Crooked

by Austin Grossman

  He put one hand on my shoulder to stop me. He had always been strong, but now it was like a girder had descended on me. “Dick, I am not come to talk about your feelings, although, yes, always interested to hear. I wish to do you a favor and bring you to a man I have lately become acquainted with. He is standing close by.”

  My shoulder was going numb. I saw the man waiting for me across the room, like a dark heavy stone in the frothy sea of blond hair and jewelry.

  The strange thing was, I knew him. He was older and fatter now, with a kind of permanently delighted twinkle, as if he’d stumbled on a piece of good news that meant nothing to anyone but him and that he’d decided to keep to himself, forever. But I knew his face. I’d seen it in the war.

  In 1944 I was a naval passenger control officer for the South Pacific Air Transport Command. On behalf of my unit, I traded favors, used whatever leverage my position and rank gave me in a very complicated game of supply, demand, and priority played very fiercely among competing sections of a vast and deeply corrupt but surprisingly functional bureaucracy.

  My view of the war was the traffic of objects and people through the transportation network. I filled out itineraries and requisition forms as we leapfrogged north and west from the Solomon Islands to the Philippines. I scheduled flights and refuelings for marines and wounded soldiers and VIPs. I watched the planes take off and land and helped load and unload crates of pineapples and bandages and spare tires and footwear and typewriters.

  I knew where we were stalled; I knew about the islands that wouldn’t be taken, that week after week ate fresh men and supplies and sent back the dead, wounded, and exhausted. One of the islands was called Peleliu.

  And I knew about things that weren’t officially supposed to be there because they belonged to something too weird or secret to talk about. Crates and entire planeloads of matériel that had been redacted. Experimental devices bound for field-testing; high-level cryptographers and intelligence analysts; civilian specialists. I’d send the CO a questioning look and he’d give a tired wave of the hand or a curdled, indifferent shrug. The people who had set up the system also created exceptions to it for their own reasons.

  I knew there were code breakers being delivered to freshly captured cryptographic materials. A few celebrity entertainers made their visits to the troops incognito. I’d heard rumors of the Manhattan Project and the thing that was silently being transferred to within striking distance of the Japanese mainland.

  Sometimes I couldn’t even guess. Two men from the Corps of Engineers transported two old, roughly rectangular stones wrapped in newspaper to the front lines. I was instructed to give them a plane to themselves. There were crates of dirt; an enormous tank of seawater. A basalt obelisk traveling by itself. Some of it, I now understood, emanating from the farm at Pawtuxet.

  And once, a pale, dark-haired teenager in a white shirt and a sweater-vest despite the heat, flanked by four marines. Slender, bespectacled, and oddly beautiful. They walked him through checkpoints more like a piece of experimental ordnance than a soldier. Whenever they stopped he would pull out a tiny, worn book barely the size of his hand and page through it rapidly. We passed him up to the front, to Peleliu.

  They passed him back two days later along with the planeload of exhausted soldiers. He sat as unruffled as if he were riding the subway, maybe on the way to a chess tournament at the local YMCA. The other passengers on the crowded plane had made a collective decision not to go within ten feet of him. I later heard rumors about what had happened on the island. That they’d let Henry walk into the jungle on his own, that they’d heard voices bellowing and chanting in languages neither English nor Japanese, that they hadn’t even found all of the dead. Firsthand I knew only that air traffic was being routed to give the island’s interior the widest possible clearance. This was Henry at twenty-one.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  August 1966

  “Richard Nixon, this is Henry Kissinger,” Arkady told me, and I found myself shaking hands with a bland, spectacled little man. I’ve asked myself many times since if it was really a man at all.

  I’d heard rumors of the wunderkind of foreign policy, genius of Bavaria and the Upper West Side. Heinz Alfred Kissinger, called Henry, refugee, bright star of Harvard and the RAND Corporation. I’d been curious to meet him, a man in politics who was famous for being smart. In person, he was thickset, alert, but somehow sly. He had something in common with Eisenhower, that sense of a calculating intelligence kept well out of sight.

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said.

  “I am very much looking forward to your presidency,” he said in that German accent with a tenor lilt. He looked up at me shyly.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Henry has very interesting ideas about you,” Arkady said. “He’s done a lot of thinking about what’s happening in the world right now.”

  “Indeed I have, Mr. Nixon. I will come to the point: the current outlook is most unfavorable for the West. It is evident that in the next few years the United States will become quite overmatched, disrupting the carefully achieved balance of power and precipitating a catastrophic clash of forces well beyond what has previously been imagined.” He spoke, like always, as if to a lecture hall.

  “There isn’t really a missile gap,” I said. “That was all—”

  “A canard of the Kennedy administration, yes,” he said. “But there are strategic elements apart from the nuclear. I would think you of all people would realize what I am speaking of, Mr. Nixon. From your talks with President Eisenhower.”

  “You know Eisenhower?”

  “I have met with him on multiple occasions, yes. He was most forthcoming on certain matters, although others remain—how do I say—obscure. This much is clear, however: The doctrine of mutual assured destruction can continue only as long as no new, disruptive technology appears on one side and not the other. Since Eisenhower’s infirmity and your unfortunate electoral, er, moment, we have no one in the leadership echelon prepared to appreciate fully the dimensions of this conflict. Not Romney. Not Reagan. No one but yourself.” His voice had a hypnotist’s gently persuasive rise and fall and carried with strangely perfect clarity in the crowded hall.

  “I’m not a part of this.”

  “I wonder,” he said. “But you know what I’m speaking of, don’t you? You have seen things. Long ago, yes? Very long ago, I think. A thing spoke with your brother’s voice.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “Notwithstanding,” he said quickly, and I wondered if the others had even heard him. Or if I had imagined it. “I was Rockefeller’s adviser for years and he seemed a promising figure, but I see that you are the man I was looking for. I am here to make you president.”

  There was a long silence, under which I heard Reagan’s stage-trained voice talking about the deficit and the workingman. Arkady watched me expectantly and I held my features still, as if I’d ever been able to hide anything from him.

  There are the rare, rare moments when you’ve lost a thing you treasured and made your peace with that loss; your life is going to go on without it, a diminished place, but you’ve figured out how to twist yourself around just right to love and appreciate that new thing you’ve become—and then you’re given another chance at the thing you wanted so badly. And you have to choose—are you the old person you remember, or the new person you taught yourself how to be?

  “You’ve made a mistake,” I told him. “I no longer have political aspirations, Dr. Kissinger.” Caesar refusing the laurels, only not remotely as convincing. But I was still ready to pretend. I turned to go, half staggered, but Arkady simply stood in my way and corralled me while Kissinger spoke.

  “I haven’t been clear, Mr. Nixon,” Kissinger went on. “Mr. Eisenhower’s schemes for America’s strategic architecture have gone badly awry. You are needed. Your loss in 1960 was a disaster for America’s supernatural armaments preparedness. What Eisenhower began has languished, it has spoiled, where
as the Soviets have embraced this arena of possibility with an enthusiasm I find most exhilarating. Your old acquaintance Gregor, or whatever consciousness now goes by that name, has thrived in the Soviet command structure.

  “Long-range missiles with hybrid thermonuclear and necromantic payloads. Grafted and crossbred infantry divisions. Strategic alliances with folkloric, extraplanar, and subterranean entities. Field deployment of weaponized paleofauna. Large-scale saturation of target areas with invasive fungal and floral xeno organisms. Megadeaths and mega-undeaths. This is the Cold War now. An American president must be found who, whatever his other qualifications, is prepared to maintain our competitiveness in this area. I’m afraid that that person is you.”

  “It’s not me,” I told him. “What did Eisenhower tell you? It was supposed to be me but it’s not. He never trained me. It’s no one.”

  “I know,” he said. “Eisenhower was a soldier who fell in his country’s defense, and his knowledge is gone. But what was lost can be recovered. As Taft did, so can we. You are the one, Mr. Nixon. He chose you, and no one else.”

  Arkady looked at me expectantly. A man who had heard the Romanovs’ death agonies and lived the fifty years that followed wasn’t about to be fooled by any coy foot-shuffling when it came to political maneuvering. He’d sensed from the very beginning that there was a part of me that would do anything to win and that it would never, ever go away.

  “But you’re forgetting that even if I wanted to do it, I’m done politically. They finished me,” I told him. “I’m unelectable. Really, you want one of them.” Romney and Reagan and Rockefeller worked the room and secured funding and made sure that everyone knew that, if the time came, they would humbly answer the call and serve their country. I knew the call wasn’t coming. Phone disconnected, hacked off at the root.

  “As to that, Mr. Nixon, I believe that you can and will be president. But I must have your answer.”

  “I’m going to have to speak to my wife.”

  “Yes. Speak to her,” Kissinger said.

  I thought about what I’d built for myself and my family. We were safe and prosperous and had the chance to live normal lives now, comfortable in our modest place in a great nation’s history. Who could complain? Who would ask for more than that? More than the vice presidency in the golden 1950s. What kind of person wouldn’t be satisfied at that point? Only a foolish or pathological self-obsession would drive a man to climb farther.

  It wasn’t possible, and if it was possible, it was almost certainly undemocratic. Nobody wanted me to be president except me, and Henry, and Arkady (who was Russian KGB, which presumably affected his eligibility as a voter). But what’s the point in pretending I said anything other than yes? That was as much convincing as it took. Yes, please. God, yes. Make it me.

  I’d gone to the reception to get away from the apartment. It was a gorgeous, incomprehensibly expensive residence on Central Park East. I could look out the front windows into the closest thing Manhattan offered to total darkness.

  Pat was still awake. It was past eleven and I could smell her cigarette smoke, which meant she was drinking in the front room. Marriage. I leaned in the doorway.

  “Hi, dear.”

  “How was the reception?” she said. She was in a dressing gown and pajamas. When she was drinking she cultivated a kind of Hepburn oddball sophistication.

  “It was—it was interesting. I had a strange conversation.”

  “What, did they ask you to run for president again?”

  “No! N-no,” I told her. “I mean, why would you say that?”

  “Oh, Dick. I’m not stupid. I see the look on your face. You went to a Republican function and you hung around the drinks table waiting for people to recognize you.”

  “People recognize me. I was vice president.”

  “For eight years. And then you were almost president, and then you weren’t. You’re not going to be. Have a drink.”

  “What if I were, Pat? What if there’s someone who believes I can be?”

  “We all believe in you. Nixon together!” Pat started to say but giggled halfway through it.

  “Dr. Kissinger does.”

  “Is that a psychiatrist?”

  “The Harvard academic,” I told her. “He thinks I should run. He has backers. Real money.”

  She looked a lot more sober now.

  “I would be horrified if I thought this was at all serious. Are you drunk?”

  “No,” I said. A little.

  “Are you lying to me?”

  “No!” Was I? About the backers, yes. Maybe it didn’t matter.

  “Dick, think about this. Please. We were just starting to have a life here. I know we haven’t been, well, close, but this is just craziness. After all that’s happened. They can’t take you back.” It was awful, but it was almost good to see how heartbroken she was. At least it was a reaction.

  “Pat, I think it might be serious. What if—”

  “But you promised.”

  “What if there was a reason I had to run?” I said, sitting down opposite her.

  “A reason?”

  “An important one. A thing you don’t know about, but it’s really important.” I tried to put it into my voice like politicians do. A great cause. A heroic destiny. Surely I could sell this.

  “You always give reasons; that’s what you do. Taking the nation forward or something. Don’t talk like that in here.”

  “No, a real reason, an important secret reason I couldn’t possibly tell anyone. But it’s why I have to do this. Why I’ve done all of this.”

  “I don’t care if it’s secret.”

  “It’s a state secret and you’d think I was crazy if I told you.”

  Pat sat and stared at me while cars honked outside on Fifth Avenue. I was going as far as I could. Daring myself to go farther, but I couldn’t.

  “I’m going to bed,” Pat said. I stepped aside as she went into the hall. “Do what you want. You always do anyway.”

  “Are we going to get divorced?” I called after her.

  “No, we’re not getting divorced, idiot. Shut up.” She came toward me until she stood closer to me than she had in years. “We’re not getting divorced. I’ll help you do this thing.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But other than that, I do what I want. I don’t talk to you if I don’t want to. I sit where I want to on the campaign plane. I eat my meals separately. I sleep separately. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  She glared at me a moment.

  “This would be easier if you would tell me what the fuck your stupid secret is. If it’s an affair, just tell me. I can’t think what else it would be.”

  “It’s not. I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s not.”

  “I think this is the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Well, good luck.”

  I went to sleep thinking of the last thing Henry had said to me: “I will do this for you. I will make you the greatest president the Republic has known but there is one thing you must agree to.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “There is a pact we must seal, you and I, if I am to lend my powers to yours. I cannot be president, you understand? I am Bavarian-born, ineligible. But I can partake of your presidency. A little blood, a few words, and it is done.”

  I nodded, hardly listening.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  July 1967

  The air of the Miami Beach Convention Center was hot and still and tense. There was a murmur, nonplussed and restless, as I arrived at the lectern. They knew they’d voted for me on the first ballot, but they weren’t exactly sure why—it was a confused moment in their memories. But here I was at the microphone, confirmed and present. Old Nick had returned.

  “Mr. Chairman, delegates to this convention, my fellow Americans. Sixteen years ago I stood before this convention to accept your nomination as the running mate of one of the
greatest Americans of our time—of any time—Dwight D. Eisenhower.

  “Eight years ago, I had the highest honor of accepting your nomination for president of the United States. Tonight, I again proudly accept that nomination for president of the United States.

  “But I have news for you. This time there is a difference. This time we are going to win.” It was, basically, the worst thing I could have said. A reminder of how badly it had gone the last time. A reminder that nominating me was a horrible idea.

  Well, I could have said something worse. I could have said, In the entire course of my public life I have never done anything remotely this terrible. I have tricked you all in monstrous fashion. Standing before you now, I am the likely death of democracy and the rise of a sorcerous tyranny. Certainly that’s what I was thinking to myself as I began my address to the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami to accept the party’s nomination for president.

  I congratulated Governors Romney, Reagan, and Rockefeller on a hard fight and said that I counted on them for their support, all the while thinking of the moment I came through the door of the hotel suite where they were meeting to divvy up power.

  “Dick,” Reagan had called to me.

  “Come on in,” said George. They’d sounded puzzled and looked up at me with patronizing smiles, a little sad that this aging prodigy, the one-time icon of the party’s future, was pretending he was welcome.

  “Just thought I’d look in on the young bucks,” I’d said. “You all know Dr. Kissinger?” I asked. He stood in the doorway and made an awkward half bow before I gestured him in.

  “Of course, Dick. Take a seat.” Rockefeller stood, courtly in manner but, I could see, terribly uncomfortable. I sat, and Henry stood behind me. I tried to ignore the terrible feeling of being an uninvited, pitied guest.

  “Go on with what you were doing, really,” I said. “I won’t be any trouble.”

  Reagan cleared his throat. “Now, George was just pointing out some of the problems we’ll have in the South if we give this to Nelson—”