Shift: A Novel

Washington, DC

November 7, 1963

BC didn’t have time to wash Burton’s uniform, so he sprayed it inside and out with Lysol. Not that it was dirty—and not that Burton was a Negro—but BC had never worn another person’s clothing in his life, and the mere thought of sticking his legs where another man’s had been brought goose pimples to his thighs. He wasn’t sure how he was going to get the coveralls into the DOJ Building, though. The plan was to enter as Special Agent BC Querrey—it was unlikely anyone at the desk would have heard of his suspension—then become Gerry Burton somewhere inside. Should he put the uniform in a shopping bag? But why would an FBI agent carry a shopping bag into the Department of Justice Building, especially after hours? Should he carry a suitcase? But that would invite questions, and the answers could lead to rumors, and rumors had a way of getting back to Director Hoover. Then he realized: he could put the uniform in his briefcase! No one would ever think there would be clothes in a briefcase!

Then he remembered: Melchior had his briefcase.

In the end he used a valise that looked enough like a briefcase that he didn’t think anyone would notice, and if they did notice he could just say it was his overnight bag (which in fact it was, and which he’d brought into the office more than a dozen times, but which seemed to acquire a suspicious sheen when he put someone else’s clothes in it).

He waved at the guard when he went in. He didn’t often work late, but often enough that no one was surprised to see him. What was surprising: the guard waved back, and smiled, too. It felt almost like a benediction.

At the elevator he punched the button for the fourth floor, as always. Once the doors were closed, however, he pressed three and got off there instead. The corridor was deserted, and he used Gerry Burton’s key to let himself into the maintenance closet. He took his tie off but left the rest of his suit on, figuring it would help fill out Burton’s voluminous uniform, which hung on him like a Santa suit on a scarecrow. He was just about to head out when he saw his shoes sticking out from the pant legs—pointed black wingtips so shiny he could see his face in them, even in the dim light. Definitely not janitor shoes. He looked about for a pair of galoshes or something, but, seeing nothing, grabbed a mop instead. It had been put away damp, reeked of mildew—BC was thinking that if he did work for the custodial department, he would have had to report someone—and quickly, before he could stop himself, he swabbed the slimy strands over his fifteen-dollar Florsheims, even turned the mop over and scratched at them with the rough wooden handle. Only when the reflection of his face was gone did he pull Burton’s ID necklace from his suit and hang it over his head, and, taking a deep breath, he pushed open the closet door.

“Goodness gracious! You startled me!”

BC jumped so high he nearly hit the top of the door frame. A Negro woman, fifty or sixty years old but no bigger than a ten-year-old girl, stood just outside the door, a cleaning cart off to one side. BC had reached reflexively for his holster, which, fortunately, was empty, and behind the zipper of Burton’s uniform to boot, so it just looked like he was pawing at his chest.

The woman stared at him expectantly, and he realized she was waiting for him to say something. What did janitors and cleaning ladies say to one another? The thought of Gerry Burton and “Ashley” popped into his head, and he felt a blush burn his cheeks. He opened his mouth, let whatever would come out come out:

“Shee-ut.”

The woman chuckled. “No need to get nasty. I won’t tell nobody. Now get on outta my way before somebody comes.”

He took the stairs to the fourth floor. As he pushed through the door he stopped short. This was his floor. His hallway. Why hadn’t he thought of that ahead of time? Anyone who saw him would recognize him instantly. Would wonder what in the world he was doing in a janitor’s uniform. Why in the hell hadn’t he waited a couple more hours before he came in, when he would be much less likely to run into someone he knew? As a detective, he knew this was why criminals get caught: they’re so focused on the object of their crime that they forget the thousand and one things standing between them and their goal. He himself had caught a dozen men that way, in the year and a half he spent in Profiling before his transfer to COINTELPRO. He should have known better! But he was here now. There was nowhere to go but forward. He shoved his right hand in his pocket and wrapped his fingers around Naz’s ring. He would let fate decide if he was meant to find her or not.

He trudged toward the director’s office, letting his head hang and his shoulders hunch up around his face as much as possible. He should’ve brought some kind of cap. He should have mussed his hair, but really, there was no hair to muss. He’d kept his standing Wednesday evening appointment with the barber last night. Fortunately, even though he heard plenty of activity through open doors, the corridor itself was deserted, and eventually—he didn’t remember the hallway being this long!—he found himself in front of the office of Helen Gandy, the director’s secretary. He glanced up and down, then ducked in the open door. He started to close it, then, worried it might draw attention, went straight to the double doors that led to the director’s office. He put his ear to one, heard nothing, took a six-inch metal ruler out of his pocket and slipped it between the doors, angled it back until it touched the tongue. Then, bracing himself, he leaned all his weight into the right door so that the lock’s tongue emerged a fraction of an inch from its socket in the left. At the same time he applied pressure on the ruler, and it slid down the curve of the tongue just enough to push it into its housing in the right door. Without the slightest sound, the door slid open, and there it was:

The Vault.

The director’s famed—and feared—personal files. Ten black metal cabinets, five on each side of the narrow hallway that led to the director’s office. Yet the material they contained—compromising information on Hollywood stars, leading journalists and politicians, not to mention every president since Calvin Coolidge, who’d appointed Hoover head of the (not-yet-Federal) Bureau of Investigation all the way back in 1924—was enough to have earned their owner a forty-year sinecure as the nation’s top cop. Though there were any number of more secure locations they could have been stored, the director insisted the cabinets be left here for all to pass through as they made their way to his sanctum sanctorum. The hubris was unbelievable. Ten filing cabinets containing enough material to ruin thousands of careers, bring down administrations and corporations and probably one or two governments. All of it guarded by the same kind of lock you’d put on a bedroom door.

An elevator dinged in the corridor. BC started, then stepped into the Vault quickly, pulled the door closed. Now it was just him and the files—standard-issue four-drawer Twenty Gauge cabinets with locks that could be picked by a hairpin, nail file, or, in BC’s case, a ghost he’d made from an old padlock key.

BC scanned the cabinets. The drawers were labeled minimally: “A—Ab irato;” “BARKER, Ma—BIRMINGHAM, Ala.” “CARTER, James—CIA.” The file took up the entire back half of the drawer and extended into the next one, two, no, three drawers, a block of tens of thousands of sheets of paper the size of a bale of hay. BC stared at it in disbelief. It would take hours to search it all.

In fact, it took only minutes. J. Edger Hoover had made his name by proving that information is power, but only if you have ready access to it. In 1919, during the Palmer Raids, he compiled a list of more than 150,000 so-called “hyphenated Americans” (the phrase was President Wilson’s), i.e., potentially subversive ethnic nationals with