Shift: A Novel (3 page)

“Jejune,” Naz said mockingly. “In that case,
dit moi
indeed.”

She’d fixed the accent—local, refined but also relaxed—and the shirt, which, though a little worn around the cuffs (French, fastened with tarnished silver knots), was bespoke. The knowledge that he was of the patrician classes emboldened her. She knew these people. Had been raised by them, manipulated by them on three different continents, and learned how to manipulate in turn.

The man shook his head. “I’m sorry, the story isn’t repeatable in polite company.”

“Well, why don’t you tell me what you’re drinking, and we’ll start there.”

He held up his martini glass. “I believe we are both drinking gin. Although I prefer mine without all that tonic, which only dilutes the alcohol.”

“Oh, but the carbonation speeds its absorption, and the quinine is good for treating malaria, should you travel to exotic climes.”

“I’m afraid summers in Newport is as far south as I’ve gone.” The man waved a finger between their glasses as though it were a magic wand that could refill them—a task the bartender accomplished almost as quickly. “My grandmother swore that quinine kept her gout in check. She took an eyedropper full every evening, although I think the decanter of vermouth in which she took it had something to do with any salacious effects she realized. Salubrious, I mean.” The man’s blush was visible even in the dim light. “Salubrious effects.”

Naz touched her G&T to his martini. They each sipped longly, then sipped again. Once again Naz prompted:

“D-I-M-E.”

“Okay.” The man chuckled. “You asked for it. As part of the initiation ritual into my finals club, pledges were required to submit themselves, if you take my meaning, to a female volunteer known as ‘the coin mistress,’ who translated inches to cents, which were then recorded on the pledge’s forehead in indelible ink. Anyone below a nickel was refused membership. I was one of only three dimes, which, frankly, surprised me, since I’m pretty sure I’m one or two pennies short of the mark.”

He fell silent for a moment. Then:

“I cannot
believe
I just told you that story. Actually, I don’t know what’s worse. The fact that I told the story, or the fact that I said I was one or two pennies short of the mark.”

Naz laughed. “I feel as though I should say something about how much candy eight cents will buy, or nine—” She broke off, blushing even more than her companion, and the man waved his hands like a drowning swimmer.

“Bartender! It is very clear we are not drunk enough for this conversation!”

“So tell me,” Naz said while they waited for their refills, “what has your brow so furrowed this evening?”

“I, uh—” The man’s forehead wrinkled even more as he tried to figure out what she meant. “I have to get the first chapter of my thesis to my advisor by tomorrow afternoon.”

“You seem a little old to be an undergraduate.”

“My doctorate.”

“A professional student. How many pages do you have to turn in?”

“Fifty.”

“And how many more do you have to write?”

“Fifty.”

“Aha.” Naz laughed. “I can understand why you’re so, um, furrowed in the brow area. What’s your dissertation on?”

“Oh please,” the man swatted her question away. “Can’t we just start with names?”

“Oh, pardon me. Naz, I mean—” She broke off. So much for an alias. “Naz Haverman,” she said, offering him her hand. “Nazanin.”

The man’s fingers were cool from his glass. “Nazanin,” he repeated. “Is that … Persian?”

“Very good. People usually think I’m Latin. On my mother’s side,” she added in a quiet voice.

“Sounds like there’s a story there.”

Naz smiled wanly, sipped at her empty glass. “You haven’t told me—”

“Chandler.” His hand pressed hers so firmly that she could feel a pulse bouncing off his fingertips, though she wasn’t sure if it was hers or his. “Chandler Forrestal.”

“Chandler.” The name made her conscious of her mouth. The lips had to purse to pronounce the
ch
and her tongue popped off her soft palate to voice the
d-l
combo, making her feel as if she’d just blown him a kiss. But it was the last name she commented on.

“Forrestal. I feel like I know that name.”

Chandler offered her a pained smile. “My uncle perhaps. He was secretary—”

“Of defense!” Naz exclaimed, but inside she was less excited than suspicious. This seemed a bit … fortuitous, given the circumstances. “Under Roosevelt, right?”

“Navy under Roosevelt. Defense under Truman.”

“Well. I had no idea I was chatting with a member of the political elite.”

But Chandler was shaking his head. “I keep as far away from politics as I can. As you said, I’m a professional student, and if all goes well I will be till I die.”

They both suddenly realized they were still holding hands and released each other simultaneously. A true gentleman, Chandler had eased off his bar stool to introduce himself. He slipped back on it now, but even so, Naz felt a closeness between them that hadn’t been there a moment ago. She relaxed then. She’d been at this long enough to know when the deal was closed.

“Would you excuse me a moment? I have to powder my nose.”

The road to the village Bayo had named cut through a swath
of jungle that had been cleared and grown back so many times it was all one height, like a thirty-foot-tall golf green. The dense weave of trunk, vine, and leaf was as intricately layered as chain mail. This, Melchior thought, was the real difference between forest and jungle: not some measure of latitude or climate, but the willingness of lesser plants to yield to greater. In the temperate zones, oak and maple and conifers choked out all the other life with their spreading canopies and root networks, whereas in the tropics lattices of vine strangled the trees—eucalyptus and palm mostly, the mahogany and lemonwood and acacia having long since been harvested. Strange succulents took root in the trees’ bark and branches, leeching the life from them until they were left whitened skeletons. If he were prone to generalizations, Melchior might’ve seen something symbolic in this: the top-down stability of northern democracy versus the bottom-up anarchy of southern revolution. But a lifetime in intelligence had made him a practical man, one who dealt in facts, not abstractions, targets rather than causes. Eddie Bayo; his Red Army contacts; and whatever it was the latter hoped to sell to the former.

He cursed himself again for shooting Bayo. It was the kind of mistake he couldn’t afford to make. Not tonight. Not after two years spent crisscrossing this godforsaken island. The only thing that gave him any hope was the fact that no one seemed to know anything about the deal. Cuba had more intelligence agents per capita than any place this side of East Berlin—KGB, CIA, the native DGI, plus God only knows how many paramilitaries hopping from one sponsor to another like the local tree frogs, fat, warty fuckers whose skin exuded a poisonous mucus (the frogs, not the paramilitaries, although the latter were if anything even more toxic). At any rate, the blackout suggested the operation was small. Melchior himself would have never gotten wind of it if he hadn’t been keeping tabs on Bayo for more than a year. Two would be perfect,
he thought now. Two Russians, two buyers, four bullets. All he had to do was make sure he didn’t miss, or else he’d end up with a lot more holes in his suit than the one over his heart.

He reached the rendezvous without surprising anything more than one of the island’s ubiquitous feral dogs. Melchior’s relationship with them stretched back to the beginning of his time in Cuba: early on in his eight months in Boniato, he would toss dead rats through the bars of his window after lacing their corpses with strychnine. The guards used the poison as a rodenticide, but the inmates gathered up as much of it as they could, partly to use to kill one another (or commit suicide when they could no longer take their captivity), but mostly because the rats were the steadiest source of food in the prison. Later on Melchior, too, learned to keep the rats for himself, but for a while it was fun to watch two or three wretched mutts fight over a poisoned corpse, only to have the winner collapse in a pool of its own vomit. One thing you could say about the dogs, though: they knew the value of keeping a low profile. The bitch bared her teeth when Melchior’s flashlight passed over her, but she didn’t snarl or bark.

In fact, Melchior’d been hoping one of them might show up. He’d brought a sack of meat from Bayo’s house, and he used morsels of it to keep the bitch trotting behind him all the way to the burned-out sugar plantation and the single structure still standing, though barely: the mill. Its main edifice, a large barnlike structure, was a dark shadow against the moonlit sky. The windows had been boarded up, but flickering light came from a thousand chinks in the siding.

Melchior made one man at the entrance. A perimeter check turned up no other guards or trip wires or jury-rigged warning devices. KGB would’ve never been this careless, he thought. He might pull this off after all.

He took the dripping burlap sack with the meat from Eddie Bayo’s body—Eddie Bayo’s house, that is, heh heh—and tied it over a tree branch about five feet off the ground. The bitch watched him curiously. Her tongue lolled out of her mouth and she smacked her chops greedily.

“Shh.” Melchior jerked a thumb at the guard, who was so close Melchior could smell the smoke of his cigarette.

When the sack was secure, he moved out in a wide arc to the guard’s
left. Before he’d gone halfway, he heard the branch rustle as the bitch went for the meat. More important, so did the guard. His flashlight jerked in that direction. There was a louder rustle as the dog jumped again. The sound was loud and repeated enough that no one—not even a guard stupid enough to stand around in the dark with a cigarette clamped between his lips like a target—would’ve taken it for a person. But it was still enough to hold his attention, and while the guard peered to his left, Melchior drew himself about thirty feet off the man’s right flank. He pulled his knife out and waited.

After the crashing had gone on for more than a minute, the guard finally went to investigate. Melchior moved in. There was no cover between the edge of the jungle and the barn. If the guard turned around, Melchior was dead. But he also had to wait to strike until the guard was far enough from the mill that no one inside would hear him if he managed to cry out.

He was twenty feet behind the guard. Fifteen. Ten.

The guard was almost at the bush. He’d seen the dog but not the sack of meat. He leveled his gun. Melchior was afraid he was going to shoot her. He was five feet behind the guard.

He felt the branch beneath the thin sole of his sandal even as it snapped. The guard whirled, which actually made Melchior’s task easier. He aimed his blade for the throat, felt the cartilage of the man’s larynx resist a moment, then the steel pushed through soft tissue until it lodged against the cervical vertebrae.

The guard opened his mouth but only blood came out, along with a last wet puff of smoke. Melchior separated the man’s spasming fingers from the stock of his weapon with his right hand even as his left wrapped around the man’s shoulders and, gently, as if he were saving a drunken buddy from a bad fall, eased the guard to the ground. He was still alive when Melchior leaned his head forward to ease the rifle strap around his neck, but he was dead when Melchior set his head back on the ground. As he stood up, he noticed that the bitch was staring at him intently.

“He’s all yours.”

Carbine fire marked the walls of the mill like the jumpy lines of an EEG, and the whole of the east side was scorched black. Melchior peered through the bullet holes, made out six men and a flatbed truck.
Two were clearly Russian: the dishwater crew cuts and holstered Makarovs gave them away. One of them stood slightly apart from the group, AK at the ready.

The other three wore gaudy suits and had their own guard posted with his own machine gun—an M-16, which was intriguing to say the least, since Melchior had now made one of the four as none other than Louie Garza, an up-and-comer in Sam Giancana’s
³
Chicago Outfit. Lucky, that’s what he called himself. Lucky Louie Garza. How in the hell had he gotten his hands on a U.S. Army weapon, unless—oh, it was a beautiful unless!—the Company’d brokered a deal with the devil.

But that was something he could find out later. Right now he was more interested in what was hiding behind the slatted sides of the flatbed truck. The second Russian had a large piece of paper in his hands with some kind of drawing or diagram on it. Melchior squinted, but the lines on the page were as indistinct as the threads of an old spiderweb. The tailgate was open, however, and he made his way around the corner of the mill and found another hole to look through.

“Ho-ly
fuck.”

Melchior took his eye away from the bullet hole, rubbed it, leaned forward again. He wasn’t sure if he was delighted or terrified to see that it was still there: a metal box whose crudely welded seams were in direct opposition to the delicacy of the mechanism inside it. The word “
” was stenciled on the side in yellow letters. Melchior sounded it out.
Dvina
. He had to bite his lip to keep from swearing again.