Crooked Page 5

  “I think I make a call to the embassy if you don’t mind.”

  “I am in authority here, Colonel, not you. You just do your part,” Gregor said. He tucked his gun into an armpit holster and stripped off his jacket. “And you just stay where you are, Mr. Nixon. We’re about to make history.”

  Gregor put the briefcase on the floor between us. It had a dull, scratched metal finish, a heavy industrial look, and two locks. Each man took out a key and set it in a lock, then paused. Gregor quietly counted, “One, two,” and they turned the keys simultaneously to open it.

  Arkady pawed through the contents and picked out two envelopes covered with emphatic Cyrillic script in various sizes, some of it in red. “We verify first. No mistakes,” Arkady said.

  “Very well.” They each tore open an envelope and shook out a pen and a thick piece of card stock. Each wrote out a long string of characters on the card, evidently working from memory, then they swapped cards and studied the results against what was on the backs.

  “Accepted,” Arkady said after a moment. “You?”

  “Yes. I will be primary, you will administer. Get us a proper seal, threefold. This will be one of the exarchs. Tolerances are here.” He tossed Arkady another envelope. Arkady opened it, studied the contents, then took a measuring tape and a felt-tip pen and began marking precise points on one wall.

  Meanwhile Gregor opened a metal box full of small glass bottles. He dug around in the briefcase, removed a miniature scale, and began measuring out little samples of powder and depositing them in a ceramic bowl. He poured in a few drops of clear liquid, spat into the dark mixture, and crushed all of it together using the butt of his gun as a pestle. A chalky smell filled the room and he coughed.

  “Is what?” asked Arkady.

  “Someone said bone. Comes from one of the dig sites.”

  Arkady took the bowl and a small brush and began connecting the dots he’d made on the wall, forming odd angles and curves.

  “I want you to know I’ll be alerting the authorities,” I told them. “I will expect a full accounting.”

  “He does not know a thing, this one,” said Arkady.

  “Stay quiet, this will be easy,” Gregor told me. “It’s all standard procedure. Arkady, you know the axes go the other way on this continent?”

  “Just waiting on an entity code.”

  “‘Novosibirsk L three four oh nine.’” Gregor read this from a small piece of card stock, then tore it in half twice.

  “Female, then.”

  “It’s the Raven Mother. We gamed it out. Mother of millions. Optimal spread for urban deployment, and she’ll—”

  “I know what she does,” Arkady said. “I read the file. Xenomorph exarch. This is wise, Greggy? She is hard to stop.”

  “Activation phase,” Gregor said. This part, it turned out, was quite lengthy and in Russian. They took turns reading aloud from a numbered set of note cards, dropping each one on the floor when they were finished. I heard my name twice, mixed in with the rest of it. Gregor kept an eye on me, I suppose so he could stop me in case I tried to move. I studied what Arkady had drawn on the wall. It looked like a geometric proof or an unfamiliar set of constellations. Near the center he had filled in a large black circle. It glistened, refusing to dry.

  At one point, they stopped, counted off, and, to my astonishment, launched into a rhythmic chant while shuffling through a complicated set of steps and hand movements. It wasn’t a dance exactly, but it seemed like the product of a long technical rehearsal. When they finished I wondered what time it was. One o’clock? Later? I was feeling tired. The room seemed darker, although the bare bulb still shone.

  “Are you ready?” Gregor said. “We’ll have six minutes from when I initiate.”

  “I am still within my rights to object,” Arkady said.

  “Do you exercise that right, my friend? You’d best tell me now.”

  “I do not.”

  Gregor took out a metal flask, shook it for five seconds, then uncapped it. “Counting six minutes from now.” He sniffed the mixture, made a face, and chugged the contents. He shivered despite the heat of the room. “Get him ready.”

  “What is he doing?” I asked Arkady. He ignored me. Gregor took his shoes off and kicked them to one corner. One of his socks had a hole in the heel.

  “I would like you to touch that circle on the wall,” Gregor said. He pointed to one part of the diagram.

  “Why?”

  “It is not important.”

  “I’m not going to,” I said. I don’t know why. It seemed obscurely humiliating like a bully’s trick. I wasn’t going to touch anything.

  “It is only a formality.”

  “Do it, please.” Arkady looked at me grimly.

  “I don’t—” I began, but there was a flash of light and then I was on one knee, the side of my face gone numb. It came to me that Arkady had just hit me. He was already hauling me forward by my wrist. I stumbled to my feet, trying to make a fist, but my nerves weren’t connecting quite right. I glanced at the wall. The circle seemed bigger. Almost a foot across.

  “Initializing host,” Arkady said. There was a flash of cool on my palm, then a stinging, and my palm was bleeding.

  What was this? I’d heard the Soviets had their own interrogation methods, that their foreign intelligence service dated back to 1917 or maybe earlier. That they’d do anything to get what they wanted.

  “You’ll get nothing from me!” One of them chuckled.

  “Just touch the circle, please.”

  “No!”

  “Touch it!”

  “I don’t want to!” There was a breeze moving through the room now. A moment ago I’d been prepared to tell them anything, but for some reason I didn’t want to touch the circle. I fought but Arkady was heroically strong. He twisted my arm, locked the elbow, and dragged me across the room.

  “What’s the matter? He should be immobilized by now.” Gregor sounded panicked.

  “He resists. I don’t understand it either.”

  “Cuff him!”

  “No handcuffs! I have only the murder stuff.”

  “Is this—I don’t understand; am I being tortured?”

  “How long?” Arkady said.

  There was a ringing in my ears, perhaps from the blow.

  “Shouldn’t be long,” Gregor said. “Just hold him.”

  “I’ve got a few drops on it now but it does nothing. He must be an outlier.”

  “Fuck! You hear that? We are at the final stage,” Gregor said. And I did hear something, the sound of a woman laughing, an older woman. It sounded far away, elsewhere in the building maybe.

  “I don’t understand,” I whispered.

  “It’s a new world, little congressman. There’s going to be a new war. The last war. We’ll see you at the ascension, Mr. Nixon. Get his hand in, Arkady.”

  Arkady’s full weight was on me, crushing me against the wall, and I could see only a little slice of the room around his midsection. He rotated a little and I saw where my blood had been smeared on the wall and the floor. The circle was much larger now. Gregor must have added to it, although I hadn’t seen him do it.

  “When do we move to minimum safe distance?” Arkady said. “I am not liking to be here for the, what do you call, emergence.”

  “Get it done.”

  Arkady tensed again for the effort. I looked at the circle, and the blackness took on an impossible depth. I had the terrible impression it was no longer a circle but a dark hole tunneling into the wall.

  “No!” Without understanding why, I was seized with a terror I hadn’t felt since childhood. I thrashed, twisted. I managed to stomp hard on one of Arkady’s cheap shoes and he yelped. I got my left arm free and clawed feebly at his face. I would have done anything to a human body just to be spared touching that circle. His grip loosened and I lurched back, arm free, gasping for air in the close room. The three of us looked at one another.

  The hole in the wall was expanding,
slowly. Beyond I saw stars and a bulky shape silhouetted against them. The air that came through was shockingly cold. Something on the far side moved, just a shadow. I couldn’t understand the scale. It looked huge.

  “It’s going to be hungry,” Gregor said, maybe to himself. He glanced from one to the other of us, making a calculation, just a whisper of thought. He reached toward his pistol, but in the same second Arkady was already moving, swinging one tree-trunk arm in a thunderous open-hand slap. Gregor staggered, fumbling the gun from its holster.

  Arkady drove forward, using his bulk, almost falling into the smaller man. He had a hand on Gregor’s sleeve, trying to control the gun. I scrambled across the room.

  “You fucking idiot to pull this,” Arkady said, oddly calm. Gregor strained against him, fired the pistol at nothing. Arkady swung him into the wall; the impact was like a man hitting the ground from four stories up. The gun fell to the floor and spun.

  “We cannot abort.” Gregor began talking very quickly. “She sees me now. The blood is his but she sees me—”

  “You want to shoot me, Gregor? You think I don’t know what you pull?” Arkady said. He muscled the smaller man toward the hole. Gregor clawed at Arkady and then froze, and his face cleared in blank terror.

  “I felt it. It touched me,” he said. Then, “Ich bin bereit…Ich bin ganz…” His shirt had torn and I saw a tattoo on his forearm, an eight-pointed star, like a black radiant sun.

  “Pick up the gun!” Arkady snarled, one hand now around Gregor’s throat. I realized he was talking to me. I grabbed it, checked the safety like I’d been taught.

  “Stop this!” I shouted. “You’re both under arrest!” Neither of them seemed to hear me.

  “Shoot him now,” Arkady said. “Do not wait.”

  “I can’t.” I held the gun close to Gregor’s face, trying to make him look at it. I was intensely aware that I had never pointed a gun at a live human being, not even in the war. How had Gregor done this so casually?

  “The king will come,” Gregor spluttered. He was almost blue but seemed as strong as ever. Arkady was losing his grip. “The king of America. The blank throne.” In one motion he pulled free and plunged his arm through the hole, impossibly deep, almost to the shoulder.

  “Y’gsth—”

  My body went slack, and in a moment when I didn’t care what happened because obviously none of this was happening in the world as I understood it, I put the barrel against Gregor’s chest and pulled the trigger. I lost, I think, a few seconds after that, and then I was sitting against the wall. I must have dropped the gun and fallen backward. Arkady was holding it now. He fired four more times into Gregor’s body, a slow line down the torso. The body twitched. It would not lie still. I heard a faint crackling.

  The big man stopped, waiting, pistol still pointed. He looked at me and pulled the trigger once more, and it gave a dry click.

  “No more bullets, okay?” he said. “No more shooting. Is done.”

  I nodded. My ears were ringing but I didn’t hear any sirens. The hole was a blank circle again.

  “Is he…” I asked.

  “I do not think so. We do not have the tools here to finish.”

  “What was happening to him?”

  “I hear of such things but I do not believe until now. Grafts and injections, no one lived. Gregor was one in ten thousand.”

  “What did he say, just at the end?”

  “Not here. Fuck. What a goatfuck tonight.”

  “Is he—dead?” I asked again.

  “If he is not, then we are sure not killing him now.”

  “Is it…is that hell? Was that the devil?”

  “I have heard it called an angel, or the last czar, or leviathan-grade bioweapons ordnance. It has a name for itself I cannot pronounce. Is not good place to talk here, or breathe even. I think it would be good to have a drink right now.”

  We found a dive bar a couple of blocks south on Lexington. The terrifying scuffle of a few minutes ago was fresh on my raw skin. I felt bruised and sore and my hand was swollen. Arkady ordered us each several shots of slightly cloudy vodka.

  “You are really from California?” he asked.

  “What? Yes,” I said.

  “What part?” His English was better than I’d thought at first, far less accented.

  “Southern. Southern California.”

  “Ha!” he barked, abruptly, some private joke. “You see many movie stars?”

  “Well, once in a while, I suppose,” I said, thinking of the time I saw Cary Grant two cars ahead of me in a traffic jam.

  “I’d like to fuck one of them one time.”

  “That…that’d be pretty fine,” I said.

  I held up my hand. There was a raw burn across the ball of my thumb. “I can’t feel it now. Is it poisoned?” I asked.

  “More like anesthetic. Thing is like wasp. Then it lays eggs.”

  “What?” I tried to see my hand better but it was too dark. “Jesus. I think I need to go to the restroom.”

  “You would know if they were there. Size of Ping-Pong balls. And I would have cut hand off at this point.”

  “Great. Thanks, though. For letting me go. Eventually.”

  “I have done enough shitty things, I am thinking. And Gregor was going to take me too, I am very sure of it. But I will say, I should not have tried to feed you to that thing.”

  “Cheers, then.”

  “Za vas.”

  We drank.

  “What happened there? How did you know he was going to…” I made a gun out of one hand. Thinking back, he’d reacted impossibly fast.

  “Richard, how old do you think I am?”

  I looked him over. He had a couple of really nice scars and he’d spent a lot of time outdoors. “Fifty?” I said, guessing ten years more than that.

  He shrugged.

  “All right, fifty. So I been in the Soviet Union since I was nineteen, Soviet intelligence since—”

  “Wait, you’re a spy?”

  “What the fuck you think I am? Since whenever. Point is, how many purges you think I go through? Mission fucked, he wants to burn me. I’ve done it myself to other guys. More than fucking once. I know what it looks like.”

  He gestured for another shot of vodka, and downed it.

  “I know who you are, Mr. Nixon, the guy trying to catch Alger Hiss. You make a lot of speeches. You really that angry about it? All the Commie spies.”

  “Maybe I’m a little madder about it now, yes.”

  “I cannot blame you there. Was a bad thing, tonight.”

  “He is a spy, right? Hiss? That’s what this is all about? Just tell me. I don’t even know what I saw.”

  “Maybe nothing, huh? Maybe you just forget about this crazy stuff, yes? Hiss does nothing for no one but himself. I tell you what, Mr. Nixon. Probably best you go home. You go out looking for spies, maybe you find other things sometimes. You know this now. Is not for amateurs. Think of it as bad dream. Wake up tomorrow and forget.”

  “But…but I have to know what happened. What all this was.”

  He stood, put some money on the bar.

  “I am sorry for it all. You not a bad guy. You need it, I help you out sometime maybe.” He extended a hand. I shook it.

  “Do not follow me. I see how you follow Hiss, it is pathetic.” He took his hat from the bar and left.

  I waited fifteen minutes. I started to shake a little and ordered another shot of vodka. I’d heard about American covert operations in Europe. I knew we’d tried to plant dozens of sleeper agents behind the Iron Curtain. Hardened men, partisans who’d fought the Nazis, nationalists who’d then stayed behind when the Communists took control after the war. In short, men and women a thousand times tougher than I’d ever be. We tried to get them into the government or the police, anywhere they could inform for us or sway a key election or just stay in one place until we needed them, but that dreamed-of resistance movement never quite found its moment. They went dark, dead or turned or
scared into submission, every single one of them. I wondered now how they’d died or what they’d been shown to change their minds. I wondered if they’d acted any better than I had.

  When I left the bar, it was maybe five a.m., still warm and humid, an August night shading into early morning. My hotel was on Central Park South. I walked the whole distance, not even feeling drunk. I sat on a park bench and watched the very tops of the higher buildings fading into view.

  What was I doing? I was a stage actor pretending to be a politician, a spy hunter, a tough guy. Now that I’d met the tough guys, I knew I wasn’t one, not even close. And I’d seen something else.

  I was thirty-five and I’d thought I was playing political poker and it turned out I’d been playing in some other game I didn’t even know about. Like I’d been holding a hand of kings and then the people around the table started putting down more kings, a king with a squid’s face, a naked king with goat’s horns holding up a bough of holly. A Russian king with an insect’s voice. I knew the look on my face because I’d seen it on other people’s faces, that moment when the cocky junior-league cardsharp who thinks he’s been running the show all night looks around the table and finally figures out who the sucker is.

  Chapter Seven

  I woke up still in the clothes I’d worn to yesterday’s hearing. I looked out my hotel window into bright sunlight and smelled the faint scent of gunpowder on my jacket. It had happened. Now what was I supposed to do about it? Gregor was dead. Arkady had saved my life, or I had saved his.

  I took the train down to Washington, and Pat picked me up at the station.

  “Did you find any spies?” A sour edge in her voice.

  “Not yet, dear,” I said.

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll get them.”

  “You don’t have to say that,” I told her. I closed my eyes on the way home, pretended to nap. Some instinct told me to lock away what I remembered, to keep those strange blurred moments of struggle shading into inexplicable horror in a separate part of myself. Over the next few days, the strangeness faded and I began to doubt what had happened. The rest of the world continued as it had. I was a nobody with no connections and I was going to disappear from the world.