Shift: A Novel

Department of Justice Building

Washington, DC

May 17, 1963

Ding-dong.

Gladys Miller’s smoke-laced diphthongs preceded her corpulent form into BC’s office by half a second. A cigarette dangled from the corner of her pink-painted lips.

“Did you see this morning’s Peanuts?” she asked as she made her morning rounds, dropping off papers, retrieving others, and generally poking her nose into places it didn’t belong.

“No.”

She pulled her silver cats’-eye glasses from her chest to examine some photographs in a manila folder on top of a filing cabinet. The pictures documented the arson of a post office in rural Alabama, nothing more grisly than the corpses of ten thousand letters, and Gladys let out a smoke-filled sigh as she let the folder fall closed.

“Lucy finally let Charlie Brown kick the ball.”

“She did?” BC reached for his newspaper.

“Of course not. And you”—Gladys turned from the filing cabinet and pulled BC’s resignation letter from his typewriter with a sharp zzzzzzzip—“have just about as much chance of asking me to send this letter. So, what’ll it be, sir?” She waved the paper in front of him. “Should I drop this in interoffice mail? Or just file it with the others?”

BC didn’t even think of protesting. From her tightly laced steel-gray bun to the sensible shoes five feet below it—not to mention the some two hundred–odd pounds in between—the department secretary was the kind of woman for whom the term “battle-axe” had been invented.

“With the others,” he sighed, and watched as Gladys wadded up the letter and dropped it in the trash basket. She took a long inhale and stared at the man behind the desk. Shoulders broad as a yoke, fingers spindly as wire hangers, a little boy’s haircut crowning the whole package: buzzed on the backs and sides, three-quarters of an inch left up top. Just enough to comb to one side. The part, pulled as tightly across BC’s scalp as the ribbons of Gladys’s girdle, sliced through his dark brown hair like a scar.

She shook her head in confusion or disappointment or possibly even dismay and ashed on the letter she’d just thrown away.

“He wants to see you. And for Pete’s sake stand up straight. You go in there looking like a beat-up old dog, he’ll just kick you that much harder. Heck, I want to kick you myself.”

BC was a foot taller than Gladys—thirteen inches to be exact—but he felt smaller than a headless chicken as he skulked past her out of the room.

“I enjoyed your report on Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” she called after him. “If it’s half as racy as you make it out to be, I’ll have to run right out and buy a copy.”

Until that moment, BC Querrey never imagined Gladys Miller having a sexual thought in her life, let alone a sexual experience. Yet her throaty cackle (she would be dead in three years from cancer of the larynx) filled his mind with an image of her naked bulbous body running through a dewy English meadow. It was not a pretty sight. But it turned out to be infinitely preferable to what the next twelve hours had in store for him.

In 1963, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation still occupied a suite of rooms in the southwest (i.e., back) corner of the Department of Justice Building. Funding for a dedicated FBI facility on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue had been approved by Congress the previous year, but it would be another eleven years before the Bureau moved out of the “temporary” quarters it had occupied in Justice for the past thirty years. In the meantime, Helen Gandy, the model to which Gladys Miller (and every other Bureau secretary) aspired, guarded the director’s outer vestibule; once past her slight but formidable presence, visitors entered a short hallway made cramped by a double colonnade of fireproof black filing cabinets. This was “the Vault,” the director’s famed—and feared—personal files. Though there were any number of more secure locations the Vault could have been located, the director insisted the cabinets be left here for all to pass through as their made their way to his sanctum sanctorum. Ten black metal boxes, five on each side. Yet the material they contained—compromising information on Hollywood stars, leading journalists and politicians, not to mention every president since Calvin Coolidge, who’d appointed Hoover head of the (not-yet-Federal) Bureau of Investigation all the way back in 1924—was enough to have earned their owner a forty-year sinecure as the nation’s Top Cop.

Or so it was said. Upon Hoover’s death in 1972—though he spent forty-eight years running the Bureau, he died two years before the building that bore his name was completed—Helen Gandy and Clyde Tolson, the associate director and Hoover’s closest confidante, destroyed most of its contents, and, like the Ark of the Covenant, whatever charms and totems it guarded passed into myth. Certainly BC had never seen the cabinets open, nor had anyone he knew. Although a mountain of circumstantial evidence pointed to their reality, still, the young agent had never been able to shake a sneaking suspicion that the files were as devoid of real data as those lists Joe McCarthy waved around on the Senate floor a few years ago, and every time he walked through the narrow corridor he had to put his hands in his pockets to keep from banging on the cabinets to find out if they were hollow.

Beyond the Vault lay the director’s imposing yet somehow provisional-looking private office. Double doors opened onto bare ivory walls and beige carpeting into which the logo of the Bureau had been woven. The far corners were guarded by eagle-capped poles sporting gold-fringed flags of the United States and the Bureau; between the flags were two windows looking out on Constitution Avenue and the back of the National Museum of Natural History, and between the windows sat the director’s modestly sized desk. Over the desk hung a picture of the president of the United States of America. Though John Kennedy had been in office for two and a half years, a large pale outline still framed his rather skimpy-looking portrait, as if to say that the war hero so popular with the younger generation had a long way to go to fill the void left by the general who masterminded the Normandy invasion and defeated Adolf Hitler.

Needless to say, BC had no idea that Melchior was thinking almost exactly the same thing ten miles away in Langley.

Beneath the haloed portrait, a man sat squinting at a stack of pages through a pair of black-rimmed reading glasses. His thinning hair was combed flat against his skull, and his pale, almost neckless face spilled over a nondescript gray suit like foam spewing from the tip of a science-project volcano. Four decades in office had erased any vestige of an inner self from J. Edgar Hoover, until only the public servant remained. He had secrets, of course—secrets always came with power, as evidenced by the gauntlet of filing cabinets—and the director’s were rumored to be as scandalous as anyone’s. But that’s not the same as saying he had an inner life. The Bureau had replaced Hoover’s blood with paper and his imagination with indexes, engulfing his once-lean features in a gelatinous form that seemed held together by the buttons of his suit and the knot of his tie. His eyes blinked out of two folds of skin like myopic camera shutters. His voice was as rapid and impersonal as clacking typewriter keys. He glanced up when BC entered the room, then returned his attention to the stack of pages before him—field reports by the look of them, which he was marking up with the earnest concentration of a second-grade teacher.

“Didn’t your mother teach you not to walk into a room with your hands in your pockets, Agent Querrey?”

BC pulled his hands from his pants. The lead of Hoover’s pencil crossed out lines with a faint squeak that made the agent think of a termite burrowing through a wall. “Tell me, Agent Querrey,” the director said after a long moment, “have you ever heard of a psychologist by the name of Timothy Leary?”

The name rang a bell, but BC couldn’t place it. “No, sir.”

“Until very recently, Dr. Leary was associated with Harvard University.” Hoover’s voice was slightly vexed, as if he expected Bureau agents to know the faculty of every major American institute of higher learning, or at least those of the Ivy League. Or who knows, maybe it was just the report in front of him. He touched his pencil lead to the tip of his tongue, drew a line through six or seven words, then continued speaking. “Dr. Leary left Harvard at the beginning of the year, and, after a brief sojourn in Mexico, has now established some type of ‘experimental-community’-cum-‘research-center’ outside the town of Millbrook, New York.”

BC could hear the echo of beatnik mumbo jumbo in a term like “experimental community,” but he wasn’t sure how such activities merited the attention of the Bureau. Of course, he rarely understood why many of the groups he investigated merited the Bureau’s attention, so that wasn’t saying much. It wasn’t his job to know, only to do.

“The express purpose of this research center,” the director was saying, “is the investigation of an extremely powerful ‘psychoto-mimetic’ chemical compound called lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD for short. The Bureau has, of course, been aware of LSD for some time. Allen Ginsberg and other malcontents of his ilk have been extolling its virtues for some time. It is manufactured by Sandoz Laboratories, a pharmaceuticals company based in Switzerland. For the past several years, Sandoz has graciously allowed us to track not only its sales in the United States, but also its export to other countries as well. Just over a year ago, however, we noticed a discrepancy between the amount of LSD Sandoz manufactures and the amount they purport to sell. Initially we feared the company was concealing shipments to the Soviet Union or one of its Eastern Bloc satellites, but with a little digging we were able to discover that the missing quantity had in fact been acquired by Dulles’s boys over at Langley—McCone’s boys, I should probably say—although I think we all know where their loyalties lie. Ac-cum-mu-late.”

Silence hung in the room like a low cloud. The only sound was the director’s pencil drawing an X through an entire paragraph. Finally BC spoke.

“Beg pardon, sir?”

“Ac-cum-mu-late.” The director didn’t look up. “One ‘m’ or two?”

“Er, one, I believe, sir.”

The director frowned. “I think it’s two.” He made a mark, then turned the last sheet face down. Opened the center drawer of his desk, put his pencil in it, closed it; took his reading glasses off, opened a side drawer, put them away as well. Only then did he look up at the agent standing before him. The left side of his mouth slanted upwards, the right down; the rest of his face remained unchanged, as though Hoover’s mouth were a snake skimming the surface of swamp water too sludgy to ripple. Over the past year, BC had come to recognize this parallelogram as his boss’s version of a smile.

“Now, I don’t pretend to understand the reasoning behind what I’m about to tell you, let alone condone it. As you know, I am no fan of Allen Dulles nor of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose mission more properly belongs under the auspices of this Bureau. I am merely repeating information as it has been reported to me. Under the direction of Sidney Gottlieb, the director of the so-called ‘Technical Services Section,’ the agency is investigating drugs with what they see as potential intelligence applications. Although they claim to be researching nothing more potent than incapacitants and truth serums, we have it on good authority that they are in fact looking for chemical agents that have”—the director found it necessary to pause again—“mind-control abilities.” A twitch that could have been a smile, or just an embarrassed tic. “As we understand it, the goal is to create a so-called ‘sleeper agent’—a Manchurian candidate, if you will, who can be programmed to perform certain actions not only against his will, but without his knowledge. You read The Manchurian Candidate, did you not, Agent Querrey?”

The question was rhetorical. BC had written a report on the novel for the director eight months ago. The director’s mouth twitched and slanted more sharply than before—a smirk?—but the rest of his face remained shapelessly still, even after he began speaking again.

“Because CIA lacks the facilities to fully investigate these kinds of drugs in-house, it has been compelled to foster associations with third parties, often without their knowledge. Enter Dr. Leary. Apparently his ‘experiments’ did not pass academic muster at Harvard, and he was, to put it politely, not asked to renew his contract. Cut off from his academic supplier, the doctor was forced to enter into a relationship of convenience with Billy Hitchcock. No, not the Orioles ‘coach.’” Another lopsided smile, acknowledging the Orioles dismal .500 record last season. “William Mellon Hitchcock is the grandson of William Larimer Mellon, the founder of Gulf Oil, and the great-grandson of Thomas Mellon, founder of Mellon Bank. He also, apparently, has aspirations to being a spook, and, in exchange for being allowed to supply Dr. Leary with enough LSD for his experiments, he reports on the results of those experiments to his handler at CIA, and Edward Logan based in Boston. This morning we received credible intelligence suggesting Dr. Leary has achieved some kind of breakthrough. The exact nature of this breakthrough is not clear to us, nor does it appear to be clear to CIA, perhaps because of Leary’s attenuated relationship with Logan. I need you to travel to Millbrook to find out if anything Dr. Leary has discovered—or, dare I say, created—has the potential to be a threat to the interests or security of the United States of America, and, if so, to take it, or him, into custody. The last thing we need is for CIA to get its hands on this ‘Orpheus.’”

As he spoke, Hoover’s mouth seemed to separate from the unmoving white sludge that surrounded it, until it was just a void in space through which issued the director’s uncannily articulate summary. Beyond the pinkish slug-shaped lips and small, sharp-looking teeth, the tongue pulsed wetly, and, even further back, the uvula wiggled in front of the dark shadow of the director’s esophagus like a pendulum swinging at the entrance of a house of horrors. With each word, BC felt as if he were being sucked toward that void, so completely that when the director’s lips sealed shut, he almost felt as if he were being swallowed.

“Agent Querrey? I wish you wouldn’t chew your lip like that. It’s hardly becoming in a representative of the Bureau.”

BC blinked his eyes rapidly, took a moment to consider everything the director had just told him. He’d never heard of Hoover telling a joke. He’d heard that Hoover had interfered with American citizens in left-wing groups in clear violation of their First Amendment rights. He’d heard also that Hoover had cut deals with gangsters in Chicago, New York, and Miami to the effect that if they confined their business to prostitution and narcotics and a little bit of honest graft at the dockyards—and continued to maintain a hardline anti-Communist stance—he wouldn’t sic the Bureau on them. He’d heard that Hoover’s mania for keeping up appearances was a reaction to his father’s nervous breakdown, that his hatred of miscegenation stemmed from the fact that he himself was mulatto, and that he was sexually involved with Associate Director Clyde Tolson, and was wont to sport black cocktail dresses at their all-male soirées. But he had never heard of Hoover telling a joke, and he didn’t want to know what would happen if he laughed in his boss’s face. But still:

“Orpheus?”

An actual expression flickered across the director’s face. It was hard to read, yet BC could have sworn it was consternation, as if the director had been caught out. “The code name for the project,” he said, waving a hand as if the term were of no importance. “As with all CIA terminology, its meaning is unclear. It seems to be used variously to refer to the drug, the ‘receptor’ in the brain to which the drug is meant to ‘bind,’ and the person to whom the drug is administered.”

The director paused. He was not generous with his time, and this had already been a long briefing. His mouth pursed, his cheeks stretched like egg whites beaten to within an inch of their life. Then:

“We find ourselves in a curious position, Agent Querrey. On the one hand, we have ridiculous claims of chemically engineered secret agents that, on the face of it, defy credulity. On the other, we have evidence of ten years’ worth of CIA experiments on a single compound, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars and at least one life lost. And, finally, we have a supporting cast of players who all bear watching. This Timothy Leary character was kicked out of West Point and three or four subsequent colleges, and earlier this year attempted to found something that looked like a Communist cult in Mexico. Billy Hitchcock has simply extraordinary amounts of capital, not to mention influential positions on the boards of several of the nation’s top banks and a desire to leave his mark on the world. And then there’s the breakthrough itself. As I stated, we don’t know its exact nature, but we do know it centers around two persons who are, shall we say, of interest to the American intelligence community. The first is a young woman by the name of Nazanin Haverman, whose parents were killed for aiding CIA in the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh’s Communist regime in Persia, and who may well bear animus against this country for failing to protect them. The second is a man named Chandler Forrestal, nephew of the late secretary of war—and one of the founders of CIA—James Forrestal. Both the secretary and his brother John, Chandler’s father, took their own lives, the former in response to the failure of Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s plan to liberate the Ukraine from the Soviet Union, and the latter in response to his failure to successfully negotiate the business world. In addition to suggesting a family history of mental instability, this personal history also gives Chandler as good a reason as Miss Haverman to hold a grudge against the United States. So I submit to you that, though the possibility of any sort of science fiction–type success with this Orpheus project is extraordinarily slim, it still behooves the Bureau to investigate. Given the family connections borne by Messrs. Forrestal and Hitchcock—oh, and Miss Haverman is the goddaughter of Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of Teddy—it also calls for extreme discretion, which is why you were especially chosen for the task. You have a reputation for curmudgeonly reticence that would be seen as an indication of antisocial tendencies in anyone other than an agent of the Counter Intelligence Program, where it is instead admirable.”

Hoover paused, and glanced at his watch.

“The ten twenty-seven will get you into Pennsylvania Station at three fifty-eight,” he said in a voice that had slipped back into its executive tone. “An agent will have a car waiting for you. If you beat rush hour, you should make it there without difficulty. I had one of Clyde’s boys fill a suitcase for you, so you can leave immediately.”

BC heard heavy footsteps behind him, turned to see the tall, athletic form of Associate Director Tolson walking out of the Vault with one of his—well, his mother’s—suitcases. The suitcase had been in his mother’s—well, his—bedroom, in the closet, behind a box of Eddie Bauer, L.L. Bean, and Sears and Roebuck catalogs that had accumulated since his mother died. Certain pages had been dogeared in these catalogs, displaying items of clothing that, let’s just say, wouldn’t have fit BC, and he searched Associate Director Tolson’s face to see if “his boy” had reported this to him. But all the associate director said was:

“Agent McClain says your underwear drawer is better organized than Miss Gandy’s files. He also tells me you have a very nice Hepplewhite secretary.”

The secretary was in the downstairs study, where, presumably, Agent McClain had not expected to find any clothes needed for a weekend trip. BC wondered when McClain had broken into his house. It was barely nine thirty, after all. He must have been waiting outside for BC to go to work this morning.

“It’s, ah, it’s a reproduction.”

The associate director shrugged. “Although the director has quite a passion for antiques, they were never really my thing.”

BC thought about saying “It’s a reproduction” again. He didn’t.

“One last thing,” the director said. BC turned back to the desk and, with a sinking heart, saw that a book had materialized in Hoover’s hand. The slant of his smile had grown especially long, slicing open his pasty face like a baked potato. “You’ll need some reading material for the train.”

Forty-eight minutes after he left J. Edgar Hoover’s office, BC was seated in the smoke-filled first-class compartment of the 10:27 bound for New York’s Pennsylvania Station. An officious Negro conductor, his uniform as square on his shoulders as a Marine’s dress blues, helped BC get settled. He punched his ticket, stowed his suitcase in the overhead rack, folded BC’s coat and placed it beside the bag, then laid his hat atop the coat. Finally he lowered the table between BC’s seat and the empty one across from it and set a small foil ashtray on it. He performed each of his tasks with the methodical slowness of someone who marks time not in seconds and minutes but in actions repeated thousands of times a day.

“Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?” the conductor said, already turning away, and BC only shook his head at the stiff fabric stretching between the man’s shoulders. Before his time in Counter Intelligence, BC would have hardly noticed the man, but ten months of surveilling civil rights meetings in chapels and gymnasiums and dusty fairgrounds across Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi had made him acutely conscious of the people who opened doors for him, took his tickets, brought him food, washed his clothes, and generally stepped to one side when he walked down the street. BC wouldn’t have described himself as a warm person, let alone empathetic; he was quite aware that he was a stiff, shy man who immersed himself in his job the same way this Negro conductor hid inside his uniform. But he prided himself on being polite, especially to his inferiors, and he was deeply disturbed by the thought that he’d spent the last twenty-seven years unwittingly offending a segment of society whose lot in life was hard enough as it was. That he didn’t recognize this disturbance as guilt speaks to the times as much as the person, but even so, he couldn’t help but stare at the conductor as he worked his way down the aisle. BC wondered how deep a grudge the man bore, how sharp. Did he harbor dreams of racial equality or just revenge? Well, probably neither. Not this man. He wore his ridiculous uniform (brass buttons, gold braids, a flat-topped cap with a shiny black visor) like an embarrassing chastity belt that nonetheless protected him from the world’s unwanted advances. It was pretty clear his only desire was to get through the day unscathed, and the next, and the next, and the next, until he was finally eligible for his pension.

BC’s briefcase, filled with a half dozen vague-looking reports on Leary and LSD and something called “The Orphic Flag,” sat next to his seat, but he had chosen to pull out the director’s parting gift instead, deeming it the least far-fetched of his choices of reading material.

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. It sat on the fold-out table before him like a fish waiting to have its belly slit so it could be boned. Well, de-boned. Beau-Christian Querrey was not exactly known for his boning.

The black cover had large graphics of the flags of imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, as well as the tagline, or subtitle: “An electrifying novel of our world as it might have been.” Since every novel was essentially a story of the world “as it might have been,” this struck BC as a particularly pointless addendum, even for a work of science fiction.

He traced the book’s edges with his fingertips. His “book reports” had started ten months ago, concurrent with his transfer to COINTELPRO. The genesis had been peculiar, to say the least. In June 1961, during his regular perusal of the major East Coast papers, the agent had read an account of an unusual suicide in Boston. A Harvard freshman had thrown himself into the Charles River wearing a trench coat whose pockets were weighted with old-fashioned flatirons. The pockets had been sewn shut so the irons wouldn’t fall out, as had the coat itself, sealed with thick twine from collar to hem, as if the victim wanted to make sure he wouldn’t slip out of the garment underwater; on top of that, his shoelaces had been knotted together, which would have made swimming that much more difficult. The story pricked at BC’s consciousness, and he called the Boston field office and asked them obtain the body for forensic examination before it was interred. It turned out that the victim had freshly broken bones in both hands, which suggested he’d been in a rather serious fistfight, and cast doubt on the idea that he could have sewn himself into his own coat. There was also a note on his person, sealed in wax paper so it wouldn’t deteriorate in the water, in which the victim said he was killing himself because he felt an incestuous attraction to his sister—a rather remarkable claim, since the victim turned out to be an only child. The victim had been a frequent visitor to Harvard’s student counseling center, however, where he was known as a borderline personality with the “potential” for hallucinations, and the Boston office was reluctant to comply with BC’s request that the death be declared a homicide. BC was insistent: the murderer, he said, had recreated a scene from William Faulkner’s 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury, in which Quentin Compson, a mentally unbalanced Harvard freshman, kills himself because he feels attracted to his sister Caddy; the crime had even taken place on the same day as Quentin’s suicide, June 2.

With a dearth of forensic evidence and a lack of support from his superiors, BC’s only investigative lead was the press. He looked in the Boston papers first, combing through two years’ worth of issues before casting his net wider. It took nearly a month before he found what he was looking for: a series of three deaths on eastern Long Island—a hit-and-run of a young woman, and a murder-suicide involving a middle-aged man and the husband of the woman who’d died in the hit-and-run. The murdered man had been shot and was found face down in a pool; the suicide—and presumed cuckold—had then shot himself. BC was willing to admit that the tableau from The Sound and the Fury was a bit esoteric, but was surprised no one caught a full-scale reproduction of the climax of Gatsby, especially since it had taken place in Great Neck, the inspiration for Fitzgerald’s fictional town of West Egg. The Gatsby reenactment had occurred almost a year before the Boston murder—at the beginning of fall, just as in the novel. If the Boston drowning was the killer’s first crime since that one, it suggested he worked slowly and methodically, which meant BC should have a few months to catch him before he struck again. But as with the Faulkner recreation, there was no physical evidence. So how to anticipate the killer’s next move?

The only thing to go on was the books themselves. Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Two of the three great American writers of the first half of the century, the third being Ernest Hemingway. BC put out a call for libraries up and down the Atlantic seaboard to be on the lookout for runs on Hemingway’s books. Two weeks later he found what he was looking for: a Providence, Rhode Island, man by the name of Freddie Pyle had spent the past two months reading Hemingway’s complete oeuvre in the public library in Fall River, Massachusetts; before that he’d spent several months reading Faulkner novels, and before that—bingo!—F. Scott Fitzgerald. Agents rushed Pyle’s house, but he’d either spotted them or, even worse, had already departed to commit his next crime. The last book he’d checked out was The First Forty-Nine Stories (an awkward title, BC thought, but he guessed that if you only had forty-nine stories then, well, you only had forty-nine stories, though surely a fiftieth would have come along eventually). The agent spent a feverish day and night scrutinizing every story, every sentence, every word in the volume. The first two crimes had been site-specific, so there was every reason to assume the next one would be as well. The only problem was, Hemingway didn’t seem to have written a story set on the East Coast. It was only on his third go-through that BC realized the story called “The Killers” took place in a town called Summit. There was a Summit, New Jersey, forty-five minutes outside New York City. The Bureau thought it was a long shot and wanted to place a call to the local PD and leave it at that, but BC knew he was right. He took a sick day—his first in four years—and raced to New Jersey.

Pyle had been missing for forty-eight hours, so BC had no idea if he would be in time. The victim in the story was a boxer called Ole Andreson, who was killed by a pair of mob hit men for not agreeing to throw a fight. There was only one boxing club in Summit. BC asked the owner if any of his regulars had failed to show up in the past forty-eight hours, and indeed one, Willie Stevenson, had been conspicuously absent that day. Once the nut was cracked, everything fell into place, but even so, BC wouldn’t have been in time if Pyle hadn’t been so scrupulous in his reenactments. In the story, a pair of killers go to a restaurant called Henry’s Lunch Room, where Ole Andreson normally takes his meals. They hold the “nigger” cook and the soda boy, Nick Adams, for several hours, but when it becomes clear their target isn’t going to come that day, they leave, presumably to look for Andreson elsewhere. BC learned after it was all over that Pyle had gone to a local diner called Hank’s, lingering there for nearly four hours and brazenly telling a fourteen-year-old boy what he was going to do. The boy, Philip Rothman, had not believed him at first, but ultimately decided to look up Pyle’s quarry in the phone book. By the time Philip got to Stevenson’s house, Pyle had subdued his victim, but he was still alive. Philip’s chivalric arrival was a deviation from the script, however—the whole point of the story, Pyle would insist at his trial, was that no one raised a hand to save Ole Andreson’s life (just as, he elaborated, Quentin’s family failed to come to his aid and Nick Carraway was complicit in the cover-up that led to Jay Gatsby’s death). At any rate, Pyle spent nearly an hour deciding how to proceed, finally electing to tie Philip to a chair and force him to watch; at the trial he would say that this seemed most “thematically consistent” with the story’s depiction of young Nick Adams as a passive witness to evil. Before he could kill Stevenson, however, BC arrived and saved the day—and, ironically, ruined his career.

Because it should have been a career-making case. He’d taken a pair of unconnected events separated by ten months and nearly five hundred miles and sniffed out the serialized crimes of a killer with a rather singular read on literature. He had gauged his target’s predilections so accurately that he’d been able to head him off before he could kill again. But unfortunately for BC, Sammy Caputo, the owner of the Summit Boxing Rink, got a little too excited by an FBI agent inquiring into a possible connection between organized crime and the boxers at his gym. He called the Star-Ledger in Newark and told a reporter that “a G-man” was about to “pinch a big-time gangster,” possibly a member of Jersey’s own DeCavalcante family. The reporter, cameraman in tow, had been on Stevenson’s front steps as BC led Pyle out in handcuffs, Stevenson following with a large gash on his forehead, and Philip Rothman staring up at the intrepid, insightful federal agent with worshipful eyes. BC would remember the flash forever, not because he sensed any foreboding in it, but because he hadn’t realized it was dark out. He had been so focused on capturing Pyle that he hadn’t noticed the sun had gone down, as if he had broken the case not with his eyes and ears but some other faculty that operated independently of his senses.

The photograph was on the front page the next morning. Later that day BC found himself in the office of J. Edgar Hoover for the first time in his four years at the Bureau. He told himself he was going to get a promotion or commendation, and technically speaking, he did: COINTELPRO was an elite division, one that agents had to earn their way into. But BC’s assignments were anything but elite. He was sent all across the rural South to stake out meetings and sit-ins and “Freedom Rides” by a host of groups whose acronyms he had trouble keeping straight, let alone what they stood for: SCLC, SNCC, CORE. Often he was the only white man present in these groups, which made his undercover status an open secret, if not simply a farce. Though he heard lots of rhetoric in these meetings about “shaking things up” and “blowing the lid off the establishment” and “throwing out the old order,” the most serious infractions he witnessed were misdemeanor violations of various Jim Crow laws, which were beyond his purview to enforce even if he’d wanted to. It was not, as he would write in the resignation letters he began typing up after six months at his new post, what he had signed on for. Nor was it what he deserved.

Querrey had known what he was risking when he set off after Pyle—independent thought wasn’t a trait Hoover looked for in his agents—known, too, how much worse he’d made things by allowing the photographer to take his picture. The director felt the lure of publicity was a distraction to a federal agent, and the only employee of the Bureau who was allowed to give interviews without prior permission was Hoover himself. BC had not in fact answered any of the reporter’s questions, but he hadn’t asked for the photographer’s film either. In fact, he’d smiled. He couldn’t help it. He was proud of himself. He knew that what he’d done was exceptional. But pride had no place in Hoover’s FBI, nor even, on some level, did prowess. The director had famously turned down an application from Eliot Ness, the man who brought down Al Capone, when the former, a Prohibition agent under the Treasury Department, wanted to switch to the broader purview of the Bureau; Hoover described Ness as a “publicity hound” and would have nothing to do with him. Similarly, when FBI Agent Melvin Purvis became a national hero for breaking up a string of gangs in the early thirties, including those of Baby Face Nelson, Ma Barker, and Pretty Boy Floyd, Hoover began to pick apart the man’s record and assignments, until by 1935, barely a year after he brought down the Dillinger gang, Purvis was forced to resign. BC knew that that’s what Hoover wanted him to do, and at this point defying his boss was the only thing that kept him in the Bureau. But it was a perverse game, and BC didn’t know how much longer he could play it.

The worst part, though, was the book reports. In their brief interview, Hoover hadn’t asked BC why he’d pursued a case outside his jurisdiction or why he went so far as to violate the chain of command in order to apprehend the suspect himself. Nor did he mention the photograph. Instead he asked seemingly straightforward questions about how BC had figured out what Pyle was up to. He seemed particularly fascinated by BC’s literary knowledge—the new president had recently told a reporter that he was a fan of Ian Fleming’s 007 novels, but the director confessed he hadn’t read a work of fiction since his sophomore year at George Washington. The next day Gladys Miller delivered a copy of the Negro writer Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, along with a note from the director saying that he’d heard Ellison was a Communist sympathizer and had given the American Marxist movement “moral and intellectual succor” in his novel. Hoover was afraid such sentiments might “inspire” a reader in the same way Freddie Pyle had been inspired by Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway. Would Querrey examine the novel and provide a profile as to what kind of crime such a novel might engender?

BC was surprised, but complied, reading the novel in three evenings and filing his report on the fourth. The book itself he found fairly straightforward and a bit tedious; if it was intended to incite the masses, it stuck him as self-defeating. Certainly “racist” whites were depicted and derided (although their characterization struck BC as so one-dimensional that he doubted anyone, even a Negro, would find them believable, let alone culpable), but so too was virtually every racialist movement. In addition, the main character’s antisocial tendencies, sexual compulsiveness, and psychological problems made him a less-than-inspiring agent of social change. What Hoover thought of this interpretation BC never heard, but more books followed almost every day. The “Beat sickness” was particularly onerous to Hoover, and he sent over a veritable library of works by Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, along with John Clellon Holmes’s essay “This Is the Beat Generation,” Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro,” and the work of James Baldwin, who, though not a Beat himself, seemed to espouse most of their worst beliefs—inversion, racial equality, Communist sympathies, and a taste for mind-altering substances. When Hoover discovered that Sidney Gottlieb, the head of CIA’s Technical Services Section, often looked to spy novels and science fiction for inspiration, a slew of pulp paperbacks arrived on Querrey’s desk: Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth, The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon, Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein.

The irony in all of this was that BC was not, in fact, a reader. His mother was. Or rather had been, since she’d died almost two years ago. Widowed before she turned thirty, the pious Mrs. Querrey had divided the rest of her life between two great comforts: the church, which she attended every morning (Reformed Calvinist, a modern version of the French Huguenot tradition from which she was descended), and the novel, which she read every afternoon, evening, and often all through the night. A serious Protestant, Mrs. Querrey had preferred edifying or educational texts (hence Faulkner and Hemingway, though she would have agreed with Freddie Pyle’s assertion that there had been no novels worthy of the name since the Second World War). Because her son didn’t share her interests (in either the church or literature), Mrs. Querrey recounted the plots of everything she read in lieu of dinner conversation. BC did his best to tune her out with a criminology textbook or forensic handbook or even just a newspaper (where, after all, you learned about the real world, rather than a fantasyland someone had made up to prove a point), but long before Hoover began forcing him to read them, he had come to regard the novel as did Cid Hamete Benengeli, aka Mr. Eggplant, the fictional author of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote: they made you crazy. Just look at his mother, after all. And of course Freddie Pyle.