He goes to take another drink and discovers that his glass is empty. He shrugs and pours himself another. It’s his birthday after all. Forty-three. He never thought he could be a forty-three-year-old.
Sometimes on nights like this, after two or three Scotches, or four, or five, he asks himself what would have happened if the president hadn’t died. If Chandler had managed to stop Melchior, if Caspar had missed? Or if Jack Ruby hadn’t been able to walk up to Caspar in a crowded police station and shoot him dead and the president’s killer had talked and told the bizarre story of his life that people have been piecing together ever since? Would things have turned out differently? The good things—Civil Rights and the War on Poverty and the sexual revolution—and the bad: the Vietnam War and Watergate and the sexual revolution. Would the country have turned out the same? The world? Would he?
The question makes him think of the book he was reading on the train the day it all started. The Man in the High Castle. A novel that asks what would have happened if the U.S. lost World War II. He’s kept the book with him all these years, but he’s never tried to read it because, frankly, he doesn’t think it ends well, and he doesn’t want it to prejudice his investigation. A lot of things about him have changed over the years—or, more accurately, he now acknowledges things about himself he never would’ve admitted before all of this started, and one of them is that he’s not the rationalist he thought he was. The believer in causality and consequence. The truth is, he’s a bit superstitious. More than a bit even, and a part of him believes it wasn’t an accident that this of all books should have fallen into his hands when it did. A book that asks if the facts of history have any meaning at all, or if we’re all on a oneway train to apocalypse.
But still. He hasn’t read it and won’t. Not till he’s found Chandler and Naz. Not till Melchior is brought to justice.
Which brings him back to the original question: would things have turned out differently if Chandler had stopped Oswald? He can’t help but think that Melchior was telling the truth in his parting words: that the shift started a long time ago before Oswald pulled the trigger, that the change would have happened regardless of what played out in Dealey Plaza. Maybe so. But that still doesn’t change the fact that an innocent man was killed, and a lot of innocent people were dragged into a crime that had nothing to do with them as the nation tried to find scapegoats for their own feelings of vulnerability, and culpability, and failure.
The whine of feedback from the small TV behind him cuts into his thoughts. Eighteen years disappear, and he’s back in the chair in Dallas, watching the screen fade to black and hearing Walter Cronkite’s voice flood out of the darkness. Somehow he knows even before he turns around.
“This is a CBS News Special Bulletin. In Washington, DC, shots have just been fired by an unknown gunman at President Reagan as he left the Washington Hilton Hotel. It is unclear whether the president was hit or not. However, we do know that James Brady, the White House press secretary, was injured, as well as a Secret Service agent. The gunman fired at the president from approximately ten feet away and was immediately subdued by the Secret Service. Any details about his name or motivation have yet to be released. Stay tuned to CBS News for further details.”
BC stares at the screen for a moment. He’s not sure what he’s waiting for until a commercial comes on. The inescapable theme song to Pac-Man. After eighteen years, history is still told courtesy of its commercial sponsors.
BC presses a button on the intercom. Duncan answers almost before the buzzing stops.
“Yes, BC?”
“Get me on the first plane to DC.”
A pause. “Under your name, or—”
“An alias,” BC says, then releases the intercom. He looks at the half inch of Scotch in his glass, then sets it undrunk on the desk. “It’s starting again,” he says to no one but himself. “It’s finally starting.”7
1 Police officer J. D. Tippit fatally shot by Lee Harvey Oswald at approximately 1:12 p.m.
2 Lee Harvey Oswald killed by Jack Ruby at 11:21 a.m. as he is being transferred from Dallas Police Headquarters to the Dallas County Jail.
3 Mary Meyer murdered on a towpath along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in Georgetown. Henry Wiggins, the only witness, reported seeing “a black man in a light jacket, dark slacks, and a dark cap” standing over Meyer’s body. Meyer’s diary, in which she is alleged to have recorded the details of her affair with the murdered president, was first given to CIA associate deputy director of operations for counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton, and later destroyed by her sister.
4 Frank Wisdom found dead in his home October 29, 1965, of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot to the face. The shotgun in question belonged to his son.
5 Jack Ruby dies of cancer in Parkland Memorial Hospital, the same hospital where John F. Kennedy had been pronounced dead just over three years earlier.
6 Sam Giancana executed in the basement of his home in Chicago, shot once in the back of the head, then six more times in the face. At the time of his death he was scheduled to testify before a Senate Committee investigating the possibility of collusion between CIA and the Mafia in the Kennedy assassination.
7 John Warnock Hinckley Jr. attempts to assassinate Ronald Reagan as the president leaves the Washington Hilton Hotel. Hinkley claimed to have shot the president in order to make himself as famous as Jodie Foster, with whom he was obsessed. At his trial, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Operation Mongoose
There were six people in the hold of the C-47 idling on the runway of the Retalhuleu base in Guatemala: Robertson, Sturgis, and he himself, plus two Cuban exiles who’d originally trained to be part of the Bay of Pigs, as well as a more recent defector with the unwieldy name of Don Gutiérrez Ravé de Méndez y Sotomayor.
Six people and one box of cigars.
Melchior—not his real name, but the most convenient one available to us—looked down at the box of cigars. He held it in his lap like a sleeping infant, delicately and firmly at the same time. Not wanting to disturb it, yet not wanting to drop it, either. He knew the cigars had something to do with the plan, but only Don Gutiérrez Ravé de Méndez y Sotomayor understood their exact purpose, which he refused to divulge until the team was on the ground. If that didn’t tell you what kind of asshole he was—not to mention how badly this mission had been planned—then there was his unbearable cologne, which filled up the cabin with the stink of chemical roses, or the fact that Gutiérrez Ravé de Méndez y Sotomayor was just his surname and that he insisted it be used in full whenever someone spoke to him. In Melchior’s experience, no one in the Spanish-speaking world could match the effete snobbery of a Cuban hacendado. The castellanos of Mexico came close, and high-born Argentinos were about as palatable as pig shit. But the sugar patróns of Cuba were the last people in the Western hemisphere to profess an unabashed belief in the institution of slavery—which belief had only become that much more entrenched since the slaves had driven them from their country.