TELL MR. HANDY I SAID THANKS FOR THE DRINKS!
OH, AND BY THE WAY, I AM BLACK.
—MELCHIOR
The piece of paper was moist, as if it had soaked up some of the CIA man’s—Melchior’s—sweat, and BC unfolded it delicately, as much to avoid getting the moisture on his hand as to keep from tearing the paper. The diagram that emerged didn’t make any sense at first. It showed a complicated mechanical device, possibly an engine of some kind. Most of the captions were written in what BC thought was a Cyrillic alphabet, but one English word popped off the page: “Polonium-210.”
“Oh, my God.”
BC grabbed his coat and hat from the luggage rack, swept up the book and paper from the tabletop—and, on impulse, the cigar butt too—and sprinted down the aisle. Before he’d taken two steps, the doors swished apart and people spilled out of the car like water through the opened gates of a dam. BC pushed his way through the crowd, his head darting left and right for a sign of Melchior—and then suddenly he was on the platform, and he pulled up short.
He stood there with his bundle clutched to his chest like a refugee as the bombers scream across the sky. The train shed of the nation’s largest and busiest rail station occupied an enormous dusky cavern that receded into the distance on every side of him—acre upon acre of fretted steel columns reaching more than a hundred feet into the air and supporting a barrel-vaulted ceiling made of what seemed like millions of grimy panes of glass. At one end were a dozen arched tunnels disappearing into the bowels of the earth, at the other an equal number of staircases climbing two stories to the crowded concourse. But it was a cloudy day, and what little light managed to penetrate the filthy ceiling cast thick, oily shadows that confounded the eye, and on top of that at least two other trains were loading and unloading passengers: hundreds of people were pushing and weaving their way along the platform, nearly all of them shrouded in rain-darkened jackets and hats. BC’s eyes flitted desperately from one to the next. Melchior had been carrying neither coat nor hat, and BC did his best to confine his search to the bare heads. There were only a few, but in the murky light every exposed head seemed uniformly dark. Any of the men could have been Melchior—or none of them.
He sprinted for the stairs at the end of the platform, ran into the station’s world-famous waiting room. He didn’t notice the immense coffered ceilings, the pink marble floors (muddied on this wet day, and stained with tens of thousands of footprints), the diffuse light streaming in through arched windows taller and wider than his house in Takoma Park. He raced across the waiting room—two blocks long and nearly half a block wide—up the stairs, out the front entrance. At least he didn’t have to look for his car. A two-door coupé, mint green and shiny, individual raindrops glittering on its freshly waxed hood like a thousand slivers of glass, was parked directly in front of the main door, chaperoned by a nattily dressed young man leaning against a No Parking sign. He looked mightily pleased with himself.
BC ran up to the man, fumbling through the bundle of his coat to retrieve his wallet. He flashed his badge.
“Special Agent Querrey. Is this my car?”
“Nineteen sixty-two Chevrolet Corvair,” the man drawled like a car salesman. “I’d roll the windows down if I was—”
BC pushed the man out of the way, threw his bundle into the passenger’s seat, and—after pumping the gas too hard and flooding the engine and waiting five minutes for the plugs to clear—squealed down Seventh Avenue. Before he’d gone a single block the cabin had filled with noxious fumes coming in through the air vents, and he had to roll the window down.
He caught a last glimpse of the station’s facade in the rearview mirror, five hundred feet of Doric columns stretching out like God’s own picket fence. It really was impressive—more imposing than the biggest monuments in Washington—but he thought he remembered hearing talk of tearing it down. But in truth BC was less concerned with the possibility of New York losing its grandest edifice than with his own loss of a smaller piece of property. Not his briefcase: his bookmark, which, like his house, his name, and his sense of revulsion at the crude workings of the human body, he’d inherited from his mother. Thus are history’s losses measured: eight acres of stone and glass and steel on the one hand; on the other, an ivory sliver no bigger than a driver’s license. Both smudged from years of contact with human hands, and even more obscured by the shroud of sentiment that makes it difficult for us to see clearly the things we hold most dear. It would be the bookmark BC missed more in the years to come, Pennsylvania Station having played a significant role in the life of New York City but not in his.
But all that was in the distant future. Right now he had to get to Millbrook,9 to something Director Hoover had called an “experimental community” run by a Dr. Timothy Leary.6 He had no idea what was so important that both the FBI and the CIA had to send men to investigate. All he knew was that he had to get there before Melchior.
Millbrook, NY
November 4, 1963
Chevy’d added an optional 150-hp engine to the ’62 Corvair, but the Bureau’d clearly stuck with the 98-hp mid-range model. BC could’ve sworn the little engine cursed at him, and carbon monoxide spewed from the heater vents in visible gusts, but the little minx did what she was told. The posted limit on the Taconic was sixty-five; BC stamped both feet on the accelerator if the car dropped below ninety. He had to fight the Corvair’s tendency to oversteer, a consequence of its unusual engine placement over the rear axle, and on top of that rush hour had begun. Despite this, BC covered the fifty-mile shot up the curvy, car-choked parkway in thirty-two minutes.
Once in Millbrook he had to find Dr. Leary’s community—Castle or Castille, Castalia, something like that. The directions had been in his briefcase (along with the files on Project Orpheus), but even without them he had no trouble locating his target. At the edge of town he saw a large hand-painted sign in multicolored bubble letters:
YOU ARE ON THE PATH TO TRUE
ENLIGHTENMENT
(JUST TURN LEFT!)
Beneath that, someone had added in smaller but significantly clearer letters:
FREAKS GO HOME!
BC knew nothing about either the freaks or their detractors, but his initial reaction was to side with the latter, if only for their penmanship.
A mile down the road he came to an absurd fieldstone gatehouse, complete with a turret peaked like a witch’s cap and something that looked a lot like a portcullis. Another half mile of curved driveway led to an enormous and extravagant building, a Lilliputian dollhouse swollen to Brobdingnagian proportions, with towers and gables and hundreds of feet of porch wrapping around the whole thing. Glasses and plates were strewn around the unmown lawn that stretched in front of it, along with a truly remarkable number of wine and liquor bottles, while a glowering pine forest encroached on the back. The dense trees, already losing their color in the failing light, made the giant house seem two-dimensional, as if you would open the front door and emerge on the other side of a theatrical flat. With the exception of the dishes and bottles and a few items of clothing, the place seemed to be deserted.
The Corvair sighed in relief when he killed the engine, and a moment later BC heard the sound of a distant jackhammer—woodpecker, he realized a moment later, and chuckled at himself. It had been a long time since he’d been in the country. The things of nature sounded like the things of man to his ears, when even he knew it should have been the other way around.