Shift: A Novel (48 page)

He goes to take another drink and discovers that his glass is empty. He shrugs and pours himself another. It’s his birthday after all. Forty-three. He never thought he could be a forty-three-year-old.

Sometimes on nights like this, after two or three Scotches, or four, or five, he asks himself what would have happened if the president
hadn’t died. If Chandler had managed to stop Melchior, if Caspar had missed? Or if Jack Ruby hadn’t been able to walk up to Caspar in a crowded police station and shoot him dead and the president’s killer had talked and told the bizarre story of his life that people have been piecing together ever since? Would things have turned out differently? The good things—Civil Rights and the War on Poverty and the sexual revolution—and the bad: the Vietnam War and Watergate and the sexual revolution. Would the country have turned out the same? The world? Would he?

The question makes him think of the book he was reading on the train the day it all started.
The Man in the High Castle
. A novel that asks what would have happened if the U.S. lost World War II. He’s kept the book with him all these years, but he’s never tried to read it because, frankly, he doesn’t think it ends well, and he doesn’t want it to prejudice his investigation. A lot of things about him have changed over the years—or, more accurately, he now acknowledges things about himself he never would’ve admitted before all of this started, and one of them is that he’s not the rationalist he thought he was. The believer in causality and consequence. The truth is, he’s a bit superstitious. More than a bit even, and a part of him believes it wasn’t an accident that this of all books should have fallen into his hands when it did. A book that asks if the facts of history have any meaning at all, or if we’re all on a oneway train to apocalypse.

But still. He hasn’t read it and won’t. Not till he’s found Chandler and Naz. Not till Melchior is brought to justice.

Which brings him back to the original question: would things have turned out differently if Chandler had stopped Oswald? He can’t help but think that Melchior was telling the truth in his parting words: that the shift started a long time ago before Oswald pulled the trigger, that the change would have happened regardless of what played out in Dealey Plaza. Maybe so. But that still doesn’t change the fact that an innocent man was killed, and a lot of innocent people were dragged into a crime that had nothing to do with them as the nation tried to find scapegoats for their own feelings of vulnerability, and culpability, and failure.

The whine of feedback from the small TV behind him cuts into his thoughts. Eighteen years disappear, and he’s back in the chair in Dallas,
watching the screen fade to black and hearing Walter Cronkite’s voice flood out of the darkness. Somehow he knows even before he turns around.

“This is a CBS News Special Bulletin. In Washington, DC, shots have just been fired by an unknown gunman at President Reagan as he left the Washington Hilton Hotel. It is unclear whether the president was hit or not. However, we do know that James Brady, the White House press secretary, was injured, as well as a Secret Service agent. The gunman fired at the president from approximately ten feet away and was immediately subdued by the Secret Service. Any details about his name or motivation have yet to be released. Stay tuned to CBS News for further details.”

BC stares at the screen for a moment. He’s not sure what he’s waiting for until a commercial comes on. The inescapable theme song to Pac-Man. After eighteen years, history is still told courtesy of its commercial sponsors.

BC presses a button on the intercom. Duncan answers almost before the buzzing stops.

“Yes, BC?”

“Get me on the first plane to DC.”

A pause. “Under your name, or—”

“An alias,” BC says, then releases the intercom. He looks at the half inch of Scotch in his glass, then sets it undrunk on the desk. “It’s starting again,” he says to no one but himself. “It’s finally starting.”
⁷

There were six people in the hold of the C-47 idling on the runway of the Retalhuleu base in Guatemala: Robertson, Sturgis, and he himself, plus two Cuban exiles who’d originally trained to be part of the Bay of Pigs, as well as a more recent defector with the unwieldy name of Don Gutiérrez Ravé de Méndez y Sotomayor.

Six people and one box of cigars.

Melchior—not his real name, but the most convenient one available to us—looked down at the box of cigars. He held it in his lap like a sleeping infant, delicately and firmly at the same time. Not wanting to disturb it, yet not wanting to drop it, either. He knew the cigars had something to do with the plan, but only Don Gutiérrez Ravé de Méndez y Sotomayor understood their exact purpose, which he refused to divulge until the team was on the ground. If that didn’t tell you what kind of asshole he was—not to mention how badly this mission had been planned—then there was his unbearable cologne, which filled up the cabin with the stink of chemical roses, or the fact that Gutiérrez Ravé de Méndez y Sotomayor was just his surname and that he insisted it be used in full whenever someone spoke to him. In Melchior’s experience, no one in the Spanish-speaking world could match the effete snobbery of a Cuban
hacendado
. The
castellanos
of Mexico came close, and high-born Argentinos were about as palatable as pig shit. But the sugar
patróns
of Cuba were the last people in the Western hemisphere to profess an unabashed belief in the institution of slavery—which belief had only become that much more entrenched since the slaves had driven them from their country.

Just before they took off, JM/WAVE radioed from Miami with the news that the plan had been code-named Operation Mongoose. The fact that Ted Shackley was willing to break air silence for such a trivial piece of information—the fact that Shackley had been made a station chief at all—was one more indication of the Company’s sad state of affairs under the new president, who had recently let slip, in the goddamned
New York Times
, of all places, that he wanted to “to scatter the CIA to the four winds—to break it into a thousand pieces,” The ironic thing was, Melchior thought as he looked around the ragtag crew gathered in the C-47, the Company seemed to be doing a pretty good job of scattering itself.

Take Robertson for example. A plump pink specimen of American manhood with a ziggurat of Spam cans squeezed between his thick thighs. Here was a guy for whom eighth-grade arithmetic had clearly been an issue, let alone the implications of the Monroe Doctrine in the second half of the twentieth century. Now he was part of a team tasked with killing the most paranoid leader this side of the Atlantic—which fact he wasn’t going to find out until after he’d parachuted onto Cuban soil. Even before the plane rattled down the runway and heaved its belly into the air, Robertson had popped the top on the first can of Spam, and for a long time the only sound in the hold was the rumble of the engines and the softer smack of his cud. Then:

“So, uh, who’s the mongoose?”

On the opposite bench, Sturgis started at the sound of Robertson’s drawly voice. He was one of those twitchy fellows. Not scared. Just eager for the killing to start. He took a pull from the mysteriously full pint of whiskey he’d been nursing since Melchior had arrived that morning, then said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

Robertson spooned a gelatinous pink mound into his mouth. “I mean”—he pushed half-chewed meat into the pockets of his jowly cheeks—“is the mongoose Castro, or is the mongoose the Company?”

“Rip, you’re a fucking idiot.” Sturgis took another pull. “Of
course
the Company is the mongoose. The mongoose always kills the cobra. That’s the only reason you’ve ever
heard
of mongeese.”

Mongeese, Melchior thought. Meat you can eat with a spoon. If Castro needed any propaganda to support his revolution, all he had to do was broadcast footage of these two paragons of capitalism.

“Cobra?” Robertson was apparently confused by the addition of a second animal. “Who’s that?”

“Oh my fucking
God
.
Castro
is the cobra. Now shut your fucking mouth before I shove that can of Spam down your throat.”

Robertson looked at Sturgis like, Isn’t that what I’m doing?

“With
out
opening it, you dipshit.”

Sturgis took another pull from his pint, then offered it to Melchior. The gesture was diffident, as if he was more interested in whether the newcomer would take it than in trying to make an ally. The label on the pint said Johnny Walker Black, which Melchior doubted matched the contents. Still, it was bound to be better than the backyard rum that lay in their immediate future. Melchior ignored it anyway. Robertson might’ve been an idiot, but Sturgis had fought with Fidel Castro against Fulgencio Batista before he seemed to realized the capitalists paid better. If there was one thing Melchior hated, it was a traitor. He’d’ve sooner imbibed the piss of the whores who worked the comfort stations outside the Retalhuleu base, and God knows what was swimming around
their
guts.

“I’m gonna catch some Z’s.” He tapped the box of cigars on his lap. “Anyone wakes me before Matanzas gets one of these up his ass.”

He wasn’t wearing a cap, so he draped the day-old copy of the
Washington
Post
over his face like a veil.
ALLEN WELSH DULLES RESIGNS AS HEAD OF CIA IN WAKE OF BAY OF PIGS DEBACLE
, screamed the headline.
CHOICE OF FORMER HEAD OF ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION AS NEW DCI SUGGESTS KENNEDY SOFTENING POSITION ON CUBA
. A moment later he heard Sturgis chuckle, presumably after he’d finished subvocalizing the words of the headline.

“The plural of ‘mongoose’ is ‘
mongooses
,’” Melchior growled beneath the paper. “Fucking dipshit.”

About twenty minutes after they cleared the East Coast, the sky began to wring itself out in one of those up-and-down squalls that plague the Caribbean at the tail end of hurricane season. For the next hour and a half the six passengers in the C-47 were bounced around like loose socks in a washing machine. Melchior had snored through hurricanes, cyclones, monsoons, and every other synonym for a tropical storm you could think of, but at the first sign of turbulence, Don Gutiérrez Ravé de Méndez y Sotomayor pulled an ornate silver crucifix out of his shirt and pressed it to his lips. A sibilant stream of Spanish passed from his mouth to the little crucified Jesus, interrupted by sharp groans whenever the plane hit a particularly big bump. Melchior’d been in bordellos with less moaning, and, what with the rattling of the ever multiplying empty Spam cans bouncing over the floor like Mexican jumping beans, it was impossible to get any sleep.

“Jesus, that’s starting to get on my nerves,” Robertson said, working his way to the bottom of his eighth or ninth can of Spam as he glared at the defector. “What the fuck’s he saying anyway?”

One of the Cuban exiles glared at him, but the other said, “He is praying for his safety, for our safety, for the safety and success of this mission, and for the peace and prosperity of the glorious Cuban nation and its friend and protector, the United States of America, especially its new leader, the Catholic President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, may God bless and guide him in His wisdom, you redneck motherfucker.”

He said this in Spanish, and Robertson just stared at him blankly.

“Jesus, that’s starting to get on my nerves.” He scooped up another scrotum-sized mound of Spam, licked it off his spoon as though it were ice cream. “Hey, Donny, keep it down, will ya?”

Don Gutiérrez Ravé de Méndez y Sotomayor gave no sign that he heard. “En el nombre del Padre y del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo,” he finished up, then kissed the crucifix, took a breath, and started in on another round. “Padre nuestro, que estás en los cielos …,”

Across from Robertson, Sturgis was shaking his head in disbelief.

“You don’t speak Spanish?”

Melchior bit back a laugh. The guy barely spoke
English
.

Robertson’s lower jaw hung open, exposing a mouthful of pink pulp, which, on second glance, might’ve actually been his tongue. “Why do I need to speak Spanish? We got the three-a them.” He added more meat to his mouth. “D’
you
speak Spanish?”

“Of course I speak Spanish, numbnuts. We’re going to
Cuba
, fer Chrissakes.”

“No one told me I needed to speak Spanish. No one told me shit.” He glanced significantly at Melchior. “Hey you. Domenico. Do
you
speak Spanish?”