Crooked (26 page)

In the end
the notebooks told me very little I could use. Clues and fragmentary records point me to the Blue Ox project’s persons of interest. Colonel McAllister had been thorough, if undiscriminating. People in government service touched by the unhallowed presences that survived in America and the world beyond. One I knew; the rest had served without distinction and then sunk out of sight.

There were five of us present in the Oval Office when I started it off. Agent Hunt had seen a lot in the past decade. He’d been part of the Bay of Pigs and there were photographs of him on the scene in Dallas when Kennedy died. At fifty he looked a haunted sixty, and none of the others were particularly young. They were all fleshy older white guys, a circle of blue and gray suits, patriotic neckties, and thinning hair. In fact, they looked terrible. All men with promising careers that had disintegrated into eccentricity, obsession, and dangerous extremism. The Plumbers.

H. R. Haldeman, forty-five years old but perpetually boyish with his brush-cut hair, a campaigner and a former ad executive. I’d made him chief of staff but never spoke to him outside of work. He’d attended UCLA and started out as a Near Eastern studies major but had changed shortly after an incident involving a noise complaint, campus police called to the department library on Portola Plaza. Report of a strange smell, unusual plant growth. In the end, four students were dispatched to psychiatric services.

George Gordon Liddy had been an FBI bureau supervisor in DC at twenty-nine. One day a work crew laying the foundation for a parking garage uncovered unusual remains, and Liddy was called to the scene. Subsequently brought in were a forensic team, a hazmat team, and a paleobotanist. The excavation went unusually deep.

John Ehrlichman had served in the South Pacific, part of a squadron out of the Philippines tasked with surveying low-lying reefs in a certain island formation, coincidentally during a month of extraordinarily low tides. They returned with reports of lights burning under the ocean and vast and dark forms moving among them. Seven men, navigators mostly, were hospitalized and subsequently discharged from the unit.

“I’d like to welcome you all to the Presidential Task Force for Vaguely Important Matters. The point is, it’s a secret task force. Doesn’t officially exist. Nobody talks about it. Okay? One of those.” They nodded. Everyone here, I had noticed, liked to be on a secret committee. They also shared, in addition to everything else, a twitchy, depressed affect.

“You all have a certain amount of intelligence background, legal background, or military background. None of you are particularly distinguished in your fields. All of you have been sent for psychiatric evaluation more than once. All of you had involvement with the now-defunct Blue Ox program, and, even more extraordinary, you are still alive and more or less functional.

“You are here in case I should happen to have a problem I don’t know how to explain, or would prefer not to mention, or don’t want to admit exists. We all know these kinds of problems are out there. There are sections of the government that were set up to deal with—the kind of things we’re talking about. I believe some of them are gone; others have left the direct control of Strategic Air Command.

“If you tell another living soul about this I’ll probably deny ever having spoken to you. I will certainly pay people to make you look crazy.

“I can offer you only one thing: The things you know, the things you’ve seen that you can never tell another living soul? The president knows them and has seen them too.”

There was never any great hope that the Plumbers were going to cover themselves in glory. They were Nixon men. Ambitious strivers, failed agents, and failed civil servants. They were well known to be corrupt, vulgar, incompetent, intermittently criminal. They were the remnants of the remnants, the last and least of the United States supernatural research corps.

They were there when the end began and the trap started to close.

“We are here to discuss a national security risk that has been detected,” Henry said.

“Do you mean Ellsberg? I think I can deal with it,” I said. I realize that no one is going to back me on how I handled that one, even in hindsight, but what was I supposed to do? I had a great deal to hide at that point. It wasn’t going to help anything if people realized Kissinger was—what?—a thousand-year-old necromancer.

“That is heartening but it is not what we discuss on this day,” he said. His eyes shifted around the room. Ehrlichman was there, taking notes. Haig was there too, scowling, his oath and basic loyalty preventing him from telling anyone that the top of the executive branch was an occult cell.

“I have learned of the existence of a massive insurgency within our borders. Organized and malevolent and possessed of the knowledge and, moreover, the will to strike at us with devastating swiftness,” Henry said. His eyes continued to dart around the room as he spoke. Was it me, or was he getting more and more manic lately?

“You want to give me these people’s names?” said Haig. “Shouldn’t be hard to round ’em up.”

“I speak, naturally enough, of the Democratic Party’s National Committee,” he said. “They have been meddling with friends of yours, Richard. If the old gods rise, it will represent a significant realignment of the electoral landscape. And not necessarily in our favor. You know how important the Christian demographic is, so we’ll lose most of the southern states. Maybe not Georgia.”

“What do you suggest we do, Henry?” I asked.

“Is there a UN policy on domestic use of the thermonuclear arsenal? In the name, perhaps, of public order?” someone said.

“You know I’m going to end up looking crazy over this,” I said.

“It is not to our disadvantage,” Henry said, “if we appear irrational to the Soviets in this regard.”

“I think there must be other options,” I said. “I’ll speak to my people.”

“The one you call Gregor has approached the Democratic National Committee. They have proven surprisingly cooperative. A pact was made. A process of spatial distortion and hybridization has commenced. They are developing their candidate as we speak.”

“How is it possible they could agree to a thing like that?”

“The election is approaching, Mr. President, and you are favored overwhelmingly. As is so often the case in such conflicts, they believe you are capable of taking steps similar to theirs and that perhaps you have already done so.”

“But to make a pact with Gregor…”

“Surely you of all people must understand. There are those who wish so very badly to become president, they would do anything to make it happen.”

I didn’t tell them everything, mind you. Just enough to get them through the missions. I didn’t want to tell them exactly how bad it was. I didn’t want to tip my hand to any particular side. It was becoming obvious that none of the enemies of my enemies were my friends.

Did we have an enemies list? We did. Gregor could operate in the United States and he could look like anyone and he had no reason to be kind to us. Many of his cells had been replaced by those of an elder god and that did nothing to enhance my appreciation for civil liberties. Yes, Paul Newman was on the enemies list. It was Ehrlichman’s call and I wasn’t going to second-guess him. Was Barbra Streisand on that list? We flagged her for good and sufficient reasons, is all I will say. Judge me if you must.

Did I have multiple meetings with Elvis Presley? I admit that I did, and that I deputized him in the name of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. The deeds he performed in the name of that office will remain retracted for another century, but they will one day be told.

On September 9, 1971, did we break into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist? Everything is so clear in hindsight. We could just as easily have been right on that one too. We were right about Watergate.

I could see
well enough in the dark, not as if it were daytime, but I saw a kind of vivid moonlit outline of things. Night by night we tested and discovered there was more.

Why did I ever think I’d have a soldier’s powers? Eisenhower did, and rightly. My affinity was with shadows, with concealment. Pat and I tested the idea by playing hide-and-seek with the Secret Service. If I concentrated hard enough I could occasionally confuse them, forcibly lapse their attention while I walked away unnoticed. There were moments when I could vanish into the shade of a pillar before their eyes, and emerge to startle them. I could cloud men’s minds, it seemed. What evil lurks in the hearts of men? The shadow president knows.

This is what sparked the idea of the grand plan, the deception in the plain sight of history, but before we acted we would have to run a field test. No games in the White House; it had to work anywhere. The form was my idea: the most famous face in the world would spend one night in the open.

I prepared in mundane ways. I practiced moving my shoulders and head more when I spoke. Applied putty to build up my cheekbones. A heavy layer of foundation made the jowls less apparent. There was nothing whatsoever to be done about the nose.

I trained my voice to be half an octave higher, more nasal, less of the signature guttural growl that anchored my public speaking. Finally the dirty-blond mop of the wig; awkward, but I’d need it for only a night. For clothes, a pair of blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and a canary-yellow shirt bought from the Salvation Army. The shirts were a size too small and showed off a pair of biceps the world didn’t know about. Seventy dollars cash and a false passport out of an old emergency kit, with a photo of my disguised self painted in, grinning as broadly as I could. A harmless goofball with a terrible haircut.

I dispatched the body double to a children’s concert for the evening. And finally there was the car, a 1969 Ford Thunderbird painted a sparkling gold. Borrowed from the younger brother of one of the social directors on the White House staff, ostensibly for intelligence purposes. I slipped into the visitors’ parking lot and fumbled with the door lock. It had been so long. The last time I drove a car was before I won the presidency four years ago, and I’d never driven a car like this one. I got the thing open and ducked inside to find myself much lower down than I thought, practically supine, feet splayed. I pulled the door shut and sat for a while inside this silent, dark, cushioned pod, breathing the smell of leather, cigarette smoke, a stranger’s sweat.

I turned the key and the car shuddered and vibrated. The wheel was broad and turning it felt like steering an ocean liner. The sudden sense of physical ease was overwhelming; the car seemed to say to me,
Anything you want, guy, anything at all.
I briefly laid my head against the steering wheel. I broke into an involuntary, profoundly un-Nixonian laugh that built into a spasm remarkably like a sob. It was so, so good to be somebody else for a moment.

Time to go. I yanked the stick and put the car in reverse, eased it out past the checkpoint and into the nighttime Washington, DC, streets. Richard Nixon had escaped the zoo.

It was only nine o’clock; I had the whole night ahead of me. I cruised, took easy lefts and rights through the grid just for the pleasure of it. I had an itinerary, a map with addresses marked, but for a while it was enough just to drive. A few guys looked me over when we pulled up at a traffic light. I froze in panic until one of them yelled, “Nice car!” It
was
a nice car. I had one of the most recognizable faces on the planet, but just for tonight it wasn’t about me. No spark of recognition, no applause, no jeering. Bored indifference, or a thumbs-up.

I was a Guy with a Nice Car. What if this was who I was meant to be, on the most elementary level? What if years of deception and ambition and horror and accomplishment were utterly separate from the person I basically was? A lost, forgotten Nixon who ought to have been. Dick Nixon, just a guy in a city with a shitty job and a cool car and a mellow attitude.

I pulled up at a convenience store to give the outfit its first test under fluorescents. A Hershey bar and a Coke. Panic again; I had no idea how much these things cost. I shoved a twenty at the guy at the cash register and then scooped up the change. He didn’t even look at me. I stammered out “Th-thanks, man,” snatched up my purchases, and fast-walked back to the safety of the car, afraid of breaking character completely. I peeled out of the parking lot, gleeful again the moment I hit the streets. The sheer administration-wrecking potential of the evening’s plan was sharply apparent. The night could end in a police standoff or at the emergency room or with any number of other unpleasant outcomes, each a first in the annals of the presidency.

A few blocks down I pulled into the lot of Jerry’s, a bar promising beer and color television. The tires scraped and popped on the gravel, and I skidded to a stop. I resisted a Nixonian impulse to fix a shitty parking job. That’s not what I was there for.

It was dark inside, and crowded, and I aimed for the neon light over the bar. Bathed in moist, beery air I almost backed out again at the sheer peril of walking into an utterly unvetted crowd, one that the Secret Service hadn’t checked, cleared, and saturated with undercover operatives. I tried to concentrate on being inconspicuous as I stood in the doorway cataloging faces and firing angles until finally a guy in an
Easy Rider
T-shirt shoulder-checked me into motion again. I stumbled toward the bar. Easy Rider walked on, and I realized nobody was going to tackle him. We were just a couple of guys, and it was Friday night. I could get used to this.

The younger faces looked like the ones I’d seen on TV lately: men with drooping mustaches and masses of hair, women dressed sloppy-sexy, smiling and knocking back shots at the bar. Not for the first time I observed that I had no idea what country I was president of. I ordered a Budweiser, and, in the unfamiliarity of the moment, I did it in my own voice. The bartender did a mild double take but that was the end of it. So what if the dude sounded like Nixon? People sounded like all kinds of things. Men and women crowded in around me and I made room. Everyone chattered and laughed, and, invisible among them, I waited for my moment.

I watched the television, scarcely able to process it.
The Brady Bunch,
then a variety music show. Who the fuck was Ziggy Stardust? Then the late news, the news about me. I’d hoped for something on the SALT conference, but it was yet another piece on the sagging economy. I turned to the man next to me, gestured with the bottle at my face on the television set, and uttered my one line for the night in a way that was supposed to be hearty and casual but came out sounding like something from a gangster movie:

“Whaddya make of that guy?” I said and then I turned back, looked straight ahead, heedless of the response. It was the bartender who answered, his handsome face earnest and manly serious and disconcertingly young under its mustache and beard, younger than I remember feeling, ever.

“I think he’s an asshole,” the bartender said.

I nodded and muttered, “You got that right,” chugged the rest of the beer, went out through the crowd and into the parking lot, and almost made it to the car before starting to cry, big uncontrolled jerks of the body.

“You okay, man?” said the voice of a stranger.

“Fine, man, I’m fine,” I replied in I don’t know what voice this time. Just a voice.

Three more bars, three versions of the same answer, and I was done. I left the car in the White House lot with the keys inside and a note saying thanks and that the mission had been a success.

I could have run off, taking the car west as far as I could, trading it in for another. Drifting from place to place, keeping just ahead of the massive cloud of ill omen that was my life’s legacy. Focus on being that unknown guy with the cool car. It was just that a long time ago, Cool Car Guy started making the choices that turned him into Richard Nixon.