Crooked (6 page)

Arkady’s full weight was on me, crushing me against the wall, and I could see only a little slice of the room around his midsection. He rotated a little and I saw where my blood had been smeared on the wall and the floor. The circle was much larger now. Gregor must have added to it, although I hadn’t seen him do it.

“When do we move to minimum safe distance?” Arkady said. “I am not liking to be here for the, what do you call, emergence.”

“Get it done.”

Arkady tensed again for the effort. I looked at the circle, and the blackness took on an impossible depth. I had the terrible impression it was no longer a circle but a dark hole tunneling into the wall.

“No!” Without understanding why, I was seized with a terror I hadn’t felt since childhood. I thrashed, twisted. I managed to stomp hard on one of Arkady’s cheap shoes and he yelped. I got my left arm free and clawed feebly at his face. I would have done anything to a human body just to be spared touching that circle. His grip loosened and I lurched back, arm free, gasping for air in the close room. The three of us looked at one another.

The hole in the wall was expanding, slowly. Beyond I saw stars and a bulky shape silhouetted against them. The air that came through was shockingly cold. Something on the far side moved, just a shadow. I couldn’t understand the scale. It looked huge.

“It’s going to be hungry,” Gregor said, maybe to himself. He glanced from one to the other of us, making a calculation, just a whisper of thought. He reached toward his pistol, but in the same second Arkady was already moving, swinging one tree-trunk arm in a thunderous open-hand slap. Gregor staggered, fumbling the gun from its holster.

Arkady drove forward, using his bulk, almost falling into the smaller man. He had a hand on Gregor’s sleeve, trying to control the gun. I scrambled across the room.

“You fucking idiot to pull this,” Arkady said, oddly calm. Gregor strained against him, fired the pistol at nothing. Arkady swung him into the wall; the impact was like a man hitting the ground from four stories up. The gun fell to the floor and spun.

“We cannot abort.” Gregor began talking very quickly. “She sees me now. The blood is his but she sees me—”

“You want to shoot me, Gregor? You think I don’t know what you pull?” Arkady said. He muscled the smaller man toward the hole. Gregor clawed at Arkady and then froze, and his face cleared in blank terror.

“I felt it. It touched me,” he said. Then,
“Ich bin bereit…Ich bin ganz…”
His shirt had torn and I saw a tattoo on his forearm, an eight-pointed star, like a black radiant sun.

“Pick up the gun!” Arkady snarled, one hand now around Gregor’s throat. I realized he was talking to me. I grabbed it, checked the safety like I’d been taught.

“Stop this!” I shouted. “You’re both under arrest!” Neither of them seemed to hear me.

“Shoot him now,” Arkady said. “Do not wait.”

“I can’t.” I held the gun close to Gregor’s face, trying to make him look at it. I was intensely aware that I had never pointed a gun at a live human being, not even in the war. How had Gregor done this so casually?

“The king will come,” Gregor spluttered. He was almost blue but seemed as strong as ever. Arkady was losing his grip. “The king of America. The blank throne.” In one motion he pulled free and plunged his arm through the hole, impossibly deep, almost to the shoulder.

“Y’gsth—”

My body went slack, and in a moment when I didn’t care what happened because obviously none of this was happening in the world as I understood it, I put the barrel against Gregor’s chest and pulled the trigger. I lost, I think, a few seconds after that, and then I was sitting against the wall. I must have dropped the gun and fallen backward. Arkady was holding it now. He fired four more times into Gregor’s body, a slow line down the torso. The body twitched. It would not lie still. I heard a faint crackling.

The big man stopped, waiting, pistol still pointed. He looked at me and pulled the trigger once more, and it gave a dry click.

“No more bullets, okay?” he said. “No more shooting. Is done.”

I nodded. My ears were ringing but I didn’t hear any sirens. The hole was a blank circle again.

“Is he…” I asked.

“I do not think so. We do not have the tools here to finish.”

“What was happening to him?”

“I hear of such things but I do not believe until now. Grafts and injections, no one lived. Gregor was one in ten thousand.”

“What did he say, just at the end?”

“Not here. Fuck. What a goatfuck tonight.”

“Is he—dead?” I asked again.

“If he is not, then we are sure not killing him now.”

“Is it…is that hell? Was that the devil?”

“I have heard it called an angel, or the last czar, or leviathan-grade bioweapons ordnance. It has a name for itself I cannot pronounce. Is not good place to talk here, or breathe even. I think it would be good to have a drink right now.”

We found a dive bar a couple of blocks south on Lexington. The terrifying scuffle of a few minutes ago was fresh on my raw skin. I felt bruised and sore and my hand was swollen. Arkady ordered us each several shots of slightly cloudy vodka.

“You are really from California?” he asked.

“What? Yes,” I said.

“What part?” His English was better than I’d thought at first, far less accented.

“Southern. Southern California.”

“Ha!” he barked, abruptly, some private joke. “You see many movie stars?”

“Well, once in a while, I suppose,” I said, thinking of the time I saw Cary Grant two cars ahead of me in a traffic jam.

“I’d like to fuck one of them one time.”

“That…that’d be pretty fine,” I said.

I held up my hand. There was a raw burn across the ball of my thumb. “I can’t feel it now. Is it poisoned?” I asked.

“More like anesthetic. Thing is like wasp. Then it lays eggs.”

“What?” I tried to see my hand better but it was too dark. “Jesus. I think I need to go to the restroom.”

“You would know if they were there. Size of Ping-Pong balls. And I would have cut hand off at this point.”

“Great. Thanks, though. For letting me go. Eventually.”

“I have done enough shitty things, I am thinking. And Gregor was going to take me too, I am very sure of it. But I will say, I should not have tried to feed you to that thing.”

“Cheers, then.”

“Za vas.”

We drank.

“What happened there? How did you know he was going to…” I made a gun out of one hand. Thinking back, he’d reacted impossibly fast.

“Richard, how old do you think I am?”

I looked him over. He had a couple of really nice scars and he’d spent a lot of time outdoors. “Fifty?” I said, guessing ten years more than that.

He shrugged.

“All right, fifty. So I been in the Soviet Union since I was nineteen, Soviet intelligence since—”

“Wait, you’re a spy?”

“What the fuck you think I am? Since whenever. Point is, how many purges you think I go through? Mission fucked, he wants to burn me. I’ve done it myself to other guys. More than fucking once. I know what it looks like.”

He gestured for another shot of vodka, and downed it.

“I know who you are, Mr. Nixon, the guy trying to catch Alger Hiss. You make a lot of speeches. You really that angry about it? All the Commie spies.”

“Maybe I’m a little madder about it now, yes.”

“I cannot blame you there. Was a bad thing, tonight.”

“He is a spy, right? Hiss? That’s what this is all about? Just tell me. I don’t even know what I saw.”

“Maybe nothing, huh? Maybe you just forget about this crazy stuff, yes? Hiss does nothing for no one but himself. I tell you what, Mr. Nixon. Probably best you go home. You go out looking for spies, maybe you find other things sometimes. You know this now. Is not for amateurs. Think of it as bad dream. Wake up tomorrow and forget.”

“But…but I have to know what happened. What all this was.”

He stood, put some money on the bar.

“I am sorry for it all. You not a bad guy. You need it, I help you out sometime maybe.” He extended a hand. I shook it.

“Do not follow me. I see how you follow Hiss, it is pathetic.” He took his hat from the bar and left.

I waited fifteen minutes. I started to shake a little and ordered another shot of vodka. I’d heard about American covert operations in Europe. I knew we’d tried to plant dozens of sleeper agents behind the Iron Curtain. Hardened men, partisans who’d fought the Nazis, nationalists who’d then stayed behind when the Communists took control after the war. In short, men and women a thousand times tougher than I’d ever be. We tried to get them into the government or the police, anywhere they could inform for us or sway a key election or just stay in one place until we needed them, but that dreamed-of resistance movement never quite found its moment. They went dark, dead or turned or scared into submission, every single one of them. I wondered now how they’d died or what they’d been shown to change their minds. I wondered if they’d acted any better than I had.

When I left the bar, it was maybe five a.m., still warm and humid, an August night shading into early morning. My hotel was on Central Park South. I walked the whole distance, not even feeling drunk. I sat on a park bench and watched the very tops of the higher buildings fading into view.

What was I doing? I was a stage actor pretending to be a politician, a spy hunter, a tough guy. Now that I’d met the tough guys, I knew I wasn’t one, not even close. And I’d seen something else.

I was thirty-five and I’d thought I was playing political poker and it turned out I’d been playing in some other game I didn’t even know about. Like I’d been holding a hand of kings and then the people around the table started putting down more kings, a king with a squid’s face, a naked king with goat’s horns holding up a bough of holly. A Russian king with an insect’s voice. I knew the look on my face because I’d seen it on other people’s faces, that moment when the cocky junior-league cardsharp who thinks he’s been running the show all night looks around the table and finally figures out who the sucker is.

I woke up
still in the clothes I’d worn to yesterday’s hearing. I looked out my hotel window into bright sunlight and smelled the faint scent of gunpowder on my jacket. It had happened. Now what was I supposed to do about it? Gregor was dead. Arkady had saved my life, or I had saved his.

I took the train down to Washington, and Pat picked me up at the station.

“Did you find any spies?” A sour edge in her voice.

“Not yet, dear,” I said.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll get them.”

“You don’t have to say that,” I told her. I closed my eyes on the way home, pretended to nap. Some instinct told me to lock away what I remembered, to keep those strange blurred moments of struggle shading into inexplicable horror in a separate part of myself. Over the next few days, the strangeness faded and I began to doubt what had happened. The rest of the world continued as it had. I was a nobody with no connections and I was going to disappear from the world.

I went back to work. The hearings had moved to Washington, DC, and the political press was watching. Chambers described in detail the Hiss household, its decor, the family’s quirks, and odd bits of personal trivia. When Hiss took the stand, he dismissed Chambers as a passing acquaintance, a parasite, and a mediocrity. I glared at him helplessly. I had seen the man’s diary, and in theory all I had to do was wait for a slipup or a sign of weakness, but he had nerves like a gunfighter. He toyed with me, and gave up nothing. All that fall he kept it going. Prominent politicians were coming out in support of Hiss, and my grandstanding opportunity was turning into a national embarrassment.

One night I had dinner with my family in front of the television set and we watched American planes landing in Tempelhof Airport to bring food to cheering, blockaded Berliners. No one had to say anything; it was obvious. When I pointed the finger at Hiss I’d thrown a pebble down a hillside, and now it was part of an avalanche. For once I’d guessed right about where history was going, but my opportunity to be the Cold War’s first great hero was slipping away. It was probably gone already.

I excused myself and went for a nighttime walk in the suburban streets, the air still warm with late-summer heat. I tried to see a way out of the trap I’d put myself in. Hiss was a spy, I knew it, but I couldn’t say anything about the diary, and I couldn’t prove it any other way.

What I did next was the kind of irrevocable step that you take without thinking or knowing why until years after. I was angry and unhappy, and on some profound level I didn’t care about what I might be sacrificing, my reputation or my country or my marriage or the sanctity of my oath of office. I didn’t give a shit, and I didn’t even know it. Not until the moment I watched myself throw it all on the fire and let it burn.

I stopped at a public telephone and dialed the number I’d copied from the piece of scrap paper in Hiss’s office. I held my breath as it rang. I still only half believed in what I remembered from that night. A woman answered.

“Hello? Who is this, please?” she said.

“It’s Alger Hiss calling.” I couldn’t say my own name, could I?

“Just a moment, please,” she said. Then, farther off, “He says he’s Alger Hiss.” I heard a click as the phone was transferred, then a familiar voice.

“Mr. Nixon! It is good to hear from you. You are well, yes? I see you in papers all the time now. How is trial?”

“It’s not a trial, it’s a hearing. Hello, Arkady. How did you know it was me?”

“Who else? The hearing goes well, Mr. Nixon? You catching the spies yet?”

“Not really, Arkady.”

“Well, then. How can I help you?”

“Do you know…do you know where I got this number?”

“Of course I do, Richard. Why do you call me? No spies here, I promise you.”

“Where are you, Arkady?”

“Russian embassy, of course. In my job as cultural attaché. I am arranging Kandinsky show here in Washington, you must come. You need tickets? This is why you call?”

“Thank you, Arkady. But…that night you said…well, if I needed something.”

“Of course, of course. Just tell me and we talk about it. Man to man.”

“Well—you know our mutual friend? The one who I had…come to visit. I had the sense that maybe…maybe we could talk about him more. Maybe you and he were…not so friendly?” I realized I was trying to talk like a spy when I had never met a spy. Except Arkady.

“What you want, Dick?” he asked. And that was the question. What I wanted.

“I guess I want to talk.”

“We can, yes. But you are sure about this?”

“Of course.”

“Very well. You know the Grant Memorial?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps you go there around midnight tomorrow. Wait for sound of owl then begin walking north. Four blocks. You see a man with white hair carrying copy of
Middlemarch
and you follow him. He get into parked car, you get into car three cars behind him. Say the name
Annabelle
to driver. If someone follow you, they die, understand?”

“All right. Yes.”

“No! Don’t act like asshole. No one cares what you do. Just come meet me tomorrow, one o’clock at my office.”

The next day I told myself it was just to see what happened. Just to see how far this game would lead. It was just a conversation, nothing more. Just talk.

In spite of what Arkady said, I took a taxi from work to a crowded department store, walked in circles for half an hour before guiltily buying a set of earrings for Pat, then left by a different exit and hailed a taxi. We had driven for a few minutes before I realized the driver was shaking with laughter.

“Now I am chauffeur, eh?” Arkady said. He turned to look at me. In daylight he looked uglier. Lined face, worn overcoat, thinning jet-black hair.

“You followed me?”

“You try and do the spy thing, I think,
All right, does not kid around.
We do not wait. I am going to introduce you to a person, you talk to them, we see what happens.”

I tried to look calm and confident, as if I often let Russian spies drive me through the streets of the capital. I touched the revolver in my pocket. I’d bought it at a pawnshop earlier. It was heavy and loaded, but it still felt like a stage prop.

After perhaps twenty minutes, we pulled up at the loading dock of a brick office building. He left the motor running and turned in his seat to give me a long look. He had a wide, fleshy peasant face. Up close, he looked sixty at least, older than the government he served. Old enough to have survived the NKVD purges of the 1930s. Old enough to see straight through a thirty-five-year-old social-climbing congressman who fancied he was a spy hunter.

“She’s in room eight, Dick,” he said. I stepped out into the cool air and the city noises. The taxi glided away and I was left alone on the loading dock, useless gun heavy in my pocket, looking at a gray steel door with a metal handle. I stood outside for a few moments waiting for a cue that didn’t come. The door wasn’t locked.

Room 8 was halfway down an anonymous corridor, thin gray carpeting and fragile-looking drywall, door numbers painted in sky blue. I could hear a radio playing rinky-dink jazz elsewhere in the building; a man and a woman arguing. I stopped outside the door to room 8. All I could think about now was having a gun in my pocket. I tried to come up with something to say if I was searched. Maybe lots of congressmen carry guns.

I took a breath, knocked. No one answered. I tried the doorknob and it turned easily. It was a surprisingly large office, anonymous modern furnishings. A woman sat behind a desk, apparently expecting me, in an olive-green suit made out of some cheap polyester. It was the woman I had seen Hiss arguing with the night I followed him.

“Hello, Mr. Nixon,” she said with only the faintest accent. She stood and we shook hands. “How pleasant to see you again. You may call me Tatiana.”

“Hello,” I said as we both sat down. “Are you—you’re not Russian?”

“Only when I want to be.” Her black hair was tied back neatly, and her lipstick was immaculate, but she smelled intensely of stale foreign tobacco.

“So what happens now?”

“What do you want to happen?” She looked at me for a long nervous unblinking moment.

“I want…” I found I had forgotten to take a breath. I made myself say it out loud. “Well, you know who I am, I guess. Arkady must have told you. We met under, well, odd circumstances. But I was led to—well, it seemed like you’d talk to me about Alger Hiss.”

“If Mr. Hiss were in our employ, why would we give him to you, of all people? Richard Nixon, the anti-Communist crusader? The man who hates us? You do, don’t you?”

“I don’t know. It’s not so simple. We’re in opposition, yes. It’s my job to protect my country.” I cleared my throat. “I wasn’t sure you cared about Hiss.”

“Even if Alger Hiss is innocent, he’ll be watched the rest of his life. He’d be awfully hard to make use of.”

“Well, yes. I’d thought ahead that far.”

“You want to convict Hiss, but that’s not all you want, is it?” She paused to let me speak, but I had nothing to say. She went on with something like a hypnotist’s odd cadence. “Richard Nixon, I represent a nation of a hundred million people. We are a new civilization on this earth. Forget about Alger Hiss for now. We’re doing extraordinary things, things you can’t imagine. We’re not evil; we’re not even your enemies. We can transform your life. Now, tell me: What can I do for you? What do you want?”

She leaned toward me as she spoke. She had an odd, charming, sloppy, lopsided smile and a way of giving you her whole attention that was hard to resist. It was, I later learned, the spy’s craft to know there are people who go through life feeling that those closest to them can’t hear them no matter how loud they shout, people just waiting to be asked to spill the whole damned list. Or was it only training? In the end I told her everything. I told her I wanted a Senate seat. That I wanted Pat to respect me and be happy. I wanted everything I’d been shut out of because of where I went to school, because I didn’t talk right, because my parents were poor. I told her what happened at the Wexford building. I told her I wanted to be president of the United States and that I wanted to know why there was a tiny part of me that didn’t care what happened to anyone as long as I got what I wanted.

And I thought of all the smug people who had laughed at me for playing it straight, for being the hardworking student sweating through the nights to keep up with his classmates, the navy man, the small-town lawyer grinding through divorce cases to make ends meet. I’d worked hard for what people like Kennedy got for nothing. And I decided: No more. I was tired of being a schmuck. I’d get what I had coming and I wouldn’t play fair. By hook or by crook.

Was this how they’d gotten Hiss? Somehow, I thought not. Whatever had happened, he’d probably put up more of a fight. It was ten minutes’ work for them to turn Richard Nixon.

“Why would we give Hiss to you?” she asked again.

“I thought…” I said. There was a long breathless pause, because this was the moment I’d never really admitted to myself would come. When I spoke again it was with a stranger’s voice. “Maybe I could do something for you as well.”

“You are in luck, Mr. Nixon,” she said brightly, a smiling nurse jollying a needle-shy patient through an injection. “We often deal in cases like yours. Mr. Alger Hiss is an exceedingly bright man who had a few too many ideas. We would be happy to see his credibility undermined. You seem like a man who could make that happen.” For a moment I had the impression I was speaking to someone else entirely, a person of great age, impossibly regal. A flash of some other room, gold and dark wood, and then it was gone.

“I can do it; I just need evidence he spied. Enough to go on TV and make that claim, that’s all,” I said. “But what do you want in return?”

“Favors to be named later,” she said.

“What if I don’t want to do the favor?”

She smiled. “We are betting that you will,” she said, and she stood up. The interview, it seemed, was over.

“But—how does this work?” I asked her as I was leaving. “How will I know?”

“We’ll find you. It’s one of the things we do.”

I found myself out in the hallway. I barely knew what had happened. Outside, the sun was going down, and for a moment I was a new person, a strange new man in an unknown city hailing a cab. Was it really this easy to change your whole life? And then I got a cab, and the driver asked me for an address, and we drove back to where I lived, and I was the same person again, almost, but knowing that something had shifted forever inside me and I wouldn’t be able to take it back.

That night Pat asked me where I had been. I told her I’d been working.

“You smell funny. Cheap cigarettes. Have you been drinking?”

“No, dear.”

“You know you can tell me anything. Don’t you, Dick?”

“Of course, dear. There’s just nothing to tell.”

“Welcome to the Watergate Hotel, Mr. and Mrs. Nixon,” a young man said, gesturing us through wide double doors. Pat held on to my arm, still wobbling a little on new heels.

The ballroom beyond positively hummed to itself, full of a mix of journalists, high-level administration types, staffers, socialites, celebrities. Handsome silver-haired white men in tuxedos and beautiful women in satin dresses. One of them smiled at me and I blushed. Everyone smiled at me now. The room was hot; the windows fogged. Outside it was winter. December 23, 1948.

A few months earlier, I would never have been invited. But then I had found, tucked into my morning newspaper, a manila folder showing the exact location of a cache of microfilm concealed in a pumpkin patch near Alger Hiss’s home. Hundreds of stolen State Department documents, incontrovertible proof of the threat posed by American officials secretly in the employ of the Soviet Union. Explain that, Mr. Hiss. He’d tried, and maybe I’d get him only for perjury, but I was going to win and everyone knew it.

“Is it true you’ve caught that awful Mr. Hiss?” a helmet-haired senator’s wife asked me.