“I’d tell you that you’ve got an inflated sense of your own importance,” Rip countered, “but you’re almost right. Killing Castro was the primary mission, but getting rid of you was the fallback.”
“It wasn’t the Cubans, was it?
Rip’s smile caught the streetlights and glowed wetly.
“I’d’ve preferred killing you myself, but I’d been made and had to get out of the country.”
The two men circled each other warily. Melchior suspected Rip wouldn’t actually kill him unless he was forced to, since a dead man can’t provide any information. He’d have to pull his blows, at least at first. That might be Melchior’s only chance.
“So tell me. Does the Company know Orpheus is alive?”
“They do now. Jesus Christ, Melchior. You’re Frank Wisdom’s personal pickaninny. We always knew you was crazy, but a traitor? What gives?”
“It was the Company that betrayed the Wiz. Pushing him out of Plans, frying his brains to shit. My loyalty was to him. It still is. I’m disappointed in you,” he threw in. “I’d’ve thought an old-timer like you would’ve known to bring a radio. Now I don’t have any choice but to kill you.”
Rip blinked. Melchior didn’t wait for a second chance. He lunged. Rip went for him with the knife, and Melchior put his padded right hand directly in its path. A searing pain sliced across his knuckles but he ignored it, twisting the rapidly dampening jacket around Rip’s wrist. The blood-soaked fabric tangled around Rip’s weapon, tying him to Melchior, who kicked his right foot into the side of Rip’s left knee. It buckled and Rip went down with a grunt. The tangled jacket pulled Melchior down on top of Rip, and he felt the knife drive deeper into his hand. At the same time there was a sharp pain in his right arm: in his panic, Rip was actually
Rip tried to suck air through his collapsed throat with a sound like greasy water going down a clogged drain. Melchior kept one eye on him as he untangled his bloody jacket. The knife had gone through the edge of his hand. Gritting his teeth, he pulled the blade out, then used it to cut a strip of fabric from the sleeve of his jacket and bound the wound. The whole time Rip gurgled and thrashed on the ground.
“It’s a shame it had to come to this,” Melchior said. “You’re gonna miss all the fun.” Then he stepped on Rip’s throat to shut him up.
When Rip was finally still, Melchior just stood there, catching his breath, staring down at the dead agent. He was a little woozy from loss of blood, and his hand was starting to throb like a motherfucker, but at the same time he felt exhilarated. Another link between himself and the Company had been severed.
He pressed his foot into Rip’s neck, felt the jelly of the dead man’s Adam’s apple spread beneath the thin sole of his sandal. He stared down at his foot for a long moment. Something about it bothered him. Then he knew. He plopped down on the grass, kicked off the sandals Segundo’s men had given him when they pulled him out of prison, took Rip’s shoes, and put them on his own feet. Pointy wingtips in shiny black leather. For a thug, Rip was a bit of a dandy.
Before he knew it, he was pulling Rip’s pants off him, his jacket, his shirt. In full view of a dozen darkened houses and any cars that might happen along, Melchior stripped off the linen execution suit he’d been wearing for nearly a year and put on Rip’s thoroughly respectable gray wool. He pulled his wallet and keys from his bloody jacket, tossed his old clothes in the backseat of his car, then walked up the block until he found a car with an unlocked trunk and stuffed Rip’s nearly naked body inside. The corpse would probably start to smell in a day or two, and in another day or two, maybe longer if Melchior got lucky, someone from the Company would make the rounds of the morgues and put everything together. That was fine. Keller could erase any trace of the lab by then.
He drove a few miles out of his way to dump the knife in a trash can, then headed home. Before he went upstairs he threw his old suit and shoes in the incinerator in the basement, stood there in his new clothes watching them reduce to ash. It seemed to him that the last thing to burn away was the bullet hole over the breast of his old suit. A fantasy, he knew, the product of blood loss. But even so, the hole seemed to burn before his eyes, growing larger and larger and larger until it consumed the world.
All he needed to do now was get Orpheus back. But he wasn’t too worried about that. He was pretty sure Chandler was going to come looking for him.
Washington, DC
November 9, 1963
Charles Jarrell took one look at the figure on his front porch, then pulled BC inside and slammed the door.
“Jesus H. Christ. Take that ridiculous thing off your head. You look like Phyllis fucking Diller.” He looked BC up and down one more time, then shook his head. “Does he know you’re here?”
BC pulled off the ratty wig and scratched his itching scalp. “Who?”
Jarrell kicked BC’s mother’s Electrolux hard enough to dent the motor’s housing. “J. Edgar Vacuum, that’s who.”
“Oh, ah—no.”
Jarrell opened his mouth, and even as a whiff of liquor-soaked breath floated BC’s way he said, “I need a drink for this,” turned on his heel, and disappeared.
He lived in a decrepit row house just a few blocks north of Capitol Hill, one of those DC neighborhoods that, forsaken by the nation’s prosperity, seemed doomed to eternal poverty. But not even the boarded-up windows and beaten-up cars on the street could have prepared BC for the chaos inside Jarrell’s house. The walls were covered with peeling paper whose color and pattern were completely obscured by a coating of cigarette smoke as sticky as creosote. Stacks of newspapers, five, six, seven feet tall, made a veritable maze of the floor, while the air was similarly partitioned by bolts—clots—of smoke. Despite the reek of tobacco, BC could smell the spicier tinge of alcohol and sweat beneath it. He’d heard the expression “down the rabbit hole” innumerable times in reference to
