Crooked

by Austin Grossman

  “A lot of these things I don’t object to, but really. Give this one up, would you?”

  “I have explained the madman theory, Mr. President, it is your only card to play. As long as you are a rational actor, they will not fear you, but once they believe you are capable of anything, that changes. The minds that inhabit the Kremlin, well—at present, there is what I might call a ‘madness gap.’ Only give the word. Not even. Nod your head, and you’ll be the president they talk about in a thousand years.”

  “Henry. It’s been coming for some time now. I know our partnership has been an important one in both our lives but—”

  “Mr. President—”

  “I mean it, Henry. I’m asking for your resignation.”

  “I gave up a great deal to place you in this position, Mr. President. More than you can ever know,” he said. “I am owed, you understand?” He had reddened slightly.

  “Henry, I’m sorry. It’s my decision.”

  “Mr. President, this is irresponsible. You are not prepared to lead in the world where the Soviets—”

  There was a knock, and Pat poked her head in. “We’re late, Dick.”

  “Just a minute, Mrs. Nixon,” Henry said, and turned back to me. “I ask that before you do this, you meet me tomorrow at the Pentagon. I wish to show you something important. After that, you may do as you like. And I will tell Gregor he may have you.”

  He left, brushing past Pat.

  “What’s the matter with him?” she said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Who’s Gregor?”

  “I have absolutely no idea,” I said.

  The next day, a page led me through the security labyrinth to a meeting room inside the Pentagon complex where Henry waited, smoking, with his world-weary but faintly impish demeanor intact.

  “Mr. President, I wish to make plain how the chain of command will operate in time of emergency so that you will understand your role. If you will please follow me.”

  We walked. The section we were in didn’t seem to see much use. The fluorescent lights overhead were dim and set at wide intervals, so that as we reached the midpoint between two of them, we walked for a moment in darkness.

  He seemed to know his way perfectly. I glanced into one of the offices we passed but there was no one inside. The furniture was stacked in a corner. We kept going, and it seemed that none of the offices in this wing were in use, and perhaps never had been.

  “The Pentagon contains seventeen miles of corridor,” he said. “Did you know this?”

  “Yes, Henry.”

  “Of course, that is only aboveground.”

  I glimpsed, far off down a side avenue, a man piloting a floor polisher. I wanted to call out to him, maybe just for reassurance, to get a friendly wave. We kept walking and he was lost in the dark behind us. Henry led me through a fire door and into a stairwell lit by bare bulbs.

  “The upper levels were completed in the latter phase of the Second World War, but construction has continued on and off.”

  I peered down over the railing and saw the utility stairway spiraling down into darkness. He led the way, one flight after another of identical concrete steps and landings, each with an unmarked metal door. It was getting colder. Henry kept talking as we went.

  “A much larger structure was initially planned. The original architects had some very interesting ideas.”

  From far off, I heard a man reciting a long list—names? numbers? towns?—and it seemed I was just about to understand the words when Dr. Kissinger stopped at the fourth landing and turned into a corridor identical to the ones above.

  At the end of the corridor we reached a door that looked just like all the rest. Henry opened it and the sound leaped out at us and I saw an enormous room where dozens of men and women were at work at rows of terminals; on the wall in front of them was a map of the world. A few of them jumped to their feet but Henry gestured them down again.

  “Where are we?”

  “This is called the Deep Underground Command Center. You have seen the plans, yes?”

  “Yes, but…the funding wasn’t there.”

  “Really, Mr. President. Have we ever run short of money on this end of things?”

  “I guess not.”

  “The funding was reinstated, simply from an unrecorded source. I see that it is maintained.”

  The room stretched on for at least a quarter mile, dozens of military personnel. I glanced at the man at the closest terminal and realized his skin looked odd, an unhealthy gray. His eyes bulged. I wondered how long he had been down there. How long since any of them had seen the sun. What had Henry done?

  We walked farther on.

  “Do you know how it is done, the nuclear attack and response?”

  “In theory.”

  “It is most interesting to observe. It is beginning now. Sighting, I think, over Nova Scotia.”

  A lone little light went on at the far top right of the great map. A man in a headset perked up.

  “Contact, sir.”

  “What have we got?” Henry asked him.

  “Nothing on the schedule. Not one of ours.”

  Several more lights appeared.

  “Multiple contacts, sir. This is way outside the norm. We’re locking down.”

  “Is this a drill, sir?” another man asked. He looked nervously to Henry and then to me.

  “What is it? A demonstration,” Henry told him. Now the big board had dozens of contact lights, slow-burning pinpoints falling down across the pole. Henry waved his arms as if conducting an orchestra. “We can extrapolate a targeting pattern here. At this point it’s military targets only, but right there at the edge? Just the hint of a second wave and I bet it’s major-metropolitan-area stuff. I wonder what can have set them off.

  “Do you give the go-ahead, Mr. President?”

  “What?”

  “The launch code. We must retaliate.”

  “I—I don’t know.” I had always known that in the clutch, I’d fumble this. I hadn’t learned my lines.

  “The president wishes to go ahead,” Henry told the room. “Comprehensive scenario, you understand? We empty the silos. We need their command elements down. Transport, runways. No way to knock out the submarines, I’m afraid.”

  There was a hush, then they bent to their work, reciting code phrases, thwacking and chunking heavy plastic switches into place.

  “It is working. Men are picking up the phone now. Two men under the Nebraska plains are receiving instructions right now. Glancing at each other shyly, seriously. Going to their codebooks. They will target Kiev. Men in a submarine in the North Atlantic, en route to Bangor, have stopped. They listen, then gather briefly in prayer. Twenty-seven thousand five hundred and fifty-two warheads in all. Like Samson in his blind despairing rage, we take this temple down.

  “We will need an attack profile, yes? Something forceful yet nuanced. Proportional. Civilian targets with industrial value must be considered, I’m afraid.”

  Here and there in the background, staticky communication chatter cut in and out, urgent voices exchanging codes and countercodes. Somewhere a young man cried until his channel was silenced.

  “There’s a high-pressure system this week; the winds are blowing west but it’s a blessing in disguise, at least they’ll be sending their infantry into West Germany’s irradiated sectors as they come toward us. I shouldn’t worry for ourselves. This facility is well shielded and well supplied. We may dwell here for years to come in safety.

  “SAC B Fifty-Twos are already en route to target, awaiting final confirmation. If we go dark they’ll assume we’ve been hit and carry out their last instructions. This is the end of the world, Mr. President, at least as far as your species knows it. As for whatever else might rise in the nuclear winter ahead…it is not for me to say. There’s a kind of relief in it, isn’t there? Knowing it’s all decided.” Henry’s words had a hypnotic spell on the room.

  “Tell them to stop, Henry,” I said.

&nbs
p; “I will not,” he said softly.

  I felt weightless and numb. A cadaverous MP stood staring up at the world map, and I snatched the pistol from his belt and pointed it at Kissinger’s forehead.

  “Please, Henry,” I said.

  Across the chamber two military police aimed their rifles at me.

  “Put your guns down, gentlemen,” Henry said. “No one will be harmed here.”

  “Yes, sir.” The two men lowered their weapons. I kept mine pointed at Henry’s forehead. He took a step closer to me.

  “Tell them to stop,” I said. “You’re destroying the world. You’ve made your point.”

  “You, Mr. President, may continue,” he said. “Pull the trigger. Satisfy your curiosity, if you wish to see the result of shooting me. You will not be the first.”

  I lowered the gun.

  At that moment, the lights on the massive screen vanished. A half dozen separate, musically discordant electronic tones ceased to sound. The room collectively exhaled. Henry smiled. He beamed.

  “What about that, Mr. President? It seems to have been a false alarm after all,” he said. “A glitch in the system. Makes you think, doesn’t it? About how precious it all is, this little blue marble.”

  I looked again at the men and women at the machines and knew, finally, what they were. The pale skin, the livid fingernails, the stiffened moves. Not rotting but somehow preserved. Dwellers in the underworld, acolytes of the final god. The dead-hand system, I saw. The true silent majority.

  “We ascend now,” Henry said. “We may take the elevator this time.” He gestured toward a set of brushed-steel doors. They closed behind us and we stood there, side by side.

  “You’re insane,” I said.

  “Not at all. I am only a minor sorcerer,” he said after a moment. “Barely one thousand years old, but I am well able to access the Strategic Air Command’s conventional command-and-control protocols. Is that understood?”

  “Crazy.”

  “The aftermath of a thermonuclear exchange would be an uncomfortable time for me, but not a decisive one. And there are many things alive today that would welcome such a development.”

  I had the pistol fired before I could think, twice, into where I hoped the kidneys were. The air in the tiny elevator was acid with the smell of gunpowder and a sickly-sweet dust and tiny floating bits of tweed from Henry’s jacket.

  Henry shuddered slightly but that was all. He turned slowly toward me, his face close to mine. It seemed unnaturally large, like a grotesque idol’s.

  “The year 1976 will be the final one of the American Republic,” he whispered. “Cut free from the Twenty-Second Amendment, you will be an immortal mage-president. Able to crush the rebel cult of the Supreme Court implanted by rogue initiate founders. You will subjugate the massed power of the four legislative bodies—House, Senate, Gestalt, and Hovering. You will sit on a white throne in a white house for all eternity, ruling the two hundred and forty-eight states of the Final Union. E pluribus Nixon, eternum.”

  The elevator doors opened and he left, still trailing threads and dust, and lost himself in the empty halls of the Pentagon.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  May 1970

  By then, all the headlines could talk about was the Nixon administration. Secretive, unpopular, indifferent to the will of the nation. Approval stood at 57 percent, disapproval at 32 percent, those with no opinion at 11 percent.

  I suppose that’s what it looked like. On the inside, I was trapped in the belly of an enormous beast, a conspiracy that had swallowed me up like a foolish boy in a fairy tale, the kind of story they tell kids to keep them from making stupid mistakes. I was the boy who followed the pretty lights too deep into the forest, never thinking about the path and the setting sun, and now I was in the dark and I had met the beast. If you do not do as I say I shall come and eat you up. Another boy would have known what to do, had a trick, a lucky pebble, a magic sword.

  Yes, Mr. Beast, anything you like, said Dick Nixon, and oh, how I wish I could claim it wasn’t me, that I never said it, but I had. I’d said yes and been eaten up just the same.

  Where could I turn? Eisenhower always said Chief Justice Earl Warren was surely the wisest owl in the whole operation. He was Eisenhower’s generation. Governor of California, vice presidential nominee, and now he wore the black robes. He had administered the oath of office to four presidents—Ike for his second term, then Kennedy, Johnson, and me. He’d looked each one in the eye and made him president.

  Eisenhower had told me once about the justices’ secretive order. How they danced and laughed and chanted by night and lights shone from the windows of the high court, but those who intruded found nothing but silence and dark corridors, and they would not have good luck thereafter. The judges served for life and told their secrets to no one and weren’t to be called on except in times of direst necessity.

  I set out for the Supreme Court building in full state; it was all of a mile and a half but I took a motorcade and a police escort. Surely they couldn’t ignore the chief executive? The driver stopped in front of an empty lot. I rapped on the window separating us but he only shrugged as a Secret Service man opened the door.

  I stepped out of the car. This was where the building should have been. I’d passed it a hundred times. But the pavement was cracked, the stones shattered and askew. The familiar set of broad steps led upward but it was all wrong; they were smooth and overgrown as if lost for a thousand years, a relic of an empire long gone. The monumental statues were worn down to faceless nubs and beyond those, the weathered stumps of eight pillars. The rest was gone as if swept away by a ruinous cataclysm centuries ago. Overhead, the midday sun looked orange and weak and uncomfortably large. Beyond, the city of the present day continued. Only I seemed to see all this.

  I stood on the pavement while a crowd gathered and curious press snapped photos. Someone shouted questions.

  “It has begun,” Henry later told me. “The great separation of powers is at hand, and the court cannot see you directly, nor you them. The chief justice is a wily old barrister, and what you saw is a day that will come long after your time, when the sun fails at last, and the nation’s capital will move to quite foreign shores indeed. But perhaps I shall live to see it after all.”

  On May 4, National Guardsmen fired live ammunition at student protesters, killing four and wounding nine. A crowd was already gathering at the Lincoln Memorial, and I found Kissinger waiting in my office.

  “Do not speak of it,” he said. “There is more happening than you can possibly understand. They’re going to kill us if they can; better for us to see to them first.”

  “Who?”

  “Rival magicians, perhaps. There have always been such, hiding deep in the unreclaimed South and the forests of Maine. I hunt them. They know the executive is growing stronger and they make common cause,” he muttered. “They showed their hand at Woodstock. I believe they wish to destroy us.”

  This had gone far enough. Only an idiot would deceive himself about the presidency; I was the chief executive of a huge organization, the federal government, and parts of it killed. But this? If there was a line I would not cross, this might as well be it. Action must be taken. I held an impromptu screening of Patton and drank a considerable amount of whiskey.

  Later that night I called Kissinger. There was no answer so I dialed the number a few dozen more times. But no, Kissinger was not the man to save me here. I called my valet Manolo at four thirty in the morning. “Have you ever been to the Lincoln Memorial at night? Get your clothes on, we’ll go!”

  I set out through the French windows onto the lawn, dew soaking my slippers.

  I heard someone shout, “Searchlight is on the lawn.”

  “Where’s my car?” I called to the Secret Service man who was sprinting along the colonnade in search of his superior. I moved as fast as I could, knowing Kissinger would try to catch me before I could break free. Knowing I’d be too afraid to move if I stopped to th
ink.

  “Where’s my car!”

  I heard the lawyer Krogh, one of Ehrlichman’s people, stage-whisper to somebody in the war room, “My God! Searchlight has asked for a car.”

  “Searchlight wants a car!”

  An intern was working late, or maybe early, a moonfaced undergraduate, prematurely balding. I recognized him and leaned through his doorway. “Do you have a car?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Then let’s head to the parking lot. What’s your name?”

  His name was Lionel.

  Gary found me somewhere along the way—I had to respect that he’d taken the football in preference to finding his shoes. We all crammed into the backseat of Lionel’s VW. It took him two or three tries to get the car started. He was succumbing to the civilian nervousness that follows me around, the starstruck paralysis of people shoved onto a historic stage. But he managed, and we were off.

  The sun was coming up when the four of us reached the steps below the Lincoln Memorial, the giant stone body staring from its plinth, one square-toed shoe projecting off the edge. There was a small camp of college students wrapped in blankets, a few of them awake, singing an indistinct melody.

  These, then, were the ones Henry feared, the notional white witches.

  “Hey! Help me…” I called out. “You have to help me.” In the half-light I could have been anybody in a suit, a businessman coming off an all-night bender. Not a man walking into the teeth of the enemy.

  “What’s wrong, man?” a bearded kid with a kind voice called out. “You okay?”

  “I need to talk to you. All of you.”

  “Sure, man, sure. It’s a safe space. What’s going on, man?” A couple of others roused themselves as I edged into the circle. Kids born in the 1950s, I realized. When half my life was over.

  “But—it’s me,” I said. “It’s Dick. Dick Nixon. The president.”

  The kids laughed. Did they think I was doing impressions? Then a blonde in a velvet cape narrowed her eyes at me. “I think it’s really him.” That got them. Two of them leaped to their feet, arms halfway lifted in an awkward movement that suggested an obscure martial art or sorcerous intent.