Shift: A Novel

“Actually, a lot of people knew,” he said aloud. “Just not the who or the where. That’s why Segundo hired me. He found it easier to stomach the idea of a small-scale CIA operation to remove one or two pirated devices than for his country to be blown off the map when word leaked that there were nukes on its territory.”

“I repeat, we have no intelligence indicating—”

“Damn it, Drew, did you even read my report? I’m the intelligence. That’s what you pay me for, remember?”

“We paid you to assassinate—” Everton cut himself off. Even in Langley, there were some things you didn’t say out loud. “We paid you to deliver a box of cigars. Instead you drop off the radar for almost two years, and when you do show up it’s smelling like rum and dressed like a plantation owner. Now, if you have any proof—”

“Hacendado.”

Everton folded his hands in front of him so tightly the knuckles turned white.

“What?”

“A plantation owner is called an hacendado, which you’d know if you paid any attention to the goddamn western hemisphere you’re supposed to be in charge of.”

Everton opened his mouth but Melchior spoke over him. “Twenty-three months I spent on that miserable little island, Drew, and I’m telling you there are Russian elements—call ’em rogue, call ’em crazy, call ’em whatever the hell you want, but they’re using Cuba’s proximity to the U.S. to move the Cold War in a whole new direction.”

Everton’s knuckles were so white they were practically green, and his pursed lips were equally pale, and the little crescents dancing in the hollows of his flared nostrils.

“Fine. If you have any proof of such a conspiracy, by all means, produce it now. And by proof I mean something more than a blazer with a hole and a stain that looks like it was made by an exploding cigar. Pen, I mean. An exploding pen.”

For the first time all morning, Melchior’s smile was genuine. This was his moment.

He reached for his shoe, but the look of disgust on Everton’s face stopped him. He’d expected that look, even if he’d imagined it on Helms’s face rather than some mid-level functionary’s. Indeed, he’d planned the whole meeting around it. Had resurrected the ridiculous suit and sandals Segundo had given him and chosen an especially fragrant pair of socks so that the paper in his shoe would acquire a healthy tang of foot stink.

There was the look, just as he’d planned. The only problem was, it had nothing to do with Melchior’s attire, Melchior’s action, Melchior’s words, and everything to do with Melchior himself. Melchior’d seen the same expression on the faces of countless anti–Civil Rights demonstrators in the newspapers he’d been reading since he got back. It was the face of a primly dressed white girl as she threw a tomato at a black boy walking into her school in Georgia. It was the face of a uniformed police officer siccing his German shepherd on a black man attempting to use the whites-only entrance of a cafe in Mississippi. It was the face of George Wallace taking the oath of office as governor of Alabama: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Despite all the whispers referring to him as the Wiz’s pickaninny—whispers that started, he knew, with the Wiz himself—Melchior had always done his duty to Company and country, and even if he’d often felt like a second-class citizen, he’d never felt black. But now he knew: as far as CIA was concerned, he was just as much a nigger as Medgar Evers.

His foot was still in the air, the sandal half off his heel. He let it hang there for one more moment, then reached down and slipped it back on, placed his foot firmly on the floor.

Everton’s hands and face relaxed, and watery pink replaced greenish white as the blood flooded to his skin.

“I want to be completely candid with you. Deputy Director Helms didn’t meet with you today because he was busy. He didn’t meet with you because you are not worth his time. You are the product of a failed experiment on the part of the former occupant of this office. You and your fellow ‘Wise Men.’”

“Caspar,” Melchior said, his voice dangerously quiet. “Balthazar.”

“I don’t care if your names are Huey, Dewey, and Louie. Deputy Director Helms feels it’s time the Company got out of science fiction and secret wars and returned to the business of gathering intelligence. The Wiz Kids were the first of the Company’s ridiculous experiments²⁰, from which sprang Bluebird, Artichoke, Ultra, and now Orpheus. It’s only fitting that the first should clean up the last.”

Melchior’s eyes narrowed.

“Orpheus?”

Everton was silent a moment. Then: “Did you ever meet Cord Meyer’s ex-wife, Mary?”

“Are you kidding? I never even met Cord.”

“Oh, that’s right. The Wiz liked to keep you out of the spotlight. Or, who knows, maybe you kept yourself out of the spotlight.”

“Who knows?” Melchior said. “So what’s the trouble with Mrs. Meyer?”

“She’s sleeping with the president.”

Melchior shrugged. “From what I heard, you could open a rival to the Rockettes with the girls Jack Kennedy’s bagged since he got in the White House.”

“Be that as it may,” Everton said, “none of the other girls are slipping him LSD.”¹⁸

Melchior didn’t react for a moment. Then he leaned forward, retrieved his hat, and set it on his head.

“None of the other girls is slipping him LSD,” he said, smiling beneath the brim of his hat. “None of the other girls is.”

Cambridge, MA

November 1, 1963