Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 (20 page)

 
          
 
"Everything in Category 7 is
top-top-top-secret. Remember that."

 
          
 
"An Iranian student could reassemble
those secrets, y'know."

 
          
 
“Nothing's perfect. We don't have to make it
easy for them."

 
          
 
"Who's 'them'?"

 
          
 
"Whoever."

 
          
 
"I don't see what good this does,"
said Burnham. "Everything in the joint is burned every night anyway."

 
          
 
"But first it's collected by the
janitorial staff, and the janitorial staff is not Q Cleared.
Imagine"—Renfro lowered his voice—"what would happen if a member of
the janitorial staff got hold of a Category 7 document."

 
          
 
The man's serious, Burnham thought. All he
could think to say was, "Staggering!"

 
          
 
"DOE is not the United States Navy. A
Walker
scandal will never happen to us."
Renfro put a hand on Burnham's arm. "Right, Mr. Burnham?"

 
          
 
"Right, coach." Burnham recoiled.
"Is that all I'm supposed to shred? Category 7 stuff?"

 
          
 
"Not at all. Let's see." Renfro
scanned Burnham's desk and saw, as a bookmark in his
Bartlett
's Quotations, an information stub from a
recent paycheck. "Great Scott!" he said, and he yanked the stub from
the book. "Never leave these around. Always shred them. Nobody needs to
know you work for DOE, let alone as a GS-15 step 9. It's a giveaway that you
have Q Clearance."

 
          
 
"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."

 
          
 
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."