Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 (58 page)

 
          
 
The President hung up. A second later, the
only sound from the recorder was tape hiss.

 
          
 
“Well," Burnham said. He rewound the
tape, removed it from the recorder and dropped it in his pocket.

 
          
 
Dyanna sat stiffly on the edge of the couch,
head high, lower Hp aquiver. "Would you like my resignation?"

 
          
 
Burnham hadn't given a thought to her part in
the drama, or to her reaction to it. "Don't be silly. How could you
know?" He touched her cheek. "Besides, look at all the answers you
got for us." He patted the pocket in which he had dropped the tape.

 
          
 
"You mean you're happy?" Her
expression had changed from lugubrious to hopeful, and the color was returning
to her cheeks.

 
          
 
"To have it confirmed that my life is a
fraud? Not exactly. To have the answers? Relieved. And to know that the President
still thinks we're doing a pretty good job . . . well, yes. I guess you could
call it happy."

 
          
 
Her shoulders relaxed, and she sat back in the
couch. *'What do you think the test was Mr. Epstein was talking about?"

 
          
 
"I don't know." Burnham gazed out
the window at the sprawling expanse of the South Lawn. A man in a gray suit and
mirrored sunglasses passed in front of the window, his left arm ill concealing
an Uzi submachine gun under his jacket. The President must be speaking in the
Rose Garden, Burnham thought idly.

 
          
 
Machine guns every time you step out your back
door. Jesus, what a life.

 
          
 
"But I know one thing: He's not going to
call it off. Any man with the chutzpah to tape his phone calls with the
President likes to live on the edge."

 
          
 
A step before he would disappear from sight,
the Secret Service agent turned and saw Burnham looking at him. He stared
back—a challenging, prognathous stare.

 
          
 
Burnham saw the outline of the Uzi and the
reflection of his own face in the agent's sunglasses.

 
          
 
He knew he should feel safe.

 
          
 
He didn't.

 
          
 
Ivy's life had calmed like a shallow sea after
a sudden squall.

 
          
 
Jerome was working. The diploma and grade
transcript had gone through the system smooth as cream. He was bringing home
over three hundred a week, giving her a hundred off the top.

 
          
 
She had seen no more of Mr. Burnham or Debbie
Reynolds, and nobody had humbugged her about missing papers. Why should they?
The papers weren't missing. They were throwaways; she had just made sure they
were thrown her way.

 
          
 
She hadn't had any need to bother Mr. Pym, and
he hadn't contacted her, so she figured everything was mellow on that front.

 
          
 
The interesting thing was, her leg wasn't
bothering her half so bad any more, even though she had stopped taking the
pills after she heard that snippy crone at work make a crack about how Ivy was
probably taking a nip now and then.

 
          
 
Maybe the leg was reacting to tranquillity.
Everybody said pain was in your head, so if her head was peaceful, maybe the
pain decided to take a breather, too.

 
          
 
The light changed, and she crossed the street.
Ahead, two kids were squabbling over a bicycle wheel, a young couple sat on a
stoop and alternated licks on an ice cream cone, and a woman pushed infant
twins in an A&P grocery cart.

 
          
 
Then, ahead, signs of trouble. Shouts. A
slamming door. More shouts.

 
          
 
Ivy stopped. She gripped her shopping bag. Her
eyes sought the nearest shelter from a running crazy or a stray bullet.

 
          
 
Six or eight houses down the block, a door
flew open and people poured out, white people, dressed all in black, with black
beards and stringy black hair. Jews. Some special kind of Jews. Ivy had heard
about them, had seen one or two over the years, but she didn't know they lived
around here, not a whole flock of them anyway.

 
          
 
They were all yelling, in that weird language
that nobody but God understood and even He had to use a dictionary.

 
          
 
Was their house on fire? There was a firebox at
the end of the block, but nobody ran for it.

 
          
 
Maybe one of them had gone berserk and seen
the devil in the kitchen.

 
          
 
Now they were in the middle of the street, and
they formed a circle. What were they going to do, stretch a sheet between them
and catch a jumper?

 
          
 
No. They were going to dance. Hollering and
singing and laughing, they started the circle spinning, and they dipped and
kicked and squatted and hopped.

 
          
 
Man, Ivy thought, those folks are having
themselves a time! One of them hit the lottery?

 
          
 
People swarmed out of other buildings, kids
mostly but women too and a few men who'd been watching TV. Some of the kids
wanted to bust into the circle, and the Jews didn't mind, they just spread the
circle wider, and when a couple of the women saw it was okay, they joined too,
and pretty soon the circle took up the whole width of the street.

 
          
 
Ivy moved closer. By now there was a circle of
watchers and clappers outside the circle of dancers, so she couldn't see much,
but she could hear them singing, and from the few syllables that made any sense
to her—like Gott and danke and lieber—she understood that it was some sort of
religious song of praise.

 
          
 
And I thought blacks knew how to show God a
good time. Ivy said to herself. These people are pros.

 
          
 
Behind her a car horn blew, and she turned to
see a TV truck, one of those mobile units that they always blatted about on the
"Action News" shows as if they were the greatest things since
electricity, work its way through the milling people and stop in the middle of
the street.

 
          
 
A man carrying a video camera hopped out of
the truck and climbed the nearest stoop and began to take pictures of the
dancers.

 
          
 
Another man, younger, with a coat and tie and
one of those sculpted haircuts, stood right behind Ivy and, while he waited for
the cameraman to finish his shot, practiced what he wanted to say into his
microphone.

 
          
 
Ivy waited for him to finish muttering. Then
she said, "What's this all about?"

 
          
 
The man didn't welcome the interruption, but
he said, "They caught Mengele this morning. In
Paraguay
."

 
          
 
"Oh," Ivy said. "Good."

 
          
 
"You know who Mengele is: Josef
Mengele?"

 
          
 
"Well . . . not exactly."

 
          
 
"
Auschwitz
. The Angel of Death. He experimented on all
those Jews. Killed thousands of them."

 
          
 
"Oh. Right. I remember. On the
news." Ivy peered through the crowd of dancers. "Nice. I'm glad they
got him."

 
          
 
"Just in time, apparently. He had new
people with him, ready to carry on for him."

 
          
 
Ivy nodded. "Put out the fire before it
spreads. What'11 they do to him?"

 
          
 
"Put him on trial. Then hang him, I
guess."

 
          
 
Ivy sucked on her teeth. "They ought to
skin him."

 
          
 
The young man started. Then he said,
"That's interesting. How about I interview you on camera?"

 
          
 
"Me? I'm nobody."

 
          
 
"Sure you are. You're smart, I can tell.
And you're not afraid to speak your piece."

 
          
 
"I don't know . . ."

 
          
 
"Wait'll your friends say they saw you on
TV."

 
          
 
"I look a wreck."

 
          
 
"You look fine. Dignified. Honest."

 
          
 
"Well . . ."

 
          
 
Foster Pym was in a mortal struggle with a
hollandaise sauce. First he dropped an egg white in with the yolks, which
confused the brew so that it wouldn't come together. Then the maverick electric
stove decided to heat the left-front burner to incineration, which burned and
separated the butter and left little clots of curd clinging like doughballs to
the sides of the bowl.

 
          
 
His problem, he knew, was that he wasn't
concentrating, and the destruction of his concentration was due to his concern
about Eva, who stood beside him slicing lemons with a taut-jawed determination,
as if she were decapitating mice.

 
          
 
They didn't speak. The only human sounds in
the kitchen wafted in from the living room, where a frenetic TV pitchman was
making a last-gasp attempt to hawk storm windows to viewers waiting for the
evening news.

 
          
 
It wasn't that Pym and Eva weren't speaking,
rather that they seemed tacitly to have agreed that there was nothing new to
say. They had discussed and argued their dilemma to a state of stasis. Eva
continued to photograph Burnham's DOE documents but declined to relate any
details of her private conversations with him. Teal continued to press for
more. Pym, caught in the middle, continued to mediate, stalling Teal and
cajoling Eva.

 
          
 
She was frightened; he was frightened. And
they had no choice but to continue.

 
          
 
Pym looked at the mottled yellow muck in the
bowl before him, and gave up. He scraped the mess into the garbage can and
started fresh. He broke an egg and held its two halves over the sink,
separating white from yolk.

 
          
 
Someone he knew must have come into the
apartment, for suddenly a familiar voice was speaking in the living room. He
looked at Eva, who looked at him. They both frowned. He dropped the egg and
walked into the living room. No one there. Then he looked at the television
screen.

 
          
 
"Look!" he said, pointing.

 
          
 
"What?" Eva wiped her hands and
followed him.

 
          
 
The round black face filled the screen. A
legend on the bottom identified it as belonging to "Ivy Peniston,
Neighborhood Resident."

 
          
 
For a split second, Pym yielded to the
egocentrism that afflicts all those who dwell in the house of fear: She had to
be talking about him. Why else would a reporter want to speak to her? Surely
the only noteworthy thing she had ever done was steal documents for him.

 
          
 
Then he heard her say: "He tortured all
those people, why give him such an easy out? I say skin him. That'll give him a
lot of reflecting time."

 
          
 
Ivy vanished and the reporter was talking.

 
          
 
"Skin who?" Eva said.

 
          
 
"Sssshhh!"

 
          
 
"... search for Mengele ended at exactly
twelve
twenty-four
,
eastern time, this afternoon, on a back road outside a suburb of
Asuncion
..."

 
          
 
"Mengele," was all Pym said.

 
          
 
"Hey, terrific!" said Eva.

 
          
 
"... advance notice from the Israelis,
American television was permitted to send a pool crew to film the capture.
ABC's Brock Wilcox reports from
Asuncion
."

 
          
 
The reporter was replaced by a jerky,
hand-held image of a speeding jeep approaching through dense underbrush. The
breathless ABC man described the ambush in a whisper. When the jeep was ten or
fifteen yards from the camera lens, the underbrush erupted with Israeli
commandos firing machine guns at the tires and the engine compartment of the
jeep. The jeep swerved, rose on two wheels, then settled back and stopped.

 
          
 
For several seconds, all that was visible was
a swarm of commandos over the jeep. Then the swarm dispersed, and two senior
Israelis carefully, solicitously, helped Josef Mengele from the jeep and
marched him, hands manacled behind his back, toward the camera.

 
          
 
Eva said, "He doesn't look eighty."

 
          
 
Pym shook his head. "Plastic
surgery."

 
          
 
Mengele was lean and seemed fit. He walked
with his shoulders back, his jaw set and his steely, droop-lidded eyes fixed on
some distant point in the future or the past. He did not glance at the camera.