Crooked

by Austin Grossman

I eased the door inward as far as I dared. The furniture of the Oval Office had been pushed to the curved walls. There was Eisenhower, motionless, bent over a small stack of papers. He’d been chain-smoking and the smoke drifted up past the two great flags that stand behind the chief executive’s desk.

  He remained there for a long minute, then he harrumphed a little, straightened, and walked very deliberately around to the front of his desk. He turned to face something I couldn’t see and then he said, clearly, “Well, on we go.”

  A voice answered, “Yes, sir.” I recognized the high-pitched voice of the secretary of defense. Somebody Wilson. I could barely hear him. He sounded like a man talking in his sleep.

  “Are we recording?” the president asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Let’s get through this. No questions, you understand? And not a word to the Joint Chiefs.” Eisenhower took a deep breath, cleared his throat, and took up a long knife from the desk. “Am I on the spot we marked?”

  “Looks like it, sir.”

  “Commencing tactical incantation. This is attempt four,” Eisenhower began. He rolled up one sleeve and drew the knife—I saw now it was a worn-looking bayonet—across the top of his forearm in a quick jerk. He stood a moment and watched it bleed until he was satisfied. He shook it out and I heard the blood spatter. I risked leaning a little farther into the room and saw that he was standing before a portable bulletin board on which was pinned a large map of Korea. It was dotted with blood now. The president held up a page and read from it.

  “‘Eighty-Sixth Engineer Searchlight Company.’”

  He repeated the blood-spattering gesture and spoke again, very quickly and quietly, tonelessly.

  “‘Let their fates pass from them. Let them go unobserved. Let them strike fiercely in the night. Seven Hundred and Second Ordnance Maintenance Battalion. Let their fates pass from them. Let them go unobserved. Let them strike fiercely in the night. First Psychological Warfare Leaflet Company. Let their fates pass from them. Let them go unobserved. Let them strike fiercely in the night.’”

  Each line was the same except for the unit name. By the time he reached “‘Fourth Chemical Company of the Twenty-Third Chemical Battalion,’” the flow of blood had just about stopped. He let the page he was holding fall to the floor.

  “Right, then,” he said. “We’ll do the heavy stuff now. Authorization code one, one, Charlie, uniform, victor. Presiding, Dwight David Eisenhower.”

  “Authorized,” the secretary answered. “You are to proceed.”

  “I do so. Phase one, confirm target First Deputy Chairman Lavrenty Beria.”

  “Confirmed.”

  “I hereby offer him my ill will, malice, and condemnation in the full power of my office as president. Let all manner of mischief befall him. Let the Black Lady of the Woods prey on him by night. Conclude.” I noticed he was sweating, unusually.

  “I witness.”

  “Phase two, then. Confirm target General Secretary Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. Jesus, that’s a mouthful.” His voice shook a little.

  “Confirmed, sir.”

  “Proceeding. Let Abaddon-class entity designated Twelve Sierra, name redacted, visit him in its accustomed manner. Let the following authorized agents of the United States military inflict their harm: entity Fortuno, entity Mentalis, entity—” He stopped in a fit of coughing, bent over for a moment.

  “Is there—”

  Eisenhower spat on the floor. “And entity Pariah are granted full scope and discretion in the matter. Conclude.”

  “Conclude.”

  Eisenhower straightened, crossed to the fireplace opposite, and slowly and deliberately put the typewritten pages on the fire as Wilson bent over the wastebasket and puked his guts out.

  “All right there, Wilson?” Eisenhower said, rolling down his sleeve and moving to his desk. “You can go. I’ll see to it you won’t remember this tomorrow. Not a thing.”

  “Thank you, sir. I’d really very much appreciate that.”

  I’d been absorbed in the scene and realized a moment too late that Wilson was walking straight to the door. Before I could move, he opened it and walked sightlessly past me, leaving the door wide open. In the abrupt, ringing silence, I looked down the length of the Oval Office at President Eisenhower.

  “Hello, Dick,” he said.

  “Mr. President.”

  “This is a surprise visit. Is anything wrong?”

  “I thought I heard a noise,” I said.

  “A noise.” He thought a little while. “A suspicious noise?”

  “Well, odd, maybe. Talking.”

  Slowly he shook his head.

  “You’re sure it wasn’t a radio? This new music kids listen to. They say it’s just terrible.” He looked me in the eye as if daring me to argue. Call my bluff, he seemed to say. He wasn’t a large man—an inch shorter than I was—but for a moment he seemed to loom over the desk from an unfathomable height.

  “Maybe…maybe you’re right, sir. I’m sorry to intrude.”

  “Wait, wait! While I have you here,” he said, and the momentary impression of great height was gone. “Something I’ve got to show you. Really terrific.” He fumbled in the desk drawer.

  “Mr. President?”

  “Ha!” He found what he was looking for and came around the desk to meet me. He was holding a deck of cards. I noticed once again how enormous his hands were. Pillowed in one palm, the deck looked as tiny as a matchbox.

  “It’s a really great trick.” He shuffled the deck automatically; the cards cascaded from one hand to the other. “Do you like card tricks?”

  Did I? I couldn’t recall anyone ever showing me one. I shrugged at him like a sulky adolescent.

  “All right, here we go. First take a look at the deck.” He handed it to me to inspect.

  “Completely ordinary,” I said, returning it to him.

  “All right. Now you pick one.” He fanned the deck out one-handed, facedown, and I chose one: the king of clubs. “Give it back.” It was one of the longer conversations I’d had with him since the inauguration. He shuffled the cards and fanned them again, watching me intently.

  “Okay, now pick another.” I did. It was the king of clubs again but evidently from a slightly different deck. This one had a demented little grin, and instead of gazing off to the side, it stared straight out. It looked, annoyingly, a little like my younger brother Arthur. I handed it back.

  “It’s a nice trick, Mr. President.”

  “Nearest thing to being a general, isn’t it? Misdirection. Pop up where you’re least expected. Now go again.” He was a little too pleased at having a captive audience. I picked another king of clubs, but this time it had a larger mustache, a squarer head. It looked oddly familiar. Stalin.

  “Once more. Last time. Watch my hands as I shuffle. This time for real.” I watched cards pour from one platter-size hand to the other. I’ve never been good at figuring this stuff out. He fanned out the cards.

  “All right,” I said. But as I reached for a card, he drew the deck back.

  “First I want you to remember something.”

  “Remember what?”

  He turned the deck over so I could see that it was all kings, the entire deck. Or were they kings? The one at the far left was more than familiar. Washington. Then Adams? Then Jefferson. I looked for Eisenhower’s face—the thirty-fourth president, there in the middle. Was I next? I looked for my face but the cards that followed were all in shadow.

  “Remember to stay out of my office.” He flexed the entire deck then let it go so it spat toward me, cards scattering straight into my face. I stumbled back and blinked, just for a moment, and the room was dark.

  What the hell? I took another step back and banged into a desk that hadn’t been there a moment ago. My eyes adjusted and I saw I was standing in my own office, down the long hallway and around the corner. Had I fainted? Been hypnotized? I stepped into the corridor. I really was there. The building was dark. The Oval Office
was locked; the West Wing was silent. Somewhere in the building a radio came on, and a voice told me that Joseph Stalin was dead.

  Chapter Seventeen

  March 1953

  The following day I was going to signal that I had news when I took a call from a Mr. Lermontov at the Russian embassy—Arkady’s signal to me. He picked me up an hour later. We drove for a few minutes, then parked to check for a tail.

  “I’m sorry about Stalin,” I said.

  “Is not that asshole.” He started the car again, then gave me a look. “Is you. You okay, boss?”

  I glanced over at him. He was back to watching the road, impassive. Arkady had fought at Stalingrad. Arkady had returned fire at Wehrmacht troops from behind the stacked frozen bodies of his own dead. What registers as “not okay” if you’re Arkady?

  “Why did you ask if I’m okay?” I said. “Is something wrong?”

  “You’re drinking too much. Your tradecraft is for shit.”

  “You’re saying I’m a drunk? Or a lousy spy?”

  “You’re a smart person. So then you don’t check your angles, you show up forty seconds late, I wonder why. I’m left circling the block like chump just waiting to get made. If a CIA guy rumbles you, who do you think has to clean that up?”

  “You haven’t actually done that. Have you?”

  “You’re fucking up, Dick. Vice president and you’re spinning out. What’s the problem?”

  I felt the walls of the car around me, and I felt like no one could hear me, and I thought, What will happen to me if I tell the truth for once? Just say it out loud. It came in a rush.

  “I’m…I’m unhappy in my marriage. I can’t talk to her about any of this. I come home and kiss her on the cheek, I tell her some story about working late. I look at her and she looks at me, and it’s like we both know and we can’t say. Jesus. I’m in hell.”

  Arkady turned the wheel, pulled us off the main drag.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Don’t worry. Nobody going to know you here.”

  A few blocks north, shops and apartment buildings gave way to warehouses and faceless industrial brick. He seemed to know the territory and found us a bar, an unmarked storefront with the door standing open, dark wood inside. It might have looked the same a hundred years ago.

  We drank out of bottles labeled in Cyrillic.

  He considered me. “You fucking Tatiana?”

  “No! No, I’m not fucking Tatiana. Jesus.”

  “Okay. So we don’t got that to deal with. You gonna be okay.”

  “What am I going to do, man? I’m fucked. Sooner or later I’ll get caught. Or, Jesus, one of you guys will get the order to rat me out. Photos go to the CIA and I go to jail.”

  “Why you always have to imagine the worst thing?”

  “You killed, what, two agents domestically in the U.S. in 1950. Another one three months ago. You know how many agents we’ve lost over on your side?”

  “I do. I know also what happens to them. It is not my fault your country’s intelligence service sucks. We had the atomic bomb since 1946, guys didn’t even figure that out until ’49.”

  “Wait, you guys had the bomb in ’46?”

  “Our guys know how to keep their mouths shut. We test in…” He trailed off, mumbled in Russian. “In remote place. Very remote.”

  “How come we heard about it in ’49?”

  “Honest? What you guys picked up is not a test exactly. We had a little problem at one of the blacked-out research cities in Kazakhstan. Naukograd, archaeological division. A dig site. In Moscow we get code from them. Priority signal. Codes can mean different things, you see. In Moscow we got big chart, what all the codes mean; what we do in response depends on the site. One code means, maybe, ‘We need supplies.’ Or ‘Medical help.’ Some are good. ‘We make discovery.’ ‘Hey, prototype works as planned, it is hovertanks for all comrades.’

  “This code, not a good one. Chart says it is very bad. Chart says do not trust anyone emerging from this site. We shoot down helicopters coming out. We drop gas. After three days, no more come out, but sounds are heard. Chart says to be very afraid. We drop bomb.”

  “Did…Jesus, did it work?”

  Arkady shrugged.

  “We wait a couple years then send a guy. We do this four or five times since then. Russia is big place, you know? But you get me off track. I have thing to tell you. A problem. You remember the man named Gregor?”

  “Of course.”

  “It is not exactly true that he is dead.”

  “But I shot him. You shot him.”

  “Even at the time I tell you I do not know for sure. What we did that night was to summon a great beast, a chudovishche. A thing of the steppes. A first-strike option, one of the early developments. Never tried, of course, never had the ingredients. It would have heavily compromised life in the northeastern United States, at least.”

  “My God.”

  “Yes, yes. All is well that ends well, yes? But what happened to Gregor is not understood. Cleanup team was well briefed but what they found there killed them dead for real. Gregor was not found.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because I am not working for you—when the fuck do you learn this? Because you do not need to know. Because I tell you what I tell you. You know how long I work with Gregor? A lot longer than with you.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Okay.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He knows how to disappear, as we often must. Was in Prague, I think. Guatemala certainly. I hear things through the network, jobs that look funny. Hijacking here, sabotage there. Bodies are left behind in odd condition. Ones who survive, they also are not well.”

  “Are you going to—take care of him?”

  “Gregor is our man. You worry about yours.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  March 1954

  It’s easy for a vice president to fill up the days, to fill up a year, given that there’s no end to the minutiae, meetings the president would rather not take, positions that need defending that he’d rather not defend. In the cosmology of the Eisenhower administration, I was the lurking shadow to Eisenhower’s Sun King, a darkly goblinish servitor dispatched to loom in senators’ doorways and remind them where their votes were going to go. They knew I was willing to be nasty about it; that was the Nixon brand, after all, if anything was. I was sent to put down Joseph McCarthy for doing exactly what I’d done, just a little bit more stupidly and shabbily.

  Stalin was gone, then his bloodthirsty henchman Beria. The Korean War came to a close. The CIA backed a successful coup in Iran to keep the Soviets out. A new man emerged in the Kremlin, the foul-mouthed, belligerent Ukrainian peasant named Khrushchev.

  The longer it goes on, the more spying becomes a habit of mind. I made space for it in my day, gave my excuses to Pat without thinking. Mentally tracked schedules in the West Wing, looking for the little windows when I’d be alone and unobserved. Who was I spying for? Not the Soviets. For myself, for the lonely three-person cabal of Arkady, Tatiana, and me. For the sake of the mystery.

  I don’t know why I forced the issue that particular night. I had stayed late; word had come of a ruinous defeat for the French in Indochina at a place called Dien Bien Phu, and although we had supplied their effort, it hardly seemed of material interest that the French had lost another relic of the colonial era. But a strangely doom-laden aura hung over the event; there was an odd coda in the aftermath report—lights in the jungle and ugly silhouettes. In fact, we’d offered to nuke the site off the map, but the French had decorously declined.

  Nonetheless, I felt a new urgency. Presidents and vice presidents looked down at me from the walls of the West Wing. This wasn’t my house. Had any of them felt like this? Intruders in a strange, ancient structure? I padded along the plush carpet listening at each door. Senior staff. Chief of staff, situation room.

  I thought of a dream I had had when I was eight after me
morizing the whole long list of presidents for a school prize. In the dream there was a long dark hallway lined with marble statues that stretched on down the years, and these were statues of the presidents.

  I walked along the hallway in my pajamas, passing under the gaze of each one. It started with Woodrow Wilson, president when I was born. I passed Taft, Roosevelt, and went across the century mark to William McKinley, rotund and scowling.

  I looked down the line, seeing how each one was different. One seemed to laugh; others seemed deeply serious. But each one an infinitely noble, infinitely complex individual. An exalted lineage of the great.

  I kept walking, feeling compelled. Harrison, Cleveland, Arthur. The statues were growing larger and less human, like crude pagan idols. Lincoln towered above me, a skeletal giant. The light dimmed, and past James Madison I could barely make out the statues’ awful faces. Washington himself was hidden in darkness but I knew he was there and that if I saw his face it would drive me mad with fear. I cannot tell a lie, he seemed to say, still holding the fatal ax. And in the dream I prayed that he would please, please lie, for if he spoke, what terrifying truth might he reveal? I woke, gasping, in my attic room, to the news that Warren G. Harding had been elected.

  Now I tried the door to the Oval Office. It was unlocked again, and it opened noiselessly. The Oval Office is thirty-five feet long, twenty-nine feet wide, the seat of power in the Western world. Low cabinetry and bric-a-brac along the walls, low couches and coffee tables. A landscape painting, a horse and rider. The president’s desk is at the far end but most of the room is open space, dominated by the great seal, the eagle clutching arrows and olive branch. A room for discussion, state visions. What else? Stepping inside was like stepping onto a great stage. I heard a low hum almost below the threshold of perception, or perhaps I imagined that. Or maybe it was due to the fact that I was quite drunk.

  The door swung shut behind me. My feet made no sound on the carpet. In the dark, I felt bodiless. I drifted through the space toward that massive desk, like a castle rampart. I would get Eisenhower. I would stare him down. Whatever he was doing, whatever he was, I would drag it into the light.