Shift: A Novel

He slipped a beret from his pocket and pulled it low on his forehead, added a pair of glasses with thick black rims, then eased himself into the crowd. He was conscious of the Book Depository on his left, row upon row of open windows looking straight down on him. For the next several minutes he was wide open. It was all up to Caspar. Either he was loyal to Melchior, and he would wait for the president to show, or someone had supplanted him in Caspar’s esteem—Scheider, the Wiz, Giancana, who knows, maybe even Ivelitsch himself—in which case Melchior was dead to rights. Here’s hoping Caspar’s marksmanship hadn’t improved in the last few years.

“All right, Chandler,” he said under his breath. “Show yourself.”

Chandler wasn’t sure how long the void had been there before he felt it. Two minutes? Ten? It crept up on him like white noise until suddenly it was all he could hear.

Melchior.

But where was he? It was hard to pinpoint a silence, especially in the midst of so much commotion. He barely had any juice left and didn’t want to waste it. He did his best to ignore his brain, searched the crowd with his eyes instead. The feeling came from the north, toward the depository, and he began to make his way in that direction as stealthily as he could.

It was hard to see people’s faces because everyone was turned toward the eastern edge of the park, waiting for the first sign of the president’s motorcade. (Funny word, motorcade, he thought as he walked past a young black man sitting on the grass eating a sandwich. Probably supposed to be a combination of motor and parade, but it sounded more like a combination of motor and arcade—a shooting gallery—which didn’t make any sense when you thought about it.) He searched the sides of people’s faces, their physical profiles, anyone big enough to be Melchior. He found himself staring at a lot of plump women with beehives—what more unexpected disguise could there be for a man as aggressively masculine as Melchior? But unless he’d found a way to alter the shape of his face, none of the women was him.

Suddenly it came to him. Cavalcade. That’s where the cade in motorcade came from.

Jesus Christ, Chandler, he said to himself. That’s really not important right now. Focus.

He made his way closer to Elm. On the far side of the street, on the edge of a grassy embankment, a large man carrying a closed umbrella¹⁵ caught his attention. The man was staring right at him, holding his umbrella in the middle so that it pointed out from his abdomen, and Chandler mistook it for a gun at first. He started to look away, then glanced back at the man’s face. A black beret was pulled down over a dense cap of stiff, straight black hair, and the rims of the man’s glasses were nearly as thick as a raccoon’s mask. Chandler had been looking for an elaborate disguise, but now he saw that the simplest could be just as effective: he wasn’t 100 percent positive it was Melchior until the rogue spy smiled at him.

Chandler kept his eyes on Melchior’s hands as he crossed the street, but the big man merely stood there with that smile on his face. He heard motorcycles a few blocks away, a sputtering rumble punctuated by frequent backfires pulsing out of the canyon of Main Street. People strained to see the president and First Lady. Their thoughts flitted through Chandler’s head like whispers from a hidden PA system. Almost here, he heard, and I wonder if she’s as pretty in real life, and He may be a Yankee and a papist, but he’s still the president, and then, louder than all these other thoughts, more desperate:

Where are you, Tommy?

The cry was so urgent that Chandler looked up at the School Book Depository. The anguish was like a beacon drawing his eyes to the sixth floor. The southeast corner. The window. He saw an outline low above the sill, as if someone was kneeling just behind it. He couldn’t see the face, though, because it was concealed behind a—

He heard the pfft and tried to jump to the left, but it was too late. Something punched his abdomen just below the ribs, hard enough to knock the wind from him. Spots danced in front of his eyes and he braced himself for the numbing effect. Instead the spots danced faster, gained size, intensity, color, and he realized Melchior hadn’t shot him with a tranq. He’d shot him with LSD—a lot of LSD. Chandler fought to get control of the trip, but the world got brighter and brighter and louder and louder. Jesus, he thought. Melchior must have injected him with thousands of hits. He’d never felt anything like this before.

He felt a hand on his shoulder, looked up in confusion to find Melchior beside him.

“Come on, old buddy. Let’s get you out of the street.”

“What did you …” He couldn’t get the words out. The ground was churning beneath him and it was hard to stay upright. He clutched Melchior’s arm for support. People’s thoughts knifed through his brain, a thousand Technicolor razor blades cutting his mind to mush. Someone was thinking of the case of Ken-L Ration he needed to get on the way home, and someone else was wondering how to tell her boyfriend she was pregnant. An eleven-year-old boy was dreaming of being the first black superhero and a forty-seven-year-old woman was wondering what would happen if she put a little dill in the mashed potato salad, or a little ground glass.

But none of the minds was more potent than Caspar’s. Chandler saw him in the orphanage again, looking up at Melchior adoringly, saw him as a little boy in his home in New Orleans with his mother and stepfather and brothers, nervously sitting apart from the group, knowing he was different from them. Saw him as a thirteen-year-old in New York City facing a truant officer, a seventeen-year-old enlisting in the Marines, saw him in California, Japan, Russia, England, Finland, America again, rafting through the South like a latter-day Huck Finn until he ended up in Dallas, dressed all in black with a rifle in his hand, telling Marina to hurry up and take the picture. So much travel for such a young soul! He’d seen half the world before most men had finished college. And everywhere he went, he was looking for someone to love him, and someone to kill.

And still there was more: Caspar in Mexico at the Soviet Embassy. Caspar in a Dallas hospital looking down on his newborn daughter. Caspar looking through the scope of a rifle at Melchior at this very moment and not knowing it was Melchior.

“Here you go, Chandler.”

He felt something in his hand, looked down to see Melchior wrapping his fingers around the handle of a cane. No, not a cane: the umbrella. Despite the fact that it came from Melchior, he leaned on it gratefully. There were red spots on Melchior’s fingers and he focused on these. If he could just make these spots go away, he told himself, he could get control of the trip. But a moment later he realized the world had in fact stopped spinning, that the voices and pictures slicing through his brain had subsided to an indistinct murmur. He was in control, or at least as much in control as a mahout astride a seven-ton bull elephant. But still the stains remained on Melchior’s fingers.

He looked up at his enemy’s face.