Shift: A Novel (54 page)

“So what’s Khrushchev’s real plan?”

“You misunderstand. At this point, Khrushchev is only nominally in charge of the Politburo, and the Politburo is only nominally in charge of the country. But I have reason to believe that certain officers of the KGB—men whose power predates the premier’s and will continue long after he has been replaced—have come up with a less visible strategy. The missiles will hold everyone’s attention, but they are just empty shells, both figuratively and literally. Their payloads are the real threat. While everyone’s attention is focused on the shells, these men plan to move several ‘unmated’ nuclear devices into Cuba under cover of conventional trade shipments—oil, wheat, and the like. The payload of an SS-3 weighs nearly three thousand pounds, so they can’t exactly be carried in a suitcase. Nevertheless, they are relatively small and portable compared to a rocket-powered MRBM and, should the necessitating situation arise, could be delivered to locations in the United States by boat or airplane and thence by small truck to any target desired. No doubt some of them would be intercepted along the way, but if even one got through, it could wreak tremendous damage.”

Melchior’s head was spinning, and it wasn’t just the fact that he’d been on an eight-hundred-calorie-a-day diet for the past three months.

“That doesn’t make sense. The conventional wisdom says that nuclear weapons are only useful if the other side knows you have them. If anything, you want to exaggerate the size of your arsenal, not play it down. ‘Mutually assured destruction,’ as the policy has it. What would be the benefit of having a hidden nuclear arsenal on Cuban soil?”

“Your analysis presupposes the idea that the men who are bringing this arsenal to Cuba are interested in maintaining détente or some other version of the balance of power. But what if they actually want to
win
the war, or shift its terms?”

“You think they actually plan to
use
these weapons? But that would lead to nothing but their own annihilation.”

“Would it? If millions of lives were lost in an anonymous nuclear attack on the United States, what purpose would it serve to wipe out Russia and perhaps China? The damage would have been done. A counterattack would be nothing more than punitive, and would lead only to reprisals. Destruction on an unimaginable scale. No, the Soviet Union would be an unattractive target. Cuba, though. An insignificant little country. A thorn that had somehow managed to pierce the aorta of the United States.
That
would be a target to appease an enraged citizenry’s demand for blood, without risking any kind of serious reprisal.”

Melchior looked for a flaw in Raúl’s reasoning. He didn’t see one. So here it was, he thought. The next level of proliferation. Not nuclear-armed states but nuclear-armed organizations, nuclear-armed
individuals
, with their own, unparsable agendas. He supposed it was an inevitable development, but God, it had come fast.

“Then my question is the same,” he said. “Are you telling me about the bombs so I can pass the information along to the U.S. government?”

“Pass along what? A rumor? Your James
Jesús
Angleton”—Raúl gave the middle name its proper Spanish pronunciation—“will spend weeks analyzing every possible motive we might have for telling you such a story and ultimately dismiss it as misinformation, a strategy to focus CIA attention on Cuba while the Soviet Union hatches its real plan elsewhere. You need proof in order to make your story compelling. Of the bombs’ existence, and of their location.”

At last Melchior understood.

“You don’t know where the bombs are.”

“Because they are being moved here clandestinely—that is to say, without Politburo approval—it is very difficult for even my government to keep track of them.”

“So you want me to track them down and tell you where they are. Why would I do that?”

“If all I wanted was to track them down, I would put my own men on the task. I want you to remove them.”

“You want to give nuclear weapons to your worst enemy?”

“I am giving you nothing that you don’t already have. I merely want them off my soil. Cuba has no desire to join the nuclear club, and it is tired of being the pawn in other countries’ wars. I can easier stomach a small-scale CIA operation that my brother can denounce as capitalist intervention than a full invasion in search of something that might not even exist—or, worse, a couple of ‘pre-emptive’ nuclear strikes.”

“Let me see if I got this straight. You’re going to set an American agent free”—Melchior figured the time for subterfuge was long past—“on Cuban soil, to track down possible nuclear bombs being moved here by rogue officers in the KGB, and, if I find them, to bring a full CIA team into the country to remove them?”

Segundo smiled.

“Who said anything about setting you free? Just as your country has denied your existence for the past three months, so shall I announce your escape a half hour after you walk out of this office, and call for a national manhunt. Of course, as the man in charge of that hunt, I can do as much to hinder as help its efforts. But if my men
were
to catch you, well …” Raúl shrugged. “I would probably shoot you myself, just for making me look the fool.”

Melchior sat silently for a long time.

Then: “What makes you think I won’t just shoot Fidel the minute you let me go?”

Raúl laughed so hard that Melchior thought he was going to fall out of his chair. When he’d finally regained composure, he reached into a drawer, pulled out something small and shiny, and tossed it across the desk’s broad surface. Melchior recognized it immediately.

Donny’s crucifix.

“Shoot him?” Segundo said. “Wouldn’t you rather offer him a
cigar
?”

The doctor was trying to find a pair of underpants.

He’d been wearing nothing but a tie when the agent’s knock woke him. Had slipped a pencil-striped button-down over it to answer the door, then pulled on two socks (one dark, one light, both on the left foot) while Morganthau explained that his presence was needed in the remote building that, despite its official designation as a coach house, the Castalians preferred to call the gingerbread cottage.

A pair of trousers straddled the back of a chair like a boy riding the top rung of a fence. Before the doctor could put them on, however, he had to find underpants. That was the rule. His mother had taught him when he was two years old. So he was bent over, his shirttails riding up and exposing the pale, golden-haired globes of his buttocks while his right hand poked and prodded the clothes on the floor like a heron hunting fish. For some reason it was necessary to stand on one leg like a heron as well. Or a flamingo. Did herons stand on one leg, or just flamingos? Did flamingos hunt fish, for that matter, or just gather in ostentatious crowds in the center of Hialeah? The one-legged approach slowed the doctor’s search, but it gave the underpants less advance notice of his presence. Both feet would send ripples of disturbance through the layer of clothing—
well, obviously
—giving his skivvies ample time to scurry away.

And besides, herons were blue and flamingos were pink, so it was perfectly clear which one
he
was.

He sifted through the litter, but it was difficult to concentrate. There was the heavy weight of Morganthau’s eyes for one thing, also the snores of the woman on the bed, who had promised to kill anyone who made the mistake of waking her before noon. Oh, and the 250 micrograms of LSD he’d taken after dinner, washed down with tea made from some kind of mushroom Dick had brought back from his last trip to the Village (along with a case of rectal gonorrhea, poor man). That probably had something to do with it too. The LSD, not the gonorrhea. The LSD and the mushrooms. The doctor wasn’t sure what time it was—he had an idea it was thirty-seven o’clock, but a niggling, hidebound aspect of his brain told him there was something wrong with this theory. At any rate he was pretty sure he was still feeling the effects of the acid, because all the objects in the room seemed to have lost their color. Not as if they’d misplaced it as sometimes happens—
Oh, I’ve lost my yellow!
—but as if some sentient fog that survived by leeching the reds and greens and blues from the world had passed through while he lay sleeping, leaving everything parched, black-and-white, desertish. What was the word he wanted? “Lunar,” that was it! The bedroom looked like a moonscape.

Of course, that could’ve just been the fact that it was illuminated only by moonlight. Two bars as cold as Corinthian marble slanted through the tall windows, illuminating a monochromatic carpet of clothing that stretched to all four corners of the floor: jackets, pants, shirts, coats, and shoes and undergarments; also empty bottles, crusty dishes, water-pipes, lighters, and innumerable baggies, their transparent skins scummed with the residue of hashish or tuna salad; and then finally dozens of books, all folded open like thick, two-petaled flowers. In the thin light, the hard objects looked as malleable as the soft, as if the fog that had stolen their color had stolen their substance as well; and over this Dalí–meets–de Chirico landscape rose the rectangular escarpment of the bed, its sheet coiled caduceuslike around the supple curves of its sleeping occupant.

Something about this sight aroused the doctor—possibly the woman’s right breast, whose dark nipple pointed at the ceiling like the tip of a volcano, or the fingers of her right hand, which flitted across the folds of her pubis as though they were the pages of a closed book. Sighing heavily, the doctor reached between the wrinkled tails of his shirt, past penis and testes (both slightly damp, cf. the woman on the bed), and pressed his index finger against his perineum. The sleeping woman had revealed to him the erogenous possibilities of this part of his anatomy earlier in the evening. It was like a button, she told him, like a little pump. Pressing it caused the penis to fill with blood, and continuing to press it—

“If you wouldn’t mind sparing me the blue show, doctor?”

The doctor started. He’d completely forgotten about the silhouette in the doorway. The agent. Morganthau. That probably wasn’t an accident. Freud said there were no accidents, didn’t he? Only deliberate omissions perpetrated by the unconscious because the conscious mind is too afraid to violate the rules that govern our day-to-day existence. Freud was a sex-obsessed idiot, but Morganthau still scared the shit out of the doctor. His foot tapped the lintel impatiently, and it seemed to the doctor that the light leaking up the stairs squealed each time the sole of his wingtip crushed it to the floor.

Funny he should use the term “blue show,” though, when there was no blue in the room. No color at all. The color had been eaten by the fog. Or drunk? Would you call that action drinking or eating? The doctor decided to make a note and ask Dick tomorrow. Terminology, after all, was crucial to their enterprise. “Psychedelic,” “acid,” “trip.” How much better these words were than “hallucinogenic” or “lysergic acid diethylamide” or “chemically induced altered state of consciousness.” Castalia as opposed to Millbrook. A new world required new names, and those names would color how other people saw it.

Color
. There it was again. This was definitely worth writing down. There were certain aspects of the psychedelic experience that couldn’t be processed by the straight mind—like, say, the bit about standing on one leg, which would’ve never occurred to him sober—but other things needed to be recorded so they could be examined more rationally at a later time. That was why everyone who came to Castalia was given a notebook as soon as he or she arrived. The doctor himself used a clipboard. It was partly a vestige of his former life, when he still made grand rounds, and partly a way to invest himself with the teensy-weensiest amount of authority. In this place, where titles and rank dropped away like clothing, the clipboard was practically a scepter of power.

He abandoned the search for his underpants (among other things, he’d put his second foot down at some point, so his drawers were no doubt long gone), pulled his shirttails down as low as they would go, and picked his way toward the doorway. His clipboard hung from its sacrosanct nail just inside the doorframe, a Bic tied to it by a shoelace. Conscious of Morganthau’s eyes on him, the doctor jotted down his note.
Fog color drinking?
he wrote.
Eating? In my brain underpants
. A second question occurred to him.
Gonorrhea rectum? Better ask Mom
. Because Morganthau was looking at him, he used a private script he invented on the spot, an irregular series of loop-de-loops like the spine of a spiral notebook after all the pages have been ripped away. He flashed the clipboard at the agent—just let him try to read that!—then clapped a hand to his head in a parody of a salute.

“Lead on, Agent Morganthau!”

“Timothy,” came a weary voice from the bed, “if you don’t get the
fuck
out of here, I will cut your balls off and use them to gag you.”

The doctor winked at Morganthau, as if to say: wouldn’t
she
be surprised when she did that, to discover he wasn’t wearing any underpants?

On the other hand, it could’ve just been a twitch.

Hundreds of almost-empty glasses lined the wide staircase, through which a narrow path meandered like a mountain brook. Morganthau’s heavy footsteps rattled them dangerously as he descended the treads, sending up a sticky-sweet cloud of alcoholic fumes abuzz with flies and fairies. In the vast living room, a half dozen bodies were strewn on, under, and around couches and chairs and carpets. One blissed-out bohemian lay stretched on the long trestle table with various glasses and candlesticks and religious tomes crowded around him (leading the doctor to wonder if the sleeper had climbed over them to get to his berth or if the other occupants of the room had placed them there after he was already ensconced). The sleeper had covered his face with a cloth napkin on which the first hexagram of the
I Ching
—creativity in its purest and most powerful expression—had been drawn in six rainbow-colored lines. The doctor took the fact that he could see all six colors as a sign he was coming down, although why they were blinking like a neon sign was anyone’s guess.