Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 (16 page)

 
          
 
"What went wrong?" he asked Cobb.
"What could've gone wrong?"

 
          
 
*'Nothing, far as I know. I told the Signal
Corps to send me the tape, but it isn't here yet."

 
          
 
"Then what's this about?” Burnham felt
frantic. There was an unsavory smell to the summons, the bitter smell of
surprise.

 
          
 
"Beats me. For what it's worth, he didn't
sound pissed. Just sort of matter-of-fact."

 
          
 
"Icy, you mean. Wonderful. Let's wait for
the tape."

 
          
 
Cobb shrugged. His phone rang. It was answered
by a secretary somewhere, and then a buzzer sounded once, meaning that the call
was from inside the White House and Cobb was to answer it personally. (Two
buzzes signaled him to speak on the intercom line to the secretary.) Cobb
punched the flashing button and said, "Cobb. . . . Oh, hi, Evelyn. Yep,
he's right here. ..."

 
          
 
Burnham felt sweat on his palms and under his
arms.

 
          
 
"Okay," Cobb continued. "It's
his candy store. Right away." He hung up and said to Burnham, "He
wants to see you now, so you better haul ass."

 
          
 
Burnham took a deep breath and stood up,
clutching his papers. "Let's go."

 
          
 
Cobb shook his head. "He said
alone."

 
          
 
"Oh, shit."

 
          
 
"Yes." Cobb nodded. "I would
say that is a fair appraisal of the situation."

 
          
 
Burnham smiled weakly as he reached for the
door and said, "Say later that my demise eclipsed the gaiety of
nations."

 
          
 
Burnham's breath was coming too fast, and,
climbing the stairs to the first floor of the White House, he gripped the
banister and fought to breathe rhythmically. He turned the comer and walked
down the corridor past Epstein's office, where Esther Tagliaferro orchestrated
the medley of bells and lights that began every rooming just before 8:00 and
tailed off every evening just after 8:00 and kept eight healthy American women
so busy that no two dared visit the ladies' room at one time; past the
perpetually closed door of the office of the President's Appointments
Secretary, a quiet, retiring man who wielded immense power by virtue of
controlling access to the President, power about which he cared little since he
served the President only in payment of an enormous unspoken debt owed by his
father to the President's father, power in return for which he had to function
supercurricularly as Special Assistant to Receive Unfocused Presidential Abuse
and to Keep from Public Scrutiny Awkwardnesses and/or Embarrassments Committed
by the President or Members of His Immediate Family; toward the two Secret
Service praetorians who flanked the door to the Oval Office.

 
          
 
That door opened, emitting Mario Epstein and
the Secretary of the Treasury, a middle-aged polymath named Jerome

 
          
 
Goodman who had been educated at Harvard and
Stanford and had since educated others at Harvard and Stanford when he wasn't
rescuing some conglomerate from the chapters or writing, under a pseudonym, a
series of intricately plotted crime novels that elicited from critics phrases
like "wickedly clever."

 
          
 
Epstein and Goodman did not look up. They
looked at each other's shoes, the way important people always do when they
exchange profundities on the hoof. Burnham was pretending to read his Important
Papers, and if some kindly muse had not told him to look up at the last second,
he would have barged into both men. But he did look up, and, with the quickness
of a startled tarantula, flung himself flat against the wall. Epstein and
Goodman flowed by, unaware.

 
          
 
Burnham saw one of the Secret Service men
notice him plastered against the wall, and frown, and say something to the
other Secret Service man, who looked, and frowned, and then recognized Burnham
and grinned.

 
          
 
Burnham shook himself together, as an actor
does before an entrance, and walked with measured pace down the hall,
pretending once again to peruse his documents. He nodded gravely as he passed
the Secret Service men, and walked beyond into Evelyn Witt's office, the
anteroom to the Oval Office.

 
          
 
Evelyn Witt was in her mid-fifties, and she
had been with the President since her early twenties. He had brought her with
him from
Sandusky
,
Ohio
, when he had come to
Washington
as a freshman congressman. When he resigned
his seat to join the Navy to fight in
Korea
(a meticulously planned fit of patriotism
that freed him, on his return, to allow himself to be drafted for nomination to
the Senate), she joined the Navy, too, as an ensign. At his urging, she stayed
on in the Navy and did not take part in the Senate campaign, which was the
smartest thing she could have done, since it kept her off the political
battlefield and out of the public eye and made it seem eminently sensible for
him later, as a senator and member of the Armed Forces Committee, to request
her transfer to him as a Naval aide.

 
          
 
He thus acquired, at no cost to his staff
budget, a cherished, trusted assistant who owed him her entire professional
life. She thus acquired a job in which her promotions were mandated by her boss
and his colleagues, her benefits comprehensive, her pension generous and
guaranteed, and her status secured by rank and respected by law.

 
          
 
At the moment, though she did not wear a
uniform except when there was some benefit to be garnered from a display of
feathers, she was a captain in the United States Navy, and she and the
President had already discussed the timing of her final promotion so that a few
weeks before he left the office of the Presidency, the Congress would confirm
her as Vice-Admiral Evelyn Chester Witt, USN. She lived with her mother.

 
          
 
Because of her relationship with the
President—they had a favorite bit of banter, in which she would say, "I'd
better get this right or you're sure to fire me," and he would say, “I
could never fire you, Evie, you know that. I'd have to have you killed,"
and then they would both laugh—Evelyn was above White House politics, so she
could afford to be, and (save at times of extreme stress) was, kindly,
solicitous and considerate of those she called "those poor sites" who
had to deal with, bow to and be terrified of Benjamin T. Winslow.

 
          
 
She was particularly nice to the writers—or so
it seemed to them—perhaps because she perceived them as they perceived
themselves, as a pack of lost souls staggering around in the dark, serving the
unservable, with no authority and a lot of accountability.

 
          
 
She looked up as Burnham entered her office,
and she said, "Good morning, Timothy. Thank you for coming. You look
awful. Are you all right?"

 
          
 
"Of course I'm not all right. I'm a
basket case."

 
          
 
There were many people in the White House you
could finagle, with a smile or a bit of slick patter. Evelyn Witt was one of
the few you couldn't. She knew too well the power of the aura—some thought of
it as a miasma—of the Oval Office and the man who occupied it. She had dealt
with the congressman who had taken that one extra belt of vodka in pathetic
hope of brewing enough courage to go toe-to-toe with Ben Winslow, only to slide
into a spasm of uncontrollable hiccups and, finally, a fitful slumber right
there in her office; with the dashiki-clad cannibal. Colonel Roe his name was,
who swept into the Oval Office full of macho Third-World bullshit and demanded
this and that, and for his trouble found himself referred to in public by the
President as Chairman Moe; with the newly crowned sheik of some date-picker's
paradise who spent his time with the President discussing Great Ladies I Would
Like to Ring My Bones Upon and who tried to entice two of Evelyn's younger
assistants into coming back to the desert "for a little holiday."

 
          
 
"With anybody else," Evelyn said,
"I'd ask if it was a hangover."

 
          
 
"I wish it was a hangover. Then I'd know
it would get better. No. Life. Fate doth conspire against me. First thing I did
today was smash my head on a beam. Next thing was tear the a ... the seat out
of my pants. And now this. D'you know what it's about?"

 
          
 
"No more than you do."

 
          
 
"Can you find out for me? Please?"

 
          
 
Evelyn smiled. "No time. He's only got a
few minutes before he has to speak to"—she consulted the President's
schedule on her desk "the American Association of Junior Labor Leaders, in
the Rose Garden."

 
          
 
"I guess that's a comfort." Burnham
tried to sound convinced. "How much damage can he do in a few
minutes?"

 
          
 
She started to smile again, at Burnham's
innocence, but then she snorted instead as she recognized the desperation in
his voice.

 
          
 
"Go on in," she said, pointing to
the closed door to the Oval Office. "He's waiting for you."

 
          
 
Burnham turned and faced the door. A knot of
pain dug at his colon, and he had a fleeting terror that he would defecate on
Evelyn's rug. The sweat under his arms was not trickling, it was coursing. He
hoped he didn't stink. He wiped his handshaking hand on the seat of his
trousers and reached for the doorknob.

 
          
 
He had never been in the Oval Office, but he
had seen so many pictures of it that he found nothing unfamiliar. He even knew
about the tiny pock marks he saw on the cork floor by the door leading to the
Rose Garden—the marks left by Dwight David Eisenhower's golf shoes, covered
over by other floors laid by other Presidents but revealed anew at the command
of this one.

 
          
 
The President was in the far right comer of
the office, his back to the door, bent over his "signing table," an
early American pine refectory table on which the secretaries placed all the
letters, messages, memos, speeches, executive orders, proclamations and other
papers that needed presidential approval, disapproval, initials or signature.

 
          
 
Burnham took a step into the office and shut
the door quietly behind him, and suddenly there was something brand new to his
senses. It was the smell. Automatically, he decided it was the smell of power,
but no; that was too easy. It had in it a faint aroma of cologne (Old Spice, he
thought), and furniture polish, and clean, dust-free upholstery, and a tang of
a substance with chlorine in it, and altogether it smelled of care, of concern,
of gravity. This was not an office frequented by laughter.

 
          
 
"Ah . . . sir?" Burnham wasn't sure
the President had heard the door.

 
          
 
"Right with you." The President
signed a final paper, closed and put away his fountain pen, straightened up,
turned around and smiled.

 
          
 
He walked toward Burnham, so Burnham walked
toward him, hoping that motion by him would not be misconstrued as an
assumption of equality, and they met in the center of the Oval Office.

 
          
 
The President held out his hand, so Burnham
held out his hand, and when the two hands met, the President's hand ate Burnham's
hand, swallowed it and then returned it intact.