Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 (55 page)

 
          
 
"I been thinkin' about this, Tim, and
I've decided: You're my man." The President paused for dramatic effect.
"I want you to write my memoirs."

 
          
 
"Wha—Sir?"

 
          
 
"I know, I know." The President
raised a hand, as if to ward off an embarrassing effusion of gratitude.
"It's a heavy burden. But you deserve it. Ever since that first day, I've
known you're a man with a sense of history. You can handle it. Besides, I'll be
sitting by your side, helping you with every damn comma."

 
          
 
Burnham was appalled. The thought of spending
the remainder of his adult life sculpting self-serving reminiscences was a hell
beyond imagining. And yet to decline was to buy himself a one-way ticket to
disfavor.

 
          
 
So he said, "I don't know what to
say."

 
          
 
"I know how you feel," the President
said, patting his shoulder. "I felt that way when the Chief Justice
administered my first oath of office. Don't say anything. Just take real good
notes from now on."

 
          
 
He had obeyed, had begun to take copious notes
which, he prayed fervently, he would never have to use, except perhaps as fuel
for the novel he would write. From a hideout. In
Botswana
.

 
          
 
Now, as he approached the door to the West
Basement, he saw twin black Cadillac limousines idling at the curb. He
recognized the drivers, which told him that the two Cabinet officers with the
President were the Secretaries of State and Defense, which meant that the
meeting would also include Epstein and Duggan, which meant that the subject
was, as Burnham had suspected,
Honduras
.

 
          
 
Ever since Ronald Reagan had, during his last
year in office, orchestrated the invasion of Nicaragua by a ragtag band of
Contras, Cuban exiles, American mercenaries and assorted outcasts and
survivalists—an invasion that had been squashed in a debacle widely assessed as
worse even than the Bay of Pigs—Honduras had taken over the role as plague upon
the foreign policy of the United States.

 
          
 
Los Tegucigalpehos, as the guerrillas called
themselves, had looked to the south and seen that kicking Yanqui ass could be a
profitable enterprise, and, with the help of their Sandinista brethren, they
were hell-bent on toppling their government and forming a Central American
Revolutionary Confederation with
Nicaragua
. The Russians were sending AK-47s, the
Cubans were sending Cubans, and Mu'ammar Qaddafi was offering to pay for the
training and transportation of any American blacks eager to join the struggle
against "the capitalist imperialist cabal."

 
          
 
President Winslow was the man in the middle,
hectored by one extreme to get the hell out of
Central America
once and for damn-well all, and by the
other to get the Communists out of
Central America
once and for damn-well all.

 
          
 
The most vocal pressure on the President was
to go on prime-time television and resurrect the Monroe Doctrine with ringing
rhetoric and then to launch, with the support of Congress (presuming he could
get it), a full-scale, undisguised land-and-sea invasion of Honduras by
America's Navy, Air Force and Marines. Secure
America
's back yard.

 
          
 
Once and for damn-well all.

 
          
 
Burnham had listened to every argument on
every side a dozen times. He had spent whole evenings playing right-wing
firebrand and left-wing appeaser, while the President abused him as a fool, a
dunce, a maniac and a lily-livered pussy-whipped wimp.

 
          
 
Never, however, had the President asked Burnham
for his own advice, and for that Burnham was grateful. He didn't know what he
would say. All he knew for sure was that under no circumstances, ever, not in this
life or any subsequent incarnation, would he agree to be President of the
United States
. The fact that no President had suddenly
infarcted to death in office, or been hauled away in a wagon and left to watch
cartoons for the rest of his natural life, was a miracle.

 
          
 
Burnham walked through the door of the West
Basement, climbed the stairs, passed through Dyanna's office, his own and the
President's private office, and opened the door to the Oval Office. He didn't
knock; the President had told him not to.

 
          
 
''You'RE nuts!" Eva shouted at her
father. "They won't stop with me. What about when they get to you?"

 
          
 
Foster Pym sat in an upholstered chair and
picked at the loose threads in a seam of the slipcover. He was sweating, maybe
from the haste of his trip home after Eva called him, maybe from the news she had
delivered.

 
          
 
"Nothing," he said. "They'll
find nothing."

 
          
 
"Great! And then what? There is no such
thing as a person without a past in this country. That's the worst thing they
could find. Nothing."

 
          
 
"Not necessarily. When they get to a dead
end, they'll have to come to me."

 
          
 
"And what'll you say? 'I can't
remember'?"

 
          
 
"Precisely. I was a John Doe. There were
hundreds of John Does. Thousands."

 
          
 
"They'll take fingerprints."

 
          
 
"They won't find a record."

 
          
 
"And? Weren't Americans fingerprinted
when they joined the Army?"

 
          
 
"I ... I don't know. Perhaps my hands
were mutilated during the war.''

 
          
 
"They'll check your teeth. They can tell
if dental work was done abroad."

 
          
 
"I never had dental work done, not till I
came here."

 
          
 
He waited for her next barrage, but none came.
He wanted to be irritated at her hammering, but he couldn't summon the feeling.
What she was doing was useful. Reassuring, now that he had greeted each
interrogatory with a credible response.

 
          
 
"See!" he leaned forward and patted
her hand. "Let them dig. They'll come up with a dry hole."

 
          
 
"What about my mother?"

 
          
 
Pym paused—not evasively, but because any
thought of Louise was alien to him. He hadn't thought about her in years, in
any context whatever. To him she was dead, as, for all he knew, she was in
fact.

 
          
 
Eva anticipated him. "You can't say she's
dead."

 
          
 
"No, but I can say I don't have the
faintest idea where she is, or whether she's alive. I haven't seen the woman in
nearly thirty years."

 
          
 
"Suppose they find her. How much did she
know about you?"

 
          
 
Now Pym was uncomfortable, because he didn't
have an answer. He knew how much he had told Louise—nothing— and he knew that
she had been so obsessed with the resurrection of the Reich that she seemed
incapable of any other concerns. Seemed. That was the key. He didn't know how
perceptive she had been, how much she might have noticed, consciously or
unconsciously, about him. Nor did he recall how careful he had been, way back
then. How meticulously had he detailed his past for her? How had he excused his
occasional late-night sorties into dark parks?

 
          
 
He decided to dismiss Louise as a threat. She
was crazy then, she was probably even crazier now, and if an FBI agent should
turn over a rock and find her the den mother of a bund in
Hopewell
,
New Jersey
, he would hardly be inclined to give much weight to her testimony.

 
          
 
He said, "Don't worry about her."

 
          
 
"We have to worry about her. Remember
what Timothy said—a Nazi, a Communist or a Martian. Well, two out of three's pretty
heavy."

 
          
 
"Never worry about things you cannot do
anything about," Pym said, lecturing just a little. "We cannot do a
thing about Louise."

 
          
 
"There's one thing we can do something
about." Eva reached into her purse, took out the half-glasses and tossed
them into Pym's lap. "We can stop. Right now. Before they catch us in the
act. If they're watching me, you can bet they're watching Timothy when I'm with
him."

 
          
 
Pym toyed with the glasses, tilting them back
and forth in the lamplight to see if he could discern the plastic shield over
the tiny lens in the nosepiece. "I'm afraid not," he said, and he
folded the glasses and placed them on the arm of his chair.

 
          
 
"What does that mean? We can do what we
damn please."

 
          
 
"Eva," Pym sighed, for suddenly he
felt tired and old and trapped, "they are very happy with what we have
given them so far. I don't know what's in those papers, but they're very happy.
They want more."

 
          
 
"To hell with them."

 
          
 
Pym continued as if she hadn't spoken.
"They want more than more. As they see it, they have the most valuable
agent they could hope for—a mole in the Oval Office. They want you to start
pumping Burnham for information."

 
          
 
"I won't do it."

 
          
 
Pym sighed again. He had to make her see that
the decision had been taken from his hands. They were not agents any more; they
were instruments.

 
          
 
He said, "What do you think they'll do to
us if we refuse?"

 
          
 
"Nothing. Why should they? They should
get down on their knees and thank us for what we did do." She snorted.
"What do you think they'll do, kill us?"

 
          
 
"No. I don't think they'd bother. We're
not worth the trouble."

 
          
 
"So?"

 
          
 
"If we refuse," Pym said with forced
calm, "and they decide they can't trust us any more, they'll dump
us."

 
          
 
"Dump us?"

 
          
 
"Make sure we get caught. You and me and
your Mr. Burnham. Especially your Mr. Burnham."

 
          
 
"Why? Why would they do that?"

 
          
 
"It would be a great coup for them. Make
the American government look stupid, ineffective and untrustworthy. Make the
President look like a fool. It would wreck American intelligence and security
operations. Their allies wouldn't share with them any more. You remember—no,
you were too young—but when they found all those spies in the British services.
Ml-5 and Ml-6 were the laughingstock of the Western world. Burgess and
Maclean—and, later. Blunt—may have outlived their usefulness, but they had one
last service to perform for Mother Russia. They turned British intelligence
into a bad joke. It took years for the Brits to recover. And still nobody
trusts them, not really." Pym paused. He could see by Eva's face that she
was not yet convinced, so he said, "We're in so deep now that they'd have
to sacrifice us. They couldn't take the chance that you or Mr. Burnham would be
seized by a sudden fit of patriotism and decide to turn yourselves in. That
way, the whole thing could be covered up and denied. There would be no coup.
No. They will want to control it."