Shift: A Novel

New York, NY

November 4, 1963

Five minutes outside Pennsylvania Station, BC excused himself to use the lavatory. As he stepped out of the W.C., he noticed the Negro conductor farther up the car, pulling ticket stubs from the tops of seats. BC approached him, waited until the man had finished what he was doing.

“Yes, sir?” The conductor didn’t look at him.

BC had already pulled a pair of fives from his wallet—all the money he had until the banks opened on Monday. “I’d like to pay you. For our drinks.”

The conductor unfolded the bills and handed one back.

“Keep it,” BC said. “For the trouble.” He tried to meet the conductor’s eye but the man refused to look at him. “If there’s a problem with my companion. If he makes a complaint. I’d like to …” He didn’t know how to finish. “I’d like to speak in your defense. If I may.”

The conductor continued to stare at the two bills in his hand.

“It’s just that, well, how could I do that?”

“How …?”

“How can I identify you?”

For the first time, the conductor looked up, and BC was surprised to see that his eyes were filled not with fear or shame but fury.

“I have a name.” The man’s voice was so guttural that BC thought he might actually bite him.

A glint of gold on the man’s chest caught the agent’s eye. BC Querrey, who had noted that the soles of the conductor’s shoes were more worn on their outside edges than the inside, suggesting an internal torsion in the tibia, as well as the fact that the middle button of his jacket had fallen off at some point and been sewn back on with yellow thread rather than the gold that adhered the top and bottom buttons to the placket, had not noticed that the man who had visited his seat thirteen times in the past four hours was wearing a name tag:

A. HANDY

“Ah,” BC said, or sighed. “Yes.” Having seen the man’s name, he now found it impossible to use it. “Well, if there’s a problem, please don’t hesitate to contact me.” He handed the man one of his business cards even as, with a lurch and a hiss, the train came to a stop.

With a start, BC turned from the conductor and hurried down the aisle. He’d been so focused on making amends that he’d completely forgotten the train was reaching its destination. He weaved in and out of passengers, pardon-me-ma’aming and excuse-me-sirring his way with increasing speed, until he burst through the doors of his car. The seats were empty, the passengers queued at either end of the aisle waiting for the doors to open. It took only the briefest glance for BC to see that the CIA man was gone, along with his—i.e., BC’s—briefcase.

BC ran to his seat. The only thing left on the table was the novel by Philip K. Dick, the half-smoked cigar sitting on top of it like a turd. BC noted that the book was turned toward his companion’s seat and, flicking the cigar off it, he flipped open the cover. A folded, wrinkled piece of paper fell out, on which had been hastily scrawled:

TELL MR. HANDY I SAID THANKS FOR THE DRINKS!

OH, AND BY THE WAY, I AM BLACK.

—MELCHIOR

The piece of paper was moist, as if it had soaked up some of the CIA man’s—Melchior’s—sweat, and BC unfolded it delicately, as much to avoid getting the moisture on his hand as to keep from tearing the paper. The diagram that emerged didn’t make any sense at first. It showed a complicated mechanical device, possibly an engine of some kind. Most of the captions were written in what BC thought was a Cyrillic alphabet, but one English word popped off the page: “Polonium-210.”

“Oh, my God.”

BC grabbed his coat and hat from the luggage rack, swept up the book and paper from the tabletop—and, on impulse, the cigar butt too—and sprinted down the aisle. Before he’d taken two steps, the doors swished apart and people spilled out of the car like water through the opened gates of a dam. BC pushed his way through the crowd, his head darting left and right for a sign of Melchior—and then suddenly he was on the platform, and he pulled up short.

He stood there with his bundle clutched to his chest like a refugee as the bombers scream across the sky. The train shed of the nation’s largest and busiest rail station occupied an enormous dusky cavern that receded into the distance on every side of him—acre upon acre of fretted steel columns reaching more than a hundred feet into the air and supporting a barrel-vaulted ceiling made of what seemed like millions of grimy panes of glass. At one end were a dozen arched tunnels disappearing into the bowels of the earth, at the other an equal number of staircases climbing two stories to the crowded concourse. But it was a cloudy day, and what little light managed to penetrate the filthy ceiling cast thick, oily shadows that confounded the eye, and on top of that at least two other trains were loading and unloading passengers: hundreds of people were pushing and weaving their way along the platform, nearly all of them shrouded in rain-darkened jackets and hats. BC’s eyes flitted desperately from one to the next. Melchior had been carrying neither coat nor hat, and BC did his best to confine his search to the bare heads. There were only a few, but in the murky light every exposed head seemed uniformly dark. Any of the men could have been Melchior—or none of them.

He sprinted for the stairs at the end of the platform, ran into the station’s world-famous waiting room. He didn’t notice the immense coffered ceilings, the pink marble floors (muddied on this wet day, and stained with tens of thousands of footprints), the diffuse light streaming in through arched windows taller and wider than his house in Takoma Park. He raced across the waiting room—two blocks long and nearly half a block wide—up the stairs, out the front entrance. At least he didn’t have to look for his car. A two-door coupé, mint green and shiny, individual raindrops glittering on its freshly waxed hood like a thousand slivers of glass, was parked directly in front of the main door, chaperoned by a nattily dressed young man leaning against a No Parking sign. He looked mightily pleased with himself.

BC ran up to the man, fumbling through the bundle of his coat to retrieve his wallet. He flashed his badge.

“Special Agent Querrey. Is this my car?”

“Nineteen sixty-two Chevrolet Corvair,” the man drawled like a car salesman. “I’d roll the windows down if I was—”

BC pushed the man out of the way, threw his bundle into the passenger’s seat, and—after pumping the gas too hard and flooding the engine and waiting five minutes for the plugs to clear—squealed down Seventh Avenue. Before he’d gone a single block the cabin had filled with noxious fumes coming in through the air vents, and he had to roll the window down.

He caught a last glimpse of the station’s facade in the rearview mirror, five hundred feet of Doric columns stretching out like God’s own picket fence. It really was impressive—more imposing than the biggest monuments in Washington—but he thought he remembered hearing talk of tearing it down. But in truth BC was less concerned with the possibility of New York losing its grandest edifice than with his own loss of a smaller piece of property. Not his briefcase: his bookmark, which, like his house, his name, and his sense of revulsion at the crude workings of the human body, he’d inherited from his mother. Thus are history’s losses measured: eight acres of stone and glass and steel on the one hand; on the other, an ivory sliver no bigger than a driver’s license. Both smudged from years of contact with human hands, and even more obscured by the shroud of sentiment that makes it difficult for us to see clearly the things we hold most dear. It would be the bookmark BC missed more in the years to come, Pennsylvania Station having played a significant role in the life of New York City but not in his.

But all that was in the distant future. Right now he had to get to Millbrook,⁹ to something Director Hoover had called an “experimental community” run by a Dr. Timothy Leary.⁶ He had no idea what was so important that both the FBI and the CIA had to send men to investigate. All he knew was that he had to get there before Melchior.