Chandler sighed now, let his concentration drop. The effort of reaching into so many minds had used up a good portion of his energy, and he needed to save what little he had left.
Something was wrong, though. Where was Ruby? How come he wasn’t out here trying to figure out why he’d been raided? Chandler sent out the lightest feelers he could, trying to discern who was still in the club. He counted three girls in the dressing room, all of them thinking about stuffing their tips into their purses before Ruby could take his cut. There were the two unconscious bouncers, the barman hiding behind the bar. Nothing that felt like Ruby. But …
He pushed toward a mirror set in the wall high over the bar. Not a mirror, he realized. A window. It must be the office. There was a … cloud on the other side of the glass. Not a mind, not as he’d come to understand it, but not a void either.
He looked around, saw a door off to one side of the bar. He went to it, pushed it open. A narrow staircase led up.
He mounted the stairs slowly, pushing all the while at the cloud. It had edges but no dimension. He kept trying to see around it, but there was just more cloud.
His head came up to the floor level of the office. He saw a carpet littered with cigarette butts, coffee cups, soda bottles, the kind of stains you don’t want to look at too closely in a place like this. He mounted higher, reached the landing, turned around.
A voice spoke from the shadows at the opposite end of the room.
“Hello, Chandler.”
He squinted, and Melchior’s face jumped out of the darkness. He pushed then, pushed with all his might, but all he felt was the cloud, and he stumbled forward and nearly fell.
Melchior smiled, and only then did Chandler see the gun in his hand.
Chandler heard the click when Melchior pulled the trigger, but instead of a shot he heard a hiss of compressed air followed immediately by a stabbing punch in his abdomen. He looked down to see a barb dangling from his chest, then felt himself falling to the floor.
Washington, DC
November 20, 1963
At first glance, it seemed that Charles Jarrell had acquired several new stacks of newspaper in the eleven days since BC’d seen him last. The foyer was barred by a wall of densely packed newsprint; to get into the rest of the house you had to veer into the living room, following a trail that led almost all the way to the far wall before doubling back into the front hall. Jarrell led BC through this maze into a room that had apparently once been a library or study: several thousand books still filled the built-in shelves, but they’d been turned spine in, so that all one saw was the different colored pages aligned in faded vertical strips like one of the abstract paintings in Peggy Hitchcock’s house.
Jarrell tipped his bottle of rye into the two glasses that sat on the stack of papers in front of the couch. BC was sure they were the same glasses from his last visit.
“Excuse the mess. You caught me in the middle of refiling.”
“Refiling?”
“Goddamn Company broke in here night before last. They break in pretty regularly, so I need to make sure they can’t find anything.” Even as he spoke, Jarrell grabbed two feet off the top of one of the stacks, moved it to another.
BC looked around the room. In addition to the stacks, loose papers lined the floor and snaked up the walls. He felt like he was inside a giant papier-mache sculpture.
“The, uh, Company breaks in?”
“Once a month, sometimes more. They try to put things back, but I can always tell when they’ve been here.” Jarrell split a stack into a half dozen units, reshuffled them like cards, then moved the whole pile to a corner of the room. “Bureau probably comes half that often.”
“That just leaves KGB,” BC said, his voice light but tight.
“They’ve only been here once or twice.” Jarrell busied himself building what looked like a castle wall complete with gun emplacements. “That I know of.”
“I meant in New York. I, um, had a run-in with them.”
“I know.” Jarrell grunted now, continued moving paper. “In a mere eight weeks you’ve gone from being a COINTELPRO weasel to being a person of interest to both the Bureau
“You heard about that?”
“Heard that you caused a bit of a ruckus at Madam Song’s, too.” Jarrell paused to regard BC through his stacks of paper. “What
“I had him,” BC said then. “I had him, and I let him get away.”
“Melchior?”
Jarrell met BC’s gaze, then looked away. He grabbed his glass, saw that it was empty, walked over to BC and picked up his drink, and drained it in a swallow.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” he said then. “Must be those puppy-dog eyes.”
