Crooked (14 page)

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 memorizing 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.

Tricky Dick it would be. I tried the desk drawers. Locked, each one. I felt for secret compartments, buttons. Nothing but smooth wood. I sat in the deep leather chair and leaned back. What was I looking for anyway?

I spun in the chair, looked out at the gardens, invisible by night. Dimly seen, my beetle-browed reflection looked back at me. The world outside was incalculably strange and huge. In Korea the sun had already risen over two armies, and there was nothing I could do about it. I hadn’t been given a secret key to control the government, and there was no inner circle, unless it was the domelike skull of Eisenhower himself.

I spun again, the world revolving around me, feeling more relaxed than I had in months. I was in the White House! For whatever reason. In 1960 I’d run for president and win and then I’d rule over half the world. President Nixon. Why not? Hail Caesar, hail the great Trickus Dickus. Hail King Nick.

I spun yet again and flashed past a pale figure that loomed over me across the desk, skeletal and macrocephalic. I yelped and jammed my feet on the carpet as the figure resolved into Dwight Eisenhower in shirtsleeves.

“Hello, Dick. Back again, I see. In my office.”

I had had, at that moment, enough of Dwight Eisenhower. I was a little too drunk to be terrified, and a little too terrified to care about what I was saying.

“Mr. President, what am I doing here?”

“Now, I would have gotten around to asking that myself in a moment. Looking for ghosts, perhaps?”

“Not what am I doing in your office. Why am I vice president? Why did you ask me to do this? Respectfully, sir. You came to my house. You drank tea with me. Then you gave me the second-highest office in the entire world. You could have picked anybody in America. Philanthropists. Millionaires. War heroes.”

“You think I wanted a war hero? I wanted Kennedy flashing his grin all over the place? An all-American?”

“With respect, I’m as good a man as Kennedy.”

“You’re a climbing little rat. The way you went after Hiss, the way you got on TV and spilled your guts, the way you begged for it. You’re bent, Dick. You were by a long way the sorriest son of a bitch I could get for the job.”

I don’t think I realized until that moment how much I admired Eisenhower. How much I valued his opinion of me, knowing that he was better than I was and that secretly he must despise me.

“Don’t worry about it, Dick. I picked you for a good reason.”

“What was it, then? If that’s what you think of me.”

“Dick, it’s just you and me in here, isn’t it? Just a couple of presidents. So I’m going to say a few things that stay between us. Executive branch only.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You figured it out. The nuclear policy makes sense only if we have something else up our sleeve, isn’t that what you guessed? If you really were guessing, and I don’t think you were.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“There are things out there that will live through a nuclear hit and remain deployment-ready. There are things that even the Reds are afraid of. We’re developing second-strike capability, and it isn’t nuclear at all.”

“I—I know, sir.”

“What if, Nixon, there are rooms underneath the White House? Strange rooms? What if even Ulysses S. Grant, the Butcher himself, sealed them off for fear of the terrible things that were done there? Because he saw what was left of Lincoln by the time they killed him. What if there are worse things in the world than nuclear weapons?

“I could have had Kennedy for the asking. I picked you because I knew the next president would have to be a little shit of a human being. The things that were done in those rooms? I did them. I killed Stalin. I did a lot worse.”

I was backing away by this time. “Sir? What does that mean?”

“You’re a liar, Dick, and I’m morally certain you’re also something worse. You want me to take a guess? I think Hiss went down a little easier than he should have. I think you got help.”

It’s often been said that I don’t have a gift for ingenuous speech. There is no gesture, no words that are not filtered through a moment’s calculation. And maybe there was never a time when I didn’t feel like I was maintaining an elaborate false identity, that I was born into a deep-cover operation. To become a Russian intelligence asset was only to confirm what I always knew. At least I could put a name to the unspeakable secret inside myself. But Eisenhower had spoken it.

“No,” I whispered. “That never happened.” I wasn’t brave. I would do anything to keep the truth from getting out. I drew the revolver from my pocket and pointed it at him.

“Oh my. Oh my,” Dwight said. He looked intense, impatient. “What happens now?”

“It’s not true,” I said. His look was cold as he leaned forward over the desk, the calculating stare of a man who’d gotten the drop on the entire Wehrmacht.

“What’s your plan? Are you going to shoot the president?” he said.

I realized in a sudden panic that I couldn’t see his hands; he’d gotten them under the desk. He could have a gun there, or anything.

“Keep still,” I said. He couldn’t rush me from where he was.

“You’re a finger twitch from the presidency. Don’t you want it? How badly?”

I never found out. His right hand whipped up in a curious gesture, fingers half closed. I told myself to fire but there was a thunderclap, and my right hand felt as numb as if it had been amputated, and the gun thudded onto the carpet. How had he touched me? Had I hit him? I didn’t even know if I’d managed to fire. My right arm hung limp. He spread his arms to show me a clean shirtfront, no hole, no spreading stain. He looked a little surprised himself.

“Well, this was hardly presidential,” he said after a moment. “Damned awkward, actually.” I started to apologize but he cut me off.

“I’ll give you this one, Dick. Maybe every vice president should get one free shot at the big chair. Good for morale.”

“You authorized funding for Blue Ox,” I said. “We both know it. You lied to me.”

“Yes, I did. I did a lot more than that. And if you were at Pawtuxet Farm, you didn’t get there on your own. Now, how much of this do you want to talk about?”

“All of it, sir.” I said it quickly, for the first time that evening not having to think about the answer. “You have to tell me what’s going on. I’m the vice president. I have a right.”

“Yes,” he said, “I suppose you do. A long time ago Bill Taft trusted me, and one of these days I’ll have to trust somebody or it will all be for nothing.”

“What will be for nothing? Sir?”

He shook his head, for once looking every one of his sixty-four years.

“All of it. Lincoln, Taft, what they did. The H-bomb, the RAND Corporation, the king of Persia, the whole long con of it all. Go to bed, Nick. When it’s your turn I’ll make sure you have what you need.”

“You take care, sir,” I said, which was, I think, the only time I ever made him laugh.

After that I didn’t sneak into his office again although I couldn’t help but see that he was working on something. I’d pass his office and see huge blueprints spread out on the desk; they were always carefully locked away when he wasn’t using them. I’d hear him talking to another man at night, wrangling over longitude and latitude. And I knew that whatever he was doing absorbed a massive appropriation from the Department of Defense’s black budget.

I’d seen it only once, only for an instant. He’d stood in the center of the oval room late at night, the curtains pulled back, and for a moment I saw what he did: the landscape outside was full of incandescent lines that ran north and south and east and west, out past the horizon. At this scale it was impossible to tell for sure, but the lines seemed to curve just slightly, as if we were seeing the tiniest portion of an unthinkably big, utterly invisible design.

The State Dining
Room buzzed with suppressed aggression and shone with the best silver and the most attractive members of the waitstaff. We were hosting a Soviet delegation and wanted to foster goodwill and demonstrate courtesy in the most viciously showboating manner our economy could support. It made for a glittering evening, one of the finest of the Cold War, the peak of its frigid glamour.

The Soviets filed in two by two with an extra swagger in their step. The Warsaw Pact had been signed the previous year, formally aligning the Eastern Bloc against us. They’d scored one victory after another, brutal interventions in Poland and Hungary and Syria. Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had lately turned up in Moscow, confirming the suspicion that Soviet intelligence had well and truly eaten their British counterparts for lunch. And Khrushchev was finding his feet on the international stage with a theatrical flair. “History is on our side,” he’d just told us. “We will bury you.”

We, of course, had come to play. We’d held on to Iran and the trump card of nuclear superiority. We had developed a defensive nuclear missile to knock out incoming bombers and had ICBMs with a truly impressive kill radius if you didn’t think too hard about the fact that you were setting off nuclear explosions in your own atmosphere. Our bomber teams were drilling like Olympic athletes at midair refueling, staggered taxi and takeoff formations, anything to sweat a few more seconds off our response time. Our nuclear submarine was up and running. We had, moreover, built Disneyland.

Cocktails were served in the Red Room and I lingered there. Pat was in good form, chatting up the crowd of visitors, the men puffy and frighteningly pale and nervously drunk, the women bitter and imperious. They were all survivors. There was a charge in the air, though. They’d been let out for recess. It felt like they wanted to get into trouble.

Eisenhower worked the opposite side of the room. Since the night I’d tried to shoot him, he’d accorded me a little more status, unless I was imagining it; maybe it was just a more respectful form of neglect.

It was a tradition that everyone got a handshake with President Eisenhower, and that let me slip into the dining room to get an advance look at the vice presidential table, the losers’ bracket of the status-conscious delegation. Tonight it was a Sergei Ivanov to my right and an Irena Ivanov to my left. I consulted my note cards—the two were embassy figures rotated in to advance American understanding of traditional Russian culture and to monitor and maintain ideological correctness among the permanent staff.

I slipped back into the smoky crimson of the Red Room, and I had joined Pat when I was accosted by a half-familiar voice speaking in the smooth, only slightly exotic accent of the Russian diplomatic corps.

“Mr. Vice President? It is a signal honor to meet you. I am Sergei Ivanov.” I turned to look into the middle depths of an extremely large, exquisitely made tuxedo shirt. Arkady had still managed to rumple it somehow.

“This must be your lovely wife,” the old monster said. He kissed Pat’s hand in a deadpan caricature of European manners. “And this is my niece Irena, gracing our embassy as a cultural ambassador.” It was Tatiana, in low-cut black. I said nothing. Worlds were colliding and only I could hear the thunder.

“Very pleased,” she said in a Muscovite warble, as if she’d painstakingly memorized the phrase. Her color was unnaturally high and she looked a wide-eyed twenty-five. She curtsied unsteadily in her own pitch-perfect interpretation of a stock embassy character, a newcomer out of her linguistic depth, drinking much too fast to kill the nervousness. She was, I hoped, only pretending to be drunk.

Pat and Tatiana shook hands and smiled, showing teeth. I shook hands with Tatiana myself. She smelled of her Russian cigarettes, the ones I had come home smelling of too many times.

“A pleasure to meet you,” Pat said. “We’ll see you inside.”

I took her arm and walked her into the dining room for our ritual entrance. She was escorted on the opposite side by a slightly aggressive-looking cadet.

“Dick, do you know those people?” she asked me.

“I might have met them at one of these functions. He certainly seemed to know me.”

“The daughter is very pretty,” she said.

“Niece,” I said. “It’s on the note cards. She’ll be a bore but we’ll manage.”

Pat was seated across from me, Tatiana and Arkady to my left and right, respectively. Eisenhower stood and gave a short speech, barely audible to us over the distance to the head table. A string quartet went into its act, and the salad was served.

“What part of the Soviet Union do you come from, Irena?” Pat said.

Tatiana mumbled something too fast for me to catch.

“Famous for its grain production levels,” I said too loudly. “You must be proud.”

“Not since locusts. Twenty years,” she answered, making a mournful pout. “We know great suffering.” Arkady choked a little.

“Tell me, Miss Irena,” Pat said, “what does a cultural ambassador do?”

“I come of an ancient people,” Tatiana began, and she launched into an extended set speech about traditional dances. She kept up a kabuki flirtation with me, touching her hair, glancing at me and shyly looking away, her hand brushing against mine. I edged as far away as I could, almost into the folds of Arkady’s massive tuxedo jacket.

Pat watched and listened. Maybe she smelled the cigarettes; maybe she just saw I was in a situation I wasn’t happy about. She’d sensed—I knew it—that a door to a secret world had cracked open, and she was hungrily sniffing the air. I wanted, very badly, to tell her we were sitting with my best friends. That I’d known them for eight years, that we were investigating a vast occult conspiracy.

After an hour of terrifying brinksmanship, Tatiana looked at my wife. “Mrs. Nixon, I feel a little unwell. Would you escort me to the—how do you say it?”

“Of course, dear,” Pat said. They left, Tatiana leaning heavily on Pat’s arm. Tatiana looked tiny next to my wife.

“So this is famous White House,” Arkady said, grinning like a loon. His accent returned the moment they had gone. “Is nice. A little bourgeois, maybe. Your wife is nice lady, no?”

“You asshole! Why the fuck are you trying to ruin my life?”

“Relax,” he said. “No one is ruin anything. Tatiana is bored, that is all. Relax and have fun.”

“And why didn’t you tell me you speak perfect English? Why the fuck do you talk like this all the time?” I said. “You sound like fucking Boris and Natasha.”

“Is easier I talk this way.”

Pat returned and sat heavily in her chair, Tatiana following. I could tell something was wrong. In a few short minutes the KGB agent had managed to get my wife drunker than I’d ever seen her.

We all stayed at the table for a while after that. The candles burned lower and most of the guests cleared out to the Green Room. We were nearly alone.

“But Mr. Ivanov,” Pat was saying to Arkady, “do you really believe in all of it? In dialectical materialism and the workers’ paradise? Do you truly?”

“What do I believe?” he said. In the last half hour he’d slipped back into his regular pidgin English, but Pat didn’t seem to notice. “I tell you story. In 1917 I am Cheka, you understand? Bolshevik police. I am eighteen-year-old dumb fucking asshole who thought it would be cool to carry a gun.”

Pat nodded, rapt. This was the world she was normally kept from. Tatiana watched as well, and I wondered if she knew where this was going.

“So one night—we got the czar now, yes? We are doing so great, good for us. We got him in this house outside Yekaterinburg. But White Guard on its way—czar’s people, yes?—and they got Cossacks. Nobody sure what’s to happen.

“We stand around in the snow in the dark and one guy starts joking they are going to do it tonight. Kill them all. Asshole, but I think he is right maybe. Two in the morning, a dozen guys go into the house, Yurovsky in command. Watchmaker, he used to be.

“I hear all kinds of yelling inside, the whole family woken up. Goes on for an hour and they move to basement. We hear how they are cranky, is no place to sit and so on. No doubt now what is to come, so we all listen at the basement window waiting for it. Yurovsky reads an official statement. I think it cannot be real because somebody would stop it or maybe the world would turn inside out.
‘Chto,’
says the czar. Man who fixes watches is now shooting him? He does not believe it either.

“I hear each man had assignment to shoot a person but instead they go all at once. Five minutes of shooting, then it stops, then starts again. How many times they shoot these people?”

I looked around. The room was empty except for the four of us. I wondered why Arkady had chosen tonight to show his face and then tell this, to spill his guts. Pat would remember them forever now.

“Afterwards nothing is conducted well. Bodies brought out but no one thought of stretchers. Put in blankets. We drive them a few miles but the truck gets stuck in trees so we find carts. Other people are with us now and I don’t know who they are. Some are taking things from the bodies.

“The sun is coming up and one guy says a child escaped the basement during the shooting, other man says bullshit, no one knows for sure. White Guard is near, hunting us, so we throw bodies in a mine but then orders say take them out of the mine, so we do and drive on. It’s noon almost. We stop, dig a pit, throw bodies in again, and that is how the empire ends. Sun comes up the next day, whole country is a new thing.”

“You’re a monarchist?” Pat said. You might have thought she was meeting a prince in a story. “I thought they shot people for talking like that.”

“Do not worry for me, Mrs. Vice President, I am real Commie. Forty years I am secret police. Cheka, OGPU, NKVD. Nth Directorate, yes?” Tatiana stood up, evidently ready to physically restrain him, but he glared her down.

“I clean up weird shit, Mrs. Nixon. I see collective farms a hundred miles out in the steppes go bad, and no one knows why. Farms burned and tracks lead into the snow. Farms where they speak with only one voice, or where they look like they turned to birds. I see dead men walking in the frost. I see the salt mine they dig too far, and the things that fly out. I see the kids at Dyatlov Pass and what happened to them. Irena and me and Gregor, we see a hundred fucked-up things we swear not to tell.”

“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!
”