Shift: A Novel

CIA Headquarters, McLean, VA

November 1, 1963

In the wake of his Caribbean sojourn, the Halls of Justice seemed bland and expensive. Terrazzo floors speckled black and brown like a wren’s egg, buffed walnut wainscoting giving way to Listerine-colored walls. Sure, the slate roofs of Cuba’s government buildings were leaking and the rococo wallpaper had been repatterned by gunfire. But the Cubans made all this seem intentional. Not decrepit or disheveled, but déshabillé, as the French would have it, which made the whole setup somehow alluring. Sexy even. Give the Communists a few more years and they would no doubt erect buildings like this one: fish belly–white on the outside, every bit as soulless within. But they’d never be able to afford the telling details: the all-pervasive hum of thousands of coffee-makers, Dictaphones, and air conditioners, and of course the immeasurable wattage of infinite fluorescence. Melchior pulled his hat down lower on his forehead. The Wiz always said a spy had only three natural enemies: cheap liquor, cheap girls, and bright lights.

On the beaded glass of the nearest doorway, three letters were stenciled in gold and outlined in black, like the office of a private dick in a forties noir:

D.D.P.

No name was painted on the door, but if he squinted Melchior could make out the ghostly outline of the words FRANK WISDOM just above the title. Whoever’d scraped the paint off had scratched the glass in the process, indelibly etching the Wiz’s name into the door and rendering him more of a presence than he’d ever been during his tenure as chief of covert ops. This seemed a fitting tribute, since the Wiz had spent even less time in this office than Melchior had in the Adams Morgan apartment he’d owned for the past eight years.

The door opened. A gray suit appeared. The suit had a head. The head had a face. The face had a mouth. The mouth said:

“You can come in now.”

The soles of Melchior’s sandals squeaked on epoxied marble when he stood up. He twisted his left shoe a little, which made the sound louder, longer. To an observer it might’ve looked as though he was just being obnoxious, a high schooler sliding his sneakers on a freshly waxed basketball court. Indeed, his whole demeanor exuded contempt for protocol and propriety, from his too-long and slightly oily hair to his ill-fitting linen suit to the utterly ridiculous woven leather sandals on his feet. But in fact all he was doing was adjusting the inner liner of his shoe, which had bunched up because of the piece of paper folded between it and the sole. A piece of paper worth more than this whole building, although Melchior would settle for an office in it, as long as it came with a pretty secretary.

The man who’d opened the door showed him into the inner office, then, instead of leaving, closed the door, walked around Melchior, and took a seat at the desk. The nameplate in front of him read RICHARD HELMS. Melchior’d never met Helms in person, but he’d seen his picture in the paper often enough. This wasn’t Helms.

Melchior was intrigued.

As soon as he sat down, the man seemed to forget about Melchior. He began flipping through the pages of a file on the desk. Melchior’s presumably. Melchior noted with pride the thinness of the sheaf of pages. Agents whose tenure with the Company was half his had files two, three, four feet thick, but there were only twenty or thirty pages on the desk. Even so, he didn’t like this self-important functionary looking at it. Where in the hell was Dick Helms? Given the fact that Melchior had worked side by side with the former occupant of this office for nearly two decades—not to mention the importance of the intelligence he’d gathered in Cuba—surely he rated a meeting with the current DDP?

Helms’s surrogate continued to ignore him, so Melchior plopped into one of the green leather chairs in front of the desk. The surrogate sighed but didn’t look up.

“I didn’t ask you to sit down.”

Melchior lifted both feet off the floor and held his battered sandals in the air. After fifteen months on his feet—and who knows how long on their previous owner—the soles were so worn that when he curled his toes the brown leather wrinkled like skin. So thin that you could see the outline of the piece of paper just under the leather of the left shoe, if you knew what you were looking at.

Finally the man behind the desk raised his eyes.

“I’m sorry Deputy Director Helms wasn’t able to meet with you today. I’m Drew Everton. Acting assistant deputy director for the Western Hemisphere Division.”

“How in the hell do they fit all that on your card?”

Everton rolled his eyes. “Would you put your feet down, please?”

Melchior smiled. “I just wanted the Company to see what I’ve had to endure for the sake of my country. I been walking around in a pair of huaraches for more than a year. My feet,” he said, letting them plop one at a time to the floor, “are fucking tired.”