Crooked (24 page)

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 people 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.

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 do 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.

“Why don’t you tell me who you work for, Dick? The Russians?”

“They’re just my friends,” I said.

“And that Tatiana woman? Are you ‘just friends’ with her, too?”

“Yes, her. And Arkady.” I started to slide over toward Pat but she jerked the gun up.

“Hands on the table; let’s do this properly,” she said. “How long? Since the presidency? Since Eisenhower? Since the very start?”

“Mrs. Nixon,” Arkady said, “I must tell you, I am feeling this is awkward marital conversation and perhaps I am not belonging.”

“You go over there. The bar. You sit.” He got up slowly, hands in view.

“Is great mystery, marriage,” he remarked, “of which I have not the happiness to know. But I wish its greatest blessings to you both.” Pat waited for him to take his seat at the bar.

“So you’re a traitor,” she said. “After all this time. Have you told Alger Hiss?”

“Pat, these things are complicated.” I was sweating torrentially in my wool suit, sweating like a man losing a televised debate.

“Because you’re in love with Tatiana?”

“No!” I blushed even though I didn’t want to. Was I in love after all? Was it possible to be elected president and still not know how to tell if you’re in love?

“Dick. I know we’re not anything anymore. Maybe not even friends,” she said. She sat down opposite me, the gun still in her hand. “I know that. I just don’t want to be lied to.”

“I admit that in a very technical sense, I am a spy,” I said. I closed my eyes as I said it, not wanting to see her expression. But instead of a gasp of shock, I heard something that sounded like a badly suppressed snort of laughter. I opened my eyes.

“No, you’re not,” Pat said. She smiled, a little patronizingly, I thought. “You can’t be!”

“I’m sorry, but yes, I am.” She shook her head. “Why am I not a spy?”

“Spies have to be—well, you have to be good at things. You have to be able to shoot a gun. Run a mile in a reasonable fraction of an hour. Speak languages. Hold your breath underwater.”

“I can speak French.”

“Well, then, you have to be brave,” she said, and now there was ice in it. “Are you brave?”

“I’m investigating a threat to the United States that very few people know about.” At least she wasn’t pointing the gun at me anymore.

“Is that what you’re spying on when you go get drunk on Thursday nights? Is that the only time this threat is available?”

“Pat, there is no possible way you would understand.”

“Show me, then,” she said, apparently in no hurry to finish torturing me.

“There’s nothing to see, Pat. Nothing at all.”

“So you never got the magic to work, then?”

“The…what?” I stammered, waiting for my brain to tell me she hadn’t said what she said.

“I know, Dick.”

“How do you know about any of this?”

“I got a letter from Ike. A long time ago, fifteen years maybe. It said not to open it unless he died, but then I did anyway.”

“What did he say?”

“He said the Constitution was special, that it was magic. That he was magic, because he was president, and that he’d done unspeakable things. It went on and I thought he’d gone crazy. He said he killed Stalin.”

“What else?” I said. “Did he talk about a plan? Anything we’re supposed to do?”

“He talked about you. He said he didn’t understand you. He said you had secrets from him, and it shouldn’t have been possible. But you did, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” I nodded slowly.

“He said you were powerful, that you might be the greatest president in history. And he said there was a terrible thing coming for us—he couldn’t describe it, only that it was a hideous darkness. He was afraid of you. He didn’t know if you would defeat the terrible thing, or if you were that thing.”

“So you know. You really know.” I scrutinized her face, trying to guess what she would do. You’d think after thirty years, I could. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because when Ike was gone I would have to be the one who watched you and decide what to do. I didn’t tell you because by that time I didn’t know who the fuck you were.” She said the curse word experimentally, in a way that made me remember my very first time firing a rifle: squeezing the trigger, waiting for the bang. “What if he was right? You weren’t much of a husband, so what kind of president were you going to make?”

“And you believe it all? The magic? The lineage of presidents? The Soviet necromancers?”

“Not at first, no, not fifteen years ago. But I talked to people. I learned Aramaic, which you never bothered to do. There are at least five forms of magic operating in America and at least nine in the world. Did you know that, Mr. President?”

“No. How do you know that?”

“I have friends you don’t have, Dick. You don’t have many friends at all right now.” I glanced at the gun on the tabletop; she saw me watching and rested her small, pale hand on it. “God, Dick, why do you always think you’re the smartest one in the room? You don’t know your own mother was a powerful witch on top of being a terrible, terrible person. And, okay, last one, I swear.” She gave the snorting laugh she never did in front of cameras. “I’m what’s called a New Deal Democrat. I’ve never voted Republican in my entire life.”