Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 (8 page)

 
          
 
As she passed through the tall wrought-iron
gates, she reached down the front of her dress and fished out the plastic card
with her name and picture on it that hung around her neck on a chain of little
steel beads, and she let it fall outside her dress so the guard couldn't
possibly miss it.

 
          
 
Then she walked up the long, ornate staircase
into the
Old
Executive
Office
Building
that housed the bulk of the White House
staff.

 
          
 
Are you gonna answer the phone or what?"
Mrs. Miller shrilled around the comer from her cubicle outside Foster Pym's
office.

 
          
 
Pym sat at his desk and stared at the yellow
light blinking on his telephone.

 
          
 
Peniston, Peniston, Peniston, Peniston . . .

 
          
 
He urged his mind to summon name after name of
client after client. There was no Mrs. Peniston. He turned his mental Rolodex
to creditors, wholesalers and former employees. No Mrs. Peniston. No point in
searching his file of friends, for neither of them was a Peniston. And there
was no file of lovers, for there hadn't been any, unless one counted long-gone
Louise, and that marriage had not been exactly a passion play.

 
          
 
"She's waiting!"

 
          
 
"I can't!" Pym said. "I don't
know who she is."

 
          
 
"Answer the phone. You'll know."

 
          
 
"Why will I know?"

 
          
 
"Because she'll tell you. Trust me. I
know people."

 
          
 
Ha! Pym sneered silently. You don't know
people, Mrs. Miller. You don't know people or typing or bookkeeping or
accounting or common courtesy. You don't know anything but deceit. Had I known
you were Jewish, I never would have hired you.

 
          
 
Foster Pym didn't like Jews. He also didn't
like Catholics, pregnant women, Arabs, cocker spaniels, garlic, Manx cats,
left-handed people, people with dentures, Greeks, black people, lotteries and
Chinese food—all for different reasons involving, variously, childhood
experiences, reading, hearsay, personal contact and slights (real or fancied).

 
          
 
One problem with Jews was that they took too
many holidays—more than banks, public schools and mackerel-snappers. The
calendar, Pym was convinced, had been invented so Jews could take time off.

 
          
 
Pym punched the flashing button and said,
"Hello," and as soon as he heard the first few syllables of "Mr.
Pym, this is Ivy and I'm very sorry to be bothering you at work," he knew
exactly who Mrs. Peniston was and why he hadn't recalled her name: The card
file in his head did not have her listed under "P" for Peniston or
even "I" for Ivy but under "B" for Black Woman Who Works in
the White House Complex. Now that the mnemonic had been triggered, he saw her
face, her background, her address, her phone number, her taste in music and the
current state of their relationship.

 
          
 
What he could not see, and what disquieted
him, was any reason for her to be calling him at his place of business. She
could not have good news to relate, for she could not know what would be good
news to him, at least not news good enough to warrant a phone call to him at
work. On the other hand, the prospect of her having bad news for him—truly bad
news—was so farfetched as to be ludicrous.

 
          
 
Suddenly, Pym felt an adrenaline rush in his
arms and his neck and the pool of his stomach, and he smiled to himself. A
conditioned sensory system had activated somewhere within him, and it was
reacting like a Geiger counter closing on a uranium pile. He had been
cultivating this woman for months, and now, he felt certain, she was about to
bear fruit.

 
          
 
"Ivy!" he said. "How good to
hear from you!"

 
          
 
"Yes, sir. I'm sorry to be bothering you
at work."

 
          
 
"Never a bother to hear from you, my
dear."

 
          
 
"I wonder if I could stop by and see you
for a minute tonight after work."

 
          
 
Before he said, "Of course, my
dear," Pym paused long enough to convey the impression that he was
consulting his crowded schedule. "Nothing wrong, I hope."

 
          
 
"Matter of fact ..."

 
          
 
"Jerome's all right?"

 
          
 
"For now. That's what I want to talk to
you about."

 
          
 
"Always glad to help."

 
          
 
"I know," Ivy said, "and I
appreciate it, too. And don't think I don't know I already owe you one big
favor, and I'm not a person lets her debts go unpaid."

 
          
 
"Helping is reward enough. What time will
you be by?"

 
          
 
"I get off work at six."

 
          
 
"Say six-thirty. See you then."

 
          
 
Pym hung up the phone and, clucking smugly,
leaned back in his chair to contemplate the possibilities. Perhaps it's true,
he thought: All good things do come to him who waits.

 
          
 
That credo had been one of his favorites for
the almost forty years he had served—quietly, diligently, assiduously
self-interestedly—as a Soviet spy in the United States.

 
          
 
Fyodor Michaelovitch Pinsky had been one of
the first chosen, first recruited, first trained and first sent. He didn't know
why. If he had been forced at gunpoint to guess, he would have guessed that one
of his primary-school teachers had detected an ear for languages in the child.
Nor did he care why he had been selected. He was, simply, pleased that while
scores of millions of his compatriots were being turned into dog food by Stalin
or Hitler—if one didn't get you, the other was bound to—he was learning how to
be an American in a big old dacha in Astrakhan, on the Caspian Sea, where the
closest he came to armed combat was reading propaganda posters about the vile
and vicious Hun nailed to the wall of the cafe where he spent every one of his
few unsupervised moments.

 
          
 
Commerce didn't boom in the
Soviet Union
during the war: Nobody had any money, and
if someone came upon some money, he found there was nothing to buy with it. The
law of the marketplace was barter. Pinsky had one prized commodity, his
increasingly fluent English. With it he could read English-language newspapers
smuggled by a sturgeon fisherman across the Caspian from Bobol, in
Iran
, and this tool, according to the proprietor
of the cafe, could be used "to shove the light of truth up the dark
asshole of Mother Russia." The proprietor (not owner; nobody owned
anything) had opened the cafe under the pretense of serving the people of
Astrakhan
their
midday
meals, but his true ambition was to use it
as a conduit for acquiring foods other than potatoes and fish. So he kept a
flock of ducks, which he tended with loving care and cooked with Gallic panache
and shared with

 
          
 
Pinsky in return for Pinsky reading aloud to
him translations of the English-language newspapers.

 
          
 
From the proprietor Pinsky learned to
appreciate food, which, though he couldn't know it at the time, would become
his life's work. His superiors didn't discourage him, for they knew that
whatever employment he engaged in would be but the cover for his real life's
work.

 
          
 
When his trainers deemed him to be
sufficiently American to pass as an American (which turned out to be not quite
the case—some Americans accepted him as an American but one who had spent his
entire life in an institution, and others accepted him as a person recently
arrived from Pluto), sufficiently reliable ideologically to keep the Communist
faith indefinitely anywhere in the world (which turned out to be true
generally, though with modifications that would have given Lenin apoplexy) and
sufficiently skilled in the arcana of spycraft (which turned out to be a matter
of opinion: He thought he was doing a bang-up job, but others in the trade were
less appreciative), they revealed to Pinsky his destiny: The Kremlin assumed
that as soon as the war in Europe ended, the United States and the Soviet Union
would fall to squabbling. And since the squabble had all the ingredients of a
conflict long-lived, bellicose and perhaps apocalyptic, it was important for
the Soviet Union to have moles working underground in America, establishing
themselves as Americans, perhaps acquiring bits and pieces of intelligence
data, perhaps an agent here and there, perhaps just standing by until such time
as they would be called upon to serve the homeland. Pinsky would go to
America
as one of the hundreds of thousands of
young men returning from the European Theater of Operations, would assume an
identity, find work and settle down. He would be an American. He would never
again see his family and friends, for he would never again return to the Soviet
Union unless he was apprehended by the American authorities and uncovered
before he could kill himself, in which case, even if the Americans did send him
home, his homecoming wouldn't be joyous since he would be shot as soon as he
disembarked.

 
          
 
He was infiltrated aboard a hospital ship as a
"John Doe," a soldier with amnesia resulting from shellshock. After
an uneventful crossing, during which he stole several hundred dollars from non
compos fellow patients, he jumped ship in what he assumed was New York but was
in fact Halifax, Nova Scotia, where the ship had stopped to unload Canadian
wounded.

 
          
 
Like a Canada goose with the coming of fall,
Pinsky moved gradually southward. Everywhere he stopped, be it for a few days
or a few weeks, the doors that opened quickest for him had to do with food. In
Philadelphia
, he worked as a busboy at Bookbinder's. In
Annapolis
, he was introduced to—and initially
terrified by—softshell crabs, which he had never heard of and which looked to
him like giant spiders.

 
          
 
By the time Pinsky's migration landed him in
the
District
of Columbia
, he was far more versed in the techniques of selecting, preparing and
serving food than ninety-eight percent of the American people. He determined to
construct a career in the general field of victuals.

 
          
 
He had also settled, at last, on a credible
but vague background that he would keep ready for the day when he would have to
explain himself. That day might never come; so far, he had found Americans to
be astonishingly credulous. In the Soviet Union, there were papers to attest to
everything—birth, education, employment, armed service, address, marital
status, party affiliation—and they were demanded by every petty official one
encountered. In
America
, it seemed, no one ever challenged anything anyone said about himself.

 
          
 
He molded, fired and glazed into permanence a
biographical core that began with birth in a
Nebraska
farm town (no one outside
Nebraska
knew what a
Nebraska
accent sounded like, so he was safe). His parents
had both died in the terrible winter of 1939.

 
          
 
The young Foster Pym had moved around the
Midwest
, living with this cousin and that
great-aunt, spending a term or two at the public high school wherever he was.
He had tried to enlist in the Army on
December 8, 1941
, but was turned down because of ''bad
lungs."