Crooked

by Austin Grossman

  The seal of the president was sketched on the final page, and the same one lay on the floor of the office. Here the eagle was monstrous in aspect. This was the eagle of Lincoln’s tattoo and my own. In one claw it held a tree torn up by the roots; in the other, a struggling human figure. On impulse I touched the circle, the angry form, and felt an odd charge in me. I tasted copper and sank to my knees.

  We sealed the room again and staggered back up into the light. Outside in the rose garden I squinted into the sun just above the horizon. The air felt night-cool.

  “Dick?” Pat said. “What are you looking at?”

  “The dawn.”

  “Dick, look at your watch. It’s only four in the morning.”

  She was right. I held up a dollar bill, its face clearly readable in the blackness. My first taste of power, at last. I was an American president. I could see in the dark.

  Chapter Forty

  February 1971

  We drove north in one of the black cars with tinted windows that Tatiana, as a spy, seemed able to conjure at will. My body double—Pat and I each had one now—was at the moment in the Bahamas dutifully letting himself be photographed. It was the end of February, late in the New England winter, just warm enough to rain without freezing, cold enough to make everyone miserable.

  Tatiana drove, expertly. In the passenger seat next to her, Pat pretended to sleep. Arkady and I sat in the back. After a full hour in which nobody spoke, Arkady brought out an edition of Herodotus and read silently, underlining passages as he went. I looked out the window trying to decide if there was any point in telling the truth to anyone. I’d told Pat the whole story of myself and the KGB, of Tatiana and Arkady. I’d told her because I felt I had to—after all, the four of us would be spending three days together. If Pat felt inclined to elaborate on her cryptic revelations, she didn’t see fit to act on it. If Tatiana felt inclined to forgive me for outing herself and Arkady to the First Lady as KGB spies and assassins, she didn’t act on that either. Telling the truth had only ensured that I’d spend the next three days with people who disliked one another.

  The trip north looked almost the same as it had twenty years ago. Brighter, more built up, new cars, but it still got older and more wooded as we went north. As we crossed into Massachusetts, the forest seemed to rise up and swallow the road around us. Towns were smaller and farther apart and somehow meaner.

  We reached Pawtuxet after dark and stayed in the same motel I’d stayed at before. I couldn’t show my face at the window, and neither could Pat. Arkady got out to go book our rooms, took a few steps on the rain-slick gravel, and then turned back to Pat, a question on his lips. Pat raised four fingers. Four rooms for the night.

  In the morning Tatiana knocked on each of our doors in turn. No one said anything about getting breakfast, and we drove out again in the gray rain to the farm. If there was any place left to teach us about the paranormal in America, this was it. We drove until I pointed out the shoulder where I’d been dropped off before. We got out, our collars turned up to the rain, our hats pulled down, except for Tatiana, who smiled and shook her wet hair and didn’t seem to notice the damp at all. She looked no older than she had in 1948.

  We followed the decrepit chain-link fence that led at right angles away into the dripping silence of the woods. We walked single file, ducking sodden branches. The winter forest was thawing, smelling richly of rot and rain. On the other side of the barrier, grass had grown up untended, and there were already slender saplings springing up where acorns had fallen and taken root. When we reached a spot where an entire tree had toppled onto the fence and collapsed it for a dozen yards, we abandoned the already dubious notion of stealth, crossed into the hummocked, untidy field, and walked toward the cluster of low makeshift buildings I remembered from two decades ago.

  “Wait,” Arkady said, almost the first word anyone had spoken that day. He crouched in the dead grass and pulled up a thick hank of it. Underneath was what I took to be a stone, but he lifted it to show it was hollow, and metal. A helmet, and a skull underneath. Arkady began ripping out the grass around it to find the rest of the bones. If Pat was shocked, she did a good job of hiding it.

  “See. Facedown, feet go that way to the farm,” he said. “He dies running away.”

  I looked at the buildings for movement, for any sign of life, but there wasn’t any.

  “It does not seem dangerous now but let me go first,” he said. “I am not so easily killed.”

  Rain drummed on the cheap hollow metal roofing of maybe two dozen temporary huts that were well into their fourth decade. They clustered around a broad square pit marked by blackened granite blocks, the foundation of what used to be the farmhouse. In places the earth was still darkly stained, and the rain made ashy mud. Tatiana knelt and sniffed and made a face. “It started inside. And it was set on purpose.”

  “Excuse me,” Pat said, “how the fuck can you tell that?”

  It is something to be surprised by one’s wife of thirty years.

  “I can tell because I have an excellent sense of smell and adequate psychic abilities,” Tatiana said. “Blood and gas and sweat and rotten flesh, and absolute terror. They fought. It was a last resort.”

  “Bullshit,” Pat said. “I don’t smell anything. It had to have been years ago.”

  “Would you like me to tell you your perfume? Or what your clothes are made of? Or how long ago you—”

  “Okay!” Arkady said. “I think we search the buildings now. I say we split up. Yes, Mr. President? You second this?”

  “Seconded,” I said.

  “I take Tatiana. You take your wife.”

  Inside the first hut, we heard the rain drum louder. This had been the library but roof panels were cracked or missing. The old books were scorched and sodden lumps, lying on the ground or on sheet-metal bookshelves standing askew. We moved on to the next hut, an abattoir of rusted surgical equipment and stained mattresses. The bare séance room was a small pond. I tugged at the drawers of rusty filing cabinets. In the barracks I found ruined clothes, personal effects, photographs, all scattered. Parts of the base had been emptied out, others left untouched. Four more skeletons littered the avenue outside. My good shoes were long since ruined.

  “Here!” Pat called. I followed her voice to what had been McAllister’s office. In one corner his safe remained, closed and intact. We tore the old wooden desk apart but the keys to the safe weren’t there. I pulled at the handle of the safe; it snapped right off.

  “Can we move it out of here?” I said. I gave it an experimental shove, or tried to. Arkady was pretty strong, but the road was a mile off.

  “Just a moment,” said Pat. She rummaged in her purse and came out with a tiny penknife. With a quick jerk she drew it across her thumb. I watched as she faced the wall and brought her arm down hard, casting a drop of blood.

  “One for lies,” she said, low and not to me.

  “Pat, what in God’s name?”

  She turned a careful ninety degrees on her heel and did it again. “And one for truth,” she said, and turned. “One for lost things. And one for sweet youth.” She finished her last turn and sucked the cut. “One from across the aisle. The keys are underground.”

  The stone steps down into the basement were charred but intact. A trickle of water ran through the barred gate at the bottom. Arkady stopped and heaved; the grillwork bent, then snapped. His strength must have been prodigious.

  “This is a bad idea,” he said, panting. Pat pulled a flashlight from her purse as Tatiana brushed past her.

  Through the gate were catacombs formed partly of poured concrete, and they gave onto older brick passageways. Some of the corridors had cells built into the sides. Pat shone her flashlight into one of them and drew back, shaking her head. For a while the passageway crisscrossed above an underground river, intermittently visible through a grating until it plunged down to some deeper level away from us.

  Tatiana stopped in front of another barred cell who
se door swung open easily. She pointed inside, and Pat nodded.

  They’d chained McAllister up before he died—of what, no one could say. Evidently he’d lived several years after the burning of the farmhouse. The skeleton of a dog lay near him, and his keys.

  The safe contained more paperwork, now pulpy with water damage, and notebooks secured with rubber bands. A few of its pages, written in Eisenhower’s spiky penmanship, survived. A list of agents identified by code names with annotations and commentary. Strengths and weaknesses, protocols for contact, and an index to a clandestine network of paranormal entities. Code names like Pendragon and Optical told me nothing, and it was clearly out of date. But at the very least, it indicated that not so long ago, magic had been alive and well in America.

  Chapter Forty-One

  In the end the notebooks told me very little I could use. Clues and fragmentary records point me to the Blue Ox project’s persons of interest. Colonel McAllister had been thorough, if undiscriminating. People in government service touched by the unhallowed presences that survived in America and the world beyond. One I knew; the rest had served without distinction and then sunk out of sight.

  There were five of us present in the Oval Office when I started it off. Agent Hunt had seen a lot in the past decade. He’d been part of the Bay of Pigs and there were photographs of him on the scene in Dallas when Kennedy died. At fifty he looked a haunted sixty, and none of the others were particularly young. They were all fleshy older white guys, a circle of blue and gray suits, patriotic neckties, and thinning hair. In fact, they looked terrible. All men with promising careers that had disintegrated into eccentricity, obsession, and dangerous extremism. The Plumbers.

  H. R. Haldeman, forty-five years old but perpetually boyish with his brush-cut hair, a campaigner and a former ad executive. I’d made him chief of staff but never spoke to him outside of work. He’d attended UCLA and started out as a Near Eastern studies major but had changed shortly after an incident involving a noise complaint, campus police called to the department library on Portola Plaza. Report of a strange smell, unusual plant growth. In the end, four students were dispatched to psychiatric services.

  George Gordon Liddy had been an FBI bureau supervisor in DC at twenty-nine. One day a work crew laying the foundation for a parking garage uncovered unusual remains, and Liddy was called to the scene. Subsequently brought in were a forensic team, a hazmat team, and a paleobotanist. The excavation went unusually deep.

  John Ehrlichman had served in the South Pacific, part of a squadron out of the Philippines tasked with surveying low-lying reefs in a certain island formation, coincidentally during a month of extraordinarily low tides. They returned with reports of lights burning under the ocean and vast and dark forms moving among them. Seven men, navigators mostly, were hospitalized and subsequently discharged from the unit.

  “I’d like to welcome you all to the Presidential Task Force for Vaguely Important Matters. The point is, it’s a secret task force. Doesn’t officially exist. Nobody talks about it. Okay? One of those.” They nodded. Everyone here, I had noticed, liked to be on a secret committee. They also shared, in addition to everything else, a twitchy, depressed affect.

  “You all have a certain amount of intelligence background, legal background, or military background. None of you are particularly distinguished in your fields. All of you have been sent for psychiatric evaluation more than once. All of you had involvement with the now-defunct Blue Ox program, and, even more extraordinary, you are still alive and more or less functional.

  “You are here in case I should happen to have a problem I don’t know how to explain, or would prefer not to mention, or don’t want to admit exists. We all know these kinds of problems are out there. There are sections of the government that were set up to deal with—the kind of things we’re talking about. I believe some of them are gone; others have left the direct control of Strategic Air Command.

  “If you tell another living soul about this I’ll probably deny ever having spoken to you. I will certainly pay people to make you look crazy.

  “I can offer you only one thing: The things you know, the things you’ve seen that you can never tell another living soul? The president knows them and has seen them too.”

  There was never any great hope that the Plumbers were going to cover themselves in glory. They were Nixon men. Ambitious strivers, failed agents, and failed civil servants. They were well known to be corrupt, vulgar, incompetent, intermittently criminal. They were the remnants of the remnants, the last and least of the United States supernatural research corps.

  They were there when the end began and the trap started to close.

  “We are here to discuss a national security risk that has been detected,” Henry said.

  “Do you mean Ellsberg? I think I can deal with it,” I said. I realize that no one is going to back me on how I handled that one, even in hindsight, but what was I supposed to do? I had a great deal to hide at that point. It wasn’t going to help anything if people realized Kissinger was—what?—a thousand-year-old necromancer.

  “That is heartening but it is not what we discuss on this day,” he said. His eyes shifted around the room. Ehrlichman was there, taking notes. Haig was there too, scowling, his oath and basic loyalty preventing him from telling anyone that the top of the executive branch was an occult cell.

  “I have learned of the existence of a massive insurgency within our borders. Organized and malevolent and possessed of the knowledge and, moreover, the will to strike at us with devastating swiftness,” Henry said. His eyes continued to dart around the room as he spoke. Was it me, or was he getting more and more manic lately?

  “You want to give me these people’s names?” said Haig. “Shouldn’t be hard to round ’em up.”

  “I speak, naturally enough, of the Democratic Party’s National Committee,” he said. “They have been meddling with friends of yours, Richard. If the old gods rise, it will represent a significant realignment of the electoral landscape. And not necessarily in our favor. You know how important the Christian demographic is, so we’ll lose most of the southern states. Maybe not Georgia.”

  “What do you suggest we do, Henry?” I asked.

  “Is there a UN policy on domestic use of the thermonuclear arsenal? In the name, perhaps, of public order?” someone said.

  “You know I’m going to end up looking crazy over this,” I said.

  “It is not to our disadvantage,” Henry said, “if we appear irrational to the Soviets in this regard.”

  “I think there must be other options,” I said. “I’ll speak to my people.”

  “The one you call Gregor has approached the Democratic National Committee. They have proven surprisingly cooperative. A pact was made. A process of spatial distortion and hybridization has commenced. They are developing their candidate as we speak.”

  “How is it possible they could agree to a thing like that?”

  “The election is approaching, Mr. President, and you are favored overwhelmingly. As is so often the case in such conflicts, they believe you are capable of taking steps similar to theirs and that perhaps you have already done so.”

  “But to make a pact with Gregor…”

  “Surely you of all people must understand. There are those who wish so very badly to become president, they would do anything to make it happen.”

  I didn’t tell them everything, mind you. Just enough to get them through the missions. I didn’t want to tell them exactly how bad it was. I didn’t want to tip my hand to any particular side. It was becoming obvious that none of the enemies of my enemies were my friends.

  Did we have an enemies list? We did. Gregor could operate in the United States and he could look like anyone and he had no reason to be kind to us. Many of his cells had been replaced by those of an elder god and that did nothing to enhance my appreciation for civil liberties. Yes, Paul Newman was on the enemies list. It was Ehrlichman’s call and I wasn’t going to second-guess him. Wa
s Barbra Streisand on that list? We flagged her for good and sufficient reasons, is all I will say. Judge me if you must.

  Did I have multiple meetings with Elvis Presley? I admit that I did, and that I deputized him in the name of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. The deeds he performed in the name of that office will remain retracted for another century, but they will one day be told.

  On September 9, 1971, did we break into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist? Everything is so clear in hindsight. We could just as easily have been right on that one too. We were right about Watergate.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  June 16, 1972

  I could see well enough in the dark, not as if it were daytime, but I saw a kind of vivid moonlit outline of things. Night by night we tested and discovered there was more.

  Why did I ever think I’d have a soldier’s powers? Eisenhower did, and rightly. My affinity was with shadows, with concealment. Pat and I tested the idea by playing hide-and-seek with the Secret Service. If I concentrated hard enough I could occasionally confuse them, forcibly lapse their attention while I walked away unnoticed. There were moments when I could vanish into the shade of a pillar before their eyes, and emerge to startle them. I could cloud men’s minds, it seemed. What evil lurks in the hearts of men? The shadow president knows.

  This is what sparked the idea of the grand plan, the deception in the plain sight of history, but before we acted we would have to run a field test. No games in the White House; it had to work anywhere. The form was my idea: the most famous face in the world would spend one night in the open.