Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 (54 page)

 
          
 
"Did you hear what he said?"

 
          
 
She smiled and, with her free hand, rubbed the
inside of his elbow.

 
          
 
"I've never been cruel or unusual!"

 
          
 
They walked, and she held his hand and let him
vent his sorrow and his rage and his bitterness. He plotted vengeance, and she
nodded; he voiced despair, and she rubbed his elbow.

 
          
 
Eventually, he was empty, and then he, too,
was silent.

 
          
 
"Nature does a wonderful thing with
pain," she said.

 
          
 
"What's that?"

 
          
 
"Builds a shell around it, insulating you
from it little by little, and then one day you realize that you haven't thought
about it for a while, and, what do you know, it's gone."

 
          
 
"How long does that take?"

 
          
 
"Depends if you have somebody helping
you." She squeezed his hand in both of hers. "You do."

 
          
 
He stopped walking and took her face in his
hands and kissed her.

 
          
 
From somewhere nearby a young male voice
called out, "All right!"

 
          
 
"Have you ever thought of being a
shrink?"

 
          
 
She laughed. "I didn't do anything."

 
          
 
They started walking again, hand in hand, and
she said, "What was it you were going to tell me?"

 
          
 
"Oh. Yes." He spoke without
hesitating, because he wasn't worried any more. He loved her, he knew she knew
it, and she knew he wouldn't do anything to hurt her. Besides, the whole thing
made eminent good sense if you looked at it from a logical perspective.

 
          
 
"The President gave me two options: stop
seeing you, which I don't consider an option, or make sure that our
relationship won't jeopardize anything."

 
          
 
"What does that mean? Jeopardize
anything?"

 
          
 
"From a security standpoint. He feels,
and I know you'll agree, that if you're going to be in my office, in my heart
and my head"—he smiled—"someone with my security clearance, with
access to the things I have access to, then you'd better be secure, too."

 
          
 
"What do I have to do to be secure?"

 
          
 
"Nothing. Not a thing. It's all done for
you."

 
          
 
"How?" Her pace had been in sync
with his. Now it slowed. Her grip on his hand loosened just a bit.

 
          
 
"The FBI sends some guys around to ask
questions, that's all." He felt her fingers slide away from his. "I
know it sounds scary, but it's no big deal, I promise. The only things they
care about are if you're a Nazi or a Communist or a Martian."

 
          
 
He laughed. "I think it's safe to bet
you'll pass with flying colors."

 
          
 
She stopped walking. She took her hand from
Burnham's and appeared to fish for something in her purse. Her breathing had
quickened. "Has it started?"

 
          
 
He chose a judicious fib. "I think so. I
don't have anything to do with it. Personally."

 
          
 
"I thought you said it was your
option,"

 
          
 
"Well ... in the sense that once I said I
wouldn't stop seeing you, it was a given that they'd start inv . . . asking
questions." He put his hand on her shoulder. The muscles were as hard as
marble. "Hey. I'm sorry. It was selfish of me. I should've asked you. I'm
really sorry. I—"

 
          
 
"Don't worry." She forced a smile.
She took his hand again, and her fingers felt like chilled pickles.

 
          
 
"I know it sounds gruesome. But it really
isn't anything."

 
          
 
"I guess I was surprised, that's
all." She wiggled her fingers in his. "Feel my hand. What a chicken I
am."

 
          
 
"Don't be silly. If somebody told me out
of the blue that the FBI was doing a full-field investigation of me, my mind'd
go ape trying to remember every time I sassed a teacher or got a parking
ticket."

 
          
 
"Is that what they call it?" Her
voice was a little girl's voice. "A full-field investigation?"

 
          
 
Burnham closed his eyes and cursed himself.
"Yes. But it's really a two-dollar name for a two-bit formality."

 
          
 
Eva made a perfunctory pass at her watch and
said, "Look at the time!"

 
          
 
"Yeah, we'd better—"

 
          
 
Bmeep! Bmeep! Bmeep! Bmeep! Bmeep! An urgent,
abrasive, soprano signal was triggered somewhere inside Burnham's pants, like
the digital wrist alarms that always seem to go off in theaters at the peak
moment of tender passion.

 
          
 
"What's that?" Eva looked horrified,
as if discovering that the FBI had taken up residence in Burnham's trousers.

 
          
 
Abashed, Burnham fumbled under the tail of his
jacket, contorting himself as if possessed by Saint Vitus' dance, and pushed a
switch that silenced the beeping. "See?" He tried to grin. "I
get all the perks of being a doctor without ever going to med school."

 
          
 
"What wit?"

 
          
 
"I'm not allowed to be out of touch any
more. At all. Ever. So if I'm not near a phone, I have to carry this." He
unclipped the small black metal monitoring device from his belt. "If they
want me, they fire it from the White House."

 
          
 
"Then what?"

 
          
 
"I call in, unless it's this message, and
then I hie my ass back as fast as I can." He held the device before her
face and pointed to three letters flashing in the LCD window: B.T.W.
"Himself has returned from
Camp David
."

 
          
 
"That's . . . creepy."

 
          
 
"Yeah, well . . . extremism in the
defense of liberty and all that."

 
          
 
He took her arm and led her to the curb and
flagged down a taxi. "I'm really sorry about—"

 
          
 
She put a finger across his lips and said,
"That's okay. I understand."

 
          
 
"I know you do," he said, and he
kissed her fingertips.

 
          
 
As he watched the taxi pull out into traffic,
Burnham tried to interpret Eva's last look. It had been a smile, but a sad
smile and clouded by a shadow of . . . what? Regret? Worry? Fear?

 
          
 
Forget it, he told himself, don't make more of
it than there is. You feel guilty, so you're looking for trouble you think you
deserve.

 
          
 
He crossed the avenue and started around the
long oval of the South Lawn.

 
          
 
He detested the beeper, thought of it as a
leash, resented being summoned, like a lady-in-waiting, back from his lunch
hour. He had several other similarly piquant sentiments about the destruction
of his privacy, and he encouraged himself to flush them now, before he got back
to the White House, for no matter what outcry rose from his gut, his head
reminded him that these were but the prices of proximity to the President. And
the rewards—in excitement, fascination, self-esteem and the deliciously naughty
enjoyment of other people's envy—^ were handsome compensation.

 
          
 
Besides, he should feel grateful that he had
been allowed to steal an hour away from his wall-to-wall carpeted,
temperature-controlled, electronically surveilled. Secret Service-protected
cloister.

 
          
 
Gazing at the South Lawn as he walked, he
wondered if it was true, as legend had it, that there were machine-gun
emplacements beneath the greensward which, at the push of a button, would pop
up and rake an unruly mob with computer-aimed tracers.

 
          
 
He had almost been taken to
Camp David
. The President had wanted him to go along,
said he needed a sounding board, needed his Special Assistant for Perspective,
but had changed his mind at the last minute—on the hunch that, since the
gathering at Camp David was to include only the President's wife, two of their
family lawyers and one of their sons, to resolve a sticky issue involving some
bank loans incurred by the son (who persisted in spending his father's name
like loose change whenever it could benefit him) and now under threat of
default, Burnham might be regarded by Mrs. Wins-low as a ringer brought in by
the President to reinforce his paternal inclination to let their delinquent
offspring hang.

 
          
 
As it was, before the trip the President had
played and replayed the situation with Burnham, casting him alternately as
devil's advocate, hard-nosed patriarch, pushover pop, and mother.

 
          
 
Burnham was becoming accustomed to being a
protean figure for the President. He was an alter ego for the man. He would
argue any side of an issue, exposing weaknesses, dangers and hidden benefits.

 
          
 
The President trusted him implicitly, because,
as he said one day, "You got no ax to grind, Tim. You've gone as high as
you can go here, and you know it. I've shown you how worthless the Cabinet is,
so you wouldn't want to go in there even if I'd put you there, which I won't.
You're not a lawyer, so you can't have any ambition to be a judge. And you're
not rich enough to be an ambassador. I created you, and you serve at my
pleasure, which means that your main interest has to be me. You know it, and I
know it, so I know when you argue with me you're doing it for my benefit—not
like all the rest of them, who all got some constituency or other they suck up
to, even if it's just the Harvard Club, B'nai Brith or The New York Review of
goddanm Books." The President paused, squinted and said, "You writing
your memoirs?"

 
          
 
"Me? No, sir."

 
          
 
"Good. I can't stand a man who's writing
his memoirs. It skews his whole outlook. Everything he's mixed up in, he thinks
of it in terms of himself: What do I think about this, how'm I doing, what does
the President say about me, how'll history grade me? Shit! Only one man allowed
to think like that around here, Tim, and you're lookin' at him."

 
          
 
"I know, Mr. President."

 
          
 
"I know you know, Tim, and that's why ...
I got a little present for you."

 
          
 
"Sir?" Burnham lowered his eyes, humbly,
prepared to accept a tie clip embossed with the Great Seal or a signed copy of
the President's collected speeches.