“With you as a partner, of course.”
“Let’s face it, Melchior. If someone didn’t kick your ass, you’d still be carrying around a slingshot.”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure I’d’ve graduated to a shotgun by now.” Melchior chuckled. “And what’s this new organization stand for anyway? What is it supposed to do?”
Song made sure Melchior was looking at her before she spoke.
“Anything you want.”
Wheeling, WV
November 17, 1963
Even before Chandler opened his eyes he had a sense of himself in a moving vehicle. This was strange, because he was also lying down. The first thing he saw was a ceiling of tufted white silk a scant eighteen inches above him, stained here and there from old drips. Two rows of windows flanked either side of the long, narrow compartment, covered by drawn curtains.
It hit him. He was in a hearse.
He was dead.
A voice chuckled somewhere in front of him.
“Back among the living?”
Chandler rolled onto his stomach—he wasn’t tied up, which all by itself was a good thing—and he wasn’t in a coffin either. An even bigger plus. The rearview mirror was angled so that the driver could see the bed of the hearse. Chandler could see the driver as welclass="underline" a white man, a few years younger than him. His haircut looked military, but his black suit was almost rakishly mod, the lapels barely an inch wide, the tie equally narrow.
Suddenly the memories crashed down on him. Running from the Phillips station, the smell of smoke in his nostrils, roasting flesh. He’d barely made it to his car before passing out. It was three hours before a Highway Patrolman inspected the vehicle. Chandler remembered the sound of the billy club tapping the window, a voice calling through the glass, the door opening, the cop shaking his shoulder, the twenty-minute wait for the ambulance to arrive and the forty-five-minute ride to the hospital and the battery of tests the doctors had performed on him—tests to which he had remained unresponsive, even as he recorded everything that was happening through the eyes and ears of the people around him. He’d spent a day in the bed—twenty-three hours and fourteen minutes—and then this man had arrived and taken him away; they’d been on the road for almost twenty hours.
He looked back at the face in the mirror.
“Agent Querrey?”
A look Chandler had only ever seen in religious frescoes and Cecil B. DeMille movies came over the FBI agent’s face. A look of beatific gratitude, as if Chandler were an angel confirming BC’s election among the holy.
“Orpheus,” BC whispered.
“No,” Chandler said. “Chandler.”
They set up camp at the Star-Lite Motor Lodge, just across the highway from the Bowl-a-Rama, which, according to the hotel clerk, was the only place still serving food within a twenty-mile radius. BC loaned Chandler one of his new suits—burgundy sharkskin, black piping over the pockets, a tapered waist that made Chandler feel as though he wore a corset—but it beat the tattered remains of Sidewalk Steve’s clothes, not to mention an open-backed hospital gown sans skivvies. He squeezed his feet into a pair of Italian loafers—BC was about an inch taller than him but had rather small feet—and, feeling like a cross between a Mod and Little Lord Fauntleroy, followed the detective across the highway to the bowling alley.
“Lucky it’s not league night,” said the pin monkey, who could’ve been the twin of the clerk at the motel, if not the same person. He handled BC’s and Chandler’s dainty shoes like newborn kittens, slotting them into cubbies as though putting them in a sack to drown, then gave them mimeographed paper menus. “Y’all have to circle what you want. Chang don’t speak no English.” Ten minutes later, they were seated at a small Formica table at the head of a lane, paper napkins spread over their laps and tucked inside their collars, Chinet plates mounded with rice and glutinous-looking foodstuffs set between.
“Chinese food in a bowling alley in West Virginia,” BC said. “Go figure.”
Chandler wasn’t particularly hungry, but (semi-) solid food was enough of a novelty after two weeks of a mostly intravenous diet that he shoveled down the greasy but flavorful fare.
“So,” he said between bites, “how’d you find me anyway?”
BC looked at him quizzically. “You really don’t know?”
Chandler didn’t understand at first, then got it. “It’s not like a radio. Things don’t just come to me. Or, rather, it is like a radio, but it has to be plugged in first. Switched on.”
“You mean LSD?” BC said even as he reached into his pocket, brought out a folded piece of newsprint. It was the cover of one of those supermarket tabloids specializing in Hollywood gossip and alien abductions and divine—or demonic—apparitions.
THE DEVIL IN DALLAS?
The headline was a bit misleading, given that Chandler’d been 250 miles north of the city, and the burning boy, despite his flame-engulfed body and gargantuan size, was clearly human, and adolescent to boot.
Chandler stared at the artist’s rendering, which was remarkably accurate, save for the snarling face and the horns jutting from the forehead. Then he noticed the insets at the bottom of the page, the photographs of Dan Karnovsky, Janet and Jared Steinke, and pushed the paper away. The two men finished their food and sipped at their beers until Chandler, not knowing what else to do, stood up and grabbed a ball.
“Loser pays for dinner?”
BC shrugged. “Take off that jacket first. I don’t want you splitting the seams.”
Chandler was only too happy to comply, although the shirt underneath, a dark green number with French cuffs, was only slightly less form-fitting. He’d bowled maybe a half dozen times in his life but understood the principle. It was all in the wrist, as everyone said. He lined up his shot, took two steps, swung the ball in a pendulum arc, and released it with a sharp quarter turn. The ball shot toward the right edge of the pyramid of pins, waiting like penguins staring down a polar bear, but Chandler could see from its marbling that it was twisting counterclockwise, and slowly it began to list to the left. It hit between the 3 and 6 pins, demolished the entire stack in a fraction of a second. As the grate swept the still-quivering pins away, Chandler turned back to see BC eyeing him querulously.
“I think I’ve been played.”
Chandler couldn’t quite keep the grin off his face. “Didn’t know I had it in me.”
Since the game was a pro forma affair—BC rolled a respectable 182, but Chandler knocked strike after strike on his way to a perfect 300—and because they were running from the CIA—running from them, yet running after them as well—they started to talk.
“You’ve got to admit,” Chandler said, “it really is a bizarre organization. It invests enormous amounts of money and manpower into every possible way of achieving a goal—psychic aptitude studies, chemicals to create superheroes, disinformation campaigns and covert armies and assassination plots—and yet, where’s it gotten us? They couldn’t keep the Rosenbergs from stealing our nuclear technology and selling it to the Soviets, they didn’t discover Khrushchev’s missiles in Cuba until they were already there, and they can’t keep Communism from spreading like wildfire across Asia and South America. I mean, something’s not working.”
BC let out a little chuckle when Chandler finally came up for air. “You’ve given this some thought.”
“It’s not thought as much as it’s breathing. My uncle was one of the architects of the agency. When I stayed with him at his house, people would discuss nuking the thirty-eighth parallel over breakfast and trading Poland for East Berlin over lunch. I was supposed to follow in his footsteps, but my best friend, Percy Logan, went to Korea at seventeen and was dead a month later. Then Eddie …” Chandler shook his head. “I’ve spent my entire adult life running from that world, yet somehow all I managed to do was run straight into it.”