Louie Garza waited for the Russian to leave before he took the first pill. Indeed, he was a lucky man. He only hoped the pills worked before the Russian figured out Louie’d sent him on a wild-goose chase, and came back for the truth.
Millbrook, NY
November 5, 1963
The rain beating on the roof of his motel, coupled with the pain in his forehead, kept BC awake all night. It wasn’t the drumming on the zinc sheets or the throbbing in his skulclass="underline" it was the thought of all the evidence it was destroying. Tire treads and footprints melting into useless blurs; fibers, hairs, and other minuscule clues washing away; drops of blood dissolving into the soil. Any one of them might hold the key to unlocking what had really happened in the cottage—who killed whom, and how, and why. Morganthau, aka Logan. Chandler Forrestal, aka Orpheus. And the girl who, so far, had no name.
BC had looked at dozens of cadavers, stuck his fingers in knife and bullet wounds and probed nether orifices for signs of rape or cruder trauma. But never once had he looked a living victim in the face. Never once had he heard pleas for succor or mercy. And even though he knew she was incidental to this story, that Orpheus was the real star—or at any rate the chemical, the project that had made him—it was the girl who haunted him. Somehow he’d tricked himself into believing that victims acquiesced to their fate in the end. That the greatest crime was murder, not the horrible psychic torture that led up to it. But all night long the girl’s screams echoed in his ears, and every time he closed his eyes he saw hers, wide with terror. Long after he’d forgotten she was dead, he remembered how she’d suffered when she was alive.
In an effort to get some sleep he tried to read The Man in the High Castle, the book Director Hoover had sent him north with. Among other things, the director expected a report Monday morning—assuming BC still had a job, of course. But he only got as far as the end of the second page. How easily I could fall in love with a girl like this. His cheeks reddened, the book fell from his fingers. He filled a rag with ice from the machine down the hall and put it on the bump on his forehead, then lay in bed listening to the rain wash away his chances of finding out what had happened to her.
The storm let up shortly after dawn. By the time the sun crested the Berkshires he was stashing the Corvair a quarter mile from the front gate of the Castalia estate. A bone-chilling fog filled up the road, the lawns, the space between trees. The reduced visibility seemed to amplify what little noise there was—mostly BC, his shoes crunching over gravel, his breath whistling as he scaled the crumbling stone wall, and then his slip-sliding passage as he made his way up the slick hill toward the main house. Fog ribboned through the deciduous trees on this side of the house, and the ground was cushioned by layers of leaves and mulch. BC, punchy from his sleepless night but wired on two cups of bitter coffee, half felt that he’d stepped into another hallucination. He wanted to tell himself that was impossible, but after yesterday he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to say that about anything again.
There wasn’t a light on in any of the main house’s windows, and the building emitted a pervasive silence, as if its occupants weren’t just asleep but unconscious, suppressed by the gargantuan structure until it chose to recognize a new day. BC skirted the wide lawns and made his way toward the pine forest. His chest tightened and he willed himself to relax. Forrestal was gone, he reminded himself. Orpheus was dead, and couldn’t hurt him now.
The cottage came into view more quickly than he remembered. Without the interference of a shimmering hallucination, he could see it for what it was: a small building outfitted in the same combination of Bavarian and Catskill kitsch that decorated the Big House. He combed the yard first, but Melchior’s team had been thorough. The only sign that they’d been there was the chewed-up ground itself. Inside, the rooms had the distinct look of a scene that’s been gone through by professionals who don’t care about covering their tracks. Books sat unevenly on the shelves from which they’d been taken and flipped through and hastily put back; drawers hung half-open, bits of clothing or paper peeking out; couch cushions bunched together like boxcars on a crashed train. They’d even pulled up the carpet, leaving it in a roll against one wall, and a couple of floorboards had been pulled up as well. BC had no idea if they’d found anything, but the one thing all this effort made clear was that the team hadn’t known what was going on in the house before it arrived.
It wasn’t until he unrolled the carpet that he realized the cleanup team hadn’t simply been searching for evidence: it had also been eliminating it. A huge hole had been sawn out of the center of the carpet where Logan’s body had lain, ragged-edged, contemptuous even, as though someone had hacked the blood-soaked portion out with the same knife that killed Logan. BC looked at the walls again, realized that all the bloody handprints had been scrubbed away. He was able to find a couple of small stains in the carpet, but doubted there was enough fluid in the fibers to get anything like a usable sample. Nevertheless, he clipped the strands and dropped them into his pocket—his evidence bags had been in his briefcase—then made his way through the rest of the first floor, taking two or three more samples, but not really expecting anything to come of them. Only when he was convinced the lower floor had been thoroughly exhumed did he make his way upstairs.
He’d meant to go through the ancillary rooms first, but the open door lay just past the top of the stairway and he couldn’t help but look in. The bed had been stripped. Naked pillows lay atop the dingy white mattress like seashells on a beach. A strong scent of bleach came to his nostrils.
He stepped in. There was the bureau that had flown across the room and slammed through the wall. It sat between two windows, not a nick on it, and certainly none of the drawers were smashed into pieces; the wall that it had crashed through was unmarked as well. The books and lamps that had flown at him sat on shelves and tables, equally intact, gleamingly clean. Could CIA have repaired the walls, replaced all of the furniture? No, that was just paranoia—the kind of thinking that dealing with CIA brought out in you. Somehow he had hallucinated the whole thing. But how?
He looked at the armoire that had pinned him into the corner. It stood a good three feet from the wall now, but when BC walked to the far side, he saw faint scuff marks on the bare wooden floors. Someone had made an effort to scrub them away—had gone so far as to fill them in with wax. As aha moments go, it was small; but still, it was good to know he hadn’t imagined everything. Now BC saw a deep round dent on the windowsill, flecked with black paint. He looked for the typewriter that had knocked him unconscious; it was missing from the room. More evidence that not everything that happened yesterday had been the product of his own mind. What was it his mother used to say? The devil mixes lies with truth to confuse you. An image of Melchior’s smug pucker materialized in BC’s head. Yes, he certainly did that.
BC crouched down in the corner. From this position, the armoire blocked his view of the door. Melchior could have stood there, assessing the room, formulating a plan: shoot the girl, then Chandler, then deal with BC. He shifted his attention to the bed. It sat exposed on top and bottom, barren of any sign a body had lain on it. But it was too barren. BC strode to the bed, threw the pillows off. The mattress was completely clean. I.e., no bloodstains. BC didn’t care what kind of solvent the cleanup team had used, how hard it had scrubbed: blood always left a mark. Especially when it came from a gunshot wound, especially on white cotton ticking. And besides, the bed was completely dry, which meant the CIA team hadn’t had to clean it. Which meant, finally, that there’d been nothing to clean off. He flipped the mattress just to be sure, but there was no blood on the bottom either.