Shift: A Novel

“Try me.”

Melchior combined what he knew with what he surmised, presented it all as though he’d been in on everything from the beginning. Bad enough that he was the Company representative for such a stupid plan; no need for him to look like a patsy as well.

What he knew for sure was that before the revolution Donny had worked in the Sans Souci with a man whose wife’s sister or daughter or cousin was a chorus girl turned housekeeper, now employed in Castro’s private offices off the Plaza de la Revolucion. What he surmised was that the housekeeper had agreed to add one of the Company’s exploding cigars to the box on Castro’s desk, presumably in exchange for payment, or else because the Company had something on her. Castro’s love of a good cigar was well known, as was the fact that the box in his office always contained a representative selection from the island’s top growers: Diplomatico, Bolivar, La Gloria Cubana, and of course Montecristo, which was the name on the band Sidney Gottlieb’s whitecoats in TSS had wrapped around their boom-boom sticks. When Sturgis asked him how powerful the explosive was, an image of Pablo’s headless torso flashed in Melchior’s mind.

“Let’s just say the housekeeper should be working below the belt by the time Castro’s on his third or fourth puff. And she shouldn’t use too much hairspray that day.”

“Ha!” Robertson burped. “That shouldn’t be a problem! I bet they don’t even got hairspray in Cuba no more!”

The real problem, of course, was that Donny didn’t have arms and legs no more, so it was going to be a little hard for him to deliver the cigars to the housekeeper, and God forbid one other member of the team should’ve known her name. Welcome to the new CIA. Streamlined and simplified. Apparently the endangered Cuban crocodile hadn’t been let in on the new bureaucratic structure.

Once they made it to Havana, Garcia and Lopez tried bribing random female members of the Ministerio’s housekeeping staff, which got Garcia arrested the second day and shot, as far as they could figure, sometime on the third. Then Robertson took half a dozen of the cigars to the Mexican embassy. First he tried to reach Howard Hunt at the Mexican field office, and then he tried to convince the Mexican Ambassador to Cuba to present them to Castro as a gift, which got him deported the fourth day. On the evening of the fifth day, after Garcia’s execution had been announced in the papers under the headline TRAITOR TO THE REVOLUTION BROUGHT TO JUSTICE, Lopez got so drunk that he smoked one of the cigars himself, or at least that’s what Sturgis and Melchior assumed when they found his headless, armless torso slumped in a chair, the fingers of his left hand still wrapped around the neck of a bottle of Cuban rum. At that point, Sturgis just bolted, which left Melchior by himself, nothing but a half-full box of exploding cigars for company, along with a little rum still left in the bottle in Lopez’s hand.

Three days later, as he was leaving a whorehouse in Barrio Chino, he passed a couple of police officers on their way in, one fat and dopey looking, the other more solid, and scowling.

“You smell like shit, my friend,” the fat policia said genially enough. “What were you doing, fucking your girl up the ass?”

In fact, Melchior had penetrated Rosita anally. Another of the Wiz’s field lessons: the Company only provided one condom per man per mission, but bastard children, whether fathered on a Cuban prostitute or a field slave like the one the Wiz’s grandfather had owned, always came back to haunt you, so one had to improvise. And besides, Melchior’d doubled the girl’s rate, so as far as he was concerned, he’d paid for any inconvenience.

Nevertheless, the two policias reminded him a little too much of Robertson and Sturgis, and he was half blind on rum to boot: before he knew what he was doing, he’d kicked the fat policia’s nuts through the roof of his mouth. Over the course of the next fifty years, he would realize that that single action, more than anything since the day the Wiz picked him and Caspar out of the orphanage, set him on his destiny.

He turned to go for the second policia, only to find a Makarov trained on him.

“I would much rather give one of these ladies an evening of pleasure then take you to the station. So please. Give me an excuse to pull the trigger.”

Melchior looked up from the stubby, rust-flecked pistol to the policia’s piggy little eyes. All four of them. Really, the resemblance to Sturgis was uncanny.

Even shit-faced, he had enough self-awareness to know that his smile wasn’t the kind of smile that set other people at ease.

He smiled anyway.

“I’m sure we’re all reasonable men,” he said. “Why don’t we discuss this over a nice cigar?”

Project Eurydice

It hit her as she passed through the muted spotlight over the inner door: not just the heat, the smoke, the urgent murmur of voices. The need. Though no one actually stopped what he or she was doing to inspect her entrance, she still felt her presence sizzle through the room like an electric current. Felt the sidelong glances and equally circumspect feelings that accompanied them, that ineffable combination of lust and derogation on the part of the men, sympathy and jealousy on the part of the women.

The emotional miasma swirled around her as palpably as the smoke. Against its press, all she could do was fasten her eyes on the bar and forge ahead. Fifteen steps, she told herself, that’s all you have to take. And then you can reward yourself with a nice tall glass of gin.

The men looked at her openly now, their stares as tangible as the sweaty hand of a soused uncle at a wedding reception. Barely five feet, four inches in heels, Naz was inches shorter than the rangy lasses scattered around bar stools and tables, but there was something oversized about her presence. Her pearl-gray dress directed their attention to her hips, her waist, her breasts—her cleavage—but it was her face that held them. Her mouth, its fullness made even more striking by lipstick the color of a darkened rose; her eyes, as large and dark as walnuts. And of course her hair, a mass of inky black waves that sucked up what little light there was in the smoky room and radiated it back in oily rainbows. Or who knows, maybe it was just her nose, which had more length than any native-born woman could carry off, let alone work to her advantage. It would be thirty or forty years before anyone in the room would recognize the faint dimple in her left nostril as the mark left behind by a nose ring, ceremonially administered on her thirteenth birthday, and removed less than a year later when Uncle Kermit put her on a plane to the States carrying a single suitcase equipped with a false bottom into which the remnants of her mother’s jewels had been stuffed. Even without that tidbit of knowledge, everyone in the bar could see the newcomer was