Shift: A Novel

“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

Camaguey 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