Crooked (17 page)

“Well, Mr. Brown,
it’s been a hell of a fight and I’d like to formally extend my congratulations to you. Governor Brown, I should say. I’ll have to get used to that. Yes, and to you. And your family. Good-bye now.”

I shrugged Pat’s hand off my shoulder. We were both a little drunk. It was after two in the morning.

“I think I’d like to be alone.”

“Aren’t you coming down?” she said. She was still dressed for the victory party, holding her purse. We’d arranged a massive celebration for an assured victory, before I’d lost by about three hundred thousand votes out of six million.

“Forget it. The press corps are going to be waiting. You know I can’t face them.”

“You have to. And everyone else is there too. The people who worked for you. You should talk to them.”

“I’d really rather just stay up here for a while, okay? I’ll have dinner, then I’ll be down.”

“Well, we’ll be waiting for you when you’re ready.”

She left. When I told the family I was running for governor, I’d gotten only half a sentence in before she stood up from the dinner table.

“What he means is, here we go again,” she’d said, and she walked out and slammed the door, leaving me to stumble on through prepared remarks, lying to my own children about the budget crisis, about the nation’s second largest economy. I should have just told them,
Daddy wants this and no one is going to take it away from him,
and left it at that.

Afterward she’d been good, she’d smiled and she’d been charming; she’d done everything right. It was just that I knew she was waiting for this to stop and for the joke to be over. Coming in as the overwhelming favorite, I’d lost the closest presidential election in history. Then, instead of riding off into the sunset, I’d stayed around to lose the race for the California governorship. Pat was done. Everyone was done.

There was a knock on the hotel-room door. I opened it to a small, slightly stooped man in uniform.

“Room service!” he croaked. I’d forgotten.

“Where should I put it?” he asked.

“Just near the bed,” I said. I stepped aside to let him wheel it in while I fumbled with the check. I calculated the tip, wrote it down, then saw that it had already been included. Crossed it out.

“Whenever you’re ready, Mr. Nixon,” he said.

“Yes, thank you.” I signed hastily and handed it back to him. I wanted to be alone. My political career had just ended.

“Hell of a race, Mr. Nixon,” the waiter said. Something nagged me about his voice.

“It sure was.”

“Probably the Cuban thing nixed it for you. Weird energy there.”

“Most likely,” I said. Some people liked to string out their moments with the former vice president, padding the stories they’d tell later. He stood there, swaying a bit in front of the tray, which was neatly laid out with condiments, silverware, cloth napkin, metal-covered dish. I wanted nothing more than to lie in bed and eat my hamburger.

“Is everything to your liking, Mr. Nixon?” he said. He had a slightly smug, goblinish air to his lined face.

“Of course, yes.”

He kept standing there, expecting something. I fumbled for a tip just to get rid of him.

“We’ve met before,” he said.

“Have we? Were you with us in ’60?”

“Oh, before that. I’m a real early Nixon man. You know, I’d feel better if you made sure it’s what you ordered, sir. Just hotel policy.”

I stepped over to the tray and lifted the lid. Something black and glossy lay there, limp on a bed of lettuce, smelling of rot. A dead bird.

“What the hell is this?” I turned back to him.

“It took you long enough,” he said. Gregor—I now saw—had aged badly. His encounter with Eisenhower had taken something from him, and the last six years looked like five times that. The smirk was the same.

“You can’t be here,” I told him. I thought of the KGB pistol Arkady had given me. I kept it with me for some reason. I’d never fired it again.

“It takes a lot out of me, I agree. But it’ll be worth it.”

“What do you want?” I asked.

“Just to see you. It’s been a long time. You’ve done well, present circumstances excepted. You’re all they talk about at Moscow Central.”

“Are you even Russian?”

“Yup. I went to Exeter. This is a nice room.” He opened up the bar, closed it again. He didn’t seem in any kind of hurry. I edged over to my suitcase.

“What do you mean, I’m all they talk about?”

“Well, Kennedy’s just a joke, isn’t he? Why’d you let him in power? You and Eisenhower have a plan going, but I can’t figure it out.” He was looking out the window now, making a show of unconcern. I fished the gun out of my suitcase, dropped it into my pants pocket. I wondered how many times I would have to shoot him if it came to that.

“We’re not doing anything. I just lost.”

“Ike’s as smart as they come, and you with your bloodline—no. Maybe I should ask your wife. Or you want me to ask your girlfriend? We can ask her anything we want. We’ve got her in a cell in Moscow now.”

“I think you’d better go, Gregor.”

“Is that a tough-guy act? That’s funny, with you breaking so easily back in New York that time. But if you feel like going toe to toe again, we can do that.”

“Please just leave,” I said. I remembered how strong he’d been before. Even Arkady had barely managed him.

“Not until you’ve had your chicken,” he said. He pointed to the bird on the tray. It was stirring a little, struggling to get up. I stared at it, only for a moment, but when I looked back, Gregor was gone.

In his place, in his clothes, was a creature that looked like it belonged in a children’s book, and it might have been cute there. A children’s book where the main character was a black bird shaped roughly like a man, a thing that stood upright, and wore a bellhop’s uniform, and had wings poking through the waiter’s sleeves in place of arms and an enormous shiny black head with a beak that stuck out a full two feet, and the perfectly round unblinking eyes of a bird on either side of its head.

It looked at me and screamed, the raucous high scream of a bird but coming out of the lungs of a man.

I screamed too, I think. I think I lost control of my body entirely for a short period. I fired the gun. I sprinted away, banged into the cabinet holding the television set, and staggered into the hallway. Then I ran the way you run in a nightmare, rubber-legged, gibbering, veering into walls, the screaming behind me so loud it seemed to follow me down the hall, only inches away from my ear.

I ran past the bank of elevators and face-first into the door to the fire stairs and then I ran down them, seven flights, one after another, panting with fear. It was only at the last flight that I willed myself to look back. I saw that I was alone. I couldn’t say when the noise had stopped but the echoes seemed to ring off the walls without ever quite dying away. I looked down to find the gun still in one hand, the metal dish cover in the other. I threw the cover down, stuck the gun in my pocket. I didn’t know where anything—my wallet, my hotel key—was or where exactly I was. I shouldered through the exit door into a crowded room.

There was a moment of quiet and then a blinding flash and men’s voices. “Mr. Nixon!,” “Mr. Vice President!,” and, more quietly, “He looks wrecked.”

“Mr. Nixon?” It was Herbert Klein, my press secretary. “I think I’m done here, but, um, would you like to say a few words?”

“Yes…yes, thank you,” I said.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” I began. I resisted, with all my strength, the urge to look behind me. I was safe as long as I stood here talking.

Fortunately it turned out I had things to say. About my political opponents, about Governor Brown, about the press corps. All these fucking gentlemen who had never seen a man turn into a crow. Who had never seen the Oval Office turn into a haunted forest and then back into an office again. They stared at me. Klein was on the sidelines, a hand raised tentatively, not sure how to cut me off.

Why should I care? I didn’t. In 1962 I was already a joke, the man who didn’t know when to leave the party. Nothing like what came later, obviously. But a joke.

I’d lost and lost again and had just been chased by a man-size crow. And possibly been dumped by the love of my life. So who was I doing all this for? It was time to take the hint, drop my parting witticism, make a mocking bow, and leave.

“You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference,” I told them. And at the same time I was talking to Tatiana and Arkady, who couldn’t hear, and to Gregor. To Eisenhower. To Pat, standing at the back of the room, arms crossed, mouth a straight line. She seemed to be taking a grim, amused satisfaction in it all and I remembered seeing the same look during our first days in Washington, mirroring back at me the bleak knowledge that she’d tied herself to a man not quite good enough.

It didn’t matter anymore. I was tired of trying to figure it out or fix it. Your good dog, Richard.

With the movers
gone we lingered, listening to our footsteps echo off empty walls, but at last, just before noon, the four of us got in the car and pulled ourselves away. Pat and I had had a fight last night. I was packing a few last things and at the bottom of my closet, for some reason, I’d kept a stack of poor Alger Hiss’s work, rubbings from some old graves in Pawtuxet. Pat had picked them up and asked what they were and I’d snapped at her and grabbed them away. I told her they were classified and she glared at me and called me a liar. We’d done this before. Later that night I burned the papers, all of them. Never again. Why keep them?

But as we rounded the corner at the end of our block everything lifted a little. We beat the traffic out of the city and made good time, driving northeast with the late-afternoon sun curling down behind us. The highway cut through a barrier ridge into the glowing red interior, the ruddy pastels of the rocky desert like a Warner Brothers cartoon, holding the heat in a radioactive orange smear of dusk. The sun set behind us; ahead, the sky purpled and dimmed.

Pat was silent. I knew she was thinking about what she’d seen. She knew there was something wrong, but she didn’t know what, or even if she could ask. The girls in back, fifteen and seventeen, stared out, mesmerized, as we slipped through the vast invisible membrane. We were leaving Los Angeles for good.

It was 1963 and we were crossing the entire breadth of the United States from west to east, Los Angeles to New York. Politics was over for me. Ambition was over. The Russians were gone, not a word since Tatiana walked away. Swallowed whole back into the dark, vengeful dream they’d come from. I’d accepted a partnership in a law firm in New York City. I was going to be a rich lawyer with a statesman’s pedigree, a modest and respectable success until the end of my days. I’d write about foreign policy on op-ed pages; I’d give speeches. I was going to live in one single world, unconcerned with the KGB or hidden horrors. I’d live without darkness and without secrets.

We stopped at a highway diner outside of Barstow, and a few travelers recognized me—men smiled and waved, a simple nice-to-see-you. I shook hands and signed a place mat for a young couple. Nobody had to do any voting. After that, the rustle and buzz of recognition died down and people left us alone. It would happen less and less often in the days to come. Afterward we walked out into the warm night and the gasoline fumes blurred the air and I realized I was happy inside myself in a way I couldn’t remember being since those very first few days in Washington.

We kept going, past one motel after another, each adorned with neon suns and palm trees, each time thinking we’d go just another ten or twenty miles. I could just drive away from it, I realized, and when I knew that, I didn’t want to stop. Something toxic was draining out of us.

The motel we finally chose was like a warm sandbar in an ocean of dark. I’d forgotten how much darkness there was between cities, how quiet and profound the world was. Like the world I was born into in 1913, before cars and highways and streetlights were everywhere. I suppose there must have been things out there under the sand, deep down in the cool clay, or roaming the sands, bodiless, spirits of the terrible lizards that came before us. All the things I was told about. But they stayed quiet. They were vast and I was small, just a former vice president.

The next day we skirted Las Vegas. Our car glided across the knife edge of the Hoover Dam. Tricia bent over a book; Julie pressed her face to the window wide-eyed, asking questions.

By lunchtime, the desert heat was blinding. We pulled into a diner in our cream-colored 1959 roadster with red vinyl seats. I was sweating in my wool suit, but the light was glowing like liquid vanilla fire. I was sick of darkness. I turned to look at Pat, with her blond hair and yellow-and-white summer dress; her mouth was expressionless under cat’s-eye sunglasses. For a second I didn’t recognize her, and for that second we could have been any family. A man mopping the floor in the diner glanced up at me—did he wink? I couldn’t tell, and it didn’t matter. We ordered shakes and hamburgers and got a free toy, a flying saucer.

We drove on in great slow loops through the red desert rocks, through Eisenhower’s highway system. I’d failed, I realized, but I was still alive. I was out of politics, and out of the occult. No lies, no lies anymore, no more people with animal heads or blurry photographs or secret signs between agents, no shadows and no dark underbelly to the world. All the long afternoon, it was like the light was flooding my senses, telling me,
There is only this existence and no other.

Over the next two days we followed Interstate 15 through forest and desert, past the great slumbering presence below the Grand Canyon to the south, and then took I-70 to climb the plateau to Denver. Then the long slide down and into the plains, day after day waiting for Des Moines to rise out of the fields.

The last time I’d crossed the country by car as a private citizen was in 1947, and I had begun to realize we were in a different place and time. I’d been inside the political bubble for so long, talking down to people from lecterns, locked inside the White House or hopping from hotel to hotel. Now, like a time traveler, I’d popped back in and was staring gobsmacked at the clothes and cars and people. It was 1963 and it was the future. Clean lines, brave people, nervous, excited, hopeful, angry. People under thirty talked in a rhythm I couldn’t quite catch. The Depression and World War II were what old people talked about. Ike and I had built a world that we didn’t belong in.

The highways, I realized, were Ike’s plan and his victory. I’d never understood quite how big it was or what a change it made. Even the landscape looked newly washed, like after a rainstorm. Ike had wrought a runic inscription right across the country that cut through the hidden places of the vast interior and let the air and light and traffic come in. Nothing like it since Rome first paved Europe.

The country, I knew, was haunted, but whatever powers there were felt the encroachment, the mighty world-shifting nudge of modernity. The things that lived in the in-between places, strange survivors of long-vanished primeval forests. Tribal taboos and ancient curses of millennial standing were swept away. The frailer enigmas died out; the stronger ones grumbled and shambled deeper into the swamps and valleys. Eisenhower’s binding held, and the long grief-stricken century smiled. The world was changing, maybe all the way down to its rotten taproot, maybe forever.

The phone rang at four in the morning. I pulled myself out of a confused dream about Yorba Linda: Awake in my bed, I had heard my mother singing. I’d crept downstairs. She was at the kitchen table, facing away from me. “Mother?” She’d turned, and just for an instant, I saw her face, a terrible crow’s face like Gregor’s.

I couldn’t remember where I was. Was this the White House? Was this the first strike? Where was Eisenhower? Where were the missile codes? Then I remembered—I was in my apartment in New York. I wasn’t going to have any launch codes ever again.

I picked up the phone anyway.

“Hello?”

“Dick?”

“Yes, who is this?’

“It’s Jack.”

“I’m sorry, who?”

“Jack Kennedy. The president.”

“Jack, oh God, sorry, Mr. President. I was asleep.”

“It’s all right, Dick.”

“How did you get this number?”

“Who is it?” Pat asked, rolling over and turning on the light.

“It’s Jack Kennedy,” I said.

“What?” she said. She sat up. I made an impatient gesture meant to convey that I was trying to have a conversation with the president. She turned the light back off. I dragged the phone into the bathroom, trailing the cord behind. I sat on the toilet in my nightshirt.

“How can I help you, Jack? Er, Mr. President.”

“Dick, the last time we talked—just by ourselves—I was a little rude.”

“It’s okay.”

“No, really, I’m sorry. You know it was—it was a weird time. We were both a little tense, and when you came in, you looked a bit—”

“Crazy, I know.”

“I mean, we were about to debate on TV. I thought it was a crazy trick. Psyching me out. They warned me about you, you know.”

“I guess it must have seemed pretty strange.”

“Heh,” he said. There was a little bit of silence. Then: “Dick…do you ever feel like a phony?”

“Well, sometimes, Mr. President. Sometimes I do.”

“I feel like that all the time now. Like there are things about my health and, well, my personal life that I couldn’t tell anybody ever. Like I don’t belong in this job.”

“I guess everybody feels like that sometimes, Mr. President.”

“Maybe you should have won, Dick,” he said. “I really think about that sometimes.” There was another pause, and I heard him breathing. I imagined him in the Oval Office, the lights off, breathing into the same black phone we used to use.

“Dick, you worked in the West Wing for a long time, didn’t you?”

“Eight years,” I said.

“Did you ever see anything—well, I don’t know how to say this—strange? In the Oval Office? Not animals, but shadows that look like animals that are someplace you can’t find? I know this sounds—”

“Crazy, I know. I…did see things.”

“And then like someone’s crying but you can’t find them? I walked all over the house but I couldn’t find anything. I can still hear them late at night. And once I thought I saw a woman and she turned around and—”

“Jack, I think we should probably talk about this in person.”

There was a long silence, and then: “I’d appreciate that. I just haven’t known whom to talk to.”

“It’s all right,” I told him. “I’ve been there. There’s a lot I can tell you.”

“Look, I’ll be gone for a couple of days, Dallas, but if you could come to Washington when I get back?”

“I’ll meet you there.”

“Thanks, Dick. We’ll have a real talk then. And I’m very sorry, about before.”

“It’s okay. Really. See you soon.”