Read Online Crooked by Austin Grossman - Free Book Online

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