Chandler shrugged his emerald shoulders. “I didn’t have to read their minds to figure that out.”
BC colored. “But you will admit Miss Haverman is an unusual girl. When we were at Madam Song’s, I felt something. Something I’ve never felt before. Not because it wasn’t my emotion, but because it was Naz’s.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I think you weren’t the only person changed by the drugs Agent Logan gave you.”
“Oh, Jesus.” Chandler looked more distraught than when he’d noticed the pictures of the people who’d died at the gas station. “Does Melchior know?”
“I’m not sure. Song was there too, but I don’t know if she understood what was going on.”
Chandler smacked the ball in his hands. “What the hell does he
“I don’t think he knows,” BC said. “But it’s obvious he’s angry and frustrated, and now fate’s thrust you into his hands and he sees an opportunity. He might end up destroying his life rather than saving it, but in either case he’s going to take a lot of people down with him.”
“So tell me again why we’re going after this guy instead of running far, far away?”
“Because he’s the closest thing to a lead we’ve got to Naz.”
“Oh right,” Chandler said. “Naz.”
At the word, something clicked in BC’s brain. A flash of light, a whispered voice.
“BC?”
BC stared at Chandler’s face, at the desperation there, and couldn’t bring himself to say anything. Chandler already had enough to deal with. Naz could tell him herself, when they rescued her.
Suddenly he felt a curious sensation, like the beginning of a tension headache. It felt as though someone had slipped his hands between BC’s skull and his brain and begun to squeeze, and squeeze, and squeeze. Chandler’s eyes had narrowed to slits and his lips were white with effort.
“Chandler,” BC said hoarsely. “Don’t.” But if Chandler heard him, he didn’t acknowledge it.
The pressure in BC’s head wasn’t painful as much as it was weird, and wrong. You shouldn’t feel someone else touching your brain. It took all of BC’s strength to lift up his hand and put it on top of Chandler’s.
And just like that it was over. Chandler’s face relaxed and his shoulders slumped slightly. BC’s head felt light as a balloon. He peered at Chandler, trying to tell if he’d seen anything, but it seemed pretty clear he hadn’t.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“That was …” BC shook his head gingerly. “I don’t know what that was, but I wouldn’t want to feel it when you’re juiced up.”
“Speaking of which,” Chandler said, “I don’t suppose you have any?”
BC shook his head. “The easiest thing would probably be to go to Millbrook. Wait. Leary said he had a partner. Alpert. Richard Alpert. He goes on regular buying runs to Europe. Flies in and out through Idlewild, usually stays with Billy Hitchcock’s sister in New York City.”
“What if he’s not around when we go looking for him? Millbrook’s only a few hours on from New York.”
“Yes, but if Melchior’s watching anything, it’s going to be Leary’s place. If we don’t manage to find Alpert, we can decide if it’s worth risking a trip upstate.”
“It sounds like we have a plan then.” They sat quietly for a moment, and then Chandler drained the last of his beer. “Last frame?”
“Be my guest.”
Chandler picked up his ball, rolled three more strikes, and then the pinsetter laid BC’s final frame. In a hurry to get the evening over, BC fired off his shot too quickly, handed himself a 10–2 split. It was hard not to see the two pins as emblematic: Melchior and Naz, too far apart to get both at once. You had to connect with one and hope that would get you the other. It could be done, he told himself. All you had to do was aim right.
He picked up his ball. This time he spent a good minute lining up his shot. But just as he released it he heard Naz’s voice again
Washington, DC
November 18, 1963
It was a wet day, and Union Station’s cavernous waiting room was filled with squeaks and squeals as rain-soaked commuters hurried to make their trains. It’d been raining the day he met BC, too, Melchior remembered, and he couldn’t help but smile as he thought about how he’d messed with the poor G-man’s head. My God, he’d never met a squarer peg in his life—the starched-and-stuffed embodiment of the Eisenhower generation, so naive that he didn’t suspect that virtually every law, value, and custom he was paid to uphold was being flouted by the man he worked for. He wondered how ol’ Beau was doing these days. If his meeting with Melchior hadn’t fucked him up but good, then his encounter with Orpheus surely had. No doubt he was doing his best to forget he’d ever met either of them….
But he had more important things to think about. Namely, his meeting with Pavel Semyonovitch Ivelitsch. Melchior’d arrived a half hour early to case the station, and now he sat in the middle of a central bench, scanning a paper while he waited for the Russian to show. Race dominated the headlines. Martin Luther King was still riding the success of August’s March on Washington, and there was even talk that he was up for the Nobel Peace Prize. In Mississippi, a voter registration drive for Negroes had been broken up by whites whose numbers included uniformed police officers, while a similar one in rural Georgia had persisted despite trash, rotten fruit, and bottles being thrown at the participants. Publicity-hungry congressmen called press conferences to discuss their position on the president’s Civil Rights Bill—vitriolically against, bellicosely for—but it had yet to actually reach the floor, since
