Melchior sat calmly, not reaching for his gun, not setting his drink down—although an agent with more wits about him than Caspar would have noticed that Melchior’s jacket was unbuttoned now, that he’d moved his drink to his left hand.
“Who went to Mexico? Caspar? Alik? O. H. Lee?”
“I did.” Caspar’s fingers moved from one bead to the next like the housemaids at the orphanage saying their rosaries. “I was trying to get away. But I couldn’t.”
“You were trying to go to Cuba, weren’t you?”
“I wanted to get away.”
“You were trying to kill Castro.”
“It was the Day of the Dead,” Caspar said.
“You wanted to go to Russia, too. To kill Khrushchev.”
“People were walking around with skulls hanging around their necks and painted on their faces. It was like they’d already died but their bodies hadn’t figured it out yet.”
Melchior shook his head. “Lee went to Mexico in October, Caspar. The Day of the Dead is in November. Did you think Lee was already dead?”
“But you know they don’t really want Alik to kill Castro, don’t you? Or Khrushchev?”
“They do,” Caspar said angrily, plaintively. “They want him to shoot everyone.”
“Who?” Melchior didn’t bother to distinguish between target and master.
“Anyone. Everyone.” He was pulling so hard on the string of beads that Melchior thought he was going to break it.
“Who do they want Alik to shoot, Caspar?”
“Lee.” Caspar’s eyes dropped to the floor. “I’m Lee.” And then, in a quiet voice: “You.”
“Who do they want Alik to shoot, Caspar? You know who.”
Caspar lurched across the room again, walked straight into the wall, knocked his head against it over and over.
“They want me to shoot you.”
He was by his gun again. He picked it up this time, then turned and walked over to Melchior as steadily as he could, the gun resting flat on his palms like a dead kitten.
Melchior had something in his hand too. Ivelitsch’s telegram.
“Who do they want Alik to shoot, Caspar?”
Caspar stared at the slip of paper in Melchior’s hands. At the name written there. He looked up at Melchior, his shaking hands outstretched, the gun vibrating on his palms, until finally Melchior took it from him and set it on the table and Caspar threw his face in Melchior’s lap like a humbled dog. Melchior put his hand on Caspar’s head and stroked the wiry hair, resisting the urge to bring his glass down on the back of the boy’s head and put him out of his misery.
“You said you’d take care of Lee, Tommy. You said you’d always take care of Lee.”
Very gently, Melchior lifted the string of skulls from Caspar’s neck and slipped it in his pocket.
“He will,” Melchior said. He stroked the hair and tried not to think of the orphanage. “Tommy will take care of Lee. Right up until the very end.”
Millbrook, NY
November 19, 1963
It was nearly one in the morning when BC arrived, but the Big House was ablaze with light. When he burst into the house he found a half dozen Castalians sprawled around the common rooms on the first floor. He counted twenty-two infractions of the law, along with eleven nipples (two were marble, on a statue of Dionysus, and five more were painted on canvas or the bare plaster of the walls), plus one completely naked baby.
No one noticed him at all.
He managed to track down Leary on the second floor in a round garret with a lighted chandelier and rugs draped from the ceiling. Leary sat on a pillow in the middle of the room, his legs folded into a painful-looking knot. BC had to call his name three times before the doctor opened his eyes.
“Is he here?” he demanded, although he knew it was a pointless question. Leary would not be contemplating his navel if Orpheus was on the premises.
“Agent Querrey?” BC was still wearing his hipster getup—was still stained with blood and ash for that matter —and Leary stared at him in confusion. “I would never have recognized you.”
After the circulation had come back to his knees, Leary led BC to his bedroom. A twelve-inch carpet of clothing and books and used dishes covered every square foot of floor space. In the center of this chaos rose a bed whose yellowing sheets reeked of a smell BC remembered from certain of his bunkmates’ cots in the academy: not just sweat, but something else. Something funky. Something …
Sex, BC told himself. Just say it.
“Sex,” he said out loud, and he still didn’t blush, though Leary glanced at him sharply.
“In the past two weeks, Dr. Leary,” BC began, “I’ve seen things that would surprise even you. Things that, for
