Q Clearance

by Peter Benchley

  But Foster Pym was not about to spark a scene that would cause any lasting bitterness. It would be one thing to be a middle-class caterer with an angry ex-wife pecking at him through the legal system, quite another to be a Soviet spy with a revenge-crazed ex who hung around with a band of loud-mouthed Nazis.

  So one evening, after a silent, sullen supper, of day-old moo goo gai pan, Foster said cheerfully, "Don't you think you'd be happier at home?"

  There was no artifice to Louise, which made it easier. She didn't say something maudlin like, "But this is my home!" or burst into tears and lament their failures. She just looked up, surprised, and said, "I sure would!"

  They agreed on a one-time payment of $10,000. They agreed that Louise would change her name back to Whelan. They did not discuss what her parents' reaction might be to having their baby back in the nest. Louise didn't care what her parents felt. She believed Robert Frost: Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

  They agreed about everything, so quickly and with such good humor that they felt a new glow of fondness for each other, a glow they fueled with a bottle of Canadian whisky. Finally, bibulously, they agreed that the occasion called for a goodbye screw, and they tumbled into the sack.

  And Louise got pregnant.

  She waited almost six months before telling Foster. She hoped to be able to entice a Nazi into her bed and pin the pregnancy on him (she had dreams of spawning a Fuhrerlet who would crown her Queen Mother of the Reich), but none of the SS trolls, with their acne-pitted foreheads and dyed blond hair, would succumb to her charms.

  Louise didn't suggest that she and Foster reunite. She was happily ensconced in her old room in her parents' house. She didn't suggest an abortion: By now it was too late, and, besides, her father had assured her that he would pitch her into the street, with "whore" branded on her lips, if she so much as hinted at an abortion. She didn't suggest putting the child up for adoption. She made no demands for child-support payments.

  Her proposal was simplicity itself: She would sell the child to Pym.

  Her logic was unassailable. She didn't want a baby. It would be a burden on her and her parents. She wanted money, which would lighten the existing load on her and her parents. Furthermore, she pointed out, Foster's devotion to Nazism (that is, what he had encouraged her to perceive as devotion) had been waning over the past year, as his catering business had been waxing. She wasn't criticizing: She understood that there wasn't much call for Fascist food. Surely it would be embarrassing for Foster to be the acknowledged (albeit divorced) father of a Nazi W under kind. Wouldn't it be better for him to have the child, to raise it as he saw fit?

  Foster recognized blackmail, and he appreciated it: It was his kind of plan. Besides, he rather liked the idea of rearing a successor in his own image. He even permitted himself to fantasize about creating a dynasty of homegrown spies. He agreed.

  Two days after the baby was born, he traded a cashier's check for $25,(X)0 (he had mortgaged his business) for a seven-pound, four-ounce girl already legally named (Louise's Parthian volley) Eva, after Eva Braun.

  Foster never communicated with Louise again, though he did see her twice, both times in the newspaper, standing in the background at news conferences behind George Lincoln Rockwell. After Rockwell was shot, Louise dropped from sight for good. Whenever he thought of her, which was almost never. Foster surmised that she was working as a secretary at something like a used-car agency and that she spent her evenings plotting in damp basements. He half-expected her to turn up next on a 60 Minutes report on the search for Josef Mengele, whose purported death in Brazil he regarded as a splendid fraud. Maybe as Mengele's nurse.

  Eva became the joy of Foster's life, a bouquet of posies amid the weeds of Foster's humdrum existence. A clever, sunny child, she was blessed with impossible looks: The crossing of a plain woman with an utterly forgettable-looking man had somehow produced a stunning child—corn-blond hair, gray-blue eyes, high, proud cheekbones and assertive chin. It was almost as if Louise had willed her Aryan fantasies to overcome her and Foster's drab genes.

  Foster continued to live in the Northeast, where there was a ready supply of inexpensive, kindly black labor, which suited Foster politically as well as personally: A sociologist might have labeled him an eccentric ethnic Calvinist (or a racist), for he believed that each ethnic group had a preordained place in society and that black people's place was to provide inexpensive, kindly labor.

  If parents received grades, Foster Pym would have given himself solid B's.

  Spies, on the other hand, do receive grades of a sort, and it was a source of annoyance and consternation to Pym that while he thought he deserved high B's or low A's, those who judged him consistently gave him C-minuses.

  Had an inquisitor demanded that he enumerate his successes, he would have listed at least four:

  He had learned about the Bay of Pigs invasion a full twenty-four hours before it occurred, by overhearing a tipsy New York Times correspondent brag to a comely maiden that President Kennedy had asked the paper to withdraw its scheduled story.

  He had properly assessed the global gravity of the Watergate fiasco, by watching and listening to Ben Bradlee as he interrupted countless dinner parties for phone conversations with Woodward and Bernstein.

  He had discovered that an assistant director of the CIA was a genteel junkie, addicted to paregoric.

  And he had engineered an embarrassment to the Carter Administration, adding grain alcohol to the Chassagne-Montrachet he served to a senior official of the Carter White House, a chunky, good-humored koala of a man who had only recently learned to tie a necktie, who had been seated beside the wife of the Egyptian ambassador, a raven-haired, onyx-eyed beauty with skin that shone like honey and teeth as white as Chiclets. By the dessert course, the Carter man was so thoroughly ripped that he gazed liquidly at the ambassador's wife's breathtaking cleavage, asserted vigorously that he had always wanted to see the Pyramids and begged ravenously to be permitted to "munch on the Valley of the Kings" —all well within earshot of several attentive members of the Washington press corps.

  Each of Pym's coups was received with an insouciant "So what?"

  Either the information received was practically useless (in the cases of both the Bay of Pigs and Watergate, things worked out perfectly without any interference from Mother Russia), or else it was regarded as inconsequential (half the Politburo was addicted to alcohol, and booze-fired betises were as common as flatulence).

  The reaction infuriated Pym, who thought he had done exemplary work—especially considering that he had been given no specific assignment—and impelled him to a rash exchange that he had long since come to regret.

  During his last meeting with a contact, a twilight walk in Rock Creek Park a year ago, he had endured sarcasm and condescension for nearly an hour before finally exploding, "What do you want from me? You want me to run an agent in the . . . White House ... for God's sake?"

  "That would be nice," said the wretched weasel of a man, who, apparently, knew Pym better than Pym thought, for he added, "Then perhaps you can end your days here, instead of coming home to read the news on Radio Moscow."

  "Home!" Pym choked, feeling as if an ice pick had been plunged into his liver.

  "Just a thought," the man said before he turned down a bosky path and disappeared in the shadows.

  The next morning, Pym's dormant hemorrhoids burst into agonizing bloom.

  He began to prowl the perimeters of the White House grounds, not looking for anything specific, but hoping—almost mystically—to absorb an aura that would give him a clue as to how to proceed.

  Then the poor black lady's shopping bag had burst, and he had sensed the cracking open of a door.

  Next, Eva had come home to work for him, which Pym regarded as a gift, a blessing from whatever gods oversaw his life.

  He had not been close to Eva since she went away to boarding school when she was ten. Her letters from Bennington
had been infrequent and remote, alluding to increased political commitment in which, she was sure, he had no interest at all. He began to think of her as an adult with whom he had some distant connection. He never imposed himself on her: First, he knew she would resent and resist it; second, he quite approved of the political drift she was taking on her own. She worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, then for Common Cause, then for Greenpeace.

  Then she had called, from a jail in Colorado. Evidently, she had joined a radical environmental group intent on blowing up the Glen Cfenyon Dam.

  Pym bailed her out and hired a lawyer who, for $16,000, got Eva's case separated from the others and dismissed on an obscure technical ground.

  Eva came home frightened, chastened, disillusioned and in debt to her father, to whom she tearfully confessed having also committed one third-class felony and two misdemeanors for which she had never been apprehended.

  Pym let her regain her strength and her composure and her self-confidence. He fed her, housed her and clothed her as she worked off her debt—which, of course, indebted her further, at least in her head, which was as Pym would have wished.

  He had never told her he was a Russian spy. He knew that many American leftists had no more affection for the Soviet Union than they had for America. And he wanted her to have no leverage against him: He wanted all the ammunition, in anticipation of the day he might want to use it to recruit her. Probably, he would have found the word "blackmail" infelicitous to describe his plans for his daughter, but probably, too, he wouldn't have denied it.

  That day, it appeared, was drawing near.

  Things were looking up.

  FIVE

  The West Gate of the White House was kept closed, to dissuade loons from driving up to the front door of the mansion, and it was reinforced with concrete bulwarks, to discourage maniacs from launching frontal attacks with explosive-packed laundry vans. But there was a pedestrian-access path beside the guardhouse in which sat, most mornings, Sergeant Roland Thibaudeaux of the White House detail of the Metropolitan Police Force. Each morning, Burnham would wave and say, "Morning, Sergeant T.," and Sergeant Thibaudeaux would wave and say, "Morning, Mr. B."

  It was their private ritual joke, their acknowledgment of eccentricities of language and quirks of human nature. The first time they had met, Burnham had pronounced the sergeant's name in its original French form: "Tee-boe-doe."

  The sergeant had corrected him: "It's Tibby-doo."

  "It is?"

  "Yup. Come from up Norritch [Norwich], Connecticut. My father used to say, ' 'Tain't my fault some frog got into Granny's jammies. We're Americans and that's that.'

  As he passed by the guardhouse, Burnham waved and said, "Morning, Sergeant T."

  "Halt!" The sergeant slid open the bulletproof window, smiled apologetically and tapped his left breast.

  "Again?" Burnham chuckled. "What was it this time?" He reached into his pocket for his White House pass.

  Among the scores, the hundred, the countless symbols of power and privilege in official Washington, one of the most prized, especially to those young and ambitious and unknown to the public, was the White House pass. It was a laminated plastic card, printed with a color photograph and the name of the bearer, and it looked like a driver's license. But it was awarded only after the bearer had been blessed with an offer of a job in what were called '*the highest councils of government," a job that, it was determined, required him to have access to the President of the United States, and had been sanctified by a Full Field Investigation by the FBI, which included, among other things, interviews with the candidate's grammar-school classmates about their recollections and impressions of him as a fifth-grader.

  Technically, the pass meant that the bearer could go to work in the morning. Actually, in the eyes of the rest of Washington, it was affirmation of his worth as a human being. With that pass he could cash checks at strange banks, open charge accounts at restaurants, do favors for congressmen (taking constituents through the West Wing of the White House and the private family quarters while the President was away), impress the drawers off girls by arranging to have the White House telephone operators page him during a date, and, perhaps most delightful of all, comport himself with an air of polite restraint which suggested that so full was his brain of classified, supersensitive material that his every word must be weighed before it could safely be uttered.

  Even the lowliest member of a typing pool bore the White House pass as a badge that set him a substantial half-step above his peers, for the mere existence of the pass suggested proximity to the President, and proximity was the capital's highest currency.

  Every member of the White House staff, whether he worked in the White House or in the Executive Office Building next door, was supposed to wear his pass every second he was on the premises. This was a club, and as long as everyone displayed his membership card, the Secret Service was cool, the police mellow.

  The fact that a White House pass would have been easy to steal and easier to forge was never mentioned^ It was a symbol.

  For the first few months that he worked as a speechwriter for the President, Burnham wore his pass dutifully, clipping it to his jacket when his overcoat came off, then to his shirt when his jacket came off, remembering to take it with him even when he went down the hall to the John. Then he began to notice that the more senior staff were neglecting to wear their passes.

  He said nothing, asked no questions, but observed that while there was distinct status in possessing a White House pass, there was even greater status in possessing one and not wearing it: It implied that the bearer was so in at the White House, such a veteran, so well known to the police and the Secret Service, that it would have been absurd to require him to wear his pass. After all, did the President have to wear a pass?

  One morning, he left his pass at home. On purpose. He went to work early, prepared to be sent home to fetch it. As he passed through the West Gate, feeling like a priest sneaking into a Marilyn Chambers movie, he saluted and said, "Morning, Sergeant T.," and the sergeant glanced up and saw his face and smiled and said, "Morning, Mr. B."

  That whole day, Burnham had felt very close to the seat of power.

  Nowadays, he always carried his pass with him—he'd damn well need it if he were summoned to the Oval Office (the chances of which were about as great as his election to the Papacy), for the phalanx of Secret Servicemen that guarded the presidential corpus were strangers to him, and he to them—but he seldom wore it.

  And truly, once one's face was known around Fortress White House, there wasn't any need for a pass. No wino would ever get close enough to the President to sit on the end of his bed and chat him up, like that guy had done to the Queen. Without a pass, he'd never get upstairs in the mansion. He'd never get on the grounds.

  But once in a while something happened that shook everybody's confidence and made a frappe of the White House routine, and then one of the staff pygmies, a Special Assistant to the President for Ukases and Edicts, would snap off a memo to the entire staff, a memo that always began with the magic words "The President wants ..." and, bingo! Everyone from the Executive Dog Walker just about up to the First Lady of the Land would walk around with their passes riveted to their foreheads.

  Once it had been a woman who had scaled the fence down by the Ellipse and had triggered the electronic alarms in the ground. They nabbed her as she was sprinting across the South Lawn carrying a bird in a paper bag. She wanted the President to bless her parakeet. Its name was Onan, she said, because "he spilleth his seed upon the ground."

  A pass emergency was declared whenever there was a riot in the ghetto, which usually happened somewhere at least once a summer. The implication was, of course, that without a pass it was impossible for the police to distinguish between rioters and the President's staff two miles away inside the White House.

  Burnham found his pass. "What is it this time?" he asked Sergeant Thibaudeaux.

  "Some fella come to t
he East Gate, lookin' for a ticket to the tour, just like a reg-lar visitor, only missin' a few dots on his dice 'cause he said he had an appointment to see the President."

  "He have a gun?"

  "Nope. Just said he had to see the President. Said he had orders."

  "Who from?"

  Thibaudeaux smiled. "His toaster."

  "His toaster?"

  "Every day. Said he took his marching orders from his toaster." Thibaudeaux shrugged. "Anyhow, a memo come through 'bout an hour ago."

  Bumham aimed the clip on the pass at his jacket pocket, but he missed, and the card fell to the ground. He bent over, and here was the unmistakable, awful sound of tearing thread, and he felt a cool breeze blow through his boxer shorts. He stood up, and as he reached gingerly behind him, his hand touched not the rough texture of seersucker but the smoothness of Egyptian cotton, from just below his belt right down to his crotch.

  "I've been holed," he said, "just like a clipper ship on a reef."

  "Flapjacks," Sergeant Thibaudeaux sympathized. "Flapjacks do it to me every time. 'Swhy I steer clear of flapjacks.''

  Bumham attached his pass and smoothed his jacket and tumed his stem to the sergeant. "Does it cover?"

  "Sorta. Long as you walk like you've got the piles and nobody's chasin' you."

  "You're a comfort, Sergeant T.," Bumham said. "You know what the trouble is with modem society?"

  "There's only one?"

  "Well, one of the main ones. It's that we don't listen to warnings. Since light first peeked through the cracks in my eyelids, this day has been rife with warnings. If I were primitive man, I would've cast my spear into the earth and turned back into my cave and said 'fuck it.' Or whatever was the fashionable phrase of the day. But I don't have that luxury. I must press on," Burnham pinched the rear of his trousers together, "and strive to build a better tomorrow."