Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 (10 page)

 
          
 
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.

 
          
 
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 the 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."

 
          
 
Thibaudeaux smiled and said, "Have a good
day."

 
          
 
"I have other plans." Burnham turned
away and made his way toward the White House, as guilty and crazed-looking a
figure as had ever pranced up the path—glancing furtively from side to side,
clutching the seat of his pants, trying to walk without moving anything above
his knees.

 
          
 
At the end of the path, Burnham turned not
into the West Wing of the White House but to the right, across West Executive
Avenue and into the Executive Office Building, the heap of gray granite blocks that
housed the Office of Management and Budget, the staff of the National Security
Council, the White House switchboard (in the cellar, staffed by dogged
operators who boasted that they could find anybody, at any time, anywhere in
the world, and who liked to tell reporters about the time they rousted an
errant advance man from the bed of some broad in Canberra, Australia), a
cafeteria that specialized in ciguatera, scores of members of the White House
staff (including the speechwriters), and the offices and staff of the
Vice-President of the United States, a man picked to run with the President for
three reasons: He was so rich (oil) as to be incorruptible, so stupid as to be
incapable of devious back-room maneuverings on behalf of his friends, and from
a state and region (Houma, Louisiana) that the President could never have
carried on his own. (The only liability the President's men saw in the
Vice-President was that he was so popular at home that some of his chums talked
openly of shooting the President just so good of Leroy LeDoux could have a
crack at the top job.) When the President had announced his selection of LeDoux
for the ticket, the Majority Leader of the United States Senate had protested,
albeit privately, "But he's a bigoted, bullheaded ignoramus!"

 
          
 
"Maybe," the President had replied,
"but don't they deserve to be represented, too?"