Crooked

by Austin Grossman

  “Wait! I have to talk to you. I have to explain.”

  “What do you want here?” the girl said. Long blond hair and a tired face, but angry.

  “What about Kent State, man?” someone behind me asked to shouts of agreement. People were shaking the sleepers awake now.

  “I didn’t know,” I said. “I didn’t want any of this. I never knew—” I’d expected them to be overawed but they were already shouting me down. My crowd sense was long out of date.

  “There’s no time! Do any of you know about black magic? I need your help.” The angry voices stopped. I had finally managed to surprise them. “You can tell me. I need to know. I need to know right now!” I heard the hiss of a walkie-talkie. Men in black suits were advancing up the Mall at a stiff walk.

  “Hey, chill out,” the bearded kid said. He put a hand on my arm and then whispered in a voice too low for anyone else to hear, “We know who you are. Who you really are, dig? Who your mother was. We have our own agent in place. Peace, man.”

  “Oh, thank God. Thank God. You can’t tell them I said this. Nothing, all right? Tell them we talked about football. Sports. Lie to them. Just do that much.” It was full daylight by then and the men in suits had reached the lowest steps and all at once I felt how tired I was. I was still drunk. I lunged at the student nearest me and seized his hands in mine. I thought, This might be the last time I speak to a stranger free and unchaperoned.

  In the next day’s papers it said I’d met with a student delegation that morning. They said I’d talked about football.

  The next morning I told Rose to mark the schedule with five hours of staff time and to let absolutely no one in. There was no one waiting to tell me my own secrets. If there was a power in America, I was going to find it myself. Taft wasn’t smarter than I was. Eisenhower wasn’t. If I could do just the smallest bit of magic, a gust of wind, a spark, anything, I could follow that thread. The power was everywhere around me. It was merely a matter of rituals and forms, and I needed to stumble across only the tiniest piece of it to start figuring it out.

  I began by reading the Constitution aloud, syllable for syllable, 7,591 words, including the amendments. I waited to see if it had any sort of effect. Then I read it aloud backward. I did the same for the Declaration of Independence. I poured a small whiskey, neat, and began on the Articles of Confederation.

  I repeated the oath of office and said the Pledge of Allegiance. Magic wasn’t about dignity, I decided. I sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I sang “God Bless America” and “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” which has eight verses and is not an enchanting melody, but a small drink between verses improves it. The sun was low in the sky. “Yankee Doodle” has fifteen whole verses and it didn’t do a damned thing.

  “Dick?” It was Pat, standing in the doorway from the residence. How long had she been there?

  “Hello, Pat.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I wasn’t doing anything.”

  “You were singing.”

  “I was providing leadership to the free world, which is the thing I do in here every day. Which is why you should knock before coming in.”

  “I did knock. Someone—apparently not you—was singing ‘Yankee Doodle’ too loudly to hear me. Have you been drinking? I’m also wondering why you’re wearing that flag as a cape.” That I had put on around the tenth verse, a matter of thoroughness.

  “Everything about this situation is classified.”

  “I think we need to have a talk.”

  “You know I’m busy, Pat.”

  “I heard about the students. It’s terrible, and I don’t think it’s your fault. I just want you to tell me if you’re all right.”

  “Am I all right?” I said.

  “Just tell me that.”

  I could tell her, but she’d ask why.

  “I’m the president,” I said. “It’s all we ever wanted. Don’t ask me that again.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  October 1970

  I’d gone to San Jose to yell in the faces of maybe two thousand protesters. Haldeman had told me to goad them, but I didn’t need prompting. They were the nastier kind and I was in the mood for it. I gave them the jack-o’-lantern grin and the old signature V sign, guaranteed to set them off. Why not? Let it rip, fellows. Give me what I deserve. If you have debris hurled at you often enough, you can recognize the sound without even looking up. You don’t need a Gallup poll when they’re throwing vegetables, eggs, and, if they’ve really worked themselves up, stones. A medieval mob chasing down the heretic in chief.

  We drove straight to the airport afterward, skipping the ceremonial dinner, standing up Ronnie Reagan. Pat seated herself a good three rows away and I leaned back to sleep in the semidarkness. I dreamed I lay in my childhood bed listening to that distant train whistle, my old ticket out. I didn’t even know about airplanes then.

  When we landed, I was met by a CIA man, an enormous blond who flashed his ID too fast to see.

  “Sir? We have a situation.” I nodded to Pat and the entourage and stepped toward the waiting limo. A situation sounded about right to me.

  The motorcade left the airport, lights flashing, police motorcycles flanking the central limousine. It was a shell game; I was in the black town car that veered off halfway along the route to lose itself in the side streets until it reached a shaded driveway in front of a suburban ranch house. They explained on the way what was happening—a high-level defector had demanded my personal attention. She’d already offered enough verifiable intelligence to establish her value.

  An older CIA man, white-haired with a brick-red face, opened the car door for me.

  “Connors, sir. We’re holding her until we can figure out what to do with her. She’s refusing medical attention until she talks to you.”

  “You’re sure she’s not armed?”

  “Nothing on her, and we got her a new set of clothes.”

  “And you’re sure this is worth my time.”

  “According to our Kremlin watchers, yes. If she’s the genuine article.”

  “How do we not know?”

  “You’ll see, sir. Dates of service look a little funny. But they hit her pretty hard in Budapest before we got her undercover. If this is a scam, she’s showing a fuckload of commitment to the role.”

  A Secret Service agent opened the front door and called, “Searchlight coming in,” to somebody I couldn’t see. I stopped in the doorway and let my eyes adjust. The house was a rambling one-story construction. I could see what must have been the kitchen light on toward the back.

  “She’s in the kitchen,” Connors said. “We had to cover the windows. Snipers. She wants to talk to you but—”

  “Stay here,” I said. “I’ll call if I need you.”

  “Okay, sir.”

  The kitchen was in half-light, newspaper taped over the windows, sacks of newly bought groceries set up on the linoleum counter. A dark-haired woman sat at the kitchen table over a cup of tea. She was dressed in a man’s white button-down shirt and gray slacks but I couldn’t see her clearly until she looked up.

  I saw what they meant about medical attention. On the left side of her head, most of her hair was gone, and bits of her scalp. The left half of her face was raw and scraped and burned in places.

  “It’s been a while, Dick. Did you still want to marry me?” she asked with her lopsided smirk. It really was her, the reason I was president, the reason I was never going to be truthful with anyone except her.

  “Hi, Tatiana. Are you all right?” I stopped where I was. I wanted to take her hand, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t even move.

  “I’m all right,” she said.

  “Does it hurt?” I said. I sat down across the table from her, like we were a married couple enjoying a late-night meal together. I’d forgotten how small she was.

  “I can feel it, yes. Not so bad.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Istanbul just now. Your peop
le flew me in. Budapest before that. Russia. Siberia a couple of years. Around.”

  “Did our people do that? Your head? Your hair?”

  “No. It was an accident. It did not go well, after I last saw you. It will grow back. A part of who I am.”

  “What do you mean, a part of who you are?” I asked, but she waved a hand as if it were too obvious to go into.

  “How have you been, Dick? You look good,” she said.

  “I’m the president of the United States now.”

  “Congratulations. Although I know this, I hear them talk about you. Are you liking it all right?”

  I shrugged. “We went to the moon.”

  “How is Pat?”

  “Pat is—she’s unhappy. I don’t think she likes any of this. I don’t know how to talk to her.”

  “Always you think she is stupid and untrusting. But what is she to do, not knowing the truth?”

  “And how am I supposed to—never mind, this isn’t what I came here for.” I glanced at the impassive Secret Service agent hovering outside the door. How far did sound travel in this place?

  “What did you come here for?” she asked.

  “Look, Tatiana, you’re in a tricky position. They grabbed me out of the White House for this. I’m the leader of the free world now. They think you’ve got fresh intelligence. They might try to interrogate you. Probably you should be thinking about what you can offer them.”

  “I could always offer them you.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “You and me. You and Arkady. The KGB president.”

  “What do you want, Tatiana?”

  “I’m still thinking. It has been an eventful few weeks. But don’t worry yourself, I have all kinds of spy stuff for them. Missile placements, intelligence assets around the world. They’ll be satisfied.”

  “Are we…enemies? Are you still loyal to the Soviets? Are you with us now?”

  “I’m a very good liar, Dick. If this”—she turned her burned face toward me—“does not convince you, I don’t know what more I can do.” I stared at her unhappily. What wasn’t she capable of? But if she wasn’t my friend, who was?

  “Just give me a story to tell,” I told her.

  “All right. When I returned to Russia in 1961 they were not happy with me. I was given long debrief session. Several weeks. Many repetitions of my story. They want to know what happened to Hiss. Where my subsequent intelligence came from. This causes me great difficulty at first. They do not know you are my agent, and I keep it that way, do not worry. I tell them it is Hiss, then I invent other sources, people who are dead now. A little here, a little there. I can play these games better than they can.

  “Or so I thought. Always in the past I was successful in the Russian system. Smarter and tougher, and willing to do what is necessary. But when I get back, all doors are shut. I lost my rank, my fancy apartment, my access. I was given menial work. Then it got worse. There are irregularities in my service record and they were found. Things no one should know. But the explanation was not hard to find. Gregor, who you tried to kill, is not dead. He is highly placed now, the Nth Directorate. Dark places.”

  “I know.”

  “He used his influence to make things difficult. I was taken for tests, medical tests. They started to notice things about me. I have more secrets than you might guess. My face, my age.”

  I looked more closely at her and realized what had seemed wrong from the start. I’d known her for more than twenty-one years now, and when I’d first met her she was in her early thirties. For the luckiest people, time gently suspends itself between, say, twenty-five and the midforties. Skin, hair, weight stay, with only a little charity involved, the same.

  I thought of the changes in my own face over the last twenty years. I’m not a vain person; there was no mistaking what happened. The hairline had stayed where it was, but it had thickened, coarsened; lines had been graven deeper. George Orwell said that at fifty, everyone has the face he deserves, and I was evidently less deserving than most. Tatiana, though—she had to have been in her fifties, but, apart from her injuries, she looked exactly the same as she had two decades ago.

  “What is this? What do you want, Tatiana?”

  “Tell your Secret Service man to check outside the window,” she said. “Walk over and tell him you heard something.” I did, and as he left I turned back and saw her standing there in front of me, and without warning she kissed me.

  It had been a long time since anything like that had happened to Richard Nixon. Maybe it was that, or maybe there was some other reason why it was so exactly perfect, the soft, tender, furtive Russian-spy fantasy kiss of my dreams, her body pressed against mine, the very wrong life-ruining kiss, hope and worry over in a long, loveless public marriage. The kiss you starve yourself for. It went on seconds or minutes, until she heard the screen door close and sat down quickly and I did the same.

  “What if I asked you to run away with me?” she said.

  “That’s not possible.”

  “Yes, it is. Run away with me before it’s too late. From dumb-ass job, from stupid Pat who cannot love.”

  “But I’m the president.”

  “Yes, you are. Hurrah and good for you. Now you can maybe live your life and not eat your heart out anymore. You have money. I do too. We could live anywhere.”

  “You don’t just leave the presidency.”

  “They’ll kill you,” she whispered. “You think Kennedy was an exception?”

  “Who will?”

  “Gregor will; 1972 is coming and they plan to take advantage. Gregor has had a long time to prepare. They couldn’t get to Eisenhower but you are no Eisenhower. And if Gregor doesn’t get you, there’s your own Dr. Kissinger, and you don’t know what he is but I have my strong suspicions. I watched him a long time in the fifties and he does not mean well. You’re a little chicken in a world of foxes. They’ll tear you apart between them. Your wife too.”

  “I have to stay. I’m the president.”

  “Oh, Dick. We both know what you are.”

  I stood up so fast the chair fell over, and Connors was there in an instant.

  “Is everything all right, sir?” he asked.

  “The prisoner is ready to talk,” I said. “I’ll be returning to the White House. Good-bye, Tatiana.” I said this last on my way to the door, not turning around. Gary was in the car with his hideous satchel, working on a crossword, and we pulled back onto the highway.

  “How’d it go, sir?” he asked after a few minutes.

  “You know, Gary? Go ahead and send those launch codes out whenever you feel like it. All of them. Any time is fine for me.”

  “Right, sir,” he said.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  December 1970

  Proxy wars, recession, a new offensive building in Vietnam. Approve: 52 percent; Disapprove: 34 percent; No Opinion: 14 percent. A five-point drop in approval, a new low. I mumbled to Rose about a last-minute diplomatic crisis and she knew enough to invent the rest. Then I gave the signal to activate Arkady.

  It should have gone the usual way. The limousine pulled up at the embassy and there was a quick, awkward minuet with a body double, and I transferred myself to the second limousine, which took me to a back entrance of the Jefferson Hotel. If the Secret Service thought I had a mistress, that was the least of my worries.

  I ducked into a dim, roped-off section of the empty hotel bar and took a seat in the booth. Arkady slid in a moment later, a half-full bottle of vodka and two shot glasses gripped in one hand.

  “Is not as easy as it once was,” he said.

  “The Secret Service can keep their mouths shut. They do it for everyone.”

  “Is not what I mean. You are burned but good, my friend, I must tell you. Do you not know you are followed this time?”

  “What?” I half stood and Arkady gave me a swift kick under the table. “Why didn’t you wave me off?”

  “I think it has reached a point that we d
o not solve it this way.”

  “But this can’t be known. Us, I mean, it just can’t.” I could hear myself panicking but there was no way to stop. “Is it another Soviet branch? MI6? The Post? What do we do? Arkady, you’ve got to fix this.” I waited for him to nod but he just stared at me.

  “Get it…taken care of,” I said. More staring. I whispered in his ear, “You know. Liquidate the issue. Can’t you do that?”

  “Is hard target. And also taste issue of killing wife? I think you come out now, Mrs. Nixon,” Arkady said loudly.

  After a few moments, Pat stood up rather shakily from behind the bar, hair untidy, her face a mask of shock. Wearing a trench coat over a powder-blue ensemble and Jackie O sunglasses, she looked just as much a cartoon spy as Tatiana had when I’d met her in the California diner. Pat gripped a small revolver in one hand as if it were her last hold on a sane reality.

  She walked stiffly around the bar and toward us, revolver pointed straight at me, until it was maybe two feet away. She stood by the booth as if she were a waitress taking our order.

  “I am Arkady, who you have met before, yes?” Arkady said. She ignored him and stared at me.

  “So this is where you go,” she said. There was nothing of the chirp and swoop of her public voice. This was another Pat entirely.

  “Dick and I have many locations of drinking,” said Arkady. “Is an aid to relaxation and bonding of man to man.”

  “I would like you both to put your firearms on the table,” she said.

  “Weapons? But I am humble diplomat,” said Arkady. “Emissary of peace.”

  “I don’t have a gun,” I said. “Since when do you have a gun?”

  “Since I realized I don’t know who my husband is. For a long time I thought I was going crazy, you know. Where is Henry?” she asked, lowering the gun slightly.

  “Henry?” I asked.

  “The national security adviser does not know of this meeting,” Arkady said.