Crooked (7 page)

“Almost,” I said.

“My husband is very concerned about the Communist threat, isn’t that right, Dick?” Pat said.

“Yes. Yes, of course,” I said.

I towed Pat onward through the crowd, looking for our host so I could say hello and be congratulated.

“I didn’t think it was going to be like this,” Pat whispered to me. Her grin looked a little less friendly. For a person with her arm through mine, she was making an astonishing effort not to have any physical contact with me.

“We got lucky for once. Can’t we just enjoy this?” I’d spent hours wondering if I should tell her the truth. Each time, I promised myself I’d do it tomorrow.

“I don’t like the way this happened. All these people I wanted to like us, and suddenly now they do, and it’s almost worse.”

“Can we please enjoy this?” I asked her again. “I won. I won the case.”

“Don’t be smug,” she said. “What if we just enjoy it in a mean-spirited way?”

“Deal,” I told her. “Just do the mean part on the inside.”

It wasn’t as fun as I’d thought it was going to be; even I had to admit it. They liked me now that I’d had a success, but I’d spent too long hating them to value what they had to say to me. I’d seen what they were like to people they couldn’t use.

I excused myself to the drinks table or to another guest maybe forty times, until the moment when there wasn’t any other place I could bear to walk to next, and I simply kept going, past the restroom and up a set of cordoned-off marble steps to the cool quiet of the second floor. Let them drag me back if they wanted to; I needed a moment alone. The second floor was dark and solemn. Hiss might once have been invited to a reception like this, but now, instead, he was making plans for a legal defense and worrying about staying out of prison. What did I care? He’d been a spy, hadn’t he?

I stepped out onto the balcony in my tuxedo, let the snow fall on my face for a moment, muscles slack. Downstairs the party was still in full swing.

“Congratulations, Mr. Nixon,” I heard behind me. I turned, smiling my party smile, and then I realized it was Tatiana, wearing a strapless green ball gown, her hair up, a drink in her hand.

“You can’t be here,” I said.

“Why not? I have an invitation. I am a respected member of the Soviet cultural delegation.”

“It’s not in very good taste. You should leave. Our business is done.”

“I don’t work for you, Dick,” she said. She looked directly at me in a way I didn’t like. “I didn’t vote for you. In fact, you owe me a favor.”

“How did you know the microfilm would be in the pumpkin patch?”

“Alger told me it was there. I keep very close track of my American contacts, Mr. Nixon. Especially the interesting ones. I believe you’ll be a senator soon. They’ve asked you to run. Helen Gahagan Douglas’s seat.”

“How do you know that?” I said, squirming a little. I wondered if anyone could see us.

“Oh, goodness, maybe there are Russian spies in the United States government, wouldn’t that be awful?” she said. “You’re going to be an influential man soon, Mr. Nixon. How do you like it?”

“Christ,” I said, sweating. “Would you please go? I feel bad enough as it is.”

“Don’t be stupid. And stop glancing around like that. There’s no one here. And no one would suspect anything. You look like a guilty husband.” It was true; I could barely pay attention to what she was saying. “You feel bad about what you did?” she continued. “I don’t believe it. Your whole life you tried to succeed, and you got what for it? Hack lawyer, then hack politician. And now you see you can be more than that. Slip your skin, walk between the walls. Break rules.”

“Betray my country.”

“Don’t be dramatic. You’re sorry about the deal you made, I know. Your feelings, yes. ‘I’m a traitor to my country!’” she said in a growly woe-is-me voice, the first of many Richard Nixon impressions I would witness over the years, and not the worst. “Do you care about it that much? Flag, Star-Spangled Banner? Christmastime and apple pie? I do not think you do.”

“There’s more to it than that.”

“Is there? I know you, Dick; you don’t care about all this, not deep down. Who are you betraying? What did these people ever do for you? Who’s pulling for Dick Nixon here? We are. We got you Mr. Chambers and Mr. Hiss, and we’ll get you more. Lots more.”

“No. I won’t do it.” I was drunk and tired and sounded pitiful, I knew.

“Oh, Dick. You already are doing it.” She might have been hiding a smile. “You’re one of us now, Dick. It’s not so bad, is it? There are more of us than you think.”

“How many? And who are you really? And what was all that nonsense Hiss wrote about in his diary? That night—”

“Is not good ask so many questions,” she said, pouting and putting on a heavy Russian accent.

“Dick?” I heard Pat’s voice float up the stairs. “Are you up there?”

“Go now,” Tatiana said, and she raised her glass and gave me a twinkly toast. “Enjoy bourgeois party and loving wife. I will be seeing you later.”

“I’ll be there in just a minute, Pat,” I called, glaring at Tatiana.

Pat stared at me curiously as I descended the steps.

“What were you doing up there? We need to go.”

“Just getting some air, dear.”

“Get our coats. I’ll meet you by the door,” she said. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine.”

I thought of the last thing Hiss had said to me as he exited the courtroom, knowing his mistake, knowing he’d overreached and that they’d closed in. “Of course I’m guilty,” he said, clutching my arm and whispering. “I’m as guilty as you are. I’m trying to get out!”

But you can’t get out, can you?
The thought came to me clear and unbidden. And now there is nothing that is not a lie.

“Mr. Nixon?
Mr. Nixon?” A man hurried to meet me as I was walking back to my office in the Capitol but I didn’t bother stopping. Senators didn’t have to stop.

“Mr. Nixon? My name is Howard Hunt. I’m with the CIA. Could I have a word?” The man approaching was tall, bony-faced, a few years younger than I was but with an awkward gravity. A lobbyist? Then I realized I’d seen him before. It was the man from the hotel lobby that I’d walked away from many months ago, the night I followed Alger Hiss.

“Walk with me to my office. What the hell is CIA?” I asked.

“Central Intelligence Agency, sir, the new umbrella. We were CIG for a bit. OSS, Foreign Documents, all of it got folded in together. I’m in counterespionage.”

We walked on to my office, and he chattered away. An English major at Brown University, then a failed novelist, he’d been recruited in the postwar intelligence boom. He reminded me, for some reason, of a young priest.

“Now, how can I help you?” I asked as we sat in my office. It was after seven, and the building had emptied out.

He opened a briefcase on his lap, shuffled through his papers for a few seconds, then looked up at me searchingly. “Mr. Nixon,” he said, “how much do you know about the international Communist conspiracy?”

How could they know?
was my first thought. I tried to freeze a neutral expression onto my face.

“It’s a concern to us all,” I said after a moment. “A grave concern.”

I felt the explanations welling up behind my lips.
It was only a conversation. No one got hurt. I just wanted to be famous.

“I know you brought in Alger Hiss. I don’t think he was acting alone, and, well, it’s just that I’ve made some rather odd discoveries lately. About his research. Very curious indeed.”

I’d lose everything. Richard Nixon would be a villain and a laughingstock.

Or… I looked him over.
Wait.
No wedding ring, and his shave was sloppy. Socks matched, but the shoes weren’t shined. A bachelor? Maybe he wouldn’t be missed. The gun was in my desk. Or I could use the heavy glass ashtray.
Jesus fucking Christ.
It was just a conversation.

“There’s a great deal of chatter coming out of Eastern Europe these days.” Hunt continued talking, oblivious. “All sorts of nastiness got churned up in the last war, too much to pick through, really, but I do find the occasional bits and pieces. Have a look at this? I’m going to assume you have security clearance.”

I nodded. And then, with wild relief, I thought of Arkady. He’d know what to do. He’d pay this nobody a visit. Those strangler’s hands would fix everything; tomorrow, I’d wake up safe in my own bed, life would go on, and no one would be the wiser. Dear old ugly Russian!

I wasn’t even listening to what Hunt was saying. He passed me two photographs. What was this about?

They were two pictures of the same man. In the first, he was clothed, a doughy, mustachioed, bald man in a cheap wool suit lying on a flowery bedspread, obviously dead. Mouth open; his hat had fallen off and rolled away. He’d taken his shoes off before dying.

“W-what killed him?” I asked. Why was he showing me this? A warning?

“Choked. Smothered, actually.”

The second photo showed him naked on a gurney, sad middle-aged flab. Almost six feet tall; he must have been a powerful man once. A scar on his hairy upper thigh, very likely a bayonet wound from the First World War. There was a pale gray tattoo on his left wrist, an eight-pointed star. Gregor’s black sun.

Whoever had taken the first photograph had felt motivated to arrange the dead man’s personal effects on the bedspread next to him. A needle and thread. A shaving kit, well used but in good condition. A vain man or a man with a habit of cleanliness and order instilled early. Clothing well maintained but worn out. Liquor in a glass bottle, unlabeled. Boys’ adventure novels.

“Who was he?”

“Italian passport, but it’s trash. We think his name was Helmut Berdych, a Nazi, survivor of the Berlin siege, trying to sell off intelligence materials.”

“To us?” I asked. Was I not in trouble? I tried to follow along, beginning to feel relieved.

“This is a hotel room in Warsaw. Our man found him only a few minutes after he’d met with his contact in the opposition. He was, we believe, a schmuck. Nazi middle management in a research division selling the contents of his department’s wastepaper baskets. But the market for Nazi assets wasn’t so good in 1946. This was what we found with him.”

He handed me a stack of documents. Most of the writing was in Russian. There were a few photos—a blurry picture of a concrete building in Berlin bombed to almost nothing, white with plaster dust, two children playing in the rubble. Gaps in the foundation had been circled, black openings into a foul subbasement. The kinds of things they did below street level in Berlin. And then stationery of the Third Reich, swastika surmounted by eagle, part terror and part kitsch. Scrawled notes of some random Sturmbannführer:
Rabenmutter.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Research results. Nazi lunatic fringe, we think, the kind of people who sent Ernst Schäfer to Tibet to look into mystical gods. You know Schäfer, the ornithologist?”

“Of course,” I said, knowing nothing.
Birds,
I thought.
Raven Mother.
Hiss was an ornithologist too, I remembered; it was part of how we had caught him.

“The thing is, we think the information may have been intended for Alger Hiss. I believe he was stealing secrets from the United States, yes, but also from behind the Iron Curtain. His papers are still missing.”

“Well, we took care of him, didn’t we?” I said through numb lips.

“Mr. Nixon,” he said, “I believe we are in very grave danger, the extent of which I scarcely know how to estimate. What is the Soviet Union, do you think? What is it really?”

I shook my head. In many ways, I still had very few answers to that question. What were they doing over there? What came to mind was nonsense. It was Europe, but then it was Asia. It was nine million square miles, I had read, more than twice the size of America, and I knew almost nothing else. I pictured a snowy plain under a gray sky. More snow was falling; bearded men and beautiful women wore fur hats. They drank and schemed while organ music piped fiendishly and the Kremlin loomed into the heavens behind them, a glowing red hammer and sickle surmounting the scene.

“They’re the enemy, I know that much.”

“Do you know the term
naukograd
?
 ” he asked.

“I don’t speak Russian.”

“It means ‘secret science city.’ A part of the new Soviet industrial push, an entire metropolis devoted to a given research question. They’re not on maps; some of them are underground. Blacked-out science cities, off in the frozen tundra. Dozens. Hundreds, even.”

I felt cold; my stomach seemed to drop. A country without religion and without limits. A scientific state of which we understood almost nothing. Hunt fixed me with an unsettling sepulchral stare.

“It is my belief that the Soviet Union is at work on a far greater threat than we imagine. I’d like your cooperation, Mr. Nixon. I need more men like you to be aware of the threat they represent. And it’s not just them. Hiss was…well, I’d better not speak of it.”

“Of course,” I said.

“Don’t forget, Mr. Nixon.”

The next afternoon, I went to a congressional security briefing where we viewed classified footage in flickering black-and-white. A plain-faced woman with her hair done up in a messy bun sat at a kitchen table with some household objects before her: a saltshaker, a box of matches. She bent over the table, face pinched with concentration, and made strenuous passes with her hands. The saltshaker moved a fraction of an inch. She redoubled her efforts and it moved again. A voiceover told us she’d driven a tank for the Red Army before her abilities were discovered, and they were even now being duplicated by Soviet scientists. What kind of dreamland were they building over there? What was this new world?

Uptown Theater,
Cyrano de Bergerac,
1:00 p.m., Wednesday—your old friends.

They’d written the message on a small plate underneath a piece of carrot cake served in the Senate cafeteria. They could have just sent me a postcard for all it mattered, but I guess they wanted me to know they could reach me anywhere. Because they wanted to show they knew I liked carrot cake and would always finish it. Fucking spies.

I glared at the cafeteria workers, daring one to look up at me or betray just the slightest nervous tell. In vain. And what was I supposed to do with the plate when I was done? Was that nail polish? I picked at it with a fingernail but it wouldn’t come off. Was there some obvious exit strategy that wasn’t occurring to me? I slipped it into a coat pocket. Yet another thing I’d have to throw into a large body of water and forget. On Wednesday, I told my secretary I was taking a long lunch, and she smiled and nodded as if every single thing were right with the world. I left the Capitol, smiled and waved and nodded at people I knew from television. I lived in a different universe now. No more Nixon the anxious striver; I was a crusader and a young star of the political world. I had won.

Even Pat had to admit it. Or I imagined her admitting it in a long flowery speech, explaining how she understood the pressures I was under and the sacrifices I had made and that it wasn’t a perfect fucking world, was it. In my imagination she admitted it all the time. We had not spoken recently.

I ducked into a taxi and had it take me to a shopping mall, where I purchased dark glasses, and then I walked half a mile to the movie theater. Once or twice I circled a block to see if I could spot whoever they might have had following me. It is a terrible truth of the spy trade that, just like adultery, it lends itself inescapably to cliché.

When I arrived, they were sitting together in the back row. I don’t know how they’d contrived to have the rest of the theater empty, but they had. Arkady gestured to the seat in front of them, and I sat for a few moments before twisting awkwardly around to glare at them.

“Why are we meeting here?” I asked. “Don’t you have an office?”

“I do not know about this movie,” Arkady said. “Hero is badass but does not make good choices.”

“He’s in love,” Tatiana told him. “He wants it to be pure and chaste. It’s how he keeps his self-respect despite having a big nose.”

“Because the ladies don’t like big nose? This is attitude problem for them. He looks fine. Needs better hat.”

“It is different for the French. Russia, it is no problem. We are an advanced society. Hello, Richard.”

“It wasn’t easy for me to get away,” I told them.

“But you manage it. That is good. We are impressed,” Tatiana said.

“What do you people want?”

“We have something we’d like you to do.”

“I don’t work for you.”

“Of course not!” she said, mock horrified. “We are not capitalist bosses in a historically obsolete system of economic slavery. We work together. We are comrades.” Was she being sarcastic? Was she even a Communist at all? Her Communist Barbie demeanor was like a jamming system for normal nonverbal signals. Maybe this was what it took to survive as a woman in the KGB. I glanced at Arkady.

“I mean, I can decide not to do this,” I said.

“We’ll see, won’t we? Aren’t you curious what we want?”

“Just tell me.”

“All right. You remember our friend Alger Hiss,” she said. “I think you’ll recall he was very interested in a place in Massachusetts called Pawtuxet Farm. We would like you to go and see what’s there. Simple.”

“I don’t have time. I have a very full schedule.”

“You will add this to your busy schedule. We have confidence in you.”

“You can do it. You are Tricky Dick, yes?” Arkady said. I was, by that time. A souvenir of the Senate race.

“Why do you want me to go?”

“We believe there is a government facility there and that it is interesting to us. And perhaps to you as well. I want you to learn what is happening and who is responsible. Where does the money come from? This sort of thing. A little history.”

“I won’t spy for you,” I told them. “You can’t fuck with me the way you think. I’m a senator now. I’ll have you deported.”

Tatiana sighed.

“Dick, in what we do, it is usual for people to make things pleasant and not cause a fuss. Great spies are polite and easy to get along with and that is by far my personal preference. But I can also make things unpleasant. Do you think we can’t ruin you? It happens all the time. Tricky Dick Nixon the Commie senator will be a great embarrassment to your country. The entire world will laugh at you. Arkady and I will get the Order of Lenin.”

“Already got,” Arkady said.

“Then you get a second one.”

“I would like that, yes.”

“You think Hiss has it bad right now?” Tatiana said. I turned away. “You get it a thousand times worse. For treason, you go to jail for life, or maybe you get killed, who knows? But it doesn’t stop there. You become a historic figure. You are Benedict Arnold. And your daughters are, what, three and almost six now? They grow up as the traitor’s kids. How do you think they’ll do at school? They change their names but doesn’t do any good, does it? You know how kids are. And Pat, what about her life? She finds out you lied, you’re nothing to her. And to the world she is the traitor’s whore. Or on the other hand…”

I heard her shift in her seat behind me. Her hair brushed my neck, and I felt her breath in my ear. “We could do this the other way. I can be nice to you.” She leaned her head against mine. “Has anyone ever been nice to you, Richard Nixon?”

I wanted to turn. I gripped the seat in front of me. I wanted to kiss her. I knew it was a trick. This was spy craft, the rote professional manipulation of lonely and unhappy people, the thing she did for a living. But I felt it. I hated Pat for it. She was starving me to death when I had a right to be happy. What made it okay for Pat to do that? Shouldn’t I just get what I want?

Up on the screen, Cyrano was laughing at some sad-sack aristocrat whose girl didn’t love him. I thought of a letter I’d written a long time ago, when I was a boy. They would laugh at me about it later, historians and journalists, but it wasn’t my idea. It was a school assignment to write something in the voice of a pet dog. I wrote,

I thought of that phrase, the
swarm of black thing.
It had chased me all the way from Orange County, and now was I a good dog or wasn’t I? Wasn’t I? And was anyone going to come home? None of the historians ever said.

I heard Arkady moving in his chair uncomfortably. He might be a Stalingrad veteran but he didn’t want to watch this. He knew how these things were done but he didn’t like it. Maybe he had feelings for Tatiana. I saw suddenly, clearly, what I looked like to Arkady. I knew that I hadn’t humiliated myself entirely at this point, but if I wanted to finish the job, this would be the way to do it. I stood up and faced them.

“Forget it,” I said. “I mean, I’ll do it, sure. Just forget about that stuff, okay? I’ll do it but then I’m out. I’m not a spy.” Tatiana’s look was as unreadable as ever. She’d already seen every dodge, every rationalization an intelligence asset could give. She was just letting me say what I needed to say before I cooperated.

“Pawtuxet Farm, then,” she said. “You are on train to Boston tomorrow, nine in the morning. Don’t worry, you will not be alone up there. We will join you later.”

“Easy job, nobody get hurt,” Arkady said. “Not like last time. And take this.” He handed me a packet of papers. Alger Hiss’s notes. “To read on train.”