Shift: A Novel

becomes clear their target isn’t going to come that day, they leave, presumably to look for Andreson elsewhere. BC learned after it was all over that Pyle had gone to a local diner called Hank’s, lingering there for nearly four hours and brazenly telling a fourteen-year-old boy what he was going to do. The boy, Philip Rothman, had not believed him at first, but ultimately decided to look up Pyle’s quarry in the phone book. By the time Philip got to Stevenson’s house, Pyle had subdued his victim, but he was still alive. Philip’s chivalric arrival was a deviation from the script, however—the whole point of the story, Pyle would insist at his trial, was that no one raised a hand to save Ole Andreson’s life (just as, he elaborated, Quentin’s family failed to come to his aid and Nick Carraway was complicit in the cover-up that led to Jay Gatsby’s death). At any rate, Pyle spent nearly an hour deciding how to proceed, finally electing to tie Philip to a chair and force him to watch; at the trial he would say that this seemed most “thematically consistent” with the story’s depiction of young Nick Adams as a passive witness to evil. Before he could kill Stevenson, however, BC arrived and saved the day—and, ironically, ruined his career.

Because it should have been a career-making case. He’d taken a pair of unconnected events separated by ten months and nearly five hundred miles and sniffed out the serialized crimes of a killer with a rather singular read on literature. He had gauged his target’s predilections so accurately that he’d been able to head him off before he could kill again. But unfortunately for BC, Sammy Caputo, the owner of the Summit Boxing Rink, got a little too excited by an FBI agent inquiring into a possible connection between organized crime and the boxers at his gym. He called the Star-Ledger in Newark and told a reporter that “a G-man” was about to “pinch a big-time gangster,” possibly a member of Jersey’s own DeCavalcante family. The reporter, cameraman in tow, had been on Stevenson’s front steps as BC led Pyle out in handcuffs, Stevenson following with a large gash on his forehead, and Philip Rothman staring up at the intrepid, insightful federal agent with worshipful eyes. BC would remember the flash forever, not because he sensed any foreboding in it, but because he hadn’t realized it was dark out. He had been so focused on capturing Pyle that he hadn’t noticed the sun had gone down, as if he had broken the case not with his eyes and ears but some other faculty that operated independently of his senses.

The photograph was on the front page the next morning. Later that day BC found himself in the office of J. Edgar Hoover for the first time in his four years at the Bureau. He told himself he was going to get a promotion or commendation, and technically speaking, he did: COINTELPRO was an elite division, one that agents had to earn their way into. But BC’s assignments were anything but elite. He was sent all across the rural South to stake out meetings and sit-ins and “Freedom Rides” by a host of groups whose acronyms he had trouble keeping straight, let alone what they stood for: SCLC, SNCC, CORE. Often he was the only white man present in these groups, which made his undercover status an open secret, if not simply a farce. Though he heard lots of rhetoric in these meetings about “shaking things up” and “blowing the lid off the establishment” and “throwing out the old order,” the most serious infractions he witnessed were misdemeanor violations of various Jim Crow laws, which were beyond his purview to enforce even if he’d wanted to. It was not, as he would write in the resignation letters he began typing up after six months at his new post, what he had signed on for. Nor was it what he deserved.

Querrey had known what he was risking when he set off after Pyle—independent thought wasn’t a trait Hoover looked for in his agents—known, too, how much worse he’d made things by allowing the photographer to take his picture. The director felt the lure of publicity was a distraction to a federal agent, and the only employee of the Bureau who was allowed to give interviews without prior permission was Hoover himself. BC had not in fact answered any of the reporter’s questions, but he hadn’t asked for the photographer’s film either. In fact, he’d smiled. He couldn’t help it. He was proud of himself. He knew that what he’d done was exceptional. But pride had no place in Hoover’s FBI, nor even, on some level, did prowess. The director had famously turned down an application from Eliot Ness, the man who brought down Al Capone, when the former, a Prohibition agent under the Treasury Department, wanted to switch to the broader purview of the Bureau; Hoover described Ness as a “publicity hound” and would have nothing to do with him. Similarly, when FBI Agent Melvin Purvis became a national hero for breaking up a string of gangs in the early thirties, including those of Baby Face Nelson, Ma Barker, and Pretty Boy Floyd, Hoover began to pick apart the man’s record and assignments, until by 1935, barely a year after he brought down the Dillinger gang, Purvis was forced to resign. BC knew that that’s what Hoover wanted him to do, and at this point defying his boss was the only thing that kept him in the Bureau. But it was a perverse game, and BC didn’t know how much longer he could play it.

The worst part, though, was the book reports. In their brief interview, Hoover hadn’t asked BC why he’d pursued a case outside his jurisdiction or why he went so far as to violate the chain of command in order to apprehend the suspect himself. Nor did he mention the photograph. Instead he asked seemingly straightforward questions about how BC had figured out what Pyle was up to. He seemed particularly fascinated by BC’s literary knowledge—the new president had recently told a reporter that he was a fan of Ian Fleming’s 007 novels, but the director confessed he hadn’t read a work of fiction since his sophomore year at George Washington. The next day Gladys Miller delivered a copy of the Negro writer Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, along with a note from the director saying that he’d heard Ellison was a Communist sympathizer and had given the American Marxist movement “moral and intellectual succor” in his novel. Hoover was afraid such sentiments might “inspire” a reader in the same way Freddie Pyle had been inspired by Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway. Would Querrey examine the novel and provide a profile as to what kind of crime such a novel might engender?

BC was surprised, but complied, reading the novel in three evenings and filing his report on the fourth. The book itself he found fairly straightforward and a bit tedious; if it was intended to incite the masses, it stuck him as self-defeating. Certainly “racist” whites were depicted and derided (although their characterization struck BC as so one-dimensional that he doubted anyone, even a Negro, would find them believable, let alone culpable), but so too was virtually every racialist movement. In addition, the main character’s antisocial tendencies, sexual compulsiveness, and psychological problems made him a less-than-inspiring agent of social change. What Hoover thought of this interpretation BC never heard, but more books followed almost every day. The “Beat sickness” was particularly onerous to Hoover, and he sent over a veritable library of works by Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, along with John Clellon Holmes’s essay “This Is the Beat Generation,” Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro,” and the work of James Baldwin, who, though not a Beat himself, seemed to espouse most of their worst beliefs—inversion, racial equality, Communist sympathies, and a taste for mind-altering substances. When Hoover discovered that Sidney Gottlieb, the head of CIA’s Technical Services Section, often looked to spy novels and science fiction for inspiration, a slew of pulp paperbacks arrived on Querrey’s desk: Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth, The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon, Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein.

The irony in all of this was that BC was not, in fact, a reader. His mother was. Or rather had been, since she’d died almost two years ago. Widowed before she turned thirty, the pious Mrs. Querrey had divided the rest of her life between two great comforts: the church, which she attended every morning (Reformed Calvinist, a modern version of the French Huguenot tradition from which she was descended), and the novel, which she read every afternoon, evening, and often all through the night. A serious Protestant, Mrs. Querrey had preferred edifying or educational texts (hence Faulkner and Hemingway, though she would have agreed with Freddie Pyle’s assertion that there had been no novels worthy of the name since the Second World War). Because her son didn’t share her interests (in either the church or literature), Mrs. Querrey recounted the plots of everything she read in lieu of dinner conversation. BC did his best to tune her out with a criminology textbook or forensic handbook or even just a newspaper (where, after all, you learned about the real world, rather than a fantasyland someone had made up to prove a point), but long before Hoover began forcing him to read them, he had come to regard the novel as did Cid Hamete Benengeli, aka Mr. Eggplant, the fictional author of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote: they made you crazy. Just look at his mother, after all. And of course Freddie Pyle.

 

1. The Warren Commission. Officially the President’s Commission