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.”
“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.
“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.
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