Melchior sent a couple of shots through the taxi’s rear windshield. Glass exploded into the air, and he had to duck behind the twelve-inch-high windscreen of his own vehicle as the flak sliced into his car. The taxi fishtailed wildly, then straightened out. The agent slammed on the brakes, and Melchior had to jerk the wheel to the left to avoid slamming into the taxi’s trunk. The agent squeezed off a shot over Melchior’s windscreen even as he jerked the taxi to the right and veered onto Constitution—toward Federal Triangle if he continued straight on, or, even worse, the White House if he turned onto Pennsylvania. There were still no sirens behind them, but it was hard to imagine anything less than a flotilla of armed vehicles if two cars shot past 1600 firing at each other. Melchior had to end this now.
He screeched onto Constitution, narrowly avoiding a panel truck. Again he floored it; again the roadster responded. There were a dozen car lengths between him and the Crown Vic, then there were six. Three. As they flew across Third Street, Melchior pulled up on the taxi’s left flank. The agent was cranking the wheel with both hands to make the turn onto Pennsylvania. Melchior put a shot in the man’s ear and when the agent released the wheel, the car skidded, hit a curb, then turned ass over nose onto the road, crushing the cabin beneath the chassis. If the agent wasn’t dead before the car flipped, he was dead after.
Melchior looked forward—just in time to see a truck cross perpendicularly in front of him. He was going sixty miles an hour. There was no missing it. He threw himself onto the passenger’s seat. The 356 shook and glass exploded all over his back as the car’s nose went under the bed of the truck and the windscreen was ripped off its struts. There was a moment of vibrating darkness and then, somehow, Melchior was through. He’d gone right under the truck.
He sat up, shaking glass out of his hair, then jammed the car onto Fourth Street. Still no cops—God bless America. Two cars exchanging shots a quarter mile from the White House, and not a police cruiser in sight. President Kennedy needed better security.
He ditched the car in a garage Song had told him about “just in case,” then turned the Wiz’s battered Chevy toward Langley. He’d just shot two Company agents. It was time to turn himself in.
New York, NY
November 19, 1963
“Once I destroyed a man’s idea of himself to save him.”
“Beg pardon, sir?” The Negro elevator operator seemed anything but interested in what the curiously dressed white man had to say.
“Oh, nothing, nothing,” BC said. Then, thinking he’d better try out some beatnik jargon: “Just some jive by this cool cat of a poet someone turned me on to, Frank O’Hara.”
Without doing anything more than lifting one eyebrow, the elevator operator managed to convey the idea that if the man in the car was what lay in store for the beneficiaries of Civil Rights, he’d just as soon remain a second- class citizen.
“I’m sure I don’t understand, sir.” He stopped the car and pulled open the polished wooden door. “Fifteenth floor, sir.”
BC had been able to track down Richard Alpert at the home of Peggy Hitchcock—sister of William, owner of the Millbrook estate. He insisted on going alone. Chandler didn’t put up much of a fight, which didn’t really surprise BC. He’d noticed that being around people made his charge visibly uncomfortable. No doubt part of this had to do with the fact that Chandler had become different from everyone around him, but BC suspected Chandler’d been a loner even before his transformation. He said he was more than happy to sit in the hotel and watch television. “That new guy on
BC just looked at him drolly. “Guns are so uncool, man.”
There was a mirror just outside the elevator, and BC took a moment to inspect himself. To remind himself who he was supposed to be. He’d done rather well, if he said so himself: black turtleneck covered by a long vest in some peasant-looking striped fabric, paint-spattered chinos and battered work boots, all courtesy of a Village thrift store. The coup de grace, though, was a dark wig that fell almost to his shoulders. It could have come right off the head of Maynard G. Krebs. A suede headband held it in place and gave BC a bit of a Comanche look besides.
To further solidify his performance, he’d spent the afternoon in a dusty bookstore reeking of marijuana smoke, culling bons mots from the likes of Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The only one he remembered, though, was the line from O’Hara’s poem (entitled simply “Poem,” as if to justify its presence on the same bookshelf as Shakespeare, Milton, and Donne): “Once I destroyed a man’s idea of himself to save him.” As BC regarded the unshaven, floppy-haired stranger in the mirror, he felt he understood exactly what the poet meant.
Hitchcock lived in a sprawling apartment on Park Avenue, a labyrinthine complex of large high-ceilinged rooms stuffed with Asian antiques, African sculptures and textiles, and modernist canvases covered with squiggles and smears and clumps of things BC thought belonged in a trash can rather than on a posh apartment wall. Not that he was able to get a good look at any of them, for, in addition to the expensive objects, Peggy Hitchcock’s home was also stuffed with people. Though it was a Monday night, “the joint was jumping,” as the person who opened the door said to him. Industrialists and beatniks, socialists and hipsters, starlets, jazz musicians, and artists thronged the rooms, crystal tumblers full of gin or vodka or bourbon in one hand, cigarettes of tobacco or cloves or marijuana in the other, and all of them, male and female, white, black, and indeterminate brown,
“Nice threads, my man.”
“Looking fly, white guy.”
“Way to work it
BC had never been in an environment where people were so open about their desires. Women in acres of chiffon or inches of polyester stared at him openly, as did more than a few of the men. Normally such overt sexuality would have made him uncomfortable, but the drink that’d been thrust into his hands the moment he walked through the door had calmed him, and he thought he might also be getting something he’d heard referred to as a “contact high” from the layers of sweet smoke in the air. BC used the smoke as his pretext for conversation with various persons, gradually honing his dialogue from “Pardon me, but can I ask where you procured your marijuana cigarette?” to “Any idea where I can score something stronger, dig?” which, after half a dozen tries, finally hit paydirt.
“Did someone mention scoring?”
BC turned to see a pale woman with dark hair pulled straight off her face and held in place by a large silver
