Shift: A Novel (38 page)

“Alik Hidell can do it then.”

“I don’t want to do it,” Caspar said.

“Caspar can do it too. Or Alik. Or O. H. Lee.”

Caspar got up and began pacing Melchior’s motel room. He’d placed his .38 on the bureau when they first came in, and he walked to it, stood facing it with his back to Melchior. Melchior’s gun was a warm lump under his arm, Ivelitsch’s telegram a slip of paper in his pocket.

“What’s with the skulls, Caspar?”

Caspar’s left hand slipped under his collar. “I’m Lee,” he whispered. He worried a bead between thumb and forefinger, and Melchior imagined bones breaking beneath the boy’s fingers, cranial plates cracking, teeth snapping out like kernels of corn.

“What’s with the skulls?”

Caspar whirled around to face Melchior. If he’d had his gun in his hand, he could have shot Melchior before the latter had time to react. But he didn’t have his gun in his hand.

“I went to Mexico.”

Melchior sat calmly, not reaching for his gun, not setting his drink down—although an agent with more wits about him than Caspar would have noticed that Melchior’s jacket was unbuttoned now, that he’d moved his drink to his left hand.

“Who went to Mexico? Caspar? Alik? O. H. Lee?”

“I did.” Caspar’s fingers moved from one bead to the next like the housemaids at the orphanage saying their rosaries. “I was trying to get away. But I couldn’t.”

“You were trying to go to Cuba, weren’t you?”

“I wanted to get away.”

“You were trying to kill Castro.”

“It was the Day of the Dead,” Caspar said.

“You wanted to go to Russia, too. To kill Khrushchev.”

“People were walking around with skulls hanging around their necks and painted on their faces. It was like they’d already died but their bodies hadn’t figured it out yet.”

Melchior shook his head. “Lee went to Mexico in October, Caspar. The Day of the Dead is in November. Did you think Lee was already dead?”

“I’m
Lee,” Caspar said. “
I
am.”

“But you know they don’t really want Alik to kill Castro, don’t you? Or Khrushchev?”

“They do,” Caspar said angrily, plaintively. “They want him to shoot everyone.”

“Who?” Melchior didn’t bother to distinguish between target and master.

“Anyone. Everyone.” He was pulling so hard on the string of beads that Melchior thought he was going to break it.

“Who do they want Alik to shoot, Caspar?”

“Lee.” Caspar’s eyes dropped to the floor. “I’m Lee.” And then, in a quiet voice: “You.”

“Who do they want Alik to shoot, Caspar? You know who.”

Caspar lurched across the room again, walked straight into the wall, knocked his head against it over and over.

“They want me to shoot you.”

He was by his gun again. He picked it up this time, then turned and walked over to Melchior as steadily as he could, the gun resting flat on his palms like a dead kitten.

Melchior had something in his hand too. Ivelitsch’s telegram.

“Who do they want Alik to shoot, Caspar?”

Caspar stared at the slip of paper in Melchior’s hands. At the name written there. He looked up at Melchior, his shaking hands outstretched, the gun vibrating on his palms, until finally Melchior took it from him and set it on the table and Caspar threw his face in Melchior’s lap like a humbled dog. Melchior put his hand on Caspar’s head and stroked
the wiry hair, resisting the urge to bring his glass down on the back of the boy’s head and put him out of his misery.

“You said you’d take care of Lee, Tommy. You said you’d always take care of Lee.”

Very gently, Melchior lifted the string of skulls from Caspar’s neck and slipped it in his pocket.

“He will,” Melchior said. He stroked the hair and tried not to think of the orphanage. “Tommy will take care of Lee. Right up until the very end.”

It was nearly one in the morning when BC arrived, but the Big
House was ablaze with light. When he burst into the house he found a half dozen Castalians sprawled around the common rooms on the first floor. He counted twenty-two infractions of the law, along with eleven nipples (two were marble, on a statue of Dionysus, and five more were painted on canvas or the bare plaster of the walls), plus one completely naked baby.

No one noticed him at all.

He managed to track down Leary on the second floor in a round garret with a lighted chandelier and rugs draped from the ceiling. Leary sat on a pillow in the middle of the room, his legs folded into a painful-looking knot. BC had to call his name three times before the doctor opened his eyes.

“Is he here?” he demanded, although he knew it was a pointless question. Leary would not be contemplating his navel if Orpheus was on the premises.

“Agent Querrey?” BC was still wearing his hipster getup—was still stained with blood and ash for that matter—and Leary stared at him in confusion. “I would never have recognized you.”

After the circulation had come back to his knees, Leary led BC to his bedroom. A twelve-inch carpet of clothing and books and used dishes covered every square foot of floor space. In the center of this chaos rose a bed whose yellowing sheets reeked of a smell BC remembered from certain of his bunkmates’ cots in the academy: not just sweat, but something else. Something funky. Something …

Sex, BC told himself. Just say it.

“Sex,” he said out loud, and he still didn’t blush, though Leary glanced at him sharply.

“In the past two weeks, Dr. Leary,” BC began, “I’ve seen things that would surprise even you. Things that, for better or worse, have changed my life irrevocably. But this isn’t about me. It’s about a man named
Chandler Forrestal and a girl named Nazanin Haverman and a third person—though I hesitate to give him that much humanity—whose real name might never be known, but who needs to be brought to justice.”

Fear added itself to the confusion on Leary’s face. “But I thought Chandler and the girl were—”

“Dead? That’s what Melchior wanted you to believe.”

“Melchior? He was the dark-complected man?” Leary shuddered. “There’s something
off
about him.”

BC paused to kick a pair of boxer shorts off the tip of his shoe.

“If you’d asked me two months ago, I would have told you the Bureau was my life. Was all I had, all I wanted even. Now I realize that’s not true. What I had was a desire to sort truth from lies—the kind of lies men like the ones who run the Central Intelligence Agency tell, but also, as it turns out, men like the ones who run the Federal Bureau of Investigation tell. Men who believe that truth is relative, or subjective, or the provenance of victor over vanquished. I do not believe that, Dr. Leary. I will never believe that. There are facts and there are falsehoods, and never the twain shall meet. Before, the Bureau served as the most natural outlet for me to express that belief. Now I just have myself. My faith, my desire. My will. What I’m saying, Doctor, is that I need you to tell me everything you know about Project Orpheus, not just for your sake, but for mine.”

Leary fiddled with a statuette that BC thought was a chess queen until he saw the bare breasts—all eight of them, which the doctor was running his finger over absently, like a little boy playing with the teeth on a comb.

“I told you the last time you were here, Agent Querrey. Agent Logan kept me out of the loop.”

BC stood up and stepped very close to Leary. Close enough for the doctor to see that the flesh beneath his strange new getup was every bit as real as the doctor’s. The bones. The muscles. The fists.

“You need to understand, I’m a desperate man, Dr. Leary. I’ve given up everything to get to the bottom of this story. My career. My home. My reputation. Don’t make me give up my morals as well.”

A faint smile curled the side of Leary’s mouth. “You said story.”

“What?”

“You said ‘the bottom of this story’ instead of ‘the bottom of this case.’”

BC wasn’t sure what Leary’s point was, but the doctor’s tone seemed to be softening, so he just stood there. After nearly a minute of silence, Leary nodded.

“There is one thing. I don’t think the CIA is aware of it. It concerns Miss Haverman. I did a little digging, and I discovered that before Logan drafted her, she’d been a subject in Project Artichoke, one of the precursors to Ultra and Orpheus.”

“Artichoke was about ESP, wasn’t it?”

Leary nodded. “Miss Haverman’s test results were, I don’t want to say extraordinary, but consistently above average. And the more emotionally fraught the context became, the better she scored. Over the course of her final experiment, she became sexually involved with one of the scientists administering it, and her apparent telepathic abilities increased dramatically as she became more intimate with her experimenter. He’d been instructed to conceal his participants’ results from them—they would all either ‘fail’ the tests or score just high enough above a statistical mean that they could go home thinking they were special. But anyone who scored over a certain percentage was to be sent to me on some pretext or other. In Miss Haverman’s case, it was the idea of LSD as a therapeutic agent for survivors of trauma. Unfortunately, I’d left Harvard by the time Naz tried to contact me, so we never connected until three and a half weeks ago.”

The whole time Leary spoke, BC was remembering the feeling in Madam Song’s. The hatred—the loathing—pouring from Naz like heat from the open door of a furnace. The way she’d haunted his thoughts ever since he’d laid eyes on her, so much more than Chandler.

“Are you telling me Chandler isn’t the real Orpheus?” he said now. “That it’s actually Naz?”

“I wish it were that simple. In chemical terms, I would call Naz a catalyst. I think it was some innate ability on her part that made it possible for LSD to change the way Chandler’s brain works. To make it possible for him to project his own hallucinations onto outsiders.”

“So you’re saying Naz is the key? That, in the right hands, she could be used to create a legion of Chandlers? Of Orpheuses?”

Leary shook his head helplessly. “I don’t know.”

“And what about her? Was she changed too?”

Again Leary shook his head. “I’m sorry, Agent Querrey. I just don’t know.”

“Did you write your suspicions down anywhere?”

“Yes. But after—after the incident, I caught Billy trying to find my notes, and I destroyed them.”

“So you’re the only person who knows the role Naz might have played in Chandler’s transformation?”

“Well, there’s you now.” Leary offered BC a weak smile. “You’re not going to kill me, are you?”

“I should,” BC said in a voice so cold that the doctor recoiled. “But as long as no one suspects you have secret knowledge, you should be fine.” He stood up abruptly. “You’d better pray no one followed me here however.”

“CIA—”

“Melchior’s not CIA,” BC said as he headed for the door. “Not anymore. And if he comes after you, you’re going to wish I
had
killed you.”

It was nearly midnight when Chandler pulled into the parking
lot of the Carousel Club. He’d flown into Dallas just after noon, but it had taken him most of the day to track down a single hit of acid—if Dallas had well-marked Bohemian hotspots like New York, he couldn’t find them, and, following a chain of hints, recommendations, and flat-out guesses, he eventually managed to score in, of all places, Neiman Marcus, where he also picked up several compliments on the clothing he’d taken from BC’s suitcase.

The tab in his hand was of unknown provenance, like a package of batteries lacking an expiration date. It could charge him up all the way or give him only enough energy to emit a dim glow. If he took it and Naz wasn’t in the club, he’d be forced to go after her—after Melchior—unaugmented. But Ivelitsch couldn’t have lied about her whereabouts. Chandler had read it in his brain like a neon sign. She had to be here.

He popped the tab in his mouth. He could process the chemical and normalize the hallucinations and fine-tune his mind in minutes now. The acid, thank God, was good. Not great, but good. When he opened his eyes there was a greenish tint to his vision, but it seemed less impediment than augmentation, like some kind of night-vision lens.

He got out of the car. A tall man sat beside the front door, his lardy ass spilling over either side of the narrow stool that held his linebacker-gone-to-seed frame.

“Evenin’, bub,” he drawled in a voice that could’ve been hostile or friendly, Chandler didn’t know and didn’t care. “It’s five tonight.”

Chandler’s fist caught the bouncer square in the face. The man’s nose exploded in blood, and the stool splintered beneath his flailing limbs and he hit the ground like a rotten tree knocked over in a storm.

Chandler grabbed the man by the wrist and dragged him into the shadow of some crepe myrtle that didn’t so much adorn the front of the
club as shrink away from it. He tossed the pieces of stool after him, then pushed open the smoked-glass door. As he went in he noted a flyer pasted to the glass: