Shift: A Novel

“?Gordo?”

“Not fat. Atletico.”

The man turned his head toward the pills. The action triggered a cough, long and deep but hollow, as though he were almost emptied out.

“There was a man. He could have been American. He paid Victor Bayo to park it in his shed.”

“What was in the truck?”

“He kept it covered.”

“You would not be sick if you hadn’t looked.”

The man on the bed closed his eyes. For a moment Ivelitsch thought he’d lost consciousness. He was reaching for the cane to prod him when the man opened his eyes.

“I don’t know what it was. Some kind of machine. As big as my sister’s dowry chest. There was writing on it. Russian writing.”

“How do you know it was Russian?”

“It was like the letters on the jeeps.” A tiny croaking laugh. “Backward consonants and funny shapes.”

“And what happened to it?”

“Someone came for the truck and took it away. Two days ago. He went east.”

“The American?”

“No. Cubano. But the American sent him.”

“How do you know?”

“He had keys to the padlock on the shed, and to the truck as well.”

Ivelitsch nodded, and stood up.

“You did well to answer my questions. You saved your people much sickness.” He grabbed the pill bottle and tossed it on the bed. “You might have even saved yourself. You are a lucky man.”

Louie Garza waited for the Russian to leave before he took the first pill. Indeed, he was a lucky man. He only hoped the pills worked before the Russian figured out Louie’d sent him on a wild-goose chase, and came back for the truth.

Millbrook, NY

November 5, 1963

The rain beating on the roof of his motel, coupled with the pain in his forehead, kept BC awake all night. It wasn’t the drumming on the zinc sheets or the throbbing in his skull: it was the thought of all the evidence it was destroying. Tire treads and footprints melting into useless blurs; fibers, hairs, and other minuscule clues washing away; drops of blood dissolving into the soil. Any one of them might hold the key to unlocking what had really happened in the cottage—who killed whom, and how, and why. Morganthau, aka Logan. Chandler Forrestal, aka Orpheus. And the girl who, so far, had no name.

BC had looked at dozens of cadavers, stuck his fingers in knife and bullet wounds and probed nether orifices for signs of rape or cruder trauma. But never once had he looked a living victim in the face. Never once had he heard pleas for succor or mercy. And even though he knew she was incidental to this story, that Orpheus was the real star—or at any rate the chemical, the project that had made him—it was the girl who haunted him. Somehow he’d tricked himself into believing that victims acquiesced to their fate in the end. That the greatest crime was murder, not the horrible psychic torture that led up to it. But all night long the girl’s screams echoed in his ears, and every time he closed his eyes he saw hers, wide with terror. Long after he’d forgotten she was dead, he remembered how she’d suffered when she was alive.

In an effort to get some sleep he tried to read The Man in the High Castle, the book Director Hoover had sent him north with. Among other things, the director expected a report Monday morning— assuming BC still had a job, of course. But he only got as far as the end of the second page. How easily I could fall in love with a girl like this. His cheeks reddened, the book fell from his fingers. He filled a rag with ice from the machine down the hall and put it on the bump on his forehead, then lay in bed listening to the rain wash away his chances of finding out what had happened to her.

The storm let up shortly after dawn. By the time the sun crested the Berkshires he was stashing the Corvair a quarter mile from the front gate of the Castalia estate. A bone-chilling fog filled up the road, the lawns, the space between trees. The reduced visibility seemed to amplify what little noise there was—mostly BC, his shoes crunching over gravel, his breath whistling as he scaled the crumbling stone wall, and then his slip-sliding passage as he made his way up the slick hill toward the main house. Fog ribboned through the deciduous trees on this side of the house, and the ground was cushioned by layers of leaves and mulch. BC, punchy from his sleepless night but wired on two cups of bitter coffee, half felt that he’d stepped into another hallucination. He wanted to tell himself that was impossible, but after yesterday he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to say that about anything again.

There wasn’t a light on in any of the main house’s windows, and the building emitted a pervasive silence, as if its occupants weren’t just asleep but unconscious, suppressed by the gargantuan structure until it chose to recognize a new day. BC skirted the wide lawns and made his way toward the pine forest. His chest tightened and he willed himself to relax. Forrestal was gone, he reminded himself. Orpheus was dead, and couldn’t hurt him now.

The cottage came into view more quickly than he remembered. Without the interference of a shimmering hallucination, he could see it for what it was: a small building outfitted in the same combination of Bavarian and Catskill kitsch that decorated the Big House. He combed the yard first, but Melchior’s team had been thorough. The only sign that they’d been there was the chewed-up ground itself. Inside, the rooms had the distinct look of a scene that’s been gone through by professionals who don’t care about covering their tracks. Books sat unevenly on the shelves from which they’d been taken and flipped through and hastily put back; drawers hung half-open, bits of clothing or paper peeking out; couch cushions bunched together like boxcars on a crashed train. They’d even pulled up the carpet, leaving it in a roll against one wall, and a couple of floorboards had been pulled up as well. BC had no idea if they’d found anything, but the one thing all this effort made clear was that the team hadn’t known what was going on in the house before it arrived.