Shift: A Novel Read online

  Also by Dale Peck

  Sprout

  Body

  Surfing

  The Lost Cities: A Drift House Voyage

  Drift House: The First Voyage

  What We Lost

  Hatchet Jobs

  Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye

  The Law of Enclosures

  Martin and John

  To Lisa, Amelia, and Ethan

  —T. K.

  To my husband, Lou Peralta,

  for his unwavering love and support

  during the writing of this book

  —D. P.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part 1: The Monroe Doctrine

  Part 2: Orpheus Descends

  Part 3: Orpheus Ascends

  Part 4: The Truman Doctrine

  Epilogue

  Operation Mongoose

  Project Eurydice

  Our Man in Havana

  Leary’s Little Trip

  Department of Justice Building, Washington, DC - May 17, 1963

  Captions

  yet the gods sent Orpheus5 away from Hades empty-handed …

  —Plato, Symposium

  Dallas, TX

  December 30, 2012

  The apparition appeared at 11:22 a.m. over I-35, in the two-hundred-foot gap between the north- and southbound lanes where the interstate passed over Commerce Street. Traffic was heavy at that hour, but moving well: twelve lanes on 35, average speed sixty-six miles per hour, another six on Commerce traveling only slightly less fast. When the flaming figure appeared in the sky, the results were predictably disastrous.

  According to the Texas State Highway Patrol, thirty-five vehicles collided with one another, resulting in seventy-seven injuries: cuts and bruises, whiplash, broken bones, concussions, at least three seizures. A pregnant woman went into labor, but both she and the baby—and, remarkably, everyone else involved in the pileup—survived the trauma. In addition to the injured, another 1,886 people claimed to have seen the apparition, making a grand total of 1,963, a figure later confirmed by both the Dallas Police Department and the Dallas Morning News. It was this last number that sent the story, already ricocheting around the airwaves and the Internet, into the stratosphere.

  12/30.

  11:22.

  1963.

  The time, date, and year that the thirty-fifth president of the United States had been assassinated, less than a quarter mile due east of the sighting.

  It was possible—possible, though infinitesimally improbable—that this sequence was just a coincidence. Why hadn’t the figure appeared at 12:30 p.m. on November 22, skeptics were soon enough arguing on chat shows and blogs, the actual date and time of the assassination? What was harder for them to dismiss was the fact that every single witness, all 1,963 of them, reported seeing exactly the same thing. This wasn’t a fuzzy image of a crucified Jesus on a piece of toast or the shadowy outline of the Virgin Mary in an MRI. In fact, none of the twenty-six traffic and surveillance cameras with a view of the area recorded anything besides the accident itself. Nevertheless, each and every witness reported seeing—

  “A boy,” Michael Campbell, twenty-nine, told one reporter.

  “A flaming boy,” Antonio Gonzales, fifty-six, told the paramedic bandaging the gouge over his left eye.

  “A boy made of fire,” Lisa Wallace, thirty-four, told the person who answered the 800 number of her insurance carrier.

  “He looked right at me.”

  “It was like he was looking for someone.”

  “But it wasn’t me.”

  There was a palpable sense of disappointment as witness after witness made this last admission, as if they’d somehow failed a test. But then their spirits perked up when they reported that they’d felt the boy coming, as if the privilege of witnessing his appearance was a blessing on the order of those bestowed on the sainted receivers of visions at Guadalupe, Lourdes, Fátima. One after another, witnesses reported the sensation of a tremor in the roadway that came up through their cars and was absorbed by fingers and toes and bottoms—the kind of vibration Mindy Pysanky, a California native, described as “like the start of an earthquake.” Hands tightened their grips on steering wheels or door handles, eyes scanned mirrors and windshields for the cause of the disturbance, which appeared—no matter where people were, whether they approached the area from north or south or east or west—directly in their line of vision, facing them. Looking them straight in the eye, and then looking away.

  “I saw him as clearly as I see your face,” said Yu Wen, fourteen.

  “His eyes were wide open,” said Jenny McDonald, twenty-eight.

  “His mouth was open too,” said Billy Ray Baxter, seventy-nine.

  “A perfect O,” said Charlotte Wolfe, thirty-six, adding: “It was the saddest face I ever saw in my life.”

  “Not just sad,” Halle Wolfe, Charlotte’s daughter, eleven, clarified. “Lonely.”

  The boy blazed in the air “for three or four seconds,” a figure that caused almost as much furor as the previous numbers, as lone gunman supporters lined up against conspiracy theorists over whether the apparition was some kind of otherworldly endorsement of the Warren Commission’s1 findings or those of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. No matter which side you were on, however, it was hard to say what the flaming boy could have had to do with a crime whose forty-ninth anniversary had gone largely un-remarked-upon a month earlier. Not one of the witnesses said he reminded them of the dead president or his (presumed) assassin. In fact, almost everyone expressed disinterest in the unnerving string of numbers when it was relayed to them, let alone the proximity of the sighting to Dealey Plaza, the Texas School Book Depository, the grassy knoll.

  One thousand, nine hundred sixty-three witnesses. All of them seeing the same thing: a seraphic figure ten feet tall, arms and legs trailing off in ropes of fire, a corona of flame rising from his head. The empty shadows of his eyes scanned the crowd while a silent cry leaked with the smoke from his open mouth. Sixty-two percent of witnesses used the word “angel” to describe the appearance, 27 percent used the word “demon,” the remaining 11 percent used both. But only one man said that he looked like Orpheus.

  “From the myth,” Lemuel Haynes, a businessman “from the East Coast,” told Shana Wright, on-air correspondent for the Dallas-Fort Worth NBC affiliate. “You know, turning around, looking for Eurydice, only to see her dragged back down to hell?”

  Wright, who later described Haynes as “elderly, but still fit, with a large build, dark hair, and mixed complexion,” said that the witness told her he’d just landed at Love Field and was on his way to a meeting.

  “What a lucky coincidence,” Wright recalled telling him, “that it should show up at the same time you did,” to which Haynes replied:

  “Luck had nothing to do with it.”

  According to Wright, she then asked Haynes if he thought the apparition had anything to do with the Kennedy assassination. Haynes looked over Wright’s shoulder for a long time—at the Texas School Book Depository, she later realized, which was just visible through the famous Triple Underpass—before turning back to her.

  “It has everything to do with it,” he said, “and nothing at all,” and then his driver, “a middle-aged Asian man with a wiry build,” knocked her cameraman unconscious and took the memory chip from his camera.

  By the time Homeland Security arrived at the scene, they were gone.

  2

  We owe it, therefore, to candor, and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers, to declare, that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere, as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colon
ies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered, and shall not interfere. But with the governments who have declared their independence, and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration, and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling, in any other manner, their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition towards the United States.

  … It is impossible that the allied powers should extend their political system to any portion of either continent, without endangering our peace and happiness: nor can any one believe that our Southern Brethren, if left to themselves, would adopt it of their own accord. It is equally impossible, therefore, that we should behold such interposition, in any form, with indifference. If we look to the comparative strength and resources of Spain and those new governments, and their distance from each other, it must be obvious that she can never subdue them. It is still the true policy of the United States to leave the parties to themselves, in the hope that other powers will pursue the same course.

  —James Monroe, 1823

  Camagüey Province, Cuba

  October 26, 1963

  The big man with the cigar pinched between thumb and forefinger towered over the bound, quivering form of Eddie Bayo, one foot on the fallen man’s throat like a gladiator stamping victory on a vanquished foe. The foot was shod in a woven leather sandal—less gladiator than plain old huarache—and the sock had a hole in the big toe, but even so, it was pretty clear who was in charge.

  The six-inch-long pencil-thin panatela had a name—it was a Gloria Cubana Medaille d’Or No. 4—but the big man’s name had disappeared along with his mother when he was a little boy, and for two decades he’d thought of himself only by the cipher bestowed on him when the Wiz plucked him out of the orphanage in New Orleans: Melchior. One of the three Wise Men. The black one, to be specific, which told you something about the way he was perceived in Langley, as well as about the Wiz’s less-than-genteel Mississippi brand of humor.

  Just looking at him, you couldn’t say for sure. His skin had been described by various adjectives ranging from “olive” to “swarthy” to “high yellow.” One of the maids in the orphanage had told him to embrace his “redbone” heritage, and his favorite whore in Havana’s Central bordellos called him “café con leche,” which amused him no end—especially when she said he was “good to the last drop.” But none of this changed the fact that after twenty years in American intelligence—and despite the fact that he stood six feet two inches tall, with shoulders like cantaloupes and thighs reminiscent of wooden barrels—he was still referred to as the Wiz’s pickaninny.

  So: Melchior.

  He raised the cigar to his mouth to bring up the cherry. The glowing tip illuminated full lips, aquiline nose, dark eyes that gleamed with singularity of intent. A copious amount of brilliantine wasn’t quite able to eliminate the curl in his thick, dark locks. He could have been Greek, Sephardic, a horseman from the steppes of the Caucasus—although, in his brass-buttoned, double-breasted navy linen suit, he looked like nothing so much as a sugar hacendado from before the revolución. The suit had in fact belonged to a former plantation owner, until he’d been executed for crimes against the proletariat.

  Not that any of this mattered to Eddie Bayo.

  “I don’t wanna have to ask you again, Eddie,” his captor said in Spanish not just perfect, but perfectly Cuban, albeit in a guttural kind of way.

  “Fuck your mother,” Bayo gasped against the foot on his throat. His snarl didn’t really come off, given that his upper lip looked like a slug that’d been ground beneath someone’s heel—which, in fact, it had.

  Melchior brought the glowing tip of his cigar to Bayo’s right nipple. “My mother, being long dead, has a snatch that’s too dried up for my taste.” Flesh sizzled; smoke tickled his nostrils; Bayo’s throat convulsed beneath the foot on his Adam’s apple but all that came out was a strangled gurgle. When Melchior took the cigar away, Bayo’s nipple looked like a volcanic crater. A dozen more black and red coronas were scattered across his chest, although it would have taken a particularly rarefied eye to notice that they occupied the same relative positions as the major Hawaiian volcanoes. Geography had been one of the Wiz’s first lessons to his protégé, along with the importance of keeping yourself amused.

  A hole flashed behind the notch of his lapel as Melchior reached into his breast pocket for his Zippo, and he rubbed it lightly between his fingers; he could just feel the dried blood that kept it from fraying.

  “You’re running out of skin, Eddie,” he said, relighting. “I’m gonna have to go for the eyes soon. Believe me when I tell you, few things hurt more than a cigar in the eye.”

  Bayo said something unintelligible. Behind his back his bound hands audibly scratched against the splintered floorboards, as though he hoped he could still dig himself out of this one.

  “What was that, Eddie, I couldn’t make it out. Your mouth must be dry from all the screaming. Here, let me help.” Melchior grabbed a long-necked bottle of rum, poured the shot on Bayo’s chest rather than in his mouth. Bayo moaned as the alcohol burned his wounds but didn’t actually start screaming until Melchior sparked his lighter against the spilled rum. Six-inch tongues of flame danced on Bayo’s skin for almost a full minute. A boxer once told Melchior that you didn’t know how long a minute was until you stepped in the ring with Cassius Clay, but Melchior was pretty sure Bayo would take exception to that statement.

  When the flames finally went out, Bayo’s skin was bubbling like a pancake that needed turning over. Melchior puffed on his cigar. “Well?”

  “Why should I … tell you … anything?” Bayo panted. “You’re just gonna … kill me … when you get … what you want.”

  Melchior’s lips curled around his cigar in a private smile. In the past two decades he’d heard people beg for their lives in more languages than the Hay-Adams had flags flying from its facade. But truth be told (and like most people who worked in intelligence, he’d long since forgotten what the word meant) he’d never actually killed someone in cold blood. Oh, he’d commissioned half a dozen hits in his day, shot his fair share of men in combat, but always under orders. Never once had he taken the law into his own hands, let alone gone Double-O on someone. But he was tired of Cuba—tired of this and every other banana republic and oil emirate and strategically significant sand spit he’d been deployed to over the past twenty years, and, now that the Wiz had been retired, he knew he was only one suicide mission away from being under the field rather than in it. He needed Bayo’s confession. Not just to learn the location of his rendezvous with a group of rogue Red Army officers, but to earn the security of an office in Langley. The field nigger was finally moving into the big house, and wasn’t no one gonna get in his way. Least of all Eddie Bayo.

  “I like the No. 4,” he said now, holding out the panatela as though evaluating it for purchase. “A simple cigar, but solid. Complements just about anything without overpowering it. You can smoke one with your morning coffee or wait till your after-dinner cognac. Hell, it even makes this disgusting Cuban rum taste okay. And of course the thinness”—Melchior jammed the cigar into the hollow of Bayo’s left nostril—“allows for precision targeting.”

  Bayo’s scream was like two plates of steel sliding against each other. The Cuban rolled and thrashed on the floor until once again Melchior put his sandaled foot on the man’s throat.

  “Roasted meat,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “Lookit that. I finally found something the No. 4 don’t go with.”

  “You don’t get it,” Bayo spat when he could talk again. “This is bigger than a two-bit thug like you. Russians won’t back down. They got nothing to lose.”

  Melchior pulled his knife from its sheath.

  “I don’t got any safety pins on me, so I’m gonna have to slice your eyelid off so you can’t blink. I imagine that’ll hurt a fair bit, but it’s g
onna feel like heaven compared to the sensation of having your eyeball melted down like tallow. That’s candle wax made from animal fat for an ignoramus like you. Like the kind the Nazis made from the Jews. You want your sister to see you looking like that, Eddie?” He dropped to one knee. “You want Maria to see her big brother looking like a burned-out kike blubber candle?” Melchior sucked at the cigar, getting it brighter and brighter. “How old is she now? Maria. Eleven? Twelve?”

  “Not even you—”

  “Yes, Eddie, I would. If it would get me off this shit-fuck island, I would gladly lay Fidel Castro on the altar of the Catedral de San Cristóbal de la Habana in front of a full congregation and stick a communion wafer on the head of my dick and shove it between what I assume, based on his beard, are a couple of incredibly hairy ass cheeks. And I wouldn’t even enjoy that. Especially the hairy part. But Maria? She’s a pretty girl. No one’s ever stubbed a cigar out on her face. And no one ever will. Not if you talk to me.”

  He brought the cigar an inch away from Bayo’s left eye.

  “Talk to me, Eddie. Save us both the trouble.”

  Bayo had cojones, you had to give him that. Melchior was pretty sure it was the threat to his sister that broke him, not the pain. He whispered the name of a village about seven clicks away, close to the border of Las Villas.

  “The big plantation south of town got burned out during the fighting in ’58. Meeting’s in the old mill.”

  Melchior jammed the cigar in his mouth and jerked Bayo to his knees. The seared skin of Bayo’s chest split like wet paper when Melchior pulled him up, and a mixture of blood and pus spilled from the seam and ran down his stomach. But all Bayo did was bite his lip and close his eyes.

  “You’re a good man, Eddie. You can rest easy with the knowledge that your sister will never know what you did for her. Unless of course I go to the meet and no one shows.”