Crooked

by Austin Grossman

  “We got the material, we’re going to see results. You’ll see.”

  I was shown to guest quarters in what looked like a New England bed-and-breakfast and fell asleep reading excerpts from Bradford’s history of the colonies, some battle or other in King Philip’s War. As ever Captain John Morton had fought his way to the very thick of the fraye and was the first to enter that dredful space beneath the Pawtuxet hillside. Fourteen men followed after, white men and Naragansett, and for a space of nearly an hour there was silence untill Morton emerged alone nor he wd not speke of what he witnesed therein…

  I was awakened just before dawn by a frantic lowing among the cattle that lasted maybe fifteen minutes, and I didn’t sleep again after that.

  In daylight nothing looked quite so worrisome. The temperature climbed above freezing just long enough for a miserable bout of rain, which rang off rectangular buildings of corrugated metal slumped in a desultory arrangement on a piece of farmland. They looked temporary but had clearly been there over a decade.

  Miller took me on a walking tour of what might have been the world’s shabbiest research institute. A library, rows of bookshelves and a sharp musty smell, books with pages swelling from the damp. I looked at a few, a mix of early American history, theology, and the latest in behavioral psychology. A few were written in dense Gothic script I couldn’t decipher.

  The next building was divided into classrooms and offices. In one office, a group of four Germans looked up from a heated discussion over coffee. In the next room, a darkly bearded man angrily moved to block my view of a blackboard and waved us on. The room after that was quite large, almost a third of the building’s floor area, and empty except for a wall-size map of Europe and Asia densely inscribed with notes and studded with pushpins.

  The next building was a storehouse of architectural debris: chunks of pillars, gargoyles, weathered stone blocks crowded together. Mixed in were odder items—a field artillery piece that might have seen action in the Franco-Prussian War, tapestries, carved wooden furniture. The next building stood entirely empty except for large scorch marks on the concrete floor.

  Miller told me the areas of the base I was advised not to go near: four bunkers standing in a precise row and a blunt gray concrete pyramid surrounded by a low moat with water at the bottom that hadn’t frozen. A cooling tower? In one far corner there was a small cemetery marked with old, old granite stones. Pawtuxet Farm looked small and snowbound and sad.

  I was, frankly, a little bored. What was happening here? I’d seen plenty of books in Arabic script, so I conjectured it was a kind of applied anthropology center for political hot spots.

  The only unusual thing about it was the level of everyday unease on display. No one seemed to be getting much sleep. I passed a lavatory and heard the sound of vomiting. There were no women at all on the base, or at least none that I saw.

  I went back to the stone steps once but there was nothing to indicate they ever saw any use. I looked up to see a figure watching me from the farmhouse’s upper floor; it stared at me for long moments until I walked off, and the curtains closed.

  That night in McAllister’s office, I played the only card I could think of to play.

  “Colonel, about these results—”

  “What is it, Nixon? Is the general not satisfied?”

  “Frankly, there’s talk of suspending funding.”

  “You can’t possibly—” He seemed, all at once, terrified.

  “That’s right, Colonel. If we don’t see results soon—”

  “You Washington people really don’t know the situation.” He had turned a startling yellowish white. “There’s things we’ve started here that you’d best not stop.”

  “Well, Colonel, I’m not seeing the results I’d hoped for.”

  “Results.” He giggled to himself and shook his head. “You’d see some results if you shut this place down, that’s for damn sure.”

  “Well, I’ve come all the way up here, I’m going to need something to put in my report. To the general.”

  An orderly poked his head in. “Sir? Sorry to bust in. There’s been an arrival.”

  “What’ve we got? American?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The colonel rose and shrugged his coat on.

  “Well, come on, Mr. Nixon. This is what you wanted.”

  I hurried after him, out into the cold and bright stars, followed him between buildings at a half trot, and then I was back in the map room. Seven or eight uniformed men stood uncomfortably against the walls. The only light was what spilled in from the hallway. The room was as empty as before except for a folding chair in the very center of it where a man sat, his face in shadow. Everyone spoke in whispers in the semidarkness.

  I took my hat off without knowing why. There was something sad and solemn in the occasion.

  The man in the chair stirred.

  “Sir? I’ve—I think there’s something wrong with my eyes, sir,” he said. The voice had a thin, whistling quality that made it a little unpleasant, as if something were wrong with his mouth.

  “You’re okay, son,” McAllister said. “Now, listen, I’m with the military and I have a few questions for you. What can you see right now?”

  “I—I don’t understand. Where’s the captain? The flight plan—” the man said. He sounded young.

  “You’re back in the States now. You’re home.”

  “Where am I? You’re—did we crash or something? Am I in a hospital? I don’t like this.”

  “This isn’t working,” somebody growled.

  “What was the flight plan?”

  “I don’t know. We were over water. The Adriatic. Then east, Turkey. Just trying to bait ’em. I do ECM—jamming and stuff.”

  One of the uniformed men began sketching on the map.

  “Try the words,” said a second voice.

  “Proctor, you do it,” McAllister snapped. Rustle of a piece of paper changing hands. Proctor squinted in the dim light.

  “‘By the Ninth’—what does this say?” He started again, louder. “‘By the Ninth Article, Section Seven, of the United States Constitution, I do compel and require you to answer all questions put to you by order of a duly sworn representative of the executive branch. By such articles of the ruling covenant as shall not be mentioned in this place.’”

  “Now, tell me, son, what can you see?” McAllister said.

  “There’s a—a hill, I think. And a house in the distance. There’s a sun but it don’t look right, it’s orange. How can that be? I don’t like this at all.”

  “Is there anyone else with you?”

  “There’s a—in the distance. A man getting closer. And he’s—why does he look like that? Is he all right?” he said. “I—I still can’t remember what happened. How did we get off course? My memory…”

  His voice got more and more whispery, then trailed off into nothing.

  “Hit the lights,” Proctor said. The fluorescents flickered on and we all blinked as at the end of a play. The chair was empty.

  “Waste of time,” McAllister said. He walked slowly to the center of the room and put his hand on the chair wonderingly. The others filed out, grumbling. I heard two men arguing in German, their voices fading into the night.

  “Blue Ox initiative. One of our less successful nights,” McAllister said finally.

  “I don’t understand. Who was in the chair?”

  “Tentative ID, Tech Sergeant John Bowman. ECM specialist, crewed on a modified C Ninety-Seven out of Wiesbaden last year. Four hours out they realized he wasn’t on the plane anymore. We’ve had him a couple of times now. He never knows shit.”

  “Where—where did he go?”

  McAllister sighed. He looked tired. “One of the mandates for Blue Ox is intelligence gathering,” he said. “But we’ve still got nothing behind the Iron Curtain.

  “Ever since the last of the Romanovs bled out, it’s been batshit in there. For forty-five years, from the Polish border to the Sea of Japa
n, it’s been open season. We don’t even have good maps of the place. At the end of World War Two we had all those guys in place, ready to stick it to the Sovs, be our eyes on the ground. Tough guys who’d fought the Nazis. And the NKVD rolled ’em right up, every one.

  “We did what we could, started picking up German POWs who got let out of the gulags and repatriated. Bits and pieces. Railway lines, airfields, mines. A couple whole cities we didn’t know about. You can think of this as the logical next step. There’s more than one way out of the Soviet Union. So you tell the big man we’re making progress.”

  “Big man?”

  “Ike. None of this happens without him.”

  I lay awake the rest of the night, watching the cold light filter back through the curtains. I had never spent much time in New England and the cold was new to me, and the pitiless trackless forests. I wondered that anyone had thought to try to live here. I wondered about the Pilgrims making their way here, grim and God-haunted, scraping at the iron soil, and about what they would or wouldn’t do to survive. Were they in any sense American? What did that actually mean?

  Pat didn’t meet me at the station, so I had to get home myself, and it was ten p.m. when the taxi let me off half a block short of our brownstone. The street was blocked by a couple of shiny town cars, and two dark-suited men flanked the door of my house. I stayed in the shadow of an elm tree, watching them.

  I’d been discovered, that much was certain. Followed by U.S. counterintelligence to one of my meetings. Perhaps Pat had grown worried about me, had had me followed by a private detective who had stumbled on the truth. Or maybe Arkady and Tatiana had traded me away exactly like they had Alger Hiss.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. If people had betrayed me, it was because I’d betrayed them first. The only oddity was that I hadn’t expected it. I’d wandered along in my own little bubble of deception, taking no more precautions than a child skipping school. As if it weren’t real. But now the black cars were outside my house, and men in dark suits were at the door.

  I had no better idea than to run away. Turn the corner of our block and keep going. Back to the train station, where I’d buy a ticket west, and vanish. Who could find me? I saw myself reaching San Francisco, where I’d make my way to the dockyards, join the merchant marine, ship out for foreign ports. I could slip my skin and be a different man, and Dick Nixon would cease to be. In two months I could be in Shanghai, Tokyo, Jakarta. I stood in the freezing night watching that house where Pat was waiting inside, looking at the doorway, which was more terrifying than anything beneath the ground in Pawtuxet.

  I thought of the alternative to running. Standing on the threshold and meeting all of their gazes.

  Mr. Nixon, we’d like to ask you a few questions, they’d say, but everyone in the room would already know. The policeman’s gentle hand on my shoulder, maybe a young man barely out of his teens, more puzzled than hurt that a man his country looked up to could be caught in such a position, a thing he could never in his life picture doing. And Pat, withdrawn, visibly preparing herself to live with the knowledge that she’d picked the wrong man. Then the storm of publicity: “Crusading Congressman Tied to KGB Spy Ring.” Whatever Hiss had lived through, I’d have it a thousand times worse. And who knew what further punishments would come? I’d learned in Pawtuxet that my government was a stranger thing than anyone knew.

  It’s hard to describe the thought process that led to my stepping out from behind the elm and walking unsteadily toward the door. The far-distant chance that Pat would at least understand, that I’d be taken away knowing I had one person still behind me. Fear of the double humiliation of being caught running away. The idea that I could salvage a little bit of the situation if I faced my accusers and went willingly.

  The two men watched me climb the seven steps to my own door. One of them said, “He’s waiting for you, sir,” and opened the door.

  Inside I faced a strange scene. Pat rose from where she’d been sitting on the living-room sofa, stiff with formality, and called, “Dick,” in a voice much too loud.

  “We have a visitor!” she practically screamed. She stumbled against the coffee table, which rattled with five or six cups of tea. A dark-suited man stood by the wall, tea-less.

  A man seated in the easy chair facing away from the door twisted around to look up at me, then stood. He had a wide, froggy face with a generous crooked mouth and dark blue eyes that peered from below an enormously capacious brow, giving his head a top-heavy appearance. His ears stuck out comically and the whole effect would have been cartoonish if it weren’t for the impression of danger, of a cold shrewdness applied to every interaction.

  I recognized him, of course, as the president of Columbia University, former governor of the U.S. occupation zone in Germany, and former chief of staff of the army, the architect of Operation Overlord as well as the Blue Ox program. Dwight D. Eisenhower.

  Part Two

  Chapter Eleven

  February 1951

  I had the momentary urge to salute, which I quelled at the last instant and turned into something between a rather stiff offer of a handshake and a low-angled sieg heil. He sat back down, just as if my living room were his private office.

  “Now, listen, Mr. Nixon,” he said, “I’m sorry to barge in on you after your long trip.”

  “Oh, it’s no trouble,” I said, as if I regularly held open houses for world leaders. What was happening to the world? I glanced at Pat. How long had she been attempting to make small talk with the savior of Western civilization? I sat down next to her on the flowered sofa. I wondered how much trouble I was in, and with whom.

  “You were—where again? Boston?”

  “That’s right, sir. Massachusetts. Euro trade conference.”

  “Any fun?”

  “Boring stuff, sir.” I couldn’t help staring. After I’d spent months currying favor with senior senators and State Department officials, the most important man in America—in American history?—was planted immovably in my living room.

  “No sightseeing? No side trips?” he said. Eisenhower’s skin had a waxy pale look, as if he had been annealed by the heat and pressure of surviving in the crucible of twentieth-century history. He was unreadable, the man who had funded Pawtuxet.

  “Well, sir‚ there was a kind of side trip. Fact-finding.” I was at that moment when you begin to tell a lie and have to decide how much of the truth to reveal, knowing that you don’t have time to think it through but that whatever comes out of your mouth is what you’re going to have to stick to. I trailed off and shot a meaningful glance toward Pat. I was trying to telegraph to Eisenhower both Classified information, not for civilians and I was not at all freaked out by your terrifying occult secrets.

  “Never mind, never mind. You’ve been doing very interesting work. With Communists. I meant to tell you that.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Can’t be too careful. About time somebody stood up to those people. Got some real answers.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Except not McCarthy, you know? Takes it a bit far. And there’s—you know—” He mimed swigging from a bottle.

  “Right. Right. Doesn’t know when to stop.” Stop drinking? Stop persecuting Communists? There was no clarifying. Even I didn’t know what I was saying.

  “But not you. A real go-getter, that’s what they might call you.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “You’re really going places, that’s the plain fact.” He sipped his tea, unhurried, the center of the universe.

  “I hope so, sir,” I said. I glanced at Pat, who gave me a shaky nod. Going places. Good?

  “Now, I hope you’re ready for it,” he said abruptly. “People can give you a hard time in the press when you’ve got a high profile. You’re not hiding anything? No skeletons in the closet for Dick Nixon?”

  “No, sir. Not me,” I answered. “I’m a straight shooter.”

  “Well, I’ll take you at your word. Dic
k Nixon is a straight shooter, that’s what they all say.” He had an easy, folksy smile. On a prettier man it might have looked slick or ingratiating but on him it was endearing. It was one of those gifts fate gives a person who goes into politics, a single trick that makes him likable to millions.

  “Exactly.”

  “Welp, I’ll be toddling along now. Past my bedtime.” He stood, and I walked him to the door. His attaché opened the door for him.

  “Th-thanks for coming over, sir,” I said. Behind him, Pat winced, but he only grinned again.

  “You’ll be hearing from me soon enough.”

  One dark-suited man—a federal agent of some kind, I assumed—went first, to alert the others, then Eisenhower, then two other agents. We stood in the door watching the entourage finish their choreography, scouting lines of sight and then, agent by agent, folding themselves into the shiny cars, which pulled away down the snowy lane and headed back toward the corridors of power and influence, fleeing the scene of our quaint little living room.

  We went inside to clear the tea things.

  “Well,” said Pat. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

  “I didn’t know that was going to happen.”

  “I just sat with him for three hours. I really need to pee,” she said. “He never peed once. How is that possible?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.” We sat on the couch together, and then she bounced up again, poured me a tumbler of whiskey, and sat back down.

  “So you’re going to be vice president?” she said. “That’s what this means, right? Or I am, conceivably. One of us.”

  “I guess that’s what it has to be. Did we—did we pass?”

  “I don’t know. If he ran next year, would he win? He would, wouldn’t he?” she said. She got up again. “He will. And you’re going to be vice president.”

  “We’re going to need new clothes,” I said.

  “Right. We are.”

  “And servants. Does this mean servants?” I said. “Can we have servants?”