Shift: A Novel

Chandler looked down at Melchior’s hand. At first he thought Melchior was holding a ball of blood. A ball of blood connected to a silver loop of tissue. But then he realized the ball was actually a ruby—Naz’s ruby—and the loop was the ring on which it was mounted, and the ring was still on—still on—

It was still on her finger.

“This is just a taste of what I’ll do to her,” Melchior said. “Now, shoot him.”

Chandler stared at the finger. Sixty feet above him, Caspar saw it—saw a finger stained with blood at any rate, and knew it to be his own. He looked down at his father in the limousine.

“Lee’s dead,” he whispered. “He died when you did.” And then his severed finger squeezed the trigger.

Chandler felt Caspar’s finger pull the trigger. The president’s thoughts vanished from Chandler’s brain like light disappearing from a shattered bulb. A thousand other minds rushed in to fill the vacuum. The First Lady’s, and the agents in the car, and the sheriffs on their motorcycles, and the hundreds and hundreds of spectators all staring with horror at the fleeing limousine, but over it all came Melchior’s voice.

“Good job, son. I knew I could count on you.”

Chandler whirled on him. He was about to throw himself on him but he was overcome by a fit of dizziness and almost fell over.

“Why don’t you sit down for a spell?” Melchior said as everyone began running—after the limousine, away from the shots, toward anything that would pass for cover. Everywhere Chandler looked he saw open mouths, but the roar of the gunning motorcycles drowned out all the other sounds, so it seemed that the people around him were screaming silently. On the trunk of the president’s car Jackie was crawling toward something that looked like a bloody toupee.

Melchior pulled a small zippered case from his pants. He held it up to his face for a moment as though it were a walkie-talkie, but when he took it back down Chandler saw a man running past him, a camera stuck to his eye. Melchior unzipped the case, and Chandler saw that it was empty save for a single cigar, which Melchior pulled out and unwrapped casually, as though he were in a drawing room rather than at the scene of an assassination.

The familiar exhaustion was setting in now. An immense tiredness that seemed to leech the marrow from Chandler’s bones, leaving him as helpless as a marionette whose strings have been cut off.

“What—what is that?”

“This?” Melchior brought the cigar to his lips, lit it with a series of lip-smacking puffs. “As Dr. Freud says, Chandler, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

He stood up then, glanced at the Triple Underpass through which the last of the motorcade had disappeared, then reached down and pulled Chandler to his feet.

“You—you killed him.”

Melchior puffed ruminatively at his cigar. “Who can say who really killed JFK? Was it me? Was it Caspar? Was it you? Was it that guy up on that grassy knoll?”

Melchior pointed. Chandler looked. He didn’t see anything, but Jean Hill and Tom Tilson and Ed Hoffman did. The figure was blurry and disappeared almost as quickly as it appeared. Who knows, maybe their own minds made it up, but they would all swear till their dying day that they’d seen a man with a gun there.

The two men started walking up the grassy slope toward the rear parking lot where Melchior had parked BC’s Rambler. After only a few steps, though, Melchior stopped. He was staring at a small russet-haired man walking quickly out the front entrance of the depository. His hands were clenched in fists and his small, nearly lipless mouth was set in a hard line; it was obvious he was doing his best not to run. He looked neither left nor right but Chandler thought he saw his eyes flicker in their direction, a glance filled with a combination of fear and confusion and pride. His face, too, winked across Dealey Plaza. For most people, it merged with the image that showed up on their televisions later that night, but for some—for Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig especially—it would haunt them for years. Craig swore he saw a man matching the description of Lee Harvey Oswald¹⁴ get into a car on the far side of the grassy knoll, a light green Nash Rambler driven by a dark-complected man.¹⁵

“Where are you taking me?” Chandler said as he slumped in the car.

“Into the future,” Melchior said as he climbed behind the wheel. “Into the brave new world that you and I made together.”

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