Crooked (25 page)

A cold war
keeps going even when you can’t see it; even when it’s miles under the ice. Armies glare over the border and jockey for advantage; factories strain to outproduce one another; proxy wars are won and lost; new technologies are invented and change the strategic landscape. But one way or another, a cold war has to end, even if it takes decades, or centuries, or millennia.

Maybe a common enemy appears and the opposing sides unite for the sake of self-preservation. Some cold wars flare up into hot ones; a border commander loses his temper; missiles fly, and mutual annihilation takes its course. Or maybe the conflict just drains more and more resources from both nations, a mutual grinding into nothingness that goes on and on until both sides simply collapse.

Or sometimes there is just magic.

It was a very odd Christmas Eve celebration at the White House that year. Afterward, everyone else in bed, Pat and I sat in the Green Room and talked, sipping incredibly old bourbon we found in the back of an ancient cabinet, the label in Gothic script. I cautiously told Pat about Alger Hiss, Eisenhower, Arkady, Tatiana. Gregor.

“Eisenhower liked you. He just knew you had secrets, and he couldn’t figure out how you were keeping them. He said it shouldn’t have been possible, not the way the power works. I couldn’t figure them out either.”

“All those years. Why did you stay? Why the hell didn’t you leave me?”

“God knows I thought of it, every day. Then I’d tell myself it was nothing, or that I’d stay just another week. Maybe I just don’t know to leave people.

“But there were good days, and there were times when I thought: Well, Dick has to be in there somewhere.”

“I was.”

“Remember the day Ike came to see us, the first time? And we waited for you? I spent three hours making tea and listening to his stories about war and golf. And I happened to be at the window and I saw you come up the street. You saw the black cars and the Secret Service and I’d never seen a person so afraid, so clutched by shame and terror. You’d done something wrong and you thought you’d been caught.”

“I’d just come from the farm at Pawtuxet. It was the first time I spied for them.”

“But then you turned back and you walked to our door. You thought no one was watching but you did the brave thing, just that once. It wasn’t much to go on for the next decade and a half of marriage. If I’m telling the truth, it was starvation wages.” She took a sip of her whiskey. “But I tried to remember it, and I did. Even when they told me not to.”

“Who told you not to?”

“The Democrats, silly. Even Eisenhower never understood. It’s a much older party—your people didn’t get started until the Outworld Horror Kings—excuse me, what you call the Civil War, which was when so much was lost. You’d be surprised who turns up at society séances and tarot readings. Those people at the Lincoln Memorial were my friends.”

We walked along the colonnade through the snowy night to the Oval Office.

“What have the Democrats really been doing all this time? What do you know?”

“I know about how FDR’s plan for the modern version of the Oval Office came to him in a dream. About historical anomalies around Grover Cleveland. And Woodrow Wilson. The plagues of 1918 were his work, you see. His final words were never written down, but it was a kind of ghastly antiquarian curse.”

“What did you say about the Oval Office?”

“He dreamed it. You haven’t thought, then, about the shape?”

She traced the wall with one hand, feeling the numinous curves.

“Why is it not a circle?” she said. I stared bleakly around myself, as I’d done every day of my tenure there.

“I don’t know. Because it’s an oval. I don’t know why it’s an oval.”

“The first time you saw Ike do his ritual, he wasn’t alone, was he?”

“No, he had the secretary of defense with him,” I said. I leaned on one of the low-backed couches, which is what low-ranking cabinet members do when they’re being left out in meetings.

“Eisenhower guessed, then, that it would need a second person to make any of this work. Now I’m going to teach you what they’ve learned on the other side of the aisle. The office isn’t just an oval, is it? It’s an ellipse, which means it has two focal points. You only have to measure to figure out where the points are. Here, and here.” We marked spots on the carpet with tape. “I think FDR didn’t want one person to have all that power.”

“Why didn’t Eisenhower just tell me that himself?” I asked.

“Maybe he didn’t know. Or maybe, dear, he somehow got the idea you were an asshole.”

We stood on the points we’d taped, maybe twenty feet apart.

“What now?” I asked.

“Well, what did you try all the other times, Mr. Chief Executive? Or was it all just ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’?”

We started with the Constitution. I never found out exactly what did it. An activation code, a resonant sequence of words or syllables, a gesture. I’m not a technical magician;  two-thirds into the backward reading of the Declaration, Pat stopped me.

“Dick? How long has that door been there?” she asked.

I turned, slowly. Without the room’s seeming to have expanded at all, there was now enough space between the fireplace and the grandfather clock to fit two doors instead of one. One led back to the residence. To its left was a large white-painted wood door in the style of most others in the West Wing, unremarkable except that it had never been there before.

“What now?” I said. No one implied this wasn’t going to be dangerous.

“I think we have to,” she said.

The door opened inward onto a simple flight of stone steps curving down and out of sight to the left, lit by dim electric bulbs strung along a wire stapled to the wall. The walls were unadorned plaster, their age impossible to determine. Outside it was silent, early Christmas morning. Pat took my hand and we descended.

Past the first turn the plaster walls gave way to brick and the air grew colder. One turn and we were level with the lowest subbasement, and then below it. Who had come this way last? Did Eisenhower descend these steps, in the earliest days of the Cold War? Did FDR force himself to make the trip down and up on his crutches and halting, crippled legs?

A second turn and the brick grew older, mortar crumbling. Far off I heard a sound like constant rippling thunder, or an enormous river cascading into the depths. Another turn and the stairs stopped in front of a door just like the one above.

“It’s the real Oval Office,” Pat said. “The true one. It must be.”

I opened the door. It was the same room but it wasn’t. Oval, yes, but the details had shifted.

The presidential desk was solid New England granite, carved, more altar than workspace. The chair behind it was high-backed and seated there was a skeleton, long dead, in an outdated wool suit suggestive of the 1940s. Its posture was skewed left as if by a sharp blow or bullet impact, its bones shattered at the shoulder joint. One hand still clutched at the receiver of a red telephone. There was a black phone as well, its cord severed, and next to it a white phone, and a sapphire-blue one. I lifted the blue receiver to my ear and a voice spoke in musical tones, urgently but too quietly for me to understand. I felt a numbness spreading up from the hand that held the phone, and I slammed it back down.

The painting of Lincoln gazed empty-eyed, somehow devoid of expression. The portrait of Washington hung just as it did upstairs, but its face was seared away almost entirely.

The high windows were obscured by green velvet curtains. I eased them back and looked beyond the windows. A vast white cavern of marble, the neoclassical architecture of the American Capitol expanded to inconceivable size, a city of white stone hewn into enormous blocks. A broad flight of steps gave onto a massive causeway flanked by gigantic fluted white columns whose breadth and height I couldn’t estimate. It might have been beautiful, but it seemed somehow hideous. We saw in the distance a vast plaza, crowned with an empty white throne like the seat of the Lincoln Memorial. An enormous sphinx crouched on its left, its massive face was Washington’s. A second sphinx sat on the right, its face in shadow but as I strained to see I thought I discerned a long bulbous nose and angry sloping brow.

I closed the curtain. This was the madness that America made itself forget. The madness of King George Washington the First, the king who never was.

Pat had been pulling books off the shelves, checking titles and stacking them on the floor. Many of them were half burned, a few were just loose pages bound in twine. She’d stopped and laid one flat on the dead man’s desk.

“It’s a manuscript copy of Bradford’s history of the colonies, but there’s another set of writing in the margins. Listen to this,” she said. “‘At first the wind blew against us, day after day, and then it died altogether and we drifted, sails slack, on a current of black water, under stars that no man of us knew. When we landed we were some two hundred miles north of New Amsterdam, and—as we were to learn—it was by no accident. By whose unseen will, we were soon to learn.’”

The unknown narrator had left us a fragmentary portrait of the founders’ first year. They were brilliant in their way but they were not like us. They believed in a predestined elect, an original depravity, and an agonizing afterlife for all but a few. They spoke Latin and German and Aramaic and there were some who had read widely in profane and pagan texts now lost. It was 1620 and Europe still lingered on the threshold of the century of Descartes and Galileo. But for all their knowledge and bravery, these people who’d come to the New World were dying.

The Pilgrims looked on their problem with cold eyes and a breathtaking intellectual flexibility. Long ago, kings and princes and the nations of the world had made peace with old things neither angel nor seraph nor demon, but the Pilgrims had crossed a great ocean to a place where no treaty or contract shielded them.

They would forge a new one, with stolen Native American knowledge and Old Testament thunder and the scraps of learning they’d brought from Europe and much else they invented for themselves. Somebody walked into the forest and summoned the terrible old ones and made a deal. The Pilgrims would live and the old contracts would be broken. The principals of those old contracts, the Pequot and Narragansett and Wampanoag tribes, would lose both their protection and their title to these strangers.

Reading between the lines it seemed clear the four surviving women were the instrumental parties: Eleanor Billington, Mary Brewster, Elizabeth Hopkins, and Susanna White Winslow. I have a dark suspicion that in some way, the women who didn’t survive made their own contribution. I believe the members of the Roanoke colony were either reluctant to pay a similar price or unable to live with having done so.

It was not a small thing they bought. Everyone thinks of the Enlightenment as the end of superstition, the breakdown of religion and magic and the beginning of a new and rational order. The United States is the standard-bearer of that order, a nation founded not on superstitions about bloodlines and myths of swords in stones but on sound civic principles and contracts rationally entered into.

Everyone is wrong. The dawn of modernity wasn’t the end of enchantment, only the beginning of a new and more terrible one. The Plymouth elders made a bargain and brought forth nothing less than a new American sorcery, the casting of a vast invisible spell great enough to bind the darkness of the New World. The settlers lived, and prospered, and over time their work was given the name by which we now know it—the Constitution, the thing that opened the way for the master enchanters of the nineteenth century, Lincoln and Whitman, and for the obscene magical forces that would one day push us all the way to the Pacific.

The Pilgrims’ bargain bought them a continent, and we were the inheritors of a contract bound into our land and our nation and infused again and again into the flesh of its principal executive, the president of the United States.

No one ever matched the power of the events and conjurations described in the first generation of founders. American magic may have reached its peak with Washington, the desperate man who married wealth and was given command of the Continental army only to see it on the verge of starvation until, in unknown fashion, he contrived to come into his power. After him the line of chief executives waxed and waned, scholars of the Constitutional arts. But after the disasters of Grant and the Civil War so much was lost, and the result was wilder spikes and surges in executive force, diminishing until even McKinley couldn’t save himself. Taft had begun his project of retrieval too late. The presidential seal had certain properties, yes, and the signing statement, and the blood of the sworn, but all of these varied from decade to decade, president to president. So much depended on the officeholder. Or was it something else? The decade? The electoral mandate?

The seal of the president was sketched on the final page, and the same one lay on the floor of the office. Here the eagle was monstrous in aspect. This was the eagle of Lincoln’s tattoo and my own. In one claw it held a tree torn up by the roots; in the other, a struggling human figure. On impulse I touched the circle, the angry form, and felt an odd charge in me. I tasted copper and sank to my knees.

We sealed the room again and staggered back up into the light. Outside in the rose garden I squinted into the sun just above the horizon. The air felt night-cool.

“Dick?” Pat said. “What are you looking at?”

“The dawn.”

“Dick, look at your watch. It’s only four in the morning.”

She was right. I held up a dollar bill, its face clearly readable in the blackness. My first taste of power, at last. I was an American president. I could see in the dark.

We drove north
in one of the black cars with tinted windows that Tatiana, as a spy, seemed able to conjure at will. My body double—Pat and I each had one now—was at the moment in the Bahamas dutifully letting himself be photographed. It was the end of February, late in the New England winter, just warm enough to rain without freezing, cold enough to make everyone miserable.

Tatiana drove, expertly. In the passenger seat next to her, Pat pretended to sleep. Arkady and I sat in the back. After a full hour in which nobody spoke, Arkady brought out an edition of Herodotus and read silently, underlining passages as he went. I looked out the window trying to decide if there was any point in telling the truth to anyone. I’d told Pat the whole story of myself and the KGB, of Tatiana and Arkady. I’d told her because I felt I had to—after all, the four of us would be spending three days together. If Pat felt inclined to elaborate on her cryptic revelations, she didn’t see fit to act on it. If Tatiana felt inclined to forgive me for outing herself and Arkady to the First Lady as KGB spies and assassins, she didn’t act on that either. Telling the truth had only ensured that I’d spend the next three days with people who disliked one another.

The trip north looked almost the same as it had twenty years ago. Brighter, more built up, new cars, but it still got older and more wooded as we went north. As we crossed into Massachusetts, the forest seemed to rise up and swallow the road around us. Towns were smaller and farther apart and somehow meaner.

We reached Pawtuxet after dark and stayed in the same motel I’d stayed at before. I couldn’t show my face at the window, and neither could Pat. Arkady got out to go book our rooms, took a few steps on the rain-slick gravel, and then turned back to Pat, a question on his lips. Pat raised four fingers. Four rooms for the night.

In the morning Tatiana knocked on each of our doors in turn. No one said anything about getting breakfast, and we drove out again in the gray rain to the farm. If there was any place left to teach us about the paranormal in America, this was it. We drove until I pointed out the shoulder where I’d been dropped off before. We got out, our collars turned up to the rain, our hats pulled down, except for Tatiana, who smiled and shook her wet hair and didn’t seem to notice the damp at all. She looked no older than she had in 1948.

We followed the decrepit chain-link fence that led at right angles away into the dripping silence of the woods. We walked single file, ducking sodden branches. The winter forest was thawing, smelling richly of rot and rain. On the other side of the barrier, grass had grown up untended, and there were already slender saplings springing up where acorns had fallen and taken root. When we reached a spot where an entire tree had toppled onto the fence and collapsed it for a dozen yards, we abandoned the already dubious notion of stealth, crossed into the hummocked, untidy field, and walked toward the cluster of low makeshift buildings I remembered from two decades ago.

“Wait,” Arkady said, almost the first word anyone had spoken that day. He crouched in the dead grass and pulled up a thick hank of it. Underneath was what I took to be a stone, but he lifted it to show it was hollow, and metal. A helmet, and a skull underneath. Arkady began ripping out the grass around it to find the rest of the bones. If Pat was shocked, she did a good job of hiding it.

“See. Facedown, feet go that way to the farm,” he said. “He dies running away.”

I looked at the buildings for movement, for any sign of life, but there wasn’t any.

“It does not seem dangerous now but let me go first,” he said. “I am not so easily killed.”

Rain drummed on the cheap hollow metal roofing of maybe two dozen temporary huts that were well into their fourth decade. They clustered around a broad square pit marked by blackened granite blocks, the foundation of what used to be the farmhouse. In places the earth was still darkly stained, and the rain made ashy mud. Tatiana knelt and sniffed and made a face. “It started inside. And it was set on purpose.”

“Excuse me,” Pat said, “how the fuck can you tell that?”

It is something to be surprised by one’s wife of thirty years.

“I can tell because I have an excellent sense of smell and adequate psychic abilities,” Tatiana said. “Blood and gas and sweat and rotten flesh, and absolute terror. They fought. It was a last resort.”

“Bullshit,” Pat said. “I don’t smell anything. It had to have been years ago.”

“Would you like me to tell you your perfume? Or what your clothes are made of? Or how long ago you—”

“Okay!” Arkady said. “I think we search the buildings now. I say we split up. Yes, Mr. President? You second this?”

“Seconded,” I said.

“I take Tatiana. You take your wife.”

Inside the first hut, we heard the rain drum louder. This had been the library but roof panels were cracked or missing. The old books were scorched and sodden lumps, lying on the ground or on sheet-metal bookshelves standing askew. We moved on to the next hut, an abattoir of rusted surgical equipment and stained mattresses. The bare séance room was a small pond. I tugged at the drawers of rusty filing cabinets. In the barracks I found ruined clothes, personal effects, photographs, all scattered. Parts of the base had been emptied out, others left untouched. Four more skeletons littered the avenue outside. My good shoes were long since ruined.

“Here!” Pat called. I followed her voice to what had been McAllister’s office. In one corner his safe remained, closed and intact. We tore the old wooden desk apart but the keys to the safe weren’t there. I pulled at the handle of the safe; it snapped right off.

“Can we move it out of here?” I said. I gave it an experimental shove, or tried to. Arkady was pretty strong, but the road was a mile off.

“Just a moment,” said Pat. She rummaged in her purse and came out with a tiny penknife. With a quick jerk she drew it across her thumb. I watched as she faced the wall and brought her arm down hard, casting a drop of blood.

“One for lies,” she said, low and not to me.

“Pat, what in God’s name?”

She turned a careful ninety degrees on her heel and did it again. “And one for truth,” she said, and turned. “One for lost things. And one for sweet youth.” She finished her last turn and sucked the cut. “One from across the aisle. The keys are underground.”

The stone steps down into the basement were charred but intact. A trickle of water ran through the barred gate at the bottom. Arkady stopped and heaved; the grillwork bent, then snapped. His strength must have been prodigious.

“This is a bad idea,” he said, panting. Pat pulled a flashlight from her purse as Tatiana brushed past her.

Through the gate were catacombs formed partly of poured concrete, and they gave onto older brick passageways. Some of the corridors had cells built into the sides. Pat shone her flashlight into one of them and drew back, shaking her head. For a while the passageway crisscrossed above an underground river, intermittently visible through a grating until it plunged down to some deeper level away from us.

Tatiana stopped in front of another barred cell whose door swung open easily. She pointed inside, and Pat nodded.

They’d chained McAllister up before he died—of what, no one could say. Evidently he’d lived several years after the burning of the farmhouse. The skeleton of a dog lay near him, and his keys.

The safe contained more paperwork, now pulpy with water damage, and notebooks secured with rubber bands. A few of its pages, written in Eisenhower’s spiky penmanship, survived. A list of agents identified by code names with annotations and commentary. Strengths and weaknesses, protocols for contact, and an index to a clandestine network of paranormal entities. Code names like Pendragon and Optical told me nothing, and it was clearly out of date. But at the very least, it indicated that not so long ago, magic had been alive and well in America.