Shift: A Novel

CIA Headquarters, McLean, VA

November 1, 1963

“So.” Everton took a cigarette from a gold case monogrammed RH and lit it with a crystal lighter the size of an inkwell. “What’s with the hat? Afraid I’ll get a good look at your face, Melchior?”

Since it looked like he was going to have to deal with this fool, Melchior took a moment to scrutinize him. Or, rather, his clothes. Everton was clearly less man than mannequin, a prop wrapped in the uniform of his class. His gray wool suit, though perfectly tailored and brand-new, was ten years out of style (the lapels were practically as wide as a beauty queen’s sash, for one thing, the serge so stiff it looked like it would stand up on its own). But that was hardly surprising: fashion trends would be beneath the notice of the acting assistant deputy director for the Western Hemisphere Division, and no doubt his tailor had been cutting his suits the same way since prep school. From the crisply symmetrical half-Windsor knot to the double peaks of his white pocket square to the gold Longines with its plain leather strap peeking out from his French cuffs, Melchior couldn’t find a single aspect of the man that didn’t reek of Wasp prudery. Even his gold wedding band, narrow as solder wire and (tastefully) unpolished, seemed to hide inside the hairs on his knuckle. Really, he was the type of man who could just disappear, and it would be months before even his wife noticed.

Melchior took his hat off and set it on Richard Helms’s desk.

“I’m not the one who should be afraid,” he said, pulling a Medaille d’Or from his breast pocket and lighting it with his Zippo. “Drew.”

Everton’s eyes followed the glowing tip of Melchior’s cigar like a rabbit transfixed by a swaying snake.

“The elusive Melchior,” he said, averting his gaze with difficulty. “I’ve always wanted to meet you, just to find out if you were real. That story with the slingshot still makes the rounds.”

“You should see what I can do with a cigar.”

Everton ashed so hard he broke his cigarette in half.

“I, ah, read about that in your report. Actually, I have a few questions about your account of your time in Cuba.”

Melchior waved the cigar like a magic wand. “Ask away.”

It took Everton another moment to tear his eyes from Melchior’s cigar.

“Right. So. Twenty-three months ago you were dropped into the Zapata Swamp as part of Operation Mongoose. There were six people on your team: you, two American freelancers, and three Cuban defectors with contacts in the anti-Communist resistance movement. You yourself are reputed to have extensive and impressive field credentials from Eastern Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia, among other places, yet within a week of your arrival all three Cubans were dead, one of the freelancers had been deported, the other was MIA, and you were in Boniato Prison.”

“That sounds about right.” Melchior puffed contentedly. “Rip ever turn up? I owe that son of a bitch for ditching me.”

A thick stream of smoke from the broken cigarette spiraled in the air between Everton and Melchior. Melchior could tell Everton wanted to put the cigarette out, but he just kept talking.

“After nine months behind bars, you claim that not only were you released, but were brought to the office of Raúl Castro and asked to keep an eye on Red Army activity in Cuba.”

“He gave me this suit too.” Melchior flipped open the left lapel, revealing the small hole over the heart. “Took it off a man he’d had executed. Was nice enough to have it cleaned first, but he left this memento mori to make sure I knew what the stakes were. Even threw in a pair-a shoes. Well, sandals, really.” Melchior lifted his feet again, waggled them at Everton.

Everton threw up his hands, which caused the smoke from his broken cigarette to dance around like an impish genie.

“You have to realize the idea that Fidel Castro’s brother hired a CIA agent to work for him defies credulity.”

“With all due respect, Acting Assistant Deputy Director for the Western Hemisphere Division Everton”—Melchior sucked air dramatically—“the Company sent me to Cuba to try to get El Jefe to smoke an exploding cigar, so I’m not sure where you get off saying what’s credulous or not.”

“Desmond Fitz—ugh.” Everton couldn’t take it anymore. He grabbed a pencil and used the eraser to stamp out the broken cigarette. “Desmond FitzGerald read too many James Bond novels,” Everton said when the smoke had finally dissipated, leaving behind the smell of burning Hevea brasiliensis sap, “and is a little too impressed by what Joe Scheider¹⁷ cooks up in his labs.”

Melchior rolled his eyes. The exploding cigar had been a stupid idea, but it was hardly the point. “Why is it so far-fetched that a pair of totalitarian governments should be prone to the same factionalism that’s in the process of ripping apart this country, not to mention this agency?”

“I don’t—”

“Listen, Drew. I been back in the States three days. Just about the longest time I been here since I was thirteen. But it didn’t take me more than three hours to see that there’s been a shift. This country’s splitting in half. Democrats on one side, Republicans on the other. Liberals and conservatives, reformers and old guard, beatniks and squares. What was the gap in the last election? A hundred thousand votes out of seventy million? High school elections have more swing than that.”

“Kennedy won. That’s all that matters.” Everton didn’t sound at all pleased by this fact.

“With a little help from Momo Giancana,” Melchior said, “who, I gotta say, seems to be moving in very elite circles these days.”

Everton’s expression didn’t exactly change at the mention of Giancana, but it stiffened with the effort of remaining impassive. “Fine,” he said in a condescending tone. “Let’s say you did meet with Raúl Castro. That still doesn’t explain why he would task an American with the job of finding out what motives the Soviets might have for a Cuban alliance.”

“With all due respect, Drew—which is to say, none—you got to stop thinking like a bureaucrat and start thinking like a spook. Segundo didn’t trust his own men to get to the source of the problem. And even if they did, he didn’t think they could fix it.”

“By ‘problem,’ I assume you mean this fanciful notion that the Russians left nuclear weapons in Cuba? We have reconnaissance photographs showing the missiles being taken off the island.”

“You have pictures of boxes. Those boxes could be filled with matryoshka dolls for all you know.”

“Nikita Khrushchev isn’t stupid enough to risk Armageddon for the sake of hiding one or two bombs on Cuban soil.”

“Those are the dolls that sit one inside the other, by the way. Like Chinese boxes.”

“I know what matryoshka—”

“Although I guess in China they just call them boxes.”

Everton’s ears were so red that Melchior was surprised they weren’t oozing smoke like his broken cigarette. Melchior puffed on his cigar.

“Listen to me, Drew. Nikita Khrushchev might not be stupid enough to start World War III, but there are plenty of Russians who are. People whose objectives aren’t the same as Khrushchev’s, or the Kremlin’s for that matter.”

Everton snorted. “You’re trying to tell me a rogue Soviet element was able to steal Russian warheads without anyone—KGB, CIA, or DGI—finding out about it?”

Don’t forget the mafia, Melchior almost added.

“Actually, a lot of people knew,” he said aloud. “Just not the who or the where. That’s why Segundo hired me. He found it easier to stomach the idea of a small-scale CIA operation to remove one or two pirated devices than for his country to be blown off the map when word leaked that there were nukes on its territory.”

“I repeat, we have no intelligence indicating—”

“Damn it, Drew, did you even read my report? I’m the intelligence. That’s what you pay me for, remember?”

“We paid you to assassinate—” Everton cut himself off. Even in Langley, there were some things you didn’t say out loud. “We paid you to deliver a box of cigars. Instead you drop off the radar for almost two years, and when you do show up it’s smelling like rum and dressed like a plantation owner. Now, if you have any proof—”

“Hacendado.”

Everton folded his hands in front of him so tightly the knuckles turned white.

“What?”

“A plantation owner is called an hacendado, which you’d know if you paid any attention to the goddamn western hemisphere you’re supposed to be in charge of.”

Everton opened his mouth but Melchior spoke over him. “Twenty-three months I spent on that miserable little island, Drew, and I’m telling you there are Russian elements—call ’em rogue, call ’em crazy, call ’em whatever the hell you want, but they’re using Cuba’s proximity to the U.S. to move the Cold War in a whole new direction.”

Everton’s knuckles were so white they were practically green, and his pursed lips were equally pale, and the little crescents dancing in the hollows of his flared nostrils.

“Fine. If you have any proof of such a conspiracy, by all means, produce it now. And by proof I mean something more than a blazer with a hole and a stain that looks like it was made by an exploding cigar. Pen, I mean. An exploding pen.”

For the first time all morning, Melchior’s smile was genuine. This was his moment.

He reached for his shoe, but the look of disgust on Everton’s face stopped him. He’d expected that look, even if he’d imagined it on Helms’s face rather than some mid-level functionary’s. Indeed, he’d planned the whole meeting around it. Had resurrected the ridiculous suit and sandals Segundo had given him and chosen an especially fragrant pair of socks so that the paper in his shoe would acquire a healthy tang of foot stink.

There was the look, just as he’d planned. The only problem was, it had nothing to do with Melchior’s attire, Melchior’s action, Melchior’s words, and everything to do with Melchior himself. Melchior’d seen the same expression on the faces of countless anti–Civil Rights demonstrators in the newspapers he’d been reading since he got back. It was the face of a primly dressed white girl as she threw a tomato at a black boy walking into her school in Georgia. It was the face of a uniformed police officer siccing his German shepherd on a black man attempting to use the whites-only entrance of a cafe in Mississippi. It was the face of George Wallace taking the oath of office as governor of Alabama: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Despite all the whispers referring to him as the Wiz’s pickaninny—whispers that started, he knew, with the Wiz himself—Melchior had always done his duty to Company and country, and even if he’d often felt like a second-class citizen, he’d never felt black. But now he knew: as far as CIA was concerned, he was just as much a nigger as Medgar Evers.

His foot was still in the air, the sandal half off his heel. He let it hang there for one more moment, then reached down and slipped it back on, placed his foot firmly on the floor.

Everton’s hands and face relaxed, and watery pink replaced greenish white as the blood flooded to his skin.

“I want to be completely candid with you. Deputy Director Helms didn’t meet with you today because he was busy. He didn’t meet with you because you are not worth his time. You are the product of a failed experiment on the part of the former occupant of this office. You and your fellow ‘Wise Men.’”

“Caspar,” Melchior said, his voice dangerously quiet. “Balthazar.”

“I don’t care if your names are Huey, Dewey, and Louie. Deputy Director Helms feels it’s time the Company got out of science fiction and secret wars and returned to the business of gathering intelligence. The Wiz Kids were the first of the Company’s ridiculous experiments²⁰, from which sprang Bluebird, Artichoke, Ultra, and now Orpheus. It’s only fitting that the first should clean up the last.”

Melchior’s eyes narrowed.

“Orpheus?”

Everton was silent a moment. Then: “Did you ever meet Cord Meyer’s ex-wife, Mary?”

“Are you kidding? I never even met Cord.”

“Oh, that’s right. The Wiz liked to keep you out of the spotlight. Or, who knows, maybe you kept yourself out of the spotlight.”

“Who knows?” Melchior said. “So what’s the trouble with Mrs. Meyer?”

“She’s sleeping with the president.”

Melchior shrugged. “From what I heard, you could open a rival to the Rockettes with the girls Jack Kennedy’s bagged since he got in the White House.”

“Be that as it may,” Everton said, “none of the other girls are slipping him LSD.”¹⁸

Melchior didn’t react for a moment. Then he leaned forward, retrieved his hat, and set it on his head.

“None of the other girls is slipping him LSD,” he said, smiling beneath the brim of his hat. “None of the other girls is.”