With grotesque intimacy, he leaned in again and put his mouth on BC’s, pressed hard enough that BC could feel his lips through two layers of tape. It didn’t hurt. It didn’t even feel like a kiss. But BC felt his stomach churn and had to fight the urge to vomit.
After what seemed like an eternity Melchior stood up. He smiled down at BC like a proud father, then brought his hand to the tip of BC’s nose to wipe away a drop of moisture. It could have been a bead of sweat or mucus or even a tear. Even BC didn’t know.
“Beau-Christian Querrey,” Melchior said in a voice whose solemnity was all the more oppressive for being genuine, even caring. “You are the burning boy. You—are—a—faggot.”
But he wasn’t finished. He stuck his fingers in BC’s pants pocket and wormed his hand over BC’s thigh. BC turned his face away, his eyes squeezed closed, his breath whistling out of his nostrils with drops of snot.
Suddenly the hand was gone. It was a moment before BC could open his eyes. Melchior was holding Naz’s ring up to the faint light.
“I don’t think you need this anymore, do you?”
Before he left he turned on the television.
“I know daytime TV’s for housewives,” he said as he headed for the door. “But keep your eyes peeled. There just might be something interesting on today.”
As soon as he left Wesley, Caspar went straight to the sixth floor. He wove his way through the dusty stacks of book boxes until he reached the southeast corner window, where he stood his package upright behind a stack of boxes. The tall parcel made a heavy metallic clunk as he set it on the bare concrete floor. He moved a few stacks of boxes to create a blind around the window, set three more underneath it to serve as a stand. He couldn’t bring himself to look out the window, but he did notice that the clouds were breaking up and the sunlight streamed into the little nest he’d made for himself. It was going to be a beautiful day. The park would probably be full of people at lunchtime, all waving at the president and First Lady as they drove by.
Chandler loitered in the shade of an oak on the eastern edge of Dealey Plaza, as far from the Book Depository as he could get without losing sight of the entrance. He’d waited to take the second half of the acid after he arrived, then maneuvered close enough to the six-story building that he was able to sift through the minds of the dozens of people inside. He didn’t have to look far. Caspar’s anxiety was like a beacon, and there, front and center in his thoughts, was Melchior. Melchior and President Kennedy and a rifle he’d hidden on the sixth floor, right by a corner window. What Chandler didn’t see was Melchior himself.
When he saw the gun—saw what Caspar planned to do with it—he was brought up short. If he confronted Caspar now or, God forbid, dragged the police in, he knew he was losing any chance he had to catch Melchior and extract Naz’s location from him. And he could see also that Caspar didn’t want to do it, and didn’t expect to. Melchior was supposed to make contact. Supposed to call it off before Caspar had to pull the trigger. Caspar seemed to think he was actually going to show up here. Chandler was inside Caspar’s head, so he knew the would-be assassin wasn’t lying to him—it was just a question of whether or not Melchior had lied to Caspar in the same way he’d lied to Song and Ivelitsch about sending Naz to Dallas. Chandler knew he was risking a lot—not just a man’s life, but the president’s and, who knows, the country’s. But the alternative was losing his last, best chance of finding Naz, and so he found the most sheltered spot he could and waited.
Searching Caspar’s mind from such a distance had used up a lot of his juice, however, and now there was the familiar fatigue. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it’d been other times, but still, yawns were splitting his jaws, and he had to smack himself in the face to stay awake. He should’ve waited, he realized now, not taken the second hit until he saw Melchior.
“Excuse me,” he said, stopping a middle-aged black woman pushing a white baby in a stroller. “Do you know what time the president’s supposed to come by?”
“Why, you early, ain’t you? Didn’t the paper say he wasn’t supposed to get by here till half past noon? It’s only—”
“Ten forty-two,” Chandler said. He made a show of looking at his wrist, but since he wasn’t wearing a watch, it didn’t help. The woman frowned and pushed her charge away.
The thoughts of passersby flickered in and out of his head. It was amazing how banal the minds of most people were. Something to eat, something to drink, something to screw. God, I hate my boss/my wife/my husband/my parents. A man sat down on the retaining wall beside the little reflecting pond. He was waiting for his secretary, with whom he was having an affair, and when he said to himself, Could you take some dick-tation, Miss Clarkson, he and Chandler chuckled at the same time. The man peered at Chandler nervously, and Chandler quickly turned away. He realized that at some point over the past month this state had become natural to him. That the time he spent unaugmented had come to seem not only vulnerable but incomplete and, even worse, boring. The thought filled him with self-loathing, and the self-loathing filled him with fantasies of revenge. He would make Melchior pay for what he’d done to him, and then, if he couldn’t find a way to reverse the condition, he would take his own life to end this terrifying cycle of flight and violence. Once Naz was safe, he would bring it all to an end, one way or another.
But where was Melchior?
All morning long he had the intermittent sense that someone was peering over his shoulder. He’d whipped his head around so many times that one of his coworkers said he was acting jumpier than a man in his marriage bed with another woman. Finally, at a couple minutes before noon, he stood up from his desk.
“Guess I’ll take lunch,” he said. His manager waved at him without looking up.
He walked to the stairwell slowly, but as soon as the door was closed he bounded up the stairs to the sixth floor. As he was walking past the elevator it opened, and Charlie Givens stepped out and asked him if he was going downstairs to eat.
“No, sir,” Caspar said. He just stared at Givens, and after a moment Givens shrugged, picked up the pack of cigarettes he’d left on top of a stack of boxes, and got back in the elevator. Caspar waited until the doors closed before he headed to the southeast corner of the building. He passed a plate with some chicken bones on it, but saw no sign of anyone else. The faint sound of motorcycles floated through open windows.
He retrieved his package from behind a wall of boxes, ripped it open as quietly as possible. He assembled the Carcano quickly, rested it on the short stack of boxes beneath the window, and then, for the first time that day, looked outside.