Crooked

by Austin Grossman

  “Yes, Sergei, you swore,” Tatiana said. “And why do you tell it now?” Tatiana and I exchanged glances. If Arkady was spilling his own secrets, was he going to spill ours while he was at it?

  “I make point, dearest niece. I think there was something in the Romanovs to keep this from happening. Because that night when we threw them into the mine, they tell us to pull them out again. Why? I go back in. Mine is filled partly with water but I have seen the last czar die and I am feeling nothing. There was a person there in the mine. Not one of us, see? Big eyes, round, wide apart, watching us, just a little man living in the mine where no one should be. He sees how we have murdered these emperors and empresses, old men and children. He knows we have done this.”

  “You can’t blame yourself, Arkady—Sergei, excuse me,” I said. “You weren’t going to stop what was happening.”

  “I know,” he said. “And you know, Nicholas Romanov was good-for-nothing, real son of a bitch. But what I wish for, what I wait for, maybe, is the true czar. A true king, yes? Who will show me that? We must drink, yes?”

  “Is time we go,” Tatiana said, all but lifting him out of the chair as he emptied the last of the vodka into the remaining glassware on the table.

  “Last toast!” He raised his glass, and his voice echoed through the darkened White House. “To the old gods and the lady vice president and let me think of the words—do not worry, it is British toast, no Commies. Yes, I think of it. ‘That we may work in righteousness and lay the foundation of making the Earth a Common Treasury for All, both Rich and Poor.’ Anything else makes you an asshole. Za vas!”

  Chapter Twenty

  November 1957

  Toward the end of 1957 the Cold War had begun changing again, a new war even less intelligible than the previous ones had been. A space war.

  Notionally, we had the lead. We had U-2 spy planes flying seventy thousand feet up, in theory too high to show up on radar. From there we could count their missile-production facilities, their Bison-class long-range bombers, anything we could recognize in a blurry photograph.

  There were drawbacks, in that violating Soviet airspace was an act of war. And the crews flying certain routes suffered a mysteriously high attrition rate. Psychiatric, at first. Multiple incidents where pilots destroyed their own photographic records before landing. Written reports produced less and less actionable intelligence and instead described unexpected mountain ranges, disturbing geometries, and giant forms or lapsed into single words and phrases, such as writhe and oh God, the dance. It got worse as time went on. Here and there, planes would land and we would open them to find only bones inside, as dusty as if a thousand years had passed inside the cockpit.

  In August of that year the Soviets had tested a long-range ballistic missile that could strike a target six thousand miles away. Europe, Khrushchev asserted, could become a “veritable cemetery” if he wished it.

  As if that weren’t enough, in October the Russians had put themselves even further ahead. Nine hundred kilometers above us, they announced, invisible yet radiant, Sputnik spun and shimmered and made its soundless bleat every half a second or so. A month later, its sequel would bear the corpse of a dog over our heads, like the terrifying banner of a barbarian nation.

  One night, I found Eisenhower waiting in my office, listening to the beeps on the radio, the keening little moon. He’d been drinking, but mostly he looked tired.

  “Dick,” he said, “I know you have questions.”

  “I’m going to be president in two years. I think it’s time you told me what you’re planning. And what happened that night when I shot at you?” I asked. “Why didn’t it work? And what are you?”

  “Well,” he said, “to take the last question first, I’m the president of the United States. I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution. You could say I’m a party to a very old contract with some very odd terms. When you swear the oath, it…takes you a certain way. Taft could have explained it better, he was the technician.”

  “Presidents aren’t bulletproof. McKinley was shot. Lincoln was shot.”

  “It works differently for everyone, no one knows why. Lincoln swore the oath and it didn’t seem to do anything. Chester A. Arthur’s laugh could break the bones in a man’s hand. FDR’s gifts killed him and he never knew why. As far as I’m aware, I am the most powerful chief executive of the past hundred and fifty years.”

  “What about, you know, George Washington? Was he…powerful?”

  He nodded. “There are no first-person accounts of Washington operating at full strength. I don’t think it was a survivable event. Perhaps in the British military archives, but we’ve been denied access. If I’m being honest, we’re not clear on whether he’s entirely dead.

  “We’re ignorant, Dick. We live on the tiny fringes of a habitable moment. There are great beasts, Nixon. There are ones under the earth who watch us; there are things in the deep oceans we can’t even get a look at. There are things that wait in the future and lurk in the deep past, Dick. We just don’t know.”

  “What are you planning? I saw it once for a moment, but it was too big.”

  “My legacy, Dick. A strategic architecture for the twentieth century. When you come into your own, you’ll see it for what it is.”

  “But when will I? Why did you make me vice president if you don’t want to tell me anything?”

  “If you must know, I didn’t want to,” he said. “I did it because Calvin Coolidge told me to.”

  “Coolidge?”

  “Coolidge, who learned from William Howard Taft, who was the smartest person, I believe, ever to hold the office. The line broke, you understand? Whatever the founders knew, we lost it when the Union broke, or maybe before. No one would know anything if it weren’t for Taft. He passed it on to Coolidge, who passed it on to me.”

  “What about Truman?”

  “He didn’t know anything. Not every president teaches his vice. Maybe FDR didn’t think Truman could be trusted. And Dick, that raises the question I’m trying to figure out. Because I have the same problem FDR did, but worse. You could be the greatest since Washington, is what they told me. The greatest or the worst.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  November 1957

  The supernatural strategic initiative of the Eisenhower administration ended on November 25, 1957, with what was described publicly as a minor stroke that left Eisenhower weakened but still very much in command.

  The night before there was another state dinner, again for the Russian delegation, but one with a very different atmosphere. The Russians laughed too loud and drank vodka they’d brought themselves and acted as rudely as they dared under our roof. It was their turn to gloat.

  At cocktails I was startled but not quite surprised to see two familiar guests. I hadn’t seen Tatiana or Arkady since the reception in August of 1956. Arkady was plainly a risk factor at this point. When they asked for meetings, I told them to wait or ignored the requests altogether. I was never sure what Eisenhower might or might not know about me. And then, it was possible that I didn’t need them anymore. I enjoyed having secrets, and maybe—to put the worst face on it—I’d been offered better secrets with a better deal. Why be the secret traitor when you could secretly be the future greatest president of all time? For the most part, I’d stopped thinking of them.

  But there they were. Arkady had maybe slumped a little further into his big man’s slouch, and a little more of his hair had been swept off. He was nearly sixty. Tatiana remained in an eerie stasis, raven-black hair and blue-veined skin, only a little more gaunt and pale. She was reprising her fake-drunk routine with a couple of married senators.

  There was a tap on my shoulder.

  “Mr. Vice President? Can I speak to you a moment?” It was Howard Hunt of the CIA. He had aged noticeably, the lines in his long face deepening. I had had word of him over the years, a sort of roving meddler for American intelligence—a fixed election in Guatemala, then covert duty in Japan and Uruguay. Oc
casionally the reports would come in with darker messages written in Hunt’s feverish prose. An urgent, unexplained request to have defoliant chemicals shipped to Uruguay. A plea for us to ask the Vatican for an assist after a hushed-up incident in the Nagasaki suburbs. He had a way of finding unusual trouble spots, or else he was drawn to them.

  “Howard. How are you?”

  He walked me into the hallway, away from the guests. He seemed a little breathless. “Listen. This is a sensitive matter, but I can trust you, can’t I?” In his formal wear he looked more than ever like the functionary of some grim church.

  “Of course.” I hesitated. I’d forgotten how much he knew about the Hiss affair.

  “Sir, there’s intelligence—reliable, in my estimation—that there is a security issue on the grounds. The case has been building but I now believe there’s a hostile asset that’s been operating undercover on a long-term basis inside the White House itself.”

  “In the White House?” I repeated, stupidly. Was he watching my face for a reaction?

  “There have been rumors for years in the service, a case on the back burner. Data that correlates a little too well. Too many things going wrong. There’s every indication of a breach at the top.”

  “Who?” I managed to say.

  “I have only guesses. But the handlers must be here; it’s almost the whole Russian delegation. We’ve been tracking a huge spike in coded message traffic. There’s an operation tonight, I’m sure of it.”

  Wait, was it a trick? Was this how they got you? I tried to catch Arkady’s eye, then stopped myself. “When I think about what those dirty Russians could be getting up to in our nation’s capital, it makes me sick,” I said with all the vehemence I could muster.

  He looked distraught, and I wished I could help him. The worst part about having a secret isn’t the secret as such, it’s making the puppet version of yourself, acting the way you think a person who doesn’t know the thing you know would act while at the same time you hold the white-hot coal in your mouth, gingerly, desperate not to burn yourself, unwilling to let the truth out yet desperate to let it out.

  “We’ll get the bastard. I’ll give this my personal attention, Howard. Anything you need. I won’t let you down.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  I returned to the party and looked around at the crowd of guests, State Department officials, cabinet ministers…were there other moles? How many?

  Tatiana brushed against me, stumbled, and excused herself.

  “Let me get that for you,” she slurred. She reached out to fix my lapel, then jammed her hand into the pocket of my jacket. The handoff was so clumsy, I realized all at once that she actually was drunk. Smashed. She lolloped back to her seat, leaving me to slip into the bathroom and pull out the scrawled note. Blue Room. One hour. Old business. I tore it up and flushed it away as they called us for dinner.

  At the table, the Russians talked about the future as they ate, about going to the moon and beyond. Arkady’s laugh boomed. He told stories of the Russian front to his embassy cronies, ignoring his hosts. Two places away, Tatiana smiled up at me from the ruins of her lobster thermidor, although given how much she smoked, I didn’t know how she could taste it. Mine tasted like ashes, the little of it I could get down.

  “Are you all right, Dick?” Pat said. I realized I hadn’t spoken for ten minutes. The table around me, the vice president’s table, had gone dead.

  “Just not feeling well. I’ll be right back.”

  “Okay.” She looked at me, concerned.

  I went into the marble entrance hall and then wandered through the multicolored rooms, like chambers in a palace in the Land of Oz. It wasn’t so often that I got to walk alone through the White House. I wondered if this would be my last night in office. If they really were on my trail, I was about to become the center of the worst scandal in presidential history. It didn’t seem real. It couldn’t be. I hadn’t even spoken to the Russians in a year, and we’d been careful. Hadn’t we?

  I walked into the Blue Room to find Tatiana waiting, backlit. The room was another of the White House’s stylistic follies, done in monumental Egyptian fashion, all gold and lapis lazuli, a hushed temple to unnamed gods. Two obsidian caryatids held a pair of candelabra aloft, their candles smoking. I looked around for Arkady but we were alone.

  “Hi, Richard. It’s been a long time for us,” she said.

  “It’s been a difficult year, Tatiana,” I said. “I’m busy. How are things?”

  “I have bad news.”

  “I know,” I said. “They know there’s a mole inside the executive branch. This man Hunt is going to find me.”

  “That’s not possible,” she said. “Not unless you…”

  “I didn’t tell anyone! Not even Pat. I thought this was you. Revenge because I wasn’t in contact.”

  “It’s not me. It could have been, but it’s not. I didn’t.” She put a hand on my chest and kept it there. It was unpleasantly like a scene I’d desperately wanted for a long time. What was the point of being a spy if I couldn’t be James Bond?

  “Listen,” she said. “I have to tell you—”

  “Dick? Are you all right?”

  Tatiana was gone even before Pat stopped speaking. Some spy trick Arkady had never covered in our drunken nights out.

  “I’m in here.”

  “I thought I heard you talking to someone,” Pat said, coming in.

  “The embassy woman. She’s drunk,” I told her. “She’s gone now. Come on, we’ll go back.”

  There are times when it’s great to be a spy. When you’re carrying around a secret, a part of you no one can reach, your own secret room. You could be a husband or a father but unbeknownst to anyone you’re also fighting a large, important war. You know you’re bigger than all of the people around you. There’s nothing anyone can do to you that you can’t burn away along with your latest passport.

  And don’t get me wrong, you were an absolute genius to create that room. But then there are nights like this, when it feels like that safe secret room you created for yourself is filling up with an invisible toxic gas. And you’re banging on the window trying to get somebody’s attention because you just now remembered you forgot to tell anyone about your hiding place. And maybe no one else knows about the idea of having rooms, maybe you were the only one ever to think of that. Too late now.

  We’d reached the ballroom phase of the evening. Eisenhower had turned in, then Pat, leaving me to play host for as long as it took. I drifted with the crowd of happy Communists who sang songs at the exquisitely tuned piano and drank while I waited for what was coming. Around four in the morning, it came.

  “Sir? Could I borrow you for a moment?” Hunt tugged my sleeve. I followed him down the service stairs.

  “I saw two handlers slip away. The older Russian man and the drunk woman. I think they must have been making a drop. Let’s check the library first.”

  It wasn’t much of a library; gift books that had wound up here over the years, antique first editions. Eisenhower wasn’t a reader. We began gently ransacking the small room, feeling under couch cushions, running fingers along the undersides of coffee tables.

  How long would it take Hunt to figure this out? Minutes? Years? The odd thing was that I liked him. I remembered a conversation I’d had with Arkady on one of our bar crawls.

  “Have you ever killed a friend, Arkady?” I’d asked.

  “Do I kill a friend?” he’d said. “No. Or…I do not think of us as friends, but he did. Gave him ride to airport once, he got the wrong impression.”

  “Was it…worse, I guess? Than killing a stranger?”

  Arkady reflected. “He was not a bad guy, he was a double agent, but it happens sometimes. No real choice but to…” He made a motion with his hands that I think must have been tightening a garrote, then shrugged. “But maybe better that I did it than someone else. Why ask me? Wait, did you kill a friend? You planning to?”

  “Maybe,” I’d said, and
I shook my head.

  “Tell you what,” he’d said. “You need to, I help you, understand? I help you do this thing. It happens quick, happens clean, we go have a fucking drink. All over. Who’s this friend?”

  In the library, I wondered if Arkady was close by. I circled left, trying to face away from Hunt so he wouldn’t see my hands shake. It’s all too obvious, I thought. I wondered what he’d say if he knew I was the man he was looking for. Would he shoot me? Arrest me? Start crying? I couldn’t begin to imagine.

  “Got them! Dick! Come here!” I heard Howard call from the sitting room next door. Inside, he was holding a pistol on Arkady and Tatiana as they sat on a rather ugly Victorian couch.

  “Look at this,” he said. “Sneaking around.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “I am Sergei. We have met before,” Arkady said. “My niece was not feeling well.”

  “Howard, this is Sergei and…”

  “Irena,” Tatiana said. “Is an honor to meet you. There are things I must explain.”

  “You’re not allowed in this room,” he told her. To me he said, “This old guy’s been the DC station chief for years.”

  “I make complaint,” Arkady said. “Mr. Vice President, I am guest in this house.”

  “Quiet,” Tatiana said to him. “Mr. Hunt, I would like you to look in that room over there. I think you will find a more pressing problem.” There was a doorway leading to a bathroom. Hunt shuffled over and looked inside, then stepped in.

  “Oh my good Lord,” we heard him say. He backed out, his shoes tracking something dark onto the floor, mumbling, “It must have come out of him. It must have come out of him.”

  “Did you find any spies, Mr. Hunt?” Tatiana said. She looked as though she’d tasted something bad. I stared past Hunt at what lay on the floor, a body, maybe of a Secret Service agent. Most of what was identifiable was his suit. Something was scattered around it. Black feathers. There was a strange burned smell, like scorched caramel.