Q Clearance

by Peter Benchley

  "Mum's the word." Burnham plucked the stub from Renfro's fingers and fed it to the shredder. "It's fun," he said. "Kind of like feeding flies to a spider."

  Renfro flipped through the papers in Burnham's IN box but found nothing that needed treatment more special than the normal day's-end conflagration in the basement of the building. There wasn't a single Top-Secret paper in the box.

  "I had no idea White House work was this . . . routine," Renfro said.

  "You mean boring. I told you. Sometimes we classify things for the sheer hell of it."

  "You do?"

  "Sure. 'Eyes Only' is a favorite. Like, 'Eyes Only to McGregor: I have a squash court for seven o'clock.' Stuff like that."

  "Don't you realize that it all gets archived?"

  "Not if we throw it away it doesn't."

  "But you can't throw away 'Eyes Only' material."

  Burnham looked at Renfro and smiled and said, "Renfro, you're a great American."

  Renfro was beginning to blink again. "Let's see what you have in your pockets."

  "Got a warrant?"

  "I'm not getting personal!" Renfro barked. "I only want to show you what should and shouldn't be shredded. Sometimes people carry things on their persons that they shouldn't, and they throw them away in any old receptacle."

  Burnham shrugged and slipped his hands in and out of his several pockets. He found two pieces of paper. One was blank: He carried it to make notes on, in case a felicitous idea should come to him on a bus or at lunch. He glanced at the other and handed it to Renfro. "Just this."

  "What is it?"

  "A prescription . . . sort of."

  "For what?" Renfro studied the sheet of paper. "What's Zimag?"

  "Vitamins. Things like that."

  "You don't need a prescription for vitamins."

  "For some kinds you do. It's . . ." Burnham paused, searching for a simple explanation that wouldn't involve all the arcana of orthomolecular medicine and force him to defend its apparently eccentric tenets to a man who, Burnham had no doubt, would condemn them as sorcery. Like most people, Renfro would know vitamins only as food supplements. He would never have seen the reaction in an allergic person to a dose of, say, niacinimide—the instantaneous blotching on the face, the hive-like welts that would wax and wane like boiling tomato sauce. He would never have seen a child with a zinc imbalance—the pustulant sores, the pestilential itching, the swelling that could shut the eyes and close off the esophagus. He would not know of the torment a human

  being goes through by overdosing a simple thing like B-6—the ghastly, guignol nightmares that jerk you awake every fifteen minutes and eventually, after many sleepless nights of horror, begin to come during the day as hallucinations similar to, and occasionally mistaken for, delirium tremens.

  He would not know any of these things, and so wouldn't understand that the purveyors of certain vitamins insisted on seeing a doctor's authorization before they peddled potential poisons to people on some freaky chemical crusade.

  Burnham settled for: "Those are special ones. I'm allergic." That usually worked.

  "Oh." Renfro handed the prescription back. "That you don't have to shred."

  Burnham noticed that there was an expiration date on the prescription and that it had passed weeks ago, so he dropped it into the wastebasket.

  "As a general rule," Renfro said, "aside from Category 7 documents, use your common sense. Anything that would tell anybody more than you would want anybody to know—shred it."

  "Done and done."

  "Good. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to call me. Do not use the DOE switchboard. Our association is nobody's business. Here is my direct number. Commit it to memory. Do not write it down." Renfro recited the seven digits, sounding like the robot voice on the phone that gives you the new number to which the number you dialed has been changed.

  Burnham repeated the numbers once, at Renfro's insistence, but he had already concluded that it would be more fun to tweak Renfro by calling him through the DOE switchboard, so he determined to forget the numbers as soon as Renfro left.

  On his way to the door, Renfro's omnivorous eyes lit upon the Important Papers Burnham had tossed on the couch. He bent over and studied the telephone-message slips Dyanna had stapled to the top page of the papers. He touched each one with a fingertip, as if to confirm that they were real.

  "Have you returned these calls?" he said.

  "Not yet." Burnham had never looked at them, had no idea what they said.

  "As soon as you do, shred them. Shred them immediately."

  "Right."

  When the door had closed behind Renfro, Burnham went to the couch and picked up the Important Papers. As he read the message slips, he grinned: Dyanna's ambition for him knew no bounds.

  Dyanna pushed the door open and said, "What a rude man!"

  Burnham pulled the message slips off the legal pad and held them up to her. "You," he said, smiling, "are a piece of work. Did that saucy Thatcher ever call back?"

  Dyanna blushed. "I just thought—"

  "Look at this." Burnham was feeding the messages into the shredder. "Sucker's got some appetite. You s'pose we could turn it into a planter? Begonias'd look nice." He reached to turn off the shredder and the fabric in the seat of his trousers pulled tight and two staples sprung free. "Whoops!" he said. "Where'd I put that needle and thread?"

  "Sit at your desk and give 'em to me," Dyanna said. "I'll do it, while you tell me about the President."

  "But that's not your job."

  Dyanna smiled and held out her hand. "Things are changing. I can tell."

  SIX

  By FIVE O'CLOCK. Ivy was desperate. She had been working for seven hours, and she had seen, found or heard nothing— not a scrap of juicy gossip, not a heated exchange between overworked secretaries, not a rumor of high-level huggermugger —with which to amuse, delight or intrigue Mr. Pym. In an hour and a half she would be visiting the man's home to ask a big favor of him, a dangerous favor, and she had promised to deliver something in return.

  He didn't seem to care, but she did: She couldn't bear to be a beggar.

  Sweet baby Jesus, come through for me now, she whispered as she wheeled her utility cart—loaded with mop, broom, dust rags, toilet paper, paper towels, furniture polish, trash bags and light bulbs—down the marble halls of the Executive Office Building.

  She had spent the first few hours of her shift in the cafeteria, cleaning up after the breakfast crowd, then after the coffee-break crowd, and setting up for lunch. During her own lunch break, she sat in the kitchen and ate the food she had brought from home, two chicken legs and a cucumber sandwich.

  From 3:00 to 4:00, she stocked the ladies' rooms with paper products. At 4:00, she took a break and had a cup of tea, with which she washed down two yellow pills, for her knee was swollen and sending arrows of pain up and down her leg. At 4:30, she launched her cart slowly down the second-floor corridors of the E.O.B., hoping to find an empty office to clean, an office whose occupant had called in sick or had left for the day or was out of town on business.

  But a sliver of light shone beneath every door, and from within she heard telephones ringing and typewriters clacking.

  By 5:15, she had circled the entire second floor and half the first floor, and still she had found no unoccupied office. She was tired, and her leg throbbed, and she was beginning to despair and to conjure imaginative apologies for Mr. Pym, when she saw a door open at the end of the corridor and a couple emerge, laughing.

  The man was tall and slender, good-looking if you liked white-bread looks, and he wore one of those light, blue-and-white-striped summer suits that make the slim look slimmer and the fat look foolish. He carried a small athletic bag like Jerome's—well, sort of like Jerome's, for where Jerome's was made of plastic-rubber stuff, this one was of old, well-worn leather—and a midget racket for a sport that wasn't tennis.

  The woman looked as if she had been made in a toy store: small and delicate and
perfect. Everything about her was just so—her little feet in their high-heeled pumps, her helmet of hair that defied a saucy breeze to muss it, her fingernails that probably had more coats of lacquer than a German car.

  The man said something, and the woman laughed again and reached inside the closing door and snapped off the light. Together they walked out of sight toward the door that led to West Executive Avenue.

  Ivy waited for a moment, to be sure they had gone, then pushed her cart down to the empty office. The nameplate beside the door said "Timothy Burnham" and "E.O.B. 102." Nothing about who he was or what he did or whom he worked for. Well, hard darts. It was 5:20, and in 70 minutes she had to be across town at Mr. Pym's place. She didn't care if this Burnham fellow was a masseur or a mail clerk. She'd find something in his office for Mr. Pym.

  She cracked the door and put her back to it, pushing it open as she pulled her cart after her and flicking on the light as she passed.

  This first, small room was the secretary's. Nothing worthwhile here. The typewriter was covered, the desk bare and the file cabinets closed and locked.

  She turned to her right and pushed the cart before her into the main office. Even before she had put a foot inside the office, she felt a shiver that was part excitement, part shock and part uneasy fear.

  This was the biggest office she had ever seen—bigger than her apartment, bigger than the whole ground floor of her house in Bermuda. There were conference tables and sofas and easy chairs, huge windows through which she could see the White House and the Washington Monument, and, behind the desk, signed photographs of the President together with this Burnham person.

  Oh my, girl, she thought. Looks like you struck the mother lode. No question: big doings go on in this place. But you best be careful. It's one thing to pinch a little something to tickle Mr. Pym's fancy, quite another to get nicked for sticking your hand in the big-time cookie jar.

  She had no illusions about Mr. Pym; she was confident she had him pegged good and proper. All his talk about being interested in people's "quirks and foibles" was just that: talk. What he really wanted was dirt. Who had the skeletons in the closet, who had the power to do what and to whom. He was in a competitive business, catering to the movers and shakers, and spicy scuttlebutt was cash money to him. If word got around that he could provide more than canapes and veal birds, that he was party to the inside skinny on some big hitters, his business would grow like Topsy.

  She had no illusions about herself, either. She was tired of playing the game strictly by the rules. If she didn't take the initiative now and then, she'd end her days sitting in a wicker chair with no one to care for her but a cat. Jerome was her only hope and computers were Jerome's only hope.

  Fair enough. Time to become a free-style, free-enterprise entrepreneur.

  But don't be rash. The place could be bugged. There could be a camera in the chandelier. Ever since that money-mad ex-Navy man had whipped up a whole litter of spies, people were seeing spies behind every blade of grass. They might not be so quick to understand her point that there was a difference between spying and muckraking.

  There was a wastebasket by the desk, and she went to empty it, but there was something sitting on top of it, a machine that looked like a telephone-answering machine, only thicker, or a copier, only it wasn't a copier. She lifted it up (anyone watching from the chandelier would think it natural for her to remove the machine to get at the wastebasket) and set it on the floor. The wastebasket was full of paper spaghetti, some of which seemed to have writing on it. Maybe this would intrigue Mr. Pym. She emptied the basket into an unused plastic trash bag and replaced the machine.

  She began to dust the glass top of the desk and noticed on the far comer an appointment calendar. Maybe it would tell her more about who this Mr. Burnham was. But she didn't dare flip through it in view of the chandelier (which, by now, she knew to contain a camera; guilt was already creating phantasms in her head), so, as she rounded the desk, she hit the calendar with her hip and knocked it onto the floor. She grumbled aloud (for the benefit of the microphones that might be behind the paintings or in the electrical outlets or even in the dingle-dangles on the chandelier) and knelt—slowly and carefully, supporting herself on the edge of the desk so as not to insult the ligaments in her knee—behind the desk, out of sight from the chandelier, and said, "Where'd you get to? Come back here. Way over there? Damn!" talking a torrent of nonsense to cover the sound as she flipped through the pages of the calendar in search of tidbits about its owner.

  ''Ivy, my dear!" Foster Pym forced a smile as he held the door open. "How good to see you! Come in, come in!"

  Clutching her bulging shopping bag, feeling dowdy and frumpy. Ivy tried to square her shoulders and stand tall, so she wouldn't look like a bag lady. "Evening, Mr. Pym. I'm really ..."

  "Come in, my dear!" Pym took the shopping bag and helped her into the apartment. He felt her limp. "That pesky leg is bothering you again, isn't it?" In the past hour, he had read over his notes on Ivy, had refreshed himself about her likes and dislikes, about her son, her ailments and the pills he had given her. He hoped she had become dependent on the pills.

  "It's nothing I can't live with," Ivy said as she allowed herself to be led into the apartment. She wasn't here to complain about herself. She heard "Clair de Lune" playing on the phonograph in the living room, smelled cinnamon toast and strong tea.

  "Do you have enough pills?" Mr. Pym was the most thoughtful man she had ever met.

  "I have a few left. It's funny about those pills. Most of the time, one does the trick, but now sometimes it takes two. I wonder if they make up different batches."

  "It's possible."

  "Or maybe I'm building up a resistance to them."

  "No. Different batches, I'm sure. Don't worry, I have plenty. I'll give you some more before you leave. Why don't we have some sherry?"

  "Fine, fine."

  Pym went into the kitchen, and Ivy leaned back in the sofa and stretched out her leg and closed her eyes. The lilting music was cleansing. It seemed to suck the pain from* her knee and the worry from her head. She could feel her face and forehead soften.

  Pym carried the sherry on a silver tray and poured it from a cutglass decanter into tiny crystal glasses. This man, Ivy thought, this man knows how to live. No pint bottles and Dixie cups for him.

  She told him her problem. Jerome's problem. Their problem.

  Halfway through the tale, Pym knew what the request would be, but he let her finish. He wanted to make her ask, didn't want to make it too easy for her. He wanted her to be fully aware of the magnitude of the favor she was asking. She would not be permitted to blind herself, as she had in the Bermuda videogames caper, to devious procedures. She was asking him to commit an illegal act on her behalf, and he wanted her obligation to be complete.

  She finished. Pym furrowed his brow and sighed and picked at a loose thread on the arm of his chair.

  "You do have a problem," he said.

  Ivy looked at him. He was frowning. Had she gone too far? Had she insulted him? Stupid! she said to herself. "I understand ... I shouldn't have ..."

  "Even if the diploma was possible," Pym said, "DTCo. might want a transcript, SAT scores, all kinds of things from the school."

  Her fear evaporated. At least he wasn't angry. He was trying to help her. Maybe he could, maybe he couldn't, but so far she hadn't poisoned their relationship. "I know," she said. "It's probably impossible. I shouldn't have asked."

  Pym held up a hand. "No, no. I just have to think."

  Change the subject. Ivy told herself. Now. Don't let him think so hard that he blows a fuse and decides he can't help. "I brought you something."

  "Oh?" Pym looked up and smiled.

  Ivy reached into her shopping bag and pulled out a plastic trash bag tied with a twist-tie. "I was on the early shift today, and one of the girls was sick so they sent me to do some of the offices I don't usually do, and I was in the biggest office I have ever seen—it was as b
ig as a cricket pitch—and this fellow has a machine on top of his wastebasket."

  "A machine? What kind of machine?"

  "I don't know. But look at this." Ivy reached into the trash bag and pulled out a handful of strands of paper spaghetti.

  The easy smile froze on Pym's face. Mother of God! A shredder. Take care, now. "Whose office was it?" Pym fell that his voice sounded urgent, and he tried to smile again.

  "Someone named Burnham. Timothy Burnham. What's all this for, d'you think? Everything in those offices gets burned anyway, every day. Why would they do this?"

  "I can't imagine," Pym said. He held out his hand, and Ivy passed him a bunch of the strands. Some of them were blank, some had pieces of letters on them, some pieces of numbers. He pretended to try to decipher a message in the strands, while through his mind ran the various possible possessors of the shredder. Who in the E.O.B. would be exalted enough to warrant a shredder? The Vice-President, of course, if he demanded one, but from what Pym had heard about the relationship between the President and the Vice-President, he doubted that the Vice-President would ever be trusted with a document classified higher than "Confidential." Members of the National Security Council staff, he supposed. And that was about it.

  Pym felt his adrenaline beginning to flow, but he willed himself to stay cool. "Fun!" he said. "I wonder if we could put it all back together?" He knew full well that the reassembly of shredded documents could be accomplished only with a microscope, surgical tools and an infinity of time and patience.

  "Whoo!" Ivy said, pleased that Pym was pleased. "Maybe, if you've got a year or two." She reached into the trash bag and came out with more masses of paper. "This stuff doesn't quit."

  "What else do you know about Mr. Burnham?" Pym asked.

  "Not much. But there was some stuff in the basket that wasn't wrecked."

  Ivy handed him a couple of pieces of paper.

  One was a pay envelope from the Department of Energy.

  Why did the Department of Energy have a man in the White House? Pym was familiar with the curiosities about the White House staff, with the fact that more than three-quarters of the President's men were detailed from other agencies for purposes of clerical obfuscation. It was not inconceivable that an Energy man would be sent to the White House, but if the Department were forced to sacrifice a job, surely it would choose one in fossil fuels or rural electric power, not atomic energy. Yet this man, whoever he was, was of a rank high enough to be given a shredder. Fossil-fuel experts did not need shredders. Obviously, this Burnham had access to atomic-energy secrets.