Crooked (10 page)

Pat didn’t meet me at the station, so I had to get home myself, and it was ten p.m. when the taxi let me off half a block short of our brownstone. The street was blocked by a couple of shiny town cars, and two dark-suited men flanked the door of my house. I stayed in the shadow of an elm tree, watching them.

I’d been discovered, that much was certain. Followed by U.S. counterintelligence to one of my meetings. Perhaps Pat had grown worried about me, had had me followed by a private detective who had stumbled on the truth. Or maybe Arkady and Tatiana had traded me away exactly like they had Alger Hiss.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. If people had betrayed me, it was because I’d betrayed them first. The only oddity was that I hadn’t expected it. I’d wandered along in my own little bubble of deception, taking no more precautions than a child skipping school. As if it weren’t real. But now the black cars were outside my house, and men in dark suits were at the door.

I had no better idea than to run away. Turn the corner of our block and keep going. Back to the train station, where I’d buy a ticket west, and vanish. Who could find me? I saw myself reaching San Francisco, where I’d make my way to the dockyards, join the merchant marine, ship out for foreign ports. I could slip my skin and be a different man, and Dick Nixon would cease to be. In two months I could be in Shanghai, Tokyo, Jakarta. I stood in the freezing night watching that house where Pat was waiting inside, looking at the doorway, which was more terrifying than anything beneath the ground in Pawtuxet.

I thought of the alternative to running. Standing on the threshold and meeting all of their gazes.

Mr. Nixon, we’d like to ask you a few questions,
they’d say, but everyone in the room would already know. The policeman’s gentle hand on my shoulder, maybe a young man barely out of his teens, more puzzled than hurt that a man his country looked up to could be caught in such a position, a thing he could never in his life picture doing. And Pat, withdrawn, visibly preparing herself to live with the knowledge that she’d picked the wrong man. Then the storm of publicity: “Crusading Congressman Tied to KGB Spy Ring.” Whatever Hiss had lived through, I’d have it a thousand times worse. And who knew what further punishments would come? I’d learned in Pawtuxet that my government was a stranger thing than anyone knew.

It’s hard to describe the thought process that led to my stepping out from behind the elm and walking unsteadily toward the door. The far-distant chance that Pat would at least understand, that I’d be taken away knowing I had one person still behind me. Fear of the double humiliation of being caught running away. The idea that I could salvage a little bit of the situation if I faced my accusers and went willingly.

The two men watched me climb the seven steps to my own door. One of them said, “He’s waiting for you, sir,” and opened the door.

Inside I faced a strange scene. Pat rose from where she’d been sitting on the living-room sofa, stiff with formality, and called, “Dick,” in a voice much too loud.

“We have a visitor!” she practically screamed. She stumbled against the coffee table, which rattled with five or six cups of tea. A dark-suited man stood by the wall, tea-less.

A man seated in the easy chair facing away from the door twisted around to look up at me, then stood. He had a wide, froggy face with a generous crooked mouth and dark blue eyes that peered from below an enormously capacious brow, giving his head a top-heavy appearance. His ears stuck out comically and the whole effect would have been cartoonish if it weren’t for the impression of danger, of a cold shrewdness applied to every interaction.

I recognized him, of course, as the president of Columbia University, former governor of the U.S. occupation zone in Germany, and former chief of staff of the army, the architect of Operation Overlord as well as the Blue Ox program. Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Part Two

I had the
momentary urge to salute, which I quelled at the last instant and turned into something between a rather stiff offer of a handshake and a low-angled
sieg heil.
He sat back down, just as if my living room were his private office.

“Now, listen, Mr. Nixon,” he said, “I’m sorry to barge in on you after your long trip.”

“Oh, it’s no trouble,” I said, as if I regularly held open houses for world leaders. What was happening to the world? I glanced at Pat. How long had she been attempting to make small talk with the savior of Western civilization? I sat down next to her on the flowered sofa. I wondered how much trouble I was in, and with whom.

“You were—where again? Boston?”

“That’s right, sir. Massachusetts. Euro trade conference.”

“Any fun?”

“Boring stuff, sir.” I couldn’t help staring. After I’d spent months currying favor with senior senators and State Department officials, the most important man in America—in American history?—was planted immovably in my living room.

“No sightseeing? No side trips?” he said. Eisenhower’s skin had a waxy pale look, as if he had been annealed by the heat and pressure of surviving in the crucible of twentieth-century history. He was unreadable, the man who had funded Pawtuxet.

“Well, sir‚ there was a kind of side trip. Fact-finding.” I was at that moment when you begin to tell a lie and have to decide how much of the truth to reveal, knowing that you don’t have time to think it through but that whatever comes out of your mouth is what you’re going to have to stick to. I trailed off and shot a meaningful glance toward Pat. I was trying to telegraph to Eisenhower both
Classified information, not for civilians
and
I was not at all freaked out by your terrifying occult secrets.

“Never mind, never mind. You’ve been doing very interesting work. With Communists. I meant to tell you that.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Can’t be too careful. About time somebody stood up to those people. Got some real answers.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Except not McCarthy, you know? Takes it a bit far. And there’s—you know—” He mimed swigging from a bottle.

“Right. Right. Doesn’t know when to stop.” Stop drinking? Stop persecuting Communists? There was no clarifying. Even I didn’t know what I was saying.

“But not you. A real go-getter, that’s what they might call you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You’re really going places, that’s the plain fact.” He sipped his tea, unhurried, the center of the universe.

“I hope so, sir,” I said. I glanced at Pat, who gave me a shaky nod. Going places. Good?

“Now, I hope you’re ready for it,” he said abruptly. “People can give you a hard time in the press when you’ve got a high profile. You’re not hiding anything? No skeletons in the closet for Dick Nixon?”

“No, sir. Not me,” I answered. “I’m a straight shooter.”

“Well, I’ll take you at your word. Dick Nixon is a straight shooter, that’s what they all say.” He had an easy, folksy smile. On a prettier man it might have looked slick or ingratiating but on him it was endearing. It was one of those gifts fate gives a person who goes into politics, a single trick that makes him likable to millions.

“Exactly.”

“Welp, I’ll be toddling along now. Past my bedtime.” He stood, and I walked him to the door. His attaché opened the door for him.

“Th-thanks for coming over, sir,” I said. Behind him, Pat winced, but he only grinned again.

“You’ll be hearing from me soon enough.”

One dark-suited man—a federal agent of some kind, I assumed—went first, to alert the others, then Eisenhower, then two other agents. We stood in the door watching the entourage finish their choreography, scouting lines of sight and then, agent by agent, folding themselves into the shiny cars, which pulled away down the snowy lane and headed back toward the corridors of power and influence, fleeing the scene of our quaint little living room.

We went inside to clear the tea things.

“Well,” said Pat. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

“I didn’t know that was going to happen.”

“I just sat with him for three hours. I really need to pee,” she said. “He never peed once. How is that possible?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” We sat on the couch together, and then she bounced up again, poured me a tumbler of whiskey, and sat back down.

“So you’re going to be vice president?” she said. “That’s what this means, right? Or I am, conceivably. One of us.”

“I guess that’s what it has to be. Did we—did we pass?”

“I don’t know. If he ran next year, would he win? He would, wouldn’t he?” she said. She got up again. “He will. And you’re going to be vice president.”

“We’re going to need new clothes,” I said.

“Right. We are.”

“And servants. Does this mean servants?” I said. “Can we have servants?”

“I don’t know. Possibly.”

“God. What else?”

“You’re going to have to give speeches,” she said. “And go to parties. Like now, except—”

“Except we’ll actually be invited,” I said. I might have giggled a little. We both did.

“And then you’d be president.”

“Oh God, Pat. I know things haven’t been that great for us. I know—”

“I just spent three hours with General Eisenhower, Dick. We talked about gardening and bridge and Shakespeare. I had to remember the plot of
Twelfth Night
. And about sports. Are the Steelers a sports team? We may have been talking about actual—”

“It’s okay. I don’t know either. But you really helped.”

“I just want you to tell me you’re a good man. Can you do that? That’s what I need to know. Because you can’t do this without me. And I need to know that. And you’d better not lie to me.”

“I am, Pat. I know it doesn’t always seem like it. I know I’m not always doing the right thing. Exactly. But I’m trying to figure it out. I really am.”

It’s what I said. At the time I was thinking only
I’ll figure out a way to make it true later.

A couple of
days after that I found a note in my jacket pocket. I called Pat to tell her I’d be working late and drove to a parking garage in midtown and waited for them to walk up, which they did, holding hands, laughing, and chatting like a married couple. They let themselves into the backseat, immediately drenching the car with the Russian atmosphere of tobacco, sweat, cheap aftershave.

“Drive us, please,” Arkady said. “How much time do you have?”

“I can be out until ten.”

“Plenty of time for a drink, then,” he said. “I direct you.”

“We’re impressed,” Tatiana said once we were under way. “Eisenhower likes you. I think you have his attention.”

“To watch you fuck up this way and receive enormous reward, it is touching,” Arkady added. “American system is perhaps not so different from Russian after all.”

“Did you bug my house?”

“Of course we have listening devices there. You are one of us, Dick.”

“What did you find inside Pawtuxet Farm?” Tatiana asked. “I want to hear your thoughts.” I hesitated. It wasn’t really treason until I told them about it. I stalled, took the car around in a pointless circle just to see if anyone was following, even though it was dark and I wouldn’t have been able to tell.

“Stop pretending to be spy,” Arkady said. “No one follows.”

“You read Hiss’s diary,” I said. “The place is what he thought it was.”

“Yes? Go on.”

“Americans are working on—I don’t know what you call it. Biological weapons. Spiritualism. I saw a kind of séance. And cells and hospital beds and people doing research. Germans, some of them. I wasn’t allowed to see all of it. I talked to the base commander, who didn’t seem all there. Is this what you want? Do you need numbers? What do you want?”

“That is good enough for now. What did you think of it?” Tatiana asked. “You can tell us.”

“Is not for report,” Arkady said.

“What I think is none of your business.”

We reached one of their apparently infinite supply of nameless dive bars. Arkady and I sat in a corner booth while Tatiana went to get the drinks.

“You do it and we do it,” Arkady said. “We maintain parity. Is Cold War doctrine, I know. I read your Defense Department policy sheets.”

“How do you—”

“I’m a spy. When we steal stuff, that is what we steal. And unlike most congressmen, I actually read them. And since you and I are fighting a war against each other, I do you the courtesy of explaining there are rules you evidently do not know.”

Tatiana returned with a small tray of vodka shots.

“Shouldn’t we drink something a bit less Russian?” I asked.

“You want Pat to smell it?” Tatiana said. “Didn’t you ever drink when you were a teenager?”

“I was trying to get into college.”

“Happy graduation.” She and Arkady downed theirs first.

“America got atomic bomb,” Arkady went on. “Good for you. You drop the bomb and war ends. But now what? Is freaky situation. Who is enemy? Who is friend? Who is tough, who is not? Rules are all different.

“We got plenty tanks and men and all that but what do we get for it? You are top dog, we are chumps. If you decide to blow up Moscow, all we do is watch the plane go past and get a melancholy feeling.

“But you’re not so special. You got bomb first, but we get it sooner or later. Maybe we got it already and don’t tell you. You don’t even know. But when we do, rules of the game change, but they are not complex.

“We can attack with great force but we cannot defend. The winner is one who goes first, if they are fast enough to strike the crippling blow. It’s the smart play. Nobody wants to attack but nobody wants to lose either. Every day, everybody wakes up knowing this and thinking,
Is today the day? Is today the day everybody just fucking goes for it, takes their pants off and shits on the table?
And what triggers that? Some new device, maybe, the next thing after the bomb, changes the rules again. Maybe something different from the bomb. So that is why we are spies. We try to figure out what you’ve got and when it becomes that day.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah. Proxy wars, second strikes, limited war. Why does everyone think I’m an idiot?”

“Because you’re old and you’ve had your nose broken what looks like seven times.”

“The kind of shit I do, bloody nose is like first prize. Second prize not nearly as good. I hand out a lot of those, asshole, I can remind you. But not lately. Now mostly I sit in cars and watch and do this thing we do now. Thinking war. Lying war. Cold War.

“So, Dick, I am not Soviet director of intelligence. I am mostly here to get shot at. But even I see that if Soviet asset is given job of U.S. vice president, it is interesting situation.”

“Arkady, please. Let me out of this. It’s too big now.”

“It is big, yes. At present the Kremlin knows you only as Flamingo. They know nothing of who you are or what you may become. If I tell them more, they get perhaps too excited. They overreach, yes? Eisenhower gets a poison dart, and you are in the top spot.”

“Oh Jesus. You can’t let them do that.”

“Do not worry. I do not tell them. Why? Perhaps because I know you are crap spy. I wish it is your wife we hired. Your older daughter, maybe; I think six-year-old girl might do better for this.”

“All right, all right. But I want out of this.”

“We’re not here to ruin your life.”

“What are you going to do with me? Because you can’t expect me to—well, I’m not a puppet. Understand? I’m not the KGB.”

“I do not mean to be impolite but you are already a KGB asset,” Arkady said. “So now it is only a question of your duties.” He signaled for another round.

“Don’t exaggerate,” Tatiana told him. “Dick, we did not send you to Pawtuxet Farm to get us information we already have. We sent you so you would know what we know. Arkady and I work a long time together in Russia. We see a great deal. We are Soviet intelligence, yes, but that is not a simple thing.

“Arkady has told you of the Romanovs, what he sees there. Yes? And you see for yourself. That’s only the first part,” Tatiana said. “So listen to me. When I am little girl, my father works in a factory, very poor. Engine parts. I was in school in Kiev. I remember not much of it. Dirty air, dead cat in the street. In school there are tests, history and foreign language and mathematics. I do very well, I score first in my region. I am prodigy. Also, I am pretty.

“A man, a party official, notices me. He speaks to my father, who can do nothing. And I say okay, why not. I want only to leave that place. I go to Leningrad with him but it does not last long. But another man gives me idea to go to school. Spy school, yes? They teach this now. I learn to shoot, to take apart locks, to speak English, German, French, Hebrew. I learn many things. How to handle informants, pass messages, all these things. Make a man or woman fall in love with me.” She looked at me steadily.

“I graduate, I go to Moscow and begin work. The war comes. I am in Poland, then I am in Berlin. Lots of work for a person like me. It’s a big world now. Go out every night and sleep till noon. Champagne and dancing and photographing documents with horrors in them. I am twenty-six years old then, thinking every day I am vanquishing demons, risking life.

“When Germany breaks, I have four passports and I speak six languages. What do I do? I could be Italian, I could be American, or British. I could even be German.” She said it crisply, swapping accents as she went, a South Carolinian accent for America, her British one a film-star version of the upper classes. Maybe it was just a party trick, a one-off; maybe it wasn’t. I wondered what, if anything, of her demeanor wasn’t a conscious performance. It was perhaps the most frightening thing I ever saw her do; it was as if her mastery of espionage made her a kind of animate mask, as if human speech were no more than insect chirps or birdcalls to be mimicked.

“I could have disappeared but I went back to Moscow, the city that made me. Who else really knew what I was worth? It was 1946 and there were more meetings, more parties. We should be happy, everything going so well, we got Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia. Yugoslavia, more or less. Osterreich, sure. But no, everyone drinking and shit scared, because you got the nuclear bombs. Who will save us?

“And maybe we’ll get the bomb. Other projects. People will try anything when annihilation coming. It is only that the Manhattan Project finished first. We got some Germans, but did we get the right ones? But there are other options, maybe. Europe is a rummage sale now, crackpot ideas and mystic frauds the Reich poured money into. More than one way to blow up the world.

“I meet a man. GRU colonel. He has a wife but he likes me better. I learn there are shadow regiments, not on the books. There are weapons. He tells me there are people in the Kremlin who fear what is happening, but then there are others who try to find uses for these things. They try to summon them or to—well, make them. They manage to kill a lot of people but they are trying. You see the result in Gregor, I think.

“I meet Arkady. We are partners, we go out into steppes, places you never heard of. Follow stories. Voices in the forest. Missing children. Radiation burns where none should be. Cattle death. A woman says she meet the devil on the road outside Kirov.”

“That one I believe still,” Arkady said.

“We agree to disagree, okay?”

“Two years we are out there.” Now Arkady took over. “Bad roads. Moskvitch, you know this car? Piece of shit. Take trains. Fly when we can. Out there is nothing for hundreds of miles. Then a factory stamping out wheels or farm machinery. This is the part you never understand. Old Russia dying out and children like Tatiana—sorry—don’t remember. Children on these collectives all watching each other, speaking from script. And we see things. And we tell the party. And the science cities spring up.
Naukograds.
Bone city, digging city, city for magic. Places where there is no name. Stalin will do anything he likes. And he needs a result.

“One of these times we get a little too close. It is hard to tell. And so maybe we leave a few bodies out there. We get ourselves transferred to embassy here. And here it’s easy. Steal the bomb. Bomb plans, bomb materials. Anything bomb. Easy by comparison. Commies every place, right? Just like you are saying in the speeches.

“But even here it’s not all bomb, is it? Even in America it is rotten.”

“Hiss told you this?” I asked.

“He dug for me,” Tatiana said. “Why do you think I ran Hiss like I did? We need to know what is happening. Hiss overreached, of course he did. He was a Baltimore intellectual. Not trained, just a civil servant with a notebook, a camera, and a library card. The Russian intelligence service is an institution hundreds of years old. I was trained by agents whose teachers operated against Bismarck and infiltrated the court of Queen Victoria. Hiss, he is so sloppy that even you catch him. They take his memories by now; probably he believes he was an innocent fellow traveler.

“But then you come. The crusader, the coming man. Young and capable and smart. And look at you now. We like you very much, Mr. Nixon,” said Tatiana.

“Yes, we do,” Arkady said.

“But no,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “We do not let you go.”

“What do you want from me?”

“We will never be allies. We are not friends. But you have seen what you have seen, haven’t you? And not just at Pawtuxet,” Tatiana said.

“I don’t like this. You said yourself I’m not properly trained.”

“Trained, who is trained?” Arkady said. “No one we trust, at any rate.”

“What happens if I say no?”

“There is any number of things that could happen,” he said, “because you have made yourself very vulnerable by entering public life. We do not have to look hard to find the next ambitious man, eager to be the one who brought the famous Mr. Nixon down. For instance, you would not like for people to know you are in the company of such an attractive Russian lady without Pat’s knowledge.”

“Pat’s not part of this. She is not.”

“Ideally, she does not come into this,” Arkady said. “Pat has a happy life, hears none of this. She is one of the civilians like you used to be. But is why you must do this. We can threaten you, but that is not the reason you do this. There are things to be afraid of much worse than us. Eisenhower himself.”

“So now we come to Eisenhower. Not entirely what he seems,” Tatiana told me. “Believe me, we have ways of detecting things.”

“He’s…what? Not human? The devil?”

She shook her head. “Not like that. But he has touched a power he should not have. Like Gregor did. Maybe worse.”

“Could be they make him hybrid,” Arkady added. “Or he has a being inside him. Spirit from Pawtuxet. Or maybe he got it in Europe. You Americans got up to plenty of tricks over there.”

“I want you to learn what he is hiding. Okay?” Tatiana said. “I do not trust this one.”

“He’s Dwight D. Eisenhower. He ran the show in the Second World War. He’s a legend. What exactly do you suspect him of?”

Arkady said, “He reads wrong, I know this. Maybe he did something to himself to do all he had to? Agreed to something he should not have? Maybe not his fault. But we should know. He has a secret. I would be very curious to know whether he is genuinely alive.”

“What do you mean?”

“The colonel told me once that the Cold War isn’t about East against West,” Tatiana said. She seemed to be remembering something, reciting verbatim words she had heard. “You have seen strange things, and I do not care if they are Russian or American. And when it comes to such things, we are not KGB. Not after the things we’ve seen. Do you understand? Not Russia, not America. I do not understand who is in power now. The Kremlin itself is a scene of horrors I would rather not describe. The real war is the living against the dead.”