Shift: A Novel (30 page)

“I don’t mind that you turned to me. I mind that you didn’t fill me in. Do you think I would have let her out of the residence if I’d known CIA was looking for her, let alone KGB?” She paused. “Melchior, you have to tell me what you’re doing. Not just with Naz.” Her eyes burned into his. “With Orpheus.”

Song’s face was inscrutable. Was she trying to help him, Melchior wondered, or herself? He didn’t know. And what did he want from her anyway? Assistance, or something more?

What the hell was he doing? Risking his life to squirrel Orpheus away from the Company, and then Cuba, too. If only Chandler hadn’t disappeared. If only it hadn’t been Rip the Company sent after him. If only KGB hadn’t entered the fray. He could have handled one thing at a time: Song, or Naz, or Chandler, or Cuba. But all of them, all at once. It was too much.

“Melchior,” Song said again. “Are you going—?”

“Don’t say it!” He jerked a thumb at BC. “We have to get rid of this one first.”

Song’s eyebrows flicked, just once. “Killing FBI agents? You
have
come a long way since the last time I saw you.”

“Believe me, there’s nothing I’d like to do more than drill Beau here through the eyes, but that’s the kind of heat I don’t need on top of everything else. But don’t worry, there are other ways to take care of him—ways he’ll enjoy a lot less than death.” He pulled a vial from his pocket. “How’s Garrison’s head? Can he work a camera?”

Song paused a moment, then smiled. “I think he can manage.”

An hour later
, Song and Melchior stood in the open archway between Lee Anne’s sitting room and bedroom. The only sound in the suite was the clicking of a camera shutter and a faint, confused moaning.

On the bed a headless, naked male torso and a pair of well-muscled legs stuck out from beneath Lee Anne’s large firm buttocks and wild mane of hair. BC’s skin seemed even whiter against Lee Anne’s chocolate brownness, and his moans echoed out from her nether regions.

“What did you give him?”

“A combination of things. LSD, coupled with methamphetamine to keep him awake, and six shots of Scotch to make sure his breath smells extra sweet when the cops find him.”

“I hope you didn’t raid my private supply. It costs fifty dollars a bottle.”

“It costs someone fifty dollars a bottle. I doubt it’s you.”

“The LSD seems to have had a
suppressing
effect on him.”

Melchior chuckled. “Somehow I don’t think it’s the drugs that’re keeping BC’s little soldier down.”

“How’s this?” Lee Anne’s back was arched so that her ass peeked out from beneath the feathered hem of her negligee, and her breasts sat atop her brassiere as though on a shelf.

“You look great, baby,” Melchior said, “but we gotta see his face. Scoot down his chest a bit.”

“Naz?” BC said when his mouth was uncovered. His hands fumbled at Lee Anne’s breasts. “I’m sorry, they’re just so”—he shook one up and down—
“bouncy.”

Song stiffened at the mention of Naz. “There’s something about that girl.”

“You should meet her boyfriend.”

“Orpheus?”

Melchior waved the question away.

“Let’s finish this first.”

“Actually,” Song said, “I’m more concerned about this.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a piece of paper, handed it to Melchior.

Melchior crumpled the note in his hand. “Fuck.”

Song waited. Then, when it was clear Melchior wasn’t going to be more forthcoming: “Can I offer some advice?”

“Shoot.”

“You need an organization.”

“To do what?”

“To do what you’re doing.”

“Don’t say it.”

Song turned him away from the bed and made him look her in the eye.

“Melchior,” she said. “You’re going rogue.”

Melchior was silent a long time. He looked down at the crumpled piece of paper in his hand.

“Fuck,” he said again.

Song surprised him then. She put her hand on his shoulder, turned her face to his. Somehow the little knot on the side of her head made her that much more attractive.

“Yes,” she said. “Let’s.”

“Flip him over,” Garrison was saying as they left the room. “And hand me that newel ball. He thinks popping me upside the head was painful, but it ain’t nothing to what it’ll feel like when I stick that piece-a wood where the sun don’t shine.”

It was easy to climb the snake ladder once you set your mind
to it.

He’d been afraid the snakes were going to bite him, but soon enough he realized they couldn’t—if they opened their mouths the ladder would come apart and the snakes would fall to their deaths in the canyon below, which was inexplicably filled with camellias. Camellias made from cut glass.

Well, a lot was inexplicable really. Like why he was climbing a snake ladder, or why it led to a giant nest woven of tubes and wires, or why there was a baby sitting inside the nest.

His baby.

His and Naz’s.

He wasn’t sure how they’d made a baby, since all he’d done was squeeze her breasts—which had been much larger than he’d thought they’d be, and browner, too—and he was a little surprised their child was still an infant, since it had been almost three centuries since the last time he’d seen her. But he didn’t worry about that, just as he didn’t worry about why the infant was the size of a rhinoceros. It was his baby—his and Naz’s—and it was calling him. He had to go to his son.

He himself had grown so old that his wrinkles had turned to scales. Well, less snake scales than lizard skin. His fingernails had grown into claws, and his hair had been replaced by a dorsal ridge that extended from the top of his head to the tip of his tail, which hung down several feet lower than his legs. He didn’t remember when any of these changes had occurred, but he accepted them at face value because they were what he saw when he looked in the mirror, or when he closed his eyes for that matter. There were mirrors inside his eyelids now, and they reflected him more perfectly than any looking glass ever had.

He was nearly at the top of the ladder now. The snakes hissed and
writhed in his grasp, but none bit him. For all he knew they were his friends and not his enemies. It was hard to tell these days.

He glanced up. The tubes and wires and plates of soldered steel that made his son’s nest were familiar for some reason, although he couldn’t remember where he’d seen them before, and even though they weren’t transparent he could still see the boy’s shadow through their tangled mass. His chubby legs splayed in front of his torso, his pudgy arms batted at the air. The nest itself was huge. As big as a pile of towels in the laundry room of a prison. Given the size, the boy must be seven, eight feet tall. BC wondered if he had been born this big or grown to this size. It would have been a painful delivery for Naz.

He reached the lip of the nest sooner than he expected, toppled over the edge into its hollow cradle. The boy was even bigger than he’d imagined. Eight or nine feet tall from the bottom of his diapered rump to the wisp of hair on his otherwise bald head, which was easily five feet in diameter. Except … except the head wasn’t a head.

It was a bomb.

An old-fashioned bomb, perfectly spherical, with two chalk circles marking the boy’s eyes and a single line stretching from ear to ear for a mouth. The coil of hair growing from the head was actually a fuse, and the fuse was burning. For some reason its glowing end reminded BC of the tip of a cigar, but before he could figure out why, the fuse reached the bomb with a little
pfft
of smoke.

BC braced himself, but all that happened was that the mouth opened with a clockwork whir, revealing row after row of slimy, sharp teeth and a sulfurous glint coming from the back of its throat. BC squinted. It was Naz’s ring.

Tell Chandler
, the mouth said, opening wider and wider.

“Tell him what?” BC said.

Tell him about me
, the mouth said, and then, darting forward, it swallowed him whole.

The beat cop
who found BC on the corner of Chesapeake and Seventh Street SE nudged the moaning man with his foot.

“Buddy? You okay?”

He rolled BC over, and a wave of whiskey-soaked breath bathed his face. Underneath it, though, the officer smelled something sweet and smoky. Marijuana. And a large dose of urine as well. The bum had pissed his pants.

“Fuckin’ beatniks,” he said, and this time his toe caught BC squarely in the jaw. “Let’s go, buddy. It’s into the tank with you.”

As he hoisted BC onto his shoulder, a picture fell out of the bum’s expensive-looking jacket. It took the officer a moment to sort out the tangle of legs and arms—he counted six of the former, but only five of the latter. He hoped the missing limb had merely been cropped from the frame.

“A pervert, too, huh? What the hell is this world coming to?”

When they finished, Melchior said, “That proves the old axiom
that the boss should be able to outperform any of her employees.” In case Song had missed the point, he added,
“Wow.”

Song lit a cigarette, took a drag, passed it to Melchior.

“As I was saying earlier,” she said in a voice that gave no hint of the ripe smell that hung in the room, “you need an organization.”

Melchior sucked on the cigarette, held the smoke in his lungs just to the point of discomfort, then exhaled.

“This conversation requires clothes.”

“So,” Song recapped
after Melchior had told her everything that had happened since he’d returned to the States. “Orpheus in Frisco. Naz in DC. And something”—she looked at Melchior significantly—“in Cuba. You entrusted them all to freelancers and look what happened. You’ve lost at least two assets, and, depending on what Comrade Ivelitsch meant by his note, possibly all three.”

“He wouldn’t have left that note if he’d found it.”

Song rolled her eyes.

“I know it’s a bomb, Melchior.”

“What’s a bomb?”

“I told you. Drew Everton, second and fourth Thursday of every month.”

“He doesn’t believe me when I tell him there’s a nuke in Cuba, but he tells—”

“Focus, Melchior. We’re talking about Ivelitsch. He wouldn’t have left that note if he was acting with KGB approval.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying he’s testing the waters, just like you. Looking for an excuse to go freelance.”

“And what’s that mean to me?”

“He’s going to call. My guess is he’ll make a perfunctory effort to turn you. I want you to counteroffer. The two of you pretend to work for KGB to take advantage of their resources, but in actuality you form a new, independent organization.”

“With you as a partner, of course.”

“Let’s face it, Melchior. If someone didn’t kick your ass, you’d still be carrying around a slingshot.”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure I’d’ve graduated to a shotgun by now.” Melchior chuckled. “And what’s this new organization stand for anyway? What is it supposed to do?”

Song made sure Melchior was looking at her before she spoke.

“Anything you want.”

Even before Chandler opened his eyes he had a sense of himself
in a moving vehicle. This was strange, because he was also lying down. The first thing he saw was a ceiling of tufted white silk a scant eighteen inches above him, stained here and there from old drips. Two rows of windows flanked either side of the long, narrow compartment, covered by drawn curtains.

It hit him. He was in a hearse.

He was dead.

A voice chuckled somewhere in front of him.

“Back among the living?”

Chandler rolled
onto his stomach—he wasn’t tied up, which all by itself was a good thing—and he wasn’t in a coffin either. An even bigger plus. The rearview mirror was angled so that the driver could see the bed of the hearse. Chandler could see the driver as well: a white man, a few years younger than him. His haircut looked military, but his black suit was almost rakishly mod, the lapels barely an inch wide, the tie equally narrow.

Suddenly the memories crashed down on him. Running from the Phillips station, the smell of smoke in his nostrils, roasting flesh. He’d barely made it to his car before passing out. It was three hours before a Highway Patrolman inspected the vehicle. Chandler remembered the sound of the billy club tapping the window, a voice calling through the glass, the door opening, the cop shaking his shoulder, the twenty-minute wait for the ambulance to arrive and the forty-five-minute ride to the hospital and the battery of tests the doctors had performed on him—tests to which he had remained unresponsive, even as he recorded everything that was happening through the eyes and ears of the people around him. He’d spent a day in the bed—twenty-three hours and
fourteen minutes—and then this man had arrived and taken him away; they’d been on the road for almost twenty hours.