I prepared in mundane ways. I practiced moving my shoulders and head more when I spoke. Applied putty to build up my cheekbones. A heavy layer of foundation made the jowls less apparent. There was nothing whatsoever to be done about the nose.
I trained my voice to be half an octave higher, more nasal, less of the signature guttural growl that anchored my public speaking. Finally the dirty-blond mop of the wig; awkward, but I’d need it for only a night. For clothes, a pair of blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and a canary-yellow shirt bought from the Salvation Army. The shirts were a size too small and showed off a pair of biceps the world didn’t know about. Seventy dollars cash and a false passport out of an old emergency kit, with a photo of my disguised self painted in, grinning as broadly as I could. A harmless goofball with a terrible haircut.
I dispatched the body double to a children’s concert for the evening. And finally there was the car, a 1969 Ford Thunderbird painted a sparkling gold. Borrowed from the younger brother of one of the social directors on the White House staff, ostensibly for intelligence purposes. I slipped into the visitors’ parking lot and fumbled with the door lock. It had been so long. The last time I drove a car was before I won the presidency four years ago, and I’d never driven a car like this one. I got the thing open and ducked inside to find myself much lower down than I thought, practically supine, feet splayed. I pulled the door shut and sat for a while inside this silent, dark, cushioned pod, breathing the smell of leather, cigarette smoke, a stranger’s sweat.
I turned the key and the car shuddered and vibrated. The wheel was broad and turning it felt like steering an ocean liner. The sudden sense of physical ease was overwhelming; the car seemed to say to me, Anything you want, guy, anything at all. I briefly laid my head against the steering wheel. I broke into an involuntary, profoundly un-Nixonian laugh that built into a spasm remarkably like a sob. It was so, so good to be somebody else for a moment.
Time to go. I yanked the stick and put the car in reverse, eased it out past the checkpoint and into the nighttime Washington, DC, streets. Richard Nixon had escaped the zoo.
It was only nine o’clock; I had the whole night ahead of me. I cruised, took easy lefts and rights through the grid just for the pleasure of it. I had an itinerary, a map with addresses marked, but for a while it was enough just to drive. A few guys looked me over when we pulled up at a traffic light. I froze in panic until one of them yelled, “Nice car!” It was a nice car. I had one of the most recognizable faces on the planet, but just for tonight it wasn’t about me. No spark of recognition, no applause, no jeering. Bored indifference, or a thumbs-up.
I was a Guy with a Nice Car. What if this was who I was meant to be, on the most elementary level? What if years of deception and ambition and horror and accomplishment were utterly separate from the person I basically was? A lost, forgotten Nixon who ought to have been. Dick Nixon, just a guy in a city with a shitty job and a cool car and a mellow attitude.
I pulled up at a convenience store to give the outfit its first test under fluorescents. A Hershey bar and a Coke. Panic again; I had no idea how much these things cost. I shoved a twenty at the guy at the cash register and then scooped up the change. He didn’t even look at me. I stammered out “Th-thanks, man,” snatched up my purchases, and fast-walked back to the safety of the car, afraid of breaking character completely. I peeled out of the parking lot, gleeful again the moment I hit the streets. The sheer administration-wrecking potential of the evening’s plan was sharply apparent. The night could end in a police standoff or at the emergency room or with any number of other unpleasant outcomes, each a first in the annals of the presidency.
A few blocks down I pulled into the lot of Jerry’s, a bar promising beer and color television. The tires scraped and popped on the gravel, and I skidded to a stop. I resisted a Nixonian impulse to fix a shitty parking job. That’s not what I was there for.
It was dark inside, and crowded, and I aimed for the neon light over the bar. Bathed in moist, beery air I almost backed out again at the sheer peril of walking into an utterly unvetted crowd, one that the Secret Service hadn’t checked, cleared, and saturated with undercover operatives. I tried to concentrate on being inconspicuous as I stood in the doorway cataloging faces and firing angles until finally a guy in an Easy Rider T-shirt shoulder-checked me into motion again. I stumbled toward the bar. Easy Rider walked on, and I realized nobody was going to tackle him. We were just a couple of guys, and it was Friday night. I could get used to this.
The younger faces looked like the ones I’d seen on TV lately: men with drooping mustaches and masses of hair, women dressed sloppy-sexy, smiling and knocking back shots at the bar. Not for the first time I observed that I had no idea what country I was president of. I ordered a Budweiser, and, in the unfamiliarity of the moment, I did it in my own voice. The bartender did a mild double take but that was the end of it. So what if the dude sounded like Nixon? People sounded like all kinds of things. Men and women crowded in around me and I made room. Everyone chattered and laughed, and, invisible among them, I waited for my moment.
I watched the television, scarcely able to process it. The Brady Bunch, then a variety music show. Who the fuck was Ziggy Stardust? Then the late news, the news about me. I’d hoped for something on the SALT conference, but it was yet another piece on the sagging economy. I turned to the man next to me, gestured with the bottle at my face on the television set, and uttered my one line for the night in a way that was supposed to be hearty and casual but came out sounding like something from a gangster movie:
“Whaddya make of that guy?” I said and then I turned back, looked straight ahead, heedless of the response. It was the bartender who answered, his handsome face earnest and manly serious and disconcertingly young under its mustache and beard, younger than I remember feeling, ever.
“I think he’s an asshole,” the bartender said.
I nodded and muttered, “You got that right,” chugged the rest of the beer, went out through the crowd and into the parking lot, and almost made it to the car before starting to cry, big uncontrolled jerks of the body.
“You okay, man?” said the voice of a stranger.
“Fine, man, I’m fine,” I replied in I don’t know what voice this time. Just a voice.
Three more bars, three versions of the same answer, and I was done. I left the car in the White House lot with the keys inside and a note saying thanks and that the mission had been a success.
I could have run off, taking the car west as far as I could, trading it in for another. Drifting from place to place, keeping just ahead of the massive cloud of ill omen that was my life’s legacy. Focus on being that unknown guy with the cool car. It was just that a long time ago, Cool Car Guy started making the choices that turned him into Richard Nixon.
Chapter Forty-Three
June 17, 1972
My memories of the night of June 17 will never be complete, and the various wild and hallucinatory accounts of what happened cannot be reconciled. The only certainty is that some went into the eighth floor of the Watergate Hotel, and some fewer walked out.
The Democratic National Committee had fatally overreached. Gregor had contacted that fool McGovern and sold him on a plan for electoral victory, sold him as only a Kremlin-trained operative could. The Politics of Spirituality or some such hippie line, tailor-made for the New Left.
As it was, they were almost too late. When Arkady tore the door off the room on the sixth floor, the air inside felt frigid, felt like dawn over Russian permafrost. Several DNC staffers were found frozen to death, still standing in the postures in which they had completed the ritual, victims of their own naive understanding of power politics. The suite was soaked in blood, caked in feathers, and strewn with candles, paper, the debris of the summoning.
American magic is haphazard, a thing of genius loci and wild talents. The Russians had set their most inventive minds to the problem of travel through frozen, starry places beyond their gates. When they came,
the eight military shamans who stepped out onto American hotel carpeting were hardened from service in Afghanistan and stranger places, and ready to die to establish their beachhead.
While six shamans dug in behind desks and chairs, the final two prepared the way and its cold breath pervaded the room. Pat glimpsed it but would say little, a dark shape rising from the Russian steppe, spilling millennia-old snow from wings that could shroud a city. It needed only to empower a proxy in the land of its enemy and it could bring its will to bear. And then, its host in power, it could at last shake off its bonds and take flight over the pole to the New World, its form a gargantuan blot on American radar before it descended to breed in its new satellite nation. A McGovern presidency would end the Cold War and unite the rival powers in one savage, blasphemous coalition.
I wish I could have seen the fight. Tatiana unrestrained, a blur to the eye, at last free of the pretense and control of civilian life.
I’d begged Pat not to go but she wouldn’t hear of it. As I heard it later she was capable of far more than she ever confessed to me. I believe she had spent time in the subterranean White House without me, reading the Democratic disciplines that had belonged to that party long since, battle magics perfected in the War of 1812 and on the fields of the Revolution itself. Pat reportedly shone so brightly it was impossible to look at her; it was as if the world had been torn open to show the light behind it, a fracture in the shape of my wife.
Henry loomed in the fray, the dark beast of the Bavarian forest at last unleashed. His origins will never be understood and whether he was profoundly good or evil, human or not, it was his legalistic sorcery that turned the tide and closed the gate, though the effort nearly killed him. He did his duty that night; his only mistake was to miss that crucial last card I would deal from the very bottom of the deck.
A numbed and semiconscious George McGovern was apparently central to what they’d hoped to accomplish. We also recovered several spheroid objects, each two feet across, whose composition was later found to be an inexplicable match with lunar rock formations. But Gregor was nowhere to be found.
I, of course, was nowhere to be found either. In fact, I was in the lobby, disguised and safe from harm, only waiting for the outcome. Eventually, I went to the restroom, walked to a stall, and sat down to wait in privacy. Just for a minute, face in hands, trying not to wonder how much time it would take. After a few seconds, I heard the restroom door.
I thought maybe Gary had come to tell me the world was ending after all. I opened the stall door just a crack. A little old man in the red-and-gold uniform of a Watergate Hotel valet lingered in the restroom doorway.
It was a shock to see how much Gregor had changed. The sleek young man of 1948 had withered and puckered; his skin had a deep permanent tan and age spots. He still wore his thinning hair combed straight back, but there was now a circular scar on his left temple, the skin roughened, the surface visibly cratered. It appeared he’d once been shot in the head and it hadn’t worked.
“Richard?” he said. I didn’t say anything. There were no other exits. It wasn’t going to be hard to find me, but I couldn’t bring myself to step out of the stall. I was only seconds away from a very unpleasant thing happening. I wanted those seconds. I wished with all my heart I could fight him. Eisenhower would be gathering thunderclouds by now, preparing to strike the man dead.
“Richard, I don’t have much time. I wanted to do this properly and have a good talk but Kissinger’s made it hard. I was going to run for office against you. If you think Kissinger played it rough, well…you should see how we do it back home.” True, the restroom had only one exit, but the space was palatial in scope. A line of stalls ran down each wall, with a marble island of sinks, soaps, and mirrors in the center. I was in a middle stall and watched while Gregor strolled along the stalls opposite me, stopping and nudging each one open, taking deliberate care, one and then the next. I waited breathlessly for him to pass the midpoint.
“But you’ve come on your own, and it’s too much to pass up. I truly can’t wait till he sees me wearing your face. What a time we’ll have then. East and West united. Down comes the Berlin Wall. We’ll go to the moon. All comrades together.” Now Gregor had reached the middle, and then he passed it. I was closer to the door than he was.
Behind him, I eased the stall open and took my first step along the tile. Gregor was making headway. He could turn at any moment. I took another step, as silent as I could be in stiff presidential shoes. I tried to calculate my odds. The moment I began to run, he would hear my footsteps clattering. He still walked like a young man, and I had never been fast. A desperate scramble across the tiles with the devil himself at my heels. For some reason that was the thing I couldn’t stand. What if I slipped? What if he caught me?
Two more gingerly placed steps. In ten seconds he was going to turn around and see me standing there. The thirty-seventh president would die creeping through a public restroom. Where were my fucking powers? The real ones? I’d thought I was going to be able to fly.
Five seconds. Just up to the mirror with the light switch. I should probably have started running by now. Eisenhower would have backed Gregor down and laughed him out of the room. I was nowhere near the door. Could I get back to a stall? No. It was a joke. It was over. Three seconds. The awful thing was going to happen and I didn’t know what to do.
I turned the lights off. I heard a soft “Oh” from across the room. Had Gregor noticed where the light switch was on his way in? If he had, then I’d just told him where I was. I stood frozen and waiting for it but it didn’t come. I watched as Gregor felt his way along the row of sinks to the door.
“All right, comrade. I’ll wait. I’m at the door now. You may come to me when you’re ready.”
I felt my way forward to the sink and turned one of the taps on, and the water hissed out, the white noise masking every other sound in the room. I slipped my shoes off for good measure.
“What are you doing, Mr. Nixon?” Gregor said. I looked for something I could pick up, anything at all. It didn’t seem like anything in the room was going to kill Gregor. I lifted the heavy ceramic lid off one of the cisterns, hefted it; the man who controlled North America’s nuclear codes was going into battle armed with a toilet-tank lid.
I remembered being dragged, long ago, toward that hole in the wall and the frightful thing beyond, and I remembered begging them to stop, and I watched now as the shadows around Gregor darkened further. He was becoming less human as I watched, features contracting and lengthening into that hideous beak.
And there was nowhere to hide now. I was going to die alone with the darkness inside me that had always been there, inescapable. The night in Yorba Linda, the train whistle, dark shapes in the depths of the reservoir. I had written once of the black thing in a tree, and the dark swarm that came out of it, and the good dog Richard who ran from it, ran all the way home.
I saw now that Gregor stood in the darkness too, blind and deaf and very far from his home. Gregor, the monster I made. He didn’t see me as I hefted the cistern lid and swung, hard, but it was only to get his attention. I let it drop and shatter on the tile. I’d lived in that darkness for so long and I knew it now. I was the blackness of a particularly cold winter night in 1620, and although Gregor was a frightening man, there were worse things in the world. There were in particular four women still out there in the dark forest under the snow who had never quite died after all, had they? And they knew what to do with Gregor.
Chapter Forty-Four
An hour later the second team entered the Watergate Hotel. Their mission, to shift the night’s drama from tragedy to farce. A group of young and highly competent men meticulously cleaned and reconstructed the offices of the Democratic National Committee to make them look only mildly ransacked and then stood in the middle of the suite and waved flashlights around until, at 2:30 in the morning, the police were finally called. They disclosed their names and handed over their surveillance equipment, cameras,
emergency cash, and at least one incriminating phone number and then proceeded to deny everything. The curtain on the final act of my low-comedy political demise had risen, and the masquerade, the bizarre double game whose story has been told and retold, was afoot.
I egged them on, all of them. “Come and get me,” I said. The ones whose phones I’d tapped, whom I’d lied to, slandered in the press, stolen votes from. I’d spent a lifetime making enemies, and here they were. They were coming for me and they were going to have themselves a grand feast.
But Richard Nixon would fight them first. I brazenly declared my innocence. I lied. I told them it was a matter of national security. I threw John Dean to the wolves, and then the rest of them, denying their friendship, loyalty, credibility. I pleaded for time and clemency. I cursed them. I’d go kicking and screaming, ducking and dodging and, ultimately, crying. I’d go out like a Nixon.
It took them a year. In July 1973, they began asking for the tapes. What tapes? No one had any tapes. Well, in fact, everyone had tapes. Johnson did, Kennedy did. We all made them. And no, they couldn’t have them, subpoenas be damned. I invoked executive privilege. The tapes were a sacred trust, to expose them would compromise anyone’s ability to speak with the president. The court told me to give them the tapes. We appealed, lost, appealed again. I wouldn’t go quietly. I couldn’t.
Four years later I would sit for my interview with David Frost. We had scarcely met before we were thrust together under the lights, and he smiled, mousy and sharply discerning. He asked, for his very first question, why I didn’t destroy the tapes. Pat Buchanan had told me to destroy them, everyone had. I was startled and very nearly told the truth, at least part of it, which was that I deserved them. I deserved to be brought before the judgment of history and damned in my own voice.
But I did not necessarily want what I deserved, not yet. In October I fired the special prosecutor, and in response, the attorney general and his deputy both resigned, the famous Saturday Night Massacre. They called it the most poorly judged act of my political career. They hadn’t seen anything yet.
Crooked Page 28