Shift: A Novel

Camagüey Province, Cuba

November 1, 1963

Maria Bayo trembled before the tall man in the gray suit. He wasn’t a particularly big man—he was in fact as lean as a knife—and he’d done nothing to threaten the eleven-year-old. But there was something dead about his gray eyes and hair so blond it was the color of ice, and inside the gray suit his wiry body was taut as an icicle. Maria had never seen an icicle, but she thought it must be the worst thing in the world: water rendered hard as steel, and just as sharp.

“What is this barn used for?” the iceman said in heavily accented Spanish—the same Spanish used by the soldiers who wore uniforms with the hammer and sickle in their insignia.

Maria looked back at the car the iceman had driven her in. She hadn’t wanted to get in the car with him, but she had wanted to get out of it even less when she saw where he was taking her.

“It’s a mill, señor,” Maria said, looking back at the car, gauging how long it would take her to run to it. “No one uses it since the revolution.”

“There are tire tracks leading to the door, fresh bullet holes in the wall.”

Long before the Communists came to power, Cuba’s proletariat had learned to hide things from whoever was running the country. Whether it was a party official or tax man or sugar hacendado, the people in power made their money off the backs of the poor. But Maria was too scared to lie. Too scared to lie well anyway. Her brother had disappeared, and she was afaid she would disappear too.

“Maybe it was the American in the village. I never saw him in a truck, though.”

“How do you know he was American?”

“He wasn’t hungry.”

The iceman nodded, then leaned close to her. “And how do you know it was a truck, if you never saw it?”

“N-n-no one from my village comes here, señor. The dogs guard it. They kill anyone who comes close.”

“Dogs?”

“The wild dogs.” Maria’s head swiveled around, as if just mentioning the dogs could bring them. “They say the ones who guard this barn developed a taste for human flesh. Even one bite from them will make you sick.”

Pavel Semyonovitch Ivelitsch paused. His men had shot four of the animals when they arrived this morning—mangy skin-and-bones wraiths with sores all over their bodies. The men said the dogs had stalked them as though they were a herd of deer or tapir. They’d found a couple of human skeletons, too. Ivelitsch had assumed the dogs were rabid. But now he was wondering.

“Maybe the man was in a truck with something like this in the back?” He drew on the ground, a complex arrangement of squares and tubes.

Maria shrugged. “There are many trucks, but usually they are covered. Farmers want to hide their produce from the inspectors so they can keep some for the black market.”

“That is bad Communism.”

“Yes, but good for their wallets, and their stomachs.”

The iceman smiled, but at the same time he was using his shoe to rub out the image in the dirt. He moved his foot methodically back and forth until every trace of the drawing had been completely erased—so completely that Maria wished she hadn’t seen it, because he clearly wanted it to remain secret.

Just then Sergei Vladimirovich Maisky came out of the barn, the wand of a Geiger counter dangling from his hand like a golf club. He took off his headphones and scratched his bald, sunburned scalp.

“Nothing, sir.”

Ivelitsch had a hunch.

“Wave your wand over the dogs.”

“The dogs, sir?” Sergei Vladimirovich was a thin, bookish man, and his lip curled in disgust.

“Humor me.”

Sergei Vladimirovich walked over to the motley pile half hidden by some bushes. The carcasses hadn’t begun to smell, but there were so many flies buzzing around them that they could be heard from twenty feet away.

Seeing the pile, Maria’s eyes went wide with horror and she crossed herself. “You shouldn’t have killed the dogs. They will only send worse next time.”

Ivelitsch, who’d seen the mutilated corpse of her brother, thought perhaps the little girl was right, but he said nothing. He watched his man wave the Geiger counter over the grisly pile. After less than a minute Sergei Vladimirovich turned and ran back to Ivelitsch.

“You were right, comrade!” he yelled in Russian. “All of them! Trace amounts of radiation!”

Ivelitsch turned back to Maria. He squatted down, being careful not to put the knees of his suit on the dirt, and took one of her hands in his. It was a hot day, but his hand was as cold as the Arctic fields she imagined had spawned him.

“Do you know anyone who has been made sick by these dogs?”

Maria opened her mouth but nothing came out.

Ivelitsch squeezed her hand. Not enough to hurt. Just enough to press the chill to the bone.

“Listen to me, little girl. I am the man they sent to take the place of the dogs, and it will be much better for you and your neighbors if you tell me what I need to know.”

Maria swallowed. “M-my uncle.”

“Take me to him.”