Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 (21 page)

 
          
 
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
big 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.

 
          
 
The second piece of intact paper seemed to be
a prescription of some kind. Twenty or thirty chemical combinations were
printed on the paper, of which a dozen had been checked by the doctor whose
signature was on the bottom. Some were routine: B-12, B-1, B-6, ascorbic acid.
Some were exotic: lecithin, pantothenic acid, dolomite. Some sounded as if they
were used in the manufacture of automobiles: chromium, zinc sulphate, manganese
10. And a few Pym recalled seeing in articles about mental illness: lithium,
Elavil, Tofranil.

 
          
 
"You think he takes all these?" Pym
asked aloud.

 
          
 
"He must be one sick fellow," said
Ivy.

 
          
 
"Or the healthiest man in the
world." Pym smiled. "I doubt that any disease could get through all
that."

 
          
 
"Well, he exercises, I know that."

 
          
 
"What d'you mean?"

 
          
 
"I saw him leaving the office today, and
he had one of those little rackets they play . . . ah . . . squash with."

 
          
 
"I wonder where he plays."

 
          
 
"There's a Y on Seventeenth. I pass it
every day. But I don't know if they have squash." Ivy remembered the
appointment calendar. "He's playing tomorrow, too. It's the only
appointment he has for tomorrow. His calendar says 'Twelve
noon
, squash with . . .' and then a question
mark."

 
          
 
"He plans to pick up a game, then.
Wherever he plays has a pro who matches players up."

 
          
 
Ivy laughed. "Dick Tracy!"

 
          
 
Pym laughed, too. "I love puzzles like
this." He got up to refill the sherry glasses and change the record.

 
          
 
If "Clair de Lune" had been
soothing, "La Mer" was almost anesthetic. Ivy felt that if Pym were
to leave the room for five minutes, she would drift off into a lovely sleep.

 
          
 
Pym returned to his chair. "Let's see if
we can take all the evidence we've got and discover this Mr. Burnham's
story." He began to sort through the strands of paper, tossing aside the
blank ones and laying out those on which there was some writing in neat lines
on the table beside him. Mostly, Pym was radiating enthusiasm for Ivy's
benefit. But there was an off chance that two or three strands would fit
together and disclose a bit of valuable information about Burnham's job.

 
          
 
Ivy was delighted. Mr. Pym seemed genuinely
pleased by what she had brought him. She had delivered. Even if he couldn't
help her with Jerome's problem, things were back in balance, and she needn't
feel embarrassed about calling him again.

 
          
 
A key turned the lock in the front door of the
apartment, and a woman walked in. She was young, in her late twenties, and
beautiful in a careless, confident way, as if she knew that nature had created
in her a splendid creature of perfect proportions, and she saw no reason to
gussy herself up with hairdos or makeup, jewelry or chi-chi clothes. Her hair
reminded Ivy of goldenrod, for its yellow was dusty rather than shiny, and it
fell ungoverned to her shoulders. Her nose was straight and sharp and must have
been made for her face, unlike those noses that seemed to have been placed at
random on inappropriate faces. Her eyes were a light gray-blue: Any darker,
they would have been nondescript and boring; any lighter, they would have been
scary. Her skin was faintly, smoothly tan, as if she had once spent so much
time in the sun that the melanin in her skin had moved permanently to the
surface. She wore a blue cotton shirtwaist dress and brown leather sandals.

 
          
 
"Hello," she said pleasantly and
with an ease that told Ivy she was at home here.

 
          
 
My, my. Ivy thought. Mr. Pym is full of
surprises. He has himself one top-shelf girlfriend. "Hello," she
said.

 
          
 
Reluctantly, Pym abandoned the strands of
paper. "Eva, this is Ivy Peniston. Ivy, this is my daughter, Eva."

 
          
 
Daughter! Ivy stared. My God! They must've
crossed Mr. Pym with that Cheryl Tiegs woman.

 
          
 
Eva smiled and said, "Hello again."

 
          
 
"Eva is a . . ." Pym glanced at her.
"... nutritionist."

 
          
 
"At the moment," Eva said.

 
          
 
"Look, Eva." Pym pointed to the
strands of paper on the table. "Ivy brought us a nifty puzzle."

 
          
 
Pym sketched for Eva what little he and Ivy
knew about Burnham. Then he gave her the prescription sheet and said,
"Does this make any sense to you?"

 
          
 
Eva read the paper carefully, noting each of the
vitamins and chemicals that had been checked. "He's hyperhystemic,"
she said. "He's allergic to a lot of things, probably including foods. He
may or may not be a kind of alcoholic. Sometimes he has broad mood swings. He
has trouble remembering his dreams."

 
          
 
Ivy was amazed. "You got all that from
that piece of paper?"

 
          
 
Eva smiled. "One of the Greenpeacers I
worked with was an orthomolecular shrink. We never ate right, and he used to
pump us full of nutritional supplements. You spend six months with someone on a
boat, you learn whatever he has to teach." She said to her father,
"The man is like a Ferrari: He works like a dream when he's finely tuned,
but one little thing goes out of whack, he'll fall apart. What is he to
you?"

 
          
 
Reflexively, Pym lowered his eyes and turned
his head. "Nothing. It's just for fun."

 
          
 
Eva looked at her father. A smile started on
her lips, but she suppressed it.

 
          
 
Pym tried not to look at Eva. He was a child
caught in a clumsy lie, and he knew he was blushing. He busied himself with the
decanter of sherry, finding a glass for Eva, filling it, spilling some, wiping
up the spill, handing her the glass.

 
          
 
Ivy sensed that her presence had suddenly
become an intrusion. The last thing she wanted to do was annoy Pym, leave him
with an unpleasant aftertaste. Time to go. "Well," she said, leaning
forward and fitting her feet back into her shoes, "I should be
going."

 
          
 
Pym helped her up and fetched her shopping
bag. "Why not leave all this with me?" he said, gesturing at the
strands of paper scattered on the floor. "I'll play with it and see if I
can make something of it."

 
          
 
"Fine."

 
          
 
"And keep your eye open for any other
piece that might fit the puzzle." He winked and smiled and hoped he looked
mischievously conspiratorial.

 
          
 
Ivy nodded. "I'm on the early shift all
week." She took a step, put her weight on the bad leg, and the unexpected
pain stopped her short and made her gasp.

 
          
 
"Ivy!" Pym felt her totter, and he
grabbed her.

 
          
 
"It's all right," Ivy said.
"She stiffened up on me. I have to work 'er some."

 
          
 
"Have some more sherry."

 
          
 
"No thanks. 'F she complains about
walkin', she sure don't want to crawl me all the way home."

 
          
 
"I'll get you some more pills." Pym
looked at Eva, who came and held Ivy's arm while he fetched the pills.