Crooked (8 page)

A long, long
February train ride north from Washington, DC. There were fewer highways in this pre-Eisenhower world, and to go by car would have meant meandering along a hundred poorly maintained roads and byways in a country that was already beginning to look a bit stranger to me than it used to. The nation was still a disconnected patchwork of odd little plots of land, towns and farms and cities, some seldom visited and little changed since the nineteenth century. A whole day’s travel on the train, myself and salesmen, families, men obviously out of work, chattering college students. We rattled and swayed past stubbled snow-drowned farmland, past small-town railway platforms and the neglected back lots behind brick warehouses and factories, and through cities, Baltimore and Newark. In New York City, I ate lunch in the echoing din of the vaulted crystal palace of the old Penn Station. Then onward north, the landscape growing whiter as we moved past New Haven to Boston. Traveling north was like moving slowly into the past, into a world of clannish towns and families in decaying colonial farmhouses out there surviving the winter. I looked out at the countryside and wondered what lay ahead to the darkening north.

My name is Alger Hiss. It is with the greatest trepidation that I now set down the
disturbing events of the past three years…
I imagined him in his dingy little office, typing out his confession by night after a day of lying to me before the public, chronicling his private secret war. Yes, he’d been a Communist all along, although it turned out there were different kinds of Communists. There were the pitiless master manipulators of the steppes, and then there was the schoolmasterish Mr. Hiss, a principled, rather prudish lawyer who thought working-class people were treated unjustly in the West and who’d decided to risk his freedom and reputation to do something about it.

He wasn’t naive. He’d been at the Yalta Conference, where, in the aftermath of the Second World War, England, America, and the Soviet Union met to decide the fate of a broad swath of the entire world. He’d been in the room with Stalin. He’d read the Long Telegram, America’s first formulated idea of the Soviets’ policy of intimidation and fear. He’d seen dirty tricks on both sides, and he’d chosen.

He planned his treason carefully around a modest, austere family life and his promising career. He quietly photographed State Department documents and passed them on, day by day, patiently and professionally. The diary reported his moments of disquiet and doubt. Anxiety about being caught, and about what would happen to his wife and stepson. He didn’t care for Stalin and his aggressive policies but considered them a necessary compromise. In his public life, he went from success to success, and the work was steady. It might have gone on for decades.

The change came when his old handler was retired and his replacement arrived.

A young woman, dark-haired, who speaks fluent English, one of the new breed from the Leningrad academy, born and raised in the Soviet tradition. No peasant girl, an intellectual. We met and talked late into the night discussing Dostoyevsky and
Lermontov, the nature of good and evil societies. I have seldom met a more challenging thinker. In our work she began pressing me for information on specific government programs not mentioned in the news and not funded through regular channels.

Were she and Hiss lovers? There was no mention. Certainly, as the days went on, Hiss spent less and less time with his family as Tatiana—it could only have been her—pressed him to take greater and greater risks. Soon Hiss was rummaging through trash bins, forging credentials, and amassing dossiers on military research programs that would never appear on an official budget.

As the diary reached 1947, Hiss became more and more fixated on the facility called Pawtuxet Farm. Whatever was happening there had, it seemed, been happening for some time.

During the war, there had been an American program labeled Blue Ox. All Hiss knew was that it began in 1939 and involved recruitment of civilian professors from the faculty of a number of colleges and universities as well as a few dubious independent scholars. The program lacked the decisive effect of the Manhattan Project—in fact, it showed no results whatsoever on paper—but it remained active year after year. After much searching, Hiss worked out a location for the facility in Pawtuxet, Massachusetts.

Hiss nursed dark suspicions that he wouldn’t quite specify, but he quoted figures on the purchase of exotic chemicals and the rate of psychiatric breakdowns among the project’s personnel. I knew we were in an arms race and that the pace of research was only accelerating, but he seemed to believe we had a nuclear testing site in rural Massachusetts. It didn’t make sense.

Was this the next triumph in the arms race? I knew there was a black budget for military research; I’d voted on the 1947 National Security Act myself. But people weren’t telling me things. I didn’t have real friends in Washington, or at least not the right ones. If there was a success to be made here, it occurred to me I should be a part of it. Was I going to be left behind, outflanked by a Washington clique I had no access to? Why not get a jump on the bastards before they even saw Dick Nixon coming?

As Hiss and Tatiana grew closer, Hiss’s investigation branched off in another direction. He became suspicious of his own masters in the Soviet hierarchy.

Tatiana has told me of what she witnessed in the Ural Mountains. The walking shapes, the secret fires (nuclear?) that burn there ceaselessly. She tells me that she believes the USSR has a similar, perhaps more advanced program. I have begun to suspect a truth more dark and terrible than I can commit to paper at this time.

He began a separate investigation into the Russians. Certain military units were detailed for specialized duty and then vanished from the normal border postings into Russia’s trackless interior. Truckloads of political prisoners were taken from the gulags and then disappeared from civilization forever. A salt mine in Ukraine was decommissioned, but trucks still came and went. Circled and reprinted in larger Cyrillic characters was the phrase
Проект Кощей.
(Later, with a worn used dictionary, I painstakingly puzzled this out into Proyekta Koshcheya. Project Koschei.)

Tatiana, it seemed to me, was a master manipulator, and Hiss had met his match in her. As far as I could tell, she’d made him her stalking horse in an internal political rivalry. She’d played on his native paranoid streak and driven him into his own little private, paranoid cave. Was this what I was going to end up like? A whiny, self-absorbed neurasthenic prophesying doom for all?

I spent the night in Boston at a cheap hotel near the railway station. I sat at the fake-wood-grain desk in my room as snow fell outside and continued reading the diary under a bare bulb, trying to shut out the clattering of the elevator and the shouted drunken conversations outside my window.

I rented a car and made my way north and west, over the border to New Hampshire, along narrow roads that ran for miles and miles through pine forests. I stopped at Lowell to consult maps and ask directions, a succession of lefts and rights at the odd-sounding town names the indigenous world had left us—Mascuppic and Musquash. I found Pawtuxet just as the midafternoon sun tipped over toward evening and the buildings’ shadows seemed to lean into the street. I drove past a small village green with surly hangers-on trampling the snow into dirt; a church with a stunted-looking steeple; a market; a one-story motel.

I tramped through the snow of the parking lot to the front desk and was given a curiously appointed room, Victorian wallpaper and a towering chest of drawers in dark wood.

I sat down to read while I waited for the others. Did Hiss stay at this motel too? I found myself wishing he were here to talk to.

I read the last pages of his diary in the dimming light that filtered through a yellowing shade.
The works of which I have obtained evidence defy belief, and yet the sober testimony of these trusted and brilliant sources cannot be entirely ignored. It has become necessary to begin researching on my own. And, if required, conducting my own
experiments.

This was where Hiss revealed a surprising breadth of scholarship for a civil servant. He read monographs couched in arcane academic phraseology. Some concerned the recent rediscovery of works of a pre-Indo-European civilization in the Ural Mountains; others followed North African trade routes in the eighteenth century. He copied out long passages in Greek from medieval alchemical texts.

At the same time, his record of events became, if anything, even more overheated and elliptical. A passage read,
I have obtained (with what trouble and expense I shall not record here) that true mixture of which the Syrian wrote. I believe his original text contained certain code words whose true meaning I have lately divined. The Baltimore night holds terrors I have not imagined, and I sleep perhaps one night in three
. Was this a Middle East arms connection? Nuclear materials denoted by code words routed through Syria?

It was around this time that I myself started to be a feature in the diary, and I saw the hearings take shape from his point of view. I was a hired gun from the government’s secret committees, and Chambers was a fat pathetic tool making moon-eyes at him from across the room. I remembered his contempt for me in the hearings. I also remembered his icy cool and his genial manner most days, joking with the press and making light of himself as a hunted man. I’d seen more bravery than I thought.

There was no further mention of a Syrian, only more cryptic library visits, until this, just two days before I broke into his office.

At last I have tangible proof of what has henceforth been discussed in whispers. I have both spoken with the dead and looked at the horror that will walk this earth ten
thousand millennia hence.

And then a single word set apart in a paragraph on its own.

CROATOAN.

I must learn why they died and why the others lived.

He seemed to have suffered a psychotic break. Or did he just have a night like the one I’d had? Either way, it’s no wonder the Reds were eager to be rid of him.

There was a knock at the door.

“Is Romanian whore you ordered!” Arkady bellowed.

“Just a minute!”

“She cannot wait for you! She has many clients!”

I opened the door.

“Shouldn’t you keep your voice down?”

“Relax, is Ukrainian accent. Locals suspect nothing.”

Just after sundown we set off, balding tires slewing sideways across a wide patch of ice as I pulled out of the motel parking lot. Tatiana gave directions and we followed a narrow paved road that led straight off into the unlit void between Massachusetts towns. The forest was black around me and came up almost to the border of the asphalt. The lights of town were lost behind us.

“Not so fast here, we are close,” she said. I slowed down but saw nothing other than trees on either side. But soon the road’s shoulders widened and a hurricane fence appeared, running parallel to the road and topped with barbed wire.

“Stop.”

I backed up to where the fence started and parked on the narrow shoulder. With the engine off, the night was silent, just wind and the creaking of the trees. The air smelled like pine sap and cold.

“You’ll go in alone,” Tatiana said in a whisper.

“What? You two aren’t going in?”

“It is not permitted for me to be captured by a foreign state,” Arkady said flatly. “Nor Tatiana.”

“But you guys are the spies.”

“Think of yourself, Richard,” he said. “If you are caught with two Russian nationals, what lies will you tell them? You are best off alone.”

I shone my flashlight through the fencing and saw only more trees. The fence extended along the road for what might have been miles. Up ahead there was a padlocked gate.

With the spies watching me, I thought for a moment what to do, shuddering in the wool coat and scarf Pat had bought me when we’d moved east. I’d told her I would be at a conference for a few days. What was she doing now? Being safe and warm and disliking me.

I walked up to the gate and tested the padlock, and it was indeed locked. Maybe the metal was brittle in the cold? I didn’t know.

“What you do now?” Arkady called.

“I’m looking for a rock!” But there didn’t seem to be any rocks.

“Just a moment.” Tatiana got out of the car, walked to the lock, and held it in her hand for a moment. She shifted her feet a little.

“You do not see this,” Arkady said, coming up behind me.

“See what?” I said just as Tatiana gave the lock a quick hard jerk. There was a snap and a ringing sound, and something metal flew off and hit the pavement. The gate swung open.

“How did you do that?” I said.

“Do what?” She slipped the lock into her coat pocket. “Go on, then. We circle back on the hour. Good luck.”

I shrugged and stepped through. I could always turn back if it got any worse. I glanced behind me to see them silhouetted in the headlights, Tatiana shaking her hand as if it stung.

The path leading from the gateway vanished almost immediately. I turned off the flashlight, but it was shockingly dark, and after almost plowing into a tree, I kept the flashlight on. The cold bit through the thin leather of my shoes. The snow was only an inch or two deep, but wet. After a hundred feet or so I reached a second fence, identical to the first. A sign was fixed to it with twists of wire, and I shone the light on it.
U.S. ARMY PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
It was old, rusted through in places, and the wires looked like they’d crumble at a touch.