Shift: A Novel

Camagüey Province, Cuba

October 26, 1963

The big man with the cigar pinched between thumb and forefinger towered over the bound, quivering form of Eddie Bayo, one foot on the fallen man’s throat like a gladiator stamping victory on a vanquished foe. The foot was shod in a woven leather sandal—less gladiator than plain old huarache—and the sock had a hole in the big toe, but even so, it was pretty clear who was in charge.

The six-inch-long pencil-thin panatela had a name—it was a Gloria Cubana Medaille d’Or No. 4—but the big man’s name had disappeared along with his mother when he was a little boy, and for two decades he’d thought of himself only by the cipher bestowed on him when the Wiz plucked him out of the orphanage in New Orleans: Melchior. One of the three Wise Men. The black one, to be specific, which told you something about the way he was perceived in Langley, as well as about the Wiz’s less-than-genteel Mississippi brand of humor.

Just looking at him, you couldn’t say for sure. His skin had been described by various adjectives ranging from “olive” to “swarthy” to “high yellow.” One of the maids in the orphanage had told him to embrace his “redbone” heritage, and his favorite whore in Havana’s Central bordellos called him “café con leche,” which amused him no end—especially when she said he was “good to the last drop.” But none of this changed the fact that after twenty years in American intelligence—and despite the fact that he stood six feet two inches tall, with shoulders like cantaloupes and thighs reminiscent of wooden barrels—he was still referred to as the Wiz’s pickaninny.

So: Melchior.

He raised the cigar to his mouth to bring up the cherry. The glowing tip illuminated full lips, aquiline nose, dark eyes that gleamed with singularity of intent. A copious amount of brilliantine wasn’t quite able to eliminate the curl in his thick, dark locks. He could have been Greek, Sephardic, a horseman from the steppes of the Caucasus—although, in his brass-buttoned, double-breasted navy linen suit, he looked like nothing so much as a sugar hacendado from before the revolución. The suit had in fact belonged to a former plantation owner, until he’d been executed for crimes against the proletariat.

Not that any of this mattered to Eddie Bayo.

“I don’t wanna have to ask you again, Eddie,” his captor said in Spanish not just perfect, but perfectly Cuban, albeit in a guttural kind of way.

“Fuck your mother,” Bayo gasped against the foot on his throat. His snarl didn’t really come off, given that his upper lip looked like a slug that’d been ground beneath someone’s heel—which, in fact, it had.

Melchior brought the glowing tip of his cigar to Bayo’s right nipple. “My mother, being long dead, has a snatch that’s too dried up for my taste.” Flesh sizzled; smoke tickled his nostrils; Bayo’s throat convulsed beneath the foot on his Adam’s apple but all that came out was a strangled gurgle. When Melchior took the cigar away, Bayo’s nipple looked like a volcanic crater. A dozen more black and red coronas were scattered across his chest, although it would have taken a particularly rarefied eye to notice that they occupied the same relative positions as the major Hawaiian volcanoes. Geography had been one of the Wiz’s first lessons to his protégé, along with the importance of keeping yourself amused.

A hole flashed behind the notch of his lapel as Melchior reached into his breast pocket for his Zippo, and he rubbed it lightly between his fingers; he could just feel the dried blood that kept it from fraying.

“You’re running out of skin, Eddie,” he said, relighting. “I’m gonna have to go for the eyes soon. Believe me when I tell you, few things hurt more than a cigar in the eye.”

Bayo said something unintelligible. Behind his back his bound hands audibly scratched against the splintered floorboards, as though he hoped he could still dig himself out of this one.

“What was that, Eddie, I couldn’t make it out. Your mouth must be dry from all the screaming. Here, let me help.” Melchior grabbed a long-necked bottle of rum, poured the shot on Bayo’s chest rather than in his mouth. Bayo moaned as the alcohol burned his wounds but didn’t actually start screaming until Melchior sparked his lighter against the spilled rum. Six-inch tongues of flame danced on Bayo’s skin for almost a full minute. A boxer once told Melchior that you didn’t know how long a minute was until you stepped in the ring with Cassius Clay, but Melchior was pretty sure Bayo would take exception to that statement.

When the flames finally went out, Bayo’s skin was bubbling like a pancake that needed turning over. Melchior puffed on his cigar. “Well?”

“Why should I … tell you … anything?” Bayo panted. “You’re just gonna … kill me … when you get … what you want.”

Melchior’s lips curled around his cigar in a private smile. In the past two decades he’d heard people beg for their lives in more languages than the Hay-Adams had flags flying from its facade. But truth be told (and like most people who worked in intelligence, he’d long since forgotten what the word meant) he’d never actually killed someone in cold blood. Oh, he’d commissioned half a dozen hits in his day, shot his fair share of men in combat, but always under orders. Never once had he taken the law into his own hands, let alone gone Double-O on someone. But he was tired of Cuba—tired of this and every other banana republic and oil emirate and strategically significant sand spit he’d been deployed to over the past twenty years, and, now that the Wiz had been retired, he knew he was only one suicide mission away from being under the field rather than in it. He needed Bayo’s confession. Not just to learn the location of his rendezvous with a group of rogue Red Army officers, but to earn the security of an office in Langley. The field nigger was finally moving into the big house, and wasn’t no one gonna get in his way. Least of all Eddie Bayo.

“I like the No. 4,” he said now, holding out the panatela as though evaluating it for purchase. “A simple cigar, but solid. Complements just about anything without overpowering it. You can smoke one with your morning coffee or wait till your after-dinner cognac. Hell, it even makes this disgusting Cuban rum taste okay. And of course the thinness”—Melchior jammed the cigar into the hollow of Bayo’s left nostril—“allows for precision targeting.”

Bayo’s scream was like two plates of steel sliding against each other. The Cuban rolled and thrashed on the floor until once again Melchior put his sandaled foot on the man’s throat.

“Roasted meat,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “Lookit that. I finally found something the No. 4 don’t go with.”

“You don’t get it,” Bayo spat when he could talk again. “This is bigger than a two-bit thug like you. Russians won’t back down. They got nothing to lose.”

Melchior pulled his knife from its sheath.

“I don’t got any safety pins on me, so I’m gonna have to slice your eyelid off so you can’t blink. I imagine that’ll hurt a fair bit, but it’s gonna feel like heaven compared to the sensation of having your eyeball melted down like tallow. That’s candle wax made from animal fat for an ignoramus like you. Like the kind the Nazis made from the Jews. You want your sister to see you looking like that, Eddie?” He dropped to one knee. “You want Maria to see her big brother looking like a burned-out kike blubber candle?” Melchior sucked at the cigar, getting it brighter and brighter. “How old is she now? Maria. Eleven? Twelve?”

“Not even you—”

“Yes, Eddie, I would. If it would get me off this shit-fuck island, I would gladly lay Fidel Castro on the altar of the Catedral de San Cristóbal de la Habana in front of a full congregation and stick a communion wafer on the head of my dick and shove it between what I assume, based on his beard, are a couple of incredibly hairy ass cheeks. And I wouldn’t even enjoy that. Especially the hairy part. But Maria? She’s a pretty girl. No one’s ever stubbed a cigar out on her face. And no one ever will. Not if you talk to me.”

He brought the cigar an inch away from Bayo’s left eye.

“Talk to me, Eddie. Save us both the trouble.”

Bayo had cojones, you had to give him that. Melchior was pretty sure it was the threat to his sister that broke him, not the pain. He whispered the name of a village about seven clicks away, close to the border of Las Villas.

“The big plantation south of town got burned out during the fighting in ’58. Meeting’s in the old mill.”

Melchior jammed the cigar in his mouth and jerked Bayo to his knees. The seared skin of Bayo’s chest split like wet paper when Melchior pulled him up, and a mixture of blood and pus spilled from the seam and ran down his stomach. But all Bayo did was bite his lip and close his eyes.

“You’re a good man, Eddie. You can rest easy with the knowledge that your sister will never know what you did for her. Unless of course I go to the meet and no one shows.”

Bayo didn’t say anything, and Melchior exchanged his knife for his pistol, brought the gun to the back of Bayo’s head. A shot to the back of the head sent a message. If you were going to execute someone, you might as well make it count. Still, the gun in his hand felt ponderously large and heavy, and Bayo’s head seemed suddenly very small, as if, if Melchior’s hand didn’t stop shaking, he might miss. He brought the gun so close to Bayo’s head that it tapped against his hair like a typewriter key worried by a twitching finger.

“They’ll kill you, too,” Bayo said, a desperate whine in his voice.

Melchior laid his thumb on the hammer to still it. “I’ll take my chances.”

“Not the Russians. The Comp—”

Bayo jerked to the left—even managed to get a foot on the floor before Melchior squeezed the trigger. Clumps of brain splattered across the room, along with his right ear and half his face. He remained upright for a second or two, wobbling like a metronome, then fell forward. His cracked skull shattered when it hit the floor, and his head flattened out like a half-inflated basketball.

As the reverberations of the shot faded from the room, it occurred to Melchior that he should have cut Bayo’s throat with his knife. He only had five bullets left in his gun. Four now. If Bayo hadn’t lunged, he would’ve remembered that before he pulled the trigger.

“Damn it, Eddie. You went and ruined it.”

Well, that was Cuba for you. It could take the fun out of just about anything.