Crooked (18 page)

Part Three

For most of
you, the ones born in 1970 or after, this is where my life starts, the accelerating disaster you read about in the history textbooks. At a tiki-themed fund-raising event at a New York hotel not far from the Commodore, I began to run for president for the second time.

I’d lived in New York for three years and in most ways I had come to resemble an ordinary citizen. For three years, I hadn’t even thought about the boom-and-bust drama of the electoral cycle. I’d cashed out, gotten an ordinary, unheroic job. All the rest of it faded remarkably fast. The glamour of power, the sense of a calling beyond myself, the idea that it had to be me making the decisions. And of course the memories of what I’d seen faded too. The sight of Eisenhower chanting in the Oval Office, of space folding, of horrors in the Pennsylvania Avenue night were—not unreal, but I could put them somewhere else in my head.

I told Pat most of this, as much as I could. I told her it was over and I was different, this time for sure. I told her the stress of governing had made me imagine some strange things, and I might have been out of my head for a while, but I was fine now; in fact, I was happy. I promised, solemnly and openly, that it was done. She didn’t leave me, but there was always that space of reserve I’d come to recognize, the stance of a woman living on intimate terms with a man she can’t entirely trust. We had dinner together every night; we explored the city. Once we happened to walk past the Wexford building on East Seventy-First, and by an effort of will I didn’t even look up.

I did go through the motions of being a former vice president. For a fee I gave speeches at college graduations, talked about political and inspiration themes, looked down from the lectern at the increasingly shaggy undergraduates of the mid-1960s. They in turn looked up with a declining sense of interest and it was obvious that they, too, were less and less sure of where I belonged in history, which vice president I’d been exactly and when and what I had done or not done.

Why should they have known anything? They had only just been born when I met Whittaker Chambers, when the impulse caught me one summer evening to follow Alger Hiss uptown to his strange little office. The Eisenhower administration was just a long vague halcyon era of their middle childhoods. The Russian menace and the Cold War were immutable facts of the world they lived in.

Somehow they remembered the little, wrong things about me. That people had thrown rocks at me in South America. That I gave a speech on television about a dog. The image of me sweating and fidgeting on the debate stage. And they remembered—every last one of them, without even knowing why—that my nickname was Tricky Dick.

The party was just a midterm election fund-raiser but it was already a boozy, sequined arena for the small set of people positioning themselves for the Republican primaries in ’68. The Democrats were weak, there was going to be a Republican resurgence, and everyone wanted it to be about them. The crowd was a mix of wealthy people, career politicians, press, and the hard-to-classify but well-connected riffraff that fill in the gaps.

It was not a triumphant return. Everyone recognized me, of course, and I smiled and shook hands and played the elder statesman at fifty-three. But I caught murmurs in my wake:
Can you believe he’s still around? What’s he doing here?

People have long since forgotten the ludicrous improbability of my return to presidential politics. But you have to remember, I’d spent eight years in Eisenhower’s shadow, his dubious little hatchet man, eight years in a White House that ushered in a golden age. Then, handed this legacy, teed up as no politician ever was, I bungled it for the Republicans.

Remember, I didn’t even bungle it properly; I lost it by the thinnest margin American history had ever seen. If I’d lost by a respectable amount, I might have walked away clean and decent, bowing to a mightier political talent. But I managed a graceless, mean loss that left doubt in everyone’s mind and a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. And then there was the governor’s race and the hysterical concession speech and political
Selbstmord.
With my particular genius I had turned eight triumphant years in the White House into a story about failure. Not until the year 2000, from where I hid in foreign parts, did I witness a closer race and an electoral loss of equivalent unforgettable nastiness.

But here I was. Because Pat had been bored and irritable and drinking that night, and with the children off at college, I was the only other person in the apartment and the target of her moodiness. And I wanted to see the new front-runners, the presidential-candidates-in-waiting. I’d read about them but I wanted to see them in the flesh. Did any of them know what Eisenhower knew? Had he truly been the last of the presidential initiates?

There were three of them and they were easy to spot because they were American politicians. They had large square heads, beautiful hair, and sharply etched features. There was the movie star, Ronald Reagan, who carried himself like an Olympic athlete, who was gorgeous and kind and blandly ambitious with a lizardlike hindbrain that sensed opportunity and danger. George Romney, millionaire and governor of Michigan and apparent simpleton, whose one trick seemed to be canting his shoulders like a gangster and fixing you with eyes of an eerily vivid blue. And Nelson Rockefeller, prodigiously wealthy, with the life and education of a young American prince.

They milled around, trying to stay visible but not stand out too much. They were waiting to be called to the office, to emerge as the obvious choice to run for president in 1968.

They were also easy to spot because they avoided me with an almost visceral disgust and terror. I watched their panicked entourages herd them away as I drifted toward them. Part of it was the timeless and instinctual revulsion that arises on the cellular level between a pack of ignorant bullies and someone who at least tried to get good grades in college. But mostly it was just the feeling that failure was contagious and that I carried it like a plague.

I stared at them with tactless directness and tried to see anything other than confidence and charm. I tried to see darkness, nervousness, any hint that any of them had stared down horror, heard unpleasant secrets he could never convey to a living soul. I got nothing.

A waiter came through the crowd wheeling an oversize novelty cake, a vast cream-colored totem head, and as the crowd collapsed in again behind it, I saw something I didn’t want to see. A large man in a tuxedo standing apart from the crowd, scanning the room. I didn’t literally drop my drink, but I paled and swayed so badly that an especially alert Supreme Court clerk gently reached out and took my drink from me. I barely noticed.

My body knew what to do before I did. In a moment I was peering at him from behind an arrangement of tropical flowers. I looked more closely. It was him, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? Yes and no.

Arkady had aged, but in a peculiar way. Instead of bending him, time had straightened him; he looked three inches taller. He’d lost his sad-sack slouch along with twenty or thirty pounds. His face had lost a little of its soft Slavic humor; it had graven itself into more seriousness, had squared its jaw and looked windward.

Maybe I should have been relieved to see an old friend I’d thought lost, but in reality, I felt nothing but dread. For three years I’d felt I’d cheated the past, been through all that strange darkness and gotten out clean. When Arkady and Tatiana left the country, they took my secrets with them forever. And when I lost the governor’s race, it was as if my ill-gotten gains had ceased to be, and that was that. I’d made my pact with the devil and escaped with my skin intact and at least a piece of my soul, a fair bargain and no hard feelings, right?

No, it wasn’t, and deep down I knew that. The moment I broke into Alger Hiss’s office, I’d stepped off the straight and virtuous path. I’d been rewarded for it well beyond my wildest dreams, and I had no business pretending that didn’t happen.

And here it was, a big fat Russian reminder in a tuxedo. The accursed city had been drowned in the depths of the ocean. But now, after a thousand years, the waters were drawing back and the haunted streets and nightmare statues were emerging from the depths again.

I wasn’t going down without a fight. It was still possible he hadn’t seen me. Keeping the enormous cake between us I avoided him the way the rest of the party avoided me. When he moved, I moved to keep away from him, and Rockefeller, Reagan, and Romney moved to get away from me. Their entourages followed in turn, so together, Arkady and I stirred the circular ballroom with a slow anxious rhythm. I inched us toward the coat check. A few more minutes and I could make my excuses, collect my things, and sprint off into the night, and everything would be back to normal.

Behind me I heard a glass drop; glass shattered and there was a little scream of delight. I turned back too late and saw now that I would never get out. Arkady had seen me and successfully reversed course to cut me off.

“Dick!” he called loudly, unnerving a pack of Reaganites. “Dick, you motherfucker!” He grinned maniacally at me as he battered his way through the crowd, shoulder-checked Nancy’s security detail, and strode to where I stood pinned against a column.

He clapped an arm around me, outwardly friendly but hard enough to make it clear to me I was caught.

“Dick, my friend,” he whispered, “I think it is best we visit the bar for a moment.”

He steered me to the open bar, plainly showing I was in his custody.

“You are surprised; is not an unusual reaction. Do not worry, I am not here for murdering of any sort. I am your friend, a legitimate diplomatic representative of our great workers’ republic.”

“It’s good to see you. I just didn’t think—”

“You thought I would be purged due to the wisdom of our party elders. Is not so unlikely. But that is not what happened.”

“Is there a way we could be more discreet about this?”

A matronly party elder was staring at the former vice president and his Communist buddy.

“No. I have reason to be here. But first we drink a little, like old times. How is Pat and kids? How is boring life? You are rich capitalist now.”

“I’m—I’m fine. Really. Being a lawyer is different. Arkady, what happened? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Long story. Three, four years now, right? We go back to Moscow, Tatiana and me. Aeroflot, Chicago to New York to Oslo. Drinking, mostly not talking. Party men meet us at airport. Then off to questioning.”

“Her too?”

“They take me off for strip search, I thought was just for a minute, but after that I do not see her again. I am sorry, Dick. I came out of this so maybe she is okay somewhere.”

“Are you—” I glanced around, tried to hush my voice in the party din. “Are you still KGB?”

“Jesus, you still suck at this. So bad.”

“Are you?” I asked, turning to look at him.

“I don’t know. Are you?”

“Did you—tell them about that?”

He shrugged, fatalistic. “At first they ask about you. When they stop, it is how I know you lost election. Sorry. More interested in Eisenhower and American defenses. I tell them about the highways.”

“You told them the plan?”

“Was an interrogation. I give them a little something, Dick. And I felt bad; I don’t wish to be unkind, but it was not that great of an interrogation. These kids try to mess with me, set little traps. Change details and ask me to verify. A little yelling and screaming. But they are simply not that good. Commie types, they punch like philosophy majors. Almost I take pity on them. But no, I do not tell them about you.”

“And they let you go?”

He shook his head. “The Kremlin has become strange. Offices and bureaucrats who speak odd languages. And many new subbasements. A few I have glimpsed inside. Fires that do not consume. Statues of silver that speak and sing. And in the tomb of Lenin, he does not sleep.

“In the end, so that I may serve the motherland, I am considered for corrective labor camp, a little uranium mining in Kazakhstan, perhaps. I believe our friend Gregor intervenes. The Nth Directorate gets hold of me, sends me to Baikonur. You know it?”

“The space program.”

“Kosmograd, yes. It has changed since I am there last. Rockets, yes, but also I am shown stone gate, and through it I see stars. Strange machines and metal towers that rose towards the heavens, and today one cannot even see where the highest ones end.

“I was there with a Science Pioneer Detachment, twenty spies and criminals and political malcontents. I am oldest man by far, most not even twenty-five. We are informed we will receive experimental surgeries. Tissue-grafting procedure. I must report that morale for Pioneer troops was not high. Much belated talk of the pleasures of uranium mining and other missed opportunities. The surgical unit was enormous, like an airplane hangar. Shielded trucks delivered the materials and medical personnel wear heavy leaded clothing.

“We are taken one by one. I lie awake and think of Czar Nicholas, of Anastasia, and think maybe this is justice. I am nearly the last; perhaps I benefit by the surgeons’ experience. Many die, many survive but are not fit to be seen. I am fortunate exception.”

“My God, Arkady.”

“Those who survive such things are much valued. I am reassigned to field but perhaps a little disenchanted with Soviet policy at this time.”

“Arkady, listen,” I said. “Listen, it was nice to see you again. Really, really great, but I’m through with all that—you know, stuff. I’m in a different place right now and I don’t—”

He put one hand on my shoulder to stop me. He had always been strong, but now it was like a girder had descended on me. “Dick, I am not come to talk about your feelings, although, yes, always interested to hear. I wish to do you a favor and bring you to a man I have lately become acquainted with. He is standing close by.”

My shoulder was going numb. I saw the man waiting for me across the room, like a dark heavy stone in the frothy sea of blond hair and jewelry.