Benchley, Peter - Novel 06

by Q Clearance (v2. 0)

  "Positive," he said. "Absolutely." He turned away, wishing he were a better liar.

  BuRNHAM closed the connecting door, walked across his office, shedding his loafers one by one as he went, and fell onto his couch.

  He needed a drink. The longing was stronger than it had ever been. He craved the cool, satiny feeling as the elixir coated his throat and numbed the little nerve endings, the delicious warmth as it pooled in his stomach, the few seconds' wait for liftoff, and finally—most of all—the release as the circuits tripped one after another and shut down the thoughts that spun like pinwheels in his brain. He needed to give his brain a holiday, to let it float free in sweet nothingness.

  Did the President drink? Burnham had seen him sip a watery bourbon now and again, but that wasn't drinking. Booze wasn't a toy, it was a tool, and anyone who treated it like a toy shouldn't be allowed to play with it. "Social drinking" was an oxymoron, a term coined to sanitize the socially unsavory. Dr. Johnson knew what booze was for: "To get rid of myself, to send myself away."

  No, the President didn't drink. Not enough anyway.

  If I were President, Burnham thought, I'd make it a point once a week to lock myself in a room with no phones, only a TV set that showed reruns of I Love Lucy, and knock back a fifth of vodka. Just to give my brain a break.

  How could the President keep all that crap in his head? Yes, no; right, wrong; black, white; night, day. Maybe he didn't keep any of it in his head, maybe he just let it happen around him and waited for a few drops of distillate to fall into a cup and become a decision.

  The Secretary of Defense had said that the guerrillas in Honduras were intent on establishing a totalitarian Communist regime.

  The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said that two-thirds of the country was already under a totalitarian Communist regime.

  Dennis Duggan puffed on his pipe and said that Tegucigalpa reminded him of Saigon near the end, an isolated enclave.

  The Secretary of State said that this put him in mind of 1954, and didn't the President agree that there was an awful lot of Red-baiting going on?

  The Secretary of Defense said that if the Secretary of State was accusing him of McCarthy ism, the Secretary of State should watch his mouth or he'd find his paisley tie jammed up his puckerhole.

  The Secretary of State said he thought things were getting out of hand and the time had come to break for cocktails and a light lunch.

  The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs recommended a preemptive strike against guerrilla positions in the north.

  Mario Epstein said that the guerrilla positions were changing every fifteen minutes, and that "preemptive strikes" were code words for turning Honduras into a parking lot.

  The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs asked Epstein if he meant to compare him to Curtis LeMay.

  The Secretary of Defense reminded his colleagues that Curtis LeMay hadn't been all wrong.

  Dennis Duggan asked Epstein, in an aside, who Curtis LeMay was.

  The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs brought out an enormous color-coded chart that separated all of Honduras into thousand-hectare slices and proceeded to detail the guerrilla activity in each slice.

  The President asked Burnham if he wanted a Fresca, and Burnham said. No, sir, but he did ask for a Coke.

  He needed the sugar.

  And on and on it went, for three hours, ending only when the President had to depart to brief the Congressional leadership on his current thinking about Honduras.

  Burnham suggested that the President tell the leaders that this was an immensely complex situation, with potential repercussions that could last for generations, and that he had learned from the mistakes of his predecessors and was determined not to fly off half-cocked on a course of action that all Americans would come to regret.

  The President liked the suggestion: It insulted everyone from Johnson Democrats to Reagan Republicans, let them know that their man (and, by association, they themselves) was responsible, at least in part, for the mess America was in and from which he was trying to rescue it, without mentioning anyone by name.

  Lying on his couch, lamenting the loss of his good friend John Barleycorn, Burnham wondered if there was a pill he could take. Not a happy pill, just a goodbye-see-you-later pill. He knew little about pills, and what he did know he didn't like. ,

  He decided to try meditation. He hadn't meditated in a year, but he remembered how. He closed his eyes and told his mind to instruct his muscle groups to relax, one at a time, and he imagined himself in the safest place of all, his childhood bedroom. He saw his bed and his hockey stick and his Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra posters and—

  "Mr. Burnham?"

  The voice sounded far away, like someone calling from the kitchen, but because it didn't belong in his head it was jarring, intrusive.

  He opened his eyes and looked between his stockinged feet and saw Dyanna standing in the doorway.

  Her face was ashen beneath its veneer of rouge, which made her cheeks look splotchy.

  "I have to talk to you right away."

  Burnham expended a mighty breath and rolled upright. He opened and closed his eyes and rubbed his temples with his fingertips. His mind had begun a retreat, and to be yanked back suddenly from the lip of oblivion was painful. "I don't suppose it can wait."

  "No, sir. Not this. I'm afraid I found out why we're here."

  "What?" He looked at her to see if she was joking. "You mean you've solved the seminal teleological riddle? For that you woke me up? It's been lying around for a billion years. It could have waited another half hour.''

  "Here." Dyanna pointed to the floor. "Why we're here."

  "I know why I'm here. The President told me. I'm to be his Boswell."

  "That may be why you're here now, but it's not how he found you."

  "What are you talking about?"

  Dyanna opened one of her hands and showed him a Sony microcassette. "I'm sorry," she said. "I mean, I think I'm sorry. I don't know! Don't you see?"

  She's about to burst into tears, Burnham decided. She's come unglued.

  He stood up and went to Dyanna, took the cassette from her and put an arm around her shoulder. "We have any coffee?"

  She nodded.

  "Let's have some coffee."

  "Then you'll listen to it?"

  "Then I'll listen to it, whatever 'it' is."

  He followed her into her office, and as she fumbled for the cups and the sugar substitute and the nondairy creamer and the coffee, the words flooded from her like water through a ruptured dike.

  "I ran out of tapes for my dictation machine, and I needed another one in case the President wanted something in a hurry and you had to dictate or whatever, I didn't want to be caught without one, so I called downstairs and they won't have any new ones in until tomorrow, and our old ones have been used so many times they're fuzzy and sound like a chicken fight."

  She handed Burnham his coffee and, carrying her micro-cassette recorder, followed him back into his office and shut the door behind them.

  He did not try to hurry her, did not want to interrupt her, because he sensed that whatever it was she was leading up to was something about which he would need to know every minute detail.

  "Well, I knew that Mr. Epstein's girls have a whole bin full of these tapes, 'cause you know every phone call he has is taped and—"

  "It is? Every one?"

  "Uh-huh. Not so much for a record or anything, I mean this isn't Watergate or anything, he's not crazy, but just so the girls can type an accurate transcript if they need to later, and then when they're done with it or they don't need to transcribe it they just throw it in the bin and use it again. So I asked Connie if she'd lend me a tape and she said sure and she reached into the bin and gave me a whole handful of them, so I brought them back here and I picked one and put it in my machine and pushed 'play' just to make sure it wasn't all crackly and . . . well, that's it." She pointed to the tape in Burnham's hand. "I'm sorry."

  "What are you sorry a
bout?"

  "You'll see. I mean, maybe you'll be happy. I don't know."

  Burnham handed her the tape and sat on the couch. She loaded the recorder and placed it on the coffee table.

  "Sit down," Burnham said, and he patted the place beside him on the couch.

  "No, sir, I—"

  "Jesus, Dyanna, I'm not gonna kiss you!”

  "No, sir, I'm afraid you might strangle me."

  He smiled at her and said, "I promise. Now sit."

  She sat on the edge of the couch, as if poised for flight, and pushed the "play" button.

  From the little speaker in the recorder came the voice of Evelyn Witt: "Just a sec, Mario."

  Then a second of silence, a click, and the President: "Yeah, Mario."

  Burnham pushed the "stop" button. "He records all his conversations with the President?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "If the President knew, if he even suspected, he'd have Epstein's ass." Burnham smiled. "Whatever's on the rest of this tape, Dyanna, no matter what it is, I'm gonna have a medal stmck for you."

  "Wait." Dyanna's hand fluttered over her hair. "Please wait."

  Burnham started the recorder.

  "Mr. President," Epstein said, "I've spoken to Dennis again about this Gromyko business."

  "And?" There was an edge of aggressive irritation in the President's voice.

  "Sir, we hope you'll reconsider the idea of using Burnham."

  "Why? You don't think I know people? You don't think I can pick my own man?"

  "No, sir ... I mean, no, that's not what we think. He's not qualified. It's as simple as that."

  "How do you know?"

  "We've double-checked his whole file. He has no experience in foreign policy. He's never negotiated anything with anybody."

  "You checked his file." The President chuckled. "You ever check Dick Helms's file? How about Kermit Roosevelt's? Just bureaucrats, right? A file's like the credits on a movie: It doesn't tell you anything about the story behind the story."

  "But, sir—"

  "You want me to send Parker Randall? He's 'qualified,' all right, but you know's well as I do that he'd spend the whole time trying to find a restaurant that made you eat with eight forks and six spoons. Gromyko's dealt with nine American Presidents. He knows more about the history of our foreign policy than we do, crissakes. He's got no respect for college boys with on-the-job training. What he respects is someone he knows, someone he also knows has the ear of the President. And that's Tim. To a 'T.' "

  "Excuse me, Mr. President, but how do you know Burnham knows Gromyko?"

  (Burnham said to Dyanna, "I can't wait." She did not reply. She picked frantically at her nail polish. She seemed 4o be shrinking into the couch.)

  "How do I know?" the President thundered. "I know, that's how!"

  "Did Gromyko tell you?"

  No reply.

  "Did Burnham tell you?"

  "As good as. The first day he came in here, that day I was gonna fire him for fucking up, he had a couple of phone messages on his papers. I know, 'cause I picked 'em off the floor myself. One said he should call Margaret Thatcher. The other said Gromyko had retumed his call and he was to call back right away."

  (Burnham stopped the tape. He looked at Dyanna, who was wishing she could vanish into the floral print in the upholstery. He said, "Jesus Christ."

  She nodded.

  "The whole thing?" He waved his arm around the room, gathering in the White House, the presidency, his entire life. "Everything? From two silly messages you scribbled for me because I felt insecure walking around the White House without papers?"

  She nodded again.

  "He must've thought I was ... I don't know. What?"

  She pointed dumbly at the tape recorder, so he pushed the "play" button.)

  "Phone messages?" Epstein's voice had risen half an octave. He was trying his best to muzzle a scream. "But, sir . . . how do you know they were genuine?"

  "Goddammit, Mario, don't be an asshole! What kinda jerk-off runs around writing himself phony messages to call the Russians?"

  Epstein made a noise that sounded as if he had a piece of stew beef caught in his esophagus, a kind of gurgly breathless swallowing noise.

  Sensing that his counterstrike had drawn blood, the President resumed the offensive.

  "You know, your trouble, Mario, is you think anybody who doesn't report to you and God forbid anybody who knows something you don't know, he must be a friggin' Chinaman or a spy or something. But there are people in this government that you don't know about, and some that even I don't know about, who serve their country goddamn well in spite of you. Like Timothy. Now, if you're still nosing around him, I want you to stop it. I'm not gonna have you bitch up some major undercover operation just 'cause your pride's got piles. Understood?"

  "Yes, sir. But there's one test I'd—"

  "No. No tests. No nothing. Got it?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Remember something, Mario: This country's run for more than two hundred years without your hand on the helm. I don't care if Tim climbed out from under some friggin' rock. He serves his President—and without a lot of the pissing and moaning I hear from other pains in the ass around here."

  The President hung up. A second later, the only sound from the recorder was tape hiss.

  “Well," Burnham said. He rewound the tape, removed it from the recorder and dropped it in his pocket.

  Dyanna sat stiffly on the edge of the couch, head high, lower Hp aquiver. "Would you like my resignation?"

  Burnham hadn't given a thought to her part in the drama, or to her reaction to it. "Don't be silly. How could you know?" He touched her cheek. "Besides, look at all the answers you got for us." He patted the pocket in which he had dropped the tape.

  "You mean you're happy?" Her expression had changed from lugubrious to hopeful, and the color was returning to her cheeks.

  "To have it confirmed that my life is a fraud? Not exactly. To have the answers? Relieved. And to know that the President still thinks we're doing a pretty good job . . . well, yes. I guess you could call it happy."

  Her shoulders relaxed, and she sat back in the couch. *'What do you think the test was Mr. Epstein was talking about?"

  "I don't know." Burnham gazed out the window at the sprawling expanse of the South Lawn. A man in a gray suit and mirrored sunglasses passed in front of the window, his left arm ill concealing an Uzi submachine gun under his jacket. The President must be speaking in the Rose Garden, Burnham thought idly.

  Machine guns every time you step out your back door. Jesus, what a life.

  "But I know one thing: He's not going to call it off. Any man with the chutzpah to tape his phone calls with the President likes to live on the edge."

  A step before he would disappear from sight, the Secret Service agent turned and saw Burnham looking at him. He stared back—a challenging, prognathous stare.

  Burnham saw the outline of the Uzi and the reflection of his own face in the agent's sunglasses.

  He knew he should feel safe.

  He didn't.

  TWELVE

  Ivy's life had calmed like a shallow sea after a sudden squall.

  Jerome was working. The diploma and grade transcript had gone through the system smooth as cream. He was bringing home over three hundred a week, giving her a hundred off the top.

  She had seen no more of Mr. Burnham or Debbie Reynolds, and nobody had humbugged her about missing papers. Why should they? The papers weren't missing. They were throwaways; she had just made sure they were thrown her way.

  She hadn't had any need to bother Mr. Pym, and he hadn't contacted her, so she figured everything was mellow on that front.

  The interesting thing was, her leg wasn't bothering her half so bad any more, even though she had stopped taking the pills after she heard that snippy crone at work make a crack about how Ivy was probably taking a nip now and then.

  Maybe the leg was reacting to tranquillity. Everybody said pain was in yo
ur head, so if her head was peaceful, maybe the pain decided to take a breather, too.

  The light changed, and she crossed the street. Ahead, two kids were squabbling over a bicycle wheel, a young couple sat on a stoop and alternated licks on an ice cream cone, and a woman pushed infant twins in an A&P grocery cart.

  Then, ahead, signs of trouble. Shouts. A slamming door. More shouts.

  Ivy stopped. She gripped her shopping bag. Her eyes sought the nearest shelter from a running crazy or a stray bullet.

  Six or eight houses down the block, a door flew open and people poured out, white people, dressed all in black, with black beards and stringy black hair. Jews. Some special kind of Jews. Ivy had heard about them, had seen one or two over the years, but she didn't know they lived around here, not a whole flock of them anyway.

  They were all yelling, in that weird language that nobody but God understood and even He had to use a dictionary.

  Was their house on fire? There was a firebox at the end of the block, but nobody ran for it.

  Maybe one of them had gone berserk and seen the devil in the kitchen.

  Now they were in the middle of the street, and they formed a circle. What were they going to do, stretch a sheet between them and catch a jumper?

  No. They were going to dance. Hollering and singing and laughing, they started the circle spinning, and they dipped and kicked and squatted and hopped.

  Man, Ivy thought, those folks are having themselves a time! One of them hit the lottery?

  People swarmed out of other buildings, kids mostly but women too and a few men who'd been watching TV. Some of the kids wanted to bust into the circle, and the Jews didn't mind, they just spread the circle wider, and when a couple of the women saw it was okay, they joined too, and pretty soon the circle took up the whole width of the street.

  Ivy moved closer. By now there was a circle of watchers and clappers outside the circle of dancers, so she couldn't see much, but she could hear them singing, and from the few syllables that made any sense to her—like Gott and danke and lieber—she understood that it was some sort of religious song of praise.

  And I thought blacks knew how to show God a good time. Ivy said to herself. These people are pros.