a long time ago. Her body had been dropped outside of Brownsville, Texas, just north of the Rio Grande. She was dressed in a peasant blouse bordered with a floral Mayan collar, a chain of Day of the Dead skulls draped around her neck. Her hair had been hacked into a crude bob, her face bludgeoned to conceal the more Asiatic of her features, but one look at her unlined hands should have told anyone that she wasn’t another illegal immigrant hoping to toil her way out of Mexican fields and into the service of some middle-class white American woman looking for a maid—even if, for some reason, Melchior had cut off a finger and taken it as a trophy. BC hadn’t bothered to point any of this out to the local PD, however. It wasn’t Song he was looking for.
He sips at his Scotch and tries to tell himself that his fervor is as strong as ever, but the fact is, it’s been so long since the last time he was down here that everything is covered under a layer of dust. In his head, Naz’s face shines as brightly as it ever did, and Chandler’s, and even Melchior’s, but the truth is nearly two decades have gone by. God only knows what they look like now. More than likely at least one of them is dead, and it’s a fair bet they all are. For, of them all, the only one he’s gotten any leads on at all is Pavel Semyonovitch Ivelitsch, who, as far as BC can tell, still works for KGB. The most likely scenario is that he duped Melchior into turning Chandler over to him, probably as a way of recovering the bomb that had been stolen in Cuba, and then, when he got it back—Jack Ruby’s death is proof that he got it back—he killed them all. Gunned them down like the Bolsheviks gunned down the Romanovs. The only thing that gives him any hope at all is the trips that Ivelitsch continued to take to Cuba, but the last one happened in 1975, and though BC has visited the island three times, he’s never figured out what Ivelitsch was doing there. It’s a beautiful country, after all. Not even Communism can sully the Caribbean or dim the tropical sunshine. Maybe he was just going on vacation.
He goes to take another drink and discovers that his glass is empty. He shrugs and pours himself another. It’s his birthday after all. Forty-three. He never thought he could be a forty-three-year-old.
Sometimes on nights like this, after two or three Scotches, or four, or five, he asks himself what would have happened if the president hadn’t died. If Chandler had managed to stop Melchior, if Caspar had missed? Or if Jack Ruby hadn’t been able to walk up to Caspar in a crowded police station and shoot him dead and the president’s killer had talked and told the bizarre story of his life that people have been piecing together ever since? Would things have turned out differently? The good things—Civil Rights and the War on Poverty and the sexual revolution —and the bad: the Vietnam War and Watergate and the sexual revolution. Would the country have turned out the same? The world? Would he?
The question makes him think of the book he was reading on the train the day it all started.
But still. He hasn’t read it and won’t. Not till he’s found Chandler and Naz. Not till Melchior is brought to justice.
Which brings him back to the original question: would things have turned out differently if Chandler had stopped Oswald? He can’t help but think that Melchior was telling the truth in his parting words: that the shift started a long time ago before Oswald pulled the trigger, that the change would have happened regardless of what played out in Dealey Plaza. Maybe so. But that still doesn’t change the fact that an innocent man was killed, and a lot of innocent people were dragged into a crime that had nothing to do with them as the nation tried to find scapegoats for their own feelings of vulnerability, and culpability, and failure.
The whine of feedback from the small TV behind him cuts into his thoughts. Eighteen years disappear, and he’s back in the chair in Dallas, watching the screen fade to black and hearing Walter Cronkite’s voice flood out of the darkness. Somehow he knows even before he turns around.
“This is a CBS News Special Bulletin. In Washington, DC, shots have just been fired by an unknown gunman at President Reagan as he left the Washington Hilton Hotel. It is unclear whether the president was hit or not. However, we do know that James Brady, the White House press secretary, was injured, as well as a Secret Service agent. The gunman fired at the president from approximately ten feet away and was immediately subdued by the Secret Service. Any details about his name or motivation have yet to be released. Stay tuned to CBS News for further details.”
BC stares at the screen for a moment. He’s not sure what he’s waiting for until a commercial comes on. The inescapable theme song to Pac-Man. After eighteen years, history is still told courtesy of its commercial sponsors.
BC presses a button on the intercom. Duncan answers almost before the buzzing stops.
“Yes, BC?”
“Get me on the first plane to DC.”
A pause. “Under your name, or—”
“An alias,” BC says, then releases the intercom. He looks at the half inch of Scotch in his glass, then sets it undrunk on the desk. “It’s starting again,” he says to no one but himself. “It’s finally starting.”7
1 Police officer J. D. Tippit fatally shot by Lee Harvey Oswald at approximately 1:12 p.m.
2 Lee Harvey Oswald killed by Jack Ruby at 11:21 a.m. as he is being transferred from Dallas Police Headquarters to the Dallas County Jail.
3 Mary Meyer murdered on a towpath along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in Georgetown. Henry Wiggins, the only witness, reported seeing “a black man in a light jacket, dark slacks, and a dark cap” standing over Meyer’s body. Meyer’s diary, in which she is alleged to have recorded the details of her affair with the murdered president, was first given to CIA associate deputy director of operations for counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton, and later destroyed by her sister.
4 Frank Wisdom found dead in his home October 29, 1965, of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot to the face. The shotgun in question belonged to his son.
5 Jack Ruby dies of cancer in Parkland Memorial Hospital, the same hospital where John F. Kennedy had been pronounced dead just over three years earlier.
6 Sam Giancana executed in the basement of his home in Chicago, shot once in the back of the head, then six more times in the face. At the time of his death he was scheduled to testify before a Senate Committee investigating the possibility of collusion between CIA and the Mafia in the Kennedy assassination.
