Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 (46 page)

 
          
 
She hesitated for a second, and a trace of a
frown wrinkled her brow. Then she said, "Okay."

 
          
 
He watched her until she had crossed
Pennsylvania
and turned into
Lafayette
Park
. He knew he was behaving like a fool,
captive of an adolescent infatuation that could, if it got out of hand, be
very, very expensive.

 
          
 
So what? No pain, no gain, right? What was it
Browning said? "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a
heaven for?" He probably wasn't talking about reaching for heaving bosoms
and steamy loins, but what the hell ...

 
          
 
He turned into the E.O.B. and skipped up the
steps, feeling like Frankenstein's monster, a hollow man suddenly jolted back
to life.

 
          
 
He flashed his pass at the police officer at
the desk, left Eva's name on a list of noon-hour guests and walked smartly down
the long hall, enjoying the click-clack of his footsteps resounding off the
marble. At the end of the hall he turned right and descended the staircase that
ended fifteen feet from his office door.

 
          
 
He walked directly into the office, not
pausing long enough to notice that the brass nameplate-holder beside the door
was empty.

 
          
 
Dyanna wasn't at her desk. He looked at his
watch:
9:30
.
Curious. Was she sick?

 
          
 
Then he sensed something awry. It wasn't a
look or a smell but more an atmosphere, or a lack of something intangible, like
the feeling in an apartment when its resident has died.

 
          
 
The personal paraphernalia on Dyanna's desk
was gone— the bud vase, the pictures of her and her parents, her calendar and
her Rolodex.

 
          
 
He stepped to the nearest file cabinet and
yanked it open. Empty.

 
          
 
Oh shit.

 
          
 
It couldn't have happened. This wasn't
Hollywood
, where you went out for lunch and returned
to find that your name had been painted over on your parking space. They had to
give you notice.

 
          
 
Didn't they?

 
          
 
He stepped into his office. The furniture was
there, and the paintings and the curtains and the carpet. But his television
sets were gone, and his desk had been swept clean: no IN box, no blotter, no
appointment book. There were marks on the wall behind his chair, where his
personal pictures had hung.

 
          
 
No one lived here.

 
          
 
He felt sick.

 
          
 
Now what? Where did he go to collect his
things? His effects. Just like a dead man.

 
          
 
Wait a minute. Why hadn't they lifted his
pass? That was the first thing they did when they fired you. He remembered
hearing about a writer who had gotten drunk at lunch and had decided that his
planets were in the proper alignment for deposing Mario Epstein. He had marched
into the Mess and announced to all and sundry that Epstein (who was lunching
with the Prime Minister of Italy) was the bastard son of Golda Meir and Al
Capone. By the time the writer had reached the door to the West Basement on his
way back to the E.O.B., the word had reached the guard, who pulled his pass and
escorted him out onto
Pennsylvania Avenue
.

 
          
 
And why had they fired Dyanna, too? They
couldn't blame her for what he had done. Whatever that was. Maybe she had been
transferred to the Census Bureau.

 
          
 
Who could he ask? Cobb? No. If Cobb didn't
know why he had become the President's darling, he wouldn't know why he had
been magically changed into a turd.

 
          
 
Evelyn Witt. Maybe she had witnessed the chain
reaction that culminated in the presidential explosion that cost him his job.
What was her number? Where was his White House directory? Gone.

 
          
 
He picked up the phone and dialed the
operator. "This is Timothy Burnham."

 
          
 
"What are you doing there?"

 
          
 
Christ! he thought. Everybody knows.

 
          
 
"Trying to figure out what's going
on," he said.

 
          
 
"Would you like me to connect you with
your office?"

 
          
 
"I'm in my office."

 
          
 
"No, you're not."

 
          
 
"I'm not?" He looked around. What,
was he on the wrong floor? No. "Sure I am."

 
          
 
"It says here you're on
twenty-three-oh-six."

 
          
 
"Where's that, the Bureau of Indian
Affairs?"

 
          
 
"Not exactly." The operator
chuckled. "But you may wish it were."

 
          
 
"Where, then?"

 
          
 
"Ground floor of the West Wing."

 
          
 
Burnham didn't know what to say, so he said,
"Oh."

 
          
 
"You want me to ring?"

 
          
 
"No. No. Thanks." He hung up and
sank into the chair behind the desk.

 
          
 
The office was between Epstein's and the
President's. It was the office of the President's Appointments Secretary. Or it
had been.

 
          
 
Unless Burnham had been promoted to
Appointments Secretary.

 
          
 
No. Please, God. No.

 
          
 
Dyanna sat at her new desk. Her bud vase held
a fresh white rose. Her Rolodex and her calendar and her pictures were all in
perfect symmetry, as if they had been arranged by a computer. She was flushed
and excited. She clasped her hands in front of her, then touched her hair, then
clasped her hands again. Her eyes kept darting to her enormous telephone
console, as she awaited her first Important Call.

 
          
 
"Good morning, Mr. Burnham!" she
trilled.

 
          
 
Burnham felt ashen. He assumed he looked
ashen. "When did all this happen?"

 
          
 
"Isn't it fabulous?"

 
          
 
"Where's what's-his-name? The
Appointments Secretary."

 
          
 
"They tell me Mr. Dilworth moved into the
East Wing."

 
          
 
"But why?" Burnham waved his arm.
"We don't need all this!"

 
          
 
Dyanna smiled. "Somebody thinks we
do."

 
          
 
Burnham walked into his office. It was smaller
than his office in the E.O.B.—but then, the only offices bigger than that one
were in the Kremlin and Versailles—though still large enough to accommodate two
easy chairs, a sofa, a coffee table, two end tables, a desk, a swivel chair and
a full-size American flag that stood between the two huge windows overlooking
the South Lawn. And whereas his E.O.B. office had been decorated with cast-offs
from the General Services Administration, this office had had the attention of
the curator of the White House. Some of the furniture was from the Smithsonian
collection. All the paintings were from the National Gallery.

 
          
 
The top of his desk (an eighteenth-century
kneehole number with fine gold-leaf inlay around its borders) had been arranged
exactly as he had left his desk in the E.O.B., only neater. The lettering on
his IN box seemed to shout at him: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote
except for money!" What had been amusing in the E.O.B. now struck him as
puerile, frivolous and untrue. He turned the box around so that the letters
faced away from the door.

 
          
 
His typewriter and word processor were on a
mahogany table behind the desk. The shredder perched over a leather wastebasket
to one side.

 
          
 
His telephone console looked like the control
panel of the Concorde: at least a million buttons, some clear, some red, some
blue, some green. He'd need a master's degree just to call home.

 
          
 
Home. Suddenly he ached for his children.
Christopher would love this. Dad had a Star Wars office. It would be far-out.
Gross. Outrageous. Awesome.

 
          
 
He was distracted by the sight of another
phone, on the other side of the desk, a white telephone with no dial, just a
single red light bulb—menacing, like a poised panther.

 
          
 
A POTUS phone.

 
          
 
He stood in the center of the room and wailed,
"Where are my friends? What am I supposed to do in here?"

 
          
 
"To begin with," Dyanna said from
the doorway, where she stood like a nurse about to lead him to therapy,
"you have a Cabinet meeting in fifteen minutes."

 
          
 
"/ have a Cabinet meeting?" Burnham
looked at her as if she had turned a final comer into madness. "What do
you mean, I have a Cabinet meeting?"

 
          
 
She took a step into the room and lowered her
voice, grinning like a child with a naughty secret. ''He came in and told
me." She pointed to a door in the wall behind Bumham. "Himself! He
spoke to me!"

 
          
 
"Where does that door go?"

 
          
 
"Into his private office," Dyanna
whispered. "The little one."

 
          
 
"And so dies freedom," Burnham said,
and he thought: I'll have to get an executive order whenever I want to take a
leak.

 
          
 
"What? What did you say?"

 
          
 
"Nothing." He sat in his new chair.
It was stiff, its springs tight and recalcitrant. It discouraged relaxation.

 
          
 
"Can I get you something? Coffee?"

 
          
 
"I'd like a double Beefeater
martini."

 
          
 
"Mr. Burnham!"

 
          
 
"A bottle of Thunderbird in a brown
bag?" He smiled wanly.

 
          
 
"Would you like some coffee?" Dyanna
looked stem, matronly.

 
          
 
"Where did you get that face? I've never
seen that face."