pair of sockless loafers two sizes too big (Chandler’s clothes were long gone, so he was wearing Sidewalk Steve’s; the homeless man had turned out to have freakishly large feet). For another, despite the city’s reputation for friendliness, not a single citizen had been kind enough to leave the keys in his or her car. Quite a few were unlocked—once, when Chandler saw a shadowed figure approach, he hid inside a Packard that must’ve dated to the forties—but even though he’d seen thieves and spies and adventurous teens hotwire cars in any number of movies, he himself had no idea how to do it. You were supposed to reach under the steering column and produce a fistful of wires, but all he managed to do was bang his knuckles on the underpanel.

But one way or another, he had to get out of the city. Had to go east. To DC. A few scattered images he’d seen in Melchior’s mind had told him Naz’s fate was somehow connected to the nation’s capital. A beautiful Asian woman in a long black car. A song—wordless, toneless, but somehow central to Naz’s location. If only he’d been able to concentrate better! As disturbing as his new power was, he was going to have to learn how to use it if he wanted to find Naz. If he wanted to save her.

Meanwhile, though, he had no money. There were people he could call in Cambridge, but how to explain his situation? A prostitute working for the CIA slipped me some kind of experimental drug, and now I have mental powers? Oh, and a Nazi scientist held me captive, and I killed my best friend’s brother? Somehow Chandler didn’t think that was going to fly. And besides, wouldn’t Melchior and his cronies be watching his closest friends? Listening in on their phones? Hanging out in front of their houses in repair vans outfitted with eavesdropping equipment? Who was to say they wouldn’t kidnap the first person
Chandler called and threaten to hurt or even kill him unless Chandler surrendered?

None of which changed the basic facts. He was penniless. Nameless for all intents and purposes. Orpheus in the Underworld, looking for Eurydice, his only protection his song. His ability to melt men’s hearts and minds.

He put a hand in his pocket, pulled out the vial of LSD. The inch of clear liquid looked like viscous water, yet it was enough to soften the solid shape of the world. He pulled the stopper from the vial, pressed his index finger to the lid, turned it upside down. He felt the spot of dampness fit itself to the grooves of his fingerprint as if the acid was the mirror image of his identity. He pulled his finger from the vial, looked at the glistening tip in the streetlight. It was hard to believe in the power there. But it was all he had to get him to Naz. He poured a dollop of clear liquid into his palm, then, screwing up his face like a five-year-old about to take a spoonful of cod liver oil, slurped up his medicine. Salvation tasted bitter, and he had to fight the urge to spit it out.

An hour later
found him walking up the steep incline of Lombard Street. The world seemed to have a colored transparency laid over it, painting woodwork and masonry with a pulsing array of colors that might’ve been soothing had it not been so unnatural. Visions appeared in the windows, in the air, on the street—giant rabbits and lollipops and girls in pinafores, tanks, soldiers, mushroom clouds, a blizzard of books, a sudden riot of grapevine and pill bottles, a lone pterodactyl cruising silently down the urban defile. If he squinted, he could see through these apparitions, but it was easier just to let them roll over him. To trust that the world would continue to be solid even though his eyes told him he was walking on a crystalline lake over a bed of multicolored stones. No, not stones. Eyes, winking at him knowingly. The only thing he worried about was the return of the flaming boy. Chandler didn’t know who or what it was, whose mind it had come from, but he knew he couldn’t control it. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

A pinkish purple sea turtle swimming toward him slowly resolved into a massive mauve Imperial from the late fifties, before Chrysler
scaled them down. An expensive car, immaculately maintained. Just what Chandler was looking for.

He felt for the driver’s mind. He was as gentle as he could be—he didn’t want the man, Peter was his name, Peter Mossford, to veer out of control when the road turned to water. Facts flitted past like flash cards. Mossford was fifty-two. Divorced. Was returning from an emotionally hollow rendezvous with the woman he’d foolishly left his wife for. Not that he missed Lorna—a shrew, born and bred—but he missed his boys. Mark, fourteen, still living at home with his mother, and Pete Jr., in his second year at Dartmouth. Mossford used to love to take Pete camping in the hills north of the city when the boy was younger—hell, when
he
was younger, before work left him too tired for anything on the weekends besides a steady stream of Scotch-and-sodas. What he wouldn’t give to go back to the good old days, when his hair was still brown and thick and his sons didn’t retreat to their rooms the minute he walked through the door, blasting their ridiculous jungle music on the hi-fis he’d mistakenly bought them in a bid to win their affection. When the city wasn’t crawling with peacocky fellows like this one—a beatnik probably, “messed up” on Mary Jane, or who knows, maybe one of the fruits who’d started settling in the Castro. I swear, Mossford thought, it’s not safe to let your kids walk the streets these days. Why, if that were Pete—

Mossford stepped on the brakes. Peered through the window. On the other side of the glass, his fair hair dappled in a ray of sunlight that shone on him like a spotlight, eleven-year-old Pete Jr. pantomimed rolling down the window.

“Hey, Dad,” Chandler said as a blissful smile spread across Mossford’s face. “Wanna go camping?”

It was too
tricky to keep the image of Pete Jr. firmly fixed in his father’s mind and at the same time convince Mossford that the western route out of Oakland was actually the road leading to the hills north of the bay, so Chandler let his chauffeur pilot the car as he wanted. Mossford spewed a stream of regrets to his son, apologies, pledges to do things differently. It wasn’t right, Chandler thought. In the morning Mossford would wake up with the night’s events pulsing in his brain
more vividly than any memory, any dream he’d ever had, and how great would his sorrow be then? Life was hard enough already. One man shouldn’t be able to do this to another. But the longing for Naz was too great, and he pressed on.

When they were safely in the deserted hills, the fantasy of Pete Jr. told his dad that he thought this place looked swell. Mossford parked the car, then went to the trunk to unpack the tent. Chandler couldn’t bear to watch him go through the motions, a beaming smile on his face as he pounded imaginary tent pegs into the ground with an invisible hammer, so Pete Jr. said, “Look, Dad, I did it myself,” and there before Mossford’s eyes was a perfectly pitched pup tent. Mossford didn’t question it, just as he didn’t wonder how it had gone from a golden morning to a blustery night in the hour it had taken them to drive out of the city. Instead, father and son crawled into their respective sleeping bags for the night.

“Can we go fishing tomorrow, Dad?” was the last thing Pete Jr. said to his father.

Mossford pulled the imaginary zipper of his sleeping bag all the way up. “Whatever you want, son.”

Chandler waited till Mossford was asleep before he lifted the man’s wallet from his pants and got back in the car. He felt like a complete heel. He wanted to punish the people who had done this. Wanted to make them feel what Peter Mossford would feel when he woke up. But as soon as he had that thought, an image of Eddie Logan flashed in his mind—his face, contorted in terror, his own hand driving a knife into his heart to spare himself the horror that Chandler had put in his mind—and he knew that he’d already done much worse than what he’d done to Mossford.