Shift: A Novel

Dallas, TX

November 22, 1963

On the television, a middle-aged woman and an old man sip from ornately patterned coffee cups. Despite the seriousness of the situation, BC can’t help but think of J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson and their talk of gravy boats and butter dishes. He stares at the TV out of one eye even as he continues to try to work his right arm free of the duct tape binding it to the chair. The tape has bunched into a gooey, fibrous strand, making it stronger than ever, but also slightly looser. BC has yanked so hard his skin has torn, and a trickle of blood encircles his wrist like a bracelet. He wiggles even more, using the blood as lubricant.

“I have some very interesting information,” the woman says even as the old man slurps his coffee like someone who’s just wandered out of a desert. “Your great-grandson and his mother are going to have Thanksgiving dinner with us.”

“I must say, I’m surprised,” the old man responds, although all his attention seems focused on his cup. Maybe his lines are written there? He’s lowering his face for another slurp when the whine of feedback shrieks from the TV’s single speaker, and the picture fades to a black screen emblazoned with white letters.

A moment later, the articulate, assertive voice of Walter Cronkite takes shape out of the black screen like God speaking from the void. But it’s not the beginning of the world Cronkite is narrating. It’s the end.

“Here is a bulletin from CBS News. In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.”

For a moment BC has the distinct thought that his mouth would be hanging open if it weren’t taped closed. He stares at the screen, but there are just the white letters, the black background, the preternaturally calm voice of the nation’s first anchorman.

“More details just arrived. These details about the same as previously. President Kennedy shot today just as his motorcade left downtown Dallas. Mrs. Kennedy jumped up and grabbed Mr. Kennedy. She called, ‘Oh no!’ The motorcade sped on. United Press says that the wounds for President Kennedy perhaps could be fatal. Repeating, a bulletin from CBS News: President Kennedy has been shot by a would-be assassin in Dallas, Texas. Stay tuned to CBS News for further details.”

In the background another voice is heard—“Connally, too”—and then the screen cuts to a spoon swinging back and forth like a pendulum, a heart beating with the regularity of a metronome—or, rather, a metronome beating with the regularity of a heart. “It takes more than an instant to make a real cup of coffee.”

A commercial for Nescafé. Behind his gag, BC finds himself giggling. Maybe that’s what the old man was drinking. A promo for that evening’s episode of Route 66 follows. BC stares at the face of George Maharis, his dark hair rippling as he sits behind the wheel of the famous red Corvette, and then for some reason he remembers hearing that the car Buz and Tod drive is really light blue. Apparently it photographs better in black-and-white than an actual red car. Just one more sign, if you still needed it, that things aren’t always what they seem.

Be that as it may, BC thinks as he resumes his struggle to get free, it’s doubtful Route 66 is going to be on the air tonight.¹

Moscow, USSR

November 24, 1963

The apartment’s right on the Moskva. Picture-postcard views, even if the wind off the river comes colder and harder than bullets, and reeks of rotten fish besides. Four rooms, each practically as big as a swimming pool. Fourteen-foot ceilings, eighteen-karat gold detailing on the paneling, marquetry on the floor so intricate that it looks more like embroidery than oak and sandalwood and mother-of-pearl. It’s the kind of place that would have belonged to a minor noble or major bureaucrat under the tsars, and now only goes to one of the Party faithful—or a prominent defector.

“Caspar’s apartment in Minsk wasn’t half as nice as this, I can tell you that much,” Ivelitsch says when he shows it to Melchior. “And it’s a hell of a lot nicer than my place.”

“I’m not a defector,” Melchior growls. “Neither was Caspar.”

“Yeah, yeah, tell that to your neighbor, Kim Philby.”

Right now, though, Melchior’s less concerned with his new home than the man he’s sharing it with. He’s asleep right now, on a hospital bed outfitted with shackles at wrist, ankle, and waist, and enclosed inside a big steel cage to boot. He’s been asleep for two solid days.

“Why isn’t he waking up?”

“I don’t understand,” Keller says, flipping pages on his clipboard, flitting from one instrument to the next. “I’ve given him Preludin, epinephrine, methamphetamine. I even gave him cocaine—enough to give an elephant a heart attack. But his pulse is barely ten beats per minute. Are you sure you didn’t give him too much sedative?”

“I told you, I didn’t give him anything. He collapsed in the car on the way to Song’s—on the way to the plane. Hasn’t woken up since.”

“Melchior.” Ivelitsch is standing in the living room doorway. “You might want to look at this.”

“I’m not letting you out of that cage until you figure out what’s wrong, Doctor,” Melchior says, striding into the other room. “Either you wake that man up or you die in there with him.”

The living room is empty save for a huge console television and a massive broken chandelier hanging over it like a glacier punching a hole in the sky. Beneath it, the TV looks more like Pandora’s box than a modern technological conveyance. It even sounds creepy, voices from six thousand miles away booming out of the shot speaker like ghosts looking for a way out of hell. The tiny screen shows a shallow brick alcove crammed with people. Flashing lights, garbled voices, an air of eager, almost greedy expectation so palpable you can almost see it, although it’s probably just static.

An announcer is speaking, but Melchior concentrates on the noises coming from the alcove itself. Suddenly the pitch heightens several notches, the camera flashes grow even more frenetic; a moment later Caspar melts out of the shadows. His hands are cuffed in front of him, his hair is mussed, and there are bruises on his forehead and lip. He walks slowly, as though dazed or drugged. His right elbow is held by a man dressed all in white, his left by a man dressed all in black, the two men towering over him like a pair of angels bickering over the soul of a little boy.

“It’s a police station,” Ivelitsch says. “What the hell can—”

“There,” Melchior says, pointing to a flicker of movement from the right side of the screen even as a voice rises above the din of the crowd:

“Do you have anything to say in your defense?”

A gunshot rings out. The crowd yells, but Caspar’s groans are louder. The men holding him try to support him, but he falls to the floor.

“He’s been shot!” the announcer says. “He’s been shot!”

“I told you,” Melchior says, heading back to the other room. “We don’t have to worry about Caspar.”²

Camagüey Province, Cuba

October 12, 1964

It’s been a long pregnancy. Eleven months, maybe more, yet the mother has borne it stoically. Indeed, she doesn’t seem to have suffered at all, and, despite the worries of the women in the village, who dote on her like one of their own daughters, she insists her baby will be fine. She refuses their gifts of spicy food, warm rum, doses of castor oil. He will come when he’s ready, she tells them, not a moment before.

He is ready now.

Louie Garza stands at the back of the room, leaning on his cane more out of habit than necessity. Tropical Storm Isbell is gathering strength off the western coast of the island, pushing cold damp winds ahead of it that aggravate the old injury to his hip. A stiff breeze whips the curtains, the bed skirts, Naz’s hair, but she has insisted the windows be left open.

Louie’s angled himself so he can’t see what’s happening beneath the sheet that covers Naz’s legs but can still see her face. It’s unreal. Her face, that is. Serenely calm and beautiful, like that of a woman waking up after a peaceful night’s sleep rather than engaged in the agony of childbirth. One of the women who styles herself Naz’s abuela has embroidered her a brightly colored pillowcase, so that it seems her face rests on a kaleidoscopic rainbow.

“Empuja,” the midwife says, but quietly. Furtively. “El viene ahora.”

Naz smiles wider. If she is pushing, it doesn’t show on her face. “I know he’s coming. Just like the storm.”

“Empuja,” the midwife says again, and crosses herself behind the sheet.

A gust of wind shakes the whole house and a ceramic pitcher smashes on the floor. A thread of water snakes across the floor toward Louie’s feet, but he doesn’t notice. His eyes are glued to Naz’s face. For a single moment her brows knit together, more in concentration than pain, as if she is willing her child into existence. The next minute the midwife is calling,

“¡Es aquí! ¡Es aquí!”

Despite his yearlong gestation, the baby is normal-sized, even a bit small. But his limbs are strangely articulate and fine—not thin but lean, as if he has already started to tone his muscles and burn off his baby fat. He is as calm as his mother. His eyes are open, and he doesn’t cry as the midwife wipes him clean, wraps him in a blanket, and carries him across the room. He looks not at his mother or the woman holding him but directly at Louie, and when the midwife offers him the baby, Naz’s guard hesitates, looks at the mother.

“Do you want to hold him first?”

Naz shakes her head. The wind whips her hair around, a dark halo at the center of the riot of color on the pillowcase. Her dark eyes stare at nothing—nothing in the room anyway—and her smile grows even wider.

“Take the boy to him. I’ve already told him everything he needs to know.”

“To—the father?” Louie still hasn’t accepted the baby from the midwife, who seems eager to have it out of her arms.

“To Melchior,” Naz says, smiling radiantly. “I want him to see the face of the man who will kill him one day.”³

Arlington National Cemetery

November 22, 1965

Beneath its hollow cross the tombstone reads only:

FRANK

WISDOM

JUNE 23, 1909

OCTOBER 29, 1965

The grave is almost a month old, but for some reason the sods haven’t taken yet. Though the rest of the cemetery is uniformly, immaculately green, the grass over the Wiz’s grave is brown and friable—so dry that the man carrying a bouquet of forget-me-nots imagines it would crunch beneath his shoes if he dared to step on it. “Happens sometimes,” a passing groundskeeper tells him. “Don’t worry, sir, it’s already scheduled for resodding.”

The man with the flowers nods. He doesn’t bother to point out that the brown strands extend well beyond the rectangle of cut sods laid atop the grave itself—that its tentacles spiral out a good six inches in every direction like a negating kaleidoscope sucking the color from everything it touches. As soon as the groundskeeper is gone, the man pulls a bullet-shaped lead from his pocket. The lead is attached to a long coil of wire and the man drops it in the center of the brown patch, then glances at what looks like a watch on his wrist to confirm what the grass has already told him. He reels the lead up, drops it in his pocket, and turns away; almost as an afterthought, he tosses the flowers behind him.

Something about the gesture stops him in his tracks. A memory shakes him like a muscle spasm. A hot spring day in New Orleans in 1942, a marble toss he made without looking. The day it all started. He knew it even then, even if the Wiz didn’t, or Caspar.

He turns, and when he steps on the grave to lean the flowers against the headstone, the grass does indeed break beneath his shoes. There’s not enough radiation to worry about—not for a few seconds anyway—but even so, he takes care not to touch the ground or the stone or the rotten flowers that already adorn the site, and then he turns and makes his way to the pay phones outside the chapel.

Only someone watching would notice that he doesn’t put any money in the machine or place a collect call, just punches several long strings of numbers. It takes nearly two minutes for the connection to be made. Finally a click, a hollow “Da?”

“It’s leaking,” Melchior says, and hangs up.⁴

Dallas, TX

January 3, 1967

“Credentials?”

The police officer guarding the hospital door is soft but solid and has a no-nonsense air about him. He peers at the badge the man in the white coat shows him, then scrutinizes the face that goes with it.

“I ain’t seen you before.”

In answer the man pulls his coat open, revealing a Star of David hanging from a chain around his neck.

“Oh. Go on in, Mister, uh”—the man glances at the badge—“Rabbi Gaminsky.”

BC slips past the guard. Once in the room he pulls a plastic-bottomed steel wedge from his pocket and slides it beneath the door, just in case the room’s occupant makes a fuss. But the person on the bed doesn’t wake up, so BC pulls out a needle and, ignoring the IV line, slides it directly into an arm. Epinephrine, aka adrenaline. The same stuff Melchior had used to save his life just over three years ago.

Jack Ruby’s eyelids flutter apart, barely, his lips part the tiniest sliver as though a knife has sliced them open.

“Who …” His voice breaks. He swallows and tries again. “Who are you?”

“You haven’t got much time left, Mr. Ruby. I’ve come to give you the chance to make things right.”

Ruby stares at him a moment and then, as if it takes all his strength, turns away. His body is so desiccated that when he turns, strands of hair break from his head and fall to the pillow. The thin lines wavering on the white background remind BC of staff paper for some reason, the blank pages of an unfinished symphony that he has been desperately trying to complete for the past three years.

“Mr. Ruby, you told Dallas Deputy Sheriff Al Maddox last month that someone gave you an injection for a cold but that it really contained cancer cells. It wasn’t cancer cells, Mr. Ruby. It was a radioactive poison taken from a Soviet nuclear bomb stolen from Cuba. You said: ‘The people who had an ulterior motive for putting me in the position I’m in will never let the true facts come aboveboard.’ Who are these people, Mr. Ruby? Tell me their names so I can bring them to justice for President Kennedy’s murder—and yours.”

It is a long time before Ruby answers. Then: “No one,” he says.

“You know that’s not true, Mr. Ruby. You gave Sheriff Maddox a note in which you said that President Kennedy was killed as part of a conspiracy. Who was involved in that conspiracy? What were their names?”

Ruby’s head shakes again. More strands of hair fall to the pillow. “There was no one.”

“Mr. Ruby, please. You told a psychiatrist named Werner Teuter that you were framed to kill Caspar—to kill Lee Harvey Oswald, just as he said he was a patsy for someone else. Who, Mr. Ruby? Who framed you?”

At the name Caspar, Ruby’s eyes sharpen, but then his lids fall closed and a long, wet breath bubbles from his nostrils.

“Does the name Caspar mean anything to you, Mr. Ruby? What about Orpheus? Melchior? Do these names mean anything to you, Mr. Ruby? Please, Mr. Ruby. This is your last chance to make it right.”

Ruby’s voice, when it comes, seems to leak from him like his breath, as if he is not speaking but expiring.

“There is nothing to hide,” he whispers. “There was no one else.”⁵

Camagüey Province, Cuba

June 19, 1975

Over the course of the past twelve years her garden has grown remarkably. Her corn is the sweetest in the province, her tomatoes the largest, her beans more numerous. It helps that the local children come over after school to work with her, that women give her fish heads to sow and men give her a share of the manure the state has allocated them for their own plantings. No doubt the time and energy expended on this half acre of land are a profligate waste of resources in a managed economy. But they produce some gorgeous fruits and vegetables, a small portion of which she trades for rice, the rest of which she gives away.

Her garden has matured, but she hasn’t. For twelve years he’s been watching her, and Louie Garza would swear she hasn’t aged a day. Only sometimes, when he’s standing across a field, say, or on the second floor of the house he shares with her, watching her toil away in her garden, he seems to see cracks in her facade—gray hairs among the black, wrinkles at the sides of her eyes and mouth, the beginning of a sag in her breasts. It makes no sense, of course. Even if these signs were real, he wouldn’t be able to see them from so far away. And when he approaches her, they always disappear, and she becomes ageless again, perfect. It is as if, in waiting for the day when Orpheus comes for her, she has decided to keep herself exactly as she was the last time he saw her.

But all that is changing now. The icy Russian stands on the porch of the house Naz and Louie have lived in for more than a decade, looking out at her as she weeds a patch of amaranth.

“Do you have to take her?” Louie does a poor job of keeping the pleading note out of his voice.

“Melchior’s convinced she’s the only thing that can wake Chandler up.”

Louie has no idea who Chandler is. Which is to say, he knows that Chandler is the same person as the Orpheus Naz sometimes speaks of, and knows that for the past twelve years Melchior and the Russian have been trying to wake him from a coma, but what they expect him to say or do when he wakes up has never been specified. It seems a little unreal to him. As unbelievable as Naz’s unchanging beauty must sound to anyone who doesn’t live with her. But who is he to doubt? It isn’t Chandler he cares for. It’s only Naz.

As the Russian heads out into the garden, Louie hooks the tall man’s arm with his cane.

“I’ve protected her for twelve years. I won’t let you hurt her.”

The Russian looks first at Louie’s cane, then at Louie. His eyes are as cold as the land he comes from and wants to take Naz to.

“I don’t think I could hurt her even if I wanted to. But just to put your mind at ease: I’m under strict orders to bring her back unharmed. Melchior’s convinced himself that she’s somehow the key to everything.”

Louie nods, and releases the Russian. As Ivelitsch turns and heads into the garden, he glances at the syringe he’s palming in his right hand.

“He didn’t say I couldn’t have a little fun, though,” he says, and, baring his teeth in a smile that practically causes the plants to wilt, he strides toward Naz.⁶

San Francisco, CA

March 30, 1981

It takes BC a moment to find the light switch in his basement office—it’s hiding under a piece of paper he must have taped up the last time he was down, and the room’s two tiny windows, similarly covered, let in no light at all. He finds it finally, clicks it, and, one by one, the fluorescent rectangles flicker into life. The steady, measured brilliance of American industry illuminates the seven-hundred-square-foot space, every inch of which is covered with newspaper clippings and photographs and Xeroxes and other bits of evidence and clues. Even the door, when it falls closed, is revealed to be covered with flowcharts and diagrams scribbled in marker, pen, pencil, something that looks like lipstick or blood. Red, blue, and green threads connect various faces and places with one another in a system not even he fully understands anymore. He is like a spider who has woven a web around his own body, trapping himself. At least there’s Scotch.

He pulls a bottle and crystal tumbler from a cabinet, pours himself a finger of rich amber liquid, knocks it back, pours himself another. It’s his birthday, after all. His forty-third. There’s no mirror in the room but he knows what he looks like well enough. Knows that he looks good for his age—damn good—but that, even so, he’s not the twenty-five-year-old kid who got sucked into this wild-goose chase eighteen years ago. There’s gray at his temples, even more in his beard when he doesn’t shave, lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth that don’t go away even when he’s not squinting or frowning.

As he sips his second drink he remarks, not for the first time, the similarity between his office and Charles Jarrell’s home, and thinks he will have to let Duncan down here to vacuum and dust and put things in piles. But he knows that sooner or later—a few days, a few weeks, the difference means little measured against eighteen years—a new inspiration will strike, a connection he missed before, a lead he failed to follow, and he will come down and tape things to the wall again, draw lines between them as, for the thousandth time, the ten thousandth, he tries to figure out where Melchior disappeared—and Chandler, and Naz, and Ivelitsch. Song, well. Song he found a long time ago. Her body had been dropped outside of Brownsville, Texas, just north of the Rio Grande. She was dressed in a peasant blouse bordered with a floral Mayan collar, a chain of Day of the Dead skulls draped around her neck. Her hair had been hacked into a crude bob, her face bludgeoned to conceal the more Asiatic of her features, but one look at her unlined hands should have told anyone that she wasn’t another illegal immigrant hoping to toil her way out of Mexican fields and into the service of some middle-class white American woman looking for a maid—even if, for some reason, Melchior had cut off a finger and taken it as a trophy. BC hadn’t bothered to point any of this out to the local PD, however. It wasn’t Song he was looking for.

He sips at his Scotch and tries to tell himself that his fervor is as strong as ever, but the fact is, it’s been so long since the last time he was down here that everything is covered under a layer of dust. In his head, Naz’s face shines as brightly as it ever did, and Chandler’s, and even Melchior’s, but the truth is nearly two decades have gone by. God only knows what they look like now. More than likely at least one of them is dead, and it’s a fair bet they all are. For, of them all, the only one he’s gotten any leads on at all is Pavel Semyonovitch Ivelitsch, who, as far as BC can tell, still works for KGB. The most likely scenario is that he duped Melchior into turning Chandler over to him, probably as a way of recovering the bomb that had been stolen in Cuba, and then, when he got it back—Jack Ruby’s death is proof that he got it back—he killed them all. Gunned them down like the Bolsheviks gunned down the Romanovs. The only thing that gives him any hope at all is the trips that Ivelitsch continued to take to Cuba, but the last one happened in 1975, and though BC has visited the island three times, he’s never figured out what Ivelitsch was doing there. It’s a beautiful country, after all. Not even Communism can sully the Caribbean or dim the tropical sunshine. Maybe he was just going on vacation.

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

1 Police officer J. D. Tippit fatally shot by Lee Harvey Oswald at approximately 1:12 p.m.

2 Lee Harvey Oswald killed by Jack Ruby at 11:21 a.m. as he is being transferred from Dallas Police Headquarters to the Dallas County Jail.

3 Mary Meyer murdered on a towpath along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in Georgetown. Henry Wiggins, the only witness, reported seeing “a black man in a light jacket, dark slacks, and a dark cap” standing over Meyer’s body. Meyer’s diary, in which she is alleged to have recorded the details of her affair with the murdered president, was first given to CIA associate deputy director of operations for counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton, and later destroyed by her sister.

4 Frank Wisdom found dead in his home October 29, 1965, of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot to the face. The shotgun in question belonged to his son.

5 Jack Ruby dies of cancer in Parkland Memorial Hospital, the same hospital where John F. Kennedy had been pronounced dead just over three years earlier.

6 Sam Giancana executed in the basement of his home in Chicago, shot once in the back of the head, then six more times in the face. At the time of his death he was scheduled to testify before a Senate Committee investigating the possibility of collusion between CIA and the Mafia in the Kennedy assassination.

7 John Warnock Hinckley Jr. attempts to assassinate Ronald Reagan as the president leaves the Washington Hilton Hotel. Hinkley claimed to have shot the president in order to make himself as famous as Jodie Foster, with whom he was obsessed. At his trial, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity.