Shift: A Novel (56 page)

Ding-dong
.

Gladys Miller’s smoke-laced diphthongs preceded her corpulent form into BC’s office by half a second. A cigarette dangled from the corner of her pink-painted lips.

“Did you see this morning’s
Peanuts
?” she asked as she made her morning rounds, dropping off papers, retrieving others, and generally poking her nose into places it didn’t belong.

“No.”

She pulled her silver cats’-eye glasses from her chest to examine some photographs in a manila folder on top of a filing cabinet. The pictures documented the arson of a post office in rural Alabama, nothing more grisly than the corpses of ten thousand letters, and Gladys let out a smoke-filled sigh as she let the folder fall closed.

“Lucy finally let Charlie Brown kick the ball.”

“She
did
?” BC reached for his newspaper.

“Of course not. And you”—Gladys turned from the filing cabinet and pulled BC’s resignation letter from his typewriter with a sharp
zzzzzzzip
—“have just about as much chance of asking me to send this letter. So, what’ll it be,
sir
?” She waved the paper in front of him. “Should I drop this in interoffice mail? Or just file it with the others?”

BC didn’t even think of protesting. From her tightly laced steel-gray bun to the sensible shoes five feet below it—not to mention the some two hundred–odd pounds in between—the department secretary was the kind of woman for whom the term “battle-axe” had been invented.

“With the others,” he sighed, and watched as Gladys wadded up the letter and dropped it in the trash basket. She took a long inhale and stared at the man behind the desk. Shoulders broad as a yoke, fingers spindly as wire hangers, a little boy’s haircut crowning the whole package: buzzed on the backs and sides, three-quarters of an inch left up top. Just enough to comb to one side. The part, pulled as tightly across BC’s scalp as the ribbons of Gladys’s girdle, sliced through his dark brown hair like a scar.

She shook her head in confusion or disappointment or possibly even dismay and ashed on the letter she’d just thrown away.

“He wants to see you. And for Pete’s sake stand up straight. You go in there looking like a beat-up old dog, he’ll just kick you that much harder. Heck, I want to kick you myself.”

BC was a foot taller than Gladys—thirteen inches to be exact—but he felt smaller than a headless chicken as he skulked past her out of the room.

“I enjoyed your report on
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
,” she called after him. “If it’s half as racy as you make it out to be, I’ll have to run right out and buy a copy.”

Until that moment, BC Querrey never imagined Gladys Miller having a sexual thought in her life, let alone a sexual experience. Yet her throaty cackle (she would be dead in three years from cancer of the larynx) filled his mind with an image of her naked bulbous body running through a dewy English meadow. It was not a pretty sight. But it turned out to be infinitely preferable to what the next twelve hours had in store for him.

In 1963, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation still occupied a suite of rooms in the southwest (i.e., back) corner of the Department of Justice Building. Funding for a dedicated FBI facility on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue had been approved by Congress the previous year, but it would be another eleven years before the Bureau moved out of the “temporary” quarters it had occupied in Justice for the past thirty years. In the meantime, Helen Gandy, the model to which Gladys Miller (and every other Bureau secretary) aspired, guarded the director’s outer vestibule; once past her slight but formidable presence, visitors entered a short hallway made cramped by a double colonnade of fireproof black filing cabinets. This was “the Vault,” the director’s famed—and feared—personal files. Though there were any number of more secure locations the Vault could have been located, the director insisted the cabinets be left here for all to pass through as their made their way to his sanctum sanctorum. Ten black metal boxes, five on each side. Yet the material they contained—compromising information on Hollywood stars, leading journalists and politicians, not to mention every president since Calvin Coolidge, who’d appointed Hoover head of the (not-yet-Federal) Bureau of Investigation all the way back in 1924—was enough to have earned their owner a forty-year sinecure as the nation’s Top Cop.

Or so it was said. Upon Hoover’s death in 1972—though he spent forty-eight years running the Bureau, he died two years before the building that bore his name was completed—Helen Gandy and Clyde Tolson, the associate director and Hoover’s closest confidante, destroyed most of its contents, and, like the Ark of the Covenant, whatever charms and totems it guarded passed into myth. Certainly BC had never seen the cabinets open, nor had anyone he knew. Although a mountain of circumstantial evidence pointed to their reality, still, the young agent had never been able to shake a sneaking suspicion that the files were as devoid of real data as those lists Joe McCarthy waved around on the Senate floor a few years ago, and every time he walked through the narrow corridor he had to put his hands in his pockets to keep from banging on the cabinets to find out if they were hollow.

Beyond the Vault lay the director’s imposing yet somehow provisional-looking private office. Double doors opened onto bare ivory walls and beige carpeting into which the logo of the Bureau had been woven. The far corners were guarded by eagle-capped poles sporting gold-fringed flags of the United States and the Bureau; between the flags were two windows looking out on Constitution Avenue and the back of the National Museum of Natural History, and between the windows sat the director’s modestly sized desk. Over the desk hung a picture of the president of the United States of America. Though John Kennedy had been in office for two and a half years, a large pale outline still framed his rather skimpy-looking portrait, as if to say that the war hero so popular with the younger generation had a long way to go to fill the void left by the general who masterminded the Normandy invasion and defeated Adolf Hitler.

Needless to say, BC had no idea that Melchior was thinking almost exactly the same thing ten miles away in Langley.

Beneath the haloed portrait, a man sat squinting at a stack of pages through a pair of black-rimmed reading glasses. His thinning hair was combed flat against his skull, and his pale, almost neckless face spilled over a nondescript gray suit like foam spewing from the tip of a science-project volcano. Four decades in office had erased any vestige of an inner self from J. Edgar Hoover, until only the public servant remained. He had secrets, of course—secrets always came with power, as evidenced by the gauntlet of filing cabinets—and the director’s were rumored to be as scandalous as anyone’s. But that’s not the same as saying he had an inner life. The Bureau had replaced Hoover’s blood with paper and his imagination with indexes, engulfing his once-lean features in a gelatinous form that seemed held together by the buttons of his suit and the knot of his tie. His eyes blinked out of two folds of skin like myopic camera shutters. His voice was as rapid and impersonal as clacking typewriter keys. He glanced up when BC entered the room, then returned his attention to the stack of pages before him—field reports by the look of them, which he was marking up with the earnest concentration of a second-grade teacher.

“Didn’t your mother teach you not to walk into a room with your hands in your pockets, Agent Querrey?”

BC pulled his hands from his pants. The lead of Hoover’s pencil crossed out lines with a faint squeak that made the agent think of a termite burrowing through a wall. “Tell me, Agent Querrey,” the director said after a long moment, “have you ever heard of a psychologist by the name of Timothy Leary?”

The name rang a bell, but BC couldn’t place it. “No, sir.”

“Until very recently, Dr. Leary was associated with Harvard University.” Hoover’s voice was slightly vexed, as if he expected Bureau agents to know the faculty of every major American institute of higher learning, or at least those of the Ivy League. Or who knows, maybe it was just the report in front of him. He touched his pencil lead to the tip of his tongue, drew a line through six or seven words, then continued speaking. “Dr. Leary left Harvard at the beginning of the year, and, after a brief sojourn in Mexico, has now established some type of ‘experimental-community’-
cum
-‘research-center’ outside the town of Millbrook, New York.”

BC could hear the echo of beatnik mumbo jumbo in a term like “experimental community,” but he wasn’t sure how such activities merited the attention of the Bureau. Of course, he rarely understood why many of the groups he investigated merited the Bureau’s attention, so that wasn’t saying much. It wasn’t his job to know, only to do.

“The express purpose of this research center,” the director was saying, “is the investigation of an extremely powerful ‘psychoto-mimetic’ chemical compound called lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD for short. The Bureau has, of course, been aware of LSD for some time. Allen Ginsberg and other malcontents of his ilk have been extolling its virtues for some time. It is manufactured by Sandoz Laboratories, a pharmaceuticals company based in Switzerland. For the past several years, Sandoz has graciously allowed us to track not only its sales in the United States, but also its export to other countries as well. Just over a year ago, however, we noticed a discrepancy between the amount of LSD Sandoz manufactures and the amount they purport to sell. Initially we feared the company was concealing shipments to the Soviet Union or one of its Eastern Bloc satellites, but with a little digging we were able to discover that the missing quantity had in fact been acquired by Dulles’s boys over at Langley—McCone’s boys, I should probably say—although I think we all know where their loyalties lie. Ac-cum-mu-late.”

Silence hung in the room like a low cloud. The only sound was the director’s pencil drawing an X through an entire paragraph. Finally BC spoke.

“Beg pardon, sir?”

“Ac-cum-mu-late.” The director didn’t look up. “One ‘m’ or two?”

“Er, one, I believe, sir.”

The director frowned. “I think it’s two.” He made a mark, then turned the last sheet face down. Opened the center drawer of his desk, put his pencil in it, closed it; took his reading glasses off, opened a side drawer, put them away as well. Only then did he look up at the agent standing before him. The left side of his mouth slanted upwards, the right down; the rest of his face remained unchanged, as though Hoover’s mouth were a snake skimming the surface of swamp water too sludgy to ripple. Over the past year, BC had come to recognize this parallelogram as his boss’s version of a smile.

“Now, I don’t pretend to understand the reasoning behind what I’m about to tell you, let alone condone it. As you know, I am no fan of Allen Dulles nor of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose mission more properly belongs under the auspices of this Bureau. I am merely repeating information as it has been reported to me. Under the direction of Sidney Gottlieb, the director of the so-called ‘Technical Services Section,’ the agency is investigating drugs with what they see as potential intelligence applications. Although they claim to be researching nothing more potent than incapacitants and truth serums, we have it on good authority that they are in fact looking for chemical agents that have”—the director found it necessary to pause again—“mind-control abilities.” A twitch that could have been a smile, or just an embarrassed tic. “As we understand it, the goal is to create a so-called ‘sleeper agent’—a Manchurian candidate, if you will, who can be programmed to perform certain actions not only against his will, but without his knowledge. You read
The Manchurian Candidate
, did you not, Agent Querrey?”

The question was rhetorical. BC had written a report on the novel for the director eight months ago. The director’s mouth twitched and slanted more sharply than before—a smirk?—but the rest of his face remained shapelessly still, even after he began speaking again.

“Because CIA lacks the facilities to fully investigate these kinds of drugs in-house, it has been compelled to foster associations with third parties, often without their knowledge. Enter Dr. Leary. Apparently his ‘experiments’ did not pass academic muster at Harvard, and he was, to put it politely, not asked to renew his contract. Cut off from his academic supplier, the doctor was forced to enter into a relationship of convenience with Billy Hitchcock. No, not the Orioles ‘coach.’” Another lopsided smile, acknowledging the Orioles dismal .500 record last season. “William Mellon Hitchcock is the grandson of William Larimer Mellon, the founder of Gulf Oil, and the great-grandson of Thomas Mellon, founder of Mellon Bank. He also, apparently, has aspirations to being a spook, and, in exchange for being allowed to supply Dr. Leary with enough LSD for his experiments, he reports on the results of those experiments to his handler at CIA, and Edward Logan based in Boston. This morning we received credible intelligence suggesting Dr. Leary has achieved some kind of breakthrough. The exact nature of this breakthrough is not clear to us, nor does it appear to be clear to CIA, perhaps because of Leary’s attenuated relationship with Logan. I need you to travel to Millbrook to find out if anything Dr. Leary has discovered—or, dare I say,
created
—has the potential to be a threat to the interests or security of the United States of America, and, if so, to take it, or him, into custody. The last thing we need is for CIA to get its hands on this ‘Orpheus.’”

As he spoke, Hoover’s mouth seemed to separate from the unmoving white sludge that surrounded it, until it was just a void in space through which issued the director’s uncannily articulate summary. Beyond the pinkish slug-shaped lips and small, sharp-looking teeth, the tongue pulsed wetly, and, even further back, the uvula wiggled in front of the dark shadow of the director’s esophagus like a pendulum swinging at the entrance of a house of horrors. With each word, BC felt as if he were being sucked toward that void, so completely that when the director’s lips sealed shut, he almost felt as if he were being swallowed.